Forest of Death
Part II
Naruto couldn't help but scowl as he was chased out of what felt like the hundredth gambling hall. He'd started his search for Tsunade right after breakfast, and now it was well after lunch and still no luck. It didn't help any that everyone decided to follow him to see if he could back up his declaration to get the gym leader to accept his challenge.
"What makes you so sure that she'll be in a casino?" Sakura asked as he dusted himself off and scanned the streets for another.
"I got an inside tip," Naruto replied. "She wasn't at her gym, so she has to be somewhere else in the city…"
"I still can't believe you didn't ask Minato Namikaze for an autograph," Kiba muttered. "You always babble on and on about how awesome he is. Shouldn't that be the first thing you go for?"
Naruto rolled his eyes. The Inuzuka boy had been going on about that all morning—at first not believing Naruto's claim that he'd met the League Champion in person, and then after Sakura and Sasuke had confirmed that it was true, he'd complained about Naruto's failure to ask for an autograph. Perhaps, if things were different, Naruto would be kicking himself for not asking the great trainer for his signature, but now it didn't seem that important.
"Well, he is awesome," Naruto asserted. "I think I was still kind of out of it from my concussion. I can get an autograph from him some other time."
"Some other time?" Kiba snorted. "When else are you ever going to see him? He's the champion trainer of the whole country!"
"I'll see him again," Naruto insisted. He said that I'd see him again…
"You still think you're going to be the next League Champion?" Sasuke muttered. "You do know that getting eight gym badges is only part of what you have to do, right? There's still a bunch of tournaments you have to do well in, and then the Elite Masters Tournament, just to challenge the Champion."
Naruto blinked. "Sure, I will someday… Geeze, Sasuke, I think that's the most I've heard you say at one time in forever!"
"Hn," the Uchiha grunted.
The Uzumaki boy sighed. "And it's right back to the two-grunt Sasuke-language…"
They rounded the corner then, and stumbled upon an interesting scene going on in front of a small restaurant.
"I warned you that drinking wasn't a good idea," a dark-haired woman with a spoink in her arms sighed.
"Don't talk so loud!" a blonde woman with pigtails and a very impressive bust moaned as she rubbed at her temples. "Now are we going to get some breakfast, or not?"
"But…it's closer to lunch, Tsunade-sama," the younger woman protested. "Or dinner."
Tsunade? Naruto squinted at the blonde woman. Huh…she's just like Jiraiya the Super Pervert described. …I thought he was exaggerating the size of her boobs. Oh well, here's my chance!
Naruto sucked in a deep breath and marched right up to the two women. From a distance it was hard to believe that the blonde woman was the same age as Jiraiya. But when he got closer, he noticed faint lines at the corners of her eyes and around her mouth that she'd tried to hide with make-up. He bet that she dyed her hair to hide the gray and had some plastic surgery, too.
"You're the gym leader here?" Naruto asked the busty woman, just to be sure.
"Yeah," Tsunade grunted and squinted down at him. "I'm Tsunade Senju. Who're you?"
"I'm Naruto Uzumaki," he answered, "and I want to challenge for the Leaf badge."
"Uzumaki?"
The woman frowned at him and scrutinized his face carefully. Then her eyes went wide in shock. And then…she burst out laughing.
Naruto rubbed at the back of his head. "Er…so…will you take my challenge, or not?"
Tsunade's laughter died down and her sour expression returned. "You want a badge, huh? Shizune—"
"No," the woman with the spoink said. "I'm not subbing for you anymore. Tsunade-sama, you haven't taken a challenge yourself in months! Unless you decide to retire and leave the gym to me, I can't in good conscience continue to cover for you as much as I have been."
Now Tsunade looked really irritated. "…I don't suppose I could talk you into coming back tomorrow?" she asked him.
"No," Naruto answered stubbornly. "You've already made my friends wait for weeks," he said, pointing to his former classmates, standing a few feet away. "I don't want to hang forever until you finally decide to give me my fight."
