Shy Venom

“WAKE UP!” The word went off inside her skull like a struck bell, and the dark peeled back in a single blink. Hinata's Byakugan flared behind the visor, veins blooming at her temples, the world snapping into focus all at once. Her lower back was driven deep into the brick face of an old abandoned building on the edge of town, the masonry caved in a crater around the small of her spine, her armored upper body hung forward over open air, head lolled toward the muddy ground three meters below. The rain came down so hard it had drawn a gray curtain over everything, drumming on her plates, swallowing the town past arm's reach in a wall of falling water. She let the Byakugan push out through the downpour, sweeping the streets in a slow spiraling arc as she opened the channel. “Report. All of you, report in.” Her doubled voice rolled out over the channel, the deep resonance under her own alto steadying as it went. The blast had thrown her clear across the town to the northern outskirts. Around her, the scattered remains of one of the warehouses lay strewn through the alley, a buckled steel door folded over a cart, a length of rafter standing upright out of the mud like a grave marker. She swept her sight south, down the streets, toward the docks. Where the three warehouses and the wharf had stood there was nothing now but a torn black gap in the town's edge, the pilings gone, the buildings gone, debris flung in a wide fan across every street that fed the waterfront. The sea had come in over the ruins and stood there in churning gray waves, sliding up the lower lanes, water glinting in the broken streets two and three blocks inland. The explosion had walked outward through the whole town ahead of it. Glass hung in jagged teeth from a window frames, and through them and over them the civilians moved in a panic, wading the flooded lanes, scrambling up onto the roofs, clutching children and clutching each other and staring back toward the water. The flood had risen to the lower sills and stopped there, the lanes left wet and stranded where they should have been drowned outright, the sea that Kisame had thrown at the town shoved back out into the ruined harbor by the force of the three buildings going up at once. Far out past it all, the sea was still a single wall of gray fog and storm, motionless and waiting. Her squadmates were clean steady shapes spread across the rooftops between her and the water, each of them upright and moving, all of them alive, already turning back toward the docks. Hinata set both armored palms flat against the brick to either side of her hips and pushed. The wall let her go with a low grinding crunch, masonry sloughing away as she dropped, and she landed in the alley mud in a heavy crouch, water sheeting off her plates. The bodies of the mutants were scattered around her, the warped things from the tanks flung loose by the blast and laid out broken in the muck, no glass left to hold them. She rose, and as she turned to look back at the wall she had been buried in, she went still. A rogue bandit had hit the brick first. His body was crushed flat into the caved-in face of it, arms splayed, and where his head should have been there were two deep round concaves pressed into the wall on either side of a thin crushed ridge, his face split clean down the middle into the gap between them and driven inward to either side, frozen in a wide-eyed, open-mouthed mask of pure horror, two perfect globe-shaped hollows stamped into the brick over what was left of him. The man had landed against the wall, and then the heavy armored weight of her had come down on top of him rear-first, the solid round mass of her backside swallowing his head whole and folding his skull open down the deep cleft between her armored buttocks, printing the shape of itself into the masonry an inch deep and leaving his shattered, terror-struck face wedged in the seam between the two hollows. A single bead of sweat slid down the inside of her visor. Her head swiveled, slowly scanning the empty rain-lashed alley to be very certain that not one living soul had seen the manner of his passing. “Okay, what is it with this mission and everything blowing up?!” Kiba's ragged voice tore across the comm. “That's twice now! Twice!” “Neji here. I am unharmed. Regrouping.” Hinata straightened and turned south. “To the docks. Move.” She did not wait for the rest of it. Her knees bent and she drove off the alley floor, the mud cratering under her boots, and she was up and over the first roofline, weaving low and fast across the slick tile through the curtain of rain. The civilians were already up on the rooftops below her shouting, and a dozen arms were flung out toward the water, pointing the same direction she was running, pointing at the sea. The replies came in over the channel one after another as she crossed the roofs, each of the others reporting in unhurt and already turning onto a converging line toward the wharf, Lee breathless with cheer, Tenten clipped, Shino flat, Akamaru's bark carrying behind Kiba's voice, all of them folding in toward the same point. She came down on the bordering buildings just short of the torn ground where the warehouses had been, and a shape dropped onto the wet tile beside her, red hair plastered flat, glasses streaming. Karin landed in a low crouch and her head came up, relief cracking through the strain on her face. “Hinata-sama, you're alive.” She pushed her glasses up her nose with a shaking knuckle. “I lost your signature in the blast, I thought, I couldn't feel you for a second there…” “I am fine.” Hinata's gaze stayed on the streets below, on the water threading up the lanes out of the smoking gap where the docks had been, sliding street by street into the lower town. The flood had come in hard and then simply stopped halfway up the buildings, the blast that had hit her the only reason the town was not under three meters of harbor. “The explosion held the water back. It will not hold it long. We contain this now.” She kicked off the roof. Her hands snapped through the seals as she landed on the next ridge, the biomass at her wrists flaring white, chakra pouring down through her boots into the stone of the building. “Doton: Doryūheki (Earth Release: Mud Wall).” A slab of dark earth ripped up out of the flooded street between two buildings, climbing past the eaves into the rain, its face hardening to compressed stone as it rose, and the water that had been sliding up the lane piled against the back of it and stopped. She was already moving, bounding to the next gap, slamming another wall up across it, then another, sealing the lanes one by one against the creeping tide. Below and around her the rest of the squad came down onto the bordering roofs in ones and twos, Neji and Tenten on the eastern line, Kiba and Akamaru and Shino dropping in to the west, Lee and Guy folding in last, all of them turned to face the sea. She drove the last wall up across the final open lane, and the moment the stone locked into place her Venom-sharpened senses lit with warning, a cold prickle racing the length of her spine. Her head snapped up toward the fog. The sea had closed into one solid gray wall from shore to sky. She let her sight slide off the Byakugan and onto the deeper spiritual channel, reaching past the breakwater, and she found his point of presence far out, deep on the open water. It had changed. The signature she had locked onto during the fight was wound tighter now, fused into something denser, his shape no longer reading the way it had on the dock. She filed it without a word. Across the whole face of the sea the chakra in the fog was thickening, the saturation climbing, the pressure of it building toward something. “It's coming again.” Karin's voice cracked over the comm on high tone. “Same as before, the big threat, it's, it's right on top of us…” A vast chakra-wreathed shark erupted straight down out of the fog directly above Hinata, jaws spread wider than her body, eyes of white compressed chakra burning at the front of its skull. She threw herself sideways off the ridge as it came, and the thing smashed through the space she had stood in, crashing down onto the roof and the earth wall behind it, the wall shattering apart under the impact in a burst of stone and brown water. She was still in the air when the second one rose at her out of the rain below, bigger, climbing fast on her exposed flank. The lightning cloak ignited over her in a single crackling instant, white-hot arcs racing the length of every plate, and the biomass at her forearms surged and stretched into a pair of long scythe-blades, cerulean veins running their length, lightning snarling up the edges. Her wings snapped wide from her shoulder plates and beat once, kicking her into a hard backflip up and over, and the shark passed beneath her open and blind, and she brought both scythes down through it as it went. It came apart in a long crackling tear. The two failed sharks crashed down across the streets and the rooftops and burst, dissolving into great heaving volumes of brown water that came down and filled the lane she had just sealed, slopping up over the broken wall. She landed and her hands were already moving. Another earth wall tore up across the reopened lane, choking the flood back, and she flipped her wings and threw herself toward her squad's line. As she crossed the gap her eyes caught the fog and her stomach dropped. Dozens of the giant sharks were rising out of the gray wall all along the waterfront, peeling up out of the fog in a school, and every one of them was driving in toward her teammates. Kiba and Akamaru hit the first as a single spinning blur, the gray fang-vortex of them shredding through the chakra shark in a spray of dissolving water, and as they fell out of the spin toward the tile another shark was already on them, jaws yawning over Akamaru's flank with no room left to turn, and then Lee was there, dropping out of nowhere with a shout, the heel of his foot driving through the thing's skull and bursting it to spray. Tenten met two more on the fly with the twin blades drawn, blue-white current sheeting down the folded steel, and she slashed both apart in a crackling double arc as they passed her, the electricity unmaking their chakra cores. Neji took the next head-on, his palms a blur, his Vacuum Palm crushing one out of the air and his open hand driving clean through the body of another in a burst of force. Karin twisted aside from a shark that came in low across her roof, and it tore past her and plowed straight through one of Hinata's earth walls, stone exploding outward, and as it went its great spined fin caught her across the leg and swept her feet from under her. She went down hard on the streaming tile, sliding, scrabbling for grip on the slick surface, and as she got a knee under herself the next one was already falling, an enormous open maw dropping straight down over her with nowhere left to roll. A long beam of white-cerulean light lanced in from the side and split the thing top to bottom, the Raikōhō (Lightning Cannon) carving it in half a hand's breadth above her head, and the two pieces sheeted apart into falling water to either side of her. Hinata came down on the roof at Karin's back, boots planted, visor still leveled at the sea, her shoulder cannon hissing steam where the beam had vented. “Are you hurt?” She did not turn around. “N-no.” Karin was already pushing up onto her feet behind her. “I'm okay, I'm…” Both of them felt it at once, the prickle climbing past warning into something cold, and both of their heads snapped toward the fog wall. Beyond the school of sharks still battering at the squad's line, something else was coming, a mass so vast it dwarfed the buildings, rising up out of the gray like a hill heaving itself off the sea floor, several times the height of the roofs they stood on, and the whole town's worth of sharks were a screen in front of it. Hinata's hands came up. Earth was not hers, the element sat heavy and foreign in her chakra, and from the dark coiled length along her spine Venom flooded forward into the work, the co-processor seizing the seals, the alien will leaning its weight behind hers. Lean on us. Now. The two of them cast as one. “Doton: Doryūheki (Earth Release: Mud Wall).” The ruined ground where the docks had been ripped itself open. Walls of dark stone tore up out of the rubble and the standing water in a steep forward-angled rank, climbing higher than the building she stood on, one slab after another canting out over the waterfront like a breaking wave frozen in earth. Two of the rising walls caught sharks on their faces as they came and burst them flat against the stone, the chakra bodies sheeting away into water. The last slab locked home with a deep grinding boom. The instant it finished, a wall of sound hit it from the far side, KRACK, a single colossal slamming blow that rolled in under the thunder and merged with it, the crack of a lightning strike and the crack of stone fusing into one enormous sound, and a fork of white splintered the sky overhead as a fresh web of cracks raced up the new walls. “It's holding!” Tenten's taut voice came over the comm. “It's holding, the walls are taking it…” The upper edges of the stone began to crumble. They sheared off the top of the rampart in great wet sheets, and over the broken crest, where the walls had stood tallest, the dark spined shapes were already pouring through, sharks by the dozen cresting the top of the barricade against the lightning-shot sky. “Oh, come ON, not again!” Kiba howled across the channel. Hinata's biomass surged. It boiled up out of the seams of her armor over her shoulders and back, twin cannons unfolding atop her shoulder plates, tendrils whipping out from her spine, the lightning cloak roaring back to full white life across every plate. The crest of the earth wall directly above her and the wide-eyed Karin at her back blew apart, and several dozen chakra sharks broke through the breach all at once and came down out of the dark toward their roof in a falling stampede. The two cannons on her shoulders flared and fired. Two continuous beams of white-cerulean lightning roared up off her plates and connected to the falling mass, sweeping through it, and the sharks melted on the beams as they came, their bodies unmaking, but the chakra that held them gave way into water, and the whole stampede sheeted down into a colossal falling weight of it that blotted out the last of the gray sky and dropped the world into night-dark over the two of them. “HINATA, ABOVE…” Tenten's voice broke and drowned. Her tendrils were already moving, dozens of them whipping out from her back and shoulders in a blur, weaving the lattice overhead. “Hakkeshō: Klyntar Tenshū (Eight Trigrams: Klyntar Heavenly Dome).” Black hardened biomass spun out into a perfect ribbed shell above them and filled with a translucent crackling skin of lightning chakra, and the full crushing weight of the dispelled sea came down on top of it. The dome rang under the impact, the water slamming flat against it and sheeting away to every side, and through the noise of it Karin's voice came from close behind her shoulder, shaking but steady. “Hinata-sama. We can't, we can't hold against that thing out there. We have to fall back right now.” Hinata drew the lightning inward to her core, all of it, the cloak and the dome both folding down into a single point of white pressure at her center, and let it go. “Raiton: Hakai Shōgekiha (Lightning Release: Destructive Shockwave).” The protective dome peeled outward off the two of them in a single cataclysmic ring of white electricity, blasting the standing water off the roof in a flat exploding sheet, hurling it back over the eaves in every direction, and her senses swept out riding the edge of the blast and found every one of her squadmates upright and clear, untouched, the shockwave breaking around them and dispelling a fresh cluster of sharks into bursting steam. In the same breath she and Karin both saw the next wave, another dozen of the things converging out of the fog and the rain, this time from every bearing at once, low and high, left and right. Hinata's stance dropped and shifted, her shoulder cannons cycling up to fire again, and along her arms and back the biomass was already pulling itself into blades and clubs and scythes, a dozen weapons rising half-formed and lightning-laced, every one of them lining up on a different angle of attack. And under all of it she felt his presence arrive right on top of them, the spirit-point she had tracked out on the deep water suddenly here. For a single instant he stood revealed on the broken crest of her wall through the rain, stripped of his cloak and his shirt both, bigger than he had been on the dock, the muscle of him swollen dense across a wider frame, the shape of his skull pulled longer, smoothing back toward a point. Her fused senses read him and stuttered, because there were two lives wound into that single body, two presences braided into one the same way she and Venom were one, and the recognition landed cold. His massive fist was already drawing back to swing at her, and she was already turning her weight to meet it, and then a green blur came in from the side and a heel slammed across his elongated face with a sound like a dropped boulder. “DYNAMIC ENTRY!” BOOM Kisame's head snapped sideways, his swing torn off its line, his whole reshaped body launched off the crest of the wall, and the look on what could be seen of his face was pure, blank astonishment, surprised off his feet a second time by the same green-clad fool. Hinata let her cannons die and her gathered weapons fold and re-form, the whole storm of half-shaped biomass realigning in a blink, and she stepped into the falling sharks instead. “Hakke Hyaku Nijūhachi Shō: Mugen Ranbu (Eight Trigrams 128 Palms: Infinite Wild Dance).” She became a black squall. Her body blurred apart into a wild churning storm of strikes, palms and talons and tendrils and blades lashing out from every angle at once, hundreds of impacts a second, and the converging sharks came apart against her the instant they entered her reach, every one of them unmade mid-flight, the whole multi-angled wave of them disintegrating around the two figures on the roof and collapsing into nothing but falling, sheeting water. It was not enough to save them from the water. The full crushing mass of every shark she had just dispelled came down at once across the rooftops in a violent wall, and Karin, half-risen and already turning to run, was swept off her feet by it and snatched sideways off the roof, tumbling, carried out over the eaves on the back of the wave as it raced down the broken lanes toward the open sea. “KARIN!” Hinata's wings flared and she threw herself off the roof after her, one hand snapping back through a seal as she went, a fresh earth wall tearing up across the lane behind her to choke the following water off the rest of the squad. She drove down through the rain along the lane that the flood was draining back into the harbor, her spiritual sight thrown wide. Far out over the open sea two bright points wheeled and clashed above the waves, Guy-sensei and Kisame, locked together out past the breakwater, neither of them sinking. And below her, close, Karin's trace was already in the water past the ruined wharf, the soft thread of her presence sliding down through the dark sea, deeper and fainter by the second. The whole harbor was a roar of saturated chakra, the lightning overhead jamming her electromagnetic sense into white noise, the spiritual channel the only thing she had left. She folded her wings flat against her back, locked her arms to her sides, and drove herself headfirst down off the last broken piling into the black water after Karin. The surface closed over her helmet and the storm went away. The thunder that had been hammering the town flattened into a dull pressure that rolled through the water and through her plates, the lightning above reaching down only as faint gray pulses that died a few meters under the chop. The world went cold and dark, and the weight of the chakra in it pressed against her from every side like a fog she could feel against her skin. Venom answered before she had to ask. The biomass woke along the seams of her armor and remade itself for the water in the space of a breath, the spiracles in the silver Weave along her ribcage flaring open under the plates and drinking the sea straight into her, a soft cerulean pulse running the line of them as the alien gills took over her breathing. Long ribbed fins unfurled off her shoulders and forearms and down the backs of her calves, biomass spreading thin and wide to bite the water, and between her armored fingers translucent membranes snapped taut. She stopped being a thing that fell through the sea and became a thing that belonged to it. Her spiritual sight found Karin below, the soft thread of her dragged farther out and farther down, tumbling in a slow helpless spiral away from the shore and into the deep. Around that small fading trace the water was thick with denser shapes wheeling in, half a dozen of the chakra-wreathed sharks already closing the circle, their compressed-chakra eyes the only hard points of light in all that black. Hinata locked on, swept her fins back, and fired herself down at Karin like a loosed harpoon, the abyss roaring past her visor. Karin's lungs were burning. She had her lungs packed with the last air she had managed to grab off the surface and she was clawing at the water with both hands, trying to find which way was up, her glasses gone, her senses screaming with the saturation of the whole churning sea. Everything around her read as denser cold blobs sliding closer, circling, and the panic was climbing her throat past the burn in her chest. One of the dense shapes broke off and drove straight at her, jaws spreading wide enough to take her whole, and she had no air left to scream with. Something flickered across the water in front of her face, and the shark came apart down its length and sheeted away into nothing. Then more blinks, light and dark together, white-cerulean flashes braided through a black shadow that flickered between the circling shapes faster than her eyes could hold, and one by one the dense forms burst and dissolved around her. The black shadow resolved in front of her, an armored giant crowned with horns, its face a blank plate, bigger than anything that should be down here with her, and her heart slammed once in pure animal terror, before the deeper sense under her panic recognized the serene drowning ocean and the silent predatory trench wound through it, and she knew it, and the terror folded into relief so sharp it almost made her sob out her air. Hinata caught her by the harness of her vest and turned her, drawing Karin in against her own armored back and folding the smaller woman's arms forward over her shoulder plates, and Karin clamped on, legs and arms locking around her like a child onto a parent. Through the visor Hinata read the bright fading thread of the chakra in Karin's chest, the oxygen in her nearly spent, and read the black below them, no floor anywhere in it, the surface already a distant smear of dim gray far overhead, too far to climb on the breath Karin had left. The biomass rose off her spine in slow tendrils between the bracing weight of Karin's arms, reaching up and back, and threaded toward the woman's face. Karin felt it touch her and flinched hard, a thin muffled sound of fright escaping her and trailing silver up into the dark, and she recoiled harder still when two fine threads of it found her ears and slid inside. Be still. The voice did not come through the water. It came up from somewhere underneath Karin's own thoughts where nothing should have spoken, a melodic alto wound through a baritone so deep and so vast that it seemed to come from the bottom of the sea itself, an old resonance with too many voices folded into the one. Calm down. We have you. We are going to help you breathe. Hinata? Karin's mind reached back, ragged with shock, the name breaking across the link. Hinata-sama, is, is that you… Yes. Be still. The thrashing went out of Karin by degrees, her grip easing from a death-clench into a hold, and as she stilled the biomass flowed up over her jaw and sealed across her nose and mouth in a soft warm membrane, cerulean light pulsing faintly inside it. Breathe in. Karin's whole body resisted it, every instinct she had refusing to pull water into her chest, until the burn in her lungs won and she dragged in a desperate breath through the membrane, and cool clean air filled her, and another breath came after it, and another. I can breathe! The thought tore through the link so loud Hinata felt it ring. Oh, oh my, Hinata-sama, I can breathe, what is this, I can BREATHE down here… Hinata did not answer. Her senses had already caught the next thing, a more concentrated knot of cold sliding in toward them through the murk, denser than the saturation everywhere else, picking up speed. Behind you! Karin's mind cracked the warning out the same instant. Watch out, there is, there is something coming, big… A large shark came out of the dark on their flank, longer than the others, and Hinata was already moving. She rolled off her line and shot in a tight spiraling helix around the length of its body, faster than it could turn, the biomass on her forearms snapping into a pair of long blades that lit cerulean and threw threads of white current crawling into the water around them, and she opened the construct down its whole flank as she spun past, fwsh, the body sheeting apart into a billow of dispersing chakra and ordinary seawater that shoved against her in a cold pulse. There are more! Karin again, pressing flat to Hinata's back. Half a dozen, maybe more, coming in from out there, farther… Hinata swept her fins and went at them. She wove through the deep water in long fast curves, cutting one apart with a scything blade as she crossed its path, twisting around the next and splitting it, and where two came in together too wide to reach she leveled an armored palm and let