The rain had finally let up, but everything was still soaked. Water dripped from every branch, and the bark was slippery as hell under my feet. Mikoto and I were making decent time through the trees, keeping maybe half a mile between us and the caravan below.
But something was off.
She was keeping pace, sure. But her face looked a little tighter than usual, like her mind was somewhere else.
"Hey, you doing okay?" I asked as we jumped together to a thick, moss-covered branch.
"Yeah, I'm fine," she said, but there was something in her voice. "Just a little tired, I guess."
"Tired?" I gave her a look. "That's not like you."
That got a small smile out of her. "Yeah, well. I guess there's a first time for everything."
We jumped in silence for a while, but I could tell something was bothering her.
"Mikoto," I said finally, during another pause. "What's going on?"
She was quiet for a long moment, staring off through the trees. "It's nothing. Just... family stuff."
"Family stuff that has you looking like someone kicked your cat?"
"I don't have a cat."
"You know what I mean."
She sighed, running a hand through her damp hair. "We got word from the front yesterday. My cousin was involved in the latest engagement over in River Country."
"Wait, was?"
"No, he's alive," she said quickly. "But barely. He took a pretty bad hit to the chest and ended up losing half his squad in the fighting." Her voice got noticeably quieter. "Three other Uchiha didn't make it back at all from that mission."
"I'm sorry, Mikoto."
"It's war, right? People die in war." But even as she said it, her hands were clenched into tight fists. "It's just that... we're supposed to be the best, you know? With the genjutsu and the Sharingan and all that clan pride stuff everyone's always going on about. And we're still losing people to Suna and River."
I didn't know what to say to that. The Uchiha were supposed to be untouchable, that's what everyone believed, probably what they believed about themselves too.
My first instinct was to kind of roll my eyes at the whole thing. Of course the clan princess was having trouble dealing with the reality that her family wasn't actually invincible. Welcome to the real world, where even the fanciest bloodlines in the village couldn't stop a kunai to the throat if it was aimed right.
But then I actually looked at her. Like, really looked at her properly.
And it sort of hit me all at once, she was just a teenager.
I'd been thinking of her as this confident, skilled Uchiha who just happened to be on my team. Someone who could keep up with me in the trees without slowing down, who had pretty decent instincts, who didn't get in my way when things got serious. I'd been treating her like she was, well, like an equal I guess.
But she wasn't. She was a teenager who'd probably grown up hearing stories about how great and powerful her clan was, how their Sharingan made them nearly unstoppable, how they were the pride of Konoha. And now people she'd grown up with, people she'd probably looked up to, were coming back broken or not coming back at all.
For all her skill, she was still just a genin dealing with her first real taste of what war actually meant.
"I'm sorry," I said after a moment. "I bet you actually knew those guys pretty well, didn't you? The ones who didn't make it back from the mission."
She nodded, not saying anything.
"That sucks. It really does." I shifted on the branch, trying to find the right words. "For what it's worth, being upset about it doesn't make you weak. It makes you human."
"Well, the clan doesn't really do 'human,'" she said with a bitter little laugh. "We do 'strong' and 'victorious' and 'bringing honor to the Uchiha name' instead."
"The clan can go stuff it for a minute then. You're allowed to feel sad when people you actually care about get hurt or killed."
That got a snort out of her that was half laugh and half sob at the same time. "You realize you just told one of the most powerful clans in Konoha to go 'stuff it,' right?"
"What are they gonna do, glare at me really intensely with those fancy eyes?"
"With the Sharingan, actually, yeah they could." But she was almost smiling now. "Though knowing you and how you operate, you'd probably find some way to make even that backfire on them somehow. Like you'd show up to a genjutsu duel wearing a blindfold or something equally ridiculous."
"Hey, that's not a terrible strategy. Can't get caught in a genjutsu if you can't see it."
"That's..." She paused, actually considering it. "That's still completely insane as an idea, but also kind of brilliant in a very you way."
