The Argent-Eyed Heiress (Naruto/Exalted)

Hinata stared as death rampaged towards her, dirt fountaining between its claws at every thundering leap, the smaller trees and shrubs simply falling away before its bulk.

For a moment, she was stuck there, awed. It was beautiful.

Then a tree erupted beneath the lumbering behemoth, decades of growth concentrated into the span of a heartbeat, branches spiked and jauntily green, a spear aimed for its neck, hoping to use its own momentum against it, like a horse meeting a pike. But it lowered its head, avoiding the tip. One could not simply halt however many tons of momentum it was with a single tree: it shattered, the boom echoing through the undergrowth as the bear slammed it to the side, and nearly flattened an Aburame that had gotten close. A further four trees sprouted surrounding the bear like pillars.

Hinata's mouth went dry. She'd heard of it, of course, but Konoha had supposedly lost the bloodline that could-

In front of her, Mr. Kinoe had one hand in a half-seal, the other against the ground, pumping chakra into it. The bear bellowed, hurling itself at a pillar. It shuddered.

"It's fighting me," he muttered. The ANBU mask, while impressive, could not stop her eyes. Her byakugan saw his eyelids flash open, even from behind his head. "Something's not-" The white flowers on the bear's neck lost petals as it sunk its claws deep into one of the wooden pillars. The wood expanded and contracted, thumping like a heart. So did the bear.

"Oh shit," Kinoe said, rapidly canceling the technique. Even so, the wood remained and the bear continued to thump.

They all stared. The bear was… growing… taller…

Three Aburames leaped towards it, streaks of darkness that turned into a swarm that surrounded the bear, so thick that it left nothing more than a fuzzy, roaring outline.

About ten juddering heartbeats had passed since it'd first appeared.

Hinata let go of the breath she hadn't known she'd been holding.

"Well, this definitely changes things," said Kinoe, sounding a little frazzled. Of the seventeen shinobi that had been present, most had already left, so only the genin and the single remaining ANBU heard him as he said: "We're probably in more trouble than we thought."

"More trouble?" Naruto said. He pointed at the bear. "It's almost as big as the snake that ate me!"

Shino, who had been watching the spectacle of his clan members using their swarms to handle the giant bear whose fuzzy outline was staggering, looking heavily wounded, turned to stare at him. "A snake-"

The toad on Naruto's head interrupted, addressing the member of ANBU directly. "Hard to see how that's possible, boss. Didn't that Danzo fella call this a Village-wide emergency? I didn't think ya had a step up from there."

Kinoe tapped the side of his mask: Hinata noted, weirdly, that it was a tic he had, but not a true one, more like a pretend-habit. "As Village-wide emergencies go it was supposed to be relatively minor: pressing, yes, but easily contained if addressed early. In difficulty, probably not much above a B-ranked mission. Reports never had it feeding on mokuton chakra before. In fact, I was supposed to be our trump card."

"Well, now you're more like its meal ticket," said Naruto. Concentrating, the blond shinobi made a seal: four other Narutos popped into existence with little bamf!'s of sound and smoke and leaped into the trees, presumably to begin scouting.

Hinata was impressed by his poise: Naruto usually didn't act so mature.

"Yes, thank you for that comment," Kinoe said. He sounded frustrated. "I'm a liability now."

"I-I'm sure that's not true," Hinata said.

They all turned to stare at her. Um, now that she said it out loud... it did sound kind of silly.

"He is," said Shino, his voice unbearably kind. "Why? Because he is a mokuton user who are famed for having their elemental natures be a part of their very body. He is now more vulnerable than most to the infection."

Kinoe nodded. His masked gaze quickly encompassed them all, but seemed to settle on Naruto. "I'm sorry, as genin and candidates for the chuunin exam, you should be exempt from this level of danger, but the situation being what it is, you three are going to have to perform and perform well. We're running out of options. The First left a number of seals around the Forest to check its growth, and while the seals are guarded by various means, they are of course heavily mokuton-based and time has clearly begun running out for them. I must report this to the Hokage directly."

"In the meantime, you three must trust your own judgment. I don't know you, so appoint your own squad leader and complete the mission as given to the best of your abilities." He nodded at them, fingers blurring in a complex seal. "Dismissed."

Then he vanished.

The three of them stared at each other. In the background, the bear fell over, knocking down a few trees as it spasmed in what Hinata dearly hoped were its death throes but which she suspected were not.

