The four genins ate their fill and exited the common room after each took a quick break to the bathroom. After a rapid talk, it was decided they would start their journey back home before night had fully fallen. They were dirty and weary of travelling for more than a week now and wanted to be back in Konoha without too much delay. They just had to get the storage scroll back: it was the property of Konoha after all and their mission included bringing it safely back to the village.
Leading the three other, Neji stepped up to the door of the supply office and gave it a firm knock. The door was promptly creaked ajar and opened in full when the clerk behind saw the forehead protectors.
"We have arrived this morning and it should have left you plenty of time to sort your business. Please give us back the scroll and we'll be on our way." Neji demanded, the clan-bred arrogance giving an inimitable weight to his order.
The clerk paled and bowed. "A-ah ninja, I hoped you'd stay here tonight," he stuttered. "Y-you see, one of my men made a mistake with the scroll and poured ink on it. We know how to absorb it but now the scroll needs to dry. If only you'd allow us to correct our mistake during the night."
Neji frowned and gave the stuttering man a dark look. "Crass incompetence," muttered the Hyuuga just loud enough for the clerk to hear. "That isn't acceptable. You'll give us the scroll now and pay a fee to Konoha for your mistake."
The clerk paled further. "Oh p-please ninja-san, surely it isn't necessary-"
Neji rose a palm to stop the man's protest and glared harder. "You'll give us the scroll, now." The Hyuuga demanded, his open palm lowered horizontally and waiting.
"H-hai, ninja-san, of course," the clerk bowed before he walked deeper in his office to retrieve a scroll marred with ink. Neji exhaled powerfully by his nose and shook his head.
"You'll be sent an invoice with the fee you'll have to pay for your mistake. Have a pleasant evening," said the white-eyed boy with all the haughtiness he could muster.
The four genins walked off, the scroll fastened on Lee's back, leaving behind a sweating clerk. As soon as the young ninjas disappeared behind the corner of the hallway, the clerk counted to ten before he ran off in the other direction and hup a flight of stairs. He didn't see the smaller blond boy peeking back from the corner.
Naruto smiled somberly. He had been spot on all along. Now, he had to start whoever was going to tail them on a wild goose chase. One he'd make sure would end up badly for their pursuers.
The genins checked their pouches and exited the fort as the sky was coloured pink, purple and orange by the setting sun. The evening made the city a little more animate than it had been during the morning at their arrival. People, the genins soon noticed, were mainly going to taverns to drink their current problems away.
Naruto frowned at the thought. He understood they weren't fighting with violence because that would be stupid to seemingly openly revolt against the local lord and the mandated officer of the Fire army. Doing nothing, however, seemed just as wrong. The blond shook his head. He had no time for such consideration: he needed to ensure the survival of his teammates and his own and if they could reach Konoha, the problems of these people would soon be solved anyway.
Taking the northern road, the most direct one to reach Konoha, the four ninjas exited the town at a good pace before they jumped up in the trees bordering the path. It was the Konohan's favoured mean of travel when they were operating within their country after all.
A minute after their exit, a shadow raced behind them.
As soon as team Gai gave their assent, Naruto got up and directed his steps to the toilets. Entering one of the free stalls, the blond took the opportunity to relieve his bladder first before he crossed his fingers and created a clone who exited the stall in his stead.
A minute later, Neji entered the toilets and immediately activated his doujutsu. Veins bulged around his eyes as they took an eery quality. Getting inside a stall himself, he relieved his bladder all the same while he surveilled the exterior. There was a small round window, left open to ventilate the toilet that they could use to escape but it was narrow. The Hyuuga narrowed his eyes.
He wouldn't call Tenten fat in a million years, first because it wasn't true at all and second because for all his genius he knew he wouldn't survive. However, his female teammate had, like all fourteen-years-old girls, larger hips than males of the same age.
And the window was very small. Neji narrowed his eyes further and proceeded to a quick calculation. Given his teammate's three sizes - bless and curse the Byakugan - then normally...
No, it would pass, if barely. Neji sighed and focused back on the outside of the building. Stretching his vision to its limits, he looked and looked. That was when he found him.
The shinobi who would be their enemy. Neji smirked when he saw the man was not at all at the right spot: he was sticking to the high ceiling of the common room like some sort of overgrown spider, observing his team with the hunger of a predator.
