Hidden Leaf, Hidden Talents 95 (Patreon)

Somewhere in Lightning Country, in a forest that stank of iron and wet earth, Minato Namikaze was killing people.

A chunin rushed him from the treeline, right hook already cocked. Minato saw the punch leave the hip, saw it travel, saw it miss. He was already somewhere else, and caught the man's wrist on the way through, redirected the punch's momentum into a full arm rotation, and used the torque to swing himself up and over the chunin's shoulder in a single fluid vault. His legs scissored around the man's neck at the apex, and then Minato twisted his entire body midair, wrenching the chunin off his feet and whipping him headfirst into the forest floor. WHAM. Dirt sprayed. The ground cratered. Minato landed in a crouch on the man's chest, drove his kunai down once, and was already moving before the body stopped twitching.

Third kill.

Another Kumo nin dropped from the tree behind him, blade out, aimed at the gap between his shoulder blades. Minato felt the air shift before the blade arrived. He didn't turn. His body tilted forward into a handspring. At the peak of the handspring his legs snapped out, heels catching the nin under both arms and launching him up into the branches. The man hit a limb back-first, bounced, and Minato was already there, having kicked off a trunk mid-flip to intercept. He caught the man's collar in one hand, the man's tanto wrist in the other. He pried the blade free from fingers, flipped it around, and drove it through the man's flak jacket on the way back down. They hit the ground together but only Minato stood up.

Fourth kill.

He wiped his hands on his pants and looked over.

Shinji's clone was fifteen meters away, crouched beside a Kumo nin who would not be filing any more mission reports. Clone #63 had his old tanto laid across his knee and was pulling a newer one from the dead man's belt, turning it over in his hands, testing the balance with a few experimental flicks. Around him, seven bodies in various states of not alive anymore lay scattered across the clearing. Some of them had been killed cleanly. Some of them had not. One of them appeared to have been put through a tree trunk.

Seven kills. Minato had four. #63 had seven and was checking the edge of a tanto he'd pulled off the last body, running his thumbnail along the blade like he was deciding if it was worth keeping.

Minato wiped blood off his cheek with the back of his hand and walked over. "Seven already?" He shook his head, a small, rueful laugh escaping before he could stop it. "I need to pick up the pace. You're going to lap me at this rate."

#63 looked up. Stared at Minato. And then bit down on a laugh so hard his jaw flexed.

Minato crossed his arms. "What's so funny?"

"Sorry, sorry. It's just..." #63 rubbed his face. "You said you need to be faster. You, Minato Namikaze, are standing there telling me that your problem is speed." He shook his head slowly. "That's... yeah. Don't worry about speed. Speed is going to work itself out for you. Trust me."

"What's that supposed to mean?" he frowned.

"It means eat your vegetables and keep training. You'll figure it out."

And if Minato didn't figure it out on his own, well, the old pervert would probably hand him the answer on a silver platter eventually. The man couldn't keep a jutsu to himself when there was a golden student around to impress.

Minato watched #63's back for a few seconds. Replayed the words. Turned them over twice.

Still didn't get it.

He shrugged it off. Shinji and his clone said strange things sometimes. Most of the time, actually. It was part of his charm, if you could call it that. Half the things he said sounded like inside jokes with someone who wasn't in the room.

He was about to talk about their next mission when familiar footsteps landed on the branch above them.

"Yo." Jiraiya dropped out of the tree, landing soft enough that the leaves barely stirred.

"Jiraiya-sensei." Minato straightened. "All eleven confirmed down."

Jiraiya took in the clearing at a glance, the bodies, the scorch marks, the two young nin standing in the middle of it. "All eleven, huh? Not bad," A grin spread across his face. "Look at you two. I leave for an hour and you go and make me proud."

#63 said nothing. Didn't look up. Didn't acknowledge Jiraiya at all. Just kept looting, adjusting his new tanto in his belt. Minato had gotten used to this. The clone and Jiraiya-sensei had a dynamic that he'd stopped trying to understand a long time ago. It wasn't hostility, exactly. More like the clone had decided that acknowledging Jiraiya's existence was optional, and Jiraiya-sensei had decided to find that funny instead of insulting.

