Chapter 59 The Ghost of Konoha!

The Suna camp was pretty quiet at midnight.

Sentries walked the edges of the camp in pairs. Cook fires had been stamped to embers. The desert-born shinobi of Sunagakure slept in their tents in shifts, half the camp awake while the other half rested.

Emi utilized the Ghost Transformation Jutsu at three in the morning. Her physical form slumped against a tree safely in her home camp, limp as a puppet with its strings cut, and her spirit rose out of it like smoke from a dead fire. She flew directly toward the last reported location of the Sand camp.

She passed the outer sentries without a sound. Through the canvas walls of the first tent she reached, and she didn't slow down until she found what she was looking for.

A chunin. Sleeping. Big man, strong jaw, calloused hands wrapped around a kunai even in his sleep.

Emi's spirit shot into him. His consciousness surrendered. It didn't fight, it couldn't fight. It never even knew she was there. One moment he was dreaming about whatever Suna chunin dreamed about, and the next his mind was crushed beneath hers and his body belonged to a thirteen-year-old Konoha girl who was currently slumped against a tree kilometers away with her eyes closed.

Emi opened his eyes. Her eyes now. She sat up. She picked up the kunai. She walked out of the tent. The sentry at the end of the row nodded at her. "Can't sleep, buddy?"

She nodded back. She walked past him and into the next tent, where four Suna shinobi slept in their bedrolls. She killed the first one before anyone woke up. The kunai opened his throat from ear to ear, and the gurgling sound woke the second, and by the time the second understood what was happening, the kunai was in his chest.

The third rolled out of his bedroll and grabbed a weapon. He saw her standing over two dead bodies with a bloody kunai and a blank expression.

"HEY?! WHAT ARE YOU-"

She drove the kunai into his eye. The fourth ran.

"HE'S GONE CRAZY! HE'S KILLING PEOPLE! SOMEONE STOP HIM!"

The camp erupted. Shouts. Shinobi pouring out of tents with weapons drawn, and all of them converging on the big chunin with the bloody kunai who was standing in the middle of a tent full of dead friends with no expression on his face.

Emi fought them. She was better than the original owner of this body had been, but his body was still a chunin's body and there were thirty people around her. She killed two more before a jonin put a sword through the chunin's sternum and the body collapsed.

Emi's spirit left the corpse and drifted back to her own body. She opened her eyes. She stretched. She yawned.

Five dead. One night. And the Suna camp had just been forced to kill one of their own to stop it.

"How'd it go?"

Orochimaru was sitting against the tree across from her, arms folded, watching her with those golden, slitted eyes. He'd been there the whole time, guarding her body while her spirit was away.

"Five," Emi said. She dusted off her pants. "Would've been six but the last one was fast."

"And the body?"

"Dead of course." She laughed. "That's fourteen in three nights. Five the first night, four the second, five tonight."

"And you're sure they can't detect the jutsu?"

"They don’t have the necessary specialist to stop me." She picked a leaf out of her hair. "Just a bunch of regular shinobi from what I could see."

Orochimaru smiled. "How long do you think before they break?" He asked her.

"Probably tomorrow." Emi said. "They've posted triple sentries. They've started sleeping in full gear. Two of their chunin got into a fight this morning because one accused the other of being 'the next one to snap.' Their morale is falling apart."

"That’s good to hear."

"We should prepare to attack, then, right?" Emi grinned. "They’re at their lowest point. It only makes sense, Orochimaru-sama."

"I’ll inform you when it is time." He told her.

"I’ll be ready." Emi already knew what was coming soon.

"Eat something," he said. "You've worked hard these last three days."

"I'm fine."

"I didn't ask how you were. I told you to eat." Orochimaru reminded her. "You're no use to Konoha exhausted."

Emi almost argued. She wanted to inform one of the legendary Sannin that she didn't need to be told when to eat, thank you very much. She was a chunin. She'd been at the front for nearly a year. She'd earned the right to manage her own meals.

But Orochimaru was Orochimaru. And she was just a chunin. A genius or prodigy, some in the camp called her, but chunin, nonetheless. So she ate. Because it was an order, not because she was hungry. That was how she framed it.

She was starving.

