Chapter 149: Chapter no.149
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"Those two always were a pain in the ass..." Naruto mumbled to himself as he spread out his senses and felt that his clones had finished their job and were now back within range of him at the beginning of the tunnel.
Forming a half-ram seal, Naruto simultaneously detonated his clones along with the explosive tags, triggering a chain reaction as every explosive tag in the compound and the tunnel went off. Within the span of a second, explosions were going off one after another all throughout the tunnel and the hideout as each explosion caused a section of it to collapse and bring more weight down upon the section below it until the actual earth shattered beneath the surface and the tunnel caved in.
Naruto could feel the earth shifting and shaking below his feet as the ground began to create large fissures from the large-scale shifting occurring beneath it. It became hard to keep his balance as the shaking was equivalent to that of a magnitude six earthquake, but Naruto needed to keep the barrier up to keep the full effects of the explosion contained within it.
After several minutes of withstanding the force that the explosions brought upon the very earth itself, the shaking began to die down as the fissure finally stopped spreading and breaking apart the earth and the final explosives went off.
Naruto looked around and noticed that he was standing on the only earthen pillar in the area as his chakra had preserved it, with all the rest of the ground having been shattered and collapsed from having no more support from the structures below. It could easily be described as a giant crater that ascended into darkness or a bottomless pit.
As he surveyed the destruction their mission had caused, Naruto released his control on the barrier, forcing it to subside. Seeing as how the entire radius around the hideout had been destroyed, including the rock formation that contained the entrance, Naruto Shunshined to where the land began once again before looking back once more and blurring out of sight to reconvene with the rest of his team.
What remained of the once favored hideout of Orochimaru was nothing, it was as if its entire existence had been erased from the face of the earth.
On top of a large cliff, Naruto and his team stood side by side as they gazed upon the small, quiet Banaro Town. The town itself looked to have an old Wild West theme to it, at least the team had assumed so from the movies they had seen during their youth due to the fact that they were based off of merely fantasy. The town was surrounded by vast forests and huge rocks that faced upwards in different directions, known as Banana Rock according to the map that Naruto had picked up at a previous town. The team were situated on the highest of these rocks.
It had been about thirty minutes since they had detonated the exploding tags at Orochimaru's hideout, and thanks to the barrier Naruto had put up, it looks like nobody was aware of what had happened. This was to be expected since the barrier not only prevented sound from traveling, but it also limited any of the vibrations from within the earth to reach outside of it.
This time lapse had given the shinobi of the team time for their chakra to regenerate, as well as recover from any wounds or mental stress they had accumulated through the course of the mission.
From the chakra levels Naruto was able to sense, most of the villagers within the town were civilians. However, there were a few signatures that could borderline on shinobi levels. This meant that either they really were shinobi and were suppressing their chakra, they had shinobi training but had no affiliations with any of the villages, they were nuke-nin, or they were retired shinobi. They were too high up from the town for Naruto to be able to accurately sense them with his Haki, so they were going to have to do this the old-fashioned way.
But before that...
"I think it would be best if we gathered all of the storage scrolls and sent them back to Konoha in case something goes wrong with this part of the mission...I can't help but feel that something going to happen soon, though that may just be my imagination." Naruto spoke as he walked away from the edge of the cliff, towards the middle and knelt down on one knee where he began removing the numerous storage scrolls from weapons pouch and his flak jacket pockets.
The other members slowly followed him and replicated his actions. They didn't know exactly why, but there was an odd sense of foreboding in the pit of their stomachs, that was the only reason they didn't dismiss Naruto's words as merely paranoia. Though that still begged the question of how they would get the scrolls back to the village.
After everyone had emptied their pockets, ten storage scrolls lay in the middle of the circle that the shinobi had created. Narumi and Natsuki were unfamiliar with the workings of storage scrolls and they had not been given an information retrieval mission, so they hadn't contributed any of the scrolls. Mikoto had filled up four entire storage scrolls, Satsuki had contributed five, and Naruto had only recovered enough information to only need one and then there was the scroll that contained Jūgo's dismembered remains.
"Um, Nii-san? How are we going to transport the scrolls back to the village? Is part of the team returning to the village early?" Natsuki asked with a tilt of the head. She had been silent ever since they left the hideout as everything that she had done in the hideout finally settled into her mind. Though, she wasn't really hit with deep feelings of remorse or guilt like her sister had been, what she felt...was nothing. It was something of an out of body experience, she knew she had killed those men, but yet, it felt like she hadn't at the same time...it was odd.
She didn't receive a verbal response, Naruto merely stepped back a few meters and bit his thumb to draw a bit of blood, after which he placed his hand on the surface of the rock. He had mastered the summoning technique to such a degree during the reprieve between the second and third stages of the chūnin exams that he no longer required hand seals to summon any of his phoenixes.
There was a large burst of smoke, signifying the use of the summoning technique from the actions that Naruto had previously preformed. Once the smoke cleared, the eyes of all four kunoichi widened, even Satsuki's and Mikoto's who knew what kind of contract Naruto held. Standing, or rather levitating, in front of Naruto was a bird-like dragon. It possessed an aerodynamic body, with the lower half of its body colored blue with jet-plane wings and fin-like feet and white and blue arms that looked like they could be tucked into its body, on its chest was a red triangular mark. The upper half of its body was white and it had triangular ears and a blue face with a white pentagon in the middle.
An outsider would find it strange for a dragon-like creature to be a part of the phoenix contract, but the dragons were the descendants of the phoenix, so it makes sense if one knew the relationship between the two species. It is rumored that the dragon contract is the most powerful of the summoning clans, but that is only rumor, there is no such contract. That is because the dragons lie in the depths of Mt. Silver or roam the atmosphere where no other creature would be able to survive. Just as the dragons have descended from the phoenixes, their abilities have also evolved and spread out so that their abilities do not lie solely with fire. From the looks of this particular one, it appeared to be specialized in speed, perhaps being able to fly so fast that it could be described more accurately as teleportation.
"Sorry for calling you out so suddenly Latios." Naruto apologized merely out of courtesy. Latios was one of the phoenixes that he had taken a liking to him during that month he had spent on Mt. Silver. He may have been a dragon, but Latios was still considered to be a phoenix because he was their descendant.
There was another interesting fact about Latios. He couldn't speak the way most of the other of his kind could, though it wasn't due to a lack of intelligence, actually he was one of the smartest of his kind. He possessed incredible telepathic abilities and communicated with others that way.
'It's okay Naruto, I told you that you may summon me whenever my presence is required. How may I be of service?' As Latios spoke telepathically to Naruto, its eyes turned a shade of light blue to signal the use of its telepathy. To outsiders it would seem that the interactions between the two were no different from any other animal, with the dragon giving off a small roar that sounded more like a sonar than anything. But it was obvious to the four still-gobsmacked kunoichi that these two understood each other very well.
"I need you to transport these documents back to Konoha as quickly as possible. They're incredibly important and we still have a mission to complete. I'd normally just wait until we could bring them back ourselves, but I can't help but feel that something is going to go very wrong very soon." Naruto spoke as he unsealed a messenger bag, from the scroll that held his personal effects, and placed the scrolls containing the information they had retrieved into it.
'Very well, it shall be done. Once I reach your village, I will take my human form and deliver them to your sensei.' Latios dipped his head down so that Naruto could strap the messenger bag around the dragon's neck. After which Latios raised his head back up and placed his arm around the bag, securing it so that it would not fall off when he reached top speed.
"Sorry for all the trouble." Naruto apologized once more. He didn't like treating some of the most majestic creatures in the world like they were merely a delivery service to be used at his convenience.
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