At the end of the first fight of the Chuunin Exam finals, Naruto emerged the victor to most of everyone's stunned disbelief. But Iruka clapped despite the light smattering of applause and when he looked up at the bleachers just behind him and to the left, he smiled wider when he spotted Kiba cheering loudly all the same. Both he and Sakura sat leagues away from the other rookies at the top row near one of the exits. The latter had been attentive to the battle, and though she remained expressionless through the majority, he saw her crack a smile at Naruto's finishing blow.

Iruka was glad they offered their support when no one else did.

Kiba shouted something he couldn't quite catch, and his smile falters a touch. There's... actually a lot about them, Kiba especially, that he would've never learned had he not trained him for the entirety of a month.

Even though Iruka knew how proficient his old student was after stumbling upon him and his theories at the library, he should've known there was more to it. Every time they met, Kiba came with new inquiries of outlandish theories that he somehow made work, questioned solid seal formations to propose new loopholes or builds, and had even once brought the idea of organ preservation through seals that could mimic body functions to keep things like hearts and livers alive until transfer.

Eventually he learned that he got some of his ideas from Shino working at the hospital and Sakura's surprising knack for imagining concepts, but it was mostly all weaved from the mind of one Inuzuka Kiba to his teacher's utmost astonishment and guilt.

And one day when he decided to accompany him to a shop to stock up on sealing supplies, he learned something else.

"Still practicing, kid?" the shopkeep smiled, gathering everything set in front of her and punching in the numbers. "It's the third time this week you've popped in. Think you're ready to be the best seal's master Konoha's ever seen?"

Kiba laughed. "Nah, I'm still tryna make a good storage scroll. I messed up the first one and did lotsa studyin', so I know what to do know. And when I make a real good one, I'll even write your name on it!"

She chuckled and stacked the sealing paper and ink bottles in a paper bag, exchanging it for the money he handed over. "You'll do fine, kid." She granted Iruka an appraising stare. "And you're a new sensei of his, right? Make sure you do right by him. I won't have some hoity-toity shinobi messing up this kid's chance of being amazing."

Iruka nodded fervently. "O-Of course!"

"Sato-san, c'mon," Kiba groaned. He peered into the bag and frowned. "Hey, I only got six ink bottles. Why's there eight in here?"

Sato-san pressed a finger to her lips and winked. "I want to see my best customer turn into Konoha's Number One Seal's Masker and he needs good ink for that, eh?"

"Oi, Sato-san! I can't—"

"I'm not hearin' it, kid! Now scram and get that practice in!" She shooed them out from behind her counter, and Kiba begrudgingly retreated to the exit with a pout. The shopkeep pointed a finger at Iruka. "And don't you mess up either, bub!"

Akamaru barked and Kiba reddened. "Sato-san!"

Though amused as he was, once they leave the shop, Iruka's humored smile fell as he peered down. "Kiba, you already know how to make a good storage scroll. I've seen your work—it's-it's the first thing you told me you learned how to make. And you managed to nearly everything-proof it!" His frown deepened. "You seem to really get along with Sato-san. Why did you lie to her?"

The boy glanced up, and suddenly, there was a show in his eyes even if the rest of his face didn't betray his grin. It sends shivers down his spine. "Sato Akemi-san's a nice lady and has lots of good stuff at her shop, and it's not like I wanna lie, y'know? But if she knows how good I am, she's gonna tell a lotta people and a lotta people are gonna find out and I don't want that." His grin finally dropped. "No one needs to know how good I am with this stuff, and I'd 'ppreciate it if you didn't tell anyone either, sensei."

"Kiba—"

"And one day, I'll make her my best storage scroll." His gaze shadowed further. "I'll also give her protection seals. Set up good luck charms around her shop." He met Akamaru's eyes for a moment before looking back up. "Her kid went missin' a long time ago."

Iruka startled. "Oh? That's... That's terrible."

"Yeah. Sato Aki." Akamaru whined, but Kiba didn't seem like he was listening. But he did face back forward and all the chuunin can see of his face was his profile. "So if I can make her smile a bit by comin' in a lot and pretendin' I'm gettin' there slowly, I think I brighten up her day a bit more. I don't mind. She doesn't mind. So it's all good there, right?"

(It would be a long time until Umino Iruka would learn the name Sato Aki was whispered into a lantern and set adrift.)

The second match ended with an immediate forfeit. Shino barely had the time to pull his hands from his pockets when the Kazekage's eldest son lifted a hand and called a surrender.

The stadium swelled in incredulous murmurs, and Kiba threw his arms up.

As the proctors readied the next match, Nara Shikamaru v. Sabaku no Temari, Iruka let his mind wander again.

A line of kunai and an unhealthy amount of senbon were piled up at the boy's side. On each weapon a part of a seal was attached and Kiba rambled happily about his new theory. "So long distance sealing, right? If you can attach paper bombs and stuff to your weapons, why shouldn't this work? You get ta' control how big or small your range of attack gets, like this!"

He absentmindedly took a handful of senbon and launched them towards a tree. Iruka spied the delicate ink work painted on each one and watched, flabbergasted, as he made a perfect diamond with a swirl design in the middle.

His gape furthered when Kiba grasped the four kunai with the attached tags next, looped chakra wire at the hilts, and fired. Each kunai maneuvered to a different corner of the field. At the exact point in which each of them land, ink burst with the force of a water spout and flowed through the grass until it shaped into a harshly complicated matrix.

When was the last time a long distance sealing technique was attempted to such a caliber? Iruka recalled combing through books upon books on sealing when he was first invested and found near nothing published less than thirty years ago. Sealing was a subtle art, feared for what it could grow into but not taken up by many because of the time and intricacies it took to master even one of the worthwhile ones. And since things like explosive seals and sealing scrolls were sold by the bulk at shinobi-approved prices, it wasn't hard to figure that people would sort of... drop off learning it if it was already at their disposal.

It took a moment for Iruka to deduce it as a trap he'd taught about a week ago.

'He... mastered it already?'

Akamaru wagged his tail enthusiastically and stood with pride.

Iruka dragged a scrutinizing gaze over the senbon embedded in the tree, searching for fault but finding nothing significant. The spaces between each weapon were uniform, the swirl drew its attention to the activation in its center, and the ink on the metal was immaculate despite looking like it had been drawn on with a toothpick.

Incredible.

The kunai, though, were a slightly messier thing to deal with. It was harder to input the finer details on a grand scale, but he doubted the typical shinobi were well versed enough in the sealing arts to know the difference between the beginning and end of a—what was this, a folded patch seal locked in four quadrants? Meters long?!

If anyone else caught wind of this—

Iruka swallowed down the dread that suddenly lodged in his throat, the fate of Uzushiogakure lurking in the depths of his mind.

He didn't want to think about it.

"Sensei." Iruka spun around from his close inspection of a top edge sequence to meet Kiba's back. He faced the seal on the tree, poking at one of the senbon with a careless finger. "You know anythin' 'bout seal reversals? Not like, seal breaking or chakra overloading, but uh, actual reversals."

"Well, there's a 2% guaranteed success rate at conception. It increases .5% with every section you bypass, but bypassing also guarantees a .35% increase in fail rate due to another component getting negatively affected as a result," he explained, rubbing his chin with a hand. "That's why there's only one documented success for a seal reversal, and it was achieved by an Uzumaki when Uzushiogakure was still thriving. The process is tedious and it's highly unlikely to achieve the 50% success rate they need to attempt it, and most who try just drop it within the first few years."

"... take too long," Kiba muttered.

"Hm?"

"Nothin'. Just thinkin' out loud," he replied. His finger jabbed the senbon a little too forcefully, and a drop of blood ran down his skin. He perked up. "Hey sensei, you think the power of a seal increases with different liquid mediums?"

Iruka opened his mouth to comment on the abrupt change of topic—Kiba never brought up a new theory without spouting out at least ten minutes of new possibilities before getting distracted by a new idea. But, he stopped himself. There was something... underlying there, like in class when a student avoided his gaze because they didn't want him to call on them.

Or perhaps, in this case, there was something he knew too much of and he simply refused to share.

It wouldn't be a stretch. Not with how inexplicably talented Kiba was.

Shikamaru surrendered when he could have won, delivering the victory to the sand genin and lazily sauntering out of the arena. Iruka slumped at the boy's lack of enthusiasm and pinched the bridge of his nose. Borrowing his habitual muttering, he sighed his own: "Troublesome."

Sasuke was the only remaining Konoha contestant now. Five minutes counted down on the clock, and Iruka caught something odd.

