Hidden Leaf, Hidden Talents 92 (Patreon)

Shin sat beside the thin futon, eyes on Yahiko's mother's chest as it rose and fell in uneven little stutters.

The tent was quiet beyond that. She was still out cold, breathing in short, rough pulls. Yahiko had fallen asleep next to her at some point during the night, one hand locked around her fingers like he was afraid she'd disappear if he let go. His cheek was smooshed against the edge of the futon, mouth hanging open, a thin line of drool connecting his lip to the fabric.

Shin looked over her injuries again and sighed.

On the outside, she was a mess. Swollen eye, split lip, bruises crawling up her arms in shades of purple and yellow that would take a couple weeks to fade on their own. Painful, sure. But none of it was going to kill her.

The ribs were another story.

She'd been kicked while she was down, and whoever did it wasn't holding back. That was hours ago, and she still hadn't opened her eyes. Could be shock, could be exhaustion, could be something a lot worse.

Best case scenario was bruised ribs, which would hurt like hell for a few weeks but she'd survive. Worst case was a broken rib that had dug into something soft and important, lung or abdomen, internal damage that was completely survivable if you had a medic and completely fatal if you didn't. And in a refugee slum where medical care amounted to "good luck, try not to die loudly," she didn't.

Shin ran a quick diagnostic, keeping his chakra low enough that a nin would have to be inside the tent to notice. And sure enough, it was the worst case.

One rib was cracked clean through, and the broken end had shifted just enough to nick the lining of her left lung. Not a full puncture, but the tissue was swelling and there was fluid building where fluid wasn't supposed to be. Give it another twelve hours without treatment and the swelling alone would start compressing her breathing further. After that, it was a countdown.

So he got to work.

Keeping his chakra suppressed while doing iryōninjutsu was like trying to thread a needle while wearing oven mitts. Everything in his training told him to open up, let the chakra flow, get it done properly. But properly meant detectable, and detectable in Amegakure meant getting found. And getting found meant dispelling, which meant every third-gen clone he'd spawned outside the village would pop with him, which meant the entire Nagato operation would collapse.

So he worked slow. Painstakingly, frustratingly slow. The healing that should've taken twenty minutes stretched into an hour. Realigning the rib fragment. Sealing the nick in the lung lining. Draining the fluid buildup. Reducing the internal swelling around the injury site. Each step done with the barest trickle of medical chakra, just enough to do the job and not a drop more.

By the time he finished, the sky outside the tent had gone from black to pre-dawn grey, and his hands ached from maintaining fine control for so long.

But she'd live.

Shin pulled his hand back and flexed his fingers. She was breathing properly now. Deep, even, none of that shallow desperate pulling from before. Just a woman sleeping. The rib was set, the lung was clear, and the gap between "alive" and "dead by morning" had widened considerably.

He left the external wounds alone.

The bruises, the swollen eye, the split lip. He could've cleaned all of that up in about three minutes if he wasn't worried about anyone asking questions. But a woman who went to sleep looking like she'd been beaten half to death and woke up the next morning without a scratch? In a slum full of refugees who had nothing to do but gossip and stare? That would raise flags. Big, loud, extremely inconvenient flags that would eventually reach the ears of people Shin did not want paying attention to this corner of the refugee quarter.

So the surface stayed messy. She'd heal naturally. It would hurt, but she'd manage. And nobody would wonder why a miracle happened overnight in a place where miracles didn't exist.

He sat back against the tent pole and waited. Morning came slow and grey, same as every other morning in Ame. The sky outside the tent got a shade lighter, and the slum started making noise. Coughs, murmurs, something metal dragging across concrete, a baby wailing in the distance.

Yahiko's mom woke up first. Her eyes opened slowly, barely slits, and the first thing she did was turn her head toward her son. Her fingers tightened around his, just a little. Yahiko stirred a few seconds later, probably felt the squeeze in his sleep. He blinked, looked at her face, and froze. The noise that came out of him was somewhere between a sob and a laugh and a hiccup.

"Mom? Mom, you're awake!"

She swallowed. "Yahiko..."

"You're okay! You're okay, right? You're talking, so you must be okay. Are you okay? Does it hurt? Don't move, just stay still, I'll get water, I'll—"

"Yahiko." Her fingers squeezed his. Weakly, but they squeezed. "I'm alright."

She wasn't, really. Still looked like hell. But she was awake and talking, and for Yahiko, that was the whole world right now. He pressed his forehead against her shoulder and shook, and her free hand came up to rest on the back of his head.

The moment was interrupted by a voice from outside the tent.

"Yahiko? You in there?"

Shin knew that voice, the man from last night who'd had the unfortunate job of telling Yahiko what happened to his mom.

Yahiko wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and ducked out through the tent flap. "Ojisan! Mom's awake!"

"She is?" The man's voice carried genuine relief. "That's... that's really good to hear. I was worried all night."

"She's still hurt, but she's talking and everything. She's gonna be fine, I know it."

