The sea split and threw her up into the storm.
Hinata broke the surface on a fountain of white water and the noise of it all slammed back over her, rain and wind and a long roll of thunder out in the fog. Her wings snapped off her shoulder plates and beat once, hauling her up out of the chop and across to the patch of heaving water where Naruto stood waiting among his clones, and she came down beside him with chakra blooming flat under her sabatons to hold her on the rolling swell.
Karin's voice was already going when Hinata's boots found the surface, the small sensor mid-rant at a knot of clones with both hands in the air. "…and then they all just winked OUT at once! Fifty of them, poof, gone, in one second! Do you have any idea what that feels like from the inside?! I thought something ATE you!"
"That was the boss callin' us back, not, like, a sea monster," a clone said, leaning away from the finger she was pointing at his chest.
"It FELT like a sea monster!"
Then they all caught sight of Hinata standing in the rain among them and the bickering cut off at once, the clones and the real Naruto and Karin turning and closing in around her armored bulk on the water. Naruto craned up at her visor, soaked to the skin, the orange sage-marks faded from his eyes now. "Hinata-chan! You good? You just dove and left us up here, what'd you even go down there for?"
She lifted her hand and opened it between them. The ring sat dark in her armored palm, the single character carved into its face catching the next stroke of lightning.
Naruto's whole face changed. "Hold on. That's, that's an Akatsuki ring. You went down there for his ring?"
Karin leaned in, screwed her eyes nearly shut to peer at it through the curtain of her dripping hair, then drew back, blinked, and dug a hand into the small waterproof pouch at her hip. A spare pair of glasses came out of it in a tiny puff of unsealing smoke, and she shoved them onto her nose and leaned in again. "Okay. A ring." She looked from the band to Naruto to Hinata, plainly not following the weight of it. "It's important, then? You're both looking at it like it bit somebody." She straightened and gave a firm nod anyway. "Right. Important ring. I'm going to trust you two know why."
"The plan changes with this," Hinata said, closing her hand around it.
"Okay, but what is the plan?" Karin pushed the new glasses up her nose. "And where's Guy-sensei? He was out here trading blows with the shark freak, last I felt of him."
"Kisame's last attack threw him back to the direction of the shore," Hinata said, the doubled voice steady under the rain. "When the sea reared up, it drove him in toward the town. He is alive, and he is there."
"Yeah, I felt him off that way too," Naruto said, jerking a thumb back into the grey wall of fog. "Bushy-brow sensei, can't miss him, he burns bright."
"Then we go back to the fishing town and regroup with the…"
FWOOOM
A roar of wind tore the rest of it out of her mouth. The storm came down on the three of them all at once, a gust slamming across the open water hard enough to stagger even the clones, the rain folding sideways into a solid grey sheet, and out past them the sea heaved itself up into long black ridges that climbed higher as they watched, the thunder cracking right on the heels of the lightning now with no gap left between. They turned into it together and looked.
Hinata's Byakugan flared behind the visor, the veins blooming at her temples, and she pushed her sight wide through the downpour. "The fight has carried us out," she called, pitching the doubled voice over the wind and the breaking water. "We are a long way from the shore, and the storm has shut the road back to the town. But one of the islands is close." She turned her helmet a few degrees and leveled an armored hand at a darker mass humped low under the clouds. "There. We make for that."
Naruto's clones burst as one, hundreds of them across the heaving sea popping into smoke that the rain flattened the instant it formed, and the real Naruto wiped his face and nodded hard. "Right. Yeah. The island, c'mon!" The three of them dropped low and ran, chakra flaring under their feet as they tore across the surface of the rising sea in long flat sprints, breaking each climbing wave with a hard chakra-loaded leap that flung them a dozen meters at a stretch.
The dark mass rose out of the murk as they closed, low at first and then lifting, the long ragged outline of a large island heaving up ahead of them with the surf breaking white along its base. Their battle had dragged them nearly to the islands after all. They came off the last wave together and dropped through the rain onto bare black rock and a thin grey beach, boots sinking into the wet sand, the sea hauling back out behind them in a long suck of foam. No light or boat or net showed anywhere along the shore, only the empty back of the island taking the full weight of the storm. Ahead the beach ran up into a tumbled wall of rock, great dark slabs of it heaped against the spine of the island. They picked their way up into it with Hinata's sight cutting ahead, and found the opening she was looking for, a wide mouth of stone set back under an overhang where the rock folded in on itself, deep enough to swallow the wind. They went in out of the storm one after another, and the roar of it dropped away behind them.
"Ugh. This rain. This stupid, stupid rain." Naruto stood in the middle of the cave wringing out the hem of his jacket, then gave up on his hands and ran a pulse of chakra through the whole garment instead, the water boiling out of the cloth in a thin hissing cloud, leaving him dry from collar to boots. "It just drags everything down, ya know? Cold and heavy and you can't see a thing and your socks are soaked. I hate fighting in the rain."
Around him a dozen of his clones were already working, two of them snapping foldable chairs open out of a scroll while the others stacked driftwood and a bundle of sealed kindling into a ring of stones, laying out a whole campsite in the span of a minute.
"It's the worst I've ever seen, and I grew up around a lot of weather," Karin said. She was sitting on one of the unfolded chairs with her knees drawn up, stripped down to the fishnet underlayer with her vest and jacket and the rest of her soaked gear hung dripping along a line of small folding driers a clone had staked out by the wall, wringing a fistful of her own red hair out over the stone floor. "And I'll tell you something else. We came in on the dead side of this rock. No lights, no boats." She nodded out at the black mouth of the cave. "There's a fishing village on this island somewhere, has to be, but it sure isn't here."
Light bloomed in the ring of stones, a small curl of white fire leaping off Hinata's fingertips and catching in the kindling, fwoom, and the campfire took and steadied into a low orange glow that pushed the dark back to the walls. The clones that had built the camp dispelled themselves in a soft rolling chain of pops, leaving the three of them alone. Hinata sat back into her own chair, a wide reinforced thing of heavy plastic she had unsealed to take her weight, and let her helmet break apart and seal away off her head in a thin curl of smoke. Her midnight-blue hair was bound back in a tight bun, and in the dark of the cave with only the fire on her, the glowing silver lines that threaded her temples and the soft cerulean light of her eyes made something quietly otherworldly of her face. Naruto snapped his own chair open and dropped it down beside hers, glanced over, and forgot for a second what he was doing, the firelight moving in those luminous eyes. Even sitting she rose over the both of them, her head riding high above his where he settled in at her side.
He shook himself, leaned over, and started digging through the seals stitched up the inside of his jacket. "Okay, hang on, I packed food before we shipped out, it's in here somewhere, just gotta find the right…"
The dark plating across the upper part of Hinata's chest came apart. It thinned and vanished into the air, the segmented armor over her breastbone dissolving away, and the matte-black undersuit beneath it went the same way a breath later, peeling back off her skin until the deep line of her cleavage stood open in the firelight, the full heavy swell of her breasts pushed close together and the silver Weave glowing through the skin there, the bright knot of tribal lines of patterns gathered at her solar plexus pulsing a soft cerulean. Without any change in her face she slid her right hand down into the warm valley between them, and it came back out with a bar, a long dense dark thing the length of her forearm pulling free of the seal at her sternum in a wisp of smoke, pmf. She brought it up and bit a piece off the end, crunch, chewing.
Naruto's hand had stopped inside his jacket. Karin's hair had stopped dripping in her fist. Karin's face went red to the ears and she snapped her gaze sideways into the fire and held it there with great deliberation. Naruto did not look away at all, his eyes fixed and his mouth slightly open, until something caught up with him and he blinked hard and gave his head a small shake.
"…uh. Hinata-chan. What, uh. What is that?"
