- Location
- washington
Offhand what's the limit of skill gain in this fic if you had to measure our peak against a canon character?
Bone and Blood (Naruto Quest)
- Thread starter No Country
- Start date
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
While I haven't read the entirety of the series, my impression is that the shinobi of Naruto have been ODing on "cold-blooded calculation" for a looooooong time, and a lot of their thorniest problems grow directly from that addiction.
For even Konohagakure, the village which prides itself on familial loyalty, to be incapable of finding any answer to their problems with the Uchiha other than genocidal kinslaying is indicative of how deep the rot goes. They failed to find a solution which didn't involve irrevocably crossing their sole moral line in the sand - and arguably, their failure to either better assimilate the Uchiha into Konohagakure's cultural fabric or start reconsidering their relationship with the village smacks of short-sightedness all around.
You can try to maintain relations with a clan which doesn't consider you its equal and has a long history of self-sabotaging arrogance without demanding that they change their minds about you - but you can't do that while also cramming your internal security and intelligence services full of that clan's members.
Again, there's a recurring problem of the various villages choosing short-term gains and then trying to ignore the long-term costs.
Welp this ended up being a lot of words, hope the notification didn't trick you into thinking this was an update.
So to analyze these from a different perspective:
"Melee" Ninjutsu: Techniques which enhance taijutsu and bukijutsu, like most of your current arsenal.
Ranged Ninjutsu: Cast techniques, you don't have very many of these right now.
Taijutsu: Not techniques, but rather refinements of your existing abilities and enhancements of your existing traits.
Shikotsumyaku: Your kekkei genkai, though you're approaching the limits of its standard techniques.
Anyway, to get back on track, Tsubaki has a lot of chakra and is pretty good at chakra control, her only problem is that she infuses and uses it in an irregular manner, since she's able to store a lot of her chakra in her bones, and draw it out of them, even bypassing her chakra system and tenketsu (this will be fun when you fight Hyuuga again). So left to her own devices she can learn ninjutsu fairly well, though with some trial and error, but she struggles a lot more when someone tries to instruct her in it.
So to analyze these from a different perspective:
"Melee" Ninjutsu: Techniques which enhance taijutsu and bukijutsu, like most of your current arsenal.
Withdrawing basically just makes you hit even harder and faster, though it's more situational than Propulsive/Howling/Jet Movement; Lancing Tailwind is a really powerful technique, but most people were right in reading that it's not really necessary right now, and I've said it before, but Lancing Tailwind+Camelia Dance would do good damage to a V1 or V2 Jinchuuriki, even at this point; Pilot Light was there partly to pad it out, but it also leads down the path of Fire Jutsu which can enhance attacks or linger on the ground. These would have started to build out Tsubaki's toolset along familiar lines, but in different ways.
Ranged Ninjutsu: Cast techniques, you don't have very many of these right now.
It's what it says on the tin, but diversifying into ranged ninjutsu wouldn't hurt you in any way or even really hamper your existing style or abilities. Black Powder is a pretty good escape/area denial jutsu, though it is weaker than some of your existing techniques through Shikotsumyaku, it also doesn't give away your bloodline, and it still isn't as good as Burning Ash or Hiding in Ash and Dust but it's a start; Flame Bomb is just the start of the main line of ranged Fire Style techs, but again, it gives you a ranged alternative to Shikotsumyaku; Air Bullets and Air Formation Sphere are pretty much the same, Air Bullets is necessary for the next tier of Jet Movement, but so aren't some kekkei genkai techs, as it's something Tsubaki will have to invent. Also Fire Style especially will synergize well with Tsubaki's sustained Wind Style techiques, since once the higher levels of those are cast, they're self-sustaining, meaning she would be able to use Fire/Wind combination techniques like Kakuzu did. Well, not to the same level, yet, that also requires some KG investment, and not Scorch Style.
Taijutsu: Not techniques, but rather refinements of your existing abilities and enhancements of your existing traits.
This one won, and I think people have a pretty good grasp of everything here, even if it was Speed Demon 4 that carried it over the finish line. Speed Demon 4 is Speed Demon 4, speed is speed, you all know that, though it might be reaching a natural soft cap soon without a breakthrough, similar to Shikotsumyaku, not sure though, you're already very fast and you're going to get faster either way; Fireproof isn't just there to be Insulated but with Fire chakra, it has some synergy with Shikotsumyaku, nothing active, but a fun little passive I want Tsubaki to have eventually; Sleight of Hand is just a nice little thing I sort of came up with while writing the update, especially after the Minato interaction, not that he actually saw what your bloodline does. Overall a solid pick, but none of these were a landmine or necessarily worse than the others, this one is probably just the most incremental.
Shikotsumyaku: Your kekkei genkai, though you're approaching the limits of its standard techniques.
I know I just said that none of these were a landmine but this one almost was, because it was almost Larch Dance: Cone (which is Larch Dance but you can shoot off the bones) + Pollen Dance. Pollen Dance is pretty good and gives you a sensory option without really giving away that you have a bloodline or what that bloodline is, it also scales well with later, more esoteric Shikotsumyaku techniques while being one of them itself, sort of, as it's ninjutsu not taijutsu, the same as Bracken Dance or Thistle Dance; Finger-Drilling Storming Thunder-Bullets is a bigger step up from Finger-Drilling Rapid Bullets than you might think, even if it's also the very cap of its branch as is Larch: Cone, but I decided to change that very recently, it's just a matter of working it back in, it's rapid enough to whittle down more durable targets and, like all of the Finger-Drilling Bullet techs it gets enhanced by the Wind Style movement techs. So as-is, I can see why this was supported and I'm almost surprised it didn't win but not surprised it was pretty dominant, even if Tsubaki still has to be careful with openly using her kekkei genkai.
That it is bad. That is all I will say. Actually no, I will say that every since Samurai 8 got canned it's looked more and more like Kishimoto took that poorly and is just pushing the ideas that flopped in that more and more in Boruto when they were the parts of that story that people already took the most issue with. Now let us be done with talking about this series and think of more happy things.
Tsubaki kind of already has built-in layering for ranged techs, especially Fire Style, as I said further up in this post. She also has a natural inclination for ninjutsu, though she hasn't really taken advantage of it because she hasn't really needed to, excelling so well so early for so long, but doing one thing really well will only get you so far, you do need some variety. Unless you're willing to kill yourself with the Eight Gates or have a demon shoved into your stomach when you're a baby, but I don't think Tsubaki would do the former and besides being a bit too old for the latter, I think a Kaguya's body would outright reject a Tailed Beast 99.98% of the time.
Anyway, to get back on track, Tsubaki has a lot of chakra and is pretty good at chakra control, her only problem is that she infuses and uses it in an irregular manner, since she's able to store a lot of her chakra in her bones, and draw it out of them, even bypassing her chakra system and tenketsu (this will be fun when you fight Hyuuga again). So left to her own devices she can learn ninjutsu fairly well, though with some trial and error, but she struggles a lot more when someone tries to instruct her in it.
Pollen Dance is rather imprecise, but it works less like the Byakugan and more like the barrier technique Jiraiya used against Pain, though again, on a smaller scale unless you want to sneeze a ton of shrapnel into the air. If anything it's kind of a bootleg Hiding in the Mist, though with a slight irritant effect. As I said above, Finger-Drilling Bullets 5 is a pretty devastating attack, when it's sustained (it's very sustainable), with a wide AOE that makes it dangerous for softer targets, even when they're elite.
Thanks, glad you're enjoying the quest! It's always nice to have new players. And Tsubaki isn't an asshole, she's just weird.
Withdrawing and Lancing Tailwind are necessary for another jutsu that leads directly to the next level of Jet Movement, but that technique needs a few different things. Theoretically, you could actually do it without Shikotsumyaku, but the Shikotsumyaku technique that leads into it makes it a lot less complicated to develop, so it would go a long way in helping Tsubaki create it.
Not really. I'm going to (tm) write a Sidestory about the Konoha side of it, cause I like Minato a lot and have been waiting for an excuse to write him for a while, but Tsubaki did kill the target, and in the end the assassination was not pinned on Mist. How do you think it was screwed up though?
Well, the power ceiling for the quest isn't the same as Canon. And when I say Canon I mean the original manga, and maybe the anime incluing the Hagoromo filler because I kind of liked that filler except for the alien parts and giving Indra and Ashura movesets we had already scene so their final fight was basically just dollar store Madara vs Hashirama. So the power ceiling would be around EMS Madara/Hashirama/healthy Nagato rather than Six Paths Naruto/Rinnegan Sasuke/Kaguya. As for how high Tsubaki's peak is? I'm not going to put a number on it, but it is very high, let's just say that even during the war she could very well rival someone she's already run into...
Well, Konoha did have another answer to the Uchiha question. Granted, that answer was to brainwash Fugaku and possibly his inner circle (depending on your interpretation of Kotoamatsukami), but it was still an answer that didn't involve killing them all. You have to also remember that Obito/Black Zetsu were actively working to eliminate the Uchiha so that the Eye of the Moon Plan would be easier to pull off and that Danzo was following the Second Hokage's precedent regarding the Clan a little too closely.
TimEd
Meteor maker
Yeah, the Uchiha Massacre had a lot of actually decent factors involved into it. Regardless of it was planned from the start or added in afterwards, it still worked out to make the whole thing feel as close to inevitable as possible due to the board state and the players available at the time.
On our little murder blender's development, I've been fairly happy with the questors' picks barring the sword issue.
On our little murder blender's development, I've been fairly happy with the questors' picks barring the sword issue.
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Brainbow
Jamais vu
My reasoning is that there was that other objective where the assassination didn't get pinned on Konoha. If Minato was there when that happened, it stands to logic that Konoha might be involved with what happened.
To clarify, Konoha also doesn't want it pinned on Konoha. It may have been Ame before, but now that the Sakumo situation has gone down, pinning it on Ame doesn't really help them; Iwa will be their go-to given the lack of (open) hostilities between Iwa and Kumo.
MaHaL
Conductor of the Choir of Death
- Location
- Canada
Does this mean when Hyuga look at us they get hit with Bones Malone and the Spooky Tsubaki, just an angry skellington ready to fuck their shit?
Aside from the obvious thing where bypassing tenketsu means we can fucking style on standard gentle fist.
GhostKing 666
Bringing Nightmares to life evey minute
Wasn't that powerup both temporary(I don't recall Naruto using Sixth Paths powers like truth seeking orbs after the war) and kinda requires being hooked up to multiple bijuu?
And while Sasuke kept his rinnegan, without him also being hooked up to multiple bijuu, all he can really do with it is some teleport hax and some of the standard rinnegan techniques(and not even the crazy ones like Pain's revive the dead jutsu or seeing through multiple bodies, just the gravity jutsus and some chakra absorption, which aren't all that game breaking at his level anyway).
The peak that Naruto and Sasuke reached at the end of the Fourth War was one of those "lots of shit fell into place just right for this to happen" sort of things, including the spirit of Hagoromo intervening to keep his moon bunny mama from reviving and Naruto and Sasuke shoving multiple bijuu into themselves, and both lost that peak when Naruto let the other Biju go free.
Man, we're not going to go far if we have to rival that poor uchiha kid.
XkaliburRage
Perpetual Procrastinator
Spooky Glowy Skeleton that's wearing a kunoichi.
IIRC they have to concentrate to look inside of people, but even if they did that they'd just see the subdermal bone armor, or the concentrated chakra on your skin with Cedar Dance. Even if neither of those were up they probably would see the (glowing) outline of her skeleton without having to look for it and her tenketsu would be unclear.
Yeah, but there's also the Ten Tails' Jinchuurikis (also extenuating circumstances) and the feats from the Last and the other post-series material. Either way I like the hard-ish cap being somewhere above but not in a different stratosphere from Pain. So you either need to cheat or be born lucky and grind the hell out of your inate ability to be able to even contend with a Tailed Beast.
If you manage to get his friends killed in a way that he feels is his fault that might not be so bad, right?Man, we're not going to go far if we have to rival that poor uchiha kid.
Legend's End
Sakumo Hatake wasn't tired, though he should have been, no, he had enough energy to continue to fight, it was his mind that was fatigued. The city of Kaen, which he had been in charge of the conquest and defense of, was now under full assault by Iwagakure, and the enemy village had sent its elites to break its defenses. And he had orders to hold the city by any means necessary, the orders had even come with a plan, delivered by a masked courier who quickly departed, which outlined tactics which could be used in the defense of the city. He had burned both scrolls once he had read and memorized them, but he knew, even before he read it, that Command's plan for holding the city would be the same as the scenario he had already envisioned. More than two-thirds of the ninja in his command would have to die, and that was the conservative estimate. The losses would be quickly replaced, far faster than Iwa could replace their own, but Sakumo had lost so many men already. Good shinobi, good kunoichi, jounin, special jounin, chunin, even the genin they had been employing as runners and in the rear line, were already gone, lost in the opening months of the Meadows Campaign and Konoha's dogged defense of Kaen.
Kaen, the Garland City. It had been beautiful, once, and it could be beautiful again, when the war was over, years later. Now, when Sakumo looked out over the former trading hub from the reinforced concrete high rise in the city's eastern square, all he could see was the devastation; even the city's famous surrounding parks had been burned down in the fighting. The structure he stood on was the only building in the city left that was more than seven stories high, after the trading depot had been brought down to keep the canal that cut the city in half flooded after Iwa blocked it off from its source in the north. That had managed to keep Iwa from contesting the city for a few weeks, until midnight, three days prior.
