Interlude: From Kinder Dice, Part 4
"Halt!"
Hazō cursed and required a broad smile to blossom on his face as he turned to the approaching ANBU.
"Hi! What can I do for you, sir?"
The enemy ninja's head cocked, a tiny gesture of disbelief. "You..." For a moment, he didn't quite seem to know how to deal with a thief who seemed utterly unbothered. Then he shook it off. "You can surrender. I saw you emerging from that window. Return whatever you stole and come with me to the city dungeon."
Hazō considered that. "I'd really rather not...?"
The ANBU agent was done being confused by Hazō's shenanigans. He grabbed the young man's arm and—
Hazō slid out of the way, escaping the grip by a whisker. "Hey! Hey, Mr GrabbyHands! We were talking!"
The ANBU twisted off a trio of handseals and hurled a bloom of light into the sky above Rock. It split into a half-dozen lights as it traveled, the individual lights spreading out to form an arrow pointing at its caster.
Hazō cursed.
"Okay, kid," Jiraiya called, stepping out from the concealment of his Chameleon Technique where he had been leaning against a nearby wall. "You've been spotted, your cover is blown, and did I mention that the enemy has spotted you. What now?"
The ANBU jumped back, every muscle tensing. "The Hokage?! What are you—"
"Shh!" Jiraiya said, flapping a hand at the man without turning away from Hazō. "Don't interrupt. It's rude."
"But..."
Jiraiya sighed and turned to the man. "Look, it's Take Your Kid to Work Day, okay? I'm here to steal a bunch of your top-secret jutsu scrolls and I figured it would give the kid here some experience to come along, see how his old man does it."
"I'm hardly a kid," Hazō said dryly. "I'm eighteen."
"Yes, and I'm very proud of you for that. Now, what's your next move?"
"Well...you said that Hiding Like a Mole was a bad idea around here, so I guess I run for it?"
"Very good. And remember, no skywalkers. You need to stay on the ground or they'll see you. We don't want them spotting you and identifying where we came from."
Hazō gaped. "Are you kidding?! You're standing here in your actual Hokage hat! That guy there even called you by your title! How am I the one who's going to get us identified?!"
"Do you want to complain, or do you want to run?"
"Right."
Hazō turned and took two steps, preparing to leap to the nearest roof, but the enemy ANBU agent was suddenly in front of him, a kunai in each hand. He lunged with superhuman speed, one blade at chest level, arm withdrawn in preparation to stab or parry, while the other came up in a vicious disemboweling stroke.
Hazō flipped backwards, chaining into a series of handsprings as the other ninja came for him with thrusts and cuts at furious speed. Twenty feet later, Hazō managed to fire off a Poor Man's Yellow Flash seal—ahhhh, his very first original seal, such good memories—and Substitute with the projectile it ejected. No sooner did he arrive than another pair of ANBU jumped down from the wall, one moving with lightning-enhanced speed, the other one wielding a rope dart where both rope and dart were made of stone.
Hazō leaped, chakra surging as powerfully as he could manage, throwing himself twenty feet in the air. From his left, he ignored Jiraiya tut-tutting in disappointment. Instead, Hazō focused on his chakra manipulation and handseals.
"Earth Element Technique: Tentacles of the Earth Kraken!"
The ground erupted around them, tentacles four yards thick bursting from the ground everywhere within a hundred yards. Random passers-by shrieked and dropped to the ground, covering their heads and waiting for the crazy ninja people to stop causing natural disasters in the middle of a perfectly good shopping day.
The tentacles formed a wild, twining snarl, but the ANBU slid through the snarl like greased eels, evading each thrashing strike, ducking under every backhanded swing.
Hazō ran for the gates of the city, bounding across the tentacles with each step. The constructs were mindless and self-directed, not under Hazō's control any more than the ANBU's. Despite that, they knew their master and their every movement aided him; where he stepped, there was a rigid surface. When he leaped, the tentacle beneath him surged, flinging him forward even faster. When a hail of kunai and shuriken and tiny darts of flame rained down around him, three tentacles closed together to form a protective barrier.
Despite the advantage, the ANBU were older and more experienced.
"Not liking your chances, kiddo," Jiraiya said. He was running backwards alongside Hazō, ducking under and around the thrashing tentacles with casual ease. "Those guys are just about on you, and I see six more coming."
"Damnit, old man!" Hazō shouted. leaping to the side. A tentacle swung by and he latched onto it with chakra adhesion, allowing it to swing him around hard until he let go and was flung off in another direction.
The ground shattered where he had been standing a moment before, a Rock ninja's Earth Bullet cratering the street a moment before its creator touched down.
Two tentacles, each one a dozen feet thick and sixty feet long, whipped past. One smashed down atop the enemy, one swooshed horizontally past. The ninja stepped aside from the first attack, then stepped up on the second and began running along it, holding his balance easily as the construct twisted and thrashed beneath him.
"Stop, thief!" he shouted.
"Earth Element Technique: Multiple Earth Wall!" Hazō replied.
"Wha—"
The ANBU's words were cut off as a wall burst forth from the tentacle that he was standing on. It came up directly beneath his feet, hurling him into the air and into the path of another tentacle swiping from right to left with bone-crushing force. The man's pulped body went flying into the distance.