Shino, who'd taken a temporary aisle seat beside Sakura during the intermission, lurched suddenly—he'd gotten new glasses too, red-rimmed, where had he seen those before—and bent to whisper in her ear. She frowned before glancing up at the Kage Box where her frown promptly morphed into a sneer, and she looked away. Kiba leaned towards his team incredulously, looking more than ready to explode, but she forced him back into his seat.

"Then we'll do it now." Iruka squinted to watch her mouth move. "Get the stray."

Then Sasuke and Kakashi appeared in a tornado of leaves and the stadium rumbled in excitement. Spectators rose to their feet for the most anticipated fight of the day, but it blocked his view of Team Eight.

Uneasy, he glanced up at the Kage Box. Nothing... looked wrong?

He reluctantly shifted his attention back down to the arena in the end when he found nothing fruitful.

But not too long after, white feathers floated down from the sky and and a sudden tiredness washed over his bones. He didn't know if he was hallucinating or not, but when he looked back up at Eight as his eyes fell shut, they were no longer there.

::

Most of the village had yet to be alerted of the attack. Civilians walked the streets without a care and off-duty shinobi began to wonder why the hairs at the backs of their necks started to stand.

On one of the many rooftops covered by a particularly dense tree, four bodies crouched low with a scroll unfurled at their feet.

Slung low behind her, Sakura's katana brushed against the concrete. Her kusari-fundo was coiled at her hip. "Kankuro and Temari carried Gaara out of the village, Sasuke in pursuit," she informed. "It won't be long until everyone else wakes and the rest of the forces are dispatched—I'll follow after them and jump in when it's not suspicious. You all know what to do?"

Kiba smirked, but it was bitter. The weight of what they were about to do is heavy against his shoulders, but he didn't break. He couldn't. Not now. "ANBU's gonna go after the snake, jounin'll go after the enemy-nin, chuunin evacuate and protect the civilians. For the most part, anyway. We went through the blueprints and Konoha's emergency protocol, we know what's up."

Beside him, the lithe form nodded. "ROOT will be occupied due to the scale of this event," Tenzo added. His cat mask donned his face as his bone white armor shone. "After Kiba and I infiltrate the Hokage Tower, the seals will go up and we'll have a ten-minute window before they dissolve."

"And I will be heading for the hospital to attend to the injured that will surely come of this," said Shino. By now, he's almost used to the prosthesis. He could make it through an entire hospital shift without drawing notice to his eye, or lack thereof, and his sight didn't blur as much as it used to under stress. "Why? The hospital will earn the lowest level of active scrutiny, allowing me access to secluded areas for us to reconvene." Kikaichu poured out his sleeve and up Kiba's. He nodded towards them. "You know their purpose."

"Then it's settled," Sakura remarked. She extended her fist the same time Shino and Kiba's do, Akamaru's paw joining in quickly after. Tenzo hung back awkwardly until Kiba rolled his eyes and elbowed his side.

"Clock's tickin', dude. Come on."

Tenzo blinked once behind his mask and quietly obliged, curling his fingers into his palm and reaching forward.

Shino started. "The weak are meat—"

"—the strong eat," Kiba growled. Sakura's lips tipped down as her eyes hardened in promise.

"And this time, it won't be me."

There was a depth to their words Tenzo didn't understand; a call to the other times they'd said it when no one else was there to hear it.

It's not a triumphant cry. They echoed a loss and a fault, a lie and a secret—all spilled over tongues they could no longer call their own.

They were far past the point of no return.

'But why,' he thought, 'did a group of genin care to dig out the darkness of the village when no one else bothered to try?'

::

"Shishienjin!"

Purple flames shot up from the corners of the roof of the Kage Box, shining a blinding light as a barrier curved around the edges. The lines of fire grew into four milky black walls that trapped the Sandaime along with his assailant.

It was too murky to clearly see through.

An ANBU tried to ram it and caught fire upon contact.

Hiruzen narrowed his eyes at the arm wound around his neck and the kunai pressed against the bottom of his chin. "Kazekage-sama, I don't quite understand your ploy," he stated calmly. "From our last correspondence I assumed both Konohagakure and Sunagakure were on terms of acquaintanceship."

"Acquaintanceship? A true fool you are, Hokage-sama," the Kazekage chuckled. "The only relationship Konohagakure and Sunagakure will have with each other is war."

"War?"

"What else?"

"War should never be the first act. One must try to find a negotiation through civil means." His eyes narrowed further as the Kazekage's head bowed and his shoulders started to shake. "There's still time for such."

He waited and refused to flinch when the Kazekage threw his head back in a raspy laugh. "They say as one ages, the more one gets addicted to peace, Sarutobi-sensei."

Hiruzen froze. No. It couldn't be.

On one of the far walls, an enormous three-headed snake smashed through. Bricks and foundation flew, but he didn't hear it. His heartbeat was in his ears, sweat dripped down the side of his face, and a hundred regrets clogged his throat.

"Here I came for a simple mission: take the Uchiha boy, destroy Konoha in the process, then I'm on my merry way. It's a good plan. Or, at least, it was." Half the Kazekage's face was covered, but he imagined a wide smile beneath the cloth, pale lips stretching in a way lips shouldn't. "But plans change. Wrenches get thrown in the works, and I've discovered my dear old sensei has turned into quite the hypocrite of himself."

Hiruzen gritted his teeth. What was he getting at? "Is that so?"

"Your thick head led Konoha to be outmaneuvered and outdone," the other hissed. A hand reached up to grip the skin of his face and pulled, tan pieces tearing to reveal the terrible paleness beneath. "And," he paused to chuckle, a harsh, sickly sound, "your surprising cruelty led to that cute genin team in the Forest of Death to nearly die by your hands."

Orochimaru drove the kunai into his own hand and yawned as he released the Sandaime from his grasp and stepped to the side. "Ah, the set-up to the finals bored me to tears. I was so sleepy," he sighed. A glance to his mentor granted him the view of a wide-eyed shock, and he grinned. "What sort of look is that, sensei? Did I push a button? Strike a nerve?"

"The genin team—"

"Your priorities, sensei," he chided like he would to a child. "And it's quite interesting to see you so worried about getting caught than it is to watch your village burn."

::

No one noticed the two figures that slunk along the shadows, nor the even smaller, four-legged form creeping the spaces between windows and ledges. This part of the village had yet notice they were under attack, but it was only a matter of time before they saw the broken wall far east or the sound-nin that were no doubt beginning to swarm the place in droves.

Tenzo's cloak, flowing and beige, was enough of a buffer for Kiba to stay hidden between it and the walls they hugged. If anyone were to chance a look their way, no matter how brief (which would be few and far in between) they would see a higher ranking shinobi about their business.

At the Tower, he pulled them all to one of the hidden access routes secured behind the pipework attached to the side of the building.

Kiba huffed. "Secret entrance, huh? How many more you got?"

"Seven," the ANBU replied, wrenching off a wall panel. Kiba grinned—sharp canines and all—and sent Akamaru through first before slipping himself in.

'Though the entrances are not meant for our purpose of breaking and entering with the intention of stealing priceless information,' Tenzo continued to himself. He was the last to enter and quickly snapped the panel back into place.

A flash of guilt threaded through him. He shook it off.

'No. This needs to be done.'

They emerged into a cleared hallway on the second floor. Kiba knelt to pry up a plank of the flooring armed with a senbon and a bottle of ink. Carefully, he painted a sequence no bigger than his pinky nail and watched the finished product whirl together to form an inconspicuous black circle.

'I have to do this for them.'

He pressed the plank back into place. "Alert seal's good, should let us—ghk!"

A gloved arm wrapped around Kiba's middle and the other around Akamaru and then they were upside down on the ceiling in a shadow at the end of the hallway. Kiba stopped breathing as a couple of chuunin ambled down the hall.

"—oint is, it exists. Like, I saw it with my own two eyes and it's gonna haunt me for the rest of my damn life."

"It's not fucking real."

"Then WHY did I SEE IT."

Tenzo counted to fifty-seven before he slowly crawled forward. Catching the hint, Kiba attached his feet to the ceiling and crawled alongside him, Akamaru settled into his hood as they crept their way towards the Hokage's Personal Library.

Five hundred sixty-three steps from the first stair onto the floor. Four seals on each corner of the library: one to hide it, one to lock it, one to bar it, one to shift attention away from it. Over fifty had tried to break in over the past ten years, but none had been the three of them: one of them the Hokage's top ANBU guard, the other a young boy with the raw talent of an untamed seals master, and the last a familiar with the mind nearly as sharp as his partner and a nose that picked up the faint musk of yellowing paper behind wooden walls.

