Author's Note

Anko's doing half a talk-no-jutsu. Warning possibly: out-of-character Anko compared to canon.

Chapter 67

Temari (approximate time: 7:25 AM)

From the intel shared between the two teams, none of the Oto bases had security. They were all remote enough that civilians wouldn't find them easily. Or, if a civilian did manage to find one of the bases somehow, they were so brutal that civilians would've been kidnapped and experimented upon, upon detection. It was unsurprising to either of the two teams.

The remote base they were targeting was deep in the rugged mountain range of the Land of Wind before it gave way to the Land of Rivers' canyon valleys and fertile grassland. Buried under an overhanging cliff, it was arranged like our English letter "L", two side tunnels connected to a nexus after the stairs descending downwards. They had the easier time going in—fighting downwards—but it was after the stairs that they'd have the trouble. The Oto-nin, having home advantage and the benefits of the narrowed tunnel, didn't need a high number of people to hold the defense.

"Alright, two tunnels, two teams. One team each, right?" Anko asked with a grin on her face.

"Maybe. One of the tunnels are longer than the other, I assume that one might have more shinobi and be tougher to tackle," Temari replied.

"We might be lucky or 'lucky,' though. There might be a seal on one of the tunnel walls to another tunnel that connects to the other two bases we need to hit in the Land of Wind," Katiya added. "More personnel can come through there—or be evacuated away. Though, the backdoors are only accessible to certain shinobi chakra signatures."

"Alright. Who's taking which tunnel?"

"We'll take the longer one," Kotetsu said. "We've got us two chunin, Anko, and better combat ranges for this. We're all mid- to short-range fighters," he said, gesturing to his partner, Izumo.

Temari herself and Gaara both favored long-range jutsu—disadvantageous for fighting in a tunnel without risking its complete collapse. It left Temari with short range wind cutters directed over her closed fan, maybe her (still work in progress) Gale Palm Jutsu, and Gaara with his Sand Coffins and Sand Bullet Jutsu.

"Perfect," Temari replied.

"Any information on what else to look out for, Katiya?" Kankuro asked.

"Nothing I haven't already said in my report. But just remember, between all of us, I'm the only healer… and I can't use chakra because of my collar." The Konoha team had already previously been informed she was technically still under house arrest. "We can't risk getting hurt too badly," she finished.

Everyone nodded. "We good?" Izumo asked.

"Yeah," Temari replied for the team.

Katiya (approx—unknown)

Katiya sidestepped for a clear shot and threw two kunai—one each for each of the two enemy necks she sighted—into the space between their chins and their splotched neck guards. When a monster dies, you celebrate it. The kunai both struck true—arterial spray decorating their chests and nearby wall. It reminded her of how her favorite maneuver—a chakra scalpel slash to the neck or jab to the chest—was one of the moves she had used to kill the Suna-nin that had guarded her the day she escaped.

"We're all monsters in Oto."

She pivoted to throw another kunai at an Oto-nin that had managed to get past the defenses set up by the forward Konoha team.

"They have families, Katiya," Itachi reminded her from within her mind.

The blade she threw missed, taking off the enemy Oto-nin's ear instead of puncturing the neck as she intended. The Oto-nin replied with a sonic blast from an arm-implanted speaker. Air ripples as the sound travelled were visible to her naked eye.

"Ears!" Katiya yelled before going down.

Katiya herself had clapped her hands over her ears but it wasn't enough while for the others, it was. Her ears rang and she could feel vertigo onsetting. Per Temari's plan, Temari in the forward position kept to short-range Wind Scythes and her closed fan to avoid collapsing the enclosed tunnel base with her stronger wind jutsu. But the Oto-nin managed to get through her front guard by going further underground and then jumped Kankuro's puppet when he had his hands clapped over his ears. Gaara, with handless jutsu, had to use a Sand Bullet to take down the enemy for them.

Katiya tried to pull out more kunai but she realized she was shaking. Damn it, she cursed. She looked to the crowd of enemy shinobi coming out of a forward and side tunnel, into their staging ground in the underground base's "lobby". Everyone else managed to recover but not her. Damn it.

"Are you alright?" Gaara asked her while she still couldn't hear.

—USELESS—!

"No. No! Lost hearing!" Katiya yelled back.

Temari yelled something over her shoulder, something about "guarding the rear" to Gaara, Katiya assumed. Gaara and one of the other Konoha-nin were on rear duty to ensure they didn't get boxed in as they made their way into the base.

"Damn it, I'm a useless trash-nin right now!" Katiya said aloud at what she hoped was a low volume after she ducked, trying to stay out of the way of Kankuro and Gaara's jutsu.

