[Genjo/Shinji's Clone POV]
The biwa sang under Genjo's fingers, and the afternoon crowd gathered like moths to flame.
He sat cross-legged on a worn mat in the town square, his robes faded to that soft, travel-worn grey that came from too many washings and too little rest. The instrument rested in his lap, its strings answering every touch with notes that drifted through the air and settled over the marketplace like warm honey. People slowed their steps. Vendors paused mid-transaction. Even the stray dogs abandoned their usual routine of looking pitiful near food stalls to tilt their heads and listen.
Genjo played the biwa the way time itself plays favorites. He had learned from modern virtuosos who treated creativity like a competitive sport, and the gap between this era's music and his was wide enough to warrant its own zip code. When he moved into Jōruri-hime, the soft Satsuma-biwa tale of devotion pulled tight by longing, the melody poured out so naturally it felt like it had always existed and was only waiting for him to call it home.
A child tugged at his mother's sleeve, trying to get her attention, but the woman didn't respond. Tears tracked down her face in thin lines, catching sunlight as they fell. She didn't seem to notice she was crying. Didn't lift a hand to wipe them away. Just stood there listening while something in the music reached into whatever grief she carried and squeezed. The child tugged harder, worried now, looking between her mother's wet face and the monk playing like maybe he'd done something wrong, maybe this was bad, maybe they should leave.
An old man with a walking stick planted himself at the edge of the growing audience and went completely still. His eyes were distant, focused on something nobody else could see. Maybe a smile he'd memorized. Maybe hands that used to fix his collar before he left the house. Maybe just the empty space beside him where someone used to stand. His grip on the walking stick trembled slightly, and his mouth moved without sound, forming words or a name that got lost in the music.
A merchant forgot he was supposed to be selling vegetables. The radishes sat in their basket, ignored, and his hands hung loose at his sides like he'd forgotten what they were for.
And through this sea of captivated faces, Konan moved like a small purple ghost.
She was maybe thirteen years old, maybe fourteen. Hard to tell with kids sometimes. The purple hair caught afternoon light and did things to it that seemed unfair to every other hair color. She stepped carefully between listeners, not wanting to break whatever spell the music had cast, wooden bowl held in both hands as she made her rounds.
The bowl clinked softly each time someone dropped a coin inside.
Actually, calling it "clinking" was underselling what was happening here. The bowl was getting heavy. Men were reaching into their pockets with this glazed expression, pulling out coins they'd probably earmarked for lunch or sake or whatever responsible adult purchase had been on their agenda before the music grabbed them by the throat and refused to let go. The melody had done something to their decision-making centers. Turned off the part of the brain that calculated value and turned on the part that just wanted to give something back to beauty, to preserve it, to say thank you to whoever had reminded them that life could sound like this. Konan would pause in front of someone still lost in the performance, hold out the bowl, and they'd drop coins in without even looking down. Completely automatic, totally unconscious. The music had opened their wallets before she'd even arrived.
It was devastatingly effective.
A middle-aged merchant pulled out his entire coin purse and dumped half its contents into her bowl without counting. His wife elbowed him hard enough to leave a bruise. He didn't even notice, still listening with wet eyes.
Genjo kept playing, each note chosen to pull at whatever emotional thread these people had been trying to ignore. Watching grown men cry into their sleeves while handing money to a child with a wooden bowl felt like a con even if the emotion was genuine, but money was money and this was his job. The coins kept coming and Konan's smile got wider with each clink.
The song reached its final notes. Genjo let the last one hang in the air for three full seconds before releasing the strings, letting silence replace melody. The crowd made this collective sound, somewhere between a sigh and applause, and then the clapping started.
Konan bowed to the audience, clutching her now-heavy bowl with both hands. Genjo bowed his own thanks, fingers still resting on the strings. The whole performance had gone exactly according to plan, tears extracted, wallets opened, another day of food and lodging secured through the power of tragic love songs and excellent string work.
They slipped away while the crowd was still dabbing at their eyes, Konan practically skipping beside him with the coin pouch secured at her waist and bulging enough to make suspicious noises with each step. The afternoon sun painted the street in orange and gold, and behind them people drifted back to doing what people in towns do, buying things, complaining about prices, existing loudly in public spaces.
"That was so amazing!" Konan said, loud enough that a passing housewife turned to stare. "Did you see how much money we made?"
Genjo kept his face blank and went right back to talking like a monk. "This humble monk is pleased that our performance was well received by the generous townspeople."
"Uh-huh. Sure." She grinned at him, all teeth and mischief. "You can drop the act now, old man. There's nobody close enough to hear us."
