Bone and Blood (Naruto Quest)

Interposing yourself between your team and the brace of kunai flying towards them, you bat the projectiles out of the air before giving the chunin a quick once-over. It's really just to confirm the silent, mental choice you made when you got a look at the Konoha team. Rapid, simple signs to communicate that you want the three chunin who seem the freshest from your traveling to go after the scroll carriers, while motioning for the two combatants who remain by your side to protect the sensor. The sensor barely moves while you and the two chunin you told to stay drop in front of the Konoha formation. Naturally, you appear in the middle of the enemies. Well, it's more near the back, to keep any of the Konoha-nin from screening their comrades carrying the supplies.
The first of your opponents to attack you is a big shinobi wearing a dull brown but otherwise standard set of gear under his flak jacket, with a bandana-style forehead protector. His taijutsu isn't bad, but compared to you, he's painfully slow, and you slip inside of his axe handle strike to deliver an upward elbow to his chin. The strike impacts with a loud crack, and you vault over him as he falls, aiming for a pair of ninja who are trying to reinforce the scroll-bearers, who have already disappeared from sight, along with the chunin you sent after them.

You grab the first, a teen a few years older than you, by the trailing ends of his forehead protector, which dangle behind him as he moves, and put his face through one of the nearby gnarled trees. The other, an auburn-haired kunoichi with what look like clan markings on her face, catches a full wheel kick to the diaphragm, sending her crashing into another tree back-first. Before she even slumps over, you've already moved onto your fourth target.

Said fourth, a scared teen who looks to be about your age, manages to twist in time to strike at your neck with his tanto. Unlike last time you were in that situation though, you aren't under genjutsu, and you casually break the blade with double knife hands and grabbing him by the collar of his flak jacket. He lets out a clipped gasp when you jerk your hands together and cut off the blood flow to his brain, he's unconscious when you drop him.

A small Earth jutsu isn't enough to throw you off of your pursuit of the five Konoha-nin currently pressuring your own chunin. Though from what you can see, your own chunin are holding their own capably, with the sensor hanging back to throw out the occasional Fire jutsu as cover for the others. Still, they're outnumbered even after one of their opponents peels off to intercept you.

At first, you think the risen earth was courtesy of the Hyuga charging you, until you're nearly blindsided by the big shinobi from before, your first opponent. You duck his bull rush, just slipping under his earthen gauntlets, before shouldering him over your back and doing your best to drive his head into the dirt. It's then that the Hyuga reaches you, but you slide into him by continuing the momentum of the throw, aiming to sweep his legs out from under him. The pale-eyed ninja stops short and leans forward to poke at you with his middle and index fingers pressed together. You dodge back and around, quickly casting Propulsive Movement, and aim a right hook into the side of his head. Living up to his clan's reputation, your opponent manages to spin in time and catches your punch in a corner block, stopping the momentum by striking you in the shoulder. There's a brief flash of tingling as the strike makes contact, but you ignore it and shift your forearm into your elbow, letting you make a fist in the fabric of the Hyuga's dark blue shirt.

He pokes your left arm three times in rapid succession, again causing the brief tingling sensation before it quickly wears off. Actually, as you palm strike his chest and pull back on his other arm, you can tell that your shoulder and arm are somewhat numbed, and that you have to put the tiniest bit more effort into moving them. Still, even as you let your grip on the Hyuga's sleeve go and roundhouse kick him to get some distance, you can feel the sensation begin to wane. You're not quite sure what it is that makes the Hyuga clan's fighting style so infamous, but you figure that it has something to do with the effect their strikes have.

What makes you back off from the melee with the Hyuga is the bigger ninja attacking you with a ball of mud bigger than your torso. You easily dodge the jutsu before ducking several more strikes and stomps from him and hook kicking at his head. He blocks with an Earth-clad fist, but the power of your kick blows the gauntlet apart, and your follow up punch lands on his temple. When he straightens up, you see what looks like a vajra sewn into the collar of his flak jacket.

Despite your lack of exposure to clan politics, courtesy of both your mother's sheltering and Ame's bucking of the traditional clan structure as a whole, you can recognize that clan symbol. You almost light up, almost, before your eyes dart between the Hyuga and the Senju standing between you and the rest of your team. They're the oldest of the Konoha-nin, and you can tell that they aren't holding back, they're actually just chunin.

