¡Hola, mis lectores espectaculares!
How are you?
How's your day going?
I hope you're doing more than ok!
ASTRONOMICAL shout out to KissfromaRose12, LeviDragon, saiyan prince1, Imheretolive08, guest110, Ishimaru Taiki, shinobinoyami16, BJJF691 and Be lekker. You're all unbelievably wonderful people :))
I can't begin to say how much I appreciate everyone for how nice your being, and for all the helpful reviews/messages. I'm even more glad that you're enjoying the story so far; the main reason I got into writing stories is to make at least one person happy, and if I manage to do that much then I'm more than glad myself. I really try my best and I extremely happy you're all having fun reading :D
THANK YOU FOR EVERYTHING!
I know I'm taking you all for granted with these delayed updates. I'm really sorry for that. It's just that...I haven't been able to figure out some stuff and it's been difficult adjusting to my new place (new state, new job, new neighbours, and yet somehow even older dreams). Then I've been doing my best writing outside of fanfiction. So far I've only posted the first two parts of a flash fiction I'm writing.
More info at the end of the chapter.
In this chapter of Whisper Group, be prepared, there will be multiple fight transitions in this chapter. I tried to make them as neat and smooth as I could. There will be fast paced fighting, a brief but horrific imagery of someone getting mauled alive, and an almost too casual disregard for human life. You've been WARNED .
…Ya ready?
Enjoy…
CHAPTER 7
Silence reigned in Team Minato as they shuffled through the slim tunnel.
Kakashi was at the lead, being both team leader and also the team's appointed short-to-mid range fighter, Rin was safely nestled in the middle of her two teammates, serving as the medic, the vital beating heart of the team for whom was preciously protected for one of her roles was to heal their wounds, and at the back of the mute procession was Team Minato's chakra tank, Obito. The Uchiha had the most chakra among the three of them and Minato constantly had him covering Rin's back while Kakashi went ahead to active combat, until Obito was called on for support. The Uchiha's hand-to-hand wasn't as refined as Kakashi's but he was a stubborn boy with a thick skull, a good quality for back-up.
It was a formula that worked for them.
Presently, there was noticeable tension.
Obito's unusual silence didn't help matters.
Kakashi didn't mind the relative peace, focusing his eyes on the bright natural lights beaming in from the tunnel's exit, relieved that they were about to leave the very slim tunnel; he wasn't claustrophobic but he rather preferred having a wide range of movements than being limited so much.
Some metres from the exit, Rin couldn't hold her tongue anymore.
"You know, Kakashi, you can be a real jerk sometimes."
"And I should care, why…?" the Hatake drawled, unmindful and unapologetic for whatever reason his female teammate was irritated. Yes, they were dripping wet from bursting into the waterfall in order to get to the tunnel, but that was neither here nor there. That was probably why she was mad. "Stay focused, Rin."
The girl turned pink at the ears, steaming.
Obito, sensing her rising ire, played a role he was very much not used to; the peacemaker. "Rin, leave it alone."
"No, Obito, I won't leave it alone. I can't leave it alone." She grabbed Kakashi by his left forearm and the boy ripped it out of her hold immediately, as if her hand scolded his skin through his forearm guard, shifting on ahead and nearing the exit. "Can't you stop for five seconds and think about anyone else than yourself? Anything other than the mission?"
"Right now, the mission is all that matters; if we fail, then Iwa overruns our home." He then added as an afterthought. "And if you're still hung up about us getting wet, you probably already know how little I care for that." Obito's eyes briefly widened, before he gnashed his teeth, forcing his mouth shut; he didn't know how Kakashi knew but Obito was well past expecting sympathy from his male teammate.
Rin didn't take Kakashi's carefully careless words as well as her friend. "How heartless can you be?!"
"As heartless as I have to be for us to focus on this mission," The team leader pressed, turning his head around to Rin while still sidestepping to the exit. "Because, newsflash, he's not the only one that lost his father, ok? His just collapsed and mine killed himself." Kakashi relived that haunting memory every time he closed his eyes and relived that night every time he saw a blade, no matter the kind of blade, envisioning his father's blood and guts spilled out on the ground, the man slumped forward with his stomach torn open and his throat sliced from corner to corner. Kakashi spat, blinking those thoughts from his head and reorienting himself. "Don't come to me for sympathy, especially not on Obito's behalf."
"Kakashi, that's enough." Obito mumbled, hardening his tear glazed eyes. He spoke through gritted teeth. "Rin, leave. It. Alone."
His father's Remembrance was today and instead of spending it with his grandmother, his only blood related guardian left, like every year, he was here, sacrificing his life and wellbeing for his village like a good shinobi.
One of Obito's first memories was when he was having a bath with his father; the man harmlessly left the boy to splash around in the tub with his toy boat for another few minutes while he went to the shower to rinse off, only to suddenly grip his chest, screaming in indescribable agony. Seconds later, he wilted to the shower floor, unable to move as the showerhead poured water on his face.
No one else was home to hear Obito's wailing.
It was only later that afternoon that neighbours came to check in when they noticed the father and son pair hadn't left the house for work and kindergarten, respectively.
The medical report stated that Obito's father had a severe heart attack, though had died of drowning.
Custody of the boy was passed to his grandmother.
Since that time, Obito wasn't too fond of falling water.
His aversion was less like a phobia and more disdained.
The boy didn't remember his father all too well; he was very young when the man died after all, but the memories he could drudge up of the late man we're comparable to merry, heartwarming laughter flitting jovially over a cool breeze, being lifted so high into the air by a pair of giant hands that he felt like his pudgy baby fingers scraped the tender fabric of the clouds and tickled the endless skies.
When the Uchiha thought of his father, he recalled love and care so pure, so overwhelming it made him cry.
Like now.
Mourning within himself, Obito steeled his expression, locking his sorrow behind fragile, paper thin doors.
Obito wasn't going to let Kakashi make him feel that losing his father was insignificant to the Hatake's, not to talk of the way it happened.
At least now the Uchiha understood his teammates position on his father drowning in the shower, similar to how the kids in the Academy couldn't fathom how an Uchiha man could die outside of active warfare.
"When this is over," Obito began, speaking so low that Kakashi's ears twitched. "When we blow up that bridge and come back home to Konoha, I don't want to ever see you again, Kakashi."
" Hn." The masked boy sniffed, not moved by the grim certainty of his teammates layered threat. He jeered, lowering his eyebrows. "What about me being your rival?" Kakashi slipped out of the exit and walked three steps ahead, stretching his arms over his head, rolling his shoulders after that. Rin followed, quietly biting her tongue. The Uchiha didn't respond, helped out of the thin tunnel's even thinner exit by his female friend. One boy glared and the other boredly cast his eyes away, looking at a peculiar spot on a jagged rock, making sure to hide how he didn't want to meet Obito's eyes. "Don't be an idiot; we're on the same team, we live in the same village, we even have the same barber. I'm not going to go out of my way to avoid you. It's a waste of time and energy."
"That's out of line, Kakashi." Rin pointed, slipping between both boys as Obito charged up to the Hatake, two tomoe sharingan nearly boiling over. She squeaked, sandwiched in their middle. She wiggled to her side and placed her hands on their chests, keeping them apart. "This is too much, even for you."
"No, it's not "too much"" Kakashi air quoted, brushing the girl's off him. "He's been moody all day and he thinks it's justified because his father drowned in the shower."
"You shut your mouth, Hatake!" Obito swore, mere milliseconds from completely losing it. Rin knew that, seeing the crimson twisters in his cycling eyes. "Shut the hell up!"
"Keep your voice down, idiot. This is a canyon." The masked teen drawled, crossing his arms and raising an eyebrow. "Or do you have a thing with canyons too?"
Rin was using all the energy in her body to hold her friend from literally butting heads with the calm Hatake.
"Don't call yourself a Chunin if you can't get over yourself." Kakashi spat, jabbing a finger over Rin's shoulder, poking at his male teammates reddened face. " That's why you won't ever become Jounin. How the Council gave you that Chunin promotion is beyond me."
