Naruto scaled over the wall of an abandoned building that seemed modern enough to still host rather well-off inhabitants. Then again, the fact that this entire version of Konoha was turned into a virtual free-for-all warzone made one understand why there was not a single soul, even simulated one, outside the hunters and the contestants that resided in the village.

The taps with which Naruto's sandals met the light puddles on the roof were light and the string reeling noise from when he ran across wires connecting separate poles was noticeable but not one demanding attention. What did shock and scare the pigeons located on the corner of a nearby building roof was when a white ax that appeared as if had morphed from the arm that hosted it penetrated Naruto from behind, forcing the young man to yell out in pain.

"Got you!" an overly excited white humanoid with a mushy right side of his face, short green hair and bland, yellow eyes with teeth that resembled the ridge of a saw. "Where are your friends, I wonder…"

Instead of answering the white humanoid, Naruto dispersed in a loud pop and a cloud of murky smoke. The white humanoid shook his head in confusion and then scratched it with his pointy nail.

"Where did you go? A clone, it seems…" he nodded to himself. The walking spore-man with the uncanny ability to mold his body as his consciousness saw it fit looked over the edge of the roof and waited until a pair of eyes identical to his own looked up with the lines of sharp teeth biting their lips in eagerness for engagement.

"It's a bust, this was a clone scout…" the humanoid yelled down at his clones.

"Too bad, we were looking for someone to play with…" one of the clones answered with pity on his face.

"Someone to play with…" the identical brother to the clone's side repeated.


"Hmm… There seems to be a whole army further on ahead." Naruto relayed on the mental link. At this point speaking would have raised too much noise and exposed them to danger. Team Hokage was moving at a snail's pace but it was the pace they'd have to deal with since noise attracted the hunters and Kiyomi had reckoned that fighting the hunters would have raised more noise, which meant more hunters.

"Can we sneak around them or avoid them?" Kiyomi wondered.

"Don't think so. Only one of them attacked me but my clone saw a bunch of them trying to hide from me. They didn't seem too smart, probably good only for brawling, you know." Naruto shrugged. The trio stopped by the corner of the building and peeked from time to time at the street on the other side. They had just left the garden area that meant to simulate the Ninja Academy backyard and had to move around a handful of alleyways with great care. The main street leading up to the hospital was their first big obstacle.

"Were they any good?" Meiko asked.

"I don't know, took out a clone of mine that was trying to keep a low profile and scout over being careful," Naruto replied. "I'd say they're enough trouble to be an inconvenience, you know."

"Do you know that person from your universe, are they a rogue ninja perhaps?" Kiyomi turned to Naruto.

"I don't know every rogue ninja alive, you know…" Naruto crossed his arms over his chest.

"It seems to me from what I've heard so far that you're a magnet for every bad guy in your universe. I don't recall a single rogue ninja from your universe you couldn't name or haven't fought…" Kiyomi raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

"Okay… So I do kind of know the Aloe Guy. But when I last saw him he was different, he was black and white and this one's just white as if the black part got peeled off of him and… Back when I saw him, there was just one of him though he didn't fight so maybe cloning is his ability, you know." Naruto grumbled in a whisper, which was pretty much as if he had grunted out loud with the level of silence that the more careful teams tried to maintain.

"Do we engage them? We've got the advantage and, from what Naruto says, we could take all of them out." Meiko turned to Kiyomi.

"No. I recall seeing a handful of teams take the same route we did. If this Aloe Guy is as widespread as Naruto claimed, they'll fall for his trap eventually and give us a chance to sneak past. Naruto, keep your clones on tight surveillance of the enemy, sacrifice a clone or two if needed to keep their interest." Kiyomi relayed her orders.

"It's not like I know what my clones know until they die, you know." Naruto pouted his lips and blew out his cheeks.

"Sure, that's why I've included them onto the mental link. It's a hassle keeping it online on such range but as long as I'm not getting distracted by the tension of active combat we should be fine. I've had many years to hone this ability." Kiyomi replied.


"Any signs of the enemy?" Kei-J of Team Stratus turned to Roh-D, who donned a more advanced eye-scope gadget, spanning all over the left side of his face than when Team Hokage had last met him during the Chuunin Exams.

"Define an enemy…" Roh-D grumbled while numbers went up and down on his scouter in a manner that was unperceivable to anyone but the one wearing the scope or one with an eye that granted them advanced perception like the Sharingan. "I've already told you that Team Hokage's staying close to the ground. For whatever reason, they've stopped two blocks back."

"Could they be sensing danger?" Aya-K wondered, turning to her male teammates with a worried gaze of her bubbly and shiny green eyes. She was a soft-faced girl of round facial shape and silky, burgundy hair. Her skin was a few shades darker than that of any Konoha native but nowhere near as that of her teammates, implying a foreign element to her origins. "Perhaps we'd be wise to take a detour as well?"