I reached over and gave her shoulder a quick squeeze. "For what it's worth, you being out here doing this instead of being on the front lines probably means someone else gets to go home safe tonight. That caravan we're protecting down there? Those are real people with families and lives too."
She nodded, taking a shaky breath. "Yeah, I know that. I do. It's just hard to keep that in mind sometimes."
"Yeah, it really is."
We sat in comfortable silence for a moment, listening to the water drip from the leaves around us. The heaviness was still there, but it felt more manageable now.
"So how you holding up?" I asked, shifting the conversation to lighter ground. "You know, besides the whole existential crisis thing."
"Well, my hair's definitely going to be all sticky and gross tonight from all this moisture." She wiped some of the rain off her face, and she seemed pretty grateful for the change in subject. "But I'll survive, I think. What about you?"
"Pretty much the same. At least it stopped pouring on us."
"Don't even think about jinxing us," she warned, already starting to move toward the next tree over. "We've still got hours left to go on this escort."
"Don't worry, I wouldn't—"
The memories suddenly hit me out of nowhere, and it felt like someone had just smacked me in the skull with a pillow. Soft impact, but still weirdly disorienting and way too personal.
[My clone had been moving through some brush near the road, maybe three hundred meters out from the town. Something was wrong. There was movement happening in the trees above him. Six figures dropping down fast—bandits maybe, weapons already drawn, no time to react properly before—
The surprise hit me like a punch to the brain. My vision blurred, and suddenly I wasn't really seeing the branch in front of me anymore. Instead I was seeing flashes of steel and blood and—]
My left foot went out from under me on the slick bark.
I twisted my body around, grabbing for anything, and managed to slap my palm against the trunk. I swung around it, using the momentum to flip myself back up onto another branch.
"Shinji!" Mikoto was right there beside me almost instantly, her eyes scanning over me to check for injuries. "What just happened? Are you hurt?"
"No, I'm okay." I took a second to catch my breath properly. "One of my clones just got taken out somewhere. I wasn't really expecting the memory dump right now."
She landed on the branch next to me, her expression concerned. "Memory dump? What does that mean?"
"So… when one of my clones gets destroyed or dispels, everything they experienced while they existed just..." I made this vague gesture at my head, trying to explain it. "Floods back all at once. Usually I have them dispel on a timer so it's not so jarring, but this guy got jumped."
She studied my face. "You sure you're okay?"
"Yeah, I'm fine, really." I gave her a short nod. "There's no actual pain. It's just the memories themselves hitting me all at once. It caught me off guard for a second, that's all."
I blinked a few times, trying to sort through the messy swirl of secondhand adrenaline and all these jumbled visuals that were still bouncing around in my head.
Steel flashing in the light. Rough bark under hands. Leaves that were stained with fresh blood. The smell of wet grass mixed with something metallic.
Then I saw them, six figures moving like pros despite their rough clothes.
These weren't desperate bandits out for easy coin.
"There were six of them, and they were at least chunin from what I could tell," I said. "Dressed like bandits but fighting like trained shinobi. And they had a sensor with them, my clone never even saw it coming."
Mikoto's face went noticeably tight at that information. "Wait, they had a sensor with them?"
"My thoughts exactly." I stood up, testing my balance. "We need to warn Miyabi. Have her find a good defensive spot where the caravan can make camp for the night and set up proper watches around the perimeter. Maybe have them scout out some backup positions while they're at it, just in case things go bad."
"How much time do you think we actually have before they might try something?"
I ran through the numbers quickly in my head, trying to estimate based on where my clone had been when it got taken out. "Maybe four hours, could be five if we're lucky. They're close enough that they might actually try something tonight if they think they have a good opening."
"Alright, I'll have Tsume get word down to the caravan."
"And make sure they know about the sensor. Last thing we need is someone wandering off to take a piss and walking into an ambush."
I leaned back against the trunk, letting the bark dig into my shoulder while my brain spun through the mess we were in.
They had the upper hand, they knew the terrain, had been watching the roads for days, and that sensor of theirs meant we couldn't so much as sneeze without getting flagged. Stealth was off the table.