Obito froze.
Rin sagged, losing her will to withhold her Uchiha friend.
Somewhere both near and far, Naruto winced, his activated Byakugan dimmed at his friend's unfiltered opinion.
'Oh Kakashi…'
The mute Yakuza boss couldn't say he was proud of the Hatake in this moment.
Turning around and proceeding with the mission, the silver haired teen tossed an errant comment over his shoulder. "You want me to stay away from you? Gladly. Do what you want. I don't care."
Naruto glanced at one of his wolves, and the creature gave an odd, slanted frown, mirroring Naruto's apprehension at how the mission was going.
He didn't think Kakashi would be the reason Team Minato imploded so quickly into the mission; the team dynamic that Minato had boasted so much about might as well not exist, not in this heated moment anyway.
Concentrating on the task at hand, as Kakashi had been so doggedly pressing on, would become close to impossible now.
This made Naruto's job just that much harder.
'Damn it, Kakashi.'
He vanished from his perch.
A sandy brown beetle, tiny enough to be an ignorable speck and disguised as a loose piece of stone on the rocky canyon wall, opened its back and fluttered its transparent green wings, buzzing off in a haste to deliver an direly important message to Danzo.
The trap worked.
Naruto is here.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Somewhere under Grass country
Since the "Orochimaru Incident", where the Sannin supposedly attacked Minato with the intention of taking out a candidate for the Hokage title and was summarily badly beaten, to the extent the semi-immortal man needed emergency surgery and temporary prosthetic kneecaps in place of the real ones that had been stolen until his kneecaps regenerated.
Danzo had a hunch Naruto was somehow involved with the incomplete execution, and was therefore in contact with Minato.
Showing mercy by permanently incapacitating an enemy was textbook CORE; those kneecaps Orochimaru were missing still haunted him to that day, even though he had managed to regrow them.
Mercy, in this case, was a term used sparingly.
Minato couldn't have come up with such a brutal punishment.
No sane person with a solid claim to humanity or common compassion could conceive pulling out an enemies kneecaps, against the more truly merciful option of simply driving a hole into the side of their head.
Matter of fact, ROOT were taught no such "merciful" tactics.
Minato knew Naruto, Danzo concluded.
Drawing out the boy needed the Namikaze to truly be desperate for Konoha's survival, desperate enough to call on ex-CORE support when his pleas for the Master of CORE fell on deaf ears.
Fortunately, Danzo wanted the mission to fail, and if that could happen while he could also reclaim his lost disciple, then all the better.
ROOT Operative Torune Aburame, fifteen years old, went down on one knee and set his left hand on his right chest, tilting his torso forward and firmly fixing his goggle-shaded eyes on the grey scale floor. Fuu Yamanaka, a ROOT Operative he was often paired with on missions, did so as well in mirror-like sync with his partner.
The two Shinobi placed their right hands flat on the ground.
"Ninety-Nine has been confirmed to be in the canyon, sir." Torune swore, pressing his hand closer to his chest and speaking tightly. "My beetle has been unable to pick up his chakra but, without a shadow of doubt, he spotted Ninety-Nine watching over Team Minato, as you suspected, Lord Danzo."
"Let us retrieve him, Lord Danzo." Fuu said, ignoring the scathing side eye from his partner for speaking out of turn. The blonde mind walker went further, reminding his Master. "He is weak to people from my clan."
It was a Yamanaka that placed the memory binds on Ninety-Nine's mind, sealing his earlier memories in an unbreakable mental chest.
Naruto wasn't completely Hatake; memory binds worked exceptionally well, unlike with Kakashi or Sakumo.
Ironically, Naruto created an A rank Hiden Jutsu that gave him control of the brain, spinal column and voice boxes of victims, while also inducing rapid, irreversibly fatal cellular deterioration and decay. It was the closest a non-clan member had gotten to replicating a Yamanaka technique.
The only thing keeping Naruto's so-far nameless Jutsu from becoming S rank was that the boy didn't permit anyone to study it, only observe its effects.
With a mental fortitude as unshakable as Naruto's and physical attributes that surpassed a fair majority of his siblings, you would be surprised with how vulnerable to Yamanaka mind control he could be compared to his siblings.
Danzo observed the Yamanaka boy with an empty gaze, noticing that the boy's hand curl into a fist.
"No." The boy's head tipped down, more so, shading his hiss. "You two are staying down here till I say otherwise. The Loyalty Program needs fine tuning in anticipation of Ninety-Nine's arrival."
"Yes, Lord Danzo." Fuu grated, hushed. "As you command."
The one eyed man saw the composed boy falter, holding his words.
Not counting the hundreds of ROOT ninja crawling the underground base, training their skills and maintaining correspondence with their comrades out in the field, Danzo Shimura had a rotation of twenty CORE constantly guarding him.
CORE were immensely exceptional.
One rogue spelled doom, both for him and for all of ROOT.
There was no such thing as being too careful, especially because of the mysterious and unique events surrounding Naruto's birth and continued existence.
Putting the boy through the Loyalty Program should wipe away those bothersome thoughts of dissent.
"Call One and One-Hundred. Tell them you've found their brother."
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Northern and Northeastern Forest regions
Waterfall-Grass-Fire country border areas
Fire country
Three hundred Iwa Shinobi against thirty or so Konoha ninjas.
Those were the odds against one single Leaf platoon, a glimmering reflection of what the other four Leaf platoons were facing. The total of which were roughly one thousand to one thousand five hundred Rock ninjas deployed by the Tsuchikage to squash the one hundred and fifty Leaf ninjas that raced to reclaim ground in Grass country.
Oonoki ordered his men to pursue the retreating Konoha fighters, ordering his commanders to break up his thousands of soldiers into companies of five to finish the also branched apart Konoha forces, intending to end Hiruzen's hopes for winning the war once and for all.
Iwa's troops primarily being Chunin and Special Jounin populating Konoha's available ranks didn't matter, not against hundreds.
Oonoki's confidence that whether or not the Konoha tactic was a trap, his forces would bombard and flatten Hiruzen's men in a matter of days. Iwa's reserve Shinobi were a brimming regiment comprising of thousands of reinforcements, so in the unlikely chance Hidden Leaf found a way to cut down the advancing force, waves of swift and eager reinforcements would drown Konoha's resistance to death.
No two battlefields were the same.
Some Platoon Leaders got to pick, others decided to draw lots and the rest were appointed their battlefields by the Hokage.
Jiraiya, Leader of Platoon One, took the densely forested Fire-Grass border area close to Waterfall country and Hidden Rain. The Toad Sannin didn't enjoy the tight squeeze of the trees but his battlefield was given to him by the Hokage, so he trusted his former teacher's judgement.
The Leader of Platoon Two, Orochimaru, was fortunate to draw a swampy, boggy landscape, where Hidden Rain truly met with Fire country. The snake man even smiled.
Tsunade Senju Led Platoon Three, and the Slug Sage, with the support of Minato Namikaze, claimed the brown lands between Fire and Grass countries as their battlefield, previously scouting the region of autumn-dried grass and levelled hills as the best place for the range of movement they needed.
The lady leading Platoon Four, Kushina Uzumaki, selected the arid, sandy lands bordering Grass country. The desert was reportedly the end result of the First Kazekage unleashing his might against the First Hokage, before retreating back west to Suna. The last Uzumaki, the most serious anyone had ever seen her, said that she had a plan.
The last leader, the one commanding Platoon Five, was Fugaku Uchiha. He drew lots with Orochimaru and, also satisfied with the draw, picked a rocky, stony landscape, an area near Waterfall. He said it was ironic.
Operation: Open Jugular's objective wasn't to win any of those five battles but to stall and distract the mass of Iwa forces long enough for Team Minato to blow up the Kannabi bridge.
Prolong the battle.
Still, that didn't mean each Platoon Leader didn't want to whittle Iwa's forces down to nothing. Despite their lesser numbers, they had three distinct advantages; home advantage, mastery in rank, and last was that they were resolved to die.
