Shy Venom

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. The road back was long and quiet under the stars. The camp that came up through the trees below was not the camp they had left. The two clearings of canvas and lantern light had become a small fortified position, braziers and standing lamps pushing the dark back from the perimeter, a row of sealed-archive tents along the original work site with chuunin moving between them by the dozens, full patrols sweeping the trees in slow loops. A hand signal at the rise was answered from the perimeter, and the guards opened to let them through. A fresh escort met Guy at the planking and lifted the bound deserters from Hinata's shoulders, the squad falling in around them as they crossed the central thoroughfare toward the containment line. Four tents stood there in a tight row, canvas reinforced at the seams and ringed with paper seals, three guards on each with blades drawn loose at their sides. Halfway across, Suigetsu hurried up with a half-eaten ration bar in one hand and a borrowed flak vest hanging open across his thin chest. He took one look at the line and stopped where he stood, the sharp-toothed grin pulling wider across his face as he named one captive, then the next, then the next with open glee. The words tumbled out of him faster than the guard moving to intercept him could close the gap, an offer to help, an offer to assist, every version of it he could think of in order to participate in "questioning". It went on until Hinata's helmet tilted in his direction and her single short refusal came down through the resonance, heavy enough to flicker the lanterns in the nearest tent. Suigetsu stopped on it. The grin did not vanish, but it pulled in at the edges, and his hands came up at chest height in the small giving-up motion of a man who had already lost the argument. A mild gesture from Guy sent two chuunin to his shoulders, and he let them turn him without a fight, the resentment plain in his eyes as they walked him off between the tents and out of sight. Karin glanced sideways at Neji, and he answered with the smallest nod. Suigetsu's outburst had at least confirmed they had the right ones. The deserters were led on into their separate tents one by one. Inside the second containment tent the man chained to the chair at its center sat with his wrists in heavy iron and his ankles locked into shackles bolted through a wooden plank under his feet, paper seals climbing his arms and chest in a rows, suppression seals. Karin stood at the canvas wall to his left, arms folded. Neji stood at his right, hands at his sides, the Byakugan running a slow pass through his body in the silence. Guy stood directly in front of him, set in the warm patient expression he wore when there was no need to hurry. And behind all of them, filling the back half of the tent, stood Hinata, the crown of her helmet pressed up into the canvas roof, the fabric bowed and stretched. The visor was lowered. She had not moved since entering the tent. The captive's eyes moved between the four of them. He had been speaking for some time. “That is all of it,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I told you the routes. The drops. The cell I came up through. I do not know any more. There are not any more.” The silence that came down after was unnerving. Nobody moved. The lantern at the tent pole hissed gently in the quiet, and the captive's gaze flicked from face to face, and what he saw on each of them was the same thing. They did not believe him. His mouth opened. Nothing came. Behind the line of faces, the air shifted, and a single armored step came down on the planking, thoom, the whole floor of the tent moving under it in a slow heavy pulse he felt in the soles of his bound feet and in the seat of the chair. The second step landed closer. The canvas overhead drew tighter as the bulk under it changed angle, and the lantern on its hook rocked once. She came around the chair and stopped in front of him. His head tilted back. The faceless visor hung above him like a piece of the night sky, the broad armored shoulders blocking Guy out of his sight entirely, and she stood so close that the heat off her plates reached him on the skin of his face, the ozone scent under it landing at the back of his throat and not going. He stopped breathing. The visor tilted down. “There are other things,” she said. The resonance under the words moved the tent itself, and the chain on his right wrist rattled in a fine bright shiver. “That you have not yet told us. And every person in this tent knows it.” “N, no,” he started, his voice climbing without permission, “I swear, I swear on my, on my mother's…” His sight buckled. She moved nothing he could point to, no hand, no seal. The air between his eyes and the smooth black plate simply bent, and bent further, and gave way entirely. Tent and lantern fell away together, and he was looking forward into a dark wider than the night outside. Then the dark began to move. Pinpricks of light went past him at the edges of his vision, slow at first, then faster. He understood after a heartbeat that the lights were stars, and a heartbeat after that that he was the one moving, hurtling through a black that opened endless in every direction. The stars stretched into lines, the lines into streaks, the streaks into long pale rivers running straight at his face at a speed for which he had no name. His breath had stopped on a half intake. The air sat locked inside his chest. His throat had closed, his mouth hung open, his eyelids held wide. The cold dread along the back of his neck was the only thing in him still moving. In the middle of the black, ahead of him, a small bright dot. A faulty star. It grew, and kept growing, and came at him instead of passing. It bloomed across the center of his sight, its edges resolving into bands, and the bands were turning. A sphere resolved out of the black. Vast. Tilted across the line of his approach at an impossible angle, its surface a slow grinding parade of storms, broad belts of cold blue rolling against broad belts of bruised red, the meeting of them churned into long ragged seams. In its lower half a wound the size of a continent turned slowly in place, a great unblinking eye of crimson cloud staring up at him as he came in. It filled his vision and kept filling, swelling out past the edges of his sight where his eyes could not turn to follow. The belts moved faster the closer he came. The storms peeled open in long furrows. The eye opened wider, opened nearer, and behind the surface of the whole thing something was singing, a low note, so far below anything a human throat could shape that he felt it as a thrum in the small bones of his ears before he heard it at all. He was falling into it, the body that should have stopped him gone from him entirely. Invisible pressure hit his chest like a wall. His ribs bent the wrong way. His heart, beyond his ability to feel from inside his frozen body, slammed the inside of his ribcage somewhere in this place in a frantic wet hammer that ran through every part of him at once, thud, thud, thud, each beat a separate tear in the meat of his chest. The eye opened wider and wider. His thoughts frayed, stretching the way the stars had stretched, paying out behind him into the dark in long ribbons that did not come back. Something inside the eye of the storm reached up, and he screamed inside his own head with everything that was left of him. I will tell! I will tell! I will tell you everything I know please please please!