There were two outcomes. Either they succeeded and lived until the next attempt at their lives, or they lose and were killed regardless.

But there was only one end they would accept, and that's what it would be.

"I think Iruka-sensei did this month's seal change," Kiba murmured as he ripped off two hidden seals at the base of the door. He held one up to the light, considering. "His quirks are all over it."

"Quirks?"

"You can tell who made a seal based on handwriting and sequence placement. He's been teachin' me for a whole month, so I can definitely pick up his stuff by now," he said. "And we don't gotta worry 'bout preservin' the seals. I've known 'im since back at the Academy, so I can forge anythin' he's made. Easy."

The top left seal probably needed to be downed first, and it didn't take long to unlayer and unstitch at the margins. Iruka always stopped at the bottom right and worked his way up and to the left before trying to fold it towards the center. But the thing about those folds was that there was an astronomically high chance for tears because of the angle and—there it was. Barely the width of a single sheet of paper.

Kiba tacked onto it with a pinprick of chakra and yanked, and the seal spilled over in ink as the bars trapping the lock fell apart. After, all he needed to do was unlock the ends of each line to undo the matrix that melted away far quicker than the seal before it.

The boy grinned and spun on his heel to gesture dramatically at the now opened door. "Ta-da!"

Tenzo stared at the door, then at the genin with a puppy happily wagging a tail in his hood. "Konoha must be full of idiots to not realize your potential."

Kiba snorted before pulling out four new seals he stuck to the corners of the door. A brush came out of his pouch as well and he started copying the seals in almost identical strokes.

"You know what happens to good shinobi in this system? Get chewed up in the machine and get spat out more fucked up than when they got thrown in," he sneered. "Sensei showed you that envelope, didn' she?"

He'd known Uchiha Itachi. Worked with him. Spoke with him. Fought alongside him.

The papers fell from Kurenai's shaking hands and he'd caught them, trying to digest just... just what these kids were insinuating.

This couldn't be! This had to be some far-fetched idea, some concepts thrown together after grasping at the straws, this couldn't... this...

Once, he'd watched the Hokage stand to the side as Danzo forced seals on four innocent tongues.

Why should this be that much of a stretch?

"Is..." Kurenai gulped and lowered her voice to a deathly whisper. "Is there a chance this is true?"

Tenzo sighed and crumpled the research in his hands. "Yes," he replied softly. "Yes, there is."

Twenty minutes on the dot since it opened, the seal glowed red and it, the envelope, and the notes burst into ashes.

A couple minutes later and no more close calls with unaware chuunin, the genjutsu seal reactivated but the other three seal were dormant, but ticking.

"We've got ten minutes before the whole thing blows over Get in, get out—got it?"

No one was in the hallway to see an ANBU, a genin, and a dog phase through a rippling wall.

::

Orochimaru leapt into the air to avoid the roof tile flung his way like shuriken and a snake erupted from his throat and out his mouth to dig its fangs into the Sandaime's neck. But that Sandaime melted into nothing but a pile of mud and the moment the sannin's feet touched back down on the roof, a mudslide sent him careening down the way.

"Is this all you can do, sensei?" he laughed. "Ah, how terrible it must be to grow old."

Hiruzen narrowed his eyes, his hands already flying through a new set of seals. "Doton: Doryuudan!" Followed quickly by a, "Katon: Karyuu Endan!"

The mudslide pulsed and stretched into a dragon's head that spat mud bombs coated in orange flame, and Orochimaru was struck with more than ten of them before the mud dispersed and his real body slunk back up from hiding.

The ANBU guarding the outside saw nothing but a silent flash through the darkened barrier.

"Did you think that's all it would take to kill me?" Orochimaru hummed. His tongue flickered and the odd, synthetic quality of his skin barely crinkled. "You've definitely put more effort trying to end that team, ah, what were their names? Kiba-kun, Shino-kun..."

Wary eyes were searching. Guarded. "Certainly you haven't come here to lecture about a passing intrigue, Orochimaru."

The sannin had to pause before a sharp grin carved into his face. He'd never quite found the reason for little Sakura-chan's animosity towards her Hokage, nor why ROOT of all people had been out on the hunt the one time screams of terror would be chalked off as part of the game.

It had been a while since he'd lurked, though. That month since he saw Kisame off he'd respected his wishes and hadn't paid that lovely team a visit. But when he sat up in the Kage Box in full view of Sakura-chan and her beautiful new scars? Oh, he just had to tip off that Aburame about the siege, for what fun could they be if he caught them off guard with Kabuto's genjutsu?

He'd watched them disappear from the arena, alerting no one of their discovery and leaving the village to succumb.

In that moment, it was apparent to him. Inuzuka Kiba, Aburame Shino, and Hoshigaki Sakura weren't loyal to Konohagakure—least of all the Hokage.

And his dear old sensei had once again found a way to let his people down.

"And how strange for the Hokage to have grown to care so little about Konoha's future," he smiled. "There was something they'd mentioned when I'd come across them. What was it again? Ah, I'm sure it'll come flowing back to me in a moment. Where were we?" He hummed. "Oh, yes, right where I want you."

Pale fingers curled into four signs: tiger, snake, dog, dragon, before his hands clapped together and two coffins rose up.

::

"Take Gaara and get outta here!" Kankuro snapped, his patience at its end. Temari hesitated for a moment. She glanced at the prone body of her youngest brother, then to the back of the elder brother, and she sighed as she looked away from both. They'd get nowhere if all three of them were caught in that Uchiha's way.

"Fine," she relented with a tired sigh. Gaara's body—had it always been this small?—was up on her shoulders. "But get this over with quick. We don't have time for more interruptions."

Temari was long gone by the time Kankuro's fingers brushed the top of his puppet, and Sasuke sneered from his perch on a tree branch.

"It doesn't matter who I fight," he scoffed, reaching into his pouch for a kunai. "You'll be dead where you stand."

"Which won't be necessary," a new voice interrupted. Struck at the familiarity, Sasuke blinked and turned to the branch behind him. Sakura leaned against a tree with her arms crossed and her face as blank as it ever was and—shit, when did she get those huge scars? He hadn't seen her since finding out she was the idiot's next door neighbor.

"What are you doing here?" he demanded. Sakura turned a pair of bored green eyes to him.

"Shino placed one of his kikai on you before you left the arena," she said. He flinched and looked down, grimacing when he spotted an insect or two crawling along his black shirt. When he looked back up, he couldn't help but flinch again at the sight of insects crawling up from inside her shirt to the flesh of her cheek. "Uchiha-san, go after Gaara. I have business to deal with here."

Sasuke glanced between the both of them, Sakura as cold as he'd ever seen her and Kankuro quieter than how he was mere seconds ago.

He smirked. "You seem confident. Are you going to be okay?"

"... Heh." She returned his smirk with a small one of her own as she gripped the hilt of her katana. "Don't worry about me when I'll be the one shredding his puppet to ribbons."

Sasuke smirk widened as he leapt up through the trees after Temari and Gaara.

Exactly fifteen seconds after his departure, her face dropped and she met Kankuro's gaze. Or, tried to. His head was tilted and she was sure his eyes were flickering over different parts of the bark behind her, trying to focus on anything that wasn't her.

"It's not hard to play up Uchiha-san," Sakura said. The hilt dropped from her grasp and her arms were back over her chest. Kankuro blew out a terribly shaky sigh as his hand dropped from his puppet. "So?"

His brow scrunched. "So what?"

"So both your siblings, one of them the eldest of the Kazekage's children and the other Suna's jinchuuriki are out being chased by the sole survivor of the Uchiha massacre. Not exactly a prime example of political decency."

She disappeared and reappeared beside him on his branch to take a seat on the gnarled bark. Kankuro hesitated, briefly, before mussing the top of his hood and plopping down beside her. He wanted to ask how she learned to shunshin with such faint traces of smoke or when she started studying with swords, but he kept quiet. The birds chirped, the wind rustled, Konoha's walls fell, and the screams of battle echoed every which way.

"Why..."

Sakura tipped her head, but didn't look his way. The beetles continued to crawl along her cheek. "Hm?"

"Your village is being attacked. Suna and Oto teamed up to take you down and—what, you're fine with it? Sitting here drinking some metaphorical tea with the enemy while your literal home is crumbling to dust?" He waved an incredulous hand in the direction a plume of smoke started to rise. "Fuck, dude. If I didn't know any better, I'd say you couldn't give two shits about Konoha."

When there wasn't an immediate response, a small chuckle, or even a light scoff, he shifted. And quietly, so quietly, he spoke.

"... Fuck. You for real?"