For Konoha.
For their home.
A panicked scream rend the air, the distinct, unmistaken sound of a person futilely fleeing death shattered the dense silence of the forest and drove a jolted shock through the carefully wondering Iwa force spreading out through thick forest, pondering what had happened.
"Casualty report." Jounin Commander Asuka Shirokami said to her radio, crouching down low the ground and holding her left arm outstretched to her side, keeping the radio close to her lips. The Chunin under her command followed suit and halted, keeping their heads low and their eyes high, searching the dense trees for attackers. The trees of the forest were about four foot or so close to each other, towering several metres tall and nearly blotting the sunlight from breaking into the forest. The Leaf ninjas they were pursuing had vanished as soon as the Iwa ninjas broke into the borderland forest. The jounin repeated, whispering firmer. "Casualty report."
A solitary woodpecker rapped its beak into the trunk of a tree, some birds fluttered away somewhere in the distance, and a jumble of bushes yards behind the lady ruffled.
The forest was dark but Asuka's eyes zeroed in on the bush, flagging for her men to take notice. She flicked three fingers up and pointed them at the bush, and three Chunin crept to the restless bush.
Geeyaaaaaa!
The jounin snapped her head around, eyes wide as the Chunin that had been to her immediate right was whipped up off the ground and snagged into the blackened cluster of leaves overhead, snapped up by a noose around her neck.
Someone yelled.
"Commander! Dog!"
Six more people ascended into the branches, ripped from the ground and spirited away.
The woman hastily returned to the three Chunin approaching the bush, the words left her lips too late.
A one-eyed dog as large, if not larger, than a brown bear dug its front paws into her shoulders and its maw snapped at her defenseless throat, meanwhile Tsume Inuzuka, smeared with green and black camouflaging warpaint, emerged from around a tree and caught a Chunin from behind, choking him with one powerful left arm and repeatedly plunging her kunai into his lower right side, disappearing again when the breathless man dropped to his knees, quickly losing blood.
Jiraiya flowed through a set of handseals and bound down from the tree branches far above head. He finished his blurry hand movement when he landed with a crouch inside a group of panicking chunin and the dog mauling the Jounin Commander fled, giving the Toad Sage space.
"Needle Jizo."
The man's unruly white hair lengthened, falling to his ankles and shrouding his body, hardening, spiking pointedly at the Chunin frantically escaping. The wide spray of white needles caught them, those fleeing and those frozen to the spot alike.
Only those that managed to find themselves covered by trees kept their lives.
But for how long?
More ninken and their human partners swept down from branches, descending like frenzied demons, armed with claws, fangs and blades just as lethally sharp as the other two.
The Iwa Chunin, dozens at a time, found that they couldn't move.
Their shadows didn't permit them.
They were at the merciless mercy of the slaughtering Inuzuka clan members, unfazed by the hundreds more enemies gathering their wits and forming a perimeter.
In the crimson red panic, a haze of light brown fur barrelled to a Chunin, passing him. Only when he looked down did he notice his left leg, from his knee down to his foot, were torn off.
He fell face down into the mud and Orochimaru, discarding the stolen leg, gave the crippled man his back.
Hiruzen Sarutobi brought his adamantium staff down on the fallen Iwa ninja with a wet crunch, smashing the man into a red paste.
"Tell me again why you're here, Sarutobi-sensei?" Orochimaru asked, letting his eyes stray to the wall of rain marking the other exact territorial border of Rain country. The marshland outside on Fire country's side of the border was dotted here and there with corpses.
The Hokage rested the outrageously large and red-stained staff on his shoulder, observing around the swampy battleground for more enemies. "A leader stands at the front as an example to their troops."
"Yes, fine, but why here? Why in my platoon?" The Sannin fought down a skin crawling wince at a brief wave of agony rippled through his skeleton, rising from his reformed kneecaps and ending at the temple like a surging volcanic eruption, remaining him of his oath for revenge on the punk that caused him so much pain. "Asuma's in Minato's platoon; shouldn't you go and watch over your son?"
The Hokage pursed his lips, comically trying not to cry, sniffing, blinking so that his welled up eyes won't leak as he sulked his chin down to his chest. "He's a big boy now. He-...He doesn't need me anymore." The fifteen and a half year old Chunin, Asuma Sarutobi, made that very clear when he realized he was being deployed to his hero's military company.
His wife had warned him not to smother the boy, that Asuma was rightly safe under the Namikaze's command, but the Sarutobi father didn't want to let go of his son so soon, especially now that there was ample chance of making the boy flustered in front of his idol. He'll have to drop by Minato's platoon when he found the time.
"Besides, I'm want to make sure your doing fine." Hiruzen's brows then lowered, noticing the trembling pain reverberating through the pale snake man, approaching his favourite student. "If you aren't able to stand, then go back to the tent and rest."
"No." The snake man snarled, backtracking two steps with sizzling golden yellow eyes lit with venom. "I am capable."
For some seconds there was silence between the men, managing to perfectly keep themselves afloat the soupy, sticky swamp ground. Many Iwa ninjas lured to this ultimate trap were incapable of such a thing; water walking was a ninja art different, and simpler, than traversing the surface of a swamp, which was an inconsistent mix of earth and water.
Arms, legs and heads stood stiff in the brown soup under their feet, frozen like ghastly plants in the swamp. Some twitched every so often, some that had sank and we're half-buried in the muck gasped, croaking for air.
Aburame clan members lingered about the crooked battlefield, putting whoever hadn't already perished out of their misery.
Those enemy Shinobi that didn't fall for the trap were being barricaded from escaping the general vicinity by a buzzing, droning cloud of beetles.
"Have you been taking your pills?" The Hokage questioned, spotting the twitching hands of the Sannin as the pale snake man plodded away from his teacher. Hiruzen called, not shouting but speaking in a tone the former student was all too accustomed to heeling at. "Orochimaru."
"...Don't worry, sensei. You'll win your war, and I can finally continue my research." My retribution, Orochimaru swore inside his soul. "Focus on staying alive. Iwa reinforcements will be here any time now."
" Hm." The Sarutobi frowned, looking after his favourite student as the man leaped elsewhere. The Sarutobi Hokage was unaware of the snake hatchling secretly slithering to Ame.
Not all battles were as "simple" as Jiraiya's and Orochimaru's territorial and tactical superiority.
"Hold on, Yugao. I'm coming! Hold on!" Kushina yelled, savagely cleaving off an Iwa ninjas left arm with her right katana and slicing a clean line across his throat with her right blade, kicking the gurgling corpse aside and immediately crossing her dual blades before her face to block the brazen, meaty blow from a mountain of a Shinobi, entering a strength tussle with the man three times her size. The ground fractured at the rapid pulse of chakra from both combatants. The redhead shouted again, frantic, sensing fifty more enemy Shinobi converging on her and another fifty flying down to the cornered girl. "Stand your ground, Yugao! I'm on my way!"
The purple haired Special Chunin girl Kushina was roaring at snarled, deepening her stance and flicking her eyes left and right. The messily slashed dead bodies scattered about her feet cast an even more ominous image of sheet stubbornness that infuriated the Iwa Chunin.
The fourteen years old girl's left arm hung limp, a kunai driven into her shoulder from behind and further injured with three ninja stars buried deep in her side, nicking her ribs. The sword prodigy gripped her katana tightly in her right hand, pointing it forward and moving around in a careful circle, warning the Iwa ninjas daring to approach what would happen if they came closer.
There was also a ninjato, having the same designs and alterations as her signature katana, clamped down between her teeth by its handle. It was a replacement for her useless left arm that helped keep her out of enemy capture.
Head to toe, Yugao was soaked in red. Her purple hair matted down to her head with sweat, dirted by the sand. Her clothes were worse for wear, and the worrying limp of her twisted right ankle didn't make Kushina feel any better.
An Iwa man leaped at the girl and Yugao slid aside, snapping her head to the right and tearing a thick, bleeding line on the attackers arm, parting his elbow from his arm and finishing off with a downward cut, a smooth decapitation.
