Disclaimer: Naruto is the work of mangaka Masashi Kishimoto, Harry Potter is the work of author J.K. Rowling. The author makes no claim to ownership of the aforementioned works and no profit from this fanfiction.
Uchiha Fukurou
Of Friends, Enemies and Deathly Eyes
Uchiha clansmen Tekka and Yashiro stood at the outskirts of the Kokoro Forest. The older man was holding a map and compass while Tekka just held his reservations.
"All right," Yashiro started, "We know Fukurou-kun lives somewhere in there, let's go find his place."
Tekka still looked uncomfortable with the idea, "Yashiro," He said with thinly veiled nervousness, "Don't we have better things to do? You saw how Yakumi was. The guy did so many jumping jacks he threw out his back."
Yashiro ignored him and started walking forward as he spoke, periodically looking around with his sharingan active, "We already know that the defenses on his home activate in a specific area. If it's a static defense then we'll simply skirt around the edges and find the borders of the place that way."
Tekka was following and had his sharingan active as well, "I feel like I forgot something…"
Yashiro reached out and grabbed the man before he could walk off. He marked something on the map and led a reluctant Tekka away from the spot.
"How did you feel?" He asked the man.
Tekka seemed briefly distracted before coming to his senses, "I… wow, that must be some genjutsu. I completely forgot what I was doing for a second." He focused on the area He had been standing at with a frown." I didn't see any charka there either.
"It seems not to depend on Fukurou being around to remain active, though since you haven't spouted off about starting a stamp collection… The effect is either progressive of at a lower setting than before." Yashiro mused,
The two men moved on, catching the other when one stepped within the field of the strange, invisible barrier. Eventually they came full circle and stepped out of the trees. Yashiro was frowning at the map. Tekka was blankly staring at something in the distance.
"This doesn't make any sense…" Yashiro muttered. There was a circle on the map alright; it included a small section of forest and part of the residential area neighboring it. Only, Yashiro had seen nothing but trees when he'd been walking, trees and shrubs and none of the buildings the map said they walked by.
"Yashiro…" Tekka said slowly, "Kokoro forest is to the south of the village right, Close to the gate?"
"Yes," Yashiro answered. He looked up from the map, "What the…"
The two were standing on the Hokage Mountain about as far north as possible without leaving the village proper.
"Ah, to hell with this…" Yashiro, groused, "You're right, we've got better things to do anyway…"
"Yeah..." Tekka agreed with relief.
Then the two men began to yodel.
In his office, Sarutobi Hiruzen looked up when he heard a warbling cry, "Hmm? What the heck is that?"
"What an annoying guy!" Hiko groused from where he sat with Fukurou.
Chun Chu wasn't exactly an intimidating woman at first or even second glance. Her pale skin and pink cheeks made her look like something of a china doll. The baggy clothes and jounin vest on her short and skinny frame made her seem almost childlike. Having fought her, Fukurou knew better, the samurai didn't. Unlike most of the Daimyo's forces, these men hadn't ever worked with ninja. They were basically there to enforce the local magistrate's decisions and carry out routine duties that didn't require that one be a ninja.
This was not to say that their training or professionalism was inferior. These men all came from families that had served as retainers for generations and were trained from childhood to do a job that had largely been eclipsed in worth by modern shinobi. Most samurai that had experience working with ninja at least developed a sense of professional courtesy that was lacking in Chun Chu's interactions with the samurai in charge of the detail.
On the fourth day into the trip, she had agreed with the officer in charge of the samurai that an attack seemed unlikely. The man hadn't asked her opinion however nor did he seem to take her team any more seriously than he did her. In the end Chun Chu dealt with the situation gently by ensuring her suggestions on where and when they would rest were timed perfectly. This was in part due to the scouting of Hiko and Shigure. Her suggestions were also phrased in such a way that left the man with no reason to refuse lest he seem a fool.
Playing nice seemed to backfire that day; however, when their sensei was forced to make her suggestion two hours before the traveling group normally took their rest. Neither Hiko nor Shigure could find a more secure spot than the one Chun Chu decided upon, within a day's journey. Unfortunately, the leader of the samurai guards ignored Chun Chui's advice and later settled in a clearing off the road at the base of a small cliff. The kunoichi merely shrugged and told Hiko and Fukurou to stand guard while she had Shigure help her scout the forest behind the cliff.
Fukurou heard a sharp whistling sound that he'd recently become quite acquainted with over the past week. His eyes tracked the arrow back to its source even as his body leapt into motion, tackling Hiko in the midsection an instant before the older boy would have taken a hit in his neck. The two tumbled to the ground and lay still in the shadow of a wagon. Cries of alarm rose about them and high screams filled the woods. He had a few moments to drag Hiko under the wagon and assess his state.
