Lost on the Road of Life (An AU Naruto Quest)

"Rice crackers?" Kakashi asked, turning around.

Sugiyama shook their head silently.

"No? Alright then," he said, leaning forward to tap Shizuka on the shoulder. "Rice crackers?"

She grunted. "Are these ones soggy too?"

"No, of course not!" Kakashi said. "They were sealed only seconds ago from old lady Abo's corner stall, and-"

Sugiyama stumbled on a stone in the riverbed and the bathtub shifted, sending a wave of water across the travelers, and washing over the crispy rice crackers.

"Okay, well, now they're soggy." He sighed and returned them to the storage scroll, then grabbed the sides of the bathtub to help hold it down to the riverbed.

It was an unconventional method of border crossing, but one he'd read about in one of Jiraiya's books. By flipping a bathtub upside down, they could make a pocket of air to breathe with while they walked along the bottom of a riverbed. There had been some initial difficulties that hadn't been in the books – the bathtub alone was too buoyant and easily pulled all three ninja to the surface, but weighing it down too much made it hard to walk and recover from mistakes. Still, after a fair few failed practice runs, they were finally starting to figure it out. The uneven riverbed definitely made walking challenging, and they needed to time their steps so enough people were holding chakra adhesion that the bathtub didn't float away. Still, that's what practice runs were for.

And, to sprinkle some fun into the practice, he'd brought plenty of reading and snacks. Sadly, his traveling partners didn't appreciate the various river-water-flavored snacks he'd offered, and his dramatic readings of old Icha Icha volumes met only silence.

Though, now that I think about it, Shizuka was the one to suggest this strategy. Does that mean she's read Icha Icha 16: Deep Sheets Infiltration? Maybe I should put that on the list for the next practice run.

Still, while the first practice runs had ended disastrously, they'd finally started figuring things out. Notably, letting Shizuka take the lead and having everyone follow exactly in her footsteps let them handle the uneven riverbed, and a timed march evenly distributed the burden of holding down the bathtub.

"Did you eat fish today?" Shizuka asked.

"No, of course not," said Kakashi.

"Yes, of course," said Sugiyama.

Shizuka groaned. "Why would you do that!?"

"The portents spoke unambiguously. This was the only auspicious daytime meal I could have chosen."

"Then you should have skipped breakfast and spared us your fish breath!"

"It's not that bad," Kakashi said.

Sugiyama huffed. "I am barely willing to go along with this farcical plan as-is. It would be profoundly unethical to demand that I deprive myself of breakfast as well."

"And besides," Kakashi said, "the seals are providing us with fresh air."

"They did for a bit!" Shizuka said. "But now, they're recycling the old fishy air and it's getting stronger! You'd better wash your mouth out before we actually cross."

"Fine," said Sugiyama.

"You know," Kakashi said, "We've been going for nearly two miles. We'll probably only need three to get cleanly across the border. Why don't we call it here and rest up. We'll do one last practice run today, and if it goes well, we'll do it for real tomorrow?"

After grunts of assent from the other two, Shizuka angled her path up the side of the riverbed. They slowly rose up the side, and Kakashi said a minor prayer for whichever Kami had shaped the riverbanks in northern Wind to have such shallow slopes. Once the top of the bathtub crested the river surface, Kakashi raised his arms until the seal of water was broken, giving them a rush of fresh air, then hurled the bathtub onto the riverbank where it bounced once, twice, then slid to a stop.

Right next to a small camp of three ninja playing cards.

Kakashi jumped out of the water and stuck his legs down to water-walk on top of it and Shizuka followed. Sugiyama scrambled back and the enemy ninja reached for their weapons and rose.

"Sugiyama, run!" Kakashi called out as he rushed forward to engage the enemy.


Minutes later, Sugiyama came inching back, only to see Kakashi standing over two corpses by the riverside with Shizuka farther away, rifling through the pockets of one that must have tried to run.

Kakashi looked over at the medic. "As I was saying, this was a learning experience."

Shizuka found an explosive tag up the young man's sleeve and tucked it into her seal pouch. "Throwing the bathtub was never going to be a good idea, Hatake. Still, I agree. Before we leave the river, I'll swim to the surface. If it's all clear, I'll signal to you two to emerge."

Kakashi bent down and started searching through the pockets of one of the ninja, a teen girl with a broken neck. "Oh, and we should make you a ghillie hat."