a burst of white lightning rip out through the water between them, the current snarling out in a branching net that touched both cores and burst them to nothing, the dull boom of it rolling away through the sea. She kept her body angled the whole time so that not one of them came near the young woman locked to her spine, taking each on her own armored front. Through it all the shapes read to her own sight as nothing more than vague denser smudges in the all-over fog of chakra, every one of them blurring into the saturated dark, and she only knew where each truly was because Venom had taken the whole of it, the co-processor along her spine running the cold water and the moving blobs and Karin's frantic warnings into a single clean stream her conscious mind could fight from. How are you seeing them so clearly? She asked it down the link as she split another shark and banked. To us they are only denser water. You name them before they move. It's my sensing. Karin's thought came back steadier now, settling into the thing she was good at. I don't see blobs, I see, I see the shapes of the chakra, and the flavors of it, every signature tastes different. The constructs are all the same flavor, dead and flat, the real water is, is nothing. That's how I sort them. That's all I'm doing, I'm sorting them for you… Hinata turned that over for half a stroke. Then, without a word out loud or in, she reached inward along her spine and nudged the coiled presence there, a silent question pressed against the alien will, and felt it lean back against her in answer. Then let us in. Open your sensing to us. Let me have what you have. I, okay, yes, Karin sent, but how do I even, how am I supposed to… The question never finished. A surge of something vast came across the link from the other side, a pressure of thought so much heavier than her own that it pushed the breath out of her, and for one suspended instant Karin felt the strength of the body she was clinging to land inside her own mind, the sheer dense weight and power of it, the cold patient depth of the second thing that lived in it. She took a deep shuddering breath through the membrane, her whole frame trembling against Hinata's plates. Oh my God, she breathed into the link. And then Hinata and Venom were through, threading down the contact and into the young woman's sense, into the Mind's Eye of Kagura. Over Hinata's own perception, her Byakugan and her electromagnetic feel and her deeper spiritual sight, a wholly new way of perceiving the world bled in and settled. The sea that had been one undifferentiated fog of chakra at a thousand densities suddenly sorted itself, the murk resolving, every dense smudge pulling into a defined shape with a clean edge and a distinct flavor she could taste apart from the rest. The flat dead signatures of the constructs separated cleanly from the living warmth of Karin on her back and the bright distant points far out across the water. Interesting. Venom said it lowly inside her alone, kept clear of the shared link, and Hinata felt the symbiote's curiosity bloom through her like warmth, a delight wholly its own, the wonder of a creature that had just been shown a band of color it had never known the eye could hold. Focus harder, Hinata sent down to Karin. Hold it open for me. I've got it, I've got it, go, Karin answered, locking her grip and bending her whole sense to the task. Hinata swept her fins and drove off in the direction she had chosen, and the sharks that came at her now she met with her sight running ahead of her, weaving between them where before she had only torn through them, cutting them open one after another with blade and burst as the school thinned in her wake. She marked, distantly, that the things had changed. When they had hit the docks they had moved as one coordinated wave, every one of them driving at a target. Now they wandered, sweeping the deep at random, casting through the black for anything at all, a net with no hand on it anymore. What troubled her was the cost of them. She read the saturation pressing in from every direction, the immense standing volume of chakra that filled the whole bay and the whole deep beneath it, the great masses of water that had been conjured out of nothing, and now sharks rising out of that water without pause, a flood of constructs with no bottom to it. The amount of it was staggering. One man had poured this into the sea. Their volume is as deep as our primary male partner's. Venom said inside her, meaning Naruto, the bright tireless one she was bonded to. This shark person carries an ocean of it, the same as our chosen mate carries his fox. And the sword. A cold thread of regard ran through the thought. The sword has more mind in it than we credited. It is not a tool. It functions as we. It feeds him, it mends him from wounds that should have ended him, it makes him more than he is. He carries a symbiote of his own, and does not know to call it that. Hinata took it in and bent her concentration forward, past the wheeling sharks, out toward her destination. Far from the town's drowned shore, out over the very middle of the open sea, two points burned bright in her spiritual sight and stood sharp now in the borrowed sensing besides, two flavors of chakra she knew. Guy-sensei and Kisame. They were moving across the surface above the deep at a speed that turned them into stuttering flickers, blinking from one patch of water to the next, each touchdown blooming a great burst of chakra as fist met sword and sword met fist, the sea around them lit and churned with every exchange. Karin. Hinata angled her body toward the two distant points and poured on speed, the abyss streaming past. The biomass rose off her shoulder plates in answer to her will, unfolding upward and out into rank after rank of slim cannon-barrels that grew, locked, and began to thrum with gathering cerulean light, arrays of them sprouting along both pauldrons. Get ready. The sea went off like a struck anvil the size of a hill. KABOOM Kisame's lunging arm and the green fool's swinging leg met in the open air above the chop, his Samehada-thickened forearm against the man's shin, two slabs of bone-dense muscle slamming together with an unspeakable force. The shockwave punched outward from the point of contact in a flat white ring, and the rain-lashed water below them caved away from it on every side, a wide circle of sea simply shoved flat and out, spray hurled into the storm in a blooming crown. Kisame felt the blow run all the way up into his shoulder and rattle the teeth in his elongated jaw, and the bandaged weight of Samehada along his back hummed and drank the shock to keep his arm from breaking outright. The bastard was still smiling. Kisame snarled and brought his other arm around in a fast brutal hook, fast enough to take the man's head off his shoulders. The green blur was not there. It blinked, gone at a speed his eye could not follow, the air clapping shut where it had been, and reappeared a body's length higher with that same hideous shining grin fixed under the bowl of black hair, the leg already coming down, and the heel cracked across the side of Kisame's skull and threw his head hard to the side. He let the snarl rip out of him on the turn and made his swimming the instant his neck reached its limit, his free hand snapping down and out and closing around the man's ankle before the leg could draw back. He had him. He swung the whole green-clad weight of him in a screaming arc and hurled him out across the storm, sent him cartwheeling thirty meters over the open water, and his hands were already moving through the seals. “Suiton: Suikōdan no Jutsu! (Water Release: Water Shark Projectile!)” The sea heaved up under the flying man and resolved into a charging shark of solid water, driving up his line of flight. This was getting very old. The man twisted in the air, kicked off the rising face of the shark itself, whump, burst it apart into falling rain and flipped clear of the spray, landing on the surface of the heaving sea in a low crouch with his fingertips brushing the water, grinning at him through the downpour. Fine. Kisame dropped. He let himself fall straight back into the sea, into the cold and the dark and the pressure where he was a god and the green man was a drowning ape, the water closing over his shoulders, the storm flattening into a dull roar above the surface. He was a collar-deep when the water in front of his face folded inward and the man was simply there, having crossed the open water faster than Kisame could submerge, and the fist drove into his sternum like a dropped boulder and launched him straight back up out of the sea, breaching into the rain on a fountain of white water. How the hell?! It tore through him on the way up furiously. He flipped backward on the fly, the rain hammering his exposed back, his hands already racing through seals as he gathered a fat heavy mass of chakra into his palms to dump down onto the man the instant he reappeared. And he reappeared. He blinked in directly before Kisame's tumbling form, already inside his guard, that infuriating grin a hand's breadth from his face, and the fist was on its way to the jaw Samehada was still busy knitting back together from the last kick. Kisame aborted the jutsu. He flung the gathered chakra wide and got his thick forearm up across the punch instead, took it on the bone, krak, and drove his own fist back into the man's grinning teeth. For all his bulk he was not slow, the sea-honed body of him snapping through the rain with a speed that surprised even the green man for half a heartbeat, and the two of them traded blows mid-fall and across the chop, Kisame weaving his huge frame around the man's strikes, the man twisting around his, the rain bursting off both of them with every near miss. Kisame swung a wide hooking arm meant to fold the bastard in two. The man dropped under it and snapped up into a flipping backward kick that came together with a sound like two palms cracking flat, KRACK, and out past the breakwater a fork of lightning split the sky and the thunder answered it in the same instant, so the kick and the storm spoke as one voice. And the Kisame that took the kick across the jaw came apart into a sheeting collapse of water. The water clone burst and rained down, and from every quarter at once the others rose, a dozen Kisames surging up out of the sea around the man and lunging in from above and below, two of them breaching at his flanks with arms already swinging, more of them driving up at him through the water. The man did not fall for any of them. He twisted himself sideways in the air between the two flanking swings, folding his body around them so they passed through nothing, and came down with both hands planted flat on the surface of the heaving sea, and then he spun. He drove his whole body around on his palms, legs whipping out level above the water, a screaming horizontal whirlwind of green, and his feet carved through clone after clone in a single rotating sweep that only gained speed, his hands walking the spin on the water's skin, the kick-line of him a flat scything blade that took the legs out of two clones and the heads off two more and burst the breaching pair in the same revolution. He kicked up off his hands at the crest of the spin into a rising corkscrew jump, still turning and cutting, and the last of the clones dissolved around him into nothing but falling brine, a whole dozen of them unmade in one obscene flourish of a dance. He came down out of the spin already locked on, his head snapping toward the one real Kisame standing further off across the water, and he launched himself across the gap. Kisame grinned. Because the little fool had finally given him the half second he needed, and because it was raining hard everywhere across the whole heaving face of the sea. Every drop of it was his. The green man blinked in close, the devastating kick already uncoiling toward Kisame's ribs, and then the kick slowed. The whole flying weight of him slowed, the leg drifting in toward Kisame's side at a crawl, the rain around the two of them hanging in the air. The man blinked, the grin faltering for the first time, his eyes going wide as he felt his own body turn to honey, as he felt himself simply floating. “What's the matter, bastard?” Kisame's voice came out thick and gleeful, his sharp teeth bared. “Done running?” The sphere was vast. The whole churning volume of sea and air around the two of them, ten meters across and more, had gone over to a single suspended globe of water the storm feeding it, the man hanging in the dead center of it like an insect in amber. He opened his mouth to shout and only a fat string of bubbles climbed away from his lips. He hauled at his own arms and they would not come. He was caught. The gills along Kisame's cheeks and the sides of his neck split open, flaring wide, drinking the water straight into him, and the grin on his reshaped face pulled back into something past human, gleaming with hunger. He kicked off the floor of his own prison and lunged through the dense water at the floating man, his thickened arm drawn back, the killing blow already swinging. A spear of white light came up through the bottom of the sea and hit him in the chest. The Raikōhō (Lightning Cannon) punched up out of the deep dark water below the sphere and took Kisame full in the torso, and the front of him came apart, flesh stripping off his ribs in a boiling cloud, the blow throwing his whole bulk sideways out of his own jutsu in a tumbling spray. The water prison lost its master and burst, the entire sphere collapsing into a falling deluge that dropped the green man back into open air, and the man landed light on the chop and was already gone, launching himself after the spinning Kisame before the spray had cleared. Kisame righted himself on the fly, the cold rain sheeting into the steaming ruin of his chest, his hands flashing to wall the bastard off with another sphere, and a second beam of white lanced up out of the freaking water and clipped him and spun him bodily around, and out of the spin the green heel arrived and caught him square across the face, snapping his head back. He rode it. He let the kick throw him where it would and turned the throw into a dive, casting as he fell, a fistful of water clones tearing into being around him to swarm the man, and he hit the surface and went under and started to swim fast and zig-zagging away through the deep. And under the water, Kisame finally saw the rest of it. His sharks were gone. The school he had filled the deep with, most of them simply dispelled, hanging shreds of water where his constructs had been, and down below all of it, deeper than he had gone, a long black smear was moving through the dark at a speed that made no sense, weaving, trailing pale blue light. That. He swam, and the cold deduction landed in him with flat certainty as he went. That is the overgrown Hyuuga bitch in the black armor. The one from the dock. The same monstrous height, the same insectoid plating, the same searing white-blue jutsu. Down here. In the deep. Under the water, where nothing breathed but him. How? He cut hard left as a lightning beam drilled past where he had been. How is she down here? How long has she been down here? There was nothing in the bingo book about it. There was nothing in the file Itachi had pulled, nothing from other network, no whisper that the Konoha freak could draw breath at the bottom of the sea. He knew the abilities of the foreign shinobi worth knowing. He had never heard of this. He swam harder, throwing his huge body into tight darting cuts through the black, and the beams kept coming, white lances of lightning spearing up at him through the water from below. He slipped most of them, but lightning in water did not need to hit him, it walked outward through the sea on its own, and even his clean dodges left the current biting into him, crawling over his hide. Samehada, fused into the meat of his back now, drank the worst of it, eating the charge before it could lock his muscles, hissing against his spine each time the water lit. He twisted through a near miss and threw his hands together and seeded the deep behind him. “Suiton: Senjikizame! (Water Release: Thousand Hungry Sharks!)” Several dozen sharks of compressed water boiled out of the murk and shot away down into the dark toward the black smear, jaws snapping, and Kisame turned off them and started to climb, drawing a dome of water in tight around himself as he rose, meaning to breach and snatch the green bastard off the surface while the bitch was busy dying below. He locked onto the man's chakra up top, still wheeling and lashing through the last of the water clones on the storming surface. A beam of lightning slid past his face close enough to boil the water against his cheek. He wrenched aside on instinct, the dome warping with him. Already? The thought came sharp and disbelieving. She is through them already? Three dozen sharks, and she was already firing up at him. More beams came, one after another, and Kisame threw his climbing body into wild explosive cuts through the deep, the dome shredding and reforming, the lances of white walking past him on every side and never quite missing clean, the current crawling into him with every one. He spun into a tight rising helix to shake the angle of them, corkscrewing up through the black, and as he came out of the last turn of it there was already a ball of blinding white light the size of his own body hanging in the water right in front of his face. That was new. The deep went white. The blast threw a shockwave out through the whole sea, a hammer of pressure that punched the dark in every direction and heaved a vast dome of water up off the surface, and Kisame went up with it, blown clear out of the sea on the rising column, tumbling back into the storm. Again? AGAIN?! A lightning beam chased him up out of the water and he slipped it on the fly, his torso a single screaming sheet of stripped meat and seawater where her first cannon had opened him, the rain pouring into the wound. He twisted in the air and found the green man far across the chop, still locked in his stupid dance with the last of the water clones, still grinning and untouched. Fine! Kisame's hands tore through seal after seal, faster than they had moved all night, pulling the whole storm down into his palms, the heavy rain, the fog hanging on the sea, all of it. “Suiton: Bakusui Shōha! (Water Release: Exploding Water Colliding Wave!)” The sea reared. A wall of water taller than the breakwater stood up out of the churn along his whole front and began to fold forward, a moving cliff aimed straight down the green man's bearing, and Kisame slammed his hands together one more time inside the rising face of it. “Suiton: Senjikizame! (Water Release: Thousand Hungry Sharks!)” Hundreds of them this time, a teeming flood of compressed-water sharks born right inside the rising tide and racing down its forward face, the whole monstrous wave alive with snapping jaws, driving toward the man still fighting on the surface. Then Kisame turned and dove for the dark, falling back toward the sea, and the sea threw things at him on the way down. Drills of white lightning corkscrewed up out of the water at him and he slipped between them. Then balls of fire, actual freaking fire, rising up out of the sea against all sense and bursting in the rain around him, and he wrenched his huge frame through the gaps in them with a snarl on his ruined face. He hit the water and went under in a single heavy crash of spray, the storm sealing shut above him, and far below in the cold black the long black smear was still there, trailing its pale blue light through his domain. Kisame leveled his body toward it, bared every tooth, and launched himself down into the deep after her. The deep had two monsters in it now, and they were closing on each other. Kisame drove himself down through the black with Samehada flattened along his spine, his reshaped body cutting the water faster than anything alive had a right to move, a long contrail of disturbed sea trailing white behind his shoulders. The dark armored shape far below him stopped running and turned. It came up to meet him instead, fins sweeping back, biomass boiling out over its right gauntlet and hardening into an enormous fist veined with crawling cerulean light, a fist grown several times its size. His own had swollen the same way, knuckle and bone wrapped in dense water-fed muscle, and the two of them met in the middle of all that dark with their arms drawn back and their whole weight behind the blow. The fists met. WHUDOOM The sound of it was a flat concussive thud that punched out through the sea in a single expanding sphere, the water itself caving away from the point of impact and then slamming back, a wall of pressure that rolled up over both of them and kept going. It threw them apart like two stones spat from a sling, Kisame hurled up and back into the murk, Hinata flung down and away, the shockwave booming off into the deep and dying somewhere far out in the dark. She turned the throw into a backflip without losing a stroke, tucked, and shot herself deeper, fins raked flat, the abyss screaming past her visor. Her sight ran ahead of her body. Through the Byakugan, and through the borrowed clarity of Karin's sensing layered over it, she watched Kisame arrest his tumble in half a heartbeat and right himself, his reshaped skull swiveling, locking back onto her trace before she had even leveled out, recovered and already hunting again. Along her shoulders and her waist and down the backs of her thighs the biomass surged and reshaped itself, ranks of slim ribbed barrels locking into place and angling upward toward him, dozens of them, blooming open along her armored frame like the spines of some deep-sea thing turned outward. They began to fire. Drills of white-cerulean lightning corkscrewed up through the dark at Kisame in a rising swarm, Rendan Raikōsen (Barrage of Lightning Drills), several dozen of them grinding upward at once, forcing him off his line and to throw his huge body into hard darting cuts to slip between them. Each one she missed clean still bit at him, the lightning walking outward through the water on its own, biting into his hide, snapping his muscles taut for a half-second before Samehada drank the worst of it off his spine. He climbed away from the barrage, driven up out of the deep dark and into the higher, paler layers of the sea where the storm-light reached, and every stagger cost him. She felt Venom already moving underneath her, the co-processor running the whole churning sea at once, leaving her conscious mind free to choose. She needed her next steps, and she was reaching for them when a denser shape peeled up out of the black on her lower right and drove straight at her. Bottom right! Karin's thought cracked bright across the shared link. Big one, coming up at you! Hinata was already rolling. She let her body twist into a tight spiraling helix around the thing's charge, faster than the construct could turn, the biomass on her left forearm snapping out into a long curved scythe that lit cerulean and trailed white current into the water, and she opened the shark down its entire length as it passed beneath her, fwsh, the body sheeting apart into a billow of dispersing chakra. Her eyes never left the climbing Kisame above. Her cannons never stopped. Oh, this one is going to be fun. Venom's voice rolled up through her delightfully, the predator leaning eagerly into the work. The arrays along her body fired again, a fresh barrage chasing up after the first, and woven through the lightning drills this time came something new, fat glowing spheres of compressed Raiton rising slow and bright among the fast white needles. Above her, in the paler water, Kisame was working hard. The drills came up at him without pause from below and he wove between them with the shark's ugly grace, slipping and cutting, but there were always more, and now the slow bright balls were rising into his space as well. He snarled out a rope of bubbles and brought both swollen arms around in front of him and slammed his palms together with everything he had. WHUMP A flat shockwave punched down out of the clap and caved the water open in a cone beneath him, knocking a whole swath of the rising drills off their lines, scattering them sideways into the dark, dispersing the nearest of the lightning balls before they could reach him. The water cleared in front of his face for one breath. The next wave was already there to fill it. More drills, and more of the glowing balls among them, and the balls did not need to touch him. They burst. One after another they detonated through the dark in great soundless blooms of white, each one throwing out a flash so bright it stamped the whole deep into a flat blank glare, and Kisame wrenched his huge frame through the gaps between them, dodging the bodies of the blasts but never the light. Detonation chained into another, and the black sea around him went from a thing he ruled by sight into a drowning field of pure white blindness, the whole deep lit up white from end to end. He never saw her cross the last of the distance. By the time the glare cleared enough for him to find her, she was already on him, wreathed head to fin in the crackling white of her lightning cloak, her whole body spun down into a single grinding drill of light, and she struck him dead in the center of his chest. The Hakkeshō: Raikō Kaiten (Eight Trigrams: Lightning Drill Revolving Heaven) bored into his sternum and bit, and he convulsed around it, a thick gout of blood torn loose from his mouth and clouding dark into the water. She did not slow. Still drilling, she drove upward off the impact and dragged the whole massive weight of him with her, hauling his reshaped bulk up through the layers of the sea behind the screaming corkscrew of her body, the surface rushing down to meet them quicker with every heartbeat, a wild silver ceiling churning with rain. Kisame's body broke out of the sea first, flung up into the storm on a fountain of white water, and Hinata