Hidden Leaf, Hidden Talents 93 (Patreon)

-3rd gen Clone-

The thing about being a third-gen clone is that you know exactly what you are from the second you open your eyes. You just pop into existence with a full set of memories that aren't yours, a body that'll dissolve if someone breathes on you too hard, and a job that probably ends with you not existing anymore. It's not depressing. It's just a fact, like gravity or the price of rice. You don't waste time being upset about gravity.

I was Clone #... actually, I'd stopped counting. Nobody was keeping track this far into the operation. There were too many of us for numbers to mean anything. I was me, and so were the thousand other guys wearing the same face jogging through the rain in a column that stretched back further than I could see. Not that I needed to see the end of it to know the number. Two thousand, give or take. That was what the second-gen told us before we shipped out, and I had no reason to doubt him.

We'd been moving for about forty minutes. The River command post was southwest, sitting in a valley between two ridgelines that made for decent natural defense if you were the one behind them and a real pain in the ass if you were the one approaching. Which we were. Our second-gen had laid out the plan before we left, three prongs, center column pushes straight while two flanking forces loop around from north and south. About as simple as you could get with two thousand bodies. The fewer moving parts, the fewer things that could go wrong.

The rain helped with that, at least. Getting rained on sucked just as much for clones as it did for real people, but it muffled sound, reduced visibility, and made it harder for anyone without a sensor to get an accurate read on our numbers until we were already close. The sensors would pick us up regardless, but sensors could only tell you 'a lot.' They couldn't tell you what 'a lot' looked like until it was standing in front of you.

The guy running beside me, another third-gen, glanced over. "You think they know we're coming?"

"Two thousand guys in matching outfits jogging through the rain? No idea why they'd suspect anything."

"Hey, I'm just asking. Maybe they're having a bad sensor day."

"Nobody has a bad sensor day when two thousand chakra signatures are heading their way."

"Fine. So they know." He shrugged. "Doesn't really change anything for us, does it?"

"Nope." Not even a little. The plan was the plan whether they saw us coming or not.

"Cool. Just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing some part of the plan where we were supposed to be sneaky."

I was about to tell him that 'sneaky' stopped being an option about nineteen hundred clones ago, but the treeline ahead was thinning, and the clone running point had just raised his fist.

Every clone saw it at the same time. Every clone stopped at the same time. Two thousand bodies going from a jog to nothing in about four seconds, because what was coming through the rain and the thinning trees didn't need a second look. Movement. A lot of it.

"Well," the clone next to me said quietly. "Looks like they got tired of waiting for us."

Tired of waiting was an understatement.

The enemy was coming to us.

I couldn't see the command post yet. It was still somewhere southwest, tucked behind the ridgelines and the grey curtain of rain. But what I could see, pouring over the eastern ridge and fanning out across the open ground between us and the valley, was an army.

They moved fast, which meant they'd been ready. Probably scrambled the second their sensors picked up two thousand signatures marching toward them. No way they were going to sit behind their walls and let us choose when and where to hit. Not when their communication posts had been going dark all day. Not when every depot and relay station in River Country was burning. They knew what was coming. They'd decided to meet it head-on while they still had the ground to do it.

Can't say I blamed them. If I were a real person sitting in a command post watching two thousand of the same guy march toward me, I wouldn't want to wait around for the knock on the door either.

They were still dots at this distance. A lot of dots. Moving in a wide spread that suggested some kind of formation, but too far away to make out much more than that.

The whole reason we were hitting this post was because it was the spine of their operations in this sector. Take it out and their entire front loses coordination and communication. The boss had worked that out back at HQ.

The post had sent three hundred men to reinforce the farming village the first time, then sent even more to retake it after our clones burned it down. Best guess from our intel clones was about a thousand River nin and four hundred Suna, all of whom were currently heading our way. On paper, we had the advantage. Even at full strength, fourteen hundred against two thousand put us up by six hundred. Factor in the troops they'd already sent out, and we should've been rolling over whatever was left in under three hours.

A second-gen dropped from a branch and landed beside me. "Well, that saves us a trip."