Yugao panted, ragged.
Tired.
About a hundred Iwa ninjas had perished in that scathingly hot desert land, maybe more, but at the cost of nine capable Leaf ninjas and their sacrifice in finishing Kushina's trap.
Yugao parried a kunai upwards, deflected another into the path of two shuriken and allowed another to glance the ninjato clenched in her jaws, training the small blades to stab an Iwa Shinobi in the chest. The girl then plunged her sword into a woman's gut, yanked it out and ran her knee up into the Iwa woman's chin, hopping around and cutting her jaw-ninjato down a man's chest, opening it up.
The girl dropped to a knee.
Tired.
The Uzumaki screamed a venomous curse, charging chakra harder into the muscles of her arms, lower back and calves, tearing through the fist and spiralling up the arm in a burning blaze of purplish-red chakra, slicing the massive man into ribbons. She rode the man as he toppled down, leaping off at the last second and planting her foot into a ninjas face, skipping off the staggered foothold and bounding off to someone else's shoulder, jumping to a person's head.
"Hold on! I'm coming! I'm coming-"
A fireball slammed into the woman and a right hook clipped Yugao's temple, driving her face first into the ground.
Ignoring her searing skin as it mended itself and disregarding her scorched clothes, Kushina grated her teeth and huffed, breathless.
She was now further away.
She staggered to her feet, supporting her rise to her feet with her right katana.
Just a few more seconds…
Iwa ninjas split between flooding to Kushina and Yugao, collectively assuming that the other Konoha ninjas were dead.
The Kyuubi bellowed to be released.
The Jinchuriki closed her eyes, just for a second, shushing the great beast to give her some peace of mind to think; they already had the Iwa ninjas unknowingly corraled far inside the chakra-made desert and most of her surviving platoon were safely outside the perimeter, tending to their wounds.
She needed to get Yugao out.
Kushina didn't care much for her life; she wasn't going to sacrifice any more promising lives.
She couldn't.
She wouldn't.
When she opened her eyes, her heart lifted along with the bright smile on her face and her glimmering purple gaze.
Hayate Gekko had Yugao Uzuki propped up on his back, and the girl's weapons in each hand. The Special Jounin protecting his Kenjutsu sparring partner kept his own blade, an ornate katana nearly as spectacular as Yugao's, sheathed. Two shadow clones tightly held wooden swords in their grips, watching their master's back.
Yugao drifted in and out of consciousness, eased by the familiar air permeating Hayate.
"I've got you." He reassured her, heaving with a slight smile thrown over his shoulder at the rapidly fading girl. "Relax, Yugao, I've got you."
Yugao exhaled, the most relieved she had ever been in her entire life. "Thanks, man…"
She saw hope in the expression he showed her.
A solemn tear slipped from her eyes and her lips quivered. "Thanks."
"It's cool." The sword user got into position, his clones as well. The clones uttered a different technique than their master. "Dance of the Crescent Moon."
The two clones dashed outwards, hoping to for a diversion. Their pronounced Jutsu required at least three Hayates' to properly perform but Gekko was in dire straits, seriously low of chakra and winded from a toxic wind Jutsu used against him some time ago. Two clones would have to do.
The real Hayate Yugao's swords up and clapped his hands, calling out his unique stealth Jutsu. "Transparent Escape technique."
By the time the two blades returned to his hands, not longer than four seconds in the air, he and Yugao rippled, melding with the tones of the world around them and becoming transparent.
Sensing the Kenjutsu specialized pair slipping their way to a swift escape, Kushina sheathed her dual blades, sliding them into their sheathes crossed on her back and snappily laced her fingers together, flickering passed twenty four more handseals and staring down the invading Iwa ninjas stampeding over the desert floor, either battering the clones or rushing to her.
Kushina sprang up high, soaring backwards and finishing her set of seals.
"Secret Sealing Art: Excavation Mirage. Seal!"
Hundreds of metres of sand for miles around vanished from beneath their feet, and the Iwa ninjas giving chase to her as well as those that finished off Hayate's clones, fell into the pit and landed on jagged rocks, and on each other.
It was a large scale Fuinjutsu that required hours of planning ahead of time, even more hours to carefully and correctly draw, and the wherewithal to make sure the enemy forces were at the right place at the right time.
No actual digging needed to be done. What was required was for the seal to be stretched as far as possible. Any good sensor that saw the seal before it was activated would say that it resembled an impossibly large cube. The sand, and any other inanimate object in contact with the seal, were sealed away but only for a little while.
The spikes at the bottom were just a fatal feature Kushina added when she first activated the seal.
A good two hundred or so of Oonoki's Chunin dropped into the hellish sand pit. Any that survived, forced to use their fallen comrades as safe perches from the sharp rocks at the bottom, began gathering to scale up from the pit, struggling to secure their feet and hands with chakra against the loose, sandy wall.
The surviving Konoha ninjas didn't waste this chance, not wanting the Iwa reinforcements to arrive to rescue their comrades; they ran around the top of the pit, making sure not to get too close to the edge and fall inside, crisscrossing themselves and dropping several jars inside the pit.
The jars hit those Iwa men and women trying to clamber out of the pit, smashing and drenching them in toad oil. They fell off, pelted with more and more jars of flammable toad oil.
"Fire users!" Kushina bellowed, and the trapped people in the pit realized what was going to happen. "Light 'em up!"
Columns of fire poured down on them and a bonfire of tortured screams rose out, wailing in inconsolable torment.
It took only ten seconds of relentless flaming to smoulder the enemy forces.
The leader of Platoon Four released her hold of the seal.
The sand reappeared as abruptly as it had disappeared, filling the fiery pit and dampening the flames, smothering the Iwa ninjas under the desert.
Patches of desert here and there cracked, glassy, and a few others crackled black, wafting remnants of smoke as if escaping from the pits of hell.
Kushina released the breath she didn't know she had been holding, sitting on the sand and letting herself fall to her back. She shooed away the medic that knelt by her. "I'm fine, I'm fine. Go help Yugao. Gekko."
"But…your burns." The medic worried, eying the raw pink redness of the woman's arms, sides and the upper right part of her face, exposed to the cruel elements. It was amazing how Kushina could suppress so much agony into a wide grin.
"Oh this? Don't worry about it. Kyuubi's got it covered." And with that, the natural paleness of Kushina's clear skin slowly ran down the deep burn wounds, taking its sweet time regenerating charred tissue. Inside its seal, the Nine Tailed Beast scoffed. "See? This is nothing."
That didn't stop the medic from pressing. "But ma'am-"
Kushina sighed, trying not to move too much. " Ugh, go already. That's an order."
They needed to get those that could stand back onto their feet for when more invaders came to attack.
Somewhere in the distance, a bomb went off.
BOOM!
Fugaku lobbed another explosive seal tag-wrapped rock out of the trench and ducked down, plugging his ears and bracing as it exploded.
THOOM!
The Uchiha clan head bound out of the trench, eyes burning red and turning a blistering storm. He skid on his knees under a swipe from a head cleaver, snagged a discarded kunai with his left hand while his right dug into the ground, pivoting him around the attacker and sweeping the burned man off his feet, sinking the blade into the Iwa man's eye and spearing the brain.
Fugaku hefted the large man off the ground, shielding himself from a volley of kunai.
Suddenly, the Uchiha man's body flickered and he was replaced by a large rock, making the kunai riddled man to slump to the ground. Fugaku's hands dragged one of the Iwa ninjas formerly pelting him with projectiles underground, shooting out in the middle of their formation and snapping his legs apart, blasting his right fist forward, knocking away three enemies at the same time.
Wasting no time, Fugaku spun backwards on his right foot, planting his heel across an Iwa woman's face and, with the same leg and in that same brutal arcing strike, hooked the back of his knee around a man's neck, forcing him to the ground. A clan mate sprinted to her clan head and punted the defenseless Iwa ninjas head, violently snapping his neck.
Fugaku unhooked his knee from the unmoving man's neck and gave his subordinate a curt nod, receiving the same.
