Capítulo 18: Chapter Eighteen
Pre-Chapter AN: Hey, thanks for reading this. It's literally my favourite thing to write these days. Enjoy the chapter, and let me know how it sticks if you enjoy it. After reading this, you can either wait until next week for the next chapter or read the next three on Pa Treon right now and keep reading as I write. Have fun with this. Also, if you haven't checked out my other story (Gamer of the Desert) yet, please do so. It's also set in the Naruto universe. It's an SI into Gaara with some gamer elements. I can guarantee you'll love it. It's also much farther along than this one, so gives you something to really sink your teeth into. Also, I have a prologue (and now the first chapter!) to a new story up here now. It's a crossover where a variant of Dr Doom from the MCU gets inserted into the Harry Potter Universe into Harry's body on the day he gets chosen by the Goblet of Fire.
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The next course of action was clear. Since we'd killed the shinobi that was here to watch the situation, and thus our foremost source of intel on the situation, there was only one more option open to us to figuring things out. The only issue was that pursuing this option was basically going nuclear. The land of waves was allied with the land of fire even if there were no official-written treaties proclaiming that, there were still decades of trade relations. That meant that doing something as serious as capturing and interrogating the Mayor of the town was basically going to flush a lot of that down the drain. So we were forced to ask ourselves one simple question, 'would it be worth it?'
"Konoha does not negotiate for the Land of Fire, and we sure as hell do not speak for Konoha. Doing this would be terminating an agreement for both of those parties. We'd be overstepping our boundaries by several orders of magnitude. We'd get in so much trouble, that I find it difficult to even conceptualise the level of mud we'd be wading through at the end of this" Toshiro dropped in his two cents. So far, Uzume had emphasised that she had no interest in leaving things unfinished and that if the Mayor's head had to roll for us to get to the bottom of this, then it was an acceptable sacrifice.
Shika remained silent for a few seconds before turning to me, "What do you think?"
"I think that there is a difference between the Mayor of the Land of Waves, and the Land of Waves themselves. Considering he needed a shinobi to keep him in power, it's clear that he isn't at the peak of his popularity with his people and that gives us an opportunity here. If they already dislike him, then removing I'm from his position could actually mean that the alliance gets strengthened. The opposite is also through. Leaving right now like Shori suggests is dangerous because eventually the fear of the absent shinobi will die, and they will go for him again. Except this time, they will succeed and then replace him. Considering civilians, at the best of time, barely have any understanding of the concept of different shinobi belonging to different villages, I think its likely that they'll just lump us in with whoever's been taking their kids, and we'd lose the alliance either way." Was my own submission on the matter.
Shika sat still for a few minutes. Going through the academy with her meant that we allowed her to have her space as we knew that she was thinking things through. Probably working through more permutations in her mind than we could comprehend. In three minutes, her eyes snapped open.
"Okay, I've made up my mind guys. We follow Shori's plan, but we have to make sure that we do this in a way that leaves the civilians with the best possible impression of us. That means that we don't just need to take him out, but we need to figure out some way to either get the kids back or conclusively deliver closure on what happened to them."
For the third time, the lot of them made their way to the Mayor's office, and this time, they found the door to the building wide open. That was already something unusual. Unusual often meant dangerous in their line of business so they were all instantly on edge. A situation that was heightened when they found the dead body of the secretary slumped against her table. The blood pooling around hr head made it clear what had caused the injury, and the amount of it meant that if she wasn't dead, she would be getting there soon. The world spun in harsh clarity as he activated his byakugan now, no longer averse to risking being caught out by the chakra usage.
With it, he could make out the soft beating of the Secretary's heart and the fact that she did not have long left to live. That only drew his attention for a few seconds, as he instead turned it to the Mayor's office, where the man was presently making conciliatory gestures to a duo. Shinobi. Their headbands marked them as Mist Ninja, and the fact that one of them wielded a blade that was easily as tall as she was and shone with chakra to his eyes like no other sword he'd ever seen, while the other had a pair of blades crossed across his back in an X symbol. Considering this blade was also shining with chakra, it was easy enough to figure out who they were and what they carried. The fact that the twin blades on the man's back gave off a distinctly electric feeling to their presence. The Executioner's blade, and the thunderswords. Two of the even Swordsmen of the Mist. Looking around his own team, he was almost instantly certain that they were outmatched, but that was only if they were enemies. Considering the Mayor's posture, these people were nothing close to his friends.
