Chapter 92: Problems Arising…

The cavern sat beneath a mountain that had no name on any map, in a region that cartographers had left blank because nothing lived there worth drawing. The only light came from nine shimmering figures standing on the fingertips of an enormous statue, their bodies translucent, flickering with the distortion of long-range projection jutsu, each one standing hundreds or thousands of kilometers from the others.

Eight of them were already present when the ninth arrived.

"HALLOOOO!!"

The figure that materialized on the statue's left thumb was split down the middle, one half white and one half black, and the white half was waving both arms like a child arriving at a festival.

"Oh man, oh man, that Rock Lee kid is something else! The rumors weren't kidding about his ability to fight tailed beasts." White Zetsu's voice bounced off the cavern walls with an enthusiasm that had no business existing in a room full of S-rank criminals.

"Zetsu." Pain's voice was quiet.

White Zetsu's arms lowered. "Right. Sorry, Leader. Got excited."

The deeper voice came from the same body, from the black half. "The Four-Tails jinchuriki, Rōshi of Iwagakure, has been defeated in combat. Son Gokū took control of the body and left the battlefield. It went west, into the mountains past the Grass border. I know where it is resting."

"Then it's alone," Kisame said. "No village. No escort. That's a gift."

"No." Pain didn't look up. "Three villages have their eyes on the Land of Grass right now. Anything that moves there is seen. We take nothing while the war is watching." A pause. "A beast with no village has no one coming for it. It will still be there when the fighting ends."

"The shinobi responsible is a Konoha special jonin by the name of Rock Lee." Black Zetsu continued. "The fight took place in the Land of Grass. There were numerous witnesses on both sides. Stone has placed an S-rank bounty on his head."

"Special jonin?" Kisame's silhouette tilted its head, the outline of Samehada visible on his back. "A special jonin took down a tailed beast?"

"He's been capable of doing so since he was a genin." Black Zetsu said. "As for the broader situation, the war continues to escalate on all three fronts. Konoha struck first and maintained offensive momentum on the Stone and Cloud fronts. The Mist front has stalled into attrition. All four major villages are committing significant military resources. Casualties are mounting."

"And the Two-Tails?" Sasori's voice was clipped, impatient. He hated meetings. He hated waiting. He hated anything that kept him from his work. "My agents confirmed weeks ago that Konoha took possession of the beast after the engagement in the Land of Wind. Beyond that, details have been difficult to acquire. Wartime has made things harder."

"I have seen no sign of it on any front," Black Zetsu said. "Whatever Konoha did with it, they are not showing it off."

"You're losing your touch, Master Sasori, hm?" Deidara's silhouette leaned against nothing, arms crossed, the smirk audible in his voice. "I thought your spy network was supposed to be the best in the world."

"If I wanted the opinion of someone who plays with dirt, I would visit an academy."

"Aw, don't be like that. I'm just saying, if your little spies can't even get past a few shinobi..."

"Enough." Pain did not raise his voice.

"Enough is RIGHT!" Hidan's voice exploded into the cavern like a dog that had been straining at a leash and finally snapped it. His silhouette was animated, one arm gesturing wildly, scythe bobbing on his back. "There's a GODDAMN WAR going on and we're sitting here doing nothing?!"

"Do you people hear yourselves?! Three fronts! THOUSANDS of shinobi killing each other every single day, and I'm stuck in some backwater temple instead of being out there doing Lord Jashin's work! That's a feast out there! A FEAST! All that death, all that blood, all those souls waiting to be offered, and you want me to sit on my ass and talk about a monkey?!"

"Hidan." Pain said.

"Don't 'Hidan' me! I swear on Lord Jashin, if you don't give me something to kill soon, I'll start with the plant!"

"Hey!" White Zetsu protested. "What I do?!"

"I don't like your face! What even are you man?!"

