| [May. 8th, 2014|03:08 am] |
There was a school of thought that said waiting was the worst part of any mission.
Kakashi was inclined to think gruesome and painful injury was the worst part, but waiting came a close second. Especially when the timeline was nebulous. ‘Guard with a birthmark’ wasn’t the most terrible signal he’d ever seen, but it wasn’t winning any awards for precise.
The guard in question was a leanly muscular man in his mid-twenties, light-haired, with a port-wine splash across the left side of his face. From their vantage point on the neighbor’s rooftop, it looked a lot like arterial spray. Or, from a less morbid frame of mind, dark autumn leaves. He was leaning against the sheltered eastern side of the building, taking the chance to have a surreptitious smoke.
“That’s going to get him in trouble,” Kakashi murmured.
“More trouble than dead?” Ryouma murmured back, almost soundless. He was nearly invisible at Kakashi’s back, resting in the space between shadows with the casual talent of a shinobi used to disappearing. It said something about their training, Kakashi thought, that even a man as loud as Ryouma could erase himself from the universe with a hand-wave. Or maybe it just said something about Ryouma.
“Look at his teammates,” Kakashi said. “Notice anything?”
“Less obvious vices?” Ryouma quipped, but Kakashi felt his attention sharpen, flicking from guard to guard. “They’re tense.”
“Expecting something.”
“Us, you think?”
Kakashi tapped half-gloved fingertips soundlessly against his knee. “Intel didn’t think so.”
“Reinforcements,” Ryouma said, landing on the next likely thought. “Kiri ninja would make me nervous, if I was a baby guard.”
“Yeah,” Kakashi said. “Exactly.”
“Lieutenant's got a sharp chakra-sense. He’d’ve let us know by now if he’d landed on a Mist nin’s lap.”
“Yeah,” said Kakashi again, only slightly doubtful.
The lightshow of civilian chakra made it hard to pick out an enemy signature deliberately hiding itself. If enemy shinobi were already lying in wait, there wouldn’t be any warning.
Still, every mission had its hiccups. And if nothing else, Kirigakure always brought an interesting challenge with them.
Bloodthirsty insanity had that effect.
“There,” Ryouma said, a half-second before distant steel flashed, blood sprayed, and the guard’s body dropped in a boneless heap.
The radio crackled. “Go,” said Genma.
“Roger,” said Kakashi and Ryouma in the same breath, and took off. Ryouma arrowed to the left, leaping across the alley to the Tsuto estate’s outer wall, before he dropped like a stooping hawk on his chosen knot of three guards. That took care of the northern side. Genma had already dispatched a second guard and was handling a third on his side. Kakashi translocated with a tight shiver of chakra, landed on the steel spine of a greenhouse roof, and vaulted lightly down between the southern guards.
One man was so tense, the surprise made him drop his sword.
Kakashi caught it, saving the movement it would have taken him to draw his own, and twisted through one vicious, scything circle. Three bodies fell. He let the sword drop back on its former owner—good steel, but poor balance—and went for the house. |
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