Raidou’s sector—Crescent Moon sector, because he needed a better mask—was a forty-square-mile swath of forest that bled out onto the Shoudo Plains, ending just after the land blackened and cracked. The rumor was demon fire, but they’d had no confirmation on that. Something had blighted the grasslands; Raidou would’ve put even money on a regular nasty-ass jutsu.

Either way, his sector was empty. Time to say goodbye and move on.

From chatter, he’d gleaned a pretty good idea of where most of the candidates had landed, but a few were dust in the wind. Hatake had vanished and stayed gone—best guess put him somewhere in the badlands, maybe as far as the valley. Tousaki had shown and split a few times. The guy with the fuuma shuriken—Aki-something—had given Omashi some serious trouble and rabbited.

Nakashima, the kid who liked to use ice spears as punctuation, was firmly on Raidou’s shit list.

He packed up his last trap, sealing the twists of wire and hooks in a scroll to prevent a self-stabbing, and pulled his mask off for a brief, glorious second. His hair was plastered to his forehead; he raked it back, wiped his face, and took a deep breath of blessedly cooler night air.

It tasted like sweat and leaf mulch.

“This glamorous life of mine,” he murmured. He put the mask back on and went to stir the rabbits from their bolt holes.

The Shodou Plains were still warm underfoot, reflecting back a day of soaked-in sunshine. He took a quick, graceless roll in the dust to darken the bone-white parts of his armor, and set a quick pace under the broad yellow moon.

When he reached the marker, he clicked his comm. “Crescent Moon ready.”

“Your name, man,” came Omashi’s voice, crackling.

“Crescent Moon also willing to squash Grasshopper,” Raidou said.

“Grasshopper invites Crescent Moon to suck his giant hairy—”

“Gentlemen,” said Hajime.

Hissing static filled the air for a moment, then Usagi came on the line. “You had to interrupt.”

“Focus,” said Hajime.

One by one, the ANBU checked in, a few breathless from chasing quarry. Genma was the last.

“Let’s go,” he said, “before she gives me the slip.”

“Light ‘em up,” ordered Hajime.

Raidou cupped his hands, calling a spark of chakra into a flickering, thumbnail-sized flame. He set it to the trigger buried in the dust, and stepped quickly back. A long fuse hissed to life, racing a snake-trail through the blackened earth.

When it reached its target, the badlands detonated.

Not all of it, but a long, broad strip went up in glorious shower of boiling fire. Twelve separate explosions, triggered simultaneously by twelve ANBU. The heat crisped the tiny hairs off Raidou’s arms. Some terrible joker added a thread of chakra to theirs and made an exploding phoenix from the flames.

“There they go!” said Usagi.

She was more sensitive than Raidou, but even he caught the flicker-edge of someone’s distant chakra bursting into alarmed movement.

“Goddamn, I saw that blast from here,” said Hajime. “Good job, boys and girls. Have at ‘em.”

Someone—Usagi, probably—let loose a loud, ululating wolf’s howl and burst through the fire wall, scattering it to shreds in the distance. Yowls and roars went up from half a dozen other agents, as they followed her example and tossed subtlety to the wind.

Laughing, Raidou threw himself through the fire and went after that distant chakra signature.

Nakashima, it turned out.

What followed was very, very fun.