He kept walking, staff doing the whole tap-tap thing blind monks were supposed to do. "This one does not understand what the young miss is implying."
"The young miss is implying that you're full of it." She laughed. "You've been talking like that all day and it sounds so fake. You know that, right?"
"This humble monk speaks only the truth and—"
"Also, you're doing that thing where you look totally different than you actually are. The disguise jutsu or whatever it's called?" She poked his arm like she was testing the texture of a lie. "I can see your chakra and it doesn't match up with how you look. You're not really old at all. And you're probably not really blind either, are you?"
Genjo stopped walking so fast his staff nearly tripped him. He leaned down toward her level and started making these frantic shushing gestures with both hands, waving them around like he was trying to physically push the sound of her voice back into her mouth. His eyes darted up and down the street, checking for anyone paying too much attention. A few people walked past but nobody seemed interested in a monk having what looked like a silent panic attack next to a teenager.
"Could you maybe not say that so loud?" He dipped his head toward her, voice dropping to a whisper. "There are hunters out here, missing-nin, all sorts of people who would love to hear something like that. I'm trying not to get flagged as today's special, so maybe keep that part to your inside voice?"
Konan giggled, her shoulders shaking. "You should see your face right now."
"My face looks exactly how it should when someone announces I'm using a henge in the middle of a public street."
"A henge?" She tested the word out. "Is that what it's called?"
"Yes and you basically just announced it to the whole neighborhood."
"Nobody heard me. I wasn't that loud."
"You said it at regular talking volume. Regular talking volume is plenty loud enough to ruin my entire week."
She was still giggling, hand over her mouth, clearly delighted by how flustered he'd gotten. "Is the great monk worried about getting caught?"
He sighed and started walking again, faster this time. "You're going to get us both in trouble."
"Probably." She skipped twice to catch up. "But I'll keep your secret."
"Will you."
"Mm-hm. For a price."
He glanced down at her. "Let me guess. You want a bigger cut."
"Bigger cut," she said immediately, like she'd been waiting for him to bring it up. "Okay so I was thinking, seventy-thirty? And I get the thirty. Because I'm the one out there getting pushed around and dodging elbows and stuff while you just sit there making pretty sounds."
"You're fourteen."
"Exactly. Which means my rates are a bargain. If you hired an adult for this, you'd be bankrupt by morning."
Genjo felt something tug at the corner of his mouth. It was absolutely the wrong time to smile, given the place and the fact that this child had just negotiated her own cut in public like it was nothing. But the smile showed up anyway.
"Seventy-thirty," he muttered. "Fine. Deal."
"Knew you'd see reason." Konan patted her coin pouch, making it jingle. "This is the first time I've ever seen this much money. It's so heavy. We could probably buy a house with this."
"It'll get us fed for a few weeks and keep a roof over our heads," Genjo said. "So don't go naming your imaginary house just yet."
Konan puffed out her cheeks in a pout, clearly offended on behalf of her nonexistent house.
"A few weeks of food still sounds amazing though." She glanced up at him, her gaze brightening the way kids do when they want something. "So like... can we maybe get dumplings tonight? The good ones, you know the stall I'm talking about, right? The one by the bridge, with the old lady who always gives extra sauce?"
"We'll see."
"That means yes in adult-speak. I'm learning all your tricks, old man."
They kept walking, the fake monk and the purple-haired kid making their way toward the bridge as the smell of the food stalls drifted toward them. Behind them, the town square was thinning out, the last bits of the crowd peeling away as the day settled into a comfortable, hungry dusk. Up ahead, the lanterns over the dumpling stall were just beginning to glow.
...
Orochimaru walked down the crowded street with a bag of groceries that had been completely full yesterday and was now only half that. Food went faster when you had fewer mouths to feed, which should have been a relief except it wasn't. Logic didn't work that way when the missing mouths belonged to people you'd known for years.
He stared at nothing in particular as he walked, letting his feet handle navigation while his brain circled the same thoughts it had been circling for days. The war with Suna and River had been eating people alive since it started. Orochimaru had lost count of how many comrades he'd seen die since it started. This squad was new, assembled specifically for this mission into Ame, and already it was falling apart the same way every other squad had fallen apart. Nine people at the start. Only five still alive as of this morning. One killed in action, three dead from Chiyo's poison before sunrise, and another currently in the process of dying back at their hideout while Tsunade worked herself into exhaustion trying to stop it.
The pattern repeated itself. New squad, new faces, same ending. He was getting tired of learning names just to forget them weeks later.