What loss of functionality would you have once I'm gone? You asked me once what about the hurt my own death would cause but what hurt? No one mourns a monster when it dies, no one mourns an appendix they don't need.

Gaara grasped Katiya's shoulder and signed negative before moving his hands uncertainly, while mentally commanding his sand to shield. It was as if he was trying to say more shinobi hand codes he didn't have the words for, things he wanted to say in a Land of Wind civilian sign language he didn't fully know.

Temari caught a glimpse of it and knew the conversation might have been a long one. She concussed one last Oto-nin before yelling over her shoulder, "They're rallying troops. Heavy gear! We don't have time for this!"

Katiya shook her head, signing "WAIT" in Konoha-Suna's allied shinobi hand code. You could walk on frostbitten feet. You cannot walk on missing feet, and so unfreezing one's toes before it was safe was considered bad practice. She didn't want to risk making herself a gibbering emotional mess even worse than she was already.

Kankuro (approximate time: 9:10 AM)

Kankuro gritted his teeth. His puppets were better with dealing with one-on-one battles and while Temari was on crowd control on Suna's side of the twin tunnel entrances, there were too many getting through for him to handle alone. Even with Gaara using his Sand Bullet Jutsu and now with Katiya being shakingly down.

"Oh, mother of kuso," Kankuro cursed, seeing exactly what gear Temari saw the Oto-nin bring in. A mechanized tunnel driller? Where the hell did they get that from?!

"Kankuro!" Katiya yelled from behind, trying to push him down. Kankuro's eyes widened as an enemy kunai clipped him through the shoulder.

"Damn it!" Kankuro yelled, clapping a hand over the bleeding. He lost control over a puppet, and he switched its control to his injured hand to yank it back to him while his non-injured one tried to staunch the bleeding.

"There's too many! I can't use my Cyclone Scythes without damaging the side rooms! Gaara! Can your Sand Tsunami work?!" Temari yelled without looking behind herself to Gaara. There was report prisoners were kept in the side rooms and as they wanted access to the base's administrative documentation rooms, they couldn't just collapse the whole base.

Gaara answered back firmly, "Not without killing us as well."

"We need to collapse the tunnels but only the tunnels, then! We can raise the roof again using earth-style but that's the only way to clear the path and get into the side rooms!" she called back from her forward position.

"We can't! The tunnels are reinforced with metal! " Kotetsu replied. Or was that punk Izumo? Whatever the two looked the same to Kankuro and probably won't be seen again by him anyways. One of the other Konoha-nin that isn't Anko yelled back.

A metaphorical lightbulb flashed in Kankuro's mind. "Gaara! You—! Gaara, you have Father's kekkei genkai!" he yelled.

Everyone flashed Kankuro surprised looks. Temari and Gaara, a different reason from Katiya's and the Konoha-team's general confusion. Kankuro could see Temari's question etched across her face. Gaara covered for them as everyone looked to Kankuro. Kankuro flipped the strap of his puppets' harness over with a bloodied hand, exposing a seal on it. Brushing a chakra-focusing finger over it, a kunai wrapped in cloth popped into existence. The Konoha-nin, still not understanding. But Temari did as he held the unwrapped kunai up to the light.

"Gaara—! Just think of the metal as earth! You can ground earth down into sand! You can do the same to the metal!" Temari shouted, resuming her attack.

Confusion flickered over Gaara's face as Kankuro handed him the kunai. They didn't need a magnifying glass to see the feathered, fluffed, metal filament edges no properly maintained kunai would have. But even if Gaara had his father's kekkei genkai, there was still a difference between earth and quartz to metal. And Gaara didn't understand how to…

"You can do it! Father's kekkei genkai—it's magnet-style!" Kankuro helpfully yelled to him excitedly.

Temari shot a glare at him. It wasn't something they needed Konoha to know. Oops. Kankuro just pretended he didn't say anything and none of the Konoha-nin reacted to the news anyways… so… Kankuro silently melted inside under Temari's glare, taking it as an excuse to lower himself to the ground amid his blood loss.

"I'll try," Gaara called, the first one to speak after the verbal oopsie.

Gaara tucked away the kunai into a pocket before raising his hands, one for each tunnel. He closed his eyes as he began to channel chakra.

Gaara (approximate time: 9:15 AM)

A Shukaku take-over meant a suppressed automatic sand barrier but somehow that wasn't a concern now. Shukaku had stopped threatening to kill Suna-nin and even the Konoha allies were spared death threats.

Gaara pushed his sand thinly into the tunnels, away from the enemy shinobi and focusing on each of their rafters and ceiling panels, pushing as deeply as his chakra could reach. He dipped into the spirit realm the spiritual energy aspect of chakra connected to, for the extra sand he didn't carry on person. With his sand, Gaara speared the metal reinforcements first, and then attempted to pull the metals down while breaking it down with his more earthen sand.

