Chapter 103: Keys.

The mountains around Iwagakure did not have a gentle side. The wind never stopped up here. It came down off the peaks at night with ice in it and went through cloth like it wasn't there. Nothing grew taller than a man's knee. Nothing grew at all on the north faces.

There was one road through.

It came up out of the Land of Grass in long switchbacks and squeezed between two cliffs into a pass so narrow that four men walking abreast would scrape their shoulders on the stone. Then it widened, slowly, into a long rocky valley that climbed for two kilometers toward a notch in the far mountains. Past the notch was Iwagakure.

Neji lay on his stomach on a ledge four hundred meters above the valley floor with the wind pulling at the edges of his cloak, and looked at all of it.

"Byakugan."

The veins rose around his eyes. The night fell away. The valley was not empty. It only looked empty. Three walls crossed it. Earth walls, raised by technique, each one twenty meters high and as thick at the base as a house was long. The first stood just past the mouth of the pass. The second stood a kilometer behind it. The third stood at the foot of the notch, the highest and thickest of the three, and its top was lined with Stone shinobi lying flat against the cold stone, sleeping in shifts. Behind each wall, tunnels ran down into the rock and came up again on the far side, so the men holding one wall could fall back to the next without ever showing themselves.

The valley floor between the walls was a lie. Neji could see straight through it. Pits under a skin of packed dirt, some of them three meters deep and lined with spikes, some of them ten meters deep and lined with nothing, because the fall would do the work. A field of them, laid out so that anyone running straight from one wall to the next would find at least one.

On the ledges above the valley, on both sides, boulders the size of houses sat in hollows cut into the cliff face. Each one was held in place by a skin of earth no thicker than a man's hand. Behind every boulder, in a cave scooped out of the mountain, two or three Stone shinobi sat with their palms on the rock, ready to break that skin.

And in the cracks of the cliffs themselves, hundreds of paper tags.

He followed the tags along the walls of the valley. They were stuffed into every crack and seam, in clusters of ten and twenty, deep in the stone where no one would see them. Some of the clusters had chakra running between them, thin lines, joining one cluster to the next.

"Explosion Corps, they brought out a dangerous group." Fū said beside him.

Fū's eyes were closed. He was lying with his cheek against the rock, his breathing slow, and he'd been sensing the valley with his chakra.

"There are a lot of them." Fū said.

"Three hundred tags on the eastern cliff. More on the western."

"If they set them all off at once, they'll bring both cliffs down into the valley."

"Yes."

"On their own people too."

"Their people will be in the tunnels." Neji said. "Ours won't."

Sai was sitting cross-legged behind them with a scroll open across his knees. He hadn't drawn anything. He was just holding the brush. "The Hyuga will see it."

"Hiashi will see it." Neji said. "He'll see all of it. It won't matter. It'll still cost them."

Neji let his sight run on, past the third wall, up through the notch, out the other side.

And there it was. Iwagakure sat in a bowl of mountains like a fist sitting in a palm. Towers of stone rose out of the rock, tall and narrow and bunched together, linked by bridges that ran from one tower to the next at a dozen different heights. Lamps in the windows. Smoke from the chimneys. Over all of it, the tallest tower, with a cone-shaped roof and a single great character carved into its face. Earth.

Around the whole village, from the mountains on one side to the mountains on the other, a dome. It was faint. Even to the Byakugan it was faint, a thin skin of chakra so even and so smooth it could have been mistaken for the night air. It rose out of the ground at the edge of the village and arched over the towers and came down on the far side. Neji followed it down to its root and found what he was looking for: a squat tower near the eastern edge of the village with no windows, and inside it, sitting in a ring on the floor, eight people with their hands pressed flat against a seal carved into the stone.

"A barrier…" He said.

"It's a sensing barrier probably just like ours." Fū said.

"Who's in the tower?"

"Sensors. Eight." Fū was quiet for a moment. "They're good. They change over every few hours. The ones going off rest and the ones coming on are fresh. There's no tired man in that ring."

Neji watched the dome.

A pair of Stone shinobi came up the road from the notch, walking fast, carrying a message pouch between them. They reached the edge of the dome. They walked through it.

Nothing happened.

Neji narrowed his eyes. He watched it happen again a few minutes later. A single runner going out this time, down from the village toward the third wall. And this time, Neji was looking at the right place. As the runner passed through the skin of the dome, something on his forehead flickered. A pale point of light. It sat inside the metal plate of his forehead protector, under the engraved symbol, small and folded in on itself, and as it touched the barrier it flared once, bright and quick, and the barrier around it seemed to part.

Then the runner was through, and the light went quiet.

