| [Sep. 24th, 2013|12:51 am] |
Hyuuga chose that moment to start picking debris from the gash in his arm. Asuma clenched his jaw, closed his eyes, and suppressed a curse. He only needed to remember the facts right now. The rest could come… later. Much, much later.
“At least three divisions,” he answered. “They’re seventy-five men each here. Plus an additional forty or so—the ones that’re outside in the hall. All the guards we met on the field we killed. The rest of the Twelve…” Just the facts, just the facts. “They’re dead, sir.”
Hokage-sama’s voice remained as cold as steel. “Which of them did you personally kill?”
Momotaru and Masaki had been the first to fall—or so Asuma had thought, before he discovered how Masaki had backtracked to ambush Chiriku—burned to ash in the limelight jutsu. Then Tou, which ensured the limelight jutsu could never be cast again. More had fallen in rapid succession, Kazuma and his people doing their best to separate and destroy rather than allowing Asuma and his allies to effectively fight as a team. Far too quickly, the Twelve had been culled to two.
“Koga,” Asuma said after a pause. His hadn’t been the killing blow, but he didn’t think Yondaime-sama would see much difference between ‘helped a lot’ and ‘killed without assistance’. “And Kazuma.”
A long silence followed. Asuma dared to open his eyes again and look to his Hokage, as dignified and commanding in a bathroom as anywhere else in the world.
“I recognize you’re injured and low on chakra, Sarutobi, and that this is difficult for you.” Yondaime-sama’s face was stern. “But I need information, if I’m to keep the Daimyou and my own people safe. Are you absolutely certain the rest of the Twelve are dead?”
Asuma met Yondaime-sama’s eyes, forced himself to hold the gaze and not think of his dead friends. “Yes sir. Two are in the hall outside. I can place the—“ Not the bodies. “—the others on a map. For retrieval.”
That response, finally, seemed to earn Hokage-sama’s approval; he nodded, sharp and apparently satisfied. “Yuuhi, see to it,” he ordered, and gave Asuma one more piercing look. “Before I meet with the Daimyou, Sarutobi, is there anything else I need to know?”
Asuma cast one more net to dredge through the clutter of his exhausted mind. Each member of the Twelve had been semi-autonomous, with their own responsibilities to look after and report on. The palace guards and their rotations had been Asuma’s responsibility, which didn’t reflect well on him considering how many had joined Kazuma’s cause. It did, however, give him more insight than usual on what to do with who was left and how to ferret out any additional deserters.
“How’d word get to you?” he asked, looking back up after a moment of thought.
“Via the Daimyou’s radiomen,” Yondaime-sama replied. “Unencrypted, but on the correct channel.”
Asuma nodded, closing his eyes once more. “Then the captain of the guard, Ito Hiroki, is clean. And the radioman that sent the message, if you can find them.”
Hiroki was the only one, outside the Twelve, who knew the correct channel to use in order to send an urgent distress call to Konoha. Chiriku wouldn’t have left the Daimyou’s side once the coup was under way, and Masaki wouldn’t have initiated a call only to attack the safe room. That the message hadn’t been encrypted meant Hiroki couldn’t stay for the duration of the call; that the message went through at all meant the radioman had no other allegiances. It was an extremely small start to reorganizing the guard, but a start nonetheless.
“I’ll give orders to look for them,” Yondaime-sama said. “Hyuuga, when you’ve put his arm together, join up with Kawasaki in triage. Yuuhi, I want that map as soon as you can produce it. Sarutobi’s full report can follow.”
The stress was faint, but audible enough that Asuma picked it up even through his exhaustion. It was the kind of emphasis that said by ‘full report’, Hokage-sama actually meant ‘interrogation’. Or something near to it, at least. Asuma supposed he couldn’t blame the man, considering there weren’t any other Guardians left to back up his story. The thought left his chest heavy with resignation. |
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