Hidden Leaf, Hidden Talents 89 (Patreon)

It took Tsunade and my clones about twenty minutes to get everyone patched up. Well, "patched up" might be overstating it for a few of them. Some of the Konoha nin were in rough shape. But Tsunade worked fast, and my clones weren't exactly sitting around watching. She had them running triage on the less critical cases while she handled the poison victims herself. Most of them were learning on the fly, picking apart Hanzo's toxin with her walking them through the steps between patients. It was messy, and there was a lot of trial and error involved, but by the time we were done, every single person who was alive when we started was still alive when we finished. That had to count for something.

Orochimaru was back on his feet too. Not exactly in peak condition, but he could stand without swaying, and his face had gone from "freshly embalmed" back to its usual pale.

With the flank secured and everyone patched up, that left one question on the table, what now?

The obvious play was reinforcing the main force. We'd come out here to take the pressure off their flank, and we'd done that. Now the smart thing would be to loop back, link up with the bulk of Konoha's forces, and press the advantage before Ame could regroup. Easy enough to say out loud, and it made perfect sense on paper. A plan so logical that nobody in the room would even bother questioning it.

Reality, though. Reality had different plans.

Because Hanzo didn't retreat. He pulled back, sure, but only long enough to come back with friends. Close to four hundred fresh Ame reinforcements pouring out of the fog from three directions and slamming into us while we were on our way to reinforce the main force. The swamp went from empty to crawling with wet, angry shinobi who very much wanted us dead, and Hanzo was right there at the front looking like he had a personal score to settle.

What came next was nothing but ugly, grinding violence.

Hanzo's opening move was smart. He didn't blanket the whole battlefield, that would've gassed his own men. Instead, he laid down poison fog in strategic patches, cutting off our retreat routes and forcing us into kill zones where his forces were waiting. The Ame nin hung back at the edges wearing rebreathers, pushing us deeper into the purple clouds while staying clear themselves. Guys who were fine one minute were choking and convulsing the next. Tsunade was running herself ragged trying to keep up, and my clones helped where they could, but the rate of new cases was outstripping everyone's ability to treat them.

And yeah, I was pretty sure this was personal. A salamander he'd probably raised from birth, and some kid in a black jacket had nearly cut it in half. That wasn't something a guy like Hanzo shrugged off.

But here's what Hanzo didn't know. He thought the clones he'd been fighting earlier were all I had. A few dozen, maybe. Annoying but manageable.

He was wrong.

I'd been holding back the real numbers, keeping most of them hidden across kilometers of swamp. The ones he fought were the tip. When he brought reinforcements, I showed him the iceberg. Two hundred clones came out of everywhere, hitting Ame's fresh troops before they even finished forming up. Every single one a bomb with a smile and a sword. Combined with the hundred or so Konoha-nin we had, we almost matched their numbers. If you squinted and rounded up generously.

But clones only get you so far when the other side has poison. The fog chewed through them just as fast as everything else, and the real Konoha nin caught in it didn't get the luxury of popping into smoke when their lungs gave out. But clones were cheap, and chakra was something I had in absurd quantities. Ame's forces didn't have that equation. Every soldier they lost was a real person who wasn't coming back.

When the fighting finally stopped, it wasn't because someone won. Everyone just stopped fighting, too chewed up to keep swinging. Half our people were poisoned, a quarter were wounded, and from what I could see across the fog, Ame wasn't doing any better.

Konoha's losses were bad. Mostly from the poison. We held the ground, technically, but "holding ground" felt hollow when it was littered with your own people. Ame's losses were higher in raw numbers, but percentage-wise we probably came out about even. The difference was that my clones didn't have families waiting for them back home.

But numbers on a page don't tell you who won a war. The fighting petered out with both sides limping in opposite directions. We held the ground, yeah, and we'd bled them badly, but Hanzo was still breathing and half our people couldn't fight anymore thanks to his poison. If that was a victory, it didn't feel like one. If it was a loss, Ame probably felt the same way.

Either way, nobody was celebrating.