“There’s a seal in their forehead protectors on the inside of the plate. The barrier reads it. If the seal’s there, the barrier lets them through without a sound. If it isn’t, eight sensors open their eyes.” Neji said.

“They’d open them for a farmer too.” Fū said. “They’d look, see a farmer, and close them again.” He was quiet for a moment. “They won’t close them for us.”

Sai looked up from his scroll. “Then we need three of them.”

"Three plates," Neji said. "Three faces. And a reason to be walking home in the middle of a battle."

Fū opened his eyes and looked at him.

"They'll be bringing their wounded back." Fū said. "Tomorrow. All day. All night."

Neji let his sight drift back down the valley, past the walls, past the pass, out onto the slope below it where the Leaf had made its camp. A thousand fires, small ones, hidden in the folds of the hillside. Sentries. Medics. Hyuga in the front lines with their eyes open in the dark. Aburame with their insects already crawling out into the grass. Akimichi eating.

And at the back of the camp, far behind the front, alone in a little clearing at the edge of the firelight, a figure in green doing one-handed push-ups.

Neji looked at him for a long time.

Lee was counting under his breath. Neji couldn't hear it from here, but he could see his lips move. His other hand was folded behind his back. He turned his eyes away.

"We go down tomorrow at dusk," he said. "Sleep."

Gantetsu had held the first wall for eleven days, and on the morning of the twelfth, the Leaf came up the pass.

He saw them from the top of the wall in the grey light before sunrise. They came out of the narrow throat of the pass four abreast and spread out into the valley beyond it like water pouring out of a bottle. Walking. Hundreds of them. Then more. The sound of their feet on the stone carried up the valley and came back off the cliffs so that it sounded like there were twice as many.

At the front of them walked the Hyuga.

Straight-backed, unhurried, their hands loose at their sides. Fifty of them, maybe more, in pale clothes, spread in a wide line across the valley floor. And at the center of the line, a little ahead of the others, a man with long dark hair and a face like a carved mask.

"That's him." said Kokuyo, crouched on the wall beside him. "That's the head of the Hyuga Clan. Hiashi Hyuga."

"I know who it is."

The Hyuga line reached the first field of pits. And they went around them. Not one man stepped wrong. The line bent and flowed. A Hyuga walking straight would turn half a step to the left without breaking stride, walk three paces, turn back. The man beside him would turn right. Behind them, the rest of the Leaf followed in their footprints, step for step, a long snaking army threading itself through the gaps between the pits.

"They can see through the ground." Kokuyo said. "Just like you said they would."

"Of course they can." Gantetsu said.

He'd known they would see the pits. Everyone in Iwagakure knew what the Hyuga could do. He hadn't dug the pits to catch men who couldn't see them. He'd dug them to catch men who could, and who would walk the narrow paths between them, packed close, in lines, exactly where he wanted them.

"The river, now!" He shouted.

Kokuyo slapped his palm flat on the top of the wall three times. Under the valley floor, in the tunnels beneath the first field of pits, twenty Stone shinobi lying on their backs in the dark pressed their hands against the roof of earth above them and poured their chakra into it all at once.

"Earth Style: Earth Flow River."

The ground moved sideways. The whole floor of the valley between the pits turned from packed stone to mud in a single breath and began to flow, slow and heavy and thick, like a river in spring, sliding east toward the cliffs. And the narrow paths the Hyuga had been walking slid with it.

Gantetsu watched it happen. He watched the Hyuga shout. He saw their heads snap down, saw them see it, saw them call it out a heartbeat before it came. He saw the whole Leaf line try to jump clear. Some of them made it. Most of them were standing in it already, sunk to the ankles, to the knees, and when they tried to jump the mud held their feet, and the river carried them.

It carried them into the pits.

The first one he saw go was a Hyuga girl. She'd been walking near the edge of the line. The mud took her sideways and she went over the lip of a pit and the skin of dirt over it gave way under her, and she went down out of sight screaming before it suddenly stopped.

Then dozens more. Leaf shinobi sliding sideways in the river of mud, grabbing for each other, for the edges of the pits, for anything, and going in. The ten-meter pits took them silently. The three-meter pits with their stakes didn't.

"Ledges!" Gantetsu said. "Now. While they're stuck."

Kokuyo raised a red flag and swung it twice over his head. On the cliffs above the valley, the boulders fell. Twelve of them came down at once, six from each side. The sound was like the mountain itself splitting open. They broke loose from their hollows and bounced and fell, stones the size of houses tumbling down the cliffs in a thunder of dust and shattered rock, and the Leaf line was sunk in mud to its knees under them.

