Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. I am constantly taking real-world steps to become the greatest human being that the eastern seaboard of the United States has ever seen, and my ascension will be complete when I finally take possession of what is mine.
It's all a matter of time Kishimoto. Save yourself the embarrassment and heartbreak, and give me what's mine now. I'll keep you on in an advisory figurehead role.
Chapter 11: The Value of One's Life
"Good morning!" Kakashi chirped, sticking his head into Anko's tent despite the probable risk of cranial impalement at the hands of the clanless kunoichi, "Rise and shine. We've got a fun-filled day of defying death to attend to."
Anko moaned tiredly, shifting around in her sleeping roll before opening her eyes to glare at her awakener, "You suck. You know one of the things I always liked about being a lone ninja? Picking your own hours."
A subtle hint to leave her alone for at least five more minutes.
Kakashi seemed to consider this for a moment before entering the tent entirely, "Hmm, no. I've sent Naruto, Tenten, and Shino to scout ahead. I'm keeping watch over the camp until you're ready to go. You're the straggler here. Breakfast is outside on the campfire cinders."
"Well at least you made me breakfast…" Anko growled, sitting up out of her portable bedding with an arm over her chest to cover her bare upper body, "Of course, I'm probably betting one of the brats did it instead of you."
"Well, yes. I'm not much of a caregiver you see."
Anko just grunted in response and pulled her legs out to sit on top of her sleeping arrangements while she woke herself up, "Yeah, you're kind of a dick. I noticed," She said bluntly.
Kakashi merely watched her, a question burning inside, "You're not going to sit there and ask me why I can't be nice?" Kakashi asked, wondering why it was this woman didn't seem to ever increase in her hostility toward him despite his demeanor. It usually made people quite hostile, which was what he liked because it kept them away from the train wreck that was his life.
And rest assured, it certainly was one.
Be that as it may, he was notable for offending the vast majority of people that had spent any decent amount of time around him. He had been that way for the better part of ten years, and it was part of the reason he'd gained so many enemies. As the last of the Hatake Clan, he had always possessed a chip on his shoulder that made him a rather abrasive personality, to put it lightly.
Watching your father die meaninglessly to try and fulfill the terms of a doomed mission contract, leaving you alone before your age came anywhere close to hitting double-digits would do that to you. Not to mention all of the things that had happened since then, including the complicated series of events that led to his trump card in his left eye socket.
If Anko had openly despised him, she wouldn't have been the first person and certainly wouldn't have been the last, but she didn't, at least not any more than she abhorred anyone else that hovered into her general field of vision.
Anko merely scoffed in return at his question, "No, I won't, because the world isn't nice. I wasn't expecting or depending on you to be."
The way she'd come up from her more youthful times hadn't exactly been the most pleasant, even by mainland Elemental Nations standards. As long as she was dealing with someone who was willing to be honest about the fact that they'd take a blade to her neck if she slipped up, she'd be fine for the most part.
It was disturbing that her standards for the conduct of others happened to be so low, but she had yet to deal with the person that could get rid of her, so it was forgivable.
"Besides-," The ill-tempered kunoichi continued, "-The moment this is all over with and we go our separate ways, we never have to see each other again. So I'm not holding my breath that I'm going to be the special one to fix your broken widdle heart." She taunted baby voice before smirking and pushing up her breasts with the arm shielding them, "Don't be fooled by these. If you haven't noticed, I'm not much of a caregiver either."
"No amount of caregiving, even by someone as 'maternal' in appearance as yourself, could fix the mess that I am," Kakashi freely admitted, actually registering a look of surprise from Anko instead of, "What? You didn't think I could admit when something's wrong with me? I'm sure you've heard of me and what people think. The whole 'watching over the kids' thing is just a favor to someone I respect."
Anko had been wondering about that honestly, "Yeah, you don't seem to be the type."
"I'm not. Naruto and Tenten are good kids, but I'm sorely lacking in the coddling and child-rearing department."
The way he treated the kids was him actually trying to be pleasant.
Sighing to herself, Anko turned her back to Kakashi to spare herself some semblance of modesty as she started reaching for some clothes to wear, if only her mesh armor and panties to get up and walk around a bit. As she did this, Kakashi's vision was drawn to a rather new looking scar just above her lower right hip.
She could feel his eyes on her, and she knew exactly what he was looking at, "It's still kind of sore you know."
"Kakuzu?" Kakashi asked, wondering just how tough this woman was, 'Sore she says. It looks agonizing.'
"He's got this thing about him," Anko explained, "He likes to pilfer organs. Hearts mostly. Takes 'em from people while they're still living. He ripped one of my kidneys out and left me for dead. Said I looked healthy and he hadn't replaced one of his in a while, so he took mine."
That sounded sick. Why?
"Just like that? How'd you survive?"
"Hate. Lots and lots of hate until I crawled back close enough to a town for someone to find me and get a doctor. As you can see, it was a civvie doctor, not a medic-nin. There probably wouldn't be a scar if it had been."
How brutal.
Kakashi had been stabbed before, he'd even been run through a time or two, but he'd never had a person reach inside of him and remove an organ from his still moving body before. He'd lost his eye, but that wasn't comparable in the slightest here.
Kakuzu took her kidney, and the other one didn't fold underneath the slack that it had to pick up in return. Just how tough was this woman?
Idly he reached his hand out and traced the scar with his fingertips. Yes, it was quite clear to him just how much of a fool move this was, to lay his hands on a quite underdressed and somewhat unhinged adult kunoichi, but despite the dangerous aura that she constantly gave off it was missing here.
She seemed vulnerable. More vulnerable than she ever seemed when he and the kids had captured her. She was showing him the ultimate mark of her weakness, and she seemed to regard it with more uncertainty than her own naked body.
After touching her, the first thing that Kakashi expected was for Anko to punch him or cut his fingers off, and once he felt her tense up he figured his luck had run out. However she didn't attack him. She didn't even threaten him. She only turned her head halfway around to look over her shoulder.
"You have cold hands," Anko declared bluntly.
Kakashi almost laughed.
Almost.
XxX
(With Naruto)
"This is ridiculous," Tenten said, concealing herself in the trees with her two teammates Naruto and Shino. The route they'd been taking to scout ahead on their path wasn't very safe. A certain distance away from where they'd made camp the area was swarming with Uchiha Clan members searching for something, "Do you think Kakashi-sensei's broken up camp yet?"
If he hadn't it probably wouldn't take long for some of the Uchiha to stumble upon it. Not that they were concerned about him, but Anko was still sort of injured from whatever Kakuzu had done to her. It would have been best for everyone if she kept from exerting herself too much.
An insect floated to them and landed on Shino's finger, granting him the information it had gone around and picked up, "There are ten of them in the area. Their pattern of search is sectioned, they keep themselves spaced out, and all of them are in possession of topographic maps. They are not searching for a person."
Naruto idly wondered if Uchiha Sasuke was amongst them before deciding that it didn't matter. If he was, he'd kick his ass. If he wasn't, well that just gave him something else to hold over that guy's head if they ran into each other again; the fact that he'd been the one to find what ten older members of his clan couldn't.
Tenten pulled out an area map of her own and frowned at the area on it that had been circled the previous night by Anko, "Oh boy, that's so far to go."
In a show of good faith, Anko had proven that she knew where the entrance to Kakuzu's hideaway was, marking it on one map and one map only at a random point of the evening and deigning that she'd plant it on 'one of the chibis' in her own time before sunrise.