The clone next to me shook his head. "So much for catching them with their pants down."

"Tsk." I watched the dots getting bigger. "We marched all this way and they won't even let us knock on the front door."

"Guess we skip knocking." The second-gen grinned. "Get the human trebuchets ready. On my signal!"

The rain kept falling. Two thousand pairs of lungs breathed in.

The signal came.

And the first thing that happened wasn't a charge.

Lines formed at the front. Twenty clones each, stretching into a single-file chain. The ones at the back planted their feet and flooded chakra into the ground, anchoring themselves to the earth like roots. The ones ahead grabbed the wrist of the clone behind them, one after another, twenty bodies linked into a living chain that stretched across the mud. If you've ever seen a fisherman cast a line, it was like that. Except the line was made of sixty-kilo men and the fish was about to have a very bad day.

Then the base swung.

The first three clones wrenched their bodies sideways in one synchronized arc, and the momentum traveled. Each body in the chain whipped the next one faster. By the time the energy reached the tenth clone, the line was a blur. By the fifteenth, the air was screaming. The clone at the tip, number twenty, was moving at a speed no human body was designed to survive. Lucky for him, surviving wasn't part of the job.

The tip clone let go. Or got let go. At that velocity, the difference didn't matter. He shot through the rain, fast enough that the air behind him popped and the downpour bent around his path like a tunnel punched through water.

Then he hit.

I lost sight of him somewhere in the last hundred meters, when he stopped being a person and started being a projectile. But I saw where he landed. Dead center of the advancing enemy line, right into a knot of River nin packed tight enough that they couldn't have gotten out of each other's way even if they'd known what was coming.

Half a second of silence. Just enough time for someone down there to look up and think 'what the hell is that.

Then BOOM.

Human. Goddamn. Trebuchets! I couldn't stop grinning.

The flash came first. Bright enough to bleach the rain white. Then came the shockwave, and the ground remembered it was supposed to move. A ring of mud and fire ripped outward and ate everything in its path. People, ground, air. Nothing in that radius survived. The shockwave reached us a second later, thumping against my ribs.

And before the ringing stopped, five more human trebuchets went off at almost the same time. Five clones sailed across the gap, five black streaks cutting through the grey sky at different angles, each one aimed at a different section of the enemy advance.

The explosions overlapped. The ground didn't just shake, it heaved. Five columns of smoke and fire rose through the rain, each one big enough to swallow a building, and where they overlapped the blasts merged into something bigger. Something that turned the air itself into a weapon, a pressure wave that flattened everything standing in a large stretch of the enemy line. I watched men get thrown off their feet from the shockwave alone, bodies tumbling through mud and rain like leaves in a gale.

What was left behind was six holes in their formation. Six craters where squads used to be. And the advance hadn't even started yet.

We didn't wait for the smoke to clear.

"Reload! Keep them fed!" someone shouted, and suddenly I was part of the most ridiculous supply chain in military history.

A clone sprinted toward the nearest Human Trebuchet. The chain was still spinning, twenty bodies rotating in a blur, and the tip had just been flung screaming into the sky. The chain kept spinning anyway, one body short at the tail end, hungry for a replacement.

I gave it one.

The sprinting clone held out his hand without slowing down. I grabbed it, planted my heel in the mud, and slung him straight at the Trebuchet's spinning tail.

Crack. Another body screamed across the sky.

"Next!"

All around me, every Trebuchet was getting the same treatment. Clones launching clones, boosting off backs and shoulders, slinging each other toward the spinning chains from every direction. It looked insane. It was insane. But it was working. One guy flew too high and sailed right over the whole Trebuchet. Nineteen caught him by the ankle and hauled him down into position before he became a very embarrassing miss.

"You're welcome!" Nineteen screamed over the wind.

"Throw me less hard next time!" Twenty screamed back, half a second before the trebuchet peaked and sent him flying. His complaint ended in a whoom.

A clone to my left was running a one-man elevator service, hands cupped, launching clone after clone skyward toward the passing tips of the trebuchet. His last throw went wide. The clone missed the grab and dropped back into the mud face-first.

"Seriously?"