… Everything stopped. The dark unstretched. The eye drew itself shut to a single point and dropped backward away from him, the streaks of light running the other way now, the night pulling itself out of his head as fast as it had pulled itself in. The faceless visor drifted back across the center of his vision, and the canvas overhead was canvas again, and the lantern was hissing again at the tent pole. No breath would come in or out of him. His whole body shook on the chair in one fine high vibration, and a slow dark stain spread down the front of his trousers without his noticing. Hinata held it a second longer, the visor still trained on his face. A presence at her right shoulder. She turned her head. Guy had come up beside her, hands folded at his lower back, his expression composed. A fine sheen had risen along his temple that had not been there a minute before, a small steady tension sitting behind the warmth in his eyes. “Magnificently done, Hinata,” he said, bringing one hand up at chest height with the palm turned down and drawing it slowly toward the floor in the smooth gesture of a man asking a musician for lower volume. “Perhaps. A small notch lower. Yes?” Hinata blinked inside the helmet, and she looked. Neji was three paces behind her at the canvas wall, eyes closed, shoulders set hard, hands flat against the tent fabric at his sides. A single bead of sweat had rolled out of his hairline and was tracking down his temple. His chest moved once, then again, in the long measured breaths of a man dragging himself back out of something he could feel through his cousin's chakra at point-blank range. Karin was worse. She was leaning into the tent pole on the chair's far side, one hand pressed flat over her heart and the other braced behind her on the canvas, her glasses slid forward on her nose. Her face was flushed a deep mottled red from her throat to her hairline. Her eyes were open and wide and faintly unfocused, glassy in the lantern light in a way that did not seem to know whether it was terror or something else, and the breath coming through her parted mouth was loud enough to hear at three paces. Her knees were not holding her up well. Hinata jolted. “Oh, I, I am sorry,” she said, the resonance dropping out of her voice in the same beat as she pulled killing intent inward. The pressure went off the tent. The lantern's flame steadied at the pole. The shadow on the canvas drew its edges in. Neji's breath came out in one long quiet rush, his eyes opening as he nodded once at the floor and straightened. Karin closed her mouth, the flush still everywhere on her face, and she pushed her glasses back up her nose, dragged in a long breath through it, and set her knees against the pole behind her with visible effort. Across the chair, the captive's lungs found a way to work, pulling in one long ragged breath, then another, then another, each one a wet choked scrape that came out of him without permission, his shoulders shaking and his teeth chattering audibly. The chains at his wrists rattled in time with it. Guy let two more breaths pass, then stepped past Hinata's shoulder and came around in front of the chair, lowering himself into a crouch and settling his elbows on his knees with his hands clasped loosely between them. “My friend,” he said. “I think it would be wise of you to begin again. From the start. With the parts you left out.” The captive's head jerked up and down in a fast desperate nod. His mouth opened. The words were not steady, but they were coming. Most of what came out was confirmation of what they had already pulled off from the base. He had run cargo at the base for years, and he had been pulled in to fetch and hold during research procedures. The routes matched. The drops matched. The internal decay he walked them through fit the shape the documents had already drawn. What he gave them past that was the town. The market settlement at the secondary trade road had served the base as more than a supply line. It had been the recruiting and trafficking hub. For years bandits and rogue shinobi had filtered in through it on the way up the road to the base, the base skimming the ones it could use and pushing the rest back down into the gangs that had brought them in. Year after year that traffic had hollowed the town out. Lawful trade had thinned. The local administration had given ground until the gangs ran the streets in everything but name, and what had once been a market had become a criminal den wearing one for cover. When the supplies thinned and the orders from the base stopped coming down, the deserters walking out had simply joined the gangs already in possession of the place. The squad had walked in on the moment those gangs were preparing to put what they had carried out of the base up for auction to the first bidder to come up the road. Then the second base. Suigetsu's words from the surface camp had not been a guess. It sat off the southern coast of the country, on a small chain of islands close enough to the continent to be reached and far enough that nobody had a habit of going. Resupply ran a long line. A fishing village on the shoreline serviced a small port at a fraction of its capacity. A ferry crossed from that port to the larger fishing village built on the nearest island, and from that island small boats slipped through the channels between the others to the base itself. Several warehouses along the harbor frontage of the shoreline village were the visible end of an invisible chain. The records on the terminal had called them inventory points. The captive called them what they were. Karin pulled the regional map across the folding table. The chain was there, the gap to the continent at the right scale, the channels between the islands narrow enough to throw a stone across. He did not know which of those islands held the base. He had asked once and had been told it was none of his concern. The peer he had a contact on the inside there had run logistics across the same chain, and the man's circumstances had mirrored his own. Supplies thin and suppliers cagey, Orochimaru's trusted agents stretched and stretching further. Communication arriving with weeks of dust on it when it arrived at all. Above the surface of the operation a new hand had begun laying out demands in volumes that did not leave room for argument, and pulling resources elsewhere in the same volumes. The captive named no party for it. His contact at the second base had stopped answering cleanly several weeks before his own had finished emptying. The men sealed in the row of containment tents along the perimeter were the long arc of the same drift. They had walked out of his base, taken what they could, and moved on to the next chance to convert it to a payday. The town had been the chance. The bidder had not yet shown up. The briefing tent ran warm with lantern oil and the close press of bodies along a folding table. Hinata stood with the helmet sealed away. Guy beside her, Neji and Shino at her right, Karin at her left, Tenten and Lee ringed in close at the table's far side, Kiba just inside the open flap with Akamaru sitting on the toe of his sandal. The map of the southern coastline lay open between them, the chain of small islands pinned at the lower corner. “We need to move on quickly,” Hinata said. “It is only a matter of time before the people at that island base finish what we walked in on here. They abandon, they scatter, and the trail dissolves into a hundred threads we will never run down. Then Akatsuki could reach them before we do.” The shift went around the table without a word from any of them. Everyone had shown their agreement on that without talking. Neji broke first. “The last message from the main base of operations confirmed that the other groups remain assigned to their own objectives. Communications across this country have stretched thin enough that by the time anything moved on a notice from us it would arrive days behind.” His arms were crossed loose at his chest. “For the immediate, we are on our own out here.” Shino's hive shifted against the inside of his sleeve. “The extraction team here remains committed to dismantling the base below. Their work will not finish for several days. The last message from the diplomatic team carried a separate request from the feudal lord of this country, asking for assistance in securing the town we cleared. Forces will be allocated from this camp toward that purpose. The reach of the perimeter widens, making our numbers lower.” Karin had one finger laid on the chain of islands at the corner of the map and had not lifted it since the briefing began. “Then we go ourselves,” she said. “The port village first. We investigate it. We pull one or two out of it if it can be done cleanly, anyone with a name worth knowing. If everything keeps going well, we can cross to the island. If it does not, we stop.” The lantern caught the rim of her glasses. “By the time we have something worth a full report, the reinforcements will have caught up to us.” The same shift moved through the tent a second time in agreement. Guy laid one palm flat on the map across the chain