…

The next night, Emi didn't even need to possess anyone. She left her body, drifted into the Suna camp, assessed their positions, and drifted back. The camp was vibrating with a fear she could taste: sentries jumping at shadows, arguments breaking out between squad leaders, a jonin shouting at his subordinates that the next person who accused a comrade of being "compromised" would answer to him personally.

"Now is the perfect moment," She told Orochimaru at the command tent. "They’re at their breaking point."

Orochimaru studied the map. The command tent held just him, Emi, several jonin, and a chunin runner. The jonin knew Emi had been doing something to the Suna camp these last three nights, something that had Suna's sentries jumping at their own shadows. Only Orochimaru knew exactly what.

"Numbers?" Orochimaru asked.

"Maybe a hundred and forty. They've been reinforced since last week."

"We have ninety-three."

"And they have a hundred and forty people who haven't slept in three nights and don't trust the person lying next to them," Emi said. "We should move first."

Orochimaru didn't answer right away. He laid one finger on the map, on the eastern side of the Suna camp, and drew it slowly around to the west.

"Before dawn," he said. "Their night watch will have been awake for hours, and their day watch will still be rubbing the sleep from their eyes. Ryōta. Take some squads and every explosive tag this camp owns to the eastern trees. When I give the word, make them believe the whole of Konoha is coming through there."

A broad-shouldered jonin at the end of the table nodded once.

"Everyone else comes from the west. Quietly." The finger moved again, down to the southern edge of the camp, where a narrow road ran out between two ridges toward Suna's own lines. "And nobody goes here."

One of the other jonin frowned at the map. "We're leaving the south open?"

"Yes."

"Then they'll get away."

"Some of them." Orochimaru's eyes didn't leave the map. "A frightened man runs. A trapped one fights. I would rather they run with our current numbers."

Nobody argued after that.

"When they turn east," Emi said, "I can hit them from the west." She rested her hand on the war fan leaning against her chair. "A new jutsu I’ve developed."

Orochimaru looked at her. "How effective?"

"The only other person I could see matching me would be you."

“I see. What do you plan to do afterward?”

"My comrades will be there to cover me, Orochimaru-sama." She smirked. "I crush them. Everyone else cleans up whatever's left. We win."

Kayo, the jonin sitting closest to her, shook her head. "This girl is going to give me grey hairs."

"We'll all have grey hairs, if we live long enough." Another jonin chuckled.

"Kayo." Orochimaru didn't look up. "You'll stay with her."

Kayo sighed. "Of course I will."

…

An hour before dawn, Emi lay on her stomach at the edge of the western treeline with the giant war fan beside her in the wet leaves and Kayo crouched at her shoulder.

The Suna camp spread out below them in the grey half-light. Rows of tents ran east to west in long lines, with a wide aisle down the middle where the cook fires had burned down to red coals. The sentries walked in threes now instead of pairs. At the center of the camp stood a larger tent with a lantern still burning inside it. A figure moved behind the canvas, back and forth, back and forth.

Somewhere in the trees behind Emi, ninety-odd Konoha shinobi waited without making a sound. She couldn't see Orochimaru anywhere.

The eastern sky began to pale.

The first explosive tag went off on the far side of the camp with a crack. Then four more, one after another, a line of fire and splintered wood rolling along the eastern treeline. Kunai came whistling out of the smoke. Somebody over there was shouting, and somebody else was shouting back, and in the dim light and the smoke it sounded like a whole army coming down the slope.

The Suna camp erupted.

"KONOHA! EAST SIDE! THEY'RE COMING FROM THE EAST!"

Tent flaps burst open all down the rows. Shinobi poured out of them already armed, already running, and every one of them ran east. Emi watched it happen through the leaves. After three nights of not knowing which friend would turn next, the enemy was finally outside the camp where they could see it, and they threw themselves at it.

A jonin near the center was bellowing orders. A stone wall rose along the eastern edge of the camp, thick and grey, and puppeteers knelt behind it and snapped open their scrolls. The fastest of them were already over the wall and into the trees after Ryōta's squads.

The rows between Emi and the east filled up with backs. The slower ones. The ones still buckling vests, still pulling on sandals, still stumbling out of tents with their hair flattened from sleep. Fifty of them, sixty, all facing the wrong way.

Emi stood up.

She planted the fan in the dirt at the edge of the trees. Kayo didn't try to stop her.

