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It had always struck Sora as rather odd that Fire Country was the most habitable of all the lands of the East. For somewhere that sounded like it should be covered in volcanoes and molten lava, Fire Country had surprisingly little fire and a surprisingly large amount of trees. She had heard from Naruto about the training with the leaf that gave the hidden village its name, but she suspected it had more to do with the fact that the founders had wanted to make sure that the rest of the world knew that there were, in fact, leafy green things in Fire Country. Because there sure weren’t in a lot of the other countries.
The Hidden Village of Rock in Earth Country was exactly what the name implied; rocky. However, the full extent of this rockiness was almost impossible to understand unless you went there yourself. Earth Country was huge and sparsely-populated because there was so little vegetation to keep anyone alive and Rock barely would have counted as a village. Most of the people lived in houses carved into the sides of the deep canyons that dredged their way through the country, making due with the sparse vegetation that grew along the riverbanks. They lived away from the light of day, stripped away from the rest of the world.
This was where Nadare had grown up; a huge, hulking man who towered over the rest of his brethren. Within the confined space of the tunnels of rock, his sheer mass had startled people, but nothing more. He was well-known for being a rather gentle giant, and while he had not proven to be anything special, he was generally liked and respected. He didn’t seem to connect with others very well, but that was not too great a cause of concern. After all, he loved his country. He was something of an outcast, not someone you would personally hang out with, but not someone you would object to being around.
That is, until the day he killed his entire family and more than half the people in the small village he lived in. With one giant wave of chakra, he collapsed part of the cliff where two hundred or so Rock villagers had made their home. Then he turned and walked away, leaving the survivors to scream after him one question he refused to answer; why?
By the time Shiraku had partnered up with Nadare, he had become a quiet giant in the underworld, partially because he was simply such an enigma. He was a mercenary, but he turned down some jobs and accepted others with seemingly no logical pattern. He would settle down for a few years and not work at all, once even going so far as to take a wife and have a child. And then one day he killed them both and left to wander again. His unpredictability was one of the things that made him so feared. You didn’t know when he was going to turn.
To Shiraku, Nadare’s shifting personality was an almost insufferable secret. He was constantly trying to decide if Nadare’s actions were part of a carefully-crafted persona or truly the random splattering of things they seemed to be. It was actually this that had brought the two men together. Shiraku was the king of carefully crafted personas, and he was constantly trying to decide if Nadare had somehow managed to create one that was actually better than his. Nadare, for his part, was the only other member of the Akatsuki who could stand Shiraku.
Shiraku was fond of saying that he had always known he was evil, a fact that he enjoyed telling people about in length; multiple times if possible. He used to stare at the mirror, looking at his pale hair and skin, and simply know that he was destined to be one of the most evil men to walk the face of the earth. It was an attitude that made a number of the other members of the Akatsuki rather irritated, but they couldn’t deny the man’s skill. Whether it was a case of a self-fulfilling prophecy or not, Shiraku was one of the more truly dastardly men among them, and, most importantly of all, he was willing to go to great lengths to prove it.
And so Shiraku always did the dirty work. He was proud of the fact that he was a villain worthy of striking fear into the hearts of his victims. He was an absolute sadist, among other things. But Cloud nins had always brought a certain level of extra unease to those around them.
Lightning Country was thus named for a very simple reason. In some bizarre twist of nature, the basin in which Lightning Country sat was filled from mountain peak to mountain peak by a constant storm that laced the sky with lightning. Strategically, it was one of the best protected of the countries in the East. The sun never shone, the lightning flashing frequently enough to provide sufficient, if sporadic, light. It was a generally considered fact that the lack of a clear day and night drove everyone in Lightning slightly batty.
The government of Lightning was one of the most corrupt of countries of the East. It was not, as many believe, ruled by a Kage, but in truth secretly run by a few clans who possessed bloodlines and put a king of straw on the throne. The clans had inter-married and complexly inter-connected, but always struggling with and within each other for greater power. As a result, the rest of the country was lawless and falling apart. It was a no-man’s land that few dared to enter.