"My bad!"

"Your bad? I've got mud in my teeth!"

"Look, that one was like ninety percent your fault for not reaching."

"You threw me three meters to the left!"

"So reach harder next time! You've got arms, use them! Get up, next one's coming."

Crack. Boom. Crack. Boom. The trebuchets kept spinning. We kept feeding them. I grabbed the next clone's hand, launched him up. Grabbed another. Launched him too. My arms were going to be sore tomorrow, assuming I made it to tomorrow.

The trebuchets had bought us time and taken chunks out of their ranks, but the survivors weren't breaking. They were charging. Pouring over their own craters and through the smoke of their own dead, screaming as they came. I could see their faces getting closer. Mouths open, eyes wide, blades up. Some screamed orders. Some just screamed. The ones running fastest had the wildest look in their eyes, eyes that had already skipped past fear and landed somewhere worse.

The gap shrank fast. Five hundred meters. Four hundred. Three.

At two hundred meters, they opened up. Every hand forming seals, every mouth breathing fire or wind, every foot stomping earth out of the ground.

A massive wall of compressed air screamed toward the front of our army and hit it broadside. I saw the clones ahead of me get shredded. Twenty, thirty of them, just gone. Popped in an instant, their smoke mixing with the rain and mud to create a dirty haze that smelled like ozone and wet earth.

Then came the fireballs. Too many to count, arcing over the gap like a volley of flaming artillery, each one finding a different section of the army. Fifty meters to my left, three of them hit almost the same spot. The heat washed over my face.

I kept running.

The gap closed. A hundred meters.

Fifty.

Twenty.

Clang!

The distance disappeared. Everything became close, wet, and personal.

A River nin came at me from the right. I didn't see his face. Just the blade. I dropped my shoulder, let it pass over me, and put my half cracked blade through his stomach. He grabbed my wrist. I twisted the blade and pulled it free.

I didn't watch him fall. Something else was already moving on my left.

Clang!

A kunai skidded off my blade. I didn't give him a second try. My foot caught his knee and bent it the wrong way. He went down screaming and a clone behind me stepped on his chest on the way past without slowing down.

Every time I pulled my blade out of somebody, someone else was already there. Already swinging. Already trying to kill me. I couldn't even finish a kill in peace. Parry a sword. Gut the owner. Spin. Catch a kunai on my blade. Break the thrower's wrist. Move on. Repeat. Over and over until my arms got heavy and my lungs burned. The looted blade in my hand was slippery with blood and rain and I had to keep adjusting my grip because the handle wouldn't stay dry.

A Suna puppet decided that was a good time to test me from my blind side, bladed arms coming in fast. I caught one mid-swing, ripped it off the body, and flickered. Lightning crackled, mud sprayed, and I was standing behind the puppeteer before the puppet finished its second swing. He didn't even turn around before I put his own arm through the back of his head. The puppet dropped when he did.

Before the puppet's limbs stopped rattling on the ground, I was already fighting someone else. And someone after that. And someone after that. At some point, time stopped working the way it was supposed to. Minutes that felt like hours. Everything blurred into one continuous loop of violence. I killed a man with a broken jaw who was trying to form seals with shaking hands. I killed a woman who came at me with a kunai in each fist and died with fury still on her face. I killed a chunin who couldn't have been older than fifteen. He froze when he saw me impaling his face.

But I kept going. Because that was all there was to do.

The ground under my feet wasn't ground anymore. It was red soup. Thick, heavy, sucking at my boots every step. Something rolled under my foot and I didn't look down to check what it was. Some things you're better off not identifying.

My blade broke mid-swing. The blade caught an armored shoulder plate and the steel just snapped. I drove the broken edge into his neck anyway. He grabbed at the jagged steel. I was already pulling his sword out of his grip before his knees gave out. Heavier than the last one I'd picked up. Balance all wrong. Didn't matter. It was sharp and it was whole. That was all I asked of a weapon at this point.

Couldn't ask much of myself either. I was slowing down. Every breath came shorter than the last. My vision kept narrowing, the edges going dark, then snapping back when I blinked. The rain was cold on my skin but I'd stopped shivering a while ago, which wasn't a good sign.