Shizuka looked over at him and rolled her eyes. "Of course I'll be using a ghillie hat. You don't need to tell me how to do my job."

The ninja that Shizuka was standing over let out a loose gurgle and twitched his arm. Sugiyama started towards him, but before they could travel more than a step, Shizuka quickly swiped her kunai across his neck, silencing him. She looked up sheepishly at Kakashi, who had also turned at the sound. "Sorry, I forgot. To be fair, the poison would have got him in a couple minutes anyway."

Sugiyama looked back and forth between the two ninja. "Why… why have you done this?"

Kakashi glanced up at Sugiyama, then flipped the girl's corpse over to access any rear pockets or pouches. "Why did I do what?"

Sugiyama gestured at the scene in front of them, the trio of corpses. "This… purposeless violence, ending lives merely because you have the power to. You are cutting away the threads of fate before they make their full purpose known. Is this truly a good thing to have done?"

Kakashi shrugged. "Hey, if they could have killed us, they would have. Turns out we were stronger than they were. Simple as that. If they were stronger, they'd be searching our pockets right now."

"And thank the Sage for that," Shizuka said as she started to drag her corpse over to the riverside. "Sure, I like it when people aren't trying to kill me, but it is vastly simpler here than all the byzantine rules and restrictions on the Eastern Continent, or in Sea."

"Heh, that's the truth. In Demon, I had to spend loads of time around a giant group of foreign ninja. That was awful, my skin was constantly crawling. Way easier to just kill 'em or run." Kakashi looked at Sugiyama. "This isn't a decision, and even if it were, it isn't a hard one. This is what ninja do."

Sugiyama looked between the two of them, aghast. "But… they're children!"

"No," Kakashi said chidingly, "they're genin. Once you're a genin of a Hidden Village, you're an adult in all the ways that matter. You'll follow orders and kill anyone your superiors tell you to kill, never mind anything else you do to look out for the village's best interests on a mission."

Shizuka finished dragging her corpse over. "So, what do we do with the bodies? Tie some rocks to them and give the fish around the bottom of the river a nice meal?"

Sugiyama frowned, but said, "I know not what Wind Country sees as the appropriate ritual traditions to see a troubled soul into the afterlife, but I would certainly be willing to do my best to ensure that they join with the spirits of their ancestors in lasting peace."

Kakashi looked at the two of them like they were idiots. "No, what a waste!" He pulled out his stack of storage seals. "We'll seal 'em up and collect bounties later. You got all the seals off of them, right? And make sure they're dead, we really don't want the storage seals to fail."

Shizuka gently smacked her forehead. "Right, I forgot. I don't think I've fully internalized what it means to travel with someone who can just make more seals. Three Hidden Sand genin should get us at least a… few thousand ryou, right?"

Sugiyama struggled to get words out. "What… Why…?"

Kakashi looked to the appalled fortune teller. "Well, pretty much everyone who isn't Hidden Sand wants there to be less Hidden Sand ninja, so they want to incentivize people to kill Hidden Sand ninja. Money's the best incentive. Same with pretty much every village on the continent. There's usually a bounty station in a city near the yearly Chūnin Exams. Nominally, they don't take missing-nin, but given the circumstances they won't scrutinize us very hard.

"Funnily enough, with bloodline holders, Hidden Sand, or anyone, doesn't want their bloodlines falling into foreign hands. I think good medic-nin could figure out a lot about how a bloodline works and how to counter it by dissecting their bodies. As a result, any village tries to be the highest bidder for the corpses of their own bloodline ninja."

Shizuka let out a short laugh. "That's an awful incentive."

Kakashi nodded. "Yeah, having to pay out big time for other people to kill off your bloodline? Sounds sucky. Though I assume that there's layers and layers there – the clan that collects their cousin's corpse wants to know who killed them to exact revenge, but the seller doesn't want their identity known, so there's a whole back and forth." He put a finger to his chin. "The risk associated with that probably means that the home village needs to pay a lot more for their own dead ninja to compensate for the inevitable retribution against whoever killed them. Maybe it would be safer just to sell these guys to Rock, even if they turned out to be bloodline ninja."

Sugiyama's horror grew as the two ninja spoke. Kakashi sealed the bodies, jotted down a note about what was in the seals, then tucked the seals away. He looked at the speechless fortune teller and shrugged.

