Chapter 52: The Totally Unexpected Attack!

They left Hanawa at dawn with the whole village watching them go again, and this time nobody was quiet about it. Kane stood at the village edge with her arms crossed and her sparrow-small frame planted like she meant to guard the road personally until they were out of sight. Momo followed them for two hundred meters, holding Yoshino's hand, and had to be physically collected by her mother, who bowed so low to Mikoto that her forehead nearly touched the dirt.

Daigo made it further. Half a kilometer, a stick sword over his shoulder, running alongside Nawaki and chattering about how he was going to be a shinobi someday so he could dig people out of hills too, and could Nawaki teach him ninjutsu, and also swordsmanship.

"Sure, I don't mind. But it's going to be really tough. Are you sure you can handle it?" Nawaki smiled.

"I CAN HANDLE ANYTHING TO BE LIKE YOU, BIG BRO!"

They finally sent him back with a promise to visit.

Then it was just the four of them and the road and the hills folding away behind them, and the morning was gold and cool and theirs.

"Best mission," Tsume announced, running on all fours beside Kuromaru, who barked in agreement. "Best mission ever! Way better than catching Kuma."

"Everything is better than catching Kuma." Yoshino scoffed.

"We saved people, Yoshino!" Tsume flipped onto her feet and walked backward so she could face the group, arms spread. "We're basically heroes now. They’re going to tell stories about us to their grandchildren."

"It was a C-rank disaster relief mission… Stop making such a big deal out of it."

"A legendary C-rank disaster relief mission!"

Nawaki walked with his hands behind his head and his face tipped toward the sky.

"Sensei," he said. "Thank you."

"Hmm. For what?"

"For this mission. For making it... for making it feel like what being a shinobi is supposed to feel like." He was looking at the sky, not at her. "The war was just surviving. This was helping. It's different."

Mikoto looked at her three genin.

"It is different. Remember that difference. War is terrible." Mikoto smiled.

They walked on. The road wound through forest and low hills, birdsong and leaf-shadow. Tsume and Yoshino argued about whether soup or rice was the better post-mission meal. Nawaki practiced his chakra nature with a leaf pinched between two fingers. Kuromaru chased a butterfly.

They were maybe two hours from the village gates when the birds stopped singing.

The forest had been alive with sound, thrushes and warblers and the dry rasp of cicadas in the warm air, and then it wasn't.

Mikoto kept walking for three more steps. Her hand drifted to Shark Skin's handle.

"Sensei?" Nawaki had noticed her hand.

Tsume's nose wrinkled. Kuromaru's ears went flat against his skull and a thin whine leaked out of him.

"There's people," Tsume whispered. "A lot of people. In the trees. Everywhere. Sensei, Kuromaru's shaking." Kuromaru had never shaken like this before.

"How many?"

Tsume's eyes went wide as she counted. "Ten. More. Twelve, maybe. I can't tell, they smell like nothing, they smell like…" She swallowed. "Like nobody."

Twelve.

Mikoto drew Shark Skin.

"Nawaki. If I tell you to run, you take the girls and you run. You do not look back. You run until you reach the village gates. Do you understand me?"

Nawaki's hand was on Kusanagi's hilt. "I understand."

She opened her mouth to say it.

Then the world went black.

It came down around her like a bell dropped over a candle.

Four figures in the trees, at four points around her, hands clapped together in the same seal at the same instant, and from each of them a wall of black poured down and outward and met the others in a dome. Ten meters across. Seamless. It swallowed the road and the sky and the sun, and it swallowed Mikoto, and it cut her genin off on the other side of it before any of them had finished turning around.

The last thing she saw through the closing gap was Nawaki's face, and behind him, four more masked figures dropping out of the trees toward her students.

Then the dome sealed, and she was in the dark with four more.

They dropped in around her. Dark clothing with no markings. No headbands. Smooth white masks with nothing on them at all, no animal, no village etching, nothing. Each of them carried a short tantō.

None of them looked at her face.

That was the first thing she noticed, and it told her everything. Their masks were turned toward her chest, her hands, her feet. Four jonin-level killers who had studied her, who knew what the Sharingan could do with a single glance, who had trained themselves to fight a target without ever once meeting her eyes.

Her genin were outside. With four of them.

Mikoto didn't wait for them to start.

