Hidden Leaf, Hidden Talents 91 (Patreon)

I breathed out, made the sign, and five more clones popped into existence in a haze of white smoke.

Ninety-five. That was the ninety-fifth batch of second-gen clones I'd personally churned out in the last hour or so. Meanwhile, the clones I'd already made were doing their own thing further out, spawning third-gens by the hundreds. Maybe thousands at this point. I'd lost count somewhere around batch sixty, and honestly, trying to keep a head count felt like counting grains of sand during a sandstorm. Pointless. My mind had bigger things to worry about.

I watched the newest batch stretch, crack their necks, exchange a glance with each other, and scatter into the trees without a word.

The army was growing. Spreading out like a swarm, which, now that I think about it, wasn't the most flattering comparison. Swarms tend to end badly for the swarm. But the visual was right, even if nobody ever roots for the swarm.

I stared at the treeline where another group had just disappeared and let out a long breath.

Was this a good idea?

No matter how I sliced it, what I was about to do would cause a lot of people to die. Enemy shinobi, sure. That was the point. But supply lines didn't exist in a vacuum. They ran through towns, past farms, alongside roads where regular people lived their regular lives. And the thing about destroying infrastructure is that regular people depend on it too. You burn a grain storehouse that's feeding an army, congratulations, you also just burned the grain storehouse that was feeding the town next door. Civilians would get caught in the crossfire. Not because I wanted them to, but because war didn't care what anyone wanted.

I shook my head before that train of thought could go any further.

This was war. People were already dying. People were going to keep dying no matter what I did. The only question that mattered was which people. And given the choice between enemy territory burning and Fire Country burning, I'd pick the one where my people weren't.

"Shinji."

I turned. Orochimaru was making his way over, looking like someone who'd been through hell and had mostly come out the other side. Mostly.

"So," he said, stopping a few feet away. "I've been watching them multiply for the last twenty minutes. The rate is... remarkable." His eyes tracked a batch of newly-spawned clones as they dispersed into the trees. "I knew you had something special in you, but this is beyond what I expected. Even accounting for whatever's sealed in your stomach, this output shouldn't be possible." He looked at me. "What exactly is that thing feeding you?"

"Honestly? I have no idea. It just kind of... does its thing."

"And you've never investigated it?"

"I try not to poke the ancient demon living in my gut, Orochimaru-san. Seems like common sense."

"Mm." His gaze lingered on me a second too long. Like a chef eyeing an ingredient he'd never cooked with before. "You know, if you ever change your mind about that, I'd be very interested in taking a closer look. Purely for research purposes."

"I'll keep that in mind." I wouldn't.

He let the subject drop with visible reluctance and moved on. "I take it the Intelligence nin has told you the enemy's key positions?"

I crossed my arms. "Yep, I'm going to hit River Country. That's where all their stuff is anyway. Suna and River are running this war together, so their supply depots, staging areas, communication posts, everything the Intelligence guy flagged, it's all sitting in River. That's where the supply lines are, that's where the logistics flow through, that's where it hurts them most." I paused. "By the time the Kazekage and Onoki realize their supply lines are gone, they'll be stuck in Fire Country with no food, no reinforcements, and no way home that doesn't involve walking through a few thousand of my clones. And if my clones still have gas in the tank after gutting River, they push into Wind Country and start wrecking whatever Suna's got left at home."

Orochimaru nodded slowly. "Then the communication relays should be your first priority, not the depots. Destroy their supplies and they'll know something is wrong within hours. Destroy their communications first, and they won't be able to warn each other that the supplies are next."

I thought about it, then shook my head. "Can't do it sequentially. The second their relay stations go dark, someone's going to notice. Military networks expect regular check-ins. Silence is its own alarm. If I hit comms first and wait, all I've done is trade one warning for another."

"Fair point." Orochimaru didn't look the least bit put out that I'd shot the idea down. The slight curve at the corner of his mouth said he'd already known the flaw was there before he opened his mouth. "So you hit everything at the same time. Comms go down, depots go up, and by the time anyone figures out what's happening, there's nothing left to save."

"That's the plan. One coordinated hit across every target we have intel on. By the time anyone figures out what's happening, there's nothing left to save." I paused. "The problem is the intel itself. The Intelligence guy said he had most of their positions. Most isn't all. If my clones miss even a few relay stations, the warning still gets through."

"It will get through regardless," Orochimaru said. "You cannot silence an entire country's communication network with incomplete intelligence. Messenger hawks, patrol runners. Information leaks. That's inevitable." He glanced at me. "The question isn't whether they find out. It's how long it takes them to respond. A simultaneous strike across dozens of targets creates confusion. Confusion delays coordination. And every hour they spend trying to figure out what's happening is an hour their pursuit force in Fire Country goes without resupply."