Tsunade grimaced as she took in the clump of young trainers that watched her. "Where'd you all come from?"
"Konoha Town," Kiba answered.
"Great," she muttered and turned her brown eyes back to Naruto. "Hm… How about this: We have a quick one-on-one right here, right now. If I win, you buy my breakfast and go away. If you win…I'll take your challenge tomorrow afternoon."
Naruto thought over the offer for a moment before making up his mind. "We can have a battle on the street?"
"There's an alley on the other side of the café," Tsunade told him. "So are you taking my stakes?"
"Yeah," Naruto nodded.
A one-on-one battle meant that he'd only get one chance, but she'd be just as limited. He figured that he had a fifty-fifty chance to win. And if he didn't, he'd get a look at one of her pokémon and he'd just bother her later (she'd said go away not go away and stay away).
"Excellent," the woman smirked and led him to the alleyway between the restaurant and a candy shop. "Now let's get this over with," she grumbled and immediately set loose a burly nidoqueen.
Naruto gulped as he eyed the imposing blue pokémon and ran through his roster of monsters to find the best one to use. Nidoqueen was a poison type, which made her weak against ground and psychic types. Sandy was a ground type, but the nidoqueen's secondary type was also ground, making Sandy less effective even though she'd evolved into a vibrava which also made her a dragon type. Nidoqueen's secondary type, ground, was weak against grass, water, and ice, and while Naruto didn't have any grass or ice types, he did have…
"Okay then," Naruto grinned and set loose Typhoon. "Let's get started!"
While the nidoqueen had to take a step back from the force of Typhoon's intimidate, Tsunade looked furious at the sight of his gyarados. It was as if his gyarados somehow was a personal insult or something. She turned to Shizune, her subordinate trainer, with a grim expression.
"Start us off, Shizune," she said icily.
Shizune sighed, set her spoink down on its spring-like tail, and started them off as Naruto's former classmates watched in silent anticipation.
"Begin!"
"Typhoon, ice fang!" Naruto instructed.
"Hime," Tsunade growled, "thunderbolt."
Naruto sucked in a sharp breath as—just when Typhoon was closing in with glowing fangs and foggy breath—the nidoqueen launched an electrical assault from her stubby head-horn. Being both a water- and flying-type, his gyarados was doubly weak against electric attacks, which made the thunderbolt devastating. When the blinding flash of the lightning had faded, Typhoon looked rather fried as he struggled to keep from collapsing flat onto the asphalt as the nidoqueen watched, unscathed.
"Poison fang," Tsunade ordered coldly, and her nidoqueen stormed forward with purple fluid dripping from her fangs.
"Try ice fang again!" Naruto called out.
Typhoon tried to twist away from the charging nidoqueen and still latch on to her with his ice-cold fangs, but the blue monster caught his serpentine body with her venomous bite. While gyarados had thick scales, the nidoqueen's powerful jaws easily crunched through and pumped poison into his body. But as Hime chewed on him, Typhoon managed to bite her in the back.
"Thunderbolt again," Tsunade commanded.
From such close range the attack was even more devastating. Combined with Typhoon's poisoning, the gyarados simply couldn't withstand it. The sea serpent collapsed into unconsciousness while the nidoqueen pawed sorely at the cold spot left on her spiky back.
Tsunade retracted her nidoqueen to its sphere and marched right up to Naruto and held her hand out. "Wallet."
Naruto fumbled around in his pocket and reluctantly gave her his politoed coin purse. The woman rifled through the money inside, took a good chunk of it, and then shoved the wallet back into Naruto's hand. The boy cringed at the loss of his hard-earned money, and how much thinner his precious "Gama-chan" felt.
"Now scram," Tsunade growled and stalked back to the café to get her breakfast…or lunch.
Sighing, Naruto put Typhoon away and shoved his wallet back into his pocket. "Man, is she always so bitchy?"
"Lately, yes," Shizune sighed as she walked up to him. "I can show you were the nearest pokémon center is if you like."
