The branch wasn't moving. I noticed that first because everything else was. Twelve nin, except no, not twelve anymore. Nine now. Three had died before the others realized what they were up against, which meant Commander Minoru wasn't joking when he said Suna had actually put me in their bingo book. The remaining nine had finally worked out the obvious solution to fighting someone who specialized in explosive clones. Don't fight them at all.
They kept moving in wide circles, throwing shuriken and kunai at the clone swarm when they had clear shots, launching the occasional jutsu when they thought they'd hit something worthwhile. Then more clones started flooding in from the swamp and they stopped attacking altogether. Just ran. Kept running in these wide loops, trying to stay ahead of the swarm without getting cornered. It would've been funny if it wasn't wasting my time.
I stood there watching them play keep-away with my clones and couldn't decide if I wanted to laugh or click my tongue. On one hand, they'd correctly identified the threat and adapted their tactics. On the other hand, watching grown men sprint away from teenagers was objectively hilarious.
Then one of them hurled something into the sky.
The object arced up, spinning, trailing smoke, and burst into a massive firework that lit up the entire night sky in brilliant red. My smile disappeared faster than the light did.
Signal flare. Reinforcements. More enemies incoming. Great. Wonderful. Exactly what I needed right now.
I dropped from the tree and hit the ground running.
The wetlands blurred past as I took a different route, cutting through the murky water and reeds at an angle that would intercept them before they could reach whatever backup they'd just summoned. Around me, another twenty-something clones emerged from the shadows and fell into formation. We moved together, forming a net that tightened with every step.
The Suna-nin saw it happening. Saw more than 30 clones converging from all directions. Saw the trap closing. They tried to bolt, scatter, break through the weakest point in the perimeter.
I let out a sharp whistle, and the rain did absolutely nothing to muffle it.
The clones heard it. Every single one went wild.
Shunshin after Shunshin after Shunshin, the air filling with displacement sounds as clones flickered in and out of existence, closing the circle tighter and tighter until the Suna-nin were trapped in the center with nowhere left to run. The nearest fourteen clones smiled at the trapped nin. I could see their eyes transforming, black irises flooding with gold that spread in waves until the whole eye glowed, and anyone who'd seen that glow before wasn't around to warn these guys about what came next.
Then again, some lessons don't require prior experience. When you're staring at something designed to kill you, your brain fills in the blanks pretty fast.
The horror showed up on every face the second those eyes finished glowing. These weren't rookies. They'd survived long enough to recognize death when they saw it, and right now death was wearing fourteen identical grins and staring at them with eyes that had already started the countdown.
My heart pounded. Badump. Badump. Loud enough I could hear it over the rain. I'd never detonated fourteen clones simultaneously before, so I was genuinely excited to see how powerful the blast would actually be.
Glorious didn't begin to cover it.
The explosion was massive. Not just big. Massive. The ground shook, the air screamed, my bones vibrated inside my body like someone was playing my skeleton like a drum. The blast kept expanding, unfurling like a storm as a beautiful wave of fire and force swallowed everything in its path.
Including the space where I was standing.
My hands flew through seals faster than conscious thought, muscle memory taking over while my brain was still processing the fact that I'd vastly underestimated the blast radius. The earth opened beneath me like water and I slipped underground, diving deep, the Hiding Like a Mole jutsu pulling me down just as the shockwave reached the spot where I'd been breathing half a second ago and removed that option from existence along with every tree, rock, and unfortunate animal in range.
Everything above was noise and heat and violence. Everything below was dark and relatively safer, though the earth shook and my chest felt the rumble even through soil. I stayed there, counting seconds while tremors rolled through the soil, waiting for the explosion to finish doing whatever explosions did when left unsupervised.
Two minutes later, I surfaced.
The crater was gigantic. Just... enormous. I surfaced at the outer rim and stared down into it, trying to process the sheer scale of what fourteen simultaneous detonations could do to a landscape. The murky water was gone. The ground was gone. The reeds and vegetation that used to be there had been completely erased. Everything had been converted into scorched earth and open air. The rain fell into the crater and hissed when it hit the superheated ground, filling the air with steam.