The Hidden Village of Cloud was so called because it was in a virtually permanent fog. As opposed to Mist, where there was a light haze of water, the air in Cloud was almost permanently in a state of saturation, the streets difficult to navigate in a fog so dense that it seemed almost impenetrable. People simply disappearing in the fog was not an uncommon occurrence. Many were the tales of people who had been seen entering the Hidden Village of Cloud but never came out again, sometimes vanishing from a group of companions in the time it took to walk a single block.
Shiraku had left Lightning Country at the age of six in order to find the answer to a simple question; how to compensate for his lack of bloodline limit. If he wanted to be evil, he was going to have to be powerful as well; after all, what was the point of being evil if one was weak? He could be cruel, and even among the Cloud nins he was considered one of the cruelest, but that wasn’t going to get him where he wanted. As long as he stayed in Cloud, he was going to be treated as sub-standard for his lack of a bloodline limit and never admitted to the ranks of the ruling clans.
So he left Lightning behind in search of a way to truly become powerful. And while he was only a fair hand at most things, he found he had two strengths; his active attempts to do the cruelest things possible in every situation possible, and an uncanny talent with scrolls. He could even tweak what he wanted the scroll to do beyond the writing. But scrolls were awkward; they needed to constantly be re-made, and they didn’t quite have the finesse he was looking for.
That was when he came up with the idea for the tattoos.
By the time the Akatsuki began to form, creating loose plans and gathering their members, Shiraku was completely covered in white tattoos running in lines and curves all over his body. A slice of a knife across his fingertips, and he was ready to draw the line of blood down his thigh or across his stomach. He knew exactly where to draw to get the desired jutsu; just where to tweak it to get the desired effect.
He was however, much to his disappointment, not much more than a common criminal. He had killed a number of people with powerful bloodline limits and eliminated entire clans down to their children, but he wasn’t the legend he wanted to be. He wanted to be someone whose very name sent shivers down the spines of grown men. He wanted to be someone whose legend would live on long after he was gone.
So when the chance had come to join the Akatsuki, he had jumped at it.
Itachi had protested his being brought in. Shiraku, however, had some very valuable assets when it came to setting up the plan that united the original ten Akatsuki together. It was his skills with scrolls that made the plan possible at all. However, his part was finished, and as soon as that happened, watching his back had become a top priority.
The Akatsuki were not some brotherhood of S-Class criminals who wanted what was best for the group. They were not people who believed in fair rewards for good work. They were even more cutthroat with each other than they were with the rest of the world. Shiraku knew that it was only a matter of time until someone within the organization stepped up to get rid of him. He was the weakest of the group, and unless he made a statement that said that he was still of potential value to the plan, he would not live to see its end; and if he died now, he would be lucky to get a footnote in history.
And so he was making his play to remain valuable now, while there was still time. Now, before Itachi could nab the boy, he was going to bring Akatsuki the keystone to their plans. Then when the time came to reap the rewards of their actions, he would still be alive to receive his share.
His destiny was at hand.
The tattoos on his arm seemed to glow slightly and rise off the skin as he called out the name of the technique. The marks twisted on his arms, swirled around, and then started to stretch as Shiraku lifted his hand away from the skin. They started to grow and pulse, stretching longer and longer between his arm and his hand.
“Scatter!” Sora screamed.
They all ran in opposite directions, trying to get away from the two Akatsuki members. The heat from the lightning was starting to heat the air and the snow around Shiraku’s feet. As the power built, the lightning started to strike out away from him, sending deafening claps of thunder into the air. They increased into a frenzy as he pumped more and more chakra into the jutsu.
Finally it reached its peak, and Shiraku turned towards Sora, now a good fifty yards away. He grinned. This was what he lived for.
“Release!” he screamed; the sound waves from the thunder were enough to throw someone to the ground, and the sudden shock of heat from the bolts of lightning shot past them It extended in all directions in a wide circle, and it was growing faster then they could run.
“Shit!” Sora cursed. She looked back over her shoulder at Shiraku. He was focused on her, and from what she could make out through the light, the lightning was moving towards her because of it. Good; that gave the kids a chance to get away.