Tsunade tried everything. Spent the whole days hunched over poisoned squad members, chakra burning through her reserves as she manually kept hearts beating and lungs working. He watched her fight for every extra minute they got. Watched her lose anyway. Poison was poison. It broke down cells and corrupted blood and killed nerves until the body just stopped. Chiyo's brew did all that and more. He figured Tsunade would need weeks to crack it properly. They didn't have weeks. They barely had days at this rate.
A commotion pulled him out of his thoughts. He stopped walking and turned his attention toward the town square where a crowd had gathered around something. Music drifted over the marketplace, soft and melancholic, the notes heavy enough to make people stop like someone had yanked their strings. He wasn't sure if it was the song or if everyone here was just that easy to distract.
Then he saw the source, a monk with a biwa on a worn mat, playing something that dug under your ribs and twisted. A purple-haired girl moved through the crowd collecting coins while people cried into their sleeves.
The music was genuinely moving. Orochimaru could admit that much. But he couldn't focus on it because something about the old monk was… off.
So he tightened his guard and walked away, groceries pulled close. They couldn't afford new problems. Half the squad was already dead, the rest barely holding together. If something in him said avoid the monk, he wasn't arguing.
The hideout was an abandoned house on the edge of town, the type of place nobody looked at twice because looking at it once was depressing enough. He entered through the back, set the bag on what used to be a kitchen counter, and climbed the stairs to the second floor where Tsunade had set up her makeshift medical station.
She greeted him with sweat on her cheeks and exhaustion in her eyes, kneeling beside their last poisoned squad member on a thin mattress. Last because they'd lost another one while Orochimaru had been out buying food. Five people still alive this morning. Four now. The count only ever moved one way.
Tsunade was channeling chakra continuously into the man's vital organs, keeping his heart beating and his lungs working and his liver processing toxins it had no business trying to process. Medical ninjutsu at this level was basically arguing with death through sheer force of will and chakra expenditure. It bought time but didn't solve the underlying problem. She knew that. He knew that.
She'd been doing this for days now. Testing medicines, observing reactions, analyzing how the poison moved through the body and what it did when it got there. Most of the results had been unchanged or marginally slowed progression at best. No cure. No breakthrough. Just incremental data collection while people died in front of her.
Today was different though. He could see it in how her hands moved, how her face changed from the usual grim focus to something that might have been hope if hope wasn't such a dangerous thing to feel in situations like this. She'd mixed up another medicine overnight, some new combination she'd thrown together while the rest of them tried to sleep, and the poison was responding to it. Not just slowing down like the other attempts. Actually breaking apart. Neutralizing bit by bit, slow but real enough that he could see the change in the body's reactions.
She'd found it. The cure.
But she'd found it too late.
The poison had reached his brain hours ago. Orochimaru could see it in how the man's pupils had stopped responding properly, how his breathing had gone irregular. Tsunade could buy minutes, maybe an hour if she really pushed herself, but brain function didn't come back once it shut down. The man was already gone in every way that counted. She had to know that. Had to understand she wasn't saving him anymore. She was keeping the meat running long enough to confirm the cure worked, making sure she knew exactly what combination of medicine and Iryoninjutsu would stop Chiyo's poison in someone who still had a chance.
Something dark in Orochimaru's mind latched onto that observation and wouldn't let go. She was using him, wasn't she? Using the body while it was still warm to figure out how to save the next person. Testing her cure on someone too far gone to make sure it worked on someone still alive.
He wouldn't have expected that from Tsunade. Then again, what else could she do when people died faster than she could develop solutions? You used what you had available. Learned what you could from the ones who were already lost. It made sense when he thought about it. Ugly truth, but still truth.
And just like that, something clicked in his head. That nagging concern he'd been carrying around since yesterday, the one that had been picking at him after he'd experimented on that captured Suna prisoner before disposing of the body. The worry about what people would think if they found out. What they'd call him. It faded. Just evaporated like it had never been there at all. Tsunade was doing the same thing, wasn't she? Using a dying man to gather data that would save others. Nobody was calling her a monster for it. Nobody was saying it was wrong. Because it wasn't wrong. It was necessary.
If using one body could save five, ten, twenty others down the line, then wasn't that the right choice? The smart choice? He'd been thinking about this wrong the whole time. Treating enemy prisoners like some moral problem he had to solve instead of what they actually were. Resources. Data sources. Bodies that were going to die anyway that could contribute something useful before they did.
The man stopped being a person somewhere between Orochimaru's second and third thought. Just a face that used to have someone behind it and now didn't.