She went for the one directly in front of her, Body Flicker, and he was already moving to meet her, eyes down on her sword arm, reading her shoulders instead of her face. His tantō came up to catch Shark Skin's swing. Steel met bandaged shark skin. The tantō shattered on contact, allowing Mikoto to follow up with a swing that shredded the shinobi’s flesh, bones, and chakra. He dropped with a scream as a pool of blood formed around his dying body.

The other three moved in without hesitation.

Senbon. A fan of them from the left, low, aimed at her calves and thighs, and she smelled the poison on them before she saw the glint. She went up. A one-handed flip over the spread with Shark Skin trailing in her left hand, and as she came down the second operative was there, waiting for her landing, tantō sweeping at her ankles. She landed on the flat of his blade. Pressed it into the dirt with her heel. Swung Shark Skin down one-handed onto the crown of his mask.

The man’s flesh was peeled from top to bottom.

The third came from behind with wire. She felt it before it touched her, a thin bright line of steel looping toward her throat, and she caught it in her free hand, let it cut her palm, and pulled. The operative on the other end came off his feet toward her. She met him with her knee. Then finished the job with a downward slam with Shark Skin. The man’s body was cratered into the ground as spiderwebs of earth cracked around him.

One left. The senbon thrower. He'd backed against the dome wall with a fresh fan of needles between his fingers, mask tilted down at her feet, and Mikoto could feel it on her, the sting in her left calf where one needle had grazed her mid-flip. A burn spreading upward. Something fast and nasty.

She didn't stop to fix it. She walked toward him.

He threw. She cut the needles out of the air with three short strokes of Shark Skin and kept walking. He threw again. She caught two between her fingers and let the rest go past. He reached for a seal, and she was already there, and Shark Skin came across in a flat arc at the height of his throat.

The flesh and bone of his throat were stripped away before his head went flying in one direction and his body went the other.

Four.

She knelt for exactly five seconds. Drew the poison out of her calf through the graze in a thin black thread with medical ninjutsu, flicked it into the dirt, as Shark Skin fed chakra back into her and the skin closed. Then she stood up and looked at the barrier.

It was powerful. Even someone like Tsunade would be troubled by a barrier ninjutsu of this level. Unfortunately, she didn’t have time to waste being stuck in here. Her students were in trouble. And these weren’t run of the mill bounty hunters but skilled shinobi capable of threatening jonin.

There was only one way through, and the moment she used it, nobody who saw it could leave this road alive.

Mikoto decided that was fine.

She set her feet, raised the writhing overjoyed engorged shark weapon in both hands, and slashed at the barrier. Over and over again as the shinobi maintaining the barrier panicked. She felt it through the handle, an enormous, gleeful, bottomless hunger, devouring the barrier. The barrier thinned. Greyed. Cracked outward in spiderweb lines from the point of contact, and the cracks spread, faster, up and across the curve of the dome, and outside, four people who had been pouring their chakra into it felt it draining out of them through the barrier itself, into a sword that was supposed to be nothing but a big, ugly cleaver underneath.

The dome shattered like black glass and was gone.

Daylight. The road. The trees. And at four points around her, four masked figures with their hands still locked in the barrier seal, all of them swaying on their feet, all of them looking at the sword in her hands.

That wasn’t the reported cleaver…

However they didn't run. Their orders were to kill Mikoto Uchiha, and Lord Danzō did not forgive failure.

All four of them came at her at once.

The first two arrived together, from her left and her right, tantō drawn back for the same horizontal cut at the same height. A scissor meant to meet in the middle of her and take her apart at the waist. She didn't block. She jumped. Up and back in a high, tight flip over both blades, the steel passing through the air where her stomach had been, and at the top of the flip, upside down, she whipped her right leg around with every scrap of chakra she could pour into it.

The kick caught the left shinobi in the side of the head. There was a sound like a melon dropped from a roof. His body left the ground and kept leaving it, up over the road, over the treetops, a dark shape turning end over end against the blue sky, smaller, smaller, gone, hundreds of meters out into the forest.

She was still coming down. Shark Skin came down with her, two-handed, onto the operative on the right.

He got his tantō up. It didn't matter. Shark Skin went through the blade, through his guard, through his shoulder and his chest and the dirt of the road underneath him, and when Mikoto landed in a crouch and pulled it back up, there wasn't much left on the road to call a man.

