Disclaimer: Still don't own Naruto.
They split up the sentries between them. At most, they had observed nine a night, and the three days of surveillance had shown that the sentries rotated every three hours. That meant two for each of them. Tenzou slipped through the trees like a shadow. The moonlight found no metal to glint off of; they had darkened their masks and armor and the steel plates on their gloves with the concentrated, washable dye ANBU brought on most missions. The Black Ops moved unseen.
There were supposed to be eight to ten jounin in the group; Intel predicted the rest to be mid to high chuunins. The radio in Tenzou's ear crackled. "Two minutes."
Four voices whispered acquiescence. He took a position in the trees. "One minute." Tenzou marked his two targets, spaced out in a wide perimeter around the concealed camp. Simultaneously, he decided. A quick handseal, and a second masked Tenzou appeared with barely a flicker of extra chakra. "Ten seconds...five...Now." Tenzou dropped to the forest floor.
Around the perimeter, nine bodies fell silently into the dirt. "Approach," Kakashi's almost inaudible order came. Tenzou paced past the corpse, dismissing his clone. The trees began to thin, and he stopped behind a tall trunk, merging with the moon-shadow. "Three. Two. One. Attack."
They had the advantage of surprise, or at least they would have. The same ninja who had concealed the camp with genjutsu woke as soon as Raidou's covering illusion went into effect. Hayate skewered him as he began to stand, but the scent of blood woke the rest of the camp. Twenty ninja rose from the ground, grabbing weapons to fight.
Tenzou trapped one as he stumbled from his blankets with bindings of wood that sprang out of the ground to wrap around the man's ankles. He fell on his face, but shot a katon jutsu at the wood, and rolled to his feet. Tenzou deflected his kunai with his own, flung a handful of shuriken at close range, then ripped a kunai across his throat for good measure. The blood splattered wetly against his fingers. Two more were charging at him from behind. Tenzou flashed through seals, and more tentacles of wood sprang from the ground, writhing like live beings. The two ninja dodged, leaping easily over the dangers. Tenzou fell back a step, hands moving again.
He broke off in the middle of his seals to draw a kunai and block the thrust of a katana. The other missing-nin launched a wind attack, and Tenzou leapt away. Twisting under the wind-user's guard, he thrust his kunai into the man's chest, just before the katana blade entered his back.
His armor saved his life; the missing-nin had misjudged the force needed to penetrate ANBU-issue vests, and only the first inch of the blade entered his flesh. The ANBU reached behind him before the man could withdraw his sword, and grasped the blade with his gloved hand. With the other, he threw a shuriken at the half-dressed, messy-haired man. The ninja released the hilt and toppled back to the bedrolls spread out on the ground, blood spurting from his neck. Tenzou ripped the blade from his back, and felt the warmth of his own blood exiting his body. Three down; he should take out at least one more.
The three had been chuunin level, Tenzou decided. That meant Kakashi and the others must be engaging the jounin. The clearing was eerily quiet, only the clash of metal and a single, thin voice wailing in the dark. No longer seeing through tunnel vision focused only on the enemies in front of him, Tenzou glanced around, trying to judge where his teammates were. The flicker of a blade over there was probably Hayate; he caught a glimpse of his silhouette as a body fell away from his katana. Then Tenzou felt the flicker of chakra behind him, a moment too late.
He spun around, kunai up but in the wrong position, as the massive club crashed down towards his skull. He lifted the kunai in a futile gesture, a split second away from having his head smashed in. He imagined he heard birds.
The mace wavered, and dropped. Tenzou fell to his knees, pushing the spiked weapon away easily, no longer being accelerated down by his attacker. The mace thudded into the dirt, and Tenzou looked up at the surprised face of the missing-nin.
Kakashi's mask appeared as the corpse slumped off his fist with a soft sucking noise. Tenzou straightened up slowly, breathing raggedly. "Thanks."
Red flashed in the eyehole of Kakashi's mask, and the young man turned away. "Don't get distracted," he said harshly. The ringing of metal had died away, the clearing suddenly still. Only the one voice broke the silence. Kakashi stalked over to where the wailing had turned to quiet sobs. He paced deliberately forward, like a wolf on the hunt. Tenzou followed, left hand pressed to his back.
The ninja was younger than Tenzou, wearing a scratched Cloud headband around his neck. He tried to scramble away from Kakashi as the dark figure bent down, blocking the moonlight, but Kakashi put a sandal on his wrist. "How many?" he asked quietly.
