Chapter 33.6- One Thousand Hands

The first of which, was poisoning the rives that the Suna nin were definitely going to be relying on. That was what he, Uraume and Shiba had been dispatched to handle. Shika had divided them into multiple teams to handle different aspects of the war effort when it came to putting an end to Suna’s advance. Izuku and Uzume were set to set parts of the forest on fire to smoke up as much of the land of rivers as possible. Thanks to the Country’s generally sparse vegetation, the thickest bits of the forest were the bits that led towards the land of fire so they would be first to go to deny the Suna shinobi the chance of relying on said vegetation for their war effort. Omoikane, Inoken, and Choni were going to be focused on picking as much of the land clean as they could to deny the Suna army whatever food they could. The hardest jobs had been given to Kizuru, Toshiro, and Shika herself who would be working on destroying the Suna army’s supplies were possible, raiding their reserves, and getting rid of their scouts were possible.

The others had been set towards creating fall back points for their little squad, trapping and flagging possible paths of retreat that they could make use of, and trapping the Suna nin’s path forward. After the basic preparatory steps, they would move on to the second part of the plan.

“Have you got it, Uraume?” He asked, turning to look at his cousin.

“Yes, I think so. The rivers branch out a lot but I think I’ve found a straight enough path that should get us to the siource in a few hours” She said, and I nodded.

While Shika had ordered us to poison the rivers without specifying the means of doing so, it was my idea to seek out the source of the rivers. Just blindly poisoning a few streams and rivers ran the risk of only getting some portion of the army in our attack. This? This meant the entire land of rivers would be feeling our effects soon. Of course, that meant we were limited when it came to what forms of poison. Would be War Lord of not, I would not be killing thousands of civilians in an indiscriminate attack if I had any other choice, and thankfully I had more than a few options in my newly acquired bag of tricks.

We tracked the river’s path from our hidden positions in the foliage and covered nearly half the length of the land of rivers as we tried to follow it to the source. In the end, we came to a cave from which flowed a waterfall that branched out and fed nearly three dozen different streams and rivers. Some of them went on to feed dozens more. With the amount of water being contemplated here, I’d expected to find some sort of passage from the ocean that I could poison, but the idea of all that water coming from a single fixed point almost boggled the mind. It didn’t just boggle my mind, it had it firing at light speed, making connections with a certain tale that Granduncle Tobirama had spent some time obsessed with.

“What’s in that cave?” I asked Uraume, even as I activated my own byakugan.

“I can’t see into it” She finally said after staring at the cave with narrowed eyes. I agreed, only seeing a grey outline when I tried looking at it with my byakugan. Fascinating.