In the momentary glance that he had caught of the archer's position, he'd seen five men and had a moment to think, "Sensei was right."
He'd also seen something else, a dark silhouette that looked like an enormous spider creeping up from behind the bandit archers, to one side. He thought that it might have been Chun Chu-sensei though he'd never seen her move like that before. She reminded him of a hunting acromantula. Several loud thuds signaled the demise of the archers at the bottom of the cliff, one of whom helpfully illuminated the camp some more by rolling through the fire. Fukurou decided he had been right about Chun Chu being up there and decided to get moving.
His lips tightened as the furor about them rose in volume. Hiko was unhurt but shivering under his hands. The boy's brush with death had shocked him and the situation was only made worse when a bandit fell to the ground next the wagon they were under. The man's arm batted against Hiko's leg and the young shinobi sucked in a gasp. Fukurou looked away as a samurai fell upon the bandit, stabbing the man to death.
"We have to move." He whispered urgently.
Hiko shook himself and stared at Fukurou blankly, "We need to get to a safer position, I know where sensei and Shigure are, let's go!" Fukurou said, almost bullying the other boy out of his stupor. Harry Potter had lived through worse, seen worse than this. Though Fukurou hoped never to see such devastation again, he drew heavily on that experience for strength in the knowledge that he had survived worse situations before, showing coolness and confidence he did not necessarily feel. He sensed Hiko draw strength from his act and the two boys crept out from under the wagon, staying in the shadows.
They hadn't quite cleared the chaos of the battle around them when a bandit lunged at Hiko from behind another wagon. The Yamanaka danced to one side, on instinct he drew his ninjatō and dealt the brigand a lethal blow. The distraction caused the boy to freeze up which left him open for another bandit probably following the first, to run into him, knocking the boy to the ground.
A kick to the ribs from Fukurou forced the man to shift his attention and lash out with a dagger. The blow narrowly missed and Fukurou was briefly made to back off. It happened too fast, and Hiko was still too shaken to prevent it. Their assailant drew a badly kept katana and stabbed at Hiko. The boys could only watch as the blade reached its apex, the bandit snarled ferally at Fukurou an instant before his hand came down.
Fukurou, was an Uchiha, a member of a clan that bred their children for battle and held a long legacy of hatred and conflict that ran through their veins. Several things had happened when the bandit lashed out with his dagger at Fukurou. Fear quickened Fukurou's pulse and a shot of adrenaline still coursed through his veins from their narrow escape from the archers. The tomoe of Fukurou's sharingan began to spin in answer to his family's evolved survival traits, forming almost a solid circle of black.
Harry Potter had been a formidable Auror in his time, earning his position as head of the Department for Magical Law Enforcement through skill and hard work rather than relying on his reputation and connections. Later as a politician, in an arena of half-truths and misrepresentations, he'd honed a sense for guile and a ruthlessness that would have made Mad-Eye Moody proud. He did so not out of a love of power; but as a measure to protect his friends and help those important to him.
He did so because the lessons of his youth told him what would happen if he didn't crush the nascent Dark Lord intruding upon the peace of his grandchildren. He did so because it was the right thing to do. He did so not out of fear for his own death, he did not fear it then or now. He did what he had to do and let nothing stop him.
There was a reason people were afraid of Harry Potter. His grandchildren didn't see it, Yamanaka Hiko didn't see it. The bandit… saw it. He snarled at Fukurou because in his panic and bloodlust, only his hind brain registered what he was facing. Fukurou saw what the man was about to do and weighed his enemy's life against Hiko's. An old and weary thing, cold and pitiless reached out with chakra into the would-be killer's mind. It touched upon something normally inviolate… and crushed it under heel. Fukurou's voice was not entirely his own as he spoke.
"Kill Yourself."
Sawada had half completed the arc of his blow when the Voice spoke to him. He could do nothing but obey, not even conscious enough to feel horror as those Eyes within his head watched him contemptuously. Fukurou did not draw back from the connection, feeling it a penance perhaps; he waited until the darkness reached for him as well before letting go. To Hiko, the blade that would take his life curved away at the last second. The brigand above him was smiling eerily even as he carved out his own heart. He died with that grin still upon his face.
"Ugh!"
Fukurou's grunt of pain drew Hiko's attention, worried that his teammate was also under attack and that there lay other threats about them, he put the strange incident out of his mind. But Fukurou was unharmed, the other boy rubbed at his eyes as he hastily scrambled to his feet. The fight ranged around them too close for Hiko to waste his breath on any questions, though he dearly wanted to know something.
