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CHAPTER 17

Mission Specifications

Name of the Client: The identity of the client is unclear. Konoha's Intelligence Department suspects the client to be Kitsuchi of Iwagakure, henceforth on mission referred to as Client till confirmed otherwise.

Purpose of the mission: The client has called for a meeting with 'Konoha's Red Demon' on a matter they could not disclose in a letter. The client claims to have information on Konoha's 'traitor'. The client wishes to meet with 'Konoha's Red Demon' Hidden Rock Village, at the Kamizuru clan settlement. Refer to page 25 of your world map.

Client's last known location: Unknown. Konoha's Intelligence Department has been able to isolate Kamizuru village as the meeting point.

Current State of the Client: Unknown.

Manner of approach: shinobi-on-duty is to assume this meeting is a trap. Proceed with extreme caution. As there are only a handful of Kamizuru clan members remaining, and the village itself is populated by Kiri refugees, the chances of stiff resistance are slim unless the Tsuchikage is involved in this mission request. Shinobi-on-duty is to take into consideration the terrain and adapt accordingly. If confirmed otherwise, locate the client and collect the necessary information from them. Remain level-headed and nonconfrontational; Iwa people are known to be antagonistic to Konoha, so expect insults and condescension.

Warning: Beware of Kamizuru clan members. Any unavoidable engagement should be nonlethal.

Mission Priority: A

Mission Class: A

Shinobi-on-duty: Naruto Namikaze (Jounin).

Naruto rolled up the scroll and tucked it into the folds of his dark cloak, looking down from the mountain he had scaled over to the Village Hidden by Rocks. The restless wind of the high altitude billowed his cloak, and the boy leaned back to the rockface and merged his presence with the mountain.

He would have called Iwa ninjas careless for not properly guarding the mountain pass, but it was understandable why no sane person would assume an attack from Konoha through the mountain ranges. Naruto was only able to stay conscious because the thin atmosphere of the mountaintop was vaguely similar to the thin air when he ran at the speed of sound. Namikaze lungs could breathe at any altitude as long as there was some oxygen.

The bulk of Iwa's border protection was at the base of the mountains, through which there were mountain passes for normal people to pass through. As much as Iwa antagonized Hidden Leaf, they did not bar Fire country merchants from bringing business to their village.

Naruto's eyes flashed red and he sniffed, dressing his cloak to cover his lower face.

Steadily, and not using his chakra, the boy ambled down the breathless mountain, treading the slim path and leaping from rock to rock, descending to the ground and speeding away from the unsuspecting border patrol into Iwa.

In terms of landmass and population, Hidden Rock strongly rivalled Hidden Leaf, but that was where the similarities stopped.

While Konoha was a thriving economy surrounded by forests, Iwa had a struggling economy that was laid out over a massive stretch of rocky, uneven ground.

Naruto liked to think of himself as a realist; he knew that there were still people in Konoha that struggled to get their next meal, people that lived on the streets, people that did demeaning things to earn a living, people that did criminal things either to survive or for their enjoyment, there were also children that couldn't go to school for one thing or the other or retired shinobi that found it difficult to get financial support. There were drug raids in Konoha's red light district every other week, and the police caught and arrested sex traffickers for what seemed like every week. Despite the Fourth Hokage's efforts and dictated laws, the system he inherited from his predecessors was flawed at its foundations.

Iwa was not in the same economic bracket as Konoha. Any person in Iwa that was reasonably wealthy lived at the heart of Hidden Rock and those that couldn't afford the affluence of the village settled in the surrounding areas, wallowing below poverty.

The road was rocky and dusty, and the air was dry. The houses were small and scattered, made from stacked rocks and cement, so they resembled curved cones with gaping mouths covered by wooden doors, and two or three windows per home on each side of the building. Some houses were bigger than the rest, but Naruto doubted that there were any storey buildings in the area.