Orochimaru watched it happen and found himself thinking about how fragile life really was. How temporary. You could be breathing one second and not breathing the next. Could survive ambushes and combat and explosions only to die from something you couldn't even see working through your blood. Could watch your entire squad get picked off one by one while standing right there next to them, unable to do anything except count how many were left.
And when they were gone, what did you have? Bodies. Data. Information that could maybe keep the next squad from ending up the same way. Seemed wasteful not to use it. Seemed stupid to let all that potential knowledge just rot in the ground when it could save lives instead. If he could just—
"Damn it." Tsunade's voice came out rough, exhausted, like she'd said it a hundred times before and would probably say it a hundred more before this war was over. "God damn it."
She reached out and closed the dead man's eyes, and whatever thread Orochimaru had been following in his head snapped.
She stayed there for a moment, kneeling beside the body, breathing hard. Then she pulled out a small notebook from her medical pouch and started writing. Notes on the cure. Dosage. Timing. The exact combination of medicine and Iryoninjutsu that had worked. Her hand moved fast across the page, recording everything while it was still fresh in her mind. When she finished, she tucked the notebook away, stood up slowly, and wiped the sweat from her face with the back of her hand.
"Okay. We're leaving." She looked around the room, not quite meeting anyone's eyes. "Pack everything up. All of it, I don't care if it seems useless, just grab it. We move in ten minutes, so... yeah. Ten minutes."
She turned to the tracker, gesturing vaguely toward the back of the building. "Handle the bodies before we go. I don't want Suna or Iwa finding anything they can use."
The tracker nodded once and moved to pick up the body, carrying it to the back room where they'd been keeping the others.
Akane and Kasumi, who'd been standing against the wall watching everything with tense shoulders and the worried expressions of people who knew they were running out of time, finally let themselves sigh in relief. They'd been trying to convince Tsunade to leave. Had explained how dire the situation was, how staying here was suicide, how Chiyo's forces were closing in and they needed to run while they still could. She'd refused every time, insisting she needed to stay until she saved them.
She hadn't saved anyone. But she'd gotten what she came for. Now they could finally leave this town and get back to somewhere safe.
Then Tsunade's next words made everyone in the room freeze.
"Okay, change of plans, we're going after Shinji." She said it like it was obvious, like it was the only thing that made sense. "My student's out there right now fighting for us, probably completely outnumbered, and he needs backup. So that's what we're doing."
Akane and Kasumi froze, and so did the tracker in the backroom. Tsunade still wanted to fight after everything that had happened, after losing many people to Chiyo's poison, after barely finding the cure in time. She wanted to go toward the danger instead of away from it.
Tsunade caught the looks they were giving her and kept going before anyone could argue.
"Look, I know what you're thinking, but just—hear me out, okay?" She held up a hand like she was trying to stop the objections before they started. "I figured out the cure. Finally. It took way too long and I lost people getting there, but I have it now. And yes, I'm the only one who can administer it properly because it requires a specific Iryoninjutsu that I don't have time to teach anyone, but that's... that's fine. That's workable. Point is, Chiyo's poison? It's not going to kill anyone else. Not on my watch. Not anymore."
She looked at each of them in turn, making sure they understood.
"And I'm not asking you to fight Chiyo directly. Just keep yourselves alive and stay away from anything pointy. Dodge the puppets. Don't get stabbed. If anyone does get hit, I'll handle the poison side of things. That's literally all I need from you. We find Shinji, we back him up, we all get out of Ame alive. That's the plan."
Akane opened her mouth like she wanted to say something. Probably something about the dark circles under Tsunade's eyes, or how she'd barely slept in days, or how pushing herself this hard was going to get her killed before any enemy did. But the words didn't come out. You could tell someone to rest all you wanted, but if they'd already decided to keep moving, you were just wasting breath.
Orochimaru joined the conversation, grocery bag forgotten on the counter downstairs.
"We should probably get moving now, actually." He glanced toward the window, then back at Tsunade. "I ran into some unfamiliar faces out there while I was grabbing supplies. Shinobi obviously, though I didn't stick around long enough to find out what they were doing here. Best case, they're Suna reinforcements who don't know we're here yet and we can slip out before they figure it out. Worst case, they're here specifically for us and we're already out of time. Either way, I'm not really interested in sticking around to find out which."
Tsunade nodded and started gathering her medical supplies. The rest of the squad followed her lead, packing what little equipment they had left.
Five people preparing to walk back into a war zone to save one jonin who'd probably gotten himself into more trouble than any teenager had a right to survive. The numbers were bad. The odds were worse. But Tsunade had made her decision, and when Tsunade made decisions they tended to stick whether logic agreed with them or not.
