They edged past the rockfall to find a new tunnel angling upwards. At a junction, Satomi led them to the right. The cavern floor was unmistakably stained with old blood. They didn’t have to go much further before the stomach-turning reek of decay was in the air. With every step they took it grew stronger.

Ahead of them, Abe shuddered and gagged. Kurenai, who had gone even paler than Kuroda, coughed, shoulders heaving, then raised her hands to cast. Her jutsu blossomed around them, blanking the stench out of existence.

Usagi blew a relieved sigh. “Thank gods. I could kiss you, Yuuhi.”

Genma took a few deep breaths, counting the seconds while his own nausea diminished. “That’s worse that anything Tousaki has ever done,” he said. “I haven’t smelled that much death since the Fox.”

Fukuda’s expressing turned even darker, and she picked up her pace to just short of a jog, with the dogtags clenched tight in her fist.

“If we're done suffering from vapors, perhaps we could continue like shinobi,” Kuroda said, voice dripping with scorn.

Kurenai casting that genjutsu was acting like a shinobi. So was dry-heaving but not vomiting. Genma gritted his teeth. One more mission. All they had to do was get through this mission, and Team Six would be out from under Kuroda’s thumb.

They rounded a final curve, and the tunnel broadened out to reveal an expansive chamber. The soft greyish light of a genjutsu illuminated a scene out of a nightmare. More than twenty bodies lay scattered on the cave floor in dried pools of rusty brown. Fresh drag marks spattered with gore led the way to the far end of the cavern, where blue-white lightning crawled over the rock walls and ceiling of another tunnel.

Kakashi and Ryouma were nowhere to be seen, but Ginta was bent over the bodies of a young woman and a baby, checking the woman’s pockets. He’d rolled his sleeves up past his elbows and cuffed his pants to the knee, presumably to keep his clothes from touching the decaying corpses. A dozen more sets of dogtags dangled from chains around his wrist.

Fukuda stood at the edge of the killing field, eyes wide with horror, jaw clenched tight. Her shoulders shook for a moment, and then she broke into a near run, rushing towards Ginta and the corpses.

Kurenai exchanged a tight look with Satomi, and followed Fukuda.

Ginta jerked to his feet and stood in front of the bodies, looking all the more forbidding with his gruesomely swollen eye and battered cheek. He caught Fukuda by the shoulders as she sank to her knees. Kurenai shook her head at him, and he nodded, stepping to the side. His hand stayed on Fukuda’s back. Genma couldn’t tell if he was comforting or restraining her.

Fukuda’s hand reached out to stroke the long tea-brown hair of the dead woman. Then she looked helplessly up at Ginta and Kurenai. “It’s not her.” Her voice was hollow.

Kurenai helped her to her feet, leading her away from the carnage.