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CHAPTER 25

Onboard the ship, the first indication that something was wrong was the smell.

The stench of filth and death permeated the vessel.

Rin covered her mouth and nose, gagging with both dread and disgust. Samehada, though couldn't conventionally smell, began to writhe and squirm on Rin's back, shuddering with excitement within the bandages it had been wrapped with.

Naruto fought the bile in his stomach at the stench, flagging for Itachi and signing for the Uchiha to go and search the exterior of the boat.

The twins found the door leading to the interior section of the boat, closing in on the smell.

Hiashi Hyuuga's report had said that there were about five hundred shinobi inside each ship, but that was deceptive on the part of the Mizukage.

Although he was remarkably as strong as his Kage counterparts, Yagura Karatachi wasn't known as the Monster Among Monsters only because he was monstrously strong; he was a man that had no empathy.

There was not an ounce of remorse, regret, compassion or reservation in the Mizukage's body.

Everyone had a line they couldn't cross. Except for Yagura. He could and would do anything to remove anything that slowed down his reaching his ambitions, even if that thing was a minor inconvenience.

The cabins they passed were untouched and vacant.

There were people inside the ship though, specifically in the large ship's wide mess hall.

Weak and starving people, strewn haphazardly about the large hall at various stages of desperation, wearing rags that barely clung onto their skeletal frames. Their eyes were sunken and hollow, glimmering only with an invisible twinkle of hope at the entrance of the two Konoha ninjas, though most of the people were too weak to move. Their stringy hair poured down their faces, thin, twisted and dirty.

Human waste littered the ship extensively, either on the ground or on people.

There was also the dead among them, yet flies indiscriminately swarmed both the living and the dead.

Those that could muster the strength to walk were mothers and fathers, holding their starved and dehydrated children and loved ones in their arms and sluggishly shuffling to Naruto and Rin, blubbering pleas for them.

Rin sobbed, tears prickling her eyes as she widely gestured for the people coming to them to calm down.

The drone of pleading and crying vibrated the Konoha ninjas' resolve.

"It's alright," Rin said in a watery tone, waving for the people that knelt at their feet to stop speaking at once. "It's alright. We can help." She cast a look to her brother and her eyes widened when she saw his stony expression. His arms were crossed and his brow was creased in contemplation, looking over the multitude with his sharingan. Rin snapped her fingers and Naruto's red eyes flicked down to her, raising an eyebrow. She grated in a firm voice, leaving no room for argument, "We're helping, Naruto."

"Hold on," he told her, looking around at the sight of filth and death again. "Just…hold on."

That was when Itachi entered the mess hall, stumbling in visible shock at the sea of emaciated humanity strewn about the eating area. He bound to Naruto's side and passed him six exploding seal tags and the captain's logbook.

"I found these." Naruto collected them and checked them with his sharingan. Itachi deactivated his doujutsu and said, "The bombs are dead." Naruto noticed so, seeing as the fuinjutsu for the paper bombs were eaten away by water and wind. "I couldn't find the captain, but I found this." Itachi indicated the logbook with a nod. "It was hidden under some logs in the fireplace at the captain's quarters. Whoever the captain was, they didn't want the book to be easily found but they also didn't want it destroyed." Then Itachi hummed. "It's good it wasn't destroyed."

Naruto skimmed his eyes through the book, his frown dipping lower and lower at what he was reading. He jerked his head to the door and Itachi ran out, going over to the other ships to search them for traps.

Seconds later, the Hokage brought out a two-way radio from one of his jounin vest pockets and pressed the button on it, communicating with his forces waiting at the southern forest of the Hidden Leaf village.

"I want medics and relief items. Bring nutritional supplements and water. Prepare to evacuate Kiri refugees."

A wave of tearful relief went around the sea of suffering humanity.

It wasn't an unusual command given by any Hokage; the Third and Fourth Hokage had actively rescued those fleeing Kiri, or more specifically, those that had managed to escape Water country's tight borders.

There were refugee settlements inside Konoha's walls that were populated by Kiri, Iwa and Snow country citizens, though nowadays Kiri refugees were beginning to outnumber every other nationality. Integration into Konoha's markets and other day-to-day activities wasn't nearly automatic, but a large amount of Konoha's budget was allocated to refugees and their gradual rehabilitation.

Though that didn't mean that each incoming refugee wasn't screened to make sure that they weren't spies. For that, Konoha was very thorough.

Still, accepting all refugees was part of Konoha's history since the end of the Second Great Shinobi War. That was one of the reasons why Konoha's military was one of the largest on the continent, ranging in the thousands and second only to Iwagakure in size alone. Meanwhile, the power and specialization of the ninjas were unmatched.

Soon, the three ships were taken over by Konoha forces.