Their sharingan turned in sync.
The lady smirked. "What time's dinner?"
Fugaku grumbled, stoic and yet still frowning. "Today's my turn huh." Mikoto bobbed her head, whipping out a fistful of shuriken and spinning them to her right, lodging the ninja stars into calves and sides. The chaotic symphony of blasts and war cries couldn't break through the newlyweds bubble. The man still appreciated his wife's composure though, speaking to him in the heat of the moment while also reacting accordingly to enemy ninjas. "Seven." He added before his wife could say anything. "Yes, yes, I'll see how I can sneak some bell peppers onto Itachi's plate."
The leader of Platoon Five pointed to his right, at a Hyuuga man being overwhelmed by member of Iwa's Explosion Corps.
"Help him."
Mikoto dove to support the Byakugan holder.
This was probably the only time both the Uchiha and the Hyuuga clans were so united; their numbers were vastly less than the Iwa invaders but they had managed to lure Oonoki's people further away from the Kannabi bridge, even though Fugaku's platoon hadn't been able to whittle their numbers down much.
Strategic backpedaling.
The best comparison was backing away three steps and bounding forward in two steps, picking off those they could with that sharp forward strike and drawing the Iwa soldiers deeper into enemy territory when they leaped to retaliate.
Fugaku flagged his hands back, motioning over his shoulders, and proceeded to race away.
Twenty nine Uchiha and Hyuuga ninjas trooped after him, fleeing.
Wave after wave of Iwa Shinobi gave chase.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Minutes after Danzo located Naruto
Somewhere under Grass country
CORE Operative One shook her dozing brother, trying to wake him up. "Sandy, get up. Master's calling us." The Uchiha rolled onto his other side, smiling wistfully at the sugary dream he was having. His brow twitched when a gooey marshmallow sandwich rippled inwards, turning into his baby sister's talking head. "Sandy, get up already!"
The napping child's eyes burst open and his Mangekyo Sharingan twisted hotly in their sockets.
He grated, glaring a hole through his overexcited baby sister.
"What?"
"We found big bro!"
"Big bro? Which one? We've got like fifty."
"Nine-Nine!" The girl squeaked, vibrating on the spot so vigorously her medicated, wire-rimmed glasses nearly left her face. The oversized storage scroll on her back rattled, mirroring her exuberance. Immediately, the sleep cleared out of the Uchiha's foggy mind. His eternally activated sharingan wound to a halt, then beginning to spiral backwards, anticlockwise, whirling in mounting happiness. "Sandy, we found Nine-Nine!"
"What are you waiting for?!" Sandy shot upright, nearly flying off his hammock, all traces of sleep erased from his countenance. "Let's go get 'im!"
COREs Sandman and Kraken duo kamui teleported to their Master.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Kannabi Canyon
Naruto's doujutsu sizzled, sealing a dead body and confirming that the Kiri camp had been adequately erased from existence, by CORE standards.
He jumped away as Rin rounded the blindspot that formerly hid the quaint Hidden Mist camp, stuttering into seamless nothing by the time Obito's two tomoe sharingan roved left and right.
With Team Minato's dynamic in question, Naruto didn't want to risk them entering active combat against even the most moderate of opponents; Naruto's mission was to make sure Minato's students finished the mission, preferably all alive.
This was the second Kiri camp the ex-CORE Operative had rubbed out, and the seventh corpse he had loaded into a Storage seal.
Of course he left hints that Kiri ninjas were present, just to keep the trio on their toes, but those loose, faint smells might as well be weeks old.
Kiri hates Konoha, but they were less keen on throwing their support behind Iwa.
For Naruto though, their presence in the canyon was…odd.
They were transporting crate loads of Leaf-made weapons, tons of them. Good quality ones too, the expensive type that were too painstaking to be so mass-produced.
ROOT quality weaponry.
The blonde recovered fourteen crates.
It seemed he'd have to extend his "friendship" with Minato.
Danzo could be trialed for high treason-or some other fancy, war criminal-type crime-if the crates and export manifestos got to trusted hands, leaving the man vulnerable whether he decided to stand trial or make a run for it.
But that wasn't the issue here.
Kiri were camping in Kannabi Canyon, hoarding and transporting ROOT-made weapons, and doing so at the same time Operation: Open Jugular was under way.
The whole scenario didn't smell right.
Naruto shook his head, promising himself to look deeper into what was happening.
Now, there was another issue at hand.
Mist.
Down below, tendrils of palpable, milky white mist rolled down the canyon, seeping and crawling not unlike a serpent washing the length and breadth of the canyon's bottom. It was high enough to obscure the sun, and inside the misty depths not a single whisper of breeze howled.
Naruto's Byakugan couldn't cut through the chakra-laced manifestation and his trained senses struggled to pick apart his charges from the mist.
Kakashi, trudged slowly, one steady foot in front of the other. His nose wrinkled, searching for confirmation if they were still moving forward or had somehow gotten turned around in the whitened smog.
Spying a look back, all he could pick out of the murky air were Obito's red eyes.
"Steady…" the Hatake whispered, reaching his right hand back, opening and closing his hand for it to be taken but it wasn't. "Rin, are you there?"
It was delayed, and muffled, but the team's medic whispered. "Yeah."
"Take my hand. Obito, hold hers." He stopped, shaking his hand harder for it to be taken, sounding urgent as the mist thickened. "Now. Do it now. Hurry." The pair of red eyes bobbing at his back, bodiless, became fainter and fainter, harder to discern from the world of infinite whiteness all around. Kakashi shuffled his right foot onward, waving his hand behind him, more urgent. "Obito-"
Right then, there was a sharp crack, a silenced yelp, padded running, and a swooping, whooshing noise similar to a wind rushing through a tunnel only for the wind to halt abruptly.
"Obito." Kakashi hissed, making to step forward again. "Obi-"
A hand found his waiting palm, a hand that definitely wasn't Rin's, and it tugged him still, pulling him from proceeding.
"...Obito?"
"Thread." The Uchiha said, whispering in the tiniest voice he could muster given the situation. Kakashi swiveled his neck around and squinted, hard, looking for the source of the voice and the owner of the hand in his own. The two sharingan eyes surged close to his face, so much so they were nose to nose. "Chakra thread all around us. Stay still."
There was no lilting laughter in Obito's tone, sounding more serious than when he wanted them to never be friends again, and that set off severe alarm bells in his head.
True to what Obito uttered, the slim beams of sunlight that sank down into the mist glinted off some silvery threads, crisscrossing into what resembled a spiderweb.
All around them.
Kakashi stood still, squeezing Obito's hand and nodding curtly, knowing well that the Uchiha's likely couldn't see the motion.
Obito's next words made Kakashi's heart sink.
"They got her." Obito choked quietly, breaking apart at the seams and hardly able to keep his tone down. "They got Rin."
"...They got...Rin…?" The leader of the team muttered back, narrowing his eyes and creasing his brow. "Who's "they"?"
"I don't know…but I can find her." The stationary pair of crimson eyes blinked open and close. "My eyes always know where she is."
It was…hard to explain.
Obito and Rin had been friends for so long, and their friendship ran so deep that finding his best friend became instinctive for the Uchiha.
Plain and simple.
The same could be said about Rin, only she just didn't know it yet.
Rin's chakra wasn't very much, with average sized chakra coils for a Chunin her age, but in this present situation Rin stood out in the vast whiteness like a single match in a misty white room.
The mist thickened.
"We need to go back-"
"No."
"What do you mean "no"?" Obito spat, hushed and surprised. "She's our friend."
"She's your friend." Kakashi corrected. "The mission comes first; when we finish that, we can come back for her."
"Are you even hearing yourself?"
"Yes."
"We don't have time for this. Whoever took her could be doing Kami-knows-what to her? Are you really ok with that?" Obito pressed. "If you were the one-"
"I'd expect you to finish the mission. She probably expects the same."
There was a moment of stunned silence.
Obito gawked, mouth opening and closing.
