…
He was still carrying Hideki when Kaito's voice cut through the wind.
"Something's wrong."
Murakami didn't slow down. "I know."
He'd felt it the moment they cleared the previous clearing, the two heavy presences hadn't pursued.
They'd stopped at the edge of his perception range and held position, and that stillness was more unsettling than if they'd given chase.
Pursuers that didn't need to pursue because they knew where you were going didn't hurry.
Just then, thirteen signatures appeared.
These ones had different chakra signatures entirely.
They were sharper and more organized. They moved with the particular discipline of shinobi operating as a coordinated unit rather than a pursuit force.
The aftertaste of lightning and earth ran through their chakra signatures like a signature. Kumo and Iwa nin, moving in formation, spreading wide across the forest ahead and to either side.
They were not chasing, they were flanking.
"They have a sensor," Murakami concluded. "They know exactly where we are."
Kaito landed on a branch beside him without breaking pace, his eyes already moving through the treeline ahead.
A second passed, two, three, and Murakami could see him reading it, the same picture assembling itself in a more experienced mind.
"Thirteen," Kaito said.
"Yes."
"Jonin level."
"All of them."
Another beat of silence. Kaito's jaw set almost imperceptibly.
"We can't outrun them," Murakami said. That was not an option.
"No." Kaito looked at Hideki, then at Murakami. Then forward again. "We split. Divide their attention, make them choose which trail to follow." He paused. "One of us draws the bulk of them. The other gets the boy out."
Murakami glanced at Hideki over his shoulder.
Hideki's expression said he had heard every word and had strong feelings about being referred to as "the boy" that he was currently unable to express at appropriate volume.
"I'll draw them," Murakami said.
Kaito looked at him.
"You're carrying him," Kaito said flatly.
"I'll put him down first."
There was a pause. "You're a genin."
"I'm aware." Murakami kept his eyes forward. "But I still have this technique running. You're more spent than I am from the jonin engagement. And if there's a sensor in that formation, they'll follow the stronger signature." He glanced at Kaito. "That's you."
The logic wasn't wrong and Kaito knew it. The silence that followed was the silence of a man working through a calculation he didn't like the answer to.
"You draw seven," Kaito said finally. "I draw six and take Hideki northeast. River, same as before."
"Understood."
Kaito moved alongside him. "Don't engage more than you have to. Delay, disrupt, scatter their formation. Then disengage and follow."
"Yes… sensei."
Kaito looked at him for one more second with the particular look of someone filing something away rather than expressing it, and then peeled right, his chakra pulling back as he moved, deliberately compressing his signature to something smaller and harder to track.
Murakami slowed and set Hideki down on a wide branch without ceremony.
Hideki landed, found his footing, and looked at him.
"You're staying behind," he said.
"Temporarily." Murakami reached into his pouch and pulled the whole thing free, holding it out. "Take this. Explosion tags, wire, kunai. If anything gets close before Kaito reaches you, scatter, don't fight."
Hideki took it slowly. His jaw was tight in the way it got when he wanted to argue but knew there was no winning.
"Murakami."
"Run, Hideki."
Something passed across Hideki's face for a moment before disappearing, too fast to name. He looked at the pouch in his hand, then back up.
"Don't die doing something stupid," he said.
"I never do anything stupid."
Hideki's mouth did something that wasn't quite a smile and wasn't quite not one. Then he turned and ran, following Kaito's retreating signature northeast through the canopy.
Murakami watched them go for exactly two seconds.
Then he turned the other direction.
…
He found a shattered ridge fifty meters back, a broken terrain from some earlier engagement, jagged boulders and toppled trees scattered across a depression in the forest floor like discarded bones.
Good cover. Multiple angles. Elevated positions on three sides.
He dropped into the shadow of the largest boulder, pressed his back against the stone, and began pulling his presence inward.
Not the casual suppression he used walking through the Lotus Store.
This was something more deliberate, chakra coiled tight around his core, heartbeat slowed, warmth drawn inward, movement reduced to nothing.
He peeled back every layer of his presence until what remained was as close to silence as a living body could produce.