Hinata blinked, and a small smile touched her mouth as she looked over at him. She stopped chewing and held the dark bar up between them, turning it so the firelight ran along its pressed surface. "It is a protein bar. I make them for situations like this one." The doubled voice warmed. "Each one holds a great deal. Several dozen different foods, pressed down together until almost nothing is left but the nourishment. One of these can carry me through a full day of fighting."
The fire popped into the silence that followed. Naruto stared and Karin stared into the flames.
Then Hinata blinked again, as if catching herself. "Oh. Forgive me. It is rude of me, to eat in front of you both." Her left hand was already rising, sliding down into her cleavage after the first. "Naruto-kun. Would you like one as well?"
"Y-yeah," Naruto said, mesmerized, his eyes following her hand, and then he caught himself a second time and shook his head fast, color climbing his neck. "I mean, no, no, I'm good. I packed my own stuff, I've got plenty, you don't gotta, uh." He patted the seals on his jacket as if to prove it.
"All right." Hinata drew her left hand back out empty, and the dark undersuit flowed up over her skin again and the armor plating re-formed across her chest in a soft black ripple, sealing her back to the collar, and she went back to her bar with another crunch. The fire crackled between them for a moment.
"How did you come to be here, Naruto-kun?" she asked, the bar held loose in her fingers. "Your team was sent to the Land of Grass. That is a long way from a storm in the southern sea."
Across the fire Karin shifted in her chair, drawing her knees a little tighter, and turned her face toward Naruto with the embarrassment still sitting high on her cheeks.
Naruto blew out a breath and scrubbed the back of his head, his energy settling into something steadier as he found the thread. "Right, okay, so. We get to the base in Grass, and the place has already gone to hell. The whole thing's a rogue fortress now, dug into the side of this dead dry mountain, and there's Orochimaru's people crawling all over the country around it." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "We cleared the ones in the open, but most of 'em were holed up inside the mountain, so we had to wait for the squads behind us and dig in for a siege. And some of those mutants in there threw in with the rogues too." He spread his hands. "So me and Captain Yamato and Kakashi-sensei put our heads together, used some earth jutsu to punch a way in from under them while the other squads hit the front. I'm, uh, I'm pretty rough at the earth stuff, but the captain carried it. We got inside and cleaned the whole thing out. Place was packed wall to wall, I'm telling ya, the fighting just did not stop."
"Hold on." Karin's head came up, her voice sharpening. "If it was that bad, that close to their own border, why didn't the Grass Village deal with it? It's their country." Her lip curled. "I hate that village."
"Yeah, that's exactly what we said," Naruto said, pointing at her. "But then we start squeezing the bandits we caught and going through their papers, and turns out a whole bunch of those rogues were Grass shinobi. Their own people. A lot of folks had been signing up with Orochimaru, bandits, villagers, Grass nin, all of 'em, and then the snake just lost his grip on the whole thing. He hadn't shown his face there in a long, long time, and the ones left holding the base figured nobody was coming and went rogue on their own."
Hinata's eyes moved over him while he talked, and caught the marks the rain had not washed off. The orange cloth of his jacket was scorched pale in two places along one arm, and there was a clean little tear at his shoulder seam and another at his hip where something had gone through. "You fought hard for it," she said. "We found the very same thing in the base we took. It had been abandoned by its master long before we reached it, and the ones left behind had gone rogue, selling off whatever they could to whoever would pay."
"Right? Same story." Naruto nodded. "So we wring out the high-up ones, and lemme tell ya, Snake Lady volunteered for that part way too fast and had way too much fun with it, and we dig through everything, and that's when we find there's another base down here in the islands. Me and the team, we put it together that this is where the snake bastard's gotta be holed up. Him and…" He paused half a beat. "And Sasuke." He pushed on. "So we hand the Grass base off to the squads behind us and move out to River Country. I figured I'd link up with you guys there." His gaze came up to her. "But the guy running the camp at that old base you cleared out, he tells us all about you. Your whole squad, where you'd gone. So we hustled down to the coast to catch up." His jaw tightened. "And on the way through, going through that town you guys liberated, we ran into Itachi."
The name pulled Hinata fully around to him. "Itachi. Is everyone all right?" The doubled voice dropped, the resonance hardening beneath it.
"Whoa, hey, everybody's fine, nobody got hurt." Naruto put a hand up quickly, taking Karin into the look too. "He barely even fought us. Poked at us a little and then he took off, just left. Everybody's okay, I promise."
Hinata held on his face. There was more sitting behind it, a tightness around his eyes the reassurance had not reached, and she let it lie for now. Naruto went on. "Anyway, by the time we get to the fishing village, your squad's already there trying to patch the place up, and then I hear over the line that you and Bushy-brow sensei and Karin are out on the water going toe to toe with the shark guy." A little of the old fire came back into his grin. "Yeah, I wasn't gonna sit that one out. I came running."
Karin sat up. "Wait. Sakura's in the fishing town?"
"Yeah, the whole team's there, helping out," Naruto said.
"Then we wait." Karin tugged her drying jacket an inch straighter on the line without getting up. "Our squads catch up to us here, and in the meantime we're stuck riding out this weather whether we like it or not."
Naruto's leg started bouncing. "Or. Hear me out. We take a breather, and then we just go. Find Sasuke ourselves while we've got the jump on him."
"That is insane," Karin said flatly. "Three of us, no backup, no idea which island, walking into Orochimaru's base in the middle of a storm. Absolutely not."
"Okay, okay." Naruto put both hands up. "Bad idea. Forget I even said it."
"Even if Sasuke is on these islands," Hinata said, "he is going nowhere in weather like this. No boat is crossing those channels tonight. He will keep until morning."
"…Yeah." Naruto deflated, the leg going still. "Yeah, you're right."
They let it go quiet. For a while there was only the snap and settle of the fire and the long rolling booms of thunder coming muffled through the rock. Then Naruto slapped both hands down on his knees and pushed up out of his chair. "All right. We all had a rough one out there. Let's grab some rest while we can." He hooked the chair up under one arm and carried it over toward the mouth of the cave, dropping it down where the firelight thinned and the wet wind reached in. "I'll take first watch."
Hinata watched him settle in at the edge of the dark, and something in her chest eased that had been wound tight since the dock. Stretched as their situation was, marooned on a black rock with an enemy base somewhere out in the channels, she was glad past saying that he was here. Her deeper sense had him without her reaching for it, that bright tireless warmth of his pouring off him and filling the cave at her back, a sun banked low in the dark. If this were not a mission, she thought, with the heat of him so near and the long fight still humming in her blood, she would already have him under her on the cave floor and be working her hips down against him until he forgot his own name. She drew a slow breath and let the thought bank itself back down.
Across the fire, Karin's eyes kept drifting to Naruto's back at the cave mouth and pulling away again. Hinata marked it without a flicker of jealousy. She understood it now in a way she had not before the fight, those long minutes in the deep with their minds laid open, when she had ridden inside Karin's sense and felt the world the way the sensor felt it, every living thing a flavor and a warmth. She knew now how a presence like Naruto's would pull at someone built that way, a great steady fire in a cold world. It was not Karin's fault that he was made the way he was.
"Um. Hinata-sama?" Karin's voice came out small, the words picked one at a time.
Hinata turned her glowing eyes to her. "Yes?"
"When we were out there. In the water. When we had the, the mind thing open." Karin's hands knotted in her lap, the red climbing her face again. "When he showed up. When Naruto got here. I, um. I felt it. What you felt. When he…" She stopped, mortified, the memory of it plainly scalding.
The corner of Hinata's mouth curved up. She said nothing, and let the young woman flounder.
"And I just wanted to ask, you don't have to answer, this is probably so rude, I'm sorry." Karin pushed her glasses up and pressed on against her own better judgment. "Is it always like that? When he's near you. Do you, do you always feel like, like that?"