Pushing your disappointment down is easy, you know there are plenty of Hyuga out there, and there must be some Senju left if this guy is allowed to wallow as a chunin. You flip under a haymaker courtesy of the Senju, springboarding yourself up with your hands and delivering a pair of Propulsive Movement-enhanced snapdragon kicks at his temples. That is enough to knock him out, or at least slow him down, and you can refocus on the Hyuga. It seems that your earlier grab injured his arm, as you can see blood starting to seep through his sleeve. He adopts a wide, solid stance, the veins around his eyes bulging even harder than they had before, and you launch yourself forward. Without Propulsive Movement, you would have only been marginally faster, and his first strike would have likely caught you, but with the Wind girding your wrists and ankles, you somewhat casually slip inside his guard, stomp on his forward knee, and deliver a one-two jab-hammer combo directly between his pale eyes.

Your chunin have managed to take down one of the enemy shinobi in the time it took you to eliminate the half of the Konoha team you went after, but that's admirable considering they're outnumbered. Still, at this point they're being pressured, so you decide it's time to intervene. Grabbing the sleeve of the one remaining kunoichi to prevent her from stabbing your sensor in the eye, you wrap your other arm around her throat and pull her arm into a hammer lock as hard as possible. The joint dislocates with a pair of wet pops, and, despite earning her chunin jacket, the blonde kunoichi screams. You sink your knee into the back of her knee before letting her go so she can gasp and whine on the forest floor.

The sound of rapid footsteps makes you order the sensor back with a gesture, and you shove the other two chunin back as the three Konoha-nin still fighting leap back towards their fallen comrades. A flash of what feels like genjutsu is broken by Willful Cactus breaking the bones of your lower arm, which makes you wince, but isn't enough to take you out of the moment when one of the chunin you sent after the Konoha-nin carrying the scrolls comes through through the trees, moving as jerkily as the decoys you had seen earlier, and hissing with at least a dozen explosive tags adhering to his flak jacket.

Shielding your eyes and covering your ears, you kick the unfortunate Ame-nin in the gut, even shedding the movement technique from your leg to give the strike more power. But something keeps him from being propelled backward, and he explodes almost in your face. The measures you took keep you from being injured, though you can feel several shallow cuts in the skin of your arms and torso. When you drop your arms, you see that everything above that one ninja's knees has been completely destroyed, and his lower legs are about five meters apart. You also make out a taller ninja wearing a cloak and a vaguely insectoid yellow and black mask following the same trajectory as the now-exploded chunin, though much more naturally. Strangely, the shadows of the treetops above seem to be retreating, as if they had been held there by the makeshift suicide bomber.

You deflect a downward strike from the masked ninja's tanto with the kunai you palmed from the kunochi whose shoulder you broke, before sweeping their legs. They jump over the attack and move backward, seemingly testing out the weight of their tanto. For a brief moment, you stare at each other, pondering your next moves.

[] This is an ANBU, one of Konoha's shadow elites. You've fought ANBU before, two-on-one, even, but Konoha's are held to a different standard, or at least have different qualifications than Suna's. You'll have to deal with this one, and their partner, which you suspect they have, and hope that your team can disengage and evade long enough to find and deal with the scroll-bearer(s).

[] It's a shame, the three chunin who you kept with you were pretty good, but you're going to have to use them as a decoy to complete the objective of your mission. Or at least your part of the mission, you have no way of knowing how the other jounin are doing. But that just means you have to kill the scroll-bearers and destroy their supplies. Even if the chunin you sent after them were able to accomplish the former, you doubt that they were able to destroy both scrolls, if the ANBU are bothering to deal with the rest of your team at all.

[] Draw the ANBU back in the direction they came from, where the supplies theoretically should be. There was no formal command structure in this mission, so you can leave the chunin to their own devices against the other Konoha-nin, but the mission is paramount. And being able to test yourself against the hidden underside of the immaculate leaf is a nice bonus.

[] Write-in (have some sort of plan)

Voting closes at Mar 25, 2024 at 11:15 PM !

A/N: Everyone was right! At least if you guessed Yamanaka or Nara.
A/N1.5:Quick question, I haven't watched Blood Prison, probably since Road to Ninja came out, and I remember nothing about it, but checking the wiki for some other stuff the location was in Kusa's unnamed country (Meadows here). I was under the impression it was in Taki's unnamed country (Hills here), which would make more sense both in canon and here where Kusa is getting its shit rocked. Anyway, giant monster inside a box aside, does the concept of the ninja prison justify its own existence?
I should watch all of the movies again, but I just wanted to know. The castle existing would help justify Kusa's continued existence. All they do in canon is get their ninja killed by Orochimaru.