The boy was crying, Tenzou saw. The right side of his body was almost entirely pulped, and he wondered whose jutsu had done that. The sight made him slightly nauseous. "Thirty-two," he sobbed. "Please, let me go. I didn't do anything, please—"
Kakashi slit his throat. The other three had already melted out of the darkness to array themselves behind their captain, and watched impassively. Kakashi stood up, and glanced cursorily over his team. "Any injuries?"
Genma, leaning heavily on Raidou's shoulder, shook his head. "Nothing life-threatening." Tenzou decided not to complain about his stab wound. It was minor; he didn't have to bring it up.
"Count the bodies," Kakashi ordered, voice emotionless.
They came up with exactly thirty bodies, including the nine dead sentries. Genma called up a light, and Hatake unrolled the mission scroll. Of the six ninja specifically listed for elimination, five were present in the pile of corpses in the clearing.
Tenzou expected them to head out immediately to chase the survivors, but Kakashi stopped them. "Ankle, Genma."
The injured man grimaced, pushing back his mask to see more clearly. Raidou lowered him to the ground, and Genma unwrapped the bandages. The joint was swollen, turning purple, and obviously giving him pain. "Can you get me a painkiller?" he asked Raidou, as he began to tie it up again. "Nothing else to do," he told Kakashi. "It's not a problem."
Raidou handed him two pills from a bottle in the portable med-kits they all carried. "Rookie," Kakashi added. "Any injuries? Don't lie to me."
Hayate began to cough quietly. Tenzou nodded. "Back. It's small, though."
Kakashi walked around behind him. "Take off the vest." He wrapped Tenzou's back in a layer of bandages before he let the younger nin buckle his vest on again.
"Any tingling?" Genma asked from his seat on the blood-soaked ground. "Nausea?" Tenzou shook his head. "Probably not poisoned, then. Kakashi, if you're going to mother-hen us all, tie up that leg, or I'll make Hayate do it."
Tenzou's eyes snapped down to Kakashi's leg. In the darkness, the pale skin showing through the ripped fabric on his thigh stood out, and the black color of the lower half indicated blood. Tenzou cursed himself for being so dense as to not notice, and pulled a roll of bandages out of his own med-kit.
Kakashi pulled the cloth from his hands as he approached. His red eye still glared through the mask. "I can do it myself, rookie," he said, letting amused condescension color his voice. The wound was deep but clean, and they were ready to go less than five minutes after the fight, the massacre, ended.
Kakashi's hands were already stained with his own blood, and he performed the summoning jutsu quickly. A pack of dogs appeared in a puff of smoke. "Two ninja left here," he told them tersely. "Find them."
"Here," the smallest said after a moment, nosing the ground on the edge of the clearing. "They're heading this way, together."
"Towards Grass," Genma hissed. The five ninjas sprinted off into the night, leaving the carnage of the meadow behind.
The first hint that something was wrong came when they found the corpse. The dogs stopped suddenly, churning to a halt in a semi-circle on the ground. The ninjas dropped from the trees, and Kakashi lifted the body's head from the dirt. "It's the sixth one," he confirmed. Flipping the corpse over completely, he stared at the kunai in the man's chest. "The other killed him."
"Why?" Hayate asked, swallowing a cough. "Does he have other allies to go to?"
"We have to find him before he reaches Grass." Raidou leapt back into the trees. "Come on." Kakashi dropped the body, and they ran even faster.
The wires were well hidden, nearly invisible, and moving as fast as they were, even Kakashi missed them. The trap flung Hayate into a tree, the whiplash of taught razor-wire ripping through his ANBU vest. The explosion followed a moment later, engulfing the trees around Hayate in flames.
The rest of the squad pulled up short, spinning around as the boy's body was tossed through the air. "Hayate!" Genma shouted. Kakashi hurriedly soaked the area with a spray of water jutsu, putting out the fires threatening Hayate's limp form.
He was breathing, when they reached him, but not well. Blood slid out from between his lips, and his eyes were dazed. He groaned when Genma tried to lift him upright. "Broken ribs," the shinobi said, pressing lightly on his friend's chest. "Concussion, too." Hatake dropped to his knees, his uncovered sharingan whirling. A few unpracticed handsigns, and green light enveloped his hands. "Stop that," Genma ordered, shoving Kakashi's hands away and disrupting the healing jutsu.