His nose then grazed Kakashi's, speaking with finality. "Your dad won't leave a comrade behind. He'd think you're less than trash." Obito yanked his hand free of Kakashi's grip, harshly shaking the silver haired teens hold off his hand. "And I think so too."
The Hatake lunged. "Obito, wait-"
The Uchiha took a step back and his eyes disappeared.
Kakashi's hands found nothing, only shortly feeling the pattern of extra thin, metallic threads Obito had somehow bypassed.
He opened his arms and turned around in a wide circle.
"Obito." He called, trying to keep his voice down. " Obito."
A masked face oozed out from behind, hovering over Kakashi's shoulder, tittering at the unaware boy as Kakashi panicked to find his Uchiha teammate.
The masked wielder of the Needle sword commented on Obito's departure.
"Oh, he's gonna die for sure."
Kakashi whipped around, already finished blitzing through a blizzard of handseals. He inhaled deeply and exhaled, roaring forth surging winds.
"Wind release: Great Breakthrough!"
A humourless hymn echoed in the canyon. "He has no idea who he's running toward." Kakashi jumped away some feet, dodging the thin sword as it impaled the ground he formerly stood on. Mist shrouded the weapon and it was gone by the time the Hatake blew gale after gale of wind at it. "Call it foreshadowing, but that boy's dying today. Wolves or no wolves."
Kakashi's confusion at the last statement faltered his third wind Jutsu, casting away a good amount of mist but not preventing the cloud of apprehension from drifting down on him.
Obito didn't turn back, not even after hearing the hollow bellow of wind rampaging up the canyon. The red eyed boy sped headlong to that singular candlelight wavering tiredly in the choking mist.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Propped up against a cave wall, Rin's head lolled to the side, bleary-eyed and sleepy. Her hands were on the ground, palms up, and her body slumped deeper. She almost fell forward if not for a harsh push back to the cold, damp cave wall, jerking her partly away.
A curtain of chakra descended over her brain and her eyes felt the tantalizing urge to shut, releasing her from the cruelty of being awake. Her limp, weepy body felt so heavy, as if a thick blanket drenched in water had been left on her.
There was a brief chill shooting up her back, jolting her awake again but only for the iron curtains to be slammed shut around her senses again, lowering her eyes and her head till her chin pressed into her chest.
"What are you doing in the canyon?" A watery voice questioned, tipping her weak head up and forcing the medic to look into the Mist ninjas eyes. His face was a mishmash of grey and white colours, but Rin's unfocused eyes picked out an eye patch on one of the Kiri ninjas eyes. Which eye? She wasn't sure. He snapped his fingers, simultaneously pouring more focus into the hypnosis. "What mission are you on?"
Rin chewed on her tongue, stifling the temptation to provide an answer. Her reply though, was teetering to her right side.
Genjutsu wasn't working.
Her will was too strong.
She couldn't be older than fourteen, maybe even fifteen, and yet her will to withstand an adults genjutsu was so strong.
"Tell us what you know!" Ao's impatient teammate shouted, rattling the girl's eyes wide for no longer than half a second before Ao put her back under. Kisame gnashed his teeth, defiantly glaring at his senior. "Get her talking or I'll kill you."
He didn't work well with teammates anyway.
Ao controlled his expression, keeping himself from frowning. "Be patient, Kisame."
"Then hurry up." The small cavern the pair were holed up inside might have been devoid of mist but it was saturated in Kisame's agitation. "I can smell ice and snow."
"Snow?" Ao asked, setting Rin up and placing a hand over her eyes, enticing her back into half-sleep. "Snow Shinobi."
"What I'm smelling aren't human; they're animals. More than a dozen closing in." Kisame warned, peering out of the cave and searching the mist, though finding nothing amiss in the perilous whiteness. "They could be Ninken." And as far as anyone knew, Hidden Leaf's Inuzuka clan had mastered the art of weaponizing animals, whether as a pack or individually. The bundle of bandages on the shark teens back vibrated, shivering. "Samehada says they're wolves." The sword trembled, communicating the exact number of snow wolves carefully creeping to the cave. "A lot of wolves."
Neither Ao not Kisame held any hope of outrunning such stealthy, coordinated and group-minded creatures.
Wolves were evolved to strategize and hunt.
Still, Ao remained calm, turning back to the hypnotized girl. "Clear some of the mist and deal with them however you want. Just don't let them in."
A gnarly expression raced across Kisame's face and bus eyes stormed something vengeful, detecting a distinctly familiar "Leaf" scent. " You."
" Hm?" Ao hummed, looking back only to find no one there. He shrugged and deepened the genjutsu well Rin was drowning inside.
As he did that, Kisame stalked from the cave, pushing away his mist with each loaded step until there was a large, clear space between two turgid walls of mist on either side.
The approaching snow wolves retreated into the mist blankets on both sides of the new clearing, growling low with their heckles raised ever so aggressively, their fangs bared and their claws primed for a brutal slaughter. Kisame only spotted a few eyes, different toned eyes belonging to just a few wolves that could be discerned; beady black or pale blue or dark red.
Grrrrrrrr!
It was a savage noise that ruffled Samehada gleefully.
"You've got that Kumo stink all over you but you still reek of Konoha, Hatake Shit." Kisame grated, gnashing his teeth and sweeping around in a full circle. Samehada sniffed the air, twitching in impatient agitation, searching for the one that had gotten it's handler so frazzled. "All you do is run…all you do is hide…. Come on out, brat."
He remembered the brain splitting headache he got on waking up the next day after the blood soaked blonde had knocked him out, made worse by the shark teen being trapped neck deep in the ground.
His grudge against the Sakumo Hatake lookalike ran deeper than the rivers of hell.
The Kiri jounin snapped to his right and his jaw clenched, the knuckles of his unarmed hand popped.
Two pale lavender eyes hovered on the right side of a boulder, bodiless.
Vacant.
Like spotlights beaming onto the shark teens soul, those eyes blinked closed and open again, punctuating the long sigh floating to Kisame's hearing.
Really?
Now?
Of all times, now?
Literally and figuratively, Kisame was in his way. And given the altercations that had taken place and the current state of the mission, Naruto was far too annoyed to humour the shark teen with a fair execution.
Two seconds had passed in utter stillness and Kisame's last nerve snapped, bellowing.
"Come on! Let's end this! Here and n-"
Three kunai flew from the side of the boulder, zipping in a straight line and aimed straight at Kisame's chest. The shark teen easily saw the Explosive tags tied to the kunai at the end, tugging Samehada off his back and wiping the sturdy weapon across, uselessly sending away the three blades to explode elsewhere.
As he did that though, five flak jacket wearing snow wolf burst out from the mist, streaming white fog in their wake as they pelted to their target.
Kisame readied.
Setting himself in a wide, unshakable stance and holding Samehada out with one hand.
At the last moment, the wolves diverted away from the swordsman, out of reach, bounding to the other side of the misty wall, only for more wolves to race out, snapping and cracking their jaws; these ones didn't have on Shinobi vests. Those ones too skirted out of Kisame's reach, running to the other side and leaping into the mist, replaced by more wolves until the expansive clearing that was devoid of mist littered with snow wolves of all kinds of fur tones racing around the blue skinned teen, never nearing closer than ten foot.
Kisame's eyes moved about, keeping a careful stare on the feral beasts circling and running around him. His senses were too flooded to notice a Rock Wall rising up and enclosing the cave mouth, Ao and Rin still inside.
All too suddenly, the swarming wolves dispersed back into the mist and all that was left after their departure were a handful of Explosive seal tags, discarded left, right, behind and in front of the Kiri ninja. Along with Barrier seals strategically set about him, that activated milliseconds before the explosives went off, locking him inside the chakra barrier and surrounded on all sides by explosive seals.
They sizzled as one.
They went off at the same time.
Kisame saw bright lights before he was slammed with flesh searing heat.
BOOMPH!
If not for the nearly sonic boom of the explosions blasting in unison and the sharp burst of heat that flooded outwards, the explosion could be considered fairly controlled.
