Chapter 19.3- One Thousand Hands

I body flickered once, and then twice, and thrice, making sure to cover massive amounts of distance with each usage of the jutsu, but not so much that I lost track of my teammates. Hohojirozame was definitely still alive. So was the platoon of Chunin chasing us. That made a minimum of 25 chunin and one jounin after us in foreign soil. That was our opposition. Our strengths on the other hand, were few ad far between One soldier pill had given me roughly a quarter of my total chakra capacity back- enough to fight or to run, but definitely not for both and not with Toshiro on my back. Uzume, to my eyes, had roughly a third of her capacity intact. That made her the freshest out of all of us in that respect. She was also physically in better shape than Shika.

She was the logical choice. I tossed Toshiro at her, and nodded when she caught him without stopping, and I turned around. “What are you doing?” She screamed out at me as I body flickered away. She was a smart girl, she’d figure out what I’d deduced in no time. We had no chance of outrunning them. Not now that I could see them at the very edge of my vision. Not now that I could see two of them split up too take Yuki from Hohojirozame’s hands and allow him join the chase. Maybe if Toshiro was conscious, then we’d have had more of a chance but he wasn’t. And waking him up to get into this would be a terrible idea. Now I just needed to figure out how I was going to delay them without turning this into a suicide play, I looked around me, taking note of the trees in the sparse forest and began to feel the very beginnings of a plan form in my mind.

XXXXXX- CHIHIRO

There were five of them in his team. Five teams altogether in this damn forest, and it felt tlike there weren’t enough of them to find the damned Konoha nin. From the moment, they’d stepped in, it had been one problem after another. First of all, there was the fact that they had gotten lost twice. Both times, they’d been under some form on insidious genjutsu that had made them retrace their steps twice. One time, they’d even ended up getting so lost that they’d run into another team and begun fighting before they collectively snapped out of the genjutsu and realised that they were being played.

Hohojirozame-sama was somewhere ahead of them in this mess leading the charge, but they hadn’t been able to even catch up to him or get a message across to him. All they had to do was hope that he found whoever was going this before they got to kill even more of his comrades. With that thought, he stopped as he noticed a familiar marking on a tree for the second time. “Kai” He intoned, snapping the genjutsu, and realising that he’d somehow wondered away from his teammates. He turned to begin searching for them, but never made it far enough as he fell to the ground with an arrow sticking out of his throat.

XXXXXXXX- AKUMA

He managed to swipe his katana in time to slice the arrow that was sent at him in half. It had just been luck that he’d noticed the path of the arrow in time. Zumi and Zuma, fucking bastards, had not been so lucky. The arrows flew with no sound to give off their locations, and they also flew with no rhyme and reason as to their origin point. Zuma had been killed by an arrow from the south, and Zumi had fallen to one from the West. The one that almost killed him had come from the east. That meant-

“North” Both he, and Pakumi said at the same time, turning in time to push Kira out of the way of the arrow that would have done her in. Okay. One arrow from each of the cardinal points, they could deal with that. That was his thought process until the floor beneath his feet stopped being floor.

He pushed his massive frame, trying to struggle out of the mud, but it was futile. The more he tried to force himself out the deeper he sunk. “Kuma!” He heard his teammates call out for him, but he could not listen to them. Could not think. Could not breathe. There was just so much mud. Mud everywhere. Mud that his mind’s eye replaced with dirt from that day. The day they’d buried him alive. He pushed and pushed, crying out just as he did that day. But unlike that day, there was no one to help him. All that he saw was darkness as the mud consumed him slowly and completely.

XXXXXXX- KIRA

Weighed down by the mud, neither her nor Pakumi had managed to deflect the arrows that flew for their throats in time. Instead, they got to stare at each other for their last, painful seconds of life as they died as they had once hoped to have lived. Together.

XXXXXXXX- KISUKE

“This isn’t going well,” he whispered to their jounin commander, Hohojirozame-sama.

“How many gone so far?”

“Just over half”

“And you say you can’t trace the bastard?”

“No. His chakra is everywhere. It’s almost like he’s managed to spread his chakra signature across the entire forest at the same time. None of it even feels stale. It feels like he’s continuously outputting from all those places at once”

“I’d have removed your head from your body for your incompetence if he wasn’t doing the same thing to my nose as well. Shit!” Hohojirozame had never been the most even-tempered nor level-headed of superior officers, but there was something almost manic about his movements now.

“I can sense the others at the edge of my range. I say we leave this forest and go after the Uchiha and Nara. They are still worthy prizes,” Ichimaru’s voice spoke out, saying the words on everyone’s mind.

“The only scalp that Mizukage-sama is interested in is Shorirama Senju’s. Anything less might as well be an insult to him. So either you help me find the damned Senju brat like I brought you for or you shut the fuck up”

A/N; A thingy thing