Pre-Chapter A/N:Another chapter on time? Guess my lock-in is going pretty well. If you haven't already, I recommend turning on notifications for my stuff so you can see when new stuff drops right as it drops. Next five chapters on my patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)— same username as here and link in bio. Since I just started a new story, there's a cheeky discount on said patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga) page for anyone interested(expires in two days from now so don't snooze it).
XXXXXX- KAERU OF THE NEW STONE
She scoffed as she stared at this new group of tree-huggers. These ones were not even Anbu. They wore Jounin vests. While the Anbu units warranted caution with their general demeanour and the way they seemed to always be waiting for the attack to come, these ones seemed to have little worries of note. They lounged around an open flame. So arrogant and stupid.
The Anbu would never even have dared light a flame this far in enemy territory. She wondered if they were trying to be noticed—was this a trap? But these were just run-of-the-mill Konoha Jounin. Teenagers like her, too young to have been able to do much in the war. But unlike her, who had been forced to grow in the war's aftermath, they had grown in Konoha—the ones who had started the war and still profited from it in the end.
They had grown up weak and complacent. They had grown without shinobi haunting their every move to earn the bounties Kumo had placed on Clan shinobi with bloodlines. Of course they needed a fire to sleep. They had never had to deal with a night in the cold. She felt her irritation spike even further as one of them unsealed a fish and they began to prepare it to place over the fire. While they did so, they joked with themselves. The blonde one smiled easily and widely, the red-haired one had the loudest voice, and the black-haired one seemed to be content to just watch them joke with a fond smile on her face. They had clearly been a team from a young age. It showed in the way they moved in and out of each other's personal space with ease.
"Yumi?" she whispered.
"Captain?" she heard back.
"Status?"
"Checked everything. Done all the redundancies. No others. No signs of ambush. Best guess is that they're really just that stupid." She nodded. That was what she thought as well. But then why were her senses telling her not to move forward? Not to attack?
There was a chance that the three of them were not as lax and unprepared as they seemed, but even that wouldn't matter all that much. Kaeru had five to their three. And it was a truth of life that each Iwa shinobi was worth two tree-huggers. So it was more like ten versus three. They had all the advantages that existed in the situation.
The element of surprise—if they weren't faking inattention—the numbers advantage, the terrain advantage from knowing these mountains like the back of their hands, the first-mover advantage, and all the initiative in the world. So why did she still feel hesitant to make the move? She felt a jolt from her suit and looked over at Kaito to find him gesturing at her to hurry up. She breathed out slowly.
She had this. These tree-huggers would never know what hit them. She signalled to go, and Kaito was the first in their midst, body brimming with earth release chakra. He struck like a mountain. The black-haired one and the blonde scattered. The redhead stayed and did something that had Kaeru gaping. She caught his punch. All Kaito's power and might, and this tiny woman just caught it.
Ren followed in Kaito's aftermath, kunai lashing out at her outstretched limbs. From the treeline came the shuriken that knocked each one out of the way.
Focus, she chided herself. She weaved seals and spat a jet of honey at the blonde one as he tried to approach her from the side. He jumped over the approaching stream and spun, twisting so he landed right behind her. He was fast, she noted. She managed to block his first kick and that was all the time that Yumi needed to ensnare him in her genjutsu. At least, that is what should have happened.
Instead of him stopping once Yumi's chakra washed over them, he seemed to ignore it entirely and continue his onslaught. She dashed out of the way of the next punch, and then his foot was intertwined with hers and she found herself falling to the ground. She flexed her chakra, and the ground welcomed her like an old friend, taking her in its embrace and allowing her to sink far out of the reach of the blonde one. She could feel the footsteps of her squad through the earth. It wasn't looking good.
The redhead was tossing Kaito about like he was nothing. Ten was already out of the fight. She felt the blonde move for Yumi and knew that a dangerous taijutsu master like he clearly was would make short work of the genjutsu specialist. She weaved seals even as she commanded the earth to spit her back up. She shot between them and as she did so, she slammed a hand against the seal tattooed on her forearm.
Several of her clan's bees answered the call, each one larger than a horse. They shot for their enemies and she took a second to breathe out the tension that had flooded her body. A second too long, as that was all it took for everything to change.
