At the sound, Genma froze flat against the trunk of a tree, pulling his chakra in to as tight a radius as it was physically possible to inhabit. Raidou’s chakra signature flared briefly, alongside what had to be one of Kakashi’s hells-damned hounds. The summoned dog’s chakra had a prickly impermanence to it, an artifact of its link to the Summoning Dimension. Raidou’s was all too real. It vanished as quickly as it had flared, but damn, Raidou. That was a surprising mistake. The dog must have really caught him off guard.

Another dog’s voice joined the first, baying high and eerie on the muggy air. Genma threaded a final paper bladder of finely ground pepper onto the line he’d rigged. The packets clung like beads of dew on a spider’s silk. He pulled the triggering wire taut, secured it to a knee-high knot of bark on the tree, and fed chakra into the trap in a thin trickle.

It was maddening how slow he had to go, to keep his chakra undetectable. The hunting game was a standard exercise for every ANBU team, but there was something especially exhausting about the tight chakra control you needed to hide from another sensor.

And now Genma was running low on traps. He’d parted with half his precious stash of trap-making material when he’d crossed paths with Raidou not half an hour ago. If Raidou had been caught already, and wasted them, Genma was going to be really irritated.

The trap set with a distinctive curling snap when it was fully primed. Genma leaned back on his heels and swept out a risky feeler for Raidou, Ryouma, or Kakashi. He’d thought he’d felt Ryouma right before the dog and Raidou had taken over his awareness. Now there was nothing but the low steady thrum of forest life, and way out at the edge of training field nine, a cluster of undisguised ANBU sparks belonging to another team.

Kakashi could be anywhere. At least it seemed like Raidou had managed to get away. For the moment.

A bird startled out of a branch overhead with a flurry of wings. Genma translocated without waiting to see whether it was his pursuer or just a rival sparrow that had set the bird to flight.

The dogs were to the northwest. Genma went south. He snapped back out of the spacetime ripple his translocation jutsu created, and dropped to a spongy, leaf-littered floor in the middle of a bamboo thicket. His head throbbed — he really should have drunk more water to counter his hangover — but it was a little late to be worrying about that now.

He slunk through the slender bamboo poles, timing his movements with the faint rustle of a June breeze that disturbed their feathery tops. If Kakashi pursued him here, he’d probably try to get downwind and catch Genma’s scent.

There was a shallow basin where the ground dipped to allow rainwater to run free, next to a low, flat rock. That’s where Genma would go if he were trying to find a target in this grove. He took a square of inked mulberry paper out and folded it several times, then puffed into it to inflate it. It looked innocuous — a child’s plaything. He smiled at it in grim satisfaction, tucked a glass vial of stinkweed oil into the opening he’d use to inflate it, and attached a hair-thin wire to the cork. Then he carefully threaded the wire through the leaf litter to the rock. It would take just a single, unsuspecting footfall to trigger the trap, uncork the oil, and detonate the seal painted on the paper.

He started to rig a snare net to a willow near the water path, but a lower, deeper-voiced dog thundered out a volley of barks not far off. Raidou’s chakra blazed like a wind-whipped bonfire, and this time it stayed a fixed point, moving towards him at high speed.

Damnit, Raidou.

Genma swung up into the willow and headed towards the commotion. It was a questionable move, since it put him at risk of capture with his less-stealthy captain. But Kakashi had recruited an entire household of dog summons to help with the hunt. It seemed only fair for at least two of the pursued to gang up on trying to evade.

As Genma spun through the hanging foliage, Raidou’s chakra storm became sharper and brighter, almost like a beacon—