"H-Yah! Ha! Ha! Hya!" Gai's fists were a blur as he danced around his opponent. His lips were pulled tightly across his gums, exposing both his teeth and full-hearted joy. Lee was nearly as loud, and nearly as fast. He was actually scoring more hits than his sensei, in no small part because Kisame was clearly able to see that one was more dangerous than the other and prioritized avoiding Gai's limbs when he was stuck between the two.
It was a little intimidating. Karin cringed a little, inadvertently curling close to Itachi's side. He scared her on a visceral level she couldn't explain, but at least at the moment he didn't look like he was mad with bloodlust. And he was supposed to be helping her, right? She didn't like being away from comrades. Had Kakashi separated her from her team because he was mad at her? No, he wasn't that petty. This was the best solution, she had to believe it.
'This is why I don't do field work,' she fretted, heartbeat racing. 'It's too messy.'
The rain that had been fogging her chakra sense was gone, which was a mixed relief. After so many weeks of essentially being crippled, it was disorienting to suddenly be in the midst of a new place with so many signatures moving. She could tell that the Kiri troops were intending to engage Kakuzu—and that was going to be soon, she would message them in a few minutes to let them know he was almost on top of them so he couldn't slip by. Naruto and Yamato and Sasuke were barreling towards possible hostiles. Everyone else was either fighting or slinking around inside the base—which had led to the disconcerting realization that Kakashi and Neji had found some sort of facility within the building with chakra suppressors. They'd disappeared from her view a few minutes back. So there could possibly be more people waiting in ambush.
'And I've been left with Sasuke's creepy brother.' And boy, was he ever creepy. Karin didn't have any right to complain about red eyes being unnerving on principle, but his were so distant and impassive. It was like he wasn't looking at people. He was looking at facts and figures and weighing outcomes. She shivered uncontrollably and wrapped icy cold fingers around her arms in a pitiful attempt to warm up. Once she had stopped moving, the chill had set in. Ame was awful and dreary even without the artificial and constant rain. Her long sleeves weren't much help, soaked as they were.
'There's nothing for it. I have to trust him. I have to trust Sasuke's assessment. Being suspicious of Itachi won't do me any good. I can't hope to fight him, and I need his help to make sure I can do my job. Keeping everyone aligned is too important for me to cower.'
"I-Itachi-san?" Her voice almost sounded normal. "Do you think they can beat Hoshigaki?" She immediately worried at her lower lip once the words had come out. Itachi would know, of course, he should know the Akatsuki's weaknesses better than anyone. He didn't seem like a man who would lie to reassure her. She almost didn't want to hear his assessment—if he said Lee and Gai were about to die, what would she do? Should she try to help?
"They will defeat him."
The timbre of his voice was pleasing, and the cultured enunciations he used made him sound intelligent. It was only the detached way he spoke that made it seem like something was very wrong in the older Uchiha's head.
Still, she felt a flicker of relief. "Good." Karin swallowed, allowing herself to look back at the closest fight. It was… Well, she could barely see what was happening. It was far faster than she could fight. Far faster than anything she'd seen from Sasuke or Naruto, even. She didn't want to have to interfere. It seemed more likely that she would get in the way.
"The other team will not be able to stand against Konan."
Startled, she wheeled around. "Say what? They have her surrounded five to one," Karin protested nervously. "If Gai-sensei and Lee-kun can defeat Kisame, then why…"
Itachi seemed almost pitying. "Konan is a formidable opponent." He looked away into the distance, as if he could possibly still see that fight. There was no way he could, of course. They had passed out of her field of vision six minutes prior and they were still moving, though unsteadily.
'Is Konan intentionally herding them?' She suddenly wondered, sickly with nerves. Her abilities were so stupid and useless when she didn't know the terrain!
"Kakashi-sensei… Is he going to find anything in the base?"
Itachi seemed strangely tolerant of her questions and presence—patient, even. She might as well push her luck. What was he going to do, snap and kill her? Karin suppressed hysterical laughter. She was trusting her life with a mass murderer because Sasuke said he was alright. God, if he was wrong, she was going to come back as a ghost and choke him to death with one of his pretty collared shirts.
Belatedly, she realized that she was growling. Karin stopped that.
Her companion and apparent bodyguard might have even looked a little amused at her sudden emotional shift from nervousness to vowing vengeance. "Very little. He may be interested in the holding facilities. I suspect that Suna will be interested in re-acquiring some of the individuals within."
Karin blinked, remembering Aiko's description of her time in captivity. It had sounded rather more casual than a stay in an actual holding facility. "Cells? Are those new?" she asked sardonically. Instantly, she flushed.
'Idiot! Don't try to joke with him. You don't know how he'll take it.'
The worst part was that he was so damn still that he was all but impossible to read. "No." At least he didn't seem angry, but he looked directly at her. "But they are seldom occupied. Pein-sama prefers not to keep prisoners, but he made a concession for practicality's sake. Kisame has been feeding Samehada there."
"..and Samehada is what, a dog?" she asked, feeling lost.
If that sound had come from anyone else, she might have labeled it an aborted laugh. Instead, Karin convinced herself it was a tiny cough. "His sword," Itachi stressed gravely.
'Oh, right. Kakashi said that earlier.' Feeling stressed and like her focus was slipping, Karin ran her tongue along the inside of her teeth. 'Time to alert Kumo, I think.'
By now, the motions to call the twin to the serpent she had planted in Kumo's main camp were executed without so much as a thought. Gently, she caught the animal that appeared and let her twine around Karin's arms in a pitiful attempt at warmth.
"I apologize," she murmured, turning politely away from Itachi to talk to her summons. Rakki squeezed around her wrist with enough force to hurt, clearly not much appeased. "Tell Scale-sister that the digger will be with the humans from Kumo within two minutes."
"Yes," Rakki agreed unhappily, and let go. Karin let her fall, ending the connection keeping her in the human world before the serpent could hit the ground.
'They are going to be angry with me,' Karin mused guiltily for the hundredth time. It was far too cold here for her summons, and the time commitment was as long as the task was dull. She was going to have to get them so many lizards to make up for this… Mice weren't going to cut it this time.
A pained cry rent the air. Karin jumped half a foot, hand flickering with a chakra scalpel before she had decided whether her impulse was to heal or cut.
"Oh my god," she whispered, eyes wide and fixed on the smallest figure visible. Whatever had happened had clearly taken him out of commission. He wasn't even standing. "Lee!" She'd never seen him hurt like that before—he got scrapes and broken bones like anyone else, but he'd never- he was just too strong and too stubborn to be unable to fight.
It became unpleasantly clear that Gai-sensei was no longer enjoying his fight. She couldn't hear what he said, but the red chakra that coated his body couldn't possibly be a good sign.
Frantic, she surveyed the situation- Kakuzu had been engaged. The team fighting Konan was going strong. Captain Yamato's team was fine and had taken out one of their opponents. Kakashi and Neji were still hidden from her senses in some dark hole in Akatsuki's base.
She should hold her post and pay attention to the grand scheme of the theatre in case something went wrong. Instead, she tore across the mud, slipping at one point but not caring. Karin crossed the distance separating her from her downed colleague in a matter of seconds, completely forgetting that she had an intimidating shadow. Itachi didn't say anything one way or the other.
"What happened, Lee?" Karin breathed, dropping to her knees in the sod and marsh. He grinned up at her tiredly, but the cracks in his cheer showed it for the lie it was.
"I was defeated, Karin-san! But fear not. Next time, he shall not get the better of me."
Involuntarily, she cast a dubious glance over her shoulder at the carnage happening far too quickly for her to see. Suddenly, the 'Beast' nickname didn't seem like a boast at all. "I don't think Gai-sensei is going to leave anything for you to fight," she mumbled, pulling her jacket off and balling it under his head. "Hold still, Lee-kun."
Had he been any other shinobi, she probably would have pulled his shirt up before examining him. As it was, she didn't think he would thank her if she ripped his jumpsuit and left him in his tighty whities. So she gently placed just her fingertips over his gut and tried to ignore the way he winced and clenched his jaw. Karin closed her eyes, cataloguing what her senses were telling her as she moved her hands.
