Chapter 48.1- Gamer of the Desert

XXXXXX- THE GENIUS HYUGA

He fought down the urge too scowl with the ease of long practice as he an d his partner covered the ground between the forest and the walls of Kusagakure. Their goal was simple. They were to infioltrate the village and assassinate the Head Jounin of the Hidden Village. Cutting off the snake’s head from the get-go, so to speak. The problem with that, the reason he was annoyed, was that it was a marked departure from what the plans had previously been. In fact, it was such a sharp departure that there could only be one reason for it.

This was a test. Danzo wanted to test them again for some reason. That irritated Neji. He’d believed that they were done with their Sensei’s seemingly never-ending barrage of tests. And now here was another. it was also annoying because Neji knew that the reason they’d not been informed earlier was purely to include the element of surprise into the rest itself. He had no doubts that Danzo had planned this out well before. The man hated rash and sudden actions with all the dictate a cat held for a bath. There was no chance he’d not planned this in advance. And if Danzo had planned this, then it was very likely that the Commanding Officers were more than aware of this aspect of the plan.

“Follow my lead” His teammate signed at him in one of the dozen variants of the Konoha Sign language that Danzo had forced them to learn in the first weeks of their training. He watched him with sharp eyes, byakugan inactive as even the lighest application of chakra had a very good chance of getting them caught. Kusa wasn’t one of the great five, but they were still a hidden village at the end of the day.

Sasuke ramped up his speed for a few seconds, and in a series of movements that would have confounded his genin self, Neji’s teammate reached the wall, planted one foot on it and then used that as his boost to begin running across the wall. He wasn’t making use of chakra, purely relying on the momentum from his run across the ground. He spun in the air with one final boost before landing on the top of the wall. The guard there had no chance of sounding the alarm as Sasuke’s kunai lashed out in a flash of light. The man fell to the ground, dead. Neji took a deep breath before running at the wall himself.

He was not a fan of the directness of this approach, but there was little he could say to fault it. They were on a time crunch, and this approach might as well be the most efficient one with how things looked. Sasuke signed at him some more and then turned to the other side of the wall, sliding down the wall with his gloves and boots to slow down his descent until he was close enough to dismount safely. Neji followed his lead. The body would be discovered soon enough, but as night was just beginning to fall, Neji had a good amount of hope that it would be a while until they’d need to change shifts. Long enough for them to complete their mission, at the very least.

Now, within the village, they could begin to make minor uses of their chakra. First things first, he activated his byakugan to assure himself that the coast was clear and they’d not been noticed. He felt his teammate do the same beside him. Once he was sure of their safety, his next action had been aimed at locating the head Jounin.

‘Follow me’ He signed at his partner, maintaining their unspoken agreement not to speak. They melded into the shadows and leaned heavily on their training to make the journey from the village’s outskirts to the very centre of it without being noticed. The byakugan and sharingan made it child’s play for them to avoid notice. This was the power of Konoha’s premier kekkei genkai, Neji told himself.

The centre of Kusa’s government was nothing when compared to the Hokage tower. Not when it came to outer appearances, at least. Learned in the geography of all the other great hidden villages, it was easy for Neji to see where Kusa had diverted from the example set by their betters. Their ‘kage building’, instead of stretching to the sky in a show of dominance and strength, the Kusa building did the exact opposite. For anyone without eyes like his, the building would be nothing to write home about from the outside. It was a bungalow in a sea of bungalows. Nothing special. Only the Byakugan allowed him to see that beneath the building there extended a complex network of tunnels that ran through most of the entire village. Instead of having the heart of the village be on a skyscraper that stood as a bastion of the village’s strength, Kusa had done the opposite. The minor village hid their heart beneath the armour of the ground.

‘Is that the only entrance’ Sasuke signed back after Neji informed him of the situation. Both of them kept at least a fraction of their attention on the bungalow and its highly unusual amount of foot traffic.

‘Yes. We can’t burrow either. Landmines everywhere’ he replied his partner, waiting for a reply.

He didn’t need to wait for long as Sasuke stretched himself out of the shadows for a second. If Neji had not been watching him, he might have missed the way his partner moved. Silently and quickly, he grabbed a hold of one of the men who was making his way into the bungalow and returned to their alcove with no one being any the wiser. When he let go of the man’s mouth, he moved to scream but aborted the movement as his eyes caught Sasuke’s. Sharingan genjutsu allowed Sasuke rifle through the man’s mind as he asked question after question that the man answered. When he finished, he took the man’s appearance and gave Neji a significant look. Neji copied his teammates previous movements to get another man for their interrogation. Once they finished, he took the second man’s appearance and they made their way into the building.