I admired my handiwork for exactly three seconds before more clones started popping up from underground like moles, completely ruining the moment.
"Well," one of them said as he brushed dirt off his jacket, "that was definitely something."
"Fourteen was too many," another said while climbing out beside me. "Eight would've done the job."
"Eight would've left survivors," a third clone argued, emerging from the crater wall. "Fourteen was necessary."
"Fourteen almost killed the original."
"Yeah, well, almost didn't happen, so we're good."
I watched them argue while more clones surfaced, all of them covered in dirt, all of them apparently ready to have opinions about close calls while standing in the middle of proof that the call had been way too close.
"Anyone find bodies?" I asked, interrupting what was shaping up to be a very pointless debate.
The clones stopped talking and looked around the crater. Steam obscured visibility where rainwater met superheated ground, creating these shifting clouds that made it hard to see, but from what I could tell there was nothing left down there to find.
"No bodies," one clone finally said. "Just… this."
He gestured at the crater. At the complete absence of anything that used to be Suna-nin.
"They must've been vaporized," another muttered, sounding almost impressed. "Like, completely gone. Not even ash."
"That's not how explosions work," a third corrected. "There'll be remains somewhere. Just not big ones. And good luck finding anything in this swamp."
"Doesn't matter," I said. "Dead is dead. We should be thinking about reinforcements, they're probably already on their way."
"And Konan's still in the village," one reminded me. "The clones searching the village haven't reported back with anything."
"Useless," I muttered. I pointed at four nearby clones. "You four. Join up with the main squad and keep them protected. If anything happens, you know what to do." The clones nodded and headed off in the direction the girls had gone. "Everyone else, we're heading to the village. Let's move."
We slipped into the forest without another word, flickering away through the rain.
....
I headed toward the village to pick up one future problem child before she could grow into a full-blown catastrophe, except I only made it halfway before stopping dead in my tracks. The last group of clones I'd sent there were already dead.
All of them. Gone. Dispersed. Their memories hit me in a rush of information that reorganized itself in my head, and the culprit was exactly who I'd been worried about encountering since this whole mission started.
Granny Chiyo.
Well, she's not Granny Chiyo yet, since she was still in her mid-thirties or so. The 'granny' part came later. Right now she was just Lady Chiyo, master puppeteer, poison specialist, and general pain in my ass. Still in her prime. Still dangerous. Still very much someone I didn't want to fight if I could avoid it, which apparently I couldn't because here we were.
I hummed while sorting through what the clones had experienced. The nearby Suna-nin had spotted my clones fast, which made sense given how loud the fighting had been. Explosions weren't exactly subtle. Unlike the earlier groups, these ones were sharp. They saw the clones, saw the craters, immediately put two and two together and got "oh no, it's that guy from the bingo book," then started screaming for someone to contact Lady Chiyo and the Puppet Brigade.
After that, everything went downhill faster than a landslide.
There simply wasn't enough time for those clones to churn out enough third-gen clones before Chiyo and her brigade arrived. The window between 'call for backup' and 'backup arrives' was too narrow for proper preparation.
Still, the clones weren't completely useless before they died. They'd managed to map the entire village, kill any straggler enemies they encountered, and most importantly, gather intel on Konan. In the relatively intact orphanage, the orphans they'd bribed with snacks had told them about a teenage girl named Konan who'd lived in the village but was already gone. Taken away by a monk carrying a musical instrument after her parents were killed by Suna-nin. One clone had asked how they knew, and the orphans said they'd been playing together in front of her house when it happened.
That was all the clones managed to learn before Lady Chiyo killed them on their way out of the village while they were searching for more clues.
