Chapter 145: The Return Home
For at least a minute after the jōnin left, Hazō and Noburi simply knelt over Usamatsu's Glorious Life-Saving Purifier, gasping for breath. Never had a seal more lived up to its ridiculously pompous name.
"We need to get out of here," Noburi said, his voice shaky. "She might be hanging around waiting for the dome to fail."
Hazō nodded limply. It was hard to think with his brain still fuzzy from the toxin he'd inhaled. "Yeah."
Noburi waited for a moment, then poked him in the shoulder. "C'mon, Hazō, man up. Are you going to let a little bit of incredibly fast-acting and possibly lethal toxic gas keep you down, you big sissy?! Do the thing."
Hazō looked at him blearily. "Do what thing?"
"You know, the thing! The thing where you stare off into space for half a second and then have this detailed plan to solve whatever ridiculously complicated problem we're facing."
Hazō glared. "I do not have a thing."
Noburi glared right back. "Seriously? C'mon, man. I've seen you come up with complex battle plans for fighting disgusting zombie-making sealmistresses faster than I can sneeze. Hop to it! Do the thing."
"...You're just trying to piss me off to help me focus past the effects of the poison, aren't you?"
Insouciant grin. "Is it working?"
Hazō rolled his eyes. "Oddly, yes. Okay, priorities are to survive, escape, reunite with the others, and get done with this stupid mission before anyone else ends up dead."
"Yeah, and we better hurry up with the reuniting part," Noburi said, his grin disappearing. He reached out a hand, green medical chakra flaring from his fingertips as he hovered them over Hazō's chest. "Hold still. Poison isn't really my thing but I can check for physiological effects." His eyes fell closed as he concentrated. After a moment he spoke without opening his eyes. "Hard to believe that the yaks knew exactly where we'd be, so they've probably staked out a collection of agents throughout the area. The others might have been jumped as well."
[spoiler="dice"]
Noburi, Medical Ninjutsu, 12d100: 489
Noburi, Medical Knowledge, 12d100: 533
Poison, TN: ?
[/spoiler]
"Maybe," Hazō said. "Or maybe the yaks just got lucky on this one, but let's assume the others are at risk too. Okay...okay, here's what we do. First, we secure the room." He set his hand on the floor and pushed tendrils of chakra through the wood as Jiraiya had taught him. They spread outwards like eager hounds, scampering under the Air Dome and over to the door. A sturdy wall of red granite leaped up, sealing off the door and the window.
"Think she's still out there?" Noburi asked nervously. The green light faded away and he opened his eyes. "I got nothing. You seem fine to me. Maybe the poison broke down already?" He shrugged. "Anyway—jōnin assassin, maybe still hanging around? Thoughts?"
Hazō shrugged. "Depends on her orders. She left that message, which suggests that she wanted some witnesses to carry the news. Maybe this is the end of it. Or maybe that was misdirection, or just to scare us. Might be she's setting charges on the outside of the building right now, planning to bury us and then wait for the dome to run out."
"I've got an idea. How about we don't let that happen?"
Hazō rolled his eyes. "You think? She's probably not, though. This place is solid, it would need a lot of tags to blow it down and she's probably not a student of Kagome-sensei."
Noburi snorted amusement. "Good thing we are," he said. "I say we reduce the entire building to an expanding fireball of destruction."
"I am totally on board with that, but just blasting a few holes is probably a better idea. No reason to burn up our entire supply of bang. Anyway, first thing we need to do is collect Captain Minami's body."
"You know I was only calling her 'Captain' to be polite, right? I won't say she was dumb as a brick, but she was definitely way too naïve for the job."
"Yeah, well, we still need to bring her body home so we can prove we didn't do this."
"How is 'hey, look at this dead body that was stabbed in the neck and I pinky-swear that we didn't do the stabbing' going to be proof? Why won't they just throw us back in the killbox for offing a loyal Leaf ninja?"
Hazō grit his teeth. "Noburi, we're trapped in a room full of poison gas, inside a locked building, with maybe a jōnin waiting outside to kill us. Could we please deal with those problems before worrying about what happens when we go home?"
"I'm just saying, being a missing-nin wasn't really that bad. No reason we couldn't go back to it."
"Could we please deal with those problems before worrying about what happens when we go home?" Hazō repeated.
"Yeah, sure. Sorry. Okay, poison gas first. How about we blink the Air Dome off long enough to toss some Purifiers out, let them work for a minute?"
