Ryouma stiffened. The shadow clone drew its blade back the barest inch, ready to swing.

"Hold," Genma snapped.

The bunshin's sword stopped, vibrating slightly in the misty air. The Kiri nin's mouth curled contemptuously.

Genma said quietly, "It's your friends you should be worried about, Kiri. Ours are just fine." His gaze lifted to Ryouma's kage bunshin. "Knock her out and carry her if she steps out of line. We're not done with her."

"Lieutenant," the bunshin said, with a stiff nod. It wasn't happy with the order, but it stepped back again.

"Triad formation," Genma told it, looping his arm around his own clone's shoulders again. "You and she take point, but mark the pace we set." The clone grabbed his wrist and slid its other hand behind Genma's back to grip his belt on his opposite hip. Genma tested his weight on the injured leg, leaned a little more heavily on his clone's shoulders, and nodded to Ryouma. "Let's go."

They struck out for the woods at an almost unbearably slow pace, with Ryouma's clone and its prisoner leading while Genma and his clone limped behind and to the left. They passed through the narrow belt of charred woods that was left of the copse, and Kakashi stirred on Ryouma's back.

"Wait," he rasped. "M'tanto." One hand unlocked from its clasp at Ryouma's neck and pointed waveringly at the churned mud.

It took Ryouma a moment to see the glimmer of metal in the darkness, near the dark lump of a ruined body. He hefted Kakashi higher on his back and stooped to pick up the blade. It was lighter than he'd expected, as if the steel were some sort of alloy. He tried to pass it up, realized Kakashi had nowhere to keep it, and finally wedged it through his belt, under Kakashi's hip. Kakashi gave a little sigh of relief and slumped forward again over Ryouma's shoulder.

Genma and the clones had just reached the bottom of the slope with their reluctant prisoner; they were nearly invisible in the darkness now, identified only by the faint glow of Genma's ANBU spark and the ebb of low chakra. His clone must have pocketed the glowstick. They paused on level ground, maybe waiting for him to catch up, maybe consulting map and compass to find their course to the safehouse where Raidou and Katsuko would be waiting for them.

Ryouma spared just two minutes more. A string of seals, a handful of reddish-black chakra. He knelt clumsily again beside the woman with the half-rotted torso. "Remember this?" he asked Kakashi. "It's the Nikutai Hakai. Said I'd show you if you showed me your face."

"Mm," Kakashi mumbled, half-asleep.

Well, he'd only shown Ryouma half his face, and not on purpose anyway. It probably didn't count. Ryouma set a hand to the nearest bit of cooling flesh and sent his chakra surging through, leaving black slag and crumbling bone in its wake. Kakashi whined in protest at the slap of rot-reek and buried his bandage-masked face in the side of Ryouma's neck.

"Just one more," Ryouma promised him. He waited a few seconds longer, until there was nothing left but rot, then cut the jutsu, heaved them both up, and slogged over to the earth-shackled man to repeat the process of corpse destruction. Kakashi was too tired to protest this time.

The others had set off again, arrowing north-east. Or, at least, limping that way. Ryouma rinsed his hands with the last rain in the air, hefted Kakashi higher onto his back, and trudged after them, toward the promise of dawn.