"To run into you, of all people…" a masked man spoke up, halting the hasty steps of Team Minato. The three genin all stared up at the obstacle in their way with an appropriate sense of exasperation of a problem being in their way. Something that either of the three young ones missed in their eyes was familiarity with the disguised hunter ninja.
"Are we supposed to know you?" Kotaro beamed with his eyes at the mysterious figure.
"You are a worthless mark of the history books, cut out for brevity. I'd rather you just disappeared…" the masked man replied to the young man. Space bent and molded to the left of Kotaro, quickly consuming the young boy and swallowing him up whole until nothing but thin air remained in his position. "There… Just the way history intended it to be…"
"Kotaro! You bastard!" Kushina rolled back her sleeves and clapped her hands together. Chains encased in a majestic, golden glow burst from underground and wrapped around the masked man, putting on a tight squeeze on him while keeping him in place.
"Kushina, wait, he needs to bring Kotaro back!" Minato looked to his teammate who just let out a confident smirk while looking excited about having the enemy pinned down.
"Don't worry, haven't torn him apart yet, ya know!" the redhead sassed him.
"An impressive technique spawned out of an even more remarkable ability. It's lucky for me you are far too green to be of any trouble to me yet…" the masked man spoke up with voice devoid of the respectful intimidation that Kushina felt apt for the situation he was in. Just then, for a brief moment, the man's entire body went translucent, as if blurring out of existence itself before the entire visual illusion fading away like a bad trip. The only proof of it not only having ever taken place but also being real was the deafening clang of Kushina's chakra chains hitting the ground and dissipating.
"H-Huh?" Kushina took a wary step back. She was always the powerhouse of her team that even the more formidable ninja feared and respected. She had caught plenty of cocky bastards unaware by just doing her thing and pulled her team through that way so seeing this man completely unimpressed by her talent that left anyone else dumbstruck warranted at least a heartbeat of fear.
"Kushina, let's take this man on together." Minato stepped up, removing a pair of kunai from his pouch and taking a knife-fighting pose.
"Good, for a moment there I thought you'd chicken out or say something stupid like "let's run" away, or something, ya know…" Kushina straightened her back and weaved her fingers into a preparatory position designed to make it easier for ninja focusing more on ninjutsu or genjutsu to weave hand seals, even when facing off against more agile and physical-focused opponents.
"Normally, running away would absolutely be the best option but… This man has Kotaro and we need to get him back. Until we do, we cannot take one step back!" Minato declared with a stern and focused look on his face that he rarely used.
"Oh… Those eyes… Almost enough to make my back tingle…" the masked man taunted the pair by tilting his head up and letting a malevolent crimson flare gleam from a hole on the right side of his mask.
"Let me help you with that…" Minato's voice registered in the masked man's ear but this time from behind. A silver flash that should have drawn blood only passed through thin air while the masked man struggled to look back and counter his opponent's daring attack.
"Impressive, all that from just a Body Flicker… Not quite the Yellow Flash and yet…" the masked man complimented his opponent while leaning down and avoiding Kushina's golden chains without even looking at them. Much to his surprise, Minato had raised his kunai up, hooking it up on the passing chain and letting it carry him from close range to long near-instantly on a roof of a nearby check-up station.
"Multi-Shuriken Jutsu!" Minato chanted out, unleashing a metallic downpour of shuriken on his opponent that passed right through his body again. He was testing when he could damage the man and when he could not. So far, from what the young man could gather, this intangibility ability seemed to be something that the enemy could switch on and off at will. Kushina did manage to catch him before and there must have been a reason for that…
A crack demanded the entirety of the masked man's attention, Kushina's golden chakra chains had shredded the tree he stood on to bits and directly targeted the very branch he was on, leaving the mysterious hunter plummeting a short distance in free-fall. Minato grabbed hold on the chain he had used to get up to the roof he stood on and charged forward, letting his body flicker in its path.
Instead of slashing the man and leaving him incapacitated with grievous wounds, the chain just phased right through him. The seemingly invincible ninja tapped his feet onto the ground and took a mocking glance back at Minato.
"Almost…" he taunted the pair.
"Who are you? How did you avoid my chakra sensory and why did you take Kotaro?" Minato inquired. He needed some time to come up with a strategy that would work against an unconventional opponent such as this one.
"I am nobody. I don't want to be anyone either. You may call me Tobi if you must. I believe that showing you how I avoided your chakra sensory would spoil my next trick…" Tobi shrugged and took an aggressive stance. The rippling swirl of space itself consumed the man himself as he emerged just behind Kushina. The young kunoichi cried out in pain as a loop of a chain tied around her neck and swung her over the masked man's head, threatening to slam her into the ground head-first and snap her neck.
Tobi could only snicker when he felt the pressure that his chain looped around become lighter – they no longer had a grasp of anything by the time they clanged against the paved street on the other side.
"You see… I have met you before and even fought you before and while our interests have traditionally clashed, I am a big enough fan to pick up a trick or two when I can… With my own particular spin on it, if you don't mind." Tobi let his chains disappear inside the sleeves of his black cloak about as quickly as they appeared.