"Thanks," Naruto muttered and glanced towards his friends. "Do you guys want to come?"
"Nah," Kiba answered. "Lunch sounds better. Right Akamaru?"
His growlithe barked an agreement.
"I could go for lunch," Sakura agreed. "Who else?"
"Lunch," Sasuke muttered with a nod.
"Regular meals are required for proper health," Shino said, apparently his version of agreement with the idea.
"I…I'm n-not that h-hungry," Hinata timidly squeaked.
"Alright then, see ya later Hinata!" Kiba waved and jogged away from the alley with Akamaru at his heels. "I say we get barbeque!"
"Hey, wait up!" Sakura shouted after him.
The two other boys followed without a word, leaving Naruto and Hinata alone in the alley with Shizune and her spoink.
"Come along then," Shizune sighed. "Come on, Ton-ton."
Minato panted as he braced himself against a tree while Kyuubi and Kiroi crouched by his feet and tried to think of what to do next. He'd been on the run all night and long been separated from any of the remaining police officers. A few times he'd tried to ride Ryuu out of the forest, but each time they'd caught up with him and attacked them while he would try to rig up the dragon in the riding harness. He'd also tried to send Kage to fetch help, but the honchkrow had been attacked on the way and barely found him before the luxio and luxray hunting the black bird could completely electrocute him.
It seemed like there was no way out of the Forest of Death.
The Forest of Death… he thought. The name seems so appropriate now. Those police officers…
Several of the police officers had to be dead. Many of them were hurt from the pokémon assault. Minato certainly hadn't gotten away from the melee unscathed.
His forearm and cheek were burned and they still stung like heck. He was bruised and battered and his clothes were torn from the attack and from the running blindingly through the trees. It was a miracle that he hadn't lost Kyuubi and Kiroi in the madness and the hours and hours of being hunted that had followed.
Team Sound is bad news, but they would never go so far as to lash out at the police like that. It was because of those others… Who were they?
His fatigue-fuzzed mind kept drifting back to a rumor that had come to his attention the year before. Actually, it was barely even a rumor, more like a whisper about some kind of new mysterious bogeymen. A few low-level crooks with some deeper connections had mumbled something about a group called "the Akatsuki Syndicate" or "the Movement of the Red Dawn" to the police when they'd been caught, but further investigation hadn't uncovered anything about those names.
Red clouds… Maybe it could be them. This "Movement of the Red Dawn" or "the Akatsuki Syndicate"…or whatever they call themselves. But…what are they after? And what makes them so bold? So aggressive? So…
Wild pokémon attacked people all the time, usually because the humans in question would unwittingly stumble over the pokémon's nest or something else that the pokémon was extremely protective of. But for tamed and trained pokémon to deliberately and directly attack humans…it was one of the biggest taboos that Minato knew of. Even police pokémon, which could be used to subdue criminals and underwent special training to be able to do so, would never attack a human the way that those pokémon had.
Minato scrubbed at his eyes and looked around at the gloomy forest. It was so dense where he was, it was impossible to accurately judge the time of day; it could be the morning or the evening as far as he knew. But he had to get out, get back to Senju City and gather back-up, get help for whatever police officers were still alive and lost.
If only I knew where I was, or which trail to take… His shoulders slumped and his eyes closed, just for a moment, as he leaned against the tree. If only they weren't hunting me down like an animal and sending their monsters straight after me instead of battling with me properly…
A tug on his pant leg brought his eyes down to Kiroi. The raichu looked frightened, and his ninetails was on edge, listening for any sound that might mean that something was approaching. Kyuubi was something of a recent addition to his team, but the rest had been with him for years and years, and yet none of them had ever been put in a situation like this one before.
His pokémon were used to battling the right way. They fought against enemy pokémon and the humans supervised. Enemy pokémon never attacked their trainer. It just wasn't done. It wasn't right.