"Simply, the Will of Fire is that love is the key to peace," she recited. "Maybe I do not speak for us all, and perhaps I am the first to say, but this is one village of one family. Everyone here and everyone that will be is born with a fire in their hearts, and here, I hope, that Konohagakure stokes it into a flame that burns brightly for all to see, to admire, to draw strength upon. The Will of Fire is hope. The Will of Fire is us. Senju Hashirama, page seventy-five of 'The Will of Fire'." A groan of crushing rock broke in the distance as another cloud of smoke billowed upward. "But it doesn't say what happens when a fire is stoked for too long. If it grows out of your control, what do you do? Let it consume, or snuff it out? Many choose the latter and I can't fault them on their logic, but it's them I blame for what they created."

She stood, and Kankuro slowly followed suit. He wasn't stupid—he'd tinkered with puppets long enough to know when to squint for splinters or read carved lines between wooden joints. She didn't waste her time trying to hide her admission, and he was almost surprised that it didn't send any warnings off in his head.

He knew corruption the same way he knew his father never learned to love his youngest son. He knew it could happen to anyone, anywhere, despite the good of heart or the wickedness of soul. Corruption didn't have a name or face, but people wore it well enough. Sometimes he saw it in Suna, recently he'd spied it in the depths of Orochimaru's eyes, and he thought it was about time Konoha's ugly face finally reared its head from behind its goody two shoes shtick.

"So what do you fault them in?" he questioned.

"That they'd be inept enough to start a fire in a forest. Leaves are fodder—the more they try to hide me in them, the quicker I'll burn." Her lips quirked and her eyes sparked with cold lightning. "But sand is certainly more effective at putting out flames. Now that you know I have no problem seeing smoke, what are you going to do about it? Try to snuff me out too?"

The scars on her shoulder were pink canyons in her skin. They were horrible things, like muscle had been ripped and torn out in strips.

"We leave the politics to the Daimyo and the Kage," he said, dragging his eyes away from her injuries and stuffing his hands in his pockets. "And that political mess that's gonna go down out there? None of my business, 'cept the fact I don't want my siblings dead. But they can take care of themselves and make their own decisions." He drew in a deep breath. "Just like I can."

Kankuro held out an arm. Sakura observed it before stretching out hers to grasp his forearm. The heat of his fingers bled through her arm wraps.

"If you want to see this place burn to the ground, I won't stop you. I don't know what they've got over your head, but you're too damn smart for it to be some dumb shit. I saw the way you lost in the preliminaries, but that was a choice, huh?" The amused cock of her eyebrow said all he needed to know. "Look, this ain't my mess. But if I stay on your side, you stay on mine."

"As comrades?"

"As... friends."

Friends.

The taste of the word was still odd on her tongue. Kiba and Shino she wouldn't dub as such—they were too close for that, in too deep with their secrets to be anything other than a unit. A family.

But friends?

She didn't have too many of those. Never had.

"Friends," she nodded. She eyed him thoughtfully. "Though if you ever cross me, I'll kill you and no one will ever be able to find the body."

"And lose my tourist guide? Nah, not worth the effort." He dropped her arm and cast one more glance toward Konoha. "But it'd be suspicious if anyone saw us uninjured with full chakra reserves."

Sakura hummed and tipped her head. "I can manipulate my chakra to appear a different level than it is." She paused. "Can I punch you in the face and cut one of your puppets in half?"

Kankuro stared blankly.

Then heaved a long suffering sigh. "As long as I can slam you into the ground from up here."

::

Bringing in the Shodaime and the Nidaime, he admitted, was more in part for him to buy more time for his forces to further the invasion. That, and to see just how much he could go and make his old sensei tick.

And with the reveal of his new, younger vessel, he was sure Hiruzen was one popped artery away from keeling over.

Not that it wouldn't be fun to watch an old man croak from a failing organ. No, Sarutobi Hiruzen was going to die slowly, surely, blood soaking every inch of his clothes and the sweet savor of his mistake along the edges of his teeth.

"It... It can't be. That forbidden jutsu—"

"It wasn't hard to perfect it after leaving this waste of a village," Orochimaru dismissed. He chuckled. "Ah, I remember that look on your face when you thought you'd caught me red-handed in my lab, experimenting on those delightfully dreadful children. Thought Danzo was the only one, did you?"

Hiruzen ground his teeth. "Orochi—"

"But you didn't stop me. You cornered me with no escape, you couldn't stand the thought of this brilliant jutsu development and sought to destroy my life's work!"

"Orochimaru!"

Something crazed overtook his eyes—the yellow even brighter and the promising threat that much greater. His tongue swept out his mouth in a low arc before curling back up. "You didn't kill me that day. You couldn't. What stopped you? Why did you watch your two ANBU guards die by my own hand?" In a flash he was gone, and in another flash he had Hiruzen by the throat. Two wrinkled, calloused hands clawed at his wrist and he leaned forward. "Why did you let me go that day, Sarutobi-sensei?"

Hiruzen stilled. He could recall it like it was only yesterday; the grimy water that seeped into his sandals as he ran through those dark corridors lit with the occasional torch. The bitter tang of blood clipped through the air the closer they got, some of it old as rust, some as fresh as slaughter.

Why did you let me go that day?

The Hokage choked when the hand on his throat pressed harder against his adam's apple. "You know w-why... You know why I couldn't..."

Orochimaru hissed. "That's not an answer."

"You want... an actual answer?" The hand slackened, and Hiruzen breathed. "Even when you were just a boy, you were ambitious and full of malice and you hid it well. But I was your sensei and I could see right through you when no one else could. But I... I pretended not to notice."

"You called him a 'genius with talent, knowledge, and determination—a prodigy found once in a generation'."

"I believed in you... that you would carry on my own will and power. I thought the world of you, Orochimaru. I thought—"

"You 'couldn't wait to see him grow into a proud shinobi'. But he's been twisted for a long time."

Hiruzen blinked away the tears that nearly surfaced. "I should have killed you that day."

"Everyone has a choice. And you've only been making the wrong ones."

Orochimaru bared his teeth like the predator he was and dropped the old man before shunshinning to the opposite end of the rooftop. He yawned into his hand. "Well, what an unfortunate mistake to make. Really, are you going to try and rectify what you couldn't do over twenty years ago? Hm. Perhaps you're even more of a waste of time than I anticipated." He scoffed. "Who would think to overestimate a Kage?"

Hiruzen didn't reply. Instead, he raised a pair of rickety hands together. A clone appeared on either side of him, their palms pressed against one another and acceptance plastered all over his face.

"Clones?" his old student—no—the enemy questioned. Orochimaru rolled his eyes. "You've gotten old after all. So quick to kill yourself?"

Snake, boar, ram, rabbit, dog, rat, bird, horse, snake.

There was a swirl of chakra, massive and looming and Hiruzen glanced solemnly over his shoulder. To everyone else there was nothing, merely blank space in a darkened barrier.

But to him, a gaunt apparition hung over his head. Its crimson horns barely peeked out of its wild mane of pale, white hair.

Shiki Fuujin. The Dead Demon Consuming Seal. A suicide jutsu.

"There are too many mistakes that I cannot atone for, and I know that through all my failings, taking you down is the very least I can do!"

But too soon, his eyes went wide.

He looked down.

At the sword Orochimaru impaled through his chest.

"Sakura-chan told me to make you bleed, sensei," Orochimaru crooned, like a flat note played on a broken violin. "And I'm more than happy to oblige."

::

Shino flowed as easily through the bustle of Konoha's General Hospital like a fish swimming downstream. He dodged gurneys and frantic nurses, even taking a few files from one overwhelmed with her stack of thirty. Almost immediately he tugged off his jacket and snagged a mask and a pair of latex gloves as he stepped into the general assessment quarter.

Most of who lined the cots were shinobi and civilian alike—unconscious, more than likely suspended in Yakushi Kabuto's genjutsu.

He stopped one of the nurses. "Do we have a genjutsu specialist on call?"

The nurse nodded. "One specialist responded. Yuuhi Kurenai is reported to be on her way along with several more unconscious spectators from the stadium."

"Thank you," Shino bid and let him on his way. So Kurenai would be stationed at the hospital for the remainder of the siege? Good. It kept her out of Orochimaru's war path and assured she wouldn't tie into their plans should it go south.

And besides, their mission had been the spur of the moment. They hadn't the time to tell her anything until the whole thing blew over.

He felt strangely empty at half his colony not currently at his disposal, but it didn't stop him from sending a fourth of his available colony out to run evaluations on the new patients. Shino watched them crawl over prominent chakra points and vital organs to screen for anomalies.