"Now you target Kushina? Almost like you're trying to isolate me…" Minato lashed out at the masked enigma with a stare that tried its best to kill.
"By no means. The girl just liked playing with chains, I decided to show her some of my own toys… I suppose I'm borrowing from both of you, huh? Well… It can't be helped, the two of you were around when I grew up, after all…" Tobi shrugged again, breaking his usual above it all mood and adopting a rather aloof façade.
"What?" Minato's eyes widened in surprise.
"Oh, the Seventh keeps babbling about paying no mind to all the curious paradoxes involved with this exam but… I can't help but wonder how will you look at your friends, your students, people you love, knowing that I might be one of them from this point on…" the masked man acted out a shiver. Before Minato could decide how he should best overcome the impossible odds stacked against him with this opponent, Tobi attacked without warning. His hands passed through the entire collection of hand seals in mere microseconds.
"Fire Release: Great Fireball!" Tobi yelled out while firing a massive fireball. Minato clutched his kunai closer to him, something about this attack felt off, it was too direct and basic but… The fireball had an odd angle to it. Minato barely even had to try to evade its blazing wrath while the fiery projectile blasted off at the top of Konohagakure's southern gate.
It seemed as if though the gate wasn't Tobi's target either as the attack met an ethereal resistance of an invisible bubble of unidentified force. As it struggled to detonate or overcome the opposing force, the masterful Fire Release technique found it impossible to do either of those things as it just shrunk and shrunk until it was nothing but a dissipating tongue of a single flame akin to the fire on a candle. A fire that went out completely as the entirety of Tobi's fireball was absorbed by the interloper.
"Excuse me but I went through great trouble to surprise these genin. I'd rather handle them all by myself…" Tobi addressed the hunter whom he just attacked.
"Oh? I apologize, then… Though I do not believe you have any right to dictate terms here, my eyes can see right through you and you are a despicable mutt of human genealogy indeed." The interloper stated with a high-pitched tone that was undoubtedly male despite the owner of said voice appearing very frail in figure. It only made the spectacular gleam of his alluring eyes through the gap between his murky turban and scarf all that more pronounced.
Unlike the Sharingan which Tobi appeared to possess, this set of eyes was much different, far more heavenly in its shine, like a pair of divine spheres irradiating exalted divinity itself.
"Hmph… I must warn you, hunter, I do not take to such unkind words lightly. If you continue to bother my eyes, I will remove you by force." Tobi stared at the curious presence.
"I appeared here to do my bidding and remove the unworthy genin from this competition, we were supposed to be allies in this mission of ours though your behavior makes me wish punishment for you much more than testing these kids…" the odd challenger, covered in rags all but a minor gap through which he could see with his azure eyes, lamented.
"There are no ninja alive who have the right to speak to Uchiha Madara this way…" Tobi revealed a fragment of his identity that sounded familiar to both Kushina and Minato but only as a passing mention in the history books.
"M-Madara Uchiha? The man who rivaled the First Hokage?" Minato freaked out.
"Oh, the futility of lecturing a mere insect that the foot of a chained pawn in a cave steps on while staring at reflections…" the interloper removed the turban from over his head and let the murky rag float away wherever the breeze carried it, exposing the short and curly white hair underneath and a smooth and pristine face that seemed as if though it was about to glitter in dust of rubies in the evening sunset.
"What's with this place?" Kawaki looked around the classical architecture of the Uchiha District. A place where ninja usually earned rough and dismissive looks from ninja so invested in their own blazing feelings that they tended to flat out diminish the worth of what anyone else felt as well as anything happening around them.
"Right? Looks amazing!" Meiko bent her knees lightly in utter, unrestrained hype. "I don't get to visit this place much but just smelling the air here and seeing this place live makes me want to have been born an Uchiha, right?"
"Barking up the seriously wrong tree here, girlfriend…" Kiyomi sneered at her friend, feeling a bit insulted that Meiko would even turn to Kiyomi for validation of that sentiment.
"Pfff… Whatever… Seems snobby and high falutin anyway…" Kawaki shrugged, though his eyes continued to absorb the unmatched cultural wonders of traditional structures that needed not worry with their own size or the expense that breathed life into their frames.
"Heh, could have fooled me, you're looking around and slobbering as if you've never left Amaguriyama, you know…" Naruto smirked, cheeking Kawaki in good fun.
"This place is where the Uchiha associate their interests within this village or any other version of it," Kiyomi explained to Kawaki who appeared to have fallen out of a tree with how unfamiliar he was with not only Konoha but pretty much any known human settlement. "The Uchiha are the highest-rated, most skilled ninja in the village and they won't let you forget it…"
"Hmph… What do they have to be so high and mighty about? They're just ninja anyway… They serve the people that pay them…" Kawaki leaned on his arms while continuing to gobble up the sights with almost the same amount of ecstasy he experienced when stuffing his face full of sweets earlier.
