"The pathway to the artifact we are meant to retrieve is getting crowded…" Kouta observed as he looked around, noticing more and more teams of genin eclipse them as the pair of Jinchuuriki together with a Curse Seal user had little threats capable of stopping them now that they've left the village.
"Hey, guys!" a cheerful, white-haired brat with red markings underneath his eyes, donning a vibrant white kimono with green decorations and red, flame motifs on the bottom sides of both the body piece as well as his sleeves. "Mind if we tag along? We'll be useful, I promise, Tsunade's here a real good medical ninja!"
"Hmph… I wonder how good…" Kouta smirked as he felt the itch to measure the worth of the kunoichi on the enemy team just now but felt like doing that would be something detrimental to both him and his team. While it was something his father would absolutely do and the pair had plenty of similarities, something this mad was not one of those analogies.
"For the record, you're the ones who might need us, not the other way around… It's just that Jiraiya-kun is such a loser, he tends to hide that behind walls of people as talentless as he is," a pale and slim individual dashing in a slick and flexible manner alongside the pair of the blond medical ninja and her energetic teammate declared in a husky voice.
"Orochimaru!" Tsunade scolded her moody teammate. She was an attractive young lady, dressed in a teal-colored kimono and a canary shade of blond hair that was just spunky enough to distract one from the slender and flat figure of the kunoichi.
"If you guys are planning to find out who's the strongest genin, you better include The Great Blue into this conversation!" an athletic and absolutely massive for his age young man closed in to the cluster of genin teams from the east, making Team Angler from Kirigakure appear almost like a team of hunters due to the unnatural size and fitness of their braggart participant.
"The Great Blue?" Deiji Deidao turned his head, wondering just who that might have been, even though he had more than a fair guess.
"Oh, come on! Even though I keep telling how much of a joke he makes himself sound like when he's calling himself that, don't tell me you didn't pick up on the wordplay! He totes even looks like a shark!" a girl that made Kouta regret labeling Jiraiya from before as the energetic one. This Kirigakure kunoichi shared plenty of differences with Tsunade, except she wore her canary hair in twin ponytails and looked like she was on copious amounts of caffeine at all times. If the kanabo hanging behind her, tied to black, leathery straps that crossed over her innocent, white shirt was any indication, this youth was as wild in battle as her personality with a touch for the brutish sadism.
The third member of Team Angler just continued to float over the treetops without uttering a word. This fellow was more interesting than even the muscle-headed shark-man from their team. He had similar, shoulder-length black hair to his shark-looking teammate, although far less wet and greasy, the lower jaw of his face remained hidden underneath a piece of cloth decorated to appear like an artistic duck-beak. While the youth would have stricken the beholder as the sharing type, due to his one-side pickle and parakeet dogi that left half his body exposed, the gentle aura of hazy mists emanating from the young man at all times made his movements blurry and his dash across the forest very ghost-like.
"So do all of you have nicknames? I've never met that many people from Kirigakure but that tradition stroke me as more of a Kumogakure thing…" Kouta scratched his head.
"Nah, that's just Morei's business. He tries to get himself over that way because nobody likes freaky shark-guys. For the record, it's not a disease thing – he's from the Hoshigaki clan." The teasing kunoichi from Team Angler leaned in closer to Kouta, approaching him to where she could have easily slipped a knife into his ribs if those were her intentions but, given her hefty choice in weaponry, she was more of the smash to bits type rather than one for assassinations. "I'm Chu, by the way…" she purred right by Kouta's ear, managing to keep up the hi-speed movement due to rather impressive flexibility.
"Morei must be quite the noble of his clan too. While most Hoshigaki have a fish-like appearance, to most it manifests as wet or different-colored skin, maybe some fins or, if one's really unlucky – razor teeth. Morei's an inch away from full package and needing saltwater to breathe… Some serious inbreeding was involved, I suspect." The third member of Team Angler finally spoke up in a rather melodious and elegant tune.