Orochimaru trailed after her down the stairs, leaving the room and everyone who'd died in it behind.
...
Meanwhile, the person they were going to rescue was already knee-deep in trouble. Shinji hit the rocky slope hard, boots skidding across loose gravel. Dust burst around him. Behind him the twenty-four clones scattered across the hills, each one darting through cracks and ridges like sparks thrown from a shattered stone. The wind came howling through the canyon. Every sound was sharp. Every breath raw.
Then the first barrage hit.
A storm of senbon hissed from above, and calling it a volley would've been generous since it was really just needles coming from ten different directions like the sky had developed a grudge. Shadows of puppets streaked across the cliff, riding chakra threads so fine they blurred into hair-thin lines. Shinji didn't look back. He twisted and snapped a kick into the rock wall. The heel strike sent him vaulting sideways, dodging three needles that decided to embed themselves in the wall instead of his skull.
His clones answered instantly. One slid under a boulder's lip and threw a handful of shuriken that multiplied mid-air into a hundred spinning blades, because why throw four when you could throw four hundred. Another slipped through the puppet assault like water through fingers, scattering smoke bombs as he went. Within seconds the battlefield was choked with grey haze, visibility went to hell, and the Suna-nin were forced to reel their puppets back before they started hitting each other.
That was the opening Shinji needed, and he didn't waste it. He didn't even slow down. He just slipped straight into the cluster of Suna-nin like he had been waiting for them to crowd him. The first one swung a hooked puppet arm at his ribs. Shinji caught it with one hand, twisted until the hinge screamed, and used the puppet as a shield against the next volley of senbon. The operator panicked, tried to pull it back, but Shinji was already moving. His tanto caught the operator across the throat and kept going, carving deep enough that Shinji could see things that were supposed to stay inside a person, and the man was still trying to work his puppet strings when his legs gave out.
Another puppeteer tried to get clever and whipped his wires low in a tangle meant to catch Shinji's legs. It almost worked. The threads brushed his shins for a split second. But But Shinji kicked off the ground and corkscrewed through the gap beneath the wires, close enough to scrape his shoulder on the rock, and punched upward with a chakra scalpel that cut the wires into useless twitching strands. The puppeteer stumbled backward and made the mistake of looking Shinji in the eye. Whatever stared back at him from those flat black eyes was enough to make him yank out a kunai on pure instinct. He got one swing off that Shinji batted aside, then threw a punch that Shinji weaved around like he was moving through water. The tanto went in under the ribs while fear was still the only thing on the man's face.
Shinji leaned into the stab, and the air around him went wrong. Not loud wrong, not explosively wrong, just subtly wrong where his instincts started screaming before his brain caught up to why.
Chakra threads snapped into existence beside him, close enough that the hair on his arm tried to stand up and run.
A metal spike flashed out of the blind spot behind his ribs, dragged by a thread he never saw coming. Instinct kicked faster than thought. Shinji wrenched his hand back. The blade slid halfway out of the man's body with a wet scrape, and he hurled himself back from both of them, boots skidding across loose gravel.
A second spike slammed into the ground at the exact moment he moved, punching a crater into the rock and sending gravel spraying in every direction.
So she was here, and Shinji adjusted his stance without thinking, blade tilting toward the ridge.
Chiyo appeared on the upper ridge, walking through the dust like it wasn't even there. She didn't say anything. She didn't need to. Her eyes found Shinji immediately and stayed there as three puppets dropped around her.
Shirogumo clicked across the stone with fast, hungry legs like it was seconds from sprinting off the cliff. Kurohachi spiraled down behind it, wings humming in a tight circle that blew grit off the ground. The Karasu-Otome came last, hitting the rock with a heavy thud before its torso spun open in slow rotation, blades sliding out as if greeting him.
Shinji tightened his grip on the tanto.
They were coming.
Shirogumo leapt first, launching a web of ultra-thin metal wires across the cliff face in a wide fan pattern that caught the light like a hundred tiny razors, each strand coated with something that gleamed sickly green in the sun. Shinji's clones ran right into it. One managed to slice through three lines with his tanto before the fourth wrapped around his arm and bit deep. Another clone dropped into a slide and kicked off the wall to vault over the lowest wire, twisted mid-air to dodge a follow-up strike from Shirogumo's leg, then landed and immediately had to parry. One strike, two, three, his tanto ringing with each block before the puppet feinted high and drove a leg through his hip from below.
