Chapter 11
Before they leave, Itachi compiles a folder of all the recent reports of Akatsuki sightings at bounty exchange stations and in villages. Utakata asks Saiken to relay it to the other bijuu, and then the three of them head for an exchange station in southern Earth Country, where one of Itachi’s spies saw Kinyaku Kakuzu and his partner ‘White Death’ two days ago. When they show her Itachi’s sign, the agent tells them that Kakuzu headed northwest. Gaara misses Roushi, because although Utakata is a sensor he can’t track people he’s never met before. Gaara carries them as fast as he can toward the town of Kamasen in the exact middle of Earth Country. And four hours later they fly into an ambush.
Because he isn’t a sensor, Gaara doesn’t notice until a dark blur hits Utakata’s bubble, sending it flying. “Damn,” says someone below. “I thought it’d pop. Don’t fucking look at me like that, bubbles pop when you stab them.”
Gaara stops the platforms he and Shisui are on. Shisui looks at him for a moment, nods, and then completely disappears. He probably wants Gaara and Utakata to distract the Akatsuki members so he can catch them in genjutsu. Gaara tries to clamp sand around the shouting man—White Death—but he dodges. “Hey! Come down here and fight me like a man! Fucking atheists are always afraid to get a little bloody!” His partner mumbles something and he laughs. “Yeah, yeah. I guess I’ll have to take the battle up to him!” He uses a chakra-assisted jump to draw level with Gaara’s platform—Gaara floats a little higher to avoid him, and takes a cut on the leg from his scythe. But Gaara is in just the right place to grab his head with the sand at the bottom of the platform. And, feeling sick, he crushes the man’s skull. It reminds him too much of his childhood—he struggles to remember where and when he is.
The body falls a few meters away from Kinyaku, who seems to be glaring at it. Gaara is trying to separate his sand from the blood and… fragments, so he almost misses when Kinyaku’s back bulges and rips open. Two enormous black things come out and stand over him, and though they have empty masks instead of faces they seem to be watching Gaara. He barely manages to dodge a combined wind/fire attack, but it still blisters his skin inside his sand armor.
The ground beneath Kinyaku turns to mud (Utakata?), trapping his feet and one of the masked creatures. The other flaps skeletal wings that shouldn’t be able to lift it at all, and comes at Gaara. He dodges its continual attacks—how much chakra does it have?—but manages to see glimpses of Kinyaku trying to avoid Utakata’s bubbles. When it’s not throwing incredibly powerful wind release techniques at him, the masked creature is actually pretty slow, and Gaara is much more agile in the air. He starts pulling sand out of the rocky dirt of Earth Country and manages to enclose the bottom half of the creature, crushing it. It doesn’t even notice, and he barely avoids a concussive wall of air. He can now see that it’s made of thousands of what look like living, wormlike cables. So what animates it?
He settles on going for the mask, but it’s difficult for any attacks to connect because it just blows them away. It will be easier to seal the entire thing. It takes a long time to capture it, but eventually he is able to layer half a ton of sand on top of it, both crushing it and using Shukaku’s seal to make sure it doesn’t come out. He returns to the battlefield, where Kinyaku is now missing but two more of his masked creatures lie unmoving on the ground, their masks shattered. Shisui and Utakata are standing over them, looking tired.
“What happened to Kinyaku?” Gaara asks them.
“Escaped,” says Shisui, scowling. “Went underground while we were distracted with these things. We’ll try and track him down, but we were waiting for you.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“It barely matters,” says Utakata, who isn’t even out of breath. “Now that I’ve tasted his chakra I can find him again. But we might want some kind of a strategy for when we do.” He lifts his pipe to gesture eastward. “He’s going that way.”
“So, those things are completely independent when they’re outside his body,” says Shisui, “which means that even if I can stop him with sharingan they’ll still be a problem, and we don’t know how many he has. He’s also got an earth technique that makes his skin basically impenetrable. I don’t suppose either of you knows any lightning release techniques?” They shake their heads. “Damn. Me neither, I have a secondary water affinity.” He sighs and sits down on a rock. “In that case we need to surprise him from behind or use genjutsu. Do you think you two could immobilize him long enough that I could get a good look at his eyes? I don’t think he knows I’m an Uchiha yet since I only used kenjutsu to fight him.”
“If I can’t immobilize him I can at least distract him,” says Gaara.
“Yeah, sure,” says Utakata. “I’ll see if I can poison him. Let’s go get this over with.”
They find him again a few kilometers east, above ground again, and Gaara immediately grips his legs with sand.
Unfortunately, his legs are completely detachable, and he rolls out of the way of Utakata’s water blade. Cutting won’t do any good on him. But while he’s off-balance, Shisui manages to get in front of him and looks into his eyes, stopping him dead. “All right,” Shisui says. “He’s trapped. Go ahead and stab-slash-crush-slash-poison him to your hearts’ content.”
Utakata goes first with a large bubble full of what seems to be knockout gas. Kinyaku falls over backward, limp, still staring up at the sky with half-closed eyes. “This is strange,” says Utakata, bending over him. “He has two different kinds of chakra circulating in his system. One of them may be another of those mask creatures. We’ll need to eliminate both of them.”
Shisui unsheathes his sword and very casually stabs Kinyaku through the chest. “There, did that do for one of them? I should have gotten his heart.”
Utakata looks slightly sick, but he nods. “I can’t tell where the other one is located. Gaara…”
He’s supposed to use Desert Coffin to kill this man, but he really, really doesn’t want to. Let me do it, says Shukaku. It’s been way too long since I had any blood.
“You had blood earlier today,” murmurs Gaara. “When we killed White Death.”
Oh no, says Shukaku, sounding smug. That was all you. Great job, by the way.
“That’s not something you should compliment me on,” he whispers. “Take my body.” He doesn’t see or hear it when Kinyaku dies, and he tries to pretend he doesn’t feel it. But his sand is still sticky with blood, and the smell is horribly familiar. He bites his lip hard enough to draw more blood and despises the taste.
“Got to hand it to you,” says Shisui, “you really know how to say the creepiest possible thing while talking to yourself, right before killing a guy.” Utakata glares at him, an expression Gaara didn’t think he was capable of. Shisui raises his hands in mock surrender. Then his face freezes and his hands fall back to his sides. “Fuck. How are we going to collect a bounty on this pile of sludge?”