I nodded. That was pretty much what I was banking on, but hearing Orochimaru lay it out like that made me more confident in the math. I wasn't trying to keep this quiet. Thousands of clones hitting a country from every angle at once was never going to be quiet. But it didn't need to be. It just needed to be so loud, so everywhere, that by the time Suna figured out what was actually happening and who to send where, half their infrastructure would already be ash.

"Right," I said. "And the more targets we hit at once, the longer it takes them to organize anything coherent. They'll be putting out fires in ten different places while my clones are already moving to the next ten."

He looked east, toward Fire Country. "And the pursuit force?"

"I intend to starve them. If they end up trapped too, that's just a bonus." I followed his gaze east. "Right now they've got their whole force committed to chasing down the Third, pushing deeper into our territory every day, burning through supplies way faster than their logistics can keep up with. If I pull the rug out from under the supply chain while they're stretched that far from anything resembling home..." I let the sentence finish itself.

"Can't fall back, can't resupply, and they're not going to hold an offensive together without either one." Orochimaru nodded slowly. "But starvation takes time. They're marching through Fire Country, not some barren wasteland. There are villages out there, farmland, granaries, an army that size isn't going to politely starve when there's food sitting right in front of them. They'll take whatever they need from the locals and keep moving. Cutting the supply lines is going to hurt them, no question, but it's not going to bring them to a halt overnight."

"Which is why starving them is only half of it." I held up my fingers. "I'm also sending half the clone army toward Fire Country. They'll come up behind the enemy forces chasing the Third and hit them from the rear. Pincer them between my clones and whatever Konoha can muster on the home front." I lowered my hand. "Hard to raid villages when you've got a few thousand clones breathing down your neck. They'll be too busy fighting to forage."

That got a genuine reaction. Orochimaru's eyebrows went up, just slightly, but for a guy whose face usually had the emotional range of a porcelain mask, it might as well have been a standing ovation.

"You've already accounted for the pursuit force," he said.

"They're the whole reason this works. Take out the supply lines and the pursuit force becomes a death march. They'll be running on fumes in hostile territory with clones closing in from behind and Konoha's home defense in front." I shrugged. "No supplies, no reinforcements, no escape route. Just a very long, very bad day."

"Devious," Orochimaru said, almost appreciatively. "Not something I expected from you, but not one I mind either."

"War brings out hidden talents in me, I guess." I shrugged.

Oro said. "Speaking of which, I have a suggestion of my own."

"I'm listening."

"While your clones tear through River's infrastructure, I'll take the Konoha shinobi here and join up with Tsunade's forces. Combined, we should have roughly four hundred able-bodied nin. We'll hit River Country from the north."

Four hundred? I did the math in my head, then did it again hoping I'd get a different answer. I didn't. Four hundred exhausted, beat-up Konoha nin against whatever River and Suna had waiting for them. I'd seen bar fights with better odds.

He continued. "Between your clones hitting from the east and my forces pressing from the north, River gets squeezed from two sides. And when Suna sends reinforcements from Wind Country to prop up River, they'll also have to deal with us. That buys your clones more room to operate without Suna's reserves coming down on them."

"River Country's going to have a lot more than four hundred guys waiting for you," I said carefully. Because ‘Orochimaru-san, with all due respect, that's four hundred guys walking into a blender’ is technically honest but not exactly feedback that keeps working relationships healthy.

"I'm aware of the numbers." His tone didn't change. "But River's forces won't be concentrated. A significant portion will be deployed alongside Suna and Iwa in the pursuit of the Third, and the rest will be spread across their own territory managing logistics and holding positions. If we strike fast and pick our targets well, four hundred is sufficient to cause meaningful disruption. We don't need to conquer River Country. We just need to pull their attention and force them to respond while your clones do the real damage down th line."

I still didn't love the odds, or them real flesh and blood getting involved. But Orochimaru didn't need me to explain his own odds to him. The guy was a genius. If he was walking into a bad situation with bad numbers, it was because he'd already decided the payoff justified it. And honestly, he was probably right. Four hundred men with Orochimaru and Tsunade leading them wasn't the same as four hundred men with anyone else.

"Alright," I said. "Just make sure Tsunade-sensei stays in one piece."

"I'll do my best." The corners of his mouth twitched. "Though historically, she's better at keeping herself alive than anyone around her."

"Fair point." I paused. "I've still got some clones with her from the Hanzo fight. If things go sideways, they'll get her out."

"She won't appreciate being extracted against her will."

"She can yell at me about it after she's alive to yell."