The Explosion Corps had arrived with, predictably, a bang. Kaen's western gate, once brilliantly painted and largely ceremonial, not even girded by walls, had been reinforced with Earth Style walls and prefab buildings, as soon as Konoha's forces were able to secure the main thoroughfare between it and the canal. It had become ugly, stripped of its paint and surrounded by rough fortifications, after Konoha had taken control of it. When the Explosion Corps arrived, all that overlooked the great western road that led into Lands of Earth and Storms was rubble and ash. And the pulverized remains of the shinobi who had been keeping watch over the western approach. Some of Sakumo's best men, destroyed when the Explosion Corps' sappers snuck their Captain's strange jutsu under their feet, deeper than the Konoha-nins' sensory net stretched.
A part of him, the prideful ninja part who was said in hushed tones to be a rival to the Sannin themselves, would say that they gave as good as they got, wiping out those same sappers and the regular Iwa-nin who were put under the command of the Explosion Corps the day after the elites arrived. But that wasn't true, there were sensors and scouts and Earth Style specialists who could not be easily replaced holding the western gate, and the Explosion Corps didn't lose any of its valuable members, the ones who could really use the kekkei genkai beyond its most basic applications until the second day.
Sakumo's adjutant, big, tanned Teru Morino, nicknamed "the Hawk Eyes" for the (closely guarded) eyesight-sharpening jutsu he developed to outpace his enemies in combat despite his hefty build, took the Explosion Corps' own adjutant out in an expertly-delivered ambush, only to be driven back by the enemy captain.
The explosions wracking the wrong side of the canal in front of Sakumo's eyes were courtesy of that captain. Shigen's name was almost as famous as the White Fang's own, a hero of the Second War who was pivotal in Iwa retaining its momentum even in the wake of the Second Tsuchikage's death, a ninja who had faced down the infamous Third Raikage and lived, and the youngest captain of the Explosion Corps to date, responsible for giving it the fearsome reputation it held today.
Sakumo had seen his opposite number in action several times, both during the last war and during the tenuous interbellum, though he had never been on the receiving end of the infamous Explosion Style user's jutsu until now. At least the leader of the Explosion Corps was the only one left with such an unorthodox technique, as the Hawk Eyes had literally clipped the wings of his second-in-command. But for as nice as it was to not be bombed from the air as they had been the first night of the renewed battle, Shigen's own technique was even worse to combat, especially as Iwa-nin penetrated further and further into the Garland City.
The Explosion Corps captain's technique was almost certainly based on that of the Second Mizukage's infamous clone jutsu, which sowed so much chaos during the Second War that its effects were widely known, even if the mechanism wasn't. Still, one does not need to know the mechanism of an exploding clone when one has access to Explosion Style and plenty of time and funds to figure out how to apply that to a clone. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, much like the Second Mizukage's technique, Shigen's "clones" bore little resemblance to the man, aside from hair and eye color, instead being rotund, super deformed caricatures running at surprising speeds on their stunted legs. Sakumo still wasn't sure how he created them, nobody was, all that anyone outside of the Explosion Corps was sure of was the density of the chakra contained within, and that fighting them was almost invariably suicide.
"You've been watching them blow up our guys for almost an hour, Hatake" the gruff voice of Teru Morino was barely enough to get the White Fang's attention.
Sakumo's ponytail bobbed as he shook his head, "I pulled our men out of those sectors hours ago. They're just going after decoys, or looters."
"Or Kusa-nin who were lying low and the poor fools they tricked into thinking we were leaving," Morino was tactless as ever, but that's what made the eyepatched jounin an effective XO, the bad cop to Sakumo's good.
"We are leaving," Sakumo ignored Teru's suggestion, there were no Kusa-nin left, but there were certainly civilians eager to see their occupiers' backs.
"What?"
"I said we're leaving. The casualty projections are unacceptable and the city is ruined," the commander of Konoha's operations in the central Meadows theater looked away from the burning wreck of a city for the first time.
"Hatake- Sakumo," Teru's remaining, eponymous eye darkened, "that's not what your orders were, is it?"
"No," the Head of the Hatake Clan couldn't lie, not now. "The price of holding this place isn't worth it."
"Look in front of you, Sakumo!" Teru balled his fist and smashed it into the wall next to him, spiderwebbing the concrete, "'this place' being a pile of rubble is going to make it that much easier for Iwa to hold it!"
"We aren't giving it away for free," the White Fang sneered, "but I'm not throwing away hundreds of lives for the sake of the Council's pride."
A low growl escaped the Hawk Eyes' throat, a sound that would make a lesser ninja flinch, though the White Fang just continued to look at him with a forlorn look in his eyes. "Fine," the bigger man said through a sneer, "I'll follow you, just like I always have, but—"
"But it's my career," Sakumo nodded, "I know."
"I'll whip up a squad," Teru finally said after nearly a minute of silence, broken up only by the occasional distant explosion.
Sakumo couldn't even remember the wording of his general retreat order after he gave it. It was boilerplate, as if it had been handed to him by the Hokage himself, but written up by whatever unfortunate jounin found himself in the tower to pen high-clearance missives that week; but it was Sakumo's order. He hadn't lied, he never said that it was an order from the Council, or the Hokage, or even from Command, he just never said that it was his decision. He didn't want any of the shinobi working under him to throw their lives away for the sake of their own pride, much the same as he didn't want them to die for someone else's, especially not his own. Teru returned shortly after Sakumo had finished giving the order, five of the best ninja under his command. Enough for two three-man cells and a commander.
Rutan Yamanaka, ginger, amber-eyed, and slightly tan in contrast to the majority of her blond, blue-eyed, and pale clan, was the only kunoichi among the assembled ninja. Though anyone who knew her would know that she had been brought here to serve as the second team's leader, as she was held by Teru in high regard. Since losing his eye, the big shinobi might admit, after a few drinks, that she was stronger than he was.
Fukiburi Aburame was almost as tall as Teru Morino, who's team he was chosen to be on. Like most members of his clan, he wore a long trench coat over his standard shinobi gear, though unlike most of his clansmen, he also wore a mask which covered his lower face along with the clan-typical sunglasses and a pair of less typical heavy gloves. This was because his body was not only host to the standard kikaichu, but also the extremely small and poisonous kochu, worm-like grubs who quickly die once they enter a target, rapidly killing them.
Nobusuma Shimura was a dour looking shinobi who moved as if he had gotten even less sleep than Sakumo had lately, though that was the younger ninja's norm. The rings under his gray eyes and the messiness of his medium-length brown hair were evidence of him bearing his clan's coveted summoning contract with the elusive tapirs. He would be on Rutan's team.
Hikone Shigaraki was the third man on Teru's team. His quick sense of humor and hale constitution, even during the rationing of the recent months belied the fact that he gave up a position in the ANBU for a normal posting in the war. Sakumo had the clearance to access (most of) Hikone's record, and knew that his attitude was covering up a hardened killer, but a hardened killer who he'd trust having his, or anyone other Konoha-nin's back.
The final member of the squad was Matsubara Yanagikage, a quiet and previously unremarkable shinobi who had been field promoted to full jounin shortly before Konoha's assault on Kaen began. He was the shortest member of the group, save Rutan, and his headband was part of a bandana that covered his hair that he paired with sunglasses he never parted with. When preparing to fight, he would roll up the navy blue sleeves of his standard uniform and expose the sealing formula-covered bandages wound around his arms.
Looking over the six of them, Teru Morino, Rutan Yamanaka, Fukiburi Aburame, Nobusuma Shimura, Hikone Shigaraki, and Matsubara Yanagikage, Sakumo Hatake shut his eyes and took a deep breath. He was going to do his best to not let any of them die, though he was going to make sure he knew all the risks, and that he would not tolerate unnecessary heroism.
"I'm sure you all heard my retreat general order, courtesy of Rutan's cousin," he began, face a mask and voice firm, "and you must have also guessed why I had Teru bring you all here." He exhaled, bringing his hands to rest on his hips, "we're going to delay Iwa's pursuit, but we aren't going to linger in Kaen, and we're not going to take any unnecessary risks, is that clear?" There were various noises and gestures of affirmation from each of the gathered ninja, so Sakumo continued, "It's our job to bloody Iwa's nose enough that they can't chase us on the way out, so our targets are the Explosion Corps officers, but don't forget that each of you is more valuable than any of them, I want to leave this town with two teams, not six martyrs."
The details of the plan were quickly ironed out: Sakumo would go with Rutan's team and serve as the diversion for the diversion, then strike the Explosion Corps captain himself once the Yamanaka had tracked him down with her sensory abilities, while Teru's team would attack the members of the Explosion Corps who had crossed the canal first.
The initial attack went well.
Rutan had tracked three of the constructs created by Shigen's technique to the banks of the flooded canal, where the rotund little monsters were throwing each other against a boarded up building that Konoha had already abandoned, but was now seemingly occupied by the emboldened Kaen resistance. The Yamakana informed Sakumo, as they hid on the roof of a nearby concrete structure, a ruin despite being in the middle of being erected, that despite the dense elemental chakra permeating the constructs, there was only a small amount of human chakra within them, and that she would need direct access to that core to be able to track Shigen down.
The White Fang moved immediately when he heard this, he had confidence in the other jounin to command her team to back him up effectively. Earth Style: Fang Gun came to the elite ninja so easily that all he had to do to cast it was slam his palms onto the wall in front of him, and his chakra flowed into the concrete, transmuting it into stone and shaping torso-sized dog heads along its outer surface. With another flex of his chakra, the heads became missiles, launching themselves at the oblivious Cask Boys with a series of ear-splitting cracks.
Two of the creations managed to dodge, turning their entire torsos to be able to look at the source of the attack, that is, if they could see, nobody was quite sure about that. The third Cask Boy wasn't so lucky, being drilled into a wall by a missile molded in the image of a mastiff's head. This didn't stop the construct from detonating though, utterly annihilating the building that it was attempting to break into.
Sakumo body flickered from the construction site to the roof of a nearby apartment building, as the shockwave brought the already crumbling structure down. Rutan had left the building before Sakumo started his attack, joining her squad on the ground closer to the Cask Boys. The Konoha-nin knew from experience that the constructs were extremely imperceptive, and even basic concealment techniques were enough to hide from them, meaning the abandoned buildings along the road that abutted the canal were as safe as the rooftops the Konoha team had moved in on.
Rutan's voice was transmitted directly into Sakumo's head, and, he suspected, the rest of her team's heads as well. "Don't destroy the other two, the core disappeared that time, they need to be allowed to blow up on their own for me to get a lock on the boss's chakra!"
The White Fang nodded, sending a "Noted" Rutan's way, knowing that her grasp on her clan's Hiden was deep enough to allow her two way communication, a rarity. Radios would have been nice, but Sakumo didn't want to make too much noise, and they were still unsure if Iwa was listening in or jamming their signals, they just weren't worth the risk.
The team fighting at the White Fang's side threw themselves out of a blown-out storefront, Nobusuma Shimura taking point and rapidly weaving hand seals. The remaining Cask Boys quickly took notice of their new enemies, with one (quite literally) throwing itself at the newly-revealed shinobi. Shimura finally let fly his Wind Style: Great Breakthrough, which caught the construct mid-jump and flung it into the middle of the canal with an unceremonious 'plunk'.
The final Cask Boy lowered its head and bull rushed Rutan's team, Matsubara Yanagikage was the one who responded to this, throwing a thin, forearm-length kunai he had specially prepared earlier by tying tags covered in fuinjutsu matrices around the enlarged ring at the end of its handle, directly into the crown of the round construct's head. This did nothing to slow down the brick red and white imp, which exploded with a clipped 'hah' as soon as it was within five yards of Rutan, Matsubara, and Nobusuma.
Its detonation was accompanied by a much more muted, smokier explosion from the strange tags wrapped around the hilt of the strange kunai. The ninja tool carried out its intended purpose even as it was destroyed, shaping the larger explosion into a cone, harmlessly redirecting it over the water on the other side of the road.
Now it was Sakumo's turn again, as he summoned the swiftest of his ninken, a taupe greyhound wearing a dog-sized Konoha flak jacket bearing the Hatake clan symbol on its back to grab the dull ball suspended in the air at the blast's epicenter as soon as the explosion faded. And grab the dog did, disappearing in a flash and snatching up the metallic sphere before shooting off and reappearing once again in front of Rutan Yamanaka.
The kunoichi's hands slammed together into the rat seal, while her teammates batted away the fragments of the Cask Boy's ceramic shell flying towards the core in an attempt to reform itself, and her eyes screwed shut.
In the midst of the redhead's concentration, the third construct launched itself out of the water, making a beeline for the three bunched shinobi. The White Fang intercepted the animated bomb with a flying dropkick, sending it back into water with a much larger splash. Before the Cask Boy could again emerge, Sakumo summoned another one of his ninken, the building-sized mastiff who fittingly bore the name Kuma. Kuma knew his task at a glance from his summoner, and as soon as the Cask Boy reappeared, the massive dog grabbed it in his fangs and threw himself towards the opposite bank of the canal.
The dog's huge frame was consumed by the explosion without disappearing in summoning smoke, earning a wince from the White Fang. The dog was used to punishment, but this was asking too much of him, even if, in the moment, it was necessary.
"Found him!" Rutan said after what was less than a minute, but felt like more than an hour. She quickly described the location and how to get there, and the four ninja moved out.
Halfway there, Sakumo and the team made contact with Teru's team. Or rather, just the Hawk Eyes and Hikone Shigaraki, directed to meet them via the Yamanaka's telepathy.
"Where's Fukiburi?" Sakumo asked his second with a whisper, dread building in his stomach.
"Took out two of the bastards, porters or something for this special dirt the proper Explosion Corps guys turn into high explosive," Teru began, with a short shake of his head, "While Hikone and I were busy with the sappers, one of the slippery bastards popped right up out of the road, stuffed his face with the dirt and blew up right in Aburame's face." He spared Sakumo a glance, and scoffed at the expression he saw, "Don't worry, he backed out of there fast enough, but it killed a bunch of his worms, broke his right arm bad enough for the bone to poke through. But he's still alive."