'Four broken ribs. One pierced the left lung and it's filling with fluid. Severe bruising, but that's almost negligible at this point…'
She summed the situation up with a blunt and professional, "Shit."
Lee gave a choked laugh. "Karin-san! Here I thought that Sasuke-san was jesting when he claimed that he was going to recommend you further study bedside manners."
"That sassy bastard? Like he's one to talk," she replied, managing to give the Chuunin a smile and totally miss the way Itachi nearly choked. Lee was incredible to be able to make jokes at a time like this. In his position, she might just be crying. How could someone be so good-natured all the time? He had to be in horrendous pain.
Speaking of which… Karin reached into the pouch at her left hip and dug out a yellow capsule. "Bite this, please," she ordered crisply, tucking it inside Lee's lips and ignoring his surprise. That would do for the pain, but pain was just a symptom. If she didn't do something about the blood in his lung, he would drown. That couldn't be first, though. She had to move the broken rib into place and at least get it patched up before she could do anything about the liquid.
The blood wouldn't be a problem for her. She'd mastered Tsunade's poison extraction technique as well as Shizune could teach her. Moving liquid was well within her capabilities.
'I wish I'd been better as an actual field medic,' Karin thought a little morosely. She was a poison specialist, not a trauma surgeon. Sasuke would be much, much better at the bone work.
But he wasn't here now, and she was.
She had no idea how long it took her to coax the rib piercing his lung back into place, but she was trembling and sweat was dripping down her forehead.
'It's quiet,' Karin noted vaguely. 'Does that mean Gai's fight is over?'
Maybe. She didn't bother to look or see what was happening elsewhere. A medic had to focus on the patient alone. Or they would end up with a dead patient.
Lee had lapsed into what she thought was unconsciousness for a second—until he blinked his eyes open to look up at her dazedly.
His breathing sounded terrible—waterlogged and raspy. A little panicked, Karin bent low over his chest to assess how much he'd bled while she'd been working. 'More than I'd like,' she grimly judged.
Still, this was the easy part.
"Keep your mouth open, and stay calm," Karin ordered, trying to sound confident and no-nonsense instead of like she was in the middle of her first surgery in the field.
It had to be incredibly unpleasant to feel a rush of hot blood being pulled up his lung and up and out of his throat, but Lee bore it stoically. Karin balanced the glob between trembling hands- and then tossed it to the side, bringing her fingers back down to the bottom of his lung to repeat the procedure again and again until there was no liquid left where it shouldn't be. Pale-faced and exhausted, she re-checked Lee's vitals—and slumped over in relief. He was doing well. Now she just needed to try to heal the other two ribs, see if she could perfect the patch over the one she had already done, and make sure he couldn't re-injure himself by-
"Karin-sensei," mumbled-
Karin blinked and looked up, downright shocked to hear the term of respect coming from Uchiha Itachi. Sensei was the traditional marker of respect for a doctor but she wasn't really deserving of that.
"Yes?" she asked faintly, and tried not to blush at the strange softness in his gaze or the way he slightly bowed his head to her.
'Maybe he just really respects medics,' Karin realized vaguely. That was unusual. Pleasant, but not the ordinary case among shinobi.
"May I suggest that you examine Maito-san?" He gestured towards a slumped figure she hadn't noticed. The movement was so subtle that she could tell it was a conscious effort for him to utilize body language at all. She instantly pegged him as even more socially awkward and repressed than Sai. Shame.
'Wait. Gai is hurt?'
But she already knew Lee was hurt-
Lee grabbed her hand. "Please examine Gai-sensei first, Karin-san!" He was all but begging.
Karin nodded slowly, detangling her hand. "Of course," she allowed, and pushed her glasses up slightly before she jogged across the slight distance. She tried very hard not to notice the blood splatters and obviously shattered bones in the over-large body that lay not far away.
"Kisame is dead," Itachi assured her, seeming to catch on to her hidden fear. She felt ashamed, but didn't allow herself to wallow in it.
Gai… was not in good shape. "What did you do," she breathed incredulously. He was slightly too unconscious to offer a reply. Every muscle she examined was torn, ligaments pushed far beyond their limits, bones cracked in odd patterns she'd never seen before… and his chakra core was depleted.
'Mito-sensei would be irritated with me,' Karin realized, even as she wiped her right forearm with a sanitary wipe from her med-kit and carefully placed it inside Gai-sensei's mouth. Sensei hadn't liked the use of her unusual abilities as anything except a literal last resort. Healing other people by gifting away her life energy took a harsh toll on Karin's body. It was unhygienic, unconventional, and her best option at the moment. Itachi moved, possibly startled or revolted, but didn't interfere when she placed her splayed fingers on the bottom of the unconscious man's jaw and used the force to 'encourage' his teeth to break the surface of her epidermis.
"I can share my vitality this way," she explained, feeling oddly ashamed of the crude methodology. Karin didn't have long to wallow in her inadequacies—Gai unconsciously sapped a horrifying portion of the chakra she hadn't spent running or fighting or healing. She gritted her teeth and pulled away, breathing heavily. It took two tries to find the proper proportions of neutral physical and spiritual energy to call up diagnostic chakra to check his condition, which she instantly recognized as proof that she was nearing her limits. That was all but instinctive at this point in her career.
And her glowing palm technique cut out before she could get a real reading. Frustrated, Karin shook her fingers out and tried again. A warm hand curled around her wrist before she could force the jutsu.
"Do not push yourself beyond what you are capable," Itachi said quietly. Almost self-consciously, he released her hand quickly and nodded at her patient. "A visual check is enough to confirm that Gai-san's state is much improved. Trust that your teammates will return, or that you may finish treating your patients once you have recuperated."
She stared for a second, light-headed and a little grumpy at being interrupted. "Are you always so… logical?" Karin scrunched up her nose in a moue of distaste. "That seems so dull."
Still, she took the advice and leaned back in a recovery position, getting as much oxygen as possible and re-gaining her bearings. "Speaking of which," Karin mumbled, barely aware that she was talking aloud. She squeezed her eyes shut. That wasn't strictly necessary, but when she was having a hard time focusing, it was helpful to separate her senses so that she could concentrate on whatever was most crucial.
Kakashi and Neji were back and making their way towards her position. So was Yamato's thankfully intact team. The other fight had moved quite a distance away—and Konan had disappeared off her vision. That meant that something had gone wrong. She was supposed to have been captured. Had she been killed or had she escaped, Karin wondered idly. It was impossible to know without further information. At least the five shinobi who'd been fighting Konan seemed fine.
Kakuzu was gone as well… As were two of the signatures she'd become familiar with from Kumo. Dead, or had they chased him out of her range?
"Karin, Itachi. Report. Any problems?" She blinked gummily, a little surprised that Kakashi had appeared so suddenly.
"Lee-kun and Gai-sensei are going to need another healing session before either one of them is moved," she offered. "Yamato's team won and is on their way back here. Ah… The fighting ended with Konan and her signature is gone, but I don't know what happened. No fatalities on our side, but I don't know about medical condition yet."
Self-consciously, she rubbed at her face and gave consideration to falling over unconscious instead of finishing her report.
Karin tabled the thought for later, because unconsciousness sounded blissful. May as well bite the kunai and fess up to dereliction of duty, because her commanding officer was going to figure it out even if Itachi didn't tattle on her. "I became preoccupied with healing, and I'm not certain if Kakuzu escaped or was killed. But two Kumo nin are either dead or out of my range as well."
Kakashi didn't seem pleased by her assessment. "Contact them, if you can," he ordered briskly before seeming to note that Neji was all but staring at his teammates. "Feel free to visit them," Kakashi advised a little more softly. "Hurry. You're going to go check on Tenten's team after that." Then he turned to Itachi last. "Any problems?"
"I suspect that Konan and Kakuzu have both escaped," he calmly put forth. "It should also be brought to your attention that Karin-sensei is not in fit condition to perform another jutsu at the moment."