"Sometimes it is exactly like that," Hinata said, the doubled voice warm and amused, a low purr running under it. "You will have to forgive me for letting it slip the leash. I did not mean to share it with you quite so… completely."
Karin made a strangled noise and dropped her face into both hands. "Okay. That was a bad question. That was such a bad question to ask, I'm sorry, please forget I asked it."
The fire burned down a little, and the conversation died with it, and for a long while there was only the storm. Sometime after, Hinata's ear caught the change in Karin's breathing and she looked over to find the smaller woman slumped sideways in her chair, glasses gone crooked, fast asleep where she sat, the cold and the long fight finally pulling her under. Hinata let her Byakugan bloom and swept the cave and the rock around it and the streaming black beach beyond, and found nothing in any of it but the storm and the three of them. Along her spine she could feel Venom settled and quiet, the alien coil of it gone calm and busy, already breaking the dense bar down and feeding it slowly back into her. She sealed the heavy chair away under her in a curl of smoke and rose to her full height, and at the top of the motion her bun brushed the wet rock of the ceiling and she had to duck her head and round her shoulders, folding herself down under the low stone as she crossed the cave.
She came up behind Naruto at the cave mouth. The wet wind reached in and stirred his hair, and she could feel the impatience still running through him under the stillness, his hands loosely clasped before him, his eyes half closed, trying and not quite managing to meditate while the rain came down in a roaring grey weight a step past his boots. She laid her armored hand on his shoulder, as light as she could make it. He looked up at her, calm, the impatience smoothing as he found her face.
"Hey. Hinata-chan."
"There was more, with Itachi," she said, low, keeping it under the rain so it stayed between them. "More than you told us by the fire. I saw it on you."
Naruto's nodded. "Yeah." He let a breath go and looked back out into the rain. "Yeah, there was. Still kinda turning it over, honestly."
She unsealed the heavy chair again beside his in a curl of smoke and lowered herself into it, settling in close at his side, and waited. After a while he started. "So we're coming through that town you guys cleaned out, and there he is, just standing there waiting on us. And first thing, before anybody throws a punch, he tells us straight out that the Akatsuki are hunting for clues to find Orochimaru. Just says it. Like he's doing us a favor." His hands tightened. "Then everybody jumps him at once, and for a second there, he gets me. Catches me in one of those genjutsu of his, that eye stuff."
The breath went still in Hinata's chest. She knew the inside of that man's illusions. She had stood in one herself, years ago, and walked out of it only because Venom had risen up and devoured the thing whole from within before it could close its teeth on her. "What happened in it?" she asked, very quiet.
"That's the thing. Almost nothing." Naruto huffed. "So I figure, fine, you wanna play head games, I'll throw you off. I start needling him. Telling him about Danzo, the whole thing, the raid, how it all came out, how the whole village knows now what really happened to his clan and who really gave the order." He shook his head slowly. "And he takes it calm. Calmer than I thought. I swear, Hinata-chan, he looked relieved, like I'd just lifted a weight off him. And then he starts asking me questions. About the big conference, all of it, what got said, what got decided, every detail. And the more I tell him the happier he gets. I don't know why, maybe because the blame got split. Because now the whole world knows Danzo's hands were in it too." He turned to her, still wrong-footed. "Caught me totally flat. I went in there to mess with him and he's just, grateful."
Hinata turned it over. "He was the only one the world ever blamed for the slaughter of his clan," she said slowly. "He carried all of it alone. And now it is shared out, between him and the dead old man who truly gave the order." Her glowing eyes narrowed at the rain. "Of course he is relieved. Some part of the truth finally reached the daylight."
"Yeah. That's where I landed too." Naruto nodded. "But then it gets weird. Because then he tells me there was somebody else mixed up in that whole massacre. A third one, somebody completely separate from Danzo." He hesitated. "He says it was Uchiha Madara."
Hinata went still. "Madara?" The name came out of her on a note of plain surprise. She had only ever met it in a classroom, in the dry pages of a history scroll. "Naruto-kun, Uchiha Madara lived in the time of the First Hokage. He founded the Uchiha. He fought the First and died for it. That was generations ago."
"I know, I know, that's exactly what I thought, I figured he was feeding me a load of garbage," Naruto said. "But he didn't just say it. He showed me. Inside the illusion. Put the guy right in front of me, like he was standing there, then tells me this Madara is alive, and he's in the Akatsuki right now, and he showed me what he looks like these days."
Hinata's mind was already moving fast. Between Sasori's interrogation and everything else they had dragged out of the Akatsuki's broken pieces, she and Naruto knew the organization nearly to a man, the leader and his partner in the Rain, the ones they had killed and taken, the spy, the ones still loose. She held the count in her head and turned it. "We know nearly all of them now," she murmured. "But the intelligence was clear that one place was still open. One more they meant to bring in, that we have nothing at all on." She looked at him. "Perhaps that is who he was pointing you toward."
"Maybe. Yeah, maybe." Naruto lifted a shoulder. "Anyway, soon as he'd shown me all that, he dropped the genjutsu and bolted. Didn't stick around for a fight. And the second I came out of it I told the whole team every word of it."
"And do you believe him?" Hinata asked.
"No." It came out of him instantly. "No, I don't believe a single word out of that guy's mouth, and I don't trust whatever he stuck in my head either. He's killed I don't even know how many innocent people, he's running with the bastards trying to tear the whole world apart, and everything that's happened to Sasuke, all of it, that's on him." His hands had closed into fists on his knees, and he breathed out slow. "…But I keep chewing on it anyway. That's the part that's eating at me. I don't believe him and I can't put it down."
"Then why show you any of it?" Hinata said, half to herself, watching the storm.
"Beats me." Naruto scrubbed his face with both hands, and when they came down there was a tired crooked grin under them. "Honestly? I think the guy's finally cracked. Standing out in the rain handing out his big family secrets to the guy trying to deck him." He groaned and tipped his head back against the rock. "And you know the worst part? Now I gotta write the whole thing up. Word for word. Every single thing he said and showed me, full report, soon as we're back. Pages and pages of it. I'm gonna be chained to a desk for a week."
A small laugh slipped out of Hinata, warm under the doubled voice. "Perhaps that was his plan from the start," she said. "Bury you in paperwork. Slow you down for a week with a pen instead of a blade."
"Right?!" Naruto pointed at her, brightening. "That's gotta be it. The real evil scheme. Whole trouble with bad guys is they never know when to shut their mouths, and now I'm the one drowning under a stack of forms over it." He shook his head, grinning out at the rain, and Hinata's hand found his shoulder again and stayed there as the two of them looked out into the roaring dark.
The laughter wore itself out, and the cave went quiet around them but for the storm. Far out in the fog a fork of lightning lit nothing the eye could find, and the thunder came after it, a boom that rolled in through the rock and faded into the steady roar of the rain past his boots. The mist sat thick over the black beach a step beyond the cave mouth, swallowing the sea and the sky both.
The pause stretched. Past the cave mouth the rain kept up its steady roar and a last peal of thunder rolled itself out far over the water, the fog beyond the stone still sitting white and unbroken across the dark. Naruto drew a couple of slow breaths beside her and tipped his head back to find her face, the way he always had to, her seated height still riding well above his own. His gaze drifted off her to the storm beyond the cave mouth, swept once over the fog and the dark, and came back, and the careful line of his mouth bent up into a grin.
It pulled a blink out of her. And then she felt it, low, a warm weight settling over the armored swell of her thigh. She looked down. His hand had come to rest on the plate over her thigh, palm flat, fingers spread wide across the midnight-blue alloy, and through the armor and the seams and the Weave beneath it the heat of him reached her all the same. Along her spine the coiled presence woke at once, uncurling, leaning into the contact with an interested hum, the silver filigree under her skin warming a half-shade toward violet. It seemed she was not the only one whose mind had wandered while the fire burned down.
"Somethin' wrong, Hinata-chan?" he asked lowly, the grin not moving.