The monk was obviously my clone in disguise, and apparently he had taken the initiative when her parents were killed by Suna nin and extracted her from the village. That was the correct decision. Honestly, I'd have been annoyed if the clone had just stood there watching her become someone else's tragic backstory. I'd been planning to take her eventually anyway and prevent the whole Akatsuki situation from happening at the root, but before this, taking her wasn't even on the table. She had her parents, a home, people she trusted. No kid looks at some rando showing up out of nowhere and thinks, "Yeah, let me ditch my mom and dad to follow that guy." It just wouldn't have worked. But now her parents were dead, and she was alone, vulnerable, a perfect target for someone like Hanzo or whoever else might be interested in recruiting traumatized children with potential.
Better my clone took her than let her fall into worse hands.
The problem was I had no idea where that clone had taken her. It wouldn't dispel until it brought Konan somewhere relatively safe, probably a city far from the border, somewhere with crowds and anonymity and distance from active war zones. That was a huge area to search. Could be anywhere in Fire Country or any of the smaller countries surrounding Ame depending on which direction the clone had run.
I sighed and decided to trust the clone handling her. It was me, after all. It would make reasonable decisions based on available information and resources. Konan would be fine. Traumatized, definitely. Orphaned, unfortunately. But alive and out of Madara's reach, which was the important part.
Right now I had a more immediate problem standing between me and rejoining Tsunade's squad.
Lady Chiyo and her Puppet Brigade were in Ame, which meant she was almost certainly the one who'd poisoned Tsunade's squad members. I mean, who else would it be? Suna's poison expert was right here in Ame, right in the area where Tsunade's people got hit. And if Tsunade's squad was still missing after all this time, she was probably holed up somewhere still working on an antidote, which meant the poison was sophisticated enough to give even her trouble.
I really didn't want to face anyone whose resume included "expert in poison" as a primary skill. Fighting puppeteers was annoying enough without adding lethal toxins to the equation. But Chiyo and her people were hunting for our missing squad, and once she finished investigating the explosion site she'd probably send scouts combing the area to track them down. I couldn't let her get any closer to finding Tsunade than she already was.
I signaled the remaining clones spread throughout the swamp. They responded instantly, disappearing into the trees in waves, flickering out of sight one after another until the swamp was empty except for the rain and the occasional dragonfly.
I stared at the village in the distance. Smoke mixed with rain, creating this grey haze that made it hard to tell where the weather ended and the destruction began. Lady Chiyo might be in there with her entire brigade, or she might not be. Either way, fighting her directly was suicide. She had decades of combat experience, mastery of poison, mastery of puppetry, and an entire brigade backing her up. Even with clone numbers on my side, the poison factor made close combat incredibly risky. One scratch, one nick, one tiny cut from a poisoned blade and I was done.
So I wasn't going to fight her.
What I could do was have my clones reduce her forces, thin out her brigade, make her job harder without putting myself in poison range. Meanwhile, I'd get my squad to send word back to Konoha about this whole situation because this was clearly beyond my pay grade. Suna was building up forces in Ame territory, which meant they were planning something bigger than random raids. Probably gearing up to attack Konoha using Ame as a staging ground. Commander Minoru needed to know about this before it became everyone's problem.
I turned back and headed toward where I'd left my team.
It took longer than expected to find them. They'd moved from the original position, probably Tatsu's paranoia kicking in again, but the clones I'd left watching the perimeter guided me to their new location without trouble.
"Shinji!" Akane spotted me first, relief washing over her face. "Thank god, you're okay."
"Why wouldn't I be?" I said, stepping into the group.
Kasumi glanced up from the notebook balanced on her knee, her focused expression softening into something a little too close to worry. "We heard… a very large explosion."
"Yeah. That one was mine." I shrugged. "We ran into some Suna-nin."
Akane moved closer, checking me over like she expected to find injuries I was hiding. "You're sure you're not hurt?"
"I'm fine. Completely fine. But—" I exhaled, looking at Kasumi, "We have a bigger problem."
Kasumi blinked. "Alright… what happened?"
"Chiyo and her Puppet Brigade are here," I said. "They're the ones hunting our missing squad."