A sharp eye pinned the redhead just as she made the first seal to summon a serpent. She blinked guiltily, not sure why she felt that way. "I see," the Jounin sighed. He rubbed the back of his neck. "Forgive me, Karin-chan, I should have noticed. Forget what I said." Kakashi ran through his own sequence of handseals—and a moment later smoke was clearing to reveal two hounds.
Well. One of them was a proper hound. The other was a stubby little pug with big sad eyes.
"Pakkun, I need you to deliver a message to the closest units," Kakashi ordered briskly. "Tell them to contact the adjacent squad and move into Ame. We're taking temporary control of the village."
"We?" the pug asked curiously, tilting his head.
"The alliance," Kakashi clarified lazily. "Not Konoha in particular, of course. It seems that Akatsuki is definitely associated with Ame. They shouldn't pose much threat on their own, but it would be foolish to leave known enemies unsupervised when we have taken control of their base. Bisuke, stay with Pakkun, just in case something goes wrong."
The actual hound gave a pleasant yap and beat his tail against the ground one time. Karin forced down a smile. She didn't think Kakashi-sensei would appreciate being told that his ninken were adorable and cuddly looking.
The serious expression on his face leant to that impression. She was glad she hadn't moved to pet the dogs.
Some people were just so touchy. Karin gave a huge yawn that cracked her jaw. Appalled, she slapped a palm over her open mouth and tried to force her eyes to stay open.
'I should find out what Gai-sensei did that took so much of his life energy,' she decided, even as it became clear that she wasn't going to find out anytime soon. Neji bounded off in the direction Itachi indicated, clearly on course to ensure that his last remaining teammate was not also in need of medical attention.
She would have plenty of time to find out, if they were going to be stuck in Ame for the foreseeable future. Blegh. No one was going to be pleased about putting Ame under new management.
When Neji returned, it was with Tenten, Genma, and the disgruntled Suna team. Karin knew their target had gotten away before anyone so much as spoke from their downtrodden attitudes. It didn't help matters when Naruto blandly reported that they'd won their fights before turning to Temari and asking how she'd finished Konan.
'His faith is inspiring,' Karin thought dryly. 'His situational assessment is less so.'
Still, by that point she was feeling well enough to grab Sasuke and get a secondary opinion on the men in green. Karin barely noted that the large team was talking about the fight with Konan-something about her leading them to another building and making a break for the border, leading them through a delaying ambush of Ame nin. She was more preoccupied with the situation that she could alter. Injuries for the other team were less severe than even the improved condition of Karin's two patients, so she hardly felt guilty about privileging the care of people she knew. This time, she was aware enough to recognize that Itachi was watching with undisguised interest as she and Sasuke ran diagnostics and compared notes.
Gai was recuperating shockingly well, given an infusion from her regenerative chakra. The spiderweb cracks in his bones were the only problem that would be a lasting issue—but assuming he was treated gently, only minor treatments and nutritional supplements would have him on the path to recovery.
Lee was another story. A second pass of his lungs revealed a small clot she had missed on her initial diagnosis—something that seemed to have been a preexisting condition. She frowned, mildly amazed that such a thing had slipped notice, but excised it nonetheless. His broken ribs were going to be a problem, however.
"I don't think we can let them heal naturally," Karin posited unwillingly, curling her toes inside her sandals. Normally, that was optimal. A medic nin generally encouraged the body to heal better and more expediently than usual. Forcing the healing process was disruptive and often had long-term repercussions for the patient's immunity and ability to heal naturally.
But the situation they were in was too dangerous to play it safe. Lee would hardly be able to stand without risking incurring further damage, much less keep pain at manageable levels without eating drugs like they were breath mints.
Sasuke sighed, fluffing up the back of his hair. "How is your chakra level?" he asked, not sounding like he expected much.
When she admitted that she was nearly drained, he just nodded.
"I'm hardly surprised. You've been maintaining all those summons for days now. Your available pool was much smaller than usual." Sasuke flicked his black eyes into red effortlessly, in the space between thoughts. "Can you hold the topmost rib in place while I work?"
Kakashi watched the interchange impassively, realizing in the sickly light that they had fought almost through the night. He turned his gaze on each of the shinobi in his care one by one, cataloguing their states. Most needed rest and care. Naruto and Sasuke had the best summons for getting a report back to Konoha—and this situation did need to be reported—but they should rest. Silently, he ran his hands through the seals to summon two more members of his pack. Urushi and Guruko looked up at him inquisitively. He knelt to speak with them in an undertone.
"Can I get you to take a message to Konoha?"
The ninken didn't bother to respond verbally. Guruko grinned good-naturedly. Kakashi reached out to scratch behind an ear for both hounds, silently expressing his thanks. When he drew his hands back, it was to pull a bit of paper and a pen out of his hip pouch. "Just a minute, then."
Poor Tsunade didn't speak dog, after all.
~~~
Obito jerked into awareness and simply raised one hand. Zetsu obediently halted. The unconscious man on his back swayed sickly with the motion, but didn't stir.
That was normal. He wouldn't be waking up anytime soon, if at all before the end.
"Tobi-san?" White Zetsu asked inquisitively. The dark side of his face pulled into a sneer, but said nothing.
"Do you sense anyone familiar?" Obito asked quietly, slipping out of Tobi's skin and thoughts like they were a manky old sweater. The boy obediently slunk into silence.
Zetsu quirked his head slightly. It was Black Zetsu who answered. "The greedy old man," he muttered distastefully. "Kakuzu-san is alright," White Zetsu disagreed mildly.
Obito concentrated on the important information and ignored the byplay. "Give me the jinchuuriki," he ordered, and hurriedly hustled the man onto his back. Kakuzu thought he was Zetsu's hanger-on, and would expect him to be doing the heavy lifting and grunt work. "Find out what has happened in our absence."
It wasn't long before the familiar chakra signature veered on course to meet them, clearly recognizing their party. They met several miles out of Ame's northern border.
Kakuzu was in his pajamas, clearly dirtied, and limping slightly. It didn't bode well.
"Oh no, Kakuzu-senpai!" Tobi gasped, jerking control away from Obito and flailing in concern, nearly letting his burden slip to the ground. He flitted about the older man, apparently unaware of his growing rage, and examined him from various angles. Even Tobi wasn't stupid enough to try to hug Kakuzu to make him feel better or even touch him. No other Akatsuki had fits of mindless rage like the miser did, and there was no way to get in a fight with him without losing his cover as an idiot.
"Tobi, calm yourself," Black Zetsu spat condescendingly. His calmer half tried to soothe things over by turning the conversation over to the interloper. "What has happened, Kakuzu-san? We have returned with our target."
Kakuzu snorted, ill-tempered. The fact that he hadn't lashed out betrayed that he was weaker than he was letting on, however. "For all the good it will do," he sneered. "Leader-sama left the bimbo in charge and wandered off somewhere. The Konoha and Suna morons moved into Ame. Hidan is dead. The last I saw, Kisame and Konan were fighting against poor odds." His voice dropped into simmering rage and bitterness. "Itachi has betrayed us."
'Well, that's not surprising at all,' Obito snorted. Idiots, the lot of them, never thinking to look beyond what they had been told was truth. Itachi had made a tactically sound, at least for the short-term. The only unexpected turn there had been that Pein had dared leave Ame… Was that why he had been sent out of the country? Pein had probably hoped to return before Obito knew he was gone.
'But where did he go?" Madara whispered, curling like grey smoke to strangle other thoughts. 'What does he wish to hide from us? Is he afraid of what we would do unchecked in Ame, or wary of what we would do to stop whatever course of action he has set upon?'
"Itachi-senpai would never betray Akatsuki," Tobi said loyally.
Technically, he was correct. Akatsuki had never truly had Itachi's allegiance. It was logically impossible for him to betray the organization.
That didn't mean that the wayward boy wouldn't have to be punished for his choice, of course.
Madara's conversation was more interesting than the outside topic. What would Pein want to hide from Obito?
'Or what would Pein want to do in general,' Obito thought instead, turning the nuances away from a topic he could hardly predict without more information. Pein saw the alliance as the greatest impediment to Akatsuki's goals, quite rightly so, and what would he do about that?
