Suigetsu refused every offered hand on the climb up, insisting on his own legs and falling twice before the squad reached the surface. The reinforcement teams had set up two work camps by then, one outside the base entrance and another in the entrance chamber the squad came up into, both already piled with stacked documents and rotating storage scrolls.
He was handed spare Konoha field gear and a tray of food, and ate in silence for several minutes.
Afterward he answered everything Guy asked between mouthfuls. Karin sat at the corner of the table watching his chakra. Hinata stood behind her with her Byakugan active. Between them, his exaggerations died quickly.
He had been a prodigy of the Hozuki clan. His elder brother had died, the loss had pulled him loose from the Land of Water, and he had drifted between contracts on the borders. Orochimaru had ambushed him on one of those roads with several minions in coordination, and he had not been a match for that many at once. He had been taken, tanked, and experimented on for a long time.
The "long time" was a number he could not give. When Guy told him the date, Suigetsu counted backwards under his breath and went still. A little over two years. He had not been certain whether it was months or seasons.
Inside the tube he had stayed watchful. The fluid distorted sound, and he had taught himself to read voices through the warble. He had caught references to other facilities, to a coastline, to bases somewhere near the sea, names he could not place because no one had ever shown him a map.
He had been hearing his captors come apart for months, though he had long since lost count of the days. Bored voices had turned sharp. Arguments had spilled into the room as if his presence were forgotten. He had heard complaints about supplies not arriving and orders not coming, one technician suggesting the base should simply be abandoned, another threatening that one with a curse mark. Then the visits had thinned. Days had stretched into weeks. Then nothing at all.
The data Konoha recovered confirmed the shape of his account.
Hinata had set up at a working terminal, mounted the intact hard drive she had pulled from the smashed logistics computer earlier in the sweep, and paired it against a still-running server cabinet Shino's team had stabilized. The squad's intelligence officer indexed files alongside her as they surfaced.
The base had functioned as another of Orochimaru's experimentation labs. Subjects had been drawn from three streams: civilians taken from outlying villages, criminals deceived through brokered contracts, and low-ranking rogue shinobi pulled in ones and twos so that absences raised no alarms. The intake ledgers ran back years.
Roughly a year ago the ledgers had begun to fray.
Supply manifests showed a steady, compounding shortfall. Internal correspondence blamed the disruption on Konoha without ever naming the village cleanly. Konoha's pressure on Orochimaru's logistics had been bleeding the network for two years without anyone here understanding the full pattern.
Local government had begun to circle the facility shortly afterward. Internal records carried inquiries from the regional administration, deflected inspection requests, demands routed up through high officials and a feudal lord calling for the place to be sanctioned and shut. Orochimaru had handled the problem through his own external network for a time, and several of the more troublesome officials had simply ceased to be a problem in ways the records did not need to explain. Other documents marked his operatives as captured or killed or unaccounted for. Konoha's hunters had been paring down that network from the outside while the base was leaning on it from within.
Communications with Orochimaru's other bases had thinned. Once-frequent exchanges had dropped to a trickle. A handful of sites had stopped responding altogether. The personnel here did not know what had happened to them, and their private speculation ranged from raids to defections to total losses.
The internal climate had decayed in step. Personnel rosters were hatched through with red ink, deserters crossed out by the dozen. Internal security reports recounting attempts to capture and execute those deserters grew shorter and more frustrated until they stopped entirely. The base had lost the ability to chase its own people. A separate sequence of reports covered an uprising among the prisoners, casualties heavy on both sides, the survivors sealed behind the vault and left to the rot.
And in the personal messages preserved by the thousand, a different name had begun to surface.
Heaven's Path.
The references were sparse and oblique. Personnel asking each other in private channels what was known about the new party. Wary observations that figures from Heaven's Path had been seen at command nodes, that decisions which had once flowed from a single will were now passing through an additional hand. The name appeared in lower case, in different spellings, hedged with question marks. It was a rumor with weight, and a fact that had not yet been named.
Internal threads speculated openly that Orochimaru was losing control of his bases, or had already lost some of them outright, and that Heaven's Path had begun stepping into the gaps. The talk was circulating well ahead of any confirmation.
In the last months the chain of command had gone quiet at its apex, and the people below had read that quiet the only way it could be read. They had begun to leave, taken what was valuable on the way out, locked the prisoners behind the vault, and not come back. The supplies had stopped and the orders with them, and the rumors had moved into the empty places they left.
"FREEEDOOOM!"
The shout rolled across the clearing in one long, half-warbled note, bouncing off the open mouth of the mine doors. A wet, splattering noise followed it. Then more splashing.
"Fresh air! Real sky! Real dirt! You have no idea how good this is…"
He rolled onto his back, sploosh, and let the water swallow him to the ears.
"…this is divine…"
"That," Tenten said in front of the noise, "is disgusting."
The clearing came into view.
Suigetsu was on his back in the middle of the wide, untended rainwater puddle that had sat across the threshold of the steel doors when the squad first stepped through them. The lower half of him had gone to slurry, the upper half rising and sinking lazily in the brown water. White hair plastered into wet points. His sharp-toothed grin caught the late morning sun. In the hour since the squad had pulled him out, the medics had worked him over with chakra and a thick stack of ration bars had gone down behind it, and the difference already showed in the color of his face and the fill of his ribs.
Tenten stood at the puddle's rim with hands on her hips, her mouth gone thin.
"The rest of us have to walk past this puddle, you know."
"Don't care," Suigetsu replied, blowing bubbles. "Best day of my life."
A few paces behind her, Kiba watched with arms folded and an open grin. Akamaru sat on his haunches beside him.
"Kiba," Tenten said without turning her head, "he's your problem now."
"Not a chance. I'm just enjoying the show."
Past the puddle the camp ran through the steady noise of excavation, crates stacking, storage scrolls cracking open, chuunin calling inventory numbers, a wide cart rolling a server cabinet out under tent canvas snapping in the breeze.
Hinata stood a single pace back from the puddle's edge, taller than every figure in the clearing, her shadow stretching long across the water and the man swimming in it. Her armor caught the sun in slow midnight-blue shifts, helmet sealed away for camp duty, her hair wound into a tight bun.
Suigetsu had been on the bank when she sealed the helmet off. His pale gaze had tracked the puff of smoke up to her unmasked face, and whatever surprise had begun to register there, the seven-foot armored thing having a face under the plate at all, he had killed inside of a second with a small dismissive nod and a pivot on a heel that briefly liquefied beneath him, and dropped himself face-first into the puddle. He had not looked at her again.
Now her gaze was fixed past the camp, past the trees at the western edge. The silver lines at her temples pulsed once and settled. Beneath her opalescent skin, dark veins of biomass shifted slowly, a sleeper turning over in the dark.