The temperature in the camp dropped about ten degrees. Everyone went still.
"Chiyo?" Kasumi's brow furrowed slightly. "That name sounds familiar..."
"She's one of Suna's top puppet masters," Akane explained quietly. "She's also a poison expert, probably one of the best they have."
"My clones encountered her in the village. She killed all of them pretty quickly, which is actually how I know for sure it's her. She's got at least ten puppeteers with her, probably more than that. According to what my clones saw, they were investigating the explosion sites about an hour ago. Once they're done with that, they'll probably start sweeping the whole area looking for us."
I turned to Kasumi. "I need you to send word back to the outpost as soon as possible. They need to know about this right away."
She straightened, already reaching for her supplies.
"Suna's building up forces inside Ame," I continued. "And if Chiyo's leading the operation, this isn't some random scouting party. They're preparing something big, probably using Ame as a staging ground for attacks into Fire Country. We can't let them take the fight into our territory."
Kasumi pulled out a summoning scroll immediately, biting her thumb for the blood seal. "What else did you learn?"
I gave her the broad strokes, enemy numbers, their movement patterns, the general spread of Suna forces in the area. Nothing too detailed, but enough for Minoru to figure out whether he needed reinforcements or a shift in strategy.
She jotted everything down quickly, her handwriting somehow staying neat despite the speed.
"This goes to Commander Minoru immediately," she said as she finished the message and started the sealing process. "He'll have to decide whether to send more people or pull us back."
"We're not pulling back," I said. "Not until we find our missing squad."
"That's not our decision to make," Tatsu pointed out.
"And it's not yours to question either," I replied, glancing at him. "If Minoru gives the retreat order, then yes, we leave. Until then, I'm running this team, and right now the priority is finding them before Chiyo does."
I stared at Tatsu and his friend. "Do either of you have any objections?"
Tatsu met my eyes for a moment, then sighed and looked away. "…No. No objections."
His friend just shook his head silently, smart enough to follow Tatsu's lead.
We continued searching for the missing squad but found absolutely nothing. No traces, no signs, no clues whatsoever. It was like Tsunade and her people had vanished into thin air, which was impossible because shinobi didn't just disappear unless they were really good at hiding or really dead, and I was betting on the former.
It wasn't until the next day that Akane started throwing out suggestions about unlikely places they could be hiding. Random speculation born from boredom and frustration, the verbal equivalent of throwing darts at a map while blindfolded.
"Maybe they buried themselves underground with breathing tubes," she said.
Kasumi rolled her eyes.
"Or they could be underwater in some kind of air pocket."
Tatsu's friend snorted. He didn't even try to hide it.
Akane kept going. "What about… somewhere in Iwa's territory?"
That made everyone pause.
"That's ridiculous," Kasumi said, but her voice lacked conviction. "Why would they run toward Iwa?"
"Because no one would expect it," Akane replied. "I mean, Suna's hunting them in Ame, right? So maybe they went the opposite direction to throw off pursuit. You know, do something crazy that nobody would think of."
It was ridiculous. Completely absurd. Running toward enemy territory to escape different enemies was the equivalent of jumping into a fire to avoid getting wet. But we had no other leads, no other options, and sometimes ridiculous was all you had left to work with.
"Fine," I said. "We'll check the Iwa border. Just to cover all bases."
The others looked at me like I'd lost my mind, but they followed anyway because I was technically in charge and they didn't have better ideas.
It took most of the day to reach the border area. The land got rougher as we moved, less forest and swamp, and more stone, with that creeping sense of Iwa's terrain starting to bleed into Ame. We moved carefully, watching for patrols from both sides.
And then Kasumi stopped.
"I've got something here," she said quietly, crouching near what looked like completely ordinary ground. "There are faint traces. Very faint. Someone tried to erase them but they didn't account for the mud hardening."
I stepped beside her, squinting. "You're sure?"