The answer came easily. What else could be expected from someone who thought to impose his will upon the world by creating a monster so terrible that no one would dare disobey him? Pein was crude. He would attempt to solve the matter ham-handedly.
"That's not good," Zetsu muttered, ignoring Tobi altogether. Kakuzu did as well. "Itachi is stronger than Kisame. He's probably lost to us."
"But not Konan?" Kakuzu asked, actually sounding mildly interested. None of them had worked with Pein's partner.
"I cannot estimate," Black Zetsu balefully lied in a way that implied he wished Konan would perish. Obito rolled his eyes, content in the knowledge that no one was paying any attention to him anyways. Pitiful and petty. Zetsu should know better. He was Madara's creature through and through in a way Obito had never been. For the moment, he was a valuable ally in the Eye of the Moon plan, since Obito didn't see a way to accomplish his goals without using Pein's Rinnegan to resurrect the older man.
But Obito hardly felt limited to Madara's vision. He was going to be the one to cast the ultimate Tsukyomi, not that fossil.
'Bide your time,' the deepest voice urged, amused for a reason Obito couldn't put his finger on. 'Now is not the time to show our hand.'
"Is Ame lost to us, then?" Zetsu asked curiously.
"Probably. It's overrun with Konoha and Kumo nin. We will need to contact Pein," Kakuzu grunted, giving a dismissive glance at the form slumped over Obito's back. "It is hardly wise to haul that sack of lard around longer than necessary."
"Without Kisame and Hidan, will it even be possible to extract the bijuu?" White Zetsu asked doubtfully. Black Zetsu made a rude sound, but offered no helpful opinion.
The oldest man present pressed his lips down into a resentful frown. "We will need to augment our numbers," he admitted bitterly. "Even if Konan has survived and meets with us, we will be extracting this bijuu with less than half our original numbers."
Strictly speaking, it wasn't true that they needed more people to extract bijuu. Obito suspected that he could accomplish such a thing with only Pein or Konan for a partner, but each participant cut down the necessary time for the procedure exponentially. They were most vulnerable while performing an extraction. It would be foolish not to shorten that weakness as much as possible.
Itachi was gone. Kisame was probably lost. Hidan had joined Sasori and Deidara in death—unless, of course, he came crawling back a week later as he usually did.
Obito let Tobi proffer an innocent idea. "Why don't we make more friends?" He clapped his gloved hands, as if the concept was novel. "Wasn't there a bad thing in Mist? I bet we can find some more shinobi who can't stay in the village anymore!"
A laugh nearly bubbled up in his throat at that guilelessly innocent description of missing nin, but Obito managed to choke it down in time. Tobi really cracked him up sometimes. More lately than in past, actually.
Any surviving Mist traitors would be highly suspect, of course, but it was a start.
"Good idea," White Zetsu agreed easily. "You can take care of it," Black Zetsu grunted, amused by his own cleverness. "We will hide the jinchuuriki and contact you when we have found Pein-sama."
He pretended to be ecstatic at the suggestion and hurried off the Water Country post-haste. With his abilities, that was far faster than Kakuzu could possibly have predicted. Obito didn't mind the informal mission. He had recruited most of the Akatsuki in some capacity or another. He had a knack for it.
That knack bore fruit only two days later on one of the outlier islands where any fleeing failures would have had to pass, when he went to pull an oversized sword out of the tides and found that it was connected to what initially appeared to be a stubborn current. Obito gave one curious tug, already suspecting the truth.
The boy came sputtering and baring teeth as he solidified out of the water, rather badly attempting to intimidate the Akatsuki.
'One of the water clan,' Madara thought, idly amused. 'And not a particularly impressive specimen, either. I might throw it back and look for a better fish.'
Obito ignored that advice and the obviously battered condition of his find in favor of something more interesting.
"This is one of the swords belonging to the Mist's seven swordsmen," he mused quietly, running a gloved finger over the distinctive handle and eying the half-moon cutout on the enormous blade.
"Yes, and it's mine!" The white-haired teen barked, attempting to pull the blade out of Obito's grip. He didn't relent.
"Did you steal this, boy?"
His catch bristled. "Fuck no, dumbshit. I'm the only real swordsman left."
"You might be," Obito agreed idly. If Kisame really was dead. More relevant to current issue was that Kiri didn't give these swords out to weaklings. The boy was young, clearly possessed more bravado than brains, and was not up to Akatsuki's usual standards. However… he had to have talent; and a quick check of his vitals reinforced the suspicion that the boy would be an A-class fighter given time to recuperate. His chakra was acceptable. "Let's make a deal. Join me, and I will make sure you can retrieve the remaining swords. If you do not wish to travel with me, I will kill you now."
The boy agreed, after a … demonstration of Obito's ability to harm him.
One addition wouldn't be enough, but that was satisfactory progress. Even better, this one feared only him and not Pein. The older man's use was quickly expiring, as evidenced by his failure to use his resources to accomplish a relatively simple goal. Pein had forgone expediency for subtlety and failed in both regards. If he didn't need those damned Rinnegan and an idiot attached to them for the Eye of the Moon plan, that incompetent, idealistic buffoon would have been discarded long ago.
He picked up two more missing nin in a similar fashion before he headed back in search of Akatsuki—one more displaced Kiri nin, and one piece of scum he had found attempting to cash in on a bounty in Tea country. It was time that he started edging out behind the Ame ninja's shadow in some respects. Kisame had been his only loyal follower. If he was truly dead, Obito needed a replacement.
Of course, he also needed to store his hangers on with Zetsu and find out what idiocy Pein had managed to get elbows-deep in.
~~~
Konoha felt like a city of the dead. Comparatively speaking, they had an impressive shinobi population for a hidden village. It didn't seem that way when about half of that population was out in the field somewhere. A significant portion of the remainder was either under fourteen or assigned to protecting the cloistered civilians, and therefore unavailable for the moment.
With so many either stationed with their most vulnerable or deployed elsewhere, Konoha's Jounin and Chuunin were stretched thin maintaining tightened perimeters around the village. Even when they weren't officially on guard duty, most of them seemed to walk the streets warily. And why not? It wasn't like there was much else to do.
It had been days since Tsunade had put the village on full lockdown. Doubtless, the civilians were getting restless, but they would be fine for quite a while. The village was prepared for many eventualities, including siege. No one would be happy, but no one would starve in the protected shelters for at least a few months, either.
'It's downright creepy.' Aiko shuddered, walking past yet another store that hadn't had time to lock their doors or put away the wares on display when the alarm had gone off. That poor deli owner was going to have a terrible mess to clean up when they returned. The smell was less than scintillating.
There were a surprising amount of genin aged fifteen and older. Aiko tried not to be biased or judgmental- not everyone became a Chuunin and that was fine—but it just seemed so strange that Naruto's team could have been recommended for promotion after only a few months of duty but that so many other genin apparently hadn't tried the exams yet at that age.
Whatever the reason, she was still grateful for the oddly large numbers. Genin were serving as temporary infrastructure—running messages, and performing the day to day work that kept everyone else fed and in decent health.
The ink on her arm burnt. Aiko didn't bother to look at her ANBU tattoo, though she had the first few times that she'd been summoned to a shift that way. That had made her look like a complete rookie, sadly. It heated when she was required to report in an emergency, but it didn't change in any way. So staring at it as if the tattoo would somehow have the answers was just begging for onlookers to laugh at her expense.
When she'd gotten the tattoo, the artist had told her that the chakra-infused ink could be used to contact her in case of emergencies. But she'd never been on a squad that did anything particularly risky or time-sensitive. Running patrols and taking guard shifts was formulaic and well scheduled, so there was no need to actually contact her as an operative outside of normal channels.
Burning on her arm had become the new normal for the past few days, however.
It didn't seem to indicate an actual emergency now as much as it meant that it was the fastest way to contact an operative. The genin corps had been largely conscripted to replace the existing infrastructure and secretarial positions, but that was still laughably inefficient in comparison to the well-polished system that was normally in place. Being able to run quickly and throw kunai didn't really put genin ahead of the civilian staff when it came to actually getting lines of communication running smoothly and the village operating.