Two.

They didn't come at her with ninjutsu. They'd learned. One of them reached into his vest and threw a bomb that burst into thick purple smoke at her feet. The other threw a kunai with a tag wrapped around the handle, straight into the heart of the cloud.

The explosion took the whole road. Fire and poison together, a rolling orange ball of it that tore up the dirt and blew the leaves off the trees for twenty meters around and left a crater smoking in the middle of the path. The two operatives crouched at the edge of the blast with their arms over their masks and waited for the smoke to clear. Waited for a body.

The smoke thinned. In the bottom of the crater, a blackened, splintered log lay smoking in the dirt.

One of them had time to make a small sound.

Mikoto was already behind her. She'd been behind her since the moment the tag left the other operative's hand, a Substitution and a Body Flicker so close together they were one motion. The operative started to turn.

Shark Skin took her head off her shoulders in one stroke. It went up, spinning, mask still on, higher than the trees, and fell somewhere in the forest, and her body stood for a second before it understood and folded into the dirt.

One.

The last operative stood at the far edge of the crater and looked at her.

At her face. Directly into her eyes.

He'd stopped caring about that. She saw why a moment later. He tore open the front of his vest, and underneath, strapped to his chest and his ribs and his stomach in rows, were explosive tags. Dozens of them. More than she could count at a glance. He made the seal to light them and charged.

He was going to take her with him.

Mikoto let him come.

She let him get within three strides, close enough that she could see the paper tags flaring to life one after another down his chest like a row of lanterns being lit, and then she spread her hands with palms out and pulled the moisture out of the air into water.

"Water Prison Jutsu."

The sphere closed over him mid-stride. Heavy, dense water, thick as syrup, folding in around him from every side and lifting him off the ground. He thrashed once inside it.

Then the tags went off.

The sphere bulged. Swelled out to twice its size, the water around him turning white and then orange and then black, and Mikoto poured more chakra into it, more, held it shut, thickened it, forced it to hold. The blast hammered against the inside of the prison. A wet, deep thud shook the ground under her feet. That was all. Not one flame escaped. Not one fragment.

She let the jutsu go.

The water fell to the road all at once and soaked into the crater, dark red and steaming. There was nothing left in it that needed burying.

Mikoto turned and ran toward her genin.

Nawaki had seen the dome come down over his sensei, and he'd seen the four masked figures coming down out of the trees toward the three of them, and he'd known.

Sensei couldn't help them. Not right now. Maybe not in time.

"Get behind me!" he shouted. "Tsume, Yoshino, behind me, NOW!"

They came at him from four directions, and they were fast. Faster than anything he'd fought since the war. Tsume went for the first one with her claws out and Kuromaru at her side and the operative simply stepped through the gap between them, kicked Kuromaru into a tree, caught Tsume's wrist, and threw her into the dirt like a sack of rice. Yoshino's kunai went at the second one and he caught it out of the air without looking and threw it back, and it took a line of skin off her shoulder on the way past.

They weren't interested in killing the girls but capturing them. And there was only one reason why they would want to capture them. It’d be different if they were targeting him, but no. Considering they’d thrown a whole barrier around Mikoto-sensei just to keep her busy, this had to be an assassination for her. Which meant they were going to be used as hostages to take out Mikoto-sensei.

He couldn’t allow that to happen.

Nawaki breathed in.

More air than his lungs were built for. His chest swelled until his ribs ached. The breath went deep, deeper, into the place sensei's breathing method had carved out of him over months of training, past the first door, past the second, past the third, which was as far as he'd ever been allowed to go.

He went to the fourth.

The Fourth Activation hit him like a fever. His skin flushed red, then darker, the deep color of blood seen through skin. Heat poured off him in waves that bent the air and made the grass at his feet curl and brown. His heart was pounding so hard he could feel it in his teeth. Every nerve in his body was screaming that this was too much, that he wasn't built for this yet.

He didn't care.

The operative holding Tsume in the dirt looked up just in time to see Nawaki coming. Too late to do anything about it. Kusanagi came across in a flat arc and extended as it came, the blade lengthening mid-swing, and it went through the operative's arm and through his neck behind it, and Tsume rolled free in a spray of red.

