Chapter 104: The Old Man Rises.

Hiashi sat on a slab of broken earth at the edge of what had been the second wall, with his hands on his knees and his eyes open, and watched during the night. Behind him, the Leaf slept in the ruins. A kilometer of rubble, broken slabs as big as houses leaning against each other, gaps between them where men had rolled out their bedding and lay packed close, shoulder to shoulder, for the warmth. Fires burned low in the hollows where the wind couldn't reach them. The medics' tents stood at the back, against the western cliff, where the rubble was thickest. They had not stopped working since dawn the day before. They would not stop tonight.

A hundred and twelve. That was the count Ebisu had brought him at midnight. A hundred and twelve dead. Twice that many wounded who would not fight again in this war. For two walls of earth.

He had expected it to cost but knowing it and counting it were different things.

"Byakugan."

He let his sight run up the valley, across the kilometer of open ground between the ruins and the third wall. Over the bodies there. Up the face of the wall, where the Stone shinobi lay along the top in their hundreds, sleeping in shifts. Into the tunnels behind it.

The tunnels were full with men awake, sitting in the dark with their backs against the rock walls. Fifty of them. Sixty. And in front of them, branching out from the main tunnels, new tunnels. Fresh ones. Dug in the night. Running under the open ground toward the ruins of the second wall.

Toward him.

He followed them. Three tunnels. Each one ran most of the kilometer and stopped a hundred meters short of the Leaf lines, the earth at the end of each one thin as a drumskin, ready to be broken through from below.

He looked up.

The cliffs on both sides of the valley were crawling. Stone shinobi on every ledge, on every outcrop, all the way up to the ridgelines. Hundreds of them. Lying flat. Waiting. Beside each one, a pile of rocks. Some the size of a man's head. Some the size of a man. And under the floor of the valley, under the ruins, under the sleeping Leaf, in the old tunnels that ran beneath the second wall, more men lying on their backs in the dark with their hands pressed against the earth above them.

Hiashi memorized it all. Then he stood up.

"Ebisu."

Ebisu came out of the dark at once. He hadn't been sleeping either.

"They'll come at first light," Hiashi said. "From the cliffs. From under the floor. And from three tunnels that end a hundred meters in front of the ruins." He pointed. "There. There. And there. The Explosion Corps is in all three."

Ebisu pushed his glasses up his nose. He didn't ask how Hiashi knew. "The plan, Lord Hiashi?"

"All of them," Hiashi said. "Wake the camp. Quietly."

The camp woke in the dark without a sound and every squad went where it had been told to go. The lightning squads went first. Forty of them, jonin and chunin, the best Lightning Style users on this front. They spread out through the ruins in pairs, close under the cliffs on both sides, where they could look straight up at the ledges.

The earth users went to the front of the ruins, a hundred meters back from the three places where the tunnels ended. Twenty of them. Among them, a red-haired girl with bandaged fists, rolling her shoulders, grinning at nothing.

The wind users went to the open ground in the middle of the ruins, where they could see both cliffs at once. A dozen of them. Among them, a girl with a chain whip coiled at her hip, scowling up at the cliffs.

The Inuzuka went down into the gaps in the rubble with their dogs, noses to the ground. The Aburame went with them, and as they knelt, the insects poured off their sleeves and down into the earth.

The Akimichi went to the medics' tents at the western cliff and stood there in a row, at their normal size, eating as much as they could.

And along the front of the ruins, fifty Hyuga with their eyes open, spaced out across the whole width of the valley, so that between them there was no part of it they could not see.

Hiashi stood at the center of their line. To his left, ten meters away, his daughter stood with the veins standing out around her eyes. She had not looked at him once since they'd come up the pass. She had done everything he'd asked of her yesterday, and done it well. She did not pause or break down like he'd expected. It seemed his daughter had grown stronger without him realizing… A small smile appeared on his face.

The sky over the eastern ridge went from black to grey.

"Here they come!"

Rocks assailed them. They came off both cliffs at once, a thousand hands throwing at the same moment, and the sky over the ruins filled with them. They came down like hail. Like a hailstorm made of stones. Some the size of a fist. Some the size of a man. All of them falling on the sleeping camp.

And the camp was not asleep.

"East!" a Hyuga shouted. "Two hundred! Coming down on the third section!"

"West! Center! Big ones, the size of houses, eight of them!"

"Lightning!"