came out of the surface a half-beat behind him. Her right arm had already become something monstrous. The biomass had flooded down over it and built it out into a single glowing fist several times the size of her own head, lightning chakra pouring into it, gathering with a rising roar until it lit the rain around her blue-white, and on her elbow a second mouth of black biomass, a snarling Venom head, opened wide and pointed back and ignited, white fire blasting out of it like the throat of a rocket. She slammed a fan of chakra down through her boots and anchored herself flat against the heaving surface of the water as if it were stone, and then the nozzle on her elbow roared and threw the whole charged weight of that titan fist forward, straight into the cratered ruin of Kisame's chest. KRA-BOOOM The punch went off like cannonball. The shockwave of it tore outward across the sea in a flat white ring that flattened the chop for a hundred meters in every direction and shoved the falling rain back up into the sky, and Kisame was simply gone off the end of her knuckles, launched straight up into the storm on a column of spray and steam, tumbling, dwindling. Short ribbed wings snapped open off Hinata's shoulder plates, beat once against the rain, and she went up after him. The world had gone darker while they fought. Hinata noticed it the moment she cleared the surface into clean air, the storm-light thinning toward a deep bruised grey, the sun somewhere behind the wall of cloud sliding down toward the sea. Evening was coming on. Far off across the open water, past the breakwater and the rolling fog, a single bright point still wheeled and clashed against a swarming knot of cold shapes, Guy-sensei, alone out there, hanging on by himself against a school of chakra sharks that would not stop coming. She marked him, and she pulled her attention back. He could hold. Her target was the thing falling above her. Karin. She sent it down the link as she beat her wings and climbed. Are you hurt? I, I think I'm okay, came the rattled answer, the smaller woman's arms locked hard around the front of her shoulder plates, legs clamped at her waist. I'm okay. Maybe. Just, just don't, don't let go of me up here. Never. Hinata flapped once more, hard, and closed the gap on the tumbling Kisame, and as she rose the biomass boiled up over both her pauldrons and unfolded into a pair of cannons. They opened fire. A rapid barrage of lightning drills tore up off her shoulders and raced after him, and then she narrowed her focus, poured her will down into the work, and one of the cannons cultivated something larger at its mouth, a sphere of hardened white fire wrapped around a screaming plasma core, and spat it free. “Katon: Tentai no Tsuiseki-sha. (Fire Release: Celestial Trackers.)” Her doubled voice rang out under the thunder, and a single brilliant white fireball missile streaked up into the rain on a thin invisible thread of chakra spun back to her mind. High above, Kisame righted himself in the falling rain, and the lightning drills came into him in a swarm. He took two of them across his ruined torso and snarled and started backhanding the rest out of the air with his swollen forearms, batting them aside in bursts of white, and even as he did his hands flashed and a thick dome of water folded into being around him out of the storm, a shell of churning sea to break the barrage on. Then he saw the fireball. It came up at him out of the dark far faster than the drills, a hard point of white growing by the instant, and his eyes went wide and his hands snapped through a fast seal. A lance of highly pressurized water blasted out of his mouth to meet it, a tight screaming jet aimed dead at the missile to knock it from the sky. The fireball slid aside. It canted off its line at the last instant, the water stream tearing through empty rain where it had been, and Kisame had time for one furious bared-teeth snarl before he flung his whole bulk sideways to dodge it himself. The missile turned again, mid-flight, the thin chakra thread hauling it around after him, and it found his side and struck. KABOOM The fuel-air detonation bloomed white and enormous in the rain, swallowing the water dome whole and flashing it to steam in a single breath, and the blast threw Kisame's reshaped body up and away, higher into the storm, trailing smoke off the freshly charred meat of his flank. Hinata's right arm flowed and lengthened, the biomass running down past her gauntlet and hardening into a long lightning-sheathed longsword, white current crawling its edge. She folded her wings and beat them once, hard, careful of the weight on her back, and shot herself up across the gap after the airborne Kisame, her cannons still working as she came, fire drills and lightning drills alternating out of her shoulders in a flickering stutter of orange and white. Kisame took two of the drills across his shoulder before he got his arm up, and then the great Samehada-thickened forearm came across his body and caught her descending blade on the bone. She bore down on it. The lightning edge bit through into the muscle of his arm and opened a long deep cut to the bone, and he roared, and his other leg came up and around in a snapping backflip kick that caught her across the chest plate and threw her tumbling back through the rain. She caught herself on a hard backflip of her own, snapped level, and drove straight back in, fire drills hammering off her cannons ahead of her. The flames burst across his face and chest and charred him, blinding him for a stuttering half-second, and still he got the thick arm up and caught her sword a second time. The instant the swing landed she was already pulling it back and loading the next, and as her blade came down again Kisame spat a fat blast of pressurized water under himself and rode it backward, kicking his whole frame away through the rain, so that her second swing whistled through nothing but falling water. Then the sword kept coming. Black biomass surged down the length of the blade and elongated it, the edge stretching out across the gap on a whipping ribbon of hardened symbiote, doubling its reach and more, and the extended tip caught Kisame across both arms where he had thrown them up to guard and laid him open in a long crackling line. Her sword had become a sword-whip, and there was nowhere far enough to retreat from it. She drew it back and the cannons on her shoulders cultivated a fresh fireball, larger this time, the white core swelling at the muzzle, and she was a breath from launching it when Kisame threw his head back and bellowed. “ANNOYING BITCH!” The water roared up out of him as he screamed it, both arms and both legs flung wide to every quarter. “You're WORSE than that green bastard!” A dome of high-pressure water erupted off his whole body at once, a violent expanding bubble of sea conjured straight from the storm, hurled outward in every direction with enough force to crush bone. Hinata banked off the swelling face of it, wings hauling her hard backward and down, the edge of the blast catching nothing but the trailing tips of her fins as she peeled away across the rain. She righted herself two strong flaps out, level over the heaving sea, and looked back. He was already gone under. The dome had been a curtain. Behind it Kisame had dropped clean back into the water, and even as fast as it had happened her sight caught the wounds along his arms and chest knitting closed at an ugly speed, flesh crawling back over bone, Samehada feeding him and mending him from the deep. The whole sea was a roar of saturated chakra now, the lightning overhead jamming her electromagnetic sense flat, but her spiritual vision and the borrowed flavor-sense of Karin's together still painted him for her, a single dense knot of cold moving haphazardly through the black far below, darting with no pattern to it, healing as he ran. And she had spent a great deal. She felt the floor of her reserves, deeper than any human's and lower than it should be all the same, the long fight pulling at it. She reached inward along her spine without a word and pressed a silent question against the coiled presence there, and felt it answer. Along her back, threading up carefully through the bracing weight of Karin's arms and around her without fouling the smaller woman's grip, a fresh array of long ribbed tubes grew up out of the biomass and flared open to the saturated sea. She opened the siphon. The whole drowned bay was thick with conjured, ownerless chakra, Kisame's spent ocean of it standing in the water and the air, and her tubes began to drink it down, dragging the loose energy into her in slow pulling streams while Venom seized each mouthful and filtered the foreign signature out of it and rendered it clean, refueling her by the breath. This is getting old. Venom's voice came up lowly, kept clear of the link so Karin would not hear. He runs back to the water every time and the water gives him everything back. We will trade blows with this fish until the sun comes up and gets no closer to killing it. We have to take the sea away from him. Pull him out, hold him out, and end it in one strike, or this drags on forever. She kept her silence and climbed, turning slow circles over the heaving water, letting the tubes drink while she thought. It was while she was circling that the other thing reached her broken up under the thunder, faint threads of voice crackling in over the comm from far across the bay where the storm still stood over the drowned fishing town like a wall. Fragments of her squad. Kiba's bark of a laugh cut to static, Tenten's clipped, Neji's flat voice, Lee somewhere bright underneath, all of them small and chopped to pieces by the discharge in the air. The wall of rain over the town had grown darker and more violent while she fought, the storm out there feeding on itself. And under the familiar voices there were new ones now, more of them, woven in, voices she did not have time to sort. Then one more cut across all of it, loud even shredded to fragments, and her whole chest pulled tight before her mind had even named it. She knew that voice. Naruto. LOOK! Karin's thought slammed across the shared link, the calm of the borrowed sensing gone. He's, he's making them again, look down, there's so many of them, how is he, how is he even going to reach us up here? Below, the deep had filled again with cold dense shapes, dozens of them peeling up out of the black, and Hinata had half a heartbeat to wonder the same thing Karin had before one of them answered it. A shark the size of a house tore itself straight up out of the sea beneath her with a speed nothing in the water should have, breaching the surface and rocketing up into the rain on a column of spray, jaws spread, climbing right at her. Karin's frightened cry rang down the link and out of her throat both. Hinata rolled hard, slid herself sideways around the thing's snapping ascent, and put a quick lance of white lightning through the front of its skull as it passed, the head bursting apart into dispersing water. Another came up behind it. Then another. She threw herself into a tight string of evasive turns over the bay, wings hammering, the breaching sharks rising at her one after another out of the chop, and she beat hard for altitude to climb out of their reach, and saw, even as she dodged one rising knot of them, that another had already breached far higher and arced over the top of her climb and was falling now, a house of teeth and chakra dropping straight down onto her back. Karin, brace! she sent, and the tubes still drank from the sea as she did it. Tendrils erupted from her shoulders and spine in a blur and lashed out into the rain, and they spun her. Her whole body whipped around on its own center, gaining speed with every turn, wings folding in, and the lightning roared up to sheathe her. “Hakkeshō: Raikō Kaiten. (Eight Trigrams: Lightning Drill Revolving Heaven.)” This time she held the spin in place, a roaring vertical wheel of white-hot lightning, and threw the rotation outward into a wide grinding dome of electricity that swelled around her and Karin both. Every shark in the air met it at once. The falling one and the climbing ones and the half-dozen still arcing in from the flanks all hit the spinning wall of light together and came apart, the whole airborne school of them unmade in a single revolution and falling away as nothing but rain. She kept going. The instant the last of them was gone she let the spin bleed off and the biomass was already moving again, fresh cannons growing up out of her stomach plate and her chest and angling down toward the sea, and inside their throats her lightning and her fire chakra wound together and fused into something that burned pure white. “Kōseiton: Tentai Hōraku. (Stellar Release: Celestial Body Collapse.)” The battery opened fire. Large balls of incandescent plasma, miniature suns, poured down out of her toward the deep where Kisame ran, each one trailing a thin invisible chakra string back to her mind, and she steered the whole falling swarm with her sight, hauling each star around in the air to bend down onto his haphazard, weaving position below the waves. The plasma balls hit the sea and drove under. KRUMP-KRUMP-KRUMP The water erupted, towering white columns of it blasting up off the surface across a wide swath of the bay, one after another, the booms of the underwater blasts rolling together into one long shuddering roar. Through her sight Hinata watched them land. She saw Kisame's chakra stutter and break apart each time he tried to gather it, the channeling collapsing under blast after blast, and she saw the explosions themselves tearing into him, ripping great chunks of meat loose from his frame and flinging his huge body through the black like a doll. One blast caught his arm and tore the hand clean off it. Another took a foot. The water around him went dark with his blood. And then, half torn apart, his chakra detonated upward all at once. It came so violently that both of them flinched. The sea below simply ripped itself open. A vast mountain of water heaved up off the surface, still rising, already taller than the warehouses had been, a black wall of churning sea climbing into the storm, and out of every face of it the sharks came. Hundreds of them, each the size of a house, shooting out of the rising tide-mountain from its flanks and its crown and its base, a whole sea's worth of teeth flung skyward at once. Hinata threw herself into a hard climbing turn, beating for altitude, but the mountain was too vast to outrun, spreading wide as it rose, sharks already breaching off every quarter of it and dozens more arcing up higher than her own line to come raining down. At the very peak of the rising water she could see him, cradled in the heart of his own colossal jutsu, bleeding and already knitting back together, riding the mountain straight up toward her. The biomass was already crawling across her frame, thickening, building her up for what was coming. She moved. She threw herself through the sky in tight cuts, slipping the falling sharks, putting quick lances of lightning through the ones she could not slip, and all the while she bent her will inward and poured chakra into a gathering heat between her hands, channeling harder, building something large. Through the comm, chopped by the static and unmistakably him, Naruto's frantic voice broke into both her ears and Karin's at once, close as if he stood beside them. “Hinata! Hinata, can you hear m…?! I'm almost there, just hang on, hang ON, I'm coming!” And as she banked away from a falling shark she saw it happen. The thick wall of fog and rain that had stood over the drowned town since the fight began tore itself apart down the middle, peeled open, and through the gap, moving fast over the heaving sea, came flying Naruto. Cutting straight through the storm toward her, and a moment behind him several hundred of his clones boiled out of the torn fog in his wake, a streaming host of them tearing across the bay. She felt his chakra before she could think, that bright tireless burning thing, a sun cut loose and dragged low over the water, blazing a clean path through all the cold saturation Kisame had drowned the world in. In one stolen breath, mid-dodge with sharks falling all around her, the cold knot of the fight loosened at the feel of him, and her next wingbeat came lighter. Then it turned. The feel of his chakra, the warm spiritual trace of him pouring across the bay toward her, slid sideways in her, the bright clean happiness sinking into something lower and hotter, his presence soaking through her senses like warmth bleeding through deep water, a slow molten coil drawing tight low in her belly and aching outward through her core until her thighs pressed together inside the plates of her armor, and the glowing lines mapped across her skin flushed for a breath from bright cerulean to a deep pulsing violet. O-oh, oh God, what, what is that?! Karin's thought tore down the shared link in a strangled, gasping rush, somewhere between a squeak and a moan, the smaller woman's whole body jerking hard against her back. Hinata-sama, w-what, what is that? I can't, oh, oh God! Hinata's mind snapped back into itself all at once. She remembered that she was not alone behind her own eyes, that the link ran both ways, that what she felt bled straight into the young woman clinging to her spine. The violet guttered back to cerulean. I, forgive me, she sent, clamping down hard on the heat, walling it off, the embarrassment of it sharp and hot under her helmet even with a mountain of sharks falling on her. That was, that should not have, I am sorry. Hold on. Just hold on. Out across the bay, Naruto reached the open water before the mountain, and his eyes and the eyes of every clone behind him burned a hard toad-orange. His hands came up, and hundreds of pairs of hands behind him mirrored the seal in the same instant. “Fūton: Atsugai! (Wind Release: Pressure Damage!)” The roar went up from the whole host of them as one, and they loosed a single vast concentrated blast of wind down the length of the bay. It tore through the rain like a blade through cloth, scattered the falling sharks out of the air by the dozen, flattened the raining water sideways into nothing, and slammed into the rising mountain of sea at its base. The wind sheared the thing apart. The mountain shuddered, buckled, and came apart down its flank in a vast collapsing roar, its crown shattering, the hundreds of sharks on its faces blown to spray, and the gap it left opened the sky over it clean. Hinata beat hard and climbed up over the wreck of the mountain, and the great ball of fire she had been building all this time came loose from her hands and fell. It dropped into the heart of Naruto's wind, and the wind took it. Air and flame fused into a single rolling firestorm that bloomed across the whole ruin of the collapsing mountain, the wind feeding the fire and the fire riding the wind, and the firestorm boiled the rain out of the air and swallowed what was left of the water mountain whole and burned the great reshaped shape of Kisame inside it, a roaring inferno standing up off the bay where the sea had reared a breath before. How convenient, Venom murmured up through her dryly, that he should arrive at precisely this moment. We had this fish nearly grilled ourselves. The blast rolled a wide tide outward across the bay in every direction. She hoped, distantly, that it would lose its height before it reached the town. The firestorm had finished her channeling for her, lightning and fire both come to a full, screaming charge. Flying a slow tight circle over the inferno, Hinata threw both hands out in front of her and locked her fingers together, and the biomass flooded down over her joined arms and sealed them into a single enormous cannon, one barrel built of two arms, its silver channels blazing. At its base she cultivated a hyper-dense seed of pure plasma, and the electromagnetic field wound up around it with a rising whine. Inside the dying firestorm, through the flame, Kisame's charred ruin of a body was hauling itself back together one more time, his remaining hand rising, his chakra scraping itself off the floor to try for something more. “Kōseiton: Hoshi no Shisen. (Stellar Release: Gaze of the Star.)” The cannon fired. A streak of white light too fast to track punched out of the muzzle and crossed the bay in the same instant and slammed into Kisame's chest, and the chest ruptured around it, the projectile driving clean through him and hammering his whole burning bulk down toward the sea faster than gravity could pull it. And before he had fallen a body's length, a high thin whistle screamed in from behind him, a second projectile, spinning as it came. Naruto's Rasenshuriken. The two attacks reached him together. KRA-THOOOM For one impossible instant the whole dark bruised evening over the bay went bright as noon, white light flooding out across the rain and the fog and the heaving water, throwing every drop into hard relief. In the heart of it Hinata saw her own strike obliterate Kisame's lower abdomen, blowing it apart, and saw Naruto's screaming disc of wind tear into the rest of him from the far side and come apart in a sphere of countless microscopic blades, ripping through his flesh and shredding the very chakra inside him on a level too fine to see. The combined detonation went off like a second sun, and the shockwave of it slammed outward and caught both of them where they hung on the same side of the blast, Hinata and Karin and the nearest of Naruto's clones, and threw them all backward through the rain. Hinata righted herself two beats out, wings hauling against the wash, Karin still locked hard to her spine. Through the dying glare she found the falling thing that had been Kisame. His body was still coming apart as it dropped, flame and wind and plasma still eating it. And on the deeper channel, the slow spiritual sight that nothing in the storm could jam, she watched the two lives braided into that single body tear apart from one another. The man's own light guttered and went out, snuffed down past the point where any healing could call a host back. The other still burned. The second mind wound through the great sword pulsed bright and undimmed inside the falling corpse, clawing at the dead channels, fighting to drag its master's ruined flesh back up into a life that had already left it. That stopped her cold, and she felt Karin go rigid against her back as the same impossible reading lit the smaller woman's senses. The man was finished and the weapon would not let him be, hauling at him through the air, straining to wake what could not be woken. Hinata's wings bit into the storm and steadied her, and she hung level over the heaving sea while the rain came down in a solid grey weight and the wind hauled at her plates. Out past the breakwater a fork of lightning split the cloud and the thunder rolled in behind it a breath later, a long shuddering boom she felt in her chest more than heard. The storm had not eased at all. Below her the water was full of Naruto. Dozens of his clones stood scattered across the churning surface, riding the chop through the downpour, a knot of them gathered close around the patch of foam where the firestorm had drowned. She picked a clear stretch of sea among them and tilted her wings down into it. I still can't believe it. Karin's thought trembled down the link, the smaller woman's arms locked hard over her shoulder plates. We won. We actually beat that thing. I keep waiting for it to come back up out of the water, but it's just, it's gone. We won, Hinata-sama! Hinata folded her wings and dropped the last of the distance. Her sabatons touched the surface and chakra bloomed flat beneath them, holding her on the heaving sea as though it were stone, the rain driving off her in the wind. Three clones were already running at her across the chop before she had her balance, slipping on the rolling water, arms waving through the curtain of rain. “Hinata-chan!” “Hinata-chan, hey, over here, over here!” They had to shout it over the storm, and they reached her in a tangle, talking on top of one another, hands half-raised toward her and the woman clinging to her spine. “Are you okay?! You're not hurt, talk to me, are ya hurt?” “Is that Karin?! Is she breathing, hey, is she…” Another shape came down behind them in a hard slap of water, and the original rose out of his crouch, the orange sage-marks still ringing his eyes, his gaze sweeping the whole soaked knot of them at once as the thunder cracked overhead. “Hey, hey, you guys alright?! Everybody in one piece?” Along Hinata's back the last of the biomass that had kept Karin breathing and bound to her mind drew back into the armor, the fine threads sliding free of the young woman's ears, and the link guttered out between one breath and the next. Hinata reached behind her, caught Karin under the arm, and lowered her down off her spine onto the surface of the sea. Karin's sandals found the water and held, swaying in the wind, and a clone was on her at once, hands on her shoulders to steady her against the chop. “Whoa, easy, easy, I got ya. You good? You're good.” Karin shoved a sheet of soaked hair off her face, her glasses long gone, her eyes wide and not quite focused as the rain ran down them. The words came out of her in a rush, half to the clone and half to the storm, tumbling over each other, about the cold and the dark and the sharks circling in the deep, about breathing down there with something warm sealed over her face, about the great sword that had come apart and stitched itself back together and would not stay dead. “…and the wound just closed while he was still running, the whole arm grew back, and the sword, the sword has a mind, it has its own, you don't understand what it felt like down there…” The clone holding her nodded along over the noise of the rain, plainly understanding none of it. The original Naruto came to her through the downpour and stopped close, and he had to tip his head all the way back to find her visor. She had not moved. She stood over