Still… we weren't completely screwed.
My clones had been working the past few days in Kitaura, the trading town where the rest of the Konoha teams were stationed. Quiet recon, mostly. Listening, watching, dropping info with the squad leads when they could.
I sifted through the memory dump, filtering out the ambush flashes and digging for the intel my clones had picked up from town.
Four teams assigned to this mission. Two already deployed, chasing reports of caravans getting hit. My guys had checked in with the others still in Kitaura, swapped updates, and logged their findings.
The picture wasn't pretty.
These guys weren't even pretending to be random bandits anymore, they were hitting merchants who traded with the Fire Country while letting everyone else through untouched. Someone was definitely directing this, and if we didn't shut it down soon, it was going to become a nasty problem real quick.
The timing was what really pissed me off. With most of our forces tied up fighting Suna, we couldn't spare the manpower to properly patrol every trade route. Whoever was behind this knew exactly what they were doing, hit us when we were stretched thin, make it costly enough that neutral countries would start thinking twice about doing business with us.
And it was probably working. It didn't take a genius to see where this was heading. Keep hitting Fire Country merchants while leaving everyone else alone, and pretty soon the neutral traders would start avoiding our routes. Rice Country, Hotspring Country, all the smaller nations that depended on steady trade, they'd start looking for safer options.
It wasn't just about the money, though that would hurt bad enough. During wartime, those trade routes were lifelines, medical supplies, raw materials for weapons, food to keep the civilian population fed while our forces were off fighting. Cut off enough of that trade, and suddenly we'd be fighting a war on two fronts: against River-Suna's forces and against our own supply shortages.
Worse, if this pattern kept up, other countries might start seeing Fire Country as a liability. Why risk your merchants getting killed just to trade with us when you could do business safely with Earth or Lightning Country instead? Once that reputation stuck, it would take years to rebuild those relationships after the war ended.
This wasn't random violence. This was economic warfare. Someone was trying to strangle us while we were too busy bleeding on the front lines to notice the knife at our throat.
We needed to break the pattern. Show that Fire Country could protect its trade partners. Maybe start running false flag operations, have our own people pose as merchants, let word leak about valuable cargo, then ambush whoever showed up to hit them. Turn the hunters into the hunted.
Or we could try to trace the attacks back to their source. These weren't random bandits, which meant coordination, which meant supply lines and communication networks. Find those, and you could roll up the whole operation from the inside.
Better yet, if we could figure out which country was backing the operation, we could hit their trade routes in retaliation. Make it cost them as much as it was costing us. Turn it into a proper economic war instead of just taking hits...
"Are you okay?" Mikoto had finished with Tsume and was settling back down next to me. "You're doing that thing again."
"What thing?"
"That face you make when you're sitting there cooking up some kind of weird plan in your head."
I couldn't help grinning. "Just thinking through our options. That clone that got jumped was part of my little spy network in Kitaura, the town where the other teams are hanging out. Also the same place we're supposed to drop this caravan."
"Spy network," she repeated, shaking her head like I'd just told her I raised pigeons in my spare time. "Sometimes I forget you're not like the rest of us."
"Hey, I'm totally normal." I shot her a deadpan look, then made a quick seal and popped another clone. I jabbed a thumb toward the direction of town. "Point is, I've got eyes and ears down there gathering information. While we're stuck out here babysitting these merchants and their wagons, my clones are down there collecting intel on what's actually happening. If this guy manages to make it back safely and checks in with the others, we'll know pretty quickly whether we can expect any kind of backup or not."
"Okay, and what do we do until then?"
"Until then, we don't do anything stupid." I pushed myself off the tree trunk and stretched out a bit, getting ready to start moving again. "Come on, let's get going. Miyabi's probably knee-deep in setting up tents and dealing with bad tempers from the merchants by now."
...
The clone disappeared in a puff of white smoke, leaving nothing but the sharp smell of burned chakra in the air.
One of the shinobi flicked blood off his kunai before sliding it back into its sheath. "Well, that was kind of disappointing."
