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The First Shifting Grains
CADEL
CHAPTER 12
Gaara passed the outer ring of the village and catapulted himself as fast as he could.
The small capsule in his hand felt hot and heavy, he wanted to let go of it, but at the same time he didn't want to leave it out of his sight. Strange ink seals wrapped along its body and the heat emanating from its core harshly contradicted the coldness of the jinchuuriki's palm. Gaara had lived through enough war to understand that this small container was a scatter-type bomb that was good for ambushes and traps. All you had to do was leave it hidden in some niche and then it would detonate at a programed time.
But Suna had many wards that protected the village against bombs going off within its walls. It was near impossible to initiate such an inadequate display of terrorism without the seals going off like blazing alarms. So there had to be something special about it.
It had to be an explosive armament with a lethal twist.
Of course, Gaara had no idea what that was and he understood the ink scripture even less. It could all go to hell and he was currently the only who knew about the threat. But he didn't even understand what the threat even was.
Not a moment after his dark contemplations, something caught Gaara's attention.
There, above the dome of a civilian fabric store was a shinobi flailing around the edge of the rails. It was then that Gaara spied the blazing wall that sat on the roof attached to some chimneys. The entire part of the building had collapsed and was scorched black with soot and ash from the steady flames licking at the terracotta.
Gaara narrowed his eyes. It had begun.
The jinchuuriki leaped then landed silently next to the rails to inspect the situation closer. Despite the angry looking flames and ominous glow it casted, the fire itself was small. It was the explosion that seemed to cause the most damage to the building. It was easy enough to put out, snuffing and suffocating the flames under a thick blanket of sand.
It only took a few seconds for the fire to completely die away, leaving charred, sooted rubble in its wake.
Retracting his sand into his gourd, he turned expectantly to the chūnin on the roof who was now sitting on the floor in a graceless heap.
"Why didn't you kill the flame earlier?" the genin asked with a small frown.
The ninja in question had not even looked at the jinchuuriki to his side. His expression was a strange hybrid of bafflement and catatonia.
The genin followed the shinobi's gaze and finally spied dark and grotesquely charred bits of…limbs? It was in bits and pieces, the lumpy mass of burnt flesh blending disturbingly into the scattered rubble – it's only distinction from the debris was that it looked somewhat sticky.
"M-my…my partner…" The ninja's words were grated, as if he had no moisture left in his mouth. "I don't understand, he was standing there with me and then…"
The man said no more and Gaara thought he was finally starting to understand.
He asked pointing towards the burnt remains, "That is your partner?" It was an obvious question but it seemed to get the older shinobi in a more organised state of mind.
"Y-yes." The man's words came out stressed and jilted.
"He was caught in the blaze?"
Whatever colour was in the man's face drained away to bleach bone. "No."
"No?" Gaara blinked at the answer then carefully approached the man as the older shinobi weakly got to his feet. "How did he die in the explosion?"
The shinobi shook his head with a horrified sort of realisation.
"He was the explosion."
A moment passed where neither spoke, the man's words sinking heavily into Gaara's mind.
Something delicate fell into place and Gaara found himself more than a little disturbed. He glanced back down at the 'gift' Itachi had generously given him and found that he no longer wished he understood.
"I see…" The boy whispered quietly to himself.
The chūnin beside him shook himself out of his stupor and blinked at the young genin beside him as if seeing him for the first time.
"S-Shukaku!" The ninja took a step back from Gaara then looked at the poor remains of his patrol partner and found himself in a position where he didn't know which was worse.
The jinchuuriki blinked out of his thoughts and stared at the man.
"No," he stated as if talking to a child. "I'm not."
The boy turned back to look over the village with narrowed his eyes. There will be more, there has to be, but he didn't know how to find them. The best course of action was to raise the alarms, but bringing more ninja into the scene seemed bad considering he just figured out how the bombs were carried.
The sound of rapid breathing began to puff to his side. The chūnin had suddenly collapsed to the ground.