The shockwave of the blast rocked the canyon, but Naruto ignored that, not worried about the chance of a landslide occuring.
The sightless darkness inside the cave was broken when Ao clicked on a flashlight, sweeping it around and struggling to control his breathing; one moment he was fixing the girl with a strong hypnotic Jutsu, and the next thing he heard were a pack of wolves swarming Kisame and a wall of stone shooting up to block light from coming in through the entrance.
Then the explosion.
The ground hadn't yet steadied.
The echo of the blast rampaged the canyon.
Ao jumped at the sound of a crunching footfall, swinging the light to the location and holding out his tanto in warning.
"Whoever you are," the man said firmly, sweeping the light to the left and not-so-calmly flicking his eyes about the palpable darkness of the cave. "I know you're in here."
Crunch…crunch…crunch-
The light hit an ankle as it just barely dashed out of sight, vanishing all together.
The man cleared his throat.
"Show yourself now." He ordered, swiping his kunai to the right, hearing the sound of air passing his sharp blade. "If not, you will regret messing with me."
Crunch…crunch…
This time, the man didn't jump to the sound; the implant was still new and he wasn't accustomed to the draw on his chakra, but he detested being toyed with.
Ao coolly sheathed his kunai and tucked the flashlight into the pouch, facing the light up and casting a grim shadow under his face.
"As you wish."
His palms met.
"Byaku-"
A person climbed onto his back and a pair of legs wound around his middle from behind, with one hand covering his mouth.
Silent Killing Technique.
Naruto softly shushed the man, and slit Ao's throat.
Sshhhck.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
A minute later, the Rock Wall came down and a wolf trotted out with Rin secured to her back. The female wolf was going to direct Obito back on track to the mission using Rin as a lure.
Meanwhile, the ski mask wearing handler of the snow wolves rushed out of the cave and went to Kakashi's aid, forgetting the smoking pit of smouldering ash he had caused.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Kakashi spun his ninjato, parrying and blocking a volley of senbon, snapping his fingers around the handle abruptly and swinging it downwards, knocking down a sudden stab for his gut from the Needle sword that had materialized from the mist, drawn back into the fog as soon as the deflection was made.
Switching to a reverse grip, the Hatake flicked up a stray senbon and whirled beneath a kick poised for his torso, lashing out at the attacker but only meeting intangible mist.
The teen grunted, not so pleased with many things at the moment.
"You're good, I'll give you that." The bodiless swordsman admitted, speaking forwardly. "The old man said you won't take anything lying down, and he was right!"
Kakashi dashes into the fog, leaping over a ditch of upward facing needles and driving his blade into where he was hearing the hunter ninja talking from, only for a brief spark of light to erupt as the boy's ninjato scratched a sturdy rock.
" Hahahahah, so close~."
The hunter ninja plunged Nuibari into Kakashi's left calf, slipping away into the mist with a deranged cackle.
The boy gnashed his teeth, hands shaking and eyes stuck on the long sword jammed into his leg till a good two feet of the lean sword protruded from the other side of the boy's calf.
" Guhhhh… uhhh." Kakashi wrapped his right hand around the protruding weapon, only for the Kiri swordsman to yank it into the mist using the metal thread looped through the eye of the needle. Kakashi limped half a step forward, clenching his jaw to restrain his agony.
He was losing blood.
Too much blood.
He needed to sit down.
Physically keeping his wits about him and using the force of his will to keep the poison roaring through his blood stream at bay, Kakashi panted. " Nugh…huff-huff-huff."
"Feisty." Getting a grip on his trembling limbs, or at least trying to, Kakashi whacked the side of his ninjato against the tip of Nuibari when it shot for his right thigh. His ninjato toppled from his hand, an effect of the strength of the thrown needle blade as well as the teens shaking. The sword impaled the ground and, finished powering through countless seals, Kakashi found his hands around the thread at the end of the blade. " Woah-woah-woah!"
"Chidori!"
A crackling line of electricity ran up the metal thread, meeting the source in a matter of microseconds, setting the swordsman alight in the most excruciating way possible.
Kakashi's Chidori was yet still an incomplete Jutsu because, at the moment, the critical lightning technique needed enhanced eyesight seeing as the backlash of using such a brutal assassination method was tunnel vision; in this fight, Kakashi managed to negate the tunnel vision by grasping a solid conductor, which just so happened to be a metallic thread.
Kakashi grinned, a deliriously relieved expression that was unlike him, and though his blood spattered teeth were hidden under his dark orange bandanna, he managed a staggering drop to his knees and swiftly sealed the infamous Needle sword into the seal on his left inner wrist.
He released himself then, stiffly falling onto the hard ground, limbs tightly locked and muscles throbbing, contracting without end as a result of the mysterious poison.
The mist slowly lifted, dispersing.
Kakashi's head faced the right, where he last saw Kushimaru's skeleton flare up like a holiday light show, grunting with a pleased smirk at the still and smoking body lying there.
Likely not dead but the silver haired teen didn't care.
He did that.
Him.
He was dying, sure, but he did that to Kushimaru Kuriarare, A rank hunter ninja of Hidden Mist.
Would trash be able to do that?
'Huh, Obito?'
Kakashi snickered, another thing that very much wasn't like him. Then he froze as the poison took effect of his kidneys, as if a pair of hands reached down his throat and coiled themselves around his insides, tugging up.
" Uck!"
The boy coughed, expelling blood from his mouth and nose.
Guilt.
The guilt hurt.
…It hurt.
He blinked, long and slow, and his mouth slumped open when he saw someone squatted down by the unconscious Kiri swordsman, blocking Kakashi from seeing what was happening.
Everything the person wore was dark, or could that be the light fading from the boy's eyes?
Something the Hatake was absolutely, positively, without a glimmer of doubt completely sure of was the ski mask on the newcomer's head, concealing their identity.
Kakashi gurgled, urgently and vainly attempting to rise to his feet, praying it wasn't a Kiri comrade.
The person glanced over his shoulder, then returned to searching Kushimaru.
The struggling boy blinked, even longer and even slower, and grunted in shock when a pair of feet halted in his line of sight; ninja sandals and pasty pale toes. The person squatted, flipping Kakashi on his back, unzipping the boy's Jounin vest all the way down and gripping a syringe in his other hand, it being filled with a dirty brown-green liquid, holding it like a knife so high in the air that the needle glinted against the rays of the sun.
The Hatake wasn't looking at that though, as menacing as the injection was.
It wasn't even the person's ski mask that attracted that much attention anymore.
No.
Kakashi found himself in the endless fair lavender pools that were the person's pupiless eyes, reflecting the Hatake's stunned face with its moonishly large stare.
The silver haired Jounin's voice was hushed and strained, but laced with sincere relief and happiness, bringing tears to Kakashi's eyes.
" Naruto…?"
The mute boy gave his friend a twinkling wink, and stabbed the Hatake's heart with the healing injection.
And Kakashi fainted.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOO
In that memory, he was five years old again.
A boy with shaggy, silver hair and wearing an orange bandanna sobbed, rubbing at his teary eyes with his knuckles. "Nine-Nine, I'm scared."
Said CORE ninja, the same age as his good friend, paused what he was doing, mid-sheathing a ninjato into its holster slung horizontally across his lower back. After a few seconds, he did so and the sharp weapon clicked on entry.
Ninety-Nine giggled, wiping his brow with the back of his hand and nabbing the kneeling ROOT boy by his collar, heaving him up to his feet. He signed reassurance to his friend.
"I'm here. You'll be fine."
The blonde Honorary Hatake flashed a glare at CORE Operative One, telling the bespectacled part-Uzumaki girl to keep her comments to herself.
Nine-Nine's baby sister gave her big brother a petulant huff, a pointed pout and stomped away to begin clearing away the dead bodies that had been a direct result of falling to the Byakugan boy and Uzumaki girl's blades. Too bad the corpses were Demon country Monks and Nuns; holy people, specialized soldiers and loyal worshippers of Yami.