"For once," Kakuzu said, and the room went slightly quieter because Kakuzu agreeing with Hidan was rare enough to warrant attention, "the idiot has a point. Though his reasons are worthless, as usual."

Hidan sputtered. "The hell did you just..."

"War is opportunity," Kakuzu continued, ignoring his partner entirely. "Every front has valuable targets in the field. Exhausted. Wounded. Exposed. The bingo book prices on shinobi currently fighting are substantial and rising the longer it goes." His voice carried reverence at the potential for money. "This Rock Lee, for example. An S-rank bounty on a shinobi that young. That's either very generous or very desperate. Either way, the money is real."

"That money could aid our operations." Pain didn't dismiss him. Running an organization took an incredible amount of funds.

Kakuzu waited for the rest.

"But any of us appearing on any front would draw attention to the organization. It would give the warring villages a common enemy, a reason to set aside their conflicts and unite against a shared threat. That is the opposite of our goal." Pain's gaze swept across the silhouettes. "The war weakens them all. Every shinobi who falls, every resource expended, every alliance strained, brings our objective closer. We do not accelerate that process by participating openly."

"So, if we're sneaky, we can participate?" Hidan was understanding now. Pain didn't tell him yes or no, which was enough on its own.

Kisame chuckled.

"Speaking of Konoha," he said, and his massive silhouette turned toward the smaller figure beside him with something that looked very much like a grin, "how does it feel, Itachi? Your old village, crumbling on three sides at once. That has to be something."

The cavern was quiet.

Itachi's silhouette did not move.

"Villages rise and fall," Itachi said. "That has always been true."

Kisame's grin widened. "Cold as ever, Itachi-san. I like that about you." He shifted his weight, Samehada on his back. "This Rock Lee, though. A brat who put down a jinchuriki by himself. I wouldn't mind running into him someday. Anyone who can do that is worth getting to know." He said it with genuine anticipation.

"A war on three fronts." Deidara said, his cool tone returning. He'd been leaning back through most of the argument, watching with that half-lidded smirk he wore when he was thinking about art instead of conversation. "Now that's a canvas, hm. Can you imagine what my art would do to an advancing army? The explosions, the beauty, the radiance... a piece like that would be remembered for generations."

"Your art would last about as long as it always does," Sasori said dryly. "Which is to say, not long at all."

"And that's what makes it beautiful, Master Sasori. True art is fleeting. A single, brilliant moment that burns itself into the eyes of everyone who witnesses it before it's gone forever, hm." Deidara's hands gestured as he spoke, the mouth-palms on his projections mimicking chewing motions. "Unlike your dusty puppets that just sit there for years doing nothing. How boring."

"Our directives are clear," Pain said, and the bickering stopped. "Zetsu will continue surveillance of all fronts. Keep watch over Son Gokū, and find out what Konoha did with the Two-Tails. Sasori's network will focus on gaining information on the war situation overall. With this war, time is on our side."

He paused.

"All teams will continue their current assignments. The collection timetable adjusts, but it does not accelerate. The war will run its course. When it ends, every village will be weaker than it was before, and our work will be easier for it."

Konan had not spoken once during the entire meeting. When Pain finished, she inclined her head once, the faintest nod, and that was all.

The holograms began to flicker out and the cavern was dark, and the statue stood alone in the silence of a mountain with no name.

The Land of Earth was mostly a country of stone and wind and very little else.

The mountains rose in broken ridges that ran east to west like the spine of something enormous and dead, and between them the valleys were narrow and deep, choked with scree and stunted pine that grew sideways out of the rock because the wind never stopped pushing. There were no roads this far behind the front. The Stone shinobi who patrolled here used game trails and dry riverbeds, and they navigated by landmark and instinct because maps were useless in terrain that looked the same in every direction.

Nine figures in dark clothing, faces hidden behind white animal masks, moved through the valley below the eastern ridge in a formation that left no tracks and made no sound. The one at the front wore a bird mask, the veins at his temples hidden beneath it, and his pale eyes saw everything, through stone and earth and timber.