The haul out of this place was thin, papers and broken computers, a few intact drives, personnel records full of red ink, a rumor named Heaven's Path, a boy in a tank. Of Sasuke, only sideways mentions, a name in passing, footprints across the threshold of a room he was no longer in.
A waste. Venom's voice settled along the inside of her ribs. We came expecting a serpent's nest. We found cleaning staff that quit a long time ago, papers, broken machinery, the puddle boy.
Hinata exhaled through her nose.
Two paces to her right, Karin folded her arms across her chest.
"This place," Karin said, "is not what I signed up for. We came expecting a fight. A whole base of Orochimaru's freaks. Real prisoners. Real intel." She lifted her chin and pointed with a nod, in Suigetsu's direction. "What did we get? Some papers. A bunch of broken computers. And that puddle boy."
Suigetsu's head rose calmly above the muddy surface.
"I can hear you, ya know." He blew another bubble. "The water carries."
"Good," Karin said, without looking at him.
Hinata blinked. The corner of her mouth pulled upward by an almost invisible margin.
Word for word, she observed inwardly.
It did not change the underlying calculation. The records confirmed at least two more bases out there, locations not given, and others past those almost certainly gone quiet. The network had hollowed, but still standing. Another full day on this site and the trail walking out of these doors would cool into nothing.
The decision settled. Hinata turned to her right, and the long shadow swung across the puddle.
"Wha… hey, Hinata-sama, wait, I'm coming…"
Karin scrambled into stride.
Hinata cut a line through the camp toward the largest tent at its inner edge, ducked under the open flap, and stopped. Karin slipped in behind her.
Inside, Guy stood at a folding table covered in maps, finishing a quiet logistics exchange with a chuunin in an oversized flak vest. The chuunin's eyes flicked sideways, registered the looming shadow at the flap, and refocused on Guy with the look of a man choosing not to comment. Guy gave a short nod and a brief instruction. The chuunin bowed, and slipped past Hinata's armored shoulder into the daylight.
Guy turned to her with the patient expression, and gave her the smallest of nods.
"We need to continue our pursuit," Hinata said. "The longer we stay here, the colder the trail becomes."
"Agreed. Do you have a trail?"
"The personnel of this base left on foot, in waves, over the last several weeks. Most of those echoes are fresh enough to read." The faint shadowy lines under her skin shifted. "A significant portion of the surrounding residues lay along the same bearing. They moved together, or in close succession."
She lifted a single armored finger west-southwest, past the canvas wall, past the ridge, past the line of the forest.
"There."
Guy's mouth pulled into the small, hard line that on his face passed for a grin.
"Excellent. Bring in your squad."
Within fifteen minutes the tent had filled, Hinata at the head, Guy beside her, Karin to her left, Shino a step behind, Kiba and Akamaru along the right with Neji opposite, Tenten against a tent pole near the entrance, Lee between her and the table.
The briefing was tight. The closest settlement was a market town along the secondary trade road, three hours at sustained shinobi pace, switchbacks twice along the climb. Neji confirmed it from the personnel notes, the town had been the base's standing supply source and outside courier contact, the natural gravity well for anyone leaving on foot. Hinata's bearing matched, the strongest residues fell within five degrees of that road.
Roles split clean. Hinata on the spine of the trail, Kiba and Akamaru on scent support to fill the gaps. On approach the sensors would layer, kikaichu on the perimeter, Byakugan through structures and chakra-suppressed pockets, Mind's Eye through the population for signatures matching the base. Tenten and Lee with the main body for reactive support and close protection. Objective was capture, alive and intact, deserters as threads back to the rest of the network. Lethal force authorized only if forced. No push-back from the room.
The handling of the base, the exfiltration, the convoy back, all of it transferred to the reinforcement commander.
Within fifteen minutes, the eight of them stood at the western tree line. Guy met the reinforcement commander beside the puddle for a brief handshake, the silent exchange that formally passed the base, the exfiltration, and the convoy back into the man's hands. Suigetsu lifted a half-melted hand in lazy farewell from the brown water as the formation passed. None of them broke stride.
Nine shapes lifted into the canopy, the shadow of the towering one at the head longest of all, and the forest closed behind them.
"This isn't a supply town." Karin pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. "Somebody has turned this whole place into a criminal den."
She was standing on the flat top of a tile roof at the parapet's edge, arms folded, her spectacles picking up the last orange light of the sun as it dragged itself toward the ridge line of the hills to the west.
Other squad members had spread across the neighboring rooftops the moment they arrived. Nobody below had looked up.
Kiba crouched on the flat top of a roof a half-block east, Akamaru pressed low beside him, both of them watching the street below with the same expression. "River Country's lost complete control of this place," he said into the comm. "Whatever this town used to be, it's running on different rules now."
The bones of a market settlement were still there. Low buildings, flat tile rooftops walled in by low parapets, the old market square. But the market square itself was now a yard for a few dozen armed men moving without apparent purpose, loud voices, weapons carried open at the side. Several more stood on rooftops at the far end of the main street, around what passed for the administrative block. Three main buildings stood in close formation there, none of them the same height, the tallest pushing four stories against the darkening sky. Between and behind them, smaller structures had been dragged into service, old storerooms and lean-tos absorbed into the larger body of the place. The whole mass had been stitched together over time with whatever was at hand. Open plank walkways crossing between rooftops, enclosed passages bolted to outer walls at the second and third floors, balconies sagging under the weight of the lanterns strung across them. The entrance to the largest building had a stone facing and carved woodwork around the upper windows, carrying the sign that this was a place of importance. Paper lanterns burned along every balcony. The windows on the middle floors had heavy cloth draped across them. Music came down from somewhere on the third level. So did other sounds.
A group of eight men crossed the street below Karin's rooftop without glancing up.
"Some of the ones near the northern perimeter are actively molding chakra." Neji's voice came from somewhere further east. "And look at the three on the door. The shoulders. The arms." A pause. "That kind of modification. I have seen it on Orochimaru's subjects."
No one on the street below had looked up.
"Sensors," Guy said. "Active sweep."
Karin's chakra turned inward, invisible threads of the Mind's Eye spreading out through the crowd below.
"Found one," she said after a moment. "Main street, heading south. Moving with a group of four. Signature matches the base traces."
Shino had already sent his kikaichu ahead the moment they had taken their positions. "The block is covered," he said. "The administrative complex has the largest concentration by far. Most of the signatures are inside."
"Scent matches too," Kiba said. Akamaru's ears were angled forward, reading the air. "Partial match. Some of what's coming off that place is the same as what we picked up at the base."
Hinata had been still on her own rooftop since they arrived.