Didn't need to be a good sign. Just needed to still be standing. And so did they. So I kept swinging. Right up until a flash of light caught the corner of my eye.

Thirty feet to my right, a clone was pinned against a broken earth wall with a sword through his gut. Three River nin were closing in to finish him. He looked down at the sword and grinned.

Oh no.

His eyes went gold.

I knew that glow. Every clone knew that glow. And I was standing well inside the kill zone.

"Oh, come on."

Running crossed my mind for about half a second. I could get maybe three steps before the blast turned me into smoke anyway. Or. I could make the Suna and River-nin around me regret standing so close together.

So I made a decision. My eyes also went gold. That made two golden glows in the rain.

And then…

BOOM!!!

The blasts slammed into each other and the air between them just disappeared. The ground cracked open. The rain around the blasts evaporated before it could fall. Everything standing in that space, people, mud, earth, air, just went somewhere else very fast.

…

-Commander Shinya-

On the other side of the battlefield, commander Shinya had been running for three minutes when the first black streak crossed the sky. His River forces were spread behind him in a standard advance formation, every one of them running with the same thought in their head. The command post couldn't fall. If it fell, River's entire front collapsed with it, and everything they'd spent weeks building would mean nothing.

That thought was still grinding through his head when something caught his eye. A dark smear against grey clouds, arcing high and dropping fast somewhere behind his rear formations. He almost ignored it. Almost wrote it off as a bird. A weird, fast, not-quite-right bird.

Then it hit.

The explosion shook the ground under his feet from half a kilometer away. He stumbled. The jonin beside him stumbled. Half the line stumbled, and for a second the entire advance hiccupped, more than a thousand men faltering at the same time.

"Keep moving!" he shouted. "Don't stop!"

They kept moving. The army found its legs again. Shinya faced forward and pushed harder, boots churning through mud, rain streaming down his face. The command post was counting on them. The enemy was coming and he had to get there before—

A second streak.

This one he saw clearly. A body. A human body, tumbling through the air in a high arc, black jacket, grey vest. It dropped into the middle of his left flank like a falling stone.

BOOM.

The left side of the flank blew apart. Men flew, people he'd been running beside ten seconds ago, tumbling through the air and landing in the mud and not getting up. The shockwave hit him in the chest and he tasted blood in the back of his throat. Smoke and steam billowed upward through the rain. Then came the screaming

"What the hell was that?!" someone yelled.

A third streak. A fourth. Two more arcing over the army from somewhere ahead, black dots against the grey sky, rising, hanging for a moment at the peak, then falling.

BOOM. BOOM.

The right flank this time. And somewhere behind him. The explosions came so close together the sound merged into one rolling thunderclap that didn't stop. The ground kept shaking. His teeth rattled. A wave of heat washed over him from the right, hot enough to dry the rain on his skin for a second before the cold came back.

Shinya stopped running. Turned. Looked at what was left of his army.

Craters. Three of them, still smoking, steam rising from superheated earth. Bodies scattered around the edges. Some moving. Some not. His neat formation, the one he'd spent twenty minutes organizing, the one that was supposed to hit the enemy line in a unified front, had been punched full of holes. The men who weren't dead or wounded were staggering, disoriented, trying to figure out which direction was forward and which direction was away from the next explosion.

A chunin grabbed his arm. Young guy, couldn't have been older than twenty. His eyes were the size of coins. "Taichou. Taichou, those are—"

"I know."

He already knew. Had known since the second streak.

"That's the Black Death."

The chunin's grip on his arm tightened. Shinya could feel the kid's fingers shaking through the fabric. Behind them, voices were already spreading the name through the ranks like a disease. He could hear it rippling backward through the line, mouth to mouth, each repetition stripping away another layer of whatever courage his men had left.

"Black Death. That's the Black Death's jutsu!"

"No, no, no. You're sure? You're sure it's him?"

"Who else throws people out of the sky and blows them up?!"

"The bingo book said flee on sight. It said flee on—"

"We can't flee, idiot, we're in the middle of a field!"