We stood there for another moment, not saying anything. Two people about to walk in opposite directions into two different messes, each privately convinced the other's plan had a decent chance of going sideways.

"One more thing," Orochimaru said. "I'll send word to Minoru Senju about the Third's situation. And I'll dispatch a summon to Konoha requesting reinforcements to intercept the enemy pursuit force in Fire Country."

I nodded. "Nice. Between the reinforcements, my clones hitting them from behind, and whatever home defense Konoha can scrape together, that should be enough to box them in."

"Should be," he agreed. "Assuming everything goes according to plan."

"Hey, we're still alive after fighting Hanzo. How much worse can it get?"

"We'll see." He turned to leave, then stopped. "Shinji."

"Yeah?"

He didn't turn around. "Don't die."

"You too, Orochimaru-san."

He didn't answer that. He just kept walking, gathering up the able-bodied shinobi with a few quiet words and sharp gestures. Somewhere in the shuffle, a sensor jonin Orochimaru had picked out ended up trailing behind me. Within minutes the camp was splitting apart like a cell dividing. His group headed north, toward Tsunade. My clones fanned out in every direction, half of them breaking east toward Fire Country to backstab the pursuit force, the rest falling in around me as we turned south and west.

Toward River Country.

Toward whatever was waiting on the other side of a border that was about to have a very bad night.

…

We hit the River Country border sometime after dark. The terrain shifted gradually, Fire Country's dense forests giving way to thinner woods and rocky, uneven ground. River Country wasn't a desert like Wind Country, but it wasn't exactly lush either. Drier, rougher, with sparse vegetation clinging to hillsides and shallow rivers cutting through narrow valleys. You could feel the change in the air, less humidity, more dust, and the roads got worse fast.

I kept moving past the border without stopping. And about an hour into River Country, I glanced to my right and noticed two guys keeping pace with me. Neither of them were clones, which made them immediately stand out in a sea of my own face. One was Ryota, the Intelligence Root guy from earlier, snd the other was a jonin I didn't recognize at all.

I stared at the second guy for a solid ten seconds.

"...Who are you again?"

The jonin looked at me, then at Ryota, then back at me.

"Kosuke," he said. "Sensor type. Orochimaru-san assigned me to assist you." A pause. "I told you this at the camp."

"Did you?"

"Yes. You nodded and everything."

"Huh." I scratched my cheek. "Sorry about that. Mind's been elsewhere."

"We noticed," Ryota said flatly.

"Shinji-san." Kosuke's head snapped to the left, his whole body going rigid. "Something's wrong with your clones. There's a group about two klicks northwest. I'm picking up combat, and signatures are dropping fast."

I turned to the cluster of second-gen clones running alongside me. "Anybody want to fill me in on that?"

One of them glanced over. "Vanguard squad found a cave network. Had a bunch of River-nin guarding the entrance. Six, maybe eight."

"Had?"

"Had." The clone shrugged. "They're done. Clones are sweeping the inside right now to see if there's anything worth reporting."

"See?" I looked back at Kosuke. "Nothing to worry about." Though I had to admit, having a sensor around was pretty useful. Orochimaru made a decent call sending this guy along.

Kosuke stared at me for a moment, then looked at Ryota like he was searching for solidarity. Ryota gave him a look that said "don't bother."

We ran in silence for maybe thirty seconds before Kosuke's head twitched again.

"Shinji-san. That cave from before, over sixty signatures just arrived at the location. Your clones there are..." He paused, his brow furrowing. "Gone."

I glanced at the second-gen clone beside me. He nodded before I even asked. "Yeah. Lost them. Whole squad just went dark."

"So it wasn't just some random hideout," Ryota muttered.

I mean, obviously. You don't park sixty guys on top of a cave unless there's something in it worth guarding. Whatever my clones stumbled into, the original guards were just the welcome mat. The real security showed up after the noise started.

"Send ten squads," I said to the clone.

"Ten?" Ryota looked at me. "If sixty men just wiped your first group—"

"One squad is ten clones. Ten squads is a hundred bodies walking through the front door." I shrugged. "The first squad walked in blind and didn't know what they were dealing with. These ones will. Honestly, I'd feel bad for those sixty guys if they weren't actively trying to kill me."

The clone beside me didn't waste a second. He cupped his hands and shouted down the line. "I need ten squads northwest, two klicks out! Cave full of hostiles, at least sixty of them, and they already wiped a squad that went in, so go in expecting a real fight!" A hundred clones broke formation without a word, peeling off from the main group and disappearing into the dark at full sprint.