Her answer was a slow breath drawn in through her nose, and the lines mapped across her temples flushed for the length of that breath from cerulean to a deep pulsing violet before they guttered back. Naruto's eyes caught the shift of color and stayed on it. She let two more breaths move through her in silence, and under the warmth climbing through her she sent her senses out wide on old reflex, sweeping the cave and the rock above it and the streaming dark of the beach for anything at all.
She had begun to shift her weight forward off the chair, ready to rise and turn the moment into something else, when the sweep snagged on something far out in the rain and went cold. Her gaze cut to the cave mouth. She came up out of the chair fast, and her crown drove toward the low wet stone of the ceiling so that she had to check the motion and fold forward at the waist, stooping under the rock with her glowing eyes fixed past Naruto on the storm. He was on his feet beside her in the same breath, his hand gone from her thigh, his own senses already reaching.
"You feel that too?" he breathed, barely over the rain. She gave a single sharp nod. He turned his head back into the dark of the cave and pitched his voice into a hard whisper-shout. "Karin!"
Behind them Karin came awake all at once with a jolt and a scrape of her chair, gear rustling as she snatched it up off the line. "I'm on it, I'm on it, I've got them, gimme a second…" She was up and moving before her eyes had fully opened, her senses snapping out ahead of her.
A moment later the three of them stood at the mouth of the cave where the rock folded back toward the shore. From the slight rise of the overhang the beach ran out below them and away into the rain, and far down it, through the fog, a cluster of figures moved along the waterline. "Contact," Karin whispered. They fixed on the far shapes together, each of them bending their own sight down the long stretch of streaming dark.
The cluster resolved into a dozen or so people, armed, running hard along the shoreline. Their clothes hung off them in tatters, scorched black in places, and even at this distance the way they moved spoke of exhaustion past the point of sense, some of them limping, some clutching wounds, all of them driving themselves on as though whatever was behind them was worse than the storm.
Naruto's eyes narrowed under the rain. "Those guys…" he murmured. "The cut of 'em, the gear. They look just like the snake bastard's goons we dug outta the Grass base." The torn cloth carried it even soaked through, the same dull purple worked into the seams and the sashes.
Karin's brow was furrowed, her hands half-raised in front of her. "I'm not picking up anybody else near them," she breathed. "Just them, and us. They're coming up from back that way, from where the village should be."
Hinata did not like the shape of it. Her glowing eyes stayed locked on the running figures, the violet long gone from her temples, the cerulean burning steady. "Their chakra is nearly spent, drained to the floor, and still higher than any civilian's."
A grin tugged back onto Naruto's face, and his hands were already rising into a familiar cross seal, chakra gathering thick around him. "Heh. Guess that's our break done with." Shadow clones bloomed out of the smoke around him in a rolling chain and peeled away into the storm, low and fast over the rocks, fanning wide to come at the shoreline from every angle.
Down the beach the rogues ran until one of them could not run anymore. "Hold up! Hold up, damn it, we gotta stop, just, just a minute…" The man at the back staggered to a halt with his hands braced on his knees, and one after another the rest of them slowed and gathered around him near the waterline, a dozen broken figures heaving for breath in the downpour. The rain came down on them without let or mercy, hammering their scorched shoulders, running off their bowed heads, and not one of them had the wind left to curse it.
"How much further?" one of them gasped, wiping a sheet of water off his face. "How long till we're there?"
Their leader straightened, a big man with a half-burned flak vest and a sword bound across his back, and jerked his chin up the shore toward the dark heave of the rocks. "Close. We're almost there. Just a little further, and then we can finally…" He stopped. The wind shifted across the beach, a wrong cold pull of it at the back of his neck, and something under his exhaustion drew tight and certain with dread.
The near-black sky overhead lit white for a single beat. "LOOK OU…" One of them got half the word out. The middle of the group erupted. A blast tore up out of the wet sand in their midst, KABOOM, a flat thunderclap of fire and grit that flung bodies off their feet in every direction and threw them sprawling across the shore. One of the bandits was hurled up off the blast and into the air, tumbling, and Naruto blinked across the distance faster than the eye could chase and reappeared in the air beside the rising body, the massive iron-studded kanabo already cocked back over one shoulder, longer than he was tall, and he swung it around in a single flat brutal arc like a man taking a bat to a ball. The studded head met the bandit square across the ribs, krrak, and the body folded around it and tore loose and launched out over the beach, out past the breakers and into the open sea, gone into the rain with a far thin splash lost under the storm.
He had not touched ground before the rest of him arrived. A dozen Naruto clones blinked into being across the scattered, ringing-stunned rogues, one at each man's side, every one of them shouldering its own studded war club, and they brought the kanabos down together. The shore filled with the wet heavy crunch of it, the rogues smashed flat into the sand where they lay before any could find their feet. Only the leader was left, half-risen, his sword clearing an inch of its binding, when the rain in front of him folded and Hinata was there. She had crossed from the cave mouth in a single blink, towering over him, and her open palms came in faster than he could track, a quick blurring flurry of light precise strikes that walked up his arm and across his chest and sealed the chakra out of every pathway they touched. The sword dropped back into its lashing. His legs went out from under him, and he folded down into the wet sand in a heap with the breath driven out of him, his limbs gone slack and useless. In the span of two or three seconds the whole running band was down.
Naruto dropped out of the air and landed in a crouch, and his clones burst around him in a soft rolling string of pops. Karin was already picking her way down off the rocks through the rain, and the original Naruto came up beside Hinata, sealing his own great club away into a curl of smoke at his hip as he walked. The three of them looked down at the man on the sand. He was paralyzed from the neck down, slack in the streaming wet, but his eyes were wide open and rolling, blinking frantically up at the three shapes standing over him, the worst of them the armored giant who blotted out the storm-dark sky.
Naruto crouched, took a fistful of the man's burned vest, and hauled him up off the ground one-handed until they were eye to eye, the captive hanging limp in his grip, rain pouring down both their faces. "Hey. Eyes on me." The easy warmth had gone out of his voice. "So you wanna tell me why a pack of the snake freak's guys is runnin' down a beach in the dark? Where're you all runnin' from? The base?"
The man's mouth worked, and what came out of him cracked and spilled in a rush of pure terror. "There's no base. There's, there's no base anymore!" It jolted through all three of them at once, the look passing between Naruto and Hinata and Karin.
And then the rest of it poured out of him, the words tripping over each other in his haste to give them everything he had. He had been posted here, on this island, set to watch over the fishing village while the true base sat on the next island across the water, the two of them split by nothing more than a narrow channel a man could cross by small boat or swim outright in calmer weather. Some time ago the explosions had begun, deep booming things rolling across the water from the far island, and not long after the first of the runaways had come, base personnel rowing and swimming over to this side in a panic, telling anyone who would listen that something had gotten into the strongholds. The base was many places, he said, a spread of separate strongholds each built to its own purpose and strung together by roads and tunnels bored through the rock, and whatever had come had already torn one of them apart whole. The runaways had flooded into the village and made for the ferry and the boats, and when there were not enough of either the fighting had started, his own people turning on his own people over a seat off the island. The villagers had broken and scattered into the hills and the woods to hide from it, and the village itself had come apart into a brawl and a stampede, most of the boats smashed in the struggle, the ferry half wrecked by the storm besides. He and the others with him had simply run, unable to stomach any more of it, making for a cave up in the rocks he had known about, meaning to hide there and wait out the violence and the weather both. Naruto let him drop back to the sand, where he lay going nowhere, and rose to his feet.
The three of them drew together a little way up the beach, out of the captive's hearing, a loose half-circle facing in through the rain, Hinata standing over the both of them with the storm breaking across her plates.
