| [Dec. 31st, 2016|10:26 pm] |
Team Thirteen melted away first, on a tack that would take them to the north tip of Kirigakure. Kuroda and his Intel flankers went second, rendered invisible by a skillful genjutsu from Kurenai. Team Six crouched in the silent dark for a handful of heartbeats, waiting to see whether a Kiri alarm went up.
Stillness.
Raidou flicked two fingers. Fukuda rose, a slender traitor under moonlight, and led them down through volcanic crags to Kirigakure’s heartland.
The last steps, it turned out, were the easiest. They descended as silent wraiths, every footfall carefully measured, over unmarked pathways that smelled of meat and steel and blood — hunter trails. The fog thickened protectively, just as Konoha’s trees guarded its ninja. A sheer basalt wall loomed up on them, blocking the way with black rock.
Fukuda raised her hand and pressed it gently against an unremarkable stone. Chakra rippled and the genjutsu dissolved, leaving a deep V carved out through the center of the wall. Spread below them, nestled among high spurs and low valleys, a sea of lights glittered. The Village Hidden in the Mist.
Kakashi let out an inaudible breath.
A flutter of movement pulled his attention sideways: Genma’s hands shaping a question. Where?
Fukuda pointed to the darkest side of the village, on the south edge. At this height they could only see impressions and shapes, but the pattern looked residential. Genma nodded, and turned his gaze to a tall, straight, obviously man-made structure slanting down from a mountain’s side towards the center of the village. Massive stone legs arched up to support a conduit as wide as a road, and the dull roar of pouring water made distant white noise. Higuchi Aqueduct: Kirigakure’s main source of fresh water, besides rain.
Or, as Ginta had put it, a really obvious target.
One reason among many, Kakashi supposed, why Kiri valued their privacy. The maintenance shaft was a metal tube hanging just beneath the conduit. To reach it, they had to climb one of the support pillars, which was an easy job made difficult by the need to conceal their chakra. Right now, they were all so clamped down that Kakashi couldn’t feel anything beyond the border of his own skin. They’d concealed their ANBU sparks, too, on the extremely slim chance that someone in Kiri might be able to sense them. (The Quartermaster claimed that was impossible, but beating the odds was a universal shinobi talent. Team Six had voted not to take the risk.)
In any event, scaling sheer stone with only a glimmer of chakra lining each palm was a skillset Kakashi swore to practice when they made it home.
Fukuda, one-handed, was secured by twin safety ropes attached to Raidou and Ryouma. They caught her more than once, puncturing the silence with soft, strangled cursing, but everyone made it up alive. The hatch into the tunnel was trapped; Genma disengaged the seal with delicate chakra work and a judicious senbon stab.
Inside the maintenance tunnel was about how Kakashi imagined the inside of a storm drain: loud, wet, smelling strongly of mold. Rivulets of water trickled along the pipe’s base, made slick as grease by green scum. The journey down was mostly a controlled slide, with blind leaps over riveted joint sections.
They skidded to a halt at the bottom, and waited in damp, strained silence for Fukuda to ease the bottom hatch open and signal the all clear. Kakashi studied his hands, pale abstractions in the blue-tinted dark. His pulse beat in his wrists, but his hands were steady. His heartbeat was steady. At his back, Ryouma breathed slow and even. Raidou and Genma could have been carved from stone. |
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