"We had to amputate," Shigaraki explained, tone even quieter than Sakumo's or Teru's, but casual. As if this wasn't the first time he'd had to do that in the heat of the moment. "I helped him tie off the tourniquet then took it off at the elbow. His hand was already rotting, those kochu are nasty little things."
"How much blood did he lose?" Sakumo fixed his eyes ahead of them, letting Teru fall back into position at the middle of the formation, while Sakumo took his own just behind the Yamanaka, who took point.
"He was lucid, and we stopped the bleeding pretty well before we sent him on his way," Shigaraki dutifully informed his commander.
No other words were exchanged as the team pressed deeper into the side of the city controlled by Iwagakure. Very shortly, they arrived in the vicinity of Shigen's chakra signature.
Once they stopped in a partially-collapsed home on a hill next to the old emporium that the Explosion Corps' captain and several of his elites were holed up in, the White Fang started laying out a plan. Unfortunately for the legend of Konoha, the old adage that a plan doesn't survive first contact with an enemy proved true, as after barely three minutes in the collapsed house, Rutan signaled that they were found. The White Fang ordered his team to scatter.
They split into pairs, Matsubara with Nobusuma, Rutan with Hikone, and Sakumo with Teru. Naturally, the strongest pair attracted the leader of the Explosion Corps and his new lieutenant.
Shigen, infamous as he was, had a rather unassuming appearance, with medium length auburn hair kept from his eyes by a red banded forehead protector, a face better than plain but not attractive, dull red eyes, and a thin but toned physique not unusual for a shinobi. What was unusual was that his upper half was bare, the red undershirt that Iwa-nin typically wore under their flak jackets hanging limp around his waist.
Accompanying him was a shinobi several years younger, with a gaunt face, spiky brown hair, and dark green eyes. His uniform was standard, though the single sleeve of his tan undershirt had been burned off at the elbow.
Words were unnecessary, the White Fang and the captain of the Explosion Corps knew each other by sight, and clashed before the Iwa-nin's adjutant even knew what was happening. Teru Morino summoned a heavy length of chain and batted the smaller shinobi through the wall of the house, collapsing it further before following him through the debris.
The White Fang produced his White Light Chakra Sabre, a blade nearly as famous as the man himself, and with his first strike, severed Shigen's hand. The impromptu amputation didn't give the Konoha-nin another opening though, as the Explosive Corps captain caught him across the face with a left cross. And then a left uppercut to the stomach, and then a right straight to the jaw.
Sakumo flickered backward, staring at his opponent. Shigen had six arms. Four of them were connected to his back by what looked like an extra elbow, and the other two were his normal arms. The upper right arm was missing its hand, cleanly severed from the limb by the White Fang's namesake blade. Strangely, at least as much stranger as the extra sets of limbs could get, the stump was bloodless.
The White Fang had certainly seen stranger in his long career, it wasn't quite the late Dan Kato separating his soul from his body, or old Kagami Uchiha's strange dojutsu, but at least if the strangeness was coming from his side, he had some warning about it. This was a bizarre and impromptu body modification technique that had been performed right in front of him. And it was a real body modification ninjutsu, not a genjutsu or even elemental, based on the severed bones and tendons the White Fang could see.
"Nice moves," the man with five hands said with a voice like liquid, regarding his severed limb with veiled curiosity. "Certainly complicates things," he said casually, bringing the superfluous left arms together as his main arms sealed.
The White Fang took a step back while throwing a fireball at his enemy, which detonated against a hastily-summoned Earth Style wall. A puff of summoning smoke behind the wall drove Sakumo into performing his own summoning, calling eight ninken to his side and hastily sending them underground. He heard the ninken emerge almost immediately, but was forced to body flicker from the house when they were returned to whence they came by an explosion that blew the dilapidated structure apart.
When Sakumo reappeared, Shigen reappeared across from him, missing every digit on his lower left hand and the pinky on the upper left, he was accompanied by one of his Cask Boys, on the head of which rested his extra right hand. Sakumo hoped that his ninken had taken out the other two with them, but he wasn't going to rely on that. There were explosions going off all around them, but the White Fang wasn't able to see any of his subordinates.
Shigen's main hands blazed through hand seals, and the less damaged superfluous hands clapped. Sakumo smelled the ozone before he dodged back, and a bolt of electricity jumped from the ground where he had been standing. But before he was even moving, the Cask Boy bolted towards him, plowing through the lingering electricity. The White Fang brought his famous blade down on the construct's head, an attempt to short out the explosion before it could happen, but it was an exercise in futility, as the legendary Konoha-nin had to substitute out when the strike revealed the glowing core impregnated with Explosion chakra.
Sakumo's enemy hadn't been forced to substitute, and was able to use the faster body flicker to arrive where the White Fang was going before he arrived. A thrust kick to the ribs caused Sakumo to stagger, but he was able to recover quickly enough to catch a circular strike from one of Shigen's real hands with his kenken. Kenken was a family of taijutsu techniques that had been passed on to Sakumo from his wife, along with her family's old summoning contract. He couldn't help but think of her when he used the technique, and thinking of his dear, departed wife made him think of his son. And thinking of Kakashi just made him want to get back home to see the boy, at least one more time.
The kenken grab bit deep into the flesh of the Iwa-nin's arm, and the White Fang felt his ring and middle fingers scrape bone as his thumb pulled free of the other side of the limb, his index and pinky fingers pointing up like the ears of a dog holding down its prey. He pulled his hand back, tearing a lump of flesh out of the arm, and at the same time slashed for Shigen's throat.
He couldn't see the Explosion Corps captain's extra arms signing behind his back. A wave of concussive force threw Sakumo from the roof he was entangled with his opponent on, and nearly sent him sprawling on the side of the hillock the destroyed house had stood on. Nearly. It would take more than a hastily-cast explosion to put Sakumo Hatake on his back.
Sakumo dodged a Cask Boy's clumsy taijutsu offensive, then sent it into the building with a swift kick to the backside. That brought Shigen back to his level. But it wasn't just the Explosion Corps' captain that arrived, it was Sakumo's adjutant as well.
The White Fang allowed himself a glance at the Hawk Eyes, and instantly knew how he'd escaped his fight. His eyepatch was removed, or rather torn off, given the powder burn on his temple, revealing the glass eye with a paralytic genjutsu formula etched into it underneath. Sakumo knew that the formula had to be rewritten every time it was used, meaning it was useless in the current fight. Not that the White Fang would need it.
"You said no unnecessary heroics, remember?" Teru Morino said through ragged breaths.
"That's not what that is," Sakumo replied without a hint of humor.
"Rutan's fight and mine got crossed," Teru blinked, and Sakumo could see from the blood running from his eyelid that his glass eye was actually cracked. "We've been here long enough," Sakumo shared in the Hawk Eyes' share of relief, and breathed another one when he saw that Shigen's extra arms had disappeared. "So how about you give him one of these," he tapped his burned temple, "and we get out of here?"
Sakumo nodded, allowing the corners of his mouth to rise. "Back off, I don't want you getting caught up in this." Teru nodded, then did as he was told.
Once the other Konoha-nin had moved to a safe distance, Sakumo formed the tiger seal, "Genjutsu: Bringer-of-Darkness." To Sakumo, the already gray day just became slightly dimmer, but to Shigen and the three Cask Boys at his side, the world became an infinite sea of darkness. Letting his hands out of the seal, the White Fang once again drew his blade, as his quarry's constructs rushed to three locations nowhere near where he was after body flickering twice, exploding magnificently, but ineffectively.
Outside of the blast radii, but at the center of the three of them, stood Shigen. Several more body flickers carried him to the Iwa-nin, who was standing in a defensive stance and had barely moved from where he started. The White Fang appeared at his side and drew his saber across his enemies throat.
Releasing the genjutsu before Shigen hit the ground was a mistake. The Iwa-nin split in half, or had been splitting in half since he felt the metal of the White Fang's sword at his neck, and only finished when his first body hit the ground. Saying that the captain of the Explosion Corps split in half would be incorrect, actually, as instead a second, uninjured copy of the man jumped backward from the sputtering, dying man on the ground.
But Sakumo was sure it wasn't a clone technique. Before he could move in on the new, uninjured captain, the Hawk Eyes moved first.
Much like the animal he took his eponym from, Teru Morino's tunnel vision proved fatal. While he was able to carve a gash across Shigen's pectorals, his assault gave his spiky haired opponent, who evidently broke out of the paralysis genjutsu by breaking several of his fingers, the opportunity to drop from a window above his commander and the Konoha-nin attacking him.
The decision was made before Sakumo was even aware of Teru's assailant, but he underestimated the younger shinobi. His famous sword took one of the spikes off the Iwa-nin's do, despite the White Fang aiming for the man's neck, he used a basic application of Explosion Style to alter his trajectory. Then he used a no less basic, but far larger application of the kekkei genkai on the sole of his shoe.
Then the sole of his shoe impacted the side of Teru Morino's head.
The explosion separated Sakumo from the two Iwa-nin, but it threw what was left of the elite jounin called the Hawk Eyes into the dirt, broken and lifeless. The one thing Sakumo had been fighting to prevent.
"Commander Hatake, Morino!" Rutan's voice cut through the legendary shinobi's mind like his blade had cut through Shigen's throat. "Iwagakure forces will overrun your position, pull out now, our forces are clear!"
"Aye," Sakumo thought, in that strange mix of concentration and listlessness that was needed to reply to a Yamanaka's telepathy when it could be replied to. "Moving out now," Sakumo wondered if the woe he wouldn't be able to conceal in his voice was transmitted through his thoughts.
The last he saw of Shigen was his lieutenant hoisting the man over his shoulders as he collapsed, evidently exhausted from his bizarrest of techniques, that exercise in fission. The last he saw of Kaen were the fires burning as the city disappeared over the horizon, Iwagakure deciding to flatten even more of the city to make it as defensible as possible.
Nobody asked where Teru Morino was when he rejoined the remaining four members of the squad he formed, though they let him know that Fukiburi Aburame had gone on ahead and rejoined the main forces. The main forces which would be rejoining Konohagakure's other armies present in the Land of Meadows. His team would return to the village far earlier than any of them were expecting, without the fanfare that would have been their due had they returned under those ideal circumstances.
None of them could meet his eye on the long journey back to the village, he knew none of them were grateful. But then, he knew he couldn't blame them.
A/N: This one really hit me with the inspiration stick, hope you all enjoy it. Also it's current, so I get to put it in Sidestory instead of Apocrypha!
A/N2: This may or may not have spiraled into more than one sidestory, don't worry though, it's not more Konoha, not yet at least.
T/N: I gave Explosion Style: (Pickling) Cask Boy the Japanese name Bakuton: Momotaru, which is a pun and also directly translates to "hundred (pickling) cask departure/gunshot", but both its English and Japanese name are puns; Steaming Danger Tyranny, the jutsu they're roughly based on, is also a pun, but only in Japanese.
Earth Style: Fang Gun is Doton: Hahou, literally "Fang Gun".
The Pernicious Spider Technique is Akuseigani Jutsu, which translates directly to "Pernicious Crab", but is also a play on an archaism for spider, sasagani, which means "dainty crab".
Kenken means "hound fist", dog and fist are homophones.
Apparently 'bunshin' translates more closely to 'offspring (produced by budding)' than it does either 'clone' or 'doppleganger', I did not know that. Actually come to think of it, have any of the clone techniques shown up in the quest yet?
A/N3: I knew this would be long when I was writing it. I didn't expect it to become the longest single post in this quest. Wow. The next one(s) shouldn't be as long, though this didn't take as much time as it usually takes for me to write longer things, which was nice. It's actually longer than all but the two ~9k word updates in Pure Sword, but those both took more than a week IIRC, so this is a big improvement. This also isn't the place but I may have news regarding that work, still not sure what I want to do with it. Not to end this downer of a monster of an update on a downer though, no one is expecting what the next sidestory will be, but you should all very much enjoy it, possibly more than this. Even if it's possibly grimmer, darker, crappier, and sack-ier.
Kaen, the Garland City. It had been beautiful, once, and it could be beautiful again, when the war was over, years later. Now, when Sakumo looked out over the former trading hub from the reinforced concrete high rise in the city's eastern square, all he could see was the devastation; even the city's famous surrounding parks had been burned down in the fighting. The structure he stood on was the only building in the city left that was more than seven stories high, after the trading depot had been brought down to keep the canal that cut the city in half flooded after Iwa blocked it off from its source in the north. That had managed to keep Iwa from contesting the city for a few weeks, until midnight, three days prior.
The Explosion Corps had arrived with, predictably, a bang. Kaen's western gate, once brilliantly painted and largely ceremonial, not even girded by walls, had been reinforced with Earth Style walls and prefab buildings, as soon as Konoha's forces were able to secure the main thoroughfare between it and the canal. It had become ugly, stripped of its paint and surrounded by rough fortifications, after Konoha had taken control of it. When the Explosion Corps arrived, all that overlooked the great western road that led into Lands of Earth and Storms was rubble and ash. And the pulverized remains of the shinobi who had been keeping watch over the western approach. Some of Sakumo's best men, destroyed when the Explosion Corps' sappers snuck their Captain's strange jutsu under their feet, deeper than the Konoha-nins' sensory net stretched.
A part of him, the prideful ninja part who was said in hushed tones to be a rival to the Sannin themselves, would say that they gave as good as they got, wiping out those same sappers and the regular Iwa-nin who were put under the command of the Explosion Corps the day after the elites arrived. But that wasn't true, there were sensors and scouts and Earth Style specialists who could not be easily replaced holding the western gate, and the Explosion Corps didn't lose any of its valuable members, the ones who could really use the kekkei genkai beyond its most basic applications until the second day.