He signed his observations to his teammates while having to use his hands to describe the varying blades. It was a frustrating game of charades between them as they tried to figure out which blades in particular he was talking about, but it was an essential one. He could not allow them to go in blind when he had the essential intel that could mean the difference between life and death for them, and he also could not allow their conversations to be loud enough that they ran their risk of either the Mist nin being warned of their presence before they were ready to confront them.
After the sword conversation ended, Shika moved to asking even more questions. Chakra reserves? At least at the same level as Sakumo-sensei's. Ranks? Jounin from the vests they wore, but that was a bit of a guess as well. His eyes couldn't see colour when he was using them like he currently was. Bearing? Aggressive towards the mayor, but relatively calm as regards the other. That meant they weren't allies with the Mayor, at the very least. It also meant that they had some amount of time to figure out how they wanted to approach things.
"Move now" I told my team, and we jumped straight through the wall and at our opponents. Shika's shadow reached out for both of them in the scuffle, and I watched as they both smoothly danced away from it while also edging out of the way of both Uzume and I. Toshiro's attempt to ensnare them in genjutsu clearly failed, and he was forced to dive at the Mayor to protect him from the shuriken that had been tossed at him. In a second, the entire room had exploded in chaos. I watched as Toshiro bent over the Mayor for a few seconds or so before standing up and shaking his head.
I looked at the body and grit my teeth at seeing the shurinken that was stabbed right into his carotid artery. Replaying the memory of our invasion, I noted that another shurinken had been in the shadow of the first one that had been tossed. Toshiro's dive at the Mayor had placed them right in front of the blade and the Mayor had been the one to take the brunt of the attack. It was Pure bad luck. And that was made the situation so annoying to me. Complete randomness. That Toshiro would have hit him at that angle and knocked him right into the path of the shurinken and that the shurinken would have hit him right at that spot was the kind of situation that absolutely no one could have foreseen or planned. Unlucky. Just unlucky.
"Okay, who the fucjk are you and what you do you want?" I questioned first, not feeling flush with patience.
"And who are you to question us, Konoha-nin?" The man who wielded the thunderswords. I bristled further at his words, until the woman placed a hand on her partner's arm and stepped to the forefront. Now that things weren't moving so quickly and I wasn't seeing her through a wall, I could appreciate her beauty for real. She had pale skin, and high cheekbones, aristocratic looks that would not have been odd to see among the Hyuga. Her black hair, instead of falling straight down like it did with most of my clan, fell down her face in curved rivets that framed her face and grounded her beauty lacking a better word. It made it clear that this wasn't someone from a dream-this was a human. A beautiful human. But still a human. And that made her even more beautiful to me.
"Calm down, Mako. I am sure the lovely Konoha chunin were just curious as to what was going on. We might have been intruding on their mission, after all." She said, pulling his arm down and seemingly pacifying him for the time being. That alone marked her as the authority figure in his group to my eyes.
"Hello Konoha Chunin-san. I am Yuki Asami, Jounin of Kirigakure, and this is my partner, Hohojirozame."
"Huh?" my mouth moved before I could think, and she chuckled while her partner made to step forward.
"Hohojirozame. It's a simple enough name if you break it down in bits. Hoho. Jiro…"
"Enough of that, we understand. Move on and start answering the questions" Uzume did not look pleased with the whole situation, and was shooting me a look of irritation for some reason.
"Yeah, we found out that this Mayor was working with the Land of Hot Water and the Hidden Steam Village to ship children for use in their academy. Since the shipping was taking place through waters that we controlled, the Mizukage wanted to get the full story and that was what led him to sending us down here" She explained. I nodded at her words. Definitely her words. Not the way her hair moved with her face when she spoke. And definitely not the way I could smell her perfume intruding in my nose.
"But that's beside the point. The Mayor is dead, and we have the information we needed. Can we get your names and get going?"
"As if," Uzume was instant.