"Better idea," Hazō said. "Make me some clones. We'll set up a smaller Air Dome with them between this one and the new one. The clones shut off the outer Air Dome, seal Minami's body, and walk around with the Purifiers. It'll clear the air faster. Then we blow three or four holes in the place and pop mist through all of them. We send pairs of clones henged to look like us out the other holes while we make a break for it."
"Got an even better idea," Noburi said with a grin, already forming handseals.
o-o-o-o
The bedrock of Kagome-sensei's life philosophy was that explosives could solve all problems, hence why he carried so many. The rest of Team Uplift was not entirely sold on the proposition, but they were willing to go as far as admitting that explosives could solve a lot of problems.
One problem that explosives were really good at solving was an inconvenient lack of exits. Twelve minutes after the ambush, the door of the farmhouse exploded off its hinges in a shower of splinters. Simultaneously, a similar blast blew holes in each of the other walls. Hazō and Noburi raced out the hole in the door at a dead run, obscuring mist spraying out around them as they went.
Hazō and Noburi raced out the hole in the east wall at a dead run, obscuring mist spraying out around them as they went.
Hazō and Noburi raced out the hole in the west wall at a dead run, obscuring mist spraying out around them as they went.
Hazō and Noburi raced out the hole in the south wall at a dead run, obscuring mist spraying out around them as they went.
Each pair made it to the treeline and kept going, more and more mist expanding around them as they went. In their wake the forest erupted in noise and motion as animals and birds fled from the fast-moving intruders.
Five minutes later, the forest denizens had still not calmed down when the real Hazō and Noburi emerged from the tattered building and snuck off into the woods.
o-o-o-o
Pandour appeared in a puff of violet smoke as Keiko finished the handseals of the Summoning Technique.
"Hello Pandour," said the Pangolin Summoner with a polite nod. She extended the scroll she was carrying. "I have an extensive report for you tonight. The Toad Summoner hasn't checked in yet, has he?"
Pandour looked unusual grave. "Actually, Summoner, he's waiting at the Embassy."
Keiko blinked. "What?"
"The Toad Summoner arrived at the Pangolin Embassy on the Seventh Path three hours ago and has been waiting for you to check in," Pandour repeated. "Shall we go?"
"But...yes, of course. One moment, please." She tucked the report back in her belt and turned to the rest of the team. "I should be back shortly. Since Jiraiya is there in person I'll take Minami's scroll now."
Wordlessly, Hazō held out the black-banded storage scroll containing Minami's dead body. Keiko took it with a nod and turned back to Pandour. The two of them vanished.
The Pangolin embassy was a massive burrow in the heart of Toad territory. The Pangolin were a surprisingly varied people, with some subraces that never topped the size of a tall human child and some that towered higher than a barn. Their architecture reflected this; Keiko felt dwarfed as she walked down the smoothly-sloped ramp to the meeting room where Jiraiya waited. Unlike many of the burrows in Pangolin terrority, this one was intended for use by other species as well and thus there were allowances made for the terrible senses and vision-dependence of said species. Lamps were nestled into wall sconces at intervals as she walked, casting enough light that she didn't need to worry about stumbling.
The conference room was immense, suitable for a dozen pangolin of Panjandrum's size. Jiraiya was a massive man with presence that normally dominated any room he was in, yet he was utterly lost in this cavernous, echoing space.
Keiko bowed respectfully as he waved her to the seat next to him at the conference table. "Reporting as ordered, Lord Hokage."
He smiled, seeming relieved. "Glad to see you in one piece. Is everyone okay?"
Silently, she placed the black-banded scroll on the table between them. "Min—Captain Minami is not," she said. "Everyone else is unhurt." She carefully looked at his face instead of at the scroll.
He looked at the scroll tiredly for long seconds, then scrubbed both hands across his face as though to physically force the fatigue and stress away. "Damnit." He sighed. "What happened?"
