Naruto 1. Prologue

PROLOGUE

The ground shook. The beat of thirty thousand feet drummed against the earth muffled by the thick morning fog. It was a sound like rolling thunder and much the same it charged the air with the promise of violence.

The two hosts, each even in number of almost eight thousand, marched towards each other across the lightly sloped hills of southern Earth. They were due to meet in a matter of minutes from the west and the east. The chosen field of battle a small valley gouged from the earth by a trickling river that once measured a hundred meters across. A millennia of silt, carrying nutrients and minerals from the mountains of Earth, ensured the trees and undergrowth grew thick and heavy along the river bank. Both armies, spotting each other as they crested the ridge on their respective side of the valley, raised their banners.

The army of the west, clad in grey and flying the banner of a musical note, charged in a roiling mass of yells and battle cries into the valley floor. Eight thousand men and women, clanging steel on steel, crashed through the undergrowth crushing it underfoot. None stopped to think as they forded the river, boiling it with chakra as they dashed across its surface. Their formation became stretched as they broke through the tree line on the opposite bank, the thick mud accumulated in the bend of the river slowing their footing.

There was only confusion when they saw the clear slopes of the eastern side of the valley. Where there should have been an army were only jagged stones. They halted, uncertain, and began to gather in open ground between the tree line and the stones.

Unbeknownst to them a girl hidden prone beneath her cloak spied their progress through small brass tube. She was careful not to raise her head as she counted their numbers, mindful of the hair that sat on her head in the form of two small buns. As she counted she absentmindedly crushed a clod of dirt between her fingers, coating them in a fine grit. With a deep breath she placed the brass tube into a pouch on her back and in the same motion drew out a kunai with a tag wrapped around its hilt. With a muted grunt she threw it in the air as far as she could and traced a thin red line across the sky. It burst in the air with a crack, giving off a bright red light.

Pulses of chakra rippled down the side of the valley as ninja revealed themselves, rising from their hiding spots with their hands on their weapons. A torrent of blue points of light poured from them into the enemy below as chakra charged kunai and shuriken shot through the enemy formation. Heads were separated from bodies, lungs torn and guts spilled as blood was scattered in a fine mist across the valley floor. A shinobi kunai weighed roughly a kilo. Its core was made from lead for weight with a steel jacket surrounding it. Thrown by a trained ninja it could travel almost half a kilometer and shatter bone when it hit.

Those who died first were trampled into the ground as the Oto-nin came to grips with the attack and charged up the slope. It was, however, disorganized. The sown confusion prevented a solid line as platoons were scattered by the incoming fire.

The ambushers withdrew up the slope, giving the Oto-nin the illusion of momentum. As they reached the first stones in which the ambushers had hid, four great dragons of fire rose from the ridge. The valley was bathed in light. The mist burst into nothingness as heat radiated down on the valley and flash baked the mud. The Oto-nin stopped in their tracks as the dragons screamed overhead and crashed into the tree line behind them creating a blazing inferno. A curtain of flames had bisected their army.

A green wave of bodies came charging down the hill four ranks deep the symbol of the leaf glinting in the sun that now shone brightly into the valley. They halted and the first rank crouched at the command of a silver haired officer. The sound of a thousand simultaneous hand signs being formed thundered from the line of men before a moment of silence punctuated a wall of fire racing down the slope. A gale wind followed and the wall became a blue tidal wave that incinerated everything it touched. With a roar it crashed into the curtain of flames and exploded into the sky.

The ground left behind was scorched black, with a few wisps of smoke and columns of white ash floating in the up-draft caused by the heat. The stench of burnt flesh choked the air as the moans of the dying crept along the ground. A few Oto-nin had managed to survive, more by luck than skill, as they had taken cover in the few defilades available. They were blind and drowning in their own fluids as the superheated air had cooked them from the inside out.

The Konoha forces moved into valley. Eight thousand men and women walked, the black earth cracking beneath their feet. They ignored the cries for mercy.

After the battle a man, his face and glasses half melted off, was dragged into the Konoha encampment. A few strands of grey hair somehow spared from burning up clung to the angry red skin of his scalp. Heavy chains, sealed to be chakra suppressive, shackled his arms and legs leaving him barely able to move. As he passed through the camp the shinobi jeered, spitting and kicking at him. After all they all knew who he was.

His captors dropped him in front of a large tent whose entrance was flanked on each side by two large flags. A four part symbol was emblazoned upon them. A leaf, a wave, an hourglass, and finally the face of a fox with nine tails arrayed like a fan behind it.


	2. Chapter 1 - Benzaiten's blessing

"To know ten thousand things, know one well. " – Go Rin No Sho

* * *

**Chapter 1**

Uzumaki Naruto was lying in the grass, a book perched on his face as he tried to catch a few extra minutes of sleep. He was at the Team Seven meeting grounds waiting for his ever tardy sensei to show up. So far they had been waiting for two hours, something that could be clearly seen in the irritation on his teammate's faces.

"Naruto," the pink one said "even when you're sleeping you have your nose in a book."

Naruto lifted a corner of the said book and cast his eye over his two team mates.

"Never been punched in the face by a book." He replied.

Sakura flushed and lifted a fist menacingly towards Naruto, a vein popping up on her forehead.

"See what I mean? " He continued before dropping the book again "never been ignored by one before either and I've never heard of a book being late."

"Hn" Sasuke scoffed in his usual manner.

"Well if you were more like Sasuke maybe you would have some friends and you wouldn't have to hide behind a book all the time!" Sakura said, lifting her nose and peering down at him from above.

"The bastard has friends now?" Naruto chuckled "news to me."

That earned him a kick in the ribs that sent him rolling on his side. Instead of rolling back, he simply opened up his book and continued to read. With a moan of frustration Sakura turned her attention away from the bookworm and back to the raven haired boy who had been observing the pair through the corner of his eye.

"Saaasuuu" she started.

Sasuke cut her off "No."

Some variation of this routine had been played out every morning for the last two weeks. What followed was Kakashi turning up somewhere between two to four hours late, a D-rank mission, then a couple hours of formation drill before they were dismissed for the day. Invariably Naruto would then go to Ichiraku Ramen for his evening meal before heading to his favorite haunt.

* * *

It was a large building that half sunk into one of the nearby hills on the very edge of the village. The wood it was made from was ancient, and nothing like that forests that now surrounded it. It was dark, solid as iron and gave off the faint scent of pine needles. Naruto pushed past the squat doors and descended into the cool. Small lamps that burned blue dotted the stone walls at regular intervals, casting several shadows around the small boy. That was also unusual. Stone construction was rarely found in Konoha and in particular this grey-flecked stone could be found nowhere else.

Eventually he came to a small circular chamber with several corridors shooting off it in each of the cardinal directions. In the center was a wide wooden desk with a man hunched over it, scribbling with a small brush into a large leather tome that seemed larger than the man himself. It wouldn't be remiss to feel that the man was a part of the building. His skin, heavily lined and creased like the scrolls around him, was the same grey as the stone and his dark cloak melted into the wood of his desk.

As Naruto's footsteps echoed through the chamber the old man looked up from his work, carefully clearing away a stack of gold leaf into one of his many pockets. White rheumy eyes looked up at Naruto, the blue lamp light flickering on their surface.

"Good evening Naruto." He greeted him, his voice creaking like the wind through some forgotten castle.

Naruto had never been sure if the man could actually see. The white smudges on the librarian's pupils suggested that he couldn't yet without fail he would recognize him the moment he stepped into the chamber.

Naruto dipped his head in respect "Yorozu-san, good evening to you as well."

Without another word between them Naruto walked further into the library and set himself up at one of the many tables with a large stack of books and scrolls. He was one of the few that ever visited this particular place. It held no shinobi techniques or instruction on killing and such was of little interest to that branch of society. Civilians were also not often lettered enough to appreciate the enormity of what was stored here. The history of this particular library stretched far back into the mists of time, even beyond what Yorozu, the librarian, could recall. The name of the place had long faded from the face of the building, worn away by the wind and rain.

The books here were equally ancient and took many forms that Naruto had seen nowhere else. Books in the form of paper bound with strings, glue, vellum scrolls, slats of bamboo roped tightly together. Their contents were equally strange, making reference to things and events that were never mentioned outside its walls.

Naruto drank it all in heavily like a man dying of thirst. Many of the things he read could equally be called fiction or not. It was impossible to tell but in their fantastic worlds Naruto could lose himself.

He had stumbled upon this place as a small child. Recently thrown from the doors of the orphanage he had wandered the streets of Konoha aimlessly and largely ignored by its populace. It had started to rain. A flash storm pelting the city with water and wind as people fled indoors and shuttered their windows. It was deep into the night when he had sheltered inside the library, tracking water and bits of leaves and twigs into the building. Just as he had not moments before, at that time Naruto had descended into the circular chamber to be met with Yozoru-san looking much the same and sitting at that desk.

He had recoiled back when the old man lifted his gaze and stared at him. It was a fear of what he would see in the old man's eyes. Hate, scorn, or maybe cold indifference but it was none of those. Those clouded eyes betrayed nothing but the flickering blue lamp light.

"So, another comes to Benzaiten-sama's home." The old man said.

"Oh!" Naruto exclaimed "I-I-I didn't know this was someone's house. I'm really sorry! I'll leave right now."

A dry laugh escaped from Yozoru's lips like the soft susurrus of shuffling papers.

"All are welcome here. Now tell me your name." he said.

Naruto hung his head and spoke under his breath "its Naruto…Uzumaki Naruto."

A sudden bang made Naruto's face shoot up, expecting nothing more than anger and to be thrown back out into the storm. It was instead Yozoru dropping a large stone plate onto the surface of his desk. With shaking fingers the old man drew a small black stone from one of the drawers and began to grind it on the stone. Again with the clacking of wooden drawers he then drew out a small pot and poured a measured amount of water into a small reservoir at one end of the plate.

Moistening a small fine brush in his mouth Yozoru asked a question with a chuckle.

"Naruto the maelstrom or is it the Ramen topping I wonder?"

Indignant Naruto raised his voice "Its maelstrom you old geezer! You better remember the name because one day I'm going to be Hokage."

That just elicited that same dry laugh.

With a deft hand Yozoru wrote Naruto's name into one of the many books that littered the surface of the desk.

At that time the old man had given Naruto a stack of books, one which he carried with him to this day. It was a welcome gift he had been told, something to help him on his path to becoming Hokage. Once he had been taught to read by Yozoru he had devoured them and ever since had come back to the library almost every day.

It was then that Naruto's love affair with books had started. Books were the fairest of teachers. They didn't care who he was or when he had time or what he had done or planned to do. They gave knowledge with the price of admission being nothing more than the willingness to read. They also allowed Naruto to travel, to see and to experience things that sat beyond the obstacles of time and place. Things that he had heard no mention of beyond the stony corridors of the library, things he never would or could have imagined. His fascinations with great military leaders lead him easily to that section of the library. Countries, wars and battles led by men in the far past even greater, more immense than anything in the Elemental Nations.

The next morning Naruto rose early. He had little need or tolerance for sleep. It took time that he felt could be better spent elsewhere and his restless chakra wouldn't tolerate it in the first place. He awoke before dawn every day, prepared a small meal and left to train in one of the many fields that existed for that purpose.

The library had little in the way of combat skills yet many of the things he had read impacted deeply on his motivation. So far he had exactly three justu to his name, Kawarimi, Henge and Kage-bunshin.

And so he trained those three skills mercilessly every morning for hours at a time. Faster, stronger, harder, he pushed these incremental improvements until the form of the chakra, the hand seals, the sensations all imprinted on his mind as if with indelible ink. They had to be as instinctual as breathing.

He often fought his own clones. Many sages of the past had exhorted the value of knowing one's self, of mastering one's self. This perhaps was a too literal interpretation born from a child's mind as Naruto brutally sought to gain the upper hand on his own person. They would strike and stab, crush and cut each other, himself, in the melee.

The bruises and cuts would fade by the time he made it to meet his team.

* * *

Today it seemed was different. When Team Seven found themselves once again at the mission hall in the Hokage Tower they found that Umino Iruka was manning the desk accompanied by the Hokage himself.

"Jjiji!" Naruto cried.

In reply to Hokage dipped his head as he drew on the pipe in the corner of his mouth.

"Hello Naruto. Are you well?" he said.

"Ah you know how it is Jiji. So many books, so little time." Naruto replied.

The Hokage, known as the professor, smiled. He had been ecstatic to find Naruto's love for books and indeed had gifted one to the small boy on his birthday ever since he had found out.

Everyone else there reacted somewhat differently to this brazen familiarity between a mere genin and the supreme commander of the shinobi forces. Kakashi simply ignored it, a little orange book covering the lower half of his face. Sasuke scoffed and averted his eyes in a scornful manner. Sakura and Iruka too grew a little red in the face and prepared to lash their tongues at this display of disrespect.

"Well Naruto," The Hokage said "This is time for business not pleasure. You should do well to keep that in mind."

Naruto scratched the back of his head with a bashful look.

"Ah, I apologize Hokage-sama." He said with a bow "I forgot."

This seemed to mollify Iruka and Sakura but there was still a little heat in their eyes that caused a nervous laugh to escape from Naruto's lips.

With that done Iruka began to speak "So there are currently four D-rank missions available, the first being."

"No! Not another D-rank please. Hokage-sama I beseech you to see fit to bestow upon your humble servant a C-rank mission." Naruto replied, flourishing his hand with a bow.

The Hokage's eyes creased in amusement at Naruto's little speech

Sakura punched him in the back of the head.

For the first time in days Sasuke spoke.

"The dobe is right. We deserve a C-rank."

With a questioning look Hiruzen looked towards Kakashi who gave an imperceptible nod.

* * *

Team Seven, accompanied by Tazuna, a bridge builder were currently travelling to the Land of Waves, where they were to guard the man while he completed the construction of a new bridge. It was a straightforward C-rank, expected resistance being nothing more than the odd bandit or scavengers. Going at a civilian pace it was almost two weeks before they expected to arrive in wave and begin the main phase of the mission which was to last a minimum of one month.

Both Kakashi and Naruto hung towards the rear of the five man formation with Tazuna in the center. Each, man and boy, were walking with a book held in front of their face but nonetheless their feet easily traversed to terrain avoiding sticks, stones and other tripping hazards.

Soft muttering could be heard the entire time coming from Tazuna, complaints about the quality of his escort and more so about the poor quality of the sake he had picked up back in the village. For the other two members of Team Seven, the trip was composed entirely of endless monotony as the road seemed to stretch forever and dip below the horizon.

They were then caught completely by surprise by the sudden frenzy of activity as Kakashi was suddenly torn in half by a serrated chain that flew from the side of the road. Holding each end of the chain was two shinobi, foreheads displaying the scratched symbol of Kirigakure. They were hulking figures, standing at least two heads taller than the next tallest member of Team Seven and almost twice as broad. Their faces were obscured by steel re-breathers that lent a tinny quality to their voices.

"Run little genin, run and give us the bridge builder." They said together as blood dripped from the chain and onto the earth.

The acrid scent of iron blood filled Naruto's nostrils as his eyes flitted over the two figures. With a start he stepped into a stance, flicking a pebble down the road behind him, as he considered his next course of action. Of course, that was made moot when the Uchiha charged the two ninja unheeding what his two team mates were doing.

"Sakura!" Naruto yelled "take Tazuna into the tree line and run. We'll hold them off."

The girl was holding a shaking kunai in one hand pointed at the ground and her feet were glued to the earth. He eyes were wide and her lips moved up and down in an attempt to speak but only managed a choked gasp.

"Fuck" Naruto thought to himself "Sakura!" he yelled again

With a scream she woke from her stupor and grabbed the older man and ran.

Naruto turned back to see the two missing-nin bearing down on Sasuke. Time seemed to slow as he heard the hiss of the chain cutting through the air and the heavy booming footfalls of steel clad feet.

Without thinking his hands flashed into motion

Tiger - Tiger – Boar – Ox - Dog - Snake

A Shadow clone burst into existence beside him before it was pulled away by a thread of chakra. An instant later Sasuke fell to the ground beside Naruto as his clone was went up in a cloud of smoke.

An angry look passed between the two but before words could be exchanged the missing –nin were upon them.

The pair jumped back further down the road as that blood covered chain chased after them. Mid-air Sasuke performed a string of seals

"Katon: Goukakyu no justu!"

A torrent of flames expelled from his mouth as he landed on his feet, rushing towards the oncoming enemies.

"Suiton: Mizurappa" was whispered by the one on the left and then a jet of water came shooting from his mouth to meet the flames , extinguishing them in an explosion of steam.

Their vision obscured Naruto and Sasuke stepped back warily, coming back to back in the cloud of steam. They each swept their eyes around them. Their knuckles were white as they gripped their kunai. A slow chuckle floated through the air. Then there was silence.

The two stood there for a full five seconds wondering why they were still alive then it hit them.

They spoke at the same time.

"Sakura!"

Fueled by desperation the two members of Team Seven rushed into the tree line roughly in the direction they had seen Sakura flee. Naruto's breath caught in his throat as he furiously pumped his legs and tears began to form in the corners of his eyes.

"This can't be happening. This can't be happening." He chanted to himself.

It had been so sudden. His mouth dried up. His lungs burned and his heart wanted to give out. Only a day earlier the three of them had been sitting in their training ground in a show of their odd brand of camaraderie. Outwardly they detested each other yet in this moment, suffused by the horror of death, Naruto found himself wishing to go back.

The pair landed clumsily in a clearing some ways into the forest. There was blood. The whole clearing had been painted with blood like in some feverish dream. The old man, Tazuna, was strung up in one of the trees with ninja wire. His head was missing and so was most of the lower half of his body.