"Idiot," muttered the Hyuuga before he cleared his throat. "We'll have a clear night tonight," he said out loud.
In the stall next to his, he observed Naruto, taking in the blond's chakra network and bountiful reserves.
Neji immediately frowned. The younger boy's chakra system was wrong, twisted. There was something around his hara, the gate of wonder, that distorted the flow, forced it in a spiralling maw where it seemed to disappear. The Hyuuga focused, hard, and willed his eyes to pierce to mysterious opacity - the impossible opacity - that marred Naruto's stomach. Neji's frown deepened. There was only one thing the Byakugan could not see through and it was a s-
The blond made a strange cross-like seal and a copy of Naruto appeared, distracting Neji. The Hyuuga frowned even more - he had seen nothing wrong with the way the younger boy moulded his chakra - before his eyes widened in surprise at what he could see of the clone.
It was a chakra construct. The Byagukan was called the piercing eye because, in addition to seeing through most matter, it could also peer at a shinobi's chakra system. And what Neji was seeing was absolutely breathtaking, incredible even. The clone had its own functioning chakra system, something the replica demonstrated by speeding through the hand signs of the transformation jutsu and turning into a perfect Neji Hyuuga.
A perfect Neji Hyuuga. If the boy didn't know what his own chakra network looked like, he would have been fooled by the outward appearance of the replica.
"Nice ass," he distantly heard Naruto say.
The Other Neji exited the stall and entered the common room, imitating his gait and his poise. Neji observed the strange reflection with fascination before he smirked. Not bad, not bad at all, really he did have-
The Hyuuga boy centred his thoughts as he suddenly choked. What was wrong with him, checking himself out like that? He looked up and saw Naruto looking down on him with a teasing grin. Neji glared. The blond was a bad influence on him, he was losing his touch. His natural genius needed utmost seriousness at all instant to be properly cultivated and crude jokes like this one were severely frowned upon in his clan.
Why wasn't he more annoyed about it?
Naruto, with his cheerful attitude and his optimism, his status as the dead-last and his obstinate attitude, was everything Neji wasn't. The blond reminded him of Gai and Lee, without being insufferably loud, which was a point in his favour, the Hyuuga supposed. In fact, Naruto reminded him of Lee the most and how the talentless boy, incapable of even doing ninjutsu, had blossomed into a furious taijutsu beast under Gai's guidance.
While Neji knew he was fated to be better and stay their better, he did grudgingly acknowledge that their ethic and hard work made them efficient shinobi nonetheless. He didn't think he was arrogant, he was simply a firm believer of the fact that some things could never be changed. However, it would be sheer idiocy to not recognize the fact Lee and Naruto were good.
Fate was decidedly a strange, twisted and capricious thing.
He exited his stall and was met by the dazzling smile of the blond.
"Told ya, awesome jutsu," whispered Naruto.
Neji sighed, found he couldn't stay cross at the blond because at least his smile wasn't sparkling annoyingly like Gai's or Lee's, nodded and motioned the younger boy with a jerk of his head. "Let's get out."
The blond nodded and both climbed the wall, sticking to it by pumping chakra to their feet and legs. The window was a circular panel of glass, circled and reinforced with steel, that was simply tilted around a horizontal axis to let some air pass but allow nothing bigger than a cat enter.
It wasn't, however, meant to keep anything inside and so the two boys dismantled it quickly with the help of a kunai. It was then Tenten arrived. She gave the two boys a smile before it morphed into a glare she directed at Neji.
"Deactivate that. I'm going to take the opportunity while I'm here and there'll be no peeking." She threatened darkly.
Naruto could hear Neji swallow audibly and the boy's eyes returned to normal a second after. The blond snickered and gestured for the older boy to take the window before he turned serious.
"And keep your eyes on. I'll take the heat off you if we survive."
Neji's features hardened again and he exited swiftly, his Byakugan reactivated, keeping watch of any movement. It was the beginning of the evening and it was all too bright for his taste. They were going to be caught, he was sure of it. Scaling down from the building and sticking to the growing shadows, he reached the stables and hid in a stack of hay.
Tenten exited soon after and joined him. Neji had to stop any stray thoughts from even forming.
Meanwhile, in the bathroom, Lee had joined Naruto, who once again created a clone, disguised it as the green-clad boy and made him exit the bathroom in his stead.