Sakumo's adjutant, big, tanned Teru Morino, nicknamed "the Hawk Eyes" for the (closely guarded) eyesight-sharpening jutsu he developed to outpace his enemies in combat despite his hefty build, took the Explosion Corps' own adjutant out in an expertly-delivered ambush, only to be driven back by the enemy captain.
The explosions wracking the wrong side of the canal in front of Sakumo's eyes were courtesy of that captain. Shigen's name was almost as famous as the White Fang's own, a hero of the Second War who was pivotal in Iwa retaining its momentum even in the wake of the Second Tsuchikage's death, a ninja who had faced down the infamous Third Raikage and lived, and the youngest captain of the Explosion Corps to date, responsible for giving it the fearsome reputation it held today.
Sakumo had seen his opposite number in action several times, both during the last war and during the tenuous interbellum, though he had never been on the receiving end of the infamous Explosion Style user's jutsu until now. At least the leader of the Explosion Corps was the only one left with such an unorthodox technique, as the Hawk Eyes had literally clipped the wings of his second-in-command. But for as nice as it was to not be bombed from the air as they had been the first night of the renewed battle, Shigen's own technique was even worse to combat, especially as Iwa-nin penetrated further and further into the Garland City.
The Explosion Corps captain's technique was almost certainly based on that of the Second Mizukage's infamous clone jutsu, which sowed so much chaos during the Second War that its effects were widely known, even if the mechanism wasn't. Still, one does not need to know the mechanism of an exploding clone when one has access to Explosion Style and plenty of time and funds to figure out how to apply that to a clone. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, much like the Second Mizukage's technique, Shigen's "clones" bore little resemblance to the man, aside from hair and eye color, instead being rotund, super deformed caricatures running at surprising speeds on their stunted legs. Sakumo still wasn't sure how he created them, nobody was, all that anyone outside of the Explosion Corps was sure of was the density of the chakra contained within, and that fighting them was almost invariably suicide.
"You've been watching them blow up our guys for almost an hour, Hatake" the gruff voice of Teru Morino was barely enough to get the White Fang's attention.
Sakumo's ponytail bobbed as he shook his head, "I pulled our men out of those sectors hours ago. They're just going after decoys, or looters."
"Or Kusa-nin who were lying low and the poor fools they tricked into thinking we were leaving," Morino was tactless as ever, but that's what made the eyepatched jounin an effective XO, the bad cop to Sakumo's good.
"We are leaving," Sakumo ignored Teru's suggestion, there were no Kusa-nin left, but there were certainly civilians eager to see their occupiers' backs.
"What?"
"I said we're leaving. The casualty projections are unacceptable and the city is ruined," the commander of Konoha's operations in the central Meadows theater looked away from the burning wreck of a city for the first time.
"Hatake- Sakumo," Teru's remaining, eponymous eye darkened, "that's not what your orders were, is it?"
"No," the Head of the Hatake Clan couldn't lie, not now. "The price of holding this place isn't worth it."
"Look in front of you, Sakumo!" Teru balled his fist and smashed it into the wall next to him, spiderwebbing the concrete, "'this place' being a pile of rubble is going to make it that much easier for Iwa to hold it!"
"We aren't giving it away for free," the White Fang sneered, "but I'm not throwing away hundreds of lives for the sake of the Council's pride."
A low growl escaped the Hawk Eyes' throat, a sound that would make a lesser ninja flinch, though the White Fang just continued to look at him with a forlorn look in his eyes. "Fine," the bigger man said through a sneer, "I'll follow you, just like I always have, but—"
"But it's my career," Sakumo nodded, "I know."
"I'll whip up a squad," Teru finally said after nearly a minute of silence, broken up only by the occasional distant explosion.
Sakumo couldn't even remember the wording of his general retreat order after he gave it. It was boilerplate, as if it had been handed to him by the Hokage himself, but written up by whatever unfortunate jounin found himself in the tower to pen high-clearance missives that week; but it was Sakumo's order. He hadn't lied, he never said that it was an order from the Council, or the Hokage, or even from Command, he just never said that it was his decision. He didn't want any of the shinobi working under him to throw their lives away for the sake of their own pride, much the same as he didn't want them to die for someone else's, especially not his own. Teru returned shortly after Sakumo had finished giving the order, five of the best ninja under his command. Enough for two three-man cells and a commander.
Rutan Yamanaka, ginger, amber-eyed, and slightly tan in contrast to the majority of her blond, blue-eyed, and pale clan, was the only kunoichi among the assembled ninja. Though anyone who knew her would know that she had been brought here to serve as the second team's leader, as she was held by Teru in high regard. Since losing his eye, the big shinobi might admit, after a few drinks, that she was stronger than he was.
Fukiburi Aburame was almost as tall as Teru Morino, who's team he was chosen to be on. Like most members of his clan, he wore a long trench coat over his standard shinobi gear, though unlike most of his clansmen, he also wore a mask which covered his lower face along with the clan-typical sunglasses and a pair of less typical heavy gloves. This was because his body was not only host to the standard kikaichu, but also the extremely small and poisonous kochu, worm-like grubs who quickly die once they enter a target, rapidly killing them.
Nobusuma Shimura was a dour looking shinobi who moved as if he had gotten even less sleep than Sakumo had lately, though that was the younger ninja's norm. The rings under his gray eyes and the messiness of his medium-length brown hair were evidence of him bearing his clan's coveted summoning contract with the elusive tapirs. He would be on Rutan's team.
Hikone Shigaraki was the third man on Teru's team. His quick sense of humor and hale constitution, even during the rationing of the recent months belied the fact that he gave up a position in the ANBU for a normal posting in the war. Sakumo had the clearance to access (most of) Hikone's record, and knew that his attitude was covering up a hardened killer, but a hardened killer who he'd trust having his, or anyone other Konoha-nin's back.
The final member of the squad was Matsubara Yanagikage, a quiet and previously unremarkable shinobi who had been field promoted to full jounin shortly before Konoha's assault on Kaen began. He was the shortest member of the group, save Rutan, and his headband was part of a bandana that covered his hair that he paired with sunglasses he never parted with. When preparing to fight, he would roll up the navy blue sleeves of his standard uniform and expose the sealing formula-covered bandages wound around his arms.
Looking over the six of them, Teru Morino, Rutan Yamanaka, Fukiburi Aburame, Nobusuma Shimura, Hikone Shigaraki, and Matsubara Yanagikage, Sakumo Hatake shut his eyes and took a deep breath. He was going to do his best to not let any of them die, though he was going to make sure he knew all the risks, and that he would not tolerate unnecessary heroism.
"I'm sure you all heard my retreat general order, courtesy of Rutan's cousin," he began, face a mask and voice firm, "and you must have also guessed why I had Teru bring you all here." He exhaled, bringing his hands to rest on his hips, "we're going to delay Iwa's pursuit, but we aren't going to linger in Kaen, and we're not going to take any unnecessary risks, is that clear?" There were various noises and gestures of affirmation from each of the gathered ninja, so Sakumo continued, "It's our job to bloody Iwa's nose enough that they can't chase us on the way out, so our targets are the Explosion Corps officers, but don't forget that each of you is more valuable than any of them, I want to leave this town with two teams, not six martyrs."
The details of the plan were quickly ironed out: Sakumo would go with Rutan's team and serve as the diversion for the diversion, then strike the Explosion Corps captain himself once the Yamanaka had tracked him down with her sensory abilities, while Teru's team would attack the members of the Explosion Corps who had crossed the canal first.
The initial attack went well.
Rutan had tracked three of the constructs created by Shigen's technique to the banks of the flooded canal, where the rotund little monsters were throwing each other against a boarded up building that Konoha had already abandoned, but was now seemingly occupied by the emboldened Kaen resistance. The Yamakana informed Sakumo, as they hid on the roof of a nearby concrete structure, a ruin despite being in the middle of being erected, that despite the dense elemental chakra permeating the constructs, there was only a small amount of human chakra within them, and that she would need direct access to that core to be able to track Shigen down.
The White Fang moved immediately when he heard this, he had confidence in the other jounin to command her team to back him up effectively. Earth Style: Fang Gun came to the elite ninja so easily that all he had to do to cast it was slam his palms onto the wall in front of him, and his chakra flowed into the concrete, transmuting it into stone and shaping torso-sized dog heads along its outer surface. With another flex of his chakra, the heads became missiles, launching themselves at the oblivious Cask Boys with a series of ear-splitting cracks.
Two of the creations managed to dodge, turning their entire torsos to be able to look at the source of the attack, that is, if they could see, nobody was quite sure about that. The third Cask Boy wasn't so lucky, being drilled into a wall by a missile molded in the image of a mastiff's head. This didn't stop the construct from detonating though, utterly annihilating the building that it was attempting to break into.
Sakumo body flickered from the construction site to the roof of a nearby apartment building, as the shockwave brought the already crumbling structure down. Rutan had left the building before Sakumo started his attack, joining her squad on the ground closer to the Cask Boys. The Konoha-nin knew from experience that the constructs were extremely imperceptive, and even basic concealment techniques were enough to hide from them, meaning the abandoned buildings along the road that abutted the canal were as safe as the rooftops the Konoha team had moved in on.
Rutan's voice was transmitted directly into Sakumo's head, and, he suspected, the rest of her team's heads as well. "Don't destroy the other two, the core disappeared that time, they need to be allowed to blow up on their own for me to get a lock on the boss's chakra!"
The White Fang nodded, sending a "Noted" Rutan's way, knowing that her grasp on her clan's Hiden was deep enough to allow her two way communication, a rarity. Radios would have been nice, but Sakumo didn't want to make too much noise, and they were still unsure if Iwa was listening in or jamming their signals, they just weren't worth the risk.
The team fighting at the White Fang's side threw themselves out of a blown-out storefront, Nobusuma Shimura taking point and rapidly weaving hand seals. The remaining Cask Boys quickly took notice of their new enemies, with one (quite literally) throwing itself at the newly-revealed shinobi. Shimura finally let fly his Wind Style: Great Breakthrough, which caught the construct mid-jump and flung it into the middle of the canal with an unceremonious 'plunk'.
The final Cask Boy lowered its head and bull rushed Rutan's team, Matsubara Yanagikage was the one who responded to this, throwing a thin, forearm-length kunai he had specially prepared earlier by tying tags covered in fuinjutsu matrices around the enlarged ring at the end of its handle, directly into the crown of the round construct's head. This did nothing to slow down the brick red and white imp, which exploded with a clipped 'hah' as soon as it was within five yards of Rutan, Matsubara, and Nobusuma.
Its detonation was accompanied by a much more muted, smokier explosion from the strange tags wrapped around the hilt of the strange kunai. The ninja tool carried out its intended purpose even as it was destroyed, shaping the larger explosion into a cone, harmlessly redirecting it over the water on the other side of the road.
Now it was Sakumo's turn again, as he summoned the swiftest of his ninken, a taupe greyhound wearing a dog-sized Konoha flak jacket bearing the Hatake clan symbol on its back to grab the dull ball suspended in the air at the blast's epicenter as soon as the explosion faded. And grab the dog did, disappearing in a flash and snatching up the metallic sphere before shooting off and reappearing once again in front of Rutan Yamanaka.
The kunoichi's hands slammed together into the rat seal, while her teammates batted away the fragments of the Cask Boy's ceramic shell flying towards the core in an attempt to reform itself, and her eyes screwed shut.
In the midst of the redhead's concentration, the third construct launched itself out of the water, making a beeline for the three bunched shinobi. The White Fang intercepted the animated bomb with a flying dropkick, sending it back into water with a much larger splash. Before the Cask Boy could again emerge, Sakumo summoned another one of his ninken, the building-sized mastiff who fittingly bore the name Kuma. Kuma knew his task at a glance from his summoner, and as soon as the Cask Boy reappeared, the massive dog grabbed it in his fangs and threw himself towards the opposite bank of the canal.
The dog's huge frame was consumed by the explosion without disappearing in summoning smoke, earning a wince from the White Fang. The dog was used to punishment, but this was asking too much of him, even if, in the moment, it was necessary.
"Found him!" Rutan said after what was less than a minute, but felt like more than an hour. She quickly described the location and how to get there, and the four ninja moved out.
Halfway there, Sakumo and the team made contact with Teru's team. Or rather, just the Hawk Eyes and Hikone Shigaraki, directed to meet them via the Yamanaka's telepathy.
"Where's Fukiburi?" Sakumo asked his second with a whisper, dread building in his stomach.
"Took out two of the bastards, porters or something for this special dirt the proper Explosion Corps guys turn into high explosive," Teru began, with a short shake of his head, "While Hikone and I were busy with the sappers, one of the slippery bastards popped right up out of the road, stuffed his face with the dirt and blew up right in Aburame's face." He spared Sakumo a glance, and scoffed at the expression he saw, "Don't worry, he backed out of there fast enough, but it killed a bunch of his worms, broke his right arm bad enough for the bone to poke through. But he's still alive."
"We had to amputate," Shigaraki explained, tone even quieter than Sakumo's or Teru's, but casual. As if this wasn't the first time he'd had to do that in the heat of the moment. "I helped him tie off the tourniquet then took it off at the elbow. His hand was already rotting, those kochu are nasty little things."
"How much blood did he lose?" Sakumo fixed his eyes ahead of them, letting Teru fall back into position at the middle of the formation, while Sakumo took his own just behind the Yamanaka, who took point.
"He was lucid, and we stopped the bleeding pretty well before we sent him on his way," Shigaraki dutifully informed his commander.