…

In the end, it was me, Orochimaru, and a squad of about fifteen nin who'd gotten off light enough that my clones could patch them up without Tsunade's help. Everyone else stayed behind. Tsunade wasn't going anywhere until every last poison victim was stable, and I left whatever clones had survived the fighting with her to keep the triage running. She wasn't happy about it, obviously. Something about me being reckless and having no self-preservation instincts. I told her I'd be fine. She told me to shut up and not die. Heartwarming stuff.

So off we went, sprinting back through the swamp toward the main force. The squad behind us kept pace without complaint, which was about the best you could ask from people who'd just survived what they survived.

Orochimaru walked beside me near the front. He'd cleaned most of the blood off his face, though he'd missed a streak near his jawline that was starting to dry into a dark brown smear. His clothes were wrecked, torn in places, burned in others, and his sleeves had enough snake blood on them to open a reptile butcher shop.

"You're staring," he said without looking at me.

"Just admiring the look. Very post-apocalyptic chic." I sidestepped a root jutting out of the mud. "Seriously though, what's your read, Orochimaru-san? Can Hanzo afford to pull something like that again?"

Orochimaru glanced sideways at me. "Could he gather another force that size?" He made a small considering noise. "Probably. Ame has reserves. But absorbing losses like today's is a different question entirely. Amegakure was never built for prolonged warfare. It's a small nation with a limited population and even more limited resources. Every nin Hanzo throws at us is one he can't replace." He paused to step over a fallen branch. "Today's losses aren't something Ame can just walk off."

"So he's done, then."

"I wouldn't go that far. But I think today put a very real ceiling on what Hanzo can commit to this front going forward." He tilted his head. "Your clones saw to that rather thoroughly. The sheer volume of casualties your clones inflicted on his men was... impressive.”

"Thanks. I try."

"You do more than try. Most shinobi your age can barely manage a squad engagement without falling apart. You just dictated the flow of an entire battle against a Kage-level opponent and his forces. That's not nothing."

Something about Orochimaru complimenting me made my skin crawl in a way I couldn't fully explain. It was like being praised by a snake for being warm-blooded. Technically nice. Practically unsettling. I got actual goosebumps, and I really hoped he didn't notice.

"That's—okay, that's giving me way too much credit," I said, trying to wave it off. "I didn't do anything special. I just threw enough clones at the problem until it stopped being a problem."

"Hmm." A pause that stretched just a little too long. "If you say so."

And the way he said it made it very clear he did not, in fact, say so.

We kept sprinting. The swamp thinned out as we went, ground getting firmer, trees getting sparser, patches of grey sky opening up between the branches. Ame being out of the picture was good news, assuming Orochimaru's read was right. But good news on one front just meant I had more room to worry about the others.

"There's something else bugging me," I said.

"Oh?"

"Iwa. They haven't made a single move this entire time. That bother you at all? Because it's really starting to bother me."

Orochimaru didn't slow down, but the faintest flicker of something crossed his face. "It would bother me more if it didn't bother you."

Okay, so it wasn't just me being paranoid.

"Three fronts," I said. "Three fronts and counting, and we haven't even heard a peep out of Iwa. That's a whole other great nation just sitting there doing nothing. You don't think that's weird? Because I think that's weird."

"As you should. The Tsuchikage is many things, but passive isn't one of them. If Iwa has been quiet, it's because Onoki wants them quiet. And Onoki only stays quiet when he's waiting for something."

"You think he's waiting for us to bleed out?" Suna was bleeding us. River was bleeding us. Ame just took a nice big bite. And somewhere out there, Onoki was watching the whole thing and probably smiling.

"That would be the logical play, wouldn't it? Let Konoha exhaust itself fighting on multiple fronts, then step in when the dust settles to pick up whatever's left. Onoki has always preferred to let others do the difficult work for him. At least, that's how Sarutobi-sensei has always described him."

"What a nasty old man," I muttered. "Just sit back, let everybody else kill each other, then stroll in at the end and pick the bones clean. Real classy."

"Precisely why he's survived this long. An Iwa that isn't fighting is an Iwa that's planning. And whatever they're planning, it won't be pleasant for anyone involved."

I bounced off a tree trunk to clear a rocky outcrop and kept talking. "Okay, but please tell me the plan isn't just 'wait and see what happens.' Because that's feels like a terrible plan."