"Naruto gestured towards a stall. "Take your precaution, Lee. We won't stop before a while."
Lee nodded and after a minute, he was done and ready to go, giving a smile and a thumb up to the blond. Naruto motioned for Lee to jump out of the window before he followed after putting the window back into place with some ninja wire and two shurikens. It was going to break with a strong gust of wind but he prayed it would hold until they were far away.
Naruto and Lee found Neji and Tenten hiding in the stack of hay.
"What now?" The girl whispered.
Neji spat a strand of dried weed. "We need to get out and hide in the city. Then, we leave when the night is here."
"How do we stay unseen in the city though?"
"A transformation jutsu should do the trick, no?" Naruto offered.
All three members of Team Gai turned to look at him and the blond immediately noticed Lee seemed to be embarrassed.
"Lee cannot use any ninjutsu, Naruto," Neji informed evenly.
The Uzumaki felt the cogs of his brain stop.
"Sorry, what?!" He shouted in an incredulous whisper.
Gai had snooped around and spied for almost a week and he was reluctantly amazed at the level of disinformation the Oto-nins were spreading. As if the rumours about the deserted villages weren't enough, there were also talks of strange humanoid beasts roaming the wood at night, haunting cries of pain echoing from deep within the forest as pure souls were tortured by demons.
Rice Country was made of relatively flat land, once covered by mighty patches of forest that had been mostly razed down to allow rice culture. Up north, however, close to the border with Iron, the ground was more hilly - some would even call it mountainous. There was nothing quite like playing on people's superstitions to keep them away from a specific place and, combined with the terrain - ideal to hide a small armed troupe - pinpointing a location to investigate had been easy.
Hence why Gai had travelled up north.
Yet, another few days of patient search later and the man had found nothing but eerie and dark valleys covered in thick woods, gnarled tree and thorny bushes preventing passage, while a heavy fog plunged them in perpetual night. The scenery was right out of a nightmare or alternatively, one of those B-series movies Lee was a fan of, and the jounin understood why the region was deserted.
It was wild, almost unnaturally so. Threateningly so, Gai would even say. Someone or something had transformed the region to fit their need and their need was clearly to stay hidden and ward off potential intruders. They had done that without care for whoever had lived here first, as the few ruins the jounin had come across proved it.
On day twelve after leaving his genins to their own device, Gai found the reason for the rumours of the monsters.
Someone had installed several ingenious contraptions which, when the wind blew through them, produced a very convincing roar or a ghostly wail, depending on the intensity of the breeze. Truly, the place he was searching was Otogakure.
Gai combed through his filthy hair with a hand as he observed his surroundings, crouched low in a bush. All around him it was nothing but strange, tortured trees, poisonous vines and the fog that seemed to cling to the earth like some sort of disease. His search was vain, he wouldn't succeed alone, without more time and clues. He was getting to the end of his rations, he was dirty and his attire was starting to itch in several very uncomfortable places. He knew he reeked foul enough to be found by smell alone and he hadn't slept well for the past few days, travelling by night and resting only very little. He had been as absolutely stealthy a jounin of his level could be but if the place was a nest of enemy shinobi like he suspected, then it was only a matter of time until he was found and being alone, tired and under-equipped amongst vipers was rarely a good idea.
Plus, it didn't seem like he was going to find anything anytime soon. It was like looking for a needle in a stack of hay.
He knew the easy solution to the age-old conundrum was to simply burn the hay but finely honed instincts were telling the Hokage would not appreciate one of his jounin burning away the north of Rice Country when he wasn't even missioned to.
It felt like admitting defeat and tasted bitter but Gai knew he had to go home and report his findings, as meagre and unsatisfying as they were. The jounin unfurled a sealing tag and took one of the singing contraptions to store it away. That would be a good proof to give weight to his words, in addition to the headband with the musical note. He nodded with satisfaction and rolled up the sealing tag before securing it to his belt.
It was time to go home.
AN: Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the doujutsu. I'll go with the Byakugan being able to see through most things like demonstrated in this chapter. The Sharingan will only offer slow-mo vision and the capacity to "decode" a jutsu once it is fired.
I know the Mangekyo is a hack but damn, the more I "use" Kage Bunshin, the more OP I find it. Kishimoto really was unimaginative.
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