While Rin was helping a sickly woman drink water and the medics began treating the sick, Naruto was comparing the logbooks of the other ships and, even though the wording and phrases were widely different and the handwriting varied, the entries were similar. The difference was only on account of what happened inside the ships.

Two weeks ago, the ships arrived from a place in Kiri cryptically called King.

There was no name or description or location of King, only that it was where the bloodline holders had been taken from by orders of the Mizukage and shipped out to the Wave Strait, the stretch of water between Whirlpool country and Konoha's southern region. Two of the logbooks wrote that the bloodline holders were unruly while they were kept inside King. The third logbook detailed how the bloodline holder's resistance to King meant that they were of no use to Kiri.

The ships were packed with no water or food for the bloodline holders. Anything nutritional or edible was for the captain and the few crewmates onboard. The bloodline holders were also carted into the mess hall and were not allowed to venture out. Anyone that died of starvation or sickness or any other thing was not thrown overboard but festered in a pile at the corner of the mess hall.

Meaning, the people had not eaten food or drank water for the better part of a month.

Some sympathetic crewmates spared a few morsels to them, but this was only in the case of two ships. The third ship, the captain wrote, held Kiri sailors that "deeply hated bloodline holders".

It wasn't much of a surprise that the bloodline holders of that particular ship began cannibalizing themselves out of desperation, losing their sanity and humanity during their hellish stay on the ship.

The Konoha ninjas had to strike them down.

A mercifully quick death for the survivors of the third ship.

Naruto alighted onto a speedboat and sat down, reading and comparing the logbooks with his rapt sharingan gaze. Rin joined her brother, pushing herself away to the other side of the boat, simmering in her thoughts as Samehada chittered impatiently on her back. More speedboats leapt off Konoha's shoreline, carrying shinobi on them. Two of the large ships steadily sailed back to the village.

There had indeed been some "cooperative" bloodline holders onboard the ship but they were only a few dozen in number.

Naruto reach an assumption of what King was; a facility where bloodline holders were conditioned to mindlessly serve Hidden Mist village. Like ROOT was to Danzo, King could be the same for Yagura.

Crow's Feet had briefly written about it in his last report. Even then, Konoha's foremost spy in Kiri didn't have any idea what King was or why it existed.

"We couldn't find any sailors onboard," Itachi reported when Naruto snapped the logbooks shut, sealing them into a storage seal on his left wrist. The two ships heading to Konoha moved at an unhurried pace, meanwhile, the third ship bobbed on the water. The sound of strong jets of water ebbed from the large vessel, Konoha ninjas piling up corpses and washing out the mess hall of blood and human waste. Itachi coughed into his fist, saying, "The… "cooperative" bloodline holders we found are dead. Cyanide seals in their mouths."

"Are they the ones that attacked us?" Naruto asked, deactivating his sharingan and looking at Itachi with an even stare. The Hokage's expression was unreadable.

Itachi nodded. "The descriptions Lord Hyuuga gave us match the bodies we found."

Naruto grit his teeth with a curse.

"Why would he do this?" Rin asked in a tired, wheezy voice, talking for the first time in some minutes. She turned to them, tearing her eyes away from the departing ships and staring at her brother and her cousin with haunted eyes, glazed with tears and misery. "Why would somebody do this?"

"He's trying to get in our heads," Naruto answered, pressing his fingers to his temple and rubbing them deep into his skin. "He definitely knew that the exploding seal tags he planted on the bomb would be damaged. He knew we'd come onboard and find those people."

The girl didn't move to her brother, slowly looking back to the two ships. Naruto gave her space.

Naruto leaned to Itachi and murmured. "Use your crow summons to contact Crow's Feet. Tell him to find out what he knows about King. Locate it. Destroy it."

"Make sure the people there are freed, then burn King to the fucking ground," Rin swore, her bloodlust increasing and her darkened blue eyes fixed on the departing ships.

A crow burst out onto Itachi's shoulder and the Uchiha whispered the command, reverse summoning the bird to Crow's Feet, all the way behind enemy lines inside Kiri. Not five seconds later, the bird returned with a message, whispering it into Itachi's ear.

"Shisui's already ahead of us. He's on the way there now."

"Good." Naruto hummed, sitting upright on the speedboat. He flagged to the multitude of speedboats behind him, and the third ship—now repurposed for Konoha's usage. "We move in now."

Since Yagura was expecting Konoha to come to Whirlpool country, and the Mizukage was kind enough to deactivate the island country's natural defences, Naruto dropped any pretence of launching an ambush.