"I'm positive. Look right here." She pointed at an area of dried mud. "The print was erased, but you can see where the weight compressed the mud underneath. He smoothed the surface, but the indentation stayed once it dried."
The others gathered around, squinting at the ground.
"So they actually went toward Iwa," Akane said, looking surprised and a little proud at the same time. "I was just guessing, but they actually did it."
"Crazy bastards," Tatsu's friend muttered, but there was respect in his voice.
I couldn't help the slight smile that crossed my face. Running toward Iwa territory to escape Suna pursuers meant no one would expect it. They'd waste time searching Ame while their targets slipped away in the completely wrong direction.
I hoped Suna hadn't figured it out. The longer they spent searching the wrong area, the better our chances of reaching Tsunade first.
"Does this mean they're still alive?" Akane asked, voicing the question everyone was thinking.
"Most likely," Kasumi said, brushing her fingers over the hardened mud. "These tracks are a day old, maybe two. If they died on the way, we'd see something, bodies, a struggle, anything."
"No one saw this move coming," Tatsu said. "That bought them time. And time's everything in situations like this."
The others nodded, their expressions shifting from worry to cautious optimism. Finding traces meant finding hope, and hope was dangerous but necessary when you were deep in enemy territory searching for people who might already be corpses.
I stared at the faint traces in the dried mud. "Their tracker's been perfect this whole time. Not a single mistake until now." I looked at Kasumi. "So why would someone that good suddenly slip up? This feel like a trap to you?"
"I don't think it's a trap," Kasumi said, still examining the ground. "Look at the pattern. If this was bait, they'd make it obvious enough for regular trackers to find. This is too subtle. I almost missed it myself." She ran her fingers along the dried mud. "Their tracker is good, really good. But see, when you step in wet mud, you compress it down. He erased the surface marks perfectly, but this mud hardened while they were moving through. Once it's hard, the compression stays visible if you know how to look. It's like pressing your hand into clay then smoothing over the handprint. Surface looks clean but the clay underneath remembers where your fingers were."
She traced the barely visible indentation. "He probably erased this when the mud was still soft, didn't realize it would harden and lock in the pressure pattern like this. Most terrain doesn't do this. He's skilled, just not familiar with how this specific mud composition near the Iwa border behaves."
"I see what you mean. Keep tracking then," I nodded. "Follow wherever this leads us. Akane, I need you sweeping the area every four kilometers. If they're out here, I want to find them before anyone else does."
Akane nodded and moved off to start her wide sweeps of the area. Kasumi went back to examining the ground, following whatever invisible breadcrumbs only she could see. The others spread out around us, watching our backs while we tracked.
We had something to follow now. Not much, barely anything really, but more than the nothing we'd been working with for the past day and a half. That made all the difference between wandering around hoping to stumble across friendly corpses and actually having a direction to move in. Small victories, but I'd take them.
....
Unfortunately, aside from that one trace, there were no other signs to be found anywhere. Which just proved how competent the missing squad's tracker really was. One mistake in probably hundreds of steps, and that mistake only showed up because of terrain he wasn't familiar with. The rest of his work was invisible, completely undetectable even to someone as skilled as Kasumi.
We were basically moving blind at this point, guessing where they might have gone based on one faint footprint and general logic about which direction someone fleeing toward Iwa would travel. Not exactly the most reliable navigation method, but it beat standing around doing nothing. Akane swept the area every few kilometers, her sensing range our only real advantage in this mess.
The next day, we stopped at a cliff overlooking a town in the distance. Calling it a town felt generous. Maybe seventy buildings if I was being charitable, eighty if I counted the sheds and storage houses that probably didn't deserve building status. It sat in a valley that was clearly set up with defense in mind, which was very Iwa of it. Everything about Iwa screamed defense and solid construction, their entire approach to building things apparently centered around the concept of "what if we just made everything really hard to destroy." The way the roads were laid out, the placement of the buildings, even the general vibe of the place said Iwa territory louder than any border marker could.