His skin had turned an alarming shade of pink and there was an impressive amount of sweat rolling off his skin. He looked like someone who had been baking too long in the sun at the height of summer. The man was perspiring so much that the clay beneath had darken from the moisture. All his bodily reactions comically exaggerated.
"C-can't breathe…" husked the older man. He grappled at his clothes like the very fabric was causing him extreme discomfort. "Its…it's happening…"
The man look at the charred remains of his partner than his eyes passed over to the jinchuuriki.
The chūnin's eyes all but skinned Gaara with his desperation then uttered, "…help."
It was a request the boy, unfortunately, couldn't oblige.
Not a moment later, a ball of fire belched forth from what used to be a man and burst into a torrent of heat, smoke and organic debris. Gaara perched himself far away on the building opposite and sent his sand over to suffocate the flames before they could do further damage.
What the jinchuuriki had just witnessed couldn't be described. The notion itself was ridiculous, but the other ninja had all but exploded. Words like hot, messy and violent seemed adequate enough to paint a picture, but whatever poetic description that was being fashioned in Gaara's mind was quickly chased out by the sickening fact that the situation had become several times worse than Gaara had first imagined.
The bombs didn't exist.
At least not in the traditional manner and Gaara knew now why the bomb-wards had not detected them.
It was because they were bombs at all. Not until they entered its intended vessel. The ninjas. They were becoming the human carriers of a highly volatile parasite.
The incident seemed to have aroused the attention of other shinobi in the area, all of them began scattering towards the building Gaara had been standing on. The genin on the other was racing towards the outskirts of the village but he heard the sound of another explosion and the distant yells and screams of his fellow ninja.
"What the hell's going on?!" yelled a chūnin from the alleyway to his left.
"Someone put that out!"
"Hang on is that…that looks like a person?"
"I think I hear another one!"
"Get back up and alert the Kazekage!"
All around him, shinobi began to run to the outskirts of the city. Blooms of fire, erupting like flowers in the village skyline.
It was then that Gaara saw her.
It was female jounin collapsed on the small balcony of an apartment. Her skin was pink and pulsing as if there was a supernova ready to explode from the inside out. Already seeing it once, the genin knew she would soon become a rather spectacular firework.
But what really alerted Gaara's attention was the small child peeking out the window of the very same balcony, unaware that he and his family would be caught up in a fiery blaze.
The genin's heart beat lodged itself in his throat. Gaara realised the entire area was a heavily populated civilian district, full of apartments and schools.
The situation became worse because the ninjas who had begun to collect in the one area were most likely carriers. The entire place was a hot zone. Whoever did this had viciously thought it through.
Gaara stopped and closed his eyes.
He knew he couldn't let the carriers expire, not with so many people still sleeping in their beds. But they were fellow Suna shinobi.
A shuddering sigh escaped Gaara's throat. He will protect the villagers…even if it meant killing them.
Suddenly, the several shinobi found themselves arrestingly surprised to see the demon child jump down and join the frenzy. They watched in abject horror as the boy held the collapsed woman on the balcony and snapped her neck clean and without hesitation. The crunching of her bones so much more audible than they expected.
Then they watched the jinchuuriki drop the body and move to the next one.
The demon orchestrated his sand to grab, wrap, hold and crush – rapidly picking a choosing ninja after ninja with intense calculation. Then he would move on.
Gaara ignored the people around him and looked for all the ninjas showing signs of infection.
It was with a heavy heart that he tore into them, sometimes he wasn't fast enough and an inferno would erupt from within. The only upside to his force massacre was that it was terrifying everyone else out of the civilian sector. The less people, the better.
So with a heavy heart and steeled resolve, Gaara continued to rip into the very people he was supposed to protect.
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A/N: Your support has reduced me into a writhing mess of nerves.
Sorry about the wait, school has been demanding and the baby got chicken pox. So much fun.
Thank you for all the reviews!
Cheers
CADEL
[EDITED - 16 APRIL 2015]