them with the storm breaking across her plates and her helmet angled down at the black water, very still in the middle of all that lashing weather, looking at something none of them could see, and the stillness of her pulled the grin off his face. “Hinata-chan.” His voice dropped under the rain, careful now. “I felt that shark freak go out. His whole chakra just, snuffed, like a candle. It's done, right?” He searched the blank obsidian of her visor, and a stroke of lightning whitened it for an instant. “Is there… is there somethin' else?” Her visor came around to him all at once. “There is one thing I still have to do.” Her doubled voice rolled out under the thunder, the deep resonance steady beneath her own. “Wait here. All of you. I will not be long.” She bent and drove herself down through the surface before the nearest clone could shout after her. The storm sealed shut over her helmet and the deep took her. The thunder that had been hammering the bay flattened into a slow pressure rolling through the water, a distant boom she felt in her chestplate more than heard, the lightning reaching down after her only as faint grey pulses that died a few meters under the chop. Her spiracles flared open along her ribs without being asked, drinking the sea straight into her before she had finished her first stroke down, and her fins swept back to drive her into the dark. The saturation had begun to thin at last. With the great heart stopped above her, the ocean of conjured chakra Kisame had drowned the bay in was coming undone, the all-over fog of it pulling apart into clear cold water, and her sight returned to her by degrees, the Byakugan pushing clean through the black where an hour ago it had drowned in white noise. She found the wreck of him fast, far below and still sinking, turning slow as it went, trailing a dark ribbon of itself down toward a floor she could not see. She swept her fins and went after it. She slowed as she closed, and her sight resolved the thing wound around the corpse. The great sword had come off his back. It had unwrapped itself from its bandages and crawled the length of his sinking body and clenched around his chest like a thing in grief, its scaled hide rippling, and she watched it push thin pulses of its own chakra down into the dead meat of him, still trying to call a host back across a line already crossed. Hinata drew alongside and reached for the hilt. The sword answered. Its whole hide bristled at once, every scale standing on end, and a crown of short blades snapped out around the handle, shnk, and it spun on the body faster than her eye could follow and drove its bladed butt straight at her visor. She got a forearm up on instinct and the strike rang off the hardened biomass and shoved her back through the water, surprise jolting through her before her mind had caught up to it. She caught herself a stroke out and stilled, fins flared, blades half-formed along her arms. The sword did not come after her. It hung over its dead master one beat longer, scales settling, the bladed crown sinking back into the handle, and then it let him go, uncoiling off the sinking corpse and turning away into the deep on its own, a long ribbed shadow making for darker water, leaving behind the body it could not save. Hinata blinked behind her visor, watching it go until the black swallowed it. Then she went down to the body. The right arm was gone, torn away at the shoulder in one of the last blasts, the stump trailing dark into the current. The left still hung at his side, drifting with the slow turn of his fall. She caught the cold heavy hand and turned it over, and there on the ring finger sat the band she had come down for. She worked it off the swollen knuckle and opened her grip on the rest of him, and the great ruined shape slid past her hand and on down, dwindling into the black until it was gone. She held the ring up to her visor and let her enhanced sight pour over it in the dark. It was the same as the others, the same as the three she had already taken and locked away, cut from that pale off-world bio-crystal that read under the Byakugan as kin to the great Husk in the Akatsuki's cave. A single character stood carved in its face, 南, South. And where the three she carried had gone dark and dead the moment their bearers fell, locked inert, this one still lived. A faint pulse moved in the crystal slowly, a thread of something running through it yet. It was still working. The Hivemind had told her this hour would come. An active ring, and the way to open it folded down into her the same way the Klyntar folded everything, waiting under her thoughts for the moment she would need it. She closed her hand around the band, stilled herself in the cold water, and reached for that knowledge. Venom rose to meet her. Fine tendrils of black biomass slid from the seams of her gauntlet and wound around the ring, threading into its pulse, finding the live current and pressing in. The connection took, and her mind went out of her all at once. It was torn off its mooring and flung forward at a speed that had no body in it, the black water and the dwindling corpse and her own armored shape dropping away behind her, pulled down a long bright channel faster than thought while the world streamed past. Then it opened, and a vast cavern stood around her. She was there and not there both, her whole self projected into a place her body had never entered, standing high in the dark on something cold and curved. She looked down and found it was a finger. She stood near the tip of an enormous stone finger, one of a pair of great cupped hands thrust up out of the cavern floor, and above the hands rose the rest of it, the colossal seated shape of the Husk, the same dead void-statue her sight had found once before through miles of solid rock, the day they came for the Kazekage. Even projected, even at this distance, the wrongness of it pressed on her, that void-like absence where a presence should sit, the shed shell of something vast and long gone. Something had begun to fill it. Deep in the hollow dark inside the Husk a light had kindled, and one of the great carved eyes in its face had come alive and rolled slow in its socket, sweeping the cavern, while the others around it hung dark. The light at its core looked small against the size of the thing, a single coal in a cathedral, and she pushed her sight in toward it, and her stomach dropped. It only looked small because the dark that held it was so much greater. The light itself was enormous, a roiling well of chakra she could have drowned the whole town inside, and she knew its tone. She had felt it once on a lake, in a monster the size of a hill that spat water like a god, and it lived in her every day banked low behind the navel of the man she had claimed, his inner beast burning quiet in its cage. The same fire. A Tailed Beast, vast past reckoning, and even so it was dwarfed, a single bright drop rolling in the bottom of that immense and patient void. They have one already, the understanding landed. One taken, and shut inside that thing. She tore her sight off the light and swept the cavern, and found the body. It lay sprawled in the open on the floor far below the cupped hands, a big armored man, dead, his limbs flung wrong. A heavy plated visor and a winding of white cloth hid his face whole, every line of him broken, the armor staved in, whatever had lived in him gone up into the dark above and left the husk of him behind. Other shapes stood out along the fingers around her, figures spaced along the great stone digits, each of them keyed into this same projected dark the way she was, and one by one their heads were turning. They had felt her arrive, felt a wrong presence stand up among them where one of their own should have stood. Her sight locked onto one of them and held. He stood on the far side of the great cupped hands from her, his eyes lavender and ringed, spreading out from the pupil. She had met those eyes once before. That same calm ringed gaze had swung onto her across all that stone the day they breached the Akatsuki's cave, finding her remote sight clean through the rock as though no rock stood between them, and since then Jiraiya had given the eyes a name in the Hokage's office, the doujutsu of the student he had long thought dead. The Rinnegan. And here it was, turned full on her again across the cavern. Then his signature reached her. It was alien, older and stranger than anything human had a right to be, a structure to it that fit no shinobi she had ever read. And through all that strangeness it was familiar. In the way a stranger's face can be familiar, some echo buried in it of a person she could not place, as though she had stumbled on a relative she never knew she had, or the kin of someone she did know. The resonance rang against her own bones and against a memory she could not reach down to, and she could not name it. His chakra was enormous, and more dangerous than anything else in that cavern. Around him the very space seemed to lean. She felt it even through the projection, a fine wrongness in the pull of things near his still form, gravity itself flexing and resettling around him, exactly as Jiraiya had warned them it would. A voice moved through the cavern in unhurried tone, no more weight in it than a man remarking on the rain. “It seems Kisame is out of commission.” The words had barely settled before the dark began to wobble around her, the whole projected cavern shivering at its edges, the cold footing of the stone finger coming loose beneath her. He was pushing her out. Hinata and Venom snapped into motion as one, their combined minds both clutching at everything in reach at once, dragging in every line and shadow of the place, the shape of the cavern, the count of the figures, the tone of the buried beast, the cold familiar weight of the ringed-eyed man, hauling all of it down into memory before the door could close. It closed anyway. The cavern tore away from her, the bright channel reversed, and her mind snapped back down its length at that same bodiless speed and slammed home behind her eyes. The cold black water was around her again. Hinata blinked inside her visor. The ring sat dark in her fist now, the live thread gone out of it, and she had drifted while she was under, sinking with the body she had let go, the dim grey smear of the surface a long way up. They have taken one. Venom's voice came up through her. At least one of the beasts is inside that thing now. We felt it the same as you, and we felt more, small lives moving through the stone of it, faint signatures running all through the Husk like blood through a body. It is starting to wake. Then they have already begun. Hinata answered grimly inside the water. One beast taken, and that thing stirring around it. This is worse than we feared. We need to move. She turned her sight up and found them, the bright scattered knot of Naruto and his clones riding the heaving surface, the small steady flame of Karin among them, all of them waiting where she had left them. She drew the ring back into the biomass at her wrist, swept her fins, and drove herself up toward the distant light. We pulled the Three-Tails out of their hands, she thought as she climbed, the grey ceiling growing nearer with every stroke. Sealed it away where they will never reach it. And it has not cost them a single step. They simply went on without it, and took another. She drove upward through the cold toward the storm waiting on the surface. The sea split and threw her up into the storm. Hinata broke the surface on a fountain of white water and the noise of it all slammed back over her, rain and wind and a long roll of thunder out in the fog. Her wings snapped off her shoulder plates and beat once, hauling her up out of the chop and across to the patch of heaving water where Naruto stood waiting among his clones, and she came down beside him with chakra blooming flat under her sabatons to hold her on the rolling swell. Karin's voice was already going when Hinata's boots found the surface, the small sensor mid-rant at a knot of clones with both hands in the air. “…and then they all just winked OUT at once! Fifty of them, poof, gone, in one second! Do you have any idea what that feels like from the inside?! I thought something ATE you!” “That was the boss callin' us back, not, like, a sea monster,” a clone said, leaning away from the finger she was pointing at his chest. “It FELT like a sea monster!” Then they all caught sight of Hinata standing in the rain among them and the bickering cut off at once, the clones and the real Naruto and Karin turning and closing in around her armored bulk on the water. Naruto craned up at her visor, soaked to the skin, the orange sage-marks faded from his eyes now. “Hinata-chan! You good? You just dove and left us up here, what'd you even go down there for?” She lifted her hand and opened it between them. The ring sat dark in her armored palm, the single character carved into its face catching the next stroke of lightning. Naruto's whole face changed. “Hold on. That's, that's an Akatsuki ring. You went down there for his ring?” Karin leaned in, screwed her eyes nearly shut to peer at it through the curtain of her dripping hair, then drew back, blinked, and dug a hand into the small waterproof pouch at her hip. A spare pair of glasses came out of it in a tiny puff of unsealing smoke, and she shoved them onto her nose and leaned in again. “Okay. A ring.” She looked from the band to Naruto to Hinata, plainly not following the weight of it. “It's important, then? You're both looking at it like it bit somebody.” She straightened and gave a firm nod anyway. “Right. Important ring. I'm going to trust you two know why.” “The plan changes with this,” Hinata said, closing her hand around it. “Okay, but what is the plan?” Karin pushed the new glasses up her nose. “And where's Guy-sensei? He was out here trading blows with the shark freak, last I felt of him.” “Kisame's last attack threw him back to the direction of the shore,” Hinata said, the doubled voice steady under the rain. “When the sea reared up, it drove him in toward the town. He is alive, and he is there.” “Yeah, I felt him off that way too,” Naruto said, jerking a thumb back into the grey wall of fog. “Bushy-brow sensei, can't miss him, he burns bright.” “Then we go back to the fishing town and regroup with the…” FWOOOM A roar of wind tore the rest of it out of her mouth. The storm came down on the three of them all at once, a gust slamming across the open water hard enough to stagger even the clones, the rain folding sideways into a solid grey sheet, and out past them the sea heaved itself up into long black ridges that climbed higher as they watched, the thunder cracking right on the heels of the lightning now with no gap left between. They turned into it together and looked. Hinata's Byakugan flared behind the visor, the veins blooming at her temples, and she pushed her sight wide through the downpour. “The fight has carried us out,” she called, pitching the doubled voice over the wind and the breaking water. “We are a long way from the shore, and the storm has shut the road back to the town. But one of the islands is close.” She turned her helmet a few degrees and leveled an armored hand at a darker mass humped low under the clouds. “There. We make for that.” Naruto's clones burst as one, hundreds of them across the heaving sea popping into smoke that the rain flattened the instant it formed, and the real Naruto wiped his face and nodded hard. “Right. Yeah. The island, c'mon!” The three of them dropped low and ran, chakra flaring under their feet as they tore across the surface of the rising sea in long flat sprints, breaking each climbing wave with a hard chakra-loaded leap that flung them a dozen meters at a stretch. The dark mass rose out of the murk as they closed, low at first and then lifting, the long ragged outline of a large island heaving up ahead of them with the surf breaking white along its base. Their battle had dragged them nearly to the islands after all. They came off the last wave together and dropped through the rain onto bare black rock and a thin grey beach, boots sinking into the wet sand, the sea hauling back out behind them in a long suck of foam. No light or boat or net showed anywhere along the shore, only the empty back of the island taking the full weight of the storm. Ahead the beach ran up into a tumbled wall of rock, great dark slabs of it heaped against the spine of the island. They picked their way up into it with Hinata's sight cutting ahead, and found the opening she was looking for, a wide mouth of stone set back under an overhang where the rock folded in on itself, deep enough to swallow the wind. They went in out of the storm one after another, and the roar of it dropped away behind them. “Ugh. This rain. This stupid, stupid rain.” Naruto stood in the middle of the cave wringing out the hem of his jacket, then gave up on his hands and ran a pulse of chakra through the whole garment instead, the water boiling out of the cloth in a thin hissing cloud, leaving him dry from collar to boots. “It just drags everything down, ya know? Cold and heavy and you can't see a thing and your socks are soaked. I hate fighting in the rain.” Around him a dozen of his clones were already working, two of them snapping foldable chairs open out of a scroll while the others stacked driftwood and a bundle of sealed kindling into a ring of stones, laying out a whole campsite in the span of a minute. “It's the worst I've ever seen, and I grew up around a lot of weather,” Karin said. She was sitting on one of the unfolded chairs with her knees drawn up, stripped down to the fishnet underlayer with her vest and jacket and the rest of her soaked gear hung dripping along a line of small folding driers a clone had staked out by the wall, wringing a fistful of her own red hair out over the stone floor. “And I'll tell you something else. We came in on the dead side of this rock. No lights, no boats.” She nodded out at the black mouth of the cave. “There's a fishing village on this island somewhere, has to be, but it sure isn't here.” Light bloomed in the ring of stones, a small curl of white fire leaping off Hinata's fingertips and catching in the kindling, fwoom, and the campfire took and steadied into a low orange glow that pushed the dark back to the walls. The clones that had built the camp dispelled themselves in a soft rolling chain of pops, leaving the three of them alone. Hinata sat back into her own chair, a wide reinforced thing of heavy plastic she had unsealed to take her weight, and let her helmet break apart and seal away off her head in a thin curl of smoke. Her midnight-blue hair was bound back in a tight bun, and in the dark of the cave with only the fire on her, the glowing silver lines that threaded her temples and the soft cerulean light of her eyes made something quietly otherworldly of her face. Naruto snapped his own chair open and dropped it down beside hers, glanced over, and forgot for a second what he was doing, the firelight moving in those luminous eyes. Even sitting she rose over the both of them, her head riding high above his where he settled in at her side. He shook himself, leaned over, and started digging through the seals stitched up the inside of his jacket. “Okay, hang on, I packed food before we shipped out, it's in here somewhere, just gotta find the right…” The dark plating across the upper part of Hinata's chest came apart. It thinned and vanished into the air, the segmented armor over her breastbone dissolving away, and the matte-black undersuit beneath it went the same way a breath later, peeling back off her skin until the deep line of her cleavage stood open in the firelight, the full heavy swell of her breasts pushed close together and the silver Weave glowing through the skin there, the bright knot of tribal lines of patterns gathered at her solar plexus pulsing a soft cerulean. Without any change in her face she slid her right hand down into the warm valley between them, and it came back out with a bar, a long dense dark thing the length of her forearm pulling free of the seal at her sternum in a wisp of smoke, pmf. She brought it up and bit a piece off the end, crunch, chewing. Naruto's hand had stopped inside his jacket. Karin's hair had stopped dripping in her fist. Karin's face went red to the ears and she snapped her gaze sideways into the fire and held it there with great deliberation. Naruto did not look away at all, his eyes fixed and his mouth slightly open, until something caught up with him and he blinked hard and gave his head a small shake. “…uh. Hinata-chan. What, uh. What is that?” Hinata blinked, and a small smile touched her mouth as she looked over at him. She stopped chewing and held the dark bar up between them, turning it so the firelight ran along its pressed surface. “It is a protein bar. I make them for situations like this one.” The doubled voice warmed. “Each one holds a great deal. Several dozen different foods, pressed down together until almost nothing is left but the nourishment. One of these can carry me through a full day of fighting.” The fire popped into the silence that followed. Naruto stared and Karin stared into the flames. Then Hinata blinked again, as if catching herself. “Oh. Forgive me. It is rude of me, to eat in front of you both.” Her left hand was already rising, sliding down into her cleavage after the first. “Naruto-kun. Would you like one as well?” “Y-yeah,” Naruto said, mesmerized, his eyes following her hand, and then he caught himself a second time and shook his head fast, color climbing his neck. “I mean, no, no, I'm good. I packed my own stuff, I've got plenty, you don't gotta, uh.” He patted the seals on his jacket as if to prove it. “All right.” Hinata drew her left hand back out empty, and the dark undersuit flowed up over her skin again and the armor plating re-formed across her chest in a soft black ripple, sealing her back to the collar, and she went back to her bar with another crunch. The fire crackled between them for a moment. “How did you come to be here, Naruto-kun?” she asked, the bar held loose in her fingers. “Your team was sent to the Land of Grass. That is a long way from a storm in the southern sea.” Across the fire Karin shifted in her chair, drawing her knees a little tighter, and turned her face toward Naruto with the embarrassment still sitting high on her cheeks. Naruto blew out a breath and scrubbed the back of his head, his energy settling into something steadier as he found the thread. “Right, okay, so. We get to the base in Grass, and the place has already gone to hell. The whole thing's a rogue fortress now, dug into the side of this dead dry mountain, and there's Orochimaru's people crawling all over the country around it.