He was glad the hospital staff was so used to his methods by now. He had started to grow irritated over their harping about sterile procedure and invasive healing, but after one of his specially crafted colonies had been able to detect chemical changes in the brain quicker than a regular medic could, they finally got off his back.

"Shino!"

Shino moved his head away from his kikai and towards the figure jogging his way. "Aoba-sensei."

"What's the situation in here?" Aoba questioned, lowering a body he'd carried onto one of the cots. He pushed up his green-rimmed glasses and stood by his student who flipped through some documents on a clipboard.

"Genjutsu-induced comas in every patient. We're running a general diagnostic to make sure none of them have dire problems that need to be tended to before the specialists come in to safely break it. Why? We need to assure there was no other genjutsu or something or other mixed in." Shino extended an arm and his insects swarmed back through his sleeve. "Though it appears nothing too nefarious has been done. I suspect this as a distraction ploy that disregards the safety of those affected."

Aoba nodded along. He suspected it too when he broke himself out of the jutsu some minutes after it started and awoke to an invasion. He would have stayed in the stadium to help fend off the enemy, but the five to ten upper division jounin already up in arms were taking care of it well enough, so he turned to the victims.

"What about outside?" Shino asked.

"There's been a breach in the walls and the eastern side is being assaulted by a snake summon. We've got some chuunin on the case now, but I'm not sure how much longer that can hold off." The whole hospital froze when another explosion rocked the ground from somewhere in the southwest. Then the bustle of white coats and glowing green hands frenzied. Aoba glanced out one of the windows. "I'll be awhile before I can bring any more injured or incapacitated to the hospital. I need to make it to the Hokage Tower before anything else.

Shino's mind short-circuited.

"The Hoka... why?"

"Ah, I suppose I haven't mentioned—as part of the Intelligence Division, it's part of my duty to seal up potential 'intelligence' pieces from enemy lines," he explained, tilting his head worriedly at Shino's reaction. "The Hokage Library comes first and I need to make sure no one breaks in."

'Too late,' Shino thought bitterly. His breathing sped up, his vision—ever so slightly—began to blur, his insects hummed in his growing anxiety.

But as quick as it all came, he shoved it aside—for now, just for now, they'd all be fine later, they wouldn't get caught, this wouldn't be what killed them—and stowed his clipboard at the end of one of the cots.

They expected this as one of their roadblocks. He would handle this cautiously.

"Let me go with you, sensei."

Aoba blinked. "Huh?"

"It's ill-advised to head towards such sought-after locations on your own, and with at least a medic-in-training to accompany you, the chances of survival or any victims we might encounter will rise," he said. He peeled off his gloves and mask and tossed them into the nearest trash can.

As he informed the head nurse of his departure, Aoba said nothing about how he could see the boy's hands shake beneath his sleeves. The mild panic attacks he'd witnessed over the month of training and spotting the signs leading up to them were more of a second nature now than anything.

He remembered the first time he'd seen it.

Aoba blinked away the stars in his eyes from that particularly strong elbow to the back of the head. He turned, mouth open to ask if Shino was alright from the heel kick to the face, but stopped short at the sight of broken black glasses on the ground. Shino stood to the edge of the training field with one hand over his eyes and the other propping himself up against a tree.

He rubbed the back of his head. "Are you alright?"

When he received no response, he frowned and took a few steps forward. "Shino?"

Shino straightened but didn't turn. "I'm alright, sensei."

"Did the glass cut your face? Oh-Oh no, let me see—"

"It didn't cut my face, and if it did, it would have been fine. Why? I would have healed it." He retracted his hand from the tree and waved it, but still didn't turn. "Please, just... a moment."

Standing awkwardly in the middle of the field, Aoba scratched the side of his head.

Shino had always been a... reclusive sort. Not that there was anything wrong with that and he sort of expected it with the knowledge that he'd be mentoring an Aburame, but there was just something about him that was a little off.

Again, not quite off in a bad way, but off in like a—for lack of a better term—a Sakura-like way. The strangeness Aoba had grown accustomed to over the years and the display of unexpected strengths had him more excited than wondering. The Aburame prided themselves as espionage specialists, using their insects to hide in invisible cracks or track a foe if an Inuzuka or Hyuuga couldn't pick it up. But Shino?

Instead of just using his kikai to sneak, he used it to take.

They siphoned chakra, stole medical diagnostics when opponents weren't aware, even went as far to crawl into skin and rupture limbs.

The last he'd heard as a result from the preliminaries.

Shino was blooming into a brilliant medic who showed no mercy. A combination of that sort shouldn't even exist.

Aoba's fingers caught the arm of his glasses, interrupting his musings. A handful of seconds of thought was all it took for him to slip it off his face and approach his student slowly, making his steps as loud as possible. Just from over his shoulder, he could make out the pale hands shaking minutely and heard the boy desperately try to even out his breath.

He frowned, worried.

"Here." He held out the glasses just a few centimeters away from the boy's free hand. "Put these on."

Shino turned slightly, the hand against his eyes pressing tighter. "What—"

"Just my glasses. You probably need them more than I do—and, ah, I'll turn around, okay? Just let me know when you're all good," he said, and promptly spun to face the other end of the field.

He'd also heard something about eyes being linked with their insects in the Aburame Clan and he suspects it could be something like that, but the concern in the pit of his stomach nudges him otherwise. There's too much panic there to be something as small as that.

Shino quickly shoves the glasses onto the bridge of his nose and turned back around. "I—I apologize. I don't know what came over me."

"Don't worry about it," Aoba grinned. And really, it wasn't a problem. Everyone was entitled to their own struggles and he wasn't going to pry if Shino wasn't willing to share. "And besides, the glasses look better on you than they did on me any day."

Shyly, Shino raised a finger to poke at the glasses. He'd have to take it in to have a prescription lens instead of those polarized ones, but it was nice to have a change of glasses.

"Thank you."

Aoba patted his head, bright brown eyes shining. "What for?"

Aoba hurried out the hospital the minute Shino was back at his side and they hopped out the nearest window. Dust clouded the streets and debris scattered along their course, but there was nothing too close to the hospital.

He pressed his lips together decisively. First, the Hokage Library. "Shino, we need to head—" But as he turned, all he saw was an empty space. "Shino?!"

"Move!"

He dodged to the side in time for a body to fly past and crash into a slab of concrete. Shino followed with a piece of rebar in his hand and annoyance ticking his jaw. "The sound-nin was lying in wait. How did I notice? He did not expect my colony to be the ones to scout the area ahead of us, and thus was caught." He twirled the rebar once and stabbed it through the enemy's shoulder and into the ground in an effective pin. Aoba blanched at the blatant show of violence. "This won't kill him, but it will keep him put."

Shino retreated from his display without so much a second glance at the twitching body or the way one of his sandals squelched with blood.

"I will send my kikai to map us a route least populated by the enemy. Should we encounter another, I will not be as kind." He angled towards the appointed path of his colony. "Shall we?"

A medic with no mercy.

Aoba gulped. "After you."

He would never learn the path they took only added an extra five minutes and twenty-three seconds to their arrival time.

And, he would never know he would miss running into one Inuzuka Kiba and a Cat-masked ANBU by thirteen seconds.

::

Sakura avoided explosive tags and crumbling pieces of building with a sprained ankle and a growing concussion. The cut on her inner bicep still bled and she could taste copper in her mouth, but it was still far better than Kankuro who she'd left unconscious on the forest floor.

Initially he protested the idea, especially with the condition that two kikai would be left on his person because 'What if they start eating my puppets?!', but he eventually obliged and grumbled while picking out the softest patch of grass to get knocked out on.

An enemy appeared in her way. She speared him through, twisted her blade, and sliced up through the stomach, throat, skull, and let the blood spray her pants.

They're dark. No one would be able to identify the stains.

Not too long ago an orange beetle landed on the back of her hand, signalling a part of the plan had been compromised and the meeting time at the designated hospital room was pushed up.

Another sound-nin tried to jump her from above, but she aimed the blade and thrust, metal stabbing through their chest as their choked surprise echoed in her ears and blood started to rush out their mouth. She flickered away before the body could knock her down and whipped out a worn cloth to wipe the blood off her sword. In a single swipe, it's cleaned and re-sheathed.

"One. Two," she stated aloud. She lent a quiet thought to each of her fallen opponents and continued on towards the hospital.

Halfway to her destination, she spotted a cluster of gray-garbed nin around someone she couldn't yet make out. But as a conch-shell mace erupted from the center and rams through nearly a fourth of the assailants, her recognition was immediate and she dove into the gray.

A head was cut off. Her hand snatched a fistful of hair and yanked until the head and neck attached to it snapped.