"Good. Good, I'm glad." A pause. "Listen, Yahiko. I, uh... I found something that might help."

"Help with what?"

"With everything. Your mom, food, the situation you're in." The man's voice dropped, the way adults' voices always dropped when they were about to say something they felt bad about. "There's work. Somebody's offering jobs to people from the slums."

Shin's ears perked up. He stayed in the tent, listening.

Yahiko perked up immediately. "What kind of work?"

"I don't know the details yet. Just that there's some guy hiring, and he's not too picky about who shows up. I figured... well, your mom's in no shape to work, and you two need to eat."

"I can do it. Whatever it is, I can do it."

"Whoa, slow down. I'm not the one you need to convince. Your mom gets the final say on this, not me."

They ducked back inside and the man explained what he'd heard. Someone with money was looking for workers from the refugee quarter.

Yahiko's mother shook her head before he'd even finished.

"No. Absolutely not. You're not sending my son to work."

"Well," the man rubbed the back of his neck. "Believe me, I wouldn't be bringing this up if things weren't..."

"I don't care. He's not working, end of discussion. He should be..." She tried to push herself up and immediately regretted it, sucking air through her teeth as her ribs reminded her they existed. "He's too young for this."

"Mom." Yahiko dropped down next to her. "There's no food. It's all gone. And you can barely sit up right now. Just let me do this."

"Yahiko—"

"I'm not five, Mom. I've got two arms and two legs and I know how to use them. It's just carrying stuff around, how dangerous can that be?" He looked at the man. "Tell her, ojisan."

The man hesitated. "I mean... yeah. It should just be regular work. Moving things, cleaning up. Nothing unusual."

Yahiko's mother looked at the man. Then at Yahiko. Then at the ceiling, which had no answers for her. She wanted to say no. Everything about her face said no. But her empty tent and her empty stomach and her busted ribs were all saying otherwise.

"I'll be careful, okay?” Yahiko said. “I'll do the work, grab the money, and come straight home. Promise."

A long silence.

"If anything happens to him—"

"I'll be right there with him," the man said quietly. "I was going to go myself anyway. I'll keep an eye on him."

She closed her eyes. The hand on Yahiko's head tightened briefly, then let go.

"Come back before dark."

Yahiko grinned like he'd just been handed a festival ticket.

The man straightened up and was about to leave when Shin spoke from his corner.

"Can I come too?"

The man jumped. He'd clearly forgotten there was a third person in the tent, which was fair. Shin had been sitting in that corner so long he was practically part of the furniture.

"You want to work?" the man asked.

"Yahiko shared his food with me yesterday." Shin shrugged. "Figured I should return the favor."

The man scratched his head. "Up to you, kid. I can ask the foreman if they need an extra pair of hands."

Yahiko looked back at his mom. "See? Shin's looking out for me. You don't have to worry, Mom. We're a team now." He grabbed Shin's arm. "A duo. A dynamic duo. We'll make twice the money, do twice the work, and before you know it we'll have enough to get you real medicine and a better place to sleep. Easy."

His mom's eyes went glassy. She squeezed his hand and nodded, and for a second nobody said anything.

Then Yahiko ruined it by turning to Shin with that grin. "Shin and Yahiko, the unstoppable team of—"

"Stop."

"—of best friends who definitely won't leave each other!"

"I will leave right now."

The man chuckled. "Fine by me. More hands means more pay, right? Just stay close and don't cause trouble."

Yahiko stopped at the tent entrance, came back, and threw his arms around his mom. Neither of them said anything for a few seconds. Then she kissed his forehead and pushed him gently away.

"Come back before it gets dark."

"I will."

"Promise me."

"Promise."

She let him go, and he bounced out of the tent like the last thirty seconds hadn't happened. The man followed. Shin trailed behind them both.

Walking out of the slum and into the actual city was like stepping into a different world. Well, Ame was still Ame, but compared to the refugee quarter it might as well have been a different country. The streets were paved. The buildings had walls that weren't made of scrap metal and tarps. People walked around in actual clothes instead of whatever they'd been wearing when their villages burned down. Shops were open. Vendors sold things. There was even a food stall on one corner, and the smell of grilled fish hit both of them like a fist. Yahiko's stomach screamed. Shin's screamed back. He caught Yahiko’s collar and towed him along like a stubborn dog on a leash, Yahiko's sandals scraping the pavement the whole way.

The food smelled great. The welcome didn't.

It started the moment they left the slum. A woman carrying groceries saw them coming and crossed to the other side of the street. An old man sitting outside his shop watched them pass with his lip curled. Two teenage girls whispered to each other and one of them wrinkled her nose.

The universal language of "you don't belong here."

If Yahiko cared, it didn't last long. Being outside the slum for the first time since they arrived had him too distracted. His head kept swiveling, eyes jumping from shop to shop, and that hunched posture from the stares lasted about three seconds before curiosity won out.

"It's so much nicer out here," he said, not even bothering to lower his voice. "Shin, look, they've got a noodle shop. An actual noodle shop. With a roof and everything. I haven't had real noodles since we left home."