The Hyuga saw them coming. Of course they saw them. They shouted and pointed and the Leaf shinobi who could tear free of the mud tore free and threw themselves sideways, and the ones who couldn't threw their arms over their heads.

Eight of the boulders hit stone. Four didn't. Gantetsu watched the four come down into the stuck Leaf line and there were four long smears of red across the mud where the boulders had rolled, and the boulders were still rolling. The last of the four was coming down at the center of the line. At the head of the Hyuga.

Hiashi spun, and a sphere of chakra came up around him, blue-white and solid and spinning so fast that the air around it screamed. It tore up out of the mud. It flung the mud away from him in a ring and the men around him were thrown clear of the river onto the stone beyond it. The boulder hit the sphere. The boulder broke. It came apart and the pieces flew out to both sides and smashed into the cliffs.

When the dust cleared, Hiashi was standing on bare dry rock in the middle of the river of mud, with a dozen of his men lying on the stone around him, alive.

He looked up at the wall.

Gantetsu was three hundred meters away. Hiashi was looking right at him.

"The tags!" Gantetsu yelled. "Signal the Corps!"

Kokuyo lifted a black flag. He swung it. On the eastern cliff, one cluster of tags went off. A fist of fire and smoke burst out of a crack in the stone. Then another, on the western cliff. Then nothing.

He swung the flag again.

Nothing.

Gantetsu stared at the cliffs. He couldn't see the tags. He didn't have to. He could see the cracks in the cliff faces where the tags had been packed, and the dark smudge spreading out of every one of them, thick and crawling. Insects. Tens of thousands of them. They'd come up the cliffs in the dark while his men slept, and they'd crawled into every crack, and they'd eaten the chakra out of every tag the Explosion Corps had laid.

The Corps men in the caves were screaming. He could hear them from here. The insects had found them too.

"Gantetsu…" Kokuyo said.

"I see it…"

Below them, the Leaf was pulling itself out of the river. The mud was slowing. The men in the tunnels were running dry. The Hyuga were already pointing at the ground, calling out where the tunnels ran, and Leaf shinobi were driving kunai and swords and fists down through the soft earth into the dark under their feet, and from the tunnels, Gantetsu heard more screams.

Then the Leaf came on again.

At a run now, out of the mud, over the bodies of their own dead, the whole valley full of them. Gantetsu's men stood up on top of the wall and threw everything they had. Kunai. Boulders shooting toward the valley floor. Mudslides poured down the face of the wall in thick brown rivers. The Leaf took it and kept coming.

The Hyuga reached the wall first.

Hiashi walked up to the face of it, twenty meters of packed and hardened earth, and put his palm against it. Then he struck it. He didn't pull his arm back. His palm was already against the wall, and he just pushed, and something went out of his hand into the earth, and the wall shuddered from top to bottom. A crack opened under Hiashi's palm. It ran up the face of the wall. It ran sideways. It split into ten cracks and each of those split into ten more.

Hiashi struck it again. The Hyuga on either side of him did the same. Fifty palms against the wall. Fifty strikes.

The wall came down.

Gantetsu went down with it. He fell twenty meters in a landslide of earth and came up on his knees in the rubble with his men all around him, half of them buried, half of them clawing their way out. The Leaf was already pouring through the gap.

He reached for his chakra. He pressed his hands to the ground.

Two fingers jabbed at his chest. Just below his collarbone.

He looked up and Hiashi Hyuga was standing over him. Gantetsu hadn't seen him move. Hiashi's eyes were white and empty and the veins stood out around them like cracks in old plaster. There was mud on him now, up to his thighs. There was blood on his sleeve that wasn't his.

"Eight Trigrams," Hiashi said. "Sixty-Four Palms."

Gantetsu felt the first strike. He felt the second. After that the strikes came too fast to feel one at a time, two fingers, two fingers, two fingers, all over his body, and with each one something inside him closed. His chakra pulled away from his hands. Away from his feet. The last strike landed over his heart and drove him backward into the rubble. He lay on his back. He tried to raise his hands. They wouldn't come up. He tried to call out. Nothing came.

Hiashi was already gone. He'd stepped over Gantetsu like a man stepping over trash, and the Leaf army was streaming past on both sides toward the second wall. Gantetsu lay in the dirt and watched the sky. He thought about the four red smears in the mud, and the Hyuga girl going into the pit, and the screams from the tunnels. He thought about the cliffs.

We lost the cliffs, he thought. Without the cliffs, they'll take the second wall by noon.

Then he heard it.