She gasped in pain as one of the lightning bolts hit her shoulder. Gritting her teeth, she continued to run, trying to apply pressure to the wound with the opposite hand. Another bolt hit her ankle. She staggered, but kept going. Finally, she got out of the range of the lightning and collapsed to her knees.
Peeling her hand away from the wound, she grimaced and hissed. Her shoulder was a bloody mess. Her ankle, protected by the leather in her boot, seemed to be in better condition, but still not good enough to walk on.
She couldn’t go back to fight like this; she would be more of a hindrance then a help. But self-healing was hard and took time; time she wasn’t sure she had. But she was going to have to take it.
“Come on Hinata; keep Naruto out of trouble,” she muttered to herself, and set to work on her ankle.
Naruto got about two hundred yards away from the man and stopped. He seemed to be at the limit of the jutsu, but he was so far away that he could barely make out the two men standing there, and he couldn’t see Sora at all.
He stared at the men in the center of the jutsu. Akatsuki. The men who had been chasing after him for over three years had finally caught up to him, and apparently they’d been watching him for a year. All this time they had been watching, waiting for him to get to a point where they could easily snatch him. And they were going to kill Hinata and Sora to do it.
An odd feeling of panic rose up in his throat. They were his family; the people who were more precious to him than anything else in the world. The three of them had gotten into a lot of tight situations together; first with the Kaze, and then in their excursions together into the west. He had vowed that he would never let them die, and had never doubted his ability to keep his promise.
It was easy for him to be fearless when he didn’t know what he was up against. But knowing that these were the best of the best, and having seen people who gave him chills with their abilities, there was a small nagging section in the corner of Naruto’s mind that said that he wasn’t going to be strong enough to save them.
He shook his head, as if trying to jar the thought out of his head. He was talking about keeping Hinata and Sora safe; he was going to do it no matter what. It didn’t matter what he came up against; he was just going to have to keep fighting. No matter what.
He knelt down to try and hide himself while he thought. He squinted at the two men. They looked to be about the same height. He frowned. Nadare had been significantly taller than Shiraku when he had seen them before. The coat billowed out around him, partially hiding it, but he was definitely crouching down. And the lightning wasn’t hitting him.
Naruto drew his gaze back to look at the jutsu. Shiraku had his hand raised up as far as he could and the lightning extended from his wrist in a flat plane for a good ten feet. That flat area was where Nadare was hiding. From there it expanded in width up to the edges until it was thirty feet tall where it stopped in front of him. The pattern was hard to see because the lightning was so random, but it was there.
All the theory Yasu and Sora had insisted that he and Hinata had to learn came flooding back to him. That was too large an area for him to keep complete chakra control over, no matter how good he was. There had to be holes in control where he could slip into the center of the jutsu, and once he was there, he only had to stay low enough that the lightning wouldn’t hit him. He just had to find the holes.
And to do that, he had to find Hinata.
He brought his hands up, index and middle fingers pressed together. He formed a cross in front of his chest. “Kage Bunshin no Jutsu!” he yelled.
Instantly there were three Narutos standing on the mountainside. The real one backed away slightly, while one crouched back down and the other one ran off around the edge of the jutsu towards Sora.
“Camouflage no Jutsu,” he whispered, setting one hand down on the snow. The white of the snow started to bleed up his arm, turning him and his clothes the same color as the landscape. It wasn’t a perfect disguise; your body was covered in a repetition of the colors below your palm. There was no way that it would work up close, but from a distance it generally succeeded in hiding your presence.
He started off towards where he had last seen Hinata.
As he approached her location, he swung his head around looking for her, nearly running into her in the process. There was a whispered, “Naruto-kun?” and the sound of a footstep to the side before a hand grabbed his wrist to stop him. He looked up, and there she was holding onto his hand.
“Ignore me?” he asked. She nodded.
Naruto felt rather stupid. Seeing through genjutsu still wasn’t a strong point of his, but he should have been able to see her. The technique was one of her favorites. It was actually called Gliding Eyes no Jutsu because it caused people around you to simple glide over you without really noticing you were there. But ‘ignore me’ was what you were supposed to project out.