The Byakugan pressed through the compound in steady passes, the sensors at her temples tracing their slow rhythm beneath the edge of the helmet. She moved her vision past the outer walls, through the structural layers, into the interior of the administrative block.
The stone facing on the entrance building's front wall lasted about as far as the door. Past it, the interior was four floors of original timber and rooms that had been partitioned, repurposed, and reassigned until the building's original intention was unreadable. Corridors ran deeper into it. Stairs climbed in two separate places. At the second floor, an enclosed passage on the exterior wall connected the main building to the one beside it, a door in the outer wall leading to a covered walkway that had been nailed together rather than built. The third building came in from the other side through a balcony that both structures shared. The smaller satellite buildings plugged in at ground level through cut-in doorways, the rough timber frames still unfinished.
Inside was different.
Ground level. Men at low tables in groups, bottles between them, most of them well past their first hour. In a room near the entrance, three of them had a civilian pressed against the wall by the collar while a fourth watched from a chair. The second floor held more rooms, most of them in use, doors shut, the cloth across the windows making clear what they were being used for. The third floor was noisier, an open common area beneath the noise of the music. Below all of it, basement rooms under the rear half of the main building, reached by a single stairwell, locked doors at the bottom.
She kept tracing.
The second building, the one reached through the enclosed passage, held the largest room in the complex on its own second floor. Wide sofas along three walls, a low table in the center, the kind of space that said whoever sat in it considered themselves in charge. One man was seated there among several others. His chakra signature matched both Karin's street trace and the echo she had been reading off the base residue since they left.
Four more signatures she recognized from the residue were scattered through the building. Two on the building with the meeting room. One on the ground level. One near the basement stairwell.
"Most of the targets are inside the main block," Hinata said into the comm. "Civilians throughout the upper floors and in the basement. Held there against their will."
The symbiote's mass shifted along her ribs and the long muscle of her thighs, coming to a more alert state.
The comm held for a moment.
"Right." Guy thumbed the channel. "These unyouthful deserters did not retire quietly. They walked out with whatever they had in their heads and they have put it to use here, or they are waiting to sell it to someone worse. And this operation." A short pause. "Every civilian locked in that building is someone's family. These gangs are grinding this town into the floor. That does not get a pass."
Hinata was still scanning.
She pushed back through to the meeting room and let the Byakugan resolve its full depth.
Two sealed glass tanks stood against the far wall, close to floor-to-ceiling height, the same containment she had seen once before at the bounty broker's site, the same warped silhouettes suspended behind thick glass.
"The meeting room," she said. "Two tanks along the back wall. Both occupied. Same as what we saw at the broker's."
On his rooftop, Kiba straightened. Akamaru's posture shifted beside him, ears pulling back.
Shino said nothing. The cluster of kikaichu at his wrist drew fractionally tighter.
"Is there any way to take them down before we go in?" Kiba asked.
"I can see every mark on those seal arrays. I do not recognize the formula. Whatever they are keyed to, go in expecting those tanks to open."
"Guy-sensei," Neji said. "Rules of engagement."
"These people are not walking away from this place," Guy said. "Get our targets out breathing, that is the priority. Anyone else carrying a weapon in that block is fair to engage. Keep it clean where there are civilians nearby and you cannot see clearly. And when we are in that room, we move fast. We do not let it drag."
The next several minutes moved quietly. Positions confirmed through the comm, entry vectors divided between the team, fields of approach mapped against the building layout Hinata had given them. The street-side target was bracketed on two angles to cut off any route before anyone in the main block was alerted. The four signatures scattered through the interior were assigned approach lines that avoided the civilian areas where possible. The meeting room on the second floor of the middle building, reached through the enclosed passage from the main entrance, sat at the end of the shortest line of advance.
Hinata looked at the meeting room one final time, then stepped back from the rooftop edge. Her legs found their set against the tile, the symbiote's mass surging through the long muscle of her thighs and calves in one slow pulse, gathering below the surface and coiling. One breath to let it settle, and she moved. Seven strides and the edge of the roof came up fast, and she left it, crack, the tiles at the launch point splitting clean under the force of it. The armored shape of her rose into the last of the evening light, still climbing when the lower roof of the administrative block was already passing below her trajectory, her shadow spreading enormous and silent across the tile where four men stood with cups in hand and their eyes still on the street below them.
The man at the parapet was on his second cup and the joke had been the same one for ten minutes, and nobody up here was in a hurry to move on from it. The town below had stopped expecting trouble weeks ago. He waved his cup west across the rooftops, where two streets over half a dozen of his crew sprawled around a brazier on the gambling hall, and further out four more stood at another fire on the warehouse, lanterns going up everywhere as the sun bled out behind the ridge.
"And then he says, he says…"
The man across from him laughed before the joke had finished. Four of them up here, cups in every hand, the road past the parapet empty for weeks and tonight that was funny too.
The wind shifted, and the laugh died in his throat.
He blinked, and the other three blinked with him, the joke-teller holding his mouth open around a word he had already forgotten. A cold pressure of attention had landed across the back of their necks and stayed.
Then the shadow fell. The tile around his feet went dark in a shape too quick to follow, and as his head began to tilt back, something black was already falling on them out of the sky, limbs unfolding behind it in shapes a person did not have. Suddenly, his whole life had been recalled before his eyes for a moment.
The impact was small, a neat tap of plate on tile. His vision spun. Parapet and lanterns and sky went round, and the roof pitched up to meet him, and the darkness took the rest.
Hinata straightened from her crouch.
Her arms flowed back from their scythe shapes into palms and gauntlets, the black biomass slipping away through the seams of her plates. The two longer blades that had erupted from her shoulders withdrew the same way. In their place, fresh tendrils rose along her spine in a slim halo.
Then the four bodies finally caught up with the fact that they were headless. A cup hit the tile and the torsos folded one after another, thud-thud-thump, the heads taking a different route, one bouncing to the parapet, another stopping against a planter.
Across the rooftops, a man at the warehouse brazier was just straightening with the snap-back of someone who had felt something. He never finished. A long fletched kunai with cord trailing crossed the gap on a flat arc from a neighboring rooftop and took him through the temple. Thunk. He went off his feet sideways. Two more on a parapet to the south turned at the same moment, thip, thip, and dropped where they stood with senbon in their throats.
Tenten and Karin came down out of the air a heartbeat later, a step apart, boots finding the same roof Hinata had landed. Tenten already had her next kunai out of the scroll at her hip, Karin three senbon pinched between her fingers, both of them ready for whatever came next.