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “We cleared the ones in the open, but most of 'em were holed up inside the mountain, so we had to wait for the squads behind us and dig in for a siege. And some of those mutants in there threw in with the rogues too.” He spread his hands. “So me and Captain Yamato and Kakashi-sensei put our heads together, used some earth jutsu to punch a way in from under them while the other squads hit the front. I'm, uh, I'm pretty rough at the earth stuff, but the captain carried it. We got inside and cleaned the whole thing out. Place was packed wall to wall, I'm telling ya, the fighting just did not stop.” “Hold on.” Karin's head came up, her voice sharpening. “If it was that bad, that close to their own border, why didn't the Grass Village deal with it? It's their country.” Her lip curled. “I hate that village.” “Yeah, that's exactly what we said,” Naruto said, pointing at her. “But then we start squeezing the bandits we caught and going through their papers, and turns out a whole bunch of those rogues were Grass shinobi. Their own people. A lot of folks had been signing up with Orochimaru, bandits, villagers, Grass nin, all of 'em, and then the snake just lost his grip on the whole thing. He hadn't shown his face there in a long, long time, and the ones left holding the base figured nobody was coming and went rogue on their own.” Hinata's eyes moved over him while he talked, and caught the marks the rain had not washed off. The orange cloth of his jacket was scorched pale in two places along one arm, and there was a clean little tear at his shoulder seam and another at his hip where something had gone through. “You fought hard for it,” she said. “We found the very same thing in the base we took. It had been abandoned by its master long before we reached it, and the ones left behind had gone rogue, selling off whatever they could to whoever would pay.” “Right? Same story.” Naruto nodded. “So we wring out the high-up ones, and lemme tell ya, Snake Lady volunteered for that part way too fast and had way too much fun with it, and we dig through everything, and that's when we find there's another base down here in the islands. Me and the team, we put it together that this is where the snake bastard's gotta be holed up. Him and…” He paused half a beat. “And Sasuke.” He pushed on. “So we hand the Grass base off to the squads behind us and move out to River Country. I figured I'd link up with you guys there.” His gaze came up to her. “But the guy running the camp at that old base you cleared out, he tells us all about you. Your whole squad, where you'd gone. So we hustled down to the coast to catch up.” His jaw tightened. “And on the way through, going through that town you guys liberated, we ran into Itachi.” The name pulled Hinata fully around to him. “Itachi. Is everyone all right?” The doubled voice dropped, the resonance hardening beneath it. “Whoa, hey, everybody's fine, nobody got hurt.” Naruto put a hand up quickly, taking Karin into the look too. “He barely even fought us. Poked at us a little and then he took off, just left. Everybody's okay, I promise.” Hinata held on his face. There was more sitting behind it, a tightness around his eyes the reassurance had not reached, and she let it lie for now. Naruto went on. “Anyway, by the time we get to the fishing village, your squad's already there trying to patch the place up, and then I hear over the line that you and Bushy-brow sensei and Karin are out on the water going toe to toe with the shark guy.” A little of the old fire came back into his grin. “Yeah, I wasn't gonna sit that one out. I came running.” Karin sat up. “Wait. Sakura's in the fishing town?” “Yeah, the whole team's there, helping out,” Naruto said. “Then we wait.” Karin tugged her drying jacket an inch straighter on the line without getting up. “Our squads catch up to us here, and in the meantime we're stuck riding out this weather whether we like it or not.” Naruto's leg started bouncing. “Or. Hear me out. We take a breather, and then we just go. Find Sasuke ourselves while we've got the jump on him.” “That is insane,” Karin said flatly. “Three of us, no backup, no idea which island, walking into Orochimaru's base in the middle of a storm. Absolutely not.” “Okay, okay.” Naruto put both hands up. “Bad idea. Forget I even said it.” “Even if Sasuke is on these islands,” Hinata said, “he is going nowhere in weather like this. No boat is crossing those channels tonight. He will keep until morning.” “…Yeah.” Naruto deflated, the leg going still. “Yeah, you're right.” They let it go quiet. For a while there was only the snap and settle of the fire and the long rolling booms of thunder coming muffled through the rock. Then Naruto slapped both hands down on his knees and pushed up out of his chair. “All right. We all had a rough one out there. Let's grab some rest while we can.” He hooked the chair up under one arm and carried it over toward the mouth of the cave, dropping it down where the firelight thinned and the wet wind reached in. “I'll take first watch.” Hinata watched him settle in at the edge of the dark, and something in her chest eased that had been wound tight since the dock. Stretched as their situation was, marooned on a black rock with an enemy base somewhere out in the channels, she was glad past saying that he was here. Her deeper sense had him without her reaching for it, that bright tireless warmth of his pouring off him and filling the cave at her back, a sun banked low in the dark. If this were not a mission, she thought, with the heat of him so near and the long fight still humming in her blood, she would already have him under her on the cave floor and be working her hips down against him until he forgot his own name. She drew a slow breath and let the thought bank itself back down. Across the fire, Karin's eyes kept drifting to Naruto's back at the cave mouth and pulling away again. Hinata marked it without a flicker of jealousy. She understood it now in a way she had not before the fight, those long minutes in the deep with their minds laid open, when she had ridden inside Karin's sense and felt the world the way the sensor felt it, every living thing a flavor and a warmth. She knew now how a presence like Naruto's would pull at someone built that way, a great steady fire in a cold world. It was not Karin's fault that he was made the way he was. “Um. Hinata-sama?” Karin's voice came out small, the words picked one at a time. Hinata turned her glowing eyes to her. “Yes?” “When we were out there. In the water. When we had the, the mind thing open.” Karin's hands knotted in her lap, the red climbing her face again. “When he showed up. When Naruto got here. I, um. I felt it. What you felt. When he…” She stopped, mortified, the memory of it plainly scalding. The corner of Hinata's mouth curved up. She said nothing, and let the young woman flounder. “And I just wanted to ask, you don't have to answer, this is probably so rude, I'm sorry.” Karin pushed her glasses up and pressed on against her own better judgment. “Is it always like that? When he's near you. Do you, do you always feel like, like that?” “Sometimes it is exactly like that,” Hinata said, the doubled voice warm and amused, a low purr running under it. “You will have to forgive me for letting it slip the leash. I did not mean to share it with you quite so… completely.” Karin made a strangled noise and dropped her face into both hands. “Okay. That was a bad question. That was such a bad question to ask, I'm sorry, please forget I asked it.” The fire burned down a little, and the conversation died with it, and for a long while there was only the storm. Sometime after, Hinata's ear caught the change in Karin's breathing and she looked over to find the smaller woman slumped sideways in her chair, glasses gone crooked, fast asleep where she sat, the cold and the long fight finally pulling her under. Hinata let her Byakugan bloom and swept the cave and the rock around it and the streaming black beach beyond, and found nothing in any of it but the storm and the three of them. Along her spine she could feel Venom settled and quiet, the alien coil of it gone calm and busy, already breaking the dense bar down and feeding it slowly back into her. She sealed the heavy chair away under her in a curl of smoke and rose to her full height, and at the top of the motion her bun brushed the wet rock of the ceiling and she had to duck her head and round her shoulders, folding herself down under the low stone as she crossed the cave. She came up behind Naruto at the cave mouth. The wet wind reached in and stirred his hair, and she could feel the impatience still running through him under the stillness, his hands loosely clasped before him, his eyes half closed, trying and not quite managing to meditate while the rain came down in a roaring grey weight a step past his boots. She laid her armored hand on his shoulder, as light as she could make it. He looked up at her, calm, the impatience smoothing as he found her face. “Hey. Hinata-chan.” “There was more, with Itachi,” she said, low, keeping it under the rain so it stayed between them. “More than you told us by the fire. I saw it on you.” Naruto's nodded. “Yeah.” He let a breath go and looked back out into the rain. “Yeah, there was. Still kinda turning it over, honestly.” She unsealed the heavy chair again beside his in a curl of smoke and lowered herself into it, settling in close at his side, and waited. After a while he started. “So we're coming through that town you guys cleaned out, and there he is, just standing there waiting on us. And first thing, before anybody throws a punch, he tells us straight out that the Akatsuki are hunting for clues to find Orochimaru. Just says it. Like he's doing us a favor.” His hands tightened. “Then everybody jumps him at once, and for a second there, he gets me. Catches me in one of those genjutsu of his, that eye stuff.” The breath went still in Hinata's chest. She knew the inside of that man's illusions. She had stood in one herself, years ago, and walked out of it only because Venom had risen up and devoured the thing whole from within before it could close its teeth on her. “What happened in it?” she asked, very quiet. “That's the thing. Almost nothing.” Naruto huffed. “So I figure, fine, you wanna play head games, I'll throw you off. I start needling him. Telling him about Danzo, the whole thing, the raid, how it all came out, how the whole village knows now what really happened to his clan and who really gave the order.” He shook his head slowly. “And he takes it calm. Calmer than I thought. I swear, Hinata-chan, he looked relieved, like I'd just lifted a weight off him. And then he starts asking me questions. About the big conference, all of it, what got said, what got decided, every detail. And the more I tell him the happier he gets. I don't know why, maybe because the blame got split. Because now the whole world knows Danzo's hands were in it too.” He turned to her, still wrong-footed. “Caught me totally flat. I went in there to mess with him and he's just, grateful.” Hinata turned it over. “He was the only one the world ever blamed for the slaughter of his clan,” she said slowly. “He carried all of it alone. And now it is shared out, between him and the dead old man who truly gave the order.” Her glowing eyes narrowed at the rain. “Of course he is relieved. Some part of the truth finally reached the daylight.” “Yeah. That's where I landed too.” Naruto nodded. “But then it gets weird. Because then he tells me there was somebody else mixed up in that whole massacre. A third one, somebody completely separate from Danzo.” He hesitated. “He says it was Uchiha Madara.” Hinata went still. “Madara?” The name came out of her on a note of plain surprise. She had only ever met it in a classroom, in the dry pages of a history scroll. “Naruto-kun, Uchiha Madara lived in the time of the First Hokage. He founded the Uchiha. He fought the First and died for it. That was generations ago.” “I know, I know, that's exactly what I thought, I figured he was feeding me a load of garbage,” Naruto said. “But he didn't just say it. He showed me. Inside the illusion. Put the guy right in front of me, like he was standing there, then tells me this Madara is alive, and he's in the Akatsuki right now, and he showed me what he looks like these days.” Hinata's mind was already moving fast. Between Sasori's interrogation and everything else they had dragged out of the Akatsuki's broken pieces, she and Naruto knew the organization nearly to a man, the leader and his partner in the Rain, the ones they had killed and taken, the spy, the ones still loose. She held the count in her head and turned it. “We know nearly all of them now,” she murmured. “But the intelligence was clear that one place was still open. One more they meant to bring in, that we have nothing at all on.” She looked at him. “Perhaps that is who he was pointing you toward.” “Maybe. Yeah, maybe.” Naruto lifted a shoulder. “Anyway, soon as he'd shown me all that, he dropped the genjutsu and bolted. Didn't stick around for a fight. And the second I came out of it I told the whole team every word of it.” “And do you believe him?” Hinata asked. “No.” It came out of him instantly. “No, I don't believe a single word out of that guy's mouth, and I don't trust whatever he stuck in my head either. He's killed I don't even know how many innocent people, he's running with the bastards trying to tear the whole world apart, and everything that's happened to Sasuke, all of it, that's on him.” His hands had closed into fists on his knees, and he breathed out slow. “…But I keep chewing on it anyway. That's the part that's eating at me. I don't believe him and I can't put it down.” “Then why show you any of it?” Hinata said, half to herself, watching the storm. “Beats me.” Naruto scrubbed his face with both hands, and when they came down there was a tired crooked grin under them. “Honestly? I think the guy's finally cracked. Standing out in the rain handing out his big family secrets to the guy trying to deck him.” He groaned and tipped his head back against the rock. “And you know the worst part? Now I gotta write the whole thing up. Word for word. Every single thing he said and showed me, full report, soon as we're back. Pages and pages of it. I'm gonna be chained to a desk for a week.” A small laugh slipped out of Hinata, warm under the doubled voice. “Perhaps that was his plan from the start,” she said. “Bury you in paperwork. Slow you down for a week with a pen instead of a blade.” “Right?!” Naruto pointed at her, brightening. “That's gotta be it. The real evil scheme. Whole trouble with bad guys is they never know when to shut their mouths, and now I'm the one drowning under a stack of forms over it.” He shook his head, grinning out at the rain, and Hinata's hand found his shoulder again and stayed there as the two of them looked out into the roaring dark. The laughter wore itself out, and the cave went quiet around them but for the storm. Far out in the fog a fork of lightning lit nothing the eye could find, and the thunder came after it, a boom that rolled in through the rock and faded into the steady roar of the rain past his boots. The mist sat thick over the black beach a step beyond the cave mouth, swallowing the sea and the sky both. The pause stretched. Past the cave mouth the rain kept up its steady roar and a last peal of thunder rolled itself out far over the water, the fog beyond the stone still sitting white and unbroken across the dark. Naruto drew a couple of slow breaths beside her and tipped his head back to find her face, the way he always had to, her seated height still riding well above his own. His gaze drifted off her to the storm beyond the cave mouth, swept once over the fog and the dark, and came back, and the careful line of his mouth bent up into a grin. It pulled a blink out of her. And then she felt it, low, a warm weight settling over the armored swell of her thigh. She looked down. His hand had come to rest on the plate over her thigh, palm flat, fingers spread wide across the midnight-blue alloy, and through the armor and the seams and the Weave beneath it the heat of him reached her all the same. Along her spine the coiled presence woke at once, uncurling, leaning into the contact with an interested hum, the silver filigree under her skin warming a half-shade toward violet. It seemed she was not the only one whose mind had wandered while the fire burned down. “Somethin' wrong, Hinata-chan?” he asked lowly, the grin not moving. Her answer was a slow breath drawn in through her nose, and the lines mapped across her temples flushed for the length of that breath from cerulean to a deep pulsing violet before they guttered back. Naruto's eyes caught the shift of color and stayed on it. She let two more breaths move through her in silence, and under the warmth climbing through her she sent her senses out wide on old reflex, sweeping the cave and the rock above it and the streaming dark of the beach for anything at all. She had begun to shift her weight forward off the chair, ready to rise and turn the moment into something else, when the sweep snagged on something far out in the rain and went cold. Her gaze cut to the cave mouth. She came up out of the chair fast, and her crown drove toward the low wet stone of the ceiling so that she had to check the motion and fold forward at the waist, stooping under the rock with her glowing eyes fixed past Naruto on the storm. He was on his feet beside her in the same breath, his hand gone from her thigh, his own senses already reaching. “You feel that too?” he breathed, barely over the rain. She gave a single sharp nod. He turned his head back into the dark of the cave and pitched his voice into a hard whisper-shout. “Karin!” Behind them Karin came awake all at once with a jolt and a scrape of her chair, gear rustling as she snatched it up off the line. “I'm on it, I'm on it, I've got them, gimme a second…” She was up and moving before her eyes had fully opened, her senses snapping out ahead of her. A moment later the three of them stood at the mouth of the cave where the rock folded back toward the shore. From the slight rise of the overhang the beach ran out below them and away into the rain, and far down it, through the fog, a cluster of figures moved along the waterline. “Contact,” Karin whispered. They fixed on the far shapes together, each of them bending their own sight down the long stretch of streaming dark. The cluster resolved into a dozen or so people, armed, running hard along the shoreline. Their clothes hung off them in tatters, scorched black in places, and even at this distance the way they moved spoke of exhaustion past the point of sense, some of them limping, some clutching wounds, all of them driving themselves on as though whatever was behind them was worse than the storm. Naruto's eyes narrowed under the rain. “Those guys…” he murmured. “The cut of 'em, the gear. They look just like the snake bastard's goons we dug outta the Grass base.” The torn cloth carried it even soaked through, the same dull purple worked into the seams and the sashes. Karin's brow was furrowed, her hands half-raised in front of her. “I'm not picking up anybody else near them,” she breathed. “Just them, and us. They're coming up from back that way, from where the village should be.” Hinata did not like the shape of it. Her glowing eyes stayed locked on the running figures, the violet long gone from her temples, the cerulean burning steady. “Their chakra is nearly spent, drained to the floor, and still higher than any civilian's.” A grin tugged back onto Naruto's face, and his hands were already rising into a familiar cross seal, chakra gathering thick around him. “Heh. Guess that's our break done with.” Shadow clones bloomed out of the smoke around him in a rolling chain and peeled away into the storm, low and fast over the rocks, fanning wide to come at the shoreline from every angle. Down the beach the rogues ran until one of them could not run anymore. “Hold up! Hold up, damn it, we gotta stop, just, just a minute…” The man at the back staggered to a halt with his hands braced on his knees, and one after another the rest of them slowed and gathered around him near the waterline, a dozen broken figures heaving for breath in the downpour. The rain came down on them without let or mercy, hammering their scorched shoulders, running off their bowed heads, and not one of them had the wind left to curse it. “How much further?” one of them gasped, wiping a sheet of water off his face. “How long till we're there?” Their leader straightened, a big man with a half-burned flak vest and a sword bound across his back, and jerked his chin up the shore toward the dark heave of the rocks. “Close. We're almost there. Just a little further, and then we can finally…” He stopped. The wind shifted across the beach, a wrong cold pull of it at the back of his neck, and something under his exhaustion drew tight and certain with dread. The near-black sky overhead lit white for a single beat. “LOOK OU…” One of them got half the word out. The middle of the group erupted. A blast tore up out of the wet sand in their midst, KABOOM, a flat thunderclap of fire and grit that flung bodies off their feet in every direction and threw them sprawling across the shore. One of the bandits was hurled up off the blast and into the air, tumbling, and Naruto blinked across the distance faster than the eye could chase and reappeared in the air beside the rising body, the massive iron-studded kanabo already cocked back over one shoulder, longer than he was tall, and he swung it around in a single flat brutal arc like a man taking a bat to a ball. The studded head met the bandit square across the ribs, krrak, and the body folded around it and tore loose and launched out over the beach, out past the breakers and into the open sea, gone into the rain with a far thin splash lost under the storm. He had not touched ground before the rest of him arrived. A dozen Naruto clones blinked into being across the scattered, ringing-stunned rogues, one at each man's side, every one of them shouldering its own studded war club, and they brought the kanabos down together. The shore filled with the wet heavy crunch of it, the rogues smashed flat into the sand where they lay before any could find their feet. Only the leader was left, half-risen, his sword clearing an inch of its binding, when the rain in front of him folded and Hinata was there. She had crossed from the cave mouth in a single blink, towering over him, and her open palms came in faster than he could track, a quick blurring flurry of light precise strikes that walked up his arm and across his chest and sealed the chakra out of every pathway they touched. The sword dropped back into its lashing. His legs went out from under him, and he folded down into the wet sand in a heap with the breath driven out of him, his limbs gone slack and useless. In the span of two or three seconds the whole running band was down. Naruto dropped out of the air and landed in a crouch, and his clones burst around him in a soft rolling string of pops. Karin was already picking her way down off the rocks through the rain, and the original Naruto came up beside Hinata, sealing his own great club away into a curl of smoke at his hip as he walked. The three of them looked down at the man on the sand. He was paralyzed from the neck down, slack in the streaming wet, but his eyes were wide open and rolling, blinking frantically up at the three shapes standing over him, the worst of them the armored giant who blotted out the storm-dark sky. Naruto crouched, took a fistful of the man's burned vest, and hauled him up off the ground one-handed until they were eye to eye, the captive hanging limp in his grip, rain pouring down both their faces. “Hey. Eyes on me.” The easy warmth had gone out of his voice. “So you wanna tell me why a pack of the snake freak's guys is runnin' down a beach in the dark? Where're you all runnin' from? The base?” The man's mouth worked, and what came out of him cracked and spilled in a rush of pure terror. “There's no base. There's, there's no base anymore!” It jolted through all three of them at once, the look passing between Naruto and Hinata and Karin. And then the rest of it poured out of him, the words tripping over each other in his haste to give them everything he had. He had been posted here, on this island, set to watch over the fishing village while the true base sat on the next island across the water, the two of them split by nothing more than a narrow channel a man could cross by small boat or swim outright in calmer weather. Some time ago the explosions had begun, deep booming things rolling across the water from the far island, and not long after the first of the runaways had come, base personnel rowing and swimming over to this side in a panic, telling anyone who would listen that something had gotten into the strongholds. The base was many places, he said, a spread of separate strongholds each built to its own purpose and strung together by roads and tunnels bored through the rock, and whatever had come had already torn one of them apart whole. The runaways had flooded into the village and made for the ferry and the boats, and when there were not enough of either the fighting had started, his own people turning on his own people over a seat off the island. The villagers had broken and scattered into the hills and the woods to hide from it, and the village itself had come apart into a brawl and a stampede, most of the boats smashed in the struggle, the ferry half wrecked by the storm besides. He and the others with him had simply run, unable to stomach any more of it, making for a cave up in the rocks he had known about, meaning to hide there and wait out the violence and the weather both. Naruto let him drop back to the sand, where he lay going nowhere, and rose to his feet. The three of them drew together a little way up the beach, out of the captive's hearing, a loose half-circle facing in through the rain, Hinata standing over the both of them with the storm breaking across her plates. “Okay, so we're not sitting on our hands for this one.” Naruto was already talking, the energy back in him, jabbing a thumb up the shore. “Those guys tore that village apart and the people who live there are out hiding in the woods in this. We go in, we put down whatever's left wrecking the place, the locals get to come home, and then we cross over and go see what's busting up the snake's base for us. Two birds.” “But, what is even doing the busting?” The worry pulled Karin's voice tight, her hands twisting together in front of her. “We all heard what he said. Something walked into a fortified base and tore a whole stronghold apart and sent trained shinobi swimming for their lives. We don't even know what it is, or how many. And it'd just be the three of us, no squad, no backup, in the dark, in all this.” Her eyes went from Naruto to Hinata and back. “Is that really something we should be walking into on our own?” “If we wait, it comes to us regardless.” Hinata's doubled voice rolled out steady under the rain, both of them turning up to her. “That cave is no secret. This man knew of it, and so will others running the same way. They will keep coming to this island until there is no room left on it. And whatever has torn through one stronghold will not stop at the water's edge. Once the far island is emptied, it turns here.” Her gaze swept the dark line of the hills. “Sooner or later it finds this shore. I would rather meet it on ground we have chosen than be cornered in a hole in the rock.” “See, that, yeah, exactly.” Naruto rounded on Karin, lit up, plainly delighted to have it handed to him. “That's what I'm sayin'. Waitin' around's what gets us killed here.” Karin dragged a hand down her wet face and let out a long breath through her fingers. “…Of course you'd both land on the same answer.” The exasperation drained out of her, and what was left under it was just worry. “Okay. Okay, we go. But, please, if we get over there and that thing is too big for us, we don't try to be heroes. We pull back, hide, and wait for the squads to catch up.” She looked up at Hinata, the words coming out smaller. “That's all I'm asking.” “Of course.” Naruto gave her an easy grin, already half-turned toward the village. “And hey, c'mon, breathe a little, would ya? We just took down the shark freak out there, and that guy was S-class, the real deal, bingo book and all. Whatever's stompin' around some run-down island base, no way it's worse than him.” Karin was a long way from reassured, but she let out a slow breath and held her tongue, leaving the call to the two of them. Already Hinata's helmet was flowing up over her head, the segmented plates climbing her jaw and locking shut into the smooth obsidian visor in a soft black ripple, sealing her glowing eyes away behind it. The other two fell in low and ready at her sides, and the three of them broke into a fast, silent run down the shoreline through the rain, bearing toward the village. The village rose out of the rain ahead of them, and it was already a ruin. They dropped low at its outskirts behind a tumble of broken fencing and looked in on it, and there was little left worth saving. Half the little fishing village had been knocked flat, houses caved in and torn open to the storm, and through the standing wrecks