Along the foot of both cliffs, the lightning squads wove through hand signs. The air screamed. White lines tore up off the valley floor, forty of them, jagged and branching, and met the falling rocks in the air. Where the lightning touched them the rocks burst, flying apart into gravel and dust. The earth inside them gave way to the lightning and simply came apart. The lightning squads swept their hands across the sky and the rocks broke and broke and fell on the ruins as a rain of grit that stung the skin and nothing more.

Not all of them. There were too many.

"West! Third section! They're through!"

A cluster of rocks came down past the lightning onto the western edge of the ruins. Hiashi heard them land. Heard the screams.

"Earth!"

At the front of the ruins, the earth users wove through hand signs before they slammed their palms into the ground. Walls came up slanted, leaning back toward the cliffs, steep as roofs. The rocks came down on them and hit and skidded and went sliding off the slanted faces into the gaps between the slabs, where no one was standing.

"Wind! The small ones!"

The wind users swept their hands. Blades of wind went up into the falling stones, invisible except where they passed through the dust, and the small rocks came apart in the air like dirt clods hit with a stick.

The girl with the chain whip swung it once over her head and threw her wind down the length of it, and the chain went out ten meters and the wind went out fifty past the end of it. Six rocks the size of a man's head broke apart over the medics' tents.

"Big one! Center! Coming down on the medics!"

Hiashi saw it. A slab of the cliff itself, broken off the western ridge and thrown. Three Stone shinobi had lifted it together. It turned over and over in the air, the size of a house, and it came down at the medics' tents.

The Akimichi stood up.

They stood up and kept standing up. Three of them, then five, growing as they rose, their heads going up past the height of the tents, past the height of the slabs, until they were standing in the ruins as tall as the cliffs were deep. The big rock came down at them. The biggest of the Akimichi reached up and caught it in both hands.

The ground under his feet cracked. His knees bent. He held it.

Then he turned and threw it back.

It went back up the western cliff end over end and hit the ledge it had come from, and the ledge came apart, and the Stone shinobi on it fell.

The sky over the ruins went on raining stone. The lightning went on breaking it. For a long time, there was nothing in the world but the sound of rocks bursting overhead and grit falling like sleet.

"Father..." Hinata's voice. Quiet. "The floor."

Hiashi looked down. The men in the old tunnels under the ruins had their hands pressed against the earth above them. Their chakra was going up into it. He saw the ground under the eastern half of the camp change. The packed earth turning loose. Turning wet.

"Earth users, east half!" He shouted.

Fuki was already there. She and four others wove through handsigns in the eastern ruins and slammed their palms down, and their chakra went down into the ground to meet the chakra coming up. The two met under the earth. Stone pushing it loose. Leaf pushing it back.

The ground shuddered. It went soft. It went hard. It went soft again. Mud bubbled up through the cracks between the slabs and then dried and then bubbled again.

"Inuzuka!" Hiashi said. "Under the east. Twelve meters down. Sixteen of them."

The Inuzuka were already moving. The dogs went down into the gaps between the rubble, noses to the ground, digging, and behind them the Aburame insects went down through the cracks in the earth. Hiashi watched them go. He watched them reach the men in the tunnels. He watched the insects find them in the dark and cover them, and the men pressing their hands to the earth above them felt their chakra going and pulled their hands down to swat at their own skin.

The ground under the eastern ruins went hard, and stayed hard. Fuki sat back on her heels, panting, and punched the air.

"Ha!"

"Father," Hinata said. "The tunnels."

He'd been watching them. He'd been watching them since the first rock left the cliffs.

The three tunnels had gone quiet while the rocks fell. Now the men in them were moving. Running forward. Down the length of each tunnel toward the thin skin of earth at the end, a hundred meters in front of the ruins. Twenty of them in each tunnel. Sixty men in the grey vests of the Explosion Corps.

"They're coming up," Hiashi said. "All three. Now."

The earth in front of the ruins burst open in three places at once. The Explosion Corps came up out of the ground at a run. They came across the last hundred meters straight at the front of the Leaf lines with their fists bare and their arms back, and as they ran, their fists began to glow. A dull orange light. Like coals breathed on.

The first one reached the earth walls the Leaf had raised.

He punched one and the wall exploded. The whole slab went up in a burst of fire and broken earth that threw the three earth users behind it backward through the air like dolls. The Corps ninja went through the hole and the next one went through behind him.

The second Corps shinobi punched the ground and the ground went up in a wave. A ripple, a ring of upturned earth and rock that went out from his fist across the front of the ruins and lifted everything standing on it into the air and dropped it again. Twenty Leaf shinobi were blown to bits.