She heard a grinding sound that sent a jolt through her body. And the next thing she knew, she was covered in bee innards as the blonde one ground his way through her family to reach her. The other bees that had moved to the sides stopped moving and then each one was tagged by a shuriken. The black-haired one. Each shuriken was connected to a string of ninja wire, and she was subjected to the sound of her family's bees screaming in pain as they were all executed by a stream of lightning-natured chakra.
The blonde one was her major focus though, as she jumped away from the grinding jutsu he hit the ground with. She sensed a disturbance in the air and managed to turn in time to block the kunai that threatened to skewer her.
Attached to the kunai was a woman with black hair and red eyes. Spinning red eyes. They were so beautiful, she thought. So, so beautiful.
She just barely managed to snap out of the genjutsu before taking a kunai to the neck. She kicked the woman away while being careful to keep her gaze firmly on her neck and not veering towards her eyes. An Uchiha. Just her luck. Her kick was targeted to give her the benefit of some distance, but her opponent ducked underneath it, and then came right at her again. She blocked a kunai with one of her own. Sparks came from where the two of them made contact.
She spat out a stream of honey that should have hit her opponent point-blank. But somehow she still managed to dodge out of the way of the attack. If Kaeru had thought she'd managed to gain some distance from her opponent, then she was proven wrong very quickly. Her opponent was in her face once again. Kaeru blocked a straight punch with her arms crossed. She backpedaled out of the way of a follow-up kick, and then that was it.
Her opponent twisted this way, and then that, and trying to track her movements while being careful not to make eye contact proved to be close to impossible and she never even saw the attack that did her in.
When she woke up, she found herself tied to a tree. She looked around and noticed all four members of her squad tied up along with her. She near screamed in frustration. They'd captured all of them alive. What kind of monsters were these three? They hadn't just turned the numbers advantage into nothing, but they had been so much better than them that they'd managed to subdue them non-lethally. Fuck.
Kaeru knew there was only one thing she could do in this situation. It pained her to do it, but it would never be said that the last of the Kamizuru had died a coward. The tears that wanted to fall from her eyes remained uncried as she pushed at her false tooth with her tongue to unleash the cyanide pill within.
Or at least that was what was supposed to happen. Instead, the false tooth gave way and there was nothing there. Damn it. The Konoha-nin had done some checking then. Regardless, it wouldn't matter in the end. They had failsafes for their failsafes. She felt for the seal tattooed under her left breast and flooded it with chakra. But then it didn't do anything. She just remained there.
"By now, you should be coming to the realisation that none of your suicide measures will work. A total of five. Can't lie that I wasn't impressed with the thoroughness. And the quality of the sealwork? Definitely something that will be looked at back in Konoha," a voice jolted her from her thoughts.
Almost against her will, her head snapped up to him. The blonde one. He stood between the two others, watching them like they were animals being dissected. That was the cold, assured gaze of a Konoha shinobi. A gaze that spoke only of cruelty and greed. The weakest village, but also the most cruel. She had made a mistake, she accepted it now. Attacking them, doing it here and now had been a mistake.
She should have listened to her senses. It had been such an obvious trap. That had been what made her so cautious in the first place. But after looking into all the possibilities, she'd been lulled into a false sense of security. Now she had to accept that there was another possibility that she just never considered in the first place. The possibility that the trap was that the three of them were so strong that their ambush would never matter.
She remembered the lessons she'd been taught as a child. Konoha shinobi are usually weak, but that did not matter because of the monsters they produced every generation. Monsters that the rest of their accursed village learned to lean on and rely on for everything. It was a disgusting way to live as far as Kaeru was concerned. Her pride as a shinobi would never see her rely on another to solve all her problems. Her mistake had been assuming that all the Konoha shinobi she encountered would be of the relying sort, and not the ones being relied on. That was a mistake.
Still, she kept silent as they all stared down at her. Give them nothing, she thought to herself. Her training in anti-interrogation techniques was little to write home about. There had been deemed to be no point. Everyone in the New Stone knew that it was better to die than be captured. Those fucking tree-huggers had mind readers on their side, after all.
"So what we need to know is simple. Where is your village?" The black-haired one squatted in front of her and tried to meet her eyes. Kaeru was no fool though. The Uchiha might not have been mind readers like the Yamanaka were, but their genjutsu was still said to be a level above what the rest of the world were capable of. It was cheating, she thought to herself. How Konoha had so many powerful clans to call their own.
And then tying them all together was the Butcher himself, a shinobi powerful enough to cut a village in half. She'd seen the scar that used to be Iwa. Every shinobi of New Stone had. It was their final lesson and reminder. It was why they would never rest until the Butcher was found.