No other words were exchanged as the team pressed deeper into the side of the city controlled by Iwagakure. Very shortly, they arrived in the vicinity of Shigen's chakra signature.
Once they stopped in a partially-collapsed home on a hill next to the old emporium that the Explosion Corps' captain and several of his elites were holed up in, the White Fang started laying out a plan. Unfortunately for the legend of Konoha, the old adage that a plan doesn't survive first contact with an enemy proved true, as after barely three minutes in the collapsed house, Rutan signaled that they were found. The White Fang ordered his team to scatter.
They split into pairs, Matsubara with Nobusuma, Rutan with Hikone, and Sakumo with Teru. Naturally, the strongest pair attracted the leader of the Explosion Corps and his new lieutenant.
Shigen, infamous as he was, had a rather unassuming appearance, with medium length auburn hair kept from his eyes by a red banded forehead protector, a face better than plain but not attractive, dull red eyes, and a thin but toned physique not unusual for a shinobi. What was unusual was that his upper half was bare, the red undershirt that Iwa-nin typically wore under their flak jackets hanging limp around his waist.
Accompanying him was a shinobi several years younger, with a gaunt face, spiky brown hair, and dark green eyes. His uniform was standard, though the single sleeve of his tan undershirt had been burned off at the elbow.
Words were unnecessary, the White Fang and the captain of the Explosion Corps knew each other by sight, and clashed before the Iwa-nin's adjutant even knew what was happening. Teru Morino summoned a heavy length of chain and batted the smaller shinobi through the wall of the house, collapsing it further before following him through the debris.
The White Fang produced his White Light Chakra Sabre, a blade nearly as famous as the man himself, and with his first strike, severed Shigen's hand. The impromptu amputation didn't give the Konoha-nin another opening though, as the Explosive Corps captain caught him across the face with a left cross. And then a left uppercut to the stomach, and then a right straight to the jaw.
Sakumo flickered backward, staring at his opponent. Shigen had six arms. Four of them were connected to his back by what looked like an extra elbow, and the other two were his normal arms. The upper right arm was missing its hand, cleanly severed from the limb by the White Fang's namesake blade. Strangely, at least as much stranger as the extra sets of limbs could get, the stump was bloodless.
The White Fang had certainly seen stranger in his long career, it wasn't quite the late Dan Kato separating his soul from his body, or old Kagami Uchiha's strange dojutsu, but at least if the strangeness was coming from his side, he had some warning about it. This was a bizarre and impromptu body modification technique that had been performed right in front of him. And it was a real body modification ninjutsu, not a genjutsu or even elemental, based on the severed bones and tendons the White Fang could see.
"Nice moves," the man with five hands said with a voice like liquid, regarding his severed limb with veiled curiosity. "Certainly complicates things," he said casually, bringing the superfluous left arms together as his main arms sealed.
The White Fang took a step back while throwing a fireball at his enemy, which detonated against a hastily-summoned Earth Style wall. A puff of summoning smoke behind the wall drove Sakumo into performing his own summoning, calling eight ninken to his side and hastily sending them underground. He heard the ninken emerge almost immediately, but was forced to body flicker from the house when they were returned to whence they came by an explosion that blew the dilapidated structure apart.
When Sakumo reappeared, Shigen reappeared across from him, missing every digit on his lower left hand and the pinky on the upper left, he was accompanied by one of his Cask Boys, on the head of which rested his extra right hand. Sakumo hoped that his ninken had taken out the other two with them, but he wasn't going to rely on that. There were explosions going off all around them, but the White Fang wasn't able to see any of his subordinates.
Shigen's main hands blazed through hand seals, and the less damaged superfluous hands clapped. Sakumo smelled the ozone before he dodged back, and a bolt of electricity jumped from the ground where he had been standing. But before he was even moving, the Cask Boy bolted towards him, plowing through the lingering electricity. The White Fang brought his famous blade down on the construct's head, an attempt to short out the explosion before it could happen, but it was an exercise in futility, as the legendary Konoha-nin had to substitute out when the strike revealed the glowing core impregnated with Explosion chakra.
Sakumo's enemy hadn't been forced to substitute, and was able to use the faster body flicker to arrive where the White Fang was going before he arrived. A thrust kick to the ribs caused Sakumo to stagger, but he was able to recover quickly enough to catch a circular strike from one of Shigen's real hands with his kenken. Kenken was a family of taijutsu techniques that had been passed on to Sakumo from his wife, along with her family's old summoning contract. He couldn't help but think of her when he used the technique, and thinking of his dear, departed wife made him think of his son. And thinking of Kakashi just made him want to get back home to see the boy, at least one more time.
The kenken grab bit deep into the flesh of the Iwa-nin's arm, and the White Fang felt his ring and middle fingers scrape bone as his thumb pulled free of the other side of the limb, his index and pinky fingers pointing up like the ears of a dog holding down its prey. He pulled his hand back, tearing a lump of flesh out of the arm, and at the same time slashed for Shigen's throat.
He couldn't see the Explosion Corps captain's extra arms signing behind his back. A wave of concussive force threw Sakumo from the roof he was entangled with his opponent on, and nearly sent him sprawling on the side of the hillock the destroyed house had stood on. Nearly. It would take more than a hastily-cast explosion to put Sakumo Hatake on his back.
Sakumo dodged a Cask Boy's clumsy taijutsu offensive, then sent it into the building with a swift kick to the backside. That brought Shigen back to his level. But it wasn't just the Explosion Corps' captain that arrived, it was Sakumo's adjutant as well.
The White Fang allowed himself a glance at the Hawk Eyes, and instantly knew how he'd escaped his fight. His eyepatch was removed, or rather torn off, given the powder burn on his temple, revealing the glass eye with a paralytic genjutsu formula etched into it underneath. Sakumo knew that the formula had to be rewritten every time it was used, meaning it was useless in the current fight. Not that the White Fang would need it.
"You said no unnecessary heroics, remember?" Teru Morino said through ragged breaths.
"That's not what that is," Sakumo replied without a hint of humor.
"Rutan's fight and mine got crossed," Teru blinked, and Sakumo could see from the blood running from his eyelid that his glass eye was actually cracked. "We've been here long enough," Sakumo shared in the Hawk Eyes' share of relief, and breathed another one when he saw that Shigen's extra arms had disappeared. "So how about you give him one of these," he tapped his burned temple, "and we get out of here?"
Sakumo nodded, allowing the corners of his mouth to rise. "Back off, I don't want you getting caught up in this." Teru nodded, then did as he was told.
Once the other Konoha-nin had moved to a safe distance, Sakumo formed the tiger seal, "Genjutsu: Bringer-of-Darkness." To Sakumo, the already gray day just became slightly dimmer, but to Shigen and the three Cask Boys at his side, the world became an infinite sea of darkness. Letting his hands out of the seal, the White Fang once again drew his blade, as his quarry's constructs rushed to three locations nowhere near where he was after body flickering twice, exploding magnificently, but ineffectively.
Outside of the blast radii, but at the center of the three of them, stood Shigen. Several more body flickers carried him to the Iwa-nin, who was standing in a defensive stance and had barely moved from where he started. The White Fang appeared at his side and drew his saber across his enemies throat.
Releasing the genjutsu before Shigen hit the ground was a mistake. The Iwa-nin split in half, or had been splitting in half since he felt the metal of the White Fang's sword at his neck, and only finished when his first body hit the ground. Saying that the captain of the Explosion Corps split in half would be incorrect, actually, as instead a second, uninjured copy of the man jumped backward from the sputtering, dying man on the ground.
But Sakumo was sure it wasn't a clone technique. Before he could move in on the new, uninjured captain, the Hawk Eyes moved first.
Much like the animal he took his eponym from, Teru Morino's tunnel vision proved fatal. While he was able to carve a gash across Shigen's pectorals, his assault gave his spiky haired opponent, who evidently broke out of the paralysis genjutsu by breaking several of his fingers, the opportunity to drop from a window above his commander and the Konoha-nin attacking him.
The decision was made before Sakumo was even aware of Teru's assailant, but he underestimated the younger shinobi. His famous sword took one of the spikes off the Iwa-nin's do, despite the White Fang aiming for the man's neck, he used a basic application of Explosion Style to alter his trajectory. Then he used a no less basic, but far larger application of the kekkei genkai on the sole of his shoe.
Then the sole of his shoe impacted the side of Teru Morino's head.
The explosion separated Sakumo from the two Iwa-nin, but it threw what was left of the elite jounin called the Hawk Eyes into the dirt, broken and lifeless. The one thing Sakumo had been fighting to prevent.
"Commander Hatake, Morino!" Rutan's voice cut through the legendary shinobi's mind like his blade had cut through Shigen's throat. "Iwagakure forces will overrun your position, pull out now, our forces are clear!"
"Aye," Sakumo thought, in that strange mix of concentration and listlessness that was needed to reply to a Yamanaka's telepathy when it could be replied to. "Moving out now," Sakumo wondered if the woe he wouldn't be able to conceal in his voice was transmitted through his thoughts.
The last he saw of Shigen was his lieutenant hoisting the man over his shoulders as he collapsed, evidently exhausted from his bizarrest of techniques, that exercise in fission. The last he saw of Kaen were the fires burning as the city disappeared over the horizon, Iwagakure deciding to flatten even more of the city to make it as defensible as possible.
Nobody asked where Teru Morino was when he rejoined the remaining four members of the squad he formed, though they let him know that Fukiburi Aburame had gone on ahead and rejoined the main forces. The main forces which would be rejoining Konohagakure's other armies present in the Land of Meadows. His team would return to the village far earlier than any of them were expecting, without the fanfare that would have been their due had they returned under those ideal circumstances.
None of them could meet his eye on the long journey back to the village, he knew none of them were grateful. But then, he knew he couldn't blame them.
A/N: This one really hit me with the inspiration stick, hope you all enjoy it. Also it's current, so I get to put it in Sidestory instead of Apocrypha!
A/N2: This may or may not have spiraled into more than one sidestory, don't worry though, it's not more Konoha, not yet at least.
T/N: I gave Explosion Style: (Pickling) Cask Boy the Japanese name Bakuton: Momotaru, which is a pun and also directly translates to "hundred (pickling) cask departure/gunshot", but both its English and Japanese name are puns; Steaming Danger Tyranny, the jutsu they're roughly based on, is also a pun, but only in Japanese.
Earth Style: Fang Gun is Doton: Hahou, literally "Fang Gun".
The Pernicious Spider Technique is Akuseigani Jutsu, which translates directly to "Pernicious Crab", but is also a play on an archaism for spider, sasagani, which means "dainty crab".
Kenken means "hound fist", dog and fist are homophones.
Apparently 'bunshin' translates more closely to 'offspring (produced by budding)' than it does either 'clone' or 'doppleganger', I did not know that. Actually come to think of it, have any of the clone techniques shown up in the quest yet?
A/N3: I knew this would be long when I was writing it. I didn't expect it to become the longest single post in this quest. Wow. The next one(s) shouldn't be as long, though this didn't take as much time as it usually takes for me to write longer things, which was nice. It's actually longer than all but the two ~9k word updates in Pure Sword, but those both took more than a week IIRC, so this is a big improvement. This also isn't the place but I may have news regarding that work, still not sure what I want to do with it. Not to end this downer of a monster of an update on a downer though, no one is expecting what the next sidestory will be, but you should all very much enjoy it, possibly more than this. Even if it's possibly grimmer, darker, crappier, and sack-ier.
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Sakumo is as good of a man you can be as a ninja and that naturally screws him over.
TimEd
Meteor maker
Love your Sakumo portrayal. The combat is also really freaking good, not just in terms of combat, but just how much the results of it tells us a lot of what actually happens before and after it. Sad how we likely won't have the opportunity to face the guy. A conversation (and a bit of fangirling) could have been great, but his presence in the background if the setting will certainly be felt by us questers now that we read this Sidestory.
Tsubaki was definitely right about Sakumo's actions leading to the worst possible result for Konoha. Lost the strategic position, took losses among the teams that Sakumo was trying to save, and will ultimately lead to the loss of Sakumo too. An understandable action that is a disaster for everyone (even Iwa if you count what Minato will do to them in the war as part of the result).
The Shadow's Shadow (Kiri Sidestory 1)
Glowing crystals embedded in the stone walls behind constantly flowing water features cast the hallway leading to the Mizukage's office in a gloomy light. Though this part of the walkway that ran around the top of the fortified tower at the heart of Kirigakure had a door on either side, turning into more of a reception area for the village leader's surprisingly small official space, it was still technically part of the hall. Not that anyone would walk through here without being invited or ordered to.
Sarekoube had neither been invited nor ordered here, but he had been by the Third Mizukage's side long enough to know his place. Sarekoube wasn't the masked hunter-nin's real name, but the moniker he went by. It was traditional for ANBU to use a fake name while on duty, but Sarekoube was what the man went by all the time, for he was never off duty. He hadn't spent a moment off duty in over a decade, he didn't even remove his mask to sleep anymore. Though he never thought of it, and would more readily open the throat of someone who asked him rather than admit to it, Sarekoube had likely spent more time with the Third Mizukage than anyone since the First had, and that included all three of the man's late sons. Between the hooded cow-patterned jacket he wore under his flak jacket, and the baggy pants that bunched around his heavy boots, all that distinguished Sarekoube from his fellow hunter-nin was the pattern on his mask, a thin red line kinked into squares that ran across where his mouth was. It was abnormal for an ANBU of Kirigakure, who typically had large shapes on or entire sections of their masks shaded with bright colors.
