| [Jun. 10th, 2013|04:03 am] |
Like showing up at 0400 was the hardest thing they'd had to do so far. Ryouma shifted, folding his arms across his chest. The stitches in his shoulder pulled a little; you didn’t ask for chakra-healing on a scrape like that, not when there were men and women brought in bleeding out every day, but the medic had cleaned and sutured him just fine. It didn’t impair his range of motion much, anyway. He didn’t think it’d hold him back.
Hold him back from what, was the question. Everybody’d had theories—each more ludicrous and more dangerous than the last, yesterday, as the empty glasses stacked up—but nobody knew. The ANBU trials were one of the few secrets Konoha’s gossip-mill kept.
0400 with weapons and limited supplies was enough to start guessing on, though. And the commander, apparently, didn’t believe in suspense for its own sake.
She gestured briefly. A deer-masked ANBU faded out of the darkness with a bundle in his arms. It spread out into a cloth, pale on the dewy grass, with a jumble of six-inch scrolls on top.
“Abe,” the commander said.
The blue-haired man Ryouma didn’t know stepped forward, selected a scroll from the side of the pile, stepped back.
“Akiyama.”
Another man, dark-haired, with a giant fuuma shuriken folded on his back. They were going in order, Ryouma realized, and folded his arms, ready to be bored.
Names he didn’t know. Some he did. One name was called and not answered. Silence pooled in the moonlit darkness.
“Wise choice,” the commander said at last. “Hatake.”
Kakashi walked silently to collect a scroll. He chose the first that came to hand, from the top of the shrinking pile, and came back without stirring dew from the grass beneath his feet.
Himura. Nakashima. Others, and at long last, Tousaki.
There were only three scrolls left. Ryouma chose the center one, and took up his place again by Kakashi. Ayane had drifted over from somewhere; they exchanged brief nods as Yamada was called up to select the final scroll.
The deer-masked ANBU rolled up the cloth and slipped back into shadows again. The commander said, “Open the scrolls.”
Ryouma slid his thumbnail under the seal, unrolled it, and barely registered the incomprehensible scrawl inked on the white paper before the world skewed sideways and spiraled into smoke.
He landed on one knee in thick moss, on the broad branch of a tree so high in the air that the ground was lost in darkness below him. There was paper crunched under his knee, gleaming faintly in the faint moonlight that managed to filter through the high canopy. He eased it out, compared the inked scribbles to those on the first scroll still in his hand.
A matched set. Space-time seals, linked over dozens—perhaps hundreds—of miles.
And something more, written in thick brush strokes on the second scroll. He tilted it to the light; it made little difference.
Find, he knew that character. They used it often enough on mission briefs. Two was easy enough. So was days. The rest might as well have been fancy pictures, shimmering and swimming against white paper, and he was getting a headache.
He rolled the scrolls up, jammed them inside his vest, and took his bearings. The moon was sinking over his left shoulder; there was west. The forest was alive around him, spring peepers, insects, an owl ghosting past on silent wings. Somewhere, twenty ANBU candidates.
One of them had to be able to read the trial objective.
He focused chakra in his feet, tested his grip on the rugged tree branch, and set off into darkness. |
|