"No way! Team Hokage and us go way back, they would give us a heads up if something bad was to happen, you wouldn't know, you hadn't met them back in the Forest of Death." Kei-J shook his head. Despite his confident and friendly façade, Aya-K noticed an unhealthy twitch to Kei-J's arms as his hands moved ever closer to the hanging lower end of his staff.

"Yay, friends to play with!" an ecstatic White Zetsu emerged from a nearby tree with which it had seemingly fused with. Around him burst forth a handful of bent spikes that made the entirety of the emerging clone resemble a mouth and a tongue that belonged to the ancient oak it emerged from.

Before the bursting mouth could endanger Kei-J, who was the closest to the enemy, a concentrated blast of Lightning Release blasted White Zetsu away, reducing the emerging body to a pulsing wreck that only possessed its lower body. The gruesome sight and the unexpected weakness of the enemy, so much so that a single beam of Lightning Release chakra stored inside Roh-D's palm storage seals decimated it, made Aya-K gasp and cover her face.

"Battle positions! There's no way a hunter would be this weak. This must be a clone or something!" Kei-J grunted, pulling out his steel staff and spinning it over his head before fixing it to a fighting position. His skill set was perfectly suited for fighting large quantities of weaker foes so he relished the opportunity to show off in what he saw as perfect fighting conditions.

"Heh, this must be Konoha's attempt to dispose of us. I knew they're rearing their teeth for No. 1 military in the world with Kumogakure being worn out after the Coltan Conflict!" Roh-D smirked and placed his arms on the ground, allowing four puppet arms, comprised of jaw-dropping scientific advances in implant technology to emerge from underneath his sleeveless hoodie.

Kei-J spun his staff overhead to deflect the rain of organic shrapnel that the emerging squads of White Zetsu produced. Despite his speed and impressive skill with the weapon, a handful of scratches forced few squirts of red to spurt from the young man's body.

"I'm a bit not in the mood for your conspiracy theories right now!" Kei-J exclaimed and charged upward at the enemies located on the roof. Whereas normally his prodigious agility might have allowed him to cover the entire distance from ground to the roof in a single bound, the injuries on his thighs forced Kei-J to stick to the walls and run his way up, as fast as he could.

Kei-J grunted with each successive strike with his bo staff, dancing around a vast number of enemies as he dispatched of them all one by one. Due to the greater range of his weapon of choice, the Kumogakure genin managed to dispatch of a handful of White Zetsu without even turning to them. More and more white blurs filled the roof, armed with organic wrist-blades that formed over their arms, the White Zetsu turned bolder and bolder with each dispatched member of their fold.

A pair had leaped right over Kei-J's staff and intended to stick their wrist-blades to it in a way that'd clog its movements, allowing the rest to attack unpunished but the pair that elevated from ground level soon met fiery demise when compact fireballs came in an arcing trajectory from below. The few White Zetsu that found the time to look down were met by an energetic smile of Roh-D who had launched the fireballs with smoke coming out of tubes inside his puppet arms that soon closed up.

"I'm going too!" Aya-K declared, turning to Roh-D who nodded but the moment her feet touched the wall of the building she was to scale to assist her team leader she heard his resistance from up above.

"Don't! Your abilities are best suited for one-on-one engagements. Don't wear yourself out on these second-rate thugs." Kei-J roughed out while struggling to control the ever-growing population of White Zetsu from the ground level all by himself.

Had it not been for Kei-J's excellent agility, he'd have been consumed and overwhelmed by the ever-drowning downpour of white humanoids that had grown in numbers enough to drown out the rooftops of the entire block. Despite the rapidly increasing numbers, Kei-J's staff worked some methodical magic, sometimes growing eager and going rampant all over larger groups of White Zetsu, then settling down to a controlled poking competition and coming clean through the head of each enemy one-by-one.

"He might have a point about you staying out, but no conspiracies would be unveiled if those with the keener mind sat still when they could shed some light on the facts!" Roh-D sat on one knee while his scouter worked to lock onto more enemies.

"Fire Style: Dancing Missile!" Roh-D finished a triplet of hand seals with a clap from his hands while the tubes inside his cybernetic puppet arms opened up, letting out a pair of jets of superheated air that was so scorching it streaked eye-gouging red. Emerging from those streaks, twisting and turning as demanded by their user, a handful of fireballs homed in on the select enemies, incinerating them each with one-hit-one-kill efficiency.

"Damn it!" Kei-J growled through masses of limbs and bodies that covered him in a blinding body pile. He could feel the heat of the rubbing fungus-men raising the temperature of his own body to the extent where he couldn't help but yell out in pain, he could feel pesky punches, scratches, and peels that were just desperate attempts at inflicting more damage to him. Kei-J tried pulling out a trick from his handbag that might have freed him but where his arm desperately struggled to play with the steel wire just right, it had grown limp all of a sudden and collapsed onto the roof underneath a growing mound of ecstatic bodies, each chattering something of their own that grew into an unintelligible cacophony of noises.