"Exactly, which prompts the question of why we're here, to begin with…" Kiyomi turned to Naruto. "I thought we were meant to avoid public and well-known landmarks because they're too easy of a meeting spot for hunters."
"I wanna settle things with Sasuke, you know," Naruto declared.
"That's your jerkoff friend I reminded you of, isn't he?" Kawaki turned to Naruto, whose face soured from Kawaki addressing Sasuke in an offensive way but nowhere near to where the young man would have lashed out. At least Kawaki was resorting to meaningless name-calling instead of calling him accusatory terms like "traitor" or "criminal" Naruto was used to.
"Now, all of a sudden?" Kiyomi looked to Naruto with an inquisitive glare.
"I've met my father when I fought Pain and all seemed lost, now I got to meet my mom too… It seems like I'm a whole different kind of person. This Sasuke isn't as lost in his way as one from my own universe yet. If I cannot measure up to him, I may as well forget about saving my true friend, you know." Naruto explained while scratching his belly due to the bubbling up feelings speaking of his friend made rise up. "Sorry if this goes against your plan for our team, Kiyomi, it's just something I've gotta do, you know…"
"No, that's just fine… Orochimaru is living on borrowed time after showing his evil face to me anyway…" Kiyomi shrugged.
"So you just thought you'd find him skulking here then?" Meiko squinted at Naruto as if she was referring to an utter idiot. "If anything, he'd be going for the thingymajig we gots to find himself…"
"No. I wasn't looking for Sasuke here, you know." Naruto shook his head. "I was looking for someone whom Sasuke from the point in time he was aligned with Orochimaru still would be looking for in such a situation."
A flock of crows passed through the sky, Naruto closed his eyes in disappointment. "Though it doesn't look like he's here, you know…" he admitted.
A buzzing sound splashed a curious stroke of paint over the blank canvas before a dazzle of sparks leaving Meiko's armored hand that deflected them added some spicy flare to it. The chunky shuriken that would have required an entire hand to wield even a single one of them fell to the ground in a weighty thud while Meiko's armored gauntlet, exposed through the torn-up sleeve of her green jumpsuit, armored up with one more layer, that of the Reactor Gauntlets.
"More weaklings sullying the grounds of the Uchiha District, it seems…" a growling, masculine voice directed the attention of Team Hokage to the location where their attacker emerged from. The upper layers of the massive rooftops became clustered with creepy swirls that bent and twisted space-time itself, each one of these twists of space spawned another challenger, bolstering the mighty force opposing Team Hokage.
Looming over them atop of the roof of the Konohagakure Police Force HQ was a tall and fit man of a complexion so pale it seemed as if though he'd spent the entirety of his life in a cave or a prison cell himself. Scars ravaged his entire, bald head, the most prominent of which was the horizontal scar splitting his head from the right temple to the bridge of his nose, a man speaking with a noticeable lisp due to being utterly toothless.
And yet the most prominent feature of the man became apparent once what once appeared as scars over his face opened up to reveal an ample collection of Sharingan eyes spotting over his head in multiple places and if the belfry was of any indication - rest of his body, concealed underneath a dark, fitting kimono. The reinforcements that the man had received in his ambush was comprised of the same young man, multiplied dozens of times. One of a more natural pale and a pair of beady Sharingan of their own to each, though those possessed the very same set of eyes, namely ones decorated with identical symbols as if each one of these duplicates were a shadow clone.
"Just what the hell is this, you know?" Naruto grit his teeth.
"I'd give it a guess that the answer would be – a hunter?" Meiko shrugged.
"You spoke of Sasuke Uchiha, didn't you? Tell me where he is and I may let you move on." The creepy, many-eyed man declared.
"If we knew, we wouldn't have wasted time getting noticed by you, now would we?" Kiyomi sighed.
"This guy is one of those Uchiha?" Kawaki stuck out his tongue. "I'd rather get good the good old way rather than be born talented but so misshaped."
"My sons, these people know the location of Sasuke Uchiha, the one we must kill, and they also sully the Uchiha name with their weakling tongues. Find out what they know about Sasuke Uchiha, then kill them." The freaky hunter ordered his one-son army though a few of them turned at their "father" with confused glares.
"Play with them? What about the survival of the fittest?" a son the nearest to their father wondered.
"Sometimes for the sake of a giant leap forward you must take a step around even law as fundamental as that. Look at it this way, my defiant son, you will not be letting the weak live in the end, you will cement yourself as strong by killing them, just after we know where Sasuke Uchiha is." The man instructed his sons.
Meiko turned to the rest of the team for guidance on if she should go all out against these hunters or not.
"Don't look at me, Naruto got us into this mess, he can get us out…" Kiyomi shrugged.
"Whatever happened to Aku-Soku-Zan…" Meiko squinted at her comrade.
"He doesn't look that evil, he's mentally challenged at best, putting him down wouldn't feel like eliminating evil at all," Kiyomi objected.
"It doesn't matter!" Naruto pounded his own free hand with his fist, preparing to fight back. "He wants to kill Sasuke, and I won't let anyone do that until or after I save him, you know!"