So. They needed to pick a squad leader.

She looked to the two boys. Despite what she really would have wanted to do, she found herself picking out her teammate as the likelier leader. Sorry, Naruto-

"Um, I-"

"Hinata," the two boys said promptly, before she could finish. At the sound of their voices, speaking in perfect synchrony, Shino looked in surprise at Naruto who looked in surprise at him, leaving her looking in bewilderment at both.

"M-me?" she squeaked.

"Her?" said the toad skeptically in the resulting silence. "Why?"

-----

It was a good question.

She only really figured out the answer after she had been stuck in everyone's mind as the right choice. She'd already begun flapping her wings to ascend above the treetops, the destruction-bug enveloped bear and the surrounding outskirts of the Forest of Death dropping away beneath her. With the toad gone, Naruto whooped from around her neck, whereas Shino held on a little too tightly with his legs, but neither fell off which was her primary worry.

Shino had given a list of reasons why she should be the one they picked - her speed, the breadth of her vision, the fact that of the three of them she knew their capabilities best and could therefore be best trusted to deploy them properly; while Naruto just said she was 'really, really cool,' but the reality was, neither wished to nominate themselves so nominated the one they knew.

Shino didn't really know Naruto beyond him being a classmate and someone she had a slight, um, infatuation with, and vice versa, except you needed to replace infatuation with 'teammate'.

Either of them could have done perfectly well as squad leader. Shino, actually, would have probably made a better squad leader than she did: he'd seen Naruto in action during the preliminaries after all, was objective in his assessments and was an excellent team leader for Team Eight.

She'd almost been able to refuse because in bird form she might not be able to speak, but her ability to consciously assume the bits of which forms she wanted allowed her to figure out the trick of it and off they went.

"What's our objective?" called Shino.

It was reckless, but Hinata knew that what both boys really wanted and while it was a poor basis for a tactical decision, she feared their disappointment more than she feared failure. Besides, she had beaten Neji and been acknowledged as strong by Father. She was - she was probably strong enough to protect her precious people now.

Her eyes sizzled with silver light and she put as much confidence into her voice as she could manage.

"We're going after the m-main plant."

----

Between Naruto's clones, Shino's bugs and her bird eye's byakugan they were capable of covering a tremendous amount of ground in very little time.

This did not mean, of course, that they did, only that theoretically speaking, it could happen.

As she winged above them, Hinata watched as another pack of infected tigers fought with a nest of giant spiders: the tigers were slowly but surely winning despite the spiders' poisons and superior maneuverability.

On her back, another battle was taking place, this one a little more academic.

"Naruto," Shino was saying, "shadow clones are famed for their reconnaissance-gathering abilities. Upon dispersal, you should obtain their memories."

The first three times he'd said it, it had been patiently. Now it was just a statement of fact, the sort he rolled out when Kiba was being obtuse, like if he said it often enough, the other party would understand. In Naruto, Shino found a kindred soul to Kiba and had defaulted to handling him as if he were Kiba.

"Nuh uh," Naruto said right back. "They're my clones, so I'd know. And since I do know, I don't see their memories."

"Then try to focus. Why? If you could send your clones to comb the area and obtain their memories, we could far more effectively scout the area."

Before he could answer, Hinata jumped in.

"Sh-Shino's right, N-N-Naruto," she said in a small voice. "C-c-could you please try?"

Naruto grumbled and made a few more clones that popped into existence in mid-air - like every other time it happened, they yelped and yelled 'Hey!' before dropping out of sight into the forest below. One vanished into a cloud of smoke, having landed on top of a briefly surprised tiger.

"Nope," Naruto reported. "Nothing."

"W-well, keep trying," Hinata encouraged. "Shadow clone jutsu is a pretty awesome jutsu, right?"

She'd hoped to encourage him and by the light appearing in his eyes, she'd succeeded.

"Hehe, that's right! It is an awesome jutsu. I bet it's because I only had a few hours to practise-" Hinata noted in alarm as Shino nearly lost his grip on her, "and you don't really need all the seals to make a shadow clone jutsu-"

"Please use all the seals," said Shino in a strangled voice.

Naruto nodded.

It took him about twenty variously anemic shadow clones to stumble on the right hand seals, but when he finally got the sequence right, a smile split Naruto's face. "I - yeah, I got eaten!"