Eight school-age children were kicking a deflated football down the road, roughly sticking out their feet to the one dribbling the ball, stampeding back and forth between the impromptu goalposts—two schoolbags on each side of the road. Naruto didn't see many adults, but a flash of his sharingan confirmed that there were chakra signatures inside the houses.

Looking further, he saw a hazy cloud of chakra inside four houses.

Bees, Naruto surmised as his ears twitched to the muffled drone of buzzing insects. Inside the humming storm, inside the rock house, were about seven people, lying prone on the ground and unmoving. Naruto raised an eyebrow, wondering in his mind, Are they dead?

Aside from the panting laughter of the kids and the distant drone of the bees, the Kamizuru clan settlement was desolate.

The boy checked his henge again, doing so without ruffling his cloak and making sure that his chakra core was suppressed. Aside from his cloak covering all of his body, the upper part of his face and hair were visible.

Naruto's lips tightened as he reached a frail old man in threadbare clothes, sitting at the side of the road and lifting his hands as Naruto passed him. The boy stopped before the man, lowering till he was at eye level with the man. The dry wind ruffled his cloak, tousling his brown hair as the boy slid his right hand out of the folds of his clothes and dropped a ten ryu note into the man's raised hands.

"Thank you, sir," the man whispered, clutching the note in his skeletal fingers. His protruding eyes glazed over and he bowed again. "Thank you."

Naruto's eyes flashed red and the old man froze, his large iris trembling and shifting to mirror the boy's sharingan.

The boy tilted his head to the side, making sure that the children weren't aware of him and that no eyes were facing his way.

"Has anyone from the uptown been around recently? Yes or no." Naruto questioned the old man, referring to the affluent centre of Hidden Rock. Uptown was one of the many—politer—names people from the so-called 'downtown' called those wealthier households. Naruto's hands moved to grasp the man's, bowing his head as if in prayer, very much resembling a Fire Monk praying for the soul of the old man.

The sharingan in the old man's eyes spun as Naruto put him deeper and deeper under the hypnosis.

The old man licked his thin lips and mumbled in a short monotone, "No."

"Are you sure? Think hard."

"I'm sure," the old man muttered, his slumped shoulders falling. "Kamizuru is the place people come to die."

Naruto glanced at the children, carelessly playing their game.

"They've been here every day from uptown," the man filled in Naruto's unvoiced question, following his line of sight to the children.

Getting a better look, the children were dressed in formal—now dirtied—school clothes; white button-up short-sleeved shirts, red and brown plead shorts or skirts, white socks and black polished buckled shoes. Aside from the dust on their faces, hair, hands, and knees, they didn't look like children from Kamizuru, as crass as that sounded.

The old man cracked a toothy smile. "Teachers at uptown must be shit for them to not come looking for them kids."

"For how long?"

"This past week."

"Thanks for your help," Naruto said, dropping another ten ryu into the man's waiting hands, cancelling his hypnosis. The old man blinked confusedly, knitting his beaten brow together as the cloaked boy walked off further into Kamizuru.

He stopped short when the deflated ball the children were playing with rolled to his feet.

His eyes blinked red, then returned to purple, lingering at the ball with a narrowed stare.

"Oi, mister!"

Naruto looked up, raising an eyebrow at the children. They waited expectantly.

"Kick it back," one of the girls said, flagging with both hands. Their brows creased with impatience as Naruto tapped his foot on the wilting ball, looking from it to them, then back to it, his eyes flickering once again red and purple for less than a second. They weren't an illusion, but this was a trick.

He grunted. " Hm."

He pulled his left foot back a little and tapped the ball back to them, lifting it off the ground and onto the awaiting foot of the girl that had spoken. The children returned to their game, except for a boy, a goalkeeper guarding the post.

His inquisitive look flipped from the game to Naruto, catching the ball with his chest and passing it to a teammate waving for his attention on the right side of the makeshift field.