A Leaf-nin got his arm up to block a glowing fist. The fist hit his forearm and exploded. He screamed and fell back holding a ruin of meat and splinters that ended at the elbow.

A Leaf jonin threw a kunai. An Explosion Corps shinobi punched it with his explosive fist. The kunai was sent flying back into the jonin's face, opening a hole in his skull.

"Lightning!" Hiashi said. "Front! Now!"

The lightning squads came down off the foot of the cliffs at a run. They hit the Corps from both sides.

A Corps nin threw a glowing fist at a Leaf jonin with lightning crackling down her arm, and she didn't dodge it. She met it. Her open palm against his fist, and her lightning went into his chakra, and his fist stopped glowing. The orange went out of it like a candle under a cup. He stared at his own hand. She put a kunai through his throat.

All along the front of the ruins, the same thing. Lightning meeting the Corps' glowing fists, and the glow going out. The lightning ran into the explosive chakra and defused it, breaking it apart before it could build to anything, and the Corps men's fists became fists again. Which meant they had to rely on more than their kekkei genkai.

The Explosion Corps fell back toward their tunnels. They didn't all make it. Hiashi watched twenty of them die in the hundred meters of open ground between the ruins and the holes they'd come out of. The rest went back down into the earth. And as they went, the rocks came again from the cliffs.

…

It went on all morning.

The rocks. The mud. The explosions. The rocks again. Every time the Leaf answered one thing, Stone tried another. Every time the lightning squads went forward to meet the Explosion Corps, the cliffs opened up on the ground they'd left behind. Every time the earth users went to the walls, the mud came up under the tents.

The Hyuga called every throw. Every one. And still, every hour, there were more men on the stretchers.

A lightning user on the eastern side took a rock the size of a man on the back of his head while he was looking up at the one coming down in front of him. He'd seen both. He'd only had time to break one. A wind user turned to cut a falling stone and the ground under him came apart, a mole in the earth beneath him, and by the time the dogs found the hole there was nobody in it but the mole. An Akimichi woman caught a boulder and Stone had plastered it with explosive tags before it was thrown, and it went off in her hands.

Hiashi saw all of it. He saw every one of them die. He saw them die a heartbeat before they did, the rock in the air, the mole under the earth, the tags on the boulder. He called out and the answer went where it was needed, and sometimes the answer got there in time and sometimes there were simply more things happening than there were answers.

At noon, Ebisu brought him another count.

Seventy-three. Since dawn.

Hiashi looked up at the cliffs. The Leaf could stand here and answer forever, and Stone could stand up there and throw forever, and every day Stone would lose some men on those cliffs and the Leaf would lose more in this valley, until there was nothing left of the Leaf to lose. The cliffs were the problem. Every Stone shinobi on them was standing in the one place the Leaf couldn't reach without climbing a hundred meters of rock under a rain of stones.

They'd tried. Twice since dawn, climbing teams had gone up the foot of the eastern cliff. Twice they'd come back down. Fewer of them.

"Lord Hiashi." A familiar voice called out to him from behind.

Lee was standing with his fists clenched. There was dust in his hair. He'd come all the way from the back of the camp. Hiashi had seen him coming.

"I can take the cliffs." Lee said.

"I know you can."

"Then let me go."

"I told you why I'm holding you back."

"I know." Lee's voice was quiet. He didn't sound like himself. "I walked at the head of the march, like we planned. Every scout between here and the Land of Grass saw me coming. Then you put me at the back, so I would be fresh when he came. You are saving me for the worst-case scenario. You think if I spend myself on the cliffs, I will have nothing left when the time comes." He looked up at the eastern ridge, at the Stone shinobi lying along it. "But the Tsuchikage isn’t coming, Lord Hiashi. An army at his door was not enough. He has not left his village since his son died. He is going to sit there and let his men throw rocks at us until there are not enough of us left to climb that wall. And then he won't have to come at all."

Hiashi said nothing.

"Forty-one since dawn," Lee said. "I heard Ebisu-san. I have been listening to the counts all day. I have been doing push-ups in the back of the camp while my comrades hold the walls." His fists were trembling.

"Lee," Hiashi said.

"Yes, sir."

"Take the eastern cliff."

Lee's head came up.

"Take it so that every man on that ridge knows exactly who is taking it," Hiashi said. "So that the ones who run carry your name all the way back to the notch. All the way to the village." He turned back to the valley. "If he will not come to us, we will make it so that he cannot bear to stay home."

