The nursery was almost empty. Konoha's anxious parents had already snatched away their precious children and the few remaining staff stood huddled close to the door. They watched Kakashi materialise and shrank back as he swept past them. If he didn't want to talk, then neither did they. Their feelings were divided between desperate sympathy for a man whose baby daughter had just been kidnapped, and mind numbing terror of a dangerous killer who had a good case for blaming them for the kidnapping.
Kakashi scouted the building, sweeping through each room with chilling efficiency that few within Konoha had ever seen. Of course everyone in the village knew his reputation as a top elite jounin, but he had successfully remained almost invisible to most of its residents. And even those who saw him almost daily had never before been allowed more than a glimpse of the man behind the lazy porn-reading slouch.
The nursery was a wreck, abruptly changed from the kind of disorder left in the wake of happy toddlers and crawlers, to a much more sinister form of chaos. The colourful toys that scattered the floors were shattered, and stuffing from plushies lay around in drifts, as if they had been ritually disemboweled. Kakashi took it all in with a single glance, analysing and assessing the jutsus that would have created just this kind of damage.
"Here… this window…" He flicked a finger towards it, a supremely minimal gesture typical of a jounin in full mission mode.
It had everyone's instant undivided attention.
The window, if it could still be called that, was a gaping hole with a wooden frame. Crystals of glass covered the ground like a king's ransom in diamonds.
The nursery director, a plump middle-aged woman who could only be described as motherly, appeared at his side with speed that would have done a summons proud. Kakashi didn't spare her a glance.
"Did they use it to get in or to get out."
"Er… both I think Hatake-sama. They came from this direction and left the same way. I'm so sorry… it was all so fast."
"Yes. I'm sorry too. And Iruka-sensei, where was he?"
"Well he arrived within a few minutes, to pick little Keshi up. Everything was still… I think he was the first one to realise what had happened."
Kakashi fixed her with the cold glare of his one exposed eye. He knew the effect it would have, and somewhere deep inside he regretted it. But now was not the time for small regrets.
"I want you to think about this very carefully. How much ahead of him were they… how long between when they took off and when he took off after them?"
The woman was pretty tough, but then she'd have to be, dealing with shinobi parents. She didn't even wet herself, although her fear flooded the room to a degree that was almost choking. "Er… five minutes, ten at the most."
Shit. Then unless they way outranked him he'd already caught up with them. Kakashi wasn't sure which was worse. The nursery director opened her mouth, perhaps to offer a suggestion, but he was gone.
Whoever they were, they were aiming for speed, not stealth. They'd left a trail a gennin could follow. And that was very very bad. It meant they aimed to get across the border before there was a chance for a team to be thrown together to follow.
His mind worked in overdrive, barely bothering to take conscious note of where he was being led.
Shit. They'd planned everything. Springing those traps to pull him as far from home as possible… and carefully dismantling them too. Was that so they'd be able to get back past them again, undetected?
His train of thought hit a wall with a screaming crunch.
In which case, why blaze a path as clear as a trail of chalk arrows? And wasn't this path suspiciously familiar? A quick glance confirmed that it was the exact path he'd been following with his team less than an hour before. Of course hiding your tracks within other tracks was one of the most elementary forms of shinobi stealth, but still…
A few miles further he stopped again. There'd been a fight here recently. Much too recently.
Broken branches bled sap onto the scorched ground, and his nose prickled at the sharp sting from the chakra smoke still hanging in the air. But there was something else here too, something that was much more sinister. It was almost undetectable beneath all the energy still dissipating in the area, but a corpse had been destroyed here. And not by Konoha techniques either. It was far more thorough and subtle than anything he had ever come across before.
Kakashi blinked, and swallowed hard, resisting the urge to collapse onto his knees and scream. Was this tiny disturbance all he would ever find of Iruka?
Pushing his personal feeling aside he continued, right now his job was to hunt, not to grieve. But something still gnawed at the back of his mind. He ran back and circled around the battle site twice. The third time he caught it, tracks going off to the east, hidden in all the mess and disruption. So the dismantled traps were so that no one would know that they hadn't crossed back over the western border.
The trail was broken and heavily disguised, but it just felt right. They were the kind of tracks almost no one else could follow, the kind left by top class spies… and kidnappers. Kakashi allowed himself a vindictive smirk.
He had them now.