"Three. Four." She held herself at Kotetsu's back and, just before another one of the sound-nin could sneak a kunai through one of their legs, she wrapped her legs around their midsection and twisted, sending them face first into the ground and shoving their own kunai through the back of their head. "Five."

"Kid, when I told you to count to calm down, you know this isn't what I meant, right?" Kotetsu huffed. He surveyed the bodies that littered their feet. "Um? Good work? Though? I think?"

"Thank you? Kotetsu-san? I guess?" she mocked, bowing out of the way of a half-hearted smack. She pulled out the cloth again, the smiley-face stitched in the corner unmoving as the cotton blotched red. Sakura faced her mentor. "What's your plan now?"

Kotetsu rested his mace on his shoulder and cocked his head. "Evacuation's just about finished and Izumo's running a perimeter before we guard the bunkers." He jutted his chin out at her. "I'd tell you that genin aren't supposed to be out on their own per protocol, but... what have you been up to?"

He launched three shuriken at a sound-nin halfway to heel-kicking Sakura down from behind, and she leaned to the side to avoid the light specs of blood that showered.

"Went through some of the enemy, found out Suna's part of the attack and that jounin are after most of them," she reported. Kotetsu swore under his breath. Why the hell did Suna go and breach the treaty? "Last I heard, there's a commotion—springboard."

Kotetsu braced one hand on the hilt of his weapon and the other on the body as Sakura flipped and propelled herself off his mace only to come down on two enemies in a rain of chakra-thrumming steel. He ducked a punch of a third assailant and crushed most of their body with the conch.

"Six. Seven," he heard. He hunched slightly at the sound of it.

He... He knew he shouldn't be so nonchalant about this. Any of this. The village was under attack and in ruins and he needed to go to his assigned bunker to help guard the civilians, but he couldn't help but worry about Sakura.

She'd shown up and he treated her as a comrade rather than a student, trusting her to take care of her own opponents while he went after his own.

Sakura was a genin who just killed five shinobi in front of him. Easily. And maybe she only used the moves he taught her and employed the strategies he'd drawn out himself and asked her to study, but the moment he realized her level of efficiency—

Sixteen dummies exploded into straw and stuffing at the same moment and scattered around Sakura's feet. She was still in the midst of her carnage with her blade held like an extension, crouched, and her feet three shoulder widths apart.

Her hitai-ate was firm around her eyes as she slid back into standing position and sheathed her katana with a silent click.

Kotetsu sat quietly on the grass. He... didn't expect her to pick up the combo so easily, not when he showed her only three days prior. And sure, maybe prodigies like Hatake Kakashi could've picked up something like this within twenty four hours, but she...

He shook his head. She had practically lived on the training field the last three days, repeating the technique over and over until she was satisfied, which she never seemed to be. On the first day, she would go through the motions. When he left for gate duty, he walked away with the sound of air whistles and cracking trees in his midst. He returned to the training grounds eight hours later to make sure the grounds were cleaned up—because she wouldn't have stayed eight more hours in addition to the five she'd already been there because she must have some level of self preservation—but unfortunately, he'd been proven wrong.

The field was unrecognizable with the number of cuts it suffered and the surrounding trees looked as if the top layer of bark had been peeled away.

And there was Sakura. Hairs stuck out her stern bun, she stood with shaking muscles, her sweat-doused skin shone in the faint moonlight.

And yet, she prepared for another combo.

"Time?" she asked. Kotetsu drifted out of his musings and glanced down at his stopwatch.

"Two point fifteen seconds. Trust me, kid, you're not gettin' below two secs with that series. It's not meant to be done." He reset the stopwatch. "Besides, you've got this one nailed down to the last microscopic detail. You're golden, and no, you're not gonna argue with me about it. You're not gonna win that one." She shut her mouth and he imagined her rolling her eyes from behind her blindfold. His tone softened. "You did a good job, Sakura. Take a break. C'mon."

She sighed and slipped the hitai-ate off her face. She didn't re-tie it on top of her head, rather, she stuffed it into her back pouch and proceeded to collect the dummy remains.

Kotetsu twirled the stopwatch by its cord and let it wrap around his fingers before he unwound it and twirled again. So, the kid might be a little insane. Or a perfectionist. Driven? Either way, her discipline was off the charts.

It wasn't really a weird thing to see in a shinobi. Just a weird thing to see in a rookie genin.

"So what's your goal?"

Sakura inspected a bundle of straw before tucking it under her arm. "Goal?"

"Yeah, like, what do you want to get out this training, how much do you want to rank up—you know, things like that. What's your deal?"

She turned towards him with the cold, intense stare he didn't think he'd ever get used to. "I will be an exemplary shinobi, or I will be nothing at all."

"Eight."

A body slipped free from Sakura's kusari-fundo, a chain imprint stark against the skin of their neck.

"A commotion in the forest outside the wall," she went on like she'd never been interrupted in the first place. "I think a lot of my year mates went after the Kazekage's children. I'm looking for anyone trapped beneath debris or civilians that might have missed the evacuation." She glanced at the bodies. "Do you want me to stay?"

Kotetsu had never been much of an eye-catching shinobi, but he tried his best. He upheld his duty to his village, never looked upon it with disdain, always trusted his superiors, was loyal to his Kage. He knows he's not the strongest or the weakest and maybe did guard duty more often than not, but he was a career chuunin, and he was content. There was no 'aim for the stars' for him; he was where he was, and he wouldn't be changing that for a long time.

But when he looked at Sakura, he didn't see that. With everything she did and everything she proved to him, she didn't need to strive to be an exceptional shinobi.

She already was one to him.

So, he could tell her to stay by his side as a genin should at least abide by the order of a chuunin and they could stand guard by the bunkers until they pushed back the siege.

Or.

"Go do your thing, kid." He waved her off with a grin. "Put that training to good use."

Because honestly? Sometimes protocol could get fucked.

::

Kiba unzipped his jacket, bearing his kikai-covered torso. The ones hidden in Akamaru's fur wriggled out like swollen fleas as Tenzo spread out files he'd dug out from the cabinets. Uchiha Itachi, Uzumaki Kushina, Namikaze Minato, Yakushi Kabuto...

9 MINUTES

"Copy as quick as you can," Kiba ordered. The beetles spread their wings and took off towards the files and the open bottle of ink the ANBU popped open. "Get the account books too. Mission logs, old reports, we want it."

"Specific dates?"

"Around Itachi's and Orochimaru's defections, Kyuubi attack, uh, public political bullshit like that." He darted between the packed shelves. "Oh f—our team mission too! 'Cause I know damn well they're full of shit!"

A wooden plaque caught his eye.

RESTRICTED SECTION

Kiba ran in.

8 MINUTES

Seals, seals, seals—where the hell were all the books on seals? He pulled out a weighted volume with a blank spine and flipped to the foreword; nothing but an introduction on how chakra molded into fire jutsu.

Growling, he shoved it back into its spot and gazed at the hundreds of title-less books that stuffed the shelves.

"Fuck," he muttered. "This is gonna suck."

7 MINUTES

6 MINUTES

5 MINUTES

4 MINUTES

"Kiba, we need to go," Tenzo called from one of the aisles. All the copies he'd made he bound with twine and sealed inside a small pocket scroll. He scurried to slip the files back into their spots and and the books and journals back onto the shelves, painstakingly arranging them to look as they'd never been touched in the first place.

In the restricted section, Kiba yanked out a pitch black tome. The spine bore nothing, but the first page written in old, splotchy ink read: An Anthology of Theories and Forbidden Practices of the Sealing Arts.

'Holy shit.'

"Kiba!"

"I know! I just need t—"

3 MINUTES

"We don't have—"

"But this book—"

"Our exit—"

"Up the vents through the northeast quadrant, I know! I'm the one who mapped our route!"

2 MINUTES

He wouldn't be able to find the pages he needed. Not with how little time they have left. But the book? It could be the answer to their problems, their first step to freedom, another middle finger to rub in Danzo's and Hiruzen's faces.

This information could be priceless.

They could own themselves again.

Kiba shoved down the urge to scream. "Fuck it."

He jammed the text into his jacket and dashed up to the vents to pry the grate off. In went Akamaru, then him, and Tenzo brought up the rear and shut and bolted the grate back on with a quick flare of chakra.

They dropped out through another secret entrance under an awning at the back of the building and ran until they were out of the Tower's zoned area. A block out from the hospital, they stopped by the dumpster of an evacuated restaurant.

Kiba slumped against the grimy wall and braced himself with his hands on his knees. "And I used ta' think finding that lab would be the most fucked up think we've done," he panted. "But noooooo, let's do this during an actual invasion when the actual Orochimaru's here!" The back of his head banged against the wall. "Ugh."