Lee didn't say anything for a moment.

Then he shouted, "Yes, sir!" with a salute.

"And the western cliff?" Lee asked.

"I'll take that one."

Hiashi turned.

A girl was standing on a broken slab of wall three meters away. Brown hair in two buns. A scroll on each hip. Fresh scars on her forearms and a fresh pink one across her cheek. She was eating a rice ball.

Hiashi looked at her and realized he did not know when she got back here.

She swallowed. "Sorry I'm late. Did I miss anything?"

"TENTEN!"

Lee was across the three meters before Hiashi saw him move. He threw his arms around her and lifted her off her feet and spun her around. The rice ball went flying.

"My rice ball!" She cried.

"You are here!" Lee set her down and grabbed her by both shoulders and looked at her face, at the new scar on her cheek, at the bandage peeking out from under the collar of her shirt. "You are hurt! How badly are you hurt? When did you get here? How did you get here?"

"Lee." She grabbed his face in both hands and squished his cheeks together until his mouth made a fish shape. "We are in the middle of a war."

"Yeth." Lee said through his squished cheeks.

"There are people throwing rocks at us."

"Yeth."

"Let's go kill ‘em." She let go of his face. He grinned at her. She grinned back.

Then she looked past him at Hiashi, and her grin went away, and she gave the head of the Hyuga clan a short, proper bow.

"Lord Hiashi. Chunin Tenten. Reporting from the southern front."

Hiashi remembered the reports on this girl. The girl who had made the Five-Tails run. There was supposedly another shinobi there, but Hiashi couldn’t find anything on them for some reason.

"The western cliff, are you able?" He asked.

"Yes, sir." She turned and jumped down from the slab and walked toward the western cliff, unhurried.

Lee watched her go. Then he turned to the eastern cliff, and his face changed.

“No more waiting around! If I can’t take this cliff before the day is over, I’ll do a hundred thousand push-ups!” Lee ran forward.

…

The men on the eastern ridge saw him coming and didn't understand what they were seeing. A green shape. At the foot of the cliff. Then halfway up it. Then not on it at all, but in the air above the first ledge, and the first ledge was full of Stone shinobi with rocks in their hands, and the green shape came down among them.

Lee hit the first man in the chest with both feet.

The man went off the ledge backward. His rock went with him. Lee landed where he'd been standing and the second man was already turning, already bringing his rock around to throw it at point-blank range, and Lee's left hand came up and punched through the rock and his right fist went into the man's jaw. The man went down. The third man spat a pebble. It swelled in the air between them, the size of a fist, a head, a boulder. Lee shot forward.

“Dynamic Entry!”

The boulder burst around his foot, and his foot went on through the dust into the man’s face.

Lee looked up. The cliff went up another eighty meters above him, ledge after ledge, and on every one of them Stone shinobi were turning toward him.

"Hello! The Handsome Devil of the Hidden Leaf Village has arrived!"

He ran up the face of the cliff. Chakra in his feet, from ledge to ledge, and every ledge he passed was empty when he left it. Rocks came down at him from above. He shattered every one, except the ones with explosive tags plastered across them. Those he went around. A Stone jonin on a high outcrop formed signs and the cliff face under Lee's feet sprouted spears, a dozen of them, stabbing out sideways from the rock at his legs. Lee jumped. He landed on the spears. He ran along them like a man running along a fence and kicked off the last one onto the jonin's outcrop and put his knee into the jonin's face.

"The Green Savage Devil!" Someone screamed. "It's the Green Devil!"

"At least add handsome, please… I’m really trying to add that one to the bingo books."

He reached the top of the ridge. The ridgeline ran north along the eastern edge of the valley for a kilometer, all the way to the third wall and the notch. All along it, as far as he could see, Stone shinobi were lying flat with their piles of rocks beside them. Hundreds of them. All of them turning toward him now.

Lee unwound the chain whip from his waist. The steel links ran out from his hand and went down the ridge in a long silver line, and he started to run.

Tenten didn’t run. She walked up the cliff face with chakra in her feet and unfurled the large scroll on her back, and a weapon came out of it in a puff of smoke.

Three rods of black oak, each as long as her arm, joined end to end by short lengths of iron chain. Every rod was capped at both ends with a ring of iron as thick as her wrist. She caught the middle section in both hands and let the two outer sections drop, and they swung down on their chains and knocked together under her with a sound like a temple bell.