"I've copied them before," Kakashi insisted.
"I know," Genma snapped, "But you couldn't help Masaru with them. Remember?" His voice was harsh, the words just as cold. "If you drain yourself here, the mission will fail."
Kakashi glared at his subordinate from behind his mask. "You'd let Hayate die?"
"I'm not...dying..." Hayate choked out. "Ribs...I've had...worse." He couldn't focus on the figures above him, couldn't seem to think straight. But he knew he wasn't dying.
"We have to go," the pug interjected. "He's pulling ahead." Kakashi glared down at his dog, but his squad was agreeing.
"Fine," he grated out. "Genma, stabilize Hayate as best you can, and stay with him. Raidou, Tenzou, with me." He gestured at two of his dogs, and growled something. They moved up to flank Hayate and Genma. "They'll stay, too," Kakashi told his teammate. Then the other three leapt into the trees again.
The missing-nin was moving fast. They crossed the border between Fire country and Grass country, still behind him. Then the pug in the lead stopped. "There," he said in his voice that sounded as gravelly as Hayate's when he was sick. "He's stopped." The three ninja peered down through the branches, to the apparently empty clearing below. A trapdoor into the ground gaped open at the edge of the trees.
"I-K-62," Kakashi murmured. "Damn you, Genma. Why'd you have to be right?"
"Are you going in?" the dog asked. "He's in there, you know. And it smells like explosives."
"Yeah."
He cast cynical eyes up at his summoner. "Don't do anything stupid, brat."
"Can you do clones, Tenzou?" Hatake's voice was quiet.
"Yes, Captain," Tenzou answered, just as serious.
"I don't have the range to send one down there, Kakashi," Raidou reminded his captain. "Not if you want us out of the blast radius."
Kakashi nodded, black mask not turning. "There won't be space for more than two, probably. Clone, Tenzou." The clone separated from Tenzou's body with a creaking of wood. Kakashi's shadow clone poofed into existence at the same time, and the two dropped to the forest floor. "Back off," Kakashi ordered his teammates. They faded back into the trees.
They only had to wait a few minutes, though the time seemed to last forever. The roar of the explosion came suddenly, a huge pillar of flame blossoming in the clearing and whipping superheated air around them. Tenzou and Kakashi flinched backwards at the influx of information as their clones were destroyed. Behind his mask, Tenzou paled. "Back," Kakashi shouted, barely heard over the deafening crackle of the fire beginning to spread. He made a hurried set of seals, and doused the area in water. But the fire continued to burn, smaller secondary explosions rocking the remains of the bunker as separate caches detonated.
The three ninja sprinted back towards their injured teammates, the dogs bounding along below them. Kakashi didn't bother asking if Hayate could be moved. "We need to go." Genma stood, his swelling ankle unstable. The only uninjured one, Raidou bent and scooped Hayate up gently in his arms. Genma had wrapped Hayate's ribs tightly and bandaged the long welts on his chest, but every time he coughed his ribs grated with pain, and Hayate's eyes still weren't focusing.
Unasked, Tenzou tucked himself under Genma's left arm. "Thanks, kid," Genma muttered. Then they were off again.
Kakashi stopped when the reached the sprawl of bodies littering the forest floor. He pulled a black bag from his hip pouch. "Keep going." When he caught up to his teammates again, the bag was tossed over his shoulder, bulging oddly.
They ran on chakra and the determination that was all too often the difference between living and dying. It took sixteen hours to cover two full days of travel; sixteen hours and more soldier pills than the medics listed as safe.
In the early hours, Kakashi filled the team in on what had happened in the bunker.
The missing-nin had been unpacking the explosives, and lighting a fuse as the clones had entered. "Back off," he had demanded, waving the sparking wick over an explosive tag.
The clones had stopped in the doorway, gazing into the stark white room of the bunker. It was packed nearly wall to wall with boxes and crates; the scent of chemicals was overwhelming.
"I thought you came to Grass for asylum," Kakashi's clone had asked. "Why would you do this?"
"I did," the man answered, the fuse dipping closer to the tag. "This is the price. As long as this place is destroyed, they'll pay my family a pension even if I die. My children won't starve."
"Why would Grass do that?" Tenzou's clone interjected. "How do you know they won't go back on their word after you're dead?"
