Disclaimer: I Do Not Own Naruto Or Supergirl
The strike team was in the air before dawn. Two four-person squads clipped to a pair of MH-6 little birds: compact, light helicopters used for special operations in the United States Army.
For close to an hour, the helicopters had matched the manic undulations of the desert, and now, as they jerked back and forth to avoid the tall skyscrapers of Metropolis, Command Sergeant Major Naruto Uzumaki had to use his chakra to keep his boots planted on his MH-6's landing skid.
Like the other men with him, Naruto wore charcoal fatigues and a matte-black impact armor that protected everything vital from his neck to his knees. His helmet encased his blonde hair, and its silver-mirrored visor completely obscured his jaw and blue eyes. The only place Naruto's skin showed was at his wrists where his leather gloves didn't quite touch his shirtsleeves.
Even with the gloves, Naruto's fingers were cramped with cold, and he squeezed his hands into fists to keep his blood flowing. He checked the mission clock on his wrist. The moment the luminous blue numbers hit 2300, the helicopters crested a line of factories, and Naruto and his team got their first line-of-sight view of their objective: one of National City's many abandoned industrial warehouses.
Somewhere inside that building was a suspected alien bomb-shop.
Before the pilots triggered green "ready" icons in the strike teams HUDs, Naruto, and his team were already in motion; slapping magazines into their weapons, yanking charging handles, and toggling safety switches—a well-rehearsed symphony of preparatory clicks and snaps that went unheard in the rushing wind as the MH-6's hurtled down the empty street and came to abrupt, nose-up stops on the edge of town. The modified thrusters under the helicopter's cockpit and tail rotated to keep the aircraft steady as the team unclipped from their hard-points, leapt onto the asphalt, and began to run.
Naruto was the leader of the strike team alpha, and he took point. Seeing how his own armor stood out in the pale, pre-dawn light of the city, he knew speed was essential if both squads were going to reach the workshop undetected. So he set a brisk pace, hurdled a low, chain-link fence, and wove quickly through piles of plastic crates and pallets that littered the parking lot of what appeared to be nothing more than a rundown warehouse.
By the time Naruto and his team reached the building's front door, the others were winded. If it weren't for the agent's helmets, their breaths would have billowed bone-white in the frigid air.
They didn't usually wear heavy blast gear for rapid, airborne strikes. But the Alien Insurrectionists had started booby-trapping their bomb shops, and this time, the team's commanding officer(CO) didn't want them taking any chances.
Naruto brought his chin down on a pressure-pad inside his helmet, sending a short burst of static across the squads' encrypted radio COM channel: an "in position" signal for the leader of Bravo squad, now positioned by the warehouses back entrance.
He waited for Bravo's two-burst response, then he pushed away from the buildings pitted concrete wall, raised a knee to his chest, and smashed his boot against the thin metal door, just above the lock.
The intelligence from the Department of Extranormal Operations (DEO) had suggested there would be stiff resistance. But it turned out most of the aliens inside the bomb shop were unarmed. Those that were carried human weapons. Semi-automatic pistols; inconsequential weapons whose rounds simply clattered off Naruto's armor as he and his squad sidled through the shattered door like hulking crabs, weapons up and scanning.
What the strike team knew that the DEO didn't was the real threat would come from the aliens who weren't firing—the ones with free hands who might trigger hidden explosives and blow the workshop to smithereens. The one alien who dared took a three-round burst from Naruto's heavily modified silenced submachine gun and flopped back onto a steel worktable, it's four arms outstretched and twitching. Naruto watched a small, cylindrical detonator slip slowly from the alien's lolling fist...and hit the floor with a harmless ping.
Major threat neutralized, the strike team refocused and let the pistol-wielding "Invaders" have it.
Naruto's suppressed MP5K-PDW was a light firearm. But its...off-world enhancements...allowed equally enhanced five-millimeter, full-metal-jacket rounds to rip ugly holes in his targets' powder blue clean-suits. Some of the aliens Naruto targeted dropped like stones. Others seemed to dance to the bullets' dull percussion, spinning bloody pirouettes onto the workshop's oil-stained floor.
Start to finish; the firefight lasted less than ten seconds. A dozen aliens lay dead; the strike team hadn't suffered any casualties.
"Hell." Bravo leaders big Australian accent filled the COM. "We didn't even change magazines."