"It was a clone," another one said, spitting into the dirt. "Should've known when it didn't bleed right."
The six of them stood around where their target had been, looking convincingly scruffy in their bandit gear. Weeks of playing the part had left their clothes properly torn and dirty, their weapons looking like they'd been scavenged rather than issued. It was good cover for what they'd been doing in these parts.
"Kid knowing shadow clones though," their tracker muttered, scratching at his fake beard. "That's not really normal Academy stuff, is it?"
Renji, their team leader, shifted his grip on his sword and scanned the trees. "Konoha's been switching things up, I guess." He didn't sound convinced. "Question is, how many more of those things are running around?"
"Yeah, and where's the real brat," someone added.
That's when Kota made a weird choking sound and dropped to one knee.
"Hey, Kota—" Renji was on him pretty fast. "What's going on with you?"
"I can't..." Kota's face had gone completely white, like paper, and sweat was already starting to break out across his forehead. "My arm, I can't move my arm at all."
His left arm was just hanging there at his side, completely limp and useless looking. When Renji grabbed it and shoved up the sleeve to check, there wasn't a single mark on it anywhere. No blood, no swelling. Just normal skin. Perfectly untouched skin.
"When the hell did this happen?" Renji snapped. "You were fine thirty seconds ago."
"I don't know!" Kota stared at his arm like it wasn't his. "It doesn't even hurt or anything. I just... I can't feel anything at all. From the elbow down, it's like the whole thing isn't even there anymore."
Their medic dropped her pack on the ground and knelt down beside them. "Here, let me take a look at it."
She ran her hands over his arm, green chakra flickering around her fingers as she worked. After a moment, she sat back on her heels, frowning.
"These aren't normal injuries," she said, brow furrowing. "The muscle fibers have been cleanly severed somehow, but there's absolutely no trauma around where the cuts are. No tearing anywhere, no bruising, nothing."
Her eyes flicked up to Renji. "So this must've been done with a chakra scalpel."
"A what now?" the tracker asked, moving over to crouch beside her so he could see better.
"It's medical ninjutsu," she explained, already starting to channel her chakra again. "It basically turns your chakra into a blade that you can use. Surgeons use them all the time for operations because they're incredibly precise. This kind of damage doesn't just happen randomly or by accident. You have to actually know what you're doing to cause something like this."
She began stitching the chakra threads back through the fibers, her brow tight with concentration.
"Wait, hold up." One of the others stepped closer. "Are you saying that kid actually did surgery on him? Like, in the middle of a fight?"
"No, not surgery exactly." The medic didn't even bother glancing up from what she was doing. "This was an attack. Someone took medical ninjutsu and weaponized it to use as an offensive technique."
Renji felt his stomach drop. Medical techniques like that weren't something they taught at the Academy. Most chunin couldn't even pull off a chakra scalpel properly. The kind of control it took to do something like that, the amount of training involved...
"The clone did this to you," he said, looking down at Kota.
"I guess so? I mean, I thought I had it cornered at the time. We were going at it pretty hard, and then after it disappeared..." Kota just stared at his limp arm. "I don't even remember when it actually happened. Everything was moving way too fast."
That's when it clicked for Renji. During the fight, when they'd had the clone surrounded, there had been something. A quick flash of green light around its hand, gone almost before he'd noticed it.
He'd figured it was just the light playing tricks on him.
"Son of a..." he muttered under his breath. "It used a chakra scalpel on him. A genin clone actually used a chakra scalpel in the middle of combat."
"That's not even possible though," another team member said, sounding confused. "Medical ninjutsu takes years and years to learn properly. Even just basic healing techniques are supposed to be chunin stuff."
"Yeah, well, you can go ahead and tell that to my dead arm," Kota said weakly.
The medic just kept working, her green chakra staying steady around her hands as she carefully reconnected all the damaged muscle fibers.
"How long is this going to take?" Renji asked, watching her work.