This is just insane. Minato groaned and pushed off the tree to keep walking, searching for some landmark in the forest while trying to avoid enemies—Team Sound, the red cloud people, or even some random wild pokémon that decided to attack—in the process. Kiroi and Kyuubi followed, keeping their senses alert to try and protect him better than they had previously. This is all insane…
Naruto fiddled with a bare dango skewer while Demon lay near his feet and gnawed on a chewy pokémon treat. Hinata was still nibbling at her food with her little piplup in her lap. And Shizune had finished her lunch but seemed lost in her thoughts as her spoink peeked up at her intently (being a psychic-type, maybe it was reading her mind).
After showing them the nearest pokémon center, Shizune had taken them to a small, pokémon-friendly café. Tsunade's subordinate had made a little small talk during the meal, but hadn't revealed anything terribly interesting about the gym leader. Hinata had barely said a word, managing only to ask Naruto if the soothe bell she'd given him had helped any with taming Demon.
That had been a tricky question to answer. Demon was much more tolerable than he had been, but it had taken so long to get to that point that it was hard to tell if the bell had made any real impact. At least the sound of the bell had been useful, especially when Demon was still in his I-don't-like-you-so-I'm-going-to-run-away-every-chance-I-get phase. So he'd just settled on "yes".
"Shizune," Naruto said, tapping the wooden skewer against his plate. "Why's Tsunade so nasty?"
The dark-haired woman blinked and then focused on his question. "A lot of reasons," she sighed. "Your choice of pokémon didn't help her mood any."
"She has something against gyarados?" Naruto frowned.
"Yes." Shizune's look was grim. "Tsunade-sama once had a younger brother named Nawaki. The very day after he became a pokémon trainer and received his first pokémon…he was killed in a horrible accident. Another trainer, who had been trying to raise a magikarp into a gyarados, had grown impatient with his fish and began to mistreat it. The night that Nawaki died, that abused magikarp finally evolved and with its new-found power went on a revenge-fueled rampage. Nawaki tried to help get some innocent bystanders out of the way and was crushed by the gyarados's thrash attacks."
"That's so horrible!" Hinata gasped (and had Naruto not been just as shocked, he would've been surprised that the Hyuuga girl hadn't stuttered).
"I hate people like that!" Naruto growled. "If you can't be patient enough to raise a magikarp you don't deserve a gyarados!"
"I know," Shizune nodded in agreement. "But ever since then, Tsunade-sama's had trouble trusting any gyarados, even the calmest, most well-trained ones. When a trainer uses one against her, she goes all out against it. She taught Hime thunderbolt just to electrocute gyarados."
"Man," Naruto muttered. "Talk about holding a grudge…"
"It's more than that," the woman continued. "Tsunade-sama only truly became bitter after the loss of her fiancé, Dan. He was my uncle, and a dedicated pokémon ranger. He would patrol the most remote parts of the Forest of Death and drive off poachers and help lost trainers." Her dark eyes grew misty. "He loved his job, but… A few months before they were to be married, my uncle went on a patrol during a terrible storm. Some trainers had gotten stranded by a flooding river and he was trying to help them. Just as he'd brought the last one to safety, a huge tree branch fell and mortally wounded him. He died just when she arrived at his side in the hospital."
"That's so sad," Hinata whimpered, hugging her piplup to her chest.
"Yeah," Naruto swallowed hard. "So…now she's always angry?"
"She's haunted by what happened," Shizune explained. "She's afraid to let anyone else close to her; she's convinced that her own bad luck killed her brother and my uncle. Every year the ghosts and the guilt get worse and Tsunade-sama grows bitterer and more separated from everyone else. It's gotten so bad now… All she wants to do is drink and gamble, and she hasn't been to her private training grounds in the Forest of Death in nearly two years. Tsunade-sama can't stand the forest anymore."
She's a lot like Mom, Naruto thought as he tapped the empty dango skewer on the edge of his plate. She's running away. I guess…the only difference is that she's running from dead people instead of live ones.
The waitress came by and handed out their bills. Naruto wanted to cry as he dug money out of his half-depleted Gama-chan. Stuff in Senju City was expensive, and if he had to stay as long as some of his friends had to get the Leaf badge, he'd have to take a part-time job somewhere to make some cash or he'd be broke.