The first rock came down at her face. It was the size of a cooking pot. She swung the right-hand section up and around on its chain. The iron cap hit the rock square in the middle on its way down. The rock burst. Gravel rained past her shoulders and rattled away down the cliff.

The second one was bigger. A man's height across. She stepped half a pace left along the cliff face and swung the left-hand section out wide, low and flat, and the iron cap caught the falling rock on its edge as it came past her. The rock broke apart and went on down into the valley.

Two more came down together. She whipped the right-hand section up into the first and broke it, and the chain snapped tight and pulled the rod back around her body, and she let it carry on around behind her back and come over her left shoulder into the second. That one shattered.

She started running.

The rocks kept coming. She kept the staff moving. She never let it stop. The outer sections went around her on their chains in long loops, up over her head, down past her knees, around behind her back, and every time they swung back around to the front, there was a rock there to meet them. Each one broke.

Ten meters below the first ledge, a slab came down at her that was nearly the size of a cart. Tenten set her feet on the cliff face. She brought both outer sections around in front of her at once, and lightning ran down her arms and into the oak and out along the chains to the iron at the ends, and the iron caps went white.

She swung both of them into the slab at the same moment, one from each side. Lightning went into the earth and the earth broke to it. It fell to pieces in the air in front of her, and the pieces went past her on both sides in a long grey rain, and she ran up through the dust it left behind.

The men on the ledge stared at her. She stepped onto the ledge. The two outer sections were still swinging on their chains, slowly now, around and around, the white light crawling along the iron.

"You're one of the two who forced our jinchuriki to retreat…" a Stone shinobi remembered her, his voice shaking. "You're the one from the bingo book."

"That’s me." Tenten smiled with pride.

The man beside him threw a rock at her from three paces away. She caught it on the end of the staff and it burst, and the same swing came on around and took the man who'd thrown it across the side of the head. He went down. The Stone-nin came at her with a kunai. She let go of the middle section with one hand and the staff folded, and the end section came down over the top of his guard and hit him on the collarbone, and something in his shoulder broke with a sound like a branch snapping. He dropped the kunai. She swept his legs with the other end and he went down on his back, and the iron cap came down on his chest.

Three more came at her together. She spun the staff out to its full length, all three sections, and went around in a full circle on the ledge, and the far end went around at the height of their knees. Three knees broke. Three men fell. Before they hit the stone she had the staff folded again, short, and was walking through them.

It took less than a minute. When she reached the far end of the ledge, nobody on it was standing. She looked up. Another ledge, twenty meters above. Another twenty men, turning toward her. Rocks in their hands. She grinned, gave the end section a lazy swing on its chain, and started running up.

A Stone messenger reached the tallest tower in Iwagakure an hour after noon.

He'd come from the third wall at a dead run, through the notch, down the long road, through the gates, across four bridges and up nine flights of stairs, and when he reached the top of the ninth flight he fell to his knees on the stone floor outside the Tsuchikage's door and couldn't get up again.

The guards at the door looked at him.

"The cliffs," he gasped. "Both cliffs. The eastern ridge. The western. They're gone. All of them."

"Gone?"

"Two of them." The runner's face was grey. "Two of them took both cliffs. A girl on the west. The one from the bingo book, the one who fought Han. And on the east…"

The door opened.

The Tsuchikage stood in the doorway. He was very small. The top of his head would not have reached the runner's shoulder if the runner had been standing. He wore the robe of his office, and a white beard hung down, and his nose was round and red. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back.

"Continue…" Ōnoki said.

The runner swallowed.

"The Green Savage Devil, Lord Tsuchikage." His voice cracked. "He came up the eastern cliff alone and ran along the ridge and threw every man on it into the valley. He's on the ridge now.”

The Tsuchikage didn't say anything. He stood in the doorway with his hands behind his back and looked down at the runner for a long time. Then he walked past him. He walked to the edge of the open gallery that ran around the top of the tower, where there was nothing between him and the long drop to the village below but a low stone railing. He looked out over the towers of Iwagakure, over the bridges, over the walls, toward the notch in the mountains to the south, and the valley that lay beyond it where he couldn't see.

"Han." He called.

A tall shape stepped out of the shadows of the gallery. Red armor. A steaming kettle on his back. A wide straw hat. Han had been standing there all morning. Waiting.

"Lord Tsuchikage."

"Stay in the village."

Han looked at him for a moment. "You're going yourself."

