The leader spotted Minato first. Her blade came up, lightning intensifying. "Contact! Konoha—"
Minato was already moving.
He hit the left flanker before the man finished turning, kunai opening his throat in a spray of arterial red. The flanker dropped, hands going to his neck in a reflex that wouldn't help. He was already dead and his body hadn't caught up yet.
The squad leader's lightning blade carved toward Minato's back. Fast. Genuinely fast, the kind of speed that killed chunin who thought they'd seen quick.
Minato wasn't there.
He'd shifted, somehow, the blade passing through space he'd occupied a heartbeat before. His counter was a kunai thrust toward her ribs that she barely deflected, the impact sending sparks where metal met lightning-wreathed steel.
Tatsuya didn't have time to watch. The right flanker had spotted him and was closing, tanto drawn, moving low. Trained for close work.
Chokuto met tanto. The Kumo shinobi was strong, stronger than Tatsuya, and the impact jarred up his arm. But strength wasn't the point. The point was anatomy.
Tatsuya gave ground, letting the man press, watching his footwork. Right-dominant. Weight forward on the strikes. A slight hitch in his left hip that suggested an old injury.
The flanker came in hard, tanto sweeping for Tatsuya's midsection. Tatsuya parried, stepped inside, and drove his chokuto up through the gap between flak jacket panels.
The blade punched through the man's armpit, angled to catch the subclavian artery. Tatsuya felt the resistance of muscle, the scrape against bone, then the wet give as steel found the vessel.
The flanker's eyes went wide. His tanto clattered against Tatsuya's shoulder. A hit that would bruise but couldn't kill. Then his legs buckled.
Tatsuya ripped the blade free and turned.
The rear-guard had finished his seals. Lightning Release. A crackling web split toward Takeshi's position on the high ground.
"Takeshi!"
But Takeshi was already moving, dropping from the boulder, the lightning scorching stone where he'd been perched. He hit the ground rolling, came up with a kunai in each hand, and threw.
The rear-guard deflected one, caught the second in his shoulder, and started another jutsu.
Tatsuya's hands moved through familiar seals. Fire Release: Phoenix Sage Fire.
Six fireballs screamed across the gap, spreading to cut off the rear-guard's retreat. He abandoned his jutsu to dodge, hands coming up to shield his face as fire washed over the rocks around him.
Tatsuya was already following the technique, shunshin carrying him across the distance while the man was still reacting to the flames. His chokuto came down.
The rear-guard got his arm up. The blade bit deep into his forearm instead of his neck, scraping bone, and he screamed. Still alive, still dangerous. His other hand grabbed Tatsuya's wrist, trying to control the blade, chakra surging for another technique.
Wind scalpel.
Tatsuya's free hand came up, wind chakra forming along his forearm. The scalpel caught the man across the throat, severing trachea and carotid in a single motion.
Blood sprayed. The grip on Tatsuya's wrist went slack.
He turned again, chest heaving, and found Minato still engaged with the squad leader. The woman was good. Really good, matching Minato's speed with experience and a blade that crackled with killing intent. But she was losing ground, her movements becoming more desperate as she realized her squad was gone.
Her eyes flicked to the bodies. Three of her people, dead in less than thirty seconds.
She tried to run.
Minato didn't let her.
His kunai took her in the back of the knee, dropping her to one leg. She spun, blade slashing, but Minato was already past her guard. His second kunai opened her throat.
She fell.
Silence, except for a wet rasping sound. The squad leader trying to breathe through a severed windpipe. Tatsuya watched her struggle for a moment. Five seconds, ten. Then the movement stopped.
"Clear." Takeshi's voice came from somewhere to the left, strained but controlled. "I count four down."
Tatsuya's sensing range confirmed it. No other signatures within range. Just the three of them and four cooling bodies.
He looked down at his hands. Blood on his fingers, on his chokuto, spattering across his flak jacket. The flanker he'd stabbed had bled more than expected. The subclavian was always messy.
The fatigue would come later. It always did.
"Tatsuya." Minato's voice cut through the stillness. "We need to move. They might have reported our position before engaging."
"Yeah." He wiped his blade on the dead flanker's sleeve, sheathed it. "Rally point."
Minato held his gaze for a moment longer, then nodded. He didn't push. He never pushed.
Takeshi was already cleaning his kunai, movements mechanical but efficient. "Rally point. Jiraiya-sama might need us."
They moved.
The bodies stayed where they'd fallen. No time to hide them, no point in trying. The Kumo search parties would find them eventually, and by then Tatsuya's team would be across the border or they'd be dead.
Those were the only two options that mattered.
---
The rally point was a narrow canyon, walls high enough to provide cover, with multiple exit routes in case of emergency. Standard field craft. Never use a rally point with only one way out.
Jiraiya wasn't there.
They waited. Thirty minutes. An hour. Tatsuya kept his sensing range extended, sweeping for familiar signatures, finding nothing.
"Something's wrong." Minato's voice was tight with controlled worry. "Jiraiya-sensei wouldn't miss the rally without reason."
"We follow protocol." Tatsuya knew the words were inadequate even as he said them. "Another twelve hours, then extraction."