"Good work, both of you." Jiraiya said. "That kumo squad was the last piece. Corridor's clean for the next ten minutes at least, so we've got room to breathe."

Minato finished cleaning his kunai and slid it into his pouch. "Then what's our next move, sensei? Regroup, or keep pushing?"

Before Jiraiya could answer, a sound rolled in from the east. Low, distant, like thunder from a storm that wasn't there. It went on too long to be an explosion and too deep to be anything natural. The birds went first, launching out of the trees in a panicked flutter. Then silence.

Minato looked east, toward the horizon, where a column of dust and chakra was rising into the sky like a slow-motion thundercloud. Even from this distance, he could feel it pressing against his senses. Massive. Ancient. Wrong.

"That's the ninth time," he said quietly.

Jiraiya folded his arms, but he was grinning. "Ninth since this morning. Whatever the Raikage's doing to that thing, it's not working. If anything, it's just getting angrier." He let out a low chuckle. "Can't blame it, honestly. I'd be in a bad mood too if someone kept picking a fight with me before breakfast."

Minato frowned. Nine times in a little over an hour. He'd heard about this, fragments, mostly, picked up during briefings with Jiraiya-sensei's contacts. Reports about a bijuu in Lightning Country and its failed containment. He'd filed it all away, piece by piece, building a picture from scraps. But hearing about it and feeling it were two different things. The pressure from that malice alone was enough to make his teeth ache.

"Sensei," he said carefully. "From what I've gathered, they've been trying to seal it for a while now. And every attempt has failed. Is their fuinjutsu really that weak, or is something else going on?"

#63 snorted.

Minato looked over, trying to read something from his friend’s expression. Nothing. As usual. A snort from this guy could mean anything from agreement to contempt to mild indigestion.

Jiraiya scratched the back of his head. "Their sealing's not the problem, actually. The technique works. It's been tested, refined, and on paper, it should hold just fine." He shrugged his shoulders. "The problem is the container. You can't seal a bijuu into just anyone. The host has to be compatible, and compatible hosts are rare. Extremely rare. Kumo's been cycling through candidates and every single one has failed. The seal takes, the bijuu resists, and sooner or later the whole thing collapses. Half of them don't make it through the process. The other half wish they hadn't."

"It's a vessel problem," #63 added. "You can build a perfect cage, but if the foundation can't hold the weight, it collapses anyway. Kumo's been cycling through candidates and none of them have the right constitution to contain Gyūki.”

Minato asked. "So what kind of person would be compatible?"

"It comes down to vitality," Jiraiya said. "Chakra reserves, physical resilience, the ability to endure something that would kill a normal person ten times over. The Uzumaki have all of that written into their blood. There's a reason every jinchuriki Konoha has ever produced has been an Uzumaki. It's not favoritism. It's the only option that doesn't end with a dead host."

Uzumaki? Minato frowned. "Sensei, would any Uzumaki work? As a vessel?"

Jiraiya's eyes flickered to him. "Not any. The clan has the right bloodline, but it still comes down to the individual. You need someone whose chakra is powerful enough to suppress a bijuu, and even among the Uzumaki, that's not common. Mito-sama had it. A handful of others across their history had it." He paused. "Most Uzumaki could endure being a vessel. Their bodies wouldn't break. But enduring and maintaining control are different problems, and only a few have chakra strong enough to solve both.”

The distant plume pulsed. Another boom rolled across the sky, fainter this time.

Minato's eyes stayed on the horizon. Then the picture came together.

"So our mission isn't to stop the sealing," he said slowly. "It's to make sure the vessel keeps losing control even after the seal sets."

"Now you're getting it." Jiraiya folded his arms. "The Raikage figured out what we were up to a while back. He's overseeing the sealing personally now, tightened the perimeter, rotated his guard schedules, basically rebuilt the whole operation around the assumption that Konoha's going to stick its nose in. And he's not wrong." He shrugged. "But here's the thing. Getting the seal to hold and getting the vessel to stay in control are two completely different problems. Even if the seal is perfect, it doesn't matter. The host still has to suppress the bijuu through their own willpower and chakra, and that's not a fuinjutsu problem, that's a human problem. All we need is to push the host past their limit, fear, pain, panic, anything that cracks their composure, and the Eight-Tails rips right through."