"Mm." Orochimaru hummed softly. "The interesting thing about traps is that knowing they exist doesn't always help you avoid them. Sometimes you walk in anyway, because the alternative is standing still." He smiled. "And standing still has its own consequences."

Yeah. It did. And I was looking at a guy who was going to learn that lesson the hard way if nobody intervened. The war was grinding him down, whether he showed it or not. All this death, all this poison and blood and bodies piling up in swamps that nobody would remember the name of in ten years. It did things to people. Especially smart people. Especially people who looked at a problem and couldn't accept that the answer was "there is no answer."

Orochimaru was that guy. He'd look at all these dead shinobi and his brain wouldn't stop at grief or anger or helplessness like a normal person's would. His brain would go one step further and ask "what if they didn't have to die?" And then one step further than that, "what if the human body could be made to survive things it wasn't designed to survive?" And then one more, "what if I could figure out how?"

And down the rabbit hole he'd go.

The thing was, from where I was standing, both of Orochimaru's futures sucked. Either he stayed inside the lines, played by the rules, and watched everyone around him drop dead until the war chewed him up too. Or he crossed every line there was, experimented on living humans, chased immortality down a road paved with bodies, and turned into something that barely qualified as human anymore.

Neither was great. Which was why I'd been thinking about a third option for a while now. One where Orochimaru still got to chase his ambitions, still got to poke at the boundaries of what the human body could do, but with someone keeping him pointed in a direction that didn't end with underground labs full of screaming children. A leash wasn't the right word. More like... a partnership. One where I benefited from his genius and he benefited from my “resources”, and we both got what we wanted without him going completely off the rails.

I needed someone like Orochimaru. His brain, his skills, his complete lack of squeamishness when it came to pushing boundaries. He was the perfect person to have on my side when the real work started. And the real work couldn't start without Hashirama cells. Once I got my hands on those, Orochimaru's genius would be what turned raw material into actual results.

"Hey, Orochimaru-san."

He glanced at me.

"When this is all over, remind me to show you something. I've got a place I think you'd find very... interesting."

His eyebrow crept up. "Interesting how?"

"Trust me, you'll want to see it for yourself."

"My, how secretive." The words came out smooth, almost playful, but I could hear the hook setting. "You certainly know how to dangle a lure, Shinji-kun. I do hope the reveal is worth the suspense."

"Oh, it will be. Trust me."

Speaking of Hashirama cells, though, something had been bugging me about that for a while. Nagging at the back of my brain like a half-remembered song I couldn't quite place. In the show, Orochimaru definitely got his hands on Hashirama cells at some point. That was canon. He experimented with them, injected them into test subjects, built half his research around them. But the part I couldn't figure out was how. Where did he actually get them?

The most obvious source would be those creepy white things, the ones connected to Madara's grand plan, but capturing one of those was basically impossible unless you knew exactly where to look and had the right skillset to pull it off.

So it definitely wasn't through catching one of them. Which meant Orochimaru got the cells from somewhere else.

But where?

…

-Onoki the Fence-Sitter-

Damn rain. Three hours of it and Onoki's joints were already staging a rebellion. Earth Country didn't have this problem. Earth Country had proper weather that knew when to stop. Ame didn't. The sky had been leaking this thin grey drizzle since they'd crossed the border, and his mood had gone downhill at roughly the same rate as the terrain.

Nearly eight hundred shinobi trailed behind him through Ame's backcountry, spread out across multiple formations. They were Iwa's best, handpicked for this operation. They moved like shadows through the rain, and Onoki wouldn't have brought anyone less.

The route they were using wasn't on any official map. It existed in that grey area between "known" and "acknowledged," a supply corridor that Iwa had been running for weeks to funnel weapons and materials south to Suna. On paper, Ame had no idea it existed. In practice, Hanzo almost certainly knew about every caravan that passed through his territory and had decided that pretending not to notice was more profitable than shutting it down. The man skimmed off a percentage of every shipment, which was annoying, but Onoki had factored the loss into his logistics from the start. Let the salamander have his cut. It kept him quiet, kept him compliant, and most importantly, kept this road open.

And right now, that road was carrying something far more valuable than weapons crates.