of islands. “Then we move on the shoreline village. We take two hours to eat and rest, and we leave at the close of it.” The shape of it set in her chest as he spoke. Guy-sensei had carried this whole mission the way she was watching him carry it now, the decisions coming down through him only after she or one of her teammates had landed on one first, his interventions arriving at the corrections rather than the choices. Asuma-sensei had worn that same shape on the previous missions she had run alongside him. Both men carried complete certainty in themselves, and they were laying the weight of the choosing on the squad on purpose, letting them feel what it meant to carry it. As if they were… We hope this next "investigation" of yours can be a little more challenging than the last one, Venom said along the slow long mass at her ribs, cutting straight through the thought. A boy in a tank. A handful of papers. Weaklings in the town. We were promised the serpent, and we were handed the worms. “Dismissed,” Guy finished, straightening with the warm patient expression she had been reading off. The tent began to empty around her. Kiba and Akamaru had made out of the flap first, Tenten a half step behind them. Hinata and Karin came out into the path a few paces back. “Tch.” Kiba ran a hand back through his hair and let his arms drop loose. “This whole mission has turned into a march. Walk in, walk out, walk back in somewhere else. Pretty sure my feet have done more work on this trip than my hands have.” Akamaru barked once, short, agreeing. “Right?” Tenten pulled into stride beside him, hands resting at her hips. “And there is a lot of us out here. Whole companies pushing through every road in this country. We hit one of their towns. A criminal town, sure, but still a town. Now we are about to hit another one.” Her chin lifted at the dark beyond the perimeter. “Anywhere else in the world, you would call that an invasion.” “Yeah.” Kiba's mouth pulled to one side. “Yeah, and nobody is calling it that.” Hinata and Karin trailed them a few paces back, the conversation rolling along ahead of them. Hinata tilted her head down toward her companion as they walked, the bun at the back of her head catching a corner of the lantern light along the path. “You did very good work this mission, Karin.” Her voice stayed low enough to keep between the two of them. Karin's posture lifted by an immediate inch. Red came up under her collar before it reached the points of her cheeks, and the lantern caught the lift of her glasses as she ducked her chin. “Th, thank you, Hinata-sama. I, I am so glad to hear it.” The lift in her shoulders lasted two more paces. “Hey hey hey.” Suigetsu fell into stride at Karin's far shoulder, the filled water canteen sloshing in his hand and the borrowed flak vest still hanging open across his thin chest. He took a long pull, swallowed loud, let the canteen drop back to his hip. “You know what I think about all this. I think it is rude. Genuinely rude. You guys went and questioned those assholes without me in the tent. I had complaints to share. Years of them, right there on the table for the room to enjoy.” Another sip. “Could have been a whole moment.” Karin's shoulders went tight again in a different direction. “You are technically a prisoner,” she said. “Why in the world are you walking around here like this.” Suigetsu raised one finger straight up toward the lantern overhead, the canteen tucked into his other elbow. “Ahhh. Actually.” He stretched the word out, the sharp-toothed grin sliding sideways. “I am a victim. I am also an eyewitness. Two completely separate categories, with very different paperwork attached.” His grin pulled wider. “Although, you are correct that I cannot just roam wherever I want. I have boundaries. Important ones.” He drew the last of it out as he turned his head over his shoulder, eyes flicking back along the couple of Konoha shinobi behind them. Hinata had been watching it through the back-and-forth. Suigetsu's eyes had not stopped flicking forward past Karin's shoulder to the pair of long curved Kiba blades sheathed across Tenten's back where she walked at the head of them. Each line he delivered, each sip from the canteen, his gaze came back to those two hilts and lingered a fraction longer than it needed to before it pulled away. Karin's groan came up out of her throat audibly, and her eyes rolled hard enough to push her glasses up the bridge of her nose. The squad came over the last ridge a little before full morning. The road dropped out of the trees and the coast opened up under them. The fishing village sat along the shoreline in a wide spread of grey-tiled roofs. It was bigger than they had been told. A village ten years ago, maybe. Now it was a small town, the streets pushing back from the harbor up into the hills. Out across the water, the islands sat on the horizon in a foggy line. The harbor held one port. A long plank wharf, three warehouses standing in a row along it, and a dock between them with a ferry tied up cold, the gangway pulled in. Armed men moved between the warehouses slowly. They had counted more of them than they had hoped, and a good share running chakra without bothering to hide it. Up above the wharf the streets carried ordinary civilians going about their morning, used to looking past whatever the men at the water were doing. One of the armed men had drifted further up into the streets than the rest, and the squad watched him a while. The way he carried himself and the way the others gave him room said he sat a notch above the rabble. They picked him up clean in a side alley once he wandered far enough off from the port, and it did not take long to get what they needed out of him. The base was on one of the islands. The second biggest. The line up to Orochimaru had gone quiet some time ago, and the staff there had turned bandit and gone into business for themselves. They were rushing the inventory out, port to town, town to a buyer, working on their own guess that someone was bound to come for them sooner or later. The dock had been suspended since dawn. The western horizon answered for why. A heavy dark bank of storm clouds was rolling in from the west over the sea, and no ferry was going to sail in weather like that. The warehouses were worse. They scanned every wall, and cargo. The pale dome shapes of mutant tanks ranked in tight grids along the back of each room, dozens of them again. And then the paper. Every wall was lined with explosive seals, sunk into the studs and the rafters and around the doorframes, enough to take the entire port off the map. They sat there primed, no switches, no chakra wires running back to anyone's hand, waiting. The captive's face went blank when Guy asked about them. He had no idea how to disable them, and nobody he knew in the town did either. The seals had been there when the staff walked in, and the staff had ignored them and gone on running the place around them, because there was money to make. A town sitting on a powder keg and trying very hard not to think about it. A cordon was off the table. The first barrier they put up would draw the curious half of the town in to find out what was happening, and that was the worst place to gather them. It had to be quiet. It had to be from the inside. Hinata laid the plan out at a parapet two streets back, the squad spread behind her along the rooftops. The middle warehouse, herself. Left on Guy with Neji and Lee and Tenten. Right on Karin with Shino and Kiba and Akamaru. Three rooms cleared in one stroke. Secure the ferry next. After the port was theirs they would peel outward and hold civilians off it until the reinforcements came up the road. The crossing waited on the weather. Kiba came up first over the comm. “So. River country, right. They really and truly dropped the entire ball on protecting their own people. Just for the record.” Akamaru huffed once on the same line. The squad was scattered across the rooftops behind the harbor, each one settled behind a low parapet on a different angle down onto the water. Hinata's perch sat the highest of them. The port lay open below her visor, the wharf and the three warehouses and the cold ferry at the dock, and beyond the channel the foggy shapes of the islands sat on the morning grey. Karin came up over the comm after a beat. “Hinata-sama. Those