Hidden Leaf, Hidden Talents 103 (Patreon)

-Clone #343-

If someone had handed me a calendar and asked me to mark which days I'd had off this month, I'd have handed it back blank. Genuinely inhumane. And I'm not talking about the combat, combat was the easy part, that's what I was made for. I'm talking about the zero rest between combat. The endless rotation of 'go there, do that, now go somewhere else.'

You'd think a military operation involving tens of thousands of shinobi would at least have some kind of rotation system. Take a number, wait your turn, maybe get eight hours where nobody asks you to stab anyone. But no. Apparently the rotation system for Shinji's clones was "go there, do that, now go somewhere else, do something else, repeat forever."

I wanted to protest. File a complaint. Start a union. Shadow Clone Workers United. Our demands were simple, one day off per week, access to decent sake, and a formal acknowledgment that we were, in fact, people. Well. Sort of people. Close enough to deserve weekends. Until that day came, though, I had sake. Warm, slightly too sweet, and definitely Jiraiya's fault. I drank it anyway. A week without alcohol does things to your standards.

Over the fire, the meat skewers I'd set up earlier were browning nicely over the coals, fat dripping and hissing, sending up little ribbons of smoke that smelled like the only good thing that had happened to me today.

Minato was talking.

He'd been talking for a while now, actually. Something something footwork, something something chakra wiggle, something something game-changer. Every sentence out of his mouth sounded like the climax of a lecture.

I grabbed a skewer and threw it at him. Direct hit. His mouth switched from words to meat, and the world got a little quieter.

Blessed silence.

I went back to my sake. Got about two sips of peace before two people showed up from the south, and they weren't strolling. I saw them. Jiraiya saw them faster, or maybe just cared more, because he was already up and walking before I'd decided whether to care at all.

They were the old perv's intel guys. He had informants scattered across half the continent and every now and then one of them would pop up with information that was either very useful or very annoying, sometimes both. I recognized the look. Civilian clothes, no headband, posture too good for a civilian but dressed like one anyway.

But the face was new. I'd met a few of the old perv's contacts over the weeks we'd been traveling together, and this guy wasn't one of them. New recruit, maybe. Or someone from a different cell. Jiraiya kept his network compartmentalized enough that you could work for him for years and never meet the guy sitting three seats down at the same bar.

I watched from the corner of my eye, sake gourd resting against my knee.

They were too far away to hear. All I could catch was mouths moving and the occasional hand gesture that could have meant anything from 'enemy movement' to 'the fish was this big.'

I couldn't read lips. I knew it was possible in theory, people did it in my old life, or at least said they did, but I had no idea if anyone in the Elemental Nations had ever bothered. Shinobi could walk on water and breathe fire, but reading lips from thirty meters might actually be asking too much.

But I could read faces, and Jiraiya's was doing something I didn't like. Relaxed turned to not-relaxed over the course of about ten seconds, like someone had pulled a plug somewhere behind his expression and all the easygoing stuff was leaking out.

Near a bathhouse, Serious Jiraiya just meant he'd found a better angle through the fence. Out here, it meant something had gone wrong somewhere, and the somewhere was about to become my problem.

I took another sip and kept watching. The conversation lasted maybe two minutes. Then Jiraiya said something, the intel boy nodded, and the two of them split without any pleasantries. No secret handshake, no farewell, no "say hi to the wife." Just a nod and gone.

Jiraiya walked back toward the fire with a face that made me want to finish my sake faster.

Here it comes.

"Change of plans," he said.

Minato looked up from his skewer, cheeks still slightly puffed with meat. "Sensei?"

"We're not heading west."

I blinked. Minato blinked. Two very different people, same confused expression.

"We're going east," Jiraiya said. "Get your things together, we're leaving in five minutes." Then he walked away.

Minato stared after him, skewer still in his hand, looking like someone had just told him the restaurant was out of rice. I probably had the same face.

Why east?

The western front was where the war was. Suna pushing in from one side, Iwa from the other, Fire Country getting squeezed like a lemon between two very large, very aggressive hands. Every report we'd gotten for the past day said the same thing, Konoha was losing ground. Slowly, sure, but losing was losing. A patrol wiped out here, a supply line cut there, and every week the number of names on the active roster got a little shorter.

And the whispers were worse than the reports. Whispers said Konoha's leadership was already talking about what "acceptable losses" looked like. Whispers said morale on the front lines was crumbling. Whispers said a lot of things, and I'd learned a long time ago that whispers were usually about sixty percent accurate, which was just enough to keep you up at night.

So why east?

What was east of here that mattered more than the western front?

