Ryouma wasn’t sleeping, exactly, when the horizon lit up like the Hokage’s birthday. He was still on his feet, still moving generally in a straight line, but his pace had slowed to something between a saunter and a stumble. When the ground shook and the sky went briefly orange, he did stumble. He caught himself with a knee and one hand and looked back to see the fiery glow at the edge of the burned lands, some twenty miles behind him.

Twenty miles wasn’t much to a ninja.

He tightened his boot laces, since he was kneeling anyway, and drank a little of the stale, warm water remaining in his canteen. There was still cooked rabbit in his belt-pouch. He hesitated over it, then went for a soldier pill instead.

Chemical chakra sizzled through his pathways. He straightened, fastening the flap on his belt pouch, and looked back again. He couldn’t yet see the tiny little figures in black-and-bone running across the burned lands, but Boar would be among them, lethal and fast and mocking.

They called ANBU hunters for a reason.

Ryouma bared his teeth. “Come and get me,” he said.

Within an hour, they did.

He’d made it out of of the burned lands by then, scrambled down broken slopes and boot-gouging slides to the slab-bordered rivulet of black water at the valley bottom. Only shreds of moonlight fell down here, turning shadows even darker where they didn’t touch, and he wasn’t wearing a white mask and armor the color of old bone.

He wasn’t alone, either. Another shadow, blacker against the dark stone, flitted across the other side of the stream, twenty meters away. Ryouma pressed against a rock, watching. A paler blotch tipped, looking up at the cliff above him; he heard a muttered curse, the scrape of steel on scabbard. Ayane.

Two ANBU flowed like ghosts out of the darkness. Ayane spun, struck, releasing wind-chakra like a scythe. One ANBU flipped out of the way, hit the steep canyon wall with one foot and stuck there, sideways to the world. The other ducked in under the arc of blade and chakra to close with Ayane, hand to hand.

“You like to watch?” the boar-masked ANBU whispered behind Ryouma’s shoulder.