"Guys! I'm literally right here!" Morei growled and sneered, snapping his budding snout a couple of times close enough to where he might have snapped his male teammate's arm clean off.
"Don't cha always tell us to tell everything to your face?" Chu wondered, pouting her dyed lips together and acting all playful and innocent as if she didn't lead her teammate right into a talk about the questionable genealogy of another teammate of hers.
"Interesting…" Orochimaru smirked and gave Hoshigaki Morei from Team Angler a quick but decent look-down. "Perhaps this socializing effort wasn't a total waste after all…"
"What is this? Are you guys grouping up for the final stretch? Seems risky, what if hunters find you and then can take all of you down at once?" a feminine voice attracted the attention of the three teams that had joined up without any verbal contract or duty tying them together just yet. She wore the long-neck vest of the Hoshigakure ninja as well as the Hoshigakure headband on top of black, fishnet shirt. The girl's black hair was tied back into a ponytail but she missed some livelihood to her eyes to seem like she was on the matching league of attractiveness as Tsunade and Chu.
"Hoshigakure ninja?" Orochimaru looked up with genuine bafflement. "This just keeps getting better and better…" he licked his lips.
"Dude, what did I tell you about the lip-thing!?" Jiraiya flipped out right after he was done flinching in disgust.
"What did I tell you about caring what you tell me when you told me about the lip-thing?" Orochimaru sneered back at Jiraiya before elevating his dashing position to even out with the dark-haired Hoshigakure ninja.
"Are the rumors about special chakra from the stars about your ninja true? I'd very much like to see that special chakra." Orochimaru hummed, somehow managing to make his slithery and husky tone sound almost a little pleasant and melodious.
"Is this Konoha creep bothering you, Rarrifa?" a rather pudgy-looking ninja who was too large on the belly front to keep his traditional Hoshigakure attire zipped up properly. The caring chubby had circular markings over his cheeks, those matching the Akimichi clan's markings, even the messy, falling over his face and down to his shoulders blond locks obstructed the full splendor of those traditional features.
"An Akimichi from Hoshigakure? A missing-ninja perhaps?" Orochimaru wondered.
"What? Are you special in the head, or something?" the Akimichi's eye twitched. "Branches of Akimichi are all over the world. For your information, we're quite a valued clan for our abilities to serve as excellent vanguard on the battlefield as well as cornerstone pieces due to our great stamina and physical strength!"
"Calm down, Saol must be from another universe or time…" another kunoichi in a Hoshigakure uniform landed beside Orochimaru. This young lady had blond hair and eyes of serene blue tranquility oozing from them. The likes that could only have belonged to a Yamanaka.
"Well, I'll be damned… An Ino-Shika-Cho combo from Hoshigakure…" Orochimaru chuckled to himself.
"That's right, I'm Faeino Yamanaka, this is Saol Akimichi and Rarrifa Nara, Team Westerlund from Hoshigakure." The Yamanaka kunoichi introduced her team.
"I'm Jiraiya, the knockout babe beside me is Tsunade and the guy giving off the weird, stalker vibes is Orochimaru, we're Team Sarutobi from Konohagakure!" Jiraiya winked at the foreigners. Tsunade acknowledged the familiar trio in their legendary combination only with a slight nod, looking a tad embarrassed by the behavior of both her teammates but by now she had learned to just go with it.
"Juugo Kouta, Deiji Deidao and Nanaba Aomyaku, Team Hawthorn from Konohagakure." Kouta introduced his team. Judging from the wheeze in Deiji's mask, he was about to do it, but then the air just lingered in the boy's lungs and left in a weighty huff when he realized that there was no point to do so after Kouta did it first.
"I'm Hoshigaki Morei, "The Great Blue!", this is Igaten Raizo and Kyona Chu, from Team Angler, Kirigakure." The standout character with shark-physiology pointed at himself with his thumb and then to his teammates with his index as he named them.