Learning it was a particularly fond memory; one from right when they had move in with Nori and Yasu. Yasu had explained it to Hinata, with a large amount of buildup, telling her how complicated but effective it was, and how it called a very specific mindset that was very difficult to maintain. Hinata had sat there nervously, fidgeting with the hem of her shirt, waiting for Yasu to tell her what the horribly hard to maintain mindset was. Finally, it came out. She had to keep concentrating on getting the person to ignore her. Hinata stared at her for a second, and then said simply, “I can do that.”
But the jutsu wasn’t supposed to work very well if you were trying to look specifically for the person. The opponents could not be concentrating on you, and that was exactly what Naruto had been doing. Albeit, Hinata was very, very good at the technique, but he couldn’t quite excuse himself because of that. He had nearly run right into her!
He shook the thought out of his head. He’d chalk it up to being distracted for now and work on it later.
“Hina-chan, are there holes in the jutsu?” he asked, grabbing her by the shoulders.
“Holes?” she asked, startled eyes wide.
“You know…weak spots where we can sneak in. If we can get into the center, then the lightning can’t get us. He can’t maintain that level of chakra control for that entire area; there has to be a way that we can slip in.”
“But…it’s the Akatsuki!” she whispered harshly. There wasn’t a limit to what these men were able to do, was there? They were the stuff of nightmares.
“Just look!” Naruto begged,turning her back towards the men. She gulped and activated her Byakugan
She watched as the chakra circled around the man, then closed her eyes and turned on the echoes.
The two men were still standing there in the middle of the snow, waiting for them to attack. She watched the echoes, the lines forming swirling patterns across the air. Shiraku had apparently stopped concentrating the chakra towards Sora. That was good; it meant he wasn’t sure where any of them were and she could see how the lightning strikes moved naturally. The path that each lightning strike took left an echo of its presence behind, making it easy to see the form of the jutsu; a flat circular disc that expanded into walls of lightning. But what she was able to see that Naruto had not been able to was that the walls did not end at thirty feet. They weren’t flat; they were curved, reversing back to form a thick discus of chakra that completely surrounded them.
It took her a good five minutes of staring to see how it worked. The whole disc was filled with chakra, and it was only when it clashed together at an odd angle with other chakra that the lightning could be formed. Shiraku was sending out waves of chakra that got bigger and bigger as they reached the edge of the circle. That was the only part of the jutsu he was really controlling. So that meant that when he concentrated the lightning in one direction…
She turned back to Naruto. “The only pattern that is there is the one you can see because he has only partial control over where the lightning bolts go. He triggers them more than anything else with waves of chakra. He can change the direction of the chakra he’s sending out, but there isn’t any pattern once they are created.”
“There aren’t any holes,” she concluded, almost apologetically.
“What! But there has to be!” he exclaimed. “It’s physically impossible for him to maintain that level of control over that large an area!”
“When he concentrates it in just one area, it opens a gap,” she told him.
“I told you there were holes!” Naruto said triumphantly, only to see Hinata shaking her head.
“There are temporary gaps, but as soon as we get in range, we’ll move into the area his chakra is occupying, which is basically the entire area around them. We wouldn’t get more than a few feet in before he changed the direction of the lightning towards us.”
“Well, is there any place it’s only a few feet thick?” he asked.
“No; even at its thinnest, it’s twenty feet or so!” she said, tears in her eyes. She hated to be the one to dash his hopes.
“Starting from where?” he asked.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Where is it centered? On his hand?” She nodded. “So with his hand up in the air, the center’s only a few feet below the surface of the snow. We’ll be able to tunnel in!”
Hinata just stared at him. Tunneling under someone who had been using the earth and snow against them a few minutes ago didn’t sound like a good idea to her. “What if they detect us?” she asked, trembling slightly, eyes wide with fear.
“How would they do that?” he asked, dismissing her fears, although he couldn’t deny the fact that she was right. But he would not let the Akatsuki take him away from his family! He didn’t care what the odds; he was going to push through. He started to form the seals to start Wind of Fire no Jutsu.
