| [Aug. 29th, 2017|03:40 am] |
That evening at the ryokan was their last good night for almost a week.
The summer heat settled in as they left Konoha's woodlands, and the humid air turned muggy as a steam-room. Brief storms lashed by, drenching their clothes without clearing the air. Kakashi taught Ryouma and Genma his trick of pulling water out of clothes, or tried to; they sweated through again ten minutes later.
"It's like marching through soup," Ryouma said, shoving sweat-sodden hair off his brow. He'd begun to fantasize about shaving it all off.
"At least we're heading for the mountains," Kurenai offered.
"That's the spirit," Raidou told her. But even he was finding it hard to be cheerful after their second night of poor sleep. It was too wet to sleep without tents, and too hot inside them. The cicadas droned mercilessly, even at night. They were big, ugly bugs — bigger than in Konoha, Ryouma swore — and during the day they varied their screaming with bouts of trying to fly up Genma's shirt or lay eggs in Raidou's hair.
"You do kinda look like a tree," Ryouma told him. "Big, brown, ready to fall over and kill us all—"
Raidou bounced a hopeful bug off Ryouma's face, like an ungainly kunai with too many scrabbling legs. "Don't tempt me."
Ryouma only yelped a little bit. The cicada crunched and then squished when he pulled it off his neck and stepped on it.
After that he tried to stay by Genma, but Genma was growing short-tempered, too: he'd tied a damp bandana over his hair in hopes of cooling down and discouraging the cicadas, but it steamed in the muggy air without ever actually drying. He actually snapped at Kakashi about drinking enough water—"Do you want heatstroke? I swear to every god, Hatake, if you faint again..."
Kakashi didn't quite mutter mutinously as he pulled out his canteen, but he did give Genma a glimmer of a dark look, between plastered hair and sodden mask. For Kakashi in mission mode, that was practically the same thing.
They left their ANBU masks off. It was hard enough to breath the thick air. Raidou insisted on full armor otherwise, though they were still in Fire Country and the roads weren't busy at the height of summer. They took narrow country lanes to swing a wide loop around Goshogawara with its gates and guards, and then left the road entirely to cut cross-country through the Kuroshou marshes. It shaved half a day off their journey, Raidou said, but Ryouma wasn't sure the mosquitos were worth it.
Tempers wore thinner. Kurenai's feet blistered. ("It's not the running," she said bitterly, "it's the damn sweat.") They spent weary minutes before sleep picking little burrs and foxtails out of their legbindings; even one missed foxtail could work its vicious little barbs through to the flesh beneath. No one wanted to cook, or eat, and they argued over whose turn it was to dig trenches or stand guard. All of them missed Katsuko and her inexhaustible clones, and none of them said it.
By the time they crossed the mountains into Tsurui Province of Hotsprings Country, Ryouma wasn't the only one hoping for murder. |
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