mutants in the tanks down there. Are they going to wake up and pop on us like the ones in the town, or…” “Unlikely,” Hinata answered. “Those tanks carry no seals at all. Completely idle and acting as a cargo.” She ran her sight one last time over the village. “Move.” She was off the parapet on the word. The tile sloped away under her boots, and she crossed the first roof in three long strides and went off the front of it without breaking stride. Inside her ribs the slow long mass of Venom uncoiled in a stretch. Roofs went by under her. The foggy line of the islands sat out past every gap she cleared, and the mass at her ribs settled and stayed there, watching out through her eyes with her. She could put wings out of her back right now and cross the channel before the hour was out. The dark clouds already coming in over the sea answered it for her. Alone, ahead of the squad, in weather like that, was a call she would have to live with afterward. She let the thought go. Two more roofs and she had the warehouse sentries in her sight. She brought both hands up, two fingers out on each, and snapped off four short pulses of compressed chakra. The four sentries on the middle warehouse roof dropped where they stood. The closest one folded into the rampart. The other three were limp before they hit tile. Across the way the sentries on the left warehouse were already tipping into their own boots, and the right roof cleared a heartbeat behind that. Tenten and Shino, working their own ends clean. Thunder rolled across the harbor, low and long. Rrrumble. Fat slow raindrops came down behind it, scattering on the tile. The sky above the village had gone full dark while they had been laying out the plan, the storm already over them. A thin mist began lifting off the sea, pale along the harbor stones. She turned her eyes off it and back onto the warehouse, set her boots, and jumped. The wall of the warehouse came up under her. Mid-air the biomass at her shoulders flowed up, and a fan of black tendrils opened from her back. Half the shuttered windows on the second floor had a bandit at the sill, peering out at the rain coming on. The tendrils started shooting compressed chakra needles, and each man dropped where he stood with one clean hole through the back of his head. The last window came up at her with a man still working its latch from inside, the shutter throwing wider just as she met it. His eyes lifted. They found her. Hinata went through the frame feet first. The thunder broke right then, krak, and the splinter of the shutter and the snap of his ribs and the crunch of him going off his feet were all eaten off the inside of the room. Her boots rode him a half step backward, and the back of his skull found the floor under a final quiet thunk. She stood. Her armored boot stayed on his chest. The visor tilted slow across the room. Under the boot his face had locked on the shocked open shape it had been wearing when she came through the frame, eyes still open, mouth still rounded. She moved. The second floor narrowed to a corridor of dim oil light and bodies. Her chakra fists drove through chests in single beats, the impact sound lost in the rush of rain on the roof above. From her shoulders the tendrils kept their own count, fanning into the rooms ahead and behind her in quick soundless pulses, dark flickers on the walls as men dropped where they had been standing a half breath earlier. A heavy killing intent rolled off her and went on ahead of her through the building, and the men in the rooms she had not yet reached were already feeling it. Their hands shook on their weapons. The room had gone wrong to breathe in, and they knew it before they ever saw her. Her activated eyes held the place clean in her head, every dark patch of exploding tag laid into the wood. The body she pulled into a doorway as a shield slammed the frame between two seal rows without scoring either. The head she crushed against a beam took the impact on the bare strip of wood between two paper blocks. Neji's voice came up under the rush. “We are inside.” “Clearing second floor.” Karin a half breath behind him. “Right warehouse. We are in.” A handful of the rogues at the far end of the floor had begun to put something together by then. A pair were trying to shove a heavy chest across the head of the stairwell, and the cold weight coming off her had eaten the strength out of their arms, the chest scraping the wall and refusing to seat in the gap. Three more had ducked behind a counter with crossbow stocks up against their shoulders. They got the counter braced and the first bolt loose at her in the span of one shared shouted word. The shooter's hands would not hold steady, and the bolt went wide of her and clipped the wall behind. The other two never got their bolts off. Their fingers had stopped listening to them. Then she crossed the room. The counter folded under her hit. The three crossbowmen folded with it. The chest at the stairs went over the railing with the two who had been pushing it still gripped to the handles, the whole tangle hitting the landing below in one heavy run of cracking wood. The next half dozen came up the stairs into that noise and stopped at the top. The pressure off her hit them at the top step like a wall. One look at her in the lantern light, and they turned the other way all six in the same heartbeat. The lead man's legs would not do what he wanted them to, and his boot caught the lip of the top stair on the turn and went sideways out from under him. He hit the next man, the next man hit the third, the third hit the railing, thump. thump-thump. thoom. Six bodies inside two heartbeats became one yelling tangle of arms and legs going down the stairwell in a single uneven roll. One of them got his head tucked under his elbows. One stayed mostly upright for half the descent and was carried over the rest of them by his own knees buckling under the press. The screaming went past in three different pitches and ran together on the way down. “H, hold it, hold…” “Get off, get off get off get…” “Aaaaa…” Hinata took the stairs in two long steps and went after them. The pile hit the bottom landing an instant before she did. They were still moving, hands flailing, knees and elbows working at the angles of each other's coats, but the weight bearing down on them from above had gone through their nerves and none of them could get their arms or legs to do anything useful. The front man was halfway through trying to push himself up off the second man's shoulder and could not finish the push. She came down on them on a straight line at full plate weight at high speed, krak, and the pile broke under her like the thin wall it had become. Bodies launched off it in every direction. Two into the inside of the door. One through the slats of the next bannister. Two skidding flat across the warehouse floor on the other side of the landing. Hinata came through the middle of the burst on the same straight line she had set at the top of the stairs and kept going, her plates cutting twin grooves in the planking past where the pile had been. She came up onto the open floor of the main warehouse with her stride still set. The room widened around her. Crates rose in rows to either side, rough timber boxes stacked on pallets, some marked with old laboratory codes, others left blank. Narrow lanes cut between them toward the back wall. The air smelled of wet wood, old oil, and the faint bitter chemical reek that clung to anything Orochimaru's people had ever touched. Rain hammered the roof hard enough to turn the whole building into a drum. One of the rogues she had scattered off the stair pile dragged his head up from the floor at her left. His eyes found the black greaves first, then followed them upward and kept going until his neck strained. Hinata kept moving. Her sabaton came down on the side of his head before he could lift it another inch. It was weight, angle, and the absolute certainty that the floor belonged to her now. His cheek flattened to the planks with a muffled thok, one eye squeezed shut, mouth twisting open around a sound that died under the pressure. For one strange heartbeat the sight had an ugly, intimate humiliation to it, the huge armored woman pinning him with the same attention she would give a loose nail. His fingers clawed once at the