Unlike Yahiko, the man couldn't just shrug it off. This was the guy who'd gone out of his way to find work for all three of them, talked to the foreman, vouched for them, put his own reputation on the line so they'd have a shot at earning money. Back in his village, he'd been a normal person living a normal life, and nobody had ever looked at him like he was something stuck to the bottom of their shoe. His jaw tightened when the woman crossed the street. His eyes dropped when the old shopkeeper sneered. He kept walking, but each step was a little stiffer than the last, and his hands had balled into fists at his sides without him realizing it, and they stayed that way for the rest of the walk.

Fifteen minutes later, they reached the site. A clearing between buildings, an open patch of dirt that had probably been something nicer once. It was packed with people.

Slum people. Forty of them, give or take, standing in loose clusters and looking around with varying degrees of hope and suspicion. More than half were adults, gaunt and ragged, but a decent number were kids too. Old enough to carry things, young enough to be paid half as much for doing it.

The man told them to stick near the edge, keep their mouths shut, and wait. Some important person was coming to hand out jobs. Yahiko nodded and made a show of zipping his mouth shut. He'd be talking again inside of three minutes. Shin would bet money on it.

He scanned the crowd while they waited, and it took him about four seconds to spot two familiar faces near the middle. The kid from yesterday's mugging and his skinnier partner, both standing behind three adult men who looked exactly like what they were. Gang muscle. Big, mean, and running the slum for no reason other than nobody had gotten around to stopping them yet.

The fat kid saw him first. Their eyes met across the crowd, and Shin watched the exact moment recognition hit, a full-body flinch that started at his shoulders and ended at his knees. Shin smiled and gave him a friendly wave.

That made it worse. The fat kid grabbed his friend's arm and whispered something urgent, both of them staring at Shin with frozen panic. The other kid looked ready to bolt.

Then they remembered they had adults with them this time. The fat kid leaned over to one of the three men and started whispering fast, jerking his head in Shin's direction. The man listened, glanced at Shin, and smacked the fat kid on the back of the head. Probably something along the lines of "you got your ass kicked by that little runt?"

But then the three men all looked over. Sizing him up. One of them started walking toward Shin and Yahiko, and whatever he had in mind, Shin was pretty sure it didn't involve a handshake.

A hand from one of the other two caught his shoulder. Words were exchanged, too quiet to hear from this distance but easy enough to read from body language alone. The second man was shaking his head. Saying something about timing, or the place, or maybe just "not now, idiot, there's forty people watching." Whatever it was, the first man paused and nodded. Turned back around and went back to ignoring them.

Thirty minutes of standing around in the dirt later, the big shot finally showed up.

And he was... just some guy.

Shin didn't know what he'd been expecting. A wealthy merchant, maybe. A minor noble. Someone with bodyguards or fancy clothes or at least a decent haircut. What he got was a middle-aged Ame citizen with a receding hairline. A middleman maybe? The guy between the guy with money and the people desperate enough to work for almost none of it.

He gave a speech. It wasn't a good speech. Something about opportunity and hard work and being grateful for the chance to contribute to Amegakure's growth. When he got to the pay, he said the number like he was doing them a favor. Shin did the math. It was maybe a fifth of what a real laborer would make. Nobody complained. Nobody could afford to. Five minutes later they were all marching toward a construction site on the edge of the commercial district.

The job was exactly what Shin expected. Hauling. Lifting. Carrying. Moving things from one pile to a different pile and then sometimes moving them back when someone changed their mind. Bricks, lumber, buckets of wet mortar that weighed more than Yahiko. The adults got the heavier loads. The kids got everything else, which still wasn't light, but at least it was unlikely to crush them.

Yahiko went at it like he'd been waiting his whole life for someone to let him carry bricks. Grinning. Sweating. Chatting with every single person he passed. Making friends with the bricklayers. Asking the adults if he could try laying a brick.

Shin, meanwhile, worked quietly and kept his eyes open.

Which turned out to be necessary, because the three stooges had apparently decided that if they couldn't jump them in the open, they'd make their workday miserable instead.

They didn't waste time. One of the thugs "accidentally" bumped a bucket of mortar off a ledge, aiming for Shin's path below. Shin saw it coming from a mile away, shifted half a step to the left, and as he passed, gave the falling bucket the smallest possible flick with his foot. The bucket hit the ground, bounced sideways, skipped twice across the dirt like a stone on water, and launched its entire contents across a section of wall that three workers had just spent two hours finishing. Wet mortar splattered over fresh brickwork, ran down the surface in thick grey streaks, and pooled at the base in a growing puddle. The foreman spun around. The three workers stared at their ruined wall. Every head on the site turned toward the thug standing at the ledge with his arm still extended and guilt written across his face. The foreman's scream could probably be heard in the next district.

The second thug was smarter. He'd watched his buddy get destroyed by the foreman and decided to lay low. Shin almost respected the restraint.

So he decided to fix that.

