Chapter 15
All right guys! Hiatus officially nearing the end.
I did finish my thesis (yay for me!) so I had some time to finish this chapter. Oral exams are still a thing though, so I’ll likely disappear for a while again – don’t worry, I’m super persistent. This. Gets. Finished. (even if it kills me)
Honestly though, I feel like I’ve been writing this for the last ten years, so I’m not giving up on it.
To everyone who didn't give up on me and this story: I love you and you're the best:* So here’s an extra at the end, you definitely earned it.
There are guards stationed in the Forest of Death, but none of them are Hisana. She’s … reluctantly fine with that. Yes, anxiety is crawling under her skin like fire ants, but on the whole she’s fine. There’s nothing much she can do against Orochimaru, after all – not strategically and definitely not in combat. She doesn’t want that man anywhere near team seven, but she also realizes that she’s currently scraping very closely along her own limits.
It helps that Anko is a blood hound. This test is the very first major thing that anyone has ever entrusted to her. It’s an unspoken fact that, if she fucks this up, it might very well be the last one too. And so the kunoichi is watching everything and everyone with hawk-like eyes, teeth bared in only a vague approximation of a smile. As soon as she smells anything fishy, Hisana and Hana will be the first to know, so that they can contain the mess before Ibiki can draw and quarter them all.
Also, there’s a report she needs to write on the last test. A short and boring one, but T&I are sticklers for the rules, and so she tries to cram as many details into it as possible. Next to her Shizuha is leaning so far over her paper, her glasses are slowly sliding down her nose. On the other side of the table Riku is clicking his pen in annoyance. “This,” he says with feeling, “is the reason why I would be totally fine never to specialize.”
“On average, specialized ninja earn thirty percent more than specialized ninja of the same rank,” Shizuha murmurs, pen still scraping rhythmically against her paper.
The whole situation feels inane. There is an invasion planned – they should be doing something. Something other than filling out B14 forms (‘Undercover work’, sub-type ‘Sabotage’).
“Paperwork makes me sleepy,” Hisana grouches, signing her registration number at the bottom with big, messy strokes, even while the rest of the paper is still mostly blank.
“You better wake up now though,” Hana’s voice sounds from the door. Her face is pale and her mouth pinched. “We got a problem.”
They abandon a worried Shizuha and a suspicious Riku with little explanation. “What’s going on?” Hisana hisses at the other girl, even though she’s already relatively certain she knows.
“We just found a bunch of Kusa-nin pretty much ripped to shreds and nobody has any idea how it happened. None of the guards saw or heard a thing, even though a team was stationed not a hundred yards away.”
“What about the cameras?”
“Blind spot. That’s already suspicious enough, but you should have seen Anko’s face when she looked at the remains. I think we’re in pretty deep shit.”
Hisana doesn’t have to fake the shaky sigh that escapes her. It’s one thing to know everyone would be freaking out, seeing it is quite another.”Nobody has sounded the alarms yet,” the Inuzuka continues, “because we don’t want to cause a panic if we’re wrong. But I’m pretty sure Anko knows what she’s talking about.”
“Does Ibiki know?”
“Well, he knows something’s up. But as far the rest of the committee is concerned, we’re handling it until we say otherwise.”
“I’m not sure if that’s wise.” It’s a token-protests. She already knows that it’s extremely unwise and that they should probably call the entire task off right the fuck now. The problem is, without at least confirming that it’s Orochimaru they don’t have enough in hand to just shut everything down. Right now it just looks as if there’s a sadist loose in the forest. Well, two. Killing isn’t exactly prohibited during the exam, even though it’s frowned upon during the early rounds. The only actual problem is that nobody knows how it happened – and a lack of information is something that ninjas don’t deal with well.
“Could it have been … Gaara?” Hisana prompts, eager to keep the other girl talking; she needs to be updated, so that she doesn’t have to act deaf and dumb around everyone. Hana snorts.
“No. That boy leaves a trail of destruction in his wake that isn’t very hard to follow. Dead bodies, uprooted trees, and screams the like of which I haven’t heard since mom kicked out my father.” Hisana winces. The stories about that particular incidence are varied, numerous and usually wild from start to finish. Conversation stops for a moment as they pass two chuunin. The two men nod at them amicably and Hisana forces herself to smile back. “Whoever that was,” Hana murmurs as soon as they’re alone again, “tricked a whole squad of tokujous with surveillance specialization – that means they’re either too good to be genin or they had outside help. Possibly both.” Hana’s eyes say ‘definitely both’.
As soon as they’re out of the door, they break into a run.