Part of the deal had been that Kakashi couldn't be told which child had the appropriate map, and they had to give their word that her terms would be adhered to. She wasn't willing to let herself be screwed over.
Either way, Tenten wound up being the one with the appropriate map, something that she'd discovered the morning before and kept to herself until the night before when she'd told Naruto and Shino.
Not Kakashi. Those had been the only terms of the agreement; that Kakashi couldn't know.
The woman was as shrewd as they came. Tenten respected that highly.
"It's not that far," Naruto said with a frown. Didn't these two do any conditioning? It would only take a few hours to get there from where they'd left camp. He traveled that distance every single day to train, explore, or play back on Uzu no Kuni, "We can make it there in no time. It's just… we've got a bit of a problem to solve first."
Namely, the woods teeming with unfriendly Uchiha Clan members. How did Naruto know that they were unfriendly? Well the first batch of Uchiha Clan members that he'd met tried to brutally kill him, and were only deterred by liberal use of high explosives and clones.
"What do we do?" Shino asked aloud, willing to work out ideas with his new… friends? Yes, friends. He could call them that, even if it was early to say so. He liked them well enough and the feeling seemed to be mutual, sans a few speed bumps here or there, "We can either keep going forward or go back."
"What if they track us back to Kakashi-sensei and Anko-san?" Tenten queried in return.
Naruto shook his head, not worrying about Kakashi after the things he'd seen the man do. Also, Anko was Anko. Enough said. If anyone could take care of themselves, those two could.
"I think we should keep going forward," Naruto said, narrowing his eyes on the map, "The hiding place isn't really that far away. They could find it themselves if we take too long couldn't they?"
Even if the Uchiha Clan wasn't the best with studying or understanding foreign terrain, and their skill set didn't lie with tracking or searching, if they spread out enough with their numbers they would find something.
Maybe going on their own was the best option after all, but what were their chances of actually getting there in one piece?
"How do you think we're going to get past them though?" Tenten asked curiously, "Unless you actually want to fight."
Naruto frowned and thought about it. He kind of did want to fight, but Kakashi, Kushina, and unbeknownst to him Minato would have tanned his hide for forcing a battle that there was no need to engage in, even if he did think and operate better when deadly objects and elements were being hurled his way. He was a pressure player.
If they were fighting by now he would have come up with something in the middle of the fray that would have worked. But the entire point of this was to not blow their cover and send dozens of enemy ninjas their way.
'And we all suck at genjutsu,' Naruto thought to himself before turning to his newest friend, "Shino? Any ideas?"
"I'll see what I can do," The Aburame said casually, forming his hands into a ram seal, "I can try to find us a soft path through, and cover our signatures just in case. Mushi Jamngu no Jutsu (Insect Jamming Jutsu)."
"What did you do?"
"My insects are spread throughout the forest to scout for us," Shino explained, "I can get a blanket signal from them as to the exact position of the enemy. While they do that they can release a small bit of chakra that will confuse types that are sensitive to such a thing."
That was great. They had a close-range heavy hitter in Naruto, a mid to long-range kunoichi that also specialized in low chakra-intrinsic combat methods in Tenten, and Shino who seemed to have no shortage of tricks with those insects of his.
They still needed to see him fight to find out what he could really do, but with his list of techniques and abilities keeping them out of trouble, he was making a hell of a case for himself.
"Let's go then," Naruto said, getting a nod from Shino as he and Tenten followed him through the thick of things. He had sensor moves too? If he could fight as well as bring up all of those supplementary techniques this could be one hell of a team.
XxX
There were legends of what Kakuzu's Money Pit was supposed to consist of. A 50-meter pit carved into the ground, filled with traps, inner workings, nooks and crannies, and all sorts of things that protected his hard-earned loot and swag that he'd managed to procure over the term of his long, long ninja career; treasures and riches that one could date back to several decades far past.
The man took trophies, not just in the form of money or organs from those he killed, but in the form of special weapons, crests, and anything that he felt had some sort of monetary value. The man was a walking curator of ninja history.
…Well, he was the closest thing one would get to such outside of the Sarutobi Clan anyway.
It wasn't that hard for Nawaki to believe that it was something that ninja after ninja would leap at the opportunity of finding. Just a whiff was enough to bring the scuttlebutt out of the woodwork. It was a highly sought after find after all.
"Well that's three separate clans today by my count," Nawaki said to himself, shading his eyes from the sun as he stood by a cliff and watched several ninjas from a rival clan beat a hasty retreat away from him. They thought better of tangling with him after learning that he was searching for what they were after as well.
Oh it was fine. He wasn't too keen on leaving a high body count anyway. He wasn't one of the types that took pride in the amount of kills he got during the course of his missions.
A set of slow claps alerted Nawaki to a person a short distance behind him. Standing by the border of the woods by the cliff, he saw a shameless Uchiha Clan member with an open clan jacket and a mesh undershirt sarcastically applauding him.
"I guess with a name like yours, you don't really need to fight to win your battles," The new arrival said with a dry chortle, "It's funny. For someone who calls himself 'The Hunter' you'd think you would be better at throwing off pursuit."
Nawaki shook his head with a smirk and reached for the Raijin no Ken, "Well to be honest I didn't really expect to have to run up against someone like you… yet at least. I figured I'd have to fight Kakuzu, but to think that I've got to get through Obito; 'The Ghost' of the Uchiha Clan…"
Obito didn't seem to care that Nawaki knew who he was despite the fact that he knew for a fact that Nawaki had never seen him in person before, "I hate that nickname. That has such a negative connotation to it," He didn't want to be famous. He didn't want to be anyone at all.
That was enough talk however. One of them was a Senju and the other an Uchiha. Cordiality was not meant to be the theme of the day when these two types met each other. Fighting to the death was.
The only signal that a normal ninja would have gotten from Nawaki's attack was the humming noise of the Raijin no Ken being activated. Obito immediately turned his Sharingan on and was able to see the speedy attack coming, dodging the overhanded swing of the electric sword by inches.
Nawaki's eyes widened when he felt the cold sensation of metal chains around his neck. He quickly stuck his left arm up just as the chains were tightened to strangle him, allowing him to somewhat block the choke attempt.
Shackled to both of his wrists was Obito's current weapon of choice, a simple chain. Clearly, it was effective enough for the current battle. If Nawaki hadn't blocked it he would have gotten his neck broken from the tightening of the links.
Fighting off strangulation, Nawaki flipped the Raijin no Ken in his grasp and stabbed behind himself at Obito's body, hitting nothing, 'What? But he's right behind me!' He thought to himself, dropping to a knee as his face turned red from his mounting loss of air.
He had to do something. Anything.
Dropping the sword to the ground, before it hit the ground, Nawaki made a cross seal with his index and middle fingers. A single clone quickly popped into existence next to him, catching the Raijin no Ken and swinging it at Obito who released the original Nawaki.
The clone quickly dispelled, filling Nawaki's head with what it had seen as to how Obito had dodged, teleporting via some sort of distorted vortex, 'What an odd Shunshin.'
Obito's choice of direction was right by the cliff's edge, a clear attempt to goad Nawaki into attacking him. Truthfully, it did look extremely appealing to try, but that was the point. Still, if Obito was offering, Nawaki would take advantage in his own way.
Two hand-seals and Nawaki proceeded to set his hand in a half-ram seal down on the ground, "Chikyuurakka no Jutsu (Earth-Fall Jutsu)!"