The roar of engines broke the relative calm of the water and the Leaf shinobi poured out to Whirlpool, with the ninjas on the ship serving as watchful reinforcements.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

At that same moment

An unnamed island somewhere in Water Country

An empty rowboat bobbed towards the rocky coast of the isolated island, moving closer and closer to the sightless mist that covered the entirety of the island. The four tall spotlights on the island roved the waters and the coast, shining light that cut through the thick mist. When a spotlight met the rowboat, it fixed on it for a moment and was later joined by another spotlight, before the watchmen manning each light seemed to simultaneously shrug and shift their lights away.

Could be a rowboat that hadn't properly been tied to a pier and wandered out to sea.

Still, one spotlight cautiously watched the rocky, jagged shoreline.

Crow's Feet—Shisui Uchiha—popped his upper face out of the water, resembling nothing more than a shadow on the dark water. He wore his one-eyed mask, revealing the sharingan of his right eye to be turning at a sluggishly slow pace, always observing the spotlights from a handful of kilometres off the shoreline. The wetsuit he wore kept his hair and body dry, and he calmly sucked in a breath and ducked back into the dark water, dodging the searching lights. He shifted his body underwater, lugging a waterproof satchel on his back as he steadily progressed to the unnamed island.

Nearing the shore, he lifted his eyes out of the water and observed the spotlights again, using his doujutsu to predict the movement of the lights. Then, ten seconds later, he blurred out of the water, his bare feet skipping on the sharp rocks till he reached the great walls of the secret facility.

King.

Known by the KG Research Institute, where people with kekkai genkai in Water Country were gathered and carted off to, either being plied with hypnotic drugs or disposed of. The deceptive name hid how much the Mizukage despised bloodline holders and wanted to bring them all under his control.

The Research lab that supposedly didn't exist.

The facility wasn't much to look at externally; the walls were made from brown blocks, with four watch towers on each corner constantly canvassing the thick mist with lights. Within the tall walls was a grey building with no windows and one door, rising to five stories tall.

The island was ominously quiet.

The spy checked the waterproof watch on his left wrist, nodding his head and ducking out of sight from a spotlight behind a slanting piece of black rock. Once the light passed, he doggedly followed it to the watchtower it beamed from, checking his watch again and counting down in his head.

The rowboat gently settled onto the rocky shore.

Five…four…three…two…one—

Shisui plugged his ears.

The exploding seal tags plastered on the bottom of the rowboat exploded with a deafening boom.

Immediately, the alarms went off and the spymaster set a new time on his watch for fifteen seconds.

Shisui Uchiha had been in Water Country for more than a decade now, observing, studying and compiling intel on the state of the country. He knew Kiri's protocols when it came to every form of contact with an enemy force, as well as documenting life in general and anything else, both of value and without value.

The usual protocol for this situation was to send out nine shinobi to investigate with twelve ninjas waiting back as reinforcement with long-range weapons and ready to radio Kiri if there was any major problem to initial force couldn't handle.

With that knowledge, Shisui attached himself to the watchtower, securing himself to the structure with chakra on his feet and fingers. Kiri shinobi flooded out of one from behind the walls and pelted towards the diversion.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Whirlpool country

Naruto first touched down on the beach.

The beach was pristine and white, stretching far and wide, twinkling mutely under the light of the setting sun. There were bits and pieces of wood littered around the area Naruto and his shinobi had landed, which used to be a large port for allied visitors and merchants to dock on before they were allowed proper entry into the reclusive island.

The Hokage held up his right fist and the shinobi dragging their speedboats out of the water, and marching onto the shoreline halted. All four hundred of them.

Most of the force trod water, having left their boats for the sake of better mobility in case of an attack.

Naruto felt a wave of goosebumps prickle his neck.

"It can't be this easy," he said under his breath to Rin, who warily lingered at his back, ready to draw Samehada at a moment's notice.

Several yards in front of them was a dense woodland, unkept and forgotten due to the demise of the Uzumaki clan. From the forest, a mechanical rumbling reverberated through the air, clanging and clacking noisily, getting closer and closer to the Konoha force.

"Get ready," Naruto ordered his shinobi, and the mixture of jounin and special jounin prepared, pushing medics and genjutsu experts to the back, guarded by long-range specialists and ninjutsu specialists. Close-range specialists took the front of the formation, brandishing their fists or their weapons, or their ninken in the case of Inuzuka clan members. The force stretched several yards wide behind their Hokage in that rigid formation, spanning a large area of what used to be the Whirlpool port, steadily treading water.

Most of the ninjas gulped, grating their teeth and fighting the apprehension as they settled into fighting stances.

The trees forty yards from Naruto parted and Kushina Uzumaki stepped out.

Naruto's eyes widened, his hands closing into pained fists as his body stiffened. "No…"

Rin was frozen, one hand on Samehada's handle and the other holding a half-ram seal close to her chest. The girl's mouth opened but no words left.

"Not you." Naruto shook his head, his tormented expression twisting harder. Tears escaped his eyes. "God, not you too…"

The resolve of the Konoha force physically wilted.

