Chapter 30.3- One Thousand hands

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I’d never heard someone cut to pieces as efficiently as Danzo did. “That was a very stupid thing you did, Sakumo. A very stupid thing” he started with the second we left the island. I was suprised that Danzo himself had not started the betrayal during the hostage exchange and attacked the Iwa and Kumo folks but he’d probably done the math and seen that we stood no chance in that fight and so he held his peace until we were well on our way. And after that, he did not hold his peace for long. We did not bother laying low in our journey through the land of hot water and cut our way through their borders at top speed.

At some point, Orochimaru had melted from the shadows to join us. He was not fully healed but his body seemed to be holding itself together enough for him to not slow the rest of us down. Danzo had a broken arm and several bruises, Orochimaru had leaky guts, and I had several small nicks and bruises all over my body. Sakumo, who brought up the tip of the spear was none the worse for wear, and we must have made a strange sight. I never got to ask anyone though, as we skirted around what few Yugakure shinobi we could and simply sped through the rest while flaring our chakra for the world to sense.

We weren’t hiding, but we had no interest in confrontation and chakra flaring was one way to ensure that one wasn’t disturbed. There was no chance we’d get away with doing this in the borders of any major nation, but the Land of Hot Water barely even had a ninja system to its name. Their Jounin were probably equivalent to Chunin from the Big Five and they didn’t even have a lot of those. We were doing this because we could and because it was the most efficient way to return to the village.

Our intelligence had been co-opted into a trap. Any other set of shinobi in our situation would have been killed. We were told it was going to be a meeting between Kumo and Kiri. But instead of Kiri, Iwa had been the ones there. We’d been faced with Iwa’s newest jinchuriki, two platoons of Jounin, the Gold and Silver Brothers, and the Tsuchikage’s son. That was the kind of squad that could do a massive amount of damage if unleashed. But that wasn’t the full might of either village. There were still powerful shinobi in both villages that could have been placed on the mission to guarantee success. Han, Iwa’s other Jinchuriki and the Two Tails jinchuriki were both options that came to the top of my head. The question in my mind then became, where were they? If the mission was just designed to kill some of Konoha’s powerful shinobi then why didn’t they fully commit? If the purpose wasn’t to get rid of us, then why the deceit and drawing us out?

There were so many questions I had, and things just did not add up in my head. Either some very smart people at Kumo and Iwa had decided to behave foolishly or I wasn’t getting the full picture.