The second operative was already on him. Tantō thrusting at his kidney from behind. Nawaki turned into it instead of away, took the blade along his ribs instead of in them, felt it open his side, and kept turning. His elbow came around into the side of the mask. The mask cracked. The man staggered, and Nawaki drove Kusanagi through his chest so hard the hilt hit bone.

Two.

The third came at him low, a sweep at his legs. Nawaki jumped it. The fourth was waiting for the jump, exactly as he'd been taught by sensei they would be, and his blade came up at Nawaki's hanging body, and Nawaki twisted in the air and caught it on Kusanagi's guard and let the force of it spin him, and came down behind the third operative, and put the sword through his back.

Three.

The fourth was the best of them. Nawaki could tell from the way he moved, the way he didn't rush in after the other three had died, the way he circled with his tantō low and his weight balanced. They went at each other in a blur, steel on steel, Nawaki's blood running down his side, the heat of the Fourth Activation pouring off him in waves, the edges of his vision going white.

He could feel himself burning up. He had seconds left.

He screamed as he attacked high. The operative went for the feint from the ‘reckless’ brat. Nawaki dropped and swept Kusanagi upward from below, the blade lengthening as it went, and caught the man across the face.

The mask split in half. The two pieces fell away. Under it, Kusanagi's tip had carved a long red line diagonally across the man’s face, through the bridge of his nose, through his lips.

It wasn't deep enough.

The man stumbled back, blood pouring down his face, and didn't fall.

The Fourth Activation went out of Nawaki like a candle in a storm.

The red drained from his skin all at once. The heat vanished. His body, which had been running at a level it was nowhere near built to handle, fell apart. His legs went first. Then his arms. Kusanagi slid out of his fingers and shrank back to its normal length in the dirt. He hit the road on his hands and knees and every muscle in him cramped together, and he couldn't breathe, and he couldn't lift his head.

Get up, he told his legs.

They didn't listen.

Get up. He's still alive.

They didn't listen.

And the man with the split face looked at the boy on the ground, and at the two girls, and made a decision.

He grabbed Yoshino.

He had her before she'd finished scrambling backward, one arm locked across her chest and up under her chin, his tantō pressed against the side of her throat hard enough to draw a line of blood. Tsume screamed. Kuromaru, limping, snarled from where he'd crawled out from under the tree, and didn't dare move.

That was when Mikoto came out of the trees.

She stopped.

She took it in with one look. Nawaki on his hands and knees in the road, pale and shaking. Tsume in the dirt with blood on her. Three bodies. And one man with half a face, holding her student with a blade at her throat.

"Stop!" the man said. His voice was wet. Blood ran through his ruined lips. "Drop the strange sword! Drop it, or…"

The man looked at her. She looked at him.

He was looking her in the face. Without a mask. Without his training. With the pain of the wound shaking through him and the death of eleven comrades in his ears and a ten-year-old girl in his arms as his last card.

He met her eyes.

He saw red.

That was all she needed.

…

Inside the genjutsu, the man watched Mikoto Uchiha pull a kunai from her pouch. Her movements were slow. She raised the kunai to her own throat.

"Let the girl go," she said. "You win."

Then she drove the blade into her own neck.

Blood sprayed across the road in a red arc. The Uchiha girl crumpled. Her genin screamed. The operative stood over her body and felt his mission end. Target dead. The girl in his arms didn't matter now.

His grip on the tantō eased. His arm across the girl's chest loosened.

In the real world, Yoshino felt the blade leave her skin.

The arm across her went slack. The man's body changed from threat to nothing, his one good eye glazing, his muscles going loose. He was standing upright with a blade in his hand and he was somewhere else entirely.

Yoshino wrenched free. She shoved his arm wide, came up with a kunai in her hand, and lunged at him. At his heart. Ten years old and shaking and furious, and she meant it.

Mikoto caught her wrist.

The kunai stopped a hand's width from the operative's chest.

"Not this one," Mikoto said quietly. "I need him alive. For now."

"He…" Yoshino's voice broke. She was shaking. "He had a knife on my…"

"I know. And you're safe now. Let go."

Yoshino's fingers opened. The kunai fell. She stood there vibrating with fury and fear, and Mikoto laid a hand on her shoulder, once, firm, and turned to the operative.

His eye was still glazed. Still inside the genjutsu. Still watching a girl he'd been sent to kill bleed out on a forest road.