“Naruto-kun, this is the Akatsuki! We…we don’t know w-what they can do!” she cried, voice low and slightly panicked-sounding. She tugged desperately on his jacket sleeve.
At the sound of her stutter, almost unheard of these days, he stopped and dropped his arms. “Fine; then we’ll just wait here outside his range and let him tire himself out,” Naruto ground out between his teeth. He hated waiting.
Hinata shook her head again. “He has that jutsu set up perfectly. The chakra goes out and then doubles back to form a sphere around him. It converges above and below him and then feeds back in a loop. Because the chakra he’s putting out is retuning back to him, he’ll be able to maintain it for a very long time.” She bit her lower lip, then dared to offer a suggestion. “We should get Onee-chan and run.”
But Naruto didn’t think they could run. This was the Akatsuki; they had apparently been following them for months. Running wasn’t going to do any good. He was shaken by the idea that men so powerful wanted to kill Hinata and take him away. So he pushed logic aside and went with pure faith in his own abilities, just like he was a kid again.
“What! Run! No way! We can take these guys!” he exclaimed almost angrily.
“But, Naruto-kun!” she whispered, and cringed. She hadn’t seen him this reckless in a long time. Normally he thought things through these days, but sometimes…sometimes it felt like they were twelve again, and just getting their forehead protectors.
“We’ll go in under the snow so that they won’t be able to see us. I’ll set up some shadow clones to get them to concentrate the lightning in one area, and then we can come up through the snow and grab them. It will just be a few feet. I know we can do it! Once we’re in, I’ll hit them with the Rasengan and you can seal up their chakra! Piece of cake!” He flashed her his trademark grin.
But it wasn’t going to be a piece of cake; that much Hinata knew. Tears threatened to well up in her eyes. Nervously, she pressed her index fingers together, looking off towards the Akatsuki. She didn’t want to fight them. Their presence threatened to take Naruto away from her, and at their level, she was sure that she had a better chance of keeping him if they ran away. Weren’t they supposed to be hiding from the Akatsuki? Wasn’t that the point of Naruto being here with Sora rather than back in Konoha?
He was charging in blindly again, counting on the force of his will alone to get them through; refusing to look and analyze the situation before beginning the attack. He never thought about what was going to happen in a fight for more than the next five minutes, and while his five-minute plans were often brilliant, they were nevertheless short-sighted. Over the past two and a half years he had gotten better and better, and so far they had always managed to squeak through, but there was no way that it could always work.
But if she didn’t go in with him, he would go in alone.
She held back the tears and nodded, indicating that she would go ahead with his plan.
He grinned and crossed his fingers in front of him, calling up more shadow clones. Then, he ran through the seals and activated Wind of Fire no Jutsu, pushing his hand into the ground and melting the snow around it. He forged ahead into the snow bank, creating the start of a tunnel, before he turned and held his free hand out to her with a grin.
She hesitated for a second, then took his hand and allowed him to lead her into the tunnel.
“They’re not attacking,” Nadare said in a low rumble.
“Just wait a bit longer. It’s been fifteen minutes since he sent the shadow clones out toward his sister; he won’t be able to hold himself back much longer.”
“It would be smarter for them to leave and try to position themselves better.”
Shiraku rolled his eyes in frustration. “Nadare, I’m telling you, there’s no way that the boy’s not going to attack; especially considering that he’s separated from Sora. He’s never been able to put fights into perspective.”
“What about the other girl?”
Shiraku gave a contemptuous snort. “That little thing? She does whatever he says! She probably knows that it’s a bad idea, but will let him lead her onto the battlefield by the hand anyway.”
“But-”
“No more buts!” Shiraku snarled. “Just be patient; he won’t be able to hold himself back much longer.”
And sure enough, a few minutes later Nadare felt movements just a few feet under the surface of the snow. He could feel the slight shifting below their feet. “They’re tunneling in under us,” he said quietly.
His partner sneered. “How pathetic! As if they could sneak up on us!” He ended the lightning storm. “Go ahead and force them up.”
