[Sound Country Border — Southern Tree Line, October 29th, 2:37 PM]
The Sound four-man cell had made the mistake that every Sound cell eventually made, which was assuming that the trees were the safest part of the forest. The Sound-nin had a cultural weakness for vertical terrain — it came from years of training in the Rock Arch canyons near the eastern Sound villages, where height meant advantage and cover was almost always above you. In the Fire Country lowland forest, height was exposure. The things that moved through these woods moved at ground level and were very good at it.
Hayama was the one who found them. He was a tracker by training and temperament, a lean man in his early thirties with a Konoha hitai-ate worn at an angle and the particular habit of reading the ground with two fingers spread ahead of him like he was looking for a pulse. He came back to the group with no sound and held up four fingers, then pointed southeast, then made a flat-palm gesture that meant staying.
Jiraiya held up a hand. The group stopped. The sound of the forest — wind in the canopy, the distant water of a creek, the normal small movements of things going about their ordinary business — continued without interruption.
Four Sound-nin, stationed. Not moving. Either waiting for something or resting, which in field tactics amounted to the same problem.
Jiraiya looked at Kakashi. Kakashi tilted his head toward the southwest approach, a question. Jiraiya nodded once and held up two fingers, then pointed at himself and northeast. Kakashi pulled down his hitai-ate, the left eye covered now, the Sharingan hidden, and began moving before the gesture was finished.
The Sound nin never saw Itachi at all. That was the part that would come up in the debrief and that Itachi would decline to explain in detail. The part that could be explained was this: the southeastern quadrant of the Sound cell's perimeter contained one guard instead of two at the three-minute mark, and the other guard was facing in a direction no competent guard would choose given the site's geography, and both of those facts had been arranged by Itachi in the space of about ninety seconds using the Mangekyō at a level of application that Tobirama, reading the post-mission report, would later annotate with the single comment: Sufficient.
Shisui came in from the north. Norika, the sealing specialist, came in from the west with three suppression tags already activated in her hands, flat between her fingers like cards. Hayama went low through the undergrowth.
The Sound cell was four Chūnin-grade operatives carrying a sealed messenger scroll and a cage containing two white rats that Sakura, reaching them before the others and finding them entirely neutralized, would later identify as chakra-treated laboratory animals rather than summons — which was a detail that would keep Jiraiya very quiet for a long time on the walk back to camp.
Jiraiya looked at the cage. He looked at the rats. They looked back at him with the particular expression of laboratory rats, which was no expression at all.
"He's using them as transmission vessels," Norika said, crouching over the cage. Her voice was flat and professional. "The chakra treatment — it's a seal embedded in the nervous system. They don't carry messages. They carry surveillance. Whatever these animals have seen and heard in the last seventy-two hours is recorded in the seal. When they're returned to their origin point, the record is extracted."
"He sent surveillance animals to a border crossing," Jiraiya said.
"He sent them to us," Sakura said.
Everyone looked at her.
She was still crouching at the cage. Her gloves were on — both sets, as Naruto would have been relieved to know — and her diagnostic chakra had gone from green to the deeper, slower blue she used when she was going carefully.
"The seal on the first one is standard surveillance," she said. "The seal on the second one isn't. It's a message seal. The kind that requires the recipient to have a specific chakra signature to open." She looked up. "Jiraiya-sama. It's keyed to you."
A long silence.
The wind moved through the canopy. Somewhere behind them, one of the neutralized Sound-nin made a small sound that suggested returning consciousness, and Hayama, without looking, placed a hand on the back of their neck with the minimal pressure required to solve that problem.
Jiraiya crouched beside Sakura. He looked at the rat. The rat looked back, in the way rats looked back, which was without particular opinion. He reached out and placed two fingers gently on the top of its head, and the small animal sat very still, and the seal — the message seal, keyed to his chakra signature — opened with a sound like a paper fold.
It was a voice seal. The rat's small chest moved, and the sound that came out was not the sound of a rat.
