| [May. 22nd, 2017|02:10 am] |
“I suggested yakiniku,” Genma corrected. He rolled a kink out of his shoulders and shook the lingering tingle of channeled chakra from his hands. “Especially if Hatake’s paying for it.”
“Captain just said I had to catch everyone before noon, and not cripple anyone,” Kakashi said. He dropped into a crouch with one leg outstretched, leaning away from it to maximize the groin stretch. “No one’s crippled. It’s before noon. I win.”
“A false surrender isn’t the same as a capture,” Genma said. “But I’ll grant that you knocked me on my ass.” He put a hand to his face, feeling the swelling and convincing himself he really hadn’t broken anything. “Hatake threw up an earth wall in my path when I tried to translocate out of there with you,” he told Raidou. “It was a smart play, with a lucky guess about which direction at least one of us would go.”
Raidou’s eyes widened in alarm, “He what?” He darted a glare at Kakashi, then gave Genma’s bruises a closer look. “You’re lucky you didn’t break your neck.”
“That’s what I said,” Ryouma put in. His voice was muffled by upwards of seventy kilos of oversized shepherd puppy, who still sprawled happily on his chest despite his efforts to dislodge her.
Kakashi rolled his eye and switched to stretching the other leg. “Not without a harder wall.”
“Technically, they’re right,” Genma said. “If I’d hit it at a bad angle, or you’d miscalculated the density, you and Taichou would be having a very different conversation.” He shrugged. “But you calculated right and I didn’t snap my neck, so luck was on our side. It’s not much different than training with live blades.”
“Eventually someone from another village is going to figure out how translocation works,” Kakashi pointed out.
“As long as they don’t figure out how to know which direction we’re translocating to, it probably won’t help them much.” Genma licked the split in his lip. “You didn’t really know which way I was going to go, did you? It was a guess?”
Kakashi stopped mid-stretch to give Genma a quizzical look. “Between Tousaki, the dogs, the landscape, and me, there were three clear routes. The captain tends to favor right. You’re ambidextrous, but the far left path gave you a better defensive field of vision.”
Genma could probably count on one hand the number of days he hadn’t wondered where Kakashi was hiding his genius. But there it was. Tactical brilliance was at least half made up of rapid analysis. Kakashi couldn’t have had more than a quarter of a second to come to that decision, prepare, and cast his jutsu, when Genma and Raidou had split.
“Guess we’re too predictable,” he told Raidou. “Anyway, it was smart thinking, even if it rattled my brains a little.” He pressed the pads of his fingers against his bruised cheekbone and swollen nose, trying to decide whether it was worth self-healing. “We just have to hope none of our enemies are ever as on-the-ball as Hatake.”
“If we ever run into a second Hatake,” Raidou said, “I’m retiring on the spot.”
“If we ever run into a second Hatake who’s not on our side, I’m pretty sure they’ll be ‘retiring’ us on the spot.” Genma chuckled. “Tousaki, Hatake, you’d avenge us, wouldn’t you?”
Ryouma finally managed to wriggle out from under Kin. He sat up, brushed a few blades of grass from his hair, and vowed, “I'd fight Kakashi's long-lost second cousin once removed for your sake, Lieutenant.”
“Yes,” Kakashi said, with finality. |
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