Arai took the forward position while Yuji and Sasori held the hunting zone.
The arrangement made sense. Arai would range ahead along the route, locate any incoming Konoha team before they arrived, and return well in advance to report. A supply team burdened with packs and moving through unfamiliar terrain at night would not come close to matching his speed, and with his level of skill the likelihood of them detecting his presence was negligible. He would be back among the trees long before they walked into range.
Yuji found his position in the upper shadow of a broad tree and went still. Sasori pressed himself against a trunk lower down and disappeared into it.
They waited.
Time passed without marking itself.
Then Arai dropped onto a branch above them and they surfaced from the dark.
"Six total. Two squads. Four Chunin, two Genin."
He didn't follow it with anything else. He drew one finger across his throat and looked at them both.
That was the whole plan.
With a composition like that, Yuji and Sasori were more than capable of handling it between themselves. Arai would hold back unless something changed. The three of them dissolved back into the forest and went quiet again.
The Konoha team came through several minutes later.
They moved the way experienced shinobi moved on a route they had used before, not careless exactly, but loose in the way people get when familiarity has replaced alertness. They had chosen the right conditions: deep night, a route threaded through dense old-growth forest where the terrain itself made tracking difficult, timing that put them through the most exposed sections under cover of darkness. It was sound planning.
If someone came for them out here, the complex terrain gave them options. They had run this route before without incident. That knowledge lived in their bodies now whether they wanted it to or not.
There were six of them. Two three-man cells moving in sequence, each led by a pair of Chunin with a single Genin behind. They carried large packs across their backs, the kind of weight that told you everything about what was inside without needing to look.
Yuji watched them from the canopy through the narrow gaps between leaves.
Then his gaze stopped.
One of them had markings on his face.
Inuzuka.
The calculation shifted immediately. Inuzuka clan members were not ordinary shinobi, and in a situation like this, hidden enemies, laid traps, forest terrain at night, their particular abilities were exactly the kind of thing that changed outcomes. Yuji abandoned any intention of waiting longer and moved.
As though the Inuzuka shinobi had been waiting for precisely that.
He landed on a tree trunk and raised one hand, halting the squad.
The Chunin nearest him reacted. "What is it?"
The Inuzuka said nothing for a moment. His nose worked at the air, reading something in it that the others couldn't access. Then his eyes went sharp. "Something's wrong. Scent of strangers." He opened his mouth to shout the warning.
The teammate directly behind him dropped from the branch he was standing on. Blood from his throat caught the dark air briefly before he hit the ground.
The Genin at the rear of the cell was dead before the body finished falling, his face still carrying the particular blankness of someone who had not understood what was happening. His head left his shoulders and turned through the air and the pack he had been carrying went down with the rest of him.
"Kyumaru!"
Inuzuka Kuri had turned and seen both of them go in the span of two or three seconds. There had been no interval in which to act.
Something launched itself from the forest floor, fast and low, and hit the trunk of the nearest large tree at full speed.
The attack snapped at the canopy above, at the shadow moving through the branches, and connected with something.
Leaves fell.
Then the blur dropped back through the air, twisting as it fell, and landed on all four legs.
It was a large yellow dog. A Ninken, raised in the Inuzuka clan. This one was named Kyumaru, and its front paw had been opened to the bone by whatever it had met in the canopy, but it did not look at the wound. It faced the figure dropping from the tree above and bared its teeth and held its ground.
Yuji landed in the clearing and looked at it.
"Better than I expected," he said, and he meant it. "You actually moved in time to dodge."
The Ninken had found him without any difficulty at all. Yuji looked at it with something close to genuine respect.
Inuzuka Kuri's eyes went to the forehead protector tied around Yuji's neck and his expression changed. Sunagakure.
He did not make the mistake of underestimating the boy, anyone who had dropped two of his teammates in under three seconds without either of them making a sound was not someone you sized up by age.
Behind them, the second cell had already heard enough. Without waiting for orders from Kuri, they pulled back immediately, moving fast and clean through the trees until the forest swallowed them. This was the arrangement. If the forward squad ran into trouble, the rear unit did not reinforce, it preserved the supplies and carried the intelligence home.
Kuri had been placed at the front not only because he knew the route better than anyone else, but because his nose, enhanced by chakra to a degree no ordinary tracking method could match, meant that no ambush went undetected on his watch. His squad absorbed the contact. The rear squad survived because of it. It was a cold calculation, but a sound one.
A flying knife crossed the distance between them and Kuri knocked it aside with a kunai without stepping back.
Yuji sent a second one at the back of his head. Kuri dropped his chin and it passed over him.
He was still wearing the pack.
A third knife followed the second before Kuri had fully recovered his posture. Under Yuji's Data Observation, this one would not miss. The angle and timing closed off every available response.
Kyumaru threw itself in front of its master.
The blade opened the Ninken's side instead of ending Kuri's life, and in the moment after impact Kuri caught his dog against his body and his hands were already moving through seals. Chakra erupted from him in a visible wave and his body answered it, his frame expanded, muscles pulling against his clothing, hair rising across his exposed skin as the Ninken pressed into him and the two of them folded into each other.
The Beast Human Clone. One of the Inuzuka clan's secret techniques.
His physical capabilities had multiplied.
Kuri turned to find the boy.
Yuji was already there.
He had crossed the space between them while the transformation was still completing, and now he stood directly in front of Kuri with both arms raised and his head down, fingers moving in small precise gestures.
The air around Kuri had filled with threads while he wasn't watching, dozens of them, forming a net.
"Death Waltz."
The threads contracted.
They pulled inward all at once, wrapping Kuri's expanded body before he could move, slicing through the pack on his back and scattering its contents across the ground. What should have reduced him to nothing instead left him standing, barely covered in deep lacerations, blood running freely across the new muscle and hair of his transformed body. His skin had been opened in a dozen places.
His arms went up by degrees, forcing gaps in the net through sheer physical output, the threads cutting deeper with every centimeter he gained. It was costing him, but the threads were also costing Yuji, maintaining this required Yuji's complete attention and both hands, which meant he was not moving.
Kuri could feel the resistance thinning as he forced it wider. A little more and he would be through it entirely.
He found the last centimeter he needed and the threads gave way.
His arms came free.
Then his body stopped.
Blood came from the corner of his mouth slowly, and he looked down.
Yuji had released the threads himself.
His arm, blazing with concentrated chakra, had passed through the gap Kuri created and driven straight through his abdomen.
Kuri knew the technique. He had seen it before in field hospitals and on battlefields, wielded by the shinobi who kept people alive when medicine alone wasn't enough.
A Chakra Scalpel.
He stared at the boy's face and could not reconcile what he was seeing.
A Medical Ninja.?
...
Nxt Bonus @300 PS