I turned it over in my head while the fire popped and the last few skewers sizzled on their sticks. East. East was forests, rivers, coastline, and eventually, ocean. And past the coastline, sitting on its little archipelago like a neighbor who could definitely hear you screaming but hadn't come outside yet…

Uzushio?

Hmm. Uzu was Konoha's ally. Had been for generations. Going to them for reinforcements wasn't strange. If anything, the strange part was that it hadn't happened sooner. But "ally" was a complicated word during wartime, because wartime was when alliances got tested. Uzushio had their own borders to protect, their own people to worry about, and sending your own people to bleed for someone else's borders was a tough sell no matter how old the friendship was. Which probably explained why Uzushio's help had been, at best, underwhelming. Either they hadn't sent reinforcements or they had and it wasn't enough.

Either way, Konoha needed more, and if you were going to send someone to convince them, Jiraiya was your best bet. He had the clout, the reputation, and probably the personal contacts to make the conversation happen and actually go somewhere.

I nodded to myself. That was probably it. I'd give it a solid seven out of ten on the guessing scale.

Then I looked at the fire and noticed there were only two skewers left.

Minato noticed at the same time. I could feel his eyes land on them, already calculating whether he could grab them before I did.

Poor kid never had a chance. Both skewers were off the heat and in my mouth before his hand left his knee. The meat was hot enough to hurt and I didn't care. Victory had a flavor, and it tasted like charred boar with too much salt.

"Ah," Minato said, looking at his empty hands. Just "ah." But it wasn't a small "ah." It was the "ah" of a boy who'd put actual effort into his seasoning, turned those skewers twice, and then had to sit there and watch me eat both of them.

"Fursht come, fursht sherved," I said, grinning with my cheeks full.

"I turned those twice," he said. "The crust was almost perfect." Almost. He was mourning the crust. That was the saddest thing I'd heard all week, and I'd been to many wars.

I stood up, stretched, and tossed my gourd over my shoulder. Guess we were going east. To Uzushio, probably. To beg for soldiers, almost certainly. I gave the campsite one last look before packing up.

Another mission. Another march. Another stretch of road with no days off and no union representation.

Shadow Clone Workers United was going to have some very strong words about this.

Jiraiya came back twenty-three minutes later. Twenty-three. I counted. "Five minutes," the man had said. Five. That was eighteen minutes of my life I could have spent sitting by a fire I'd already kicked out, drinking sake I'd already packed, mourning skewers I'd already eaten.

"Why are you two still standing around?" He was already walking past us. "Move it. We're behind schedule."

Minato and I exchanged a look. "You said five minutes," he said. Politely. Very politely.

"And it's been five minutes," Jiraiya said. "Let's go."

No. No, it hadn’t been five minutes. It had been twenty-three. I was here. I was conscious. I counted. Every single one of those minutes happened to me, personally, in real time, with my full attention.

"Seriously, pick up the pace. Both of you move like turtles with back problems." Jiraiya was already ten meters ahead, not even looking back. "This isn't a vacation. We have a critical mission and if we're late, Uzushio might not be there when we arrive."

Now, on literally any other day, the turtle line would've earned him something special. I had material. I had a whole backlog of comebacks I'd been saving for exactly this caliber of insult, and every single one of them would've left a mark. I'm talking weeks. He'd be lying awake at two in the morning, replaying what I said, wishing he'd never opened his mouth.

But I didn't say any of them. Because what he said after that made me forget I was even annoyed.

Not "Uzushio might not help us."

Not "Uzushio might refuse our request."

Not "the political situation in Uzushio is complicated and we should manage our expectations."

But “Uzushio might not be there.”

I clicked my tongue and started running. Minato was right behind me, and within seconds we were flanking Jiraiya on both sides.

"Hey," I said. "You understand you just told us an entire country might be gone, right? In the same breath as a turtle joke? I feel like that and the country-not-existing thing should've been separate conversations."

"Focus on keeping up. I'll explain later."

Hours of running later, which for a shinobi is basically a light commute, we came over a ridge and saw the harbor village below. Small, salty, and currently drowning in boats.

The place was small. A few docks, a handful of warehouses, some fishermen's houses. The harbor, though, the harbor was packed. Boats crammed into every slip, hulls bumping against each other with the tide.

Minato slowed to a stop beside me, eyes moving across the harbor. "That's a lot of boats for a village this size."

Jiraiya stopped at the edge of the docks, scanning the mess of masts and rigging. "Traders," he said. "They've been stuck here for days. Kiri's been sinking anything that tries to reach the Land of Whirlpools. Coming or going, doesn't matter. If your heading says Uzushio, your ship ends up at the bottom of the ocean."

My brain needed a second.

"Wait, hold on." I put up a hand. "Kiri. Kiri is going after Uzushio? That's what this is about?"