Naruto collapsed onto his knees and screamed and yelled and beat on his chest. His tears were interrupted by a surge of bile rising up from his stomach. Retching he tore at the earth beneath his hands.

Below the tree was Sakura, eyes dull and lifeless.


	3. Chapter 2 - Anthem for a doomed youth

"There is nothing outside of yourself that can ever enable you to get better, stronger, richer, quicker, or smarter. Everything is within. Everything exists. Seek nothing outside of yourself." – Go Rin No Sho

* * *

Naruto woke screaming. He was on the ground, the blue sky above him framed by the roadside trees. He sat up breathless and panting. Cold sweat ran down his face and back. What he saw was Kakashi, with his little orange book, leaning against one of the trees. Anger bubbled up from the pit of Naruto's stomach and consumed any sense of confusion. With a heave he stood and rushed at the man, fist cocked back and ready to hammer into his face.

He pinned Kakashi to the tree with an accusatory glare, willing him to stand still and take the hit. Kakashi caught his fist with ease. He didn't even need to take his eyes off his book. With his one uncovered eye the jonin looked to the side, drawing Naruto's vision to what lay at his feet. Two corpses sat there, the missing-nin, dead.

Kakashi then gripped Naruto's head and spun him around to show him Sakura, lying unhurt and alive, next to Sasuke who was also passed out.

"What?" Naruto whispered "What's going on? What the fuck is this?"

He was slowly descending into hysterics as his eyes seemed to betray his mind. Not moments before the pink-haired girl had been dead. He leapt back from the others and pulled a kunai from one his pouches and made to cut his upper arm.

He stopped though when his two team mates woke, sitting up. Sakura was patting herself down, as if disbelieving that her body was one in piece. Sasuke sat up with in alarm his eyes softening momentarily as he saw the pink-haired girl beside him.

He said one word "Genjustu," and glared at the one eyed jonin.

"Genjustu…."Naruto muttered. "It was all just a genjustu...You fucking bastard why?"

Three genin looked towards Kakashi with wounded looks.

"Why the fuck would you do something like this?" Naruto yelled as Sakura choked out relieved sobs.

Kakashi turned a page in his book with exaggerated slowness before answering.

"What did you learn?" he drawled.

Naruto grit his teeth and punched his fist into the tree drawing blood from his knuckles. It had been all too convincing because it was all too plausible. He had no reason to suspect an illusion because it was so close to reality. Without Kakashi, against shinobi, they would be cut like stalks of wheat at harvest.

"You didn't have to do it like this….not like this…" he said

Putting his book away Kakashi clasped Naruto's shoulders and looked him in the eye.

"The world doesn't care for excuses Naruto, and it was better than the alternative." He said

The rebukes died on Naruto's lips. He knew what he had wanted to say. He wanted to blame the man for not teaching them enough, for not caring enough, for his own weakness, but that would be a cold comfort if they all died on a mission, just words and nothing more. He found his eagerness to go on a C-rank mission evaporate and leave behind a bitter taste. The same thoughts seemed to pass through his team mate's minds as they too said nothing.

"What now?" Sasuke said walking over to them.

His face was held in a carefully neutral pose but the way he ground out the words between teeth betrayed his anger. A black veil of self-loathing settled over him as he played the illusion over and over again in his mind. He was too weak.

Kakashi addressed the three of them "We will escort Tazuna to Wave. A team will meet us there and we will be relieved."

The three genin nodded their heads in understanding. After all they had been attacked by missing-nin and had yet to even arrive in Wave, if not for Kakashi they would have turned around already.

"What then Kakashi sensei?" Naruto asked.

"Then," Kakashi said "you will do D-ranks until you are capable."

Sakura's grief turned to anger and she screeched at their teacher

"When we're capable? You haven't taught us anything! Then you do something like this. What the hell is wrong with you?"

"Oh? Is Sakura eager to learn?" Kakashi's voice inflected it as a joke.

"It's your job to teach us….." she said, cowed.

"This is something you must know. Not be told. Not read." He said looking at each of them. "We all die alone."

An oppressive weight dropped down on team seven as they were reminded of their harsh lesson in mortality.

"In our line of work a willingness to learn is the same as a willingness to live. Insufficient. You must be willing to lie, steal, cheat, scam, beg, bargain, kill or fuck to survive. Most of all you must ceaselessly struggle because stagnation means death."

The ominous pressure continued to press down on the three genin and they were left stricken. It had gripped them like a vice and forced them to listen to every single word that had come from the jonin's mouth.

He gave them one last piercing look before falling into a halfhearted smile.

"You owe it to yourselves, you owe it to your village, and you owe it to each other and the ones you love."

They traveled to Wave in complete silence, each genin lost in their own thoughts in the aftermath of Kakashi's first and brutal lesson. Tazuna ceased his muttering and was silent for the rest of the whole trip staring into his bottle of sake more than anywhere else.

Sakura was dazed and unable to think. So much had happened in the last few days. She found herself recoiling whenever she looked at the Uchiha heir. Not because of him but herself.

* * *

They arrived in Wave and Tazuna's home with little fanfare. No armies of mercenaries or platoons of missing-nin. A young woman named Tsunami, Tazuna's daughter, had introduced herself to the party before quickly excusing herself and her son. Naruto looked on wistfully as she led the little boy away. Inari, she said his name was. The boy was cute enough but he was marred with a streak of pessimism beyond his years.

"You're all going to die." He said and left before anyone could muster a reply. For all its truth, it wasn't something you expected from someone so young.

The midday meal had been a simple affair, some rice, a fried fish and a side of miso soup. They ate quietly but the food did not sit comfortably after the little boy's words. They would only be there until the relief team arrived, a day at the most. There was a possibility of attack but it seemed unlikely as they had passed into the country unmolested at the river border which was the most ideal for ambush. Nevertheless it bothered the three genin who still were acutely sensitive to the subject of dying.

That night a guard rotation was set with the three genin taking the first shift and Kakashi to take the second. They weren't going to risk a single genin being the only set of eyes in the case of attack and so the three found themselves using the roof of Tazuna's home as a makeshift lookout. A cool ocean breeze blew across the three as they huddled together on top of the roof, each taking a sector of the area around the building.

The next several hours passed quietly with nothing but the sound of nocturnal animals scurrying through the trees disturbing the quiet.

'What's that book you're always reading Naruto?" Sakura asked.

She remembered seeing Naruto enter that clearing as she felt the light leave her eyes. Silly Naruto, always aloof, always reading and saying stupid things, had been distraught. The anguish that wracked his body was far too real genjutsu or not. You didn't react that way for an acquaintance, and that's really all that they could call each other. She had seen Sasuke's softening face as well.

"Oh this?" he said pulling it out. It was a small green book with a fabric cover bound together with a fine red twine. The edges of the book were frayed with age and the paper yellow. The text was tiny, smaller than a grain of rice and it covered each page in its entirety. The title, brushed with ink on the cover, had almost completely faded away.

"It's called the Kokin Wakashu. It's a poetry book."

A single abrupt bark of laughter came from Sasuke.

Naruto snapped "Shut the hell up Sasuke."

Sakura frowned but said nothing, instead turning back to Naruto.

"Really?" she said "I had no idea"

Naruto tried to hide the creeping blush on his face by averting his eyes but it only deepened when Sakura asked him to read something aloud from the book.

Stuttering at first bust slowly gaining confidence Naruto began to recite several of the poems out of the book. By anyone's reckoning it was clear that he had practice as he took all the right pauses and the poetry flowed in an easy measure.

"This is an epoch  
in which no stormy winds blow  
to the scatter the flowers,  
and thus I have gazed my fill  
at the wild cherry's color."

"Do you think the poet was being honest?" Sakura asked after a moment of thought.

The two boys couldn't answer her. They looked on in confusion when they heard the question and realized just how little they knew. Not just about the world but also each other.

"I thought I died today." She said "I really did."

"Don't…" Naruto had almost told her not to worry but he squeezed his mouth shut. He had no right to say such a thing to her or anyone. The vision in that clearing slammed into his mind once again and brought bile to the back of his throat.

She ignored Naruto and said with a lilt to her voice "I thought maybe that wasn't such a bad thing."

Sasuke stood and turned to face her before slapping her across the cheek, the solid smack bringing up large red welt on her face.

"Shut up Sakura." He spoke her name for the first time with a deep growl. "Don't ever say that again."

His two team mates looked at him with wide eyes. Naruto was left speechless. The Uchiha had almost never spoken their names before, nor had he ever physically struck out in anger.

"You have family. You least of all should talk about dying."

Sasuke gave Naruto a guilty look as he said that, well aware that if anything they had at least one thing in common.

"What about your brother! Your ambitions…" Sakura said, scrunching her eyes and balling up her fists.

Sasuke snarled and had to be restrained by Naruto as he tried to rush the girl. There was no strength in his struggle though.

"Don't."

Gone too far to stop Sakura kept talking "Don't you have to rebuild your clan and get revenge? And you Naruto, what about becoming Hokage?"

She expected another outburst of anger from Sasuke, to tell her she was useless, but it never came. He had stopped struggling in Naruto's grip and had sat down facing away from the both of them.

Naruto was the first to break the silence.

"Kakashi is right. When we get home…we'll do better."

It was true that Naruto trained, and he trained hard, but he had become too absorbed in his own little world, his own little habits. He had gone too long without learning anything new. There was a limit to how highly a technique could be polished at a given level on one's own. He had to admit that he had been foolish.

* * *

The trio had bedded down in a storage room on the second floor. It had been cold. A strong draft had flowed all night from a glassless window set in the eastern wall. It was too small for even a child to fit and placed high up to aid ventilation. Naruto woke with the sun as the first sickly beams of orange light suffused the room. He was struck with a moment of panic as he opened his eyes as he felt his armed tied up and pinned. Turning his head he saw his two team mates, one on each side, huddled up to him in the middle of the room. He knew if he woke them now he would be rewarded with nothing but pain so he remained still and tried to drift off back to sleep.

His eyes snapped back open though when he heard the sound of something slamming into the wood above his head. Adrenaline charged through his body as his eyes adjusted to the light and recognized the silhouette of a kunai and the hissing of a lit explosive tag. Throwing his team mates off him Naruto jumped onto his feet and grasped the kunai. Straining his whole shoulder he pulled it free and tossed it towards the window, praying to any god who would listen that his aim stayed true.

"Dobe what do-"

A concussive wave interrupted the black haired boy as the tags back blast tore through the window and rattled the whole house. A cloud of plaster and splinters of wood showered the room, knocking them to the ground and sending their ears ringing. The three of them crawled out into the hallway, yelling and tipping over like drunken men but it was impossible to hear each other and none of them could read lips.

They stumbled out the front door only to be knocked down again when the ground in front of them exploded in a geyser of dirt. On their backs they saw dozens of tagged kunai raining down on the property, their faint hiss merging into a solid buzzing punctuated by the staccato of explosions.

The two boys hauled Sakura up onto her feet before throwing her in to the fresh crater in front of them and diving in after her. The kunai continued to fall for several long minutes during which trees splintered in all directions and the ground shook like it was being pummeled by an angry god. There was no fire, like one imagined as a child, no great tongues of flickering flames that threatened to consume you. That would be far too up front. The truth was far more insidious. All you could see was that slight distortion in the air as is it tore into everything it touched and disintegrated it, flinging bits and pieces of whatever it hit at supersonic speeds. It didn't have that deep booming quality either, sounding more like a large stick being snapped in half, it simply came as an abrupt crack that was gone as soon as you heard it.

As Naruto made those observations he realized how calm he was. It was eerie how the sense of panic seemed to drain away as he sat in that little crater being showered with dirt. Perhaps he was resigned to it. In contrast Sakura screamed and clutched at her head, rocking back and forth as she tried to squeeze herself into a smaller and smaller ball. It was Sasuke though who Naruto couldn't understand. The boy was laughing. Laughing so hard he was clutching at his ribs and shaking his shoulders.

"So you finally snapped you psycho bastard!" Naruto yelled, not that he could be heard.

Nevertheless Sasuke looked at him as if he knew what Naruto had said.

"I'm never going to kill my brother and you're never going to be Hokage." Sasuke yelled back "We're all going to die here in this piece of shit country and have our names put on that shitty rock. Even Sakura is going to be a hero!"

He continued to howl with laughter as the world evaporated around them.

The bombardment stopped.

Naruto peered over the edge of the crater. The air was thick with a haze of dust so he could see very little, just the barest outlines of the shattered trees around what used to be Tazuna's home. Sasuke was still giggling so Naruto punched him in the mouth.

"Get your shit together Sasuke." He hissed. "We need to figure out what to do."

Sakura was still crawled up in a ball whimpering quietly. Naruto grabbed her by the shoulder and shook her gently.

"Sakura look at me." he said

The girl looked up at him with dirt caked on her face with runnels of tears tracking down her cheeks. Naruto found himself at a loss for words. He had no idea what they were supposed to do. Tazuna was most likely dead, and his family. Kakashi was nowhere to be seen. The mission was a failure.

"We…we need to leave, find Kakashi."

There wasn't even the hint of clarity in the young girls face. She just stared with a blank look straight through him like he wasn't even there.

"Sakura goddamn it." Naruto said under his breath. "Can you hear me? We don't have time for this."

"Naruto…" Sasuke interjected,"Naruto!" he said again getting increasingly desperate.

"Dobe!" he tried again.

"What! You fucking bastard can't you see I'm trying to-"

Naruto turned his head to look in Sasuke's direction and his face paled when he did. Dozens of figures were materializing out of the haze. The way they held themselves and the way they walked through the devastated landscape said only one thing, shinobi.

Voices began to drift out of the smog.

"Don't you think this was a little overkill?"

"It's the copy-nin, better safe than sorry."

"HQ won't be happy when they find out we used a month worth of tags in one attack."

"They won't give a shit when we bring back Hatake."

"If his body survived the explosions…."

"Don't forget the bridge builder. We'll go to blow the bridge right after."


	4. Chapter 3 - Blood in the water

"The only reason a warrior is alive is to fight, and the only reason a warrior fights is to win." – Go Rin No Sho

* * *

Fear is said to be cold, to grip, like an icy hand around your heart. Naruto wasn't cold. In fact he was sweltering as beads of sweat ran down his face. He counted twelve shinobi alone and who knew how many were still hidden in the dust.

He tried to rationalize a course of action, any action, his mind searching frantically, desperately, for something that could be done. He was a genin with one boy for back up and a practically comatose girl between them. He had nothing. The enemy shinobi would be faster, stronger, more numerous and any hope of defeating them was slim to none. It was a quirk of human psychology. At times in the face of certain death self-preservation evaporated. Thoughts of surrender fled from the mind and somehow one was able to push their fears deep down to be dealt with later, if by some miracle they survived.

Naruto spat a thick glob of gritty spit. The inside of his nose and mouth was coated in the dust. All of a sudden he was acutely aware of how irritating it was. He was parched and his tongue sat fat and heavy in his mouth. An idea slowly started to coalesce in his mind.

"Oi, bastard" He said "I want you to take Sakura and run."

Sasuke gave him a dirty look and pulled out a brace of shuriken. His body was tense and coiled up like a spring ready to jump at any second.

"Don't overestimate yourself Dobe. You'll give us two seconds tops and I'm fast but not that fast. There's no point-"

Naruto gave an exasperated look in return and said "I never said I was going to sacrifice myself. You really are a giant bastard."

Without another word Naruto leapt up from the crater and out into the open, his fingers held in a familiar seal.

"Tajuu Kage-bunshin no jutsu!"

At Naruto's command a thousand shadow clones in henge spewed from his body and ran in random directions. For a moment the invading force was shocked to a standstill as the tide of genin dispersed like an overturned ant hill. The jonin among them even more so as they realized these were all corporeal clones. They could tell by the way the dust twisted around them as they caused turbulence in the air, and the vibration of the many footfalls passing through the earth.

Their formation was turned against them. It was set loose for the purpose of searching a wide area and they were ill prepared for such a number to beset them. The clones poured through their porous formation, passing in between each shinobi like a stream of bodies, and struck out with kunai as they ran past. One of the lesser experienced shinobi in the center of the formation panicked under the flurry of blows despite the lack of power or skill behind them and cast a wide area water jutsu. The results were disastrous. The thin blade of chakra honed water scythed through a dozens of clones, barely slowing down, as its arc continued to grow. It bisected four of the man's comrades in a spray of blood and offal. In the resulting chaos Naruto and his two team mates managed to slip away further into the forest.

* * *

The belligerent shinobi were left panting with exertion after they had cleared out the remaining clones. They had missed many and now there were hundreds of tracks circling their position. The jonin leading the group was momentarily overwhelmed by what had just happened. Four of his sub-ordinates lay dead, victims of friendly fire, and there was a konoha-nin who was capable of creating a thousand shadow clones but with only rudimentary close-combat skills. To make things worse two of the four who had been killed had been their best trackers. In a fit of frustration he gripped the throat of the fool who had fired off that jutsu and squeezed until he stopped twitching.

He knew there would be repercussions when they returned from this mission. Not for suffocating his subordinate, as that was a mercy compared to what awaited him back in the village, but for the fact that his platoon had been ambushed by mere genin and lost a tenth of their strength.

"You mother fuckers better find Hatake and bring me his head or I'll-"

"Take yours instead?"

The jonin whipped his head around to see the very man he had been hunting standing in front of them in a brazen display of bravado. The eighteen other members of the section quickly fell onto his flanks with their weapons bared.

"Here," the copy-nin continued "I got you started."

A small black sealing scroll clattered to the ground in front of the jonin and rolled to a stop against his boot. He picked it up and saw it was a standard corpse scroll used to store dead bodies for transit.