Naruto's looked without looking, trying to figure out his next move; the mission said to meet the client in Kamizuru for information on Konoha's traitor, without detailing who to look out for or where to go once he reached the dying settlement. Even standing in plain view, as suspicious as his cloak was, didn't look to be bringing his client out of wherever they were hiding. Likely, the boy thought the stranger was staring at him.

"Hey, mister!"

Naruto blinked, focusing on the boy. He didn't reply, pulling the section of his cloak covering his mouth down so that his whole face was visible, and raising an eyebrow.

"You…want to play?"

Some of the children stopped playing, turning to the stranger in the strange clothes.

Naruto shook his head, "No." he glanced elsewhere, to a house when he noticed a shadow dipping back behind it. "You should go back to class. It's not safe here."

Another boy spoke up, perching his hands on his hips and scoffing, "Says the creep staring at us."

"Kenzo," a girl hissed and the boy rolled his eyes. "Shut. Up."

But Naruto was only half paying attention to them, following a shadow as it crept out from the back of a building and skipping behind another, dashing down the road till it was across from him on the other side of the road. Naruto wasn't a natural sensor, he relied mostly on his eyes, ears and nose to perceive when something was amiss, or when he was being baited into a trap, and the mission specs emphasized that the Iwa mission was more likely than not a trap.

When he flashed his sharingan again, he saw that the shadow had a human chakra network.

Earth, fire, and water chakra natures, he confirmed with his eyes, maintaining a red stare on the person hiding behind the rock building. As quickly as he was able to pick out the person's chakra nature, he also knew that the shadow was an earth clone. He strode onto the road and the boy that had confronted him fearfully scampered away, looking at Naruto with a confused look as he passed by him and stood in front of the house on the other side of the street.

The children behind him shifted away, unnerved by his behaviour.

Naruto closed his eyes and exhaled wearily, feeling the tip of a sword poke into his lower back.

"Gotcha."

He slowly turned his head and looked over his shoulder.

"No sudden moves, Konoha freak." Her voice was low and calm, having a slight tremor in her tone and getting her breathing back under control. "Breathe and I'll kill you. Dare me."

It was an Iwa girl wearing the village's hitaite around her temple, with short black hair that framed her face and large pink eyes, emphasised further by the sharp corners of her eyes. She was wearing a red shirt with the right arm being sleeveless and the left arm being long-sleeved, shorts with fishnet tights that ran into black shinobi sandals, and a lapel on the right side of her hip. She was also wearing a Chunin vest, lowered into a forward stance with her katana prodding into Naruto's back.

"Take that henge down," she ordered through grit teeth, a bead of sweat rolling down the side of her face. She was smart enough to not look at his chin, instead of his eyes, but blanketing her with a genjutsu wasn't Naruto's intention, even as he didn't necessarily need eye contact with a victim to cast an illusion. At his delay in obeying her command, the girl pressed her sword deeper into Naruto's back, breaking the skin and warning him, "Do it, now."

The children gawked, wholly focused on the Iwa Chunin holding the stranger hostage.

Instead of following the command, Naruto imperceptibly twitched his fingers and looked forward. He spoke clearly, neither loud nor quiet, nor with any fearful shudder in his tone, as the girl would have expected him to have.

"Oldest trick in the book; making a clone sneak around as a diversion while you come up behind me." He inhaled steadily, unmindful of the sword stabbing into his back, exhaling coolly. "I'm offended you'd think I'd fall for that."

"Don't try anything—"

The girl froze and Naruto hummed.

An earth clone—Naruto's—stood behind the girl, holding a tanto across her throat with one hand, standing upright with an impassive expression on his face.

"You almost had me, Iwa ninja," Naruto remarked, not moving as the girl stiffened, the sword poked into his back remaining in place. Naruto's earth clone blinked, touching the blade of Naruto's tanto firmer into the girl's neck, and a slim line of blood dribbled down. "I'm more impressed by how you convinced these kids to try and let my guard down. How long have you been preparing for this ambush? One week?" the girl ground her teeth, steeling her resolve and not so much as shifting a single muscle. The real Naruto frowned, keeping his hands at his sides and throwing a dark glare at the children, "Scram."