The voice said: "Sensei. I know you've been looking for me for twenty years. I've been making it easy and difficult for you in equal measure, which I recognize is not something a good student does. I want to talk. Not fight. Talking first, and then whatever comes after, comes after. I'll be at the Tanigakure memorial stone at the seventh hour of the twenty-ninth. Alone. I'll be unarmed. You can bring whoever you need to bring, and I'll understand if what comes after the talking is not what I'm hoping for. The graves — I was careful with them. I thought you should know that. — K."
The rat sat still for a moment after the seal finished, and then resumed being a rat.
The chat scroll pulsed.
Kakashi: Jiraiya-sama.
Jiraiya: I heard it.
Kakashi: It's a trap.
Jiraiya: Obviously.
Itachi: It's also possibly not a trap.
Shisui: Is that the Uchiha intuition talking or the optimism?
Itachi: It's the intelligence analysis. He keyed the seal to Jiraiya-sama's chakra signature. That signature is not on any public file — it's only in the records of people who trained under him or fought him at close range. If Kabuto wanted to trap a team, he would have used a signature he could acquire easily. He used the one that required him to have spent time in proximity to his teacher.
Shisui: ...
Shisui: You're saying he used his own memories to key the seal.
Itachi: I'm saying it's possible.
Jiraiya had not moved. He was still crouched beside the cage. The seventh hour of the twenty-ninth was four and a half hours away.
The Tanigakure memorial stone was two hours south.
He was doing the math he'd been doing in the back of his mind since Hiruzen had said three teams in the war room at 2 AM, the math that started with twenty years and ended with a question he had never said out loud because saying it out loud made him have to answer it.
The question was: if Kabuto had been running toward something rather than away from it this whole time, what was the thing he was running toward?
He stood up. He put his hands in his pockets. He looked at the treeline to the south.
"We're going to be there at the seventh hour," he said. "Full team. Maximum perimeter. We hear what he has to say." He looked at each of them in turn. "Whatever he says — whatever it is — it goes in the report. Complete and accurate. We don't summarize, we don't interpret, we don't soften. Everything Kabuto says at that stone goes in the record exactly as he says it. Agreed?"
Sakura: "Agreed."
Kakashi: "Agreed."
Shisui and Itachi, together: "Agreed."
Norika and Hayama, who had not spoken in twenty minutes and had excellent field discipline, both nodded once.
The Sound-nin were bound and tagged with the retrieval seals the intelligence division had provided. The rats were secured in their cage. The wind moved through the canopy in a long slow sigh, the kind of sound a forest makes when it has been listening to something and has decided it has heard enough.
The team moved south.
The chat scroll pulsed one more time.
Naruto: OK so I'm watching the border from the wall like you said. I'm not in the field. I'm in the village. Hiruzen-sama do you want to confirm I'm in the village.
Hiruzen: You are in the village, Naruto.
Naruto: Great. Just wanted that on record. So this is definitely NOT me following you at a distance using shadow clones as decoys, this is me being in the village.
Hiruzen: Naruto.
Naruto: Staying in the village. Confirmed. Dattebayo.
Hiruzen: ...
Hiruzen: Kakashi.
Kakashi: Already on it, Hiruzen-sama.
Kakashi: Naruto, how far north of the Tanigakure border are you currently standing.
Naruto: ...
Naruto: This is a trap.
Kakashi: Yes.
Naruto: ...Thirty meters.
Kakashi: Go back to the village.
Naruto: But —
Kakashi: Naruto. Go back to the village. This one isn't yours to catch.
A very long pause.
Naruto: ...Fine.
Naruto: But if ANYONE gets hurt I'm gonna be SO —
Kakashi: Naruto.
Naruto: Going. Going. I'm going.
The scroll went quiet.
Shisui, reading over Itachi's shoulder, exhaled through his nose. "He made it thirty meters past the border."
"He made it thirty meters past the border," Itachi agreed.
"That's — honestly, for Naruto, that's impressive restraint."
"It is."
They walked south, into the afternoon light, toward whatever Kabuto had been trying to say for twenty years.
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