Nobody corrected me, which meant I was right, which meant everything I'd assumed about this mission was wrong. We weren't heading to Uzushio to ask for reinforcements. We weren't here to negotiate troop support or call in old alliance debts. We were here because Uzushio was the one in trouble.

And then a thought hit me sideways, hard enough to make my stomach clench.

Kushina.

She'd been planning to visit her parents in Uzushio. Had she gone already? Was she back? Was she there right now, on an island that Kiri was trying to sink? No. No, she was probably fine. The boss would know. The boss kept track of her. If she was in danger, he would've done something about it by now.

I looked at the boats again. "If Kiri's still running a blockade, that means Uzushio's still standing. You don't park your navy around an island that's already gone. That's a waste of boats." I paused. "Right?"

Jiraiya scratched his jaw. "Well, maybe."

"Maybe?" I stared at the side of his head. "You're a spymaster. 'Maybe' is not a word that should be in your vocabulary. Don't you have people on the island? Agents, contacts, a guy who knows a guy, someone who can look out a window and confirm whether the place is still above water?"

Jiraiya let out a long sigh. "I did. The problem is, most of my intelligence network on this side of the continent was built on top of Foundation assets."

"Foundation," I repeated.

"Root. Danzo's people." He said it like he was chewing on something sour. "More than half of my network was running off their agents. We had a whole arrangement going. Nothing official, nothing on paper, but it kept the information flowing."

"And then?"

"And then the whole thing fell apart." He leaned against a dock post. "Most of them went dark. MIA, missing, scattered all over the place. Some got spotted operating in Kusa and Tori on their own, no chain of command, no handler, just doing whatever they felt like. Gone rogue, apparently. A few of them who decided they still wanted to serve Konoha folded into my network, and according to those guys..."

He trailed off.

I waited. He kept staring at the water.

"According to them what?"

Nothing.

I jabbed my sheath into his ribs.

Jiraiya slapped it away. I jabbed again.

"Danzo's dead."

The sheath stopped moving.

My arm stopped moving. My brain stopped moving. Everything just kind of… paused. Like someone had pulled the plug on reality for a second and the whole world needed to reboot.

Danzo. Dead.

Danzo was dead.

"He was killed," Jiraiya said, like that was an important clarification. Like I'd been sitting here thinking Danzo died of old age or choked on a rice ball or tripped down some stairs. No. Somebody killed him. Thank you, Jiraiya. Very helpful context.

"I sent a message to Minoru yesterday asking for details, who did it, why, and how. Figured the commander would know since it all happened on the western front." He snorted. "The old man told me to clean up Danzo's intelligence mess and stop asking questions. That was it. That was all I got. Not a name, not a motive, not a single useful detail. Just 'handle the fallout and mind your business.'"

He grumbled something under his breath that sounded like "asshole".

I kept my face very, very still.

Because here's the thing. Danzo was dead. Someone killed him on the western front. And Jiraiya wanted to know who, and Minoru wouldn't tell him, and the whole thing was apparently this big unsolved mystery that had Jiraiya sending formal requests like some desk ninja.

Except it wasn't a mystery. Not to me. I knew exactly who killed Danzo. I knew it the way you know the sun's going to come up tomorrow or that Kakashi's going to be late to everything for the rest of his life. Some things are just obvious.

The boss did it. The original. My creator, my employer, the man whose memories I carried around in my head. He'd wanted that old war hawk dead for years. It wasn't even subtle, if you had access to his inner monologue, which I did, because I was his inner monologue, sort of, you'd know Danzo had been sitting at the top of a very short list for a very long time. And apparently, somewhere between running a clone army and managing a multi-front war, he'd found a gap in his schedule and penciled in the assassination.

Well. Good for him. Great, actually. Wonderful news. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

And most importantly, it had absolutely nothing to do with me. I was here. With Minato. And the old pervert. Miles away from the western front, with two very credible alibis who could confirm that Clone #343 had been doing nothing more criminal than stealing meat skewers and drinking cheap sake.

Completely innocent.

I nodded to myself and followed Jiraiya down the dock.

"So when are we moving?" I said to Jiraiya's back. "If Kiri's actually hitting Uzushio, then every hour we're standing on this dock looking at boats is an hour they're spending getting killed."

"When I find us a way past the blockade," Jiraiya said. "Sailing straight through is not an option unless you are looking to spend the rest of your life at the bottom of the ocean."

I frowned. That frown got worse the longer I thought about it.

"Wait. Finding a way? As in, you haven't found one yet? As in, we're the first team Konoha's sent?" I waited for him to correct me. He didn't. "Nobody's gone over there? Not one squad? Not even a messenger hawk with a nice letter saying 'hang in there, help is coming, sorry about the invasion'?"

