I was being hunted.

I did not enjoy the sensation.

If I needed another reason to ensure I never considered the shinobi profession beyond a joke, this would be it. The constant feeling of supernatural awareness of someone or something prowling around in the dark seeking me out was deeply unsettling and, if I was honest, it also made me angry on a level I couldn't easily explain. It was a complicated and volatile thing, that anger, rooted somewhere in the acknowledgement of my pursuer's ignorance and blind obedience which had placed me in this situation to begin with. While I couldn't precisely communicate the entirety of the emotion, though, I could channel it.

Focus it.

I inhaled in a steady stream, taking in as much air as I could and forcing my body to dump potent cocktails of chemicals into my bloodstream even as I refined the flow of chakra reinforcing my muscles. I had limited resources, but my objective was clear and close. My primary goal was to make my way back inside the walls of Konoha. To do this, I had twenty clean paper tags ready for seals left over from practice, two tags filled with Yakumo's dark chakra, my custom combat knife, the new seals I'd added to my feet and boots, and...

A rustling in the woods nearby caught my attention.

I grinned.

Then I moved.

…

"What the fuck is going on?" Kochi cried, looking around to his squadmates for clarification. Even at a glance, it was clear that this entire mission was fucked.

"Jun's dead," Asawa replied, looking over the charred pieces of the chunin infiltration specialist lying on the forest floor. Distantly, he could hear voices within the walls raising the alarm.

They were on a time limit.

"I can see that." Kochi stated, reigning in his temper. "Where's Yori and Unko?"

"Didn't make it out," Asawa replied bluntly in the blank tone she often used as she touched a series of depressions in the ground. "At least not this way. Given the state of Jun, I'd say they're captured or dead. Someone else came along for the ride, though. Blast was well-positioned to obscure the tracks, but we've got partial prints. Judging by the size, I'd say it's one of our primary targets."

The shinobi captain took a deep breath and looked to where his subordinate was pointing. The kid apparently wasn't going for a straight path to the wall, veering off to the side. That was both good and bad. Good in that it would give them more time to intercept whichever one of the kids Jun had grabbed. Bad in that, combined with the explosive tag, it showed they had a modicum of tactical sense and were in good enough condition not to panic.

"Dowaki." Kochi spoke, selecting a course of action. "Seal the body. The rest of you, on me. We're not walking away empty-handed from this."

The other three members of his squad formed up behind him as they leapt into the forest, moving on a slightly tighter curve than the anticipated course of travel. With any luck-

Asawa signaled and they cut back, following their tracker's signs.

Tricky little fucker.

Asawa held out her hands again.Low visibility-control-fast movement.

While the sign language of shinobi villages was, by necessity, brief and lacking many terms, it was easy to divine what his comrade was saying in this instance. Whoever they were following was skilled in some kind of speed jutsu and had enough talent or technique to leave little evidence of it. Still, 'little evidence' was not 'no evidence' and the difference would make or break a mission.

Kochi snapped a hand out, pointing in the post-dusk darkness towards a form moving from branch to branch. A set of shuriken followed the arc of his hand, cutting through the leafy foliage and hitting the child-sized shape. The figure dodged the attack, something Kochi would have been disappointed if he hadn't given how amateurish he'd made the strike, but the dodge pushed him into position for...

Hui, moving up quickly from Kochi's left, took the opportunity to seize the figure, snapping a hand around the revealed boy's neck while his other grabbed the kid's wrists. Kochi frowned as the boy strained his neck attempting to bite the hands that were holding him even as he struggled against the grip. The way he did it, though, the violent twisting motion of the body... it was strange.

"Stop fighting, kid, or I'll break your arm." Hui growled.

If Kochi had thought the near-feral behavior off before, now it was ringing alarm bells in the back of his mind. Having read the dossier on their various targets, it was easy to see something was just plain off about how the kid was acting. His eyes were unfocused, his head twitching in every direction as he tried to find an escape route... according to their information 'Kotaro' had never seen combat so this would be in line with a rookie panicking, but in comparison to all of the calculated behavior beforehand.

Maybe he just-

-CRACK!

Kochi jerked as Hui made good on his threat, the boy seizing in a jerking motion as he instantly released an inhuman cry of pain and the haze of a mirage vanishing, leaving a squirrel twisting in Hui's grasp. Kochi opened his mouth to curse even as his eyes took in the network of seal tags around the squirming creature and-

"Bomb!" Asawa cried, flinging herself back as Kochi's mouth was only beginning to form the words. His muscles, though, had long-since received the message and mimicked his subordinate as San followed suit a split-second later. In their wake, Hui had dropped the creature and was tensing his body to make the jump that would bring him to safety, when-

OOOOOOOMPH!

The shockwave of the explosion caught Kochi bodily as he leaped away, flinging him through a large branch and into the underbrush. An errant thought made note of the fact that the explosion had been far larger than it had any right to be, having contained at least the force of ten regular tags.