Shinji flicked a kunai with wire attached. The kunai stabbed into a crack above. He yanked hard and slingshot himself through a gap in the wire web, the green gleam of poison flashing past on either side. The clone beside him moved to cover his escape, twisting into a sideways flip and slicing a wire with a tanto as he passed. Kurohachi rushed him midair, wings screaming as it closed the distance. The clone deflected a burst of senbon with his blade and even managed to kick the puppet off its line for a second, but the puppet recovered too fast. Its stinger shot out in a short burst and clipped him in the ribs. He tried to stabilize his landing, knees bending for a counterstrike, but the poison hit instantly and he vanished into smoke before he could swing.
The clone had bought him maybe three seconds. Shinji used every one of them. His feet barely kissed the ground before he was sprinting again, boots grinding over loose gravel that tried to slide him off the path, and forced his body into a sprint before the slope could argue.
It wasn't enough. The pursuit didn't stop.
Two Suna-nin on the right flank ran puppets along the wall like geckos, senbon firing in waves. A third was trying to cut Shinji off from the front, letting his modular puppet split its torso open to deploy a snap-on blade arm. The blade spun while the puppet lunged.
Shinji dropped low, sliding across the ground with his hand pressed flat to the dirt. Chakra surged through his palm like a pulse that wanted out. The earth answered fast. The whole surface rippled in a heavy roll and the Doryu Taiga opened under the puppet like a trap it never saw coming. Mud swallowed it up to the waist in one drag, gears grinding as the frame sank crooked into the slurry. The operator tried to yank it free. But Shinji was already moving again. He rolled up into a sprint, planted a foot on the half-buried torso, felt it buckle under the weight, and used the rebound to launch himself straight at the puppeteer.
The puppeteer reacted fast. His fingers twitched and the puppet's back split open again, firing a burst of projectiles wrapped with explosive tags straight into Shinji's face. The blasts went off in a tight chain, heat rolling over the rocks in a dirty wave.
Shinji felt the heat of instinct rise. His body blurred out of the blast zone with Shunshin before the fire even reached him, reappearing behind the puppeteer with the tanto already angled for the kill.
The Suna-nin twisted, wires flashing around his hand. The puppet's arm launched off the buried frame and flew at Shinji blade-first. Shinji tilted his head and let it whistle past his ear, then hammered three fast punches into the puppeteer's jaw, temple, throat. Bone cracked under the first hit, the second sent a thin spray of blood from his nose, and the third crushed something soft in his windpipe with a wet crunch. But the bastard was stubborn. Even choking on his own crushed throat, he jerked the strings and sent the arm swinging back. Shinji sidestepped without even turning around. The blade meant for his spine punched through its owner's chest instead, bursting out the front in a spray of red. The puppeteer looked down at the arm sticking out of his own body, and the last thing in his eyes before they went empty was pure disbelief.
He hit the ground and didn't move again. Shinji didn't bother checking. He just kept running.
Above him the main fight had turned into complete chaos. He could hear it more than see it, the clash of metal on wood, the pop of clones dispersing, the occasional scream that meant someone on the other side had gotten careless, all of it blending into background noise while he focused on not dying.
Shinji barely got three Shunshin in before his instincts screamed at him to stop. A sharp click above him, a shadow dropping fast, and then Shirogumo crashed into his path without so much as a hint it had been falling, all legs and metal stabbing for his ribs like it wanted to skewer him into the canyon floor. Shinji veered left, boots grinding over loose grit—
—and his instincts fired again. Something was coming from above and behind, and it was coming fast.
Kurohachi folded its wings tight as it came down, not aiming needles this time. The head split open and a furnace's worth of flame blasted downward in one sudden gout, hot enough that the canyon air warped around it.
Shinji didn't dodge this time.
He met fire with fire.
His lungs filled once, heat blooming in his gut, and the Katon he spat back came out twice as big as his usual one, a full wave of fire that swallowed Kurohachi's stream without slowing, roaring past it in a huge plume that rolled up the slope. Everything in its path got scorched, stone turning black, patches of dry vegetation flaring up and dying just as fast, the air itself shimmering and distorting until the canyon looked like it was melting.
Kurohachi vanished into the blaze for a second. The fire peeled off its wings in sheets. The whole frame lurched sideways from the impact, metal glowing at the joints.
He tried to rush in and finally put the annoying puppet out of his way, but his instincts slammed him in the opposite direction. Chiyo had already changed positions. He didn't catch the movement, only the cold feeling crawling up his neck before another puppet lunged from his blind spot.
Karasu-Otome's torso spun once, blades sweeping in a clean circle toward his ribs.