of the rest several dozen rogues still moved, and they were fighting each other. The narrow muddy lanes were strewn with their own dead, sprawled where they had dropped and left to the rain, and the living trampled past them without a glance. Down at the waterfront a knot of them swarmed over the half-wrecked ferry with armloads of timber, hauling and hammering, and others were tearing the wooden houses apart board by board to feed it, wrenching loose anything that might float and dragging it to the water to lash together into something that would carry them off the island. They took the nearest first, the handful of rogues posted as ragged sentries at the village edge, dropping them quiet and quick before any could call out. Then Naruto's hands crossed and several dozen more clones bloomed out of the smoke and slipped away into the storm, threading wide through the wrecked lanes to ring the whole village in a long loose half-circle, every angle covered, the unknowing rogues hemmed inside it without one of them the wiser. A wall of fire would have ended it in a breath and taken the village down to ash along with it, so they did the slow work instead. Naruto and his clones spat compressed bullets of wind out of the dark, hard cracking shots that punched through the rogues one and two at a time. Hinata loosed needle-thin bolts of chakra down from a broken rooftop, Hakke Kūshō: Shōten (Eight Trigrams Vacuum Palm: Focus Point), each one finding a throat or a heart clear across the village without a sound. Karin worked the gaps with her senbon, taking the stragglers the other two left. The rain came down in a roaring grey weight and the wind howled through the broken houses and the thunder rolled overhead without pause, and all of it swallowed what little noise they made, the fog and the dark drawing a curtain across the killing. The rogues fell and kept falling, never sure where it came from, their numbers thinning through the wrecked village until the last cluster of them went down together at the foot of the ruined ferry, dropping among the timber they had been hauling. They did not stay to count the dead. The moment the waterfront went still the three of them were moving again, slipping out the far side of the village and up into the dark wooded spine of the island, cutting straight across it toward the channel on the seaward side. The woods closed wet and black around them, the rain breaking apart on the canopy overhead, and as they ran their senses brushed against the warm scattered flickers of the villagers who had fled into the trees, dozens of small frightened presences hunched down in the undergrowth and the hollows, hiding from their own town. None of them moved. The three left the trees behind and came down the far slope onto a low rocky shore, and there it was, the channel, a narrow run of black storm-tossed water dividing this island from the next, the dark hump of the far island rising beyond it through the rain. Out there on that ground sat what was left of Orochimaru's base, and whatever had come to tear it apart. They stepped out together onto the surface of the channel, chakra blooming flat beneath their feet to hold them on the heaving water, and started across through the storm toward the far shore. The far shore came up out of the dark as a low shelf of wet rock, surf breaking white against it. Hinata's sabatons hit stone first and drove a crack through the ledge. Naruto landed beside her a beat later, and Karin came down last with a slip on the slick surface before she caught herself. Thunder cracked directly above them, a fat fork of lightning splitting the cloud and throwing the island into hard relief for one stuttering heartbeat before the dark came back. Hinata threw her Byakugan wide in the same breath. Her sight racing out through the lashing rain, and beside her Karin straightened and opened her sensing in a soft expanding pulse. The storm still choked her electromagnetic sense flat, the lightning and the discharge hammering it to white noise, so she leaned on the deeper spiritual channel and let Karin's range fill the gaps. The island sorted itself under their combined read in silence, neither of them speaking. It was larger than it had looked from the water. The spine of it rose in a dark rocky ridge and dropped away to either side into scrub and low forest, and scattered across the slopes and the flat ground between them sat the strongholds, four of them visible to her sight, each one a compound of tall stone walls and wooden watchtowers and gated courtyards connected to its neighbors by roads running along the surface and tunnels bored through the rock beneath. One of them, the nearest to the far shore, was already a smoking ruin. Lightning lit the sky behind it and the silhouette of its shattered walls stood against the flash like broken teeth, fires still guttering in the rain along its perimeter, smoke rising in fat grey columns that the wind shredded before they cleared the treetops. Then the survey caught the second thing. Twenty signatures moving fast down the ridge, coming from inland on a direct line toward the shore where the three of them stood. “Contact.” Hinata’s doubled voice cut through the rain. “Twenty, armed, coming down the ridge. Close.” Naruto's hands were already crossing. “Then let’s roll out the welcome.” Chakra surged through him in a hot bright pulse and clones bloomed out of the smoke around him in a rolling chain, thirty of them peeling away into the dark and the scrub, spreading wide to ring the approach from the ridge in a loose crescent. The three of them drew back into the rocks above the waterline and waited. They came down through the scrub at a hard run, stumbling over the wet ground, their shapes resolving out of the rain one by one. Tattered, all of them. Their clothes hung in scorched rags, their weapons a thrown-together mess of salvaged blades and broken polearms, and four of them had overturned rowboats hoisted onto their shoulders, the keels streaming rain. Even at a distance the stink of them carried on the wind, the animal desperation of men who had been running long enough to forget anything else. They hit the shore in a ragged spread and the ones with the boats swung them down onto the rocks, already reaching for oar slots, and one of them was shouting something about the current being wrong. Naruto's clones were already around them. Thirty shapes standing in the rain with their arms at their sides, a wide half-circle of orange and black, and not one of the rogues had looked up from the boats long enough to see them there. The clones drew in a breath at the same time, cheeks swelling, the wind element gathering in their throats, and blew. The wall of compressed air hit the rogues from every bearing at once. It tore the boats off the rocks and shattered them to kindling, ripped the weapons out of their hands, stripped the rags off their backs, and drove all twenty of them inward in a dead sprint that none of them had chosen, the wind converging from every direction and slamming them together into a single tangled heap at the center of the beach, thoom. Planks and oar-shafts and flailing limbs and the screaming bulk of twenty grown men folded into a pile like laundry stuffed into a basket. Hinata raised her right hand, fingers together, and pointed. A broad fan of white fire poured off her fingertip and crossed the distance in a flat sheet, catching the wind still pouring in from every side. The fire swallowed the wind and the wind fed the fire, and the pile of rogues and shattered timber went up in a roaring pillar of flame that climbed twenty meters into the rain before the storm could beat it down. The sustained wind from thirty clones hauled the fire into a spinning column, a twisting funnel of white and orange that screamed as it hauled the heap of bodies off the ground and spun them upward through the fire, limbs and planks tumbling through the column in a rising gyre of burning wreckage. For three seconds the shore had its own storm inside the larger one, and then Hinata dropped her hand and the fire died. The wind did not stop. The clones kept blowing, their sustained gust holding the charred bodies spinning in the air above the beach, twenty shapes tumbling high up with nothing under them. Two heartbeats, three, long enough for the clones below to unseal their kanabos and set their feet and look up. The wind stopped. The bodies came down. The clones were already moving. Each one had a kanabo shouldered, and as the first body fell out of the dark, smoking, limp before it ever reached the ground, the nearest clone stepped under it, measured the drop, and swung. The studded head met the falling man across the chest with a heavy wet krak and the body folded around the iron and tore free and launched out over the water in a flat skipping arc, hitting the channel once, twice, and sinking. The next body fell and the next clone swung, and the next, the whole spread of them going to work on the falling rogues the way a batting line works through pitches, each hit a flat crunch of iron on bone that threw the broken shape out over the surf and into the channel. Krak, krak, krak. Some of them fell within Hinata's reach. She did not bother with a weapon. Her right arm swelled at the forearm, the biomass surging out over the gauntlet and hardening into a fist three times its normal size, and she met the first falling rogue with an open-handed swat that cracked across his whole body and sent him skipping across the water like a hurled stone. The second she caught with a backhand that folded him over her knuckles and flung him after the first, whump, whump, both shapes bouncing off the channel and going under. It was over in less than ten seconds. The last body hit the water and the channel closed over it, and the shore went quiet but for the rain and the low hiss of steam rising off the rocks where the fire had been. Twenty men were gone. Karin stood at the edge of the rocks above the waterline, both hands pressed flat against the stone, her red hair plastered to her face. “That was…” She stopped, worked her mind once, and tried again. “Not a single one of them even got to fight back.” Neither Naruto nor Hinata answered. The last of the clones popped away in a soft rolling chain, the kanabos vanishing with them. Hinata's visor turned inland, away from the channel and the bodies sinking in it, and locked on the smoking ruin of the nearest stronghold against the lightning-lit sky. Beside her Naruto's head came around to the same bearing, the easy grin gone off his face. On her deeper spiritual sight, past the stronghold, past the ridge, something threaded through the heart of the island, a faint trace she could not name but could not put down, wrong in a way that pulled at the back of her skull. “The stronghold,” Naruto said, quiet under the rain. “Let's go.” They turned off the shore and started inland along the road. The road climbed through scrub and low wet trees and leveled out on the spine of the ridge, and the stronghold rose out of the rain ahead of them. It had been a real fortress once. The walls were thick dressed stone, four meters tall, with wooden watchtowers at the corners and a heavy timber gate set into the southern face, and the whole of it sat on a flat shelf of rock cleared of trees in every direction. It had the shape of something from the old warring-states period, a lord's outpost built to hold ground in contested country, repurposed long after the men who laid the stones were gone. It was destroyed. Every watchtower was down, the timber shattered and strewn across the cleared ground, and the walls were breached in three places where great sections of dressed stone had been blown inward as though something had walked through them. Scorch marks ran the full length of the southern face in long precise lines, some of them the branching fans of a lightning strike and others the deep cratered burns of concentrated fire. The main gate hung crooked on its lower hinge, the upper torn clean out of the frame, and through the gap the interior was a field of rubble and broken timber, everything that had stood inside the walls knocked flat or burning low under the rain. They dropped out of the trees at the treeline and scanned. Karin's hands came up, fingers spread, her sensing reaching into the wreckage. Naruto swept the perimeter. Hinata pushed her Byakugan through the rubble stone by stone. Nothing in it moved or breathed. “Clear,” Hinata said. “No signatures inside.” “Same,” Karin confirmed under her breath. “Nothing alive in there.” They entered through the broken gate and moved through the courtyard in a loose spread, stepping over fallen timbers and chunks of dressed stone, the rain drumming on the rubble around them. Hinata catalogued the damage as she went. Every mark told the same story. The strikes were precise, placed to bring the structures down with a minimum of wasted effort, each scorch clean and deliberate. Two kinds of element had done this, fire and lightning, both wielded with a speed and accuracy that left almost no collateral between the points of impact. A single fighter had walked through this place and taken it apart the way a surgeon would take apart a body. Then, somewhere deeper in the island, past the stronghold's broken walls, a signature pulsed. Naruto stopped mid-step. His whole body locked, one foot still in the air above a fallen timber, and his head came around to the east with a sharpness that had nothing to do with danger. His face changed. The easy combat readiness dropped off him and something else came up under it, something older. Hinata felt it in the same breath, the spiritual channel catching what the storm refused to let her other senses touch. A presence half-buried under the noise of the weather, flickering in and out of perception like a candle behind a shutter. She let her sight settle on it and felt the confirmation settle in her chest. Karin caught it last. Her hands were still raised from her sweep of the fortress, and the flicker reached her sensing a beat behind, and she flinched. The color left her face. Her arms came down and her fists closed at her sides and she stared east through the rain. “Did you…” She stopped, steadied herself, and tried again, her voice pitched low enough that the rain nearly ate it. “Both of you. Did you feel that just now?” Naruto did not answer. He stood with his foot still on the timber and his gaze locked east. “Yes,” Hinata said. The doubled voice came out level. “We felt it.” Karin opened her mouth, closed it, and hugged her own arms against the rain. Whatever she wanted to ask, she read the set of Naruto's shoulders and swallowed it. They moved on through the courtyard in silence. At the far end, past a collapsed barracks and the remains of a communications tower brought down across its own foundation, the ground dropped away. A wide ramp of dressed stone descended at a steep angle into the earth, broad enough for four abreast, flanked by low retaining walls, and at its base stood a pair of heavy wooden doors bound in iron, both standing open on the dark beyond. All three felt it at once, a pressure building from below, a vibration running up through the stone under their feet and into their ankles. Hinata pushed her Byakugan down through the open doors and into the dark. The tunnels went deep. They dropped at a steep grade for a hundred meters and then leveled out into a long straight bore cut through bedrock, wide enough for a cart, shored with concrete and stone, lit at intervals by caged bulbs that still had power. The bore ran straight for the better part of a kilometer before it branched, splitting into secondary passages that threaded through the rock in several directions, a whole network worming through the island beneath the surface connecting the strongholds above. The tunnels were full. They came in a stampede, a wall of misshapen bodies packed shoulder to shoulder and running hard through the main bore toward the entrance, hundreds of them, their disfigured shapes lit in strobing flashes as they passed under the caged lights. Curse-mark mutants, the same warped and feral things she had fought at the warehouse and the village market. They ran on legs that bent the wrong way, on hands grown too large, on limbs fused to other limbs, mouths open and screaming as they trampled the ones that fell. The sound had not reached the surface yet but she could see it building, a vibration that shook grit from the walls. “Mutants.” Her doubled voice hardened. “Hundreds of them, in the tunnels, running for this entrance. Prepare.” “They're already here,” Karin whispered, her face white. “The whole tunnel is shaking with them.” Naruto pulled his gaze off the east at last and looked down the ramp at the open doors, then swept the ruins around them. “Higher ground. Now.” He pointed at the nearest section of standing wall, three meters of dressed stone still holding above the ramp. “Get up there, both of you. I want angles.” They moved at the same instant. Naruto hit the top of the wall in a single bound and dropped into a crouch on its broken edge, his hands already cycling through seals, the wind element gathering in his throat and around his fingers in a thin whistling charge. Hinata landed on the wall to his right and her left arm transformed. The biomass boiled up from the seam of her gauntlet and surged outward, the forearm thickening and reshaping, the hand opening into a wide ribbed maw with the Venom head forming at the barrel's end, jaws spread, the throat already glowing deep orange as fire-element chakra poured into the chamber. Her right hand came up beside the cannon, the Byakugan locked on the tunnel below. Karin scrambled up the stone to Hinata's left and pressed herself against the broken edge, fumbling kunai from her pouch, each one trailing a length of wire lashed to an explosive tag. The sounds reached them. A deep churning roar climbing out of the earth through the open doors, the combined noise of hundreds of bodies crashing through stone passages, screams layered over screams, the wet slapping of malformed limbs on concrete. The stone under their feet hummed with it. Along Hinata's spine the coiled presence stirred, uncurling through the cannon in a slow surge, spreading its awareness through the Venom maw with a hungry interest, the alien will tasting the approaching violence. The excitement bled through her in a warm pulse. “This is going to be fun.” She steadied the cannon and waited. The doors blew off their hinges. The heavy timber and the iron banding flew up the ramp in a spray of splinters, KRAK, and the first shapes came through the opening behind them, three mutants packed abreast in the doorframe, their bodies wedged together and still driving forward. One had a torso split open down the sternum, ribs visible and still growing, bone curling out of the wound in spiraling tusks. The second ran on all fours with its arms elongated past its knees, the hands thick with fused fingers. The third had no face left, its skull a smooth plate of bone from which a wet red hole screamed. Naruto's hands locked into the final seal. “Fūton: Shinkūha! (Wind Release: Vacuum Wave!)” The jutsu came out of him as a sustained roar, a thick concentrated beam of compressed wind that slammed down off the wall and hit the tunnel entrance dead center. The beam was visible in the rain, a shimmering column of distorted air that drove into the doorframe and pinned the three emerging mutants back into the dark, crushing the ones behind them flat. Hinata bore down on the Venom cannon. “Katon: Hakuryū no Ibuki! (Fire Release: Breath of the White Dragon!)” The white fire came out of the Venom maw in a concentrated lance, a pencil-thin beam of fire that screamed across the gap and merged with Naruto's wind at the entrance. The two met and fused and what poured down through the tunnel doors was a single roaring column of white destruction that filled the passage wall to wall. The mutants packed in the doorframe vaporized. They went from solid matter to bright expanding gas in the space of a breath, their shapes burning away from the outside in, bone and meat and warped tissue sublimating off them in sheets of white steam, and the column drove past the space they had filled and poured on down into the tunnel. Naruto's arms shook with the sustained output, the wind element screaming out of him in a continuous blast. Beside him Hinata bore down harder on the cannon, the Venom maw open wide and roaring white, the heat of the beam drying the rain out of the air for ten meters in every direction. They held and bore down harder, the column brightening, thickening, driving deeper. Through her Byakugan Hinata watched it go. The combined fire filled the main bore from wall to wall and rolled forward at a walking pace, a wall of white death moving through the tunnel. The mutants in the front rank met the fire face-first and came apart in bright blooming flashes, their bodies sublimating off their skeletons before the skeletons themselves went soft and ran. Behind them the stampede piled up, hundreds of warped bodies crashing into the ones ahead, unable to stop, unable to turn in the packed passage, and the fire ate into the pile and kept going. The concrete walls softened. Stone began to glow, first dull red and then brighter, the mortar between the blocks running liquid down the walls. A section of ceiling sagged and dropped a slab of molten concrete onto the packed mutants beneath it, and they burned under the weight. The fire reached the first branch in the tunnel network and forked, a tongue of it peeling off down the side passage while the main body drove on. In the branch it found more of them, dozens more, and those burned too. Past the branch the main bore turned and dropped, and the fire followed the turn, pouring around the bend into the deeper stretch beyond, packed to the walls with mutants climbing over each other, and she watched them go, each bright flash a body coming apart. She followed the fire all the way to the far end of the trunk line, where it blasted out of the tunnel's far exit in a gout of white flame that erupted from the face of the hillside half a kilometer away, and the mutants on the surface near that exit caught fire and staggered and fell. When Naruto let the wind die in his throat his arms dropped to his sides and his chest heaved. Hinata closed the Venom maw and the fire cut off. The sudden silence was enormous. The rain came crashing back in over the top of the ramp, steam exploding off the superheated stone around the melted entrance, a thick white fog rising and mixing with the downpour. Karin stood on the wall with the unused kunai still in her hands, her mouth open, her eyes very wide behind her rain-streaked glasses. “By the Gods.” She said it barely above a whisper. The tunnel entrance had melted. The dressed stone of the ramp and the retaining walls and the frame of the doors had softened, run, and cooled into a single lumped mass of slag that sealed the opening shut. The heat radiating off it pushed the rain back, the drops hissing to nothing a foot above the surface, a thin veil of steam hanging over the fused stone. Beyond the wall where they stood the rain-soaked ruins of the fortress were drying out in real time, the water boiling off the rubble in wisps. The smell came up thick, charred flesh and cooked stone sitting heavy in the wet air. They dropped down from the wall and picked their way to the melted entrance. Karin pressed one hand over her mouth and nose against the reek. “I don't feel anyone alive down there,” she said through her fingers. “Nothing. Not one signature in any of the tunnels.” “Parts of the network have collapsed,” Hinata said, her Byakugan still pushed through the stone. “The heat brought down ceiling sections in three places along the main bore and in two of the branches. The passages are blocked.” Naruto wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at her. “Can you tell which direction they were coming from? Where on the island?” She turned her visor toward the northeast. “That way. The trunk line ran from here to the next stronghold inland, roughly north-northeast. That is where the largest concentration was.” “Then we go surface.” Naruto straightened, scanned the dark treeline beyond the fortress walls, and started walking. “C'mon.” They ran the surface road through scrub and low trees, the rain hammering down and the lightning cracking overhead in long branching forks that lit the wet forest in stuttering white flashes. The road was little more than a cart track of packed earth turned to mud, rutted and puddled, and twice they crossed bridges over shallow cuts in the rock where streams ran brown and angry with the storm. They were not alone on the road. Small groups of rogues blundered out of the trees at intervals, twos and threes, some armed and some not, all running the same direction, away from the interior. Naruto's clones took them before they could shout. A flash of orange in the rain, a heavy krak of a kanabo, and the body went down in the mud and the three of them ran past without slowing. Once, rounding a bend where the road dropped into a shallow ravine, a stray mutant lurched out of the underbrush directly in their path, a hunched thing with its arms fused into a single broad paddle and its jaw hanging loose on tendons. Hinata did not break stride. A single compressed bolt from her fingertip punched through its chest and it went still and folded, and they cleared it. The encounters thickened as they closed on the next stronghold. The road filled with running shapes, rogues in larger groups now, some dragging wounded, and between them the mutants, singles and pairs. A rogue stumbled past with a mutant latched to his back, the warped thing's teeth sunk into his shoulder, and a clone put both of them down with a single swing. The road became a running brawl that the three of them cut through at speed, the dead falling behind them and the rain washing the blood off the mud before they had cleared the next bend. The second stronghold was worse. They came up on its southern wall through the trees and found