Sparrow held up a fist.

The squad stopped.

"Twelve targets," he said. His voice was low, flat, stripped of everything except information. "Stone squad. Mixed composition. One high-value. Moving southwest along the dry riverbed, four hundred meters ahead."

Sai was already at his left shoulder, scroll half-unrolled, brush in hand. "The high-value?"

"Tsuchikage's granddaughter." Sparrow's Byakugan tracked her through the rock. She walked near the center of the formation, not leading it.

The shinobi to Sparrow's right tilted his head behind his mask. Waiting for orders.

"Capture. Kill everyone but the girl. On my signal, attack."

They moved down the ridge like water finding cracks in stone, and the Stone squad below them had no idea what was coming.

A lion made of ink came out of the shadows between two boulders, black and silent and fast, and it hit the rear before the man could turn around. Its jaws closed on his sword arm and dragged him sideways into the rock face, and before his scream could form, its teeth clamped around his throat until the sound died with his breath.

Then the birds came.

Three ink hawks dove from different angles at the center of the formation. Two of the Stone shinobi managed to throw kunai, and one hawk burst into a spray of black liquid across the nearest boulder, but the other two hit their marks, talons raking across faces and arms and forcing the patrol to scatter.

That was when the rest came in. Seven figures dropped from the ridge above, blades drawn, and the valley became a killing floor.

A ROOT operative drove a tanto through an enemy's guard and into his chest while a second operative engaged another, trading blows rapidly. Sai sent a tiger from behind a boulder, its ink body flowing over the rough ground like oil, and it clamped onto the leg of a Stone shinobi who was forming hand signs and pulled him off balance long enough for a ROOT blade to find his throat.

The Tsuchikage's granddaughter fought back.

The first ROOT operative who got close to her caught a faceful of something white and chalky that erupted from her mouth, a spray of calcium powder that hardened on contact with the moisture of his skin and sealed his eyes shut. He stumbled, clawing at the rapidly hardening crust on his face, and she followed up with a spike of earth that erupted from the ground beneath his feet and pierced through his body.

"Lava style, just as reported…" Sai noted, brush moving. He sent two more beasts at her from different angles.

The girl ducked the first, an ink bird that sailed over her head, and punched the second, an ink wolf, with a fist coated in superheated calcium. The wolf splattered across her knuckles and the rock behind her. She was already forming new hand signs when a ROOT shinobi came from her left with a blade and she dropped into the earth itself, sinking through the stone like it was water, vanishing from sight.

She came up ten meters away, erupting from the ground in a spray of dust and gravel, and the ash cloud she spat from her mouth obscured the entire gap between the ridges for three seconds. In those three seconds, two ROOT operatives moved into the cloud, and one of them did not come back out. She'd caught him with a stone spike through the ribs while the ash blinded him.

Sparrow watched from the ridge. His Byakugan pierced the ash cloud without difficulty, and he tracked every movement below: the remaining Stone shinobi falling one by one, the girl buying time with her earth, fire, and lava techniques, the ROOT squad adapting, pressing, closing the noose.

It ended when three ROOT operatives converged on her at once after Sai pinned her footing with an ink snake that coiled around her ankles from beneath the rubble. She slashed through the snake with a kunai, but the half-second it cost her was the half-second that a ROOT member needed to chop at the base of her neck. Her eyes rolled back and she dropped into the arms of the operative behind her, who lowered her to the ground.

The rest of the patrol was dead or dying around her.

Sparrow's Byakugan scanned outward, checking for survivors, runners, anyone who might have slipped the net. Nothing. The valley was theirs.

He was about to give the order for cleanup when his Byakugan caught something else.

"Incoming," Sparrow said. "One target. Six hundred meters, closing fast."

The ROOT operatives reformed around the fallen girl. Sai's brush was already moving.

"Do we know who it is?" Sai asked.