Kushina smiled sadly, closing her eyes with sagged shoulders. "You two have come such a long way." A watery chuckle escaped her as tears welled up in her eyes, looking at the weight of responsibility that was crippling her children. "You're everything I wished."

The last time she looked at them, they were not much older than toddlers. Their Namikaze speedster bloodlines had activated at a young age and they were excelling in the pre-Academy exercises she did with them.

In their place, Kushina saw her children as she last remembered them.

Bright-eyed with shining smiles, constantly scampering after her wherever she went.

The image was replaced with the present, seeing two strong individuals that had seen the cruel reality of the world.

Rin's face broke and she sobbed. "Mom." Her hands fell limp at her sides. Naruto wrenched his eyes shut, baring his teeth to staunch his visible despair. "Mom, why is this happening? Why is Yagura doing this?"

Despite her tears, Kushina smirked widely and perched her fists on her hips. "Because he's scared of you." Her purple eyes glittered as she proudly looked at them. "Both of you." She furtively looked behind them, her brow creasing and her hands falling from her hips, anxiously tapping the sides. A dusting of red turned her expression bashful, asking her children, "Now, where's your father?"

Rin couldn't muster the strength to disappoint her mother, turning her blue eyes down.

Instead, a hard frown turned Naruto's lips down. "He's in Konoha."

Kushina's eyes narrowed, asking a question that demanded an answer. "What did Yagura do?"

"Poison," was Naruto's only response.

It started with a quick flicker on Kushina's eyebrows, after hearing news that her husband was in a bad condition. Then her eyes darkened and her features became beastly; her canines elongated and her long, red hair parted into nine, flailing tails. Rage burned on Kushina's face.

She swore, drawing her sword. "Destroy the talisman in my head."

On cue, Rin drew Samehada. The bandaged sword frilled its scales, shredding its wrappings in gleeful anticipation. Rin brought the half seal back to her chest, deftly balancing the massive sword on her shoulder, with the manic blade not injuring its handler. The girl lowered her stance, shifting her left foot two paces in front of her right and bending her knees. Her blue eyes crackled with yellow lights.

Naruto's eyes sparked, turning red. His sharingan twisted and looked at the volley of red-tipped missiles falling from the sky. Mei balanced in the sky, the flames blasting out from her feet keeping her stable as her lone rinnegan eye thrummed powerfully, locked on Naruto.

"Round two, pretty boy," the woman said with a teasing smirk.

The missiles resembled a wave of falling stars, polluting the sky with fire.

Kushina tore forward and Rin blazed to her, intercepting her mother before she could reach her brother.

Mother and daughter slammed their blades together, and the thud reverberated through the sand.

Hundreds and hundreds of bloodline holders suddenly poured out of the forest and the Konoha ninjas treading water roared, yet still waiting for the command from their eerily calm Hokage.

Meanwhile, Naruto looked up to the sky, at the missiles and at Mei and his red eyes evolved.

He gave the order with chilling finality. "Attack."

Red mist ebbed off Naruto's form and he formed a single seal, inhaling a deep breath.

Wind style: Great Breakthrough!

The Konoha ninjas surged onto the Uzumaki beach, giving a wide berth to Rin and Kushina as they wholly focused on their battle. Taijutsu specialists and weapon users raced forward, slamming into the incoming force while ninjutsu experts flicked their fingers through hand seals.

The wide volley of wind bellowing from Naruto's mouth scattered the cloud of missiles, driving them off target, either exploding early in the sky or landing elsewhere a far distance from the sea of warring humanity spilling blood on the white beach.

Still hovering in the air, Mei smirked as Naruto crumpled into red mist, vanishing completely from her sight and sensory range.

She whirled around and just barely saw the Hokage racing to her, riding on one of her loose missiles as if it were a surfboard. He leapt off the wild missile and was on her in the blink of an eye, bringing her down inside the forest, and smashing the trees upon their crash landing.

Amid the yelling of the Konoha-Mist battle and the violent conversation of swords between mother and daughter, Naruto and Mei's exchange of blows rocked the island country to its core.

Authors note

I decided to end it here.

Side note: Naruto and Mei first fought in Chapter Ten. Naruto won. Barely, cuz Mei's rinnegan (singular) allowed her mind and body to match his speed. Naruto could have destroyed Mei's rinnegan but Yagura intervened.

I wrote all of that cuz I understand how one upload a week is hurting this story. Making callbacks to previous chapters is kinda necessary for this story. It was one of the things I realized from reviews of the last chapter.

I'll completely understand if you want to hold back from reading until the story is complete.

Again, please bear with me.

How is the story so far?

Thoughts and opinions are always welcome.

I'll see you when I see you.

Foy.