A deep, flat crack from high up on the eastern ridge. Then another. Then a third. He couldn't turn his head. He didn't have to. He heard a Leaf shinobi somewhere off to his left shout a warning, and then a sound like the sky falling, and then the ground jumped under his back and dirt rained down on his face.

The Explosion Corps, he thought.

He'd seen them come up the road from the notch at dawn, twenty men of the Explosion Corps, the ones who didn't need paper. He'd sent them up onto the ridges hours ago without knowing what for. There'd been nothing on the ridges to do. There was now. Another crack. Another explosion, closer. The screaming in the valley changed pitch.

Gantetsu lay in the rubble of his wall with his chakra sealed and his hands useless and listened to it, and for the first time since dawn, he smiled.

Tsubute had been on the second wall since the first wall came down, and in all that time he'd been watching the giants come.

There were three of them. They'd appeared out of the dust behind the broken first wall, and at first he'd thought they were summons. Then he'd realized they were men. Men of the Akimichi clan, grown to the height of a tree, so big that the Leaf shinobi running around their feet looked like children.

One was an older man with red markings on his cheeks and a bristling beard. One was a young woman with her hair tied up in a knot. The third was a boy. Fat cheeked. Fat everywhere. Swirls on his cheeks. He couldn't have been more than sixteen.

They came up the valley with their arms raised over the Leaf shinobi around their feet, and the Explosion Corps on the ridges threw at them.

Tsubute saw how they did it. A Corps man would press his palm against a rock the size of a man's head and hold it there a moment, and the rock would start to glow faintly from the inside, like a coal. Then he'd throw it. Or he'd hand it to the man beside him, who'd throw it, and the rock would come down off the ridge and hit and burst into a fist of fire and broken stone.

The giants swatted them. The older man knocked three of them out of the air with the back of his hand and they burst against his skin and he grunted and kept walking. The young woman caught one in her palm and closed her fist on it before it went off, and when it went off inside her fist, she screamed and opened her hand and her fingers blew off.

The fifth one hit her in the face.

She went down slowly. She fell sideways across the valley floor and shrank as she fell, smaller and smaller, until by the time she hit the stone she was the size of a regular woman again, and she didn't move.

The older man turned and looked at her. For a moment, he just stood there. Then he turned back toward the wall, and came on faster. 

The boy was in front.

"Spears," Tsubute said. "Aim for his legs."

His squad formed the signs. The ground in front of the second wall heaved. Spears of hardened earth burst up out of it, a forest of them, each one as long as a man, angled forward and up at the place where the boy would put his feet.

The boy stopped.

He looked down at the spears. He looked up at the wall. Tsubute was close enough now to see his face, and the boy didn't look angry. He looked sad. He looked like a boy who didn't want to be doing this. Then the boy pulled his arms and his legs and his head into his body. He swelled. His whole body went round, a ball of flesh the size of a house, and he began to spin.

"Human Boulder!" the boy shouted.

He rolled. He came at the wall like an avalanche. Straight through the forest of earth spears, and the spears broke on him one after another, snapping like kindling. The ground under him tore up in a long furrow. Tsubute's men threw kunai at him. The kunai bounced off. They threw an Earth Wall up in front of him. He went through it like a paper door.

He hit the second wall.

The sound was a deep, hollow boom that Tsubute felt in his teeth. The wall shook. Cracks raced up its face. The spinning boy ground into the base of it and kept spinning, earth flying out from under him in two great fans, drilling into the wall the way a woodpecker drills into a tree.

"Get down there!" Tsubute shouted. "Drown him!"

Twelve of his men jumped down. They hit the ground on either side of the spinning boy and drove their palms into the earth, and the earth around him turned to mud. He spun in it. The mud flew. They poured more chakra into the ground and the mud came up thicker, heavier, and his spin slowed. It climbed his sides. It grabbed at him.

He stopped spinning. And the mud came up over him. It came up over the ball of his body like water closing over a stone, and the twelve men kept pushing, faces red, veins standing out on their necks, and the mud rose and rose and closed over the top of him. The ball shrank under it. It started to shift and struggle. A hand came up out of the mud, normal-sized now, a boy's hand, grabbing at nothing.

"Bury him!" Tsubute screamed. "Bury him!"

The mud hardened. Tsubute saw it happen. His men's chakra went into it and it set like stone around the boy's hand, around his wrist, and the hand clenched and unclenched and… 

A shadow fell across them. Tsubute looked up. The older Akimichi was standing over his twelve men with one great hand raised. His face was red and wet. He'd come the whole length of the valley at a run with the Corps throwing burning rocks at his back and he'd let them hit him, and his back was black and bleeding.