"It is how it is. Anyway, all ready to keep going? Let's drill the safe resurfacing once more before we go."


"I… can't believe it worked," Kakashi said.

Shizuka gave him a light glare. "If you didn't think it would work, why would you do it?"

"I don't know. Something always goes wrong, right? The odds that we made it across the border with no complications seems… abysmal."

"The point of planning and preparation is to make sure everything goes right. This is exactly what was expected," Shizuka said.

"Sure…"

Kakashi followed Shizuka's path through the forest, careful not to step on the scattered branches and mushrooms. He ignored the rain dripping through the leaves onto his hair and uniform. His skin crawled, but it was unrelated to the damp and cold climate. In fact, his discomfort wasn't even thanks to the completely flawless border crossing they had pulled, with a tactic literally from a work of fiction.

No, it was because, after almost two decades, Kakashi might well have been the first Leaf-born ninja to enter the Land of Rain since the Sannin left at the mercy of Hanzō the Salamander.


Kakashi absentmindedly balanced the stack of three balls in his hand, appreciating the rainfall's sound outside. Shizuka had left him and Sugiyama in a small hollow in the ground (though she'd been careful to show them how to waterproof it so they wouldn't get flooded out) for a few days while she scouted a nearby town. Ordinarily, Kakashi would have wanted to stay in one of the inns in the city, but given that this was the Land of Rain, he had suppressed his hatred of caves for a couple nights. Ninja in Leaf had swapped horror stories about the insane variety of sensory bloodlines in Rain and about the gory deaths of infiltrators once Hanzō inevitably caught up to them.

Kakashi scoffed to himself. The stories were all made up, of course. No one had made it out of the Land of Rain alive to tell them.

Shizuka slid down the small slope at the entrance to the hollow. She tossed another corpse storage seal to Kakashi and started to squeeze the water out of her clothes and hair with a muttered apology. Once she'd gotten herself to a state of only moderate dampness, she spoke.

"I managed to capture and interrogate a passing ninja. There's good news and there's bad news. Bad news: The new Kage is still in Rain, and they're maintaining the policy that no foreign ninja are allowed in alive. I'd been hoping that they would go back to wherever they came from with their band of usurpers. Unfortunately, if they have been leaving the country, they haven't been making it obvious. We really do need a low profile, otherwise they're going to come down on us like a divine hammer, and we're not going to survive.

"Still, there's good news in that bad news: they haven't found or figured out my father's country-wide sensory technique, because otherwise we'd already be dead. That means there's room to maneuver here.

"The real good news: the main sensory specialist among the usurpers is apparently out of the country for what sounds like another week. Once she returns, we'll have essentially no way to sneak around in the major cities, so we need to act quickly. There's a window of opportunity, but it's closing fast. At least Kagato arrives in three days."

Kakashi interrupted. "A week? I thought we had three weeks to scout things out and plan the heist."

Shizuka shook her head. "Unfortunately, timelines ended up shorter than I'd thought. It's good that we didn't take more time in Sea than we did. As it is, we're on a tight schedule. We can't afford any screw-ups now."

She looked at her two companions. "The new Kage has been playing things hands off. They're reclusive and they let the local clans handle things themselves. So long as we don't get noticed, we shouldn't provoke an unwinnable fight. My best guess is that the invaders have given the Scroll to one of the Rainlords – the leaders of the country's five founding clans – to secure their loyalty in the wake of the coup. Three of them live in the Hidden Village itself. I'll be scouting there myself."

"Sugiyama," she said, turning to the fortune teller, "the Tsuru clan is another one of the clans. They live in a city named Haboro. They are a clan specializing in paper-ninjutsu – the sensory specialist of the usurpers is actually a missing-nin from that clan, though her abilities dwarf the entire rest of the clan combined. Still, their clan techniques are incredibly good scouting and espionage tools, and conventional infiltration will be impossible. I need you to go to Haboro and determine whether or not they have the scroll. They were one of the more loyal clans to the old regime, so perhaps the new Kage would have given it to them to change their mind."

"Hatake, I need you to scout the Shōidan Clan. They live in the second biggest city in Rain, Happō, after the Hidden Village itself. Their bloodline is the Tar Release, which is an incredibly powerful elemental bloodline."

"What's an elemental bloodline, exactly?" Kakashi asked.