Nadare’s brow creased slightly; then he brought his hands together, building up the chakra in-between them before slamming one hand down into the snow.
Naruto estimated that they were about halfway there when the quake hit. He had just enough time to shout “What the hell!” before the tunnel collapsed and he found himself being pushed through the snow, moving every which way. He struggled again the currents of snow, trying desperately to keep hold of Hinata’s hand, until they were pulled in opposite directions and it was ripped out of his grasp. He couldn’t even yell out to her; he could barely even breathe.
He felt himself being thrust violently in one direction, which way he couldn’t tell, until he suddenly broke through the surface of the snow and went catapulting through the sky. He gulped for air and tried to twist himself to where he could see the enemy. He landed lightly on his feet facing them and howled in rage.
They had Hinata.
Nadare was holding her in a full nelson, his huge arms going under her small ones and his hands clenched together behind her head. Her arms had been forced wide so that they couldn’t come together to perform seals and her head was pointed down at the snow. She looked dead, hanging like a cross from the huge man’s arms, legsdangling helplessly in the air.
“Hinata!” Naruto yelled and charged at the two men head on, summoning more shadow clones. The bowl of the mountain filled with clones, littering the snow and all heading towards Nadare and Shiraku.
Shiraku pulled out his kunai, and, flipping it through the air, cut small gashes on the inside of both arms. He then brought the gashes together, hands to elbows, staring at the advancing clones from over his crossed arms. “Lightning Whips no Jutsu!” he yelled, raking his arms down each other. As they parted at his hand, a massive bolt of lightning formed between his palms. He thrust them apart, lengthening the lightning, sizzling and twisting in the air, crawling up to his elbows.
With a snap of his elbows he separated the bolt into two separate ropes, hanging like twisting snakes from his elbows, crackling in the air.
He raised one arm up across his face, watching as the clones advanced. His eyes narrowed and he brought his hand down and out in an arch. As it traveled, it grew until at the crest of the arch, it was almost fifty feet long. It swept through the army of clones, destroying each one it touched, taking out half.
Hanging back off to the side, Naruto growled. He was going to have to maneuver himself through Shiraku’s cover in order to get the man.
Hinata was going to have to hang on.
He charged again, keeping his eyes on the whips of lightning. Shiraku started to move his arms in wide circles and spirals, moving the ropes across the plane in front of him. Naruto dodged and ducked, watching as the less-skilled shadow clones disappeared in puffs of smoke around him. He was getting closer and closer; twenty feet…ten feet…he was almost within striking distance.
He reached down to the pouch on his leg and pulled out a kunai. He pulled back his arm and prepared to strike.
Both whips hit him at the same time; one across the chest and one across the face. He screamed in pain as they stung and burned at the same time, searing through his shirt to the skin below. Their force picked him up off his feet and propelled him through the air. He went flying into a snowdrift, mercifully cold on burns that were red and blistering.
Shiraku laughed at him, lightning still hanging from his arms. “Are you really so naïve as to think that you’d be able to get me with something as simple as that?”
Naruto struggled to stand up against the pain in his chest. The burns were already starting to heal, but they were still stinging and itching like mad.
He needed a new plan.
Reaching down into the snow, he drew a line in the snow, followed by the curves and loops that formed the western script, spelling out the world “grow”.
He held his hand up and started making seals, a different one in each hand. Two streams of chakra grew, flowing out of each palm. The chakra formed spiky balls in each hand, resting in curled fingers that formed a one handed seal. The center of each ball glowed blue, but at the ends of the spikes, one turned faintly green and the other orange.
Naruto brought the base of his palms together and raised them up over his head. The chakra balls banged against each other, protesting their proximity to each other. Naruto gritted his teeth and pushed his hands together, forcing the balls to become one. The force of the power vibrated through his entire body, but he held on, continuing to compress the chakra into a smaller and smaller ball.
“Iron Bamboo Forest no Jutsu!” he yelled, slamming his hands down into the middle of the word written in the snow. From just in front of his hand, tall stocks of black bamboo stared to spring out of the ground, shooting up into the sky. Naruto remained crouched, squinting through the rapidly growing bamboo towards his enemies, guiding where the trees grew.