Ten minutes later, the terrain turned hilly and uneven, scattered with low brush and the occasional cluster of trees that looked like they'd given up on growing any taller. Rocky ridgelines cut across the horizon in jagged lines. Stars overhead, bright and cold, and a thin slice of moon hung low, casting just enough light to make the shadows between the hills look deeper than they probably were.

A clone dropped in from the treeline, falling into step beside me. "Hey, Boss. Got something interesting about three klicks south. Looks like a farming village. But there's a building in there that doesn't fit the rest. Way too solid, way too big. Looks purpose-built for storage. Oh, and there's nin crawling all over the place."

I glanced at Kosuke. He was already forming a hand sign, brow furrowed in concentration. A few seconds passed.

"He's right," he said, opening his eyes. "Approximately two hundred signatures. Multiple squads stationed in and around the village. Some clustered near the center, others along the perimeter.”

Two hundred men guarding a farming village. Which meant supplies. Probably a minor collection point, somewhere River funneled food and resources from the surrounding countryside before shipping it to the front.

I didn't give the order right away.

Because a garrison meant soldiers. But a farming village meant civilians. Families. People who had nothing to do with this war except the bad luck of living somewhere strategically convenient. Sending hundreds of clones in there to burn the place down would accomplish the mission, sure. It would also accomplish a lot of things that weren't going to look great on my conscience. The supply depot, if there was one, would be mixed in with civilian structures. Storage buildings next to homes. Soldiers billeted in farmhouses. You couldn't separate one from the other without time I didn't have.

"Jonin Shinji, what are you waiting for?"

Ryota was frowning at me. He was looking at me the way someone looks at a coworker who won't stop procrastinating when there's a deadline in five minutes. Apparently my hesitation had rubbed him the wrong way.

"That's a major supply point," he said. "Every hour you waste hesitating is an hour their forces in Fire Country stay fed. You said it yourself. Hit everything. So we should hit it as soon as possible."

I blinked. Did he just... did this guy just tell me what to do?

This guy. This half-dead, barely-patched-together Intelligence grunt who I'd let tag along out of charity was standing here giving me orders. Two hours ago he couldn't stand without wobbling. Now he's got perfect posture and a tone that says he thinks he's in charge. Who does this guy think he is? I've fought a Kage. I've built an army from scratch in a single night. And some no-name pencil pusher who got his intel from a clipboard thinks he gets to tell me when and where to attack?

Danzo really needed to raise his hiring standards.

"Hey, intel boy." I tilted my head. "Genuine question here. At what point in this mission did you get promoted from 'guy who gives me intel' to 'guy who tells me what to do'?"

The color left his face. "I wasn't— that's not what I meant— I'm simply pointing out that—"

"You're pointing pretty aggressively for a guy I've been keeping alive out of generosity."

I smiled at him. Gently. And something about that gentle part made him take a step back.

He stopped talking. Whatever he was going to say next died somewhere between his brain and his mouth. His eyes went to my face, then to the clones around us, then back to my face, and I watched the math happen in real time. Hundreds of clones. One of him. Middle of enemy territory. Miles from anyone who'd care if he disappeared.

"You know what's funny?" I said, still smiling. "I've met guys like you before. Loyal to a fault. Real dedicated. Except it's never to the people standing next to them." I tilted my head. "Must be exhausting, taking orders from someone who treats people like tools. But hey, I guess some dogs don't mind the leash."

Something behind his eyes snapped. The fear was there for a second, and then it wasn't. It burned out and what replaced it was the cold, flat nothing of a man who'd just realized he wasn't walking away from this. And Root agents didn't go quietly.

He went for his kunai. Credit where it's due, the guy was fast. Faster than a guy who pushed papers for a living. Would've been impressive if the ground wasn't about to eat his ankle.

A hand burst from the ground and locked around his ankle. Ryota went down hard, face-first into the dirt, kunai skittering away, and before he could even process what had grabbed him, the ground swallowed him up to his waist. The earth clone dragged him down fast, bones grinding against rock and dirt. He screamed, clawing at the ground, and the clone standing behind him walked over casually, grabbed a fistful of his hair, tilted his head back, and drove a kunai through the base of his skull. Ryota went limp. The clone let go, and the body sank the rest of the way into the dirt like it had never been there.

A Root agent with no intel left to trade is just a spy with a front-row seat. And I don't do encores.

Kosuke looked like someone had just slapped him with a fish. Mouth open, eyes wide, body locked in awkward half-stance of a man who wanted to run but couldn't remember how his legs worked. His gaze bounced between me and the bloody patch of ground where Ryota had been, clearly hoping for an explanation that would make any of this okay.

"Wh—" His voice cracked. "What did you just— he was— that was a Konoha shinobi!"

"Nah." I started walking again. "Spy."

