Chapter 8
It goes fine until Han and Utakata are wrapped up in sand for Gaara to carry them out. Later he reasons there must have been some kind of silent alarm that sensed intruders, but when a man dressed all in black appears in front of them it’s a complete surprise. It’s like watching water drain down a sink in reverse: he flows into reality like he’s pouring out of the single eye hole in his orange mask.
“I didn’t think you’d find us so quickly,” he says. “How resourceful. How did you do it?” Neither of them answers. “Well, I can’t have you getting away with my materials. And you, one-tail, thanks for coming straight to me. Now we can start the sealing.”
“Not just yet, you bastard,” says Roushi. He spits lava at the masked man, but it seems to go right through him, splattering onto the floor behind him. “Ugh. What is he, a clone?”
The man darts forward and backhands Roushi into the wall, making small stones and dust fall from the ceiling. Gaara encases him in sand and squeezes, but no blood seeps out. A moment later his sand shield barely comes up in time to stop the man from stabbing him through the neck. He can completely disappear, but he’s certainly solid when he wants to be.
Roushi pushes him back, engaging him in a taijutsu battle almost too fast for Gaara to follow. As far as he can tell, Roushi never lands a hit even with Gaara’s sand limiting the masked man’s range of movement, but Roushi comes out of it with a shallow wound on his arm. Roushi seems to have understood that the man needs to be solid to hit him, and he engages more closely, giving Gaara an opportunity to wrap sand around the man’s wrist just as he’s about to land a blow on Roushi’s jaw. To Gaara’s satisfaction, he goes through with it, and Gaara is able to crush his wrist. A fragment of bone narrowly misses Roushi’s eye, pinging off his faceguard and splattering it with blood.
The man hisses in pain and jumps back, starting to drain back out of reality. On the off-chance that he’s still solid, Gaara throws a volley of sand kunai at him. He thinks one sticks in the man’s thigh before he vanishes.
“He could be back any time,” Roushi says, leaning against the wall. “That ability of his is perfect for ambushes. Can you fly us out of here at top speed?”
Gaara’s sand picks up all four of them, and he sends a Third Eye ahead to make sure they don’t crash into a wall. It takes a lot of concentration, but he manages to get them all out of the quarry pit in one piece. He falls to one knee and keeps them in the air, heading for the last place they saw Naruto.
“Contact Naruto,” he tells Roushi over the noise of air rushing past. “Ask where he is and if Jiraiya’s willing to help us with these seals. I need all my concentration to keep us up here where that masked man shouldn’t be able to get us.”
Shouldn’t be able to apparently means nothing for the masked man. Gaara doesn’t sense him until he drops onto Han’s back and starts creating another vortex to suck Han into. Gaara manages to put a spike of sand all the way through the masked man’s leg while he’s concentrating on his transportation technique. “Fuck,” says the man, and a volley of kunai shoots from the hole in his mask. Gaara shields himself and tries to push the man off with a wave of sand, but it passes right through him. He swings to the underside of the platform carrying Han, as if Gaara won’t be able to see him there, but falls when Gaara spikes the sand at the bottom into lances.
“If you can hear me, Roushi,” says Gaara, trying to see where the masked man fell, “please come back out soon. I don’t know if he’ll try again, and it’s hard enough to carry all of us without fighting him too.”
“We will,” says Son Gokuu’s deep voice from Roushi’s mouth. Bijuu have always been better at splitting their consciousness than humans. “Continue toward where we last saw Naruto. He says he will convince Jiraiya to help us, and that they are a day’s journey southwest of where we met them.” That means they’ll be flying through the night, and will probably reach Naruto and Jiraiya just before dawn.
Maybe Shukaku senses his worry, because he sends a wave of burning chakra to refill Gaara’s reserves. It’s like trying to use a cauldron full of boiling water to fill a teacup, and the sand platforms wobble dangerously as Gaara struggles to assimilate the extra chakra. It would be much more useful if he fed Gaara a steady amount of chakra, but he probably doesn’t have that much control. He’s obviously noticed how much trouble Gaara is having with his chakra, and he’s pretending to be angry at Gaara’s lack of skill. He’s probably worried.
The masked man hasn’t come back by sunset, but Gaara can’t allow himself to sleep. Shukaku doesn’t have the control to keep the platforms headed for their destination. Gaara never quite got the hang of sleeping for more than a couple of hours a night, anyway.
He’s promised to wake Roushi at moonrise, which with the waxing gibbous moon is a few hours after sunset. Hopefully this will all be over by the full moon, because it will be impossible to get Shukaku to do anything useful for three full days. Normally they travel to an uninhabited island and destroy everything in sight while Shukaku swears at Gaara for keeping him from slaughtering humans… but they can’t do that if it means leaving Roushi alone to fight Akatsuki.
He can’t stop himself from constructing scenarios in his head: Shukaku loses control and injures Roushi; Shukaku loses control and prevents Gaara from killing a member of Akatsuki; Gaara is exhausted trying to control Shukaku and lets himself get killed.
He makes it to moonrise and lets himself drift close enough to wake Roushi. When the sun first sends pale light above the horizon, Gaara still has chakra but he’s too tired to control it. He lets the platforms fall as slowly as he can.