Onoki scanned the treeline ahead. Nothing. Just more grey, more rain, more of Ame's depressing landscape stretching out in every direction. His scouts had gone ahead hours ago and reported the route clear. Hanzo's forces were concentrated further south and west, locked in whatever mess they'd gotten themselves into with Suna and Konoha. Half his border patrols had been pulled to reinforce the fighting. The parts of Ame that weren't actively a warzone were practically unguarded.

Perfect timing. Almost too perfect, which under different circumstances would have made Onoki suspicious. But he'd been planning this for long enough to know that timing like this wasn't luck. It was preparation meeting opportunity, and Onoki had never believed in anything else.

They crossed into River Country sometime around noon, though you couldn't tell by the sky. The rain eased off once they left Ame's borders, which Onoki took as a good sign even though he wasn't the type to believe in signs. The terrain shifted gradually, wetlands giving way to scrubby hills and thin forest that looked half-dead even in the middle of the growing season.

A squad of River-nin was waiting for them at the treeline near a shallow river crossing. Eight of them, wearing the standard flak vests and headbands of River Country's military. They looked tense, which was understandable. Having hundreds of Iwa shinobi appear out of the fog would do that to anyone, even if you were expecting them.

The one in front, a tall woman with short brown hair and a scar running from her ear to her jaw, stepped forward and gave a stiff bow. "Tsuchikage-sama. We've been expecting you. This way, please."

Onoki grunted. He didn't bow back. Not out of disrespect, but because bowing made his back hurt. "Lead the way."

The River nin escorted them through narrow valleys and forest trails, avoiding main roads to prevent any accidental encounters. The outpost at the end was modest. A cluster of buildings in a valley between two ridges.

Inside, River Country's council was waiting for him. Four people sitting around a table covered in maps and reports. They stood when he entered, formal and polite, though Onoki could tell they'd been arguing about something before he walked in.

"Tsuchikage-sama." The older man at the head of the table bowed. "We weren't sure you'd actually come."

"Iwa doesn't make promises it can't keep.” He sat down. "Now stop hovering and sit. We have a lot to discuss."

The briefing lasted the better part of an hour. River's council laid out everything, the frontline positions, Konoha's advance, Suna's deployments, the engagements that had gone well and the ones that hadn't. Onoki absorbed it all in silence, asking the occasional question, filing each answer away. When they got to the part about the Third Hokage being engaged with the Kazekage directly, personally, on the southern front, Onoki went quiet for a long moment.

Then he smiled. Small, barely there. But the man sitting next to him had served under him long enough to know what it meant.

"Get the men ready. We move soon."

…

-Shinji-

We talked while we ran.

Not about anything personal. Just the war. How it might end, what it would take, whether Suna could sustain this pace or if they'd crack first. Orochimaru's take was that the Kazekage would seek terms within a few weeks if things continued going this badly for his side. Suna's military was built for short, decisive campaigns, not prolonged engagements across multiple fronts. The longer the war dragged on, the further it strayed from what Suna was designed to fight.

I had my own thoughts on that. Mostly that I really, really hoped Suna and River's leadership was as dumb as Orochimaru seemed to think. Because smart people didn't accept losing positions. Smart people found ways to flip the board.

I was about to say as much when something in the grass ahead caught my eye.

Bodies.

Three Konoha nin, face down in the grass about thirty meters off the trail. A fourth a little further, slumped against a tree. Then two more beyond that.

I slowed. Orochimaru slowed with me. We exchanged a glance and changed direction without saying anything.

The closest one had been dead for a while, going by the color of the blood soaked into the dirt. Male, probably late twenties, jonin by the vest. His body was torn up badly, and none of the wounds looked familiar. Dark metallic fragments were embedded in his torso, dozens of them, tiny black grains that had punched through the flak jacket like it was paper. The holes were small but deep, clustered so tightly across his chest and abdomen that it looked like someone had blasted him with a shotgun loaded with iron filings.

The others were the same. All of them riddled with those black grains.

Orochimaru crouched beside the nearest body, his attention drawn to the metallic fragments embedded in the flesh. He rubbed one between his fingers and examined the dark residue it left behind.

"Satetsu," he murmured. "The Third Kazekage's signature."

I frowned. The Kazekage being here wasn't surprising. But a dead Konoha jonin this far from the main engagement meant the fighting had spilled well past where it should have been. Which meant the Hokage's forces were being pushed back. Which meant things were going badly.

