Wall Duty when things were peaceful was something to look forward to, as long as your fellow guards were interesting conversationalists. When Team Nine, Hajime’s team, had drawn it, it had usually been a rest break between harder missions.

Not now.

Even with four times as many eyes as usual on the horizon, Genma was tensely alert, scanning the treeline for shadows that weren’t there, and demons that might materialize out of thin air at any moment.

No one standing watch that morning did so easily. With the village on high alert, it was impossible not to think of the Fox’s attack four and a half years ago. Back then they’d been caught blindsided. The youngest chuunin on the wall now had been Academy students then, herded into bunkers with rest of Konoha’s most vulnerable citizens. They’d lost parents and siblings and teachers. The rest, who, like Genma, had faced down the demon, had lost partners, lovers, and friends. The raw ache that crept up Genma’s shoulders and neck was mostly fatigue and tension, but it reached tendrils down into the scars on his back, his own legacy from that night when so many had died.

It had never been confirmed, but there was credible speculation that Orochimaru had been behind the Fox. Genma didn’t doubt that at all.

A pair of chuunin slipped past, carrying a message to the commander at the next watchtower down the line. Mie-san was at her post again, conferring with a Hyuuga in full uniform.

There wasn’t a lot to do, standing ready for an attack that might or might not come, but just waiting was agonizing. Genma straightened up and walked to the wall’s outer lip, leaning against the shelf at chest height, and threading his chakra sense out as far as he could, into the shadows under the trees. All he found were Konoha shinobi on patrol, and the perfectly ordinary animal inhabitants of the forest.

At his back, he could feel Raidou’s chakra, dense and palpable, like the heat of glowing iron in a smith’s forge. It had texture and depth, and while it wasn’t the beacon-bright furnace of the Yondaime’s nearly inexhaustible supply, it felt steady. Earth nature, Genma guessed. With Water or maybe Wind tempering the glow and adding fluidity into the signature. He’d remember that chakra. Learn to trust it at his back, as he’d trusted Hajime’s bright greenish flicker.

Other chakras braided and flowed around him: the ANBU and jounin and special jounin ninjutsu-specialists were smoothest, the chuunin less distinct, lower powered, less organized, but all of them together made a wall of chakra noise as thick and impenetrable as the stone wall on which they patrolled.

Genma narrowed his focus and sent feelers out into the woods again. Still nothing but a deer here, a grouse there, a rabbit with babies in a hole in the ground. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, drew in the net of chakra and cast it once more.

There was nothing to do but wait.