"Maybe five minutes, could be ten. I can fix the actual damage, but I really need to take my time and do this right or he's going to have problems with that arm for the rest of his life."
Renji rubbed his forehead, trying to think this through. They'd been hitting caravans for weeks now, standard harassment ops to mess with Fire Country's trade routes. Make it look like regular bandits, squeeze the merchants, force the smaller nations to think twice about doing business with Konoha.
Boring work, really. Just a task they tossed to chunin teams when all the real missions were tied up elsewhere.
Except now they had some genin brat slicing people up with medical ninjutsu like it was nothing.
"Boss," one of his subordinates said, "at this rate, why are we still bothering with the bandit act? Anyone with half a brain can figure out that either Kumo or Iwa is behind all these attacks. The pattern's way too obvious at this point."
Renji's expression got noticeably darker. "Because the second we drop the pretense and stop playing the part, this whole thing stops being a deniable operation and turns into an actual act of war instead. Our job out here is to make Fire Country's trade routes unprofitable for them, not to hand them a perfect excuse to march their forces straight to our borders. So stop asking stupid questions."
The guy's jaw tightened. "Right. Got it, boss." There was just enough bite in his tone to make it clear he didn't appreciate being talked to like an idiot, but not quite enough to be insubordination.
Renji caught the attitude but let it slide for now. They were all on edge after what had just happened.
He turned to look at their tracker. "What are you picking up out there right now?"
The man closed his eyes, going still as he extended his senses. "The caravan's still moving southeast, maybe a couple kilometers out from here." He frowned, like he was concentrating harder on something. "But there are definitely more people with them than there should be. I'm counting... looks like six distinct chakra signatures total."
"So Konoha shinobi then?"
"Has to be. Nobody else would be escorting a caravan through this area right now."
Another guy nudged a dead branch with his foot, watching it tumble into the underbrush. "Alright, so what do we do now?"
"The mission stays the same," Renji said. "We hit the caravan like we planned, make it look like it's just bandits attacking them, then get out clean before anyone can figure out what actually happened."
"Boss," the medic said, still focused on working on Kota's arm, "a genin being able to pull off combat medical ninjutsu like that? That's really not normal at all."
"Yeah, no kidding," the tracker muttered. "If the kid's already this good now, what's he going to be like in a few more years?"
That comment kind of silenced everyone for a moment.
They were all solid chunin, experienced and competent at what they did. But this wasn't really just about the medical ninjutsu itself. Sure, chakra scalpels weren't exactly the best weapons for actually killing people, but that wasn't really the point here.
The point was that any genin who could already master something that advanced was probably a freak talent who could learn pretty much anything you put in front of him.
"How common is this sort of thing?" Renji asked the medic. "Genin actually knowing medical ninjutsu at that level?"
"It's not common at all. Most villages won't even start touching medical training until you've already made chunin. The amount of control you need for it, all the theory you have to learn..." She shook her head. "I've been at this for eight years, and even I couldn't pull off cuts that clean during actual live combat."
"So either this kid's some kind of prodigy," another team member said, "or he's not actually a genin at all."
"But if he is..." He didn't finish the thought.
Everyone there knew exactly what he meant by it. A talent like that wouldn't stay at genin for very long. Give the kid a few more years of experience and training, and he'd turn into a shinobi that made operations like theirs complete suicide missions to even attempt.
The smart play might be to end this potential problem while they still could.
"Alright, we're moving out," Renji said after thinking about it for a moment. "That kid's going to be a serious problem for us down the line if we leave him alone. Better to deal with it right now while we still can."
The medic pulled her hands back from Kota's arm. "That should be good enough for now, at least. You're going to be pretty sore for a while, but the arm will work."
"Alright then." Renji looked around at everyone on his team. "We're going to hit them fast and hard. No messing around, no getting into drawn-out fights. We get in there, eliminate the threats, and then we get out immediately."
They took off through the trees, moving in sync like they'd done this a hundred times. The forest was a blur of green as they closed the distance to the caravan.