"And you're all headed in this specific direction toward the temple?" Rarrifa from Team Westerlund wondered. There was a hint of something ominous in her voice.
"Yeah, we've fled from a pair of hunters. One of them, an Uchiha scolded his partner that he didn't block off an exit from the village that would lead us to this path – they were too much trouble to take on quickly so we fled the first chance we got." Nanaba explained.
"Hmmm… A fellow in a black coat with red clouds?" Orochimaru wondered.
"Yeah, why?" Kouta looked up at the pale, long-haired shinobi who lowered down his position to match better with his team's.
"We killed him and his partner from behind. He was talking about this one pathway completely devoid of hunters while we snuck up on them. My snakes devoured their bodies though now I realize they may have been clones…" Orochimaru exclaimed with a heavy tone, realizing that the rest of the teams might have shared a very similar story with them soon enough.
"Yep. We met those two. The partner guy went one on one with the Great Blue and lost. We made a bet that he'd tell us something interesting if I won and… He directed us here. His partner seemed like a wimp, just stared at us with his weird eyes and didn't interfere at all…" Morei pointed at himself in a vain way. Kouta wondered if he realized how feeble his attempts at putting himself over were when he declared having fulfilled the role of bait just the way it was planned.
"That particular pair overwhelmed us as well. The battlefield seemed flooded with clones of that Uchiha guy, some of them were illusionary, some of them exploded, scary stuff all around and… We found an opening in the form of a single direction and we took it." Faeino Yamanaka of Team Westerlund explained.
"So, it appears we have all been directed here by that Uchiha. Curious…" Orochimaru looked on ahead with a little excitement for what they were about to encounter.
"It's curious that we fell for his trap? For all we know he might be lurking here somewhere, shit, one shark-guy is to many shark guys! No offense…" Jiraiya exclaimed before turning to Morei with an apologetic shrug.
"It's okay, not everyone can handle a piece of the Great Blue!" Morei pointed at himself with his thumb while he blew his chest out and widened the gills on his neck.
"I doubt that the Uchiha planned to kill us here. Judging from the sound of it, the two had a fair handle on most of us. He certainly outwitted all of us, meaning he had a good drop on all of us." Raizo of Team Angler spoke again, making Saol Akimichi freak out above him by the fact that the black-haired young man actually spoke.
The quartet of teams all glared ahead, realizing that an opening laid in front of us. One whose nature was not entirely clear to either of the ninja involved in the affair as they just scattered across the opening and examined the place. Due to the fact that the temple they were looking for was not meant to be for a good ten to fifteen minutes of trip ahead, all of them were caught unaware by this curious location of the Forest of Death that defied the usual appearance of the place by actually having a clearing to the sky through which a pale moon stared at the ground.
The opening gleamed with cyan, teal and emerald shades and various different colors of a forest far richer and teeming with life than the Forest of Death, the exact opposite of the natural standard was. The natural moonlight that lit up over the opening every night bathed the mushrooms and various plants foreign for this location and granted them a chance at life in this inhospitable environment.
"Now, now… That's a surprise…" a masculine voice came from father ahead in the opening. A voice belonging to a man who rested his back against the remains of a building that led underground and had only its entryway peeking above ground. It was a temple of some sort, for certain, but it was not the temple that the genin were looking for, predating it by a good couple of centuries. "I did not expect so many to know this location, is there at least one amongst you with the Senju ancestry?"
"This man… He's bad news…" Kouta turned his face halfway to back to relay the gut feeling to his team. He wasn't a sensor like Mana but after fighting his father both seriously and for show so many times, he has learned to recognize when a fighter was intending to kill and when he was just showing off. While Kouta didn't sense any Killing Intent from this man just yet, the threat level that his gut perceived was just off the charts with him.
"I am! My grandpa was Hashirama Senju!" Tsunade stepped up and thrust her fist forward at the distant man, clad in red armor over his body and long, black hair.