It was easy, honestly. Almost embarrassingly easy. The thug was hauling lumber up to the scaffolding platform, stacking planks one by one. Shin waited until the guy was on his way back down for another load, then walked past the scaffolding with his own armful of bricks, and as he passed the base, his foot nudged a support wedge, barely a tap, nothing anyone would notice from a scrawny refugee kid just doing his job.

The wedge slid out about two inches. Not enough to collapse anything. Just enough to make the platform tilt slightly to one side. Slightly enough that the lumber stack up top, the one the thug had been building for the last hour, started to lean slowly and quietly, like a tree deciding which direction to fall.

The thug climbed back up with three more planks and added them to the pile. The pile said no thanks. Forty planks gave up their grip on the tilted platform all at once and avalanched off the edge, crashing into the work area below loud enough to make everyone on site flinch. Dust went up. Workers scattered. A sawhorse got obliterated. Three hours of somebody else's material sorting became a mountain of splintered chaos.

The thug stood on the platform, arms still holding the planks he'd been about to stack, staring down at the destruction with his mouth hanging open.

The foreman came storming over, veins in his neck doing things veins probably shouldn't do.

"I..." the thug started.

The foreman didn't let him finish. He grabbed the nearest worker and said, loud enough for the whole site to hear, "Get this piece of trash off my place."

"Please, sir, I swear it was an accident—"

"Do I look like I care?" The foreman's jaw was clenched so hard Shin could see the muscles jumping. "I went out of my way to hire you slum rats. Gave you work nobody else would give you. Paid you out of my own pocket. And this is what I get? This?"

Two workers grabbed the thug by the arms and hauled him down. What followed wasn't quick. They took their time with it, fists and boots, and nobody on site said a word. The foreman watched with his arms crossed. The other refugees stared at the ground. By the time the two workers were done, the thug was curled up in the dirt, shaking. The foreman walked over, looked down at him, and spat. It landed on the thug's shoulder. "Get out. Go back to your slum and starve with the rest of the rats. And if I ever see you near my site again, they won't stop next time."

The thug pulled himself up and limped toward the gate. Nobody helped. Nobody watched. He was already forgotten by the time he rounded the corner.

Except by Shin.

He waited a full minute, then set down his bricks, told Yahiko he needed to take a leak, and slipped away from the site without anyone noticing. The thug wasn't hard to follow. He moved slow, dragging one leg, stopping every few meters to lean against a wall and catch his breath. The route back to the slum was a straight line, and Shin kept enough distance between them that even a paranoid person wouldn't have spotted him. Not that the thug was being paranoid, he was too busy trying not to collapse.

Shin followed, quiet as a shadow. The guy limped back into the slum, turned down an alley behind a row of collapsed buildings, ducked through a gap in a corrugated metal wall, and disappeared into what looked like an old warehouse that had been converted into a living space. Or what passed for living space in the slums anyway, tarps over the holes in the ceiling, crates for furniture, and the faint smell of cooked rice drifting out through a gap in the wall.

Shin stopped at the edge of the alley and watched.

People trickled in and out through the gap. Young guys, older guys, some hauling stuff, some just walking around looking like they owned the place.

So this was gang headquarters. Not much to look at, but when your competition was a tarp and a prayer, a building with walls was basically a palace.

Shin spent the next few minutes circling the building, checking exits, counting heads, getting the layout. Two entrances, one in front and one around back. The back entrance was guarded by a teenager who was doing a terrible job of staying awake. Front entrance had more traffic but no dedicated guard, just people walking in and out. The walls were thin enough to hear conversation through, and at one point he caught the sound of someone laughing and someone else telling them to shut up.

Through a crack in the rear wall, he could see into the main room. A large open space with crates pushed against the walls, a cooking fire in one corner, and about a dozen people scattered around. Some eating. Some talking. Some doing absolutely nothing, which seemed to be the gang's primary activity.

And there, sitting in the center of it all on an upturned barrel, was a man who was very obviously the boss. Big. Not tall-big, just wide-big. Ate better than everyone around him and wasn't shy about proving it. He had a bowl of rice in one hand and chopsticks in the other, talking loudly to the two men flanking him about something that involved a lot of hand gestures and the occasional spray of rice from his mouth.

The beaten thug was already inside, slumped against the far wall getting patched up. The boss kept glancing over, annoyed but not enough to put down his rice.

Shin sized up the room. A dozen civilians. No training, no chakra, nothing he couldn't handle bare-handed. The plan was simple. Walk in, beat everyone into compliance, and turn the whole gang into his personal search party. These guys knew every block, every alley, every new face in the slum. Force them to find one red-haired kid and they'd probably have results by nightfall. Would it draw attention? Definitely. But memories from a clone near the village perimeter were nagging at him. Patrol rotations had doubled in the last few hours. Checkpoints that had been half-asleep yesterday were fully manned today. Ame shinobi who'd been lounging on rooftops were suddenly standing at attention. The whole village was tightening up like a fist, and Shin didn't know why. Could be Hanzo coming home. Could be a security sweep. Could be something else entirely. But whatever it was, the lazy, half-awake Amegakure he'd been slipping through for the past few days was waking up, and a village full of alert shinobi was a very different animal than one running on autopilot. No more time for the careful approach. As long as he got to Nagato before the window closed, swiped the eyes, and disappeared, the mess was someone else's problem.