"Good job, Naruto!" congratulated Hinata warmly. "I'm going to fly over the areas with the strongest concentration of infected animals, okay? Please drop a few clones over the area, even if the byakugan can't spot the golden orchid, you should be able to."

She banked and turned.

Below her, a sea of green flashed past.

Every living thing had chakra. Not every living thing had a chakra network like humans did, but there was no living thing that did not have chakra. To her byakugan the Forest of Death was an enormous living organism made of light, in some places so bright as to be utterly impenetrable. Had she been more used to training in the village, she'd no doubt have found this a debilitating distraction, but this was where Team Eight honed its craft.

She knew this Forest. And today, now that she was looking for it, it'd been injured. Great rents had been made where something else had stepped in. Trees had died and been uprooted. Animals moved with crippled chakra networks, tenketsu exploded, flesh flooded with… something. She was surprised she could make anything out at all: Danzo seemed to suggest it was impossible, but if she concentrated she could make out the faintest wisps of darkness. Though it was true she couldn't see it properly, here in the Forest, she could use negative space to define it. Places where absences should not have been.

The darkness felt strangely… familiar.

Metaphorically shrugging, she winged herself towards where the nothingness predominated.

And then Naruto said: "I found it!"

She reversed the direction of her wings, flapping mightily as she strained to hover. Bones creaked and she felt muscles strain - while most birds were not built to hover, the Crimson-Eyed Tinamu was a denizen of the Forest of Death and far away from common and so she managed it.

"Where?" asked Shino.

"Uhh," said Naruto concentrating. "It's somewhere over- hmmmm. Okay, wait."

"W-what is?" Hinata asked, panting.

He paused for while then said, mumbling: "Ummm, what does it look like? Exactly?"

Hinata had, on occasion, wanted to do terrible things to the Academy instructors who ignored Naruto, even when he'd been at his most earnest. It'd formed in him bad habits that were still manifesting now.

No one had thought to show Naruto what the golden orchid actually looked like and he hadn't thought to ask. Hinata and Shino would be able to recognize it, by virtue of not recognizing it, but to Naruto, if a flower was even somewhat yellow, it was clearly a candidate for the golden chakra orchid.

"That Danzo bastard should give clearer instructions," Naruto grumbled, after the fifth location turned out to be a strand of calatheas.

"We were expected to be accompanying an ANBU operative," said Shino wearily. "No doubt everyone else had the requisite knowledge already and the speech a mere formality."

Hinata nodded morosely, winging onwards. It'd been so easy to declare 'let's go complete the most important part of this mission', but in practise, it wasn't even the danger that was tripping them up, it was the tracking part, ostensibly Team Eight's specialty. She probably should have at least asked for clarification, or gone to-

She cut that thought off as her eyes sent a signal to her brain.

Part of the secret behind the Byakugan was information management. Even if you could see everything within twenty feet didn't mean that you could see everything within twenty feet. People with two perfectly normal eyes and an effective visual field of approximately a hundred and twenty degrees often missed surprising sensory detail. It was called tunnel vision.

The more focused you were, the less you saw. This applied doubly to the byakugan. Hinata could see maybe a kilometer in all directions but that didn't mean she could see a kilometer in all directions at once. If she were looking a kilometer northwards, she'd miss what was happening right in front of her nose.

Cousin Neji was ridiculously good at focusing everywhere at once. He had no blind spots.

She'd been letting her concentration wander, relying on her training to pick out the bits that did not fit instead of trying to scan every detail and finally she found one.

Hinata banked sharply. They'd been making their way gradually towards the center of the forest where the tower and the preliminary matches had taken place. She'd been gradually making her way there, the difference between the stream of water as well as the cleared area around the tower, and the patches of nothingness due to the chakra orchid infestation difficult to make out.

On one of the bridges, maybe two hundred feet away, she saw a body, face down against the root of a tree. There was a trickle of blood staining the bridge. "Someone here - they're hurt, they…re…"

The realization came in stages. First, she noticed their chakra network. It was familiar, like she'd seen it before, but not infested with tendrils of darkness. Then she noticed the clothes, the spotted pattern that the team from Sound had been wearing…

On the ground, Zaku turned around.

He still had one arm, the other, which she had last seen horrifically flying off, amputated by Shino's gambit and his own wind attack, was still missing. His remaining arm was a grotesque combination of vine and flesh.

A flower sprouted from his neck: white for warrior, barely hidden by his spotted scarf. Worse was the scarlet flower where his left eye should have been.

