The music rose and the pursuing Rock Ninja slowed as though they had run into something invisible. Their movements turned sluggish, coordination breaking apart mid-stride.
"Genjutsu?"
The Squad Leader's chest tightened. Genjutsu operated through chakra interference in the brain's neural pathways, disrupting the five senses as a consequence.
The standard counter was to disrupt the flow of chakra within one's own body, not to follow the opponent's imposed pattern but to break it through will and internal force.
One of his comrades hit the ground. Hypnotized, out entirely.
His own consciousness had begun to blur. He bit his tongue hard, and the pain cut through enough to steady him.
Something was wrong with the analysis. His senses weren't disordered. What was changing was his emotions.
The melody still lingering in his ears was doing something specific, pulling a feeling of heaviness and reluctance out of him, flattening his fighting instinct.
And beneath that, something else was being amplified. Fear.
Not abstract fear but fear of the specific thing in front of him: a Medical Ninja who moved with the precision of a veteran assassin, who used abilities that had no precedent in anything he had encountered, and who had just added genjutsu to the list. The unknown kept expanding, and the genjutsu was feeding directly into his reaction to it.
Just what was this person incapable of?
The thought spiraled before he could stop it, and the fear deepened as it went.
Yuji walked toward him through it all, still playing.
He could read the Squad Leader's face clearly, the panic surfacing, the moments of struggle, flashes of recovered clarity followed by the interference pulling back in.
The Imperial Armament converted into a ninja tool produced this kind of broad control effect, and it scaled with the target's mental fortitude. This one had real mental strength. Not enough to break free entirely, but enough to fight it.
The Squad Leader lunged with a shout, the sluggishness in his body breaking open for one moment of effort, his kunai driving toward Yuji's chest.
Yuji caught it barehanded.
The flute sound stopped.
Blood lines crossed the air in quick succession, finding vital points across every remaining Iwagakure ninja standing. They went down together.
Yuji looked at the result and considered it.
"Decent effect. Single-target control isn't its strength, any ninja with reasonable ability knows how to handle genjutsu, and given enough time he would have recovered completely."
He looked at the unconscious one, then back at the rest. "The real value is the group application. It doesn't cost more chakra as the number of targets increases and the power doesn't thin out.
Against genuine genjutsu experts or high-level opponents it probably wouldn't be decisive, but that's not what it's for. Against a formation on a battlefield, it's something else entirely."
A reasonable hidden card. He filed it away.
He dealt with the unconscious one, erased what traces he could, and left.
Ito moved fast on the return route, but when he reached the area where the chase had started, part of the Iwagakure pursuit force was already dead on the ground. Yuji and the remaining Rock Ninja were gone.
He stood and looked at what had been done to the forest.
Dozens of trees severed and toppled across a wide area, the ground beneath them split and carved apart. The destructive pattern across the terrain suggested Wind Release, but the scale and the power behind it were not from any ordinary Wind Release technique. And the dead were all Iwagakure.
Yuji? Ito turned it over. Hidden Sand shinobi were the most naturally inclined toward Wind Release, but he had never heard that Yuji used it.
There were also clear signs of Earth Release impact on the ground nearby.
He had no way to track where Yuji and the remainder of the Iwagakure squad had gone from here, and he couldn't afford to linger.
This was Iwagakure's operational territory, and reinforcements had almost certainly been called in before the pursuit began. Staying long enough to search properly was a risk he couldn't justify.
He took one more look at the fallen trees and the cut earth, expression unreadable, and turned back toward the Sunagakure lines.
Shortly after Ito left, several dark figures landed on the battlefield from the direction of the Iwagakure lines.
The sight stopped them.
The Squad Head's expression tightened as he read the scene. He signaled with one hand and the others fanned out immediately, moving through the wreckage to examine the bodies and read what had happened.
"How did this brat manage this?"
He exhaled slowly, keeping his voice flat, but the shock underneath it was audible. They had moved as fast as the intelligence allowed.
According to the report, the outpost squad here had been facing one Sunagakure shinobi alone, a Medical Ninja.
"Captain. We found a mark. Northwest."
One of them had located a trail marker, their own Iwagakure signal, left by the pursuit squad.
"Pursue."
They pushed northwest and arrived at the second site.
More fallen comrades. No survivors.
Nobody spoke for a moment.
All of them were killed. One of the Iwagakure ninja crouched over the nearest body and examined it, then moved to the next. His voice was unsteady when he reported. "One-hit kills. Vital points, all of them. No signs of struggle."
The same as the first site. Whatever engagement had happened here, none of them had found room to resist before it ended.
The time of death was recent. The battle had finished shortly before their arrival.
"Find him." The Squad Head's fist closed. "Find that boy."
"Yes!"
Back at the Sunagakure base, Ito delivered his report to Shimizu.
Yuji was missing in the Land of Birds.
Shimizu felt it land in his chest before Ito finished the sentence. He had not wanted this outcome. From Ito's account, Yuji had made a deliberate choice, not recklessness, but a decision made before they left the tent, probably before he had even opened his mouth to volunteer.
Ito hadn't failed. He simply hadn't anticipated how resolved the boy was.
What Ito had observed on his return suggested Yuji was alive and had accounted for a significant number of Iwagakure.
But being alive in the Land of Birds, with Iwagakure now fully alerted and mobilizing, was a condition with a narrowing window.
The longer it continued, the larger Iwagakure's response would grow. A rescue operation would already be too late, Iwagakure had reacted too quickly for that.
Ito glanced at Shimizu. "Should we go to war?"
He meant it literally, mobilize the full Sunagakure force, push against Iwagakure's defensive line in the Land of Birds, launch a decisive engagement.
"Unnecessary."
Sasori spoke before Shimizu could answer. The word came out flat and certain.
Everyone looked at him.
"He won't die. He's not foolish enough to seek death for its own sake." He paused. "And if he were dead, Iwagakure would already be using it against us.
They would want us to know immediately, it would be the most efficient way to affect our morale. As long as no news comes from their side, he's still breathing. Wait for confirmation before making any battle arrangements."
Several sentences in a row, which was unusual for Sasori.
He was the person in this room who knew Yuji most accurately. The picture Ito had painted, the selfless sacrifice, the righteous resolve, the awe-inspiring volunteer stepping forward for the sake of others, had produced in Sasori exactly one reaction.
Something was off.
Yuji was warm and genuine, and people who didn't know him well believed entirely in that surface. Sasori knew what sat underneath it.
The boy was unusually sharp and he calculated constantly, behind a face that gave nothing away. When Yuji had made his case for joining the rescue, the Medical Ninja's duty, the small possibility worth attempting, Sasori had caught the faint smell of a constructed argument.
Something being built toward a conclusion that had already been reached.
He had said nothing. He had let it proceed.
"He didn't tell me," Sasori said, his gaze going cold.
That boy was out there doing something behind his back.
...
Stones??