Minato watched the plume. It was still climbing, and beneath it, even from this distance, he could feel two massive chakra signatures colliding, one wild and thrashing, one dense and furious and refusing to give ground. The Raikage and his own jinchuriki, tearing into each other.

"So our mission today was a success, then," he said.

"Don't jinx it." Jiraiya's tone was light but his eyes weren't. "We're at the halfway point, and that's being generous. The vessel lost control, that's step one, sure. But the Raikage's still in the fight. Right now he's trying to beat his own jinchuriki into submission and brute-force the seal back into shape. And the annoying part is, he might actually pull it off. The man's that strong. So our job now is to make sure he doesn't get the chance. Keep hammering the vessel until the Eight-Tails forces its way out." The grin on his face didn't reach anywhere near his eyes. "We need that bijuu rampaging inside Lightning Country. Tearing through everything they spent years building. That's when this becomes a success."

Minato let out a slow breath. "I don't think I'll be much help on that front. Going toe-to-toe with a Raikage and a rampaging bijuu is a bit above my pay grade."

"I wasn't planning on bringing you." Jiraiya patted #63 on the shoulder. "That part's mine. Me and a few hundred of my favorite clones."

#63 shrugged his hand off and rolled his eyes.

Jiraiya laid out the rest quickly. A jinchuriki unsealing wasn't a quiet affair, Kumo would have containment squads, reinforcement teams, and units flooding the area the moment things went sideways. Someone needed to keep all of them occupied while Jiraiya and his clones turned the main event into an unrecoverable disaster. He glanced sideways at Minato. "Think you can handle that?"

Minato looked back at the plume on the horizon. Dozens of enemy shinobi, scattered across an active battlefield, with a bijuu going off in the background.

He almost smiled. "I'll manage."

"One thing." #63 caught his arm before he could move. "Don't go playing hero out there. You've got Konoha squads in the area. Lean on them. That's what they're there for."

Minato looked down at the hand on his arm. For a second, it wasn't a shadow clone standing there. It was just his friend.

"I know, I know. I'll rely on them, I promise. You're acting like I'm the type to charge in alone against impossible odds or something."

#63's fingers loosened. Minato didn't wait, he was off the branch and heading for the treeline before #63's hand had fully dropped, a little too eager to get started.

#63 knew that look. He'd been seeing it more and more lately. Every time Minato watched the clones clear a squad or dismantle a patrol faster than he could, something burned behind his eyes. Not jealousy, exactly. Something hungrier. The kid had been pushing himself harder the past few days, staying up later, running drills until his hands shook, studying scrolls that most chunin wouldn't touch for another five years. He wasn't trying to keep up. He was trying to catch up. And people who were trying to catch up had a habit of sprinting straight into things they should walk around.

‘Don't do anything reckless, Minato.’

Behind him, Jiraiya cleared his throat. "How many clones can you field right now?"

"…Around five hundred?"

Jiraiya's mouth thinned. "Against the Raikage, that's a few minutes at best."

"A few minutes is all you should need." #63 looked at him. "I'll throw everything I have at the Raikage to keep him pinned. Every second he spends dealing with my clones is a second you have with the jinchūriki. That's your window. It's not going to be a big one, so don't screw it up." He paused. "And if you can't make a bijuu manifest in ten minutes, you should seriously consider retirement. I hear the hot springs are nice this time of year."

"You know, for a shadow clone, you've got a hell of a mouth on you, kid." Jiraiya was already moving as he said it, off the branch, at full sprint. #63 followed half a second later, and then they were running, forest blurring into green and brown as they cut through the trees.

The distant booms grew louder with every kilometer, rolling across the sky like thunder chasing them forward. They were getting closer.

He glanced sideways at #63. "I'll let you start the party. Once the Raikage's attention is on you, I'll circle around to the jinchuriki."

"Got it."

"Don't die too fast. I need those minutes."

#63 scratched his nose. "I'll last longer than your last relationship. That should give you plenty of time."

Jiraiya: “…”

He didn't respond to that one. #63 counted it as a win.

They ran in silence after that, side by side, the booms getting louder until they stopped sounding like distant thunder and started sounding like something breaking. After a few minutes, Jiraiya veered left without warning. One stride he was there, the next he was a flicker between the trees, and then nothing.