A firm hand planted itself on his shoulder, and he raised his eyes. "I'll be back in contact in two days," Tenzo said. Kiba couldn't tell his exact expression behind that mask, but he vowed to be able to do it one day. "Lay low. Stay safe."

And he was gone.

Akamaru sniffed at the spot he'd left and found no detectable trace. Like every good shinobi, huh?

He barked.

"Yeah, the team already knows the blockers and overloaders," he said. Kiba blew out another breath and stood up straight. "I'll teach 'em the erasers later. We gotta head to what, fourth floor window? Let's go."

He crinkled his nose as he took a scent check of the surrounding area and almost immediately grimaced. Blood, sweat, and ash reigned thick in the air, diluting any apparent smell and lowering his detection rate. He clicked his tongue. Everything else was already annoying, why did that have to add on to it?!

But he could whine about it later, especially if Sakura and Shino were there to hear it. He took one last whiff around him, testing the waters, and bolted quickly and as silently as he could manage on the barren streets.

The hospital was half a block away now. A third of a block. A fourth of a block.

He could smell them before he saw them. Rice paddies and cane sugar, owl feathers and the bitter cold.

Akamaru transformed as his nails sharpened and his pupils shrunk. "GATSUUGA!"

He razed through two sound-nin before their soles could even scrape the ground. Red smothered him upon impact and Kiba pressed his lips together when it tried to leak into his mouth. The blood was warm against his scalp and thick in his hair, and he wiped it off his face with the back of his hand.

"One. Two," he murmured. The hospital was in his sights, but there was no open window. Eyes narrowed, he lingered near the meeting point and tried to peer through the tinted glass. "C'mon, Shino, c'mon..."

A strained bark rang in his ears and the kikaichu in his jacket buzzed as an arm came out and around his neck. A cough erupted from his lips as he was lifted in the air and a kunai dug into his side, but his hand reached into his jacket and pulled the tome to the other side of his body. He couldn't get any blood on it, there couldn't be any evidence—

White blurred past his face and latched onto his attacker's neck. He tossed his head over his shoulder in time to see Akamaru tear out the shinobi's throat in one jerk of his jaw, dropping the flesh and muscle onto the ground with a resounding slap.

He growled. One.

"Good boy," Kiba muttered. The clack from above had them both craning their necks up at the fourth floor window sliding open, and he wasted no time grabbing Akamaru and running up the side of the building to tumble through. A snide remark hot on his tongue, he was ready to nag Shino about clocks and how they worked until he looked up.

"Sakura?" He blinked. "The hell're you doin' here?"

"Shino was taken out on the field," she answered. Sakura eyed the blood caked in his hair, the growing wet spot on his side, and the string of muscle hanging from Akamaru's jaw. She frowned. "So this is what it's like to not be the most injured one on the team."

"Yeah, sucks, don't it?"

"Probably not as much as that wound in your side. Did you get stabbed?"

"Like, a lil'." He gazed around the room from his seat on the floor and spotted the cleaning supplies lined neatly in the metal case along one of the walls. "Janitor's room, huh? Couldn't be more original?"

She shrugged. "If it ain't broke." She plucked a few paper towels from the shelf as she reached into jacket to press it into his wound to at least staunch the bleeding before they made their escape back out in the hall. But, her arm brushed against something that felt a little like heavy cardboard. Her face darkened. "What did you take?"

Kiba swallowed. "It's... It's about seals. I found it too late an' I couldn't just—"

The look she gave him cut him off. Her eyes, that shade of ice green, searched his for a long while as she held the paper towels to the hole in his side.

It felt like two eternities before she spoke.

"I trust you," she said. She brought his hand over to apply the pressure on his own and helped him stand. "Make sure no one sees it."

The grin that split his face was blinding. "Psh, who dya' think I am?"

::

The moment Orochimaru saw the reaper for himself, the taste of bitter defeat starts to creep along the back of his throat. Hiruzen's hands were iron shackles on his shoulders and the reaper's skeleton-thin finger dug in somewhere past his collarbone through his biceps.

"Go on, sensei," he gritted out. The sword though the old man's chest drips like sand through an hourglass. He was running out of time. There was nothing more he could do, and for Orochimaru—that livened him. "Let me go once and for all."

"I... will not allow your ambitions to go along any farther!" the Hokage growled. Orochimaru couldn't help but raise a brow at that and, despite the fact that he could no longer feel his arms or that he was beginning to understand the implications behind it, he grinned. He grinned because this man still couldn't see that he'd been deceiving others for so long that he probably couldn't tell when he started to deceive himself as well.

"My ambitions?" Orochimaru repeated, then laughed. "A forbidden jutsu and a few dead children did not bring Konoha to what it is today. That's a Kage's job, and it's wonderful to know you've done so well."

He choked at the pull of his soul, the reaper's unbreakable grasp, and the phantom blade that poised to cut the use of his arms off from his body.

"Sakura-chan was so small when I met her for the first time. Cowering behind a murderer, trotting around like only kindness existed in the world," he said. Hiruzen's head sprung up. "Her father thinks so much of her, and I thought I would do her a favor by showing her just how much the world hates its shinobi."

"Sa... Sakura...?"

"I don't know what you've done to them, sensei, but I saw my own hatred of this place in their eyes. It was magnificent, like some ethereal beauty." The skin of his hands grew splotched as the last of the life was drained from his arms. His anger soared, but so does his sadistic satisfaction as Hiruzen collapsed to his knees, the Shiki Fuujin slowly taking its toll. "Thank you for doing my job for me, sensei, because even I could not teach how to hate so thoroughly as they do."

Hiruzen couldn't stop his eyes from falling shut, but he fought for just a few more moments. He had so many questions and not a single answer for them all, but one thought waded through the haze of his mind. A single one.

"You disrespected them by letting them be taken and you did it a second time when you left them to rot. Did you even know their names?!"

"Orochimaru... did... did you ever learn... the names of... those... children you... killed?"

"The ramblings of a dying fool are always incoherent," Orochimaru hissed. "Those children were tally marks on a cell wall. What do you take me for? A saint?"

It was getting dark.

"We memorized their names. Why? Because they deserved to be remembered by someone. The least they could've gotten were graves or a mention in a solemn speech, but even then, they had none of that. Their families to this day are left wondering and you couldn't even muster the decency to tell them that their children are dead and you set their murderer free. Do you think he's still experimenting to this day? I do, and I know it's your fault."

"Ah... what a shame..." he whispered. His eyelids fell a bit further. "Neither did I."

The last thing he saw was the mirage of a young boy. His skin was pale, his eyes were yellow, and Hiruzen remembered the warmth in his chest when he knew he couldn't wait to see that boy grow into a proud shinobi.

::

Akamaru knew that humans were a little funny sometimes, so much so that there were still times he couldn't completely understand them. Like now.

It was raining when he and pack walked down the street, and it was like everyone decided to wear the same shade of dark gray.

His partner wore another one of his fur-lined jackets, but a darker one this time, with the hood flipped up and three small scrolls over the bandages around his stomach. Shino didn't have his normal coat either, but something that looked rougher and had the rain sliding right off. And Sakura just had on a long sleeve the same color as her normal pants. She didn't look like she minded the rain.

But wouldn't she get cold?

Akamaru asked what color they all had on.

"Black," Kiba answered. "It's the color you're s'pposed to wear for funerals."

Oh, right. For the Sandaime's burial.

Akamaru huffed as he trotted alongside pack. He wished they didn't have to go.

"You could have worn something over your attire, Sakura," Shino mentioned. "Why? You'll get sick from the rain."

"If Ame citizens got sick from the rain, the village would've collapsed on itself decades ago," she said. "I think they've adapted to it, especially since half their shinobi started to utilize re-breathers rather than bothering with cloaks."

"... Is your shirt waterproof, at the very least?"

"Of course."

"Then I suppose I could save your lecture for another occasion."

Kiba rolled his eyes and knocked her with a shoulder. "You've got, like, two of my jackets back at your place."

"And they're very comfortable."

Akamaru hated that their banter died down the closer they got to the ceremony. Their voices were his favorite ones to hear. They lulled him to sleep, made him laugh, kept him safe. The village couldn't do that, or the clan, or Tsume-sama, or Hana-nee, but them.

Pack.

He didn't listen much at the service, and he honestly felt no need to. Memorial services were a place to honor those who deserved it. There was no honor here. And the only deserving as far as he could see was the death by the hand of the student he couldn't bear to kill.