"You're bluffing." The jonin said with a sneer. He unfurled it. A stupid thing to do in most circumstances but he couldn't back down from the implied challenge; it would be bad for morale.

"The legendary Hatake resorting to cheap scare tac-"

A bloody head wearing a kiri headband fell out of the scroll, followed by another, and another, and another. Sixteen heads all told had dropped from the scroll, spattering the jonin with flecks of blood as they hit the ground. It was the other half of his platoon who had been stationed further out in case they had to resort to chasing their targets. The Kakashi who had been thoroughly surrounded by this point decomposed into a puddle and to the Kiri-nin who had been focusing on the heads he seemed to simply vanish. Then a sudden jolt of pain blossomed in the Kiri jonin's chest.

The high voltage of the infamous raikiri ionized the air around the user's hand, effectively creating a blade of high concentration plasma at the finger tips. The human body was also seventy percent water.

The jonin's torso exploded in a tight cone of charred flesh and bone fragments that eviscerated the shinobi standing on the opposite side of the circle. The others only suffered a light peppering as they looked on in horror as their perforated leader sloughed off Kakashi's arm and hit the ground with a hollow squelch. His onlookers were unable to move even an inch as a dread killing intent started to rise up like a tide of blood lapping at their throats.

The copy-nin took his time to dust a fine red powder off his uniform as if it was a daily routine before he drew a kunai in each hand and eased into a practiced stance. In desperation they charged him all at once in an un-coordinated manner, getting into each other's way more often than not. Had they been thinking clearly, or their officer remained alive they may have realized it would have been the smarter option to move back and overwhelm him with overlapping fields of justsu. Instead they had opted to limit themselves by crowding in on the single enemy.

Kakashi stayed mobile, ducking and weaving around and under their blows and holding his standard issue kunai close to his body. He stayed at the very edge of the group, limiting his exposure to two or three enemies at a time as he patiently waited for the perfect opportunity.

There. His sharingan spinning madly Kakashi spotted a weak point in the mass of bodies where a small gap had opened up. He exploited it ruthlessly, ducking under a sword blade and snapping his hand out to slice open the man from groin to hip, severing his femoral arty in a gush of blood. He followed through, rushing past the dying man, and drove the momentum of his rising body through his fist and into his next opponent. The woman's face crumpled like paper. As she fell, Kakashi caught her on the tip of his kunai and body checked her into the man behind her sending him tumbling with the corpse.

He didn't stop but continued to move past them as he used the space created to flash through a string of hand seals. With a forward flip he struck the ground with both palms and performed a controlled tumble into one of the craters dotting the battlefield. A reinforced earthen wall chased after him and formed a raised lip on the side of the crater just moments before a blast wave struck the clearing. Kakashi pulled out another kunai from his pouch, this time without an explosive tag, as clods of dirt and bits of shinobi rained down on his position. As he vaulted over the wall while the Kiri-nin were still suppressed Kakashi mused that it was probably pieces of that female and the man pinned beneath her. It seemed only six more had been caught in the explosion. That left eight before Kakashi was finished.

He hugged the ground as he closed the distance, dodging and deflecting, as he passed harmlessly through a barrage of shuriken. As he reached the closest enemy, a swordsman, he spun to the right to avoid an overhead strike and jammed a kunai into the man's kidneys. Using the knife that was hooked in between the nin's spine and ribs as a point of leverage he spun the Kiri-nin around to catch several more shuriken that had been launched against him. He counted six impacts before a spray of water enveloped him as a water bullet smashed against his make-shift shield. It seemed at least one of them had realized the risk of friendly fire had dropped sharply now that there were only seven of them. There was very little liquid water to be found, however, as most of it had been blown away in the earlier bombardment. Kakashi wouldn't have to worry about any large scale water jutsu.

Dropping the mangled corpse he threw his own brace of shuriken and moved on to the next enemy, quickly disemboweling them with a reverse strike and finishing them off with a downward stab that bisected the man's collar bone and drove the tip of the blade into the man's lung then heart. He abandoned the kunai as it had stuck in the bone and spun around to see two of the remaining shinobi attempting to attack him simultaneously. It wasn't a bad attempt. They had each covered the left, right, upper and lower sectors respectively theoretically making it impossible to avoid. They were naïve. Kakashi immediately chose left, charging forward and skewering the woman through the eye socket before dragging her to the ground. Their attack had been put out of sync by the copy-nin's superior speed and the second assailant paid for his mistake as his feet were swept out from under him. Before he had even hit the ground a powerful strike shattered his rib cage and embedded him in the dirt.

The remaining four broke and started to flee, abandoning their weapons and running as fast as their legs could take them away from the man who had just slaughtered their whole platoon. Dropping his headband to cover his sharingan once more Kakashi performed a chain of pinpoint shunshins, appearing behind each retreating Kiri-nin and cutting them down. The shunshin was a high speed movement technique that was useless in open combat due to its linear and predictable nature. For running down enemies who had no intention of fighting back, however, it was perfect.

* * *

The last Kiri-nin had almost made it to the undamaged forest when Kakashi suddenly appeared before her with his arm outstretched. She stopped and her eyes bugged out when she felt a cool metal blade sitting in her mouth.

"Hello Kiri-chan." The copy-nin said. "We're going to talk."

As he said this he slowly pushed her down with the kunai, her having no choice but to follow as the kunai clinked against her teeth. She was now on her knees and looking up at the monster before her. She was exhausted. The fight had been brief but as the adrenaline drained away it left only a scum of fatigue and dread that clung to her body.

"What is Kiri doing in wave?"

She expected him to remove the knife to allow her to speak but he just looked at her with a creepy smile on his face. When she didn't speak the kunai started to angle up towards the roof of her mouth. In a panic she screamed out the answers he was looking for.

"Kiri wants to annex wave!"

"and Gato?" The silver haired nin said.

The female shinobi whimpered as the inside of her mouth was cut up as she spoke.

"He's our pawn."

She tried to speak as few words as possible as blood started to dribble out from her mouth and down her throat making it difficult to speak. The kunai started to angle again.

"Destabilize region. We move in."

She started to cry. She hadn't cried in years. Not since she had passed her genin graduation years ago. All of a sudden she was that same little girl, powerless and at the mercy of those around her.

"What are your dispositions in wave?" the copy-nin continued.

She dreaded speaking. Traitors and incompetents were not treated kindly in Kiri. She held her tongue. Even the copy-nin paled in comparison to the cruelty of the Mizukage.

With a flick of his wrist Kakashi tore out the Kiri-nins left cheek and eased the kunai back into her mouth. She howled in pain, the sound distorted and strangely guttural as she did her best not to move her tongue or mouth. Her body shuddered and was wracked with sobs. The kunai was held at the perfect height for maximum discomfort. She could neither kneel high enough to put her weight on her knees or low enough to sit on her lower legs. Instead she was held in an isometric pose that strained her tortured legs.

"Three platoons. One hunter squad"

"Including yours?" Kakashi asked

"no" she replied

A Kiri-platoon was made up of forty shinobi, all chunnin with a single jonin to lead them. Hunter squads on the other hand were all elite jonin trained specifically to assassinate and retrieve other nin. A normal section of them would be eight members. That meant there would were still one hundred and twenty eight enemy combatants in the country.

"Zabuza? I know he's her. I already met his subordinates."

"Worked for Gato. Job was bait. Should be dead."

"The genin?"

"Not dead. Escaped"

Kakashi lifted a single eyebrow at that. It was no small feat for three genin to escape from a platoon of enemy shinobi. He did have some idea of how it went down, seeing the child sized foot prints practically everywhere. Still, any self-respecting tracker could tell the difference between clones and the real thing.

He continued to question her even as she started to become unintelligible as her mouth became too damaged to form words correctly.

"Thank you Kiri-chan." Kakashi said after a long half hour of questioning "That's all I wanted to know."

He pushed the kunai up through her palate and severed her brain stem.

Wiping the blood off his blade onto her clothes Kakashi quickly traveled through the battlefield retrieving any equipment he had left behind and scavenging anything useful he could find on the dead bodies. Once that was accomplished he moved over to the remains of Tazuna's house and drew some blood on the tip of his thumb.

After several hand seals he slapped the earth and said "Kuchiyose no jutsu."

A small puff of smoke appeared over a black circle of slithering script, fading away to reveal a small dog in a blue vest.

"Pakkun." Kakashi said tilting his head slightly forward. "I need you to find someone for me."

"Who are you looking for?" The small pug said his voice surprisingly gruff. "I see you've been having some fun, a whole Kiri platoon."

Kakashi waved off the accusation and said "My genin."

"Well, do you have anything of theirs? I need a sample. You know that." The dog replied.

"Just look for the smell of strawberry shampoo. I'm sure no one else here would be using something like that." Kakashi chuckled.

Pakkun was incredulous "These are genin were looking for right?"

"Unfortunately" Kakashi said.

* * *

Naruto his two team mates were currently hiding in a small depression under a fallen tree, the three of them puffing and panting as they tried to catch their breath. Their escape had been lucky. They had almost no equipment with them, the majority of it abandoned back in the house. Sasuke had been the only one the grab one of his pouches before their mad evacuation from the crumbling building. They had no provisions or means of navigation and were well and truly lost somewhere in the middle of a foreign nation.

Naruto's hands shook uncontrollably as he struggled to tie a strip of cloth around his upper arm. A piece of shrapnel had caught him and he hadn't noticed until they had settled in their hiding spot. His head felt like it would explode as thousands of disparate memories flooded into his mind and scrambled his sense of what had happened.

After failing to secure it properly for the fifth time Naruto felt a pair of hands take the ends of the cloth from him and start to tie it properly. He looked up to see Sakura, her eyes puffy and red, concentrating intently on the task before her.

"Thanks Sakura." He said.


	5. Chapter 4 - Lost

"You must understand that there is more than one path to the top of the mountain." – Go Rin No Sho

* * *

It had started to rain. It was rain entirely like nothing Naruto had seen before. It came abruptly, falling like a solid sheet of water in big fat drops the size of his thumb. It almost physically stung to be hit. Thunder started to reverberate through the trees preceded by white hot flashes of light. A storm had rolled in. The three genin had huddled closer together under the fallen tree as the winds started to pick up, throwing debris and water into their eyes. They clutched at themselves with pale hands as if trying to hold the heat to their bodies.

"So what do we do now?" Sasuke said. He almost had to shout to be heard.

Naruto looked at Sasuke, surprised that the genin was looking to him for direction. He could have pointed that out but it seemed counter-productive. After all poking at Sasuke's ego, though satisfying, would only result unnecessary fighting. He already looked miserable after all. His short sleeve shirt had already been soaked through and his hair hung limp, plastered against his face. Despite that his expression remained neutral except the slight clenching of his jaw to stop his teeth from moving against his will. Naruto snorted in amusement. The ever stoic Uchiha couldn't deign to chatter his teeth.

Sakura was the worst off of the three of them, wearing a thin set of pajamas she had brought for sleep. She had no shoes either and her feet were caked in mud that hid scratches and cuts she had suffered in their getaway. For the first time since they had been attacked that morning she spoke up.

"We should wait for Kakashi-sensei. I'm sure he'll find us. He'll find us then we can go home."

Naruto shook his head and rested his forehead between a finger and thumb, rubbing his temples. That would, indeed, be the most convenient course of action. After all the three of them were out of their depth and having the jonin rescue them would be easy.

"We don't know if sensei is alive or not. So we should try to get back to Konoha as soon as possible." Naruto reasoned. "Those Kiri-nin are probably pissed and looking for us so we can't stay here."

"We don't know where we are." Sasuke replied with a frown.

Naruto looked up at sky. It was impossible to tell where the sun was.

"We just have to head west until we hit the strait between Wave and Fire and then get across. We'll need to find a boat. Probably going to have to search up the coast and hope we find something."

"We should wait." Sakura said.

"Damn it Sakura! I just said we can't." Naruto let out an exasperated sigh.

The rain was falling harder now, forming small rivers of water that carried away small sticks and dead leaves.

"He won't be able to find us in this anyway. We should get as far as we can under the storm cover."

Sasuke stood up, as if inviting the other two to do the same, and peered around the forest.

"What are shinobi from the Mist doing here in the first place?" he said.

Naruto gave it a thought as he stood as well. There had been far too many of them for it to be an odd team or two out for a mission who had decided to get opportunistic when they heard the legendary Hatake was in town. A sizable force like that had to have other intentions. They would never send that many chuunin to hunt the leaf jonin either, it would be like throwing chaff at a wall and hoping it would blow over if you threw enough of it. There was something else in Wave that warranted that many shinobi. Unfortunately Naruto had little to no idea of the current political climate in the elemental nations; he had paid no special attention to the subject in lieu of spending his time in the bowels of the library. He had his suspicions though.

"I don't know and I don't care." Naruto said "Come on, let's move before we freeze to death or get killed by Kiri-nin. I don't really know which one I'd prefer and I don't want to find out."

Reluctance was clear on Sakura's face. She was still huddled up underneath the tree, shivering. The two boys said nothing, however, maintaining a cool silence until she eventually got on her feet. An air of resignation seemed to settle on her as she looked around, noting the trees and the slope of the ground. She made to speak but held back for a moment as the boys marched off. She cleared her throat. The two boys turned around and looked at her expectantly.

Sakura pointed a finger off to the side and said,

"West is that way…"

There was a beat before the corner of Sasuke's brow twitched.

"Dobe….were you just walking off in a random direction?" he said.

"Haha…" Naruto laughed and scratched the back of his head.

"You were trying to look cool weren't you Naruto!" Sakura screeched.

She fell into a familiar stance with her fist held up menacingly at the blond. For a moment she forgot that she was lost in a rainstorm wearing almost nothing with only her two genin team mates for company.

"I don't know which I'd prefer and I don't want to find out." She mocked "Then why don't you look where the hell you're going first you idiot! West is obviously that way."

"Then let's go." Naruto said in a mock huff and walked off.

He cracked a smile as he did, making certain Sakura couldn't see it. It was reassuring to have the fuming, energetic Sakura back after the events of the last few days. That menacing aura just a few meters behind him was familiar and oddly comforting. He didn't really want to know how that reflected on his own personality.

* * *

They had to stay quite close to each other as they moved through the forest, heading towards the west. The continuous rain and the forest itself cut visibility sharply, no more than ten meters at best before it all hazed into a blur. Naruto grimaced as dirty water streamed into his sandals. All sorts of uncomfortable detritus, rocks, sticks, slimy leaves, seemed to get stuck beneath his feet as his foot once again plunged into a deep puddle. It was impossible to tell their depth and it was slowing their progress. Sakura was having a particularly bad time of it also being the shortest of the three. At times her leg would be swallowed up past the ankle where it got particularly deep throwing her off balance.

"How did you know this way is west?" Naruto asked. He was trying to make conversation to keep their minds off the drudgery of walking in the inclement weather. He wasn't worried about their voices travelling far, not with the rain like it was.

"We're somewhere on the western slope of the island," Sakura replied "So the sun shines longer in the afternoon than in the morning because the mountain blocks the sunlight."

Naruto frowned as Sakura took a moment to catch her breath. He understood that much from the local geography.

"I tried to check the sun but there's too much cloud cover."

"Not that. The plants."

Sakura paused again as she hurdled over a fallen tree trunk. Naruto was beginning to suspect she was doing it on purpose, pausing just after giving an extra piece of information. It only took a second longer before the two bits of information gelled together and he realized how she had known. He dropped one fist into the palm of his hand in a subdued form of exclamation.

"You could tell by the way the plants were growing."

Sakura nodded but didn't speak as she ducked under a low hanging tree branch.

"How can you tell though?" Naruto said.

Sakura gave him a somewhat disgruntled look, over the top of what had to be an already growing discontent. It fit well with their current circumstances at the very least.

"They taught us at the academy….Which you would have known if you had stopped slacking off and actually paid attention."

Naruto was reminded once again that Sakura, for all her frailty, was the most academic of the three of them, probably more so than any other genin in their generation. In fact she was probably the second most well-read just behind Naruto. The difference happened to be that the majority of the books she read were at least tangentially related to the curriculum whereas Naruto's reading habits were as wide as they were voracious. Still her admonishments didn't have the same bite as they did back in the academy.

* * *

It was roughly midday when the team took their next break. Hunger had started to gnaw at them and they took some time to forage what they could. The rain in that regard was irritating, there was no chance of lighting a fire, but it was a godsend when it came to keeping their tracks clear. As meager as it was it lifted their spirits to eat what they could. So they huddled together with their small handfuls of food and ate quickly and without conversation. The rain seemed to kill conversation with its deafening noise, demanding you stay quiet like an obnoxious person talking over you. So as their journey dragged on the quieter they became.

It was a shared moment of triumph when the trio came across the first signs of civilization. There was the faint outline of a small farmstead consisting of a one story home and a much larger barn further off from the main property. The house was quite unlike Tazuna's or anything in fire country. It and the barn too, were built on stilts and so were several feet off the ground perched on dozens of wooden columns. Several rice fields or their remains at least could also be seen cut into the hill around the home. They had been left fallow and were choked with weeds, meaning no rice had been grown there for at least several seasons. Still there were some signs of habitation. Like the partially chopped wood that presumably had been abandoned when the rain started.

"Finally!" Naruto said, "We can ask for directions and maybe get something to eat."

The agreement was plain on Sakura's face but the Uchiha seemed to be troubled.

"We should just take what we need and move on." He said "It's too much of a risk to talk to whoever lives here."

Naruto scowled and grasped the grass beneath his hands. The three of them were currently lying flat on a berm next to an irrigation ditch.

"We're not stealing. I have my wallet with me. We don't need to steal."