Kasumi glanced at Akane. "Are they really down there?"
Akane's eyes were still closed, her face scrunched in concentration. Then her expression relaxed slightly. "Yes. I'm picking up their chakra signatures now. It's definitely them down there."
Tatsu let out a breath that sounded more like relief escaping from a punctured tire. "Oh thank god, finally. That's really good work, Akane. Seriously, nice job."
His friend chimed in. "Wait, how far out can you actually sense from here? That town's got to be what, at least four kilometers away?"
Tatsu jumped on the opening like he'd been waiting for it. "Right? Most sensor types can detect chakra at this distance, but actually picking out specific people from a whole crowd of shinobi? That takes some serious skill. That's actually really impressive, Akane."
I stared at him. Most sensors could absolutely do that. That was literally among the things they taught you in sensor training. Was this guy seriously trying to flirt by complimenting her on being able to perform basic job functions? That was like praising a chef for knowing how to boil water.
This embarrassing show would've been amusing to watch if Akane's face hadn't suddenly gone pale. Like someone had drained all the blood out of her in one go.
I frowned. "What's wrong?"
"We've got thirty-two shinobi coming from behind us," she said, her eyes snapping open. "And they're moving really fast."
The atmosphere on that cliff changed so fast I could practically hear it snap. Everyone's expression changed from relief to something much less pleasant. Thirty-two shinobi meant this wasn't a random patrol stumbling onto our trail. This was a hunting party. Someone had been following us this whole time, and we'd been completely oblivious.
I felt my expression change as my brain helpfully reminded me how badly I'd messed up.
I'd forgotten to tell Kasumi to erase our traces.
Such a basic precaution. Such an obvious thing to do when you're tracking someone in hostile territory. And I'd been so focused on following the missing squad's trail that I'd completely failed to cover our own. We'd been hunting while being hunted, completely unaware that someone was closing in from behind until they were close enough that our sensor finally picked them up.
And my luck, being the generous thing it was, decided to make everything worse. I couldn't use exploding clones here. We were too close to the town, deep in Iwa territory, and detonating dozens of explosive constructs would bring every Iwa shinobi in the area down on our heads. That would turn this from a bad situation into a catastrophically worse situation involving angry Iwa nin, which would then spiral into something even more nightmarish that I didn't want to think about.
But the real problem, the thing that made my stomach twist, was that I'd led thirty-two enemy shinobi straight toward Tsunade's location.
I gritted my teeth, genuinely disappointed with myself. Not being experienced with tracker battles was understandable. Learning on the job was part of being a shinobi. But this? This was like forgetting to season the dish before serving it. Basic fundamentals that any cook worth their salt shouldn't mess up no matter how distracted they are.
Still, spending time on regret right now was pointless. The mistake was made, the consequences were incoming, and sitting here thinking about it wouldn't help anyone. Deal with reality first, everything else second.
"Akane, Kasumi," I said seriously. "I need you two to head down to the town. Find the missing squad and tell them what's happening. Then take them straight to the extraction point Minoru mentioned in the briefing." I looked at both of them. "You remember the location?"
They both nodded.
Then I turned to Tatsu and his friend. "You two are coming with me. We're going to delay the enemies for as long as we possibly can."
The color drained from their faces faster than water down a drain. They looked at me like I'd just suggested we all jump off the cliff and see what happened. Which, realistically speaking, was probably about as survivable as what I was actually suggesting.
"That's..." Tatsu's voice cracked slightly. "I mean, that's basically a suicide mission, isn't it?"
"Bit pessimistic, don't you think?" I said. "We're delaying them, not fighting to the death. There's a difference."
His friend made a sound that might've been a laugh or a whimper, hard to tell. "You're completely insane. There's no way the three of us can fight against thirty-two shinobi. We'll be slaughtered before we even get started."
I glanced between them both. "You're thinking about this wrong. We don't need to beat them. We just need to make their pursuit take longer than it should, that's all."