Mikoto stepped in front of him and looked into that eye, and the three-tomoe Sharingan went to work.

…

She made herself at home in his mind. The memories were there, but they fought her. It wasn’t the man himself. Whatever had trained him had stripped most of his will away a long time ago. It was something else. A seal. She could feel it wrapped around the deepest memories like wire around a throat. Every time she reached for the heart of it, the order, the face, the voice that had sent him here, the seal tightened, and the memory shredded itself in front of her, dissolving into blank white nothing.

She took what she could before the memories disappeared.

An order. Kill Mikoto Uchiha. Those exact words, heard in a room she couldn't see, spoken by a figure she couldn't make out. The seal erased the voice the moment she found it. It erased the room. It erased the face.

A briefing. Her mission to Hanawa. Her route. Her squad. The timing of her return. Someone had known the details of a mission that had gone through the mission assignment desk. Someone with access.

Twelve shinobi sent. Three groups of four. One to cage her. One to kill her inside the cage. One to take her students and use them as the knife if the other two failed.

All of them carrying the same seal on their tongues.

She saw it in the man's memory, his own mouth in a mirror: three solid lines and two broken ones, from the back of the tongue to the tip. A cursed seal, set into every member of whatever this was, fighting her now, burning every thread she pulled, protecting its master even from the legendary Sharingan.

She pushed harder. The tomoe spun. The seal pushed back. The memories behind it weren't hidden. They were destroyed, burned to nothing the moment she touched them.

But it couldn't burn everything.

What she could reach: the order came from inside Konoha. The man had been trained inside Konoha. Sealed inside Konoha. Sent from inside Konoha, at a Konoha jonin, on a Konoha road.

She withdrew from his mind. The operative sagged.

She killed him quickly. A kunai through the base of the skull. He never woke up from the genjutsu.

…

Then she worked.

She sealed all twelve bodies into scrolls, or what was left of them, including the one she had to body flicker hundreds of meters into the forest to find. She filled the crater. She washed the blood from the dirt with water jutsu and scattered fresh soil over the wet patches, and she checked every tree and every broken branch and every scorch mark and put each one right or buried it. By the time she was done, the road looked like nothing had ever happened on it.

Twelve. Nobody had escaped. Nobody had seen Shark Skin and lived. That much, at least, was safe.

She found her genin where she'd left them.

Nawaki was sitting up now, pale and drained, but upright, a hand pressed to the cut along his ribs. Kusanagi lay across his knees.

Tsume had Nawaki’s shirt halfway off before he could stop her.

“Hold still!” She yanked a roll of bandage out of her pouch with her teeth and spat the end of it into her hand. “You’re bleeding everywhere, dummy. Hold still!”

“I am holding still. You’re the one shaking me.”

“I’m not shaking, I’m helping you!” She slapped a wad of gauze against the cut on his ribs, hard enough that he hissed through his teeth, and started winding the bandage around his chest in big, loose, lopsided loops. Around once. Around twice. The third loop went somewhere near his armpit.

Kuromaru wedged his head under Nawaki’s arm and started licking the blood off his side with long, earnest swipes of his tongue.

“Kuromaru, stop, that tickles…”

“He’s cleaning it! Inuzuka dogs always lick wounds! It’s good for you!”

“Is it, though?”

“…Probably!”

Nawaki looked down at the bandage. It was already sliding off his shoulder.

“Tsume. It’s too loose. And you put the gauze over the wrong cut.” He pointed. “That one’s barely a scratch. This one’s the bleeding one.”

Tsume looked. Her face went red from her chin to her ears.

“I knew that…” She muttered.

“Here.” He caught her wrist, slowly, because his arm still didn’t want to move right, and guided her hands. “Fold the gauze first, so it’s thick. Press on the cut. Harder than that. Okay. Now wrap it tight, but not so tight it hurts to breathe. Go around the ribs, not up toward the shoulder.”

She did it. Her hands were shaking a little, and she was concentrating so hard her tongue poked out of the corner of her mouth. The second try was better. The bandage stayed where it was supposed to, and the blood stopped seeping through.

“There,” Nawaki said. “That’s better.”

Tsume tied it off and sat back on her heels, still red, not quite looking at him.

“Sensei taught us this,” she mumbled. “I wasn’t listening. I thought it was boring.” She picked at the dirt under her claws. “I’m gonna listen next time. Every word. So next time I don’t almost kill you trying to help.”