"Okay, so we're not sitting on our hands for this one." Naruto was already talking, the energy back in him, jabbing a thumb up the shore. "Those guys tore that village apart and the people who live there are out hiding in the woods in this. We go in, we put down whatever's left wrecking the place, the locals get to come home, and then we cross over and go see what's busting up the snake's base for us. Two birds."
"But, what is even doing the busting?" The worry pulled Karin's voice tight, her hands twisting together in front of her. "We all heard what he said. Something walked into a fortified base and tore a whole stronghold apart and sent trained shinobi swimming for their lives. We don't even know what it is, or how many. And it'd just be the three of us, no squad, no backup, in the dark, in all this." Her eyes went from Naruto to Hinata and back. "Is that really something we should be walking into on our own?"
"If we wait, it comes to us regardless." Hinata's doubled voice rolled out steady under the rain, both of them turning up to her. "That cave is no secret. This man knew of it, and so will others running the same way. They will keep coming to this island until there is no room left on it. And whatever has torn through one stronghold will not stop at the water's edge. Once the far island is emptied, it turns here." Her gaze swept the dark line of the hills. "Sooner or later it finds this shore. I would rather meet it on ground we have chosen than be cornered in a hole in the rock."
"See, that, yeah, exactly." Naruto rounded on Karin, lit up, plainly delighted to have it handed to him. "That's what I'm sayin'. Waitin' around's what gets us killed here."
Karin dragged a hand down her wet face and let out a long breath through her fingers. "…Of course you'd both land on the same answer." The exasperation drained out of her, and what was left under it was just worry. "Okay. Okay, we go. But, please, if we get over there and that thing is too big for us, we don't try to be heroes. We pull back, hide, and wait for the squads to catch up." She looked up at Hinata, the words coming out smaller. "That's all I'm asking."
"Of course." Naruto gave her an easy grin, already half-turned toward the village. "And hey, c'mon, breathe a little, would ya? We just took down the shark freak out there, and that guy was S-class, the real deal, bingo book and all. Whatever's stompin' around some run-down island base, no way it's worse than him."
Karin was a long way from reassured, but she let out a slow breath and held her tongue, leaving the call to the two of them. Already Hinata's helmet was flowing up over her head, the segmented plates climbing her jaw and locking shut into the smooth obsidian visor in a soft black ripple, sealing her glowing eyes away behind it. The other two fell in low and ready at her sides, and the three of them broke into a fast, silent run down the shoreline through the rain, bearing toward the village.
The village rose out of the rain ahead of them, and it was already a ruin. They dropped low at its outskirts behind a tumble of broken fencing and looked in on it, and there was little left worth saving. Half the little fishing village had been knocked flat, houses caved in and torn open to the storm, and through the standing wrecks of the rest several dozen rogues still moved, and they were fighting each other. The narrow muddy lanes were strewn with their own dead, sprawled where they had dropped and left to the rain, and the living trampled past them without a glance. Down at the waterfront a knot of them swarmed over the half-wrecked ferry with armloads of timber, hauling and hammering, and others were tearing the wooden houses apart board by board to feed it, wrenching loose anything that might float and dragging it to the water to lash together into something that would carry them off the island.
They took the nearest first, the handful of rogues posted as ragged sentries at the village edge, dropping them quiet and quick before any could call out. Then Naruto's hands crossed and several dozen more clones bloomed out of the smoke and slipped away into the storm, threading wide through the wrecked lanes to ring the whole village in a long loose half-circle, every angle covered, the unknowing rogues hemmed inside it without one of them the wiser. A wall of fire would have ended it in a breath and taken the village down to ash along with it, so they did the slow work instead. Naruto and his clones spat compressed bullets of wind out of the dark, hard cracking shots that punched through the rogues one and two at a time. Hinata loosed needle-thin bolts of chakra down from a broken rooftop, Hakke Kūshō: Shōten (Eight Trigrams Vacuum Palm: Focus Point), each one finding a throat or a heart clear across the village without a sound. Karin worked the gaps with her senbon, taking the stragglers the other two left. The rain came down in a roaring grey weight and the wind howled through the broken houses and the thunder rolled overhead without pause, and all of it swallowed what little noise they made, the fog and the dark drawing a curtain across the killing. The rogues fell and kept falling, never sure where it came from, their numbers thinning through the wrecked village until the last cluster of them went down together at the foot of the ruined ferry, dropping among the timber they had been hauling.
They did not stay to count the dead. The moment the waterfront went still the three of them were moving again, slipping out the far side of the village and up into the dark wooded spine of the island, cutting straight across it toward the channel on the seaward side. The woods closed wet and black around them, the rain breaking apart on the canopy overhead, and as they ran their senses brushed against the warm scattered flickers of the villagers who had fled into the trees, dozens of small frightened presences hunched down in the undergrowth and the hollows, hiding from their own town. None of them moved. The three left the trees behind and came down the far slope onto a low rocky shore, and there it was, the channel, a narrow run of black storm-tossed water dividing this island from the next, the dark hump of the far island rising beyond it through the rain. Out there on that ground sat what was left of Orochimaru's base, and whatever had come to tear it apart. They stepped out together onto the surface of the channel, chakra blooming flat beneath their feet to hold them on the heaving water, and started across through the storm toward the far shore.
The far shore came up out of the dark as a low shelf of wet rock, surf breaking white against it. Hinata's sabatons hit stone first and drove a crack through the ledge. Naruto landed beside her a beat later, and Karin came down last with a slip on the slick surface before she caught herself. Thunder cracked directly above them, a fat fork of lightning splitting the cloud and throwing the island into hard relief for one stuttering heartbeat before the dark came back.
Hinata threw her Byakugan wide in the same breath. Her sight racing out through the lashing rain, and beside her Karin straightened and opened her sensing in a soft expanding pulse. The storm still choked her electromagnetic sense flat, the lightning and the discharge hammering it to white noise, so she leaned on the deeper spiritual channel and let Karin's range fill the gaps. The island sorted itself under their combined read in silence, neither of them speaking.
It was larger than it had looked from the water. The spine of it rose in a dark rocky ridge and dropped away to either side into scrub and low forest, and scattered across the slopes and the flat ground between them sat the strongholds, four of them visible to her sight, each one a compound of tall stone walls and wooden watchtowers and gated courtyards connected to its neighbors by roads running along the surface and tunnels bored through the rock beneath. One of them, the nearest to the far shore, was already a smoking ruin. Lightning lit the sky behind it and the silhouette of its shattered walls stood against the flash like broken teeth, fires still guttering in the rain along its perimeter, smoke rising in fat grey columns that the wind shredded before they cleared the treetops.
Then the survey caught the second thing. Twenty signatures moving fast down the ridge, coming from inland on a direct line toward the shore where the three of them stood.
"Contact." Hinata's doubled voice cut through the rain. "Twenty, armed, coming down the ridge. Close."
Naruto's hands were already crossing. "Then let's roll out the welcome." Chakra surged through him in a hot bright pulse and clones bloomed out of the smoke around him in a rolling chain, thirty of them peeling away into the dark and the scrub, spreading wide to ring the approach from the ridge in a loose crescent.
The three of them drew back into the rocks above the waterline and waited.
They came down through the scrub at a hard run, stumbling over the wet ground, their shapes resolving out of the rain one by one. Tattered, all of them. Their clothes hung in scorched rags, their weapons a thrown-together mess of salvaged blades and broken polearms, and four of them had overturned rowboats hoisted onto their shoulders, the keels streaming rain. Even at a distance the stink of them carried on the wind, the animal desperation of men who had been running long enough to forget anything else. They hit the shore in a ragged spread and the ones with the boats swung them down onto the rocks, already reaching for oar slots, and one of them was shouting something about the current being wrong.
Naruto's clones were already around them. Thirty shapes standing in the rain with their arms at their sides, a wide half-circle of orange and black, and not one of the rogues had looked up from the boats long enough to see them there. The clones drew in a breath at the same time, cheeks swelling, the wind element gathering in their throats, and blew.