And my clone hadn't popped.

I had one embedded in the Hokage's forces. Had for a while now. If something catastrophic had happened, if the line had collapsed completely, the clone would have been caught in it and I'd have gotten the memories. But I hadn't received anything. No memory dump, no sudden flood of information, nothing. The clone was still out there, still alive, which meant the Third was still fighting somewhere.

"Shinji." Orochimaru's head snapped toward me. "What about Sarutobi-sensei? Do you have any information on his status?"

That caught me off guard. Not the question itself, but the look that came with it. Orochimaru asking about someone else's safety with actual urgency wasn't something I'd seen before.

"Uh, yeah, actually. I've got a few clones running with his forces." I had to think for a second, checking in with that distant tether in the back of my mind. "None of them have dispersed yet, which means either nothing's happened worth reporting, or they can't find a safe moment to dispel."

Orochimaru didn't say anything after that. Just started running faster. And the look on his face, if you could call it that, he'd probably kill me for pointing it out, but it was there. Worry. And honestly, I got it. This wasn't the Orochimaru who'd been passed over for Hokage in favor of his sensei's golden boy. That hadn't happened yet. Right now, he was still Sarutobi Hiruzen's prized student, still loyal, still someone who gave a damn about the old man who'd taught him everything he knew. The bitterness and the betrayal and all the ugly things that came after, those were still years away.

Right now, Orochimaru was just a guy worried about his teacher.

The gap between us and the squad behind us kept growing. All the signs pointed in a direction I didn't want to think about. The Kazekage's iron sand this far from the expected engagement zone. Dead Konoha nin scattered along what should have been a safe rear area. No sounds of fighting ahead. Every piece of evidence said the same thing.

Konoha was losing. Had lost, maybe.

No.

No way. The Third Hokage didn't just lose. Not to the Kazekage, not on a front where he had numerical superiority. There had to be something else going on, something I wasn't seeing yet.

I shook the thought off and threw out nine clones. One glance at the bodies and they were already gone, scattering into the trees in every direction.

We kept pushing forward, and it only got worse. The scattered dead became clusters. The clusters became piles. Dozens of Konoha nin littering the hillside, some still in formation, others scattered like they'd tried to run. All showing the same iron sand wounds, those dark metallic fragments punched through armor and flesh. One group had been caught mid-retreat, eight of them cut down in a line. Another had made a stand behind a fallen tree, and whatever good it did them, it wasn't enough.

Nobody said anything. We just kept moving.

The bodies got more frequent after that. Konoha, Suna, River, all mixed together across the hillside. The Konoha nin had iron sand in them. The Suna and River nin told a different story. Most of them had been cut down by a swordsman, someone very good, clean single strokes that ended fights before they started. The rest were taken out by standard jutsu and weapons. Whatever happened here, it had been ugly and it had involved a lot of different people killing each other at the same time.

And it was quiet. That was the part that bothered me most. By now, at this distance, we should have been hearing something. Steel. Jutsu. Shouting. The sounds a battle made when it was still happening. But there was nothing. Just wind through the grass and the buzz of insects that had already started gathering.

Orochimaru's face had gone completely blank, which on him meant he was thinking very fast and not liking any of the conclusions.

We crested a ridge and stopped.

The clearing below was a graveyard. There was no softer way to describe it. Bodies covered the ground in every direction, concentrated most heavily around what had probably been the center of the engagement. Konoha nin, mostly. Too many. Suna and River alone couldn't have done this, not to forces this size. The Kazekage's iron sand was everywhere, black streaks and clusters of metallic fragments scattered across the grass like someone had detonated a foundry. I didn't know the Third Kazekage's name, but I knew his reputation. Strongest Kazekage in history, or so people said. Looking at the carnage below, I was starting to believe it. Was this how it went? Did the Kazekage actually take down the Hokage?

But that wasn't what made me stop breathing.

It was the other wounds.

Some of the bodies weren't whole. And not in any way that made sense. They were missing pieces. Clean, geometric pieces. A jonin near the tree line was missing a perfect rectangular section of his torso, ribs and organs just gone, the edges smooth and cauterized and impossibly neat. No blood at the wound site. No torn flesh. Just a body with a chunk scooped out of it like someone had used a cookie cutter the size of a dinner table.