Behind him, the entire ground rumbled as a segment of cliff was cut clean from the ledge. Obito's face reflected sheer shock as he and his adversary slid down the face of a sheer drop on a platform of earth.
Were all Senju Clan members prone to insane actions when the opportunity presented itself? It couldn't be. Tobirama had been earnestly sane. Saner than all of them, if not a little too totalitarian for the tastes of most outsiders. Everything he did had a good reason behind it that could be logically explained, even if it was an atrocious action that no one forgave his clan for.
Perhaps it was just those directly related to Hashirama's line? Because no kid of Tobirama's would have been grinning like a loon as they careened down the side of an overhang on a dais of rock.
XxX
(Meanwhile – Uzu no Kuni Countryside)
They were on him. Jiraiya already knew this. It didn't stop or slow him for a moment. Every time his foot touched the solid ground after leaping out of a tree, he had to make sure there were no trap seal arrays forming around his feet.
'Five miles left,' Jiraiya thought to himself, plowing through the heavy forests at breakneck speed. He swore he could feel his pursuers close enough to grab at the hairs on the back of his neck, 'What can I say? Their response time wasn't the fastest, but damned if they didn't make up for it.'
These people were stamina monsters, and he was traversing the labyrinth of their heavily forested island as if the Minotaur itself was hot on his heels. Hours and hours of running, avoiding traps and keeping himself from being funneled into a choke point to be captured; the Uzumaki Clan had very good barrier techniques. Those were just the twists and turns of the game though.
And rest assured, if it was indeed a game there was no more experienced player that one would be likely to find.
The more ambushes he bypassed, the more people wound up being added to the overall chase. It was like the barrel of monkeys children's toy; more and more chaining themselves to his pursuit. Jiraiya wondered how many ninjas he could drag into this whole charade.
'I'll probably need a big chunk of the home guard after me if I plan on getting away with dropping Minato's marker,' Jiraiya thought to himself, inwardly cursing as a shock of red hair to his upper right blurred into view, hurling metal weaponry at him in order to divert his path, 'Jeez, they never give up.'
Echoing voices in the background simply prompted him to speed up as he could see the faint outline of buildings in the distance through the trees. His in-tune sense of nature let him feel the brush of nearby ocean despite the fact that he wasn't within view of the bay. This was it.
A rustling of cloth and leaves directly in front of him alerted Jiraiya to a particularly brave Uzumaki Clan kunoichi trying to head him off straight on. A quick show of killing intent from Jiraiya made the poor young woman realize just what a bad idea it was to try and mix it up in close with him.
Instead, she stopped and leapt backwards, giving Jiraiya an opening to hurl a barrage of shuriken and kunai at her. Biting her own lip hard enough to draw blood out of sheer concentration, the girl was able to narrowly avoid the screaming metal tools flying past her through the air, ignoring one in particular that hadn't been thrown with the rest; sent hard and high overhead out of the forest canopy into the air.
Either way, even if she'd failed in her self-assigned responsibility to take the fight to their intruder, she slowed him down enough for a few of her home guard clansmen to get within range to attempt to make a move, "Stop him now!" She urged.
They did not let her down.
"Suiton: Mizuame Nabara (Water Release: Starch Syrup Capturing Field)!"
Jiraiya winced as he watched several Uzumaki Clan members spit out a thick, viscous clear liquid from their mouths that slathered and stuck to the ground and the trees, 'Damn!' Channeling chakra to his feet, he circumvented the sticking effect altogether, but found himself the target of a secondary trap.
The attacking force of Uzumaki Clan members completed their hand-seals and stuck their right hands onto the ground, causing a chain of seal arrays to branch out toward Jiraiya.
The home guard was meant to take their targets alive first and foremost unless otherwise directed to, and it was clear from their coordinated efforts that they were very good at it. A lack of the constant warfare that plagued the other clans hadn't dulled the effectiveness of the Uzumaki Clan's abilities enough to deign them as soft.
Before the arrays reached him to trap him in place, Jiraiya dropped a smoke bomb to conceal his movements and mask his escape.
"Kanna, at your three o'clock!" Damn it, they had at least one Mind's Eye of the Kagura sensor, but then again he hadn't been trying to escape them. It was still annoying that they upended his attempt to get a second drop on them, "Jiraiya-san, you're too dangerous to be allowed to trespass! Explain your reasoning for being here!"
"The peaceful atmosphere, the tropical island flair, the bikinis, the babes-," Jiraiya listed, saying the last thing with a noted wink to the multiple kunoichi present, "-The hospitality," He emphasized sarcastically, "…Why wouldn't I want to come here?"
"You snuck in!"
"Yeah," Jiraiya said in an obvious tone of voice before using his index finger to circle his face, "Ninja. That's kind of supposed to be our thing. Now buzz off would you? I like this clan, and I'm not particularly looking forward to beating your asses black and blue to prove a point."
The Uzumaki Clan was noted for quite a few things. Fuuinjutsu, their abnormally high vitality and levels of chakra, bright red hair, and their propensity to be extremely stubborn.
Needless to say, Jiraiya's ultimatum didn't go over with them very well, earned reputation aside.
XxX
(Uzumaki Clan Village – Clan Head's Mansion)
Jiraiya had truly underrated strength. With the toads and the earth and fire ninjutsu, the fact that he was a physical specimen was lost in translation. He was a tall, muscular bull of a man, and it wasn't just for show.
One of the kunai he'd thrown in the cover of the several others he'd hurled as a diversionary attack had been of the three-pronged, wooden-handled variety, only he'd thrown it up, and it flew high above the village, flipping and spinning blade over handle until it reached the apex of its flight and began to fall from the sky.
It stuck into the side of a high castle wall, metal vibrating audibly from the impact for several seconds until a yellow flash appeared next to it, revealing Minato sticking to the wall with one hand and one leg.
The sudden sights and the overall feel of the village came rushing back to him all at once, a swell of nostalgia forming in his chest. He'd had the very best times of his life there, with Kushina.
A sigh emanated from Minato as realized exactly where he was and Shunshined to the top of the mansion after plucking his kunai out of the wall. He was still quite a ways away from where he remembered Kushina's house being. At least from the mansion atop the hill he could see it though. It put a smile on his face at the thought that he was one Hiraishin away from the woman of his dreams after so many years.
'She's going to beat the daylights out of me when she sees me,' Minato asked himself, 'Oh dear Kami, there's something wrong with me if that actually turns me on.'
Either way, he was one move away from her. It was scary to think about. Scary in a good way. Exciting.
With a flick of his wrist he sent the kunai flying straight for the house that he remembered being hers, waiting for it to hit her roof before he would teleport right to her.
"Banshou Ten'in (Heavenly Attraction of All Creation)."
The kunai stopped in mid-air and went flying back to the rooftop that Minato was on, it's path significantly averted away from the man who actually threw the weapon however. Turning his head, Minato saw the kunai caught by its handle by a tall pale man with red hair and ripple-patterned purple eyes.
Nagato stared impassively at the kunai for a moment before hurling it over the side of his mansion, over the cliff and into the ocean below, "You're forbidden from being in this village Minato, but I can't say that I didn't know you'd be coming after what Konan told me."
Minato squared off on the sizeable rooftop, circling his to-be adversary warily. So this was what it was going to come down to. It seemed rather appropriate, "Of course I came. You sent my old classmate to kill my son. Did you really think I was going to leave my wife here after I found that out?"
"-I would never hurt Kushina."