The wall of compressed air hit the rogues from every bearing at once. It tore the boats off the rocks and shattered them to kindling, ripped the weapons out of their hands, stripped the rags off their backs, and drove all twenty of them inward in a dead sprint that none of them had chosen, the wind converging from every direction and slamming them together into a single tangled heap at the center of the beach, thoom. Planks and oar-shafts and flailing limbs and the screaming bulk of twenty grown men folded into a pile like laundry stuffed into a basket.
Hinata raised her right hand, fingers together, and pointed.
A broad fan of white fire poured off her fingertip and crossed the distance in a flat sheet, catching the wind still pouring in from every side. The fire swallowed the wind and the wind fed the fire, and the pile of rogues and shattered timber went up in a roaring pillar of flame that climbed twenty meters into the rain before the storm could beat it down. The sustained wind from thirty clones hauled the fire into a spinning column, a twisting funnel of white and orange that screamed as it hauled the heap of bodies off the ground and spun them upward through the fire, limbs and planks tumbling through the column in a rising gyre of burning wreckage. For three seconds the shore had its own storm inside the larger one, and then Hinata dropped her hand and the fire died.
The wind did not stop. The clones kept blowing, their sustained gust holding the charred bodies spinning in the air above the beach, twenty shapes tumbling high up with nothing under them. Two heartbeats, three, long enough for the clones below to unseal their kanabos and set their feet and look up.
The wind stopped. The bodies came down.
The clones were already moving. Each one had a kanabo shouldered, and as the first body fell out of the dark, smoking, limp before it ever reached the ground, the nearest clone stepped under it, measured the drop, and swung. The studded head met the falling man across the chest with a heavy wet krak and the body folded around the iron and tore free and launched out over the water in a flat skipping arc, hitting the channel once, twice, and sinking. The next body fell and the next clone swung, and the next, the whole spread of them going to work on the falling rogues the way a batting line works through pitches, each hit a flat crunch of iron on bone that threw the broken shape out over the surf and into the channel. Krak, krak, krak.
Some of them fell within Hinata's reach. She did not bother with a weapon. Her right arm swelled at the forearm, the biomass surging out over the gauntlet and hardening into a fist three times its normal size, and she met the first falling rogue with an open-handed swat that cracked across his whole body and sent him skipping across the water like a hurled stone. The second she caught with a backhand that folded him over her knuckles and flung him after the first, whump, whump, both shapes bouncing off the channel and going under.
It was over in less than ten seconds.
The last body hit the water and the channel closed over it, and the shore went quiet but for the rain and the low hiss of steam rising off the rocks where the fire had been. Twenty men were gone.
Karin stood at the edge of the rocks above the waterline, both hands pressed flat against the stone, her red hair plastered to her face. "That was…" She stopped, worked her mind once, and tried again. "Not a single one of them even got to fight back."
Neither Naruto nor Hinata answered. The last of the clones popped away in a soft rolling chain, the kanabos vanishing with them. Hinata's visor turned inland, away from the channel and the bodies sinking in it, and locked on the smoking ruin of the nearest stronghold against the lightning-lit sky. Beside her Naruto's head came around to the same bearing, the easy grin gone off his face. On her deeper spiritual sight, past the stronghold, past the ridge, something threaded through the heart of the island, a faint trace she could not name but could not put down, wrong in a way that pulled at the back of her skull.
"The stronghold," Naruto said, quiet under the rain. "Let's go."
They turned off the shore and started inland along the road.
The road climbed through scrub and low wet trees and leveled out on the spine of the ridge, and the stronghold rose out of the rain ahead of them. It had been a real fortress once. The walls were thick dressed stone, four meters tall, with wooden watchtowers at the corners and a heavy timber gate set into the southern face, and the whole of it sat on a flat shelf of rock cleared of trees in every direction. It had the shape of something from the old warring-states period, a lord's outpost built to hold ground in contested country, repurposed long after the men who laid the stones were gone.
It was destroyed. Every watchtower was down, the timber shattered and strewn across the cleared ground, and the walls were breached in three places where great sections of dressed stone had been blown inward as though something had walked through them. Scorch marks ran the full length of the southern face in long precise lines, some of them the branching fans of a lightning strike and others the deep cratered burns of concentrated fire. The main gate hung crooked on its lower hinge, the upper torn clean out of the frame, and through the gap the interior was a field of rubble and broken timber, everything that had stood inside the walls knocked flat or burning low under the rain.
They dropped out of the trees at the treeline and scanned. Karin's hands came up, fingers spread, her sensing reaching into the wreckage. Naruto swept the perimeter. Hinata pushed her Byakugan through the rubble stone by stone. Nothing in it moved or breathed.
"Clear," Hinata said. "No signatures inside."
"Same," Karin confirmed under her breath. "Nothing alive in there."
They entered through the broken gate and moved through the courtyard in a loose spread, stepping over fallen timbers and chunks of dressed stone, the rain drumming on the rubble around them. Hinata catalogued the damage as she went. Every mark told the same story. The strikes were precise, placed to bring the structures down with a minimum of wasted effort, each scorch clean and deliberate. Two kinds of element had done this, fire and lightning, both wielded with a speed and accuracy that left almost no collateral between the points of impact. A single fighter had walked through this place and taken it apart the way a surgeon would take apart a body.
Then, somewhere deeper in the island, past the stronghold's broken walls, a signature pulsed.
Naruto stopped mid-step. His whole body locked, one foot still in the air above a fallen timber, and his head came around to the east with a sharpness that had nothing to do with danger. His face changed. The easy combat readiness dropped off him and something else came up under it, something older.
Hinata felt it in the same breath, the spiritual channel catching what the storm refused to let her other senses touch. A presence half-buried under the noise of the weather, flickering in and out of perception like a candle behind a shutter. She let her sight settle on it and felt the confirmation settle in her chest.
Karin caught it last. Her hands were still raised from her sweep of the fortress, and the flicker reached her sensing a beat behind, and she flinched. The color left her face. Her arms came down and her fists closed at her sides and she stared east through the rain.
"Did you…" She stopped, steadied herself, and tried again, her voice pitched low enough that the rain nearly ate it. "Both of you. Did you feel that just now?"
Naruto did not answer. He stood with his foot still on the timber and his gaze locked east.
"Yes," Hinata said. The doubled voice came out level. "We felt it."
Karin opened her mouth, closed it, and hugged her own arms against the rain. Whatever she wanted to ask, she read the set of Naruto's shoulders and swallowed it.
They moved on through the courtyard in silence. At the far end, past a collapsed barracks and the remains of a communications tower brought down across its own foundation, the ground dropped away. A wide ramp of dressed stone descended at a steep angle into the earth, broad enough for four abreast, flanked by low retaining walls, and at its base stood a pair of heavy wooden doors bound in iron, both standing open on the dark beyond.
All three felt it at once, a pressure building from below, a vibration running up through the stone under their feet and into their ankles. Hinata pushed her Byakugan down through the open doors and into the dark.
The tunnels went deep. They dropped at a steep grade for a hundred meters and then leveled out into a long straight bore cut through bedrock, wide enough for a cart, shored with concrete and stone, lit at intervals by caged bulbs that still had power. The bore ran straight for the better part of a kilometer before it branched, splitting into secondary passages that threaded through the rock in several directions, a whole network worming through the island beneath the surface connecting the strongholds above.
The tunnels were full. They came in a stampede, a wall of misshapen bodies packed shoulder to shoulder and running hard through the main bore toward the entrance, hundreds of them, their disfigured shapes lit in strobing flashes as they passed under the caged lights. Curse-mark mutants, the same warped and feral things she had fought at the warehouse and the village market. They ran on legs that bent the wrong way, on hands grown too large, on limbs fused to other limbs, mouths open and screaming as they trampled the ones that fell. The sound had not reached the surface yet but she could see it building, a vibration that shook grit from the walls.