Anko awaits them at the gates to training ground 44 with an uncharacteristic frown. Next to her a familiar, fussy looking chuunin teacher is scribbling notes onto a clipboard, painted lips pinched and eyebrows raised. The ‘I told you so’, directed at basically everyone who entrusted Anko with even a shred of responsibility, hangs in the air loud and clear. Hisana inserts herself between them, ignoring the slighted sputter of the chuunin.
“All right, we’re here. Don’t tell me the party started without us.” Anko’s face stays grim; like this she looks unfamiliar and almost threatening. Hisana remembers seeing this expression only once: when the woman had a bunch of genin to protect against a team of jounin, her only back-up face down in the grass.
“We have a snake,” is all she says. Most of the gathered ninja don’t seem to catch the reference; only a couple of eyebrows shoot upwards.
“A big one?” Hisana probes. “The biggest,” is the only answer.
“No, we don’t,” the annoyed chuunin sensei snaps from behind Hisana. “There’s absolutely no proof of this. Orochimaru of the Sannin has vanished years ago. He won’t suddenly appear during a Chuunin Exam and kill a team of Kusa genin.”
“He will if it’s an infiltration,” Anko hisses back. “He’s not stupid, you know. He may be working with Suna, or at least use them as a cover to follow his own goals. I recognize his work.”
The other woman rolls her eyes exaggeratedly. “You do realize,” Hana quips, “that one of his most well-known feats was instigating a small-scale civil war to cover the theft of a single scroll, don’t you? This sounds like it would be right up his alley.”
“Exactly,” Anko grunts, apparently uncertain whether to be pleased or not. “In any case, we have to investigate. I’m just saying we should be ready for anything.”
The other woman shakes her head. “Fine. I will inform the committee. But if it turns out that it was only … the surveillance squad falling asleep, you will be in deep trouble!”
With that she departs, long skirt trailing in her wake.
“Oh for the love of –“ Hana glares at her back. “I hate that woman. What does she think we are? A bunch of genin? As if an entire squad would fall asleep in the middle of a mission.”
“Forget her,” Anko interrupts. “We have bigger fish to fry. As you heard” – and here she sneers something fierce – “this is our problem until we can prove it’s either Orochimaru or Suna. Most of our team is already stationed in the forest and on alert. We need volunteers for the investigation. Scrape together whoever you trust and who isn’t busy – we need at least two teams. You have fifteen minutes. Go.”
Hisana needs twelve minutes to get her team together. The first five she spends in a bit of a daze, stunned to realize how many choices she actually has right now. She’s never seen herself as popular and if someone were to inquire about the size of her social circle, the answer would have been ‘small but close’. It’s a punch to the gut to realize that this answer wouldn’t be true anymore. Even if she limits her choices to chuunin and above, there’s Shiki and Shizuha, her entire genin team including Kohaku-sensei, Kakashi-senpai and Tenzou, and even Akimichi Choumei and Yamanaka Inomaru. There’s also an entire bunch of acquaintances that might agree to help her out – Hyuuga Airi, Iruka-sensei, Ito-sensei, Inori-sensei, a bunch of Inuzuka tokujous from the tracking department, … and the list goes on. For a brief, uncomfortable moment she realizes that she needs Sasuke to stay in Konoha – because she’s not certain anymore if she’d be able to follow him.
Of course, many of her choices are out, simply because they’re someone’s genin teacher, already otherwise part of the committee, or generally busy elsewhere. But Ran and Fudo drag in Sora and Haru in a matter of minutes, and Hisana herself has Shizuha by the hand and Shiki by the scuff of her neck even faster. Finally, trailing after Sora, uninvited but not unwelcome, Mami Hanada arrives too.
“Guys,” Hisana announces greatly, “I have a mission. It might kill us all, but I need your help.”
“So business as usual,” Sora grumbles, fingering the small puncture holes in his pants where Fudo sank his teeth in. “Your summons are so fucking rude.” Next to him Haru is hugging Ran like a stuffed animal, casting his former teammate exasperated and pitying looks.
“Wow,” Hana quips from between a pack of her rugged clansmen and their animal partners. “Love your team, Hisana.”
Hisana’s eyes glide over her make-shift squad: To her left, Shizuha is still holding her hand, eyes directed into the forest and completely unmoving. To her right, Shiki still sporadically struggles against her hold, pouting like a child. Then there’s Sora, still kneeling in the dirt to glare at his pant legs, sandwiched between a murderous looking Hanada and Mitsuharu, who looks increasingly uncomfortable and has now gathered both of her summons into his arms.
“…Shut up,” she grumbles.
They may look like a bunch of wimps and weirdoes, but she trusts these people. Even Hanada, who doesn’t need to be here but has yet to actually complain. Anko claps her hands only once and everyone snaps to attention.