"Th-thank you for showing us a-around, Shizune-san," Hinata stammered with a polite bow, which her piplup mirrored, as they got up from the table to leave.
"Yeah, thanks," Naruto nodded, his mind buzzing with new information.
"It's no problem," Shizune smiled, her spoink squealing happily. "Although, Naruto, I have to ask…do you know why Tsunade-sama found your name so funny?"
Naruto rolled his eyes. "I don't know. Maybe it has something to do with my parents…"
"Your parents?" Shizune cocked her head curiously. "Who are your parents?"
Naruto nervously rubbed at the back of his head. "Um…"
"Naruto! Hinata!" Kiba cried as he and Akamaru rushed up to them. "There you are! We ran into these police officers who're looking for volunteers—any trainers with four badges or more."
"Police officers?" Shizune muttered with a frown.
"Volunteers?" Naruto asked. "For what?"
"They want to get into the Forest of Death and look around," Kiba answered. "Apparently something's gone down out there. C'mon!"
Intrigued, Naruto jogged after Kiba along with a concerned Hinata and Shizune. He didn't worry about whether or not Demon was following him. The jingling of the vulpix's soothe bell let him know that the fire fox was right behind him.
Kiba brought them to an open plaza that looked like it was near a large police station. Sakura, Sasuke, and Shino were already there, along with several other older trainers and a group of uniformed police officers. And a few of those police officers were trying to talk to an angry-looking Tsunade.
"I said no!" the blonde woman snarled. "You go do what you want, but I'm not going into that forest!"
"But Tsunade-sama…" one of the officers tiredly protested. "As gym leader, one of your responsibilities is to—"
"I don't care!" Tsunade snapped. "And anyway, you're overreacting. Minato's with them so I'm sure that all your colleagues are just fine. They're just delayed in getting touch with you, that's all."
"Perhaps we are overreacting," a more senior police officer shrugged. "However, with the recent events of the past few months—reports of poaching, mysterious attacks on trainers, the disappearance of several rangers, and now this—it seems prudent to make a search. And as we are low on strength it also seems prudent to gather proficient trainers, such as yourself, to assist us."
"Count me out," Tsunade growled. "I have better things to do than wander around in the woods and jump at shadows."
"Tsunade-sama!" Shizune protested, rushing to the older woman's side. "You really shouldn't refuse this time. What if—"
"You go if you want, Shizune," Tsunade huffed. "I'm staying in the city."
Naruto scowled. This isn't right… She's the gym leader! She can't just hide in the city because the forest has bad memories in it… The boy glanced down at his vulpix, and was struck with an idea.
"You're staying in the city?" Naruto said loudly. "What, are you scared of the dark?"
The gym leader glared at him. "What was that?"
"N-Naruto-kun?" Hinata squeaked nervously.
"Or maybe it's the bugs and ghosts," Naruto continued. "Girls are always scared of bugs and ghosts."
"Naruto…" Sakura frowned.
"What would you know, brat?" Tsunade sneered.
"Plenty," Naruto grinned. "You're just a scared old lady."
"Old lady?!" the blonde woman roared.
"Naruto!" Shizune gasped.
"Dude, I think you should stop…" Kiba gulped.
"Yeah, you're as old as Jiraiya, and he's old!"
The busty woman looked ready to explode. "Why you little—"
"Hey, Oba-chan, if I bring a nightlight, would you feel brave enough to go into the forest?"
"That's it!" Tsunade stormed right up to him and savagely pinched his ear. "Just for that, you get to explore the forest with me, and when this all turns out to be nothing I'm calling your mother!"
"Go ahead," Naruto shrugged, putting on a confident face. Mom won't be mad when I explain…I hope.
With a final angry glare, Tsunade stomped off to get ready with the police officers.
Naruto waited until she was thoroughly distracted by her conversation before snickering to himself.
I am a genius!