"A sp— what do you mean a spy?" Kosuke's voice jumped an octave. "You can't just do that! He was with us! He was Intelligence Division!"

"He was a lot of things." I scratched the back of my head. "Intelligence Division wasn't one of them.”

"But Orochimaru-san let him—"

"Orochimaru-san got played. It happens. The guy had good intel and a convincing limp. That's all you need to get through the door." I shrugged. "Once the intel dried up, all he had left was bad attitude and a habit of telling me what to do. And I don't take orders from people I don't trust."

"You— he—" Kosuke swallowed hard. "You just killed a Konoha shinobi. Without a trial. Without any kind of— you can't just do that!"

"Eh, don't sweat it," I said, flashing him a smile. "You're actual Konoha. You've got absolutely nothing to worry about." I tilted my head, still smiling. "You are actual Konoha, right?"

The smile stayed on my face. Kosuke stared at it. Around us, a hundred clones with my face stared at him too. A hundred copies of the same smile. The same eyes. All watching. All waiting for his answer. His legs started shaking first. Then his hands. Then all of him. He nodded so fast I thought his neck might snap. "Yes. Yes. Born and raised. Academy class of— I can give you my registration number, my sensei's name, my—"

"Hey, relax. I believe you." I clapped him on the shoulder, which made him flinch, and turned to the clone beside me. "Sent thirty squads to that village. Kill every shinobi there and destroy all the supplies."

The clone cupped his hands and not long after three hundred clones broke from the formation and surged south.

"Boss." One of the second-gen clones beside me spoke up. "We're really torching all the supplies? There's civilians in that village. That's their food we're burning."

"It's a farming village," I said. "They've got fields, they've got livestock, they've got a whole forest right there. Yeah, they're gonna tighten their belts for a while, and yeah, they're gonna talk shit about us, but they'll live." I glanced at him. "You know how much two hundred shinobi eat? Way more than a bunch of farmers, I'll tell you that. Pull those guys out of the picture and the village probably ends up with more food than they started with." I spread my hands. "See? I'm practically a humanitarian. Liberating the enemy's own people from their grocery bills. Somebody should write a ballad about me.”

I called a halt shortly after.

We'd pushed deep enough into River Country. Close enough to the cluster of targets Ryota had mapped out that my clones could hit any of them within a couple hours, but not so close that we'd trip over one of them accidentally before the operation kicked off. This would be our temporary headquarters. The nerve center of the entire operation.

Which, in practice, looked like a bunch of guys sitting under some scraggly trees in a shallow valley.

"Alright," I said to the clones gathered around me. "You know the drill. Keep producing third-gens and send them out in squads."

A chorus of nods. Then most of them sat down and started meditating, drawing on what chakra they had to spawn the next generation. Within minutes, new clones were popping into existence in steady waves, getting their bearings, receiving silent orders from the clones who made them, and vanishing into the night. Squad after squad after squad, flowing outward like ripples in a pond.

I kept about two hundred second-gens close. Bodyguards, basically. Their job was to sit tight, watch the perimeter, and keep the clone factory running. I stopped producing new ones myself once I hit that number. Not because I was out of chakra, but because I'd never pushed this far before. There was no manual for "what happens when you have a few thousand copies of yourself running around at the same time." The clones dying, the memories flooding back, hundreds of them, maybe thousands eventually, all crashing into one brain at once. I had no idea what that would do to me. Headaches? Blackouts? Something worse? The thought sat in the back of my mind like a low buzz I couldn't quite shake. But it had to be done, and this number felt like enough. No point in going further when I could already hit every target on the list.

With the machine running, I finally let myself sit down.

One of my clones had built a fire in a shallow dip between two rocks, small enough to not be visible from a distance, big enough to remind my body what warmth felt like. River Country nights weren't brutal, but sit still long enough in that dry valley wind and you'd start wishing you'd packed a blanket. A clone tossed me a stick with some meat on it. Whatever it was, it smelled edible.

"Where'd you even get this?" I asked, turning the stick over the fire.

"Caught something about an hour ago." The clone shrugged. "Pretty sure it's a rabbit. Like, seventy percent sure. Maybe sixty." He paused. "Look, by the time I got a good look at it I was already mid-swing, so I just went with it."

I held the stick up and gave the meat a long, suspicious look. "So what you're telling me is there's a chance I'm eating rat right now."

"I'm telling you there's a great chance you're not."

I squinted at him. He smiled at me. With my face. God, was I always this annoying? Sigh.

I took a bite. It wasn't bad, actually. A little gamey, a little dry, but the fire had done its job and the outside had a decent char. "...It's rabbit," I decided.

"See? Told you. Nothing to worry about."