Minato merely ignored him however, shaking his head as he continued to make his point, "You made me a promise Nagato. Do you remember? It's the only reason I left without a fuss way back when. I really could have made a huge mess when you and your clan elders forbade my union with my wife. You promised me that you would never let anyone under your power hurt my family."
Nagato's face twitched in anger at his honor and his word being called into question, "The circumstances changed I'm afraid. Naruto is a threat to the security of the clan. If the world could link a jinchuuriki to our clan, they would all turn against us, even if we had no hand in creating it. This isn't about you, me, or Kushina at all. It's about keeping things level between the clans. The status quo."
Minato wanted to yell. He wanted to lose his cool and verbally tear into Nagato before he did it physically. It wouldn't serve any purpose however.
"Right then," Minato drawled, freeing another Hiraishin kunai from its confines, "Well I'm sorry, but your status quo doesn't really work for me."
XxX
From the sight of her house, Kushina felt a disturbance. There was something afoot, and it gave her pause.
She couldn't relax and let it pass, and despite the fact that she was supposed to be under house arrest, she couldn't sense her guards around her abode. The ninjas meant to enforce Nagato's will of keeping her in sight had vacated their post.
Yes, there was definitely something wrong, and consequences be damned she was going to find out what it was. She felt something familiar that she hadn't felt in a long, long time, and something inside of her was yearning to return to it.
XxX
(With Naruto – Northern Hi no Kuni)
'Not far away' was still pretty damn far from the morning's campsite.
Anko's map carried Naruto, Tenten, and Shino far, as fast as their legs could carry them without needlessly exhausting them. Unfortunately, when they arrived at the marked area on Anko's map they found no outward sign of any secret holding place for money.
It didn't help that they had to keep their presences secret for fear of running into the man/myth himself. Even if Kakuzu wasn't the literal green-eyed monster that the stories made him out to be, chances were that he would still be stronger than them, even combined.
Naruto and Tenten immediately called Shino a buzzkill and a pessimist, but neither of them directly disputed this point.
At the site of Anko's circled portion of map, the kids found a lake. A large lake with a tiny in the center of it, barely large enough to contain the single boulder on it that landmarked it. They had approached the small scrap of land tentatively, but upon reaching it they had found nothing.
There wasn't even any diggable ground, or any that seemed possible to hide such a legendarily large sum of money on at all. It was almost solid rock, and it was barely big enough for the three of them to safely fight one another on without being pushed off into the lake.
Naruto stomped his foot on the rock beneath him, his sandaled foot smacking off of the surface, "Anko didn't have it wrong did she? This can't be where the money is buried."
He seemed to be talking to himself though, as Shino kneeled down by the water, his hands held in the bird seal and his attention occupied elsewhere. Tenten seemed to be frowning and pacing about the tiny 'island' fitfully.
…These were his teammates, uncommunicative as they were.
Scoffing, Naruto dropped to his butt, sitting cross-legged on the boulder, cheeks in his hands as he pondered to himself. Anko was good. She was quite good if not extremely unpleasant in personality. If she marked a spot on a map, and had been serious about the location, this was where the treasure was to be.
She seemed to want to get a timely jab in on Kakuzu more than she seemed to be prepared to try and double-cross Kakashi for no discernable reason, so this should have been the place.
"…Hate riddles," Naruto muttered to himself, eyes cutting to the side as he watched Tenten finally give up and plop down next to him on the rock, "Ugh. So now what? Eventually Kakashi's gonna be here with Anko, and if we don't find the money by the time they get here we'll just be wasting time."
"I'd rather we find the money and make it back to them," Tenten admitted, "I don't want any part of the Uchiha Clan members in case they find this place too and figure out that this is where the money's supposed to be."
The Uchiha. Naruto's thoughts had been on them since he'd learned that they were in this area. Just what made them so big and bad really? Yeah, their doujutsu was… hellacious on second thought. It was very imposing to think about getting your jutsu copied, or worse.
Was that really all it took for them to wind up being the powerhouse clan that they were? In Uzu no Kuni their names were spoken akin to the boogeyman by kids, and so harshly scorned by adults that bringing one up in a somewhat positive light could earn you a rebuking backhand.
But they weren't unbeatable. The Senju had been dealing with them longer than anyone could remember, and Naruto himself had garnered a rather positive result against them in the past. That was only once, certainly, but apparently most shinobi didn't even survive one encounter with a Sharingan-awakened Uchiha at all, let alone against a squad, and let alone defeating them all.
That didn't matter though. They weren't important. What was important was finding Kakuzu's stash and making off with as much as they could seal away and carry.
Down by the water, Shino reached his hand in all of a sudden and pulled out a single waterlogged insect who danced around on his finger momentarily. Furrowing his brow, he then turned to his teammates sitting on the rock and made great haste in tackling them over and onto the backside of it, keeping them quiet.
Any questions the two of them had faded away when they heard the none-too-subtle emergence of a figure from the water around the little island.
A tall muscular man with tanned skin and a body that seemed to be stitched together piece-by-piece rose up wearing dark pants and a dark sleeveless shirt. His mouth had stitches along it, making him look similar to an imposing rag-doll. He had long brown hair and eerie green and red eyes that seemed capable of haunting your dreams.
Those eyes, there was no mistaking it. This was Kakuzu.
…Crap.
He hadn't seemed to discover their presence yet however. That was good. Shino was definitely getting a cookie, or the ninja equivalent of a cookie, whenever this was all over with. If they lived through it of course.
Kakuzu smoothed the water out of his hair and looked around before letting out a growling sigh. The lands surrounding his lake were buzzing with activity. Dozens of souls scouring the woods for miles around. Well whether they were coming for his riches or not didn't matter. The chance that they might have was enough of a reason for him to slay them all.
"The things I do to protect my investments," Kakuzu said before vanishing in a Shunshin.
The three kids held their breath for several beats before exhaling as one, even Shino.
Oh Good Lord that had been close.
"Was that guy even a human being?" Tenten asked after they'd for certain felt the presence of creeping death depart from their natural sixth senses, "He looked like a zombie or something."
Naruto nodded silently, wide-eyed at almost coming face-to-face with a figure of power in the modern era. He then turned to Shino, "How did you even know he was coming? Your bugs can't go underwater to scout can they?"
Shino turned his sunglasses-clad eyes Naruto's way and held up a small, wet insect in his palm, "I can temporarily recruit the efforts of local insects to assist me when need be."
"…You're awesome." Naruto said to him unabashedly, getting a nod of agreement from Tenten.
"So awesome," She followed up in kind.
"We'd build a statue you're so awesome, but I can't sculpt, and I don't think Tenten can either, so we're just gonna keep saying that you're awesome."
"Thank you Naruto-san, Tenten-san," Shino said, the cheeks hidden by his outfit remarkably red despite his lack of change in his demeanor otherwise, "But now is not the time to celebrate. There is only a short time available to us to reach Kakuzu's lair and liberate his hefty funds from his coffers."
Tenten looked befuddled at his meaning until he pointed down and over to the drink. Was he serious? Under the lake? In the water seemed like a very inconvenient place to store money. In addition to the coins rusting, wouldn't the paper notes be next to worthless?
Shino merely shook his head and dove headfirst into the nearby water. The boy wasn't much of a conversationalist; that much was for sure.
"Ugh," Naruto grunted, beginning to submerge himself in the cold water as well to follow their Aburame teammate, "I think if he explained the stuff he wanted us to do better, we'd work together a lot better."