"And how exactly are we supposed to slow down thirty-two shinobi?" Tatsu's voice went up. "They'll just run right through us like we're not even there!"
"Maybe they will. But even just a few minutes is all the girls need to reach the town and extract the squad. Every single second we buy them is a second closer to mission success."
"There has to be another way," his friend said desperately. "We could all retreat together, regroup somewhere, find a better position—"
"And lead thirty-two enemy shinobi straight to our missing squad?" I interrupted. "We'd just be moving the problem instead of solving it."
"Then use your clones!" Tatsu said, grasping at options. "Send a hundred clones to delay them while we all get out of here!"
"Can't. Average sensors might have trouble telling clones apart from the real body, sure, but skilled sensors can detect the difference pretty easily. The real body always has slightly denser chakra flow. If they've got someone good with them, and they probably do, they'll spot me in seconds and just ignore all the clones." I gestured toward the town below. "And I can't exactly use exploding clones this close to an Iwa settlement either. That would bring every Iwa shinobi in the area down on our heads. Then we'd be dealing with thirty-two enemies plus however many Iwa decides to send our way."
"So we just die here?" his friend's voice went up an octave. "That's your plan?"
"My plan is you two help me buy time for the mission to succeed. If we're lucky, we survive. If we're not, at least the mission completes and everyone else gets out safely." I looked at them both. "That's how shinobi missions work sometimes. Someone has to hold the line so the others can finish the objective."
"That's easy for you to say!" Tatsu shot back. "You've got your clones, your fancy jutsu, your whole bingo book entry! We're just regular jonin! We're not built for this kind of thing!"
"Neither am I, actually. I'm a thirteen, remember? Way younger than you guys. A lot less experience in the field. But rank doesn't really change the situation we're in. Thirty-two enemies are coming either way. Someone needs to slow them down, and we're the ones here, so it's our job." I exhaled through my nose, trying to sound reassuring. "Look, don't worry too much, my clones will take the front lines. You two just stay back and support from range. Follow orders, don't do anything stupid, and your chances of not dying go up significantly."
"This is still insane," his friend muttered. "What if it's not enough? What if they just blow through us anyway?" The words came out without much conviction. He was running out of arguments and he knew it.
I felt a sigh building in my chest and forced it down. I was getting tired of this. We were wasting time I didn't have while these two worked through their understandable but ultimately pointless panic. I could keep explaining, keep justifying, keep walking them through the logic until they finally accepted what was already obvious. Or I could just cut to the part where they realized they didn't actually have a choice.
I let the smile drop from my face. "You're right. It is insane. But here's the thing. You're free to refuse. I'm not going to force you. I'm not going to chase you down if you run. You can leave right now and I won't stop you." Then I smiled at them, and this time it didn't reach my eyes. "Of course, from the moment you abandon your squadmates during an active mission, you'll be registered as missing-nin. You'll spend the rest of your short, miserable lives running. Sleeping with one eye open. Never trusting anyone. Until a hunter-nin finds you and brings your head back in a bag. Konoha will hunt you to the ends of the Elemental Nations. Your families will be questioned. Your names will be struck from the registry. Everything you built in the village will be gone."
I paused, letting that sink in.
"But hey, it's your choice. I'll give you one minute to decide."
Both of them went even paler, which I hadn't thought was physically possible. They looked like ghosts who'd seen other ghosts and been scared by the experience. The girls were watching with obvious tension, their expressions caught between sympathy and horror.
The silence stretched out while they processed their options. Fight alongside me and maybe survive, or abandon the mission and spend the rest of their lives looking over their shoulders. Either way, their comfortable jonin careers were over.
Eventually, I turned my attention to the girls. "What are you waiting for? Go."
They startled like I'd shouted instead of spoken normally. Akane gave me a look that was equal parts apology and something I couldn't quite read. "I'm sorry," she said quietly.
"Sorry," Kasumi echoed.