"The team is in Honey now," Kei said. "We had split into two subteams in order to make the deliveries more quickly. Captain Minami, Hazō, and Noburi were handling the eastern delivery, but the contact had been replaced by an enemy jōnin. She had the passwords, so the team went into her farmhouse and did not suspect anything when she locked the door behind them. She took the message, read it, then asked who the team leader was. When Captain Minami identified herself, the enemy drank from a bottle that Noburi estimates to have contained a poison antidote, then cast a Water Element: Eternal Lullaby jutsu. The jutsu appeared to do nothing but, in fact, it created a cloud of invisible poison gas. Captain Minami correctly recognized this as an ambush and attacked with her sword. The enemy used a Water Element: Hōzuki's Mantle technique to disrupt her attack, then delivered a lethal counterthrust with a kunai. Hazō and Noburi saw that they could not defeat this opponent, so they retreated under an Air Dome. It was at this point that Noburi realized they were being poisoned. They used Usamatsu's Glorious Life-Saving Purifier seals in conjuction with ten Tunneler's Friends in order to cleanse the air.
"The enemy briefly tested the dome, then used Captain Minami's blood to write 'Do not fuck with the yakuza' on the wall. She blew them a kiss, then left and locked the door behind herself, from the outside.
"Using appropriate precautions, Hazō and Noburi sealed Captain Minami's body and exfiltrated the area without encountering the enemy ninja or any other signficant threats. They met up with our team at the expected gathering point two hours ago."
Jiraiya was a spymaster; he could make his face tell any story he chose, and usually he chose to project strength and good humor. Kei decided to interpret it as a sign of trust that his face was loudly admitting just how tired he was. She decided to interpret it that way because the idea that he was actually so worn out that he couldn't hide it was simply too terrifying to consider.
"Well, looks like I'm a little late," Jiraiya said with a sigh. "I was here to warn you guys. My network in the eastern nations has been shredded, and it was only this morning that I figured out how bad it is. I don't know exactly what happened, but my guess is that Tanaka got tumbled. He was a central coordination point for Ise and a subcommander who managed a lot of the surrounding area. Apparently he'd gotten sloppy lately, or maybe he was playing some game of his own, building up information so he could sell me out in exchange for him and his daughter getting relocated somewhere. Whatever. Best guess is that somebody pulled him in and squeezed him, then used what they learned to roll up more of the network. All of my agents in Ise are gone, as well as most of the ones in Noodle and some from Nagi Island and Water Country."
He shook his head like a horse shaking off a fly. "The frustrating thing is that I'm sure the timing on this means something, but there's too many possibilities. It could be the yakuza looking for what happened to Goda. It could be Mist looking for their Kage and leaning on every intelligence asset they can find in order to see what everyone else knows. Worst of all, it could be that Akatsuki is moving into their endgame and so they're focusing on covering their tracks by tearing up spy networks. Sage knows that Itachi's eyes make him a nightmare as a counterintelligence operative and I'm sure some of the others are just as bad.
"Anyway, I'm still trying to find out how much else is compromised, but given what you say it looks like the problem goes at least as far as Honey." He grimaced in disbelief. "Can't believe I was so stupid. Before I got the hat I spent most of the last six months in Hot Springs, Iron, and some of the minor nations. I was looking into that 'Brotherhood of the Immortal Eight-Headed Serpent' and their Hydra Foundation that you guys pointed out, and also investigating some rumors about...important missing-nin. Looks like I should have been in the east instead—I could have recognized how badly rotted the infosec had gotten and fixed it." He met Keiko's eyes. "I'm sorry, Keiko. I thought I was sending your team on a milk run to buy me time for politicking. I never expected something like this."
Kei had no idea what to say to that.
Jiraiya took a deep breath and blew it out. "Anyway. Moving on. Forget the rest of the mission. Burn the message scrolls, get on your skywalkers and get home on the double. Hopefully Akatsuki went west after taking Naruto, because my network in the east can't be trusted until I've had the chance to vet it. Any questions or anything else to report before we wrap this up and I go back to the miseries of scrollwork?"
Kei shook her head. "Nothing signficant, sir. We delivered all messages on our itinerary up to and including Honey with no other incidents. Chakra beast activity has been roughly as expected. The weather has been unseasonably poor—torrential rains for over a week now—but that is the only unusual item."
Jiraiya frowned. "Odd. At this point I'm so paranoid that I'm wondering if Akatsuki have somehow developed the ability to control weather." He thought about it for a minute, then shook his head. "No. It sounds like it's been bad, but it's not unheard of for this time of year to have heavy rains in the eastern regions. I'm not dispatching agents to search thousands of square miles just because it's raining really hard. Come home with all speed, use skywalkers, maintain opsec. Go up as fast as you can, stay high enough that no one sees you and, unless absolutely necessary, don't go below cloud level until you're at Leaf. Understood?"
"Yes, sir."