At least temporarily, the burning now meant that she was to report to the Jounin lounge instead of the out of the way ANBU facility. As was the new norm, the room was already occupied.
"Hello." Aoba nodded when she walked in.
Aiko managed a tired smile and a half-hearted wave. She sat sideways on the couch that curled around the outside of the room and stretched out her legs, glancing down at the pale expanse of her bare knees and the tan shorts that covered the top half of her thighs. She hadn't been doing much laundry lately, so she was all out of cheery colored clothing. Her top was red, which she bleakly rationalized might be useful for hiding stains if anything ever did happen. "Yo, Aoba-san. How are you?"
The man gave a rather disapproving look at her boots on the couch cushion. A little sheepishly, Aiko moved them to the floor and straightened with exaggerated care. Only then did he give her a faint smile. "I am doing well, Aiko-san. Are-"
"Uzumaki, you're joining the group on the main gate," a Chuunin read off a clipboard disinterestedly. She flipped her dark ponytail over her shoulder and traced a finger down the paper, and glanced up to check the other occupants. "Yuuhi, Aoba, you're required in the Hokage's office. Kenta…"
Aiko silently got up and gave Aoba a little wave over her shoulder, not wanting to say anything over the woman who was still reading off new orders.
She paced the top of the wall in a circuit that overlapped with the ones being walked by a Chuunin she didn't know and a girl she recognized as one of Lee and Neji's classmates. Aiko couldn't help occasionally glancing down at the guard desk. For once, it wasn't manned. There was no point when the doors were closed and there were exponentially more guards around in more defensible positions.
It was hard to know if she should be more regretful that her tendency to glance down at the unoccupied desk meant that she saw nothing coming or guiltily thankful that she'd just turned around at the end of her circuit. Being hundreds of feet north of the large doors that marked the main gate saved her life. One second, she was glancing away from the treeline to see the empty streets below, and the next a beam of white hot light had blown through the gate and a section of the wall on either side.
Aiko nearly lost her balance, jerking to the side with the percussive force as cracks shot through the stone wall. Enormous chunks of gray stone crumbled and tumbled into the village proper, flattening the guard house and breaking a flowering tree in half like a toothpick.
Shock did what the force hadn't. Aiko stumbled backwards and landed on her ass, hands by her hips and knees partially bent. And she just stared.
There was no one there. In a literal sense. The girl who had been behind her was just gone. Vaporized. There wasn't even blood spatter.
"Oh my god," Aiko whispered, momentarily stunned. Her eyes stung painfully from the dust and debris. It took a moment for her mind to catch on to the change in the situation. She scrambled back to her feet and bounded through the clearing smoke to get a better look, and tried her best to ignore that her heart was pounding all the way up in her throat.
When she felt foreign chakra flicker across her senses, it was hard to believe that she had ever failed to feel it coming. A single man stood there, just for an instant, implacable and impassive on the ground just outside the tree-line with one arm extended- and detached. And then the world seemed to explode with movement.
Aiko shrieked and dropped low, rolling away from the thousands of pounds of gray scales that rocketed over the wall and into the city. She caught a glimpse of an orange stripe on its side, but it was a literal blur.
'What the fuck is that thing?' The view was poor from below, but it was enormous. She might have called it a lizard, if lizards could grow to the size of buildings.
It wasn't alone. Down in the south, the wall was being breached in multiple positions by other oversized animals. A bird of some sort flew over and fucking snatched up a man in its mouth like he was a potato chip, swallowing him down as it beat its wings and soared upwards, out of reach. Most horribly, a crab with a glistening pale underbelly scuttled along the wall with claws held high and picked off anyone unwary or slow enough.
The bulky man standing outside the gate took slow, horrible steps in, unchallenged. Aiko put a shaky hand to her thigh pouch, reaching for her orange-handled kunai, and tried not to wonder how she had been missed when those animals had cut through the rest of her co-workers like they were made of tissue paper. She felt very small and insignificant.
And that feeling was exponentially worse an instant later, when five more men in Akatsuki cloaks stepped out of the tree-line to flank the nin who had taken down the gate. Had one of them summoned those animals, or had that been the bald man as well? Aiko stared for a moment, completely lost and out of her depth.
She thought she'd known a fair bit about Akatsuki. But there were six people she didn't recognize walking into Konoha like they owned the place.
'Oh no wait, I recognize that one,' Aiko realized dazedly. On the side opposite her, flanking the tallest man, walked the man she knew as Pein. The cold-fingered freak who'd dangled her by her neck in Akatsuki's headquarters.
Bizarrely, despite their physical dissimilarities, all the men below shared a few odd traits beyond the Akatsuki wardrobe. They were all heavily pierced, though in different patterns, and despite being worn in various styles (excluding the one bald man), their visible hair was all… It was all..
Pein's gaze lifted- and for a second, she thought that he saw her. Aiko's heart jumped into her throat, and she straightened. If he was going to kill her, she wasn't going to die cowering behind rubble. Despite her suspicions that she was about to die, he didn't make a move towards her. Both of his hands lifted slightly, and his mouth moved. The five figures at his side swayed bizarrely and flopped to the ground like puppets. Which was weird. She couldn't hear what Pein said through the distance, smoke, and sound of screams and shinobi fighting those oversized freaks of nature.
She didn't have to. The world shifted far beyond what any human should be able to accomplish, and Aiko knew he'd done it. She didn't know how, but it was him. The next thing she knew was that the ground was shaking, and that she had been thrown several hundred feet, away from Konoha, away from the epicenter of whatever the fuck had just been done to her hometown.
The grand wall that had already been breached was still largely intact, miraculously. The outskirts of Konoha were covered in debris. Everything inside of that was gone. Worse than gone, it was an enormous crater where hundreds of buildings used to be. Motion-sick and disturbed on a level she couldn't articulate, Aiko shakingly leaned over and vomited, holding onto the grass with her fingers as if she thought the world was about to change directions again leaving her falling into the sky.
The force of that…something… had thrown her outside of Konoha's boundaries, behind the six men who were outside the ruined gate.
From behind, the oddity of their shared coloring was even more obvious, now that she couldn't see that they looked nothing alike as the five that had fallen over crawled to their feet. Self consciously, Aiko brought a hand up to her head, as if considering pulling a lock of hair into view to color check. Within a few shades, her hair color matched that on the set of men striding up. Did it mean something that all those men had the same coloring? If they'd all been brunet, she wouldn't have had a second thought about it.
An instant later, she dismissed it as coincidence summoned up by her irrational frame of mind. It was just hair. That little bit of logical thinking didn't mean she knew what to do.
She wanted to sink down into the ground and die. Hope that they didn't notice her. It didn't seem… there was no way that she could fight those people. Clinically, she knew that she was panicking and needed to calm down. That didn't mean she could.
'I guess… I'm a coward after all,' Aiko thought a little hysterically, shaking severely and not even trying to calm her breathing. 'I don't see how anyone can fight that kind of reckless destruction. If we hadn't evacuated, that man would have…' Her thoughts trailed off, as she realized with a dim sort of horror that many genin and Chuunin would have been held back to hold the inner city as a last line of defense if the Jounin failed.
'Oh god. They're all dead. Hundreds of people are just dead.'
From one moment to another, almost an entire generation of Konoha's rising shinobi was just gone.
Slowly, inexorably, the six men in front of her fanned out and walked through the enormous break in the gate, not sparing a look for the devastation or the animals that were still wreaking havoc in Konoha's outskirts.
What could she do? What should she do? Desperately, Aiko struggled to relate anything in her training to this situation. She was outclassed. Running at the six Akatsuki would earn her a hilariously quick and pointless death. It was still an option. But Konoha was famous for teamwork. That meant she should find reinforcements, right? And report to Tsunade to share what little information she had?
~~~
The sensor squad got Tsunade a message several minutes before the wall exploded inwards. Tsunade leapt to her feet and was already en route to meet the invaders personally, with Shizune at her right and Jiraiya at her left. She'd been half-expecting this for days, so on edge that her heart leapt into her throat every time that someone moved towards her office too quickly.