Sparrow's Byakugan tracked the approaching signature.

"The Tsuchikage's son."

The ground between the ridges buckled and split in a line thirty meters wide, and the man came with it. The earth peeled apart, and from the gap came a wall of stone that erupted upward and outward and reshaped the entire valley floor in a single, thundering instant. Boulders the size of houses rolled free. The scree slopes shattered and reformed. The narrow gap between the ridges became a crater, and in the center of that crater stood a large man with a furious face that was already looking at the girl on the ground.

Kitsuchi.

He saw the squad his daughter was in scattered across the broken earth. The bodies. The blood. The masks. And his daughter, unconscious, limp, laid out on the stone.

Kitsuchi slammed both palms into the ground with a sound like a thunderclap, and the terrain around him erupted in every direction at once, everywhere except the patch of stone where his daughter lay. Stone walls shot upward from nothing, pillars of compressed earth punched toward the sky, the ground itself rose and fell and twisted like the surface of a boiling pot. It wasn't aimed at anyone in particular. It was aimed at everything, a wave of raw geological fury that swept outward from Kitsuchi's position and caught anything standing within thirty meters.

The first ROOT operative didn't even have time to jump. A wall of stone hit her from the left and drove her into the ridge face hard enough to crack the rock behind her. She slid down the wall and lay there.

The second and third operatives leaped, clearing the first wave of rising earth, and came down on shifting ground that immediately buckled beneath their feet. The second managed to form hand signs for a wind technique, a cutting gust that slashed into a rising pillar and split it in half, and the ground beneath him collapsed into a pit that swallowed him to the waist. Before he could pull himself free, a second wave of stone rolled over him.

The third operative had used the wave as cover. He came from above, dropping from the ridge with a blade aimed at the back of Kitsuchi's neck. Kitsuchi didn't look up. A column of earth shot upward from the ground directly beneath the shinobi, catching him mid-air and sending him cartwheeling sideways into a boulder. The operative hit the stone, bounced, and lay still.

Sai painted.

From a position forty meters out, braced against a boulder that hadn't been moved yet, his brush flew across the scroll. An ink lion materialized and charged across the broken ground, leaping from stone to stone, and a moment later a second one followed from the left. Two ink birds launched from the scroll at once, diving toward Kitsuchi's head from opposite angles.

Kitsuchi punched the first lion out of the air.

His fist was coated in earth, a gauntlet of compressed stone that formed around his knuckles in the time it took to cock his arm back, and when it connected with the ink beast, the beast exploded into a splash of black liquid that sprayed across the ground and across Kitsuchi's chest. The second lion reached his legs and he kicked it apart, and his hands came together for another set of seals.

The birds dove for his face. Kitsuchi jerked his head sideways, dodging the first, and the second raked its talons across his shoulder before he swatted it out of the air with the back of his hand.

Sai was already painting the next wave when the ground beneath him shifted. The boulder he was braced against simply sank, dropping two feet into the softened earth, and his footing went with it. Sai stumbled, caught himself, kept painting, but his next stroke was rushed, the ink beast that peeled off the scroll malformed, one leg shorter than the others, and it collapsed into a puddle of black liquid before it reached Kitsuchi.

A fourth operative rushed in from the right, blade drawn, aiming for the gap between Kitsuchi's arm and his ribs. Kitsuchi shifted his weight, caught the operative's wrist with one massive hand, and headbutted him with a forehead that might as well have been made of granite. The operative's mask cracked, and so did the skull beneath it. He went limp.

Kitsuchi threw the body aside and kept moving toward his daughter.

The last ROOT operative besides Sai came at him with explosive tags wrapped around kunai, throwing three in rapid succession. Kitsuchi raised a wall of earth that caught all three and absorbed the detonations, the stone cracking but holding, and when the operative tried to circle around the wall, Kitsuchi was already there. One hand sign and a stomp sent a shockwave through the ground that launched the operative off his feet, and a follow-up backhand caught him across the chest before he landed, sending him tumbling across the broken terrain.