Hinata's Byakugan ran the perimeter once and the rest of the squad came in all at once across her vision. Neji moving through the corridors of the northern building, three armed men in front of him going down to two and then to none in the same span of breaths. Lee a green streak through the lower hall of the tallest building, a man at the foot of the stairs already on his way to the floor, while Guy on the second-floor landing dropped another at the rail with a single open palm and Shino stood at the head of the basement stairs, a steady cloud of insects fanning down into the dark behind him. Three blocks south, Akamaru and Kiba's shapes threaded the lantern shadows behind a moving knot of figures, the man Karin had marked walking at the front of it, oblivious.
Tenten flicked a nod across her shoulder and was already moving on it, a scroll cracking open at her hip in the same breath. Smoke poured out and resolved into something the size of a small siege weapon, a long mounted launcher on a folding bipod. A second scroll fed a quiver of long arrows onto the spine. She dropped behind it, set, sighted, and fired before her knee had finished settling.
Shink. Hwip. The first arrow took a man on the warehouse roof through the bridge of the nose, and he went straight down.
Hinata raised both hands as Tenten's second arrow was already in the air. Index and middle on each, thumbs cocked back. The two dozen tendrils at her shoulders and along her spine fanned out around her in the same motion, each tipped to a fine point, each tracking a different target through the Byakugan. Karin had already started toward the stairwell housing in the middle of the rooftop, the launcher reeling back into Tenten's scroll behind her one segment at a time as Tenten broke off and followed.
Hinata fired.
"Hakke Kūshō: Shōten (Eight Trigrams Vacuum Palm: Focus Point)"
Needle-thin bolts of compressed chakra left her fingertips and the tendrils in a fast soundless rhythm, tk-tk-tk, and Tenten's arrows cut through the same beats from the launcher behind her, shink-hwip, shink-hwip, both of them harvesting the rooftops together. Heads opened in small bursts of red mist, bodies folding across the tile in a quiet rolling collapse none of the men below ever heard.
By the time Karin shoved the stairwell door inward and Tenten followed her through with the last of the launcher folding back into smoke at her hip, Hinata had already stepped over the parapet edge.
The gap to the building below was wider than a jump. Heads of black biomass rose along her shoulders and down her thighs, eyeless mouths opening. Each vented a short white-hot pulse of flame. The pulses kicked her sideways at the apex.
She flipped in the middle of air, the visor of her helmet catching the last of the western light in a single dark-red flash. Mid-rotation her hands came around and she fired again, and three men leaning out of three different third-floor windows snapped backward into their rooms with what was left of their faces no longer attached. A second pulse from the heads on her thighs kicked her forward, and she drove herself at the corner window of the third floor. Her armored shoulder went through the frame.
The man at the window had been smoking. He had heard the wrong sound a half-second before she came through the glass, and his head had begun to turn, but his hand was still around the cigarette when her armored palm opened against the side of his neck and the line of his sternum, two strikes almost gentle, riding the weight of her body's incoming momentum. The chakra pathways along his shoulders, his throat, his diaphragm went quiet at once, and his cigarette fell from a hand that no longer remembered holding. Her shoulder met his chest with her full mass behind it, and he left the window with her, traveled the length of the room, hit the lacquer table back-first and broke through it with a dry crrack, and slid into the foot of the far sofa. Hinata landed on him, her armor settling across his ribs at the measured weight she had set on the way down, heavy enough to pin him and short of breaking him. He was a target.
The room caught up.
Six other men, scattered between the sofas in various states of intoxication and undress. Some armed, most not. Several had begun to rise.
The tendrils at her back fanned out, tk-tk-tk, six bolts in the space of one breath. A torso opened in a dense red bloom. A second cratered through the spine. Where a man had been about to put his hand on a sword, the shoulder went out from under him before the hand had closed. A head came apart against a pillar. Splat. The lanterns above swung in the wash of displaced air.
Hinata rolled the man under her over and started binding him. He did not twitch.
From past the inner doorway, Shink. Thunk. Wet sounds. Tenten and Karin had come in through the corridor.
Hinata lifted her gaze.
A young man stood against the far wall between the inner doorway and a broken alcove screen. His arms were hooked around the waists of two women, one on each side, painted up like the cheaper end of a pleasure house.
All three of them were just now catching up to the bodies on the rug and the wet on the walls, eyes wide, mouths open.
The young man jolted.
He shoved both girls forward at her, turned on his heel, and made for the door.
Karin came out of the inner doorway at exactly the height his temple was at. Crack. The kick was clean, low to high. He went down sideways and did not get up.
The two girls had fainted in mid-flight, slumping before their feet touched the rug. Karin sighed. She scooped one up under one arm, the other under the other, and dumped both onto the closest sofa. Her mouth was a flat line.
Tenten came in behind her, blades drawn, eyes already moving across the room.
The comm cleared.
"Northern building secure," Neji said. "One target, intact."
"Magnificent work, my noble student!" Guy came in next. "On our end, basement, ground floor, gambling hall, all accounted for. Shino-kun's youthful little allies did remarkable work below. All civilians unharmed. I am at the second-floor passage now."
Kiba came in next. "Still on him. He keeps cutting through crowds, civilians thick around him every step. I cannot get a clean line. Circling."
"Third floor is clear," Hinata said into the comm. "One target, intact."
She straightened, lifted her bound prisoner by the shoulder of his coat with one hand, and held him out across the room.
Karin took him without comment.
Hinata was already moving, through the corridor doorway and into the stairwell head before the other two had finished pivoting to follow. The place ran on rough discipline with no surveillance laid in anywhere, and the floors below them still ran under the impression that the building was theirs, her armored foot finding the timber treads without a sound.
Three men in the second-floor corridor at the bottom.
The first stood with his back to her, fingers digging in a tin for a rolled cigarette. Her right arm flowed out into a long curved scythe in the same motion her foot left the last step, and his head came off in one decisive arc as she went past him. The cigarette hit the floor before the body did, just as the second man further down the corridor was beginning to feel the wind of something passing and turning toward it, blade half out of its sheath. By the time he had finished the turn the corridor behind him was empty, his eyes searching the air and his head taking an extra heartbeat to catch up to the cut. Whuff. The blade fell first, clank, then the rest of him.
The third had time for one breath. Hinata was past him before it filled, her scythe arm flowing out behind her in a casual backhand.
Tenten was already taking the second corridor as Hinata cleared the first, the Kiba blades flashing pale in the gloom, two long curved lengths of folded steel in a low working grip. Shink. Shink. Clean cuts, the steel passing through bone and meat tonight without the chakra she could load it with. Behind her, Karin came after with the bound captive over her shoulder, dropped him in the middle of the corridor with a disgusted breath, and shook out her hand just as Guy stepped into the inner corner of the second-floor landing from the enclosed passage out of the main building. His outfit was unmarked. A single nod between him and Hinata, given and returned in one moment.