A few of the nearby clones chuckled. Others were eating their own mystery meat in silence, staring at the fire or the stars or the dark valleys stretching out around us.

One of the clones sitting across from me spoke up. "Hey, boss."

"Yeah?"

"You ever think about what you'd be doing right now if there wasn't a war?"

I chewed slowly, considering. "Probably sleeping."

The clone rolled his eyes. "Yeah, yeah, it's midnight, very funny. You know what I mean."

I did know what he meant. But thinking about "what if" was a trap. A comfortable, warm, completely useless trap. What if there wasn't a war. What if I was back in Konoha. What if I was in my apartment right now making tempura instead of sitting in a valley in River Country eating alleged rabbit. Fun to imagine, sure. But imagining didn't stop the enemies. Imagining didn't keep the Hokage alive. Imagining was just a nice way to stop paying attention to reality, and reality had a habit of killing people who stopped paying attention.

I smiled at him. "Ask me again when we win."

The clone opened his mouth to push it, then seemed to think better of it.

I turned to another clone sitting off to my right, the one who'd been quietly chewing on his own stick of maybe-rabbit. "Hey. Got a job for you."

"Lucky me."

"From now on, you're my intelligence handler. Every time a third-gen pops, the second-gen it's linked to gets a head full of memories. I need someone collecting all of that, picking out what matters, and handing me a clean summary. Enemy positions, supply info, anything weird." I jerked my thumb at the two hundred clones spread across the camp. "I'm not playing twenty questions with every single one of these guys. That's your problem now."

The clone stared at me. "So you want me to babysit two hundred clones so you don't have to."

"Exactly. Congratulations, you just got promoted."

"To what?"

"Something cool. I'll figure it out later."

"Boss!" A clone from the outer perimeter came sprinting in. "We've got eyes on a large force moving toward the farming village. Hundreds of them, coming from the west."

Kosuke, who'd been sitting by the fire doing his best to be invisible since the Ryota incident, formed a quick hand sign and closed his eyes. A few seconds later he opened them. "He's right. Estimated three hundred signatures moving fast. Likely reinforcements from a nearby garrison." He looked at me. "Want me to do a wider sweep? See if there's more coming from other directions?"

"No need." I looked at my newly promoted intelligence handler, who was already setting down his stick of rabbit. "Send twenty squads to reinforce the village. That's enough to handle five hundred between the ones already there and the new batch."

"Just twenty?" Kosuke asked.

"The village isn't the interesting part anymore." I stared into the fire, thinking. Three hundred reinforcements don't just appear out of nowhere. They came from somewhere. A base, a garrison, another supply point. And wherever that was, it just lost three hundred men. "Those reinforcements pulled out of a position to rush to that village. Which means right now, somewhere to the west, there's a target sitting wide open with barely anyone guarding it." I looked at the handler clone. "That's your first real job. I need to know where those three hundred came from. Get the word out to any third-gen scouts in that area. Find me that position."

The clone nodded, already on his feet.

"And once we find it?"

"We take it. Then we find the next one. That's how this works." I took a bite of my rabbit. "They send reinforcements, they weaken somewhere else. We hit the weak spot, they pull from another location to cover it. And every time they move, they open up something new." I chewed. "It's a game of whack-a-mole, except we're the mole and there's thousands of us."

He pulled three second-gens from the nearest cluster and gave them the rundown. They took off south without a word, sprinting toward the village to redirect the squads in the area. Not exactly high-tech, but it worked. Radio towers would've been nice, but running clones who already knew the order was the next best thing.

He turned back to me. "Anything else?"

"Yeah." I picked up my meat stick. "Find me a better title than 'intelligence handler.' It sounds like a desk job."

"You literally just gave me a desk job."

"It's outdoors. That automatically makes it not a desk job."

He gave me a look. I gave him one back.

"Alright, jokes aside. There's more." I took a bite and started counting on my fingers. "First. Ryota's intel is hours old at best. Supply depots move, garrisons rotate, positions shift. I don't want us hitting empty buildings. Send scout squads to every target on the list."

The handler clone was already memorizing. Good. That was the whole point of him.

"Second. The pursuit force chasing the Hokage. I need to know how deep they've gone into Fire Country. The whole plan hinges on timing. We don't pull the trigger on the supply line strikes until they're past the point of easy retreat." I looked at the cluster of second-gens near the edge of camp. Some of them were the ones whose third-gens had been spawned specifically for the eastern force, the hundreds of clones currently making their way toward Fire Country to backstab the Kazekage and Onoki's pursuit from behind. "You guys. Your third-gens heading east. As they feed you memories, pass everything to the handler. Troop movements, distance from the border, pace. I need a clear picture of how far in the enemy has pushed."