Sai sent two more ink beasts. A viper that tried to bind Kitsuchi's ankles, a bird that dove for his eyes. Kitsuchi tore the snake apart with raw strength, the ink splattering across his hands, and ducked the bird. His hands came together again. The ground beneath Sai collapsed. The earth opened in a trench three meters wide, and Sai fell, catching himself on the lip with one hand while his brush hand scrambled. Debris rained down on him, chunks of stone and loose scree, and before he could pull himself up, a slab of rock the size of a table slid from the crumbling edge and caught his legs. Sai bit down on the pain and reached for his scroll with a shaking hand, his brush slick with dirt, and started a stroke.

The ground shook again. The brush jerked. The stroke went wild.

Kitsuchi was past him now. Past all of them. He reached the spot where his daughter lay, dropped to one knee, and pressed two fingers to the side of her neck. His chest heaved and his eyes were on the pulse beneath his fingertips, and when he found it, when he felt the beat, the tension in his shoulders released by a fraction.

She was alive.

Sparrow vanished from the ridge, crossing the distance to Kitsuchi's position in a single burst of speed.

Kitsuchi sensed him. The man's instincts were excellent, honed by decades of combat. He had time for one movement. He could have turned to meet the attack. He could have rolled clear of it.

He did neither. His eyes found his daughter lying exposed in the path of whatever was coming, and his arm shot backward and shoved Kurotsuchi's body across the broken ground, putting distance between her and the incoming threat.

It cost him less than a second. A fraction of a heartbeat where his body was committed to protecting instead of defending.

Neji was already there.

Lightning-natured chakra crackled along his fingers, blue-white and sharp, and he drove them forward in a piercing strike. The strike carved a deep line across Kitsuchi's chest, opening the flak jacket and the flesh beneath.

Blood sprayed across the broken earth.

The shove woke her.

Kurotsuchi rolled across the stone and came to a stop on her side, and her eyes opened to a world that tilted and swam. Her skull rang. The base of her neck was a single throbbing bruise. She couldn't make her arms work. All she could do was look, and what she saw was her father with his chest torn open, and in front of him, a masked shinobi with a bird's face and long dark hair whipping behind him as he moved.

Kitsuchi staggered. His body was already responding, and he roared and swung his right fist with everything behind it, a punch that would have crushed a boulder, powered by legs as thick as tree trunks and a fury that had nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with his daughter lying ten meters behind him.

Neji deflected the punch by pushing Kitsuchi's wrist to the side and struck forward.

Kitsuchi barely slipped the strike and wove through hand seals, blood from the wound across his chest flinging in droplets with each movement of his arms. The earth responded. The ground itself surged toward Neji from every direction, waves of stone and soil rising and crashing like an ocean made of rock, the entire floor of the valley becoming a shifting, grinding, lethal landscape built to swallow anything standing on it.

Neji moved through it.

He leaped as the first wave crested, landed on a rising pillar of stone, pushed off it as it collapsed, ducked through a gap between two converging walls that tried to crush him between them, rolled under a shelf of rock that shot out horizontally from the ridge face, and came up running along the spine of a stone wave that was still forming beneath his feet. His Byakugan showed him everything: every ripple in the earth before it crested, every stone before it fell, every gap before it opened and closed. The terrain was trying to kill him and it couldn't touch him because he was always one step ahead.

"RUN!" Kitsuchi bellowed.

His voice cracked with it. He could feel it. The wound across his chest was deep, deeper than he'd first thought, and the blood was flowing fast, and his techniques weren't landing, and this shinobi was avoiding everything he had.

"GET UP AND RUN, KUROTSUCHI!"

She tried. She got one hand under her and pushed, and her arm folded, and her cheek hit the stone again.