"So what, we just stand here and let them rain on us?!"

"I didn't sign up for this. Nobody said anything about fighting Black Death and his exploding clones!"

"Shut up!" Shinya roared. The voices didn't shut up. They got louder. Talking over each other, arguing, spiraling. "I said shut up!"

Another streak crossed the sky. Every head around him turned to watch it. Over a thousand men tracking a single black dot as it rose, peaked, and fell.

BOOM.

Center of the formation. The explosion threw mud and bodies outward in a ring. A man landed ten feet from Shinya, face-down, not moving. Another crawled past him on his hands, leaving a red trail in the mud. His legs weren't working right. They were bending in places legs didn't bend.

Someone ran. Shinya saw it happen. A River chunin in the second row just turned around and sprinted in the opposite direction, throwing his kunai off as he went. Then another. Then three more. They didn't look back. Just broke from the line and ran, and the gaps they left behind were spreading panic faster than the explosions.

"Hold your ground!" Shinya screamed. "Nobody runs! Nobody—"

Two more streaks.

BOOM. BOOM.

He couldn't hear his own voice anymore. The explosions were coming faster now, overlapping, the intervals between them shrinking. The sky was full of black dots. Four, five, six of them in the air at the same time, all at different points in their arc, a continuous bombardment that turned the open ground into a kill zone.

More men ran. A group of eight River nin broke left and sprinted for the tree line without a word. A Suna squad behind them saw it happen and followed. The formation was hemorrhaging bodies, bleeding men from every edge, and the ones who stayed were the ones too scared to run and too stunned to fight.

Shinya climbed onto a shattered cart that had been abandoned on the road. The wood groaned under his weight. He didn't care. He stood there, full height, rain hammering his shoulders, while black streaks kept crossing the sky behind him. Every part of him wanted to duck. He didn't.

"Listen to me!"

Some heads turned. Not enough.

"LISTEN TO ME!"

More. The ones closest stopped moving. The ones behind them slowed.

"That's the Black Death! Yes! You've read the book! You know what it says!" He pointed at the gaps in the formation. Empty spaces where men used to be. "The book says run! Some of you already did! Look at those gaps! LOOK AT THEM!"

"You see where they went? Nowhere! Because there's nowhere to go! Supply lines are cut! Depots are burned! You run, you die lost and alone out there. That's not how I plan on going! And I don't think that's how you plan on going either!"

Another streak crossed the sky. He didn't flinch.

BOOM. The ground shook. He kept standing.

"Those things are clones! Just clones! One good hit and they're smoke! You've killed clones before! Every one of you has killed clones before!" He drew his sword. "We close the distance, the bombardment stops! They can't throw those things into their own army! Every step forward is a step closer to making this a fair fight! And I like our odds in a fair fight!"

He pointed the blade forward.

"Forward is how we go home! Run with me! Let's go kill some clones!"

It was a good speech. It was also half a lie. His sensors had already told him the truth. Every single one of the enemy was a clone. There was no "their own army" to worry about hitting. The bombardment wouldn't stop just because they closed the distance. But standing still was dying for nothing, and retreating meant giving the clones free rein over their country. The only option that had any chance, any chance at all, was forward. A lie that made them run forward was better than a truth that made them run away.

The old jonin with the grey beard moved first. Then the chunin with the shaking hands. Then others. The formation pulled itself together, ragged and bleeding but moving. Shinya jumped off the cart, landed in the mud, and ran.

They followed.

“Kill!!!”

The two armies collided. Shinya would remember the sound for the rest of his life, however long that turned out to be. Steel on steel. Screaming. The wet crunch of things breaking that shouldn't break. His sword found bodies and his body found blades and somewhere in the middle of all of it, the clones started glowing gold.

His speech had been a lie and the lie died fast.

They detonated in the melee. In the middle of his men. In the middle of everything. One moment a clone was fighting, the next its eyes turned gold and everyone within twenty feet stopped existing. The bombardment didn't stop at close range. It got worse.

His army lasted two hours. Then it didn't.