To the perspiring officers in the cramped tactical operations center (TOC) miles away on the other side of the city hidden in a secure location under one of the DEO's smaller bases in the city, it did seem like a perfect takedown—a rare victory in what had so far been a frustrating cat-and-mouse conflict. But then Naruto cautioned, "ARCHER online. Haven't seen anything yet."
The Staff Sergeant pulled his chin off the COM-switch inside his helmet and continued sweeping the air around him with a palm-sized wedge of black plastic perforated by microscopic holes. This was a tactical version of an ARCHER device: a portable laser spectrometer used to sniff out traces of explosive chemical compounds. Larger, more powerful units were deployed in orbit and at checkpoints into major cities and high-level government facilities.
Despite the density of coverage, the alien bomb-makers had become quite adept at fooling the system by concealing their explosives in off-world materials.
Every time they hit a target with something an ARCHER thought was no more dangerous than, say, an alien bar of soap, the DEO would analyze the explosive residue and add the new chemical signature to the detection database. Unfortunately, this was a reactive strategy that heavily favored the Alien invaders, who were constantly changing their recipes.
Naruto frowned at his ARCHER. The thing was clicking loudly, trying to get a lock on what it believed might be a new mix. But the firefight had filled the air with an invisible soup of chemical possibilities. The three other agents in alpha-squad were conducting a visual search, checking the workshop's clusters of autosynthesizers and machine tools. But so far they hadn't found anything that looked—as best as they could tell—like a bomb.
Naruto took a deep breath then relayed the bad news to the TOC. "ARCHER is blind. Please advise, over."
The Staff Sergeant had been fighting aliens long enough to know what would happen next—the things they would have to do to get the actionable intelligence his officers required. But he also knew these were the kinds of things a smart agent didn't do without a direct order.
"DEO believes the ordinance is in play," replied Naruto's CO, and Director of the DEO, Major Lucy Lane. "Take the gloves off, agent. My authorization."
While Naruto's squad searched the workshop, Bravo's leader quickly brought the four aliens who had survived the firefight to their knees in the center of the shop floor. All had their clean-suits' hoods removed, and their wrists bound together behind their backs with black plastic ties. Naruto met Bravo's mirror-visored gaze and nodded his head. Without a moment's hesitation, Bravo raised one of his thick-soled boots and brought it down on one of the nearest aliens outstretched calves.
The Naltorian waited a full second before crying out, as if he were, like Naruto, surprised that the thud of Bravo's boot hitting the floor was louder than the near-simultaneous snap of his leg.
Then the alien screamed, loud and long. Naruto waited patiently for him to take a breath. Then, through his helmet's exterior speaker, he asked, "The bombs. Where are they?"
Naruto guessed one broken leg would be enough. But the alien was tough—uneager to rat to agents of a government he despised. He didn't beg for mercy or toss out any of the usual anti-human invectives. He just sat there, glowering into Naruto's visor, as Bravo's leader broke his other leg. Without his feet to balance him, the man toppled face-first onto the floor. Naruto heard the sound of teeth snapping—like sticks of chalk against a blackboard.
"Next, it's your arms," Naruto said matter-of-factly. He knelt beside the man, palmed his head, and wrenched it sideways. "Then, I let my friend get creative."
"Tires. In the tires." The words bubbled from the alien's mouth.
The agents in Naruto's squad immediately moved to the stacks of large tires placed around the workshop's walls, lifted them gently to the floor, and began probing their wheel wells. Naruto knew the aliens were smarter than that. Taking Bravo's victim at his word, he guessed the tires were the bombs—that the aliens had mixed the explosives into their synthetic rubber treads—a devious innovation his ARCHER soon confirmed and uploaded to the TOC.
The tires' explosive compound wasn't in the detection database. But the DEO director advising the mission couldn't have been more pleased. For once, they were a step ahead of the enemy, and it took less than a minute before they got a positive ID. One of dozens of aerial ARCHER drones patrolling the main highway into Metropolis caught a whiff of the compound in skid marks created by a sixteen-wheel hauler as it veered into the parking lot of a roadside diner. Some, if not all, of its tires, were bombs waiting to be blown.
As the drone—a tiny disk, a meter wide, kept aloft by a single, shrouded rotor—circled high above the hauler, it detected a second trace of the explosive inside the diner.
Scrutinizing a live feed of the drone's thermal camera overlaid with ARCHER data, the officers in the TOC determined the trace originated from the restaurant's crowded food counter—from a man sitting three stools from the front door.
"Agents, get back to your birds," ordered Major Lane. "You've got a new target."