The blonde threw a hand over Kakashi's shoulder, shaking tough comfort into his friend. He signed with one hand.
"See? They're all dead. Nothing's going to happen. You'll be fine."
One grew impatient. "Big bro, if he's not going to help, he should stay back. We don't want anyone holding us back." The two of them, CORE brother and sister, were more than sufficient for the mission. The girl audibly mumbled, ignoring the Byakugan boy's narrowed eyes. "Why's he even here?"
"One!" The blonde snapped.
"What? I'm right, aren't I?!"
"Shush." Nine-Nine gritted. "He's not holding us back; he just needs some…" Kakashi's friend faltered, finding the right word, shaking reassurance into the Hatake once more. "Time to adjust. This is a lot to take in."
"Scoff." One said to her brother's excuse.
Nine-Nine gave the other boy an apologetic wince, but Kakashi could still see it. From the downward twitch of the blonde's eyes and the small, invisible frown.
He was holding them back, and Nine-Nine didn't want to hurt his feelings by saying so.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
It was probably that day, on seeing the hidden disappointment in Nine-Nine's practiced expression, that Kakashi vowed to never lose focus of the mission.
Or it could be that Sakumo Hatake had killed himself for failing the mission, and the White Fang's son didn't want to repeat his father's mistake.
Water dripped from the roof of the cave, dropping down and echoing musically. One fell on the back of Kakashi's neck, and the Hatake mumbled his weak disapproval, slapping at the small wet spot.
"Lucky for you, I don't leave my teammates behind."
Kakashi's response was purposefully delayed, releasing a breath and blinking his eyes open.
"Ya hear me, Kakashi?" Obito grumbled, hefting his team leader properly to his back when the other boy tried to wiggle off. "You owe me, jackass."
"...I owe you nothing…blockhead."
It didn't carry any of Kakashi's usual casual venom, and for that Obito sniggered. "I take cash or credit."
"What about ramen coupons?"
"Even better. Wayyyyy better." Obito grunted, fixing his footing with chakra so that he didn't slip off the wet surface of the damp tunnel. "As long…as it's not expired."
"Good." Kakashi muttered with finality, tired enough to not want to attempt getting off Obito's back anymore.
He glanced around at the cave; it was bright and large, with sunlight pouring in from the massive entrance at their back and cascading down to the other end, which was some several metres away. The rocks were darkish and mostly jagged, wet from the water dripping from the spiked cave ceiling. A good portion of the ground was not level, slanted upwards and downwards, putting extra strain on the Uchiha to prevent them from falling to injury.
A feature of the cave that worried Kakashi was a wide crevice to their left, and peering a bit down to the inky darkness didn't reduce any of the team leaders apprehension.
There was a ten to fifteen foot wide gap between them and the crevice.
Kakashi stopped wondering why the space wasn't much larger when he looked to the other side, sighting the spires of cave rocks jumbled together like a dense thicket of trees. This was as far from the crevice as Obito could get.
The Hatake spoke up, asking. "What about Rin?"
"I'm on her trail right now."
Kakashi sagged, resigned to failing the mission.
Obito snorted. "Don't worry, we're still on our way to the Kannabi bridge." The Uchiha struggled to explain. "She's…moving Northeast to the bridge. Maybe the person that took her wants to get her to Iwa…?" It was an uncertain question Obito couldn't find a proper answer for. "Weird thing is that the chakra signature carrying her…isn't human."
Kakashi froze. "Isn't human, how?"
"Like, a dog's…I think." Obito's sharingan turned and he bobbed his head, much to Kakashi's relief. "The chakra coils make them look like a dog, anyway."
"Wolf." Kakashi corrected, providing the little intel he knew of the strange predicament Team Minato was in. "Kushimaru mentioned wolves." Sensing Obito's confusion, Kakashi added. "That unconscious Kiri guy in the hunter ninja mask." The Hatake shrugged. "Still doesn't make any sense."
"This mission stopped making sense a long time ago; first was the mist, then someone took Rin and went in the other direction of the bridge, now someone else is carrying her to the bridge and this time it's a wolf taking her there, then there was that explosion, which I'm very sure should have caused a landslide or something. There was that passed out Kiri hunter ninja I found close to you, who I'm pretty sure I've heard about before." Obito rambled, and he looked over his shoulder, saying. "And you're right; someone's watching us…but…I can't find them. Almost like they're a ghost."
Kakashi immediately retorted. "There's no such thing as ghosts." The Hatake shook his head, refocusing his mind. "As long as we get Rin back. That's what matters."
Obito stumbled up a rock face, gasping. "Yup."
"And…I…" Kakashi screwed his lips for the side, fighting the stubbornness in him and pushing through to what he wanted to say. "Apologize…for what I said about your father."
"Water under the bridge."
It was like a world of heaviness wafted off the young Jounin's shoulders.
"As long as you don't say those things again." The Uchiha carefully skirted down a slanted rock, admitting. "It's just that…I've had to endure a lot of the same thing from our classmates back in the Academy…and my clan. I kinda expected you'd be the same, and it got me down even before I heard you say it…y'know. It's...hard to stay positive when you know that someone who you think is your friend will let you down."
"...You're right." The former ROOT ninja wasn't one for apologies but he honestly wanted to make it up to his teammate; badmouthing Obito's father was a line he shouldn't have marched across.
Finding a sort of level area to set the jounin down to his feet, the Uchiha Chunin scratched the back of his head with a small laugh. "And I don't think you're trash."
Kakashi scoffed. "Coming from a blockhead like you, that means a lot."
Obito stuck out his tongue. "Good."
The Hatake smiled, but only a little. "Let's finish this mission and get you that coupon."
"Can't wait."
CORE Operative One almost felt bad for ruining this up.
Master Danzo wanted the mission to fail and for them to retrieve their wayward brother, and the glasses wearing girl was going to do exactly that.
Shaded under her Squid Camouflage, she pointed a finger gun at the pair; ring finger and pinkie facing her, index and middle finger joined and directed at her targets, and thumb gently bent down.
She closed her left eye and mentally pulled the trigger.
"Water Pressure Bullet."
The air distorted before her fingers and a ripple of wind pulsed out, shooting down faster than the speed of sound.
A hollow ringing sang in Obito's head as his ear drums burst and his head snapped to the side, cast off his feet and into the darkness of the treacherous crevice.
He vaguely saw Kakashi yell something frantic, a curse maybe, diving without a second thought and reaching his hand over the edge of the inky crevice, catching his teammate by the shirt.
Obito's eyes dimmed.
The masked boy ground his teeth, lying flat on his stomach and gearing all the muscles in his arm to keep his teammate from falling to certain doom.
Not before he took back everything he said.
Not before he properly apologized.
Obito wasn't breathing.
" Yaargh! Obito, wake up!" Kakashi wailed, feeling his grip weaken and the Uchiha's shirt started slipping from his fingers. "No, no, no, no, no, no-"
Rrrrrip…
The shirt tore instead and Obito fell.
" NO!"
The girl snorted and gingerly blew at her smoking fingers, observing a familiar shadow dashed headfirst into the crevice after the fallen Uchiha.
Deep inside the abyssal crack in the earth, Naruto's perpetually sleepy brother laid in wait.
Authors note
Aaaaaand done.
Now, about what I was saying at the start of the chapter…
The multi-part flash fiction I'm writing is called " Coi and Koko: Living Curses and Dead Traditions " and it's about time travelling twins that get dragged out of their "story" and are made side characters of another "story". As you can can probably guess, there will be plenty of action, adventure, thriller imagery and absolutely obliterating the fourth wall. The links are in my profile. Feedback would be amazing!
Give it a look if you have a chance @_@
Anywho…
Is Obito going to survive?
What's going to happen to Kakashi, now that he's injured and by himself against One?
Will the Iwa forces overrun Konoha's plans?
...Do you think Naruto will get captured?
So many questions...
What do you think of this chapter?
How's the story so far?
Let me know what you think, would you so kindly. Please and please, stay safe wherever you are in the world, and I will see you when I see you.
Foy.