The desert came apart behind Rock Lee.
He ran with the gates open, and at the speed the gates gave him the sand could not get out of the way fast enough. Every footfall blew a crater into the dune and threw a fan of it up behind him, and the fans never had time to fall, so what trailed him across the waste was a long standing wall of sand hung in the air, a wake the height of a house that hissed and collapsed only after he was already a mile past it. The heat of the day broke against the green light coming off his skin and looked strange around him. To anything watching from the ridges, and there was nothing out here to watch, he would have been a single green streak drawing a line of risen earth straight across the dead heart of the Land of Wind.
The north is good enough to hold without me for now, Lee thought. Shikamaru said his performance was enough to buy them time to turn things around for the time being. The east needs his help now.
Lee had a feeling he already knew what they would think of him when he arrived, because he knew what the north had thought of him, what the village at the gate had thought of him, what Suna thought of the green devil who had killed their jinchuriki and loved ones. They would hate him there too.
That is all right, he thought, and the desert screamed past. While it would be nice if they liked me. My mission to assist them, not be liked by them. I'd find it hard to like someone that made life in my village harder too.
He ran east, and the sand rose behind him and hung in the air a long time, and the front he was leaving fell away to nothing at his back. A lizard on a rock didn't even realize something passed by it, until the sand suddenly rose, causing it to flee as fast as possible in the opposite direction.
Kankuro crouched in the dark at the edge of the camp and pouted. Although if anyone asked him, he would deny pouting. And then maybe sock them in the mouth for suggesting that he was pouting.
He hated this Leaf bastard and a man could only stomach being shown up by a slouching Leaf chunin so many nights in a row before he got sick of it.
The bait was right in front of them, in the open-fronted tent that had been the Leaf freak's, wrapped in the freak's bedroll with the monster's green collar showing at the throat and the monster's stupid bowl-cut head turned to the canvas. It breathed. It even snored, a little, which Kankuro thought was overdoing it.
It was not Lee. Lee was somewhere out across the waste by now, a problem for the east. It was a shadow clone the Sand commander had thrown an hour ago and dressed in a transformation, and Tessen had not liked making it any more than Kankuro liked guarding it. A jonin of the Sand, playing dress-up to protect a Leaf brat who is not even here, she had said, and spat, and done it anyway, because the boy who was not here had explained why, and the why was the part Kankuro could not argue with.
We have a problem if they realize Lee is missing, the Nara had said lazily. Stone can't beat Lee on the field, so they'll try to assassinate him in his sleep. Fine. But the second they find that bedroll empty, they know the Devil left the north. And the morning Stone learns the Devil left the north, they stop being terrified and they come down this valley with everything, because the only thing holding them back is the belief that he's still in it. A shrug. So we keep them believing. We give them a Lee to kill. And we take the men they send before they get close enough to figure out he's a fake.
Disinformation and a trap in the same move. Kankuro had wanted to find a flaw in it for an hour and had not.
He worked Crow's threads against his fingers and waited, and somewhere behind him in the rocks Izumo and Kotetsu sat the two approaches the Nara had said the killers would not use, because the Nara wanted the killers funneled to the one approach where the angles were already his. The two Leaf veterans had not complained. They had listened to the plan, looked at each other, and nodded as they went to sit in the cold.
They came at the hour the Nara had estimated they would come.
Five of them. Stone. They came hidden and quiet down the funnel of rock, no lights, no sounds.
He held. Wait for the shadow. Wait for the shadow. If he sprang Crow early they would scatter, and he would definitely not be the one held responsible for this plan being screwed up.
The five reached the open tent. Four held the dark at the edges. One went in, slid up over the bedroll, raised a blade above the green collar.
The blade came down.
It stopped a hand's width from the clone's throat, the killer's whole arm locked rigid and trembling, because his shadow had gained a new ruler.
Kankuro grinned. There it is.