"Ooh." Jiraiya winced. "Bad way to go. Yowch. Well, you've done it now, kiddo. You had to go and kill one of them. Now they're really going to be pissed."
"There's currently eight ANBU agents flinging—yipe—everything under this stupidly hot sun at me and you think
now they're going to get pissed?"
"I'm just sayin'. New rule: next time, no killing."
Hazō sighed and stopped talking, preferring to save his breath for running.
o-o-o-o
"Lord Hokage?" the Sand ANBU asked, shocked. "What are you doing here?"
"Just watching m'boy here pillage the Kazekage's most prized possession," Jiraiya said, thumbing towards where Hazō was engaged in furious hand-to-hand with another Sand ninja, this one with jōnin stripes on her jacket.
"Not like that!" Jiraiya yelled to his son. "Frog Smash,
then the Descending Strike! You need to get them off-balance first or it will never land! And watch your elbow—it's still too far to the outside!"
He turned back to the Sand ANBU, shaking his head. "Honestly, you do your best to teach them but do they listen?"
The ANBU said nothing, clearly attempting to find some frame of reality that would make sense of the situation.
"For the record, he's not allowed to kill anyone," Jiraiya said. "On account of how we're allies and all."
"I could really use some speed right now!" Hazō shouted to them. He was, amazingly, keeping up—albeit barely—with a woman ten years older than himself who was also a taijutsu fighter. She was supple as a snake but her attacks hit like a hammer, and she wove jutsu into her style with effortless grace. A blast of wind threw sand at Hazō's eyes; he barely managed to get a hand up to protect his vision, but it was at the cost of opening his guard and being thrown ten feet through the air by a chakra-boosted kick to the ribs. He twisted, hit the upcoming wall feet-first, and raced up it with the jōnin in hot pursuit.
The Sand ANBU turned and started to leap down into the battle, but Jiraiya caught his arm.
"Hang on a sec," the older ninja said, leaning back on the wall. "He's already dealing with a jōnin. That seems pretty fair."
"Let go of me."
Jiraiya lifted his hands away, palms out in a gesture of placation. "I'm just sayin'. See, if it's just her then I can sit here and make snarky comments—Hazō, mind your feet! Widen your stance already!—but if you go down there then it's a whole thing and I probably need to step in." He shrugged, pulling a pipe from his belt and lighting it with a quick fire jutsu.
The ANBU looked at Jiraiya. Then looked at Hazō. Then looked at Jiraiya.
"Can I use it?!" Hazō shouted.
Jiraiya ignored the shout. "I mean, your call," he said to the ANBU. "He's still a chūnin and he's not allowed to kill anyone. Probably not going to cause much damage."
Boom! "Although I think that jōnin of yours will. Damn, she absolutely leveled that market stall. Seems like she's getting a little frustrated that she can't manage to lay a hand on some eighteen-year-old punk. You should really talk to her about self-control." He shook his head sadly. "Anyway, you're welcome to jump in, but then I have to, and then things are probably going to get...exciting."
"Jiraiya!"
Jiraiya sighed and rolled his eyes. "Fine, go ahead! Mind your exhalation!"
"Wind Element: Hurricane Steps!"
The Sand ninja blinked as Hazō seemed to vanish from before her. She turned to find him racing away, moving so fast that he threw a rooster-tail of road dust in the air, a tail so tall that it left the second-floor windows dirty and hard to see from.
Jiraiya tapped the ANBU agent on the shoulder, jolting the man out of his surprised stare.
"Tell Kiyone that I said 'Nyah, nyah!, and that it's her turn," Jiraiya said.
The Toad Sage vanished into a blur of Substitution, and the ANBU agent looked after him, utterly bemused.
o-o-o-o
"That was fun," Jiraiya said, grinning as he and Hazō dropped down the cliff outside of Hidden Sand and ran along the ocean breakers towards Leaf.
The footing would have been much better a few dozen yards further out, but no, that would have been much too easy. Clearly, they needed to run right along the shoreline, exactly where the waves were breaking. Because of course they did.
"You have a very strange definition of 'fun'," Hazō panted.
"See, I told you to watch your exhalation! Look at you, panting and gasping after a measly thirty seconds."
"It was two minutes, and I covered three miles in that time! I think being a little out of breath is entirely fair!"
"Sigh. In
my day—"
"You chewed boulders for breakfast and liked it, and every direction was uphill and yes, I know."
"Heh. Okay, okay. Did you get it?" Jiraiya asked, slowing to a stop,
"Yeah, three of them." Hazō pulled a trio of storage seals from his pocket and passed them over.
Jiraiya opened one of the seals and out popped a bottle of wine. The glass was reddish and elegant, slightly wavy, and it was covered in thick dust.
"Day-um, that is the good stuff! Nice job, kid. Kiyone is going to be so pissed."
"You seriously had me break into our closest ally's fortress just to steal you some wine?"
"Hey, this isn't just 'some wine'. This is the best wine in the world. It was grown on the slopes of—"
"By the Sage's balls, I don't even care." Hazō started jogging again, although he stayed in the surf zone instead of going either direction to where the footing would be easier. This was, after all, a training trip.
Jiraiya sealed the wine up and caught up to his son, running alongside with a wide grin. "I'm thinking Cloud next."
"Strength of the Storm this time?"
"Nah, I've got something way cooler. Here, it starts with a Tiger seal, then Bird..."
