Bone and Blood (Naruto Quest)

It seems you reach your decisions in the same moment, as the ANBU flicks their left wrist. You're faster on the draw though, and you throw your stolen kunai with a resounding crack. Both the kunai and your opponent's tanto explode when the masked shinobi moves the blade to intercept the projectile, and that's enough to stagger them. The shrapnel from both weapons shreds their cloak, but you can't tell if that injured them yet. You don't take even a moment to check, taking their instant of hesitation to move in on them and drill their solar plexus with a double front punch. Expelling the eddying wind from your wrists sends them careening back into the thicker trees with a pained grunt.

After barking a quick order to your remaining chunin to break away from their Konoha-nin opponents and go after the mission objective while you deal with the ANBU and performing the hand signs to cast Jet Movement, you rocket after your own opponent.

The ANBU, sans cloak, stands on the side of a tree, and you can see that the exploding kunai and tanto didn't injure them aside from a few superficial cuts. They have long, light blonde hair pulled into a low, tight ponytail that hangs perpendicular to them as they stand on the tree, and their figure beneath their slate gray flak jacket and sleeveless black bodysuit tells you that they are, in fact, female. The ANBU holds a pair of throwing knives, flattened and elongated compared to normal kunai, in her hands, with what look like trailing bundles of smoke bombs and dried flowers tied to their ends.

A flick of the wrist is all she needs to send one of the throwing knives at you as fast as you threw the kunai at her. Jet Movement means you're more than fast enough to evade both the knife and the dull blue cloud of gas it lets off as it flies. Evading the second knife isn't as easy, as she throws it at you while you're a lot closer, but by exploding Wind from your feet allows you to maneuver yourself in the air to be able to spring from the same tree your opponent is standing on to get out of the range of the second cloud of mist.

You spring off the ground and rocket through the cloud fast enough that it disperses, your flying heel kick connects with the ANBU's shoulder even as she dodges. The sound you hear on impact makes you fairly certain that you separated her shoulder, though she doesn't react to any pain she's feeling as she simply flips to another tree. In an impressive display of dexterity, your opponent unscrews a flask with a flick and blazes through six hand signs before you can reach her again.

A blade of water flies forth from your opponent's hands, and you twist mid-air before you're able to wrap your fingers around the strap of her flak jacket. Another quick movement of her wrist calls forth another knife she aims at your neck, but the speed imparted to you by the chakra cloaking your limbs means that your elbow shatters her mask before she can even raise her arm to slash at you. Before your hand gripping her jacket strap can slip off and crush her throat, something stops you short. The ANBU drops to the ground, pulling the remains of her mask from her face and letting it fall from her hand. The cut oozing blood above her right eye aside, she's actually quite pretty, with her pouty pink lips and big cornflower blue eyes knit in frustration as she regards you.

A spiraling black tendril creeps into your peripheral vision as you flex to escape the capture technique that was starting to ensnare you. You spin after escaping, and see your second opponent, who you had expected upon engaging the first one. While you had been on guard, you hadn't been keeping a close eye on your own shadow.

"Tsk tsk tsk," the second ANBU, about as tall as the first and slightly thinner, with a wide-faced mask with black patterns around the eyes, nose, and mouth, chides as he literally emerges from the shadows, rising to stand on the branch behind you. "You're not allowed to break out of both the Yamanaka and Nara paralysis jutsu, you know," he continues, his hands twisting into a reverse rat hand sign.

You thrust your heel into his stomach and slap his hands apart, earning you a confused sputter. Then you snake your left hand around his right wrist in a three-finger grab, extruding blades from your metacarpals and phalanges, and when he goes to retreat back into the shadows, you pull.

He shouts and swears before disappearing back into the shadows, leaving half of his hand, including two fingers, in your grasp. An instant later, you jump to the forest floor just as quickly when you hear the hissing of an explosive tag behind you.

The explosion is enough to drive you to your knees, but instead you dodge back and move around the blast radius, hearing a second explosion go off where you were after your initial dodge. The ANBU, her eyes wide, manages to catch your roundhouse kick with one of her knives, but it bounces off of your Cedar Dance hardened shin. You pull your leg straight back before thrust kicking her in the sternum, this time, she manages to stand her ground, and attempts to sweep your leg. You jump the strike and drive a knife hand down into her injured shoulder. This makes her flinch, and you shoot a crab strike into her throat. She twists her head back, but you flip your hand over to sink your fingers into the groove between her collarbone and her trapezius muscle. She spits a cloud of the same blue mist (which, based on the instant burning sensation in your eyes, is quite poisonous) into your face, but you push through it and fire a spear hand through her chest.