#63 put two fingers to his lips and whistled. FWEEEE-FWEET. A clean two-note call. Something you'd use to get a dog's attention across a field. Except the field was a mountain range, and the dogs were five hundred shadow clones.

Shadows moved between the trunks. One at first. Then five. Then too many to count, all of them running in the same direction, branches creaking under the weight of bodies that shouldn't exist. They poured out of tree lines and down from ridges and up from ravines, an army assembled from nothing, wearing five hundred misshapen masks all pointed at the same target.

#63 hit the last branch at the forest's edge and launched himself into open air. Below him, the battlefield spread out, cratered earth, shattered rock, and at the center of it all, two forces tearing the landscape apart.

Behind him, the forest was coming alive, bodies streaming out from the trees in waves, one after another after another.

The Raikage was about to have a very bad day. Not that his day had been great to begin with, but it was about to get significantly, irreversibly, historically worse.

That was the plan, at least.

Reality, as it often did, had a different opinion.

The first wave of clones hadn't even finished landing when the Raikage's head snapped toward them like a predator catching a scent it recognized. The jinchuriki he'd been wrestling into submission was still thrashing behind him, chakra erupting in waves that cracked the ground open like dry riverbed, and the Raikage just... let go of it. Dropped the problem he'd been pouring everything into for the last hour like it was yesterday's newspaper.

Because apparently, the clones were a bigger problem.

"YOU AGAIN!"

The roar hit them before the man did. A wall of sound and killing intent that made three clones in the front line stumble mid-step.

"You think hiding behind those masks changes anything?!" Lightning erupted across his body, black and crackling, turning his silhouette into something that belonged in a nightmare. "I've been killing your kind for YEARS! I know what you ARE!"

The Raikage moved.

One frame he was standing beside the jinchuriki. The next frame he was inside the first wave. The transition between those two states didn't seem to involve anything as mundane as crossing the distance in between. He was just… there.

What followed wasn't a fight. It wasn't even a massacre. A massacre implies the victims had time to understand what was happening to them. This was more like watching someone pop bubble wrap, if the bubble wrap was made of solid chakra and each bubble had a face and feelings and a tanto it never got to use.

KRAK. KRAK-KRAK. POP. THWAM.

Six clones in two seconds. The Raikage didn't even have the decency to slow down between them.

#63 clicked his tongue, brought two fingers to his lips, and whistled. Not the same call as before. This one was shrill, wrong, a stuttering three-note shriek that climbed in pitch and fell off a cliff.

Nine clones heard it. Nine clones stopped being careful.

Blue-white lightning erupted across every one of them simultaneously, screaming and dense, and they hit the Raikage from nine directions with whatever they had, looted tanto, mismatched kunai, bare fists, one guy with nothing but a rock and a sincere desire to ruin someone's day.

The first clone slid in low, tanto reversed, and the Raikage swatted the blade aside but the clone was already past the strike, momentum spinning him into a full-body rotation that whipped his legs around the man's arm. His heels locked behind the Raikage's neck, torso swinging under, tanto arcing up toward the elbow joint — KRAK. The Raikage's arm flexed and the leg-lock didn't just break, it blew apart, the clone's legs wrenching loose like they'd been pried off by something hydraulic.

But two more had already closed the gap. One vaulted overhead, body flipped, hurling kunai down at the Raikage's feet while the other corkscrewed in horizontal, stolen blade trailing blue fire, carving a rising slash across Raikage's neck.

The Raikage caught the corkscrew clone by the face and slammed him into the one dropping from above. Both popped. But the rock clone was already sprinting from the blind spot, planted his foot, and swung that lightning stone into the Raikage's jaw like he was trying to knock the man's head into next week. The Raikage's head turned two degrees. The clone grinned with cracking teeth.

"Worked, didn't it? Yo—"

POP. Black lightning punched through his chest before he finished the sentence. Didn't matter. The Raikage's jaw was already swelling. The clone saw it, laughed once, bright and sharp and absolutely unhinged, and dissolved grinning.

Just like that, two seconds and all nine of them were smoke. Just #63 left, standing alone with the Raikage's eyes boring into him, which was fine, because the north ridge behind him had just turned into a landslide of bodies, five hundred fresh, and the fourteen at the front were close enough that he could hear their footfalls hammering the dirt.