The ANBU had thankfully been alone for nearly fifteen minutes, after spending an unbearable amount of time in the presence of Fuguki Suikazan, the leader of the current generation of the Seven Ninja Swordsmen. Suikazan was huge, two and a half meters tall and well over a hundred fifty kilos, with his ridiculously-styled red hair and the massive, bandage-wrapped sword strapped to his back making him seem even larger.
Sarekoube hated him. Not as much as he hated the Third Mizukage, but he doubted there was anyone living he hated as much as the Mizukage; though he knew that was a common sentiment among the people and ninja of Kiri, very few of them hated their Kage more than Sarekoube did. Not that that diminished his animosity for the Swordsman.
Sarekoube didn't hate the Swordsman for his taunting, which was constant before he got tired of the ANBU's lack of a reaction. No, Sarekoube hated Suikazan because he was brutal even for someone in his position, and had a history of selling out his subordinates and leaving them to die. It was rumored that he looked for excuses to execute those under his command - and Sarekoube knew that those rumors were true
While he enjoyed his solitude, because that meant he didn't have to be around the Mizukage's insufferable cronies or carrying out the man's atrocious orders, Sarekoube took some solace in the moments he could spend in the presence of some of the few good ninja left in Kirigakure, so he let some of the ever-present tension leave his body when the door to his right opened, and the Head of the Hoshigaki Clan stepped through.
Despite Shumo Hoshigaki's massive frame (he had nearly 20 cm on Suikazan), his strange appearance, and his international infamy, he was an affable and honorable man. He was thinner and more well-muscled than the leader of the Swordsman, and his skin was pale green, his eyes beady and black, and his teeth sharp (though the latter wasn't unusual for Kirigakure); he wore the same pants as many other Kiri-nin, stripped and bloused at the calf, kept in place by a sharkskin belt, and a loose, sleeveless robe that hung to his ankles, unbound in the middle to allow his muscular frame to be seen. Stranger than his pallor or the three black crescents under each of his eyes were the massive brass cuffs around wrists which attached to bronze shrouds which covered his hands.
"Ah, the shadow's shadow," the huge ninja said in his surprisingly nasally voice, doing his best to not look down on the masked man, "I'm surprised you're not in there already, he let Suikazan go in ahead of you?"
"The Swordsman is taking notes for Lord Third," Sarekoube's voice was level and didn't betray that he hadn't gotten more than two hours of sleep since the war began. "You're here early, Hoshigaki. I know you aren't here for reassignment."
Most of the Mizukage's audiences today would be follow ups to mission reports, unfortunate chunin and even genin who would have their fate determined by the Third himself. The ANBU didn't need to see the reports to know that most of them would be shuffled off to die in the north once Kiri was able to begin its spring offensive. The lucky ones would be stuck with mercenaries and conscripts shuffled under the village's control by the Land of Water's central government, and thrown against Konoha and its puppet states up and down the Airo Peninsula.
The bigger ninja shook his head with a wry smile, "Clan business, nothing important, but everything is urgent in wartime." Everything was always urgent under the Third Mizukage, but nobody would say that while they were inside his tower, it was impossible to know when someone was listening.
"It's going to be hard to write down your clan business with your hands bound like that," the masked shinobi jabbed, curious as to why the Hoshigaki's hands were sealed, even if he was pretty sure he knew the answer.
"Ah right," Shumo held his hands up with a soft 'clink', "no weapons are allowed in the tower, and, well," he chuckled, "I'm sure you know my reputation."
Sarekoube did, he had even seen the big clan head in action during a rebel suppression campaign shortly before the beginning of the war. Every one of the big man's strikes tore his opponents to pieces, and not just with pure strength, he had somehow imbued his fists with the properties of a shark's skin and jaws. It was fitting, given his clan's summoning contract, appearance, and reputation.
"As for jotting everything down," Shumo looked down to his right, then to his left, then back to his right before looking over his shoulder. "Ah, there you are, get out here and greet Sarekoube, he's an impressive ninja."
A child scurried out from behind the Head of the Hoshigaki Clan, one who looked a lot like the big man, though his hairline was a lot lower, and his skin bluer than his clansman's, he also wore a similar cow-patterned robe, though his was properly fastened. The boy didn't quite come up to the man's waist, but that made him tall for his age, which Sarekoube would have guessed was eight or nine.
"Hello," Sarekoube always had a soft spot for kids, but his position had made him something of a boogeyman, "what's your name?"
The boy's own beady eyes flashed from Shumo to Sarekoube then back to his clan head. Shumo let out a short chuckle, "He's receiving private tutoring, so he's still technically a civilian, and neither of us have formally allowed him to speak to you." The clan head placed a shrouded hand on the boy's back, nudging him forward as if to encourage him to get closer to the ANBU. It didn't work. "Ah," Shumo intoned with a shrug, "this is my son, Kisame." Hoshigaki grinned, flashing his sharp teeth as his son bowed, "I suppose your reputation precedes you, he's usually polite, but following protocol this closely must be making you think I walked in with a Karatachi brat!" Shumo let out a more genuine laugh, though kept it quiet. Even he wouldn't openly laugh in the Third Mizukage's abode.
"Well, it's nice to meet you, Kisame Hoshigaki," Sarekoube said with an incline of his head. In the eyes of the village, the heir to the Hoshigaki Clan was far above any Kaguya after all.
"You as well, Sarekoube, sir," the boy finally found his voice, which sounded a lot like his father's, though a bit higher.
The ANBU was content to leave the conversation at that, he wouldn't force the boy into a stressful situation right before he had to go into a meeting with the Mizukage. And Sarekoube hadn't seen the boy before, it was entirely possible that this would be his first meeting with the man, Sarekoube wouldn't wish a bad first impression on the Mizukage on all but his worst enemies, and certainly not some kid who'd only come to help out his dad.
"He may not look it," Shumo went to pat his son on the head, only to think better of it when he remembered the bindings around his hands, "but he's a shoo-in for Nishinomi's old spot on the Seven Swordsmen's waiting list." The big ninja rolled his eyes, as if he could hear Sarekoube's doubts, "I know, I know, but he's twice as strong as I was at that age, and three times the ninja the blowhard was."
News of the prospective Swordsman's mysterious demise had turned from rumor to fact quicker than the Mizukage would have liked, which meant that Sarekoube had to plug the leak. Or at least stamp out whoever the Mizukage thought was leaking information from the tower. More likely than not the news had simply spread through couriers or patrols after the swordsman failed to complete his mission and a messenger came from Iwa for the sole purpose of informing Kirigakure command that the status quo would not be changing. Sarekoube was almost surprised he wasn't charged with killing that messenger as well. He wasn't surprised that the messenger was found floating face-down in the canals that ran along Kiri's poorest slums.
The door to the Mizukage's office cracking open signaled to Sarekoube that the day's proceedings were about to begin. The ANBU's back was against the wall opposite the Mizukage's desk before the door was fully open.
The Mizukage's office was, as far as Sarekoube understood, smaller than those of the rest of the Five Kage. Though perhaps it was designed that way to further accentuate the oppressive nature of a meeting with the Mizukage. The Third's office was even more dimly lit than the reception area, with heavy drapes drawn across the window that was directly behind the village leader's desk and a pair of flowing waterfalls covering the dully glowing crystal panels that flanked his chair. The desk itself on a raised section of floor that made up the quarter of the room farthest from the door, with the lower section of the office bare, save a navy blue rug that seemed to drink in what little light reached it, and a stool that had been set up in one of the corners of the room opposite the Mizukage.
On that stool sat Fuguki Suikazan, who was not carrying the giant sword Samehada, which was a rare sight. The Swordsman's face was a blank mask, scanning over mission reports Sarekoube knew he had already gone over twice.
Flanking either side of the Mizukage's desk, and the only things besides furniture and the Kage himself on the higher level of the room were his personal bodyguards, the "Mizukage's Shield" and the "Mizukage's Spear". Both ninja were disliked by their peers, but both at least had reputations beyond being the Third Mizukage's knife in the dark, his fixer, his 'Shadow'. But the Shadow, Sarekoube did not envy them; both the kunoichi to their Kage's right and the shinobi to his left had to serve as liaisons for the man and withstand his capriciousness in what was left of his personal life.
The 'Shield' was Akishio Tatsyumi, one of the Mizukage's clansmen, though a distant cousin, as the old man's nearest male relative was his great-grandson, the Six Tails' new Jinchuuriki. Akishio looked even less human than Shumo Hoshigaki, with a squat frame, saturated green skin, rheumy yellow eyes more than a fist's width apart, stringy black hair pulled up into an attempt at a topknot, and, strangest of all, a pair of catfish-like barbels over his wide, lipless mouth. He was dressed in the standard Kiri flak jacket over a drab bodysuit. Like Sarekoube, he was one of the few ninja allowed to carry a weapon in the Mizukage's presence.
The 'Spear' was Daki Terumi, a kunoichi touted as a prodigy who made her name snuffing out rebel groups before they could get off the ground in the years between the wars, now she had settled into her role as one of the Mizukage's elite. Terumi was a head and a half taller than her counterpart, and far more attractive, with heavily lidded eyes, pouty lips, clear skin, and a figure more than one chunin had been blinded for staring at. While at the Mizukage's side, she wore a similar outfit to Akishio, though hers bodysuit was cream colored and she wore shinobi sandals with tabi socks, and her long sea green hair was pinned into a blue and white covering that only let two bangs framing her face. Unlike Sarekoube or Akishio, who both wore a sword, Daki Terumi instead carried a pair of scrolls on each hip.
One's eyes would have come to the Third Mizukage last, even if he wasn't the furthest from the door, even if his attention wasn't directed to the calligraphy he was carefully composing, even if he weren't an old man in a dimly-lit room who was giving the observer no heed. No, one would look to the Third Mizukage last because of the aura of dread that hung over him like a funeral shroud. The Third Mizugake, which was all anyone thought of him as, for nobody called him anything else, save to his face, when they called him 'Lord Third', was an old man. An old man and an extremely old ninja, in a profession where one was lucky to reach forty, someone in their eighties was practically unheard of, in fact, the Third Mizukage had been at the First Mizukage's side when the latter was unifying the Land of Water in the name of his newly-founded Hidden Village; he was older than the Hidden Village System itself. And his age showed, the Mizukage's once-black hair was stark white, and hung in long curtains that framed his deeply-lined face, his eyes were narrow, and the heavy lines under them folded over each to form deep bags, his hands, the only other bare skin that showed from under his long white robe of office, were still straight and strong, but his skin was thin and hung loose. One of his hands, his left, the one he wrote with, was bare, but his right hand, which supported the other as he wrote, was bandaged, the binding beginning to soak through with blood.
Sarekoube didn't wince, he never moved in the Mizukage's presence without permission, and he wouldn't have winced in sympathy for the man even if he were allowed to emote. He simply regarded the injury with the same neutrality as he regarded the rest of the scene, even if he knew it was inflicted on the Mizukage during the stalled campaign in the Land of Lightning.
On his way from the village into the Mizukage's tower, the masked man had seen the price the village leader had to pay to be able to contend with and drive off Kumogakure's Third Raikage. Three other hunter-nin and a priest in a pointed, masked hood were systematically cutting the throats of prisoners kneeling in lines with their faces covered with black sacks. Sarekoube didn't know where the prisoners came from, it wasn't his place to, though he couldn't help but think they were civilians carried out of the rapidly-expanding no man's land along the Land of Lightning's eastern shore.
It also wasn't Sarekoube's place to know the specifics of what had gone on while the Mizukage was leading the campaign against Kumo, but that didn't stop him from overhearing people talking about it, especially when it was his job to not be seen. The appearance of the Third Raikage in the field had forced the Third Mizukage to call forth his boss summon, Umibozu, and the resulting clash had ruined Kirigakure's forward position, turning the war from a series of bloody, consecutive battles, into a colder affair. Though the Three Tails' Jinchuuriki was already moving to execute a bold landing to sever Kumo from supporting its ally Shimogakure. Nobody Sarekoube had overheard was sure who got the better of the exchange between Kage, but it was known that Umibozu had put the Raikage through a mountain, even after a blow from Kumogakure's leader skinned the Mizukage's right arm. Nobody in Kiri would admit that their Kage had been on the backfoot.
Before the first audience with the Third Mizukage could begin, Sarekoube saw blood begin to pool on the small pillow the village leader rested his right elbow on. Daki Terumi was the one who reacted first, producing a new cushion from seemingly nowhere, and cleaning the blood off of his bandaged arm with a hand sign.
"There you are Lord Third," she said as she straightened back up, "it should last through your audiences now."
"It will," the Mizukage's voice was strong and clear, and he refrained from looking up from his calligraphy.
"Yes, Lord Third," the 'Spear' said flatly, and Sarekoube could see the shadow of a smirk on her partner's face.
Sarekoube wondered, idly, if he would be able to cut down the Mizukage and take out either of his bodyguards if the clan head on the other side of the door behind him would aid him. He knew that the Hoshigaki wouldn't, but he couldn't help but fantasize, for an ephemeral second, about suppressing the curse seal tattooed over his left collarbone, drawing his blade, and ending the reign of the Third Mizukage. He couldn't do that though, not in the middle of a war, he may have hated the man, and he may have hated the village, he may have even hated his own clan, but he knew just how bad plunging Kirigakure into a civil war during a world war would be for the thousands of innocents who lived in the village and in the country. He remembered his clan, the vultures, swooping down on Kiri in the midst of the Third's first round of purges in the midst of the Second War. He knew he wouldn't be the one to take down the Third Mizukage. He would either die in the old man's service or outlive him, only to be swept away in the round of purges any Fourth Mizukage would order, or worse, have a dead man's switch trigger the juinjutsu embedded into his chakra network.