"It's not like you're the shining example of keeping your partner in the loop either," Tenten pointed out as she also got in with a frown. She hated actual swimming.
"The Kurama thing totally gave me a good enough reason to keep that one close to the vest!" Naruto stated before diving underwater, not giving her a chance to respond.
"Is that what we're calling being a scaredy-cat now?" Tenten shot back with an easygoing grin as she followed him down. She knew he'd still heard her.
XxX
(With Kakashi and Anko)
Anko would have to make it a habit of refraining from being late to rise. Nothing good ever happened when you slept in, aside from getting a bit more time of comfortable sleep. Sure, she had a built-in excuse of still recovering from severe internal trauma, but being hurt was never an excuse for a ninja. Being dead was an excuse, but seeing as how she still had a pulse and could draw breath, she needed to begin waking up sooner.
This time it was markedly prudent. Aside from having to weave her way through the Uchiha Clan rat's nest that the forest surrounding their campsite had become, she and Kakashi had almost had a portion of a mountain cliff dropped on them.
Because a landslide really made you feel good for waking up that day.
"I might have been better off alone," Anko muttered to herself, coughing through the dusty debris that littered the wooded area. It had been close. A large portion of rock, the size of a city block, had come rumbling down the side of a nearby mountain and had taken out hundreds of yards of trees before finally coming to a rest.
She and Kakashi had been in some of those trees and had promptly hightailed it in a safer direction.
"Oh don't be that way," Kakashi jibed with a closed-eye smile, "Two heads are better than one and all that jazz."
"Damn insane Senju… and people say Uchiha are unbalanced."
Kakashi's eyes opened widely at the sound of that voice and quickly turned in the direction of it. From the broken up, sizeable chunks of mountain, Kakashi felt like he'd seen a ghost.
Obito dusted himself off with a grimace from his ruined outfit and huffed forcefully through his nose before noting the presence of the two other nearby ninjas. He glanced momentarily at Anko before his gaze stopped on Kakashi and turned stone-cold.
Normally Obito would have had a snide remark, an immediate response with barbed wit, for anyone that he didn't like. Kakashi wasn't just someone that he didn't like. Kakashi was the single person he despised the most, for multiple reasons.
A bolt of shame flew through Kakashi at the sight of Obito before he remembered that he had a job to do, a partner to watch out for, kids to find, and money to steal.
"As nice as it was to see you again Obito," Kakashi said, trying to excuse himself from any untimely confrontation, "Anko and I have somewhere very important to be. Feel free to try and kill me later."
At that, a grin that put Kakashi and Anko ill at ease slowly spread across Obito's face, "Well part of my mission is to clear these woods of any other forces searching for Kakuzu's treasure while the other clansmen look for it. So go ahead and lie to me and say you're not looking for the money," His expression turned maniacally wide, "I dare you."
The malicious intent was not lost on anyone present.
'What the hell did Kakashi do to get 'The Ghost' to hate his guts?' Anko thought to herself, a cold bead of sweat running down the side of her face. She knew who it was from the moment that Kakashi had said Obito's name, 'I really don't want to have to tangle with this guy. And didn't he say something about a Senju-?'
"Yare… Obito-san, I'm feeling kind of neglected, you know? I thought we were having a special moment, and you drop me like a bad habit for the Copy Ninja?"
Obito chuckled and hopped a short distance away, giving him a good view of Kakashi, Anko, and the reemerging Nawaki, "Oh don't feel so left out. It's just an old axe I have to grind," And everyone knew that Uchiha held grudges. They simply couldn't help themselves, "I've still got enough for you too."
Nawaki the Hunter.
…Anko had to wonder if she'd gotten an infection or something along those lines because of what Kakuzu had done to her during their first run-in, because the sheer amount of top-name shinobi she'd run into during the last few weeks could have filled the entire careers of most other ninjas.
Well if she was meant to go down, going down in a standoff with Senju Nawaki and Uchiha Obito with Hatake Kakashi watching her back was better than most other scenarios she could envision.
All that mattered now was how the entire situation would kick off.
Kakashi didn't want to split off from Anko and turn things into a pair of one-on-ones, as she was still at a disadvantage due to her injuries, but Anko didn't want to sit things out and leave him alone against two enemies, because then she was definitely dead.
If Obito attacked Kakashi, Nawaki would take that opening to kill him, because taking out such an important Uchiha Clan member was simply too good of a chance to pass up.
If Obito and Nawaki started fighting one another, Anko and Kakashi would leave and continue on their way to Kakuzu's money hoard, but their clans would never intentionally work together by taking the two other participants out to continue their previous fight uninterrupted.
Every possible move had its pros and cons. Every move had a large potential consequence behind it.
If the entire situation was already a raging fire with the potential to burn out of control, gasoline was then gleefully thrown on the entire thing… right next to a powder supply.
BOOM!
All four were thrown away in the same direction as a catastrophically fiery explosion ripped apart the nearby tree line. It could have been far worse, but thankfully the forest made stealth attacks from a distance quite difficult.
Kakashi managed to grab ahold of Anko, using his body to shield hers as both of them slammed into the trunk of a tree. He managed to hold back the verbal cry of pain that threatened to spill past his lips, but Anko was not.
"Owwwww…" The purple-haired kunoichi whined. Right. Because Kakashi didn't hurt either after being sandwiched between a tree and a fine piece of woman, and not in a good way. Sexy as she was, that was still around one-hundred pounds smashing into him, "Thanks for the save Scarecrow. That really could have aggravated something."
"Don't mention it," Kakashi bid her as she got up off of him, "…Seriously, don't," Following suit, he wasted no time in revealing his Sharingan eye. There was no room to pussyfoot around given the circumstances, "Can you fight?"
"Do I have a choice?" Anko asked in return, pupil-less brown eyes set in the direction of the ruined trees as she saw the perpetrator of pilfering her lost kidney coming forth in all of his tall, stitched horror, "Looks like it's you and me against the world."
"Wonderful," Kakashi said sarcastically as he could see Nawaki and Obito prepped for an all-out scrum as well.
Kakuzu's odd and eerie eyes panned over his competition as he clutched a set of hearts in his hands before dropping them on the ground, "I thought members of the 'vaunted' Uchiha Clan were supposed to be strong," He said offhandedly, focusing on Obito, "Feh, those weaklings didn't even have anything worth salvaging. Even their Sharingans weren't fully matured."
Obito bristled at the thought of those underneath him who had sought him out to safely deal with Nawaki being killed by the other top-level threat before them in Kakuzu. He couldn't be serious. He couldn't have gotten them all.
Impulse was a horrible thing at times, and it always seemed to rear its ugly head in times of severity.
The air in front of Obito rippled and distorted before several large shuriken came flying out at speeds that couldn't have been achieved by a human being simply throwing them. Kakuzu had been in his share of battles to the death over the years however and had long since learned how to avoid such things, dodging them smoothly as he unhooked his hand from the rest of its body and shot it off to grab at him.
Taking care to make the flying limb miss, Obito winced at the sight of the thick black threads connecting it to the rest of Kakuzu's body, "Gross," He said before ducking to avoid being strangled by the threads.
Nawaki let out a chuckle at the sight of Kakuzu's secret technique and whistled to get the attention of Kakashi and Anko, "Well what do you two say to a temporary truce? The enemy of my enemy and all of that? We can get back to killing each other over the money after the guy who owns it is out of the picture."
Kakashi raised an eyebrow and nodded, but remained confused over one point, "And you would team with us because…?"
