Chapter 10: Genin Maki
The first wave had been messy—blood in the sand, bodies cooling under the desert sun. But they'd walked away from it intact, and that was what mattered. For two hours they'd pushed forward without rest, the rocky terrain ahead promising the relative safety of Land of Bird's borders.
Inoichi raised his fist, and they froze. "Ambush. Five kilometers out." His voice carried the weight of certainty that came from years of reading minds and chakra signatures. "Eight of them, waiting on the main road."
They ducked behind a weathered boulder, its surface scarred by decades of sandstorms. Rei pressed his back against the stone, feeling its coolness seep through his shirt. The desert's heat was giving way to something sharper—the kind of cold that came before violence.
"They're not stumbling around blind anymore," Inoichi muttered, studying the crude map spread between them. "First group probably got word out before they died. Now they know we're coming."
"Can we go around?" Rei asked, though he already knew the answer from the grim set of Shiranui's jaw.
"Three hundred kilometers to avoid them completely. Any shorter route puts us in the mountains where they'll spot us anyway—then they'll just reposition and hit us when we're tired and exposed." Shiranui had spent over a decade in these wastelands, and it showed in the way he spoke about the terrain like an old enemy.
"So we go through them." Inoichi's words weren't a question. "Two jōnin, one chūnin, five genin. Shiranui and I take the big fish. You three keep the rest busy long enough for us to even the odds."
Rei looked at his teammates. Wada Yu's knuckles were white around his kunai grip, but he nodded without hesitation. Hanazuki's face had gone pale, but there was steel in her eyes that hadn't been there at the start of this mission. Fear was making them stronger, or at least more desperate.
"Ten minutes," Inoichi said, passing around soldier pills that tasted like chalk and bitter herbs. "Then we finish this."
---
Miles behind them, Pakura crouched beside three corpses half-buried by shifting sand. The desert had already begun to claim them, but the wounds were fresh enough to read like a story written in blood and steel.
Her team watched her in silence. They'd learned not to speak when she got that look—the one that said someone was going to pay for this failure in ways that would make death seem merciful.
"Keep moving," she said finally, her voice carrying the promise of retribution. "Tell the others to close the net."
The Kazekage's seat was slipping further from her grasp with each body that fell under her command. That made this personal.
---
The ambush site was a natural kill zone—a narrow passage between two rocky outcrops that funneled travelers into a convenient killing field. The Sand ninja hadn't tried to hide. They stood in plain sight, confident in their numbers.
"Arrogant," Rei muttered, but he was grinning. The honest brutality of it appealed to something dark in his Uchiha blood. "Almost makes me miss having explosive tags."
The charge was swift and brutal. Jōnin paired off with jōnin in a deadly dance that carried them away from the main fight. Rei had eyes only for the chūnin—take out the strongest piece first, then pick apart the rest.
But the Sand ninja weren't academy students. Two genin peeled off to flank him, and suddenly it was three against one.
"This should be fun," Rei said, and meant it. The part of him that belonged to his clan's warrior heritage was singing.
The youngest of them—couldn't be more than seven—came at him with a kunai raised high. Sloppy technique, but the kid had balls. Rei's hands moved through seals faster than most people could track, and a fireball bloomed between them.
"Maki, get back!" The chūnin's voice cracked with panic.
So that was the kid's name. Rei filed it away as another genin's puppet yanked the boy to safety with a rope that shot from its mouth like a steel tongue.
"Maki?" Rei's grin widened. "Well, well. Let's see how much potential you really have."
The chūnin's wind technique kicked up a stinging curtain of sand and debris. Rei let it carry him, used the cover to vanish into the chaos. The puppeteer sent kunai with explosive tags into the cloud, and the detonations echoed off the rocks like thunder.
"Got him!" The long-haired genin's voice carried triumph that lasted exactly as long as it took for Rei to step out of his earth-style hiding spot and separate the boy's head from his shoulders.
Blood painted the sand in a wide arc. The puppet clattered to the ground, its strings cut along with its master's life.
"One down," Rei said, turning to face the survivors. His Sharingan spun lazily in eyes that had seen too much death to be bothered by one more.
Young Maki's face had gone white as bone. Seven years old, and already learning that the world was a place where people died screaming. The underground clone technique dragged him down before he could process the lesson, and Rei's blade was already moving to complete it.
The chūnin's wind technique saved the boy's life but cost him his left eye. The blade carved a line from temple to jaw, and Maki's scream finally came—high and thin and full of the kind of pain that left scars on the soul.
To his credit, the kid bit down on his agony and wrapped the wound with cloth torn from his shirt. Blood seeped through the makeshift bandage, but he stayed on his feet.
By the time they regrouped, three more Sand genin were cooling in the dirt. Hanazuki was uninjured but hollow-eyed from whatever she'd had to do. Wada Yu was bleeding from a kunai slash and fighting off poison from senbon in his leg.
"Now it's fair," Rei said, though his chakra reserves were running on fumes. "Three on two."
The surviving Sand ninja stared at him like he was something that had crawled out of their nightmares. Which, in a way, he was.
A bloodied jōnin came limping toward them, shouting retreat orders. The man had senbon buried in his forehead and moved like someone who'd came back from dead.
"Yamanaka clan," the jōnin gasped as they pulled back. "Mind techniques. We need to wait for Pakura."
Maki retreated with the others, but he kept looking back at Rei. The Uchiha had carved something into the boy's mind today—a lesson written in blood and terror that would follow him for the rest of his life.
Some lessons were worth learning. Others just taught you how to be afraid.