He brought a hand down. When it lifted again, there was nothing under it but a hand-shaped hollow in the ground, and red. The older man dropped to his knees beside the hardened mud. He dug at it with his huge fingers. He tore it open like bread. He pulled the boy out of it, gasping and choking and covered in grey slime, and held him in one hand against his chest until the boy stopped choking.

Then he set the boy down, and the boy stood, and the boy grew again. He looked at the hollow in the ground where the twelve men had been. His face went white. The older man put a huge hand on his shoulder for a moment. Then he pointed at the wall. The boy put both hands against the face of the second wall, and pushed.

Tsubute felt the wall tip. He ran. He ran for the tunnel at the back of the wall and threw himself into it as the whole thing came down behind him, a kilometer of hardened earth falling over backward onto the men who hadn't run fast enough. He came out of the tunnel on the far side, a kilometer up the valley, in the shadow of the third wall. He turned and looked back.

The dust was rising off the ruins of the second wall like smoke off a fire. In the dust, the two giants were standing side by side, looking toward him. Behind them, a third shape lay on the valley floor, small and still, where the young woman had fallen.

Above them, on the ridges, the Corps was still throwing. He went up the ladders onto the third wall. When he got to the top, he sat down on the cold stone and found his hands were shaking, and he couldn't make them stop.

Kaname had gone into the earth when the second wall fell, her and four others. Earth Style: Hidden Mole Jutsu. Her body sank into the ground like a stone into a pond and the ground closed over her head, and she swam through the dirt and the rock under the valley floor, out into the space between the second wall and the third, where the Leaf would have to cross. She lay there in the dark. She could feel the footsteps above her through the earth. Hundreds of them. She waited for the right ones.

She'd come up under a Leaf chunin an hour ago and cut his ankles out from under him and dragged him down into the earth and left him there. She'd done it twice more since. She was good at this. It was what she was for.

She was waiting for the fourth when the footsteps above her stopped.

Not all of them. Just a few. Right over her head.

She heard sniffing.

A dog. A big one. Its nose pressed against the ground right above her face, and it was sniffing hard and fast, and then it barked, once, and a voice above said, "Yeah, I smell her too. Hinata?"

"Two meters down." A girl's voice. Soft. "She's lying on her back. There are three more a little farther east. Two meters, three meters, two meters."

"Shino?"

"I already have her."

Kaname swam down. Away. Deeper into the earth, fast, and as she went she felt something crawling on her ankle. She kicked at it. It didn't come off. There was another one on her calf. On her knee. On her hand. Tiny. Dozens of them. They were coming down through the earth after her, through the cracks between the stones, faster than she could swim, and every one that touched her was feeding. She felt her chakra going. The earth around her got thicker. Heavier. Harder to move through. She had to go up. She had to get out before the earth closed on her for good.

She came up.

She burst out of the valley floor in a spray of dirt ten meters from where she'd gone down, and she had a kunai in each hand, and she came up swinging. The dog was already in the air. It hit her at the same moment its master did. Two of them. Two spinning shapes, so fast she couldn't see them, grey and brown, drilling at her from both sides like a pair of augers. She threw herself flat. One of them went over her. The other took her across the back and tore a strip of skin off her. She rolled. She came up on one knee. 

A girl was in front of her.

Small. Pale. Long dark hair. White eyes with the veins standing out around them. She was standing in a low stance with both palms open and her face was calm and sorry. Kaname threw a kunai at her face. The girl caught it on the back of her wrist and turned it aside without seeming to notice it, and stepped in, and her palm hit Kaname in the center of the chest.

Kaname's heart stopped. She felt it. One beat. Then nothing. Then a wet, sliding feeling in her chest, something inside her coming apart where the girl's palm had touched. She looked down at herself. There was no wound. There was nothing on her uniform. Nothing at all.

She sat down in the dirt. The girl knelt down in front of her and looked at her with those white eyes.

“I’m sorry.” She said. And the most annoying part of it was, she sounded like she meant it.

The last thing Kaname saw was the dog's nose, sniffing at her hand.

Shirō had heard the stories. Everyone on the third wall had heard them. How the Green Devil had come into the Land of Grass at the head of the Leaf army and turned the sky into a dragon. How he'd fought the Four-Tails and walked away. How there was one girl who fought in his outfit and had killed a Stone jonin, a jonin that Shirō had served under for six years.

He'd thought they'd be scarier. Then again, Rock Lee wasn’t as fearsome looking as his reputation either. There were three of them at the foot of the third wall, in the thick of the fighting. A girl with red hair and bandaged fists who was laughing. A girl with a chain whip who was enjoying herself as well. And between them, a quiet one with tonfas in her hands, in a green jumpsuit just like his.