A full ANBU squad intercepted her on the way, led by the last person she expected. Tsunade felt the blood drain out of her face. Her mind raced and her eyes darted between the slightly bent figure of her childhood hero and the masked men who stood proudly at his side.
"Sensei?" she asked, heart twisting.
Hiruzen seemed to guess her thoughts. "There is no time, Tsunade-chan," he told her softly, wrinkled fingers struggling to properly fasten the buckles on the equipment pouch on his thin hips.
Her throat felt thick. 'What do I do? He can't fight. He's too old, he's not in good condition. Sensei will die if he participates. Does he even know what's going on?'
Jiraiya put a warm, oversized hand on her shoulder, and for once she didn't begrudge the invasion of her personal space. The man who had made her into the kunoichi she was today looked back with a largely steady gaze that told her he understood enough. He knew that Konoha was in danger. Sarutobi Hiruzen had sworn to protect Konoha and its people when he took office as Hokage.
She couldn't tell him to cower while the people he thought of as his children fought and died. Tsunade swallowed and nodded, blinking to force down tears.
"Be careful, sensei," she said uselessly, knowing that he wouldn't. Her teacher gave her a reassuring smile that really shouldn't have made her feel any better. Tsunade was a medic. She knew perfectly well that no matter how lucid he was at the moment, a man who was nearly eighty years old shouldn't be engaging in S-class fights.
Jiraiya didn't say anything touchy-feely as he was no doubt aching to, but he gave his teacher a slow nod. "Don't worry about a thing, Tsunade-hime. I don't see how we could lose with two Hokage and so many good shinobi here to protect the village." He pulled one of his cocky grins, and Tsunade had to marvel at his ability to feign happiness.
Instead of complimenting him, she elbowed his ribs gently in what he would recognize as wordless thanks. "Let's go. Sandaime-sama, you're taking control of ANBU, then?"
"I gathered the off-duty ANBU I could find," he said mildly. "I believe that we will be seeing support from the more experienced clan shinobi soon."
And that was that, because an oversized ray of light burst through the village and took a section of wall tumbling with it. Tsunade's heart dropped in her chest, and she ran through the smoke and rubble that hung in the air and obscured her vision. A massive influx of chakra welled out of nowhere and made her quite sure that the sensor team had been mistaken in saying that there was one intruder. It seemed like hours in the dim madness—her retinue ran into a horrifically oversized beast with gray scales and far too many legs. She didn't have to see it knocking over buildings by lashing its tail in order to know that it needed to die.
Tsunade didn't waste time, leaping at the thing herself. Another shinobi would have had to find a way to figure out the beast's weakest point, or work with peers to scrounge together enough destructive force to put a dent in its hide. She leapt up the side of one of the brick structures that still stood, and crossed the distance in the air to land on the thing's back. And then she shattered its spine with a stomp of her foot. The beast collapsed like a puppet without strings.
"At least it didn't get very far in," Shizune offered, sounding angry when Tsunade jumped back down to join the group making their way towards the breach in security.
There was no time for a response. There was only the sense of intense pressure hanging in the air, enormous sound not completely unlike an explosion, and then the realization that she was looking up at the dimmed sky. Dazed, Tsunade took a moment to climb to her feet. When she did, she almost wished she hadn't.
"It's gone," Hiruzen whispered, being helped to his feet by an ANBU in a crow mask. "It's.."
Tsunade swallowed tears—anger and loss—and steeled herself. What was gone was Konoha. The Academy, the tower, her childhood home… it was all gone. A goddamn hole in the ground replaced it.
Someone had to pay for this.
Sarutobi-sensei padded lightly just behind Tsunade when she halted to stare, trying to get her bearings in the confusion. "Orders, Hokage-sama?" her teacher asked, tone forced into calm.
"Pick a target," Tsunade mumbled, feeling a bit disoriented. This hadn't been a situation she had planned for. No one could plan for this. "Shizune, stay with Sandaime-sama and his team in case they need medical assistance." No one said anything about that. It did seem redundant to have the village's two best medics in one place. "Jiraiya and I will head for the-" She jerked and flung a hand out, nearly knocking the girl who'd just appeared back ten feet. Aiko side-stepped just in time, frightfully pale and turquoise eyes wide in her face, pupils dilated in obvious fear.
All three of the kage-level shinobi who had moved relaxed.
"Aiko-chan?" Jiraiya reached out and put a hand on the girl's head. Tsunade pressed her lips together. That wasn't particularly professional, but there would be no point in scolding him.
But the girl would probably react better to structure at the moment, judging by her nearly fearful body language. When a shinobi was on the verge of panicking, it was better to snap them back into a duty mindset than try to comfort them. Especially since there was work to be done.
"Uzumaki, report." Tsunade ignored the disappointed look her old teammate gave her for her unsympathetic tone. It worked—Aiko straightened under Jiraiya's oversized paw and blinked up at her lucidly.
"Six intruders breached the East gate," Aiko began, intense in her sudden focus and looking much more pulled together. Tsunade quietly approved of the compartmentalization. "All of the intruders but one are red-headed males. The individual who breached the wall was a large man with no hair. He used some sort of explosive pulse from a detached arm. I didn't see if the individual who summoned the animals was that man or one of the others. I only recognized one of them as Akatsuki, but they all wear the cloak. The man I recognize was the one the other Akatsuki referred to as their leader, Pein." She paused for a moment, before adding, "I think he was the one who did… this." Aiko's eyes flickered to the destruction and then away just as rapidly.
Jiraiya and Tsunade exchanged looks. They didn't have to be sensors at this point to know that the intruders were separating. The oversized animals were all but rioting in the remaining streets, engaging any shinobi that sought them out, but the human intruders were staying to the very outskirts of town, attempting to encircle them.
It wasn't hard to suppose that they didn't want to allow that to happen.
"I will seek out the bald man who took down our gates," Sarutobi-sensei suggested, before bowing his head slightly. "If that is acceptable with you, Hokage-sama."
'That's so bizarre.'
Ignoring the discomfort that hearing her teacher defer to her inspired, Tsunade inclined her head in a nod. "More than acceptable. The rest of us will head to the bulk of the intruders." Three of the intruders were hanging strangely close together. They needed to be separated. Jiraiya and Tsunade as a team were nearly undefeatable—with backup from a few other high level shinobi, they should be able to overwhelm the other force.
Hiruzen and his backup splintered westward without another word. It took forty seconds for Tsunade's group to come into view of the devastation at ground zero for the attack.
Yamanaka Inoichi's ponytail whipped behind him as he swiveled to see the new arrivals. He managed a look of relief before his opponent came too close. Then he grunted in mild surprise, barely evading the whirling blows from one of the orange-haired Akatsuki.
It was positively eerie, Tsunade thought as she leapt into the fray, and would have been even if the intruders didn't maintain a strict silence. The attackers all had the same pale skin and orange hair, but they couldn't be related. Their facial features were too varied.
Their taijutsu style seemed to be all the same, however, which was downright unlikely. It was best described as powerful and fast. Tsunade bared her teeth aggressively into the face of the long-haired man who had leapt to engage her, holding the hand that would have broken her bones into dozens of pieces had she been anyone else trying to catch the blow.
Jiraiya moved in a blur, throwing off the Akatsuki who had come directly behind Tsunade in an attempt to pin her between the two. She cast up a quick thanks that her teammate had her back, grappling with her opponent and tossing him directly into the air with barely a thought.
She shouldn't have looked away from her opponent, no matter what she heard. But the sound that came ripping out of Akimichi Choza's mouth was downright inhuman.
The tableau was grim. Shikaku Naru's face was frozen in a rictus of shock even as a streak of black across the ground froze one of the red-headed Akatsuki into the same wide stance the dark-haired man was holding. Yamanaka Inoichi hit the ground face up with a soft thud, mouth open in surprise and blood trailing out his eyes and ears.
'He tried to possess one of them,' she realized numbly, barely focusing on her own fight enough to leap up to bat the man she'd flung like a cat toy horizontally across the battlefield.
There was no mistaking that, though she had no idea how it had been done. The blonde man was dead. Akimichi Choza was gaining red color and mass rapidly, clearly ready to crush the Akatsuki like a bug.