The first line of bamboo shot out between Nadare and Shiraku, cutting them off from each other. Then it spiraled in, growing thick and dense around them, pinning them into place.
Shiraku reached out and touched one of the stalks of bamboo. It was shiny like regular black bamboo, but harder and colder. It wasn’t living; it was made of cold iron, but somehow the jutsu allowed the iron to retain the flexibility of bamboo, bending in the wind. The snapback of the bent bamboo would be deadly and the leaves would slice through your skin easily.
The man smiled. He’d watched Naruto learn this technique. It was an impressive one, combining the life energy with the iron effectively when they were such opposites naturally.
Naruto ran through a few seals and then grabbed the nearest stalk of bamboo. Red hot heat surged down the length of the stalk and into the ground, melting the snow around it. It traveled through the roots, connecting from plant to plant, running the heat up the length of the bamboo and into the leaves.
The forest swayed and crackled with heat. The snow melted away, leaving the ground a tangled network of iron roots.
Shiraku smiled. Very impressive indeed. He had effectively cut the two men off from each other and changed the landscape completely. The boy was a fast thinker with quick reflexes; he would be able to navigate the treacherous ground and use the bamboo to his advantage, controlling where the heat went. It tilted the playing field in his favor.
Naruto jumped up and grabbed a hold of one of the stalks, holding on with one hand as he put his feet up and balanced on its side. He had Nadare boxed in, and hopefully that would prevent him from going off anywhere with Hinata while he dealt with Shiraku. Plus, he could still move through the forest without much trouble, so he should be able to strike where his enemies could not. He had the upper hand.
But it wasn’t going to be enough.
He started moving though the trees, trading bended stalk for bended stalk, slowly coming closer and closer to Shiraku. The man just stood in the close confines of the bamboo, watching the trees around him. He smiled slightly and nicked his finger on his kunai, then ran the bloody finger across the small of his back.
High in the bamboo above Shiraku’s head, Naruto prepared to attack. He didn’t expect to actually get Shiraku with his next onslaught. But with any luck he would be able to drive him into the bamboo. So far the tattooed man had shows no indication that he liked to use taijutsu or even genjutsu. In the bamboo forest, he would have to work hard enough to keep from getting burned or whacked that he shouldn’t be able to use seals or his damn tattoos.
But Shiraku beat him to the opening move. Out from his back ripped two long knives of chakra. With a yell, he turned in a tight circle, moving the knives in a wide arc. They sliced through the iron bamboo stalks easily, sending them toppling to the ground.
Naruto yelled as the stalks fell on and around him. The iron sizzled against his already torn skin as his plan backfired. He managed to release the heat aspect of the jutsu as he fell, but not before he had sustained several bad burns.
He collapsed, slightly dizzy with pain, under the weight of the iron bamboo. Damn it! He couldn’t even move under the weight.
Shiraku walked over to where Naruto lay prone underneath the bamboo. A few more slashes of chakra cut away the bamboo on top of the boy. He reached down and hauled Naruto halfway to his feet.
“You’re lucky you have that Kyuubi, you know that? Anyone else would be dead by now, between the lightning and these burns. But you survive without fail, which is a good thing for me, because I intend to capture you, not kill you.”
He grinned. “Still, it takes a little time for the wounds to heal, does it not? And until they do, you’re still paralyzed by the pain, aren’t you?” He raised one hand, glowing blue with chakra. “Let’s just see how long we can keep you like that.”
The hand landed over his face with a sickening hiss and horrible sting.
Naruto screamed.
Still holding onto Hinata, Nadare watched dispassionately as Shiraku toyed with the boy. They should just capture him and leave, but Shiraku always had to do it his way, and his way was always dramatic. Evil couldn’t just win. Evil had to triumph. But Nadare was starting to wonder if Shiraku’s theatrics weren’t going to make things take too long.
The sister could return at any minute. And she was one they were going to have to look out for.