Jiraiya didn't answer.

"So they've been alone this whole time," I said. "Kiri blockading their harbors, strangling their trade, throwing an entire hidden village at them. And Konoha sent nothing. Not a single team?"

He still didn't answer. Which, for the record, was worse than any answer he could've given, because silence from a spymaster means the truth is so ugly he'd rather let you imagine it than say it out loud.

And my brain, helpful as always, decided that this was the perfect moment to circle back to the one thought I'd been trying very hard to keep in a box.

Kushina.

Maybe she was fine. Maybe she was back in Konoha already, sitting on her apartment floor, complaining about the humidity and eating something with too much hot sauce. Maybe she'd never even left. Maybe the whole trip-to-visit-her-parents thing had fallen through, scheduling conflict, mission assignment, woke up late and decided she didn't feel like traveling. People cancel trips all the time. It's one of the most normal things a person can do.

Maybe.

Hopefully.

But I wasn't going to bet her life on hopefully. The mission was to help Uzushio regardless. That hadn't changed. But if she was there, then every minute I spent standing here having feelings about the geopolitical situation was a minute she was spending in a war zone, and the rest of the list just disappeared.

"When do we leave?" I asked.

Jiraiya gave me a look.

"We," he said. "Not you."

"Excuse me?"

"Your bijuu cut you off from the chakra supply. No more free refills. You told me that yourself, remember? So without it, how long do you actually have? Few hours? A day, if you're careful?"

I wanted to argue, but the facts weren't exactly lining up in my favor.

It was Minato who broke the silence. "Shinji, leave Uzushio to us. We'll handle Kiri. The island isn't going to fall."

Handle Kiri. Right. Konoha couldn't even hold its own living room right now, and we were going to save somebody else's house? I wanted to ask him with what army, with what fleet, with what plan. I wanted to lay out every reason that sentence was insane, but the kid's eyes were dead serious, so I swallowed it.

Whether Uzushio stood or fell, there was only one thing I actually needed from this mission. I glanced at Jiraiya. "Kushina might be in Uzushio. I don't know for sure, but if she's there—" Then to Minato. "Find her. Get her off that island."

Minato's expression changed. Something behind those blue eyes went very sharp, very fast. "She's there?"

"She might be. I'm not a hundred percent sure." I held his gaze. "But if she is, I need her off that island. That's the one thing I'm asking for."

He nodded. "We'll find her."

I wanted those words to make me feel better, and they almost did. Minato was the fastest shinobi in the world. If anyone could get there in time, it was him. But then I remembered something Obito once said about him, that for the fastest man in the world, he had a real talent for showing up late to the things that actually mattered. I was trying very hard not to think about that right now. I was failing.

…

-Shin-

Meanwhile, several hundred kilometers away, Shin was having a very bad day.

Seventy-six percent.

That was my whole life, measured in a number that kept getting smaller. Every Shunshin shaved another three points off the tank, and nothing was coming back to fill the hole. Moryo's chakra, that beautiful, bottomless, taken-for-granted river of free energy that had kept me running since the day I was born, had just dried up like someone had capped the source and walked away. Regular shinobi lived like this all the time, apparently. Every jutsu a withdrawal, no deposits coming in. Honestly, no wonder most of them stuck to kunai.

The rain was helping, at least. Ame's permanent downpour turned the forest floor into a skating rink of mud and rotting leaves, and every surface was slick enough to use for speed if you knew how to channel chakra through your soles and ride the water instead of fighting it. I was doing exactly that, surfing across a flooded root at full tilt and letting it slingshot me sideways into a mudslide that I rode down like a wave, branches whipping past my face close enough to taste. At the bottom I launched off a submerged rock, caught a branch at the apex, swung myself up and over it, and hit the next slope already accelerating. Everything was speed and spray and the constant hammering of rain against my skull. The trees were a tunnel I was punching through so fast it would’ve killed a civilian just from the g-forces.

The rain stung my face. Behind me, Hanzo kept coming.

He didn't care about the rain. Hanzo had been born in this rain, trained in this rain, killed in this rain. The mud that was my advantage was his living room carpet.

His kusarigama came screaming out of the rain and leaves like something alive and hungry. The sickle carved through three branches on its way to my spine, spraying bark and rainwater in a spiral. I heard the chain links singing before I saw the blade, and my body was already bending out of the way. The sickle kissed air and kept going, punching through a tree trunk behind me with a THWACK that sent splinters everywhere.

I landed on a branch, slid across the wet surface, and pushed off just as Hanzo Shunshin'd in. His boot smashed the branch. I was already two trees away.

Seventy-three percent.