Pack had no choice but to attend with the main group atop the Hokage Tower, but they made sure to arrive at least ten minutes to the start so they could fill up the back space, hidden in the throngs of silent, black-clothed shinobi.

Naruto was up in the very front, with his bright blond hair one of the few colors Akamaru could see as a blemish against the dark background.

His partner had to try so hard to look interested and both Sakura and Shino were lucky they'd gained a reputation for not having any expression at all. They stood, and watched, and waited for an hour before attendees began the line to lay a single white flower at the shrine.

His pack made sure to prick their hands on the thorns and smother the stems in their blood before retreating to the back. They passed Kurenai-sensei who stood beside Iruka in the second row, and when Akamaru glanced up at her, she granted them all a small, somber smile before facing forward.

The sun crept over the clouds about an hour after that, and as the attending shinobi slowly trickled out bit by bit, not one of them noticed how a group of three and a nin-dog hung back. The shrine would be up for a whole day for anyone to come and pay their respects in private, but under an easy, blue sky on a rooftop filled with no one, Team Eight took the opportunity to approach the shrine.

Kiba took out those three scrolls and handed one to Sakura and Shino. Almost in unity they unraveled them and summoned a single flower from a single seal, Akamaru watching from the side.

First Shino, then Sakura, then Kiba.

Aconite, orange lily, petunia.

Hatred and warning, pride and disdain, resentment and anger.

And as they buried the flowers among the sea of white, Akamaru bared his teeth and spared the Sandaime one last thought.

'Burn in hell, Sarutobi Hiruzen.'

::

The day after the funeral, Team Eight was summoned to the council room.

Councilwoman Utatane Koharu was straight-backed as she regarded the genin before her, surveying their closed expressions and their polished form.

'How interesting,' she thought, 'to see military prowess shining through such untried bodies.'

"The late Sandaime had issued a decree shortly before his passing," she announced. Koharu eyed them meticulously. "Anyone passing within the first 12 hours of the second section of the chuunin exams is to automatically sanction the ascension of chuunin rank. And since only one team had succeeded and had not been eliminated on the count of disqualification due to willingly attacking the hosting village, we as the council have decided to elect it. Congratulations."

Inuzuka Kiba was the first to crack at the news and openly baulked, blinking rapidly and gaping like some fish. Aburame Shino was confused, understandably, but didn't hold as an outwardly extreme reaction as his teammate.

But Sakura was unmoved. "If I may ask, who else gained rank, Utatane-sama?"

"You may, and your peer Nara Shikamaru after his display at the finals," she said. "But of course, with new rank comes new responsibilities, such as aiding your village in its cause for reparations. Sacrifices need to be made for the betterment of the whole."

Something shifted in the team. Their muscles coiled in anticipation.

"After discussing your performance in previous missions, the obstacles you've encountered and overcome, we as the council have decided that your proficiency should allow the success of this mission. There are no other available bodies to undertake this mission, so you understand the village's course of action should you not return, yes?"

The implication didn't sink in for them all, but Sakura held her arms firmly to her sides as she met Koharu's even gaze.

New chuunin are inexperienced, thus they are expendable.

"Yes, ma'am," she answered smoothly, ignoring the quick, anxious looks her teammates spared her.

The councilwoman tipped her head. "You are assigned your first B-rank, highly ranked for its requirements and should be no trouble for you." A scroll was produced in her hand and she offered it forward. Shino took it, and she paid no mind to the minute trembles in his fingers. "Nagi Island has experienced a series of civilian kidnappings and has reached out to us to help solve this problem. A senior shinobi will be assigned to lead your party, and all details you require are in this scroll. Memorize your information and meet your leader at the northern gates at 0600 tomorrow."

The three snapped to attention and bowed. "Yes, ma'am!" they chorused.

"Then you are dismissed."

::

"Why are you doing this?!" Kurenai shouted. Only five seconds into stepping into her kitchen, sharp, victorious grins were wiped off three brand new chuunin. The seals around the apartment flashed blue before settling, and Sakura drew forward.

"Doing what?" She gestured to the illegal file copies strewn across the dinner table. "Surviving? Getting one step ahead? We're doing what we have to do, sensei," she sneered. Kiba's fists clenched as he glared up, but his hurt was unmistakable in the way his eyes glossed.

"You said you were on our side!"

"I am!" she insisted. "I will always be on your side, but—but look at what you're doing! What's happened! The consequences you've already suffered!" Kurenai jabbed a hand back at the files, the ash remains of that letter that had taken her whole world and flipped it on its head, and everything. Just, everything. "You're going to get yourselves killed!" She ran a hand through her frazzled hair. "The Sandaime is already dead, isn't that enough?"

And it was like the whole room just tilted on its axis.

Shino's eyebrows drew together. "Enough? Do you think Sarutobi Hiruzen was all there is to it? That just because he's gone, what's wrong is righted?" Slowly, he shook his head. "We did as you said, sensei. We made a list. He just happens to be the first one we got the chance to cross off."

Her eyes watered, and Kiba stumbled back until Sakura caught him around his middle to keep him balanced. Kurenai, in all the time they'd known her, had never once cried in front of them. Not when she watched them massacre Kusabi and his men, not when they buried those thirty-three children from civilian villages that died of a virulent strain, not when she learned Orochimaru himself had come after them.

"Please," she begged. "Please don't do this. I want to see you live, to become wonderful shinobi, to be happy. Please don't make this worse for yourselves, I—I don't want to see you all suffer more."

Shino forced his eye to the ground. Sakura was unfazed as she held herself in front of her team, face ever unchanging.

But it was Kiba that bit the inside of his cheek until it bled as he stood his ground. "We can't do that."

Kurenai sucked in a shaky breath. "Please," she whispered. Pleaded. "I don't want to bury my kids."

Her words struck something in Sakura that made her seize, and Shino stepped up to her other side and clutched her wrist like she'd done for him so many times before.

He shut his eye and breathed. "Then we won't bother you with this anymore, Kurenai-sensei."

Red eyes flashed in panic as she waved her hands before her in a frenzy. "No no no, that's not what I meant—"

"We won't stop. Ever," Sakura said, snapping out of her daze. Her posture took on a sharper edge, her shoulders pulled back and her chin held high. "We'll always have people after us, we'll always be suffering these consequences, we'll always try to survive. And this mission? We might not come back from it. We might not come out alive. Is that something you can live with?"

There was silence.

And it was a silence that went on for a few seconds too long.

Kiba bowed first. Then Shino. Finally, Sakura.

"Thank you for what you've done for us, Kurenai-sensei," Kiba thanked. "You were a great genin sensei. Now that we're chuunin, you don't needta' bother with us anymore."

He wanted to say more. There was nothing else he wanted more in that moment but to yell, to scream, to ask her why, why, why?

But his voice was already so hoarse and his throat was closing up.

Tears sprung to the corner of her eyes when they stood back up without a single glance her way. Shino's foot shifted, and for a moment, it was as if he was debating something, but he simply turned and retreated from the apartment.

Sakura wasn't far behind as she followed without preamble, gathering the files in one motion and tucking them at her side. Akamaru, drooped and whining, trailed by her calves as her silent footsteps guided her out.

Kiba lingered, though, and met Kurenai's leaking stare. No words formed on the borders of his lips; anger, upset, loss—he felt it all and none of it at the same time, and he was numb.

But nothing filled him up more than his own disappointment. It throbbed dully in his heart, but he didn't blame her. She didn't want to see them dead, and if this was what it took, then they'd give it to her.

(It didn't make it hurt any less.)

Tears collected in his own eyes, he left before she could see them spill over.

The front door shut.

Kurenai fell into one of her chairs, and cried.

Outside, Kiba rubbed his face with his sleeve and Shino dragged his feet. Sakura's eyes clouded over as they listlessly walked the long way to her apartment to prepare for their mission.

This is what happens to fools who think they can change the world.

Kakuzu's tenor reverberated clear in her ears, and it made her grimace.

'I might be fool,' she thought. 'But I'd rather be fool and die for this than to die for nothing at all.'

::

When they showed up at the gates fifteen minutes prior to their meeting time, somber and worn, one person stood at the northern gates.

He turned when they were about a few meters away from him and offered the team a wide, fake smile with a face that might only be a year or so older than theirs.

"Hello," he greeted tonelessly. It was a horrible contrast to the way his muscles pulled his lips upward. "My name is Sai. I will be your leader for the duration of this mission."

::

Hey everyone! Chaos_burnz is looking for a co-author for their story Sakura Stronger than the Strong. If you're interested, please contact them!

::

And we end this monster of a chapter with some awesome fanart by 

AkbRocks26 !

WattPearl !

and AwesomeDragonTamer !