| [Sep. 20th, 2013|11:19 pm] |
“Here, too,” said Raidou, tying a final bandage into place around around Genma’s left thigh. He’d worked his way down from the major damage to the lesser scrapes; that last had just been a palm-sized gash, where a demon’s leg or a vicious rock had caught a lucky hit.
At the end tally, Genma had one nasty belly wound, a bitten shoulder, a stabbed shoulder, and enough cuts, scrapes, and bruises to keep a decent medic busy for an afternoon.
Which was unfortunate, given that he was the medic.
Plus, paralysis and self-induced fever, neither of which Raidou was happy about. In theory, the first would wear off and the second was helping it do just that, but he wasn’t a fan of that glassy-eyed, wheat-colored expression in anyone with battle wounds.
Still, he’d gotten water, a blood pill, a second soldier pill, and a carefully modulated dose of painkillers into Genma, which would hold him for now, if the painkillers didn’t flatten his breathing too much. They’d had to use narcotics—anything from another family would attack the fever—but Raidou wasn’t happy about that in a paralysed man, either.
There was a lot he wasn’t happy with today.
He tossed Genma’s crippled body armor to a clone, who caught it neatly. All twelve had returned from the mountain, which still left eight in the forest.
“Okay, you four,” Raidou said, picking clones at random. “We need a stretcher big enough for two people. Get sturdy branches. We’ll sling the tent between them.” Four clones nodded and sprinted towards the woods. “You two, put Tanuki between Ram and Rat—if he’s gonna be a space heater, we might as well put that to use.”
He expected Katsuko to pipe up about the cuddle pile again, but she seemed to be three-quarters asleep on Ryouma’s shoulder.
They might need that stretcher for three people.
Carefully, two clones lifted Genma and arranged him upright and braced between Ryouma and Katsuko, who winced and hissed at being moved. They huddled back against Genma like he was the one warm spark in a sea of frostbite when the re-shuffling was done.
“Hey, kids,” Genma managed. “D-doing okay?”
“Hush,” Katsuko told him grouchily, and buried her face against his bitten, bandaged shoulder.
Guilt chased over Ryouma’s expressive face. “Guess we didn't draw off as many as we thought. Sorry, lieutenant.”
“No sorry,” Genma said firmly. “You did good.”
Katsuko gave an irritated little hiss, presumably because people were still talking around her. She slung her good arm across Genma and Ryouma both, drawing the tent closer around them, and locked her fingers around the edge of Ryouma’s chestplate. Ryouma looked briefly startled before his chakra-drained weariness caught back up with him, and he just slouched.
Three taken care of, Raidou moved onto the next thing.
“You,” he said, picking another clone. “Take a message to the clones guarding the civilians; bring them here. The rest of you I want back up on that mountain. Go as deep as you can, see if there’s anything else nasty lurking that we need to know about, and collapse the tunnels down on it. I want that last escape hole brought down, too. Whoever makes it back up, carve me a piece off that corpse. A fang or a pincer, or the head, if you can carry it. Something to take as proof back home.”
“Oooh,” said one of the clones, because Katsuko’s personality was alive and well. “The head, definitely the head.”
“Yes,” said a second.
En masse, they flocked away.
“Need anything from me?” Kakashi asked quietly.
Raidou turned. Of the entire team, Kakashi was the only one who’d managed to keep his ANBU mask on and his armor relatively intact, though he looked exactly like he’d been dropped down the inside of a mountain once or twice. That right arm was still hanging dead, and his visible skin was a mess of untended cuts—presumably from tangling with the demon queen, or whatever else he’d ricocheted off. But nothing was broken, bleeding out, or crippled.
“Stand still a second,” Raidou said, and crossed over to hook Kakashi’s lion-dog mask off. |
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