"Those are the Devil's girls." Shirō said.

There were nine men in his squad. They went down the ladders together. They hit the three girls from three sides. Shirō went straight for the one in the jumpsuit. He knew what she did. There was intel on her. He didn't throw one big blow she could turn back on him. He went at her with a hundred small ones, his kunai flicking at her eyes, her throat, her wrists, never committing, never letting her get her tonfas set.

It worked. She gave ground. She blocked and blocked and backed up, and he cut her across the forearm and across the cheek and she didn't get a single blow back. Beside him, two of his men had the red-haired girl pinned against a slab of broken wall. A third had the chain whip girl's chain wrapped around his forearm and was hauling her toward him.

We have them! Shirō thought.

Then the three girls looked at each other. Just for a moment. Across the fighting. Three faces. And something passed between them that Shirō didn't understand.

The air changed. He felt it on his skin. A push, like the wind before a storm. The girl in front of him stood up straighter. Her eyes went sharp. Her muscles drew tight under the green cloth like ropes pulled taut, and the cut on her cheek, which had been bleeding, stopped.

The Gates, Shirō thought. All three of them. They're genin, and they can open the Gates too! I thought it was just a rumor!

She disappeared and her tonfa came into the side of his knee and his knee broke and he started to fall, and on the way down the second tonfa came across his jaw and he felt his teeth leave his mouth as his jaw dislocated. He hit the ground. He rolled. He looked up.

The red-haired girl had thrown both of the men holding her. One of them was still in the air. The other had gone headfirst through the slab of broken wall behind her and wasn't moving. The chain whip girl had pulled the third man in by her own chain, the one he'd been pulling on, and she'd met him halfway with a knee to the face.

It took eight seconds, and all nine of his men were down, and the three girls were standing in the middle of them breathing hard.

"What a bunch of losers, ganging up on some innocent little girls," said the red-haired one.

“I guess that is one way to describe us…” the one in the jumpsuit said.

"How else would you describe us?" the red-haired girl asked.

“Youthful…”

The red and purple-haired girls started laughing without restraint. The one in the jumpsuit looked down at him with an embarrassed look on her face. She looked at his knee. At his jaw. At the kunai lying in the dirt out of reach of his hand.

“I’m sorry about this, okay? We weren’t taught to spare our enemies…” She drove her tonfa down into his neck.

The third wall held until sunset. It held because it was the biggest and the thickest of the three, and because the notch behind it was too narrow for more than a few hundred Leaf shinobi to get at it at once. It held because every Stone shinobi who'd survived the first two walls was on it now, packed shoulder to shoulder along the top, and the men behind it threw up a new Earth Wall every time the Leaf broke a hole in the old one.

It held because of the Explosion Corps. They'd come down off the ridges by noon to the cliffs on either side of the third wall, where the valley narrowed to its tightest, and they'd thrown all afternoon. Every rock they touched came down into the Leaf as a bomb. The Leaf's insects went up the cliffs after them and the Corps men threw the rocks before the insects could reach them. The Leaf's earth users threw up slanted walls to turn the rocks aside, and the Corps threw over the walls. The Hyuga called out every throw, and the Leaf scattered from every one, and in a valley that narrow, there was nowhere to scatter to.

The Leaf came at the third wall three times. Three times it reached the foot of it. Three times it broke a hole in it. Three times the hole filled with Stone shinobi, and the Corps threw down into the men trying to get through, and the Leaf pulled back. And it held because behind them was their home where their loved ones were.

When the sun went down behind the mountains, the Leaf stopped coming. It pulled back down the valley. Not far. Back past the open ground at the foot of the third wall, back out of reach of the cliffs, to the ruins of the second wall a kilometer behind. It lit its fires there, in the shelter of the broken earth. And all through the dusk, the men on the third wall watched it drag its people back. Its wounded on stretchers. Its dead over its shoulders, two and three at a time. Long lines of them, going down the valley toward the camp at the mouth of the pass.

The men on the third wall watched it, and some of them cheered, and most of them were too tired to. The Leaf had taken two walls in a day. It had paid for each of them. It hadn't taken the third.

Then the Stone stretchers started to come down from the wall.

The wounded. Hundreds of them. Burned and crushed and broken and bleeding, and some of them with no wounds at all but with their chakra sealed shut, lying on their backs and staring at nothing. The medics on the third wall had been working since dawn. They couldn't do any more there. They needed the hospital in the village.

The stretchers went down the back of the third wall on ropes. Then up through the notch. Then down the long road on the other side toward the lights of Iwagakure, in a long winding line of torches. Behind them, between the third wall and the ruins of the second, in the open ground the Leaf had given back, the Stone dead lay where they'd fallen.