The reinforced double doors of the meeting room stood at the far end of the antechamber. Heavy steel, bolted iron frame. The kind of door that did not belong in what had been a market clerk's office. Hinata's sweep through the room beyond confirmed the men inside were still talking and unaware.
She gave a short nod.
Tenten produced a scroll from her thigh and palmed it ready.
Hinata closed her right hand into a fist.
Black biomass rippled out from the seams of her gauntlet in a fast, fluid bloom, layering up the back of her wrist and across her knuckles, packing itself thicker and thicker until her fist was twice its armored size, knuckles shod in heavy hooked plates. Chakra ran into it as it grew, the silver Weave on her skin beneath the gauntlet flaring with a steady cerulean glow.
She set herself.
The punch was a short drive of the shoulder, the swollen fist meeting the seam where the lock bar crossed, boom, and the doors went in.
They tore. The bolts left the frame in a single shrieking plate, and the two leaves traveled the length of the meeting room beyond like a pair of thrown shields, scything across at chest height before crashing into the far wall.
Tenten's scroll was already in the air a heartbeat behind the doors, sliding past Hinata's elbow into the room with the seal cracking open as it traveled, paper unraveling along the trajectory in a long white ribbon, wff. The four of them were behind the antechamber pillars before the scroll reached the middle of the room, and white light flooded out of the doorway in the same instant the doors hit the far wall, fwoom, the two crashes blurring into one. A rising metallic shriek pushed at the inner ear underneath the glare.
"GAH!"
"My eyes, my fucking eyes!"
"What the…"
"Get down, get…"
Inside, men cried out and stumbled, hands flying up to shielded faces, every one of them blinded for the next several seconds while their cups fell and their furniture went over around them.
The light was still climbing when Hinata stepped past the pillar and crossed the threshold, the world slowing. Through the bleached air, through the slumped shoulders and shielded faces of the half a dozen men frozen at the room's edges, she went straight at the back wall. Two glass cylinders stood there, the same proportions and fluid and warped shapes as the ones at the broker's. The seals were already burning, the brushed-ink lines lighting up one after another, the formula coming undone from the outside in. Inside the cylinders the things were waking, chakra catching like cold engines trying to turn over, hearts that had not beaten in months trying to remember the rhythm.
The biomass at her armored hands flowered out. Black plates built up across her gauntlets layer after layer, swelling her fists into two great blunt-nosed clubs as long as her forearms, and she ran her chakra through them as they grew, threading lightning through the whole length until white-hot bands crackled along the seams. She crossed the room in two strides.
The first hammer came down on the left tank. KRRAK. The lightning along her chakra lashed through the fluid in the same heartbeat the blow met the glass. The shape inside lost the top of its head and shoulders in one concussive burst. The seals cried out. Zzzhhrkk. They went dead.
The second hammer was already mid-arc, krrak, and the right tank gave the same way. The thing inside did not have a head in the moment after the wave subsided.
The world snapped back.
Plok. Plok. Two thick gushes of fluid hit the carpet at her feet. The air went heavy with the same dead, sour smell she remembered from the broker's vault.
The meeting room had been settled around her.
Karin had a knee on a man's spine and was looping a second restraint around his elbows. Tenten had three more lined up against the inner wall, working a length of cord around them. Guy had two on the far side, both unconscious. The leader, the chakra signature she had been tracking from the base, was face-down on the central rug with his hands secured behind his back. He was breathing.
"Excellent, Hinata!" Guy said. "A cleaner entry than I thought possible, even from you."
He stopped.
The bodies in the tanks were still jerking with something far more violent than the slow twitch of dying nerves. The chakra in them was flaring and cutting out and flaring again, like something half-broken still trying to start. The left body's chest was pulling itself together again, the right one doing the same.
The mutants she had killed before had gone still after a fatal hit. These kept moving, headless, the chakra in their chests are still gathering and gathering past any reasonable threshold.
She stepped back.
GET BACK! GET BACK NOW! THEY ARE GOING TO BLOW! Venom's voice tore through the inside of her skull, pitched high and frantic, the alien baritone clawing at every nerve she had at once.
She moved. Two long strides backward, a hand on Tenten's shoulder, a hand on the back of Karin's flak vest, and both women came with her before either had registered why.
"Hinata, what…"
"BRACE!" Hinata's doubled voice tore out of her at full volume, the resonance shaking the antechamber doorway and rattling every cup on the floor between them. Black biomass came roaring out of every seam of her armor at once, dozens of tendrils erupting along her shoulders and back and the long muscle of her thighs and lashing in every direction in a writhing frantic mass. Her chakra surged through her in the same breath, the silver Weave on her skin beneath the armor lighting up in a brilliant cerulean blaze, the air around her tightening as she pulled in a colossal load of chakra and held. The tendrils wove themselves outward as fast as they could move, threading together into a blackening lattice between her and the doorway, the chakra in her palms pouring into the framework as it went up. Behind her, Guy had thrown himself across the bound leader and the nearest of the captives in the same instant, low and tight to the floor.
The room behind them became a sun.
KABOOM
White light rolled through the meeting room, the walls blowing out and the ceiling launching skyward as the pillars folded in on themselves. The shockwave slammed into the half-finished lattice of biomass and chakra Hinata was still throwing up around them a heartbeat after the light, and the antechamber bucked under her boots, and the floor began to tilt, and somewhere above them the rafters of the building began to come down.
The dome held. She was able to cast her protective jutsu at the last moment.
It hung between her open palms in a thick black weave of biomass and chakra, and the blast spent its last on the shell with a long groan as the pressure bled out. The ceiling and the upper floor were no longer there.
Pulse by pulse the weave thinned, the biomass sliding back into the seams of her armor and the chakra dimming to the steady glow at her temples and palms. Her arms came down at her sides as dust rolled in across the gap, heavy and choking and thick enough to chew, coating the visor of her helmet in a fine gray skin.
At her right shoulder Guy was already on his feet, chin tilted up at the night sky that was now where the ceiling had been, his outfit clean and a pale streak of dust running across his jaw. To her left, Karin pushed up from her knee with two short hard coughs into her sleeve.
"Khh. Khh."
Tenten came up beside her with a blade still in one hand, fanning dust from her face.
"Akhh."
Both women rose into a low ready stance, eyes everywhere.
The comm went haywire.
"Guy-sensei! Hinata-san, what was that, are you alright, what is happening,"
Lee broke first, climbing over himself.
"What is your status?" Neji broke through it. "The whole complex shook. Tell me which of you is hurt?"
"We heard it from three blocks out." Kiba was layered under Neji. "Whole town heard that. Lights are coming up everywhere I look."
Karin slammed a hand to her ear and started talking through another cough.