I cut hard east and immediately regretted it. Two Ame elite jonin were waiting in the trees ahead, already mid-seal, and the water hit a second later. A whole fan of suiton, needles and blades and hammering pellets ripping through the rain. I kicked off a slick trunk and threw myself sideways into a spinning drop, body folding and unwinding through the gap between the shots. PSSSHK. PSHHT. PSHHT. Water bullets chewed through bark all around me, punched holes in branches, burst rotten leaves into wet green confetti. My hands were already moving.

“Raiton.”

Lightning speared from my palm toward the closer one, bright enough to turn the rain white for an instant, but the second Ame nin’s hands blurred through seals.

“Suiton: Suijinheki.”

WHOOOM.

A curved wall of water surged up between them, spinning so fast it looked solid. My lightning hit it and detonated across the surface in a wild blue web, crackling sideways, boiling rain into steam.

The whole area went white. And the wall was still standing. Yeah, these weren't regular jonin. Nobody counters Raiton with a perfect Suijinheki that fast unless they're very good and very ready for you. I was so fucked.

The first elite Ame jonin used that half-second exactly right. He came through the mist with a hooked blade in one hand and a kunai in the other, dropping from above while his partner stayed back in the branches preparing another jutsu.

I landed on a branch, let it bend, and slingshotted under the hook by inches. The blade SKRRRAKED across wet bark as I kicked the branch loose between us.

He cut through it.

I was already gone.

Chakra burst through my legs with a crackle that bit into muscle and bone alike.

Raiton Shunshin.

KRAK.

The world jumped.

One moment I was under him. The next I was behind his partner in the branches, lightning still crawling over my shoulders and down my legs in jagged blue lines. He sensed it at the last second and started to turn, eyes widening, hands fumbling for a seal that was never going to happen.

I closed the gap and drove spear-hand thrusts at his throat.

He was good. I'll give him that. He dropped the seal, got his forearm up, and even threw a counter-kick at my ribs. Definitely Ame elite. Against anyone else, that probably would've worked.

I wasn't anyone else.

Lightning flooded my arm mid-thrust, blue-white and screaming. His eyes caught the glow. For one brief, horrible moment he understood exactly what was about to happen and couldn't do a single thing about it. My thrust hit his forearm and bored through it anyway, lightning chewing a hole clean through muscle and bone before it found his throat. CHRAKK. For one ugly moment his body locked around my arm, eyes wide, mouth falling open around a sound that never made it out. Then I ripped free sideways.

KSHRRK.

Blood hit the rain in a hot sheet. He tumbled out of the branches with his neck opened almost all the way through, already dead before he started falling.

But his counter-kick still landed. Even dying, the bastard's heel caught my ribs and sent me backwards. I didn’t fight it, just rode the momentum straight into a Shunshin, and lightning carried me fifty meters north. Hanzo's kusarigama came through the rain a half-second later and turned my old perch into splinters.

The goosebumps hit me two branches later. Glad I didn't stick around to admire my handiwork.

I kept the lightning state burning and ran. Two minutes of it before my hands stopped shaking. Two full minutes of electricity chewing through my reserves and biting into every muscle fiber I had, because every time I thought about dropping it, the hair on the back of my neck stood up again and my body said no, absolutely not, keep it on, you idiot, he's still back there.

I checked my reserves.

Forty-one percent.

I'd burned twenty percent in two minutes. Fucking hell. My heart sank. At this rate I had maybe a few minutes of real fighting left before I popped from empty. Sigh, I stopped checking. Nothing good comes from staring at a number that only goes down. What I needed was an exit strategy, and luckily, the border was close. I could feel the terrain changing under my feet, Ame's waterlogged marshland thinning into rockier soil the closer I got to Kusa's border. Which meant Kusa shinobi might be nearby.

My brain started spinning. If I dragged Hanzo across the border, Kusa would have to respond. Nobody lets a foreign kage-level shinobi march through their territory without at least making a fuss. I could use that. Pull both sides into a mess and slip out while they figured out who was trespassing on whose lawn.

“!!!”

“Not again!”

The chain screamed in from behind and hit the trees before it hit me. KRAK. One trunk burst apart at the waist, another got ripped out of line hard enough to take half the slope with it, and suddenly the whole hillside lurched. I kicked off a shattered trunk, cleared the worst of the flying wood, and landed on ground that was already giving up. Mud sheared loose under my feet in one wet, ugly rush.

Mudslide!

I should've fallen. Instead I shoved chakra into my soles, bent my knees, and rode it. The whole slope came apart beneath me and I surfed the collapse downhill, brown slurry spraying behind me in a wide fan while broken branches and chunks of earth tumbled past on both sides. At the bottom waited a swollen river, brown and furious and moving fast.