it already under siege from the inside. Explosions thudded behind the stone, throwing flashes of orange and white above the wall line, and the screams layered over each other in a continuous rolling noise that the thunder only partly covered. The rain came down in a roaring grey weight and the wind drove it sideways across the walls, and between the lightning and the fires and the strobing flashes of jutsu in the courtyard, the whole compound looked like a city under bombardment, lit from within by its own destruction. Hinata's spiritual sense caught the familiar trace again as they cleared the treeline. Closer now, stronger, moving somewhere inside or near the stronghold, flickering at the edge of her perception and dropping away as though it knew she was looking. Through the Byakugan, past the rain and the stone, she caught one sharp bright shape blurring across the inner edge of her field of vision, too fast to read, and then it was gone. She turned her visor to find Naruto already looking inland, looking concerned. They had all felt it. A handful of rogues came scrambling over the southern wall, dropping down into the mud and running for the treeline. Naruto's clones took them in the scrub before they made ten paces. The three of them moved onto the wall itself, running low along its broken top, and the sound of the fighting inside rose up, a churning roar of shouts and detonations and the deeper, wetter screaming of things that were not human. They killed two sentries at a corner tower, the men going down to a pair of silent kunai from Karin and a single vacuum palm from Hinata that caved the second one's chest. From the tower's upper platform they looked down into the courtyard. It was a killing floor. At its center sat a large stone building, three stories tall, heavy doors and barred windows, and the mutants were pouring out of it. They came through the doors and through the windows, crashing through bars and shutters, some crawling down the walls headfirst, a stream of broken shapes flooding out of every opening and into the courtyard. Three dozen rogues had pulled back from the building and thrown up a rough barricade across the courtyard out of carts and lumber and piled stone, and they were fighting from behind it with blades and jutsu and the occasional desperate thrown explosive. The barricade was already giving. Two mutants had gotten over at the far end and were tearing into the rogues there. At the flanks small groups had broken away and were deserting, slipping along the walls toward the gates at a low run. Hinata swept the building with her Byakugan. “The building is a laboratory,” she said, her doubled voice low under the rain. “This complex goes deep beneath it, multiple underground levels. The mutants were using the tunnel network to move between strongholds, and the tunnels we burned were one of their main routes. After the fire blocked those passages, the pressure redirected them here, up through the vertical shafts inside this building and out every exit.” She pushed her sight deeper, down through the floors. “The underground levels are extensive. They are still coming up from the lowest ones.” Naruto took it in, his eyes on the brawl below. “So we kicked the ant hill and they're all coming out the front door.” “Yes.” Then she saw it, and the word died on her tongue. Deep in the building, three floors below ground, something was moving through the corridors at a speed that put the other mutants to shame. Her eyes locked onto it and the reading came back wrong in every way at once. The thing's chakra was a haywire mess, spiking and crashing, the cursed seal on its body an open wound in the network that siphoned ambient energy in a continuous torrent, pulling it from the walls, the air, the other mutants in its path. Its size was already large and it was getting larger. As she watched, the corridor it moved through became too narrow, and it drove its shoulders through the concrete walls on either side and kept going, the stonework crumbling away from it. Behind it the mutants it had trampled lay broken and still on the corridor floor. Bone spurs erupted from its arms and back, the skin splitting and reknitting around them, and its mass climbed with every step. “Something else is coming up,” Karin said, her voice tight, her hands lowering. “Something bigger. The chakra is pulling everything into itself, getting stronger by the second.” The thing hit the ground floor at a dead run and went through the wall. The heavy stone facade over the main entrance exploded outward, KRABOOOM, and the entrance and ten meters of wall on either side collapsed into a sliding avalanche of stone and timber. The building groaned. The upper floors sagged, folded, and came down in a roaring cascade that buried the courtyard in front of the building under a spreading hill of rubble, catching a dozen rogues under the fall. Dust rose in a thick cloud that the rain beat flat, and for a moment nothing moved. Then the rubble shifted. A great slab of foundation stone tilted and slid sideways, and the thing pulled itself out. It was enormous. The cursed seal was still drinking ambient energy in a continuous flood, and the mutations had gone past anything recognizable. Its torso was a swollen mass of layered muscle and jutting bone, its arms thick as tree trunks and still growing, the fingers fused into blunt clubs. Its head had pulled forward on a neck doubled in length, the skull reshaped into something flat and wide, and the mouth, a lipless gash, opened and let out a scream, SKREEEEEE, that hit the courtyard a hammer. The remaining rogues at the barricade broke. They dropped their weapons and ran, scattering toward the gates and the walls, and the thing lunged forward out of the rubble and caught one of them with a swing of its massive arm that crushed the man flat and flung the body into the barricade hard enough to send carts flying. Along Hinata's spine the coiled presence surged upward in a rush of pure delight. “At last. Something worth the trouble after that sharkman. This one will do.” Karin took a step back from the edge of the tower. “That is the same kind of thing from the tunnels, but it won't stop growing.” She turned to Naruto and Hinata, her voice climbing. “This might be one we should wait for reinforcements on. Please.” Hinata's visor did not turn from the overgrown mutant below. Beside her Naruto stood at the wall's edge with his hands loose at his sides, and his eyes had changed. The orange had come back into his irises, the toad-pupil cutting his gaze into something older. “Nah.” His voice stayed easy. “We take it d…” He stopped. His whole body went rigid, head snapping east, and Hinata felt it at the same instant, the familiar trace that had been flickering at the edge of her perception all night burning bright and close, right on top of them. Karin's hands shot up. “It's here, that chakra, it's right…” The sky split open and a bolt of lightning came down out of the storm and hit the overgrown mutant squarely on the crown of its skull, brighter than anything the storm had thrown, a single thick column of white fire that connected the clouds to the thing's head in a straight vertical line and held there for a full heartbeat, KRA-KOOOM, the sound so massive that it hit Hinata's chestplate like a fist and set the rubble in the courtyard jumping. The flash bleached the compound white, every wall and stone and running rogue and falling drop of rain printed in hard shadowless relief for one frozen instant, and in that instant she saw a figure standing on the broad flat crown of the mutant's skull. The lightning died and the dark slammed back, and the afterimage burned in Hinata's Byakugan. The mutant was still standing. Its massive body swayed, the muscles along its arms firing at random, and embedded in the center of its forehead, driven in to the hilt, a long straight blade crackled and spat with residual current, white-blue lightning crawling the length of the steel in fitful arcs. The figure standing on the thing's brow was a young man, one hand on the sword's grip, his weight balanced and easy, dark hair hanging in wet spikes over his face. He wore a white shirt open at the chest and dark trousers and a heavy purple rope cinched at his waist, and the rain ran off him the same way it ran off the stone. The mutant's body shuddered. Its legs buckled at the knee, first one and then the other, and it began to sink, the great mass of it crumpling inward. It had been dead from the moment the blade went in. The cursed seal at its core had gone dark, the siphon cut, and without the constant flood of stolen energy the accelerated tissue had nothing left to hold it together. The young man did not move from his perch. He rode the collapsing body down as it fell, the rubble shaking under the impact, dust rising and rain crashing back in. When the dust cleared he was standing on the fallen wreck of the thing's skull with the lightning sword drawn out of its head and resting across one shoulder, the blade still flickering with fading current. He turned his head slowly and looked up at the three of them on the wall. Dark eyes. A face that Naruto and Hinata and Karin had each carried in their own way for two years, and that was looking back at them now through the rain without surprise. Sasuke. Lightning cracked behind him, the thunder rolling out across the courtyard, and none of them moved. For a long moment there was only the storm, thunder speaking far out over the sea and the rain coming down through the dark in a steady roaring weight, drumming on Hinata's plates. Sasuke stood on the dead mutant's skull with the sword resting across his shoulder and looked up at the three of them on the wall. Hinata read him from where she stood. Even across the full width of the courtyard the chakra coming off him pushed against her senses, grown far past anything the boy in her memory had carried, a deep cold volume with lightning nature crackling through its tone. The cursed mark on his neck had changed too. She remembered a small echo of Orochimaru living in it, a second taste threaded under the first, and now it gave off nothing but Sasuke's own signature, and the question of what had become of the snake sat itself quietly next to all the others. Above him the storm was wrong. The strokes that split the sky everywhere else had been pouring themselves into a single knot of charge gathering directly over his position, feeding it flash by flash, and on her deeper sight she found thin spiritual threads rising off his shoulders and lancing up into the cloud, dozens of them. He was reaching into the storm itself and herding the natural lightning to him. Along her spine the coiled presence stirred, uncurling toward her attention with a slow hungry warmth. “Oh. Now this has gotten even more interesting.” Hinata turned her helmet a few degrees and found Naruto beside her. His expression had hardened into something she rarely saw on him, the glowing orange of his eyes fixed on the distant figure, deep in a thought of his own. “That's him, isn't it.” Karin's voice came from low behind them, barely clearing the rain. “That's really Sasuke.” Naruto pulled his gaze off the courtyard and turned his head to Hinata's visor. She gave him a short nod and got one back. “Let's go.” He rose out of his crouch. “Karin, stay behind us. Keep your distance, no matter what happens.” The two of them dropped off the wall together, sabatons and sandals striking the flooded stone, and started forward at a slow walk through the rubble, side by side through the rain. They stopped a long stone's throw from the fallen mutant, close enough for voices to carry, far enough that a blade would take time to arrive. Sasuke watched them come with a flat, dismissive stillness, and under it Hinata caught the small quick work of his eyes, a single pass up the full towering height of her armored frame and off it, onto Naruto, weighing the two of them. Then the silence settled in between the three of them, rain striking the stone. Naruto broke it. “Sasuke.” His voice came out calmly, and Hinata could hear what it cost him to keep it there, the heartbeat under it running harder than the words. “It's been two years.” The rain filled the pause. “What're you doing all the way out here? In a place like this?” “I have nothing to talk about with you.” Sasuke's voice carried across the courtyard without effort. “Least of all with Konoha. Not after what Konoha did to my clan.” The words landed on all three of them at once. That truth was weeks old, and it had been spreading outward ever since, running through every channel the world had, far enough now to reach even a missing-nin on a drowned island in the southern sea. Behind them Hinata heard Karin's breath catch. “Did that snake freak tell you that?” Naruto's voice stayed calm, and the calm had gone tight. Sasuke let the question fall into the rain unanswered. “Word travels, when a village airs out its own rot.” As he said it his eyes slid off Naruto and passed over the armored tower of Hinata one more time, taking the measure of her from sabaton to helm crest. “Hyuuga.” One flat word, and his gaze was back on Naruto, as though he had been keeping a quiet ledger on Konoha all these years while calling it nothing to him. Naruto took a step forward. “The ones responsible for it have answered for it, Sasuke. Danzo is d…” Across Hinata's senses Sasuke's chakra jumped a register, the frequency of it screaming upward, and his eyes flushed red. “LOOK OUT!” Karin's shout tore down from the wall. He was already moving. The courtyard between them folded away under a low flat blur, his blade clearing its sheath mid-stride with lightning already wrapped down the length of it, and Hinata met him. Her right arm had become a single great symbiotic blade in the time his sword took to leave its scabbard, cerulean veins alight, her own lightning snarling up the edge, and the two blades came together in front of Naruto with a KRANG that slapped the rain flat around them. The clash halted there. She stood over him in full battle readiness, towering, her blade bearing down on his, and along the line of contact her biomass drank. The lightning wrapped around his sword thinned, guttered, and went out, drawn down her edge and into her like water into dry cloth, and his red eyes went a fraction wider. Her counterstroke was already turning out of the bind fast, and he read it and broke away instead of meeting it, one hard bound backward across the rubble. Naruto was there before Sasuke's feet found stone, stepping into the gap between them with the giant iron-studded kanabo already swinging, a flat whistling arc at chest height. The Sharingan read it perfectly. Sasuke was under it with room to spare, and even so something flickered across his face at the sheer mass howling past above him, and then he was inside the swing, blade turning up toward the open line under Naruto's arm. The air around Naruto snapped. A tight sleeve of wind burst off his whole body in one razored rotation, and Sasuke aborted the thrust and cut away backward out of its reach, water sheeting off his heels. “A kanabo.” Sasuke said it the way a man reads a label. “Yeah.” Naruto rolled the club once in his grip and set it back over his shoulder. “You like it?” They came together again in the same breath. Blade and club met among the rubble in a fast hard rattle, krang, krak, Sasuke flowing around the huge sweeps while Naruto turned every miss into the next swing without a pause, and through all of it Naruto kept talking. “We didn't come here to fight you!” The club took a fallen pillar apart where Sasuke had just been standing. “You think I hauled myself across half the world for this?! We came to talk, ya know!” Sasuke broke off. He put half the courtyard between them in two bounds, and his hands were already flashing through seals as his gaze went up into the storm. Hinata had begun to close on him, one blink from putting herself in front of him, and she checked mid-step. The spiritual threads off his shoulders shot upward all at once, dozens of fine lines lancing into the boiling dark, and through her fused mind the sky itself changed tone, the knot of charge that had been gathering over his position all this night collapsing inward, condensing into one mass, the clouds above the fortress lighting from within. “Kirin.” He said it flat, and brought his hand down on their position. Her accelerated mind watched it come. The mass overhead ripped itself loose from the belly of the storm in the running shape of a dragon, head first, a volume of lightning vast past anything she had ever pulled into herself, and it was falling on all of them at once, her, Naruto, the place where Karin is standing. She moved. Two strides put her on the point where the strike would center, and she opened herself to the sky, wings snapping wide off her shoulder plates, tendrils fanning up from every seam and standing stiff as rods, a raised black lattice offered to the storm. KRRA-KOOOM The dragon came down on her and the world went white. The column found her raised lattice and she hauled it in, bending the whole descending mass out of its line and down through the rods of her tendrils into her body, and it passed through everything she was. She felt it in every part of her at once, her teeth, the marrow of her forearms, the roots of her eyes, a river of white fire threading every channel she had, and she drank at it as it went, the old predatory pull in her flesh turning every point the current touched into a mouth. Under her armor the silver lines of the Weave blazed, hard light bleeding out through the seams of her plates, and behind the visor her cerulean eyes climbed toward white. The volume was wrong. Her body knew how to pull power out of a living thing in a steady stream, mouthful after mouthful, and this was a sea arriving in a single swallow, the pressure of it screaming through her channels faster than she could take it down. “Steady.” Venom was everywhere inside her at once urgently, and seizing whole tracts of the work. “Stand and hold. We are going to handle this.” Tendrils off her calves had already speared down through the flagstones, and the overflow poured along them into the bedrock, the stone around her feet glowing dull orange, running glassy, steam screaming off it in a widening ring. It was too much all the same. The strike kept coming, the dragon still feeding itself down into her out of the sky, and at the peak of the overload something stirred behind her eyes. A pressure bloomed from somewhere deeper than the Byakugan had ever lived, gathering hard behind her forehead, a weight in a place she had no name for. The silver light of her Weave flashed over into a bright burning cerulean from her heels to her crown, her eyes flaring brighter still, the glow bleeding out through the visor itself, and for the space of one breath the chakra roaring off her carried a tone she could not place in herself at all. It felt wrong inside her own skull. She did not understand it. “The flow is thinning. Almost through. Keep your…” The voice stopped mid-word. The coil along her spine went utterly still, and its silence frightened her more than the lightning did, because in all the years they had been one, Venom had never once been confused by anything inside her body. Across the courtyard the Sharingan caught it. Through the glare and the distance she saw his composure crack, open confusion standing on his face for a single heartbeat before he mastered it and shut it away. Then the last of the strike ran out of the sky. The column guttered, thinned to threads, and died, and the dark slammed back down over the fortress with the rain still falling through it. Hinata stood in a ring of glassed, steaming stone, stray arcs crawling and snapping across her plates, her frame shivering with the load it was still working down, and the cerulean fire under her skin sank slowly back toward silver. The pressure behind her forehead faded. The moment passed, and no one spoke of it. Across the courtyard Sasuke lowered his blade and, after a long beat, slid it back into its sheath, shk. Naruto was at her side before the steam cleared, both hands hovering an inch off her forearm plate. “Hinata! Hey, hey. Talk to me. You okay?!” “I am… fine.” The doubled voice came out with a fine stutter riding the resonance. She flexed her right hand, and a stray arc cracked out between the fingers and died. “It is settling.” He held on her visor a moment longer, reading it, and then made himself turn back to the courtyard. “I met Itachi.” He said it into the stillness, level, the rain running off his jaw. “Days ago. Face to face.” The name crossed the courtyard and landed harder than any blow that had been traded in it. Sasuke went completely still. “Tell me.” It came out low. “Everything you know about him. All of it.” Naruto told him. The town in River Country, Itachi waiting for them in the open street, the words about the Akatsuki hunting Orochimaru's trail, the genjutsu, the questions about the conference, the calm that never broke, the way he had simply left. Sasuke's questions started before the telling was half done, every one of them biting down on a detail, the answers only opening more of them, and somewhere in the middle of it Naruto stopped and shook his head. “This ain't working. Words are too slow, and you're not gonna trust mine anyway.” He tapped two fingers against his own temple. “So look for yourself. Use your Sharingan on me. All of it's in here.” “Are you INSANE?!” Karin's voice cracked down from afar. “He tried to take your head off five minutes ago, you do not hand him your mind!” “Naruto-kun.” Hinata's doubled voice came down hard, the resonance under it flat as a blade, her frame still twitching off the last of the storm's load. “No.” “It's my head.” He was already walking forward through the rain. “And this is faster. Trust me.” He stopped two paces from Sasuke and met his eyes. The red bloomed back into them, and both of them went still. The rain struck the two of them and neither moved. Seconds stacked. What ran along the locked line of their gazes carried the conference and everything that had stood up in front of the assembled people there, Danzo's exposure and his death, the Root vaults broken open and everything dragged out of their dark into daylight, the village learning the truth of the massacre and whose order had stood behind it, and at the far end of it a rain-soaked street days old with Itachi standing in the middle of it, everything he had said and shown. From her position Karin's hands had come up on their own, and on Hinata's fused senses the same reading stood plain, the two signatures in the middle of the courtyard sliding into each other's rhythm until they beat as one shared frequency, Naruto's bright roaring warmth and Sasuke's cold storm-fed depth rising and falling in step. Then it broke. The two of them swayed apart half a step in the same instant, rain sheeting from their shoulders. “Is it true?” Sasuke's voice came out low and uneven, the flatness gone out of it for the first time all night. His eyes had bled back to black. “All of it.” “Yeah. All of it.” Naruto held his gaze. “Everyone in Konoha who had a hand in what was done to your clan has answered for it, or they're going to. I'm seeing to that myself. You've got my word on it, personally.” He let a breath go. “Come back with us, Sasuke. Come home.” The rain filled a long space between them. “No.” Sasuke's voice had leveled again. “I still want my satisfaction. Whatever orders stood behind that night, it was his hands that did the killing, start to finish, every room of the compound. He is going to answer to me for the suffering. All of it.” Naruto's tried to say something. His hands closed and opened at his sides, and for a long silent beat he stood with the rain hammering him, fighting it out with himself behind his face. “…Alright.” The word came out of him slowly. “Alright. Then I want your word too. While you're out there settling it, no one who had no part in the Uchiha business gets harmed by you. Give me that.” “You have my word.” Then Naruto reached into his jacket, and a small scroll came out of a seal in a curl of smoke. “There's one more thing you should have.” He held it out flat on his palm. “When we crossed with Itachi, there was a scuffle. A short one. I got a seal onto him in the middle of it, a hidden tracking seal, buried deep enough he won't find it quick. This scroll carries the key to trace it.” “You WHAT?” Karin's voice broke down. Hinata's visor came around to him. He had sat shoulder to shoulder with her at a campfire hours ago and walked her through that meeting twice over, and this had never once been in it. Sasuke crossed the distance and took the scroll off his palm, the first time all night the gap between them had closed without a blade in it. He turned it once in his fingers and it went away into his sleeve. Then he lifted his arm and pointed off into the rain, out past the broken wall, at a bearing far south of the channel they had crossed. “There's another island out there. Far past this one, more remote. Another hidden base under it.” His arm came down. “You'll find Orochimaru there.” “What happened with Orochimaru?” Hinata's doubled voice rolled across the courtyard. Sasuke did not look at her. “He outlived his usefulness.” The rain filled the gap where an explanation would have sat. Then, flatter still, “These past weeks I learned he had bent the knee. Before the Akatsuki.” A muscle moved along his jaw. “Before the organization where he works.” He said all of it without once letting Itachi's name into his mouth. “One more thing.” His hands were already moving. “I cleared another stronghold on this island, north along the ridge. The civilians taken from the fishing village are inside it. Alive.” His hands came together once, and the smoke of a reverse summoning burst white around him. The rain beat it flat, and the courtyard where he had stood was empty. Looks like he still had a way to leave this place. The three of them stood in the rain over the empty courtyard, the thunder still talking to itself far out over