Sasuke scoffed.

"They could betray us to the Kiri-nin."

"I don't think so." Naruto retorted. "Mist hasn't been here long. Not more than a few days at the most. We would have heard about it otherwise. So they haven't been around long enough for farmers to go running to them with information. Mist has only started looking for us since this morning anyway, these farmers won't even know."

Sasuke took a moment to consider. Intense concentration was usually something obvious but it was hard to tell with Sasuke. He appeared extremely practiced in keeping his face as still as possible. Naruto, when younger, had once foolishly believed it was one of the reasons the Uchiha boy was so popular. It seemed logical enough from pure observation. Uchiha was the most popular. He was also the most proficient at showing no emotion at all besides mild irritation. Naruto was the least proficient at that very thing and was also the least popular. When someone barely speaks to other human beings, coming up with entertaining theories such as that one was a good way to pass the time. Naruto tried to school his expression though. It wouldn't do to crack a smile or even laugh in a serious situation like this just because of your team mate's face.

"How certain are you?" Sasuke asked, eventually.

"Extremely certain," Naruto said, nodding his head enthusiastically "I read something just like this in a book once."

The other two stared at him and then looked at each other with their heads tilted. As hard as it was to read Sasuke's face Naruto also had a form of obfuscation that worked just as well. At times it was impossible to tell if he was being serious or not even in delicate situations like this one.

"Right…." Sakura said "It still makes sense though."

Sasuke let out the softest of sighs before agreeing to Naruto's plan of action.

"Fine."

So the three genin made their way up to the door of the farmhouse and Naruto gave a hard tap to one of the main wooden supports that framed the main entrance. A clattering could be heard in response. Most likely the inhabitant had been startled by the noise of someone knocking on his door. It probably wasn't a common occurrence.

"I'll be just a second." A male voice called out.

The face that peered out from the door was lined with age but set on top of broad shoulders that reflected many years of hard labor. It was difficult to pin his age, as it often was with farmers. Though his face seemed sixty or seventy his body wouldn't be so out of place on someone half that age. The most notable feature was the man's hands. They were enormous. Like spades they dwarfed the door frame and were thick with calluses that didn't quite match the man's apparent profession. The knuckles in particular had the glint of thick skin borne from repetitive punching and it only became more apparent when one spotted the thick gnarled ears and bent nose. A moment of panic had struck Naruto when he saw those hands but it soon settled as he saw the full picture. This man had most likely been a bare-knuckle prize fighter of some kind. Perhaps he still was.

"What do you three kids want?" he said.

Said kid's realized they could barely understand the man through his thick accent. It seemed Naruto was the designated spokesman as the other two said nothing.

"Just some food and directions." Naruto said

When the man's expression didn't seem accommodating Naruto quickly added "We have money to pay."

The man was still reluctant, but less so when he heard the magic word. He gave the three kids an appraising look before turning away and muttering to himself under his breath.

"I'll be right back." He said over his shoulder as the door closed behind him.

It was a long ten minute wait before the man reappeared with a cloth bundle that seemed small held between his mammoth hands. He opened it, showing a surprising amount of dexterity, with one hand and showed them the contents. There were nine balls of rice. They had a golden brown appearance, having been fried after being formed into balls as a method of preservation. Naruto recognized them for what they were and quickly re-evaluated the man in the doorway. These were soldier rations made with partially cooked rice designed to have hot water poured over them in a bowl to quickly make a basic porridge.

"You're about two days travel north from the nearest town called Aichi. There's a road about two hours walk that way following the ridge but let me tell you that it's not better on this side of the island." The man said.

The man made to say something else, his lips twitching as they tried to form the next words, but he visibly stopped himself from speaking. He had seen many orphans in the last few years and he would see many more to come.

So instead he just moved on and said

"That'll be fifty mon, a hundred if you want to spend the night in the barn."

Naruto gave his two companions a questioning look and received two minute nods as confirmation of his own thoughts. The rain had not let up at all in the hours since it had started and the thought of sleeping out in the middle of a storm after trudging for hours through it made them all feel slightly ill. So Naruto quickly felt around in one of the hidden pockets among his clothing and produced a stack of ten coins and passed it to the man. The farmer nodded in approval when he saw Naruto choose not to pull out all of his money and count it in front of a stranger.

"There's a few wild radishes too if you know where to look, feel free to have them. Also, girl" he said in a gruff voice "take these with you. It's a disgrace that one of the boys didn't give you their own."

As he spoke he produced a pair of straw shoes, much too small to be his own, and placed them in front of Sakura. She accepted them with a bow and put them on straight away.

"Thank you. You're far more considerate than this knucklehead." She said, jabbing a thumb at Naruto.

The farmer snorted with amusement and shooed them away with one of his hands. Sakura's clear omission of the Uchiha was understood quite differently by those not familiar with the group. After all Sakura avoided criticizing the black haired boy almost by reflex. That was understood by the three genin. To a stranger though her singling out of Naruto seemed more like a wife singling out the failures of her husband, after all if it came to borrowing shoes the boyfriend would come first.

"There are already a couple of kids like you in the barn but there should be plenty of room" was the farmer's parting words before his door slammed shut.

Naruto wasn't surprised to hear it. Wave was in a bad way and orphans were common. He had heard it from Tazuna himself who was some-what the village leader in that area of Wave. The thought of seeing a group of orphans set his heart beating slightly faster. He settled himself, feeling for the reassuring weight of his forehead protector hidden underneath his clothes and followed after Sakura who was the most eager to get out of the rain.

He had barely caught up to her when she threw the door of the barn open with her freakishly inconsistent strength and they saw the others they would be sharing the barn with. There were three of them. Two were asleep, an afternoon nap, and the third was rearranging a panoply of equipment, the most glaring of which was a forehead protector with the symbol of Kiri, on a large paper scroll.


	6. Chapter 5 - Making friends

"Immature strategy is the cause of grief." - Go Rin No Sho

* * *

Neither party had any idea how long they stood there staring at each other. Time had an unusually elastic quality when the mind seized up. It could stretch out to eternity as mental cogs ticked over, only to snap back at twice or three times its usual speed as the world pulled it back into place. At the threshold of that door minutes seemed to pass. In reality it was only a matter of two or three heartbeats before Naruto jumped into action. A single mistake could prove fatal. This he knew after the abrupt yet undeniable lesson Kakashi had forced upon him and his team mates.

"Wow!" he said, "Are you guys shinobi?"

He put on a faux wide-eyed look as he pushed past Sakura and entered to dark interior.

The Kiri-nin, most likely a genin going by his age, was taken aback by the sudden intrusion of the blonde haired boy. He froze for a second with a kunai in hand before breaking out in a grin.

"That's right, we are." He replied "we're from the Mist."

He pointed towards the newly polished headband lying next to a small wooden tub and puffed his chest out in pride. His two companions also started to stir at this point, woken by the sound of the conversation.

"That's so bad-ass!" Naruto continued Are you guys on some kind of secret mission?"

The Kiri boy laughed in good humor and looked bashful. Naruto felt relief wash over him. It had worked. Just like the old farmer the Kiri genin had come to the conclusion that Naruto was just another civilian orphan albeit one enamored with the concept of ninja. Indeed one of the best ways to avoid suspicion was the make the other person preoccupied with something else, like preening at their own ego.

"That's so cool, and you even look the same age as us! I wish I could be a shinobi too." Sakura had joined in at this point, seeing where Naruto was going almost immediately.

The other two Kiri-nins were completely awake by now just as Sasuke entered the barn and saw the situation. Before he could do anything rash Naruto quickly threw his arm around the Uchiha boy and dragged him close and whispered into his ear out the corner of his mouth.

"Just shut your fucking mouth and follow my lead." He said. "And try to act normal."

Sasuke's poker face held admirably. After all it was his most developed skill.

"This is my buddy Inoue and I'm Inari. The girl over there is Yukina. The old man is letting us stay here too since we got caught in the rain. We're hoping to find some work in the next village." Naruto said.

Sakura jumped in next "Hey hey, Inoue, these guys are ninja! Isn't that so cool?"

"Hn…"

Sasuke just glared at his two team mates and shrugged off Naruto's arm with a grunt before sequestering himself in the corner. Naruto and Sakura almost face faulted. When Naruto had told him to act normal this wasn't what he had in mind.

He recovered quickly though and said "Ah don't mind him. He's always been grumpy"

The boy who had been organizing his gear seemed to accept it without much trouble.

"Well I'm Saito and these are my team mates, Emi and Hise. Nice to meet you." the boy said.

Emi was a brunette, plain faced girl with her hair cropped short to just under her earlobes. She gave a jaunty wave from her spot curled up in the hay but didn't deign to sit up. In fact she had her forehead protector slid down over her eyes as a sleeping mask. Hise, the other boy, looked quite similar to Emi. Perhaps they were siblings. Either way he leered at the group and Sasuke in particular. It seemed that at least one of them was a little savvy.

"What are you guys doing here though?" Naruto asked "Wave is like the middle of nowhere, nothing ever happens here….except Gato."

Sakura made herself look suitably wounded when Naruto mentioned the name of the crime lord who had taken over the small island nation a few years ago. She even gave a subtle shudder as she hugged herself and hid her eyes under her hair like she was on the verge of tears. They were sitting now, just across from Saito on the hay covered floor and pity was plain on the Kiri-nin's face. Even Hise had a momentary lapse in his staring contest with the Uchiha when he saw Sakura's reaction to that name.

Naruto had been prepared to launch into an epic and moving story about the hardships they faced under the tyrant Gato but it seemed the Kiri-nin already had some kind of idea of what was going on in the country. Saito seemed to momentarily debate something with himself, also giving a side long glance to Hise leaning on the wall but eventually he spoke.

"Don't worry Yukina. Gato is dead. We killed him a few days ago. Well not us us, but the other shinobi who came here with us."

"Really?!" Sakura perked up and put the full brunt of her wide watery eyes on Saito, "are you guys here to save us?"

She crawled over to him and grabbed his arm and looked at him with a burning, almost desperate hope. Naruto was worried that Sakura was laying it on a bit thick but Saito seemed to be eating it up.

A wide smile split Saito's face "Yeah we are. Mist is going to take Wave back from Gato and his thugs and make it a prosperous country again."

"But Gato has so many soldiers with him!" Sakura said "Like hundreds and hundreds of them."

Saito put his arm around the pink haired girl and rubbed her back in reassurance.

"Don't worry about a thing Yukina there's over a hundred of us here and we're shinobi, a few thugs won't be a problem."

"Saito!" Hise growled.

"What? It's fine." Saito replied "they're just kids."

He then turned conspiratorially to Sakura and Naruto in a faux whisper and a hand cupped to the side of his mouth.

"As you can see, we have our own stick in the mud too."

Sakura gave a girly giggle and Naruto his best face splitting smile. Saito was as friendly as his looks suggested. He had dark hair tied back to a small pony tail and had a chubby child-like face with wide brown eyes. In contrast his clothes were festooned with the accoutrements of a killer. Naruto could see at least three pouches that were likely full of kunai and shuriken, several explosive tag bombs also hung from a bandolier and a length of ninja wire was tied around the boys forearm over a leather vambrace.

They fell into easy conversation for the next few hours, though Sasuke and Hise never joined in. Those two just sat off to the side and glared at each other. Sakura and Naruto though had no problem playing off each other, slowly creating a whole back story for the trio of Konoha genin. Luckily the three of them had little to identify them as shinobi, only the head band Naruto had hid underneath his clothes and the shuriken pouch Sasuke had managed to hide somewhere in the room.

As the day started to fade away and the sun sunk beneath the horizon the rain started to lighten and the incessant hammering hushed to a light pitter patter against the roof of the barn. As the conversation started to die down and the six children prepared to bed down for the night Naruto considered the information they had managed to glean from the talkative Kiri-nin. If it was true that there were that many enemy shinobi in Wave it would complicate their escape immensely. He had had no suspicion before that there would be so many of them but the pieces started to fall into place. Mist was here to annex Wave.

From a geo-political perspective Naruto could only speculate what that would mean but from a purely strategic perspective it made an inordinate amount of sense. Mist was nominally an island nation, composed of a group of island chains surrounding a single larger island that made up the bulk of its population. Wave as a country was in the perfect position to act as a nexus for trade between the eastern and western continents, its value in that sense was immense, but more importantly it was a known fact that projecting military power over an ocean was a difficult endeavor. Carrying troops and supplies by ship was a vulnerable bottle neck. Having a foot hold on the main continent would be invaluable if Kiri ever intended to expand in that direction. Still, their shinobi village was meant to be embroiled in a civil war. The fact that they had over a hundred of their shinobi here in wave made little sense in that regard and more annoyingly it meant the border would be locked down tight. It wouldn't do for Konoha to find out Mist was on their doorstep before they were properly established.

Naruto felt a headache start to creep up on him as considered the magnitude of what they were caught up in. As shinobi of Konoha they were obligated to get back as soon as possible to report what was going on. The chances of surviving such an attempt though were not reassuring. First things first, they had to get away from these Kiri-nin without any suspicion.

* * *

Naruto had been unable to sleep, and given the tossing and turning the Uchiha seemed to be having trouble too. They both tensed up when they heard movement in the barn. It seemed the genin from Mist were rising from their beds and preparing their equipment. Naruto sat up from his sleeping spot despite the warning look from Sasuke and pretended to rub the sleep from his eyes.

Saito's voice came out from the gloom "Oh, Inari, you're awake."

"Yeah," Naruto said "I'm a light sleeper. Sorry."

"No, we should be the ones apologizing. Just go back to sleep." Saito replied.

This explained why Emi had been sleeping all afternoon.

Naruto looked towards the friendly boy standing by the partially opened barn door as a sliver of moonlight glinted off the boy's forehead protector.

"Where are you guys going? Is there something wrong?" Naruto asked.

"We're going to kill the farmer."

"What? Why?" Naruto was completely awake now. It made no sense that three genin would be sent to kill an old farmer in the middle of nowhere.

"Saito!" It was Hise again.

"Like I said Hise, It doesn't matter, so shut the fuck up and move it."

It seemed unnatural to hear the rough language from come from those lips. He hadn't sworn at all in their previous conversations. Not even once.

"That old farmer was a retainer to Wave's daimyo before Gato. We can't have him causing any trouble when we take over. So that's why. Go back to sleep Inari."

It was said so casually that one could be mistaken for thinking he was just discussing the weather or what they should have for breakfast. After those words Saito disappeared out the door and into the night. Naruto quickly jumped up and shook Sakura awake. Sasuke was already up and retrieving his pouch from a pile of hay off to the side of the room.

"Sakura, be ready for anything okay? I have a bad feeling about those guys from Mist" Naruto said.

She nodded in understanding as Sasuke distributed the few shuriken he had. There were exactly twelve of them inside the padded case so each of them received four and sequestered them around their bodies before lying back down and pretending to sleep.

* * *

It was only fifteen minutes or so before the genin from Mist returned. It seemed they hadn't been able to catch the old man unawares despite waiting until night fall. The two boys were carrying Emi between them as she hung limp and unconscious. Sakura's eyes opened wide when she saw the large gash across the other girl's torso. It was most likely caused by a Katana and had it been just an inch longer it would have killed her instantly.

"Fuck, Saito. You said this would be an easy job." Hise yelled. "Seriously what the fuck is this. Fuck!"

"Just do what you can." Saito replied. He didn't even spare a look to the wounded girl.

The three Konoha genin rose from their positions, acting like they had been awoken by the noise of the two boys barging into the barn.

"Oh my god!" Sakura said. "What happened to Emi?"

"She was injured because of her incompetence." Saito said with a flat tone "If she hadn't been so slow on the uptake this never would have happened. At least the mission was completed."

"Fuck you Saito." Hise spat.

"Yes yes, whatever you say Hise, even though you always leave the dirty work to me."

Hise glared at the Saito with a strange mix of hate and gratitude.

"I'm sorry guys." Saito said with a dramatic sigh and turned towards the Konoha trio. "It was fun but it's a rule. No witnesses. Well… maybe I'll keep the pink one."

Saito lunged at Naruto first with kunai in hand, going for a gut shot that would guarantee a slow and painful death. Naruto, prepared, caught the knife in his jacket that he had taken off earlier. The kunai penetrated the soft material, of course, but the hand wielding it couldn't advance past the barrier. Twisting the jacket anti-clockwise Naruto kept the blade clear from his body and twisted Saito's arm at the shoulder forcing the boy to let the knife clatter to the floor or risk a dislocation.

"You're not fucking civilians!" Saito hissed before ducking to avoid an overhead roundhouse kick from Sasuke.

Saito was outnumbered and this problem was only compounded by the fact that they were in the confines of the barn with little room to manoeuvre. His greater experience and skill showed, however, as he managed to dodge and parry the simultaneous attack of both Sasuke and Naruto. Once he shook off the surprise of finding the civilians he had expected to slaughter like pigs to be shinobi instead he found that his two foes had little no co-ordination in their attack, almost like they were completely unused to fighting together. Still, he found the odd blow finding its mark.

"Hise you dumb fuck. Help!"

The other boy was far too pre-occupied, however, trying the stem the bleeding from Emi's chest to even answer.

Sakura pitched her four Shuriken at the boy from the back of the room once Sasuke and Naruto were knocked back and onto the floor. Again Saito found himself vulnerable, wondering where the hell they had found shuriken when none of them had been carrying any earlier. He was lucky that Sakura's aim was as poor as ever though and three of the four went careening off target to embed harmlessly in the wall. Unfortunately for him the fourth and last managed to slice across his upper arm, leaving it hanging limp and useless at his side.