"Mutants." Her doubled voice hardened. "Hundreds of them, in the tunnels, running for this entrance. Prepare."
"They're already here," Karin whispered, her face white. "The whole tunnel is shaking with them."
Naruto pulled his gaze off the east at last and looked down the ramp at the open doors, then swept the ruins around them. "Higher ground. Now." He pointed at the nearest section of standing wall, three meters of dressed stone still holding above the ramp. "Get up there, both of you. I want angles."
They moved at the same instant. Naruto hit the top of the wall in a single bound and dropped into a crouch on its broken edge, his hands already cycling through seals, the wind element gathering in his throat and around his fingers in a thin whistling charge. Hinata landed on the wall to his right and her left arm transformed. The biomass boiled up from the seam of her gauntlet and surged outward, the forearm thickening and reshaping, the hand opening into a wide ribbed maw with the Venom head forming at the barrel's end, jaws spread, the throat already glowing deep orange as fire-element chakra poured into the chamber. Her right hand came up beside the cannon, the Byakugan locked on the tunnel below. Karin scrambled up the stone to Hinata's left and pressed herself against the broken edge, fumbling kunai from her pouch, each one trailing a length of wire lashed to an explosive tag.
The sounds reached them. A deep churning roar climbing out of the earth through the open doors, the combined noise of hundreds of bodies crashing through stone passages, screams layered over screams, the wet slapping of malformed limbs on concrete. The stone under their feet hummed with it. Along Hinata's spine the coiled presence stirred, uncurling through the cannon in a slow surge, spreading its awareness through the Venom maw with a hungry interest, the alien will tasting the approaching violence. The excitement bled through her in a warm pulse.
"This is going to be fun."
She steadied the cannon and waited.
The doors blew off their hinges. The heavy timber and the iron banding flew up the ramp in a spray of splinters, KRAK, and the first shapes came through the opening behind them, three mutants packed abreast in the doorframe, their bodies wedged together and still driving forward. One had a torso split open down the sternum, ribs visible and still growing, bone curling out of the wound in spiraling tusks. The second ran on all fours with its arms elongated past its knees, the hands thick with fused fingers. The third had no face left, its skull a smooth plate of bone from which a wet red hole screamed.
Naruto's hands locked into the final seal.
"Fūton: Shinkūha! (Wind Release: Vacuum Wave!)"
The jutsu came out of him as a sustained roar, a thick concentrated beam of compressed wind that slammed down off the wall and hit the tunnel entrance dead center. The beam was visible in the rain, a shimmering column of distorted air that drove into the doorframe and pinned the three emerging mutants back into the dark, crushing the ones behind them flat.
Hinata bore down on the Venom cannon.
"Katon: Hakuryū no Ibuki! (Fire Release: Breath of the White Dragon!)"
The white fire came out of the Venom maw in a concentrated lance, a pencil-thin beam of fire that screamed across the gap and merged with Naruto's wind at the entrance. The two met and fused and what poured down through the tunnel doors was a single roaring column of white destruction that filled the passage wall to wall. The mutants packed in the doorframe vaporized. They went from solid matter to bright expanding gas in the space of a breath, their shapes burning away from the outside in, bone and meat and warped tissue sublimating off them in sheets of white steam, and the column drove past the space they had filled and poured on down into the tunnel.
Naruto's arms shook with the sustained output, the wind element screaming out of him in a continuous blast. Beside him Hinata bore down harder on the cannon, the Venom maw open wide and roaring white, the heat of the beam drying the rain out of the air for ten meters in every direction. They held and bore down harder, the column brightening, thickening, driving deeper.
Through her Byakugan Hinata watched it go. The combined fire filled the main bore from wall to wall and rolled forward at a walking pace, a wall of white death moving through the tunnel. The mutants in the front rank met the fire face-first and came apart in bright blooming flashes, their bodies sublimating off their skeletons before the skeletons themselves went soft and ran. Behind them the stampede piled up, hundreds of warped bodies crashing into the ones ahead, unable to stop, unable to turn in the packed passage, and the fire ate into the pile and kept going. The concrete walls softened. Stone began to glow, first dull red and then brighter, the mortar between the blocks running liquid down the walls. A section of ceiling sagged and dropped a slab of molten concrete onto the packed mutants beneath it, and they burned under the weight.
The fire reached the first branch in the tunnel network and forked, a tongue of it peeling off down the side passage while the main body drove on. In the branch it found more of them, dozens more, and those burned too. Past the branch the main bore turned and dropped, and the fire followed the turn, pouring around the bend into the deeper stretch beyond, packed to the walls with mutants climbing over each other, and she watched them go, each bright flash a body coming apart. She followed the fire all the way to the far end of the trunk line, where it blasted out of the tunnel's far exit in a gout of white flame that erupted from the face of the hillside half a kilometer away, and the mutants on the surface near that exit caught fire and staggered and fell.
When Naruto let the wind die in his throat his arms dropped to his sides and his chest heaved. Hinata closed the Venom maw and the fire cut off. The sudden silence was enormous. The rain came crashing back in over the top of the ramp, steam exploding off the superheated stone around the melted entrance, a thick white fog rising and mixing with the downpour.
Karin stood on the wall with the unused kunai still in her hands, her mouth open, her eyes very wide behind her rain-streaked glasses.
"By the Gods." She said it barely above a whisper.
The tunnel entrance had melted. The dressed stone of the ramp and the retaining walls and the frame of the doors had softened, run, and cooled into a single lumped mass of slag that sealed the opening shut. The heat radiating off it pushed the rain back, the drops hissing to nothing a foot above the surface, a thin veil of steam hanging over the fused stone. Beyond the wall where they stood the rain-soaked ruins of the fortress were drying out in real time, the water boiling off the rubble in wisps. The smell came up thick, charred flesh and cooked stone sitting heavy in the wet air.
They dropped down from the wall and picked their way to the melted entrance. Karin pressed one hand over her mouth and nose against the reek.
"I don't feel anyone alive down there," she said through her fingers. "Nothing. Not one signature in any of the tunnels."
"Parts of the network have collapsed," Hinata said, her Byakugan still pushed through the stone. "The heat brought down ceiling sections in three places along the main bore and in two of the branches. The passages are blocked."
Naruto wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at her. "Can you tell which direction they were coming from? Where on the island?"
She turned her visor toward the northeast. "That way. The trunk line ran from here to the next stronghold inland, roughly north-northeast. That is where the largest concentration was."
"Then we go surface." Naruto straightened, scanned the dark treeline beyond the fortress walls, and started walking. "C'mon."
They ran the surface road through scrub and low trees, the rain hammering down and the lightning cracking overhead in long branching forks that lit the wet forest in stuttering white flashes. The road was little more than a cart track of packed earth turned to mud, rutted and puddled, and twice they crossed bridges over shallow cuts in the rock where streams ran brown and angry with the storm.
They were not alone on the road. Small groups of rogues blundered out of the trees at intervals, twos and threes, some armed and some not, all running the same direction, away from the interior. Naruto's clones took them before they could shout. A flash of orange in the rain, a heavy krak of a kanabo, and the body went down in the mud and the three of them ran past without slowing. Once, rounding a bend where the road dropped into a shallow ravine, a stray mutant lurched out of the underbrush directly in their path, a hunched thing with its arms fused into a single broad paddle and its jaw hanging loose on tendons. Hinata did not break stride. A single compressed bolt from her fingertip punched through its chest and it went still and folded, and they cleared it.
The encounters thickened as they closed on the next stronghold. The road filled with running shapes, rogues in larger groups now, some dragging wounded, and between them the mutants, singles and pairs. A rogue stumbled past with a mutant latched to his back, the warped thing's teeth sunk into his shoulder, and a clone put both of them down with a single swing. The road became a running brawl that the three of them cut through at speed, the dead falling behind them and the rain washing the blood off the mud before they had cleared the next bend.