The children fled, a panicked flutter of limbs and tumbling bodies barrelling away from them.

The clone grabbed her shoulder and the girl released hold of the sword, letting it clatter to the ground. "Your turn," the clone intoned, looming over the girl. "Talk."

"I-…I needed to make sure you're Konoha's Red Demon," she said tightly, visibly fighting the shudder in her voice.

"A bit risky, don't you think?" the real Naruto said, turning around, ignoring the dull throb of the shallow stab wound in his back. He looked down at the girl, and she defiantly met his gaze. He was half tempted to activate his doujutsu, forcefully wring all the information out of her. "Putting those kids in danger, doing this whole operation on your own, choosing an isolated location." With each hammered point, the girl's face twisted and her eyes flicked down to her feet, snapping her pink gaze back up to Naruto's purple stare. "Did you honestly think any Konoha ninja worth their salt won't anticipate a mission request from Iwa to be a trap?"

The girl didn't answer, sniffing hotly and clenching her fists. He saw a rebuttable sizzle in her tough glare, likely about how Konoha was so desperate to capture an apparent traitor in their ranks that they would risk sending one of their best ninjas out to collect the supposed intel. Her lips sealed and Naruto's spiralling sharingan twisted slowly, still not putting her under a genjutsu.

The sharingan alone was intimidating to those that saw it.

"Tell me, what was your plan?"

"…If…" she reluctantly admitted as the clone hardened his grip on her shoulder, reminding her of the blade on her throat. "Iwa holds the Red Demon hostage, then…your Hokage won't declare war on Kiri, pulling Iwa into the fight."

"Why are you alone?" Naruto pressed, dodging her misguided assumption that his father would throw the continent into disarray by pronouncing war on Kiri. "I thought Iwa had shinobi to spare."

"Gramps didn't think this would work and…I'm not going to risk my dad's or brother's life…so I had to do this behind their back."

"This was a waste of my time," the Red Demon grunted, rubbing his temple and holding his other hand out to his clone. He deactivated his doujutsu. The earth clone dropped his tanto onto his hand and the boy neatly sheathed the blade at the holster slung at his lower back, beneath the ruffles of his cloak. The clone crumpled into clumps of earth. His expressionless stare stormed and the Iwa girl tipped her chin up against it, flaring her nose as she exhaled. The boy narrowed a glare at the defiant Chunin. "You're lucky I'm not in a killing mood, Iwa ninja."

There were a hundred and one things he could be whiling his time away doing, prominent of which was hanging out with his sister.

Because the small circle of people looking into Konoha's mole situation needed the aid, they jumped at the chance of an Iwa informant, sending the Red Demon to collect the information, if any.

Now, this whole mission was pointless.

Naruto hated wasting his time.

He slipped his foot under her sword, the middle of the blade, and lifted his leg, catching the sword in a reverse grip and holding the grip out to the girl.

She collected it, snatching it out of his hand.

"Believe me when I say that if you try anything," he harmlessly poked her temple with his pointer and middle fingers, making her stumble back a step by how unexpected the action was. "A wounded ego would be the least of your problems. Understood?"

The girl nodded once, a stubborn gesture that ended with her lifting a tough chin at him.

"Good."

She was barely older than Mikoto, Naruto's younger sister. He mentally acknowledged. Mikoto's pride came from who her family are and the expectations mounted on her shoulders. It could be the same with the girl.

He shrugged and turned around.

He honestly couldn't care less about this Iwa Chunin.

About to take a step away, he faltered to a stop, spotting someone on the road back to Iwa's border. Two more people fell down a short distance behind Naruto and the girl.

Naruto's shoulders slumped with a frustrated sigh, activating his sharingan. "Great."

