It's been two days since we made our outpost and Sakura has already gone through five of the eight captives. The first four died on the first day, Sakura having tested several combat drugs on them. The last one died today, while testing the limits of the healing tattoo.
Hinata and I are playing poker, right now the score is five to four. This honestly reminds me of the days when the war first began.
I call "Do you think Sakura is gonna finish that tattoo by the time we leave to meet Ruya?"
She raises "I don't know. What worries me is why Ruya might be leading this gang. Why is a Sunagakure Jonin leading genin to attack caravans?"
I fold, showing my two pair "I'm assuming they're dirt poor and want money. Don't really think there's anything bigger going on. Sunagakure has been having money problems for a pretty long while"
She shows me her high card "Why would a jonin need to do all of this for money? She just became an outcast for what? She is not in the Sunagakure bingo book, so Sunagakure is either approving of this or unaware."
I deal the cards "Getting paid without risking your life is a reason. Maybe she has a debt she needs to pay"
She checks her cards "I don't think so. There has to be something else going on. Her participation in this is the same as her risking her life, Sunagakure has financial problems as is. If they find one of their own jonin engaging in banditry she would get relentlessly hunted down. Don't forget they killed the last team from Suna that took this mission."
I check my cards, royal flush "Not everything needs to be a conspiracy, but now that you've put it like that then yeah. I agree there's something stinky going on"
Sakura suddenly bursts inside "Hinata! Please come check the tattoo for me! I want to make sure I didn't miss anything."
Hinata and I give each other a look before getting up and following Sakura. Inside of her testing room she has one of the captives, a bald fourteenish year old boy, covered head to toe in tattoo's. "I want you to check if there's anything misaligned or missing with the seals before I put the healing chakra in."
Hinata nods and activates the byakugan. After five minutes she's not done yet so I just sit down on the floor and start re-reading a fuinjutsu manual. It takes Hinata a full hour before she gives Sakura a thumbs up. Sakura instantly uses the mystic palm and starts moving her hand all over the boy's tattoo's. Five minutes later I think she's done.
She forms a chakra scalpel and chops off the poor sods arm. Both Hinata and I watch in morbid fascination as the arm quickly grows back, tattoo's slowly growing back along with it. In two seconds it's grown back. Sakura runs some tests on the arm, diagnostic jutsu and some other stuff I honestly just don't recognize either the function or meaning of.
Afterwards she nods in excitement "It worked! I knew storing ink in the form of the seals would work to spread them! You can't seal a seal but you can seal the ink for it! Then all you need to do is slowly spread the seal back on the arm as it regrows from the healing chakra! This i-"
I raise my hand "Me first"
Sakura looks at Hinata. Hinata stands still for a bit before replying "I need some time to think about it. I will try to give you an answer by tomorrow."
Sakura looks at me. I have no hesitation "Light me up doc"
—
It takes Sakura around five hours to finish tattooing me. After the first twenty minutes I just asked her to anesthetize me, I'd have honestly just fallen asleep if I could've.
When I wake up I feel as if I've slept some of the most refreshing sleep I've had in a long while. A look in the mirror reveals I now look like one of those tatted up gang members.
Sakura looks at me "The seal is now spread throughout your body. You can compress it by circulating some chakra near the left part of your neck. When it's compressed it won't heal you. You can decompress it by circulating chakra near it when it is compressed, afterwards it will heal any wounds you have"
Doing as she said makes the tattoo slowly move recede. Until it eventually all reaches a circle with a diameter of three centimeters on my neck. She literally just made the healing version of the cursed seal. Hope she named it the blessed seal.
I look at her "What did you decide to name it? Also, does it need to get refilled with chakra?"
She nods "You will need to add the regenerative part of the chakra from the mystic palm into it after heavy use. It can store enough to regenerate your arm over forty times. It uses up a lot of chakra and it is empty now so you will have to spend some time to fill it. Once it's full however you'll only need to occasionally top it back up, depending on how much you use it. As for the name I decided to name it The Healing Seal."
I nod "How long is it gonna take to fill?"
She chuckles "Not much, just around a month of you converting your entire chakra pool for it"
I nod once again "Yeah, that's not much at all. Lemme just time travel and rob the chakra of future me."
—
Going back to the main room of our outpost I find Hinata reading a novel, she quickly hides it before I can catch the title however. She looks at me "Want to continue the poker game? Or play something else?"