Shinya ran. He wasn't proud of it. But the men he'd told to stand were dead or running themselves, and the speech he'd given on that cart felt like something a different person had said in a different lifetime.

He ran, and he didn't stop.

…

-Shinji-

The fighting lasted another three hours. Or four. Hard to tell. They stopped counting after the first hour. When it finally ended, someone did the math. Around nine hundred enemy nin dead, scattered across a stretch of River Country. The rest, maybe five hundred, had broken and run in every direction. Some went south. Some went west. A few probably had no idea where they were going and just picked a direction that had the fewest explosions.

Either way, Shinji didn't order a pursuit. His clones had taken enough losses already, and chasing stragglers through unfamiliar terrain in the rain wasn't worth the trouble.

Also, he was in a good mood. Winning did that to a person. And a Shinji in a good mood was a merciful Shinji. He made a mental note to bring this up next time someone called him a war criminal.

The command post was a mess, but it was his mess now, so he didn't mind. He walked through what used to be the outer perimeter, stepping over bodies and around small fires that were still chewing on whatever was left to burn. The rain had slowed to a drizzle, not enough to put anything out, just enough to make the smoke hang over the post like a dirty ceiling.

Clones were everywhere. Moving in and out of tents, checking buildings, dragging crates into the open. Some of them looked fresh. Others looked like they'd been through every single minute of those three hours and had the bloodstains to prove it. One was sitting on an overturned barrel, counting kunai he'd pulled off bodies. Another was trying to clean some dead guy's sword with a rag that was somehow dirtier than the blade.

"Grab anything with writing on it," Shinji called out as he passed a group heading into the main command tent. "Documents, orders, love letters, I don't care. If it looks important, take it. If it doesn't look important, take it anyway. We'll sort through it later."

"Got it, boss."

A clone jogged past carrying an armful of scrolls. Another was stuffing papers into a sack with zero regard for organization.

Shinji pointed at a clone crouched over a dead jonin near one of the tents. "You. Rig that one with a booby trap. And any other jonin near an entrance."

A clone hauling a crate of kunai paused and looked over his shoulder. "Surprise presents for the next visitors?"

"See, you get it."

Another clone looked up from whatever he was bagging. "Isn't that, uh... a war crime? I'm pretty sure booby-trapping corpses violates some kind of international humanitarian convention. Or treaty. Or something."

"International humanitarian what?" Shinji looked at him. "Did someone hold a convention and not invite me? Because last I checked, the closest thing we have to international law is 'don't piss off a Kage.'"

"When you put it that way..."

Shinji flicked his hand dismissively. "Rig the bodies."

The path to the central farmhouse was lined with bodies and small fires still chewing on tent fabric and broken wood. A Suna jonin ten feet ahead was playing dead. Almost had it, too. But his chest was moving just a little too much for a dead man, and the kunai under his hip was a dead giveaway. Pun intended.

Without stopping, without looking, Shinji’s glove pulsed and a shuriken left his hand like he was flicking water off his fingers.

The thud was soft. The gasp was softer. By the time the jonin went still for real, Shinji was already three steps past him.

"Boss." A clone fell into step beside him. "Main tent's done. Found a bunch of documents. Deployment orders, supply manifests, some coded stuff none of us can crack."

"Bag it all. We'll send it up the chain."

"Oh, and there's a whole stash of soldier pills tucked in the back room." The clone shifted the sack on his shoulder. "Not bad quality, either."

"Now that's the kind of news I like hearing. Hand them out to whoever's about to keel over."

"One more thing." The clone jerked his thumb back toward the command tent. "There's a guy in the back who surrendered. Says he's willing to talk."

"Feed him first. Nobody talks well on an empty stomach."

The clone snorted. "You want me to tuck him in, too?"

"If it gets us better intel, sure."

The clone shook his head and headed back. Shinji stepped over another body and ducked through the farmhouse door.

The farmhouse smelled like ink and old wood. A desk sat in the center, covered in maps and papers. Two chairs, one overturned. A lantern still burning on a hook near the window. His handler was leaning against the wall beside it, flipping through a stack of documents he'd already pulled from the desk.

"Catch."