He was already picking out which guy to hit first when a flash of red caught his eye.

A kid in the corner. Scrubbing the floor on hands and knees, wearing what looked like a maid's outfit, hair long enough to brush the ground.

Wait, Red hair?!

Shin's eyes snapped to it like a magnet. For one stupid, hopeful second, he thought he'd found his target. Then the rest of the picture caught up. Long hair past the shoulders, a faded maid dress hanging off a frame too small and too delicate to be anything but a girl's. Shin let out a slow breath and turned his attention back to the room. Of course it wasn't that easy. He'd been an idiot for letting a hair color get his hopes up.

He was about to look away when the kid turned to wring out the rag, and Shin saw the eyes.

Purple. Ringed. Concentric circles radiating out from the pupil like ripples in still water. Shin had never seen them in person before, but there was no mistaking what they were. The Rinnegan.

That was Nagato. In a maid outfit. Scrubbing a gang boss's floor.

Shin's mouth twitched. He didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Those thugs had actually put the kid in a dress and made him clean for them. That was... a choice. A really weird, really messed up choice, and it told Shin everything he needed to know about how Nagato ranked in this particular hierarchy. Below the guys who did the stealing. Below the guys who stood lookout. Below the furniture, probably. Right at the very bottom, where the only job left was "put on whatever we tell you and scrub."

He watched for another few seconds. Nobody talked to Nagato. Nobody looked at him. A teenager walked past and kicked his bucket over, splashing dirty water across the floor he'd just cleaned. Two guys laughed. Nagato said nothing. Just set the bucket upright and started over.

Shin stepped back from the crack.

He'd been feeling guilty, funnily enough, about all the defenseless civilians he'd been roughing up since arriving in this slum. They were just people, after all. Hungry, desperate, weak people who couldn't fight back against a shinobi even if they tried. Every time he'd dropped one of them, that guilt had poked at him.

It wasn't poking anymore.

He cracked his knuckles slowly, rolling each finger until the joints popped, and headed for the door.

Somewhere in there, a fat man was about to have the worst lunch of his life.

…

While one clone walked into a gang hideout in Amegakure's slums, thousands of others were already at work across the continent. The war didn't pause for one kid's personal mission. It didn't pause for anything. And in River Country, where the real fighting was happening, Shinji's shadow army was doing what shadow armies did best, making sure nobody on the other side got to sleep through the night.

The first depot fell before dawn.

The jonin had been heating water for tea when the explosions started. A small indulgence, one he allowed himself at the end of every patrol. Same tin cup his father had carried in the last war, dented on one side where the old man claimed he'd deflected a kunai with it. Probably a lie, but it made good tea regardless. He never got to drink it. Three blasts shook the ground under his feet, and then he was running, the cup left behind on the fire, two other River chunin falling in beside him without a word.

The depot was in a village. Or what had been a village. A cluster of houses built around a grain storehouse that Suna and River had converted into a forward supply cache three weeks ago. The original stores had been folded into the military's inventory. The families who owned them hadn't been given a choice.

When the jonin hit the open ground, the barn was already burning.

Not just the barn. The houses on either side were burning too, fire eating through wooden walls and spreading to the roofs faster than anyone could stop it. A woman sat in the road, sobbing so hard no sound was coming out anymore. Bodies lay near the barn entrance. Nine of them were guards. One of them wasn't. Smoke filled the streets so thick it was hard to see more than thirty feet in any direction, but what he could see through it was enough.

Dozens of shapes, all identical. Same face, same build, same Konoha flak jacket. They moved through the village in groups of ten. One group was finishing off the depot guards while another blew streams of fire into the barn's remaining stores, feeding the blaze until the walls buckled under the heat. A third was already moving to the next building, kicking in doors, checking for holdouts.

"What the hell..." one of the chunin beside him breathed. "How many of them are there?"

Too many. He counted at least forty in his line of sight, and there were more deeper in the village. The sound of fighting came from the far side, weapons clashing, the ground shaking, men calling for help between the blasts.

"We gotta go." The other chunin grabbed his arm. "Right now. We report this and let command—"

"You two go." He pulled his arm free. "I'm the highest rank here. You run, I'll buy time for whoever's still alive in here."

"And leave you here alone? Against that?"

"I outrank you. That means I get to make the stupid decisions. Now go, before I have to write you up for insubordination on top of everything else."

He didn't get to say more than that. A clone dropped from a rooftop between them, already swinging before its feet touched the ground. The chunin on his left went down without drawing his weapon. By the time the jonin got his blade up, the second chunin was already falling.

…

Forty miles south, another depot burned.

