Chapter 36.4- One Thousand Hands

I nodded at her words, it explained the sudden shift in his demeanor between the last time I’d seen him and just now. But then that brought the question of why Shiba had given him the bugs if they already knew the effects. Something about the question must have shown on my face because Shika simply muttered, ‘later’ to me while we began planning in earnest.

After the first attack, we had a more comprehensive view of Suna’s situation. “My time in their camp gave us a lot to work with. For one, they didn’t split up their forces like we feared and are instead progressing as one big block of shonobi. They’re also logging around supplies and securing their lines of retreat. They don’t expect to take Kawa no kuni without being contested and don’t want us to attack while they are consolodating a hold so its clear their plan is to bait us into an attack, defeat us, and then take the Land of Rivers.”

“By us, you mean the main army right?” Kizuru clarified, and received a sharp nod for his efforts.

“Well, that’s nothing to worry about. This is one of the situations we planned around, isn’t it?” Izuku looked from Shika to me as he spoke.

“Yeah, we did but some other things I noticed mean that we can accelerate things massively.”

“Well, spit it out then” another voice said, two guesses as to who it was.

“I was getting there, Uchiha-san. The army is much smaller than expected. Only about seven hundred shinobi. With no water, and the effects of Shiba’s interference, we won’t be surprised to see that number drop rapidly. If we can prevent any messages being sent to Suna about the situation and prevent any reinforcements from being delivered, I predict that we can dispatch of this entire force in about two months”

“That’s a lot of time” I said to Shika

“To take on a force over 50 times our number? It’s barely anything”

“So what do you want us to do?”

“Well, first things first, I say we write back to Hokage-sama with the present situation and inform him that we are, at present, suited and equipped to deal with Suna’s advance. Instead of scrambling to send us reinforcements, resources should instead be focused on the other fronts.”

I looked at Shika like I was just seeing her for the first time, and I could see that a lot of people were. I was one of the few that were privy to the fact that she’d been drafted into anbu, but to see the way it had changed her thought process as just something else.

“Alright then. I vote in favour.”

XXXXX

“Northeast, seven miles” Uraume said, and I sharpened my byakugan’s vision to a pin point to spot the messenger hawk that was making it’s way towards Suna and shot it down with a single breath.

“Your aim is something else, Cousin” She said and I nodded with a smile.

“And everyone hated the bow when I first got it”

“Well, it has managed to prove useful so far in this campaign” She acknowledged but said little else.

This was our fifth day here. I ached to be doing something more exciting, but I understood just how important our presence here was. We were in charge of ensuring that no messages left or came to the Suna outpost. We’d shot about two hawks inbound, and this was the third outbound hawk we were taking down. We made sure to allow the outbound hawks fly a fair bit away before shooting them down, but the lack of communication from their village was clearly telling them something was wrong. Why else would they have sent this hawk flying by past midnight?

“They have to have noticed something wrong by now” Uraume said, unknowingly echoing my very thoughts on the matter.

“How long do you think it will be until they send out human envoys instead of hawks? How long even until their village sends someone out to check what’s going on?” I asked.

“Hopefully not for a while. Nara-san’s plans work best when we are left to implement without interruption.”

“You know you can call her Shika just like everyone else, right?”

“That would not be proper.”

“She’s your cousin as well, I pointed out”

“In a more distant manner than you are, Cousin” Her lips were poking upwards in a bare smile that told me she knew what she was doing.