the sea. Karin picked her way to them through the rubble, and let out one long breath that shook the whole way out of her. “Okay. Nobody died. Good. Very good.” Neither of them answered her. Along Hinata's spine Venom lay coiled and silent, and had not stirred since the strike, and she let it be. Inside her, under the rain, the pieces settled, the new hand that had been laying its demands across Orochimaru's dying network, the name written small and frightened into the recovered letters, Heaven's Path, and now the word that Orochimaru had knelt to the Akatsuki, all of it drawing together into a single shape. Konoha had suspected for some time that the Akatsuki would try to pull Orochimaru back into their fold, and by everything she had heard tonight, they had managed it. She turned the shape over once behind her eyes and kept it to herself. She flexed her armored fingers at her side, a last stray arc of the storm cracking out between them and dying in the rain, and turned her visor toward the Naruto. He had not moved. He was still facing the spot where Sasuke had stood, the rain running off his face, the smoke of the reverse summoning long since beaten flat into the mud. Then his shoulders came down, and he let his breath out through his nose, and turned around with his mouth already opening. “Alright. We should probably get mov…” The sky went out. Hinata stood a single pace behind him, the armored tower of her filling his whole view, and what little grey the storm clouds had been giving the night died behind the black sweep of her pauldrons and helmet. “…Hinata-chan.” Her name arrived a beat late, the rest of his sentence folding into it, but his feet stayed planted in her shadow, and his eyes went up her frame in one quick pass, sabatons to helm crest, reading the plates for damage. “You good? Everything okay?” “I am okay.” The doubled voice came down at him steadily. “But what you did with Sasuke, Naruto-kun. Opening your mind to his eyes. That was very reckless.” He rubbed the back of his soaked head. “Yeah. It was.” There was no argument in it. “But I knew I could handle him in there. And even if somethin' went wrong, I had you and Karin standin' three steps away. No way he pulls anything with the two of you watchin' him.” For a moment the tall frame in front of him gave him nothing at all, the visor a sheet of wet black with the last of the rain crawling down it. Then a breath moved out through the helmet. “Still. It was too risky.” “I'm just so glad nobody got hurt.” Karin had come up beside the two of them, hugging her arms against the drizzle. The visor and Naruto's face both came around to her slowly. “What?” Neither of them answered, and she followed their silence out and around herself. The courtyard lay in ruins from breach to broken breach, the bodies of rogues and mutants strewn across the flooded rubble where the night's fighting had dropped them, and the mountainous corpse of the overgrown mutant sprawled thirty paces off, already going soft in the rain, its reek riding the wet air. Karin realized that only now. She pushed her glasses up her nose. “I meant ourselves. Us three. Obviously.” She cleared her throat and drove past it. “So what are we going to tell the others? About Sasuke.” “The truth, mostly.” Naruto wiped the water off his face. “We ran into Sasuke, we fought him a little more, and once the truth got through his head, he stopped. He told us about the snake freak, and then he reverse summoned himself outta here to go deal with that crazy brother of his.” “You never told us about the seal you placed on Itachi, either,” Hinata said. “Heh.” He had the grace to look sheepish. “Wasn't even sure the thing took hold, so I figured there was no point bringin' it up till it mattered.” “And Sakura?” Karin's hands had found her hips. “You know exactly who this lands on hardest. If she hears about Sasuke secondhand, out of some mission report, she is going to…” “I'm gonna talk to Sakura myself. Personally.” Naruto put a hand up. “Before any report gets near her. That one's mine to tell, believe it.” While the two of them went back and forth, the coil along Hinata's spine rose. “Robbed,” Venom rolled up through her in a low growl. “We have been robbed. We had that annoying red-eyed brat. We were sure of it. A little longer and we would have taken him down and dragged him home by the ankle, and instead it ends with talking. The only worthwhile thing in this entire crawling mission was the sharkman, and our primary male partner spoiled even that one at the finish. And now this.” Something ran underneath the words that was closer to a growl than a thought. “Our male partner is really eager to ruin our wins!” Hinata blinked behind her visor. The tone had teeth in it, a raw feral edge she had not heard coming, and under it the turmoil was real, irritation rolling off the coil in slow hot waves she could feel in her own chest. She knew this shifting. She had been marking it for years now, the way Venom's register slid back and forth without warning, a cold and patient scholar taking a jutsu apart into its principles on one day, and on another day this, a fanged thing pacing behind her ribs. We ended it in better shape than we would have alone, she answered inside. The teamwork is why we are standing here barely scratched. Her gaze had drifted to Naruto, who was in the middle of recounting something to Karin with both arms thrown wide, and Karin was looking up at him like she believed every single word of it. And Sasuke had his way out of that battle from the beginning. We could have emptied ourselves to the floor and still be standing in this courtyard without him. The coil sat with that for a few long moments. “…Fine,” it allowed at last. “Fine. But we require compensation from our primary male partner. He will feed us. Large amounts of food, and chocolate above all of it. And then he will make dozens of his clones and set every one of them to pleasing every inch of this body of ours. Especially with their tongues.” A single bead of sweat slid down Hinata's temple inside the helmet. It seemed she was not the only one in this body who had been growing that particular kind of fantasy about him. “So what do we do right now?” Karin's question cut the inner channel off. She was looking back and forth between the two of them. “The night's not exactly finished with us.” Hinata's Byakugan flared behind the visor, the veins blooming at her temples, and her sight went out through the stronghold in one turning sweep, down through the rubble and the tunnels and out along the walls. “There is nothing left alive in this stronghold. The rogues and the mutants here are dead. Whatever survived the night is scattered across the island.” “Then first thing's the civilians.” Naruto turned toward the northern breach, toward the ridge where Sasuke's arm had pointed. “We find that stronghold where they got stashed and we keep it away from others.” His hands came up into the cross seal, and chakra surged off him in a hot pulse. “Tajū Kage Bunshin no Jutsu! (Multi Shadow Clone Jutsu!)” The courtyard filled. Clones bloomed out of rolling white smoke in the hundreds, on the rubble, on the walls, on the dead mutant's flank, until orange jackets crowded every level surface the ruin had left. “And after that we're sweepin' this whole island,” the original called over the mass of himself. “Every rock, every tunnel, everything still standin'. Let's move!” The host poured over the walls and into the dark, and the three of them went with it. Karin fell in at Hinata's side as they climbed the northern breach. “And there's still all those people hiding back on the first island,” she said, her voice dropping. “Out in those woods, in this weather. From what that village looked like…” Her mouth pulled tight. “Looks like not all of them managed to get away and hide.” They ran the broken curtain wall north, the rain thinning around them at last, and while her body took the shattered stone at speed Hinata let a part of her mind go back down into the white of it, the dragon of lightning pouring out of the sky and through her, and the thing underneath that moment that had not felt like her at all. She reached inward. The coil had settled since the courtyard, its irritation banked down to coals. When I caught Sasuke's lightning, she asked. You felt it as well. The strange thing. “We did.” The answer came back with none of the sulk left in it, surprisingly serious. “For a moment your body reacted in a way it has never reacted. It took in a volume of energy far past what your channels should accept quickly, as if something dormant in you had stirred and put its hands to the work. Your brainwaves changed their structure. So did the tissue of your eyes. Both lasted less than a breath, and both went back.” A pause moved along her spine. “We suspect your baseline genes carry something that has not yet awakened.” Hinata cleared a collapsed stretch of wall in one long bound and landed without breaking stride. She remembered pressure. On her eyes, and worst of all behind her forehead, a weight pushing outward from a place she had no name for, as if something on the far side of the bone had been trying to come out. “And there is another matter,” Venom went on. “This mission has shown us flaws. In our abilities, in our fighting capability. More of them than we are willing to accept. Our evolution must continue. When this mission ends, you will provide biomass, a great deal of it, and the pressed bars, the ones you showed the male and the red one. Many of them.” The coil drew itself tighter along her back. “There is a great deal of work to do.” You will have all of it, she answered, and put her sight back on the ridge line and ran. The stronghold sat north along the ridge exactly where Sasuke had pointed, and it told the same story as everything else he had touched that night. Its walls stood unbroken, its rogues lay dead at their posts with single precise burns and cuts, and behind a barred inner door he had not bothered to disguise, the civilians of the fishing village sat packed together in the dark, hundreds of them, soaked and starved, but alive. Hinata's doubled voice through the door frightened them nearly as badly as their captors had, and in the end it was Karin who talked the bar off its brackets, and Naruto's grinning clones who carried the children out. The rest of the night turned itself into a rain-soaked cleanup. Naruto flooded the island with clones and they went through it hill by hill, put down the mutants that turned on them, bound the ones that could be taken, and dug the last of the rogues out of hollows and sea caves with Hinata's sight walking ahead of every group and Karin sorting the living from the dead across the whole breadth of her range. The storm hammered on through all of it, and only toward dawn did the rain finally begin to thin, the thunder pulling away out over the sea and the fog peeling up off the channels in long grey sheets. First light found the three of them on the shore of the first island, near the wreck of the fishing village, with clone garrisons left standing over the civilians on both islands, and out of the brightening haze a ship came. It ran clean and fast for the beach, and its hull had pale seamless timber without a joint or a nail in it, grown whole out of Yamato's Wood Release. The first person off it did not wait for the ramp to settle. Anko came up the wet sand at a fast walk, planted herself in front of Naruto and Hinata, and demanded everything, from the beginning, leaving nothing out. Behind her the rest of both squads poured ashore, Guy's people and Naruto's team together, and several dozen more Konoha shinobi after them. The morning went to work. Shinobi spread into the woods after the hidden villagers and into the strongholds after the freed captives, fresh squads crossed the channel behind Naruto, Hinata, and Karin to be walked through the ruins, and the three of them laid out everything the night had held, the tunnels, the mutants, Sasuke, and above all Orochimaru, and the remote island far to the south where Sasuke's arm had pointed. The council that gathered on the beach was short. Anko wanted the ship turned around and an expedition on the water before the trail cooled, and nobody argued with her twice. Most of the squads would hold the twin islands and wait for the ships coming behind. A combined squad went aboard within the hour and sailed south. The remote island rose out of open sea near midday, and unmarked on the charts they carried. Folded into a ravine at its inner heart they found the hidden base, and it was newer than anything else they had walked through this whole campaign, the stone still sharp-edged, the seals along its corridors barely weathered. Its staff were all dead. They lay gathered into a single heap inside the entrance hall, cut down and stacked with the same surgical method as the rogues on the strongholds, Sasuke's own cleanup, finished before he ever crossed their path. Every trap on the way down had been disabled, every barrier seal cut, and the corridors stood open one after another until the combined squad reached the deepest level and stopped before the doors of Orochimaru's chambers. Hinata stood at the head of the corridor with her sight already through the far wall. “The way is safe. Nothing ahead of us is alive.” Anko went past her without a word. The large wooden double doors at the corridor's end were already broken, split down their faces and hanging crooked off the bolts, and she kicked them anyway, whud, both leaves slamming wide and one tearing loose to slap flat against the inner wall. Beyond lay a wide chamber that had been lived in and then fought in, a large bed against the far wall, shelves toppled, cabinets and lacquered furniture smashed and scattered across the floor, the struggle written into every splintered piece of it. And on the floor directly before them lay Orochimaru. “Is that…” Sakura's voice cut through from the second rank. “Is that him?” “Ugh.” Kiba had a hand clamped over his nose. “The smell is awful.” Kakashi stepped in past the both of them, his one visible eye moving over the floor. “He certainly looks different.” They looked. The thing filling the chamber would have been horrifying alive. Orochimaru's body had turned itself into a huge bone-white snake, its coiled length spilling across the whole floor and climbing partway up the walls, and its wide maw hung open where the head lay nearest the door, baring two full rows of teeth set one behind the other in the pale gums. His dead, glassy eyes looked at nowhere. Hinata's gaze slid along the length of him and caught what no one else's could. The white scales were small white snakes, thousands of them grown into a single crawling hide, and every last one of them was dead. “He really turned himself into a complete monster,” Kiba said, muffled through his fingers. “I mean, look at this thing. There's no person left in it at all.” While he talked, Hinata watched Anko. The jounin had walked up close to the dead coils and stopped there, looking down at what was left of her old teacher, and her face gave away nothing at all. One by one the rest of them drifted up and stood beside her, and for a while nobody said anything, the whole squad looking down at the body of a man who had wanted to live forever and had made a great many people suffer for the wanting. Anko lifted one foot and gave the pale coil a soft kick. The dead mass shifted the way dead meat shifts, and settled. “So, is this it?” Tenten asked from the edge of the group. “Is Orochimaru finally over?” “Not quite.” Anko's eyes stayed on the body. “The main body's done. But he stamped his curse marks on a whole lot of people over the years, and some of those marks are carrying nasty surprises inside them. Waiting for their moment.” “Then let's not spend ours here.” Kakashi turned back toward the corridor. “We proceed. Strip this place of everything usable, and then we take it apart.” They stripped the base to bare stone. Documents, samples, sealed storage, intact equipment, all of it catalogued and hauled up the ravine to the ship, and when the last crate was aboard they brought the hidden levels down and left the island holding nothing but rubble. Then the ship turned north, back to the twin islands, and the routine part of the mission began, the part nobody would ever write stories about. Squads rotated through the cleanup of both islands and the care of the civilians. The half-wrecked fishing town on the continent was cleared, repaired enough to stand, and formally handed back to the Land of Rivers' own forces. The abandoned laboratory complex in the Land of Rivers was stripped to its walls, and the mountain fortress in the Land of Grass after it. All of it was driven hard and fast, because Konoha's forces were stretched thin across two countries that were not theirs, and the other great nations and their hidden villages had begun to notice. A presence that size on neutral ground would read as intervention to a friendly eye and as invasion to any other kind, and so the squads folded up their operations one after another and flowed back east toward the operational base on the Fire border. All of it together took more than a week. The command building was new. It had gone up while the assault teams were abroad, a wide, long hall of fresh-cut timber near the center of the base, high-raftered enough that Hinata could stand at her full height beneath the beams with her helmet sealed away and her hair bound back. Her squad stood drawn up on the boards beside Naruto's team and Shikamaru's, three formations deep in front of the broad map table, and behind the table stood Shikaku, reading down a final sheaf of reports. He set the papers down. “Asuma. Last piece. The Land of Tea. Your conclusion.” “The prison was already finished when we got there.” Asuma's voice was even, an unlit cigarette held forgotten between two fingers. “Small facility, remote corner of the country. Most of the staff and most of the inmates had either died or run off long before us. What was left was one prisoner, alone, inside the high-security wing.” He paused. “He read as severely weakened. Neglected, starved, the wing had been failing around him for months. So we opened the cell to make contact. To help him, if it came to that.” He made a brief pause. “It went badly. He was a young man, barely more than a boy, and the moment the door moved he went berserk. His body mutated faster than anything we've seen out of the curse marks, and he attacked us. We tried to reason with him the whole way through. There was no sanity left in him to reach, and he took down close to half the prison trying to get at us.” The cigarette turned over in his fingers. “We were forced to put him down. We came back with a sealed body.” Shikaku took that in without moving, his eyes going down for a long moment as it filed itself away, and then he looked up across the assembled squads. Nobody was fidgeting. Ino was studying the floorboards, Sakura's listening quietly, and even Kiba stood quiet, the whole room chewing on the same thought. “We are still compiling everything this operation brought in, from every source,” Shikaku said. “That will take time. The Suigetsu individual has been taken into our custody for further notice.” He straightened off the table. “All squads. As of this hour you are stood down from the operation. Rotations and leave postings by end of day. Dismissed.” The formations broke, and over the first shuffle of feet he added, “High-ranking jounin, remain.” The hall drained until only a handful stood at the map table. Shikaku waited for the door to close. “The picture forming out of the captured records is this. Orochimaru's operations look to have severely weakened both the Land of Rivers and the Land of Grass, hollowed them out from underneath over years, and the full accounting is still being compiled.” “Is there anything preliminary we should be aware of?” Kakashi asked. “Two things.” Shikaku laid a hand flat on the map. “First. Orochimaru was keeping his own tab on the Akatsuki. Between his files from the captured bases and the description of what Hinata saw through that ring, we now suspect the Akatsuki have already taken two jinchuuriki. Both from the Stone village.” That moved through the room like cold air. Guy's brows came down, Yamato went very still, and Anko's arms folded hard across her chest. Hinata should be concerned. When she saw the chamber through that ring, only one was sealed, which means other is still kept somewhere. “Second. The claim Itachi passed to Naruto through that illusion. This Madara.” Shikaku's eyes came up and settled on Naruto. “I expect a fully detailed report. Every word he said, everything he showed you, in order, on my desk.” “You'll get it. All of it.” Naruto's answer came out prompt and flat, and Hinata, standing bareheaded at his side, caught what sat under the flatness, the annoyance ground down thin, the same splinter that talk had left in him on the cave floor days ago. He shifted his weight. “And Sasuke? Is he gonna stay listed as a missing-nin?” “He is no longer under Orochimaru's command, but he remains rogue, and his status remains what it is,” Shikaku said. “We are also not yet sure how deep he ran in Orochimaru's operations. Until we are, nothing changes.” Naruto pulled a long breath in through his nose and let it back out, and said nothing. “And Orochimaru himself?” Yamato asked. “Will his status be changed to deceased?” “For now, no. We are still compiling.” Shikaku's hand moved off the map. “If Anko's testimony, Jiraiya-sama's assessment, and Hinata's readings are all correct, then some of his curse marks may still hold fragments of his soul. Enough, potentially, for a partial resurrection. Perhaps a full one, under the wrong circumstances. We are hoping the man catalogued his own marked subjects, because otherwise we will be finding them the hard way.” Hinata's eyes went to Anko without turning her head. The jounin had not moved and had not spoken, but something in her stance had shifted at the words, her weight settling back a fraction, one thumb hooking into her coat where the collar hid the faded mark on her neck. “And the other villages?” Guy's voice had lost its usual volume, gone level and professional. “After everything we have done inside those borders, will we need to deploy again to counter them?” “All the major countries and their villages are at least aware we were operating inside Grass and Rivers. Tea, not quite yet.” Shikaku said. “We have already caught scouting attempts along both borders. I expect spies and emissaries moving into those countries within the month, all of them asking what we found and what we took. That is a problem for the diplomats first and for us second.” He looked down the table, and his attention moved to Naruto, Hinata, and Shikamaru and stopped there. “You three. I will want you later, on the handling of everything new that came out of this. Our forecasting says there is another campaign of this scale coming, in other countries this time, and it will be about the Akatsuki. The remaining jinchuuriki look to be under direct threat.” “Then I'm in it. Whenever it comes, wherever it is.” Naruto's shoulders had squared before Shikaku finished the sentence. Shikamaru dragged a hand down his face, looking exhausted by the mere shape of the future. “…What a drag,” he muttered, barely above the floorboards. “That will be all.” Shikaku bent back over his reports, and they filed out into the daylight. The base had changed while they were gone. What had been a walled patrol village with tents in its lanes was now streets, real ones, packed earth graded flat between rows of prefabricated buildings, strung lamps swaying on lines overhead, supply carts parked in ranks by the depot, somebody's laundry drying between two barracks. “Y'know,” Naruto said, hands laced behind his head as they walked, “we kinda turned this place into an actual little town.” Hinata hummed at that, ducking a lamp line without breaking stride. He tipped his head all the way back to find her face, high above his own even at a walk. “I'm gonna go talk to Sakura. About Sasuke. All of it, start to finish.” She nodded down at him. Sakura needed the proper details, and she needed them from him and from no one else. “It's just sad, y'know?” His hands came down off his head. “That he wouldn't come back with us. I could've helped him with his crazy brother. We could've done it together, that's the whole point. But no, he's still got it in his head that it's his problem and nobody else's.” He kicked a pebble down the lane. “At least he gave me his word nobody else gets hurt while he's out there. I'm hopin' he keeps it.” Hinata walked beside him and let him talk, her steps shortened to hold his pace, her shadow laying half the street into shade. “And now the interesting part's over,” he went on, groaning up at the sky, “and you know what's left? Paperwork. Reports. Pages and pages of 'em, every word Itachi said, everything on the islands, all of it in multiple copies. It's so tedious it should count as a forbidden jutsu.” A laugh slipped out of Hinata, her voice doubled and echoing as it always was, the deep resonance running gentle under her own. “You and Hokage-sama were already trying to simplify the paperwork, as I recall.” “Yeah, and after all that work we made it, like, two-three forms shorter.” He threw his hands up. “It needs way more than that. When I'm Hokage, I'm streamlinin' the whole thing, top to bottom. And maybe, maybe…” He trailed off, and his face folded into the hard frown of a man thinking at the very edge of his range. “…maybe I put one of those computer things on it. Yeah. Like the ones in the snake freak's bases. Computers can do all the tedious paperwork for me, and I just do the important stuff. I gotta figure out how they work first, but that's a detail.” “I will help you,” Hinata said. “Then it's basically already done, believe it.” He grinned up at her, and the two of them turned down the lane toward the long medical building at its end, where the lamps were already lit over the door and Sakura was working, and kept walking.