boards. Then the back of his skull tapped the floor again and he went limp. She stepped off him and continued. Her activated eyes scanned the room. Behind the crates, past a line of pallets wrapped in oilcloth, the rear of the warehouse opened into a colder space. Large tanks stood there in ranks, glass and metal, each one filled with cloudy fluid and the slack shapes of lifeless mutants. Their bodies floated motionless, curled in the tubes as inventory waiting for shipment. Thunder rolled outside, rrumm. Hinata's visor tilted from tank to tank. The explosive tags remained where they had been, buried in walls and rafters and around the main doors, a quiet lattice of danger waiting inside the wood. Then another pressure made the back of her neck tighten. Something else was wrong. Venom felt it at the same time, the biomass inside her surging from drowsy satisfaction to hard focus in one shift, every inner strand pulling taut. Hinata expanded her senses. The town side answered first, civilians in houses, armed men dropping in the left and right warehouses, Guy's team moving clean, Karin's side holding. The sudden pressure came from elsewhere. She turned outward, and the sea had changed. The mist over the harbor had thickened in the span of a few breaths, lying tight across the water now, moving with intent, crawling along the dock pilings, filling the gaps between boat hulls, spreading over the surface and down beneath it. Chakra threaded through it in long active strands. Someone was feeding it and using it as cover. “Neji. Karin. Sea side. Focus now. There is a new presence!” Hinata's echoing voice came up to the comm as she moved. Karin answered almost immediately. “Hinata-sama, I feel it. Something is coming to the docks. Something dangerous. Strong.” Large area, Venom said inside her. Surface and below. The mist hides him and lets him fill the water around him. Hinata was already reading the spiritual traces. The mist gave too much, its chakra spread across the harbor like a smeared handprint, but the pressure had a center. Venom leaned into her perception with her, silent and perfectly aligned, until the threads began to cross. There. Past the ferry, near the outer dock. He had come up from deep water far below the line anyone had been scanning, and ridden a fast rise through the harbor throat under the cover of the storm and the mist. The shape of the chakra pulled at a memory she did not name aloud. Neji cut in. “I cannot lock on properly. He is saturating the surrounding area.” Guy followed. “Could this be from Orochimaru's island base?” “No.” Hinata's stride lengthened. “Someone else. We intercept immediately.” Through the warehouse wall, through rain and mist and planks, she saw the figure step onto the dock. One of the remaining rogues outside saw him too, broke from the cover of a stack of crates and ran toward the newcomer with his weapon half lifted, mouth open in a shout Hinata could not hear over the rain. Her chakra gathered, and inside her armor Venom moved with hungry speed, biomass sliding along the channels between plates, coiling under her forearms, waking through her shoulders. She turned for the exit. Another rogue had managed to get his upper body off the floor near the broken stairwell, palms flat, arms shaking under him. He looked up at the black shape bearing down through the aisle and made one thin sound. Hinata's boot stomped the middle of his back without pause, whump, and the air left him in a burst. His chest struck the floor, chin cracking against the planks, and his arms folded under him as she drove over his body at full speed. He slid half a meter across the floor and stopped facedown, unconscious before his shoulders settled. Hinata reached the broken front of the warehouse and vanished into the rain. Kisame Hoshigaki stood on the outer dock under the storm. Rain sheeted over his cloak and ran down the bandages of the great living sword in his hand. The rogue who had sprinted at him hung from that sword now, boots kicking uselessly above the wet planks. Kisame held the weight one-handed, arm loose. The rogue's mouth opened and closed while rain filled it. His own weapon slipped from his fingers and clattered against the dock. Kisame's grin showed too many teeth. The port was a mess, broken windows, bodies half out of frames, more scattered across the ground between warehouses. Whoever had come through here had moved fast. He gave Samehada a lazy sideways whip. The rogue tore free and flew off the blade in a loose spin, blood cutting a dark line through the rain before the harbor swallowed him with a heavy splash. “Well, now.” Rain ran off his teeth. “Looks like somebody took all the fun bef…” Light flashed inside the broken warehouse, bzz-krak, and Kisame moved before the thought finished, bare instinct throwing his body aside. A wide beam of white-blue lightning punched through the rain where he had been standing and burst the dock open behind him, kraash. Planks split upward, water leapt in a boiling fan, the air cracked so hard his teeth felt it. He landed low, grin gone sharp. “Oh?” Lightning spheres came after the beam, bright balls with snapping tails, the warehouse mouth still spitting them into the rain. Kisame pushed off again. One punched through a piling and detonated under the dock, bam. Another skimmed close enough to throw white glare across his face. The third he batted with Samehada, the living sword's bulk twisting greedily as it drank the chakra and snuffed the sphere with a wet hiss. Then the angle changed. The next volley came in low and flat across the harbor from off the seaward face of the dock, fireballs and lightning spheres fanned wide, the projectiles carving white and orange channels through the rain with no figure behind them. Kisame's eyes cut across the mist and found nothing. The next volley arrived from a different bearing, high, looping in over the top of his cover. Another from a point wider still, horizontal from his right flank across the bay. The storm was hiding her cleanly, and only the volleys broke through, each from a fresh bearing. He dropped into a roll as a fireball passed where his head had been. It struck the crate behind him and burst, whoom, two more fireballs following from a fresh angle and blowing the dockside crates apart in a hiss of burning splinters. He came out of the roll moving. Kisame wove through it with a shark's ugly grace, leaping from plank to piling to the top of a cargo crate as the dock came apart beneath him. The ferry took two hits, a lightning sphere through the rail, a fireball blowing the upper cabin out in flame and glass. Rain hissed off the heated planks, white-blue afterimages strobing across the water. He kept giving ground without thinking about it, every step driving him further inland, away from the open water at his back. Kisame swung Samehada into another sphere and felt the weapon drink. “Hungry, are you?” he muttered. A sphere clipped the back of his hand mid-jump, his fingers jolting open, and for half a second Samehada spun out of his grip. He twisted, caught the handle with two fingers, clamped down. That half second cost him. The piling he meant to use vanished under a fire detonation, kaboom, wood vaporizing under his foot. He dropped hard onto the dock, landing wrong, his off-hand slapping down to catch himself, and Samehada tore loose entirely. The sword hit the planks with a heavy thud, bounced, and slid three meters further along the dock toward the warehouses. Kisame's head turned after it. “What the hell is…” She was there. One blink and the seaward planks were empty rain, the next and a wall of black plate stood on them, close enough to touch, visor already tilted down at him. Her right forearm had become a broad symbiotic blade, edge lit cerulean by chakra. It was already falling. Samehada snapped back across the planks to its master's hand in the last heartbeat. Kisame caught it, brought it up, met her swing, krrang, the sound blowing across the harbor. His sandals slid back across the wet wood under her weight, two dark grooves cutting through the water. Rain sheeted off his face and her visor. Then both of them pushed. The planks under Kisame's sandals split lengthwise with a long ugly grind. Hinata's sabatons sank a finger's width into the wood, krrnch, water bleeding up through the cracks. Neither