Pulling himself free from the dense bush of brambles he'd landed in, Kochi cursed violently as he saw the weakly rising chest of his comrade, the man's body having been launched through the trunk of a large tree and bearing severe burn marks besides.

Gritting his teeth, he started barking out orders.

…

It was very tempting to double-back to attack the probably-stunned shinobi in the wake of the massive explosion at my back, but that wasn't my 'mission.' As much fun as it would have been to brag to the girls about how I'd taken out a team of ninja sent to abduct me, it would fly in the face of everything I'd tried to hammer into their skulls about tactics and strategy. Specifically, only fight a battle that needs to be fought. Running away was always an option... and, usually, a pretty damn good one.

Like right now.

Right now was a great time to run away.

If I get out of this, I'm picking up that breathing technique thing from... Devil Killer?

The name escaped me at the moment and would probably require some serious meditation to draw up from my memories to properly recall. Anyway, the point was that I needed something to increase my speed and maneuverability. Body-flicker was nice and all, but it was too chakra-intensive to use in quick succession, especially with the need to perform other techniques or charge explosive tags on-the-spot as I just had.

Also, I need to keep an emergency loadout on me at all times. I have access to storage seals, there's no reason why I shouldn't have an entire fucking arsenal at my disposal right now, goddammit.

I'd grown too accustomed to the dangers of this world, too familiar with them. They'd lost the sting of terror that kept me up at night in my first decade of life here.

I should have been carrying a sword with me. Even a practice blade would have been something to defend myself with, but I'd decided to simply leave several swords at the Kurama estate instead of lugging them around everywhere with me.

Pausing as I crested a small hill and took a perch on an especially tall tree, I frowned as I looked towards the village. I probably had a few hundred meters left to go, but once I got in close I'd need to-

A flash of chakra and sudden movement left a team of three shinobi, all wearing leaf headbands standing nearby me. Regardless of their official identification, I tensed and readied another body flicker.

"Keep those hands where we can see them, kid." One of the ninja stated. "You the one who's been setting off the fireworks?"

"Pretty much." I replied, not moving a muscle as the three looked me over. "I'm a civilian villager academy dropout. My name is Kotaro. A couple of imposter chunin just tried to abduct me while I was coming home from eating with my friends. Might Guy's genin, Tenten, should be able to corroborate my story."

The three of them exchanged looks before one, who I assumed was the leader, nodded. "He matches the description." Turning to me, I realized that I distantly recognized the man as he chewed on a senbon. "Let's get you back in the village before anything else-"

A preternatural sense of danger flared in the back of my head as I forced my body to move with every erg of speed it possessed. Around me, the shinobi threw themselves away as I heard the whistling impact of a series of giant boulders around me and felt them cutting through the tree I had been standing on just moments prior.

A burst of pain signaled the strike of a fist against the back of my head, slamming my chin into my chest hard enough to bruise and making me momentarily see stars.

Without my experience with prana bindu, I definitely would have blacked out entirely. As it was, though, I only lost consciousness for a moment before I forced my higher thought processes back online. Even then, my body had tried to deflect the grasping hand which had caught at my right wrist to tug me over a shoulder, earning me a broken bone in the process.

"For fuck's sake-" A gruff voice yelled, delivering another powerful debilitating blow to my body as I tried and failed to evade the strike.

My left hand snaked around for the combat knife in the small of my back, working on drawing it as the blurry figure tried to stop me from drawing it. Inadvertently, this placed me face-to-face with the taller and well-built ninja trying to subdue me.

Let it never be said that I'm above using a good trick twice.

Then I spit something far more lethal than simple stomach acid right into his partially-open mouth and triggered the seals I'd tattooed on my feet to wrench myself from his grasp.

Also, I wrenched both of my arms out of their sockets, but I could fix that.

As theveryangry nin started after me from where I landed, I ducked into a dodging roll a second before a huge wet splat echoed across the immediate area and I was sprayed with blood and viscera.

"Holy fuck." One of the Konoha ninja stated in the ensuing silence as he slung the unconscious body of another ninja over his shoulder.

Yeah, ninja reinforce their bodies all the time, but it's to take blows from an opponent, not an explosive seal planted on a pebble someone just shot down your throat.

Looking around warily, I sighed at the lack of any ongoing combat and looked back to the senbon-chewing shinobi. "Can I please get back inside the village, now? I really need a shower."

Scratching his head as he visibly tried to figure out what to make of me, the ninja nodded. "Sure kid, sure." Grumbling under his breath, he signaled to a few new arrivals and I was escorted back into the village as I relocated my joints.

Thankfully, it was to a hospital and not a holding cell, but I'd resolved myself to not relax even in the relative safety of the village walls.

Hopefully they'd at least let me get some rest before interrogating me.

High above me, the mockingly-full moon rose and I grimaced as I fought the urge to select something more combat-oriented. Instead, as I lay in my hospital bed and felt the charge build, I grasped for knowledge about my own metaphysical existence. As I felt it sink in, I allowed a grim smile on my face. Especially with everything that had just happened, it was time to kick things into high gear.