"Okay, different kind of support is needed here…" Roh-D relaxed his arms, both his real ones as well as the puppet ones, with a shake. Once he weaved a pair of hand seals with his real arms, a howling build-up alerted and drove fear even to the seemingly suicidal army of White Zetsu on the roof.

Before they could properly consider the pros and cons of moving against staying on top of the unfortunate genin they had busted up, the White Zetsu got blasted away by a mighty soundwave that was considerable enough to ripple the air to the point where it was easily visible by a naked eye. It was a concussive soundwave so it didn't seem like the White Zetsu had taken too much damage.

With bleeding ears, Kei-J rose from the ground and dispatched of a handful more Zetsu, working his way through the confused and downed pile that had just been on top of him. He ignored the fact that he couldn't hear much more than the usual shrieking in his ears that usually followed Roh-D's soundwaves when he was too close to them, no, he reveled in it. What he had now was the chance to work uninterrupted by the stupid, meaningless banter of the White Zetsu.

Kei-J swung his staff with ferocity and vengeful rage, more importantly – with purpose. Even when blocked, his staff, crackling with lightning from the Lightning Release chakra cloak coating it, severed limbs and appeared to disable the White Zetsu by seemingly turning them off without the usual, grisly sounds and sights of their demise.

"J-Just what are these things?" Aya-K asked with worry in her tone. "They don't seem human at all."

"It was a good call for you to stay away. Sometimes Kei-J knows so much that I begin to wonder if he's not part of some secret society that guides events exactly as they are supposed to unfold, as future demands." Roh-D smirked, offering another one of his endless conspiracy theories. He most often offered them in the shape of a general description and his teammates, if interested, poked deeper, though it has been a while since any of them did that…

"What do you mean?" Aya-K asked.

"These guys, they're inhuman. They don't seem to fear death, there are just two things they're interested in: chatter and violence." Roh-D explained with a hint of fearful respect in his own tone. "Kei-J was right, an enemy that just keeps on coming is the worst one for you. You're at your best when we face a single enemy we cannot overcome, then you do your thing and pull out a win but exhaust yourself in the process. You're like a nuke, but you can only be fired at the enemy once."

"No, this is amazing!" Kei-J erupted from a building up a pile of white mass with his staff put back to its holster and his arms working with hand seals. The black gloves that Kei-J wore were torn up in multiple places to the point where only separate strings attached to each other like a net and the blood from the bruises and scratches on his hands that soaked it could be made out. "I don't feel too ecstatic about killing people, even these hunters, but these creeps are just what I need right now!"

"Lightning Style: Pulse Mines!" Kei-J grabbed the wrist of his right arm while producing a glow of chirping lightning around his hand, one that detached and stayed where it was initially while the hand that had manifested it continued to move back and down, creating more and more weightless lightning spheres just like it, all of them carried considerable charge for their sparkled and connected with each other with jolts that they shot out at the nearest mine in range.

Kei-J didn't appear to possess the necessary patience to wait for one of the countless White Zetsu to hit his mines, he clenched his right fist, creating a wider lightning crackle around it which fired off jolts at the nearest mine and detonated it in a lightning storm that soon grew unstable and exploded just like a real mine. Once the dust and rubble cleared out, there was not a sign of the White Zetsu that chased after Kei-J and the building he was just on had collapsed halfway.

"Those guys are getting up. The ones I didn't disintegrate… Let's move!" Kei-J grit his teeth and dashed for the nearest building neighboring the one he was taking solace sticking on a wall to. Aya-K and Roh-D followed.

"Despicable monstrosities, no doubt Konoha means to unleash them as a biological weapon to silence the working class civilians and get them in line!" Roh-D couldn't just bolt quietly.

"Why would they attack their own villagers?" the ever-naïve Aya-K covered up her mouth in disgust and horror.

"Simple, the civilians have been growing unruly all around the world, an attack from a horrible biological weapon such as this proves that ninja are still necess…" Roh-D's voice faded off in the distance. Naruto's clone dispelled, having heard and seen enough.


"Well, you've pissed off a Team Stratus. It seems like they knew you guys, you know. Also, we've got a brief opening to make it past the main street leading to the hospital, you know." Naruto prompted, dashing out of cover since he only had very limited time to exploit the opportunity so he couldn't quite wait for authorization from his team leader.

"Well, well… What do we have here? A Konoha ninja to eliminate and prove the power of the star training? It seems we've been born under a lucky star…" a man of pale tone and gaunt build, a bony face and dull, almost lifeless blue eyes, lilac-colored hair and a Hoshigakure forehead protector smiled having confronted Naruto's original self as he had stumbled onto the same main road as the eager, orange ninja.

"Shit! Aka-whatever-his name was, you know!" Naruto clenched his fists by his side, as sweat broke through on his forehead.

It seemed that in their eagerness to utilize opportunities for passage, Team Hokage ran into their own first party of hunters.