This one was a set of caves dug into the hills, carved out and expanded by River engineers to store weapons and ammunition behind the front lines. Kunai, explosive tags, wire, shuriken, soldier pills, all of it stacked in neat rows inside chambers that had been dry and secure for weeks. Three hundred Suna and River shinobi guarded the site, rotating in shifts, confident that its location was secret enough to keep it safe.

It wasn't.

They learned that the hard way when the forest around them came alive with identical faces. Through the trees, from the ridgeline, out of the ground itself. The sentries on the perimeter went down in the first thirty seconds, silent kills that left no one to raise the alarm. By the time the main garrison realized something was wrong, the outer tunnels were already compromised.

A River elite jonin was eating his breakfast when the first explosion shook the cave, scattering rice from his bowl and sending dust down from the ceiling in thin streams while the lantern overhead swung on its hook.

Then the screaming started.

He grabbed his weapon and ran toward the main chamber, joining a stream of others doing the same. The tunnel was wide enough for three men shoulder to shoulder, and they moved fast, weapons drawn, the sound of their sandals echoing off wet stone.

A blade came out of the darkness ahead, a River-issue tanto ripped from a dead man's belt, spinning straight at his face. He dodged it, a twitch of the neck born from two decades of not dying, and the tanto went past him and caught the fellow River-nin behind him through the side of the skull. The force pinned him to the cave wall, body hanging there for a second before his legs gave out and he slid down, leaving a dark wet streak on the stone. The blade had gone in above the ear and the tip was embedded two inches into the rock.

The jonin didn't stop. Didn't look back. The men around him didn't either. They ran past the body and the blood and the tanto still stuck in the wall, and what they found at the end of the tunnel was worse.

The main chamber had already fallen apart. Clones poured through two of the three entrances, engaging the defenders in close combat that filled the stone space with noise and blood. Explosions echoed through the tunnels. Someone had set off the stored explosive tags, whether on purpose or by accident, and the resulting chain of detonations collapsed an entire section of the eastern tunnel. He felt the floor shake under his feet and heard the sound of stone grinding against stone, followed by screams that cut off abruptly.

He fought. Harder than he'd ever fought in his life. Killed two clones and it didn't matter because three more stepped in before the smoke cleared. He kept swinging. Kept blocking. Kept telling himself that every second he stayed standing was another second for the garrison, another second that meant something even if he never saw the end of it. They came from everywhere at once. He blocked one and took a hit from another. Blocked that one and a third opened his shoulder to the bone. His sword arm was slowing down and he knew it and they knew it. He thought about the dog. Stupid thought. Stupid time for it. But the old mutt sleeping on his porch wouldn't eat for anyone else, and it was going to starve if he didn't come home.

He was still thinking about the dog when a knee drove into his spine, then an elbow cracked the back of his skull, and his legs stopped working before his brain caught up. He hit the stone face-first, bounced once, and didn't bounce again.

The ceiling swam above him. Shapes blurred in and out, smoke and fire and bodies that might have been allies or enemies or both. He blinked and the world tilted. Blinked again and it tilted the other way. Somewhere far away, someone was shouting orders. Somewhere closer, someone was begging. He couldn't tell which direction either sound was coming from.

The supply crates were burning. He could feel the heat on his face, see the orange glow eating through wood and paper and cloth, and all he could think was that those crates had taken weeks to fill. Weapons they couldn't replace. Soldier pills that were supposed to keep the front line standing for another week. All of it going up right in front of him while he lay on the floor and couldn't move his arms.

A clone walked past him without stopping. Its sandal came down six inches from his face and kept going, and it didn't even glance at him. He wasn't a threat anymore. Wasn't anything anymore. Just another broken body on a cave floor, not worth the half-second it would take to finish off.

Around him, the defenders were still fighting, but the sounds were getting worse. Less fighting, more dying. Fewer war cries and more screams that ended in wet coughs. Someone was calling a name over and over, and nobody was answering. He wanted to get up. He told his arms to push. They trembled against the stone and gave out, and he ended up exactly where he started, cheek pressed against cold rock, blood pooling under his mouth.

…

The depots weren't the only things burning. At almost the same time, the army of clones descended on field hospitals across all of River Country. Where the wounded couldn't stand, the medics weren't trained to fight, and the guards thought they were safe behind the lines. None of that made a difference. The clones rolled through them the same way they rolled through everything else that day.

The wounded who could crawl, crawled. The ones who couldn't, died where they lay, some of them with kunai in their hands, gripping weapons they couldn't lift but refused to let go of. Medics dragged patients through mud and rain until their arms gave out, then went back for more, then stopped going back because there was nothing left to go back to. The guards fought until there were no guards left.

When it was over, there was nothing to reclaim. The food was gone. The weapons were gone. The medicine was gone. Months of stockpiling, months of careful logistics, months of rationing and transporting and guarding, reduced to ash and rubble in a single day.

The same thing was happening everywhere. Every depot, every hospital, every supply cache that Suna and River had spent months building. Smoke and rain and ruin, repeated across the entire country like a wound that wouldn't stop spreading. And it wasn't over. Somewhere out there, beyond the fires and the wreckage, the clones were still moving. Still multiplying. Still looking for the next thing to burn.