The drone of bees in the background increased, reaching a deafening crescendo all around them, and yet the actual flying insects were nowhere to be found. Four more Kamizuru perched themselves at the top of the surrounding houses on either side of the road, baring their teeth and heaving excitedly. The Kamizuru before Naruto, some ten or so yards away, was a hulking mass of flesh whose body resembled an inflated ball, wearing the identifiable red uniform and green Jounin flak jacket of Iwa ninjas. The same was for the six other Kamizuru clan members

Naruto tugged his tanto out with a swift swish and held the tip under the girl's chin, prompting the girl's hands to race up in surrender and to also stand on her toes to keep the lethally sharp tip of Naruto's tanto off her skin. "That's close enough."

"Go ahead," the round Kamizuru rumbled deeply, a laughing smile ticking his lips. "Kill the Tsuchikage's granddaughter, let's see how well that ends." The man's stomach bubbled and he familiarly patted it, saying, "Either way, we'll be sending you to Konoha piece by piece, Red Demon. Konoha filth don't even deserve a mutt's burial."

The boy pursed his lips and threw an ironic look over his shoulder, to the alarmed girl. "Looks like your backup couldn't care less about you either."

The girl gnawed on her bottom lip, mumbling a swear. "Damn it, uncle."

Naruto lowered the blade to her throat, making the girl properly settle back down on her feet and drop her hands, hanging them at her sides. He asked, keeping the blade in view at his side, not taking any particular fighting stance as the Kamizuru behind and around him settled into taijutsu positions, "That big guy said you're the Tsuchikage's grandkid. What's your name?"

He expected her to be affronted that he didn't know who she was, but her disappointment wavered her resolve, muttering, "Kurotsuchi."

"Kurotsuchi," Naruto repeated, rolling the name on his tongue and committing her face, and chakra network to memory. "Do you still want to fight me?"

"…No."

"Then find cover, or run back to uptown and report me to your granddad. Whichever you want."

Naruto knew that he wasn't in the right in this particular situation, and as shinobi of Konoha's enemy, the Kamizuru weren't exactly obligated to keep him alive after he had infiltrated their village, and their clan settlement. He also knew that if the Kamizuru had alerted the Tsuchikage ahead of time, Iwa ninjas were going to be falling from the sky like drops of rain in a tropical rainstorm.

The boy had the chakra construction ability, a watered-down version of the Uzumaki chakra chains clan ability, so he could manifest chakra wings as well as his sister, but flying out of Iwa wasn't a sound option at this moment. Even now, he could see through the genjutsu covering a wall of bees, blocking his path of escape out of Iwa.

It explained where the deep buzzing noise was coming from, where there were no bees in sight.

He spied a slight shift in the round ninja's footing, holding the base of his stomach with both hands and swallowing a large gulp of air.

More and more, Naruto didn't think the Kamizuru were going to go out of their way to avoid harming the Tsuchikage's granddaughter as they aimed for him.

"Kurotsuchi," cautioned her in a low voice, shuffling his feet apart and bending his knees. He whirled his tanto in his palm and closed his palm around the handle, gripping it in a reverse hold at his side while his left hand came up in a half-ram seal near his face. "Last warning."

The tension mounted and the buzz of the bees vibrated the rocks on the ground.

Kurotsuchi pelted away from Naruto, and the boy stood in place, flickering his spiralling red eyes to his left and right, tracking each Kamizuru and marking their chakra networks in his mind.

His mind thrummed with data.

He exhaled calmly and his sharingan wound to a sluggish crawl—

Naruto blurred out of the way of a typhoon of bees, bellowing out of the round man's mouth and scraping up the rocky ground. A fog of thin red, misty afterimages puffed out of Naruto's body as he flickered this way and that, speeding with his head lowered and his arms flying behind him, zigzagging away from the coiling mass of insects that doggedly followed him.

The large man's jovial eyes widened and his mouth–hanging open and streaming mad bees–curled up in a grin. Gradually as more and more bees escaped his gut, his frame became slimmer and slimmer. He bound back as Naruto swiped at his chest with his sword, hissing with his teeth gnashed when the blazingly fast strike sizzled a stroke diagonally across his Jounin vest.