"What about the prisoners?" Naruto asked. The blood from the alien's fractured legs and ruined mouth had pooled darkly around his boots.
The next person to speak was the operation's DC representative—an officer Naruto had never met in person. Like most spooks, he preferred to remain as anonymous as possible.
"Is the one who talked still alive?" the officer asked.
"Affirmative," Naruto replied.
"Pack him up, Staff Sergeant. Neutralize the rest."
There was no sympathy in the officer's voice—not for the kneeling aliens nor their executioners. Naruto clenched his jaw as he switched his weapon to semi-automatic and shot each alien twice in the chest. The three beings fell backward and did not move. But Bravo leader gave them each a dead check—another single bullet to their foreheads—to be sure.
Naruto couldn't help staring at the carnage, but he did his best not to let the torn blue fabric of the aliens' clean-suits and the white smoke curling from Bravo's weapon imprint in his mind's eye. Memories had a habit of coming back, and this was a scene he would rather not revisit.
As Bravo leader hefted their lone prisoner over his shoulder, Naruto motioned the other agents out the workshop to the waiting MH-6s. Less than fifteen minutes after they'd dropped in, the two squads were clipped back into place. The helicopter's rotors spun, and they streaked back the way they came. But this time they flew for speed, high over the cities buildings.
The officers in the TOC briefly debated whether or not the drone circling the diner should destroy the hauler if it tried to roll back on the highway before the strike team arrived. The four-lane road was snarled with commuter traffic, and just one of the drone's micro-missiles was powerful enough to gut the big truck. Even an exact hit on the hauler's cab might touch off its tires, killing dozens of people in the surrounding vehicles. Far better, the DC officer argued, to flatten the hauler in the diner's parking lot. But Major Lane was just as worried about shrapnel hitting the crowded restaurant.
Fortunately, the target individual spent the MH-6's five-minute flight eating a leisurely breakfast. According to the real-time feed from the drone's camera now mirrored in the corner of Naruto's HUD, the man was just finishing his second cup of coffee when the strike team buzzed up behind a smoked-glass, multistory office building on the opposite side of the highway.
The feed was a high-angle thermal picture of the restaurant's interior in which hot objects biased white and cold items black. The target individual was very pale, as were the food counter's other patrons. The lukewarm coffee in the man's mug appeared dark gray—which meant he was due for a refill or was about to settle his tab and stand up. But most important, Naruto noticed he was surrounded by a red glow, an indication from the drone's ARCHER that he was covered with explosive residue. Naruto guessed the man had recently been at the raided workshop; maybe he'd even helped fit the explosive tires on the hauler.
As Naruto's MH-6 rotated sideways to face the office building, he strained against the black nylon cords clipped to his shoulder plates and loosed a McMillan TAC-50 anti-material from the aircraft's skids. The weapon, a fifty-inch long tube of human/alien metal, shot .50 BMG bullets at 805 m/s. While it was technically an anti-materiel weapon designed for eliminating bombs and other ordnance at a distance, it was also extremely effective against so-called "soft" human targets as well.
Naruto lowered the TAC-50 on its shock-absorbing armature and hugged it to his shoulder.
Immediately, the rifle's targeting system established a wireless link to his helmet's HUD, and a thin blue line angled across the drone's feed. This was the TAC-50's aiming vector—the path its twelve-point-seven-millimeter rounds would travel. Naruto angled the rifle down until the vector turned green: an indication that his first shot would pass directly through the target individual's chest. Almost as if the man could feel the invisible line enter through his left armpit and exit just below his right, he swiped his credit chip against the counter and swiveled around on his stool.
Naruto thumbed the safety-switch above the rifle's trigger. He performed two calming breaths and whispered.
"Target acquired. Request permission to fire."
In the few seconds it took Major Lane to respond, the target sauntered to the diner's double-doors. Naruto watched him hold the entrance open for a family of four. He imagined the man smiled—said something kind to the two parents as they hurried after their ravenous and rowdy boys.
"Permission granted," Major Lane replied. "Fire at will."
Naruto refocused and increased the pressure of his gloved finger on the TAC-50's trigger.
He waited for the man to stroll down a short flight of steps—until a hash mark on the aiming vector indicated his first shot would angle harmlessly into the parking lot. As the man reached into his baggy coveralls, perhaps for the hauler's key, Naruto fired.
The .50 BMG slug exited the barrel with a muffled crack and punched through two of the office building's drywall-walls, with no adverse effect on its trajectory.
