Morning.
Light threaded through the leaves, breaking into small rainbows. Mist hung between the trunks and traded colors with the prismatic flares, making the woods look half real, half a painted dream.
Sena Yamato and Arata Okamura had already washed up and packed. Karin Kozan was helping Kono roll her tent.
"Ahh… haa."
Kono yawned as she crawled out, clearly short on sleep. She had been up past midnight testing, trying to find the balance point between strength, speed, and mass.
The results were worth it. She had not pinned the bullseye, but she had found the ring around it. It was a huge jump.
Using Shikotsumyaku's trick of hard-as-steel yet freely moving bone, she had also reinforced every joint in the chain, which ant when her muscles fired the power traveled cleanly. Fewer leaks. More load.
By her own back-of-the-mind numbers, her fighting power had at least doubled.
Call this body Perfect Combat Fra 1.0. There would be upgrades.
"Kono, rough night?"
Karin slung the tent across her back. As the squad's dic and the least combat focused, she was used to shouldering extra weight and watching the client.
"I'm fine. Probably just excited. I'm almost ho."
"Heh. Two days to Peichuan Port, then seven or eight by boat to the Fire Country, and Tanzaku Town is still a way inland after that."
Sena counted on his fingers, unable to hide how hyped he was to see the Land of Fire.
Karin's eyes shone too. "The strongest, most prosperous country in the Five Nations. Imagine if I ran into Lady Tsunade."
"Dream on," Arata said. "Tanzaku is a pleasure town and a nest of casinos. Your dical idol would never show up there."
"Exactly," Sena added, for once agreeing.
Karin's shoulders drooped, both flaxen braids slumping with her mood.
Kono kept her thoughts to herself. If Karin ever learned what Lady Tsunade thought of casinos, the heartbreak would be worse. Better she never et her idol.
"Where's Mari-sensei?" Karin's mood bounced back as quickly as it fell.
"She went to collect last night's traps."
"How long ago?"
Silence. The four exchanged a look, and their faces tightened.
…
Mari Kurio eased a taut wire off a bent sapling.
Twong.
The whip-quick branch snapped free and lashed for her face.
She slid back and let it hiss past. The tip sliced the air hard enough to shriek.
Her sea-blue eyes swept the understory. The trap had been ant to fire kunai. She had disard those, yet the spring alone could break bone. Whoever set this was not a civilian.
Not just that. The power, the concealnt, the textbook brushwork of leaf and grass, the angles and placent that showed an old hand. She had seen these habits before.
ANBU habits.
Could it be her brother's unit?
If she were that lucky.
Mari's eyes brightened. She ghosted along the line of sign and snare, careful not to tear anything down. Alarm fields followed rules. The setter never ranged too far from the set.
Soon she had a rough circle and slipped inside its rim.
No ANBU.
In a small clearing, a girl in rough hospun was snuffing a campfire.
The girl was pale and strikingly pretty. She held her palm over the coals and pressed downward, slow and firm. The flas went out as if smothered. Mari blinked. In the dying bed she saw pinpoints of ice glitter.
She is...
Boom.
A black shape scread toward her face.
Mari dropped in pure reflex. "Wait. I am the captain's sister."
The thing roared over her head, chopped through a knotted run of branches, and buried itself in a trunk.
Only then did she see what had attacked her.
A massive blade the size of a door, the cutting edge scalloped in a crescent notch.
As a Mist shinobi she knew it on sight. Kubikiribocho, the Executioner's Blade, one of the Seven Ninja Swords of the Mist. It drinks the iron in blood to nd itself and feeds on that sa blood to restore its wielder. They say it does not break.
Its current master was...
"ANBU scum?"
The voice fell from above with the weight of cold water.
Mari lifted her chin.
On the crown of the tree, a bandage-masked man stood loose and angled, looking down at her with eyes that made ants of people.
Momochi Zabuza.
He had cut down his entire class during graduation, forcing the village to rethink the Bloody Mist. Later, as a special jōnin, he tried and failed to assassinate the Mizukage, slipped the net, and earned an S-rank in the bingo book. The ANBU had hunted him for years.
Mist thickened at once, clinging, viscous, erasing shapes. Killing intent rose out of it with a wet, tallic stink and folded over Mari's head.
She licked a dry lip and swallowed her brother's na.
Luck, it turned out, was not with her today.
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