They hit the Raikage like a freight train. The Raikage did not notice the freight train. They lasted eight seconds. That's six more seconds than the first wave got, which, if you think about it, is a three-hundred-percent improvement.

And what an eight seconds it was, blue lightning crashing against black, clones springboarding off falling brothers, using falling bodies as covers, building human ladders and lightning cages and sacrificial dogpiles that bought fractions of seconds at the cost of entire existences. The Raikage crashed through all of it. Every formation, every trick, every desperate gambit.

When the last one popped, #63 was already underground, swimming through dirt like a mole, mud closing over his face as black lightning bored into the earth behind him, chasing, splitting rock and fusing soil into glass. It stopped two meters short. The heat didn't. It soaked through the packed dirt and pressed against his spine like a brand.

#63 broke ground fifty meters out behind a slab of rubble, gasped air he didn't need, and swiveled his head around like a prairie dog as he ran the numbers.

Destruction rate was higher than creation rate, but not by much. Waves were still forming at the treeline, fresh clones manifesting and sprinting into the grinder the moment they had legs. The Raikage would burn through all of them eventually. But eventually was a long time from now, and eventually was all Jiraiya needed.

So the smart play was to keep doing exactly this. Obviously. Except there was another option sitting in the back of his skull, and it wouldn't shut up. A few hundred exploding clones, detonating in sequence, would turn this whole clearing into a crater the size of a small lake and probably take a solid chunk off the Raikage's health bar in the process. The thought was right there, warm and tempting, sitting in the front of his brain like a dessert he hadn't ordered but kind of wanted to eat anyway.

But that was the problem, wasn't it.

Hurt him too much and the man starts thinking. Starts dodging instead of swinging. And a Raikage who's dodging is a Raikage who's looking around, and a Raikage who's looking around is a Raikage who notices that his jinchuriki is suspiciously unguarded and a certain white-haired pervert is suspiciously close to it. The whole plan falls apart the second the guy's survival instincts override his ego.

So the answer was no. Keep it dumb, keep it loud, keep the man's fists moving and his brain off. The current approach was working. Brute force attrition, expendable bodies, the world's most expensive distraction.

Boring, inelegant, and completely correct. Three out of three wasn't bad.

That said. It probably wouldn't hurt to add a little something extra. Just a light seasoning of provocation. Something to keep those big angry eyes pointed at him instead of anywhere useful. #63 nodded to himself. Yeah. Yeah, that could work.

"Hey there, you stupid looking old man!" #63 cupped his hands around his mouth and hollered. "I've been meaning to ask, do you do your own hair, or does someone in your village actually volunteer to make you look like that? Because either way, somebody owes you an apology!"

The clone next to him groaned. "Bro. Hair jokes? That's what we're doing? I share a gene pool with you and I have never been less happy about it."

The Raikage stopped mid-kill and turned his head toward them. Slowly. A vein the width of a finger surfaced on his neck and stayed there. His back teeth were grinding loud enough that the clones nearest to him could hear it over the lightning.

#63 turned to the clone beside him. "You were saying?"

The clone sighed. "Fine. You win. But I want it on record that this only worked because the Raikage has absolutely terrible taste in things to be angry about."

The next fifteen minutes were, by the unanimous and unsolicited opinion of every clone present, the most disrespectful thing to happen to Lightning Country since its founding.

#63 fell into a loop. Pop up, deliver an insult so vile that nearby clones flinched on the Raikage's behalf, disappear underground before the black lightning turned his hiding spot into a crater. Surface somewhere else, fifty meters away, a hundred, once directly behind the Raikage just because he could, say something even worse, something that made the last thing sound like a compliment, and vanish again. The battlefield became a whack-a-mole game where the mole had no self-preservation instinct and an endless supply of audacity.

The waves kept coming. Fourth wave hit harder than the third, clones arriving in pairs, one launching the other like a human slingshot, the thrown clone corkscrewing through the air with a lightning-charged blade in each hand while the launcher slid between the Raikage's legs and struck upward with a reversed blade. KRNCH. He crushed the slider by the skull, but the airborne one had already planted both feet on his shoulders and backflipped off, dragging a wire trap across his throat that three more clones yanked taut from the trees. The wire sang, bit into lightning-hardened skin, and held for exactly one second. Then Raikage’s neck flexed. SNAP. The wire didn't just break, it whipped back and cut two of the clones who'd been holding it.