The Nara's shadow had come up the funnel along the floor of it the whole time they descended, thin and black and patient, threading the low places, and the instant the five of them stood bunched at the tent it had taken all five at once, every shadow stitched to his, every body frozen in the shape it had been wearing. The one over the bedroll shook against the hold. The four at the edges stood like posts.
Now me.
Crow came apart out of the dark above them and rained senbon down on the four at the edges, a fan of poisoned senbon. They could not dodge. The shadow would not let them. They took the full of it and went down inside ten seconds, conscious, breathing, and unable to move so much as an eyelid, which was exactly the state they needed. The slacker released his clan's jutsu as the men fell.
The one over the bedroll, Kankuro left to Shikamaru.
"Why did they have to send so many strong guys? I'm already running low." Shikamaru sighed as his hands slightly shifted. "Shadow Strangulation Jutsu."
The clone in the bedroll popped into smoke as shadowy hands crawled up the shinobi's body toward his neck. It only took four seconds before he dropped unconscious as Shikamaru went for a blood choke instead of a full strangulation. They wanted these guys alive for intel after all. The killer's body hit the sand as Kankuro threw a poisoned senbon to ensure he stayed down.
Izumo and Kotetsu came out of the rocks and started binding the paralyzed four with rope and chakra-sealing tags, and Kankuro walked Crow down to stand over the last one and watched the Nara come out of the dark.
He did not say what he was thinking out loud. He was not going to give the Nara that. But he did help move the prisoners.
Shikamaru had wanted very few things in his life. None of them was this.
The tent they used was set apart from the rest, downwind, and Kankuro had picked it for the downwind, which confused Shikamaru. Four of the prisoners they kept roped and silent in the dark to use later. One they sat up against the center pole, cut the paralytic so he could talk, and left everything else.
Kankuro did the work. It was Suna work and these were Suna's enemies on Suna's border, and the puppeteer had a case of poisons that he looked at like a toy box.
I could leave, he thought. Why bother watching something so gruesome and troublesome? It's not like I'm in the Intelligence Division and need to know how to extract intel from enemy ninjas.
He did not leave.
The first poison Kankuro used did not kill and did not mark. It went into the meat of the man's thigh on the tip of a senbon and for a slow ten-count did nothing at all, and then the Stone shinobi's back came off the pole and a scream tore out of him. Every nerve below the man's waist was on fire, with no flame to point at and no wound to clutch. The man screamed until he ran out of air and then screamed without it. Kankuro waited. He had an antidote in his other hand the whole time and he let the man see it and he did not use it.
"It stops when you talk," Kankuro said with amusement. "It only stops when you talk. Everything in this case is worse than the last thing. We have all night and I don't have anywhere important to be. So."
Shikamaru stood against the canvas with his arms folded and his face frowning and watched a man be taken apart, and the part of him that had spent its whole life finding the path of least resistance wanted to leave this tent immediately.
This is part of the job, he told himself. This is when you don't have an Ino next to you. What the vest means in an actual war. He exhaled. And the faster everything in this man's head is in mine, the faster I can put a shape on this whole front, and the faster I put a shape on it the faster it ends, and the faster it ends the faster I go home and sleep for a week.
It was a small and selfish thing to hold onto. Home. His bed. His ceiling. A cloud to look at and nobody dying under it. But that was for later. As for now he kept his eyes open and his questions coming.
Because that was the trade he had made with himself when he walked in. If he was going to stand here, he was going to be the reason it was worth standing here. He was not going to flinch and he was not going to look away. He was going to take everything this man had, every scrap, and turn five screaming minutes into a thing that saved Sand and Leaf lives both, so that all of this crap had a purpose.
So he asked. And in the gaps between the screaming, in pieces, in the broken bargaining of a man who would have promised the moon by the end, it came.