And after venturing out to see Iwa, they of the New Stone would return to their village. They would dig through the earth, using an established series of tunnels that dated back to the Warring States Period to return to their Sect.
Sect? Her brain prompted. Wait, what? She disturbed her internal chakra and returned to reality, finding herself staring at a pair of spinning red eyes.
"I know where her village is. But I also know why Sensei has been unable to find them. They split into Sects. I don't have the full story, but give me a second," she said, but this time Kaeru was ready. She fought the genjutsu as it came.
She fought it just the way she had been taught by Ijichi-sensei. Focus on your chakra, disrupt its flow, and the genjutsu will not be able to stick on you. Most genjutsu were vulnerable to that means of removal. The one around her Sect's entrance was not one of them as it was actively maintained by seals that kept it up and running. She'd wondered if the other sects had similar means once. They didn't have fuinjutsu masters in their numbers the way hers did. That was why they had done drop-offs with the others to arm them with stealth suits and several other seals that Kaeru made.
The other Sects—other villages—were stretched out across the land of Earth but she did not know where they were. Did she truly not? No. One of them was in the border between them and Wind, in the remnants of what had once been the Hidden Rock Village. She knew there was another in the Land of Grass, but that was the end of the insight she had been able to glean from her brother on the matter. Her brother?
Her brother was the only one she felt would know from her Sect about the location of the others. Simply because he was their Shadow. He should have known where the other Shadows were, after all.
She slumped back as reality returned again. Another genjutsu.
"Got what I need. They split into five villages instead of one. There's one near the border with Wind, and there is another in the Land of Grass," the Uchiha bitch said.
"Land of Grass proper? Sensei won't be pleased. He's ordered that place searched on more than one occasion," the blonde one said.
"He'll be fine. Especially because now that we know what to look for, we should be able to find them no problem," the redhead said. Now that they were so close and the fire danced across her face much clearer, Kaeru could see the resemblance to Kaeru more clearly. Another Uzumaki. She felt her heart stop then. Of fucking course.
The Butcher had a team, she knew. A team made of an Uchiha, an Uzumaki, and a blonde orphan of civilian origins. That explained everything.
"So what do we do with them?" She felt a sudden jolt of fear fill her as the blonde one asked that question, looking at her. She'd heard the stories of what happened to captured Kunoichi when they were caught. Konoha was famous for it, she knew. Why wouldn't the Butcher's student do something like that?
"Back to the village, I think. Yamanaka-sensei will want to know more than I was able to get with my genjutsu," the Uchiha said. She felt a brief spike of relief that she was not about to suffer a terrible fate before it was dashed like a ship on the rocks when the rest of that sentence processed itself in her mind.
She pushed against the ropes that held her, but just like she had thought when she had first felt the knot, there was no give at all. Trying to use her chakra at all to increase her strength or to use a jutsu failed on first attempt. It didn't matter what she did or how much she struggled, she had no chance of escaping.
"I'll hurry and seal them away, let's get moving. Probably for the best if we can get them to questioning before their Leader realises they've gone missing and moves shop or something," the blonde said. At least there was a silver lining, she thought. They had no idea just the kind of connection she had with her brother.
He'd have known the second she was captured. That meant there was either a rescue team on the way or the village was packing up to move from their previous location. She hoped it was the former, but knowing what she knew, it was probably better for it to have been the latter. No single shinobi—not even the twin sister of a Kage—should be worth more than the village. It would be her brother's duty to guide their village through the times to come, not to see her free by all means necessary even as she hoped that he did something about it.
She watched, hatred burning in her eyes, as her squad was sealed up one after the other by the blonde one as he moved around the room getting them one after the other.
When her time came, he just squatted until he was making direct eye contact with her.
"For whatever it's worth, I am sorry for what will happen to your people," he said, and the words Kaeru had prepared to retaliate with died in her throat as her head tilted forwards. She was unconscious now, and so Minato turned to the others with a thumbs up.
A/N: One advantage of training your own team is that you get to use them as your own enforcers whenever you want. In this case, Shori finds out about a New Iwa squad messing with the Anbu that he sent there to mess with them, and so he sends his trio of monsters he's got on speed dial. Story plods on along. Thank you. Next five up on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga) (same username as here and link in bio), support me there and read them early. Started a new story, so there's a discount for the rest of the month on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)(expires in two days from now so don't snooze it): feel free to check that out as well.