"Those things in the tanks! The mutants! They blew up!" She hacked into her sleeve. "Khh." Then she came back to the comm. "They are not supposed to do that. Both of them. Right when their seals failed they went off like they were packed with paper bombs. Hinata-sama caught it."
While Karin was talking, Hinata, Guy, and Tenten were already turning on their heels to read what was left.
There was no room. The walls had unraveled outward like a torn paper lantern, and the second floor of the middle building was now a flat platform of splintered timber and shattered tile open to the night. A breeze cold off the ridge moved through the dust, and the first stars stood steady above the rising column of ash. Only the wall behind Hinata's dome was still partially standing, with a section of inner timber, two upright pillars, and the splintered remains of a decorative screen inside the line, and nothing outside it.
The Byakugan swept through the dust in slow widening passes. Splinters and beams and roof tiles lay scattered across the surrounding rooftops, and a rafter had buried itself in a parapet two houses down.
The sofa was still there, tilted on three of its four legs with dust an inch thick across its back, the two painted girls who had fainted slumped against the cushions. They had been a floor higher and on the opposite side of where she had thrown the dome, and the structure between had taken what reached them. Both were breathing, filthy but whole.
Past the rooftops, the town had woken up. Civilians spilled out of nearer doorways and ran for the side streets, dragging children behind them and pointing back at the column of dust, while lanterns lit every shutter that had still been dark. Through the streets between, men with weapons were running toward the dust instead of away, coming up the main road with blades in hand.
She glanced sideways once, and Guy was already looking back at her. A single short hard nod, given quickly, and he thumbed the comm.
"Neji. Shino. Lee. Grab your targets. Form up on the roof, top of the main block. Now."
Karin pulled her bound captive over by the collar, Tenten shouldered hers, and Guy lifted his in one smooth motion. Hinata flexed her fingers and slim cords of biomass uncoiled from beneath her gauntlets, threading under the arms of the remaining captives and the two unconscious girls, drawing them all up snug against her sides.
Hinata went up the standing fragment of wall first, Karin a step behind, Tenten on the other angle, Guy already at the lip and waving them past. They jumped, three streets of open air in one bound, and Hinata landed first on the roof. The others came down behind her, and they dumped the bound bodies on the roof in a rough line.
Tenten straightened, brushed her palms off on her thighs, and let out a single hard breath through her nose. "Looks like we are on plan B," she muttered. "We are always on plan B."
Lee and Shino came up the western parapet a half-breath later, Lee a green slip in the lantern light with his captive slung across his shoulder, Shino arriving with his own across his back and kikaichu tightening into a band at his right forearm. They cleared the wall in a single shared drop and laid their captives down on the line Tenten had started, and Lee straightened with a short bow. "Two intact, Guy-sensei!"
Karin had already turned her head north, glasses catching lantern light from a shutter below in two narrow flares of orange. She blinked once, twice, and her hand came up. "Look. North. Neji."
Neji moved across the rooftops at a long flat pace, the captive across his shoulder a dead weight he had stopped registering three rooftops back, the Byakugan running ahead of him in the air.
The half dozen on the next roof were waiting. They had come up behind a chimney stack on the gambling hall and had not announced themselves, two short bows half drawn, one long curved blade and a kunai already in hand, three more with axes and clubs. The lead bowman lifted, drawing in the same motion he sighted, and Neji set the heel of his free hand for a Vacuum Palm.
He did not have to use it.
Three long arrows came in flat from the south, fletched dark. Shink. Shink. Shink. The lead bowman caught the first through the bridge of his nose. The second arrow took the man beside him through the eye and out the back of his skull. The third opened the kunai man's throat and went on through to bury its head a knuckle deep in the chimney behind him. The other three were already turning when a fourth shaft punched through a sternum and dropped one of them backward over the parapet without a sound, and the remaining two had their mouths open to shout when, two senbon caught one in the side of the neck and the other in the temple.
The roof emptied, and Neji landed, exhaled once, and resumed pace.
"My noble student is clear," Guy said over the comm.
Tenten was already at the eastern parapet on one knee, launcher unsealed and braced again, the long stock pulled into her shoulder and the rail already racked with the next quiver. She had not stood up since the second arrow.
"Coming up the east steps." Karin's hand came up at a different angle now, pointing further east, closer to the warehouse. "Twelve of them. Crossing under the lanterns. They will be in your line in three seconds."
Tenten swung the launcher as one piece, the stock locking back into her cheek, and fired. At the same instant Hinata moved to the opposite parapet, tendrils unraveling along her shoulders and back as several dozen of them lifted around her in a slow dark fan. Her hands rose, the Byakugan wide open behind the visor and her targets scattered on rooftops, in windows, in alleys, on stairs. She fired at every one of them at once.
Fingertips and tendril tips pulsed in the same fast rhythm, compressed bolts of chakra walking across the rooftops of the town in long steady passes, while Tenten's launcher answered each beat from the eastern parapet with the heavier bark of fletched shafts, each arrow leaving the rail with a dry snap. A handful of them carried explosive seals along the shaft, and those went off a heartbeat after impact, popping small short fireballs where men had clustered.
Hinata's bullets did not stop at cover. A wooden shutter peeled inward in a burst of splinters and the body behind it folded onto the sill. A man crouched behind a brick parapet ducked too late, the bolt punching through brick and into him, while two who threw themselves into a covered passage discovered the planks were no protection at all. She could have leveled the block, the whole town if she wanted, but civilians could be caught in a crossfire.
Tenten's launcher kept time, the shots running along the southern rooftops and taking down a knot of men on the warehouse, a column of orange rolling up, where one of her explosives caught a stack of crates.
Neji came up the western parapet with his captive across his shoulder and dumped him neatly at the end of the line. He brushed dust off his knee.
Karin's head whipped around. Her eyes flared.
"Incoming! Heavy! West!"
Three boulders came up over a roofline two blocks west, each the size of a rice cart and rotating slow against trailing brown chakra. Lee was airborne first, Neji a half-beat after him, Guy a half-beat after that, and the three of them met the first boulder at the top of its arc. Lee's hammering kick split it lengthwise, krak, Neji took the second with a Vacuum Palm that punched through and shattered the rest, krak, and Guy's heel met the third on the upswing, krak, before he swept the fragments sideways with a spinning kick of the same foot, kicking the largest pieces back along the line they had come from.
The rubble rained back onto the rooftops it had launched from, and Lee landed first on the parapet, balanced on the toe of one sandal with both arms thrown up in a triumphant pose. Neji landed beside him without comment, and Guy was a step behind, settling in like a man returning from the porch.
Karin's hand was already up again.
"Big group. Inside this building. They are climbing up. Stairs and the side passage. There are at least thirty signatures under us right now and they are coming."
Hinata's bullets were still walking across the town. She did not look around.