Shinji folded back into a handspring, the blade shaving the strap of his vest as he arced under it. His palms hit stone and he pushed off hard, feet catching a boulder behind him. He kicked off it immediately, launching himself back toward the puppet. His hand went for his tanto out of habit, but the glint of the puppet's frame changed his mind. Whatever alloy Chiyo had used for this thing, it wasn't something a regular blade was going to cut through without breaking. He formed a chakra scalpel instead and slashed across the puppet's wrist joint as he flew past, carving a thin glowing line that made its blade stutter mid-spin.
He landed on a slanted rock and let the slope launch him downward. Shirogumo lunged to meet him, legs stabbing in a tight cross meant to box him in. Shinji planted one hand on a protruding ledge and vaulted sideways, twisting parallel to the canyon wall. He caught a flicker of movement above, Karasu-Otome circling back into position. Mid-twist he drove his heel into one of Shirogumo's legs hard enough to send the limb bending in a direction it wasn't designed to go.
Karasu-Otome's blade dropped the moment Shinji cleared the twist.
He didn't try to outrun it. He just grabbed the bent leg he'd wrecked on Shirogumo and yanked it into the path of the strike. The blow hit the limb with a violent crack that jolted through both puppets. Shirogumo's leg snapped fully at the joint, the whole limb whipping off in a crooked arc, and the force kicked Karasu-Otome's blade off-center. The redirected strike chewed straight into the canyon wall instead, blasting a sheet of dust across Shinji's cheek.
He didn't get a second to breathe. Kurohachi re-emerged from the dying flames, wings bent at wrong angles but still moving. Chiyo's threads snapped it back into the fight even as the metal hissed from the heat. Shinji kicked off Shirogumo's body, used a jutting rock as a springboard, and flipped backward twice just as Kurohachi spat another burst of fire wide across the slope.
He landed on a ledge fifteen meters away and forced his breathing to behave, eyes tracking Chiyo as she came down the slope, her puppets boxing him in from all sides.
Shinji wiped the soot from his jaw with the back of his hand and listened. The sounds of fighting had gotten quieter, which wasn't a good sign for either side. His clones were dying. Chiyo's people were dying. The whole battlefield was shrinking down to fewer and fewer pieces on the board, and the problem was that Chiyo's side had brought a sensor who was apparently very good at their job. Every clone he made got tracked down and killed before it could make more clones, which completely ruined his usual strategy of drowning problems in sheer numbers until they stopped being problems.
It didn't take a genius to figure out what that meant for him. This fight was going to drag out, and dragging out meant overtime. He was going to have to work overtime against puppet users, which was basically his least favorite combination of words in any language. Gods, he hated fighting puppets. They didn't get tired, they didn't feel pain, and they kept coming at him with those jerky movements that looked wrong no matter how many times he saw them. Moments like this really made him miss having a weapon that could move faster than sound and turn enemies into past tense before they even knew the fight had started.
Shinji sighed under his breath. He didn't even bother hiding it.
Three more clones peeled off him in a quiet shimmer of chakra as he pushed into a sprint straight toward Chiyo. "Keep them busy," he said without looking back. The clones split off without needing to be told twice.
The clones did what clones did best and threw themselves at the problem. Shinji ran straight at Chiyo. He could spend all day dismantling her puppets piece by piece, or he could do the smart thing and cut off the head. Puppeteers without puppets were just regular shinobi. Puppeteers with holes in them were just corpses. Either outcome worked for him.
....
A few hours later, Kasumi and the new tracker managed to piece together enough of a trail to lead Tsunade's squad to Shinji's last known location.
What they found wasn't a battlefield. It was the aftermath of one, which somehow felt worse. Iwa's rocky terrain had been scorched in long ugly stretches that were still smoldering in places, thin trails of smoke rising from blackened stone like the ground itself hadn't finished dying yet. Chiyo's poisoned senbon lay scattered everywhere, dozens of them glinting between rocks and embedded in cliff faces, enough to make walking through the area feel like navigating a minefield. The stone itself was carved up with the marks of combat, deep gouges and blast craters and long scrapes that told stories about fights that had happened here without explaining how any of them ended.
But there was no one left. No Shinji. No Chiyo. No puppet brigade, no Suna-nin, nothing alive or dead that could explain what had happened after the fighting stopped. Just destruction stretching across the canyon like someone had decided to redecorate using exclusively violence, and then left without cleaning up.
That wasn't good enough for Tsunade. She insisted on searching anyway, moving through the wreckage like she expected to find Shinji slumped behind a boulder somewhere, wounded and waiting for someone to patch him up. She checked every crater, every scorched outcrop, every shadow that might have been hiding a body that was still breathing. The possibility that he hadn't survived his clash with Chiyo and her squad never crossed her face. She didn't let it. She didn't even let herself get close to thinking it.