"Because my only other option is an Uchiha," Nawaki deadpanned, "Kakuzu lived through a fight to the death with my grandfather. I really don't think he'd see any of us as too much to handle one at a time, but altogether we might be able to put him away."
"Yeah, but what about the Uchiha?" Anko pointed out, "If we're all focusing on Kakuzu, who's to say he won't pull out and race to the stash?"
"You let me worry about that little lady," Nawaki was flipped off in response for the 'little lady' comment, but if he said that he cared he would have been lying.
"And what's keeping us from just making our getaway?" Kakashi asked deftly, caring not that he was supposedly facing off against one of the best that the Senju Clan had to offer. Nawaki merely took on an annoyed expression and threw a stray kunai to the tree line, only for that area to be obliterated by a massive fiery explosion that seemed to come from nowhere, "…Oh."
"I'm assuming that he's got a second out there somewhere, circling the designated battlefield to pick off any stragglers or fools who try to escape," Nawaki said, drawing the Raijin no Ken to fight their aged enemy, "If you want to run the risk of getting close enough to the thick woods to look for whatever's putting out that much firepower, feel free. Of course I think it would be safer to fight what you know is in front of you with the numbers on your side."
Kakashi stood silent for a moment before drawing his white-bladed tanto, "He has a point."
Anko had never exactly been a fan of teamwork, but in this instance being on her own was the same as laying her soul down for the reaper to take without a fight, "I just want you to know that I'm fighting this battle under protest."
"You're doing this whole mission under protest."
"S-Shut the hell up and focus on the battle Scarecrow!"
Speaking of the battle, Obito's aggressive attack against Kakuzu to avenge the clansmen he'd slaughtered had started out swimmingly, but now it had become quite the troublesome chore. Merely his taijutsu alone was abhorrently dangerous. His strength was monstrous, and in addition to that the black threads that comprised his innards posed a constant threat of piercing his flesh.
He didn't want to find out just what would occur if he allowed this to happen, and had no plans on slipping up enough for it to. Were it not for the Sharingan, he would have had serious trouble with Kakuzu's multifaceted attack, and as it stood he still had to keep all of his focus on staying one step ahead.
Eventually spotting an opening, Obito wasted no time in wrapping his chain around Kakuzu's neck and pulling hard enough to snap a man's neck. Only he felt no give, and it was then that he saw Kakuzu's skin had darkened.
"Straight for the kill. I like that," Kakuzu said with a chuckle, not affected at all by the crushing force of a steel chain wielded by a high-level user, "I can appreciate that. Time is money after all."
'Shit!' Obito thought to himself as he saw a massive amount of black threads spew from Kakuzu's body, and he could make a guess as to what their targets would be.
Before this could occur, a tanto blade impacted off of Kakuzu's torso. Kakashi's attempt to run him through from the side had failed due to whatever armor-inducing technique Kakuzu happened to be using, but now, upon being so close, Kakashi was able to take note of the color of the chakra radiating off of his enemy's body.
'That armor is earth-based,' The masked ninja thought, gritting his teeth as he found no chance whatsoever of driving his weapon of choice through the legendary hoarder without breaking it. Both he and Obito locked eyes for a split-second before kicking Kakuzu on each side of his face and taking that opening to get their distance from him.
His body erupted with black threads that would have ripped them asunder had they not felt the change in the battle's atmosphere and reacted accordingly. That anomaly of a symbiotic action probably wouldn't be duplicated again, and more than likely they wouldn't have cared either way.
"Thanks," Obito said begrudgingly, breathing rather heavily from the prolonged exchange of blows with a superior taijutsu-wielding enemy.
"Don't mention it," Kakashi answered, surprised, yet pleased by the show of gratitude from someone he figured would be at his throat before ever showing him thanks. He then had to lift his arm to protect himself from the business end of a chain, "Hey!"
Obito wrapped his chain around Kakashi's arm and pulled him in for a knife-handed strike right at his throat, "Getting my back one time isn't going to stop me from trying to put you six feet deep you know!" He then had to release his hold on Kakashi to avoid a barrage of kunai thrown his way from Kakashi's temporary partner, "Damn you!"
"Save the dick-swinging competition for when we're not about to be collectively killed you monkeys!" Anko shouted from her elevated position in a tree before smirking cruelly at Kakuzu and rolling through hand-seals, "Or don't. I'll handle this myself."
A snide remark about Anko and how he'd pilfered one of her internal organs away rested on the tongue of Kakuzu until he felt the area begin to heat up significantly. Sure, it was summer and everything, but it was quickly going from muggy to sweltering.
From above, a light shone down and Kakuzu's eyes widened at the sight of a massive fireball the size of an iceberg descending down upon him.
His surprise quickly gave way to bellowing laughter, as it was mere child's play to release himself from such a genjutsu. Sure, it might have worked, and it might have fooled him if he hadn't already known where the limits of Anko's ability were set.
A woman like her would never be able to create such a massive fireball for real. To figure it as an illusion was child's play for him, who had already fought her.
"Genjutsu kai."
The smug confidence of his voice would have been enough to smother a living creature with. The foolish shinobi of the next generation, they never learned when they went up against him. There was nothing that he hadn't seen, and no facet of shinobi life he hadn't dealt with and made his in some way.
Which was why his failure to anticipate what happened next was so disappointing.
He quickly hurried to break himself of the second layered genjutsu he found himself in, brought upon him by looking into the eyes of both Obito and Kakashi from before.
That was all the opening that Kakashi, Nawaki, and Obito needed, as by the time he broke the genjutsu, he found himself ensnared around his body by a chain and impaled on two sides by an electric sword and a lightning-encased hand.
An Uchiha and a Senju working together, even in a limited capacity, to eliminate a third party. This should have been something chronicled for the history books.
All three men locked eyes and quickly withdrew their weapons from Kakuzu, allowing his lifeless body to slump to the ground and permitting them to turn them on one another. In one hand, Kakashi held his lightning at Obito as a deterrent while he pointed his tanto up at Nawaki. Nawaki held his Raijin no Ken up at Kakashi defensively, and held a half-ram seal with his mouth poised to unleash a jutsu at Obito. Obito held up his chain to block an attack from Nawaki while he had his Sharingan eyes locked on Kakashi, ready to unleash more shuriken from his space-time pocket.
Yes, Kakuzu was dead, so now they could refocus on which one of them would be walking away from the whole kit and caboodle.
Beads of sweat moved down the heads of each man. Attacking one would leave them vulnerable to an attack from the third ninja left. What sort of unholy conundrum was this?
"So the truce is over?" Kakashi asked rhetorically, "Well that didn't last long," His sarcasm was clear and present. He hadn't expected things to last even this long, and he'd been prepared for things to
"Oh come on Kakashi," Nawaki said with a smirk despite the situation, "Alliances are like clouds in the sky. The slightest gust could mix everything up."
"Funny," Obito said snappishly, "I don't remember agreeing to any truce with a Senju and a Senju's freelance bitch," Kakashi's glare narrowed on Obito at his jab, bringing up old things like that. He didn't need Obito to be reminded of his mistakes, even if Obito was front and center for the biggest one he'd ever made.
"You Uchiha always have to be so hostile about everything," Nawaki rebutted, taking great care not to make eye contact with either of them, "You know how it is. Sometimes doing the right thing isn't doing the right thing."
