Genma cracked his shoulders again and chafed his arms to warm them. The protective film of grease on his skin had stiffened to a tacky sludge in the cold water, and the cold had sunk into his bones despite it, but he was warming now, in the close chamber. It was hard to tell how far below the sea they were — not too deep, he guessed, or their eardrums would be aching. Maybe that accounted for the presence of air here.

In the dim light it was impossible to tell whether Kakashi’s collision with the jagged lava rock had done any harm.

Team Thirteen’s rookie kunoichi Kasumi slicked her fingers through her hair, wringing water out of long brown locks. “How much more sea life are we expecting in these tunnels?” she asked. “Do those things come in here?”

The eel that had gone after Kakashi had been in the open ocean, but it wasn’t hard to imagine one of them slithering down into the lava tube caves to wait for an unsuspecting meal to swim by.

Fukuda’s answering shrug was nonreassuring.

There were starfish and sea cucumbers clustered along the rock walls below the water’s surface in the chamber, and anemones spread their slender tentacles just a few feet from where they’d surfaced.

“Don’t touch those,” he said, pointing to a feathery-backed blob of a nudibranch making its way across a lip of hardened lava. “They secrete a neurotoxin there’s no antidote for.”

Fukuda looked up, surprised. “You know about them?”

Genma shrugged, not wanting to give too much away. “I’ve seen them before.” In an aquarium in Konoha’s poison lab.

“He’s right,” she told the rest of them. “There’s no antidote. But if you don’t bother them they’ll leave you alone.”

Ryouma was staring at a translucent brown sea slug with fascinated disgust. “It looks like snot.”

“They taste good, though,” Ginta said. He stabbed the point of his knife through another of the gelatinous-looking animals and plucked it from the water. “Want some?”

“Better if you clean it first.” Eizo leaned over to liberate the knife and critter from Ginta, disemboweled it, slit it into two lengthwise halves, and diced each half into a series of slender crescents. He ate one immediately, crunching it down with evident pleasure, and offered the next slice to Raidou. “Tastes like razor clam.”

Raidou chewed with dubious caution. A surprised, happy look spread across his face a moment later, and he grinned at Eizo and accepted a second piece.

Eizo’s teammates each took some, though Abe looked less than enthusiastic about it. When Kurenai declined her share, Satomi took two at once and made a show of enjoying them. Ryouma took one, chewed it briefly, then leaned over and spat it back into the water. Kakashi made one slice disappear, and then another and another, without ever seeming to disturb the waterlogged dark mask.

Genma crunched through his slice. It tasted briny and fresh, with a texture like cartilage that took some work to get through.

Ginta fanned out three slices and offered them to Fukuda, who took them without comment.