And then a flicker of orange crossed the field, and the Akatsuki was gone.
So was Aiko.
~~~
The moment she realized that one of the three men who she had found her way back to was Pein, Aiko felt physically ill. He had to die. He was the leader. She was sure he'd been the one to flatten the village. Maybe the others would give up without him to give them orders. But he was already fighting the three clan heads. Jiraiya and Tsunade were tag-teaming the Akatsuki with the longest hair. That left the other for her. She had to do her job.
Aiko sped through hand-seals in less than a heartbeat, moving towards the man who was closing on Tsunade. Running straight towards her real target in a predictable trajectory would be stupid. As soon as she'd gotten the last seal out, she forced a glob of chakra down her right wrist in the instant that she re-oriented to the last Akatsuki. Her hand lit up with the faint light refracting off the mock icicles that coated her fingers in a constantly moving mass. She brought it directly into the center of the Akatsuki's back- and then hiraishin'd away before the attack had bored more than two inches into his flesh.
The retreat had been a good move. Her opponent had whirled around with a fist that would have snapped her arm like a twig had she still been there.
With her actual, un-augmented speed, she couldn't hope to compete with this man, Aiko judged grimly. With Hiraishin… well, she'd have to kill him before he could figure out any attack patterns and predict her, because he was fast enough to still pose a significant threat. And were all the intruders like this?
'What is with Akatsuki being unnecessarily scary?' she thought, just mildly hysterical. Her opponent lunged toward her, hardly seeming inconvenienced by the gouge she'd taken out of his flesh. That was insane. She'd torn into his spine and the muscles that protected it.
'I wonder if telling him that he can't fight through that kind of injury would convince him to stand down?' Aiko forced down the laugh that bubbled up and tried to regulate her shaking breath, and fluttered out of her opponent's reach, several hundred feet away. He immediately re-oriented to her and wheeled around—and her attention was torn away to the source of a horrible shriek.
It didn't sound like something that should come out of Choza's mouth. He was… That just didn't make sense.
She cut across the field behind her opponent, getting a better view. Aiko only stayed in that position for the space of a thought, just long enough to see Yamanaka-san sprawling in the dirt.
'I was right,' Aiko realized numbly, not feeling the horror she knew she should. 'Pein is the most dangerous.'
That made him top priority. She had to get rid of him. That didn't mean she could really fight him. He would swat her down like a fly. She couldn't hope to compete with him. It was insane that she had ever thought she could compete with people like this. She'd just watched a better ninja than herself try and fail. (And oh god, Ino, who was going to tell Ino).
But she didn't have to win a fight with him. She just had to get him out of the way. He was probably the one coordinating the attack.
Aiko didn't think. She lunged forward with Hiraishin, twisted her fingers into the back of the frozen man's cloak, and pulled him as far away from Konoha as she could manage. With the large concentration of Hiraishin seals on her allies in a circle that must be the surroundings of Ame's borders, that probably meant she was standing somewhere north of Ame.
She didn't have time to feel triumphant before something collided with her back, knocking the back of her skull painfully. Her teeth ground together even as something was cracking in her ribs and shoulders. Her vision was white. There was no air. There was nothing but pain against her back and heat against her front where she'd been inadvertently pushed into Pein's back.
How did he do that? He couldn't possibly have predicted she would move them here.
The ringing in her ears made it hard to tell if anything else was happening or how long the pause in movement lasted—it felt like a hundred years, but if it had been more than a second Pein would have turned around and killed her.
'Oh god. He's going to kill me,' was quickly followed by, 'fuck no.' She lurched away with a rather pathetic Hiraishin—and hit her knees even before she'd been able to note she'd gotten away, falling over to curl on her side. Aiko nearly rolled onto her back, but the creaking feeling in her chest and biting pain wouldn't allow that. Something wet trickled around the shell of her ear.
'My keen intuition tells me that now is an excellent time to stop for a moment. Not just because I can't breathe. Air, who needs air?'
She tried her best to breathe shallowly so as not to disturb her ribs while still trying to breathe deeply to get oxygen to combat the emptiness in her lungs and white at the edges of her vision.
It took time for that struggle to fade away, though there was no way to measure that time. Aiko struggled to her feet, and turned her face in the direction that must be Konoha.
'If it wasn't almost dry here, I would say I was in Ame,' she thought, licking her lips. Strange. She was south of the tags that told her where Naruto and Kakashi and their teams were, who should have been stationed on the south edge of Ame's borders. That should mean she was in Grass country, shouldn't it?
'I'm so terrible with directions,' Aiko thought. 'I even know that doesn't make sense and I can't see how I'm wrong. I really need to get as many seals up as possible.'
She choked back a laugh, and instantly regretted the brief amusement.
"Right," she wheezed to herself at a tone that was barely audible, taking as big of a breath as possible to stabilize. "Gotta go home and help." Experimentally, she gave a couple of stretches, making sure she still had her full range of motion.
But god, what could she hope to do? Better her than Naruto, better that a hundred buildings fell than that Pein got his claws into her little brother; but the fearful part of her mind was asking how was her going back to die against Akatsuki in Konoha going to help?
It had to be in her head, but the ink on her chest felt almost warm. Aiko splayed her fingers over the tattoo, struck dumb by the thought. It was a possibility. Not a good one, no. But were there any good options?
The Akatsuki weren't going to stop until they had what they wanted. Destroying Konoha would be a major blow for them and probably tear the alliance apart. Naruto would instantly become the most vulnerable jinchuuriki. Unacceptable.
'On the bright side, maybe they'll give up without their leader,' Aiko thought optimistically in the instant before she flicked back to Konoha. Pein wasn't going to be able to run to Konoha in time to finish that battle. He wasn't terribly close to the Konoha teams around Ame, either. The distance would have to be measured in hours—he wouldn't be surprising any team with Karin on it, and they'd been prepared to fight Akatsuki anyway. This was just restoring equilibrium.
The only seals that had survived in Konoha were the ones in the forests outside the village and the one on Hoseki's collar. Her options were therefore decidedly limited. She erred on the side of landing outside of the gates instead of too close to the shelter where her ninken was waiting. Kami only knew that she didn't need to make them a target by indicating there was anything interesting there.
When she blinked in air that stank of soot instead of hanging heavy with damp, she was glad for the precaution. There was fire in Konoha. Better to have to run than materialize in the middle of an attack.
~~~
Pein stood on the strangely dry sod in the country of his birth and frowned. Almost absentmindedly, he allowed the boulder he'd summoned to his person with his repulsion abilities to drop to the ground. It thudded a half inch into the dry ground with nary a squelch.
"That was most unpleasant," he mused quietly, regaining his bearings. "I should not have allowed the girl to touch me."
Had she been as quick to think and attack as she was to move, he may have been injured. There were more pressing issues than her ultimately pointless actions, however. The Animal path could summon him back to Konoha at any moment if he desired. Right now it was more critical to find out what had happened in Ame. Specifically…
'Why has Kisame allowed the rain to stop?' Pein bled his chakra into the air, and allowed water to percolate. He took a deep breath and let it rise, rise, rise, to spread and coat his country. Then he allowed it to rain down, infused with his inquisitive chakra.
What he found shook him. Akatsuki was gone from the country. Pein barely maintained his hold on the rain, the lurch in his control a feat in and of itself, when it was remembered that he had been ensuring the land of Ame rained for years.
Konan, gone. Kisame, gone. Kakuzu, and Hidan, gone. But… Itachi had not left. Pein made an aborted step in his direction with the half-thought of seeking information before stilling uncertainly. Itachi was surrounded by other powerful chakra signatures. They were not familiar signatures, but he could guess as to whom they belonged. The cowards from Konoha, Suna, Kiri, and Kumo who had been blocking his doorstep for weeks had dared enter his home while he was away. And they had succeeded. Pein took a wavering step forward, mind twisted by grief and shock and self-recrimination. What kind of god failed to notice such a thing? What kind of god allowed his people to suffer? He had sworn to protect the people of Ame country, but they were clearly now under the control of foreign military personnel.
'Itachi… have you been captured, or have you betrayed me?'
