| [Sep. 20th, 2013|10:28 pm] |
Kakashi’s decoy clone died just before he found the second demon hatchery. He staggered, thrown by the abrupt memory of a poisonous stinger through the breastbone, and righted himself, shaking it off. The rancid smell of rotting meat and human waste guided him into a tiny, offset chamber, because disgusting flagposts were just the theme of the day.
This one was guarded.
Of course it was.
The mid-sized demon’s six eyes didn’t have eyelids that could widen, but it still looked plenty surprised when Kakashi cut it in half with a blazing tanto. Its steel-strong armor chipped the blade. He swore and kicked one smoking half of the corpse aside, splattering himself and the chamber with hot blood—and paused when someone whimpered.
He lifted his hand, brightening the glimmer of chakra.
Human bodies lay stacked against the walls like driftwood, chests and bellies ruptured open. The oldest were just brown bones arching out of insect-riddled slime, decayed beyond recognition. Some were more recent, bloated and swollen, skin splitting where it hadn’t been eaten away. They still had faces, mostly. That one had eyelashes.
And five intact bodies were still breathing.
Kakashi dropped down by an older man with a salted-pepper mustache, and knew immediately it was hopeless. The demon larva was huge, squirming beneath tight skin banded with stretch marks. The man had a day left at most, maybe hours. At his side, there was a body so fresh it was still bleeding sluggishly, with the same field-worker’s tan; they’d probably been taken together.
The living man’s eyes were closed, deeply sunken. He barely stirred when Kakashi laid the tanto across his throat and cut deep. A second downstroke killed the demon.
The next two, a middle-aged woman and a younger man, were just as far gone. Kakashi killed them as quickly and painlessly as possible, two strokes apiece, and moved on. There wasn’t time to linger.
The last two were a different story.
Kakashi hesitated over them, hunkered down on one knee. The first was a girl, maybe ten or eleven, with filthy brown pigtails and only a handspan curve tightening her belly beneath a torn checkered dress. The second was a full-grown man, black-haired and bearded, somewhere in his twenties, with a single fist-sized lump just above his navel. An egg, not yet hatched. A badly scabbed finger-length cut showed where something had sliced into him to lay it.
“Fujiyama-san?” Kakashi asked.
The man’s eyes flicked wide.
Perfect. A traumatized child and a widower with no family left to return him to. It would be kinder to kill them both.
But that wasn’t his choice to make.
“I’m from Konoha,” Kakashi said, shaping his hands into a single seal. “I’m here to get you out.”
He didn’t have the spare chakra to make two solid shadow clones; one would have to do. It fell into existence with a clear mission already stamped into the matrix that passed for a mind, and crouched down to gather the little girl up. She whimpered softly, eyelids flickering, but couldn’t move against the larva's paralytic. Kakashi picked up the man and wrestled his limp dead-weight onto the clone’s back, lashing him into place. It wouldn’t be a comfortable ride, but it would do.
Three more illusory clones took a much tinier sliver of chakra, and might give this fractured rescue a chance of success.
“There are more ninja on the surface,” Kakashi said. “They’ll help you.”
Fujiyama drew a ragged breath and managed to slur out words. “M’ … f’mly?”
No matter how Kakashi said it, he'd still cripple the man, but at least the hurt could be fast and clean.
“They died,” Kakashi said.
Fujiyama’s face crumpled. Kakashi bit the inside of his lip with sharp canine teeth and jerked his head at the clone, which took off at a dead run. The three insubstantial clones followed, orbiting like defensive satellites. Their chakra bled a blue-white stain across the sensory world, too visible.
If they went fast enough, they might make it.
If they didn’t, they’d be a thirty second distraction.
On his way out of the chamber, he brought his heel down hard on the remaining half of the demon’s carved head, cracking bone. |
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