"I am going myself." Ōnoki's voice was dry and thin and old. "I have sat in that room for weeks while my men died for me." He hovered toward the stone railing and floated above it. "And if a boy is going to try and ruin everything I’ve built, then we just have to get rid of the boy."

He flew off the railing. Up off the edge of the gallery and into the air over the village, light as a leaf, his robe snapping around him in the wind. Up past the cone-shaped roof of the tower. Higher.

Then he turned south and went.

Neji saw him go. He was sitting with his back against a chimney on the roof of a tower on the western side of the village, with Fū beside him and Sai sitting cross-legged a little farther off, sketching something in his scroll. Three Stone shinobi with borrowed faces resting on a rooftop in the cold. They had been sitting there since before dawn.

He'd had his eyes on the tallest tower all morning. He'd watched the old man sitting at his window. He'd watched Han come up the stairs at sunrise and stand in the gallery outside the door and not move. He'd watched the runner come.

Now he watched the old man rise off the top of the tower and float up into the grey sky and turn south, and go, getting smaller and smaller until even the Byakugan could only find him as a small hard knot of chakra moving fast toward the mountains.

He turned his eyes back toward the village. Han was still in the gallery at the top of the tallest tower. He stood at the railing where the old man had stood, looking south. He did not look anywhere else. And a few towers away, on her rooftop terrace, the girl was standing where she always stood, with her hands held out in front of her and a small white cube of light flickering between them.

She hadn't seen her grandfather go. She hadn't looked up.

Neji stood. Fū opened his eyes. Sai closed his scroll.

“It’s time to go.”

The Tsuchikage came over the notch at a height where the wind tore at his beard. He passed over the third wall, and the men on the top of it looked up and saw him, a small dark shape against the clouds, and a shout went up from them that rolled all the way down the valley.

He didn't look at them. He was looking at the eastern ridge. The ridgeline was empty. There were no Stone shinobi on it. There were piles of rocks where the Stone shinobi had been lying, and there was blood on some of the rocks, and there was a long stretch near the northern end where the ridge itself had been broken, a crater punched down into the stone as though something very heavy had fallen on it from the sky.

And in the middle of the ridge, alone, a boy. Green suit. Bowl cut. No injuries whatsoever. A chain whip coiled in his right hand, the steel links red. He was standing at the edge of the cliff with the wind blowing his hair around, looking north. Toward the notch. Toward the village. Toward the old man in the sky.

Ōnoki stopped a hundred meters above him and hung there in the air, and looked down. The boy looked up. He was young. Ōnoki had known he would be young. He had read every report. A Special Jonin who could not use ninjutsu. The boy who had killed the One-Tails at the Chunin Exams. The boy who had killed several hundred, maybe even thousands, of his men. The boy who had fought Rōshi of the Four-Tails and caused him to disappear.

Rage, hate, killing intent, hostility, anger. Once again, it is Konoha. First it was the Fourth Hokage and now it is this boy. He’d be more understanding if it was Kumogakure, Kirigakure, or even Sunagakure. But it's always Konoha!!!

The boy on the ridge glared at the Tsuchikage.

"Lord Tsuchikage," He called up. His voice carried over the wind. "I am Rock Lee of Konoha. You will pay for planning the destruction of my home and the death of my loved ones."

Ōnoki looked at him. Then he raised his hands. Palms facing. A hand's width apart. Between them, something began to take shape. A tiny white cube of light.

On a terrace on a rooftop in Iwagakure, the girl was trying again. Palms facing. A hand's width apart. The cube came, and flickered, and held. The size of a fingertip. The size of a thumb. She didn't hear the footsteps behind her. There weren't any. The man who had come over the edge of the roof made no sound at all. 

But she heard his voice.

"Kurotsuchi." The cube went out. 

She turned. A Stone shinobi was standing at the edge of the terrace. Tall, narrow, pale-faced, with long dark hair tied back. Red uniform. Brown flak jacket. A forehead protector with the symbol of the village.

She'd never seen his face before in her life. Behind him, two more. A young man with a scar through his eyebrow. A heavy grey-bearded man with a scroll under his arm.

"Who are you?" Kurotsuchi said.

The tall man didn't answer. He just looked at her. And as she watched, the skin around his eyes began to change. Veins. Rising up out of his temples, standing out from his skin, thick and dark, running in toward the corners of his eyes. His eyes went white.

Kurotsuchi stopped breathing. A Hyuga…