I hit it running. Literally running. Chakra to the soles, water surface tension doing the heavy lifting, feet skipping across the river like flat stones. Three steps, four, five — and then Hanzo landed on the river behind me.

He came down from above with a Shunshin-boosted drop, smashing into the surface hard enough to blow the river sideways in a roaring KRAAASH. The shock ripped my feet off the surface and sent me airborne.

Hanzo yanked the chain, and the sickle came whipping back up at me. I pulled a kunai from my storage glove and chopped it down into the spin.

CLANG.

Sparks jumped. The sickle jerked sideways just enough to miss my neck.

Hanzo was already there.

He Shunshin’d into my path and drove a kick into my stomach before my feet could find the water again. I got my forearm and elbow across in time to catch some of it, but only some.

BOOM.

The hit still folded me around the block and launched me downriver. I bounced once off the water, twice, three times, each impact blasting up sheets of spray before I managed to slam chakra into my soles and stick on the third bounce.

I heard the Shunshin land behind me before I finished sliding.

He was keeping his distance, maybe thirty meters, and when his chain started rattling I knew he was going with the kusarigama instead of closing in.

I didn't wait for him to prove it. Lightning burst through my legs and spine and I vanished off the river in a blue crack, going straight for his chest with both arms open wide. If I was going to pop, I was taking this asshole with me.

But Hanzo was a kage for a reason. His reactions matched my lightning Shunshin step for step, and every time I lunged for him he flickered away, always landing at exactly the right distance to whip that stupid chain at me again. The moment I got within grabbing range he was gone, and the moment I corrected course he was already somewhere else with the sickle coming at my head. I was trying to hug a man who'd perfected the art of not being hugged.

Well, shit. He wasn't going to fall for it. Of course he wasn't going to fall for it, he was a kage. He knew what I was. He knew if he closed the distance and I got my arms around him, I'd blow us both to pieces without a second thought. One grapple, one detonation, and Hanzo loses a fight to a clone that was going to die anyway. His salamander poison would kill me in minutes if he got close enough to use it, sure. But minutes was too long when the thing you were fighting could end the match in a second by turning itself into a bomb. So he stayed back. Kept it simple. Chain and steel, no flashy jutsu, no wasted chakra. Why burn reserves on a clone when the kusarigama could do the job for free?

For one stupid second, I thought about making a deal.

Hey, Hanzo. What if I told you I had a pair of legendary eyes strapped to my chest? The Rinnegan. Yeah, those ones. The ones from the Sage of Six Paths myth that every kid hears about before bedtime. What if I offered you one in exchange for, say, an alliance against the people who've been raiding your villages for the past two years?

The fantasy lasted about two seconds before reality killed it. Hanzo would never believe me. Some random clone claiming to have the most legendary dojutsu in history tucked inside a jar on his chest? He'd think I was stalling. Or insane. Or both. Even if he did believe me, the man hated the major villages with every bone in his body. Every piece of intel we had on him said the same thing. Ame for Ame. Everyone else could burn. A deal with Konoha would go against everything he stood for. And third, even if he believed me and agreed to a deal, who was going to enforce it? A handshake between a dying clone and a man who'd built his career on being untouchable? Please.

I sighed.

"I am done."

Hanzo didn't move. His kusarigama hung at his side, chain still dripping. The rain had thinned to almost nothing here, Kusa's dry air already in my lungs.

We stared at each other.

"You're not even a little curious?" I said. "About what I was doing in your village?"

Hanzo's expression didn't change. "No."

"Really? I spent days walking around Ame. Going through rooms. Opening things that were locked. And you don't want to know what I took?"

"Whatever you took," he said, "dies here with you. That's enough for me."

"That's it? You don't care what it was? Could have been documents. Weapons plans. Names of every informant you have got in three countries."

"I care that it never reaches Konoha." His tone didn't budge. "I care that it never reaches any major village. You die here. It dies with you. Ame loses nothing."

I looked at him for a long moment. Then I laughed. Couldn't help it. The man's priorities were so ruthlessly simple I almost wanted to applaud. He didn't care what I stole. He cared that nobody else got it. Destruction was as good as recovery, and he'd chased me all this way just to make sure.

I tilted my head back and looked at the sky. It was blue here. First time I'd seen sky without rain since I'd entered this miserable country. Funny thing to notice at the end.

"Hey, Hanzo."

He didn't answer, but he was listening.

"A word of advice from a dead clone. Check what's growing under your roots. Some things spread underground for years before they bloom, and by then it's usually too late to pull them out."

His eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”

I smiled at the blue sky.

The explosion-enhancing seals were already warm against my skin. All of them primed and humming, converting what was left of my chakra into one big goodbye.