"What information did you need?" Shika probed.
"Just some basic things like where the children are being held and who he hands them over to. Apparently, there is a hidden steam chunin somewhere here that should be picking up the kids at a cave near the beach head. We'll be moving to intercept him and return those poor children to their families." She said.
"Pretty certain that the Hidden Steam chunin in question is dead and gone. We ran into him on our way here" I said.
"Oh lovely, then. We can move to save the kids and leave that as that" She said before turning to leave.
"Hold on. Let's come with you" I said.
"Come with us?" She sounded hesitant.
"I'd love to cooperate with some konoha shinobi, but this isn't even the friendliest of circumstances, we don't know your names, and don't you have a mission to get to" She replied, while her partner grunted by her side.
"Our mission was to find the kids and return them, so we wouldn't be going out of the way here" I said to her, ignoring the way Uzume looked like she wanted to stab me in the skull.
"As for names, I am Hyuga Jinpachi, and these are my teammates Kurosaki Ichigo, Inoeu Orihime, and Kuchiki Rukia" I said, giving the fake names with a smooth smile on my face. None of my teammates reacted, as the need to avoid giving our names out was something that had been impressed even more thoroughly upon us on the eve of this mission. Iwa had put a bounty out for my head, and there were people itching to collect.
"Alright then. You've convinced me. Let's get going" She said.
"How do you know the way?" I asked after we stepped out of the building and began to move west.
"I've come on a mission or two her before. Kiri has a superb relationship with the Land of Waves" She replied.
They walked further and further down the coastline as they moved towards what his eyes had identified as a series of caves. He could see the edge of them, but not deep within as his range was nowhere near good enough to see that far. According to Uraume, his range was only a bit better than that of a toddler who had just awakened theirs and even despite all her promises that it would get better with time, it was still basically any the same level that it had been for months now. But if the tradeoff for his much better vision quality was a loss in range, then it was a worthwhile sacrifice by his estimation. After all, how many hyuga could claim to be able to copy jutsu just as well as any sharingan user and to have jutsu from all five elements under their belt as well as the mystical palm of all things.
Focused on that, he was too slow to react to Yuki's sudden movement. They were all walking in lockstep, and then in the space between seconds, she turned around, unsheathed her blade faster than he could blink and slammed it into Toshiro's side. Only the fact that he managed to somehow move with the blow prevented him from being cleaved in two. Still, he was sent flying and collapsed in a rapidly building pool of his own blood. Shocked at the transition, it took Shori a second to move. A second that she used to spit a storm of ice needles at him.
Right as it was about to hit his frozen form, the attack was blown backwards as he felt himself begin to spin. Halfway through the spin, he felt himself regain control of his body. It had only been a microsecond, but he had some strong feeling within him that something important had just taken place. Something foundational, something with the potential to c change everything. He was not allowed to dwell on the thought as the second he stopped spinning, the woman was upon him again.
"Stay still, Senju. Just let me take your head and I promise that Hohojirozame will be gentle with your teammates. You know he likes his women that age, right? And an Uchiha at that? Better surrender now so I can protect them from him" She said, spitting out the words like she was discussing the weather even as she slashed and stabbed at him with a sword almost as long as she was tall. She wielded it with ease that bellied her frame and acted as a display of incredible chakra strength.
He allowed her words to flow past him, burying the instinctive surge of rage he felt at Uzume being threatened in such a manner with the fact that he knew she'd kill this woman's stupid teammate. Seven Swordsmen of the Mist or not, they'd find some way to bury these bastards, he promised himself. They just had to do it quickly enough for Toshiro to get the medical attention he needed.
XXXXXXX
Done reminiscing about how we had gotten here, I watched as my water release exploding colliding wave created a geyser of water that shot from the ground around us before crashing towards her like a tsunami. Few things could match the crushing force of water en masse, and the beach head we stood atop got to witness this fact firsthand. First of all, the water carried Asami ad whatever defence she'd formed around herself towards the sea, just as it swept around to get her teammate. I paid him no attention, trusting Uzume and Shika to handle the water and the distraction it was going to cause in their fight while I jumped towards Toshiro. He needed help, and he needed it yesterday.