A few nods from the cluster.

"Third. Early warning network. I want clones on every approach to this camp. Every ridge, every valley, every trail within five kilometers. If anything bigger than a deer starts heading our way, I want to know about it ten minutes before it gets here. We're deep in enemy territory and sitting still. That makes us a target if anyone stumbles across us."

"Got it," the handler said. "Scouts to verify targets, tracking on the pursuit force, and a perimeter net around camp. What else?"

"One more thing. Orochimaru and Tsunade. They're pushing into River from the north with four hundred men. I need clones shadowing their movement, keep me updated on where they are and when they're in position.”

"So you want me to manage recon on every target, monitor the eastern front through second-gen memory feeds, maintain a five-kilometer perimeter around camp, AND track a separate Konoha force moving through the north." The handler stared at me. "Any other SMALL tasks you want to throw on the pile?"

"Yeah, when the scouts come back with confirmed targets, you're organizing the strike force assignments too. Group the targets by proximity so we can hit clusters at the same time."

"Wonderful." The handler let out a long breath through his nose. "You know, when you said 'promoted,' I thought maybe I'd get a cooler job. Like vanguard commander. Or squad leader. Something with a bit of flair."

"You're the most important clone in this entire operation. Every decision I make runs through you first."

"Yeah, but nobody's going to write a ballad about the guy who organized the spreadsheets."

"War isn't won by the guys swinging swords," I said. "It's won by the guys who make sure the swords are in the right place at the right time. That's you."

He looked at me for a long moment. "...That was almost inspiring."

"I have my moments."

The handler clone sat back down, then paused. "So. Not to ruin the moment, but we might have a problem."

"What?"

"We already hit a cave, attacked a village garrison, and wiped out three hundred reinforcements." He gestured south. "Whoever sent those reinforcements is expecting a report. When they don't get one, they're going to know something is very wrong in this area. That's a lot of noise for an operation that's supposed to rely on coordinated surprise."

I took a bite of rabbit and nodded. "Yeah, I know. I've been thinking about that since the cave. The vanguard was always going to bump into something. You can't push thousands of clones through enemy territory without making noise. I was hoping we'd get further before it happened, but this was always a possibility."

Either way, the clock was ticking now.

The next hour was a blur of orders and updates. At some point I bumped my cap from two hundred second-gens to four hundred. The operation was growing faster than I'd planned, and two hundred wasn't cutting it anymore. Scout reports flooding in, strike forces needing coordination, the perimeter net, the eastern army, Orochimaru's force. Too many threads for too few clones. As for third-gens, we'd passed five thousand somewhere in the last forty minutes and hadn't slowed down. My handler had officially transitioned from "reporting numbers" to "gesturing vaguely and saying 'many.'" Each of the four hundred second-gens was cranking out third-gens like their existence depended on it, which technically it did since that was literally why I made them. The result was an ever-expanding cloud of expendable mes spreading across River Country, and I'd lost the ability to visualize the actual scale about two thousand clones ago.

So I parked myself by the fire and started grinding. Twenty clones, quick breather, twenty more. Repeat until your hands go numb and your brain checks out. Which mine did, somewhere around the sixth batch. My fingers kept forming signs out of pure habit while the rest of me drifted into that weird half-awake state where you're not really thinking about anything but you're not asleep either.

I might've stayed like that for a while if a second-gen clone hadn't suddenly dropped to its knees ten feet away from me, hands clamped over its head, and popped.

The memories slammed into me like a wall.

Not one clone's worth. Not even ten. This second-gen had been collecting third-gen death memories for some time. Every vanguard squad that got wiped out, every scout that ran into a patrol and didn't make it back, every skirmish and ambush and bad luck encounter, all of it stored up inside one clone like water behind a dam. And the dam just broke.

I grabbed my skull with both hands. My vision split. I was here by the fire. I was in a forest being stabbed by a River jonin. I was on a ridgeline watching a supply convoy. I was in a ditch with a kunai in my throat. I was in six, ten, twenty places at once, dying in all of them, feeling every blade and every impact and every last second before the lights went out.

Then another second-gen popped.

Then another.

Hundreds of death memories in maybe five seconds. Hundreds of clones' final moments crashing into my brain like waves hitting a seawall, one after another after another, each one carrying a lifetime of sensory information compressed into a single agonizing burst.

This. This was what I'd been afraid of. Not chakra drain. Not exhaustion. This. Information overload. The human brain wasn't built to experience hundreds of deaths simultaneously. Mine was doing it anyway, and it was letting me know exactly how it felt about that.

I bent forward, palms flat on the ground, and breathed.

In. Out. In. Out.

