The Hidden Mist shinobi stepped out of the shadows one by one.
One of them looked at Yuji with open contempt. Three shinobi on a tree branch in the middle of foreign territory, the assumption was reasonable enough. Konoha sent Genin out here for exactly this kind of experience. There was no particular reason to think Sunagakure didn't do the same.
"Trash," Sasori said, looking at them without interest.
The contempt on their faces curdled into something harder.
"Agreed," Yuji said.
They came in from multiple directions without further exchange, spreading out to cover the approaches to the branch where the three stood.
One of them swung a chain weapon in a wide arc, the sickle at its end angled for Sasori's neck. Another used a trunk for leverage and disappeared, folding into the mist to move when the conditions were right, presence erased mid-motion.
Sasori flicked one finger.
The shinobi with the chain was still in the air when the puppet took him. Its arms closed around his body from multiple angles, locking him in place, and the two of them dropped together, the puppet's neck mechanism opening on the way down. By the time they hit the ground the shinobi's face was gone. The chain fell beside him.
As for the one who had vanished into the mist, several meters from Yuji, something small and wet passed through something soft. The sound was almost nothing. The body followed a moment later.
Yuji had seeded blood beads through the area around their position before any of this began, scattered at intervals, forming a boundary that required no hand seals to maintain.
While the two of them handled what came directly at them, Arai had already moved.
He did not concern himself with the shinobi targeting Sasori and Yuji. He went for the ones positioned further back.
He moved through the forest with the kind of speed that rendered the mist irrelevant. Several sharp concussive sounds followed in quick succession, barely distinguishable from one another.
Then it was quiet.
Arai came back to the branch and stood between them.
Ninety meters back, pressed against the far side of a tree, Yano kept very still.
He had watched all of it.
His three students were behind him, and he was grateful now that he had kept them back. The two squads, his own and the one currently engaged with the surviving Hidden Mist shinobi in the white mist beyond the clearing, had been running the same mission, paired for mutual support.
When the Mist operatives found them, both squads had split off rather than engage. Protecting students meant not fighting when you didn't have to, regardless of how it looked. Neither squad had managed to shake pursuit cleanly.
The Hidden Mist group that broke off after his team had encountered the three Sunagakure shinobi instead, and Yano had allowed himself a moment of calculation: let the two groups wear each other down and move through whatever was left.
Then the Hidden Mist squad stopped existing.
Yano eased half his face past the edge of the trunk and studied the three figures on the branch at distance.
The adult in the middle had gone through the Mist shinobi's rear formation in the time it took Yano to register he was moving.
Whatever his actual rank, his ceiling was above Yano's own, and Yano was experienced enough to know the difference between someone he could fight and someone he couldn't.
The red-haired boy was a puppeteer. Young, visibly so, but the kill had been immediate and clean. Chunin at minimum, probably more, if that technique was representative rather than exceptional.
The other one was harder to read. Yano had not been able to identify his method at all. The Mist shinobi had simply died at a distance from him without any visible mechanism connecting cause and effect.
Yano ran it back.
One adult, two boys. Squad size, age, operational pattern, all of it lining up against something already in his memory. Nearly a year ago, a Konoha supply route had gone dark. Three Sunagakure shinobi, a pursuit force sent after them, two veteran Jonin who didn't come back.
Then reports from around the Konoha-Iwagakure front, a small squad working the rear lines, never staying anywhere long enough to be pinned down, vanishing each time the main front's situation might have allowed a response.
Konoha's intelligence division had connected both incidents to the same three people.
Ryosuke had been killed by their Elite Jonin. Otani, veteran Jonin, one of the village's more respected Taijutsu specialists, had died at the hands of one of the boys.
Inoichi Yamanaka's methods had filled in the rest, pulling identities from what Ryosuke left behind before he died. Arai of Sunagakure. The puppeteer, Sasori. And the one who killed Otani.
Yuji.
The prickling reached the front of Yano's skull.
He turned and signaled his students.
When he looked back, Arai had already leaned toward the two boys and said something. The alarm in Yano's chest became something urgent and he had no time to act on it before the three figures on the branch dissolved into white lines threading outward through the trees in separate directions.
His body moved before the thought finished.
"Run! Into the mist!"
..
Bonus@400 PS