“I agree. You did almost kill me.”

“Don’t freaking agree with that. You’re supposed to comfort me, idiot.”

“Comfort you? I’m the one whose body is messed up, remember?” Nawaki pointed at himself.

“Shut up!” She sat slightly less close to him, but still nearby if he needed any more help.

Nawaki laughed even though his everything hurt.

Kuromaru, done with the bandage, climbed into Nawaki’s lap and licked his face instead. “Ah! My mouth was open, Kuromaru! At least lick my cheek not my mouth!” Nawaki cried.

Tsume burst out laughing at the sight as Kuromaru happily wagged his tail back and forth.

Yoshino stood apart from both of them, arms crossed tight, a thin red line on her throat where the tantō had been.

Mikoto had decided what to tell them while she was collecting bodies.

"Bounty hunters," she said. "My name is in the bingo books. Three nations have a price on my head, and that kind of money draws people who work in big groups. It happens, on the road, when you're a high-value target." She looked at each of them in turn. "This is the reality of being known in the shinobi world. I'm sorry you had to see it."

"Bounty hunters…" Nawaki repeated.

She knelt in front of him and laid her hands on his shoulders, and the green glow settled in. The cut along his ribs first. Then deeper. The Fourth Activation had torn him up from the inside: muscle fibers shredded, tendons stretched past their limit, hairline cracks running up both shins, tiny blood vessels burst all over his body, the bright ache behind his eyes that the breathing method left behind as its price. His body had held. Barely. She healed the fractures and the torn tendons, and left the deepest soreness in the muscle on purpose. That was how his body would grow.

"I didn’t realize how far you’d come with the Seven Heavens Breathing Method.” She said quietly.

"I had to."

"I know." She kept working. "You saved them, Nawaki. Both of them. Three shinobi far above your level, by yourself. Thank you."

She moved to Yoshino next. The girl flinched when Mikoto's hand touched her throat, then held still.

"It's shallow. It won't scar," Mikoto said, healing it.

Yoshino said nothing.

"Yoshino."

"I couldn't do anything." Her voice was boiling. "They threw us around like we were nothing. And then he grabbed me and I just… I froze. After everything you taught us. After the test, after Hanawa. I froze."

"You were facing four shinobi who individually were able to give jonin trouble. Chunin freeze in front of that. Some jonin freeze. You're ten years old, and you're alive, and you're angry about it. Which means next time, you'll fight through it."

"And if I don't?"

"I don't think you'll have that problem." She smiled at her.

But Yoshino didn’t know what she was smiling about. How could she know? How did she know wouldn’t freeze up again? 

Yoshino was unaware the red line on her throat was already gone.

Tsume hadn't said anything in minutes, which was its own kind of wound. Mikoto went to her. Healed the scrapes on her arms, the bruise rising on her cheek. Then she knelt and ran her hands over Kuromaru, found the cracked rib from where he'd hit the tree, and fixed that too. Kuromaru pressed his nose into her palm.

"You okay?"

"I couldn't do anything either," Tsume whispered. "He just threw me. Like I was nothing. And Kuromaru…" She buried her face in the dog's fur. "I'm supposed to be an alpha. I said I was an alpha."

"You're nine. Those men were elite shinobi. Being thrown around by them has nothing to do with how ‘alpha’ you are." Mikoto ruffled her hair. "You'll get there. I promise."

Tsume looked up. Her eyes were wet, and they weren't on Mikoto. They were on Nawaki, getting up to his feet while complaining.

"He was really cool…" Tsume said, very quietly, like she was telling a secret.

"I bet he was," Mikoto agreed, and helped her up.

…

They walked the last two hours to Konoha mostly in silence.

Nawaki walked in front without being asked. Tsume carried Kuromaru. Yoshino walked behind Mikoto with her arms crossed and her back straight.

It was Tsume who broke the quiet, a kilometer down the road. She kept glancing at Mikoto’s back, at the sword riding there. The bandages had split open during the fight, long tears running down the length of it, and through the gaps something showed that was not steel. Rows of grey-blue scales. Ridges like teeth. And every so often, when Mikoto shifted her shoulders, the whole thing moved. A slow, contented ripple down its length, like a cat stretching after a big meal.