"Ah, does Leaf not have any?" Shizuka asked. Kakashi shook his head. "Are you familiar with the Yuki Clan in Mist, with the Ice Release bloodline? They are born with a naturally volatile form of chakra that, when mastered, takes an elemental affinity unlike any of the conventional five. Notably, the bloodline element is aligned with some of the standard elements. The Ice Release, for example, is aligned with Wind and Water, and ninja from the Yuki Clan have a substantially easier time than normal mastering those affinities. In addition to allowing quick mastery of multiple elements, elemental bloodlines have a very different set of techniques.

"Ōnoki's Dust Release is one of these, and unlike most elemental bloodlines, it has three rather than two affinities: Earth, Fire, and Wind. As a result, it's leagues ahead of even normal elemental bloodlines in power, and I'm sure you've heard of the incredible abilities of the Ice Release. The Tar Release is like Dust. It has three associated elements: Earth, Fire, and Water. I don't think it's quite as strong as the Dust Release, but it comes close."

Kakashi suppressed a shudder. Ōnoki's Dust Release had been a thing of legend and nightmare in the Second and Third ninja wars. His main ability was to simply disintegrate whatever fell within his ninjutsu's area of effect. As a defense, it was impermeable. Attacking him physically was impossible, and he had mastered ninjutsu that defended him against the few Lightning or Fire Release attacks that could still reach him through the disintegration shell. As an offense, it was unblockable, lightning-fast, and almost universally lethal. Kakashi had heard the tale of one of the ninja from his class, a chūnin, who had lost her leg below the calf and bled out after standing near a jōnin that Ōnoki had targeted. Not even the jōnin's forehead protector had been recovered.

"I need you to investigate the Shōidan Clan. They were notoriously disloyal in Hanzō's time, and they focused first and foremost on maximizing their own clan's power. As a result, they were quick to welcome the usurpers once Hanzō fell. That said, even if the new Kage knows they're playing by the rules for now, the Kage must know that their loyalty is not guaranteed forever. It's possible that they've gotten the scroll to turn their opportunistic, power-chasing attitude into lasting loyalty."

Kakashi nodded.

"Hatake, yours is the longest journey, Happō is far to the north, but Rain is small. You should still be able to go there and back in a day. Sugiyama, Haboro is far to the east. I'll escort you there and double back to the Hidden Village. Let's meet back here in three days to rendezvous with Kagato. I'll give you all the rendezvous location as a back-up, in case Rain ninja find this spot somehow.

"For the both of you, remember that your role for now is only to confirm or deny the presence of the scroll. Don't try to take it yet. We only have one shot at this before we provoke an unimaginable amount of retribution."

Shizuka looked up at them, and for the first time, Kakashi saw passion burning in her eyes.

"Thank you both for helping me in this endeavor. I assure you, I won't forget it."

---

The Shouidan Clan has around 60 ninja, Shizuka says, and is one of the most powerful in Rain. She's pretty sure that their only sensory technique is a lasting tar-spit technique, that they can spread on the ground or leave in crevices. For the duration, which she doesn't think is more than a day (but she's not confident), they're able to feel vibrations in the tar they've left behind.

Happō is a city of around 8,000 people. The Shōidan Clan compound takes up a large part of the city's center, but there are a couple smaller clan compounds scattered about. It's mostly normal people housing, and is surrounded by well-watered farmland.

Voting time! What do you do?

[] Why mess with what works? Use your Earth-style ninjutsu like Hiding Like a Mole and Tunnel Excavation to creep around their compound from beneath.
[] They're too close to the Land of Earth, Earth jutsu will be expected. Do it Shizuka-style. Travel by night, find a gap in the patrols, and sneak in to see what you can uncover.
[] You've never been the best at the whole sneaking thing. Make up a disguise and make up some fake business (scout the city first to see what's reasonable). Start nosing around once you're in there.
[] Infiltrating a ninja clan compound seems like a waste. Skulk around the city outskirts until you find a ninja passing by, then ambush them for some lead-pipe diplomacy.
[] (Write-in)


Remember, we use approval voting, so you can vote for as many plans as you like. Feel free to ping @Paperclipped or @MMKII to ask setting or detail questions that Kakashi could plausibly know.

Voting closes at 5pm, Pacific time, on Sunday, October 02nd.