He threw more. Everything he had. The earth rose in walls, in pillars, in jagged spikes, in rolling waves, and Neji moved through all of it with an ease that would have been beautiful if it weren't so terrifying. Leaping, spinning, ducking, running across surfaces that existed for half a second before collapsing, reading the terrain through the Byakugan with perfect clarity and threading himself through the gaps like smoke through a lattice.

Neji's right hand came up. Fingers extended, palm flat. A compressed blast of air erupted from his palm, but it wasn't aimed at Kitsuchi.

It was aimed at the girl.

The Air Palm screamed across the gap toward Kurotsuchi, and she watched it come and could not move, and Kitsuchi's eyes went wide with something beyond fear. His hands broke from the offensive seals to form a defensive wall between the blast and his daughter. Stone erupted from the ground and caught the Air Palm, absorbing the impact, cracks spider-webbing across its surface.

One half-second of divided focus.

Neji was inside his guard.

Kitsuchi swung. Slower now. The blood loss was dragging at his arms, pulling the weight down, and his fists were heavy in a way that had nothing to do with the earth coating them. He threw a punch that would have shattered bones if it connected, and Neji slipped under it, ducking beneath the massive arm, feeling the wind of the punch across the top of his head.

He came up inside Kitsuchi's reach with his right palm already glowing.

Lightning-natured chakra condensed to a single point, white-hot and sharp, and Neji drove it forward into the center of Kitsuchi's chest. Through the torn flak jacket. Through the muscle. Through the bone.

Kitsuchi’s eyes went wide as a beam of chakra punched out through his back and carved a trench into the ground behind him. The earth around them shuddered. The walls cracked. The pillars began to lean. The shifting ground slowed, stuttered, stopped, and the stone that had been alive with his chakra became dead weight, ordinary rock again, and it began to fall.

Kitsuchi looked down at the hand in his chest. Then he looked past Neji, past the destruction, past the fallen ROOT operatives, to the place where his daughter lay on the broken ground.

She was on her hands and knees now, shaking, trying to stand. The wall he'd raised had stopped the Air Palm. She was alive.

His mouth opened. Blood came out instead of words.

He fell.

Neji pulled his hand back and stepped backward, and the body of the Tsuchikage's son hit the ground with a sound like a tree falling, and the last of his earth techniques crumbled around them, stone walls collapsing inward, pillars toppling, the landscape settling back into something that resembled what it had been before he'd arrived, except broken now, shattered, rearranged by a fight that had lasted less than a minute from the moment Neji had left the ridge.

Neji stood over the body and breathed once.

His Byakugan scanned outward. The valley. The ridges. The surrounding terrain to the limit of his range. No reinforcements. No observers. The only living things within eight hundred meters were his squad, the girl, and himself.

He was about to signal Sai, who was pulling himself free of the collapsed earth with a grimace, when his Byakugan caught the girl moving.

She crawled. Hands and knees across the broken ground, over the rubble, dragging herself to where Kitsuchi lay, and when she reached him, she grabbed the front of his flak jacket with both hands and pulled his head into her lap and screamed his name.

"Father!"

The word cracked in her throat.

"FATHER!"

Neji watched. His Byakugan was still active, and it was the Byakugan that saved his life, because without it he would not have seen what happened next.

Inside the girl's body, something changed.

Her chakra, which had been running in the two concurrent natures he'd identified earlier, earth and fire, suddenly split. Not into two streams. Into three. Earth. Fire. And something else. Wind. Three nature transformations running through her chakra network at once, braiding together, converging.

Three natures. Not a kekkei genkai, which combined two. This was three.

A kekkei tōta.

The air around the girl's hands began to distort. Something that made the space between her fingers look like it was being erased, the air itself disintegrating in a small sphere that grew between her palms. Geometry took shape within it: the beginning of a three-dimensional form, angular, defined, a shape that had edges and vertices.