Naruto took advantage of the surprise, charging forward and only slowing momentarily to scoop up the discarded kunai as Sasuke approached from the other side. With only one arm useful Saito was forced to make a hard decision but clearly Naruto was the most dangerous. As he parried the kunai strike with the wire on his vambrace he tried to turn his body to minimize the damage about to be done to him. His abdomen was left far too open, however, and he was far too slow as Sasuke drove a knee deep into his stomach and forced every scrap of air from his body.

Saito collapsed bodily as he was struck and was left hacking for breath on the floor. Naruto quickly jumped on top of him and with the pommel of the kunai struck the boy across the temple, knocking him out cold.

The fight was short, as it was clumsy, but it still left Naruto breathing hard and set his hands shaking uncontrollably as he loomed over the unconscious enemy. Sasuke ,however, without pause approached Hise and the injured girl.

"I don't care who you are or what you want. I'm not interested in fighting." Hise said, not even looking up. "So either help me or leave me the fuck alone."

Tears glistened in his eyes, as well as the blood covering his hands as he clumsily tried to do something about the blood.

Sasuke was about to move forwards, his intentions clear in the way he held up his guard and watched his footing before a hand pressed on his chest to hold him back. It was Naruto and the hand was accompanied by a warning look that told him to back off.

"Yukina will help you." Naruto said.

Sakura looked up with a start when she heard her false name. She didn't like the idea of watching Emi die even if they were enemies but she hadn't expected Naruto to tell her to actively help.

"I don't know what to do…." Hise whispered.

Sakura quietly took her place next to the young Mist genin and took a look at the wound. It was far beyond anything she could really do. After all she wasn't a trained med-nin and the sword wound was far cry from simple lacerations. She did know basic first aid though and had some rudimentary knowledge of wound management so she ordered Hise to retrieve some water first. He complied without complaint.

While this was going on Naruto and Sasuke were dueling gazes as they looked at each other in distaste.

"What are you doing dobe?" Sasuke hissed

"No. What the fuck are you doing bastard." Naruto hissed right back.

Sasuke grimaced and curled his fingers into a fist.

"You know we can't let them live. You know it." He said it matter of fact, like there was nothing more obvious in the world.

Naruto bared his teeth unconsciously and low growl rumbled up from his stomach.

"I don't know shit bastard." He said.

Sasuke muttered under his breath "You got that right…"

"Shut up." Naruto was incensed that someone could suggest such a thing. "We're not killing a defenseless girl, an unconscious boy and another who won't even fight back."

"And then what? They go running off to their superiors and we get hunted down like dogs?"

Sasuke's voice cracked a little as he reached the end of that sentence, almost like his throat was unused to speaking so many words in a single conversation.

"And then what Naruto!"


	7. Chapter 6 - Anger management

"Know your enemy, know his sword." – Go Rin No Sho

* * *

Kakashi flitted through the trees. His pace was relentless. Fat drops of rain thudded into his jacket and pinged off the metal of his forehead protector. He took long bounding strides across the flooded forest grounds, tapping out a staccato of chakra bursts from the soles of his feet. He couldn't afford to be slowed. He had dismissed Pakkun as soon as the rain had started and now, on the very periphery of his senses, he could feel a shadowed presence following him like a pack of wolves. There was only one group in Wave who could keep up at this pace, the hunter-nin.

A kunai flew out from the gloom like a missive announcing the start of battle. As Kakashi's sharingan spun up to speed he saw it, cleaving through the rain drops with exaggerated slowness. The night black stiletto style blade, typical of Mist, had been lovingly etched with four crashing waves in mimicry of their village symbol. Water wicked off its edges, betraying a hard edge of chakra, and flashed into silver contrails that traced its flight path.

Neither party expected it to hit nor did it. The kunai, followed by a flurry of senbon and shuriken, served its purpose forcing Kakashi to slow and defend himself against the torrent of metal. They got ahead of him, blurred silhouettes in the trees, and went to ground. Kakashi was successfully suppressed. In a form of bounding cover the hunter-nin took turns, four at a time, launching projectile weaponry at him as they leapt from tree to tree while their compatriots approached their prey. Their advance was covered by a rising mist, twisting tendrils tracking towards the copy-nin like tentacles of some great sea beast and suffusing into a thick chakra laden fog.

Kakashi felt, for the first time in months, the kick of adrenaline. A smile cracked his face as he felt the blood evacuate his viscera and flood into his muscles in preparation. It wasn't a matter of hubris. As he grew older he felt less and less challenged and now, when the mission was over, he would be notching forty eight kills to his already considerable list.

Kakashi blurred into motion with a kunai in each hand. Two decades of shinobi training manifested in an economy of movement. With a mechanical efficiency he dodged and deflected the oncoming projectiles as he dashed slalom through the trees. In the brief moment where he cut the line of sight he prepared a string of seals and thrust his hands into the water beneath his feet.

The Hunter-nin had closed to within a hundred meters by this point and they signaled their arrival with a surge of chakra. Dozens of water bullets converged on Kakashi's position in a relentless stream only to be intercepted. A huge dome of earth had burst from the ground, scattering dirt tainted water in all directions and causing a storm surge as it displaced the liquid around it. The bullets hit and tore out huge chunks of the structure. The hunters poured technique after technique into the dome, dismantling it piece by piece until only a bare skeleton of punctured earth collapsed in on itself.

There was a moment of silence as the deafening hush of the rain drowned out the ragged breaths of the hunter-nins. They didn't make the amateur mistake of approaching too close to the dome. They waited, about ten meters off, taking the moment to recover from their sudden expenditure of chakra, and watched carefully for any signs of movement in the wreckage. They were looking the wrong way.

Kakashi appeared in a geyser of water and mud behind one of the hunters, eye spinning to form a solid black ring around his iris. His hair was slick with mud and dulled in color and the wicked edge of a stiletto style kunai sung in his hand. In a lateral slash the tip of the blade slipped in between the second and third cervical vertebra of the unfortunate shinobi and delivered an electric shock as it slid through the bundle of nerve tissue. The hunter fell to the ground like a puppet cut from its strings and screamed as he felt his flesh melt off his bones, or so he thought. His scream became a gurgling noise as he collapsed face first into the ankle deep water, now paralyzed from the neck down, and his head thrashed about trying to catch a breath.

The bubbles of air frothing around the fallen nin eventually stilled.

In the wake of the surprise attack Kakashi dashed towards the next enemy, clockwise around the broken dome. The obstacle it provided earned Kakashi a few precious seconds as the other hunters navigated their way around it. In that time he approached the next shinobi with an overhead slash. It was parried but simultaneously Kakashi threw the bulk of his momentum into a rising knee strike. His knife flowed around the hunter's sword, giving way far more easily than the hunter had anticipated. It left the Kiri-nin off balance, his center of gravity shifted far too forward to recover without the resistance of Kakashi's kunai. The knee struck him in the abdomen with the full force of a ninety kilo man travelling at fifty kilometers an hour. To the hunter's credit he had managed to place his forearm in a guard position at the last moment. It was done on instinct, a reflex honed from years of difficult taijutsu training. Reflexes, however, lack judgment and unfortunately for him the knee is far tougher than the radius and ulna, and Kakashi's strike shattered his arm before blowing past into his stomach.

The man's ruptured organs protested in the form of a mouthful of blood spraying from his mouth to coat the inside of his mask. It dripped out from the bottom edge, staining his dark blue tunic, and making it appear that his throat had been slit.

In battle, even the minutest difference in skill was fatal. Mistakes were almost never forgiven when two individuals were earnestly trying to kill each other. Had the hunter been milliseconds faster, had he chosen to block with his own knee strike to Kakashi's shin, he would have lived and Kakashi would be the one dead with a shattered leg.

With another enemy dispatched Kakashi turn around and performed a stutter step shunshin as he pulled a kunai from his leg holster. A stutter step shunshin was exactly what it sounded like and was a trick he had been taught long ago by the fourth Hokage. He performed the technique but only moved a few steps forward as he flicked the kunai towards an approaching hunter. Its short travel distance made its only weakness difficult to exploit. Also, velocity had an additive quality. So not only did the kunai travel at the speed Kakashi was able the throw it but also added the speed at which he was moving during that split second shunshin. It shot from his arm like a bullet, an almost invisible flicker in the rain as it sped towards his target. What the technique gain in speed, however, it lost in accuracy, as the kunai travelled just off target and buried its head in the man's thigh.

That slowed one of them but the remaining five came to grips with the Konoha jonin, dancing around him in a collaborative effort with the long dagger like swords favored by their kind. Kakashi was hard pressed to fend them off. One each split off from the main group and moved around his flanks as the middle three kept him busy. The only thing saving him was their reluctance to truly engage with him in a close quarters fight. They would definitely have killed him but not before one or even two of their number fell so they hung back, keeping him just close enough to prevent easy movement.

Kakashi fought a fighting retreat, letting them believe they were pushing him back as he moved towards the corpse of the first casualty in the battle. A lapse in judging the angle of one of their blades rewarded Kakashi with a shallow laceration to his upper arm as the sword sparked against his kunai and slid past to almost behead him. Swearing under his breath Kakashi dropped the Kiri style kunai and quickly retrieved one he was more familiar with from his hip pouch. Once again armed he eased back into a rhythmic back and forth with his enemies.

Their captain, indicated by the wave motif along the bottom of the mask, was especially aggressive usually taking point in their formation as they attacked the leaf jonin. He wasn't half bad with a sword. Kakashi held a kunai in each hand, as was his preferred style of close combat, one in a standard grip and the other in an icepick. Konoha style kunai were unsuited for straight up stopping an enemy's sword but relied on parrying and deflections. This was due to their pyramidal shape and it suited Kakashi just fine, after all he knew how to best finesse that disadvantage. As a horizontal strike approached him Kakashi stepped in close and caught the sword between the notch of the kunai and the top of his finger. Kiri style blades often had an unsharpened ricasso just above the cross-guard due to the popularity of a sword style that required placing your forefinger there to bring the blade in line with your arm. The majority of the energy in a sword strike was also at the tip of the blade.

After stopping the sword in its tracks Kakashi snapped his head forward and head butted the captain with his forehead protector. Spider cracks appeared in the Kiri-nin's mask but it held, only a few flakes of white porcelain falling to the ground. Kakashi attempted to follow up with his other blade but the captain recovered admirably and quickly broke off contact.

He had to commend them for their tactics. They were hoping to tire him out with their greater numbers and prolonged fighting until they could safely take him out. They avoided getting into a jutsu fight. It was logical considering he was Sharingan-Kakashi and also the Copy-nin with a thousand techniques. Still, this meant that their greatest advantage, the copious amounts of water present, went largely unused though it was a double edged sword. The pelting rain had hammered their mist technique into the ground, dispersing it far too easily for it to be worth the chakra cost to maintain it. Thus it was down to this, a purely physical fight. It wasn't to Kakashi's tastes though.

* * *

In took ten seconds of fighting for Kakashi to manoeuver himself closer to the corpse. It was still face down in the pool of water it had fallen in. Kakashi stepped over it, planting a foot on its back, as he continued to move backwards from the hunters accosting him. All living things had a chakra network. Some more developed than others according to their level of training or natural inclinations. Dead bodies, however, have no chakra but their chakra pathways and coils don't just disappear and more importantly they are still chakra conductive. Using this fact Kakashi had sent a large pulse of chakra down his leg and into the body where it traveled through the dead flesh and dispersed into the water around it.

The moment that happened he leapt backwards into the air, hoping to make as much distance as he could. Usually in combat this was a death sentence. A mass flying through the air in a parabolic arc couldn't shift its center of gravity without some kind of outside force. This was true for humans too, you could flip or spin to try and dodge but your center of gravity would always trace the same path laid out by the rules of physics. This made you a prime target for projectile weaponry or jutsu. Using the advantage given to him by the sharingan Kakashi quickly evaluated and deflected the most life threatening of the shuriken flying towards him. Those that would have hit him center mass, in the chest or the abdomen went flying off in random directions as they pinged off the kunai in the jonin's hands but he still suffered. He received three more minor lacerations along his upper arms and left thigh while one of the shurikens ricocheted off the steel capped toes of his right boot and opened up his calf from ankle to knee.

It was just before he landed when his gambit activated. The spherical bombs hung on a bandolier around the corpse went off but the results were underwhelming. Hindered by being underwater and pressed between the ground and a dead body the concussive force of the explosion had been greatly diminished and only succeeded in neutralizing a single hunter. A large bone fragment, most probably the femur, had flown end over end from the explosion and pierced the unlucky Kiri-nin through the stomach. The others, almost as close to the explosion were knocked to the ground but not taken out. At the very least it interrupted their hand seals and any further attack.

Damning the village of Mist for shoddy craftsmanship Kakashi landed hard on his left leg, trying to spare his right from any more trauma. Nevertheless a lance of pain shot up his leg and burrowed into his stomach, threatening to empty it. He was forced onto one knee by the pain and he grit his teeth and tried to push it out of his mind. There was a lull in in the combat as the four remaining hunters tried to shake off the effects of the recent explosion and assess their own injuries. Kakashi wanted to take advantage of the opening but was held back by his injured leg.

It seemed none of the hunters really cared for their impaled comrade who was now moaning softly as he tried to hold his guts together. None of them moved to help him as they returned to their feet. Perhaps there wasn't a medic-nin among them. Instead the lead hunter pulled off his mask and spat a gob of blood and spit onto the ground.

"Hatake" The captain said "your genin are dead. I especially enjoyed the pink one. I fucked her bloody before I slit her throat."

The captain was approaching him with his blade held at his side. He walked with a nonchalance that reflected his belief that Kakashi was defeated. After all, the amount of blood flowing from Kakashi's leg wound was not minor and any shinobi with a disabled leg was at a severe disadvantaged. Despite that the Kiri-nin betrayed his own weakness in the slight unevenness of his gait.

Kakashi laughed and called his bluff.

"You're a quick shooter then." Kakashi said. "How sad, she went to the afterlife disappointed."

The Kiri-nin paused briefly when he heard the amusement in the leaf jonin's voice.

"When Konoha fucked Kiri, we had the courtesy to take our time." Kakashi continued.

"Shut the fuck up Hatake!" the captain screamed. He tried to move towards Kakashi faster than before but his limp became more pronounced as he did.

"Actually, I think I liked Iwa better. At least they struggled a bit before we fucked them in the ass."

The captain was apoplectic and the blood rushed to his face, flushing it a bright red that clashed with the bare white knuckled gripping his sword. Hunter squads were almost always made up of veteran shinobi who had worked up the ladder of the regular forces. This meant that it was almost certain that the men Kakashi was fighting had experienced the last shinobi world war and most likely their fathers had fought in the one before that. Both times Mist had been defeated.

"Are you here to offer me your virgin ass Kiri-chan?" Kakashi said "Oh my mistake – you should wipe up first. I don't enjoy sloppy seconds."

If anything Kakashi was a master of getting under a person's skin and how an enemy attempted to taunt you told you a lot about what would bother them the most. He also made a show of attempting to get on his feet and slipping as his right leg gave out under him.

The captain laughed as well, trying to mimic the copy-nin, but it was forced and there was a clear undercurrent of anger bubbling beneath it. Not to mention his fist still remained deathly tight on the hilt of his weapon.

"Have fun with your words while you can Hatake. After we take this place Konoha is next and I'll personally piss on the village's ashes. If I could I'd keep you alive just to make you watch."

Kakashi filed away that tidbit of information for later digestions. It wasn't a surprising revelation given what he had found out already but this was neither the time nor the place to dwell on it. Instead Kakashi made a point to draw loud ragged breaths.

"If I wanted to watch a man squat down and piss like a woman I'd pay someone a whole lot prettier than you Kiri-chan."

During their conversation the captain had come within striking range. With a snarl he lifted his sword and brought it down, attempting to split Kakashi's skull down the middle. It was sloppy strike that was far too telegraphed but Kakashi was supposed to be unable to even stand. The captain's miscalculation cost him when Kakashi rolled to the side, dodging the blade, and jammed a kunai into the man's ankle puncturing a hole through his Achilles tendon. The captain cried out in anger and swung his blade wildly trying to hit the elusive jonin. He was hindered by his twice injured leg and collapsed clumsily as he lost his balance and landed on his back. He saw the clouds for a just a second before a looming point of metal blacked out his sight forever.

Kakashi stood, unsteady on his feet. He had lost far too much blood and was forced to cover his sharingan. He still had plenty of chakra, considering he had been careful to use as little as possible, but the strain on his body was too much in his anemic state.

There was still three of the hunter squad, alive, if not exactly combat ready and Kakashi hoped they had been injured to the point of giving him a fighting chance. It irritated him when he saw how his hands shook as he held his weapon.


	8. Chapter 7 - The end of rain

"Do not sleep under a roof. Carry no money or food. Go alone to places frightening to the common brand of men. Become a criminal of purpose. Be put in jail, and extricate yourself by your own wisdom" - Go Rin No Sho

* * *

A solitary flame flickered and cast long shadows across the wooden floor of the barn. Hise had managed to find a small lamp along with the water he had fetched from a nearby river. The fire was tiny, the size of a thumbnail, and its light barely penetrated the gloom. In those conditions Sakura was bent over the still form of Emi, a whalebone needle in one hand and the trailing thread held in the other. It was slow and inaccurate work.

The wound was grisly, a florid mess of blood and fat that traced a line from her left collarbone almost down to her umbilicus. Slivers of yellow streaked white peeked out from the gash like broken teeth betraying cracked ribs and oozing marrow. There was an understanding among those in the room that the girl was unlikely to survive the night, if that long at all. The futility of the situation kept Sakura's hand steady. There was no life on the line here. She was simply going through the motions of skills taught in passing. No one expected genin to be equipped for wounds of this magnitude. Perhaps that was a mistake.

