Ginta followed, heading straight to Kuroda and the two captains to deliver a clipped report. “There were thirty-four dead here, and two more in a smaller cave back a ways. Tousaki and Hatake are on corpse disposal; I’m checking ID and valuables. Hatake says they’re all related, though I don’t know how he smelled that through the decomp stench. So far I count thirteen sets of dogtags, one chuunin and the rest genin. Fourteen if we count the ones I sent back with Satomi.”

Kuroda surveyed the corpses with the dispassionate eye of a farmer studying a fallow field. “What clan name?”

“Kusakabe,” Ginta said. “It looks like they’d been hiding here for at least a week before they were slaughtered. Only the chuunin and one of the genin managed to fight back, and they were overpowered almost immediately.” He gestured at one of the corpses, a teenaged boy, it looked like, by the size of his hands. The boy lay awkwardly on his side with a broken blade beneath him, surrounded by a litter of shuriken. His throat had been slashed all the way to the spine.

“They probably trapped the rest of them with genjutsu,” Ginta continued, “then slit their throats. Hatake said he didn’t smell any poison.”

“Kusakabe. Water transformation bloodline,” Kuroda said, looking grimly satisfied. “That confirms it: Kiri is slaughtering their kekkei genkai.”

“This can't be the whole clan,” Usagi said. “There're no jounin.”

“Stood their ground while the rest fled?” suggested Raidou. “Probably got massacred on the surface.”

Ginta nodded. “One of the bodies had a letter in its pocket that said to stay safe in the caves until the fighting was over. Looks like the fighting didn’t go the way the sender hoped.”

Genma glanced at Fukuda. Her face was composed and blank again, but her shoulders were tense, and the stump of her severed arm twitched like she wanted to reach for a weapon with her missing hand.

A pair of figures emerged from the lightning-filled tunnel. They started towards the nearest corpse, then changed direction when they caught sight of their teammates. They were both stripped to the waist, with their pants rolled up like Ginta’s. Their hands were gore-covered, but neither of them were limping.

“What have they been doing with the bodies?” Genma asked. “Too many for Tousaki to use his jutsu for disposal?”

“And too much chakra,” Ginta said. “We guessed since Kiri thinks everyone who would have used these caves is dead, they probably aren’t monitoring too closely, but just in case…” He nodded towards the tunnel the rookies had emerged from. “There’s a sea-passage that way. A few rocks to weigh the bodies down, and the sharks can have them.”

When Ryouma was closer and in better light, Genma checked more carefully for visible injuries. Other than the bandage wrapped around his forehead, and some redness on his back that would probably be bruises in a few more hours, he seemed fine. Kakashi’s cheek was scratched above his mask, but he looked otherwise unharmed. Ginta’s eye, though, was alarming. Genma glanced at Raidou, hoping for backup. “I’d like to check Sakamoto’s injury,” he said to Kuroda. “Permission to do so?”