Another one. A kunoichi, maybe twenty meters further, missing everything below the waist in a clean cylindrical cut. The top half of her body sat perfectly upright against a rock, expression frozen in something between surprise and nothing at all.

Another. A man with a perfect cube taken out of his shoulder and chest. You could see through the hole to the ground behind him.

I'd never seen wounds like that. Never heard of wounds like that, except in one very specific context that I really, really hoped I was wrong about.

But I wasn't wrong. I knew exactly what could do this. One jutsu in the entire shinobi world that erased matter in clean geometric shapes, that broke things down at the molecular level and left nothing behind. Not fire, not wind, not any normal elemental release.

Dust Release. Jinton.

The Third Tsuchikage's personal jutsu. The one that only Onoki could use.

Iwa was here. Iwa had been here, on this battlefield, fighting alongside Suna and River against Konoha's main force. Against the Hokage.

My stomach dropped.

I looked at Orochimaru. He was staring at the same wounds I was, and whatever color had come back to his face after Tsunade's treatment was gone again. He'd figured it out too. Then Orochimaru turned to the squad behind us.

"Spread out. Find the Hokage." A pause. "Find survivors. Anyone still breathing, I want to know about it. Report back immediately."

They didn't ask questions. They just scattered, disappearing into the wreckage like ghosts.

I stood on the ridge, staring at the battlefield below, and tried very hard not to think about what we were going to find.

…

-2nd gen Clone-

Today was the suckiest day to ever suck.

The clone truly, genuinely, from the bottom of his borrowed existence, felt that in every fiber of his chakra-constructed being as he sprinted through the forest at full tilt. Trees blurred past in a green-brown smear, and somewhere behind him, an increasingly persistent group of Suna, River, and Iwa nin were doing their absolute best to kill everyone in his general vicinity.

And by everyone, he meant Danzo, who was currently hauling the Third Hokage over his shoulder like a sack of rice and running like his life depended on it, which it did. The old warhawk was fast, he'd give him that. Unreasonably fast for a guy with a whole Hokage on his back. The Hokage wasn't moving. Wasn't conscious. Was bleeding badly enough that every time the clone glanced over, he immediately found a reason to look elsewhere. The trees, the brances, the shadows between the trunks. All places where someone might be lining up their next kill shot.

Life was weird. That was the only way to put it. This morning, he'd woken up with exactly one job, keep an eye on Danzo, and if the opportunity presented itself, maybe help the guy trip and fall on something sharp. Repeatedly. Shinji's orders had been simple. Sneak into the Hokage's forces, replace one of the jonin, stay close to Danzo, gather intel, and if everything lined up just right, take him out. He'd done the first part without a hitch, knocked the poor bastard out, stuffed him in a bush, threw on his face and his identity, and slipped into the formation like he belonged there. Nobody looked twice. Nobody ever looked twice at random jonin, and the face he was wearing was so aggressively average that even a Yamanaka mind-reader would have a hard time picking it out of a lineup.

Everything after that had gone about as well as a house fire in a fireworks factory.

Onoki. The Third goddamn Tsuchikage, personally leading what had to be close to eight hundred Iwa nin, hitting their flank out of nowhere while they were already locked in a brutal slugfest with the Kazekage's and River's forces. The sensors caught them coming, but by then it was already too late. You can't disengage from a three-way pincer when two sides already have their teeth in you. Then came the dust and the screaming and those horrible geometric holes appearing in people where their torsos used to be. The Hokage's formation crumbled in minutes. Not because they were weak. Because nobody planned for two Kages at once.

That was then. Right now was worse.

Something white flickered in the corner of his vision. A second later, an Iwa nin who'd been lining up a jutsu at Danzo's back made a sound that was half scream and half gurgle, then tumbled off a branch like a bag of wet laundry. Sakumo was already thirty meters ahead by the time the body hit the ground.

A pair of familiar figures blurred past on the right, black hair and black eyes and casual violence that screamed Shinji from a mile away. Fellow clones. The ones who got to wear their own face while he was stuck pretending to be some jonin whose name he'd already forgotten. They'd been fighting alongside the Hokage's guard from the start, no disguise, no pretense, just open support.