I was only a few metres away from him when my eyes caught Asami appearing from beneath the waves. I hoped she'd be a bit slower on the uptake. But I was proven wrong as a hail of ice needles fell upon the ground that separated Toshiro and I, and forced me to bank away from my teammate. Her threat was clear. Focus on me, or I will target your teammate. I weaved two seals and clapped my hands in her direction. Against all odds, she leaned out of the way in time for y lightning release: thunderbolt to strike nothing but thin air.
She formed a series of seals, much less than the 44 that the jutsu was supposed to take, and the water around her began to take a very familiar ethereal form. This was a jutsu that Granduncle Tobirama had shown me some years ago, and I silently gulped as thew water dragon formed around her with glowing yellow eyes.
As the dragon dove down, I silently said a prayer to a god I did not believe in that I would manage to do this successfully this time. Hit with a bolt of inspiration that I could not for the life of me trace the source, I began with the elemental chakra first. From the same inspiration, I chose to begin with water release and not wind. The Wind release: Rasenshuriken was not my jutsu. It was not mine. This one would be. Water first. More water release chakra than I'd ever made in my life. Water release chakra with only one concept in mind. Pressure. As much pressure as I could. I felt the chakra begin to destabilise, and the same guiding hand made me add earth release to the water release chakra. Not in high amounts. Just enough to pass along the concept of stability. Next came rotation. I forced the water release chakra to spin upon itself. Power came in the form of neutral chakra, and I then worked to contain everything either the same concept that the Kaiten worked on.
Millions of threads of chakra working together. This would not be a sphere. It would not be a shuriken either. Those weren't my weapons. I counted myself lucky that Yuki made the brain dead decision to show off by making her dragon swim through the air in concentric circles to gain altitude before it began to dive down on me. On second thought, she probably did that to maximise the range of effect of the jutsu. It was probably not cheap to use chakra-wise, and she wanted to take as many of us with it as possible. A shame that her jutsu would serve nothing more than the canvas on which I was going to paint my mark into this universe.
"Water Release: Arrow of Kami" I proclaimed, as the water release chakra took the shape of an arrowhead. The shaft was nowhere to be found, but that was a semantic that I doubted anyone would argue. The arrow head flew fast, and it flew through. I felt it shoot from my hand like a missile, and it slammed right into the dragon's head, before instantly exploding.
'I didn't think that through' was my last thought before my body was slammed into by the resulting cascading waves of water. I felt my head blank as water rushed though my nose, and my mouth, and every place it could into my head for a few seconds as I was carried along by the water. It took me slamming into one of the trees miles from the beachhead where I'd been fighting for me to come to. My momentum stopped, and I flipped my body over to avoid choking as I began to vomit gallons upon gallons of water. How had so much water gotten into my body in the first place?
Toshiro! My mind went straight to my injured teammate, and regardless of how drained my body felt, I forced it to flood my eyes with chakra to activate the byakugan. I scanned my surroundings, searching out my teammates form, but everywhere I looked was destruction. The clash between Yuki's water release jutsu and mine had devastated much of the area. The cave that was supposed to contain the kids was gone. The water had crushed it into nothingness, but the fact that I couldn't see any remains there was probably a good sign.
I felt myself beginning to panic at not being able to find a single one of my teammates before I remembered the signal we were supposed to use in situations like this. I smashed my fist into the ground. Once. Twice. Three times. Her hands came out first. I would bless those hands for the rest of my life. It took a few seconds for her to come out carrying both my teammates.
Uzume was conscious, and looked like she wanted to begin tearing into me, but all my eyes were for Toshiro. Thankfully, he didn't look much worse than he had earlier. I ran my eyes over him, making sure to understand the full scale of his injuries. With the byakugan, I had no need to use something as inelegant as a diagnostic jutsu, so I could move straight into treatment.
A/N; Here's the chapter. As I said earlier, the next chapter comes up next week or skip the wait and read the next three along with daily uploads on pa-treon. For the pa-treon, you can remove the hyphen between pa and treon and google it then search for my username- Oghenevwogaga. Or you could copy the link in my bio and remove the spaces before pasting in your address bar.
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