“Debriefing,” she announces. “We have an anomaly in sector 29B. A team of genin has been eviscerated. The nearby surveillance team hasn’t noticed a damn thing and our cameras caught zilch. Our goal is to track down the responsible party – or parties – and assess if we can let them loose on the contestants or if we need to take them out.” So far so good, Hisana thinks, watching the unimpressed faces of her team. “The problem is,” Anko continues sharply, “that this may be a precursor to an attack on Konoha.”
The Inuzuka team flinches as a whole; Hanada’s face whirls towards Hisana, who only manages to send her a grim look. Most of her friends are aware that Hisana’s run in with Gaara has Konoha up in arms against Suna. Hanada is not one of them. But even Sora and Haru only just seem to realize how serious the situation is. Hisana grimaces as both of her former teammates glower at her in reproach.
“The most likely perpetrator is Suna,” the older kunoichi continues, undisturbed by the murmurs going through her ranks. “We don’t know what they want from us but it isn’t good.” Anko rubs her forehead. She’s slipping in and out of the more formal debriefing language and it’s not like her at all. Hisana and Hana exchange worried glances. “But I tell you, to hell with ‘most likely’. It isn’t Suna. We have a Sannin on the loose here, and you all know who it’s going to be.”
“Well, shit,” one of the Inuzuka grunts. His nin-dog whines, low and nervous. There’s a moment of silence as everyone quietly panics to themselves. Then Anko whistles and everyone straightens visibly, nervous people replaced by dutiful soldiers.
“Even a Sannin is only a ninja,” she reminds them. “And ninjas die. We’ll track down whoever’s responsible and do our duty. So suck it up. Everyone, follow me!”
The forest looms ominously, but the place itself doesn’t scare Hisana anymore. It’s more what it represents that unsettles her. She can hear the quiet steps of a giant tiger sneak past and the buzzing of the monstrous insects – all of it is reasonably familiar by now; the scariest thing in this place is far smaller and makes no noise.
They follow Anko in a tight formation. It’s silly to think that numbers can protect them. It only makes it statistically more likely that one of them is going to die; a better person than Hisana might have called on people that aren’t her friends. But she does feel safer in such a large group and the familiar chakra signatures around her do soothe her baser instincts. It only takes five minutes to reach the bodies and she can smell them already two minutes into their run. He didn’t even bother to hide them, she thinks derisively. How arrogant.
Anko is right: even Sannin are mortal, no matter how much Orochimaru may wish otherwise. Hisana’s fists clench without her consent. She doesn’t care for the Kusa-nin, they’re strangers, but the sloppiness of the kill enrages her. This man plans to kill the Hokage and take over her village – the very least he could do is take it seriously.
“See this?” their team leader prompts, prodding one of the bodies with her foot. “It almost looks like she exploded. Except, there’s no blast radius. All of her blood is centered around here. Something slowly ripped her apart from the inside.” Anko casts them a pregnant look. “As if something shed her like a skin.”
The kunoichi’s jaw has come unhinged and the skin around her neck looks flabby and loose. Mostly she’s stayed in one piece, but there are parts that look ripped, as if a sausage split out of its skin. Her team mates lie a few feet away, the cause of death clearly a kunai to the neck.
“They died at least fifteen minutes earlier,” Shizuha remarks, kneeling down next to the remains of a slim shinobi. She opens his mouth and peers inside. “Ten to fifteen,” she amends. Next to Hisana, Shiki makes an unhappy noise.
“Agreed,” Hana throws out. Anko nods, looking grimly satisfied.
“All right. Hana, you’re with me. Hisana, I want you to wait here for orders. If we lose contact for more than ten minutes, inform Ibiki.”
Hisana nods, feeling uneasy. She already knows what’ll happen. As soon as Orochimaru gives them the slip – and he will – he’ll go after Sasuke. And Hisana has no idea where in this damn forest her cousin might be. There’s a very real chance won’t make it there in time.
“Do you really think it’s Orochimaru of the Sannin?” Haru murmurs. He looks worried, white brows furrowed and face pale.
“Yeah,” she confesses, equally quiet. “You ok?” He shakes his head a little but then shrugs helplessly. It’s a feeling Hisana knows all too well. They’re never ok, but they do their duty. To be honest, she never really thought Haru was cut out for this job; he’s too soft. But he’s too good to end as an academy teacher. As far as Hisana knows, he’s applied twice already and they always tell him the same thing: Stay on the active roster for a few more years. Come back when you’re older. It’s a platitude – there’s no guarantee he’ll be alive a few years from now and they know it. But Haru is surprisingly resilient. Something tells her he’ll make it yet, even just to stick it to administration. Maybe as a jounin sensei.
“Don’t think about it too much,” she tells him. “You’re not alone in this. Thank you for coming.” He shrugs again, this time with a smile.
“What,” he says, “you think we’d let you get killed by yourself?”
“Nah. You guys would want to see if I really bite it.”