"Is this some sort of a joke? I had expected Hashirama to come here, an ancient Senju sacred grounds for a spar like old times. All I get is some little snot who had earned her esteemed name by wiping the floor of her Academy class somewhat decently?" the man growled, displeased by the development. "Oh well… At least I will have a bargaining chip to force him to come here – his granddaughter. The rest of you will serve as a decent handicap to make it a warm-up, at least…"
Multiple murders of crows took off from all the different directions of the world, pooling together as they covered the natural moonlight and made the Sharingan eyes of the threatening man race across the sky, but also alarmed the genin that had confronted him as well. The crows turned in a twister in the travel down as a pillar before forming a single, compact, humanoid shape of nothing but murky black. The mass then opened its eyes and they gleamed of the red Sharingan. Before long, the complete shape of Uchiha Itachi formed and the prodigy of the current Uchiha generation squared his eyes against the God of the previous.
"So you've come…" Itachi muttered.
"I'm not sure what you mean…" the ancient Uchiha smirked. "I was waiting here the whole time. I have little patience for pathetic weaklings and rules the Seventh has placed on me. He promised me a clash with Hashirama and I intend to cash in that promise, everything else is just chaff."
"I wasn't talking to you, Madara. I was talking to the ninja I've recruited." Itachi turned his Sharingan back to the quartet of teams behind him.
"Hmph… I was wondering when you'd show your face to me. I could see you the whole time, hiding in the trees, thinking you were scouting me. It was cute, actually…" Madara teased his Uchiha peer before Itachi turned his eyes back to his elder with a displeased expression.
"Would you please stay quiet while I explain to these ninja why I've brought them here?" Itachi asked Madara, something that irked the ancient Uchiha genius enough for him to take off of the rocky platform he sat on and take a stance in full-size in front of the gathered ninja.
"Just because I don't care about mere fleas, doesn't mean I won't crush them if they overstay their welcome. And as an Uchiha, you should be able to realize how welcome fleas are at any given moment." Madara warned Itachi.
"You're that hunter!" Jiraiya yelled out and pointed at Itachi with a pale face.
"You're alive…" Orochimaru chuckled to himself. "My, my… The snakes will be displeased I've fed them clones again."
"You're a hunter." Kouta pointed out. "You said you've… Recruited us?"
"That's right. This man is Madara Uchiha. One of the strongest Uchiha in the history of our universe. He was a notable foe that Naruto had faced in his time so I had no doubts he'd bring him here. I need his pair of eyes so I can talk to Naruto." Itachi explained to the folks.
"This makes no sense whatsoever to the Great Blue, who's Naruto!?" Morei scratched his head by running his webbed index through his greasy hair.
"It might not make much sense, I don't have the time nor the crayons to explain it. What matters is that he is a dangerous hunter. Eliminating him from the game is in your best interests and obtaining his eyes is in mine, so I can look Naruto in the eyes when we meet without ruining my plan to save Konoha." Itachi replied with what he saw as an explanation but what seemed like just more trees deeper into the woods for the rest.
"Oh? You intend to fight me, over my eyes?" Madara spread his hands out, looking thoroughly entertained by such a notion, enough so to forget Itachi's previous rudeness toward him. "How amusing."
"So he's too strong to confront him yourself, that I can understand…" Orochimaru pointed out, "But you've left your partner back in the village too?"
"Kisame has little to do with this, also, I'd rather he wouldn't know about any of this. Also, most importantly of all, Morei would challenge Kisame again if he found out that Kisame held back the last time they met and I need all of you to have your heads in the game. This is our struggle against Madara and until it is done – nothing else matters!" Itachi explained and turned back to Madara with eyes brimming with determination.
"Hmph… I'm glad to see that my clan produces more than just wet blankets these days. Come, youth, I will lecture you of the power the Uchiha possessed back in their prime!" Madara flaunted the gathered ninja with a face twisted with sick excitement and a stance that left him so open – it mocked Madara's opponents more than did him a disservice.
So began Itachi's preparation for his meeting with Naruto.