The rest of the squad helped her search, none of them willing to be the first to say what they were all thinking. That changed when Akane suddenly went still, her eyes going distant for a moment before snapping back with something urgent in them.
"Okay, so... we have a problem." She kept her voice low, like speaking too loudly might make it worse. "There are Iwa-nin heading this way. They're still a few kilometers out, but they're moving fast, probably coming to check on all the noise from the fight. We've got maybe ten, fifteen minutes before they're on top of us."
Kasumi stepped closer to Tsunade. "We should pull back. If Iwa finds us here, that's a whole new problem we really don't need right now."
Tsunade didn't even look at her. "Not until I find him."
"Tsunade-sama, please." Akane's hands came up in a placating gesture. "We don't know how many of them there are, and it's not like we're in great shape to fight right now."
"I said no."
Kasumi and Akane looked at each other with matching expressions of defeat. They'd run out of arguments and didn't know what else to try. Tsunade kept searching, turning over debris, scanning the cliffs for any sign of movement.
Then Orochimaru spoke.
"We need to regroup with Konoha's forces."
Tsunade didn't stop, but she did pause, which was more than Kasumi or Akane had managed to get out of her.
Orochimaru kept talking, and somehow managed to sound reasonable without telling her what to do. "We still don't have a clear picture of the overall situation. We're at war with Suna, Iwa's breathing down our necks, and we've been operating blind for days now." He gestured vaguely at the destruction around them. "Both of our trackers have gone over this entire area already, and neither of them found anything. No footprints, no blood trail, no body. Nothing. Which means either Shinji got out on his own somehow, or..." He let the sentence hang there, unfinished. "Either way, staying here isn't going to give us answers. But regrouping might."
What none of them knew, and what wasn't really their fault for not knowing, was that Shinji had learned his lesson after being tracked by Chiyo's forces. He'd started paying a lot more attention to where he put his feet, deliberately avoiding terrain that would hold his prints and taking routes that left nothing for trackers to follow. It helped that Iwa's rocky landscape was a nightmare for tracking compared to Ame's muddy swamps. Footprints didn't stick to stone the way they stuck to wet earth. The fact that Kasumi and the new tracker couldn't find him wasn't a sign that something bad had happened. It was a sign that Shinji had gotten better at not being found.
But Tsunade didn't know that. All she knew was that her student was missing and Chiyo's poison was one of the nastiest things she'd ever had to cure.
"But he could be poisoned." Her voice cracked just slightly on the word, and she had to stop and take a breath before continuing. "You don't understand, if Chiyo got him with even one senbon, just one, he's going to need treatment. And soon. That poison doesn't wait around, it starts breaking down the nervous system almost immediately, and if he's out there somewhere thinking he can just walk it off..."
Orochimaru nodded like he'd expected that argument. "Okay, so what if you made a shadow clone and send it to keep searching. If you find him, you can heal him. But the rest of us need to regroup with the others and figure out how we're going to deal with Suna."
Tsunade opened her mouth to argue, but he wasn't finished.
"Also, I saw some of Shinji's clones back at the outpost before we left. Shadow clones disperse when the original dies. So if those clones are still around after a few more hours, even if your clone hasn't managed to track him down yet, then we'll know for sure he's alive somewhere."
The logic was hard to argue with, especially when Tsunade looked around and realized that every single member of her squad was looking at her with the same expression. They weren't going to follow her deeper into Iwa territory on what was starting to look like a desperate search with no leads. As a shinobi, as their squad leader, she knew what the correct decision was. They were still at war. Suna wasn't going to wait while she combed through Iwa's rocky wasteland looking for one person. The intel they'd gathered about Chiyo's forces, about Suna's movements in Ame, all of it needed to reach command as soon as possible. Pull back, regroup, report. That was the proper protocol. That was what a good leader would do.
But Shinji was still out there somewhere, possibly injured, possibly captured, possibly worse, and everything in her screamed to keep searching anyway. The shinobi part of her brain kept listing all the reasons why continuing was a terrible idea. The rest of her didn't care about those reasons at all.
She stood there for a long moment, jaw tight, hands clenched at her sides.
Then she formed the seal for a shadow clone, and the copy of her flickered into existence and immediately took off toward the northern cliffs without a word.
The real Tsunade turned back toward her squad, looking like someone had drained all the fight out of her in the last ten minutes.
"Fine," she said. "Let's move."