“Sensei,” Tsume said. “Your sword is… wiggling.”

Nawaki turned around. His eyes went to it and stayed there.

“Whoa.” He walked backward a few steps to get a better look. “I’ve never seen it like that. I could’ve sworn it was just a big cleaver.” He stared at the scales. “This looks way cooler.”

“Is it alive?” Tsume’s nose twitched. “It smells alive. Kuromaru thinks it’s alive. Why couldn’t I smell it before? It’s fishy too.”

Kuromaru, in her arms, growled very quietly at the sword. The sword licked its chops at the dog. Kuromaru hid in Tsume’s arms immediately.

“It’s a special blade I found.” Mikoto said, and glanced over her shoulder at it. Only then did she realize she’d never rewrapped it. She’d been thinking about her students. No wonder Shark Skin was so happy. It was finally being taken on a walk without its bandages!

They didn’t stop looking back and talking about it.

Yoshino didn’t look at the sword at all. She walked with her eyes on the road and her arms locked across her chest and said nothing. She was somewhere else, back in the dirt with a stranger’s arm across her throat, her own body refusing to do anything but shake in terror. Nawaki had stood between them and four killers until he couldn’t stand anymore. Tsume had at least gone at them with her claws. And Yoshino had thrown one kunai, had it thrown back at her, and then been worthless.

She did not intend to ever be that again.

Mikoto walked in the middle of them and let them be quiet as she rewrapped Shark Skin.

The village gates appeared through the trees in the late afternoon gold. The guards waved them through. The streets were warm and busy and full of people.

"Dismissed," Mikoto said at the crossroads near the market. "Go home. Rest. Eat. Hug your families." She looked at them. "You did well today. All of you. Even the parts that didn't feel like it."

As they looked up at her, she let her Sharingan turn, and drew all three of them, and the dog, into a genjutsu so brief none of them would ever remember entering it.

It took less than a breath. A sword in their memories, scaled and rippling and alive, quietly smoothed over into what it had always been. A big, ugly cleaver under white bandages. Nothing worth a second look.

Nawaki blinked and shook his head. He touched his temple and looked up at her, frowning faintly. Mikoto smiled at him the way she always did, and after a moment he smiled back, and the frown was gone. Tsume yawned. Kuromaru sneezed. Yoshino didn’t notice anything at all.

Mikoto watched the four of them walk away and felt a bit guilty. She had just reached into her own students’ heads and taken something out without asking. She told herself it was for them, and part of that was true. A genin who knew Konoha had a Shark Skin was a genin someone might one day torture to find out more. But it wasn’t the whole truth. 

It was for her. One loose word from a nine-year-old bragging about her sensei’s cool sharky sword, and the story would travel, and someone would eventually put it next to the old Kiri legends. And the Hidden Mist would not ask politely how a second Shark Skin came to be sitting on the back of a Konoha shinobi. Neither would anyone else.

People called her an angel. She wasn’t one. She was someone with a secret that could start a war. Many secrets. And she would keep those secrets unknown to anyone but herself. It was better for everyone that way…

She’d check on all three of them first thing tomorrow.

Then they were gone, and she was alone on a village street with the evening light going amber through the leaves, and the scrolls in her pouch weighed nothing and held twelve bodies and the most dangerous thought she had ever carried.

She walked home slowly.

Someone inside Konoha had ordered her death.

Someone powerful enough to command twelve shinobi of jonin caliber and brand their tongues with seals that could stand up to the Sharingan.

Someone with access to mission records. Who knew where she would be, and when, and which road she would take home. Someone who could put twelve ninjas on a road inside the Land of Fire and expect them to disappear afterward without a trace.

She could go to the Hokage. She thought about it the whole walk. But whoever this was had seen a mission that went across the Hokage's own desk. She didn't know whose hands that desk passed through. She didn't know who sat in the rooms she'd be reporting to. Until she did, every person she told was a person who might tell the wrong one.

Whoever it was needed her dead in a way that could never be traced back. Someone powerful. Someone hidden. Someone who looked at a beloved Uchiha and saw a threat worth killing.

She stopped on her family’s front step before going in and looked out across the rooftops, to where the Hokage’s tower stood against the darkening sky, its windows already lit.

She didn’t know if it was the Hokage himself or someone close to him.

Who are you?

She went inside and closed the door behind her.