gave. Kisame's grin held. Then he blinked. His head tilted back a fraction, the angle of his neck adjusting. She was a clean head taller than him, the visor tilted down at him. His gaze slid to the blade locked against Samehada. Cerulean light ran through the symbiotic edge in steady veins. His grin pulled wider, all teeth and rainwater. Samehada twitched. The bandages peeled back along its length, scales lifting beneath them in a wet bristling sound, leaning into the contact like a mouth opening at a meal. The chakra in Hinata's blade jumped at the touch, a thin thread of cerulean light beginning to slide down into the living weapon. NO. Venom's voice ripped through the inside of her skull, the alien baritone snapping along every nerve at once. THAT IS OURS. The biomass at her shoulders hardened in one violent pulse, and the thread cut off at its root. Then it reversed. The light yanked back through her blade in a single hard snap, dragging with it what the sword had already swallowed. Samehada recoiled. The scales flattened in a rolling shudder, peeling away from her edge in alarm, and the bandages snapped back across the exposed surface. The weapon went still in Kisame's grip. His grin folded into something flatter. Hinata's left palm snapped up under his chin, fingers splayed wide, chakra surging through the seams of her wrist in a brilliant cerulean pulse. “Hakke Kūshō: Assai (Eight Trigrams Vacuum Palm: Crush).” A flat cone of Klyntar-infused pressure erupted from her palm at point-blank range, fwoom, hitting him full across the chest and face. His cloak tore open down the front. His feet left the planks. The lock between Samehada and her arm-blade broke, and his whole frame went backward several meters along the dock, sandals skipping twice on the wet wood before they caught. Before he steadied, Hinata's left hand snapped level. Biomass bloomed out of the seams along her lower chest, gathering at her fingertip in a tight black knot, tk-tk-tk, a dozen compressed chakra rounds leaving her hand in two breaths, narrow streaks of cerulean fanning across the angle of his recovery. Kisame drove Samehada down between two planks, thunk, and anchored himself against it, blood already on his teeth. His free hand came up with the broken edge of his cloak, batting at the bolts. He blocked most. The rest slipped past, one through the meat of his shoulder, thuck, another opening a furrow along his ribs, a third taking a strip out of his left cheek. Two more chipped the bandages along Samehada's length. Too many to block, too fast to dodge cleanly. Blood threaded the rain off his jaw. Get him off the water. Throw him. Venom's mass was already moving inside her. Kisame had Samehada under him again, braced like a crutch, his free hand pressing the inside of his cloak against the ribs wound. Hinata's right hand snapped up, palm cupped. “Katon: Kasen no Tama (Fire Release: Bullet of the Fire Drill).” A swirling vortex of white fire left her hand in a fast soft arc, blooming as it traveled, and met the air in front of his chest and detonated, kaboom, a flat white burst that consumed the oxygen for ten paces. Kisame moved with it. He tore Samehada free of the planks and threw himself sideways off the dock toward the open water, Samehada drawn tight against his chest. Hinata's left hand was already up. A larger vortex of fire bloomed between her fingers and she launched it on a flat hard line, a swirling sun the size of his torso meeting the empty space between him and the water. It broke, kafoom, the white flaring brilliant for half a heartbeat before the detonation lit the underside of the storm. The blast caught Kisame along his right side and shoved him bodily back the other way, his curse lost under the roar as the line of his fall reoriented toward the warehouses behind her. Tendrils erupted from her shoulders and along her spine, each tip pulsing. “Raijin Senkōdan (Thunder God Flash Bullets).” White-hot spheres launched out of every tip at once, snapping in at him from a dozen converging angles. He was still tumbling through the air, ribs broken at angles she could read through the cloak, and even like that he wove, ducking under one sphere, twisting under another, kicking off nothing with a small burst of chakra to rotate his body around a third. One clipped his elbow and he hissed through his teeth. The seventh he met with Samehada, the living sword swatting it out of the air in a wet hungry burst. The swing left him open. Hinata's hands snapped together. “Dai-Raijin Hōgyoku (Great Thunder God Cannonball).” A brilliant white-blue sphere the size of his torso bloomed directly in front of him, and he had no time. The cannonball met him chest-first, KAKABOOM, the impact loud enough to rattle the windows of the standing warehouse a hundred meters behind her. Kisame coughed a thick rope of blood out into the rain, a low angry groan ripping out of him under the boom, and his body left the air entirely. He hit the ground at the edge of the warehouse yard back-first, his shoulders cutting a long groove through the wet dirt. At the end of the slide he drove Samehada point-first into the ground and whipped his lower body up and over in a tight backflip, landing in a low crouch with blood running down his chin. He was already moving, his free hand sweeping through seals faster than the eye could follow. “Suiton: Suijinheki (Water Release: Water Encampment Wall).” The harbor answered him. A colossal sheet of water tore itself up out of the bay along the line between him and her, taller than the warehouses, climbing into the rain and the mist. The base of it sucked the dock dry. His seals kept rolling. “Suiton: Daikōdan no Jutsu (Water Release: Great Shark Bullet Technique).” The wall reshaped on the move, the front gathering into the predatory silhouette of an enormous shark, jaws wide as a warehouse door, eyes of compressed chakra burning white. It tore across the harbor on a straight line at her last position. Above and to the south, a stream of Tenten's weapons came in from her angle, kunai and senbon by the dozens, an entire scroll's worth of steel cracking out of the rain at Kisame's back. He dismissively flicked his free hand backward over his shoulder, and a thin sheet peeled off the rear face of the wall and folded into a low arch over his head. The weapons hit it and stopped, points dragging as the water grabbed them. Two explosive tags ignited inside the water in dull underwater bursts. The shark hit the dock, the outer planks disintegrating, the great jaws closing across the ferry's midships and crushing the cabin inward in a burst of splintered wood and torn iron. Where Hinata had been a moment before, there was only churning foam. A second white fireball was already falling, larger than any of the others, lining itself up on the top of his water arch. Kisame's head tilted up. His arch thickened in answer. The fireball hit, kaboom, light flaring through the arch as the payload spent itself against the water. Then the heat caught up, and the entire canopy went off, water flashing to steam in a hot expanding ring. Hinata was already coming down. She had ridden the cover of the fireball's arc up into the storm, and as the canopy went up in steam she was over his crown and dropping, her dark form spinning at full speed, lightning wrapping her into a brilliant cerulean spindle screaming down out of the sky. “Hakkeshō: Raikō Kaiten (Eight Trigrams: Lightning Drill Revolving Heaven).” Kisame's eyes snapped up. Samehada was in the wrong place, driven into the dirt to anchor himself, the angle to bring it up between them the worst angle he had. He abandoned the motion, shoved off the ground with his free hand and threw himself sideways at the last heartbeat, his shoulder leaving the line of her descent by a hand's width. The drill grazed him. The spinning lightning caught his right side, krrshhh, every vein in his body printed against the air in cerulean white for one instant. He was thrown sideways across the warehouse yard, cloak smoking from a dozen places, and hit the side road past the warehouse shoulder-first. He came up on one knee in the mud, Samehada wrenched up out of the ground behind him and dragged back to his hand. The drill spent itself in the empty air where he had been. Hinata broke the spin with a counter-burst from the nozzles