"He could be hurt. Could be—"
"Going after him increases risk without improving outcomes." The logic was sound. The logic was also cold, clinical, everything Minato probably didn't want to hear right now.
"You can reduce everything to math if you try hard enough."
"That's not—"
"Then stop arguing about calculations and help me." Sora's voice came from the canyon entrance, rough with exhaustion. She emerged from the rocks, Kenta beside her, and between them—
Jiraiya.
Unconscious. Burns covering his chest, circular patterns that looked almost surgical in their precision. Kenta was carrying him across his shoulders, and the Sannin wasn't moving at all.
"Storm Release." Sora's face was pale, her jaw tight. "We ran into Gashira."
Tatsuya was already moving, medical training overriding everything else. "Get him down. Flat surface. Now."
They laid Jiraiya out on the rocky ground. The burns were bad. Tissue damage was only the surface; the deeper layer was worse. Tatsuya extended his sensing inward, feeling the Sannin's chakra network, and what he found made his stomach clench.
"His coils are destabilizing." The damage wasn't just surface. The Storm Release had disrupted the network itself, creating cascading instabilities that were spreading with every passing minute. "The burns are secondary. The real damage is internal."
"Can you fix it?" Minato's voice was steady, but barely.
"I can stabilize. Fixing requires Tsunade."
He went to work. Chakra flowing into damaged pathways, feeding what Storm Release had emptied. The network should have stabilized as the input matched the loss.
It didn't. The cascade accelerated instead.
Too much, too fast. Ruptured pathways. Pouring chakra in tore them wider. Tatsuya felt two more go, a third about to.
"He's crashing." Minato's voice went sharp. "Heart?"
"Give me a second."
He didn't have it. Jiraiya's breathing hitched once, stopped. Kenta swore. Minato's hands were already on the Sannin's sternum, compressions hard and rhythmic, buying Tatsuya the time he needed to think.
Wrong approach. Seal the breaks first.
He killed the flow into the ruptured pathways, withdrew the supporting chakra, started again from the opposite direction. Choking the damaged channels instead of flooding them. Triaging which networks to sacrifice so the rest could hold.
The cascade slowed. Stopped. Jiraiya's chest shuddered, drew breath on its own.
Minato pulled his hands back, wiped them on his pants without looking down.
"Got it," Tatsuya said. His voice sounded steadier than he felt. The concentration split was familiar now. Internal support and external assessment, simultaneous. But he was working on whatever margin he'd bought with the wrong answer first.
"He intercepted a beam meant for us." Sora's voice was hollow. "Took it center mass so we could run."
"I looked back. I shouldn't have, but I did." A pause. "Saw him go down. Saw Gashira walking toward him. Then he just... wasn't there anymore."
"Reverse summon." Tatsuya kept working, his attention split between Jiraiya's failing chakra network and the conversation around him. "Partial, probably. His network's too damaged for a full transit to Myoboku, but a short-range spatial skip..." He traced another destabilizing pathway. "It fits the damage pattern."
"We found him half a kilometer from where he fell." Kenta's voice was flat, but something moved behind the neutrality. "Unconscious. Barely breathing."
"But breathing." Tatsuya didn't look up. "Jiraiya-sama bought us time, gathered intelligence, and survived. That's a successful mission by any metric."
Goddamn Sannin and their goddamn sacrificial math.
But he didn't say that out loud. Instead, he kept working, kept stabilizing, kept fighting the cascading network failures with nothing but chakra and stubbornness.
Jiraiya groaned. His eyes flickered open, unfocused, struggling to track.
"The intel." His voice was a wreck. "The intelligence—"
"Preserved." Sora pulled a sealed scroll from her pack. "You made sure we had copies before engaging. We have everything."
Jiraiya's eyes closed again. Something that might have been satisfaction crossed his ruined face.
"Good." A pause. "That's what matters."
Then he was out again, the brief consciousness succumbing to damage and exhaustion. But his breathing was steadier now. His chakra network, while still unstable, had stopped its cascade toward failure.
"He'll live," Tatsuya said. "Probably. But we need to move. The mission isn't over until we cross back into Fire Country."
They moved.
---
The return journey was slower than the approach. Kenta carried Jiraiya, the Sannin's weight apparently irrelevant to the infiltration specialist's endurance. Minato took point, his speed serving as early warning for any patrols they might encounter. Takeshi covered their trail, his enhanced senses catching what others might miss.
Tatsuya walked beside Jiraiya's unconscious form, periodically checking the chakra network stabilization, making adjustments when the cascade threatened to resume.
Sora walked alone, her expression closed off, her sensor range sweeping outward in mechanical precision.
She's processing, Tatsuya thought. Another commander who sacrificed himself to protect her. Another person who might have died so she could live.
The pattern was brutal. He didn't know how to address it, whether addressing it would even help. So he filed it away for later, when there was time for conversations that mattered.
The border crossing was uneventful. The Kumo patrols were apparently still dealing with whatever had accelerated their mobilization, leaving the approach to Fire Country almost unguarded.
They crossed at dusk, marked by nothing more than a shift in the rock formations and the subtle change in how the air tasted. Lightning Country behind them. Home ahead.
Tatsuya kept moving.
Some problems didn't fit in the space between one breath and the next. He'd learned to live with that.
He was still learning.