After making sure the other ANBU is gone and hacking up a not-insubstantial amount of blood from the poison attacking your mucous membranes, you move to follow your team. Luckily, making you bleed a little is about all the poison does, as it's similar enough to ones that you're immune to that, along with your natural accelerated healing, is enough to rapidly expel it from your system. It doesn't take long to arrive at the battlefield between your team and the Konoha chunin, but you're pleasantly surprised to see that four of your chunin, the sensor and three of the combatants, are still standing in a slowly burning, recently cleared stretch of woods. They're already in the process of sealing up the dead in corpse seals, with several, both enemy and ally, clutched in the sensor's hand. You shrug off the dead ANBU for her to seal up before taking in the scene.

One of your remaining chunin's arms is bound into a sling, and another is wrapping the limbs of the two remaining Konoha-nin, the Senju and one of the two scroll-bearers, the latter of whom is heavily injured, with sealing formula-lined paper from a large scroll he's produced. They tell you that the second ANBU didn't intervene after he went after you, though he was responsible for the fatalities your team suffered, and that they were able to get the jump on the scroll-bearers after he fled, which is why the casualties are relatively light on your side. They also ask about the blood you're covered in, but you assure them that it's (mostly) not yours.


"Two ANBU?" The scarred jounin who was skeptical of you before, says with what's definitely a scoff when the entire group sent to sap Konoha's supply lines early the next day, when all of the survivors (all but two of the jounin and most of the chunin) are present. The self-declared commander of the expedition, whose name you've yet to decide whether or not you'll commit to memory, was part of the group to arrive last, a team of two (previously three, one of the jounin casualties was under his watch) jounin. Unlike your group, his didn't return with one of the scrolls full of supplies in hand, which wasn't a goal or even really needed in the village, but which is a nice trophy.

He grabs the bloody sleeve of your kimono, causing you to slap his hand away, narrowing your eyes at him. "Easy there," he says with an audible sneer, feeling the dried blood between his fingers, "doesn't look like it's yours, and you're not dressed right to be a med-nin." His seeming companion, the heavier, also rebreather-clad jounin who unfortunately, wasn't his team's casualty, openly laughs at that.

The two take their attention off of you to regard the prisoners. There are eight, including the two your group captured, and five of them are injured enough that the shinobi who know medical ninjutsu have to tend to them. The three uninjured ones are the big Senju you captured, and a pair of roughed-up kunoichi brought by another team of mostly-chunin, which was led by the jounin sensor.

"Take those six back to the village, top priority," the scarred jounin tells a heavily bandaged and dangerously pale ninja who's taken up the post of overseeing the prisoners, likely to keep himself from doing anything more strenuous.

"That's not protocol," the bandaged jounin says with a wheeze, before sparking up a cigarette. He takes a long, deep drag and exhales normally. "They'll all go back at once, same pace as the rest of us, anyone not heading back into the field immediately, at least," he takes another long drag, "not trying to piss off Konoha, you know how touchy they get about that kind of stuff."

"No idea what you mean," the de facto commander basically growls, "the injured prisoners have priority, they need better medical attention than we can give them in the field. That way, the village can have all six to ransom back to Konoha, and everyone's happy."

"There are eight," you cut in, eyes still narrowed. Something is being implied here, something you're not picking up on, but something you can tell isn't good.

"Enough from you," the wider jounin says in a deep voice, heavily modulated by his rebreather. Both he and the older, scarred jounin are almost looming over the bandaged jounin, who regards them impassively, wheezing as his cigarette hangs from his lips. You stare at the wide jounin's hand in your face with your jaw set, you've never been treated like this, not even when you were a chunin, as brief as that was.

[] It's a breach of protocol. The prisoners will all go together, along with the ninja who are due back in Ame. Give the bandaged jounin, and one of your chunin, a message to Youme-sensei, asking her to contact you if the group doesn't arrive in Ame. If anything happens, it will be an interesting foray into the internal politics of the village, at least.

[] You've had enough of the pair of them treating you like this. There was no command structure specified for this mission and the way they've conducted themselves isn't becoming of a formal commander, much less an informal one. They can stay behind in the Land of Meadows for a few hours before they leave for Ame and you leave for your next mission.

[] Well, if he's offering you his hand, maybe he doesn't need it anymore? At least the fingers on it. Torturing(?) prisoners who clearly don't have intel to give, along with the way him and his buddy have treated the rest of the shinobi here (one could easily argue they're responsible for at least some of the casualties on your side), demonstrate more than clearly enough that these two aren't fit to represent Amegakure as jounin. This isn't how jounin of Amegakure act, is it?

[] This isn't your problem. Bottle up the indignation and take it out on whatever unfortunate Konoha-nin you happen to run into when you're part of the assault division that's going to blunt Konoha's probing attack into the Land of Storms.

[] Write-in (Maybe it's time for some of that good, old-fashioned Bone Diplomacy?)

Voting closes at Mar 31, 2024 at 4:00 PM !

A/N: Well, there's the lethalness you were expecting from Tsubaki. I hope that this subject matter wasn't too heavy or disconnected from the rest of the quest or anything, it can always be dialed back if it was, though the war dialing up in Ame will make things darker overall.