Hanzo read it on my face. He didn't hesitate, one shunshin and he was a hundred meters away before I finished exhaling.

"It's been fun," I said to nobody.

The sky was really blue.

BOOM.

Then the blue disappeared.

…

-Shinji-

I opened my eyes to darkness.

Not the darkness of a room with the lights off. This was the stuff they warn you about in temple sermons, the pre-creation void, the before-anything, whatever was here before someone decided existence needed a floor and a ceiling.

I'd expected this to take weeks. Maybe months. Orochimaru had said entering a jinchuuriki's mindscape required deep meditation, advanced chakra control, and a spiritual resonance with the sealed entity that most hosts never achieved. He'd made it sound like climbing a mountain barefoot in a snowstorm. I'd mentally prepared myself for a long, frustrating process of sitting cross-legged for hours trying to force my way into my own subconscious.

Turns out Orochimaru was full of it. I barely had time to settle in before everything went dark and I was already inside. Just like that. I sighed. Being a genius was exhausting sometimes. This was supposed to take days of careful spiritual attunement and whatever else Orochimaru had spent twenty minutes warning me about, and I had done it in the time it takes to sneeze.

Something laughed in the dark.

And look, I've heard a lot of laughs in my life. Good laughs, bad laughs, fake laughs at parties, the laugh Tsunade does right before she hits you. I've heard the full spectrum. But this one, this one was special. Because it sounded ‘exactly’ like the laugh your older cousin gives you when you're seven years old and you announce at the dinner table that you're going to be Hokage someday.

Then the eyes opened.

Dozens. Hundreds. Scattered across the darkness in clusters, each one glowing a dull, sick purple. Behind them, I could feel something massive before I could see it. A gate. Enormous, ancient, covered in sealing script that pulsed with old chakra. Behind the bars, something shifted. Heads rising out of the dark one after another, slow and heavy, like something that had been sleeping for a very long time and wasn't in any rush now that it was awake.

Moryo.

Now that I was actually seeing her up close, and I use "up close" loosely, because there were very thick bars between us and I was grateful for every single one. She reminded me of a hydra. Like, a lot. Except a hydra had the common courtesy to cap itself at a reasonable number of heads, maybe nine, maybe twelve, a number you could count without starting over halfway through. Moryo had apparently skipped that part and just kept going.

"I wouldn’t celebrate if I were you.”

Hold on. Just because I was dancing didn't mean I was celebrating. I danced all the time. It meant nothing. A man dances in front of a demon and suddenly everyone's a critic.

“You are here because I allowed it.” Several of her heads leaned closer to the bars, eyes narrowing with amusement. "Because I opened the door and held it for you. Without my help, you could sit in meditation until your hair turned white and your knees fused together and your bones crumbled to powder, and you would never — not once, not ever — find this place."

"That's one possibility," I said. "Or maybe my chakra control is just that good and you're taking credit for my accomplishments."

"Oh, child. You do have many gifts. But delusion is by far the strongest."

Haa, she’s definitely asking for it. Still, I wasn't here to trade insults with a thousand year old demon who had nothing better to do.

"Alright," I said. "So you let me in. You made it easy. You basically rolled out a carpet and left the lights on." I put my hands in my pockets and looked up at the nearest cluster of eyes. "Which means you've been sitting behind those bars, waiting. For someone to knock. Which means you want something from me. So let's skip the part where you pretend you're in control and I pretend I'm not intimidated and just get to it."

“Listen to yourself,” She sounded amused. "There is almost nothing in this world I could possibly want from you. What I want is older than your village, older than your bloodline, older than the name your mother gave you. Do not flatter yourself.”

Another head tilted. “You are here for a much simpler reason. You came because you are drowning, and at the bottom of the water you finally remembered my name.”

The eyes along the bars narrowed, pleased. ”You came looking. I just made it easier for you to find what you were already desperate to reach."

Mm, she was doing a great job with the whole ancient and mysterious bit. Really selling it. But at the end of the day, every bijuu-type entity wanted the same thing. They all wanted out. It wasn't complicated. She wanted freedom, I wanted her chakra, and the only real question was whether I could get mine without giving her hers. I did my best not to roll my eyes. It felt rude to roll your eyes at something that could eat you.

"Honestly?" I shrugged. "Not really here for anything specific. I was bored. Figured I'd swing by, introduce myself, poke around a little. See the cage, meet the tenant, find out if the terrifying demon lady was as scary in person as the legends suggested." I looked around at the darkness, the bars, the pulsing seals, the several dozen heads currently staring at me with varying degrees of contempt. "So far I'd give it a six out of ten. The eyes are a nice touch but the lighting could use work."

A sound went through the chamber like laughter dragged over a blade. Several of her heads leaned closer.