…

-Somewhere in River Country-

-??? Girl-

The house was making sounds it had never made before. Creaking. Groaning. Like it was tired and wanted to lie down.

She didn't move.

Mama was on the floor by the table. Papa was next to her, one arm stretched out like he'd been trying to reach Mama when he fell. There was red on the floor. A lot of it. More than she'd ever seen. More than when Papa cut his hand fixing the roof last summer and Mama had wrapped it up with a cloth and told him to stop being a baby about it.

Papa wasn't being a baby about it now. Papa was very, very still.

She tugged on Mama's sleeve. "Mama, the house is on fire. We need to go outside."

Mama didn't answer.

"Mama, please."

The ceiling above the kitchen was orange. The fire was up there, crawling along the beams, eating the wood that Papa had sanded by hand when they moved in. He'd been so proud of those beams. Spent a whole week on them. Mama had said he was being ridiculous, that nobody looks at ceiling beams, and Papa had said he would know they were perfect even if nobody else did.

Papa would be so upset if he could see them now.

Something fell in the next room. A big crash, loud enough to shake the floor, and a wave of heat rolled through the doorway and hit her face. The heat hurt her face and her arms and she knew she was supposed to run away from fire because Mama had told her that a hundred times. But Mama couldn't run, so she wasn't going to either.

She wasn't scared. She just wanted Mama to wake up.

She sat on the floor between her parents and held Mama's hand. It was warm, but it didn't feel like Mama's hand. It felt wrong and she didn't know why.

"Mama." She squeezed Mama's hand tighter. "Mama, I'm here. Can you hear me? Mama?"

Mama didn't squeeze back.

A beam suddenly collapsed in the hallway. The crash made her flinch and press closer to her mom. "Mama..." Sparks showered across the floor. The heat was getting worse, pressing in from every direction, and somewhere in the back of her mind a tiny voice that sounded like Mama was telling her to be a brave girl and go outside now. Mama always called her brave girl. Even when she wasn't being brave at all.

She didn't want to listen. She wanted to stay here with Mama. If the house fell down then it fell down and at least she wouldn't be alone.

She was still holding Mama's hand when she heard boots outside and people talking. She looked toward the doorway, half the frame already burning, and through the smoke and the rain she saw three figures walking past her house.

Same outfit. Same jacket. The same as the people who came and burned everything and hurt everyone.

The same as the ones who hurt Mama and Papa.

Her tummy got hot. Not fire-hot. A different hot. An angry hot. It went up into her chest and her face and her hands and it made her stand up.

She put Mama's hand down gently. "I'll be right back, Mama." Her voice was wobbly. She didn't know why she was standing up. She didn't know why her legs were moving. She just knew the people who did this were right outside and her body wanted to do something about it even if she didn't know what.

The kitchen was burning but she went in anyway. Something popped in the ceiling and she ducked. "Ow, ow, ow..." The floor was hot under her feet. She had to stand on her toes to reach the counter where Mama kept the knives. The ones Mama used every night to cut vegetables while she hummed her song. The handle was hot. She grabbed the smallest one and held it tight even though it hurt her palm. "Nnn..."

The smoke stung her eyes all the way back through the house and out the door. She coughed, hard, and wiped her face with her arm but it just smeared everything around.

The three men were right there on the road. Walking. Talking. Not even looking at her house. Not even caring.

She started running before she knew she was running. The knife bounced in her grip because her hands were shaking too hard to hold it still. She screamed. She screamed so hard her whole body shook with it and her throat felt like it was tearing and snot and rain and tears all ran down her face together. "You— you hurt them— you hurt my—" The words broke apart before they could become sentences. She just wanted them to turn around. She wanted them to hurt. She wanted them to hurt as bad as she was hurting right now.

They turned around.

Three of them. Same jackets. She didn't care which one was which. She picked the one in the middle because he was closest and ran straight at him.

One of the others grabbed at her but the middle one said something and the hand went away.

His hand came up and she thought he was going to knock the knife away. "N-no—!" She squeezed the handle tighter. He wasn't allowed to take it. It was Mama's knife!

But he didn't. He put his hand down. And he opened his arms.

She crashed into him. The knife went in somewhere in his chest. Not very far. She pushed but her arms didn't have any push left. Her hands were shaking so bad she almost dropped it. "I hate you," she whispered into his shirt. "I hate you, I hate you, I hate you..."

He didn't do anything. He didn't hit her. He didn't grab her. He just stood there and let her cry against his chest with a knife sticking out of him.

She looked up at him through blurred eyes. He was looking down at her. And then, gently, a hand came to rest on top of her head.

"I'm sorry," he said.

She didn't understand. He was the bad one. Why was he sorry.

"Jonin Shinji!" one of the others shouted.

The hand on her head didn't move.

"I'm sorry," he said again. Still quiet. Still to her. Ignoring the others.