A water bottle came sailing across the room. Shinji snagged it by the neck, cracked it open, and drank half of it in one pull. The water was cold and tasted like the inside of a canteen, but it was wet and his throat had been dry for hours.

"So," the handler said, shuffling through papers on the desk. "Funny story."

"I don't like it when you start with 'funny story.'"

"You know the commander? The River guy?"

"The one in charge of this post?"

"Yeah, him.”

"What about him?"

"Some of the boys intercepted him. Tied him up like a dumpling. He's sitting outside somewhere."

Shinji paused. "Wait. Before I came in, one of the boys said something about a prisoner. Guy who surrendered and wanted to talk."

"Okay?"

"Is that the same guy?"

"I don't..." The handler looked up from the papers. "How would I know? I've been in this room the whole time.”

"You're the handler. You handle things."

"I've been reading. You're the one playing around outside."

"Okay but— do you at least know how many prisoners we have?”

"Do you?"

Shinji paused. "No."

"Then don't look at me like that."

"What do I even pay you for?"

"You don't pay me shit. I don't even have real pockets."

Shinji flicked the bottle cap at him. "Worst employee I've ever had."

"You're literally your own worst employee.”

Ten minutes later, the farmhouse door banged open.

A clone walked in dragging a man by the back of his collar. The man's hands were bound behind him, his jonin's uniform was caked in mud, and whatever dignity he'd had left was currently being scraped across the farmhouse floor. The clone dumped him in the middle of the room like a sack of laundry.

"Present for you, boss. One River commander, freshly caught."

Shinji looked down from the sofa. The guy was face down, hands tied behind his back, covered in so much mud it was hard to tell where the uniform ended and the ground began.

"This the guy who ran?" the handler said.

"Oh, it gets better." The clone was already grinning. “This guy gave a whole speech before he bolted.”

Shinji sat up. "He what?"

“A speech. Got up on a cart with his sword in the air and everything. Told his men to stop being cowards and charge. Said something about how soldiers don't run.”

The handler's mouth twitched.

"And then he ran," Shinji said.

"Like a rabbit. Our sensor picked him up three clicks southwest before the boys tackled him."

Shinji looked at the handler. The handler looked at Shinji. They both looked at the man on the floor.

The commander's ears went red.

"Don't... I’m not—" he started.

"Don't what?" Shinji said. "Don't run? Because that's what you told your guys, right? Right before you—"

"I was trying to reach reinforcements—"

"At a full sprint?"

"Without your men?" the handler added.

"In the opposite direction?" the clone chimed in.

The commander's jaw clamped shut. His ears got redder.

"How good was the speech?" Shinji asked the clone.

"Honestly? Pretty good. Something about 'forward is how we go home.' His guys actually charged after it. Some of them were screaming. I think one dude was crying. I almost felt bad."

"And where was he during that charge?"

"So far southwest our sensor thought it was a glitch."

The handler snorted.

Shinji nudged the commander with his boot. "You okay down there?"

No answer.

"I think he's dead," the handler said. "Died of embarrassment."

"Don't be ridiculous. He'd have to run three kilometers before he could die of anything."

The clone at the door made a choking sound.

"Forward is how we go home," the handler repeated, wiping his eye.

"Incredible," Shinji wheezed. "I'm promoting him."

"To what?"

"I don't know. Track and field?"

The laughter took a while to die down. Every time it started fading, someone would look at the commander on the floor and it'd start all over again.

They spent the rest of the night in that farmhouse. Maps spread across the desk, documents sorted into piles, strategy hashed out between cups of lukewarm water and whatever ration bars the clones scrounged up. They talked about troop movements, supply lines, Tsunade's front, the situation in Wind Country. Serious war things. And every twenty minutes or so, someone would glance at the commander sitting in the corner with his hands still bound, and the whole conversation would derail again. "Forward is how we go home" became the unofficial motto of the evening. By the third hour, even the clones rotating in for reports had heard the story and were finding excuses to peek at the guy.

By morning, the commander had heard his own speech quoted back to him so many times that Shinji was pretty sure the man would rather face the human trebuchets than spend another hour in that farmhouse.