Were the three tomoe swimming in each of Fukurou's eyes the cause of his tears?
Shigure hadn't needed Fukurou's frown to tell her they were screwed. While initially looking like a tactically sound location, the cliff to their backs limiting approaches and the wagons themselves serving as a makeshift palisade. To the ninja, especially as they were Konoha ninja there were a number of jarring holes in this defensive strategy. Shigure knew them because they were mistakes Chun Chu-sensei had trained her team to exploit.
The clearing was too small. Yes, there was more than enough space for the wagons but the tree line was close enough that the canopy could mask the approach of attackers until they were nearly upon them. The cliff that the guard commander had chosen to camp next to was too small to provide adequate cover and the area behind it needed to be scouted properly. When they did, Shigure had found a gentle slope dotted with trees leading up to a ledge from which she could see the entire camp… and kill them with the appropriate tools.
After following her sensei's order to hide at a good watch position while the woman set some traps, Shigure found herself returning to the cliff-top ledge only to find some bowmen taking aim at the camp below. Using every ounce of stealth she had, the girl snuck right up behind a bandit and her allies told her that Chun Chu-sensei was going to pounce on the others.
"You fail at life." She drily said in his ear.
The man startled so badly he fell off the ledge without Shigure needing to even push him. Several arrows perforated the mushi-bunshin which turned into a swarm of angry kikaichu that flew into the faces of the other bandits at the direction of the true Shigure from where she hid behind a tree. The distraction and her tricking the archers into expending their notched arrows gave Chun Chu the chance to dispatch them with extreme prejudice. Which she by did slinging around a tetsubo with lethal force.
Some of Shigure's kikaichu reported back to her, she groaned quietly, "This is bad…"
A roar rose up, signaling an attack upon the fifteen samurai by more than fifty bandits. They were surrounded.
Clink!
Twang!
Clink!
Snickt!
Clink!
Twap-Twap-Twap!
Clink!
Phut!
Phoom!
Whoosh!
Crash!
A second roar rose up, the sound of innumerable explosions going off, followed falling trees, the screaming of men impaled, poisoned, stabbed, burnt and buried alive…
More of Shigure's kikaichu returned to her and her eyebrows rose as she watched her sensei club a bandit over the head and punt another off the cliff for a three storey drop to the bottom.
"Sensei, where'd you get so many exploding tags?" The girl could only wonder.
The traps had staggered the attack enough so that the samurai only had to deal with small groups of attackers. Some were walking wounded and simply had the misfortune to be heading toward the camp instead of away when the samurai found them and cut them down without mercy. Fukurou arrived a minute later with a dazed-looking Hiko in tow. She stood guard over the boy until he recovered while the young Uchiha unsealed his bow.
She watched with carefully hidden amazement as Fukurou stabbed fifteen arrows into the earth beside him, nocked the sixteenth and in a fluid movement drew and let fly. She'd seen him with the bow while in training but never before had his actions carried a feeling of such grim finality that she didn't doubt that every one of the nine arrows he fired into the skirmish below put down a bandit even if it didn't seem as though Fukurou was even aiming. His hand drew back and the string thrummed as he released the tension on the bow. He did so quickly, methodically, dispassionately…
When it seemed that there were no more targets, Hiko and Shigure watched him do something even more amazing. Chun Chu's explosions had cleared a one hundred meter wide band of forest that formed a semi-circle around the small stand of trees the samurai had camped in. Out in the middle of it a man on a horse was shaking his fist at them, or at least she thought he was. Fukurou seemed to be paying attention to the distant figure with intense scrutiny. As the man wheeled his horse around to ride away, the boy snatched up an arrow and aiming into the sky, nocked and let the projectile loose in the air.
The three genin and their sensei were the only ones in position to watch the arrow follow an arc that didn't take to where the rider was, but where he was going to be. Like a silent thunderbolt it fell from the heavens. The arrow hit the soft flesh between collarbone and shoulder blade; and it sank in deep, up to the fletching.
Chun Chu gave a low, impressed whistle as the bandit leader slid off his horse, dead.
"He said that he'd burn Ogawa down even if it was the last thing he did," Fukurou said slowly, "So I made sure it wasn't."
AN: If every second story seems a little shorter than the one before, that's because the outlines usually cover two chapters. Or at least they swell to twice the size when I'm through fleshing the story out. They're broken up at points where it makes sense to stop. In this case the finale of the C-rank was a logical choice especially since this story has a T-rating, not an M so I can't get too descriptive and wasn't sure if it was properly sanitized. Is it?
TTFN