He skipped back again, twisting his fingers into frantic hand seals.

"Thousand Bee Stings Technique."

Naruto skidded to a stop and jumped around, his cloak billowing around him. The summoned bees, chasing after him in a cloudy, serpentine mass, tumbled so that their stingers faced their target, releasing a deafening round of stingers at the boy. The stingers fired with jarring speed, and the other Kamizuru leapt into action.

Naruto snapped his sword back into its sheath and flicked through ten hand seals.

Earth style: Earth Release Wall, he thought with a slight frown.

The boy exhaled a stream of mud from his mouth, which rose and solidified into a tall wall. The stingers bombarded the wall as Naruto tore his hands apart, sliding away from a bludgeoning blow to the head from the formerly round Kamizuru, skirting aside from a kick to his side. His sharingan flickered and sparked, reading each twitch of the man's muscles and diverting a jab to his chin to his right, racing his right knee into the man's gut, driving the air out of the man's stomach.

In one swift motion, Naruto unsheathed his tanto from his right hip, decapitating the man in that smooth movement, though the man burst into a flurry of bees, impaling Naruto with their stingers but only clattering noisily against a rock Naruto had substituted with half a second later.

Five yards from his former position, the boy whirled his blade in his hand, flicking it into his sheath and weaving more hand seals. His mud wall shattered as more bees slammed into it, twisting around and merging with the bee clone littered around Naruto's substituted rock, warping together and wailing to the boy.

He sucked into a deep breath, puffing out his chest.

Fire style: Great Fireball jutsu, the boy echoed in his mind.

The fireball smashed into most of the incoming bees, roasting them to a crisp while some others flew around the sweltering flames.

Naruto's eyes bugged wide when someone shot out of the ground. The boy pulled his head back from the knee, grating his teeth at almost getting clipped. Realizing too late, a shin slammed into his gut and he was blasted off his feet.

Naruto bounced on the ground, rolling and stumbling to a practiced crouch. He blinked his eyes rapidly and winced, spitting out a mouthful of blood.

Then his eyes narrowed, shooting up from his crouch and guarding his face against a knee, snapping around and batting away a kick to the head and sweeping the person off her feet, winding around with a back fist and smashing it across a Kamizuru man's face at his back. He lifted a foot, glaring at the Kamizuru submerged in the earth below him and reached down, tearing her out of the earth by her hair and summarily smashing her face into the ground with a booming thud, knocking her senseless.

Lifting the unconscious woman back up, he swung her and threw her into the arms of a Kamizuru, meandering his fingers into hand seals and flaring his chakra.

The jutsu thrummed from his feet and raced up his body, calling it wordlessly, Lightning style: Bug Zapper.

He gnashed his teeth, lightning furiously crackling over his form, and pointed to the clear sky. He swiped his finger down and a vengeful bolt of lightning materialized from the heavens, electrocuting his two targets, smashing into them with an ear-splitting rumble.

Quickly discarding his last victims from his mind, Naruto jumped away from a clobbering haymaker to his chest, stepping back and racing an elbow across the attacker's face, forcing his sharingan to anticipate a kick to his shin, blocking by fixing his foot into the ground and leaning into the attack, shooting a left hook clean into the side of the man's temple. The boy switched his feet and snapped a kick into the man's hip, hopping onto his other foot and slamming a kick to the man's jaw, springing around the dazed man and removing a kunai from his pouch, he whacked the base against the back of the man's neck, making him crumble into unconsciousness. Before he could hit the ground, Naruto kicked him in the way of a swarm of bees, scattering the insects.

He counted four unconscious, stepping back with a slight scowl. He had severely depowered his last lightning jutsu, for the sake of not killing the Iwa ninjas.

He was tempted to roast them alive.

Three remaining, and one of them, the formerly round Kamizuru that housed the bulk of the bees swarming him, was rubbing his throat, barely escaped losing his head seconds ago.