He screamed, his lips foam flecked and cracked. She considered flying, to get some distance, but he stretched his hand out and she saw, somehow, that she wouldn't manage it. Instead, she angled her body towards him, diving low and fast, presenting as small a profile as possible, hoping to take the wind against her comparatively armored head.

"H-h-hold ooooon!" she called.

She saw the build up of chakra in his arm. A white light appearing within the dark circle.

Something howled.

Then a tremendous wall of wind and light slammed into her, disorienting and painful, sending her into a jerky corkscrew. What felt like a multitude of tiny thorns burrowed their way into her flesh.

She fell and she couldn't control her fall.

There was a blinding impact.

And then.

Darkness.

-----

Hinata woke.

The canopy of the leafy trees stared down at her, and nothing else: her byakugan had been forcibly canceled by the brief spate of unconsciousness. She could taste dirt and green in her mouth.

She tried to scramble upwards, whimpered instead: everywhere was pain. Splinters, thicker than her fingers, stuck out of her flesh and clear through her wings. She'd clearly crashed through at least one old growth tree, bowled over by a gust that could have easily torn through an entire copse of them.

That wasn't the worst of it. Inside, inside she could feel something wriggling.

"N-Naruto? Shino?" she called her voice a pained squeak. As a reflex, she activated her byakugan.

Within herself, she could tell that her silver chakra was reacting with commendable furor at the invasion, seeking to push the parasite out. On the bridge, Zaku had resumed his previous sprawl, apparently believing they had died. Naruto was… Naruto was out cold, folded over a branch like an old shirt on a clothesline, and aside from a few new rips in his clothing, looking none the worse for wear.

Shino… Shino was facedown pretending he was dead, his swarm at the ready. An ugly crack marred his skeleton: he'd broken an arm at least.

Animals were approaching both of them, at their necks a combination of reds and blues.

They were ignoring her, likely because she was a bird and useless to them.

Naruto and Shino had landed, far away enough from each other to be troublesome. The old her would have had to pick and choose to whose rescue she went first.

Before she could start a simultaneous rescue operation, Naruto woke, groggy. "Wuzat. Wuz wuh??"

His fist lashed out and a lizard with a red blossom for a frill went spinning away, broken. Shino's swarm rose, chittering madly and Hinata… Hinata exploded out of the undergrowth, trailing silver fire.

Zaku stood, comparatively slow.

Hinata heard it even as she moved.

A voice, originating from the tower.

Danger! Danger! Protect the Father/Mother/Ancestor!

She hadn't yet seen it, but somehow Hinata was sure that voice was the golden chakra orchid, the source of the infestation.

And it'd just called for reinforcements.

----

Combat Options

[x] Join Naruto in keeping the reinforcements at bay, Shino took Zaku down once, he'll be able to take him down again, you're sure of it, and then you'll make your way to the Tower as a group.

[x] Join Shino in keeping the reinforcements at bay, Naruto took down Kiba before getting training from Jiraiya, a one-armed Sound genin certainly won't defeat him. Then the three of you can make your way to the Tower as a group.

[x] Trust Naruto and Shino to hold back the reinforcements: hit Zaku as hard and fast as possible and then make your way onwards to the Tower as a group.

[x] Have Shino take on Zaku and Naruto the reinforcements. You're a bird and can fly: you'll be going directly for the golden chakra orchid.

End the Event Option

[x] Run. You've got the location of the golden chakra orchid. Collect Naruto and Shino and direct jounin-level shinobi to retake the area. This fight is beyond you.

EVENTS

To keep a sense of a tension going despite the lack of dice rolls, here's how I'm going to handle things. You will generally get the option to pull out at whatever point. The farther along you take an event, the greater the rewards, but greater too the danger. I'm not going to tell you what the cut-off point is, though lively arguments as to why this cannot possibly be the cutoff point may get me to throw some metaphorical dice into your pocket. Stunts help too! For example, although I haven't made it an explicit part of the vote, Naruto's carrying explosive tags : that means you can make an improvised flare to call for reinforcements which would greatly increase the safety margin of this mission.

And yes, there is no guarantee that there is a cutoff. You'll have to judge for yourselves.

If you pull out now, you can pick one of the following options. If you do not wish to pull out, do not vote for them.

[x] [End1] 1 xp
[x] [End1] 2 Dodge Skill Dice Rolls
[x] [End1] 3 Stamina Attribute Dice Rolls