Beneath and between them, from Kakuzu's back, something began to visibly stir unnaturally beneath his shirt. His eyes suddenly snapped open and his hands blazed through five hand-seals, "Raiton: Kangekiha (Lightning Release: Wave of Inspiration)!" The threads from Kakuzu's wounded body reached out and gave all three separate combatants a nasty shock that brought them to their knees in temporary paralysis while he himself rose to his feet like a phoenix.
Surrounded by his prey, Kakuzu's eyes reflected no sense of triumph, instead complete anger at the thought of being fatally injured by these… these upstarts. He took his eye off of the prize. At least he had three potential replacements for the heart he'd lost to remain alive.
He'd probably take the Senju heart to replace the earth one that he'd lost. Senju had really strong bodies and life forces, and Nawaki was a direct descendant of that bastard Hashirama. His heart had to be good.
Rushing from out of nowhere, Anko hurled a senbon at Kakuzu that he caught between his fingers with a scoff until he saw the small tag attached to the end of it and wound up with a face full of sparks. Temporarily blinded he lashed out bitterly, hoping to rip the rest of Anko's organs out of her when she came to attack him in his moment of weakness, but he hit nothing.
Vision quickly returning, the stitched-together ninja noted that Nawaki, Kakashi, and Obito were no longer around him in vulnerable straits. She chose to bail the others out instead of attack him, but she did leave an explosive tag at his feet.
…Just as a nice how-do-you-do.
Kakuzu leapt directly into the air, managing to avoid the detonation of the tag and spotted Anko, growling hatefully at the troublesome kunoichi, "I guess an old-timer like myself has something important to teach you girl," From his back, underneath his shirt, his body bulged and dropped out a monstrous, black mass of threads with an ugly oni mask for a face, "How to die. Raiton: Gian (Lightning Release: False Darkness)!"
XxX
(With Naruto)
A small cave existed as a pocket of air under the surface of the lake. This was where Shino led his compatriots, all three kids surfacing and walking along soaked to the bone. This had better be some treasure.
From then on out they had to move quickly. Kakuzu leaving gave them a window, but if he came back they would be trapped down there with him, and at the moment they could think of few more agonizing ways to die.
Naruto tightly gripped the storage scroll in his pouch before sighing and letting it go. This mission had done wonders in taking his mind off of his parents, how they were faring, and if he'd see them again. In the meantime he had to focus on doing his part to help his father with his dream.
Inside of the cave rested a deep chasm, and at the bottom the kids could see gleaming from the low light of the grotto.
Was that… gold? He had gold coins covering the floor?
Naruto, Tenten, and Shino looked at each other before pulling out flares and dropping them down to illuminate the pit better. Upon doing so they realized that they were seeing a myth in real life.
Through the opening, it opened up into a vastly wide annex, and the gold coins weren't lining the floor.
A large lifting, rotating bridge sat in the middle of the pit, while entire islands seemingly comprised of gold coins peeked out of the water that covered the lower portion of the miraculous hideaway. Priceless vases and other assorted artifacts littered the gold coin islands and probably sat underneath the water on the actual floor of it as well. Scrolls, probably of immeasurable value could be seen all over. Statues and sculptures, art from all over the world. If it was worth value, it could be found there.
It was a monument to greed, to opulence, and there would be no way that they could empty the place out with the ten or twelve rinky-dink storage scrolls they had on them to pilfer a few hundred million.
Somehow making their way down the fifty meter depth to the lower level, Tenten was the first of the kids to drop down to her knees on one of the gold coin islands to run her fingers through the cold, wet metal plunder, "This is… I don't believe it. It's real."
She thought that when people said Kakuzu's money pit, they would have been talking about a vault, or some sort of liquid funds comprising most of his riches. No one could have that much physical wealth that they literally had to keep it out in the open air due to an inability to put it all somewhere.
Naruto stuffed his pockets with a fistful of gold for later. That much by itself would net him some cool products after he got to a town and got it transferred into money, "Kakashi wasn't kidding. We could take millions and that Kakuzu guy probably wouldn't miss any of it at all."
It was not greedy to take a handful. Greed would have been stuffing his pockets. Naruto's mother had taught him temperance thank you very much, and contrary to popular belief he did exercise restraint when need be. If he didn't have it, he would have eaten the Ichiraku Ramen cart out of business by the time they left Kaze no Kuni.
"This is incredible," Shino said, awe and reverence evident in his voice as he picked up a scroll and furrowed his brow at the sight of it, 'There are clans that would pay entire fortunes for these.'
Jutsu scrolls, probably created by clanless ninjas. The clans that did use scrolls to keep their techniques on never let their secret training documents leave their main strongholds. There was no crest on them either. Either they belonged to Kakuzu, or he'd taken them from some of his targets over the years.
There was enough money there to fund an entire nation for years even if it produced no discernable income. All they were after was a little (in comparison) seed money to maybe get the important aspects a village going.
Each child set away to their pre-set task of grabbing and sealing away as much as they could inside of their scrolls. Anything that could fit onto a fully unrolled scroll was theirs for the taking.
For some reason Tenten was extremely good at sealing away larger quantities of goods into her scrolls, better than either Naruto or Shino. For someone that specialized in fuuinjutsu, it really stood out to Naruto that she was so proficient at it, but when he gave her an odd look to let her know that he knew this wasn't normal, she merely gave him a sheepish grin and set herself back to work.
It took the better part of an hour, but they were finally able to load up several of the scrolls that each of them had carried on their persons. They still had a few more to fill, but the current haul had been staggering.
Wiping sweat from her brow at the hard work of lugging treasure onto the confines of her sealing scrolls, Tenten walked over to Naruto and pat him on the back, "We're walking away with more money than I've ever even seen before in my life. It's a shame we can't really keep any of it for ourselves, but…" She trailed off with a roll of her eyes.
"My old man's gonna think we're awesome," Naruto said with a pleased chuckle. He still didn't know what to make of the entire village of mixed ninjas thing, but it was the dream of his father, who was risking his neck to retrieve his mother, and that was enough, "I just hope this is enough to repay him
There wasn't enough money in the world to outweigh how important Kushina's safety and freedom was to Naruto, so a few scrolls of treasure from a nigh bottomless supply of riches were the least he could present Minato with out of gratitude for bringing her back to him. It was like mission pay that Minato had slated Naruto to go after for him in the mind of the boy, and not a mission meant to sidetrack him as it had been originally intended to be by the adults.
The thought of that made Tenten and even Shino feel awful. Both of them knew that Minato would have gone after Kushina had Naruto done nothing more than sit in Twin Ridge Town and wait on him to return. Naruto didn't have to do anything to qualify Minato going after Kushina. It would have happened regardless.
It still hadn't sunk in just what Minato being his father meant yet, and that he really didn't owe him anything for doing what he was doing. As far as Naruto was concerned, as things stood he had to make things square between them. Had he known that this was Naruto's mindset it would have torn up Minato's heart, but fortunately this was not the case.
That adjustment, to having a completed family, was going to be awkward. Extremely so. But Tenten hoped she'd be around close enough to maybe try and see Naruto through some of it.
All over the walls of the pit, candles began to light up and illuminate the entire area due to all of the gold for light to reflect off of, independent of Naruto, Shino, or Tenten, and it was then that they were able to get the full scope of where they were.
Water flooded the entire floor of the secret area, and while there were more gold coin islands sprinkled about and although they knew there was much more treasure, they were able to get the full view of just how much. There were elevated parts of floor near the walls that were stuffed with more valuables to the point of some of them being pushed into the water, probably how some of the coin islands had come into existence, which also meant that there would be even more treasure underneath the flood waters.