The second stronghold was worse.
They came up on its southern wall through the trees and found it already under siege from the inside. Explosions thudded behind the stone, throwing flashes of orange and white above the wall line, and the screams layered over each other in a continuous rolling noise that the thunder only partly covered. The rain came down in a roaring grey weight and the wind drove it sideways across the walls, and between the lightning and the fires and the strobing flashes of jutsu in the courtyard, the whole compound looked like a city under bombardment, lit from within by its own destruction.
Hinata's spiritual sense caught the familiar trace again as they cleared the treeline. Closer now, stronger, moving somewhere inside or near the stronghold, flickering at the edge of her perception and dropping away as though it knew she was looking. Through the Byakugan, past the rain and the stone, she caught one sharp bright shape blurring across the inner edge of her field of vision, too fast to read, and then it was gone. She turned her visor to find Naruto already looking inland, looking concerned.
They had all felt it.
A handful of rogues came scrambling over the southern wall, dropping down into the mud and running for the treeline. Naruto's clones took them in the scrub before they made ten paces. The three of them moved onto the wall itself, running low along its broken top, and the sound of the fighting inside rose up, a churning roar of shouts and detonations and the deeper, wetter screaming of things that were not human.
They killed two sentries at a corner tower, the men going down to a pair of silent kunai from Karin and a single vacuum palm from Hinata that caved the second one's chest. From the tower's upper platform they looked down into the courtyard.
It was a killing floor. At its center sat a large stone building, three stories tall, heavy doors and barred windows, and the mutants were pouring out of it. They came through the doors and through the windows, crashing through bars and shutters, some crawling down the walls headfirst, a stream of broken shapes flooding out of every opening and into the courtyard. Three dozen rogues had pulled back from the building and thrown up a rough barricade across the courtyard out of carts and lumber and piled stone, and they were fighting from behind it with blades and jutsu and the occasional desperate thrown explosive. The barricade was already giving. Two mutants had gotten over at the far end and were tearing into the rogues there. At the flanks small groups had broken away and were deserting, slipping along the walls toward the gates at a low run.
Hinata swept the building with her Byakugan. "The building is a laboratory," she said, her doubled voice low under the rain. "This complex goes deep beneath it, multiple underground levels. The mutants were using the tunnel network to move between strongholds, and the tunnels we burned were one of their main routes. After the fire blocked those passages, the pressure redirected them here, up through the vertical shafts inside this building and out every exit." She pushed her sight deeper, down through the floors. "The underground levels are extensive. They are still coming up from the lowest ones."
Naruto took it in, his eyes on the brawl below. "So we kicked the ant hill and they're all coming out the front door."
"Yes."
Then she saw it, and the word died on her tongue.
Deep in the building, three floors below ground, something was moving through the corridors at a speed that put the other mutants to shame. Her eyes locked onto it and the reading came back wrong in every way at once. The thing's chakra was a haywire mess, spiking and crashing, the cursed seal on its body an open wound in the network that siphoned ambient energy in a continuous torrent, pulling it from the walls, the air, the other mutants in its path. Its size was already large and it was getting larger. As she watched, the corridor it moved through became too narrow, and it drove its shoulders through the concrete walls on either side and kept going, the stonework crumbling away from it. Behind it the mutants it had trampled lay broken and still on the corridor floor. Bone spurs erupted from its arms and back, the skin splitting and reknitting around them, and its mass climbed with every step.
"Something else is coming up," Karin said, her voice tight, her hands lowering. "Something bigger. The chakra is pulling everything into itself, getting stronger by the second."
The thing hit the ground floor at a dead run and went through the wall. The heavy stone facade over the main entrance exploded outward, KRABOOOM, and the entrance and ten meters of wall on either side collapsed into a sliding avalanche of stone and timber. The building groaned. The upper floors sagged, folded, and came down in a roaring cascade that buried the courtyard in front of the building under a spreading hill of rubble, catching a dozen rogues under the fall. Dust rose in a thick cloud that the rain beat flat, and for a moment nothing moved.
Then the rubble shifted. A great slab of foundation stone tilted and slid sideways, and the thing pulled itself out. It was enormous. The cursed seal was still drinking ambient energy in a continuous flood, and the mutations had gone past anything recognizable. Its torso was a swollen mass of layered muscle and jutting bone, its arms thick as tree trunks and still growing, the fingers fused into blunt clubs. Its head had pulled forward on a neck doubled in length, the skull reshaped into something flat and wide, and the mouth, a lipless gash, opened and let out a scream, SKREEEEEE, that hit the courtyard a hammer. The remaining rogues at the barricade broke. They dropped their weapons and ran, scattering toward the gates and the walls, and the thing lunged forward out of the rubble and caught one of them with a swing of its massive arm that crushed the man flat and flung the body into the barricade hard enough to send carts flying.
Along Hinata's spine the coiled presence surged upward in a rush of pure delight.
"At last. Something worth the trouble after that sharkman. This one will do."
Karin took a step back from the edge of the tower. "That is the same kind of thing from the tunnels, but it won't stop growing." She turned to Naruto and Hinata, her voice climbing. "This might be one we should wait for reinforcements on. Please."
Hinata's visor did not turn from the overgrown mutant below. Beside her Naruto stood at the wall's edge with his hands loose at his sides, and his eyes had changed. The orange had come back into his irises, the toad-pupil cutting his gaze into something older.
"Nah." His voice stayed easy. "We take it d…"
He stopped. His whole body went rigid, head snapping east, and Hinata felt it at the same instant, the familiar trace that had been flickering at the edge of her perception all night burning bright and close, right on top of them.
Karin's hands shot up. "It's here, that chakra, it's right…"
The sky split open and a bolt of lightning came down out of the storm and hit the overgrown mutant squarely on the crown of its skull, brighter than anything the storm had thrown, a single thick column of white fire that connected the clouds to the thing's head in a straight vertical line and held there for a full heartbeat, KRA-KOOOM, the sound so massive that it hit Hinata's chestplate like a fist and set the rubble in the courtyard jumping. The flash bleached the compound white, every wall and stone and running rogue and falling drop of rain printed in hard shadowless relief for one frozen instant, and in that instant she saw a figure standing on the broad flat crown of the mutant's skull.
The lightning died and the dark slammed back, and the afterimage burned in Hinata's Byakugan. The mutant was still standing. Its massive body swayed, the muscles along its arms firing at random, and embedded in the center of its forehead, driven in to the hilt, a long straight blade crackled and spat with residual current, white-blue lightning crawling the length of the steel in fitful arcs. The figure standing on the thing's brow was a young man, one hand on the sword's grip, his weight balanced and easy, dark hair hanging in wet spikes over his face. He wore a white shirt open at the chest and dark trousers and a heavy purple rope cinched at his waist, and the rain ran off him the same way it ran off the stone.
The mutant's body shuddered. Its legs buckled at the knee, first one and then the other, and it began to sink, the great mass of it crumpling inward. It had been dead from the moment the blade went in. The cursed seal at its core had gone dark, the siphon cut, and without the constant flood of stolen energy the accelerated tissue had nothing left to hold it together. The young man did not move from his perch. He rode the collapsing body down as it fell, the rubble shaking under the impact, dust rising and rain crashing back in.
When the dust cleared he was standing on the fallen wreck of the thing's skull with the lightning sword drawn out of its head and resting across one shoulder, the blade still flickering with fading current. He turned his head slowly and looked up at the three of them on the wall.
Dark eyes. A face that Naruto and Hinata and Karin had each carried in their own way for two years, and that was looking back at them now through the rain without surprise.
Sasuke.
Lightning cracked behind him, the thunder rolling out across the courtyard, and none of them moved.