"Confirmed," her doubled voice came through the visor. "Two stairwells. The middle of the second floor has the densest cluster. They are armed and moving up in formation."
Tenten popped a fresh quiver into the launcher's spine without turning her head.
"Shino. Lee." She loosed another arrow. "Did you not clear these floors?"
The cluster on Shino's arm shifted to a slower rotation.
"We secured the basement and the ground floor. Because that was where our targets were. The upper floors of this building sat outside our entry path."
"Then we shall correct that now!" Guy was already on his feet and pivoting toward the stairwell. "Lee. Neji. With me. We will make these unyouthful scoundrels regret that they came up these stairs!"
"YES, GUY-SENSEI!" Lee snapped a salute that nearly took Neji's eye out. He spun on his heel with a grin bordering on manic. "NEJI! ARE YOU READY?!"
Neji exhaled through his nose. "Lee."
"HERE WE GO!"
Guy was already at the parapet. He vaulted it cleanly, twisted in the air, drew his knee in once, and went through a third-floor window of the building below them feet first. The glass exploded inward in a single bright shatter, the frame following half a second later in a shower of splintered wood arcing out into the street.
Lee and Neji broke for the stairwell housing in the middle of the rooftop. Lee got there first by a step. He flung the door open with a crack that nearly took it off its hinges and went down the steps three at a time. Neji descended after him with the patience of a man who had done this with these two for half his life.
The roof began to shake.
It came up through the timbers in fast rhythmic punches. Walls in the upper floor punched outward in bursts of dust. A man hit a third-floor shutter from the inside in such a way that the shutter, the man, and a large section of the wall around them all left the building together and sailed out into the street. Two more followed him on the floor below, going through what had been a kitchen window. Lee's shouts rang up through the floors in a steady joyful cadence broken only by the meaty thumps of bodies meeting walls.
Hinata's tendrils were still working on the eastern side. A man behind a tile chimney took one through the throat. A bowman on a balcony to the south doubled over a bolt that had punched through his ribs. She traced and fired without pause.
Tenten's launcher tracked back and forth.
"Hinata," Tenten called over her shoulder. "I need a hand. They are layering up cover."
"Three in the alley behind the noodle stall," Karin added at once, her hand to her ear and her eyes far away. "Rogue shinobi grade. They threw up an earth wall on the open side. We cannot get an angle from here."
Hinata's bullets paused.
"Shino. Cover them."
A shift in the air, and the cluster at Shino's wrist broke up into a long spiraling cloud that rolled out across the rooftop and off the eastern edge. Tenten's launcher kept firing through the lanes his beetles cleared.
Hinata's plates flexed once, and the biomass at the long muscle of her thighs gathered into a coil. She dropped a breath, set, and pushed, the tile under her boots breaking with a crack as she crossed three rooftops in a single arc.
The earth wall the rogue shinobi had thrown up was a thick brown slab as long as a wagon, leaning at a shallow angle across the alley mouth, and through the Byakugan she could see the three rogue shinobi in mismatched plate behind it with a half dozen bandits using the wall as cover. Their backs were to her, every one of them facing the wrong way.
Hinata twisted at the apex, arms folding to her chest with plates locking, the biomass at her shoulders and spine flowing into a smooth shell. Chakra flared along the silver Weave on her skin and ran out into the shell as raw lightning, white-hot bands threading through every layer, the spin starting at her hips and rolling up her ribs and out into her arms. Heads of black biomass split open along her back, and each eyeless mouth spat one hard burst of white fire, fwoom, the kick driving her spinning forward.
She became a drill, the ground passing underneath in a streak as the wind broke around her in a long shriek.
"Hakkeshō: Raikō Kaiten (Eight Trigrams: Lightning Revolving Heaven)"
The wall of earth came up to meet her, and she hit it dead on, krrsch. The wall did not stand. She came through it. She came through the men behind it. She came through the next thirty feet of street. The drill ground earth and stone and bone into a fine red and brown mist that hung in the air behind her in a wide ragged cloud.
She slowed. The spin came down, the white fire at her back guttering out into thin trails of smoke, and the biomass shell drew back into her plates as her boots cut twin lines through cobble for ten paces and stopped.
A man was already swinging. The rogue shinobi to her left had thrown himself at her in the half breath the drill spent slowing, his right fist wreathed in dense brown chakra and the hand crusted in stone an inch thick, and he drove the punch at her midline. Hinata's left hand came up and caught his fist in her open palm.
The stone started to crumble. The first knuckle gave in a second.
The man's eyes lifted, finding the smooth plate where a face should have been. Something cold reached up through the bones of his arm and his chakra began to drift, the bright knot under his fist flaring once and then dimming, the feeling in his shoulder and his chest going with it. His mouth fell open as his chakra cut out altogether.
Her hand closed. Bone, knuckle, palm, all of it crushed at once, and he shrieked. She lifted her arm and threw him, and he went up and away in a long rising arc, still screaming, the sound moving across the rooftops behind her as he traveled. "AAAAA."
She turned. The other two rogue shinobi and the six bandits had not moved. They had been about to swing or shout or run, and the half-second of her catching the fist and looking down had landed across the back of their necks, leaving their feet rooted to the cobble and their weapons hanging at the wrong angles.
She moved. The world blurred around her as she came in among them at a low angle. The first bandit had a long earth spear braced for charge, and Hinata caught the shaft on the way past, ripped it from his grip, and drove it down through his chest with all of her incoming weight, pinning him flat to the cobble. The man beside him swung his own spear in a panicked arc, and she stepped inside the swing, twisted the weapon out of his hands, and ran him through the same way. Schluck. A third raised his earth spear high to bring it down, and she tore it from his grip on the way up and put him on his back with the head of it through his sternum.
The next bandit was already mid-charge, shoulder lowered. Hinata met him with a flat plate kick to the sternum so hard his whole frame went horizontal in a single beat. His back hit the cobblestones a heartbeat before her boots came down on his chest, and with one shove of her hips she rode him forward like a board on ice, the back of his coat grinding along the stone under her plates while his spine carried the weight of her armor at full speed. Two more bandits turned toward the noise too late, and the underside of the body beneath her boots caught them at the knees and dragged them along, their limbs tangling under the press of her plates in a churning knot of cloth and broken bone.
She rode the line to the far end of the alley, where the last cluster of bandits was scrambling back from her path, and there she kicked off in a tight hard backflip. The tangled knot of bodies under her boots launched off the cobble at the height of her flip and slammed into the cluster ahead with a heavy wet crunch. Bones broke against bones. The pile and the bandits it hit went into the brick wall together and slid down it in a single ruined heap.
Only one rogue shinobi was still standing, his back against the noodle stall behind him and his knees trembling. A minute earlier he had thrown an earth wall at a moving target with one easy flex of chakra, and now his right arm sat dead at his side, refusing the lift. His mouth opened and closed, and he started to shout.