Neji recognized what he saw. He had memorized every intelligence report ROOT had ever compiled on the Tsuchikage and his unique jutsu, and the technique forming between this girl's hands matched the descriptions exactly. The same hand signs. The same geometric construct. The same warping of the air around the technique that the reports described as the visible signature of molecular disintegration.

Particle Style.

Neji's feet were already moving before the technique finished forming.

He didn't know if his Rotation could stop it. The intelligence said Particle Style was unblockable. Nearly undodgeable. The technique didn't just destroy; it erased, disassembling matter at the molecular level, reducing solid objects to dust and dust to nothing. Rotation deflected physical force and chakra-based attacks by spinning chakra outward in a dome. But Particle Style didn't operate on force or chakra impact. It operated on existence.

If he was wrong, he wouldn't be alive to learn from the mistake.

"Sai." Sparrow's voice was sharp. "It's time to go. Another objective of this war has been accomplished."

Sai didn't question it. He was already moving, ignoring the pain in his legs, grabbing the operative Kitsuchi had backhanded and hauling him to his feet. The second survivor was pulling herself free of the wall that had pinned her against the ridge, and she fell into formation without a word.

They ran.

Behind them, Kurotsuchi screamed.

The Particle Style released. Wild, unchecked, driven by grief rather than training. The geometric shape between her palms expanded in an instant, a perfect cone of absolute erasure that lanced outward from her hands like a beam of white light and struck the ridge behind the retreating ROOT squad.

The ridge vanished.

A section of solid rock forty meters wide and twenty meters deep simply ceased to exist, the stone and earth and everything within the cone's path reduced to nothing, leaving a hole in the world with edges so clean and smooth that they looked polished. Through the hole, the sky was visible, pale and distant, framed by the absence of a mountain.

The shockwave of displaced air hit Sparrow's back as he ran, and for one instant, one terrible instant, he felt the edge of the technique's field pass behind him, so close that the hairs on the back of his neck stood up, and then they were past it, over the next ridge, dropping into the valley beyond, and the sound of Kurotsuchi's screaming faded behind them.

They ran for three hundred meters before Sparrow slowed. His Byakugan was still on her, and it told him what he needed to know: the girl had collapsed. The Particle Style had taken everything she had. Her chakra was depleted, her body crumpled over her father's corpse, and she wasn't moving.

He stopped.

Sai stopped beside him, breathing hard, one hand braced on his thigh. The two surviving operatives halted behind them.

"Captain?" Sai questioned.

"We're clear," Sparrow said. "She's down. Chakra exhaustion."

"What was that jutsu?"

"Particle Style. Kekkei tōta. She wasn't reported to have it." Sparrow's Byakugan deactivated, the veins smoothing back beneath his skin. "She does now."

Sai looked at the perfectly smooth, perfectly round hole in the ridge behind them. Through it, the sky was still visible. The edges of the stone were so clean that they looked like they'd been cut by a master swordsman.

"That's going to be a problem." Sai said.

"Yes it is."

Sparrow turned south. Behind them, a girl knelt in the ruins of a battlefield and held her father's body and wept as reinforcements arrived.

She wept until there was nothing left in her, until her body was empty of tears and chakra and everything except the grief and the rage and the promise that was forming in the spaces where those things had burned away everything else.

Every evening since the chunin exams, since that Leaf girl with the weapons had put her in the dirt in front of the whole village, her father had stood behind her in the training yard while she tried to add wind to what she already had. Every evening it fell apart between her hands. Every evening he told her tomorrow.

It had come today. It had taken him dying for it to come.

She would learn to control it. This power that had erupted from the worst moment of her life, this inheritance from her grandfather, this weapon that had carved a hole in a mountain on its first use. She would learn it. She would master it.

A bird mask. Long dark hair. She would know him again anywhere.

Leaf. It had to be the Leaf. No one else was out here killing Stone shinobi.

And she would turn it on Konoha and she would not stop until every last one of them had paid for what they took from her.

The stone beneath her fingers was cold. Her father's skin was growing cold too.

She held him tighter.