Neji came down off the ridge at dusk with Fū and Sai behind him. They came down a crack in the cliff face that no Stone sentry had found because no Stone sentry had a Byakugan, and they came out among the dead. The valley floor between the second wall and the third was covered in them. They lay among the rubble of the broken walls, in the bottoms of the pits, against the foot of the cliffs. Stone and Leaf, though there were far more Stone. The Leaf had carried most of its dead back down the valley. Stone hadn't had the chance.

The three of them moved through the bodies with their masks on and their hoods up. In the dusk, in the smoke still drifting off the ruins, three more shapes moving across a battlefield were nothing anyone would look twice at.

Neji walked slowly, looking at the forehead protectors. He found the first one on a Stone chunin who'd died with his back against a broken slab of wall. A young man, maybe twenty. Neji's age, nearly. He'd been hit by something big. His chest was crushed flat. His face was untouched.

Neji crouched beside him and looked at the forehead protector. There it was. Inside the metal plate. Under the engraved symbol. A small seal, folded tight, dark now, quiet. Its chakra was going out of it slowly, now that the man wearing it was dead, but there was still enough in it. It would last a day. Two at most. He untied the forehead protector and lifted it off the dead man's head.

Fū crouched down beside him and looked at the dead man's face for a long time. Memorizing it. The shape of the jaw. The nose. The scar through the left eyebrow. The way his hair fell. Then he took the forehead protector out of Neji's hand. They found the second one ten meters away. An older man, heavy, with a beard going grey. Sai chose that one for no other reason besides he thought it was interesting.

The third one took longer. Neji walked through the bodies in the gathering dark and looked and looked. Too short. Too fat. Face too ruined. Forehead protector cracked down the middle, the seal broken with it. He was starting to wonder if they'd find one at all when he came around the end of a fallen slab of wall and stopped.

A Stone shinobi lay face-down at the edge of a pit. Long dark hair, tied back. Tall. Slim. His forehead protector had come untied in his fall and lay beside his head in the dirt, the plate face up, unbroken. Neji turned him over. He was older than Neji by ten years or so. His face was narrow and pale and his mouth was open. Someone had opened his throat with a blade.

"This one's mine." he said. He picked up the forehead protector. That was three. Three plates, three faces. What they still needed was someone to carry.

They found him near the foot of the third wall, where the bodies lay thickest. A big man. A Stone jonin, by the vest. His legs were gone below the knee. Neji didn't look too long at what had happened to them. His chest was still moving. Barely. A shallow catch of breath, then nothing, then another.

He knelt beside the body. So did Fū. Fū put his hand on the dying jonin's forehead and closed his eyes. "He's almost gone," Fū said after a while. "There's not much left in there. But the last few hours are still clear." He was quiet. His face didn't change. "The stretcher-bearers go down the back of the wall and up through the notch. There's a checkpoint at the far end of the notch. Two guards. They ask for your squad and your name. That's all. They don't have time for anything else." He opened his eyes. "The hospital is the second tower from the eastern edge. The one with the white banner."

"What are the squad names?" Neji asked.

Fū told him. He told him the dead men's names too. All of them. The three whose forehead protectors they carried, and the one under his hand. Then he took his hand away from the jonin's forehead and wiped it on his own trousers. Under it, the jonin's chest rose once more, and didn't rise again.

Sai had a scroll open on the ground. He'd drawn a single small bird on it, black ink, wings folded. He wrote three lines under it in his small neat hand and lifted the brush, and the bird stood up off the page and shook itself, and the words under it were gone. It hopped once and opened its wings and was gone into the dark, flying low, south toward the Leaf camp and from there toward Konoha.

"Lord Danzō will want to know we're going in." Sai said.

Neji didn't answer. He tied the forehead protector around his head. The metal was cold. He settled the plate against his forehead, and through the Byakugan he could see the folded seal sitting right there, a finger's width above his own eyes, in the place where his own seal sat under the skin. It had been a long time since he’d worn one of these…

He made the signs. The smoke went up around him and came down again, and when it was gone a stranger stood in his place. A Stone shinobi ten years older than Neji, with a narrow, pale face and long dark hair tied back. The red uniform with one sleeve, the brown flak jacket, the mesh wrapped around the ankles. All of it copied from the dead.

Beside him, Fū became a young chunin with a scar through his eyebrow. Sai became a grey-bearded man with a heavy belly.

Then the three of them picked up the dead jonin, put him on a stretcher, and carried him to the foot of the third wall.