The Third Mizukage finished writing, stowing away his pen and paper in one of the drawers of his desk. "Send the first appointment in," he said deliberately, folding his hands in front of him. Sarekoube noticed that he retained the cushion under his right elbow, but covered the bandaged hand with his left.
Sarekoube was bored to death through the whole affair, the novelty of those who held audience with the Third Mizukage being more wary of him than anyone else in the room besides the Mizukage having worn off years ago. At the end of the day, he was relieved that he hadn't gotten a nod from the old man indicating he should dole out punishment on the shinobi he was meeting with's loved ones.
The masked man's cell, because it resembled a cell far more than anything close to a room, much less a dormitory, was located in the on-duty barracks for all hunter-nin in Kirigakure. It was one of the bunkers built into the massive limestone pillars that overlooked the village, appearing as nothing more than a row of square portals at the base of one of the smaller ones. There were different levels of accommodations, with those for the hunter-nin on long term assignments within the village (of which there were very few, and most of them had other places to stay), being several stories underground, amid dank quarters and directly above the structure's generator. Sarekoube's cell in particular was dark, as there were no light switches within the rooms, the lights were on a timer, the shattered remains of the last lightbulb that occupied the socket were still there, as the maintenance crews had stopped replacing them years ago, after the cell's lone inhabitant had broken it. He didn't need light, all he came here to do was sleep. And sleep he did, darkness falling over him as soon as he lay on the thin pad that passed for a mattress.
He didn't bother to remove his mask.
A/N: Proper update after this one for sure™. Not going to do a T/N for this one, but if you couldn't guess whose POV this sidestory was from, plug 'sarekoube' into a translator and it should be clear.
Sarekoube had neither been invited nor ordered here, but he had been by the Third Mizukage's side long enough to know his place. Sarekoube wasn't the masked hunter-nin's real name, but the moniker he went by. It was traditional for ANBU to use a fake name while on duty, but Sarekoube was what the man went by all the time, for he was never off duty. He hadn't spent a moment off duty in over a decade, he didn't even remove his mask to sleep anymore. Though he never thought of it, and would more readily open the throat of someone who asked him rather than admit to it, Sarekoube had likely spent more time with the Third Mizukage than anyone since the First had, and that included all three of the man's late sons. Between the hooded cow-patterned jacket he wore under his flak jacket, and the baggy pants that bunched around his heavy boots, all that distinguished Sarekoube from his fellow hunter-nin was the pattern on his mask, a thin red line kinked into squares that ran across where his mouth was. It was abnormal for an ANBU of Kirigakure, who typically had large shapes on or entire sections of their masks shaded with bright colors.
The ANBU had thankfully been alone for nearly fifteen minutes, after spending an unbearable amount of time in the presence of Fuguki Suikazan, the leader of the current generation of the Seven Ninja Swordsmen. Suikazan was huge, two and a half meters tall and well over a hundred fifty kilos, with his ridiculously-styled red hair and the massive, bandage-wrapped sword strapped to his back making him seem even larger.
Sarekoube hated him. Not as much as he hated the Third Mizukage, but he doubted there was anyone living he hated as much as the Mizukage; though he knew that was a common sentiment among the people and ninja of Kiri, very few of them hated their Kage more than Sarekoube did. Not that that diminished his animosity for the Swordsman.
Sarekoube didn't hate the Swordsman for his taunting, which was constant before he got tired of the ANBU's lack of a reaction. No, Sarekoube hated Suikazan because he was brutal even for someone in his position, and had a history of selling out his subordinates and leaving them to die. It was rumored that he looked for excuses to execute those under his command - and Sarekoube knew that those rumors were true
While he enjoyed his solitude, because that meant he didn't have to be around the Mizukage's insufferable cronies or carrying out the man's atrocious orders, Sarekoube took some solace in the moments he could spend in the presence of some of the few good ninja left in Kirigakure, so he let some of the ever-present tension leave his body when the door to his right opened, and the Head of the Hoshigaki Clan stepped through.
Despite Shumo Hoshigaki's massive frame (he had nearly 20 cm on Suikazan), his strange appearance, and his international infamy, he was an affable and honorable man. He was thinner and more well-muscled than the leader of the Swordsman, and his skin was pale green, his eyes beady and black, and his teeth sharp (though the latter wasn't unusual for Kirigakure); he wore the same pants as many other Kiri-nin, stripped and bloused at the calf, kept in place by a sharkskin belt, and a loose, sleeveless robe that hung to his ankles, unbound in the middle to allow his muscular frame to be seen. Stranger than his pallor or the three black crescents under each of his eyes were the massive brass cuffs around wrists which attached to bronze shrouds which covered his hands.
"Ah, the shadow's shadow," the huge ninja said in his surprisingly nasally voice, doing his best to not look down on the masked man, "I'm surprised you're not in there already, he let Suikazan go in ahead of you?"
"The Swordsman is taking notes for Lord Third," Sarekoube's voice was level and didn't betray that he hadn't gotten more than two hours of sleep since the war began. "You're here early, Hoshigaki. I know you aren't here for reassignment."
Most of the Mizukage's audiences today would be follow ups to mission reports, unfortunate chunin and even genin who would have their fate determined by the Third himself. The ANBU didn't need to see the reports to know that most of them would be shuffled off to die in the north once Kiri was able to begin its spring offensive. The lucky ones would be stuck with mercenaries and conscripts shuffled under the village's control by the Land of Water's central government, and thrown against Konoha and its puppet states up and down the Airo Peninsula.
The bigger ninja shook his head with a wry smile, "Clan business, nothing important, but everything is urgent in wartime." Everything was always urgent under the Third Mizukage, but nobody would say that while they were inside his tower, it was impossible to know when someone was listening.
"It's going to be hard to write down your clan business with your hands bound like that," the masked shinobi jabbed, curious as to why the Hoshigaki's hands were sealed, even if he was pretty sure he knew the answer.
"Ah right," Shumo held his hands up with a soft 'clink', "no weapons are allowed in the tower, and, well," he chuckled, "I'm sure you know my reputation."
Sarekoube did, he had even seen the big clan head in action during a rebel suppression campaign shortly before the beginning of the war. Every one of the big man's strikes tore his opponents to pieces, and not just with pure strength, he had somehow imbued his fists with the properties of a shark's skin and jaws. It was fitting, given his clan's summoning contract, appearance, and reputation.
"As for jotting everything down," Shumo looked down to his right, then to his left, then back to his right before looking over his shoulder. "Ah, there you are, get out here and greet Sarekoube, he's an impressive ninja."
A child scurried out from behind the Head of the Hoshigaki Clan, one who looked a lot like the big man, though his hairline was a lot lower, and his skin bluer than his clansman's, he also wore a similar cow-patterned robe, though his was properly fastened. The boy didn't quite come up to the man's waist, but that made him tall for his age, which Sarekoube would have guessed was eight or nine.
"Hello," Sarekoube always had a soft spot for kids, but his position had made him something of a boogeyman, "what's your name?"
The boy's own beady eyes flashed from Shumo to Sarekoube then back to his clan head. Shumo let out a short chuckle, "He's receiving private tutoring, so he's still technically a civilian, and neither of us have formally allowed him to speak to you." The clan head placed a shrouded hand on the boy's back, nudging him forward as if to encourage him to get closer to the ANBU. It didn't work. "Ah," Shumo intoned with a shrug, "this is my son, Kisame." Hoshigaki grinned, flashing his sharp teeth as his son bowed, "I suppose your reputation precedes you, he's usually polite, but following protocol this closely must be making you think I walked in with a Karatachi brat!" Shumo let out a more genuine laugh, though kept it quiet. Even he wouldn't openly laugh in the Third Mizukage's abode.
"Well, it's nice to meet you, Kisame Hoshigaki," Sarekoube said with an incline of his head. In the eyes of the village, the heir to the Hoshigaki Clan was far above any Kaguya after all.
"You as well, Sarekoube, sir," the boy finally found his voice, which sounded a lot like his father's, though a bit higher.
The ANBU was content to leave the conversation at that, he wouldn't force the boy into a stressful situation right before he had to go into a meeting with the Mizukage. And Sarekoube hadn't seen the boy before, it was entirely possible that this would be his first meeting with the man, Sarekoube wouldn't wish a bad first impression on the Mizukage on all but his worst enemies, and certainly not some kid who'd only come to help out his dad.
"He may not look it," Shumo went to pat his son on the head, only to think better of it when he remembered the bindings around his hands, "but he's a shoo-in for Nishinomi's old spot on the Seven Swordsmen's waiting list." The big ninja rolled his eyes, as if he could hear Sarekoube's doubts, "I know, I know, but he's twice as strong as I was at that age, and three times the ninja the blowhard was."
News of the prospective Swordsman's mysterious demise had turned from rumor to fact quicker than the Mizukage would have liked, which meant that Sarekoube had to plug the leak. Or at least stamp out whoever the Mizukage thought was leaking information from the tower. More likely than not the news had simply spread through couriers or patrols after the swordsman failed to complete his mission and a messenger came from Iwa for the sole purpose of informing Kirigakure command that the status quo would not be changing. Sarekoube was almost surprised he wasn't charged with killing that messenger as well. He wasn't surprised that the messenger was found floating face-down in the canals that ran along Kiri's poorest slums.
The door to the Mizukage's office cracking open signaled to Sarekoube that the day's proceedings were about to begin. The ANBU's back was against the wall opposite the Mizukage's desk before the door was fully open.
The Mizukage's office was, as far as Sarekoube understood, smaller than those of the rest of the Five Kage. Though perhaps it was designed that way to further accentuate the oppressive nature of a meeting with the Mizukage. The Third's office was even more dimly lit than the reception area, with heavy drapes drawn across the window that was directly behind the village leader's desk and a pair of flowing waterfalls covering the dully glowing crystal panels that flanked his chair. The desk itself on a raised section of floor that made up the quarter of the room farthest from the door, with the lower section of the office bare, save a navy blue rug that seemed to drink in what little light reached it, and a stool that had been set up in one of the corners of the room opposite the Mizukage.
On that stool sat Fuguki Suikazan, who was not carrying the giant sword Samehada, which was a rare sight. The Swordsman's face was a blank mask, scanning over mission reports Sarekoube knew he had already gone over twice.
Flanking either side of the Mizukage's desk, and the only things besides furniture and the Kage himself on the higher level of the room were his personal bodyguards, the "Mizukage's Shield" and the "Mizukage's Spear". Both ninja were disliked by their peers, but both at least had reputations beyond being the Third Mizukage's knife in the dark, his fixer, his 'Shadow'. But the Shadow, Sarekoube did not envy them; both the kunoichi to their Kage's right and the shinobi to his left had to serve as liaisons for the man and withstand his capriciousness in what was left of his personal life.
The 'Shield' was Akishio Tatsyumi, one of the Mizukage's clansmen, though a distant cousin, as the old man's nearest male relative was his great-grandson, the Six Tails' new Jinchuuriki. Akishio looked even less human than Shumo Hoshigaki, with a squat frame, saturated green skin, rheumy yellow eyes more than a fist's width apart, stringy black hair pulled up into an attempt at a topknot, and, strangest of all, a pair of catfish-like barbels over his wide, lipless mouth. He was dressed in the standard Kiri flak jacket over a drab bodysuit. Like Sarekoube, he was one of the few ninja allowed to carry a weapon in the Mizukage's presence.
The 'Spear' was Daki Terumi, a kunoichi touted as a prodigy who made her name snuffing out rebel groups before they could get off the ground in the years between the wars, now she had settled into her role as one of the Mizukage's elite. Terumi was a head and a half taller than her counterpart, and far more attractive, with heavily lidded eyes, pouty lips, clear skin, and a figure more than one chunin had been blinded for staring at. While at the Mizukage's side, she wore a similar outfit to Akishio, though hers bodysuit was cream colored and she wore shinobi sandals with tabi socks, and her long sea green hair was pinned into a blue and white covering that only let two bangs framing her face. Unlike Sarekoube or Akishio, who both wore a sword, Daki Terumi instead carried a pair of scrolls on each hip.
One's eyes would have come to the Third Mizukage last, even if he wasn't the furthest from the door, even if his attention wasn't directed to the calligraphy he was carefully composing, even if he weren't an old man in a dimly-lit room who was giving the observer no heed. No, one would look to the Third Mizukage last because of the aura of dread that hung over him like a funeral shroud. The Third Mizugake, which was all anyone thought of him as, for nobody called him anything else, save to his face, when they called him 'Lord Third', was an old man. An old man and an extremely old ninja, in a profession where one was lucky to reach forty, someone in their eighties was practically unheard of, in fact, the Third Mizukage had been at the First Mizukage's side when the latter was unifying the Land of Water in the name of his newly-founded Hidden Village; he was older than the Hidden Village System itself. And his age showed, the Mizukage's once-black hair was stark white, and hung in long curtains that framed his deeply-lined face, his eyes were narrow, and the heavy lines under them folded over each to form deep bags, his hands, the only other bare skin that showed from under his long white robe of office, were still straight and strong, but his skin was thin and hung loose. One of his hands, his left, the one he wrote with, was bare, but his right hand, which supported the other as he wrote, was bandaged, the binding beginning to soak through with blood.
Sarekoube didn't wince, he never moved in the Mizukage's presence without permission, and he wouldn't have winced in sympathy for the man even if he were allowed to emote. He simply regarded the injury with the same neutrality as he regarded the rest of the scene, even if he knew it was inflicted on the Mizukage during the stalled campaign in the Land of Lightning.
On his way from the village into the Mizukage's tower, the masked man had seen the price the village leader had to pay to be able to contend with and drive off Kumogakure's Third Raikage. Three other hunter-nin and a priest in a pointed, masked hood were systematically cutting the throats of prisoners kneeling in lines with their faces covered with black sacks. Sarekoube didn't know where the prisoners came from, it wasn't his place to, though he couldn't help but think they were civilians carried out of the rapidly-expanding no man's land along the Land of Lightning's eastern shore.