Something warm was running down her fingers. Blood. His blood. Coming from where the knife went in, dripping down the handle, over her knuckles, down her wrists. She pushed harder. She wanted more. She wanted him to bleed like Mama bled. He didn't flinch. He pulled her closer, both arms around her, holding her against him while she stabbed him and bled him and cried into his shirt.

"I'm sorry," he said again.

She pushed. Her arms were getting tired. She pushed anyway. The blood was all over her hands and it was slippery and the knife kept sliding in her grip. She squeezed harder and pushed and it barely moved. Her arms were so tired. Her whole body was tired. The angry was leaking out of her and all that was left was the sad and the tired and the rain on her back and his arms around her and she hated him and she wanted Mama and she pushed one more time and nothing happened because her arms wouldn't listen anymore.

Her hands slid off the knife handle. Her forehead fell against his chest. And she cried.

He didn't say anything else. He just kept his hand on her head and let her cry, and the rain fell on both of them, and the house behind her burned down to nothing.

"I'm sorry."

…

-Shinji-

The kid weighed nothing.

That was the first thing I noticed. Holding her against my chest with one arm was like holding a bag of rice, except a bag of rice didn't shake and whimper in its sleep. My other hand stayed on her head, fingers resting in hair that was matted with rain and ash. The knife was still in my chest. Barely an inch deep, probably less.

She'd cried herself out. Took a while. The sobs got smaller and smaller until they turned into hiccups and the hiccups turned into shallow, shaky breathing and then she was just gone. Unconscious. Her body had burned through everything it had and pulled the plug on its own.

The rain kept falling. The house behind us kept burning. And I stood there holding someone's daughter like an idiot who didn't know what to do next, because I didn't.

Footsteps behind me. I didn't need to look to know it was the sensor.

He stopped a few feet away. I could feel him looking at me. That look. The one people got when they wanted to say something but couldn't figure out how to phrase it without it sounding stupid or offensive or both. I'd seen it plenty of times. Usually directed at someone else.

"Shinji-san." He cleared his throat. "Are you... alright?"

"Never better."

A pause. His eyes drifted down to my chest. Then back up. Then back down.

"You, um." Another pause. "You have a knife in your chest."

"I'm aware." Kind of hard to miss, what with it being lodged in my body and all. My nerve endings had been filing complaints about it for the last two minutes. But hey, good to know the sensor's detection abilities extended beyond chakra signatures to also include large sharp objects protruding from people's torsos. Really getting his money's worth out of those skills.

Still, the fact that he was talking to me at all was progress. A week ago he wouldn't have dared open his mouth. Funny what watching your commanding officer let a child stab him instead of, you know, not letting a child stab him, did to a man's sense of self-preservation.

He took a breath. A little shaky, but he pushed through it. "Shinji-san, if I may... doing things like that could get you killed. If that had been an enemy using the child as a distraction, or if the blade had been poisoned—"

I raised an eyebrow. "Are you lecturing me right now?”

"I— no. That's not—" He faltered. "I was merely trying to—" Whatever was left of Kosuke's composure crumbled like wet paper. "I-I apologize, Shinji-san. I overstepped. I-It won't happen again."

The man looked like he was trying to swallow a kunai sideways. I almost felt bad. Almost.

"Relax. I'm messing with you." I pulled the knife out and flicked the blood off. "Go sweep the village. Check for any signatures we might've missed."

He nodded a little too fast, like a man who'd just been pardoned, and disappeared into the rain without another word. Good man. Knew when to push and when to back off. More importantly, knew when his commanding officer wasn't in the mood.

I looked down at the kid.

Small. Alarmingly small. I knew civilian children were smaller than Academy kids, but this was something else. She couldn't weigh more than a medium-sized dog. I'd carried supply packs heavier than this girl. And now I was standing in the rain holding her with no idea what to do next.

She was one kid. One kid out of who knows how many caught between my clone army and the enemy forces across River Country. Every village my clones had rolled through today, every depot and hospital and supply cache, there were people like her. Families who'd had the bad luck of living too close to something strategically important. Civilians who'd been told to stay put and keep quiet while two armies tore their country apart around them.

I couldn't save all of them. I knew that. Even if I wanted to, I was one guy running a war across an entire country. There were limits to what I could do, and "rescue every civilian in River Country" was way past those limits.

I rubbed the side of my head with my free hand. Just what I needed on top of everything else.

"Oi." I waved over one of my clones on perimeter. He jogged up and I handed the kid over. She whimpered in her sleep but didn't wake up. "Find any surviving villagers and leave her with them."

The clone looked down at the girl, then back at me. "That's it?"

"What do you want me to do, adopt her?" I turned away before the question could sit too long. "Just make sure whoever you leave her with isn't going to bolt the second you're gone."

The clone nodded and disappeared into the rain with the kid.

I stood there for a second longer than I needed to. Then I got back to work. Suna wasn't going to sit on their hands after losing this many supply points in one day. Reinforcements were coming. The only question was how fast and how many.