“Exactly. I don’t believe it unless I see it with my own two eyes.” And then he adds, “Even then, maybe not,” before peering suspiciously into her eyes. Hisana grins.
The urgent beep of her com startles them both.
“Enemy contact!” Anko’s voice barks. “It’s Orochimaru – he got away! Two men down. We need medics and reinforcements!”
Hisana whirls around. “Ran, Ibiki! Fudo, hospital!”
“Yes, m’am!” they chirp and melt into the undergrowth.
“Everyone, let’s go. Anko, where did he go?”
“In the direction of sector 12C,” comes the static-y response. “He’s moving fast.”
“Well, then we’ll have to be fast too. Shizurin, up front with me.”
She’s never moved through a forest this fast. Even in active pursuit, there’s an element of pacing yourself, so that you don’t confront the enemy tired and out of breath. But right now it’s a sprint more than a long distance run; they don’t have the luxury of a persistence run. Tensions are high and every genin team that foolishly mistakes them for fellow competitors is mercilessly swiped aside by either a stone-faced Sora or a viciously efficient Hanada. Orochimaru’s scent is faintly familiar. It’s sharp and chemical and only the barest traces of it clung to the corpse he’d left behind. If not for that, she might have mistaken him for a medic-nin. She can smell Sasuke too, as well as a healthy amount of earth-shattering, debilitating fear.
“Ohhhh god,” Shiki chokes out behind her and then a wave killing intent sweeps over them. For just a moment she’s back in that bunker, darkness all around, only fear and paranoia driving her. Then she shakes it off. “What the hell,” she grunts, angry at herself. Someone breathes out shakily. “Get moving!” she hisses and her team snaps to attention.
“Go,” Sora hisses. “Go, go, go, before I turn around and run in the other direction.”
“Agreed,” is Shiki’s dour pronouncement.
They burst in on team 7 with all the theatrics of an ANBU squad. For a moment Hisana loses sight of everything – her team, Sakura, Naruto – hit by relief and panic both at once. They’re so lucky, so incredibly lucky to arrive in the nick of time, and so she throws herself at Sasuke just before the Sannin’s teeth can sink into his neck. They roll off the tree and straight into free fall.
Above them Orochimaru snarls.
Extra
„You look exactly like him, you know.”
Hisana slants a look at her new summon. Fudo rolls onto his back, wriggling until he sinks into the space between her legs. “Scratch,” he commands, claws pointing at his belly.
“You’re not going to gas me when I do, are you?” she prompts suspiciously.
“Not if you do it right,” he wheedles, wriggling again until she sinks her nails into his fur. Ran watches them with half-lidded eyes. “If I look at you like so,” she hums, “it’s almost as if you were him.”
“Thought you give better scratches,” her brother adds. “Shisui always squeezed too hard. I’m delicate!” He sounds wistful, though; almost as if he missed it.
“I didn’t think you were supposed to pet summons in the first place,” Hisana quips. “It’s … undignified.” Both skunks snort at her.
“You think we’d have survived with your brother if we cared about things like dignity?” Ran actually manages to look incredulous, even with her furry face and no eyebrows. “I kissed my dignity good-bye the day he summoned us because he dropped a bunch of scrolls into a gutter. Do I look like a dog to you? Or a rat? Skunks don’t fetch – or at least we didn’t use to.”
“That lazy asshole,” Hisana snorts before she can catch herself. Something about the story resonates with her and she hates and loves it both. It’s so much easier not to mourn him if she doesn’t think of him as a real person.
“‘Lazy’ is right,” Ran grunts. “‘Ran, I forgot my mission scroll at home, can you get it?’, ‘Ran, I’m out of kunai, can you fetch some for me?’, ‘Ran, I have mission report, can you deliver that?’”.
Fudo lifts his head just enough to glare at his sister.
“Will you stop complaining? At least he made you do important stuff. With me it was always ‘Fudo, I left my lunch at home’ or ‘Fudo, I’m thirsty’. I was literally the food delivery service.”
“Because he asked you to deliver a report once, and you lost it!”
“It was stolen from me!”
“You know what, you two were too much alike! Do you see what I had to deal with?” she addresses Hisana, fur bristling, before strutting up to her brother. “You two. Were exactly. The same. Person – one soul in the bodies of a human and a damn skunk.”
Hisana watches them squabble, feeling weirdly nostalgic. By now the siblings are a single ball of fur on her lap, playfully snarling and snapping at each other. In then end she carefully pries them apart and the immediately go lip in her grip.
“All right,” she says. “Behave. I don’t play fetch either, but I can’t promise I won’t forget my lunch occasionally.” Fudo wriggles in her grip and Hisana smiles. “But I’m springing for food this time.”
I'm still taking suggestions for extras, btw:)