"Wait," the tracker said suddenly, raising one hand to stop everyone. His eyes squeezed shut, and his chakra flared faintly as he concentrated harder. "One of those signatures just broke off from the main group. It's heading toward the town now, and moving pretty fast."
"Damn it," Renji muttered under his breath. "They're trying to call for backup."
"You want us to split up and go after both?"
"No." Renji was already calculating. "If that runner gets there and calls in help, we'll be looking at multiple squads instead of one. We take him out first, then double back for the caravan."
"What if they change their route while we're busy chasing after him?"
"Then we track them down once we're done." Renji checked over his gear quickly. "But we can't let word get out about what we're doing here. Konoha already knows that someone's been hitting their trade routes, they're not complete idiots. But as long as we keep up the bandit cover story, they can't officially retaliate against us while they're still tied up fighting Suna and River."
He glanced over at Kota, who was still looking pretty pale but at least stable enough to move. "Splitting up now just makes us way easier to pick off one by one. And I've already got a bad feeling about this whole mess we've gotten into."
They changed direction, angling through the forest toward where that lone signature was racing away from them. No matter how fast the messenger thought they were moving, they'd be able to catch up soon enough.
And once they'd cleaned up that loose end, they could go deal with the problem kid properly.
They started darting through the canopy, with branches whipping past them as they pushed their pace harder. The tracker kept his eyes locked ahead, reading the chakra signatures as they moved.
"Oh shit," he said suddenly, nearly stumbling on his next landing. "The signature just split apart. Now I'm picking up three of them instead of one."
"Shadow clones again," the medic said, her voice grim.
"Has to be the same brat," another team member said. "I mean, how many genin out there can actually spam that jutsu like this?"
The tracker's expression got more worried as he focused on what he was sensing. "One of them is still heading straight for town, and it's moving even faster now. The other two are hanging back, staying in range but keeping their distance from us."
Renji's jaw tightened. The whole thing was starting to look less like a chase and more like a net, and they were right in the middle of it. "Smart little shit. If we go after the one heading for town, the two behind will hit our backs. If we engage the two clones, we give the messenger time to reach reinforcements."
"It's actually pretty solid," another muttered. "Kid knows what he's doing."
"Yeah, he knows it too well for my liking." Renji's mind was racing. "This isn't some fresh Academy grad fumbling around. This is someone who actually understands tactics and how to use them." He made his call. "We're splitting up. Two of you go after the runner and don't let it reach town no matter what. The rest of us will deal with the ones on our tail."
"Thought you said splitting up was dumb," Kota pointed out, still flexing his healing arm.
"That was before this kid started playing us like we're pieces in a damn chess game," Renji shot back at him. "Now we don't really have much choice. Go!"
The team broke apart, two peeling off to chase the town-bound clone while the rest wheeled around to face the other two.
A few minutes later, the four of them closed in on the clones in a small clearing, spreading out to form a loose circle. Renji raised his hand, keeping his team at a distance.
"Everyone stay back," he ordered. "Stick to ranged attacks only. Force them to burn through their chakra on defense instead, clones run dry pretty fast if you keep the pressure on them."
Two of his shinobi moved fast, hands blurring through seals. Wind blades and jagged earth projectiles shot toward the clones in rapid succession.
One clone dove behind a thick oak just as a wind blade carved a deep notch into the trunk where his head had been. The second clone was right behind him, already yanking two smoke bombs from his pouch. He hurled them at the advancing Kumo team before retreating deeper into the forest.
Gray smoke exploded outward, thick and clinging, obscuring their line of sight, but it wasn't fooling anyone.
"Keep pursuing them, but make sure you keep your distance," Renji called out. "Use kunai and shuriken to keep the pressure on them."
The clones were moving like they'd rehearsed this whole thing together, exploiting every twist and turn of the terrain they could find. They ducked beneath low-hanging branches, wove their way through these tight knots of undergrowth, always managing to stay just one step ahead. Every single time the team closed the gap and got near them, another smoke bomb would hiss out and explode, blinding everyone and forcing them to make a choice, either charge in completely blind, or lose track of the target.