"You village bastards always think that only your village good," the ninja spat. "Grass is an honorable village, and an honorable country. They've never broken a promise like that before. I know people who've worked for them." His hand dropped lower. Kakashi's clone began to make seals for a water jutsu. "I wouldn't do that," the ninja warned. "I can drop this faster than you can finish your jutsu." The clone stopped.
"You'll start a war." Kakashi's clone tried to reason with him. "Rock against Grass, or Grass against Fire, someone will want retribution. What about your children then?"
"They're safely in Lightning country," the ninja said. "They'll be safe. This is my mission." He had smiled, then, and let go of the fuse. The bunker was destroyed completely.
Squad 14 reached Konoha on their last dregs of chakra and a prayer that somehow they were wrong. Grass had been collecting missing-nin for months now, and the ANBU had failed to stop the trigger no one had realized was coming so soon.
They stumbled through the gates without stopping; there wasn't time. Kakashi headed straight for the Hokage tower, his team towards the hospital. Hayate wasn't conscious anymore.
Kakashi brushed past the ANBU guarding the Hokage's door; they waved him through with respect both for his position as Captain and the scent of blood clinging to his skin. Dropping the heavy bag on the floor, he bowed to his Hokage. The bag had stopped dripping blood hours before, but it still smelled of death.
"I-K-62 has been destroyed," he said, voice impassive. "Kusa ordered it."
The Hokage understood immediately; it was his job, after all. "I'll need a full report as soon as the council is convened," he said. His weathered face was hard. "Wait in the Council Room." He glanced down with distaste at the bag. "And get someone to take the heads to the Intelligence Division."
Kakashi gave the bag to one of the ANBU at the office door, then wandered down to the lower level of the Hokage tower and pushed open the tall doors of the Council Room. It was a large, curved room, windowless, but furnished with a long table surrounded by nearly twenty chairs. Kakashi pulled a chair away from the table, dragged it to the wall, and sprawled gracelessly down. He closed his own eye behind the mask; Obito's sharingan was already long shut.
The borrowed eye ached. He had come so close to losing another of his people. He should have seen that wire. Should have known the missing-nin would leave traps. Should have expected it. And Tenzou was too inexperienced; his inattention had nearly gotten him killed. If Kakashi hadn't been watching him from the corner of his eye, Tenzou would be dead. Obito's eye throbbed. So close.
The door opened, and old men began to hurry into the room, pulling out chairs as they murmured to each other. Emergency council meeting—what is going on?—does anyone know? Kakashi sank into the shadows, just another patch of anti-light.
The Hokage swept into the room soon after, robes swirling. "We have a situation with Kusa," he stated flatly. "It has the potential to turn into the Fourth Ninja War."
Murmurs rose around the table. "Hokage-sama," someone began.
The Hokage cut off the voices with a raised hand. "The ANBU captain leading the mission involved will give his report. Wolf-san," he called, eyes searching out Kakashi in his dark corner.
The ANBU rose silently, materializing from the shadows like a ghost. A few of the councilors started as he emerged into the light, not having noticed the ninja. Kakashi felt a flicker of disdain. Ninja were the shadows; they should have expected him. Like I should have expected the wires. "Hokage-sama." He bowed to Sarutobi, ignoring the throb of his leg and eye. "We were assigned to eliminate a group of thirty-two missing-nin seeking asylum in Grass country," he began. "We ambushed th—"
The door slid open, and Kakashi broke off his recitation. "My apologies, Hokage-sama," the latecomer said smoothly. He glanced down the table with jet black eyes. The seats were all taken; Kakashi had moved the only free chair to the side. One of the younger councilors hurriedly stood up, offering his chair to the dour man.
The Hatake standing on the edge watched him take the seat with contempt. Uchiha Fugaku nodded to his fellow councilors, then glanced at the ANBU. His eyes narrowed. For a moment, a steely grey eye locked with the Uchiha's hard black gaze. Then the Hokage spoke again, and both broke off their glares to acknowledge him. "Welcome," he told the clan head. "Please begin again, Wolf-san."
A/N: A Naruto-less chapter...heh. He'll return, no fears. (And a chapter with no scene breaks...shocking)
And...w-wow...I never expected this story to become this popular. Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to review and read!
Last thing: I'm getting to a rather complex plot issue, and I'm looking for a beta. If someone would be willing to hash through some issues in the next few chapters, toss me a line. Thanks!