along her shoulders and spine, and landed in the gouged earth he had just vacated. Steam hung between them, rain hammering both at once. The three warehouses along the harbor frontage still stood, every wall lined inside with the quiet lattice of paper death waiting for a wrong note. She could not let it ring. This sword is annoying. Venom's voice rolled along the inside of her ribs. A living thing, sentient enough to feed. Cut him from it. Tentacles erupted along the seams of her shoulder plates, four small maws pushing out of her lower chest, and biomass surged into her right gauntlet until a long symbiotic blade extruded from her wrist, two meters from hilt to point, cerulean veins running through the black length. She moved. The maws fired as she went, tk-tk-tk, tk-tk-tk, rapid bursts of lightning and fire drills cracking the air in front of her, and she closed the gap in three strides with the blade rising. Kisame came up out of his crouch. Even staggering, even holding the great weight of Samehada in a battered hand, the man moved with a balance that did not belong to anyone that hurt. A drill clipped his thigh and he kept moving. Another grazed his shoulder and he turned through it. A third caught the hem of his cloak and lit it, and he flicked it out behind him without looking down. The rest he wove between with small fast jerks, three-quarters of a beat slower than her speed and somehow still ahead of her aim. She brought the blade down. Samehada came up in one short brutal arc and met it side-on, krrang. The instant the steel touched the symbiotic edge, his form rippled. A fine shimmer ran the length of him, a small spiritual hitch normal eyes would have missed. Her fused senses caught it. The threads of his chakra signature were shifting frequency in a way the living thing in front of her could not be. She held the swing. Biomass shot out of the soles of her sabatons, two thick black spikes driving down through the wet earth into the stone beneath, anchoring her. Her core wrenched her upper body backward at an extreme angle, spine bowing past anything human, the visor leveling parallel with the ground above her. A second Samehada came across over her chest plate at the height her sternum had been a half second earlier, krak, the side of it slamming into the bandaged length of the first. The "Kisame" in front of her took the full impact across his ribcage and burst into a falling sheet of water. Past where the clone had stood, the real Kisame's surprised face came into her vision, his free hand still following the wide wave of his sword, the swing carrying through empty air over her bent torso. She was already moving. Biomass blew out of the seam at her right hip in a long extending spear and drove into the meat of his right arm above the elbow, punching clean through. A second mass blew out of her chest plate at the same instant in the shape of a spiked club, riding a thick tether, and met him square in the solar plexus, whump. Kisame folded around the impact. Blood and air punched out of him in one combined gout, his body leaving the ground for the second time inside a minute, the spear tearing free of his arm in a long whipping retraction. Samehada stayed with him, his fingers locked white around its grip. Her spine snapped upright. She kicked off the anchoring spikes and flipped backward once for clearance, landing in a low crouch ten meters back, the biomass retracting into her plates. Her visor tracked him as he rose. The man had still kept his sword. He twisted in the air, blood dragging behind him in dark streamers, his free arm coming up to begin the seal that would arrest his arc. The air behind him rippled. Two warm shapes blinked into existence at his shoulder and hip. Might Guy's teeth were shining. They cut through the rain as if the storm had no business dimming them, a single hard white sparkle that hit Kisame full in the eyes through the downpour. Beside him, half a meter lower in the air, Rock Lee mirrored the pose, the same blinding smile, the same fist drawn back. Kisame's eyes snapped to them. “YOU?!” “DOUBLE DYNAMIC ENTRY!” Their voices rolled out as one, and two roundhouse kicks met in the same point at the same heartbeat, KRRRAKK, a single brutal crack that pushed the rain outward in a flat ring. Kisame's body left their kick like a rag off a catapult, trajectory snapping ninety degrees toward the inner streets of the town in a long flat blur, cloak burning and shredding behind him. His voice trailed after. “BASTAAAARD…” The shout stretched thin and faded into the storm. On her own rooftop Tenten lowered her face into the palm of her free hand, the echo of her teammates' shared shout still ringing on the comm in her ears. “…that came out wrong,” she muttered into the channel, ears going hot under the rain. Guy and Lee dropped onto the roof of the standing warehouse, and Hinata kicked off the yard and arrived beside them a heartbeat behind. The rain had thickened. Fog was rising off the harbor and the streets behind them at the same time, swallowing the bottom floors of the lower buildings, visibility collapsed past forty meters. Others had landed on their rooftops. Karin's voice cut through the comm. “Hinata-sama, are you alright?!” “I am unharmed,” Hinata answered into the line, the resonance of her voice rolling along the wet tile of every roof. “He is wounded but he is not finished. We must end him quickly. The civilians of this town are too close. Move.” She pushed off the tile in a single explosive bound. At the apex two wide membranes unfolded from her shoulder plates, the symbiote skin lighting up cerulean as chakra ran through. The wings beat once and her trajectory leveled into a fast forward glide. Across her spine the symbiote surged into a long cannon pointing forward over her head, chakra gathering at the breech in a tightening knot. The streets below ran empty under the storm, the rain doing what no cordon could have done. Kisame was a falling shape ahead of her, half-conscious from the kick. Then his free hand came up in a single fast seal. “Suiton: Suidan no Jutsu (Water Release: Water Collapse).” He vomited an enormous volume of water out of his own chakra at once, the mass blooming around his body into a moving sphere taller than every roof in the town. It caught him in midair, swallowed him whole, and crashed down onto an empty street, rolling forward through the lower town under its own weight. Hinata's cannon was ready. The knot of plasma at the back released, and a column of white-cerulean light tore out of the muzzle above her crown. KZZZHHH Beam struck the dome dead center, punching through. The inside of the dome lit up red. Through the streaming water her enhanced sight resolved Kisame at the center of the sphere with a hole the size of his head opened through his stomach, blood blooming outward in long curling ribbons. Got him. Venom's voice surged along her ribs, ragged with triumph. Take the body. She folded her wings and dove, the cannon dissolving back into her armor, both gauntlets opening into long grasping claws. She hit the surface of the dome and pushed through. The interior was warm with his blood and the heat of her own attack, the murk a churning red her sight cut through without trouble. Kisame was suspended in the water in front of her, cloak drifting loose around the gaping hole in his midsection, eyes half-open. She reached for him. The sword came alive. Samehada uncoiled from his arm in a single fluid burst, bandages whipping off the bristled length, the entire weapon stretching out of his grip in an extending whip-form she had not seen before. It looped once around the floating body of its master, wrapping him shoulder to thigh in a thick living coil and dragging him backward from her claws. Then it lashed. The free end came across in a hard sideways arc and caught her across the visor with the full slapping force of a creature defending its own, wham. The impact spun her sideways through the water and blew her out through the wall of the dome. She tumbled across the rooftops on the far side, helmet ringing inside her skull. That, Venom said tightly inside her, was more than we thought. The sword has more mind than a tool should have. She caught herself. Four heads of biomass blew out of the seams along her shoulders and hips, eyeless mouths venting