The enemy Oto-nin, having gone into service to someone that harmed the people Gaara was allied with and now aiming to kill Gaara's allies even in their own defense meant their lives were forfeit in his eyes. Had the Oto-nin attacked or threatened him and him alone, he would have spared them. Had individual Oto-nin been known to once be Suna allies, he would have considered sparing them. Had the Oto-nin chosen the nonviolent option of yielding or defending themselves with obviously nonlethal means while retreating, he would have considered sparing them. Or at least arguing with Shukaku over it.

It was the compromise he made with Shukaku on who he was willing to kill and who he wasn't. The Oto-nin did not yield but the cavern ceiling did.

Kankuro (approximate time: 9:30 AM)

Temari let out a sigh of relief before facing her team. "We bought ourselves some time."

"Kankuro, your arm. While the Oto-nin are regrouping!" Katiya barked out.

"Ah, yeah!"

Katiya yanked out her arm-long medical scroll. "Unseal this, this, this and this," she commanded as she yanked out needles from her thigh pouch full of only one-pointed senbon and then jabbed them into his arm. It instantly went numb and the items Katiya needed poofed into existence.

"Analgesic patches and wraps if you have muscle tears or bruising! I can't heal with chakra right now, this should help until we hit a hospital," Katiya yelled out, smacking a flat box to the ground she was kneeling on to treat a seated Kankuro.

Temari and Izumo both took some of the pain-numbing patches, plastering them where they were hurt. They weren't hurt that badly but Katiya saw Temari tuck away a few patches into a pouch just in case.

Katiya then addressed Kankuro. "You're going to need antibiotics or a sterilizing chakra healing in an infirmary later, my senbon aren't sterile. I can't do that for you right now because I am so useful," she sarcastically added. "And I'm acting like this kunai's not poisoned because I can't do a poison extraction with no chakra. If you die, it was nice knowing you."

"Uhh. Huh. Um." There was a pause as he mentally digested the deathly part. It was lucky he built up immunity to a lot of poisons being a puppeteer. "So… Why do you have a pouch of only senbon?" Kankuro asked to distract himself from the sensation of a needle going in and out of his skin.

Katiya blinked. "I think I got partial hearing back. Why only senbon? Because I have two pouches of only kunai," she said as if it was the plainest thing in the world.

"No shuriken?" Kankuro asked jokingly as she sewed his arm up with a suture kit.

"No, what? Ah, no." Her father stopped using them the moment he decided to hide the fact he was an Uchiha and it had passed the practice onto her. She changed the topic. "I don't suppose you tested positive for any blood-borne illnesses, have you?"

"No… why?"

"I was hoping to slowly kill some of the enemy stragglers we find with HIV by reusing the senbon needles," she joked. Or so Kankuro hoped she joked. It was hard to tell with her monotone sometimes. Although HIV was eliminated in their world as it was treated as a bioweapon by the shinobi, it still had a reputation. Though, there was half a joke that Iwa "smelt it and dealt it" by blaming Konoha for naturally creating it by having sex with ninken among other amorous proclivities.

The disease killed many before they found the right antivirals to use, after the Second Shinobi War. It shut Kankuro up.

"… Orochimaru. He's got a way of getting into your head, doesn't he," Anko asked after a moment, referring to the latter's earlier cry of uselessness and Katiya's sarcastic side comment. "Trash-nin," Katiya had called herself.

Katiya flicked her eyes to Anko momentarily. "I don't know what you mean."

"His brainwashing, like he's always the genius in the room."

"Not… Orochimaru is just a logical being," Katiya argued. "It's not… brainwashing if it's true and if I hold his logic to be superior to my own, there's no logic to me fighting against him… It's just now, that's changed."

Kankuro saw Gaara's expression shift, though Katiya didn't, focusing on her stitching in lieu of her Mystic Palm.

"I used to be a student of his, you know?" Anko told her conversationally by way of answer. There was no secret to either team Anko's backstory. "You probably got the file. He stuck a curse mark on me. And then wiped my memory of me saying no to joining him after that. Does that sound 'logical' to you?"

"… Yes," Katiya thought aloud, moving onto bandaging, "His wiping of why you said "no" meant you'd forget why you'd say no in the future. There's a likelihood you'd run back to him again. Lord Orochimaru only takes willing hosts... It still has sense."

"Yeah? Well, guess what, fat chance that's going to happen now. I told myself I was going to be free of him. And I will be, I swear my life on it."

"Mm…" Katiya hummed noncommittally. Kankuro could picture her mentally saying something along the lines of, "Yeah right." But instead Katiya asked aloud, "And how exactly would you do that?"