Oddly, that sent a lump of something like sorrow into his chest. With spectacularly poor timing, the realization that one of his paths had been destroyed rocketed across his consciousness. The Asura path had been facing the old Hokage, and was now lost.
Shock warred with doubt. Where-is-Konan-Have-I-left-her-to-die-alone-I-need-to-find-Konan. No, she had to be alive. Konan was sentimental. If she had known their base was lost, she would have retrieved what she could and fled. He had to believe she was alive. He knew her like he knew his hands: she would have gone to one of their secret bunkers to wait for him to return.
For the first time in many years, Nagato didn't know what to do. For the moment at least, the Animal and Human paths were holding their own against the Sannin. The Preta path was roaming nearly unchallenged in Konoha, keeping the Naraka path safe in case its healing abilities were needed.
He thought they wouldn't be much good now. The images that the Asura path had transmitted in its final moments had indicated that the canny old man was doing some kinjutsu that called upon the shinigami himself. That aspect was gone.
"All my plans," Nagato noted dazedly, looking up to the sky and catching water on his face. The Human path was taking a beating from the Sannin. If they grew wise, they might defeat it. Did he even care anymore? What had he done, by abandoning Ame? He hated Konoha for what they had done to Yahiko and his dreams, but was their destruction worth this failure?
He had to see. He had to see what had become of the village he had protected in Yahiko's place. The villagers… there were far fewer than there should have been. Pein knew every man, woman, and child like they were a member of his own familiar, had intimately caressed their budding chakra signatures with rain for years. Fourteen civilians were missing- dead or out of the country. He had to see.
~~~
Karin gave a startled curse and dropped her water bottle, face involuntarily turning to the northeast. A moment later, she redirected her gaze to the south. Most of the people nearby weren't paying her much attention. But most of them weren't Kakashi.
Kakashi had frozen, almost painfully alert, waiting for her news. But he wasn't patient. "Karin, what's wrong?" he bit out, casting a wary glance in the direction she was still staring.
The girl was faintly green. "We have two visitors," Karin said in a very small voice. "I-I think Aiko brought the Akatsuki leader back to Ame. She was by the scary signature the moment that it appeared, but now she's down there, and he's still up there." She jerked her hand in two directions, the ones that she had been looking in. "The- neither of them is moving."
"They're… just standing there?" Kakashi repeated dubiously. That didn't make any sense. A single drop of rain hit his head, digging through his hair to slip down his scalp. He'd barely noticed the anomaly by the time that the sudden drop had turned into a downpour. Ice slipped down his spine, even though the air wasn't particularly cold by his standards.
"Yes, I-" Karin blinked, and shook her head. "The Akatsuki is coming here," she reported quietly.
"And Aiko?" Kakashi asked tiredly, expecting to hear that she was gone or to see her appear in their midst to tell them that she was sorry, but that she hadn't known they'd moved into Ame and she hadn't meant to dump an A-class criminal on them.
The redhead shook her head, looking unnerved. "She's perfectly still." Karin frowned. "In the middle of nowhere," she added dubiously. "Which makes no sense, of course. There's no reason for her to stand around in Ame. And her signature… well, it isn't optimal, but she's hardly dying." Karin shrugged helplessly. "At a guess, I would say she's taking a breather?"
Kakashi pressed his lips together tightly to keep in the colorful situational assessment that wanted to be spoken.
Either Aiko had been out and about and ran into the Akatsuki and decided to take him back to Ame, like a conscientious shopper returning a lost wallet, or Akatsuki had gone to Konoha. He knew which option he preferred and which option seemed more likely.
'Now would be an excellent time for some communication,' he thought irritably.
"Karin, get Sasuke."
She left without a word, running after the three who were currently serving as a patrol team for their new and not entirely friendly territory. He paced like a trapped lion, rousing Yamato and Genma (they had been running night shifts) and sending them out to get everyone ready for a possible altercation.
Why wasn't Aiko coming to tell them what had happened? Konoha should have had word from his ninken, or would very soon. It was possible that Konoha didn't know the borders had changed yet, of course, but unlikely.
It just didn't make sense. Having an intruder in the village would have made it difficult or impossible to conduct regular business and efficiently managed orders and communication, but almost all of the Akatsuki were accounted for, and the actual shinobi of Ame had surrendered after only skirmishing. If the most powerful Akatsuki had been returned to Ame, then there would be nothing more time-sensitive for Aiko than finding his team and telling them that the Akatsuki leader had been returned to Ame. Of course, she could have assumed that they would know via Karin…
"Sasuke, summon Katsuya and find out what's going on from Tsunade," he ordered snappishly as soon as the boy returned with Karin, Naruto and Yamato. Sasuke made a face, but obligingly moved to run through the handseals to summon his familiar. "Karin, update. Has anything changed?"
The redhead tilted her head slightly and let her eyes get a bit distant. "Um, the scar- the Akatsuki," she corrected, clearly embarrassed. "Anyway, he's still on course to intercept us. We won't be seeing him for a while, but he isn't slowing down. Aiko only spent a couple of minutes here. She's gone."
'Well, at least that means she isn't laying somewhere in the middle of the country bleeding out,' he thought facetiously.
"Kakashi, Katsuya isn't responding." Sasuke looked downright bewildered. "She's never not answered."
Naruto raised an eyebrow. "I guess the old lady is working with her?" he half-asked, moving to summon one of his contracted toads without being asked. The animal that showed up was disconcertingly large. Kakashi barely stepped back in time. "Yo, Gamakichi," Naruto greeted casually, clearly unfazed by the horrifying size of his summons. "Could you find the pervert and find out what's going on in Konoha?"
The toad released a put-upon sigh, but nodded. "Okay, boss," he rumbled long-sufferingly. "One message coming up." In an offensively-scented puff of smoke, he disappeared.
Kakashi put his hands in his pockets to hide the tenseness and strain in his muscles while they waited. And waited. And waited.
Looking irritated, Naruto called his summons back after ten minutes of awkward silence. "What the hell?" he snapped, putting his hands on his hips.
The toad looked sheepish. "I… yah." He fidgeted. "Jiraiya told me not to talk to you." He brightened up a bit, turning around to look at the others standing around. "I can talk to the Hatake brat, though," Gamakichi added cheerily. "That's what he said! So, which one of you is the brat? You all kinda look alike."
Genma choked a little, but said nothing. Kakashi aimed a scalding glare at him anyway. "Everyone, clear out," he decided. "That means you, Naruto." The blond gave him a mutinous look, but let Sasuke tug him out of sight. He turned back to the toad once they were alone. "What's going on?"
The toad glanced guiltily in the direction his summoner had left, and then flexed his webbed toes. "Five or six Akatsuki are in Konoha," he confided solemnly. "I'm not sure on the details, it was a little confusing and busy. Dad's there. Anyway." Gamakichi shook himself. "It's bad. Really bad. They evacuated days ago, so the civilian casualties are minimalized, but the buildings are all gone."
It took a moment to be sure he had heard correctly.
"Pardon?" Kakashi asked weakly, raising one hand to his neck. "The buildings are-"
"All gone, yes," the toad confirmed irritably, digging its fingers into the ground. "It's a crater."
"Unfathomable," Kakashi muttered quietly, trying to wrap his head around the idea.
Damage to the village he could understand. The Kyuubi had done terrible harm to the village's infrastructure. But the village was a crater? Konoha had stood for generations. In terms of space, it was one of the largest hidden villages. And how had they misplaced so many Akatsuki?
Gamakichi snorted. "I don't think that word means what you think it means. You wouldn't be so pale if you couldn't fathom it."
He gave the toad a dirty look. At times like this, the amphibian inability to register the seriousness of a situation grated on his nerves. Still, the information was useful.
"I assume Jiraiya didn't want Naruto running back to Konoha and basically handing himself over to Akatsuki with a nice pink bow?" Kakashi drawled, trying to figure out what should be done. He couldn't send any support to Konoha when they were on the verge of having to engage in their own fight. But it was more important to do what they could to keep the villagers and surviving comrades safe than it was to hold a newly gained territory.
"Sounds about right," Gamakichi admitted sheepishly.