…..
Kota had been doing missions like this for about three years now. You track your targets, maintain a safe distance, use ranged attacks to wear them down bit by bit. Shadow clones never had that much chakra to work with anyway, so you just made them waste what little they had on defense until they eventually popped and disappeared.
Pretty simple stuff, really.
He slipped into position behind a cluster of trees, keeping his eyes on the two clones that were retreating through all the smoke. His partner was swinging wide to the left side, while the other two were advancing from the front and closing the gap gradually.
The clones were handling themselves pretty decently, he had to give them that much. Using the terrain to their advantage, throwing smoke bombs around, making the team work for every meter they gained. But it was all just stalling tactics when you got down to it. They'd run out of tricks to pull eventually.
That's when he spotted the tags.
There were explosive seals stuck right to the tree trunks up ahead, and they were barely even hidden. Kota almost laughed at how obvious it was. "Hey, obvious trap up front," he called to his team. "Going wide."
Kid was trying way too hard. Funneling them into a choke point with tags that screaming "look at me"? That was some Academy bullshit right there.
He repositioned to get a better angle through the canopy, keeping his distance like a good chunin should. That's when he caught some movement in his peripheral vision, up in the branches somewhere above him.
Kota looked up just in time to see the clone dropping straight down at him.
Oh shit—
His muscle memory just took over. Aerial assault, rule one that everyone learned, never let them pin you down to the ground. He launched himself forward and to the right, executing a textbook evasion maneuver, putting as much distance as possible between himself and the drop zone.
It was perfect form, honestly. Exactly like they'd drilled it thousands of times during training.
Except as he rolled to what should have been safety, his hand hit something that definitely hadn't been there a second ago.
A wire.
When did they even have time to—
The tripwire was strung between two trees at exactly the height a chunin would naturally roll to when evading an aerial attack. And it was connected to explosive tags, but not the ones in that obvious choke point up ahead, these ones were hidden in the underbrush right here, right where any competent shinobi would instinctively move to avoid the "obvious" trap they'd spotted.
Realization hit the same moment a seal marked "explode" (爆, baku) flared to life.
Everything went white, then spinning. The blast picked him up like a rag doll and slammed him down hard enough to bounce. Something wet splattered across his cheek, he didn't know if it was blood or brain matter, and he wasn't sure it mattered. His ears were screaming, clothes scorched, and the scent of burnt hair and cooked flesh clung to the back of his throat.
He couldn't tell up from down anymore. His sword was gone. He hadn't seen it leave his hand. He couldn't feel the hand either.
Through the static in his skull, Renji was yelling. Maybe orders. Maybe his name. Kota couldn't tell, his brain kept skipping like a scratched record.
He tried to stand. His limbs didn't agree. When he looked down, his right leg was bent sideways at the knee, but the bone was out. Jagged, wet, white. A flap of muscle hung loose like a torn sleeve.
That's when he saw the glow, green? No, blue. Flickering, like chakra caught in water.
The clone was smiling as it approached, fingers wrapped in something pulsing and alive. Its footsteps were light. Eager.
The pain didn't come all at once. First was a crack, then a wet slide as something cut into his sword arm, fast, deep, right through the muscle. He felt things snap. A ligament coiled back into his elbow like a live wire. Blood fountained up, hot, bright, and fast enough to make him dizzy.
He managed to choke out a breath and tried to scream. Nothing came. His jaw was just working uselessly like a fish's mouth, producing nothing but spit and panic.
There was something in its other hand now that he hadn't noticed before. A blade of some kind. It wasn't clean, it was already slick with what had to be someone else's blood coating it.
This isn't how this was supposed to go.
That thought rose up right before the blade shoved deep under his jaw and dragged sideways. His throat opened with a bubbling noise he felt more than heard, warm liquid pumping down the front of his vest. He saw his own blood on the clone's arm. On the leaves. On his lips.
He'd been a chunin for three years. He'd done dozens of missions like this.
It was supposed to be simple.
...
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