"Twenty-five," Katsuko said, raw-throated, as the last horse-sized demon lurched on three legs against a tree and died there. She shook steaming yellow ichor off her blade and turned in a slow circle. "You think that's it?"

"It'd better be." Ryouma leaned against his own tree and considered collapsing like the dead demon. Dead demons. Twenty-five of them, if Katsuko was counting right—he sure as hell hadn't been, playing Tag of the Damned. He hurt everywhere, except where spattering venom had numbed the skin. He stank even to himself. And if he wasn't quite dangerously low on chakra, he was getting close. The flickering dark halo of his Nikutai Tokasu was beginning to sputter, and even the slight drain of maintenance pulled at his bones. He cut the jutsu with the Ram seal, severing the chakra flow, and his left knee tried to buckle.

Not paralyzed, he thought, prodding anxiously at the kneecap with one filthy hand while he clutched at rough bark with the other. There was no tear in the sodden fabric, though one scorpion-demon had got in a good slash on his right thigh. Only leg-bindings and boots had prevented another dog-sized one from severing the tendon at the back of his ankle. The weakness in his knee was just the old injury acting up again. Rain, and strain. He straightened with a grunt and looked for somewhere on his half-wrecked uniform to wipe his hands.

A rain-wet young leaf presented itself, bud-green but already nearly as broad as his mask. "You good?" Katsuko asked, flapping the leaf at him when he didn't immediately take it. Napkin, he figured at last, and tried to wipe the worst of the black slime from his hands with it.

Katsuko had escaped spattering with slime, but she was liberally streaked with blood—both the demons' sulfurous yellow and her own sticky red. There was a nasty, oozing cut on the outside of her right arm, between the high glove and the tail of her ANBU tattoo. No blood leaked through the flesh-colored bandages covering her other shoulder, but they were dirty where she'd rolled to avoid a demon's driving stinger. A slice in the reinforced fabric over her collarbones exposed pale skin and a few beads of blood; the rain had rinsed the rest away. She'd have lost her head, there, if she'd been half a heartbeat slower.

He used the back of his wrist to shove his mask up, and grinned headily at her. "None of my insides are on my outsides. I'm good. An' I think we've single-handedly—well, double-handedly—killed more demons than anybody but the Shodai Hokage. Think they'll put us in the Bingo Book?"

"Hope not," Katsuko said, and slugged him on the shoulder. "The world isn't ready yet for hot messes like us."

"And we don't need foreign idiots challenging you both to battles once a month." Raidou dropped out of the trees behind Katsuko, who didn't even twitch: just took the canteen he handed her, tipped her mask to the side of her head, and guzzled. Raidou shoved his own mask up. He was a little pale still from blood-loss, but there was no noticeable hitch in his movements. "Collapsed two of the entrances," he said. "Everything okay here?"

"We got everything that came out," Ryouma said. He plucked another handful of dripping new leaves from the nearest shrub. Smaller than Katsuko's massive offering, but they slid between his fingers better. "Hound and Tanuki make it underground?"

"Safe and gone. I can't feel them anymore." Raidou rolled one bandaged shoulder and added, dryer, "Occurs to me that we might've kept one chakra-sensor above ground."

"Oh," Ryouma said blankly. "Yeah, that—would have been a good idea."

Katsuko laughed. "And that is why we're not in the Bingo Book."

Raidou snorted. "I'm going to trap the last entrance. Come on, geniuses."