He nodded, his mantle of power and resolution once again in place so that it seemed the action of a commander acknowledging a respected soldier. "Travel safe, all of you. I don't have so many clan I can afford to waste them." He tucked Minami's death scroll into his jacket, made the handseal of unsummoning, and vanished from the Seventh Path.
With that, the matter was resolved. Kei had fulfilled her duty as per Leaf protocol (which she had long since memorized) and the rest was in Jiraiya's hands. There was no need for her to pay any further thought to the previous team leader. Rather, Kei decided, it would be much more efficient for her to begin plotting the team's route back to Leaf. After all, it would take hours to devise a suitably precise formula for estimating skywalker travel times...
o-o-o-o
It was the second day of the trip back to Leaf and Hazō was trying his best to feel intensely guilty. He was failing.
The team had been up before dawn and on the skyroad when the first light dawned. They had spent the day racing the sun to the horizon; the giant red orb was ahead of them, hanging low and fat on the edge of the world, but it wasn't fast enough. They would make it to Leaf before the final glimmers of light faded away. For two days they had set and kept a grueling pace; it should have been mind-numbing and frustrating. Instead, Hazō was amazed at how light and cheerful he felt, simply because they were above the clouds again. Being on the ground was thoroughly unpleasant. After knowing the freedom of three-dimensional movement, being forced to stay stuck to what he had come to think of as The Flat was like slogging chest-deep through mud: it was slow and gross and made it way too easy for things to ambush you.
He carefully pushed his thoughts away from the word 'ambush'. They were above the rain, basking in brilliant sunlight that struck the fluffy cloud layer below and shattered into a thousand rainbows. Granted, it was insanely cold and the wind was howling past so hard that he had to squint. He wouldn't have traded it for anything.
Back in Honey, Keiko, Akane, and Kagome had set up camp before he and Noburi arrived at the meeting point and told them about Minami's fate at the hands of the enemy jōnin. Keiko had gone off to the Seventh Path at sundown, shortly after they arrived. When she returned with Jiraiya's orders, the entire team had taken great delight in tearing the camp down, throwing it into their storage scrolls, and making a new camp above the disgusting, ugly, dirt-colored, vile, hateful, evil clouds that had been dumping massive vertical rivers of water on their heads for so long that Hazō was having trouble remembering what it was like to be dry. There, in their lovely and safe skyfort, they had built a massive bonfire and taken turns hurling the remaining missives into it before bedding down. After a few hours of the most restful sleep Hazō had had since this stupid mission started (barring a nightmare or two), they had taken off on a straight-line trip back to Leaf, reveling in the regained freedom from weather and threat of attack.
He really should be feeling guilty about this good mood. Minami was dead and it might have been due to the team's capture of Goda. Surely Hazō shouldn't be happy when his squad leader had just died? Shouldn't he be feeling miserable and gloomy?
Somehow, he just couldn't manage it. He was alive, dry, and he was running above fluffy white sculptures shaped by the hands of the kami themselves. Akane was beside him and the mission was over—no more jumping at shadows, no more slogging across mud, no more wondering if the next contact would be another ambush. Leaf was perhaps half an hour ahead and then it would be hot baths, soft beds, and the chance to see Mari-sensei again and have their family back together.
He smiled to himself at the thought and glanced around at the rest of the team. Noburi was on his left and Akane was on his right with Keiko on the far side. Kagome-sensei was a few yards above and behind them, keeping watch for anything that looked hostile. Or potentially hostile. Or like it might possibly think about maybe becoming hostile at some point in the future. The freedom of the skies meant that Kagome-sensei could use his beloved explosives with much less concern about friendly fire or noise discipline, and he'd been grumbling all day yesterday about the lack of opportunity. At one point it had gotten bad enough that Akane had quietly told him to go ahead and throw a few charges into the clouds just for fun. Said clouds might be white and fluffy from above, but they were periodically lit up with diffuse flickers of lightning and the low booming crash of thunder; a few explosive seals wouldn't be noticeable at all from the ground. Kagome had glowered at her and muttered about how it just wasn't the same, but he'd done it and seemed happier afterwards. Even Keiko had been amused.
He glanced side to side again, watching with amusement at the way they had all fallen into step without even thinking about it. Crazy, gloomy, overly cheerful, irritating...regardless of their quirks, this was his team. They were together, they were going home. Regardless of how he should be feeling, what he actually felt was happy.