Five seconds. Maybe less.
The forest settled around him.
Thirty meters out, the first signature entered his range clearly.
Then another. Then four more in rapid succession, spreading wide across the treeline in a slow deliberate arc.
They weren't rushing. Their spacing was tight with no gaps, the formation of shinobi who had done this before and knew that rushing produced mistakes.
They were sweeping.
Murakami pressed two fingers into the earth and let his perception expand through the ground itself, reading footfall and chakra pressure simultaneously.
Thirteen. All accounted for. Seven moving toward his position.
Kaito had been right about the split, the sensor in the unit had divided them between the two signatures before Murakami had fully suppressed his own.
Three Kumo on the left flank. Four Iwa moving through the center and right.
He studied them through the stone and dirt.
The Kumo signatures pulsed sharp and aggressively, lightning chakra flickering at their edges with every step. Fast. Their footwork was light, designed for speed rather than impact.
The Iwa signatures moved differently. Theirs were heavier, each step deliberate, chakra pressing into the earth rather than hovering above it.
Earth specialists. They'd be reading the terrain the same way he was.
He pulled his fingers back from the ground before they could feel him doing it.
One of the Iwa jonin had pushed slightly ahead of the formation, a broad man moving with the careful economy of someone managing an old injury in his right leg, his weight compensating slightly with each step.
The compensation was consistent enough to be habit rather than recent damage.
A reliable pattern.
Murakami's eyes moved to the space between two boulders twelve meters from his position. The Iwa-nin's current trajectory would take him directly through that gap in approximately eight seconds.
He reached into the empty air where his pouch should have been.
Gone. He'd given it to Hideki.
He had the staff. He had his chakra. He had two techniques that didn't require tools.
It would have to be enough.
He closed his eyes, let the eight seconds pass in absolute stillness, and felt the Iwa-nin's footfall enter range.
His lips moved.
The Song of Darkness began, not sound in any conventional sense, more like a vibration threaded through the air on a specific frequency, carried on chakra rather than sound, aimed at a single target with surgical precision.
It didn't announce itself. It simply arrived, settling into the target's auditory perception like something that had always been there.
The Iwa-nin's step faltered.
A subtle thing, half a beat off his rhythm, his head tilting slightly as his brain tried to locate a sound it couldn't quite place.
His chakra flared defensively, the instinct of an experienced shinobi recognizing that something had changed without being able to identify what.
He was fighting it. Veterans always did.
But fighting it meant his attention was divided.
Murakami moved.
He cleared the boulder in a single low burst with his phantom step, closed the gap in two steps, and drove his foot into the man's right leg, the injured one, the one that had been compensating for the entire approach.
Pain exploded through the Iwa-nin's leg as the joint buckled inward under the sudden lateral force.
He cried out and crashed onto one knee.
His hands moved toward a seal formation, fast and practiced, barely slowed by the genjutsu still threading through his perception.
Murakami brought the staff across his temple before the seals completed.
The man dropped.
Not dead. Just unconscious.
The formation reacted in under a second.
"Trap!" A Kumo voice, female, sharp with command authority. "They've split, the secondary target is here!"
Chakra surged across the formation simultaneously as the six remaining signatures reoriented toward his position with the practiced speed of a unit that had trained for exactly this scenario.
But Murakami was already gone.
He melted back into the boulder field, moving low and fast between cover, letting the terrain work for him rather than against it.
Behind him came the sharp crack of splitting earth.
"Earth Release: Rising Stone Spears!"
The ground burst apart as jagged pillars of rock shot upward in rapid succession, each thick enough to skewer a man.
They erupted through the spot where Murakami had been standing only moments earlier, splintering the surrounding branches as they continued skyward.
He noted the delay between the seal completion and the technique's emergence. Approximately one and a half seconds.
Useful.
Thirty meters away, Kaito's signature was moving northeast with Hideki's smaller one beside it, opening distance steadily.
Murakami settled behind a collapsed trunk, controlled his breathing, and began planning the next three moves.
He didn't need to win.
He needed to buy time.
He was good at that.