Must be nice, not having to hold back.

The fake jonin kicked off a trunk, bounced off a second, and launched himself across the gap between the trees, crossing over to Sakumo's blind side before the bark stopped shaking.

A River nin was already dropping in from above, sword drawn, heading straight for Danzo. The clone caught the man's wrist, redirected his momentum into empty air, and drove a knee into his ribs hard enough to fold him in half. The nin's sword went spinning into the undergrowth. The nin followed it a second later, minus most of his throat.

Somewhere in between, without looking, his free hand had already flicked four kunai behind him. They caught a spread of eight incoming shuriken aimed at the Hokage's back, knocking them out of the air in a scatter of sparks and ringing steel. He landed on the next branch already running, filling the gap Sakumo couldn't cover.

Technically there were a lot of them. Him, his fellow clones, Sakumo, Danzo with the Hokage slung over his shoulder. Practically a crowd. Too bad most of that crowd was made of chakra and good intentions. Strip away the expendable copies, and you had two real people protecting one unconscious Kage from two very awake ones.

He'd seen others pull back during the chaos, some of them heading southeast in what might have been a retreat toward the Konoha outpost, others just running in whichever direction had the fewest enemies. Whether they were going for reinforcements or simply running for their lives was anyone's guess. Didn't matter right now. What mattered was that the Kazekage and Tsuchikage were somewhere behind them, and all the clones in the world didn't change the core equation, two people who bled, one Hokage who couldn't walk, two Kages who wanted all of them dead.

Not that the regular nin were giving them a break either. Another one came from the right. Suna nin, hands flying through seals, some kind of wind jutsu already screaming toward the Third. The fake jonin matched him seal for seal, faster, and a pulse of earth chakra ate the wind jutsu before it reached Danzo. Then he blurred. He reappeared inside the Suna nin's guard, and the man barely got his blade up in time. He hit it anyway. Once, twice, three times, each strike faster than the last, each one hammering the nin's guard a little further open until the kunai was slipping through gaps the nin couldn't close fast enough. The Suna nin went from blocking to staggering to falling apart in about a second and a half. The kunai found his gut on the last beat, sank deep, and he ripped it sideways before the man's knees even started to buckle.

Before the body dropped, he was already flicking two shuriken to his left, catching an approaching Iwa nin in mid-leap and forcing him to bat them aside. That half-second delay was all he needed. He shunshined again. The Iwa nin blocked once, twice. The fake jonin vaulted over the second parry, inverted himself above the man's head, slapped his seal glove on the way over, and came down behind him with a fresh kunai already buried in the back of his neck.

He landed, kept running, and really, really wanted to sigh. His fellow clones had it easy. They could fight like Shinji, use Shinji's jutsu, do whatever they wanted. He was stuck pretending to be a jonin who'd probably never seen a shadow clone in his life.

The others could dispel and update the boss anytime. But not him. He was the infiltrator. The one who'd spent days worming his way into position. If he popped now, all that work vanished, and so did the best chance they'd ever have at putting Danzo in the ground.

Which brought him to the real problem.

He eyed Danzo's back as they ran. The old man had his hands full, literally, and wasn't watching his own six. One kunai. That's all it would take. Right between the shoulder blades while Sakumo was busy with the next wave. Blame it on an enemy who got too close. Nobody would question it in this chaos. The perfect crime during the perfect storm.

Except it wasn't perfect at all.

Because trying to pull a fast one on the White Fang was about as smart as trying to pickpocket a Hyuuga. If the clone's strike looked even slightly off, if the angle didn't match an enemy's position, if the timing was wrong by even a fraction, Sakumo would know. And then the clone would have to fight the White Fang, which sounded about as fun as gargling broken glass.

So the clone swallowed the urge and kept running. That should have been the end of it. It wasn't. It came back thirty seconds later when he gutted another Iwa-nin and caught himself glancing at Danzo's exposed back. He pushed it down. It came back again when Sakumo ranged ahead to deal with a three-man squad and left the clone alone with Danzo for almost five full seconds. He pushed it down harder. It came back a third time when an enemy blade grazed Danzo's arm and the clone thought, just for a second, about letting the next one land.

He pushed it down.

It kept coming back.

…