A small leaf fell away from Raidou's chestplate as Ryouma eased it off. It must have been caught in his armor during the spar. The leaf was bright green, uncrushed, split neatly in two.

Kurenai scooped it up and stood back, frowning. Ryouma ignored her, trying to remember the order of triage Genma had taught him and Kakashi had drilled into him. Genma still wasn't back to coach him through it, but Raidou was breathing, no open wounds, no massive external bleeding—

"Cracked ribs," Raidou rasped. "I think." He groped vaguely at his side.

"Okay." Genma always managed to stay calm at this point, and Ryouma had no idea how. He felt like a thin crust of control over a bubbling pot of panic. "If, if the ribs are broken enough to float, they'll move the wrong way when you breathe in. I've got to pull your shirt up—"

"Cut it off." Kurenai knelt beside him, slit a kunai smoothly from Raidou's navel to his throat, and peeled the black panels back. Raidou managed an ironic eyebrow lift.

His chest was mottled red with massive bruising, but his ribs all moved the right way when he breathed. His abdomen was hard with muscle, not internal bleeding. Not internal bleeding, thank all the gods Genma believed in — they'd drilled those signs for days after Fukuda's death. When Ryouma sank his chakra carefully into Raidou's pathways he found the steady churn of chakra disturbed, but not displaced.

Kakashi crouched by Raidou's head, one hand braced on the muddy grass. His voice was ice-calm. "Lieutenant's gone. Orders?"

Ryouma's head jerked up. "Gone?"

He hadn't seen Genma since the statue appeared. He couldn't sense him. But he'd thought—

He'd barely thought. Desperation and terror. He'd lost his head, and if they'd lost Genma too—

Raidou's stomach muscles tensed. He grated, "Find him."

Kakashi straightened, pulled a scroll and a kunai, and slit the side of his finger. He shook the scroll out, smearing blood across the black ink characters, then clasped the scroll between two fingers and set his hands to seals.

Ozone bit at Ryouma's nose. The soft whump of displaced air encircled him: two presences at his back, one at his side. Sardonic Pakkun, lean Tsuyoshi, and another dog that might have been Tsuyoshi's littermate, dark grey with a creamy belly.

No friendly Kin, no wagging tails. The two wolf-dogs darted into the trees. Pakkun hit the dirt and snarled, revealing sharp white teeth that looked better suited to crunching through a beer bottle than drinking from one. He swung around on Kakashi. "Why does it smell like tanuki? What did you do?"

"Tanuki," Kurenai said, and looked down at her leaf.

Kakashi looked like several pieces had slotted together in his head and then detonated. "What?"

Pakkun beat a wide circle with his nose to the ground, finishing up on the torn earth where Ryouma had first seen Genma fall. "Tanuki. It reeks of them. How'd you miss them?"

"I—" Kakashi stared around the clearing, his Sharingan eye red and glaring. "What?"

The pug trotted back, eeled between Kurenai and Ryouma, and sniffed at Raidou. "Dimension-hopping little bastards. What'd you do? Tell me you didn't knock over a shrine."

"No," Kakashi said. His face stilled, cut glass beneath the mask. His eyes fixed on something in the distance. "No. But Nomiya Harubi prayed at one."

Kurenai looked sharply at him. Pakkun groaned. "What did she give them?"

"Two hundred casks of sake," Kurenai said. She held the cut halves of the leaf out to Pakkun. "This was tanuki, too?"

Pakkun sniffed the leaf halves, wrinkled his nose, and sneezed. "Yes. What was it?"

"About a thousand kilos on my ribs," Raidou said. He was trying to sit up; Ryouma reached automatically to help him. Together they managed to wedge Raidou half-upright, breathing shallowly, sweating. "Tanuki?"