Stone was not beaten. Shikamaru had known that; the man confirmed it with detail. Renga had pulled back to lick his wounds and send word up the line, and the word had come back down: the Devil was one man, and one man could only be in one place, and the Land of Stone had more men and more time than the gutted Sand did. They were not going to recklessly charge again. They were going to dig in along the high ground and grind, post by post, week by week, bleed the north slow and make Suna spend bodies it could not replace holding ground that did not matter, until the Devil wore out or went home or simply could not be everywhere the knife went in. A long war.
And there was the other thing, the thing that made Shikamaru stop slouching and correct his spine.
The man knew about the east.
Not much. He was a killer, not a strategist, and what he had was barracks talk and the shape of his own orders. But the shape was enough. Stone command was content to grind the north slow precisely because they knew the north was not the only fire. There was a second one coming. Cloud was on the move, sliding down through the Land of Rivers toward Suna's eastern flank, smelling the same blood Stone smelled, opportunistic, unhurried, massing. Stone did not need to win the north fast. Stone only needed to hold Suna's attention and Suna's borrowed monster on this border while Cloud attacked from the east.
Two fronts. One Lee.
Good, Shikamaru thought, and was a little sick that the first thing he felt was professional satisfaction. Good. He was right to send Lee east.
"That's all he's got," Kankuro said, after a while. "He's just a hunting dog. I doubt he knows anything more."
"Yeah." Shikamaru's mouth was dry. "I had a feeling."
He looked at the Stone shinobi slumped against the pole, used up, still alive, and he knew what asking-for-the-antidote-now would buy and what it would cost, knew the man could not be released to carry back the one fact that would undo the whole night, that the Devil was gone from the north. Knew what the front did with prisoners who knew that. He had known it walking in. That was part of the job too.
He turned and pushed out through the flap into the cold clean dark before Kankuro cleaned up.
Tessen's command tent, an hour before dawn.
She had the markers in the new shape before Shikamaru finished talking.
"A grinding war on my northern line," she said. "And a second army on my eastern one." She set a marker down on the Land of Rivers harder than she needed to. "And one boy to answer both."
"He can't answer both at the same time since he can't use ninjutsu, so no Shadow Clones of Lee to help us out." Shikamaru said. "Let's get over it and start making adjustments." He leaned over the map and laid it out. "The north doesn't need him anymore. Stone's not coming over the top again, they told us as much in the tent, they're digging in to grind. We can beat that with an army that doesn't give and a commander who doesn't panic." He looked at her. "That's you. Hold the high ground, trade them nothing for free, make every post cost. You don't have to win. You just have to not lose. That, we can do without him."
Tessen looked at the markers for a long moment.
"And the east gets the boy." she said.
"The east gets the boy for now. Cloud's the one committing real weight, so that's where the hammer goes." He straightened, and the tent tilted a little, and he waited for it to stop. "Lee's already most of the way there. He'll reach them before Cloud even knows he's here."
"And you are heading east with him?"
"No."
She raised an eyebrow.
"I'm running on dregs, lady." He said it plainly. "My reserves are nothing to brag about on my best day, and this isn't my best day. If I tried to cross that desert behind Lee I'd arrive a week late and useless, and that wouldn't help anyone." He shook his head. "And you still need a second pair of eyes on this line while Stone settles in. So I stay. I anchor the north with you. Whoever's in the east will be able to use Lee properly if they have half a brain."
"The late Kazekage's daughter..." Tessen grinned. "She has a head on her."
"I hope so." Shikamaru meant it as he put his hands in his pockets. "Lee plus a brain worth something. Then they should be fine."
Tessen went back to her markers. After a moment, without looking up, she said, "Get some sleep, shadow brat. You're no use to my line dead on your feet, and I have decided, against my own better judgment, that you are of some small use in my tent."
From Tessen, Shikamaru understood that she was probably complimenting him in her own annoying womanly way.
He did not have it in him to snark about it like he would have a week ago. He just nodded and left toward his tent.
Home's so far away, he thought, lying down in his clothes with the dawn coming up. He closed his eyes.
This sucks…