The forest faded. The ditch faded. The ridgeline faded. Slowly, painfully, the world narrowed back down to one place. One body. One campfire. One pair of hands pressed into rocky River Country dirt.

My vision cleared. Mostly. The edges were still fuzzy, and there was a ringing in my ears that wasn't going away anytime soon.

"Boss." The handler clone was crouching beside me, looking concerned. Which was weird, seeing my own face worried about me. "You good?"

I rubbed my temples, waiting for the flood to sort itself out. The farming village was done. My clones had rolled through the garrison and burned the supplies, but the enemy second reinforcements had made it ugly. Street fighting between wooden buildings, clones popping in narrow alleys, explosions lighting up the dark. We'd won, but it cost close to a hundred clones to do it.

The problem was what came after.

The Forward Command Post to the west had noticed. Of course it had. You don't lose a village garrison and three hundred reinforcements without someone up the chain asking questions. And whoever was running that post didn't bother asking. They just sent everyone. The scouts I'd dispatched to find the post ran into a wall of bodies coming the other direction. Hundreds of them, moving fast, headed straight for the village. My surviving clones there were exhausted and thinned out. The scouts barely made it back to warn them before the first wave hit. They didn't stand a chance.

Which meant hundreds of third-gens all died in rapid succession. And every single one of those death memories slammed into the same second-gen clone sitting twenty feet away from me. Hundreds of lives ending, one after another, bang bang bang, all flooding into one brain that was never built to handle that kind of volume. The clone grabbed its head, dropped to its knees, and popped before it could even scream. And then all of it, every memory the second-gen had collected, plus the tidal wave that killed it, hit me.

I sat there for a few seconds, breathing through the worst of it. The handler was crouching beside me, saying something.

"...good? Boss?"

"Shit," I said. My voice sounded far away. "What's the status?"

He hesitated for a second, then went into it. "Root guy's intel was mostly good. Couple targets moved, two straight-up gone, but we've got eyes on thirty-seven across River Country. Supply depots, relay stations, staging grounds, you name it."

"And the pursuit force?"

"Well past the old bridge. Three days into Fire Country, give or take." He paused. "That's a long walk back, especially without supplies.”

Three days deep. Past the old bridge. That was the trigger. That was exactly what Orochimaru told me to wait for. Too far in, too stretched thin to pull back.

"What about Orochimaru and Tsunade?"

"Last report had them moving south together, heading for River Country's northern border." He scratched his chin. "That was about two hours ago, so they should be making contact any time now."

Not perfectly synchronized. But close enough.

I pushed myself upright. The headache was pounding behind my eyes, a dull, heavy pressure that made everything look slightly overexposed. I wiped the sweat off my forehead and looked at the handler.

"Hit them."

"All thirty-seven?"

"No, just the ones I don't like. Yes, all thirty-seven. At the same time."

"Alright, alright." He stood up. "What's the plan for after? Because sitting here after launching thirty-seven attacks is basically painting a target on our foreheads."

"Which is why we won't be here. The second everything kicks off, HQ relocates. We keep leapfrogging deeper into River, one hour max per stop. Hold fifty squads back as reserves for wherever things go sideways. Third-gens that make it back from their missions form up around us as a screen. Keep the early warning net running and moving with us. Basically, don't stop, we stay a moving target."

"Got it." The handler gave me a look. "One more thing. When all thirty-seven go off, every clone death is coming back to you through the chain. The village was one target and it almost knocked you out. This is thirty-seven."

Yeah. I'd done that math already. Wished I hadn't. But then again, there was no way all thirty-seven targets were as heavily defended as that village. Some of them had to be lightly guarded relay stations or undersupplied depots with like, three guys and a dog. Right? Statistically, at least a few of these had to be easy wins.

"I'll be fine."

"You don't look fine right now and nothing's even started yet."

"Good thing you're not my doctor." I waved him off. "Go."

He went.

I sat there for about two seconds before something clicked.

"Hey. Get back here."

The handler turned around with a look on his face that said he'd been expecting this. "What now?"

"The command post. The one that sent the counterattack force to the farming village." I rubbed my temple. "They just moved a huge chunk of their men to retake a village we already burned. There's nothing left there. The supplies are ash. The garrison is dead. They sent hundreds of soldiers to guard a pile of smoking rubble."

The handler's expression shifted as the math hit him. "Which means the command post is even more exposed than before."

"Way more. They sent three hundred the first time, and now they sent even more to retake the village. Whatever they've got left at the post is scraps. Hopefully." I held up a finger. "Add it to the target list. When the thirty-seven go off, hit the command post too. Make it thirty-eight.

"Now go. For real this time." I shooed him away with the back of my hand.

He went. For real this time.

…