hard short bursts of flame in coordination to fight the spin out of her trajectory, Venom adjusting each kick by the heartbeat. Her body leveled. Through the spin her Byakugan caught the dome, already two blocks past her, rolling heavy and fast through the streets on a line straight past the warehouses, through the dock, and out into the bay. He was running. “He is escaping into the sea!” Hinata's voice cracked through the comm, the resonance sharp with command. “Stop the dome!” Tenten was already on it. “Throwing everything we have!” Hinata's nozzles surged in a single huge burst of plasma flame, fwoom, and the kick threw her forward across the rooftops in a long flat line. The dome reached the lip of the seaside fog before she could close the gap. It rolled into the wall of grey mist and vanished, the heavy crashing of its passage dampening into the rain. She killed the burst. Her glide carried her over the harbor in one long descending arc, and she set down on the roof of the standing warehouse beside Guy and Lee, the nozzles and wings reabsorbing into her plates. Guy was already at the parapet, eyes pulled into a hard squint against the fog. “Hinata!” He did not turn his head. “Neji! Karin! Do any of you see him?” The lower line of the harbor had been swallowed by rain and fog, a moving wall of grey that refused to give up anything inside it. Far on the horizon over the open sea, thunder rolled in long slow waves and lightning danced across the dark in silent flashes. Neji's voice came up over the comm, tight. “I cannot find him. The seaside is saturated with chakra in every direction. The dome bled into the water and the water is bleeding into the air. I have no clean sight past the second line of buildings.” Karin a half breath after. “Same. The whole harbor is humming. I cannot pull a single signature out of it.” Guy made a small noise low in his throat. His brow drew in. “I think,” he muttered, more to himself than to the comm, “that I have met that man before. Somewhere. Some time ago.” His eyes narrowed further. He pressed two fingers against his temple. The weather is jamming us. Venom's voice settled along the inside of her ribs, harder than usual, the long mass coiling tight. Literally. The water in the air, the chakra in the water, the discharge from the storm. Our electric sense cannot read through it. Try the other way. Hinata closed her eyes inside the helmet. She let the Byakugan slide back and reached instead through the slower deeper channel, the spiritual links that ran through every living thing as a thread of presence rather than a signal. The town hummed around her in soft scattered lights, her squadmates clean steady shapes on the rooftops. A single bright point burned in the fog far past the breakwater, moving fast, his presence unmistakable now that she had the lock. Akatsuki, she thought, they are after Orochimaru, and they work in pairs. The second one is out there somewhere. She extended her perception further along the channel, sweeping the harbor out through the fog past the breakwater, down under the water, out across the channel mouth. A vast slow pressure was rising in the deep water very far out, a wall front of chakra stretching across the entire mouth of the channel, the leading edge already moving toward the shore at a speed that did not match anything natural, taller than every building in the town. WALL. Venom's voice cracked through the inside of her skull at full volume. A wall of saturated energy. Incoming. Now. “BIG ONE!” Karin's voice ripped across the comm a half second later. “Something huge incoming from the sea! Wall of chakra! Coming fast!” Hinata's hands were already moving, her gauntlets snapping through hand seals at a speed that left small cerulean afterimages in the air, the biomass at the seams of her wrists and knuckles blazing white as the chakra surged out of her core into her palms and down through her boots into the earth beneath the warehouse. “Doton: Doryūheki (Earth Release: Mud Wall).” The ground in front of the warehouse line ripped itself upward. A massive sheet of dark earth tore out of the harbor stones, climbing into the rain past the roofs of the warehouses, the leading face solidifying into compressed stone as it rose. Behind it, three more walls ripped upward in offset checkered formation, covering the full length of the three warehouses along the seaward side. They finished rising as the first edge of the wave hit them. A tsunami of brown salt water exploded against the front face of the first wall, krrshhh, climbing it in a boiling sheet that crested the top and folded over into the row behind. The structure groaned, water sheeting down the back faces in fast cascades, cracks running up the front in jagged white lines. “It's holding!” Tenten called over the comm. “The walls are taking it, holding the line…” The hammering changed. The next impact came harder, kroom, then another, then a third, the cracks racing together in long forks. The first wall began to break inward, and through the spreading gaps the silhouettes of enormous fins and curved spines moved in the water behind, jaws longer than her body cutting through the foam. “FALL BACK!” Guy's voice cracked across the comm, the warmth gone out of it. “Everyone back, now! Off the warehouses!” The squad moved. Lee was off the parapet first, Guy a half-beat behind him. On the next roof Kiba and Akamaru and Shino and Karin were already lifting away in long bounds, Neji and Tenten breaking off their own roof on a parallel line. Hinata kicked off the tile, the first wall coming apart underneath her as she went. Water sharks burst through the breach in a school of brown chakra-wreathed shapes, the size of carts, jaws wide, eyes of compressed chakra burning white at the front of each skull. They punched through the remaining rows, kroom, and were on the warehouse walls behind her before her bound had cleared the roofline. Sharks hit the wall of the middle warehouse, the roof of the right, and the upper level of the left, folding the left building's outer wall inward in a single wet eruption of timber and tile. She was in the air, her trajectory carrying her back toward the inner streets of the town, the squad spread across the air around her in their own bounds. Kiba's voice ripped across the comm, sharp with alarm. “The explosives! The tags! All of those buildings are packed with them!” A silence in the comm, the breath going out of all of them at once. Hinata's enhanced eyes were already on the warehouse below her, the world stretching wide and slow around her sight. One of the chakra-saturated sharks hit the outer wall just below the roofline, the white chakra of its body discharging into the wood on impact. The first tag flared white, the one beside it answered a heartbeat behind, and the line of them along the wall lit up in a rolling cascade, racing along every stud and rafter into the next building. Her mouth was opening inside the helmet. “BRA…” The world went white. KRRABOOOM The middle warehouse ripped itself upward in a colossal column of fire and timber, the roof launching skyward, the walls disintegrating in a flat ring of debris. The pressure wave caught the school of water sharks and incinerated them on the spot, flashing the brown water of their bodies to steam. The shock front met the left warehouse at the same instant, its tags flaring in sympathetic chain reaction, and the right answered a quarter heartbeat behind that. Three columns of fire became one at altitude. The wave hit Hinata in the air with a force her plates registered as a single absolute shove. The biomass at her back flared into a frantic shielding lattice, the symbiote bleeding through every seam as Venom tried to absorb what it could. The shove won. Her body was thrown skyward and backward in a long hard tumbling arc, wings tearing loose in the wind, helmet ringing with the pressure. The guts of the warehouses came with her. Splintered crate timber spun past her shoulders, a shattered mutant tank cartwheeled past her hip trailing cloudy fluid and a limp body, and a handful of burning rogues launched skyward inside the column with the rest of the debris, mouths open around shrieks the roar of the blast ate whole. The roofs of the inner town began to come up at her in a long flat blur, a chimney stack, a wall, and then the dark.