Massive statues of the archetypical shinobi, carved regally with stern expressions, rested against each wall, seemingly looking down on everything between them. Massive block pillars had been enacted to support the semi-open roof of the pit.
"You shouldn't have come here you know."
An echoing voice, still tiny as it fought to sound out louder than the water smacking against the walls and the treasure, reached Naruto, Shino, and Tenten. Shino sucked air sharply through his teeth in self-rebuke. Why didn't he notice the presence of another before any of this?
Grr… he had let himself be distracted from his usual tactical operation by the sight that he had beholden, "My apologies," Shino expressed to his new friends, "I was too distracted to conduct a sweep of the room with my kikaichu."
"Don't worry about it Shino," Naruto said, having hopped up, standing with Tenten and Shino in Manji Formation to protect each of their backs, "What's an awesome ninja burglary mission without a fight?"
"Successful?" Tenten rebutted saucily before getting deadly serious, 'The sound of that voice though…' It hadn't been very loud, but it sounded like a female's voice, and not an adult either, "Who's out there?"
Tiny footsteps sounded out on top of the water until a lithe figure came into view. A girl, a few years older than even Tenten, stepped into the light. She had a tanner skin tone than Naruto's and had light-green hair down to her neck as orange eyes that seemed to flash over them with a touch of remorse upon seeing that she was the oldest person in this equation. She wore a single white cloak wrapped around her body that ran down to her thighs. She wore no shinobi sandals, instead going barefoot.
"Fuu is sorry," The girl said, face twisted in conflict and sorrow, "Kakuzu-sama says Fuu can't let bad people in here and she can't let them leave, so she has to kill you now." Her eyes flashed a green color and green chakra visible to the naked eye began to leak out of her body.
"Oooohhh… hell," Kurama said inside of Naruto's head, much to his confusion, "This… might not end so well for you squishy little runts."
'Why?' Naruto asked, prepared to retaliate accordingly to whatever jutsu their new enemy was planning to utilize.
"Because, and I can't believe there was another human dumb enough to do this to one of my siblings, she's like you."
'What?'
He barely had enough time to react to Kurama's warning before he found the girl right in his face, both of them sharing a moment of unsaid clarity between one another before she lashed out with a face-smashing punch.
Reflexively lifting his arms for protection, Naruto found himself hit hard enough to slide backward across the gold coins, stopping with a crash as he sat in the shallow water. She was so fast, and she hit so hard. A girl that tiny couldn't possibly put that much natural force behind her blows.
"Naruto!" Tenten couldn't turn her attention to him for very long, as she was forced to avoid her own attack from the girl. Seeing one punch from her land on Naruto and send him that far, she knew she couldn't allow herself to be hit. She wasn't nearly as sturdy as Naruto was, and she knew it.
The girl missed a ducking Tenten and lifted her arm to block a swiping backhand strike from Shino. Several insects moved off onto her arm from his unbeknownst to her as she moved away from the pair of young ninjas.
After disengaging from them, a pair of Naruto clones burst from the water around the gold coin island, aiming at her from the sides, one going high and the other going low.
Proper to her body-type, the girl was able to make the most of the small amount of space the attacking Narutos presented her with, jumping to twist and contort her flexible body through their pincer tactic. Even amongst the ninja sect, she was considerably agile.
Growling to herself, Tenten let fly with a short barrage of kunai and shuriken, throwing the knives straight-on and the shuriken in a curved pattern to make them harder to anticipate and dodge, 'Who is this?' She gasped when the girl avoided them and picked up a coin to pitch at her head, 'Wow that could put an eye out!'
Feeling a light pull on her chakra as she retreated slightly back onto the surface of the water, the girl frowned and wiped Shino's few insects off of her arm, giving the Aburame pause, 'My kikaichu had been on her long enough to cause a significant drain in a normal person. She isn't showing any fatigue at all.'
"You can't win," The girl said in a forlorn tone of voice, "Kakuzu-sousofu told Fuu that there would never be anyone foolish enough to come here that she couldn't destroy, not after all of the power he gave her."
"What power?" Naruto asked, standing with his two clones as a unified front, prepared to take the fight to her, even on the watery surface, 'Kurama said that she was… like me. But that can't be true, right?'
People weren't supposed to make jinchuuriki. Ever. Everybody knew that. It was the absolute taboo. Not only was it more difficult for most shinobi to learn how to do than could possibly be comprehended, it was simply unnatural. Konan and to a lesser extent Tenzo had treated Naruto like an abomination that had to be eradicated, instead of a child, just because Kurama had been sealed within him.
To think that what had happened to him had been done to someone else, and now he had to fight that person… it made him sick.
"Chomei says that it doesn't mind really," Fuu said, placing a hand on her heart, "Being sealed away inside of Fuu. Chomei says that it's quiet at least, and it has Fuu to talk to, and Fuu has it to talk to too. It can wait a few years for Fuu to die before it can go free again. It's why Chomei hasn't tried to break Kakuzu-sousofu's seal since he gave it to Fuu."
What a… morbid outlook on one's own life.
It made Naruto feel terrible, right until Fuu rushed right at his clone and destroyed it, realizing that she didn't know which one was him and there had been a one in three chance of her taking his head off right then.
You could feel as bad as you wanted to for someone else. If that someone else was a ninja, feeling bad for them didn't make them any less likely to kill you in a fight.
Kakashi was a prick, but his message had been received loud and clear from Naruto and Tenten since he'd been seeing to their training and their battles with bandits. When you fought, you fought to put your opponent down. If you could do it without killing them, fine. If you wound up killing them in the process, too bad.
Everybody that lived the life knew the rules of the game. Lives were gambled fast and loose for victory or defeat.
Tenten seemed markedly irritated by Fuu's sudden attack on one of Naruto's clones, but she found the green-haired girl to be a staunchly elusive target from a distance. For someone who took great pride in her ability to hit her target no matter what, actually fighting someone who could avoid her ranged attacks irked her.
'I can't get her at all,' Tenten thought, her eyes skillfully following Fuu's dance of evasion across the surface of the water, 'I've never seen any ninja move like that though. There isn't any form to it.'
Either way, this girl wasn't going to let them leave, and they weren't going to just be climbing their way out either.
So was this what it was like to really be in a true fight to the death?
Jutsu List
Chikyuurakka no Jutsu (Earth-Fall Jutsu). A-rank ninjutsu, offensive, mid-range. The user breaks apart entire segments of the ground, forcing it downward to be folded underneath overlapping earth. It can be used to crush enemies, or if used near a ledge can be used as a deadly trap capable of killing a significant number of enemies. It all depends on the intent of the user and the surroundings with which they attempt to take use of.
Alright, and that's the chapter. I find myself at a complete loss for words today. Strange.
Next time: actions, discoveries, revelations, and consequences. And not even in that order maybe.
Meanwhile, in real world news.
Damn it, making moves to try and get a real job you can be proud of is strenuous work. Also, my hours at the TV station after I get the job will be brutal. But once I adjust, I'll have plenty of daylight free time, so I can start training full-bore and writing more again.
Writing these stories and writing that blasted novel I plan on putting out… that will change the face of modern literature everywhere… forever.
Or at least net me enough cheddar to pay off a good chunk of my blasted loans.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the chapter. Wish me luck. With good fortune I'll be writing for the local news by January.
Kenchi out.