…

Nobody stopped them. They went up the ropes at the back of the wall with the stretcher slung between them, the dead man tied to it with a blanket pulled up over his chest, his face turned to the side. There were dozens of other stretchers going up and down the same ropes. Nobody looked at them.

They went up through the notch in the line of torches. The road was narrow and steep and slick with frost. The stretcher-bearers ahead of them and behind them were too tired to talk. Some of them were crying. One of the wounded a few stretchers ahead was screaming in a high, thin voice that went on and on and on, and none of the bearers carrying him seemed to hear it anymore.

At the end of the notch there was a checkpoint. A pole across the road. Two guards in red with lamps.

"Squad?" one of the guards asked. He didn't even look up.

Fū gave him a squad number in the dead chunin's voice.

"Name."

Fū gave the dead chunin's name. Sai gave the old man's. Neji gave his own borrowed one. The guard lifted his lamp and looked at the man on the stretcher. At the legs. He winced.

"Go on." He said, and lifted the pole.

They went on. The road came out of the notch and down the other side of the mountain, and there below them was Iwagakure. Closer now. Real. Towers of stone rising out of the dark, lamps in the windows, bridges strung between them like threads. The smell of smoke and cooking and cold rock.

And somewhere in front of them, across the road, where he'd seen it last night, the skin of the dome. Neji kept his face still. He kept walking. His hands were on the front poles of the stretcher and the dead jonin's head was rolling slightly with every step, and Sai was walking behind him with the back poles, and Fū was walking at his side.

Eight sensors, Neji thought. Eight of them, in a ring, with their hands on the stone.

The stretchers in front of them went through the skin of the barrier one by one. Neji kept his eyes down on the dead man's face. He didn't dare open them to it now. Not this close. Then it was his turn.

He stepped into it. It didn’t feel like anything. Only, above his eyes, inside the stolen plate, the seal flared. A small bright heat, like a match struck and blown out. The barrier parted around it. Then he was through. Behind him, Sai stepped through. Then Fū. Nobody shouted. No bells. Nothing.

Neji walked on another fifty paces, until the road passed into the shadow of a tower, before he let his sight go back toward the windowless tower on the eastern edge of the village. He found the ring of eight. They were sitting exactly as they'd been sitting last night, with their hands flat on the stone and their eyes closed. Not one of them had moved.

“We’re in.”

They carried the stretcher down the road and into the village. They left the dead jonin at the hospital in the second tower from the eastern edge. Nobody asked them anything there either. The ground floor was full of stretchers and the medics were running between them with blood up to their elbows. Neji and Fū and Sai set theirs down against the wall at the end of a long row of others, and turned around, and walked back out into the night.

They went up. Up a stairway cut into the side of a tower, up onto a bridge, across the bridge to the next tower, up again. The village was full of people even at this hour, Stone shinobi coming and going, civilians standing in doorways watching the stretchers come in. Three more men in red walking across a bridge were nothing anyone noticed. When they were high enough, Neji stopped in the shadow of a stone arch at the end of a bridge and looked with his Byakugan.

The whole village opened up around him, every tower, every room, every bridge. Thousands of people. Old men sleeping. Children sleeping. Women sitting up in kitchens. Shinobi in barracks sharpening kunai. A man in a cellar counting crates. Two lovers on a roof. A baby being fed.

He took no note of them until he finally found him. There. In the tallest tower. In a room near the top under the cone-shaped roof, sitting in the dark on a cushion by a window, a very small, very old man with a great white beard and a red nose. He wasn't sleeping. He wasn't moving. He was sitting with his hands folded in his lap, looking out the window down the valley toward the notch, toward the walls, toward the fires of the Leaf army on the other side of the mountains.

The Tsuchikage.

And a few towers away, on a stone terrace on a rooftop, alone, a girl. She was standing in the middle of the terrace in the cold with her feet planted wide and both hands held out in front of her, palms facing, a hand's width apart. Between her palms, something was taking shape. A tiny white cube of light. It flickered. It went out. She brought her hands together and pulled them apart and tried again, and again it flickered and went out, and again, and again.

Her face, under her short dark hair, had the look of a girl who hadn't slept since her father died. He watched her try again. The cube came, and held, and grew. The size of a fingertip. The size of a thumb. Then she lost it, and it went out, and she dropped to her knees on the stone terrace. Neji turned his eyes back to the tallest tower. The old man was still sitting at his window. Still watching the valley.

"She's there," Neji said quietly. "And so is he."

Fū looked at him. "We can't touch her while he's in the village."

"No."

"Then we wait."

"We wait," Neji said, "for the Green Devil."