It also wasn't Sarekoube's place to know the specifics of what had gone on while the Mizukage was leading the campaign against Kumo, but that didn't stop him from overhearing people talking about it, especially when it was his job to not be seen. The appearance of the Third Raikage in the field had forced the Third Mizukage to call forth his boss summon, Umibozu, and the resulting clash had ruined Kirigakure's forward position, turning the war from a series of bloody, consecutive battles, into a colder affair. Though the Three Tails' Jinchuuriki was already moving to execute a bold landing to sever Kumo from supporting its ally Shimogakure. Nobody Sarekoube had overheard was sure who got the better of the exchange between Kage, but it was known that Umibozu had put the Raikage through a mountain, even after a blow from Kumogakure's leader skinned the Mizukage's right arm. Nobody in Kiri would admit that their Kage had been on the backfoot.
Before the first audience with the Third Mizukage could begin, Sarekoube saw blood begin to pool on the small pillow the village leader rested his right elbow on. Daki Terumi was the one who reacted first, producing a new cushion from seemingly nowhere, and cleaning the blood off of his bandaged arm with a hand sign.
"There you are Lord Third," she said as she straightened back up, "it should last through your audiences now."
"It will," the Mizukage's voice was strong and clear, and he refrained from looking up from his calligraphy.
"Yes, Lord Third," the 'Spear' said flatly, and Sarekoube could see the shadow of a smirk on her partner's face.
Sarekoube wondered, idly, if he would be able to cut down the Mizukage and take out either of his bodyguards if the clan head on the other side of the door behind him would aid him. He knew that the Hoshigaki wouldn't, but he couldn't help but fantasize, for an ephemeral second, about suppressing the curse seal tattooed over his left collarbone, drawing his blade, and ending the reign of the Third Mizukage. He couldn't do that though, not in the middle of a war, he may have hated the man, and he may have hated the village, he may have even hated his own clan, but he knew just how bad plunging Kirigakure into a civil war during a world war would be for the thousands of innocents who lived in the village and in the country. He remembered his clan, the vultures, swooping down on Kiri in the midst of the Third's first round of purges in the midst of the Second War. He knew he wouldn't be the one to take down the Third Mizukage. He would either die in the old man's service or outlive him, only to be swept away in the round of purges any Fourth Mizukage would order, or worse, have a dead man's switch trigger the juinjutsu embedded into his chakra network.
The Third Mizukage finished writing, stowing away his pen and paper in one of the drawers of his desk. "Send the first appointment in," he said deliberately, folding his hands in front of him. Sarekoube noticed that he retained the cushion under his right elbow, but covered the bandaged hand with his left.
Sarekoube was bored to death through the whole affair, the novelty of those who held audience with the Third Mizukage being more wary of him than anyone else in the room besides the Mizukage having worn off years ago. At the end of the day, he was relieved that he hadn't gotten a nod from the old man indicating he should dole out punishment on the shinobi he was meeting with's loved ones.
The masked man's cell, because it resembled a cell far more than anything close to a room, much less a dormitory, was located in the on-duty barracks for all hunter-nin in Kirigakure. It was one of the bunkers built into the massive limestone pillars that overlooked the village, appearing as nothing more than a row of square portals at the base of one of the smaller ones. There were different levels of accommodations, with those for the hunter-nin on long term assignments within the village (of which there were very few, and most of them had other places to stay), being several stories underground, amid dank quarters and directly above the structure's generator. Sarekoube's cell in particular was dark, as there were no light switches within the rooms, the lights were on a timer, the shattered remains of the last lightbulb that occupied the socket were still there, as the maintenance crews had stopped replacing them years ago, after the cell's lone inhabitant had broken it. He didn't need light, all he came here to do was sleep. And sleep he did, darkness falling over him as soon as he lay on the thin pad that passed for a mattress.
He didn't bother to remove his mask.
A/N: Proper update after this one for sure™. Not going to do a T/N for this one, but if you couldn't guess whose POV this sidestory was from, plug 'sarekoube' into a translator and it should be clear.
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- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
The ANBU had thankfully been alone for nearly fifteen minutes, after spending an unbearable amount of time in the presence of Fuguki Suikazan, the leader of the current generation of the Seven Ninja Swordsmen. Suikazan was huge, two and a half meters tall and well over a hundred fifty kilos, with his ridiculously-styled red hair and the massive, bandage-wrapped sword strapped to his back making him seem even larger.
Sarekoube hated him. Not as much as he hated the Third Mizukage, but he doubted there was anyone living he hated as much as the Mizukage; though he knew that was a common sentiment among the people and ninja of Kiri, very few of them hated their Kage more than Sarekoube did. Not that that diminished his animosity for the Swordsman.
Sarekoube didn't hate the Swordsman for his taunting, which was constant before he got tired of the ANBU's lack of a reaction. No, Sarekoube hated Suikazan because he was brutal even for someone in his position, and had a history of selling out his subordinates and leaving them to die. It was rumored that he looked for excuses to execute those under his command - and Sarekoube knew that those rumors were true.
Sarekoube hated him. Not as much as he hated the Third Mizukage, but he doubted there was anyone living he hated as much as the Mizukage; though he knew that was a common sentiment among the people and ninja of Kiri, very few of them hated their Kage more than Sarekoube did. Not that that diminished his animosity for the Swordsman.
Sarekoube didn't hate the Swordsman for his taunting, which was constant before he got tired of the ANBU's lack of a reaction. No, Sarekoube hated Suikazan because he was brutal even for someone in his position, and had a history of selling out his subordinates and leaving them to die. It was rumored that he looked for excuses to execute those under his command - and Sarekoube knew that those rumors were true.
Traits are updated, update on the way. This post is more for my sake.
- Location
- My room.
Skullhead? That's certainly a name.
Campaign 4: Mission 1: Interrogation
Like most others in the Elemental Nations, you heard the tale of the frog in the pot when you were very young, a warning against complacency and being vigilant against gradual, insidious changes. You haven't experienced it yourself, at least you don't think you have. Not until now, at least.
You can't help but wonder if this is the first time the frog in the pot has been a good thing, but it really does feel like it. The unconscious Iwa chunin suspended over the side of the cliff you're standing on was as easy to eliminate as the mercenaries you fought in the very beginning of the war, in fact, his whole team was, falling to you in seconds when you dropped down from another cliff and into the middle of their formation. The first didn't even survive your initial attack and the second one was almost as ineffective, the only reason this one is still alive (you didn't even mean to knock him out really, he just moved into your strike when you attacked him rather than dodge back) is because you need to get information on the movements of Iwa's other scouting parties in the Land of Storms.
The chunin comes to with a lurch, then attacks you almost immediately. He swipes at your head with a sloppy punch, taking advantage of his longer reach, but you crane your neck backwards. To his credit, the punch seemed to be a distraction, but you're able to catch the kick aimed at your ribs under your arm with just as little effort.
"W- wh-" he sputters as you flex your grip on his throat, careful to be sure he doesn't black out again. "I'm not going to tell you anything," the chunin finally struggles out, "no matter what you—"
He screams when you jerk your elbow into your side, dislocating his knee and shattering his kneecap in the short, sharp motion. "I just need to know where you're coming through the border. Then I'll let you go."
You have to repeat yourself two or three more times before he calms down and actually listens to what you're saying.
His response is unsatisfactory, to say the least, as he does his best to spit in your eye. Just like his punch, you're able to move your head out of the way fast enough to avoid it, but this time you feel it stick in your hair.
Naturally, escalation is the only proper answer to escalation, so you drop him. Or start to drop him, as you grab him by the arm the second he begins to fall. All breaking his forearm gets you is a whimper though.
"O-okay, okay! Just- just let my teammates go, and I'll tell you!"
You stop yourself from informing him of what he already knows, that they're dead, but you can't stop yourself from rapidly blinking in surprise. You didn't break his femur or humerus, so he can't be in shock, which means you must have concussed him. Huh, maybe being the frog in the pot wasn't all good this time.
"Okay," you definitely say with confidence.
It's enough to convince your prisoner, as he informs you of a gap in the border patrols created by a team of Iwagakure jounin through means he's unaware of. Unfortunately for him, that also means you can't let him go. In all honesty, you were planning on leaving him on the cliffside, most likely to be found by a team from Ame, but with the knowledge of more elite Iwa teams who could be aware of the movements of the chunin infiltration teams in the area, you can't let him be.
A quick spear-hand through the chest serves well enough to dispatch the Iwa-nin, while you could have dropped him, that would have been a lot slower, and he did tell you what you wanted to know, in the end.
[] Approach the team of Iwa jounin on your own. Not necessarily to assault them, but to scout them out. You will attack them if you think you can deal with them on your own though.
[] Gather up some of the other Ame jounin eliminating the Iwa scouting teams to wipe out the Iwa jounin decisively. This might mean you'll have to track them down though, since it will take you some time to get the other jounin together and, as far as the chunin knew, the Iwa team will be on the move.
Voting closes at !
A/N: This was originally going to be more than just the one scene, but having a choice here starting to make sense. Previous sidestory T/N: sarekoube is an alternate reading of dokuro, which means 'death's head', or a skull/depiction of a skull displayed as a warning.
A/N2: Not really a note, but if you haven't checked it out already and you have any interest in the setting or just more of my writing, vote in this non-binding interest poll for a possible future quest.
You can't help but wonder if this is the first time the frog in the pot has been a good thing, but it really does feel like it. The unconscious Iwa chunin suspended over the side of the cliff you're standing on was as easy to eliminate as the mercenaries you fought in the very beginning of the war, in fact, his whole team was, falling to you in seconds when you dropped down from another cliff and into the middle of their formation. The first didn't even survive your initial attack and the second one was almost as ineffective, the only reason this one is still alive (you didn't even mean to knock him out really, he just moved into your strike when you attacked him rather than dodge back) is because you need to get information on the movements of Iwa's other scouting parties in the Land of Storms.
The chunin comes to with a lurch, then attacks you almost immediately. He swipes at your head with a sloppy punch, taking advantage of his longer reach, but you crane your neck backwards. To his credit, the punch seemed to be a distraction, but you're able to catch the kick aimed at your ribs under your arm with just as little effort.
"W- wh-" he sputters as you flex your grip on his throat, careful to be sure he doesn't black out again. "I'm not going to tell you anything," the chunin finally struggles out, "no matter what you—"
He screams when you jerk your elbow into your side, dislocating his knee and shattering his kneecap in the short, sharp motion. "I just need to know where you're coming through the border. Then I'll let you go."
You have to repeat yourself two or three more times before he calms down and actually listens to what you're saying.
His response is unsatisfactory, to say the least, as he does his best to spit in your eye. Just like his punch, you're able to move your head out of the way fast enough to avoid it, but this time you feel it stick in your hair.
Naturally, escalation is the only proper answer to escalation, so you drop him. Or start to drop him, as you grab him by the arm the second he begins to fall. All breaking his forearm gets you is a whimper though.
"O-okay, okay! Just- just let my teammates go, and I'll tell you!"
You stop yourself from informing him of what he already knows, that they're dead, but you can't stop yourself from rapidly blinking in surprise. You didn't break his femur or humerus, so he can't be in shock, which means you must have concussed him. Huh, maybe being the frog in the pot wasn't all good this time.
"Okay," you definitely say with confidence.
It's enough to convince your prisoner, as he informs you of a gap in the border patrols created by a team of Iwagakure jounin through means he's unaware of. Unfortunately for him, that also means you can't let him go. In all honesty, you were planning on leaving him on the cliffside, most likely to be found by a team from Ame, but with the knowledge of more elite Iwa teams who could be aware of the movements of the chunin infiltration teams in the area, you can't let him be.
A quick spear-hand through the chest serves well enough to dispatch the Iwa-nin, while you could have dropped him, that would have been a lot slower, and he did tell you what you wanted to know, in the end.
[] Approach the team of Iwa jounin on your own. Not necessarily to assault them, but to scout them out. You will attack them if you think you can deal with them on your own though.
[] Gather up some of the other Ame jounin eliminating the Iwa scouting teams to wipe out the Iwa jounin decisively. This might mean you'll have to track them down though, since it will take you some time to get the other jounin together and, as far as the chunin knew, the Iwa team will be on the move.
Voting closes at !
A/N: This was originally going to be more than just the one scene, but having a choice here starting to make sense. Previous sidestory T/N: sarekoube is an alternate reading of dokuro, which means 'death's head', or a skull/depiction of a skull displayed as a warning.
A/N2: Not really a note, but if you haven't checked it out already and you have any interest in the setting or just more of my writing, vote in this non-binding interest poll for a possible future quest.
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[X] Approach the team of Iwa jounin on your own. Not necessarily to assault them, but to scout them out. You will attack them if you think you can deal with them on your own though.
Tsubaki is all about risky decisions, this seems very much in character. Just think about the glory if we actually manage to take out that team!
Tsubaki is all about risky decisions, this seems very much in character. Just think about the glory if we actually manage to take out that team!
[X] Approach the team of Iwa jounin on your own. Not necessarily to assault them, but to scout them out. You will attack them if you think you can deal with them on your own though.
[X] Approach the team of Iwa jounin on your own. Not necessarily to assault them, but to scout them out. You will attack them if you think you can deal with them on your own though.
Tsubaki is a risk taker and battle junky so this choice makes sense.
Tsubaki is a risk taker and battle junky so this choice makes sense.
- Location
- France
[X] Approach the team of Iwa jounin on your own. Not necessarily to assault them, but to scout them out. You will attack them if you think you can deal with them on your own though.