Suddenly, the bees raced down to him. Naruto couldn't read or copy the hand seals the leader of the group was threading together, and the bees contorted over Naruto in response, forming a dome around the boy in the blink of an eye, blotting out all light and outside sound.

Naruto burned through a set of three hand signs.

Snake, tiger, ram.

Then the countless bees burst into large drops of sticky honey, pouring on and around Naruto and weighing him down to his knees as he called his jutsu.

His voice was muffled through the breathless, sticky piles of honey.

Ghost Clone technique.

There was a violent thrumming sound, matching the harsh drone of the bees hidden beneath the genjutsu blocking the route out of Iwa. The kneeling form underneath the honey vibrated, wobbling left and right till it reached a tempo that didn't look like it was shaking anymore, rather staying still. It was vibrating at a molecular level.

The honey steadily melted off the kneeling form, and Naruto stood up from his knee.

His body's outline blurred and his skin became partially translucent, so much so that the others could vaguely see the rock houses through him. His sharingan spiralled anticlockwise.

He floated a quarter of an inch off the honeyed floor.

Then more Narutos' swarmed out of the one partially hovering over the honey, dipping left and right in a cluster of pale and transparent redheads, dashing everywhere at once in heavy gusts of wind, multiplying as the original Naruto stood still on the honeyed ground.

The Kamizuru shaded their eyes and fixed their feet to the floor with chakra as the force of the winds from the multiplying clones battered indiscriminately, fighting to raise their fists in a ready stance as a large crowd of the duplicating clones bore down on them.

All too suddenly, the clones froze, standing around the three conscious Kamizuru. The bee-keeping clan stood back-to-back, their eyes dancing around uncertainly as the ghostly apparitions surrounded them and wordlessly stared down at them, their sharingan turning backwards, and their expressionless faces unmoving to the growing alarm of the ninjas. The haunting stillness of the assembly weighed dangerously on the Kamizuru clan members' determination.

There were close to one hundred ghost clones surrounding the Kamizuru, and they all dispersed into bursts of red mist, leaving the Kamizuru confused and alone.

Naruto was gone, winded from exertion and speeding to Konoha, ready to chew someone out for wasting his time.

Authors note

Jutsu List

Ghost Clone technique: this is an A-rank Namikaze clan technique created by the first Ghost Speed Release user. Using their bloodline, the user vibrates their body at a molecular level, disturbing the atoms of their body so that they become looser, which explains the pale, ghostly complexion of the user. Actual ghost clones are merely the afterimages of the user, running and stopping in various places at speeds close to the speed of sound, yet the loose structure of their vibrating particles prevents any wind drag. In essence, all of the clones are the original copy. The clones cannot be easily touched, as any blow would pass through them, but the strength of the returned blow from the clone attacks at a cellular level, hence their strength is described as to rival being hit by a speeding train.

It is a physically exhausting technique. It does not require hand seals unless the user wants to duplicate into more than twenty copies.

Done

I mentioned the Ghost Clone technique in the very first chapter, so this explanation is just a small expansion on that. A friend of mine said it was similar to Shisui's afterimage clones, and I agree.

There's also something I need to tell you guys, and no I'm not going on a hiatus XD.

My initial plan on returning to this site was to finish this story before I finish up Ink Heart, but I've been getting more and more reviews and requests to come back and update it. Since there should only be like three chapters left for that story (not this one. This is almost exactly the halfway point for this story), and the current chapter ended on a massive battle, I want to return to Ink Heart, put the story to rest, and then come back to Red Demon.

What do you think? Let me know in a review or a PM, or send me a message on Reddit/Discord.

I've got some other plans for another unfinished story I've been eying, but that's for later ;)

That's it for this chapter though.

What do you think?

Thoughts and criticisms are always welcome!

Leave a review, would you so kindly. Stay happy and stay safe, wherever you are in the world, and I will see you when I see you.

Foy.