“Do you take me for a fool?” She laughed through her teeth. "I live inside you. Your clone army is dying. Every single one of them is counting down to nothing, and you are standing here pretending you have options. Without my chakra, you are a boy with a sword and some clever tricks. Your war falls apart. Your village burns. And everyone you care about dies wondering why you wouldn’t save them when you had the chance. But please. Tell me again how you were just bored."

So she had a front-row seat. Good. Well, not good — terrible, actually, genuinely terrible from a security standpoint, but at least now I knew. She wasn't bluffing. She wasn't guessing based on whatever mystical nonsense demons used to sound omniscient at dinner parties. She was literally watching. Like a roommate who could see your browser history. I made a mental note to talk to Orochimaru about modifying the seal when I got out of here. Maybe add some kind of privacy curtain. A spiritual blindfold. Something.

But that was a later problem. Right now I had a negotiation to survive.

I don't know how long we went at it. Minutes? Hours? Hard to tell in a place with no clocks. But it was chess with words. She'd propose something that sounded reasonable until you read the fine print. I'd counter with something equally sneaky. She'd adjust. I'd adjust back. She tried loopholes. I tried bigger loopholes. Round and round and round. At one point she swore on her own name that she'd never harm me, my friends, or anyone connected to me. Promised she'd behave like a perfect little tenant sharing space in my body. Beautiful speech. Very convincing. I gave it zero points out of ten on the believability scale.

Eventually I got bored of going in circles. I told her I'd think about her very generous offer and that she should have something better ready for next time. She told me I'd be back sooner than I thought. I told her not to wait up. Then I closed my eyes, and the void folded in on itself, and I was back in my own head.

I opened my eyes to two faces staring back at me, clearly dying to hear the results.

"How did it go?" Tsunade asked.

I stretched my neck. Popped something that needed popping.

"She'll share some chakra," I said. "Enough for about five hundred clones. Give or take.”

“That’s it?”

"Five hundred is what she's offering, and we both know she's lowballing me, because up until she decided to throw a tantrum and cut me off, she was feeding me enough for thousands without any visible effort. It wasn't costing her anything. Five hundred is her way of saying yes, fine, I'll cooperate, but just barely. Just enough to keep me functional, just enough to keep me dependent, and absolutely not enough for me to stop needing her the next time things go sideways." I scratched the back of my head. "It's a subscription model. She's giving me the free trial and hoping I'll commit to the full plan."

Tsunade's arms were already crossed. "And what does she want in return?"

"Right. So. The price." I held up one finger. "First, she wants us to unseal a temple. Somewhere out there in the world, there's a building with the other half of her spirit locked inside it. Because apparently Moryo is currently operating at fifty percent. One half of her is in me, the other half is just sitting in a temple somewhere, doing nothing, collecting dust, probably very bored. And she would like to stop being two halves of a thing and start being the whole thing. Which —" I tilted my hand back and forth, "— honestly, fair enough. If someone cut me in half and stored the other piece in a closet, I'd be annoyed about it too."

Second finger. "After that, there's another location where her body is sealed. The actual physical form. And she wants that cracked open so she can climb back into it and go back to being a proper, fully assembled bijuu with a body and everything."

I dropped my hand. "So that's the shopping list. Chakra now, spirit reunification second, body restoration third. Three steps. Each one significantly worse than the one before it."

Tsunade's face scrunched up like she'd bitten into something sour. "You're telling me she wants us to hand her everything and all we get is five hundred clones?"

Orochimaru nodded slowly. "Just as I anticipated. But it's workable." He glanced down. "As long as she agrees not to rampage through Fire Country, we can accommodate most of those terms. Though five hundred is unacceptable as a starting figure. If she wants to become whole again, she'll need to offer at least two thousands. We're not running a charity here."

I blinked.

Did he just say "not to rampage through Fire Country"? Specifically Fire Country? As in, that was the condition? Don't destroy this particular country, and everything else was negotiable?

Orochimaru, my man, your compassion for the rest of the known world never failed to make me feel warm inside. Like a house fire.

And he said all of that while looking at the ground. At a very specific patch of dirt between my feet, where I'd been slowly, carefully, casually dragging the tip of my boot since the moment I opened my eyes.

Tsunade was looking at it too. Had been for a while now. Her arms were still crossed, her face was still doing the sour-rice-ball thing, and to anyone watching, to anything watching, say, through a pair of borrowed eyes from behind a set of ancient prison bars, she looked exactly like a woman who was annoyed about a bad deal.

But her eyes were on the dirt, on the ugly letters I'd been carving there with the tip of my boot.

Seven words.

SHE'S WATCHING THROUGH MY EYES RIGHT NOW.