Hise was focused completely on the procedure. His eyes were unreadable but there was a faint tremor in the hand that held the lamp. It could be seen in the subtle shifting of the shadows in the room as the flame danced from side to side. Unbeknownst to him Naruto and Sasuke had moved to the other end of the barn, a whispered argument breaking out between them.

Naruto stabbed at Sasuke with a disgusted look. He had used him name, a rookie mistake that should have been below the other boy. There was no apology in return, however, but instead a defiant look with that same upturned nose that Naruto had become inured to. Still, Naruto felt his face flush with heat. Pushing it down Naruto took a long count before speaking.

"Fine, do it."

Sasuke's eyes widened and his expression quickly changed.

"What?" he said, it came out choked like he had forgotten to take a breath before speaking.

"I said, do it." Naruto enunciated every word with a heavy emphasis, almost spitting them out between his teeth. "Kill them."

Sasuke froze in place. His hands felt unnaturally clammy and the weight of the shuriken sat heavy in his hand, the metal slick with sweat. Naruto crossed his arms and leant back against the wall of the barn, eyeing Sasuke with half lidded eyes that carried an element of scorn.

"You can't do it can you." Naruto said, "All that talk and you can't. You're not a killer."

Sasuke felt his heart jump from his chest and up into his throat and his grip tightened around the shuriken in his hand, drawing blood from his palm and fingers. His shoulders began a slow heave, moving up and down an almost imperceptible distance.

"None of us are, no matter what Kakashi said." Naruto continued. "We can't do this. We're fighters not murderers."

Naruto's speech had gotten quieter and more strained as he spoke, reaching an almost desperate chatter as if he was trying to convince himself as well. An image had struck the blonde haired boy, a piercing pain that traveled from his stomach to the back of his eyes coming with it. For a moment he saw himself, his arm thrust up beneath Hise's diaphragm and up into his chest cavity. Naruto swore that for a moment he felt the thump of a heart clenched between his fingers. He shuddered and shook his head, trying to throw off the feeling of dread that had come from nowhere and settled over him.

Sasuke had his eyes downcast, his hair obscuring the upper half of his face, and he had failed to notice the strange behavior of his fellow genin. Instead he was embroiled in his own thoughts, stuck in a mire of his own memories that refused to be forgotten.

"I'm not like you." Sasuke muttered.

"what?" Naruto said. He had failed to hear him the first time due to the momentary mental assault.

"I'm not like you Naruto!" Sasuke shouted,

And as he did he flung the shuriken in his hand down the length of the barn. It whipped across the room sheathed in a glow of chakra and as it span it burst into flames turning from blue to red as it greedily drank in the air around it.

Sakura screamed. A sheet of blood had fallen on her painting her from head to toe. Hise had had no time to react, too absorbed in Sakura's work. His head had been mulched. Little remained that was recognizable as a face, pinned as it was to the wall by the burning shuriken. The heat of the chakra-fueled fire started to melt the remaining flesh and it seemed to almost drip down the wall like candle wax. A horrid stench filled the barn and Sakura scrambled back on all fours, making it only a few meters before she had to halt. She was wracked with a dry heave as her stomach tried to empty itself.

Naruto had leapt from the wall, trying to stop the other boy from launching the projectile but had been too late, caught off guard by the sudden outburst. He could only look on in horror as Hise was taken out. Several long minutes passed as they looked on at Hise's burning corpse, each member of team seven trying to absorb what had just happened. It was a gruesome soundscape that framed their thoughts, the pattering of rain and the crackle and pop of cooking fat.

Naruto turned on Sasuke and smashed the boy into wall, pressing on his throat with his forearm. He felt ready to scream. He felt ready to kill, but he stopped. Sasuke had lost all color. His face was pale and struck with an empty wide eyed look. Naruto felt disgust, at himself as well as Sasuke. He had tried to call the Uchiha's bluff, so certain he wouldn't act, so certain he didn't have it in him. It seemed both of them had been surprised.

"Are you happy with yourself?" Naruto spat right up against the other boys face. "This is what you wanted right?"

Sasuke's jaw worked up and down in a parody of speech but no sound escaped from his lips.

"What about the other two Sasuke?" Naruto screamed "Don't you have to kill them too?"

The answer was slow coming and not at all what Naruto wanted to hear. In fact, he could barely tell that Sasuke was speaking, only seeing the slight movements of the boy's thin lips.

"Shouldn't you be thanking me? I did it so you don't have to you fucking coward."

Without thought Naruto's arm weighed down further on Sasuke's neck.

"You're not an idiot Naruto." Sasuke choked out. "You can hate me all you want but you know that some part of you is thanking me."

Naruto's whole body slackened and his arm slowly drifted away from Sasuke's neck to hang limply by his side. He couldn't bear to look at Sasuke.

"There could have been another way…" Naruto whispered.

Sasuke shook his head.

"I was already prepared to be a killer Naruto. This was for the best."

The words came out even keeled. Steady like they had been practiced but Naruto wasn't convinced. He had seen how shocked Sasuke had been, that uncontrolled flare of chakra. That wasn't a decision made rationally. That wasn't a decision to be made at all but there it was.

Sasuke had just pushed himself off the wall and onto his feet proper when he was slugged across the face by a pink haired blur. He could have dodged but he didn't. Not for the first time he found himself pushed against the wall of the barn, this time his other team mate holding him there with tears in her eyes. Naruto didn't have the mind to try and stop her.

"Why Sasuke…why….why did I waste my time."

There was a palpable edge to the young girl's voice as she pleaded with Sasuke.

"Do you know how hard I tried? Was it all for nothing?"

She was thumping him in the chest now with the bottoms of her fists, drumming out an irregular beat.

"Why Sasuke?..."

There were so many ways that question could be interpreted but Sasuke didn't really have an answer he was willing to give. He stayed silent and let her hit him.

The three genin were reminded of their current environment by a sudden roar of air rushing through the gaps in the walls of the room. The hay had come alight, and with it came a scattering of red hot embers carried by a torrent of hot air. The design of the barn worked perfectly and the dry aerated plant material proved a perfect fuel. The fire was already licking at the ceiling, threatening to bring it down in a heap of burning timber. They all snapped out of their stupor and made a mad dash for the exit. Only Naruto slowed for a moment as they passed Saito's unconscious form only to be pulled away by Sakura tugging at him arm. With no time to think he let himself be pulled away and not a moment too soon as the building collapse mere seconds after they tumbled out the door.

It was some kind of cosmic joke that the rain stopped then, just as the barn went up in smoke. There was barely a sign that it had rained at all in the skies. The clouds seemed to have simply vanished just as suddenly as they had appeared and all they left behind was the muddy ground and pools of standing water. Their absence revealed that it was a full moon but the harsh silver light was blotted out by the bonfire blazing away in that clearing. Naruto was drawn into the dancing flames as the adrenaline ebbed away and he only started to wake from his trance like state as horror slowly dawned upon him. Saito and Emi had been alive and they had been left to burn.

He imagined himself lying in amongst those burning coals, imagined them burrowing into his flesh with their burning heat, imagined his eyes drying like prunes and shriveling inside his head. His only possible solace was that Hise had died a painless death but it brought little comfort. The way his two team mates stared into the fire with unblinking eyes told him that they had come to the same realization and the same questions circled round and round their heads. Perhaps this made them monsters. A dark chuckle flitted through Naruto's mind.

* * *

The remaining hours of the night soon passed and left the barn as nothing but a patch of smoldering coals. The three of them had fallen into a fitful sleep around the warmth of the fire and woke with the rising sun. No words passed between them as they ate. Sakura had found a pot by the farmer's house. She made no mention of the farmer himself and the boys didn't ask. Still Naruto was lucid enough that he felt a small pinch in the bottom of his stomach when he saw Sakura boiling water over the remains of the barn. The rice sat heavily in his stomach and left Naruto feeling uncomfortable. It was far too macabre he thought, sharing a meal with his team mates among the ruins of the dead. In fact there were more dead then living at the farmstead and the pale white rice sitting in the blackened pot reminded him of funeral rites and offerings to the dead. To be eating it invited bad luck, or so a superstitious person would say.

They didn't linger either, quickly making their way along the route described to them earlier by the farmer as soon as their meal was done. As usual silence pervaded their group as they made their way towards their next destination. It had changed though, no longer was it the silence born of comfort and familiarity but one shaded by furtive glances and an uneasy tension. None of them knew what to say to one another and were all insecure in their own thoughts. Things had occurred so quickly that even in retrospect it was difficult to figure out what they had been thinking why they had acted in certain ways. Sakura in particular had changed. When she looked at the Uchiha boy her eyes lingered on his hands and she flinched ever so slightly when he turned to catch her gaze.

They arrived on the outskirts of Aichi the next day. It turned out to be much larger than they had thought it would be. The ground sloped away from the ocean at a gentle inclination and the town formed a large brown stain smeared across the coast and grey stone docks jutted out into the water like crenellations. The smell of wood smoke was inescapable and the exhausts of hundreds of burning stoves could be seen thrusting up into the sky like milky white fingers over the squat wooden houses that huddled together in a slipshod manner. The whole ugly mess was surrounded on all sides by an earthen berm designed to protect the town from floods and storms.

Even at that distance Naruto could see several large ships moored in the harbor. They were immense. Larger than anything he had ever seen. They seemed more castle than ship floating on the water, made as they were with towers and battlements festooned with arrow slits rising from their decks like a forest of death. Carved into the side of the ships was the symbol of the Land of Water. Naruto swore but Sasuke was the first to speak.

"It'll be risky trying to get past those war ships." He said "even if we managed to steal a boat."

Naruto's brow creased in concentration as he considered it.

"There's no guarantee we'll find something better. We don't want to be stuck in Wave any longer than we have to either." Naruto replied.

The two boys were deep in thought when Sakura interrupted with her own thoughts.

"can we get some proper food and some clothes?…we can keep pretending to be orphans."

She bit her tongue when she realized what she had said. Of course neither of the boys paid it much heed. There were far more serious things to consider. What Sakura said was true and any further information they could glean about the situation in the town would help them. For all they knew the ships out on the water were operating on skeleton crews or were principally supply ships. They would never know without further investigation.

The three of them chose to wait until it was further into the day, hoping to not invite any questions about three children travelling so early in the morning.

They passed the time watching the traffic entering the town from a distance. Naruto was gnawing on one of the rice balls as he did, grinding the hard rice between his teeth in an effort to vent some stress. It seemed there were pitifully few traders and far too many refugees and orphans flowing into the town. It was a little disconcerting in truth that they were accepting so many people into the town. Naruto had expected them to be a little more selective and had been planning to that effect. In fact the only ones who were rejected were the infirm or the disabled. It was more than once that the three Konoha genin were forced to witness a family being torn apart as sickly children or grandparents were thrown from the gate.

There was a conspicuous lack of any Kiri-nin, however, and the gates were manned by rough looking men in cobalt grey armor carrying wooden jutes. They approached the gate around midday and were held up by one of the guards. He was a short man, barely taller than Sasuke but more than twice as wide. He had a long angry scar travelling down one side of his face drawing a conspicuous line through his stubble where the hair refused to grow. The whole time he was looking at them he held his jute in one hand and slapped it against his other palm as if relishing the idea of using it to crack some of their skulls. Still he was a bit too rotund to be taken seriously. He was about as threatening as a paper barrel whose shape he mimicked so well.

"pfeh," he said "another group of little water rats."

He looked down at a book open on the table before him and scribbled a few notations into a column on one side with an ink set prepared net to it. A part of Naruto was astounded the man knew how to write, which was completely unfair to the man, but he didn't seem the type to know how.

"pfeh, Names?"

They gave them, well, the ones they had made up. They also flinched every time the man spoke. It seemed the man had an overabundance of spit as each time he spoke he would make that strange noise like his throat was drowning in the stuff. It was miraculous that none of it managed to escape his mouth.

"looking for work are we? Pfeh."

The three genin nodded silently

"pfeh. Well we can always use more runners or porters. Go on with you. Get! If you want work check the labor office by the docks."

He waved them on with his jute waving madly in the air and Naruto and his two team mates jogged through the gate, increasing their pace almost involuntarily as the gate guard urged them onwards. It seemed there was a labor shortage in the town, which explained why they were letting so many of the refugees in. What they needed it for, however, was another question entirely.


	9. Chapter 8 - Strange bedfellows

"The way of the warrior is the resolute acceptance of death" – Go Rin No Sho

* * *

Aichi was a labyrinth of mud churned streets and alleyways. Contained on all sides by flood embankments the population, which had more than tripled in the last few years, had built madly upwards. Even the smallest building stood four stories tall and loomed over the narrow streets. Naruto was amazed that any of it held together. What had appeared to be hills from further away had turned out to be enormous wooden tenements; old housing blocks that had simply merged together and sprouted upwards as more and more was built on top. Whole swathes of the ground level streets were shrouded in a constant darkness and Naruto felt as if he had stepped into a rat warren. There was no rhyme or reason to the layout of the streets. They seemed to sprawl in whatever direction they pleased, intersecting with side streets and other roads at jaunty angles and random elevations. Rough stairwells of rough cut and moisture logged wood seemed to be placed at random, leading to the upper levels of the giant timber ziggurats that covered the city.

It took the Naruto and his companions all day to orientate and acquire what they were looking for. They had wandered aimlessly at first, at a loss for what to do but they had soon been lured further into the city by the promise of proper food and warmer clothes. The sun always seemed to set quickly in the Land of Waves and soon the light had started to creep away behind the horizon. The streets had already been dark, the sky choked as it was by the haphazard structures towering up above them, but with the sun retreating Naruto could barely see the outline of the Uchiha boy beside him. Yet, as if by some unknown signal, light returned to the town. Residents and street workers, with an eerie synchronicity, came out from their homes and stations to hoist lanterns of all shapes and sizes onto the walls. The slate grey light of the clouded day had been replaced by the orange gloom of flickering flames.

The befuddling architecture had another effect. Sound traveled and bounced off the closed in walls and carried them right to Naruto's ears. The sounds of hundreds of people, even two or three streets over, traveled and only increased the feeling of claustrophobia. That was how they had found their way to the markets. The three genin had heard the yelling and shouting of street peddlers and merchants hocking their wares almost ten minutes before they had actually seen them. As they turned into another small alley they were assaulted by the cloying smell of heavily spiced fish and the hiss of hot oil.

Here at least, in what appeared to be the market district, the ground had been cobbled with smooth stones. By their appearance and the amount of wear apparent in their unnatural slope Naruto guessed that his had been one of the central roads in the town before it had exploded in on itself like some kind of cancerous growth. It was almost nice to feel something solid beneath his feet after so many hours of walking in the mud. A few silver coins had bought the three some warmer clothes, mostly of rough spun and un-dyed cotton, though Sakura had insisted on a pink length of ribbon to secure her hair. They had also bought cloaks and hats of waxed straw to keep off the rain and a warm meal amongst one of the dozen street stalls. All in all Naruto enjoyed himself immensely. Compared to the last few days of pain, discomfort and mortal peril the sights and sounds of exploring something so entirely new, like something out of one of his books, lifted Naruto's mood and almost made him forget what they had just left behind. Even his two companions had visibly cheered once they had had some proper food and some warmer clothes. In fact Sasuke had only broken a couple fingers when he had caught a street urchin trying to sneak his hand into his new canvas bag. Considering that the traditional Uchiha punishment for theft was cutting off a hand the urchin had been preternaturally lucky to catch Sasuke in an exceedingly rare good mood.

It seemed the town, though Naruto wondered if it was still fair to call it that, only became more lively as the night stretched on as the throng of people on continued to grow as the three genin started flagging. Asking a few of the stall owners for directions the three genin had eventually made their way to a local inn. It was new. Though the exterior was covered in peeling paint and the sign hung slightly off kilter the way the building had been sandwiched between two others showed it couldn't have been more than a few years old. The entire frontage of the inn was no more than five meters or so but it stretched upwards, like so much of the town did, eight stories up and was encrusted with catwalks and scaffolding made from bamboo.

The cost of the room had been exorbitant for what it was. They had made their way up to it only to find themselves in a room that resembled more a cell than it did any kind of place of hospitality. There were no windows and the floor was home to only a single ratty futon and a thin blanket that frayed at the edges as if it had been cut from a raw bolt of cloth. Sakura grimaced and gave a sidelong glance at Naruto, as if it was his fault. He didn't reply with words but simply showed her his wallet hanging limp in his hand. They had spent almost all his funds on their new equipment and this was the best they could afford. As far as insults went this was the least that they had had to bear since the disaster several days ago. Sasuke himself only gave a non-committal grunt as he discarded his cloak, hat and bag and prepared to get some rest.

"I thought you would be jumping for joy Sakura." Naruto said with a hint of mirth in his voice "The rooms so small Sasuke has nowhere to run."

The aforementioned boy tensed on the floor.

"Shut up Naruto." Sakura bit back "there's no room for me to run either."

"huh…" Naruto replied and put a hand to his chin as if it had just occurred to him.

Sakura just scowled at that and smacked the boy over the back of the head before declaring she was going to use the bathroom.

With a shrug Naruto discarded his own outer wear and settled himself on the floor after blowing out the small lamp that had been provided. Shoving his hands back behind his head Naruto spared a quick glance to the other boy in the room. Sasuke had his back turned and his face towards the wall. Naruto had almost opened his mouth at that point but had quickly realized he had little to say. He had tried to drum up some of that anger, to come up with some kind of rebuke, but just as his words had failed him before Naruto found something holding him back. Hise, Emi, Saito, names that floated through his mind, faces that twisted in agony as they were consumed by fire.