"—I don't know. Still working on it. Eating sweets helps, for me. Better than the alternative." Cutting. Bleeding. Beating or walking into beatings. "But no matter what, I'm not going back. Not back to him, not ever again. Not after what he did to me, ruining my head."

But Anko's means still weren't healthy. Katiya could smell the unwashed alcohol spills on Anko's clothing from the day previous.

Katiya let out a derisive snort. "Hmph."

"I don't have anything to say to one of Orochimaru's bootlickers. But if you want two ryo on what I did to crawl out, we can always talk," Anko smiled while letting her eyes grimace. Kankuro and Katiya both noticed, but only Katiya interpreted it as a threat against her should she be a bootlicker in Anko's eyes.

Katiya

Gaara lifted the collapsed ceilings up with his sand as soon as Kankuro was patched up.

"Katiya. You… You're not useless," he told Katiya quietly, just barely audible over the still-present rushing in her ears as they gathered themselves up to move again. "You're our team's medic," he told her.

And Katiya didn't argue with that. While she could not use chakra, because Oto had trained her to conserve it anyways, she was very familiar with how to do civilian stitches. More so than perhaps a jonin medic that relied solely on the Mystic Palm Jutsu for regular healing. Had the positions been reversed with that hypothetical jonin, it was quite possible they'd have faltered where she had not. She would realize it later.

"You're not useless. You're our… medic."

Gaara (approximate time: 10:05 AM)

The magnet-style… was that you? Gaara asked Shukaku, referring to the feathery kunai Kankuro had procured as they moved down one re-inflated tunnel. He brushed a hand over the pocket that held the kunai. He recognized it as the one that Katiya had held to her own neck. The only one that held such significance to them despite being a disposable tool.

Nuh UH, Shukaku replied. BUT! I hELpED you, I'm TELLING yoU, I HELPED YoU JUst NOw on tHe TUNNeLs!

Yes, I felt that, Gaara sedately replied back. What about the kunai? When Katiya was—?

Uhh… yeAH, nah. nAH. I thiNK that'S YOUR MagNet StYLE! BUT! I can dO MAGNET STYLE TOO, YOU KNOW! I HELPED yoU ON THE TunNeLs JuST NOW! ThAT wAs MY MAGNET STyLE!! MY—!

So they both independently had magnet-style, the statement meant, Gaara rationalized.

The Sunagakure and Konohagakure teams split up, one team to each narrow side tunnel, and the Suna-nin followed Temari's plan. Katiya was securely defended behind Kankuro in the front and Gaara's sand in the back. Not that they needed defense from pancakes.

They searched the rooms that Gaara left intact.

"Prisoners!" Kankuro yelled, opening up a room.

Katiya's fingers twitched as she tried bagging the medical records she found into scrolls, only to realize she couldn't use her chakra to seal the items up. Gaara rested a hand on her shoulder, quietly sealing the items up for her. He tried to remember some of the names, but they didn't stick. He only knew that for some reason, Orochimaru had targeted a particular clan from Sunagakure as test subjects for the base he and his siblings had raided. The Hoki clan, one of the few clan-families of Suna to have a family name.

Temari (approximate time: 10:20 AM)

Not every Oto-nin got crushed when Gaara collapsed the tunnels, and there were still regions uncollapsed deeper through, so after they raided the accessible rooms, the Konoha and Suna teams gathered back in the main holding area.

"Twelve freed prisoners, mostly from the Land of Wind, from what we gathered," Kotetsu announced first. "Thirty-six Oto-nin we had to put down, three captured and sealed. Medic-nin, they looked like so we thought we'd grab them instead of killing."

"Nice, we just had four prisoners to free, no captures," Kankuro replied. "We didn't count the enemy casualties, though."

"Yeah, well now's the hard part! You guys ready to tackle the parts of the base we didn't collapse?!" Anko smirked. Gaara had left parts of the tunnels un-reinflated in order to give the joint team more time to regroup and deal with the stragglers.

"Do you think we can collapse the rest of the tunnels and then raise the roofs again instead, Gaara?" Temari asked.

"I'm not sure I have enough chakra for both tunnels again, but I can do one. And if need be, I can try asking Shukaku."

"Ah, no, that's alright. We'll work with just the one. You're not going to be fully out like that, are you?"

Gaara replied negatively and Temari took the answer to start mentally building her next plan.

"I think the tunnels are big enough for both our teams," Izumo said. "We can block the entrance and mow them down, yeah?"

"But if there's a backdoor, we might be walking into a trap. We've delayed our assault long enough for them to regroup," Temari replied.

"The doors only open to certain chakra signatures right? Maybe we killed off all the upper ranks?" Kotetsu hoped.

"Maybe," Temari answered.