Suddenly, his world started to melt before his eyes. The sky bled down, covering everything in a pure blue. Then a knife’s edge of wind stabbed him between the shoulder blades.
Nadare stiffened and loosened his hold on Hinata just enough for her to flow out of his grip. His world went back to normal, the genjutsu ending. His eyebrows pulled together. He had forgotten that she used one-handed seals, and therefore his normal way of holding captives wouldn’t work.
Hinata flipped slightly in the air, landing on her hands and kicking her legs out, hitting the inside of Nadare’s knees. She turned back over onto her feet and started to run towards Naruto, winding her way through the bamboo.
The man bent over and rubbed his knees. There had been some sort of chakra spike in those kicks, making his knees spasm painfully. He could push in some elementary healing chakra, but it was still going to be a few minutes before he was able to move.
Ducking her way through the bamboo, Hinata tried to make her way over to Naruto. Her bloodline limit was on and her mind completely focused on getting to him. A curiously strong protective instinct had been awakened in her and she was filled with a determination and fearlessness she had never felt before.
She cleared the bamboo and slid across the ground past Shiraku, aimed for the hand that was wrapped around Naruto’s neck. The base of her palm landed firmly against Shiraku’s elbow, shooting chakra through his arm and breaking the tendons.
But just as her hand make contact, Shiraku’s hand, still pulsing with the burning chakra he had been using to torture Naruto, shot out from under his opposite arm and hit her in the stomach. They both yelped in pain, Hinata flying out into the forest again, Shiraku dropping Naruto and clutching his elbow to his body.
Shiraku watched the petite girl fall in the bamboo forest. He grinned and looked down at Naruto. “Let’s see how your little girlfriend does in an earthquake in all that lovely bamboo,” he said, raising his hand to signal Nadare.
Naruto could see the power gathering in his fist. “No!” he yelled and lurched to his feet, ignoring the tremendous pain that shot through him; but he knew it was too late. There was no way he could get to Nadare in time to stop him, and he wouldn’t get to Hinata in time to protect her.
Suddenly, an invisible hand grabbed Nadare’s arm and started to pull him off through the trees, banging against the remains of the bamboo forest as he went. Shiraku watched as the huge man cleared the trees and was thrown like a feather across the snow and out of their range of sight.
“That’s enough!”
The three who remained turned and looked at the voice. Sora stood thirty feet away, arms crossed over her chest, sunglasses pulled down over her eyes.
Naruto jumped to his feet and started after Hinata who was struggling to her feet.
Sora and Shiraku continued to stare at each other. When she spoke, her voice was low and dark. “You two go hide. I’ll take care of this asshole.” She jerked her head towards Shiraku.
The words stopped Naruto in his tracks. Twisting his neck to look at them, he glared at his sister. “What! I’m not going to go hide!” Naruto yelled at her.
“They’re too powerful for you! The other one should be gone long enough for you to find an effective hiding spot until I can finish them off!”
“But I was holding my own against them until you came!” he argued.
“You were about to get killed! Now go!” She turned back to Shiraku.
Shiraku smirked at her. “Ah I suppose that it is my time to play with the big sister.”
She smirked back. “Damn straight,” Sora replied, and a spike of wind sucker-punched him in the stomach, sending him flying off in the opposite direction of Nadare. She started to run after him, turning to yell at the two of them over her shoulder. “Now!”
With one last look towards Sora, Naruto and Hinata turned to go. Once they were out of sight, Naruto turned towards where Nadare had disappeared to.
“Come on, I think he went this way,” he said, starting down a steep incline.
Hinata had known that they weren’t going to go hide, but it didn’t make her any less nervous. “Are you sure we should do this?” she asked timidly.
He turned to look back at her, eyes serious. “Nee-chan can’t handle both of them by herself. If he comes back and we’re hiding, it’s like sacrificing her.”
She couldn’t stop thinking that they were sacrificing all three of them this way, but she pushed it down. In the end, she would rather die here then lose either one of them.
They continued down the side of the mountain.
This site is published by Samizdat Express, Orange, CT info@seltzerbooks.com
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