Then they were gone, sprinting down the terrain toward the town, their figures getting smaller with each second. I watched them descend while Tatsu and his friend remained frozen behind me. I could hear their breathing, rapid and shallow. Could practically feel the panic radiating off them in waves.
The girls kept running toward the town. And behind me, two people were still frozen between taking the gamble or running away and becoming hunted forever.
I gave them their one minute. Watched the internal struggle play out on their faces, watched them realize that calling this a choice was generous when the alternative was becoming a fugitive.
Tatsu's friend was the first to move, his feet already turning before his mouth finished forming words. "I'm sorry," he said, and it came out barely audible, more breath than voice. Then he was running.
Tatsu didn't apologize. He just scoffed and bolted after his friend without looking back. Their figures disappeared into the rocky outcroppings, getting smaller and smaller until the boulders and rock clusters swallowed them.
I didn't bother turning to watch them go. My eyes stayed on the girls, who were already dots in the distance, still moving toward the town. The important thing was them reaching Tsunade, completing the mission, getting everyone to the extraction point. Everything else was just noise and consequences that would sort themselves out later.
Once they disappeared from view, I flickered away from the cliff, heading toward the incoming enemies. Time to intercept thirty-two very motivated people who wanted me dead.
Five minutes later, I was standing on a boulder, scanning the way they'd be coming through. The village better pay me properly for this whole operation. I'd lost count of how many jonin I'd killed since this mission started, but it was definitely enough to qualify for hazard pay at minimum. Probably more than that. Definitely more than that, actually, considering jonin kills were supposed to be noteworthy achievements and I'd been racking them up like they were participation trophies. And that number was about to increase depending on how many jonin were mixed into this incoming squad of thirty-two. Safe bet there were plenty, probably ten or twelve at least, because you didn't send an all-chunin hunting party after someone like Tsunade.
Fifteen minutes after that, they arrived.
Thirty-two Suna-nin, moving through the rocky terrain in a formation that was way too coordinated to be anything but professionally trained military personnel. And at the front, leading them like she personally owned every rock and boulder in the area, was Lady Chiyo.
She looked furious. Not just angry. Furious. Deep personal fury that made people forget about hesitation and regret and just go straight to the extremely violent part of conflict resolution.
Which didn't make sense because we'd never met before. I didn't know her personally. I'd blown up some of her people, sure, but that was just normal ninja business. Occupational hazard. Nothing personal. So why was she looking at me like I'd killed her dog and burned down her house and insulted her cooking all in the same afternoon?
She stared at me for a long moment, taking in every detail. The black clothes. The face that matched whatever description she'd gotten from the bingo book.
"So you're the one," she said, her voice cold. "The one with the exploding clones. The one who's been killing our people." She didn't blink. She didn't look away. But something tightened in her expression, like a thread being pulled too far. "My son... my beautiful boy and his wife... they didn't deserve what you did to them." Her voice cracked slightly before hardening again. "But don't worry. Mother's here now. I'll make this right. I promise you, I'll make this right."
What I saw in her eyes wasn't animosity. It was pure grief-soaked killing intent from someone who'd probably spent weeks planning exactly which parts of me to remove first and in what order.
Which was deeply concerning, but also confusing.
Killing her son and daughter-in-law? That was White Fang's thing. The guy who'd become the tragic backstory character who committed suicide because the village turned on him after he prioritized his comrades over mission. But what did any of that have to do with me? I wasn't White Fang. I was just some jonin with a clone addiction and a tendency to make things explode.
What Shinji didn't know, what he had absolutely no way of knowing in that moment, was that Chiyo's son and daughter-in-law had been among the people he'd reduced to component atoms back when he and Tsunade had clashed with Suna forces near the border, back when he'd been throwing around explosive clones like candy and not caring particularly hard about who was on the receiving end as long as they weren't wearing Konoha headbands.
Apparently some of those explosions had hit closer to home than he'd realized. Literally. Chiyo's family had been in that fight. And now Chiyo was here, looking at him like he was every bad thing that had ever happened to her compressed into human form.