Traveling at over two thousand feet per second, the round whistled over the highway and hit the target at the apex of his sternum. The man flew back as the round buried itself in a rooster tail of pulverized asphalt.
Instantly, both helicopters surged up and over the office building and raced across the highway; Naruto's banked into a covering orbit while Bravo's plunged toward the restaurant.
The Bravo team leader leaped from his landing-skid while the aircraft was still a few meters above the ground and fast-walked his squad to the hauler. Bits of pink gore covered the vehicles' cab. Ragged pieces of brown coveralls clung to the side of its cargo trailer.
"We're secure," Bravo growled over the COM.
"Negative," Naruto countered. Checking the drone's leaden feed, he noticed a persistent red glow near the dead man's stool. "There's a bomb inside the restaurant."
Bravo and his squad sprinted to the diner's entrance and burst through its double doors. The diners twisted in their seats and gawked as the armored agents emerged from the vending machine-packed foyer. One of the waitresses held out a menu, an involuntary gesture that earned a rough shove from Bravo as he muscled past. The team leaders ARCHER clattered like an enraged insect as he pulled something from under the food-counter: a purse, burgundy mesh with a golden chain.
At that moment, the door to the restaurant's bathrooms at the far end of the counter swung open. A middle-aged woman in black pants and a cropped corduroy coat stepped through, casually flicking water from her freshly washed hands. When she saw the armored hulks of bravo squad, she stopped midstride. Her heavily mascaraed eyes darted toward the purse—her purse.
"On your knees!" Bravo bellowed. "Hands on your head!"
But as the Staff Sergeant lowered the purse to the counter and brought his MP5K-PDW to bear, the woman lunged toward a table where the family of four had just gotten settled. She hooked an arm around the neck of the youngest boy and wrenched him out of his chair. He couldn't have been any more than four years old. His little feet kicked as he began to choke.
Bravo cursed, loud enough for the officers in the TOC to hear. If he hadn't been burdened by armor, he would have dropped the woman before she moved. But now she had a hostage and command of the situation.
"Get back!" the woman shrieked, "Do you hear me?" With her free hand, she pulled a detonator from her coat—the same size and shape as the one Naruto had seen in the workshop.
She held the device in front of the boy's face. "Get back, or I'll kill them all!"
For a moment, no one moved. Then, as if the woman's threat had pulled some invisible linchpin keeping all the diners locked to their seats, they sprung up and scrambled for the diner's exits.
Naruto watched the chaos unfold in his HUD. He saw the bright white shapes of more than thirty terrified civilians surge around the bravo squad, driving them back and confusing their aim.
"Alpha-leader. Take the shot!" Bravo ordered over the COM.
As Naruto's MH-6 orbited the restaurant, the TAC-50's aiming-vector rotated around the woman, piercing the axis of her chest. But her heat signature was almost indistinguishable from the boy's.
Suddenly, Naruto saw the ghostly image of the captured boy's father rise from his chair, hands raised to show the Innie woman he was unarmed. Naruto couldn't hear the father's pleas (they were too soft for the bravo squad's helmet microphones), but his calmness only increased the woman's panic. She began backing toward the restroom, waving the detonator, her threats now so furious they were incomprehensible. Her face shifted, becoming more reptilian as blonde hair melted into grayish skin.
"Nail the bitch," Bravo shouted. "Or I will!"
"Firing," Naruto said. But instead, he watched the aiming-vector pivot, waiting for an angle that might spare the boy. "Firing," he repeated, hoping his words would stay Byrne's trigger- finger. But Naruto didn't fire. Not immediately. And in his moment's pause, the father jumped forward, grasping for the detonator.
Naruto could only stare as the woman tumbled backward, father on top, and the boy pressed between. He heard the rattle of Bravo's MP5, then the muffled thump of the bomb in the purse followed by the earthshaking boom of the hauler's tires. The drone's feed bleached painfully bright, slamming Naruto's eyes shut. Then a wall of shock and heat tossed him back hard against the MH-6's airframe.
The last thing Naruto remembered before he slacked inside his armor was the sound of thrusters fighting for altitude—a noise more like a scream than a moan.
Prologue to the Naruto & Supergirl crossover story I'll be posting!
Quick disclaimer: Arrowverse Naruto has a story posted on this site called Agent Uzumaki. I've asked him if I could use the premise of his story for this one, and he graciously agreed because, sadly, he will not be updating his story anymore.
Thanks for reading!
P.S. Leave review for Pairing you want to see!