She waited until the aisle down the center of the camp was full. Until the rows of tents on either side of it were full. Until there were so many Suna shinobi packed between her and the stone wall that turning around would mean shoving through their own people.

Then she pulled the fan from the earth, opened it to the third moon, and swung.

"Wind Style: Great Cyclone!"

The wind that came out of the fan was annihilation shaped like a tornado. A horizontal cyclone that howled from the fan's face and tore down the center of the camp like a ferocious predator, wider than the aisle, taller than the tents, a spiraling wall of chaotic air that hit the rows from behind and erased them.

Tents tore loose from their stakes and went up into the air with the people still tangled in them. The cook fires burst apart into a storm of red coals. Bodies flew in every direction. Upward. Sideways. In directions that bodies weren't supposed to go. The cyclone picked up the back of the crowd and threw it into the middle and threw the middle into the stone wall, and the stone wall came apart under the weight of everyone thrown against it. Screams and canvas and embers, and the full fury of a three-moon war fan wielded by a Leaf girl who had spent nearly a year learning to use it from the best teacher alive.

The cyclone chewed through the camp for four full seconds before it dissipated. Four seconds that felt like eternity.

When the wind died, the center of the Suna camp was gone. The rows of tents were bare ground and torn stakes. Coals smoked in the mud. Bodies lay scattered from the western edge all the way to the ruins of the stone wall, some of them moving, most of them not. Thirty or forty shinobi who'd been a few seconds too slow weren’t going to get up again.

The Suna shinobi at the eastern edge had stopped. They'd turned around. They stood at the broken stone wall staring back across the empty space where their camp had been, and one of them, a chunin, said the thing that all of them were thinking.

"When the hell did Konoha get one of our fans?!"

Emi closed the fan. She planted it in the earth. She leaned on it with both hands, her legs shaking, her lungs burning, her chakra reserves scraped down to fumes. One technique. Everything she had. Empty.

She was grinning.

A hand landed on her shoulder.

"Well done." Orochimaru's voice, calm, already moving past her into the camp. "Leave the rest to the adults now."

Behind him, the western treeline emptied. The rest of the Konoha line came out of the trees at a run and swept down into the wreckage after him.

Emi stayed on her feet and watched. With the tents gone, there was nothing left between the treeline and the center of the camp but open mud, and she could see all the way to the big tent.

Orochimaru walked straight down the middle of it. He didn’t run. Suna shinobi came at him from both sides, half-dazed, bleeding, and Konoha’s line caught them before they reached him.

Three figures came out of the torn tent. Even from the treeline, Emi could tell the one in the middle was in charge: older, a jonin’s vest over sand-colored robes, a younger shinobi on either side of him. His hands came together in a seal, and the ground in front of him heaved up in a wave of stone.

Something dark poured out of Orochimaru’s sleeves. Snakes. Dozens of them, wrapping around the two guards and dragging them down into the mud.

The stone wave crashed down where Orochimaru had been standing. He wasn’t standing there anymore. He was beside the commander, and something silver flashed in his hand.

The commander’s head fell. His body stood a moment longer with its hands still locked in the seal. Then the stone crumbled, and the body went down with it.

Someone across the camp screamed it before Emi could even breathe out.

“THE COMMANDER’S DOWN! THE COMMANDER’S DEAD!”

Emi heard the moment the camp broke. It was in the voices. The shouting changed from orders to screams, and then the Suna shinobi at the eastern wall were turning, looking for a way out, and they found the south road between the two ridges with nobody standing on it.

They ran. Not all of them. A few stood and fought and died where they stood. But most of them ran, down the road, out between the ridges, away from the wreckage and the snakes and the girl with their own fan. The Konoha line chased the slow ones to the mouth of the road and stopped there, as Orochimaru had ordered.

"Get down!" Kayo shouted.

A stray kunai was headed straight for Emi’s head. Emi used her fan to block it, sending it flying off into the distance. 

“Like hell I’m going to die by some stray kunai, even if I’m low on chakra.” Emi slid down the trunk of the nearest tree and sat in the wet leaves with the fan across her knees.

"You're a real freak, kid. You know that?" Kayo chuckled.

"Thank you."

"I wasn’t complimenting you, brat."

"My sensei was called that too. I take it as a title of pride." Emi explained and sank back against the tree, exhausted and proud and thirteen years old and absolutely certain she was the most valuable person in this battle.