| [Jun. 10th, 2013|04:13 am] |
By mid-afternoon, Ryouma calculated, he’d run, walked, jogged, and very occasionally translocated more than thirty miles. The translocations left him light-headed and nauseated, and once landed him in the center of Fire Country’s biggest briar thicket. He spent five minutes trying to fight his way out before he gave up and translocated out. That time he had to climb a tree and spend ten minutes shaking before he could come down again. Space-time jutsu had never been his forte, and Yondaime-sama’s new skimming-the-borders-of-reality trick felt uncomfortably like he’d left his stomach behind.
He lost an hour when an ANBU hunter picked up his trail. At least, he assumed it was a hunter, although he never caught more than a fleeting glimpse and a distant chakra flare. Another candidate wouldn’t have wasted the time. He wasn’t sure if he shook the hunter, eventually, or if the ANBU simply lost interest. Maybe they were assigned to special quadrants, and weren’t allowed to leave.
Which meant he’d moved into someone else’s territory. Shit.
He slowed a little more, took his time testing clearings that looked suspiciously empty, circled around branches that hung invitingly low. Once, in the distance, he heard a woman scream. He kept his head down and pushed on.
Konoha lay somewhere northwest, he’d figured out by now. Northwest still covered about a quarter of the shinobi world, but if he struck too far west he’d hit the road to Tanzaku City, eventually, and too far east he’d find the road to Otafuku Gai. Within fifty miles of Konoha, he’d know the land. It was as good a plan as any, and better than some he’d tried.
Much better, he hoped. Some of those plans had ended with pretty ugly scars.
Eventually, he came to the forest’s edge.
And to a boar-masked hunter, standing in the very last of the shade.
He was so still, black-and-bone armor dappled in green shadows and sunlight, that Ryouma almost didn’t spot him. If it hadn’t been for an errant breeze that shook the leaves and ruffled the ANBU’s reddish hair, he wouldn’t have. But the movement in the corner of his eye caught his attention; he glanced, and froze.
A voice whispered very softly into the back of his neck, “Like the bunshin?”
Ryouma threw himself out of the tree, hit the fire-blasted soil on his shoulder, and rolled. He came up with his hands already slipping from Monkey to Hare seal, before he remembered this was a Konoha nin: his comrade in arms for the last six years; his senpai, if he survived.
“Hesitate,” the voice murmured into his ear, “and you’re dead.”
He spun, striking at throat-height with the knife-blade of his hand. There was nothing to hit. Just blackened dust spurting up where feet might have struck, prints already swirling away in the wind. The bunshin was gone from under the trees, if it had ever been there at all.
“Easy, boy,” the voice said mockingly behind him. “You almost nicked me that ti—”
Ryouma didn’t bother spinning. He dropped, snapping his head back with all the force he could muster. His skull cracked hard against ceramic before resistance broke away. He caught himself with one hand in the dirt, pushed off, and sprinted three steps before he finished the seals for the translocation jutsu and yanked himself somewhere else.
When he landed five hundred meters away on a rocky outcropping thrusting up out of a tangle of charcoal that used to be trees, he barely managed to pitch to his knees before he was sick.
At least, he thought bleakly, spitting onto the dirt, he’d packed mouthwash in his kit. He’d come prepared for something. |
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