Three kills with one neck flex. #63 would have been impressed if he wasn't so annoyed.

Fifth wave came in vertical, clones free-falling from a human tower sixty meters high, each one kicking off the one below to accelerate, driving heel-first into the Raikage's guard with enough force to crater stone. THOOM. THOOM. THOOM. He swatted them out of the air, one after another, but every swat pulled his arm out of position for the next one. POP. POP-POP-POP. Raikage ripped through them like wet paper, but wet paper that kept replacing itself, and every sheet cost him a breath he couldn't spare.

And through all of it, #63's voice kept finding him.

The hair comments graduated to his fighting style, then his intelligence, then his parents, which was a bold choice against a man who could atomize a hillside, and then kept climbing the family tree to his grandparents, then ancestors he made up on the spot just so he could insult those too. By the seventh wave, #63 started speculating loudly about the Raikage's romantic prospects, his future children, or lack thereof, and the various reasons why no woman in Lightning Country would willingly continue his bloodline.

The Raikage's response to each escalation was predictable and beautiful. More veins. More lightning. More raw, unfiltered rage poured into killing clones instead of thinking. His attacks got wider, sloppier, more destructive. He was cratering the ground in circles now, blowing apart entire squads with area attacks that wasted ten times the chakra a precise strike would have cost. He was burning hot and fighting angry and that was exactly where #63 wanted him.

By the fourteenth wave, the Raikage wasn't even forming words anymore. Just sounds. Guttural, volcanic sounds that came from somewhere deeper than language.

"WHEN I FIND THE REAL YOU, I AM GOING TO TEAR YOUR SOUL OUT THROUGH YOUR TEETH AND FEED IT TO THE EIGHT-TAILS! DO YOU HEAR ME?! YOUR SOUL! THROUGH YOUR TEETH!"

#63, from behind his rock, cupped his hands around his mouth one more time. "Feed it to the Eight-Tails? Old man, you can't even feed yourself a decent comeback! How are you going to feed a bijuu anything?!"

KRAKKOOM!

The answering bolt of black lightning turned his rock into vapor and kept going, boring a trench thirty meters long into the earth behind it. #63 watched from underground, already five body-lengths deep, dirt packed around him like a coffin. He smiled into the dirt. If he'd known tormenting a Kage was this fun, he'd have volunteered for this mission twice.

"Hey! You idiot!" Jiraiya's voice came from somewhere above, shouting over the noise as he sprinted across the treetops. "I've been done for a while now, and the Eight-Tails has been rampaging beautifully, so wrap it up and move to the next phase already! Stop playing around!"

#63 blinked. Dug upward, broke the surface, and looked east.

Sure enough. A massive, thrashing silhouette was tearing across the horizon, eight tails whipping through the sky like the world's angriest octopus, headed toward something that looked very much like a village. The ground shook with every step. Trees flattened in waves. It was, by any definition, fully rampaging.

It had been fully rampaging for a few minutes.

#63 had been too busy having the time of his life to notice.

He cupped his hands around his mouth one last time and shouted across the battlefield. "Hey, old man! Just a heads up, your pet's off the leash and it looks super upset! You might want to go deal with that before it eats something important!"

What came out of the Raikage's mouth would haunt the surviving wildlife for generations. His eyes ping-ponged between the Eight-Tails and #63, and for one moment, he simply could not choose.

#63 didn't wait for him to decide. He grinned, threw both arms wide, and screamed. "TAMAYA!"

The remaining forty-nine clones didn't stop. They ran faster. Forty-nine pairs of eyes blazed gold, every last one of them sprinting straight at the Raikage like they wanted to hug him. And forty-nine bodies blew themselves apart simultaneously.

KRRRRAAAKKOOOOOM!!

The explosion swallowed everything, a white-gold sun blooming from the earth, flattening trees in every direction, turning the crater into a canyon. #63 dropped underground with the shockwave still ringing in his teeth, grinning so hard his face hurt.

…