His thoughts were interrupted when he felt a foot jab him in the leg. Lifting his head Naruto saw Sakura standing above him and he lifted one eyebrow in a questioning look. The girl gave an uneasy look towards their other team mate before jabbing Naruto in the side again. A level of surprise blossomed in Naruto's mind but he was careful not to say anything, instead he rolled over closer to the other boy and left the spot next to the wall vacant for his female team mate. Once again he found himself sleeping in the middle.

"Naruto…" Sakura's voice rang out in the darkness and she opened her mouth to continue speaking.

"Go to sleep Sakura." Naruto said.

He slept fitfully.

* * *

It was impossible to tell what time it was. The room lacked any way to tell. Still, Naruto woke once again with the feeling of his arms tied to his sides. He panicked but it quickly died down as he recalled the familiar feeling. That was until he saw how the room was filled with light. He knew he had doused the flame before he had gone to sleep yet there it was, flickering across the wall with the shadows of their bodies and something else. He tried to speak but found a hand clamped across the front of his mouth muffling him. He drew in air through his nostrils and prepared to shout but was stopped by the sound of a familiar voice.

"Good morning."

The hand moved away from his mouth and Naruto sat up and twisted around to face the man he had thought he would never see again.

"Sensei…" he whispered.

His two team mates woke as well, looking through their bleary sleep-ridden eyes to see what was going on. The sense of relief was palpable. Sakura had dived almost immediately into Kakashi, crushing the man in a tight hug as she started to sob lightly into his flak jacket.

"I knew you would come sensei…" she said softly.

Sasuke simply looked on with wide eyes as the momentary tension on his waking slowly bled out of his frame and left him deflated on the floor of the room.

Naruto couldn't help but drink in the appearance of the man before them. He had never seen the jonin looking so haggard. There were several rents in the man's clothes and the white hint of bandages could be seen peeping out from underneath them. The older man had seemed ready to launch into some kind of tirade but had been overcome by the pink haired girl clutching him so tightly. For a second Naruto saw how the jonin's shoulders sagged as if he had just thrown off a great weight that had left him exhausted. It evaporated quick as it came and Kakashi slowly pushed the girl off him.

"It's good to see you three." Kakashi said quietly before raising his voice. "I want a report."

The three genin quickly filled him in on what had occurred since their separation. The words came in a torrent as all three were eager to shift responsibility to their superior officer. Now that he had arrived they felt like some modicum of control could come back to their lives. When it came to the events that had occurred at the farm stead only Sasuke had spoken.

"We encountered a mist genin team. We maintained cover as civilians but were forced to defend ourselves when one of them attacked us. We eliminated them."

The entire time Kakashi had cast an appraising look on his three genin as they reported what had happened. In particular he noticed how Naruto's expression darkened as Sasuke spoke about the mist genin. Sakura held a similar expression though tempered more with grief than anger. It was clear to him that there was a lot that was left unspoken but he dismissed ut for now due to more pressing matters.

"Any witnesses?" Kakashi asked.

"None," was Sasuke's curt reply.

"Good."

Naruto winced.

The three genin were now sitting in front of Kakashi as the man kneeled before them and they quickly finished the rest of their report.

"I will let you know that you have performed admirably given the circumstances." Kakashi said. "This has quickly escalated far beyond what I had intended. Mistakes were made. You three are completely unprepared for what's to come but I trust it has only proved my earlier lesson."

The three genin nodded as Kakashi hard stare pierced each one of them. They were still far too green. His lesson during their journey to wave had tried to mimic the suddenness, the harshness of the reality of their profession but repetition and reinforcement were the basics of instructional theory.

"Life is atypical. Everything comes from and returns to death. Death is the default. To live requires exceptional effort. To lax is to return to death. You three would have died tonight if I had been an enemy."

He accused them all with his words and watched them blanch under the scrutiny. He forgave the slip, after all they were completely untested, barely out of the academy, but again the world wouldn't accept excuses. They held their tongues. Even Naruto found there was no rebuttal to those words. They had relaxed far too much in the imaginary safety of the inn.

After several more seconds of uncomfortable silence where Kakashi let his words sink in he continued to inform them of their situation and what he had managed to learn.

"Our relief team has most likely been intercepted and taken out. There is little chance of further reinforcement for the foreseeable future. Sasuke, thoughts?"

Sasuke jerked his head up at the sudden question and took a moment to collect his thoughts.

"We need to report back to Konoha and let them know what's happening here. Our first priority should be escape."

"That won't work anymore." Naruto interrupted but stopped when Sasuke glared at him.

"Continue Naruto." Kakashi said after a moment.

Naruto shrugged his shoulders and shook off the dirty look Sasuke was giving him.

"As far as we know there are still three whole platoons of Kiri-nin in Wave. They want to keep everything hush-hush so they'll be guarding the borders very closely. Were also on an island, as in surrounded on all sides by water, and they're Kiri-nin. Sensei is also injured. We'd get slaughtered trying to get to the mainland. Best bet is to lay low and wait for Konoha to realize something is wrong and send a recon team."

Kakashi nodded along as Naruto spoke but also lifted a single finger at the end, pre-empting an angry retort from Sasuke.

"Both plans have merit, "Kakashi said "but Naruto is correct that as it stands escape is far too risky. Once I have recovered from my wounds we can re-examine the possibility."

A growl emanated from Sasuke as he rose from his spot. He threw up his hand in a bunched fist and held it.

"So what, were just going to sit around and do nothing?" He demanded.

A tight feeling spread across Naruto's chest and his breath caught in his throat. He could see Sasuke's knees shaking, just slightly, and he knew once again the familiar feeling of Kakashi's killing intent.

"Sit down." Kakashi said.

Sasuke clumsily did so, his joints locking up like clockwork overtaken by rust. A slight sheen of sweat could be seen on his forehead. Naruto had apparently been lucky to only catch the edge of that particular blast but Sasuke had clearly been the target.

"You" Kakashi said pointedly "have just left me in a position where it appears I have to explain myself to a genin fresh out of the Academy."

Sakura shied back from the jonin and hid herself partially behind Naruto as the boy himself swallowed heavily and tried his best to keep still.

"Do I have to explain myself to you Sasuke?" the jonin continued.

Sasuke failed to speak as the pressure mounted and he cast his eyes down to the floor, making a conscious effort to avoid the heavy gaze of his superior. Still the submission was incomplete as Kakashi noted the tension held in the boy's arms and shoulders. With an internal sigh Kakashi accepted that it would be the best he would get, after all he had little experience dealing with mercurial children even if ostensibly they were soldiers under his command. He decided to move on.

"Come."

* * *

Sasuke had been put in his place and it reflected in his foul mood as they scrambled to gather their belongings and chase after their sensei as he left the room. The man himself had acquired a cloak and hat similar to his subordinates and the four slipped out of the inn in what appeared to be the early hours of the day. In stark contrast to earlier the streets were almost empty with only a handful of people walking through them. There seemed to be more drunks and other vagrants passed out on the roadside then individuals with some kind of purpose.

As they followed their sensei along whatever meandering route the man had in mind Naruto noted the slight limp in the man's gait and the way he favored one side over the other. His mind had boggled when Kakashi had informed them of what had transpired while they were separated. To think an individual could be so deadly, it chilled him. Not that he doubted the veracity of Kakashi's retelling but it seemed almost inhuman for man to be capable of that level of violence. He had always thought there was more to the man and the lackadaisical attitude he had become so used had now given away to Kakashi's natural element.

It was not long before Naruto found himself following the rest of his team into a dilapidated building through a small door that even he had to duck to travel through. The outside had been non-descript enough to blur into the surrounding mess of architecture and if he hadn't been led right to it Naruto was sure he would have missed it all together. Once they were all inside Kakashi began to speak again.

"I never intended we remain passive for the duration of our stay in Wave. It will take at least two weeks for any kind of response to be mounted by Konoha, most likely a month before they move in any kind of strength."

The man's voice echoed in the confines of the tunnel. The floor sloped away beneath Naruto's feet and the team slowly descended further and further down the cramped passage. It eventually opened up into a small wooden room. It appeared to have been abandoned for quite some time though originally it would have been a home. A small blacked out hearth could be seen in the center of the room with a cooking pot hanging over it from a small metal cage that covered over the top. A small photo frame occupied one corner, the glass smashed and its content bleached by time to be unrecognizable. A thick layer of dust covered every surface.

"You can come out now." Kakashi said.

Two cloaked figures materialized from the shadows

"So, these are your brats?"

A mouth, filled with shark like teeth, gleamed in the gloom.


	10. Chapter 9 - Conspiracy

"It is difficult to know yourself if you do not know others" - Go Rin No Sho

* * *

Naruto was seated in a small tea house. He grimaced at the bitter taste of his drink. The chipped porcelain cup felt grimy in his hand and the dark amber liquid sitting inside it perfectly reflected his own ugly disposition. He had let it steep far too long. Discarding the lukewarm tea Naruto leant back in his seat and eyed the street outside. It had started to rain once again and the water dribbled down the side of the building and dripped lazily from the lip of the entrance.

The girl sitting across from him carefully drew back her sleeves, a cup in one hand, and took a lengthy sip. Naruto blanched as he watched her drink.

"I don't know how you can stomach this kind of thing Haku." Naruto said.

Haku brought the cup back to the surface of the table with a practised grace and dropped it with only the barest hint of noise. Almost invisible wisps of steam escaped from the corners of her mouth as the lukewarm liquid passed down her throat.

"I also disliked it at first" she replied, scattering the steam "but it no longer bothers me."

Naruto grunted at the response and tucked his hands under his armpits and observed the rest of the room.

"I'm not so sure I could get used to it." He muttered.

"Have your brothers kept an eye on our man?" Haku said forcing Naruto from his thoughts.

He nodded as a flush of memories flowed into his mind. Naruto had long been aware of the secondary advantages his shadow clones provided. As such he had several dozen of them scattered through that area of the town. The memory transfer that occurred when the clones dispelled were an invaluable tool when it came to reconnaissance. He took several minutes with his eyes closed to parse the information.

The exact nature of the memory transfer was something Naruto had long become familiar with. At first he had been ecstatic with the possibilities but he had been quickly disappointed. Clones could be described most basically as chakra constructs and as such they lack the vital component of true memories, comprehension. They didn't truly think. Although theoretically they were capable of almost any action Naruto was in practice they could only follow basic orders. In addition any information they transferred over was exactly that, raw information unfiltered by intelligence. If you told a clone to read a book on their dispelling you would receive the exact image of the pages in that book as if a painter had perfectly recreated them. You would still have to read that damn thing yourself within that memory to understand what was written there.

"Our buddy finished half an hour ago. He's heading to… the red light district again."

He spoke with little worry of being overheard. The tea house was crowded and he was careful with his words not to mention that no one outside of Konoha knew who he was.

"Lucky for us, Uzumaki-san, he is a creature of habit." Haku said, punctuating it with another sip.

Naruto started drumming his fingers against the top of the table with the other propping up his chin. Nervous energy coursed through his body and left him restless. He could still taste that awful tea. Only the fact that it was shared with a pretty girl made it in any way palatable.

"You know it's awfully cold to say Uzumaki-san, Uzumaki-san, every time you speak to me." Naruto sighed.

"I did not know it bothered you." Haku replied with the slightest grin "and being cold is in my nature."

He enjoyed the joke with a knowing chuckle and returned his gaze to the girl.

"Well, I thought after almost five days of this we were friends at the very least." He said.

Haku's hand halted halfway between the table and her mouth, the cup hanging there as she suddenly came to a stop. The slightest hint of pink tinged her cheeks as she hid the lower half of her face. Naruto's brows stitched in mild confusion.

She spoke in sotto voce "the very least?"

It took a second for the implications to dawn on Naruto. Heat crawled up the back of his neck and suffused his face. It only worsened when the sound of laughter washed over him. It was delicate like silver bells but retained that deeper undertone that reflected honest amusement. It burned his ears even more.

"I guess if you're willing to tease me you definitely should call me Naruto." He said with a pout.

Haku's mouth was hidden behind her hand as she continued to laugh. Naruto couldn't help but notice how small they were, almost dainty, fragile, like they belonged on a fine china doll. Her nails were also immaculate. He wondered how many men had thought the same thing before those very hands had killed them. Or perhaps they were focused on other things… It was a recurring thought that he did his best to banish.

It had been five days since they had reunited with Kakashi and his new friends. The revelation that the two were missing-nins had been surprising but hadn't been the biggest surprise. Zabuza Momochi, Demon of the Hidden Mist, a giant of a man that stood almost seven feet tall wielding a blade larger than most men and with teeth like daggers. No surprise there, he was a quintessential missing-nin. His companion Haku, however, could belong at the daimyo's court or perhaps an okiya at the capital. She could have also stepped right out of the legend of the Yuki-Onna , a ghost who stalked the frigid snow plains in search of mortal men, though in this case it was an Ice based bloodline limit not demonic powers.

"Naruto then," She said

"That's right." Naruto said beaming.

"Have you ever done something like this before?" she asked.

Naruto considered the question before shaking his head.

"I've practised a bit but this is my first time for real." He replied.

"have you tried travelling or maybe Ikebana?" she continued.

Naruto took a moment before answering about his torture and interrogation experience. He had been taken off guard by Haku's nonchalance. Her casual tone would have been more appropriate for a question about his hobbies which he guessed it was in a way.

"No." he said. Inwardly he was thankful for that.

Haku's face almost betrayed something that Naruto couldn't quite catch and the way she spoke next left him more than a little confused. Contrary to her words her tone almost approached a sense of relief and perhaps guilt.

"That is unfortunate."

"Why do you do this stuff? You don't really strike me as the type." Naruto spoke suddenly as if the question had struck him.

"I know too little to do much else." She replied.

Naruto leant forward is his chair and pulled it in another inch or so. He pinned the girl's eyes with his own. She deflected by taking another sip from her cup.

"You know what I meant." Naruto said.

She busied herself by refilling her cup as well as Naruto's. Naruto simply waited as the silence lengthened between them until she dropped the teapot with a heavy thud.

"I…" she hesitated with her speech. "It's a matter of loyalty."

"Loyalty huh?... That's an easy excuse." Naruto spoke more to himself than anyone else yet Haku's shoulders hardened at the words and the temperature of the room dropped noticeably.

"Perhaps you simply can't understand." she asked "After all, my master took me in, fed me, clothed me, taught me, and gave me a purpose in life. For his sake I endure these things as distasteful as they are. To serve him, to protect him, that matters to me more than anything else. What matters to you Uzumaki-san? Perhaps you should figure that out before you think to judge me."

She slid Naruto's teacup to him and left without another word, her water proof cloak left forgotten on the back of her seat. Naruto realized what he had said just a little too late but he noticed he felt entirely unapologetic. He drank his tea and grimaced. It was ice cold.

* * *

Naruto arrived back at their hide out about an hour later after having wandered the streets for a good while to shake off any possible tails. He found himself muttering about what Haku had said to him as he waited for the other members.

"She's right Naruto,"

A voice startled the young boy out of his gloomy stupor. It was Kakashi, his hair dyed brown and his forehead protector replaced with a nondescript eye patch. A heavy hand was placed on his shoulder as the man took a seat next to him. He still had a slight limp and fell into the seat with an audible thud.

"To protect what's precious to us, our village, our friends, we are at times forced to do unsavoury things. It's how the world is, war after war, battle after battle, stretching back beyond the era of warring clans. Perhaps in a perfect world it would be different."

Only the honest weariness in the jonin's voice stopped Naruto from snapping back at the man and only left him thinking over those words. A moment later Sasuke and Sakura joined them as well nodding at Naruto and confirming they had managed to acquire a litter. It seemed his two team mates had been successful in their portion of the mission. Naruto waited for them to settle in before he started to speak.

"Our target is still following the same schedule as the last couple of days. He arrived at gambling den about forty minutes ago." Naruto said. "He'll spend about three hours there and then go visit the brothel three levels up on a different street. After about an hour he'll go home over in the next district."

"On foot?" Kakashi asked.

"Yeah," Naruto replied "He knows the streets pretty well. Our best bet is probably grabbing him as close to the brothel as possible where the buildings are the densest. He likes to go incognito and alone so it'll be easier for us."

"How are we supposed to fit the litter in the alleys?" Sasuke asked.

Naruto put his hand to his chin. "You and Sakura will probably have to wait on one of the larger streets while Haku and I grab him. After all it'll look a bit strange if we were to carry a litter away from the front of a brothel."

Sakura nodded along but Sasuke crossed his arms and scoffed.

"Haku? You're far too friendly with that missing-nin dobe. Wouldn't the two of you prefer to wait with the litter? After all-"

"Enough Sasuke," Kakashi cut in before the genin could speak any further. "Like it or not they are our allies. Without them we wouldn't even have this opportunity."

The man they were hoping to kidnap, Saburo Yamada, was the secretary to the local magistrate who governed the town and the nearby areas. According to Zabuza both him and his boss had worked for Gato and had smoothly transitioned to working under Mist as they had been aware in advance of the looming annexation. Saburo also had a gambling problem and frequented the red light district. He was a far easier target than the magistrate himself and his habits would make it easy to blame his disappearance on the local criminal elements. He presented a perfect balance between quality, quantity, and ease of retrieval when it came to intelligence.

"Good work Naruto." Kakashi continued. "Is there anything else?"

Sasuke spoke up from his side of the table.

"I counted about three hundred men in the garrison, all Wave locals. It seems Mist kept things mostly intact and only replaced the upper echelons. Most of the patrols are around the richer districts and dockside. They don't bother patrolling the more crowded districts. Still haven't seen a single shinobi but I haven't been able to look around the more highly patrolled areas."