I sit down "Let's just continue where we were"
She immediately folds. Dammit.
-next day
Hinata has agreed to get the tattoo. After she wakes up we'll both tattoo Sakura. Hopefully we'll have time to charge them up before we get into a dangerous fight. Ruya is supposedly just some rando jonin specializing in ninjutsu, so she shouldn't be too hard of a fight. If we get the drop on her then I'm confident either Hinata or I can just knock her out cold on the first hit.
-next day
The time has come to 'meet up' with Ruya. We have already prepared ourselves and are ready to start the journey to the meeting spot. We're leaving around three hours before the agreed time. The meeting spot is about one hour away from our outpost at our usual speed. Thankfully the journey is uneventful and by the time we arrive Ruya is not yet there.
We use the hiding like a mole jutsu and just wait underground for her to arrive. When she does we'll just ambush and interrogate her. It's half an hour before the scheduled time that an auburn haired woman in her twenties matching her description shows up along with five other shinobi. According to Hinata the five are older compared to the genin, ages between twenty-ish and forty. Once they stop we slowly move right underneath them.
From there we burst out of the ground. Sakura grabs the ankles of two of the shinobi and paralyzes them on her way up, lifting them from their ankles with her as she does. Hinata knocks out two of the shinobi with the gentle fist on her way up, the third she kicked in the head as soon as he turned towards her. As I burst from the ground I open with a flying knee kick into Ruya's stomach, successfully knocking her out. Afterwards we seal their chakra and tie them up. With that done I make six shadow clones to carry them with us back to our outpost. Hopefully they have some good intel for us.
When we arrive we immediately begin by interrogating the two that Sakura has paralyzed while we wait for the rest to come back to consciousness. What we find out is somewhat worrying. They have been in the organization for a long time, recruited in the same way the genin we captured were. And considering one of them is forty years old, that means Ruya is probably not the ringleader. As a wise man once said, troublesome.
—
Once the other shinobi wake up they all have the same story. Recruited from a young age as genin. After getting some experience and becoming older they were then trained and promoted. The older guy apparently knows Ruya's predecessor, another jonin that is not currently in the bingo book. Hinata was right, there's something fishy going on here.
Ruya's interrogation is last. As expected of a jonin, she does not crack at all, remaining stoically silent. Once I use genjutsu to make her think we're her allies this changes and we finally have our answer. They are trying to usurp the Kazekage.
Ruya's clan, the Hakida, are trying to undermine the current Kazekage. By making the shinobi under his patronage seem inept and making their own shinobi seem more adept. They're making trouble to create mission requests, if one of their shinobi gets the mission then they succeed. If one of the Kazekage's shinobi gets it they fail and/or die.
After we finish extracting all the info from her we decide to have a small strategy meeting, to discuss all we've learned.
Sakura is somewhat confused by their plan "I don't understand what part of their plan is supposed to be a good idea. It's not like they can actually kill Rasa, let alone usurp him"
Hinata concurs "It is a greedy and short sighted plan. Attempting to take over in this matter would weaken them if they managed to get control of Sunagakure."
I throw in my two cents "It's stupid. Ruya is supposedly one of their stronger jonin. The fuck they gonna do to Rasa? Snort his gold dust? That man is an actual S-rank shinobi, he could singlehandedly kill their entire clan in the morning and be home on time for breakfast. Even compared to us, if we somehow managed to get the drop on him he would probably still kick our ass"
Sakura agrees "It is stupid. The only way this would make any amount of sense would be if they had prepared special countermeasures against him. But they didn't, she confirmed that they are just going to try and fight him to the death, so that they apparently gain more legitimacy."
Hinata shrugs "In this case what should we do now? We can either just pretend we didn't hear anything or we can send a shadow clone towards Konoha to give a report and receive any further instructions. We arrived here for Sakura to run her experiments, the mission is just an excuse for us to be here"
I sigh "I'll make a shadow clone and send it to Konoha. Now that we're entangled in this mess it's not like we can do anything else. Ruya we will have to hand over to the Kazekage, the others we can just give to Sakura. If anyone asks, they died during the fight."
Hinata and Sakura both nod in agreement. I make a shadow clone and send it to Konoha, it should arrive there in ten days. Until then Hinata and I will just spend our time lazing around, not like we can do anything else anyhow. Sakura can keep herself busy for now.