The first man she had thrown finished his arc, came down out of the dark sky head first, and hit the rogue shinobi square across the shoulders, krmp. They went into the cobbles together and did not come up.
The alley settled, and Tenten came over the comm. "Hinata. That was. So disrespectful."
Karin chimed in a half breath later. "It was. But it was also hilarious."
"I know, right." Tenten popped another quiver into the launcher's spine.
Inside Hinata's chest the slow long mass at her ribs uncoiled and recoiled in a satisfied stretch, and the long muscle along her thighs trembled once with it. Venom did not need to speak.
A short barked laugh rolled in over both women. "So glad you guys are having fun," Kiba said. "Really. I love it. Meanwhile some help would be appreciated." Akamaru's bark layered under it, sharp. "My target broke off down the south alley," Kiba pushed on. "He is running. I am tied up. And there is. Something else down here."
Karin had already snapped to it, hand at her ear and voice tightening. "Hinata-sama. South. Two and a half blocks. Last deserter is on the foot road out of town. He is almost to the tree line."
Hinata was moving before Karin had finished the sentence, the roofs blurring under her boots in a flat sustained run with tendrils still fanned at her shoulders, the Byakugan throwing the route ahead of her in long looping passes through the buildings she crossed. Two streets south she found Kiba.
He and Akamaru were dancing around a knot of bandit corpses in a market square, eight or ten of them in a rough ring with their chests opened and their throats torn, and a mutant stood at the center of it. Tall, thick through the shoulders, the same warped knot of overgrown muscle she had seen at the bounty broker's vault. It was bellowing in a wet steady note, arms windmilling in long unbalanced sweeps, while Kiba and Akamaru gave it ground in slow careful steps, drawing it deeper into the empty edge of the square. The deserter was beyond them, almost out of the town.
His sandals slapped the packed earth of the road, and the pack thudded against his shoulders with every stride, scrolls bouncing inside it. He had folded that pack and refolded it for weeks, and he had thought he had a few more weeks for everything else, too. He had been wrong about that.
The road ahead was empty. The lanterns of the last houses had fallen behind, and the forest came up on both sides in a long dark wall. Crickets. Wind in the leaves. Far back the way he had come, the faint thud of an explosion, then a shout. His mouth had gone dry around the second hundred paces, and he pushed his sleeve up his wrist to wipe his face as he looked up.
Something passed across the corner of the night sky above the road. Dark and long. A shape he had no word for. He ran faster, the pack thumping harder against his back, and his foot caught a stone. He went down hard, palms first, the pack slamming up across the back of his neck and driving his face into the dirt, and he spat once to clear his mouth and pushed onto his knees, reaching for the pack strap.
The night moved. Across the road a long shadow rose and fell in a single fluid pass and was gone, slipping between two trees without rustling a leaf, and he left the pack where it was, turned the other way, and ran.
He did not see the obstacle in front of him. His face hit something that gave like timber and rang like stone, tunk, and his head snapped back. He landed flat on his back on the road with all the wind out of him.
He blinked the stars out of his eyes. A shape stood over him, tall and plate-armored, the visor of a helmet tilted down at him faceless. The pressure of the thing's attention came down on him in a single steady weight, and he could not pull a breath in past it.
He went out.
This was not how Kiba had drawn it up. He and Akamaru had been on the deserter for four solid minutes and had been losing him the whole time, the man knowing the streets, kept ducking through stalls, kept letting civilians fill in behind him, and then the mutant had come up out of a basement door Kiba had not noticed, and the deserter had vanished sideways into the night.
Now Kiba and Akamaru were giving ground. They flipped backward in unison off another wide swing of the mutant's arm, the air shoved heavy past their faces, and the mutant kept charging into the empty space they had left. Kiba had been herding it for the last full minute, out toward the empty stretch of warehouses on the far edge of town, away from civilians.
"Kiba." Hinata's voice came through the comm with the steady clarity of a low bell. "I have the target. Disengage. Clear at least thirty paces. Now."
Kiba did not stop moving. "Akamaru, with me!"
Akamaru barked once and they broke for the next roofline, two long bounds, then three, and the mutant's bellow shifted in pitch behind them as the meaty thump of it staggering forward kept its own pace. It had lost his focus and was already swinging its head on the overlong neck for the next thing in front of it.
Light came down so suddenly Kiba had to throw his arm up across his face, and Akamaru yelped and flattened against the tile, fwoom. A column of white burned the silhouette of every roof and lantern and shutter into the back of his eyelids, and the crack arrived a quarter heartbeat later, krrak, the roof tiles trembling under his boots.
When the spots cleared he turned to look back. The mutant was missing from mid-chest up, and the lower half of it stood for one long absurd moment in the middle of the square, a pair of legs and the line of a navel, then folded sideways and hit the cobbles in a heap of meat and overgrown bone.
Kiba exhaled. "Right."
The comm clicked. "Target secured. Returning to the rendezvous."
He turned the other way. Several blocks west, outlined against the lantern glow rolling up from the busier districts, a tall armored frame moved at a long even pace across a flat rooftop, a small slack figure carried over its shoulder. He recognized the shoulders even from this distance.
Karin came in next. "Local resistance on this block has stopped engaging. They are pulling out, and some of them are running."
Within minutes they were all back on the roof. The captives lay in a tidy line along the spine of the tile, wrists and elbows sealed with cord and mouths gagged, and the two unconscious girls sat propped on a dust-coated sofa Karin had dragged across the roof, a folded coat across their shoulders for the night air.
Below, the streets ran in the slow strange rhythm of a town that had lost its predators and not yet decided what to do with the night. Bodies lay where they had fallen, on cobblestones, across roofs, slumped over balconies, and civilians came back out of doorways, paused, came out again. By the time the squad finished its first sweep, men and women in patched coats were moving among the corpses, lifting weapons, purses, and whatever was easier to take with the bandits dead than it had been an hour earlier.
Two more sweeps confirmed it. Any bandit who had not been killed had run, and any who remained had crawled into a hole and stopped molding chakra entirely. Whatever the gangs had been holding here, they were no longer holding it.
The leader Karin had tracked was the first they unbound enough to talk to, and after a brief and very practical exchange with Guy at the parapet he talked about everything. He walked them through the rooms he had once sat in, pointed out the safes and storerooms and documents worth lifting, and the squad sealed it all into three full storage scrolls and a fourth half-filled. The rest could wait for the regional administration to notice it had a town again.
When they were done, Hinata wrapped the bound deserters into a sling of biomass cords across her shoulders. The two girls would be left at the first building. The squad took the road out of the town in a long fast line through the dark.