Kakashi tilted his head and gave that smile with the upturned eye. No one could tell if it was genuine though Naruto would have said it was the effort of a man that only partly knew how a smile was meant to work.

"Sakura?" Kakashi asked.

The girl in question didn't meet his gaze but looked nervously at her feet with her hands clutching the hem of her cloak as if she didn't know what else to do with them. It took some time but she did speak.

"I didn't find anything all that useful…but I noticed something unusual." She said before stopping and waiting for her team's reaction.

When Kakashi motioned for her to continue she did.

"This might be a bit silly." She mumbled. "But… where are all the children? I mean I haven't seen anyone younger than ten."

Her words cast a silence over the group as they all searched their memories somewhat incredulous that they could miss such a detail. They all looked at one another in silent confirmation as they all came to the same realization. What Sakura had said was true. None of the male members of team seven could recall seeing any young children at all during their time in the town.

"When did you first notice this Sakura?" Kakashi asked.

"First day we got here actually…I just wasn't sure if it was because of the area we were in or maybe some kind of curfew but I still haven't seen any." She replied.

"Zabuza?" Kakashi said turning to look at the man sitting in the corner.

The missing-nin had been content to listen in on team seven as he polished and sharpened his weapons in the rear of the room. Haku had yet to return and he was happy to let Kakashi take the lead with planning things out since three out of four of their uninjured nin were his. Even so the man had been unusually quiet as he recuperated.

"Dunno." Zabuza said not even looking up at the other jonin.

Kakashi was barely fazed by the wholly unhelpful response and nodded as if it answered all his questions. His three students, however, couldn't decide which man was worse and simply ignored the exchange.

"Well," Kakashi said without missing a beat "That is highly unusual but has no bearing on our current situation. For now we will concentrate on retrieving Saburo Yamada. Aichi is perfect for remaining hidden and Mist may have already deduced both Zabuza and I live. For now we wait and learn as much as we can. Reconvene tomorrow at sixteen hundred for a final brief before the operation. Dismissed."

* * *

The next day passed quickly and a basic plan had been hashed out. Kakashi was one who preferred to keep his plans flexible and so the operation began with only a basic framework. Sakura and Sasuke had positioned themselves several hours earlier on one of the larger thoroughfares three minutes away from the brothel transformed to appear as generic household servants.

Haku and Naruto had followed their target to the gambling den, an establishment called the Silver River in the western section of the red light district. It was one of the largest of its kind taking up almost two dozen meters of street frontage on the ground floor level. The owners had spared no expense and the place was suitably gaudy with faux gold leaf and redwood paneling covered in sinuous scrollwork. The clientele were similarly ostentatious and the combined value of their dress could most likely purchase several thousand koku of rice. Naruto found himself mesmerized by the sea of waxed parasols flowing into the entrance of the den, the metalled dragons, herons and hares printed on their faces coming to life in the torchlight.

It was an uneventful three hours as Naruto and Haku waited across the street and two stories up on a balcony that had no door leading into the building it was built on. It was another of Aichi's many oddities and oversights that came naturally with the frenzied nature of its construction. The buildings on each side of the street tapered to a join only a few meters above their heads giving Naruto the impression that they were hiding in the rafters of some great temple ironically filled with all kinds of sin. Haku had barely said a word to him since their conversation in the tea house the day before and Naruto had yet to gather the courage to broach any subject besides the mission. The slightly cool breeze floating from her direction did little to encourage him.

Yamada would always leave via the front entrance but Naruto had also seeded the area with almost two score of clones covering every possible exit from the gambling den and the brothel three levels up. It turned out to be prudent as Naruto was startled by the sudden arrival of a memory of Yamada leaving from the rear entrance.

"Something's changed." Naruto said "He's not going to the brothel. Come on."

Without waiting for a reply dashed from wall to wall and dropped down into a nearby alleyway. Just as Haku did the same beside him he created two more clones and sent them with messages written on slips of paper. One would notify Kakashi of the change in plan and the other would summon his two other team mates to rendezvous with them.

Unlike every other night this time their target didn't travel alone but had four cloaked figures forming a ring around him as they navigated through the town. Chances of extracting him looking far too slim they had settled for following him to see where he went. In the end the chase had been short lived and it hadn't taken the duo long to realize that the target had not known he was being tailed. It seemed this deviation from his usual habits had not been caused by their surveillance but was rather another item that they had yet to catalogue.

It was only thirty minutes later that they found themselves waylaid by a guarded gate. The patrols in the dockside area had been unusually light and they had followed their target quite easily until he and his guards slipped beyond their reach into the compound behind the gate. Having done as much as they were allowed they retreated back several streets and awaited the rest of their team.

"That's the Mitsui merchant house symbol on the gate" Haku said as they touched down on the roof of the building they had earlier set as the local rally point. "They're based in the Land of Rice and they trade mainly in agricultural products."

"So the question is why our buddy Saburo is visiting this place at two in the morning." Naruto muttered back. "It's not exactly normal business hours… We'll see what Kakashi wants to do."


	11. Chapter 10 - The mind and the seal

"To wield the sword well you must wield it calmly" - Go Rin No Sho

* * *

The Amber Den was an izakaya style restaurant nestled underground at the bottom of a set of slick stone steps barely wide enough to fit a single man. The moss covered walls of that stairway acted like a chimney drawing the warmth and smell of food up onto the street. On cold nights, as it was then, it would promise those passing by something akin to the promise of fool's gold glinting in a riverbed. It was truly one of the dingiest holes in the ground Kakashi had ever seen. Its only similarity to its namesake was perhaps the dark color of its tar stained ceiling or the ring of dry crusted beer that sat in the bottom of their glasses. Nevertheless Kakashi was currently seated in a private room inside the establishment, orange book in one hand and a glass in the other, making a pointed effort to ignore the missing-nin seated opposite to him. Ostensibly the two elder shinobi were on standby, the Den only being a few short minutes from the Silver River.

"You know I never would have guessed the cover was just for show. Who disguises a book on teaching as a porn novel?" Zabuza snorted, his words interrupted by the clink of his hardwood pipe against the edge of an ashtray.

"I never would have guessed the infamous Demon of the Hidden Mist would be mothered by a teenager. " Kakashi replied.

The missing-nin only grunted in response as he refilled the pipe he usually kept well hidden. It wasn't often he could indulge himself in the habit. Lighting it once again he continued to chase his original point.

"A book won't make you a better teacher. Not that you're suited for teaching."

"How meaningless that is coming from you." Kakashi murmured turning a page.

Zabuza lifted his glass with a single finger lifted off its rim and stuck in the air as if to signal a point. He shook it from side to side at the one eyed man before taking the sake inside in a single gulp.

"Well my brat could beat up your brats, all three of them, at the same time, with one hand tied behind her back. Pretty sure that makes me a better teacher."

"Ah you brag about her too. How cute," was Kakashi's dry reply.

Zabuza's teeth tightened almost imperceptibly on the stem of his pipe.

"Those useless platitudes you tell your genin won't get them any less killed. You have to let the chaff be separated from the wheat. If they don't understand what kind of shit they've signed up for by now they're good as dead whether you tell them or not."

With an inward sigh Kakashi discarded the book, slipping it away into the folds of his clothes. He honestly did have no clue how to approach teaching his genin. So far he had just gone with whatever had come to mind. Trying to recall his past training was of little use. It wasn't a matter of techniques but a matter of mindset, attitude, and ways of thinking. In his time, war time, you either learned or died, chaff from wheat. There was no war now for Kakashi to thrust his genin into and even then they probably wouldn't have survived it. Trying to instill that same sense of urgency, of survival, in his students was difficult. If his little genjutsu trick and the following events had done so or not he had yet to see. He hoped they all lived so he could find out. Kakashi's thoughts were soon interrupted by a slip of paper.

* * *

It took little time for the gathered fugitives to realize the Mitsui compound was barely guarded. Even the most cursory examination revealed only the gate was manned. It was clear that whatever Saburo was doing inside was to be kept between the fewest people possible. A large merchant compound with over sixteen warehouses filled with valuable goods should have had an equally large contingent of guards day and night. Not only to defend against petty thievery but also sabotage by rivals. Their absence was concerning but in itself a boon to whoever wished to find out why. By Kakashi's decision they had placed Saburo's anonymous disappearance by the wayside and entered the compound, climbing and dashing over the walls and roofs in search of answers.

It was when they reached near the docks that their search came to an end. Three large flat bottomed barges were lashed to the stone piers. River cargo haulers, though not uncommon, were a rare sight in a blue-water trading nation such as Wave. These vessels were designed for traversing rivers and coastlines not the open ocean and the only nearby river was the Naka that ran from the east coast of Fire all the way to its origins in the foothills of Earth.

Their man Saburo was standing in the center of a flurry of activity as supplies were hurriedly loaded onto the ships by stringy looking men in sun-bleached clothes. The only other idle person on the dock was his partner in conversation, a dark skinned man swathed in grey fabric from his head to his knees with only his eyes showing from the depths of his coverings. The Konoha shinobi and their missing-nin allies watched from the roof of a nearby warehouse. It was too far to hear what was being said but they were leery of approaching any closer. The number of men and the number of torches illuminating the area would make it far too difficult. So they waited and the sharper eyes among them noted several jade bricks being passed from the anonymous man to Saburo, several thousand ryo worth of the iridescent material.

The payment received the secretary signaled with his left hand as the other slipped the bricks into various places within his loosely fitted clothes. With a wave several other men approached from the opposite side from which Naruto and company were observing. Amongst them was someone Naruto recognized, the short barrel chested man that had noted them down at the gate. His jute was with him swinging against his thigh as it hung from a piece of red cord tied to his belt. He looked as ridiculous as ever as he waddled on his two squat legs towards Saburo. A curt series of words, perhaps only five or six, was exchanged before he turned right back shouting at the men who had come with him.

"Get the merchandise!"

Naruto mentally dubbed in that disgusting spitting noise.

The Mitsui docks ran from north to south with six piers in total. Those six were divided into two groups of three serviced by a U-bend of eight warehouses that faced out towards the sea. Naruto was currently on the southern side with the ocean to his left. The gate guard, or whatever he was, was currently moving to the smaller northern warehouse that was much closer to Saburo than they had dared to go. By his directions four of the men moved to shift the large wooden cross beam that barred the door. It was only then that Naruto was struck by the strangeness of a warehouse that was locked from the outside. Yet he didn't have to ponder it for long as the doors were pulled back and the twenty or so men with the gate guard sauntered in, drawing their jutes, pole-arms, and whatever other weapon they had on hand.

None in Naruto's group spoke but there was a sharp collective intake of air as they saw what was inside. Children, none older than ten, huddled together and filthy. The smell was carried over by the ocean breeze, the stench of piss, shit, and something far more pungent and almost cloying. It was the smell of rotting flesh.

The armed men started to yell and brandish their weapons, roughly shoving, dragging and kicking their captives out of the confines of the warehouse and out into the open and into rough lines towards the boats. There had to be almost fifty kids being shepherded out into the night. Not all of them were alive. Several of the men were stacking bodies next to the doors of the warehouse as others still dragged them out by their arms or their legs before tossing them in a pile outside.

Naruto started to rise from his hiding spot as the adrenaline started to spike through his system only to be stopped by the heavy hand of Kakashi pushing down on his shoulder. With a snarl Naruto tossed the hand away and turned to leap from the building only to be pulled down onto his back.

"Stand down Naruto." Kakashi spoke, a whisper but with a hard edge. "We must not compromise ourselves, for the sake of the village."

Naruto wanted nothing more than to strike the man holding him to the ground. He wished he could bore through the man's face by look alone. His fingers dug into the edges of the roofs tiles and for a second he could see himself pulling one of them away and smashing it into Kakashi's face in a fountain of bright red blood.

"Then fuck the village." He hissed "We can't just let this happen."

"And what of your team mates" Kakashi replied in the same tone "would you forsake them too?"

Naruto forced himself to not look where he knew them to be. He couldn't even feel sorry for what he was about to do.

"Fine…" He said, trying to draw as much of the heat away from his voice as he could.

Kakashi relaxed his grip as Naruto backed down from his gaze and turned to speak to the others. The moment he did he felt a pulse of chakra behind him. He had underestimated Naruto, his cunning, his stubbornness and most egregiously his inability to think things through. All that remained where Naruto had been was a plank of wood with not even a wisp of smoke to show he had been there.

* * *

Naruto raced towards the group of men herding the children onto the boats. With a single hand-sign he summoned almost fifty clones as he closed in to his first target. As he approached he felt something hot, almost sticky in consistency slowly rise from the bottom of his stomach and clench around his heart. He would kill them, dead men all of them. What they were doing here couldn't be forgiven, couldn't be overlooked. He would kill them. He would cut them. He would slice their throats, rend their flesh from bones, burn them to ashes and scatter them to the winds.

He leapt into the air a few short steps from the first man a kunai gripped tight in his right hand outstretched towards the sky. He fell on the slaver like a spider on its prey, legs wrapping around the man's torso and his kunai stabbing repeatedly into the man's chest. He took no care to avoid the ribs, simply smashing through them with brute force and churning the lung beneath to paste. The warm arterial blood splattered onto his face and the ooze in his belly ignited into a crackling energy that electrified him to his fingertips. He would devour these men whole.

Kakashi looked on in horror, his usually quick reaction blunted by what he felt echoing through his own pool of chakra. That which once felt could never be forgotten, that oppressive chaotic energy that lapped against your very soul, the aura of the nine tailed demon fox.

"Run. All of you run!" He shouted back at his companions.

The other two genin had been gripped by the twin hands of fear and confusion, their minds mired in their grasp. It was as if they were startled awake by Kakashi's words and only then did their fear move from the primal to the very forefront of their thoughts. Without another glance back all but Kakashi fled. His very instincts told Kakashi to do the same but he knew that without intervention there was no knowing how far would be far enough. He could barely understand how this could have happened, how Naruto had succumbed to that chakra, how a C-rank had come to this. Yet there was still a chance. The chakra didn't seem to be increasing. Perhaps this was just the tiny sliver of that malevolent energy that leaked naturally into the boy's coils somehow reacting to his mental state. Kakashi was no seal master and he could only hope.

Said boy was onto his third man by that point, his clones shoving as many of the kids as they could onto the boats. It was a plan from when he was more lucid. Getting them onto the boats and hijacking those to get everyone to Fire had seemed like a good plan. That plan was now forgotten by the original. He was gleefully cutting down the slavers as they tried to flee. The kunai in his hand had long become blunt and it drew great ragged wounds wherever it struck tearing and ripping where it had once cut and sliced.

Naruto, within the haze that had come over his mind, recalled the gate guard. His eyes roamed the nearby area in search of him. The son of a bitch had clearly been directing children towards this place, where they could be taken and sold like chattel. He in particular needed to die. Saburo too needed to pay for his sins. It was then that the third man, the one swathed in cloths, struck sending Naruto reeling and bouncing along the ground with a powerful kick to the small of his back.

Naruto skidded to a halt as long growl pushed through his clenched teeth. Splinters of the paving stones fell from his torn clothes as he faced his new opponent. Of course, the customer, how could he forget? With a piercing yell he loped across the intervening ground in long wolf like lunges, eating up the distance in a matter of seconds. His blood sang in his veins as his muscles flexed in preparation. Like a spear he thrust his body forward, his coal red eyes trained on his target, his kunai at the forefront, and nothing less than the expectation of skewering the man through and dragging his guts out through the hole.

He missed. The man simply shifted his body to the side and the blade passed harmlessly by him finding purchase in nothing but air. Before Naruto could recover the man kicked his knee up into Naruto's stomach, driving the air out from him. Surprisingly the unknown assailant recoiled back as if in pain and quickly moved past Naruto and turned to face him once again. A large patch of the man's clothing around his knee was darkly discolored and the patch only grew as his eyes narrowed and re-evaluated the threat before him. Naruto didn't wait for his breath to return. The man was already injured and now he knew he only had to touch him to hurt him. He didn't question it, only savored the possibility of the kill. He moved a half step forward and stopped.

He had been denied. They had been so focused on one another neither had noticed Kakashi. The unknown man dropped to the ground with a kunai protruding from his back. The anti-climactic end, the denial of his kill, Naruto raged.

"What the fuck do you-"

"Get a hold of yourself Naruto!" Kakashi cut him off with a pleading tone. "It's over. The slavers have all fled and your clones already have the ships on the water. If we are quick this may be our opportunity to escape. Please."

Kakashi hoped that his gamble would not get him killed but he had no other options. If only he could get the boy to calm down the nine tails influence may subside.

"You didn't come here for this but you did it. You saved those kids. Now please, we must think of returning to Konoha."

Naruto blinked several times as if he were clearing his vision before he turned to see the ships out on the water and then in turn the bodies strewn about the docks. His hands became slack and the kunai clattered to the ground as he saw his surroundings for what felt like the first time.

"Sensei?..." he asked, his throat suddenly parched.

"It's okay Naruto. It's over. Please lets go home." Kakashi said.

The words washed over Naruto as he felt the strength flee from his limbs. He was about to collapse to his knees when a sudden roar of moving water swamped them. Twisting back to the ships revealed the source. A towering serpentine creature crafted from chakra and water had burst from the ocean surface. It twisted in the air and with a sudden arrest in its momentum came crashing down upon the ships, folding the flat wide vessels like folding cards and pushing them into the depths. Naruto did fall to his knees then as the memories from his clones returned the faces of every living soul that had been on those ships.

When he saw Kakashi jerk into a readying stance Naruto barely moved. Two dozen figures dropped down from the warehouse roofs and moved in to surround them. They had also brought two others with them, his two genin team mates tied, gagged and bloody. The Kiri-nin had found them.


End file.
