Kakashi had kind of figured that.

So much for the captain’s glorious rescue. He flicked blood and yellow slime from the tanto blade and went to the next breathing body, a teenage girl who was stick-thin everywhere except for the grossly pregnant belly. Something squirmed slowly beneath the stretched skin. It was hard to tell, but Kakashi thought she was maybe a year or two younger than he was.

He touched her hand. She opened her eyes.

On the battlefield, during the war, most shinobi carried letters for their loved ones. Sealed notes to be delivered with dog tags, if the shinobi fell. Sometimes, if that failed, or if the note was blown away with a limb or half a chest, a message could be dictated.

But this girl couldn’t talk, and there wasn’t time.

“I’m sorry,” Kakashi said. He memorized her face, and cut her throat.

The thing in her belly spasmed. He flipped the tanto and drove it in beneath her breast bone, cutting straight down. A bastardized hari-kiri, except it wasn’t her failure she was paying for. Yellow and black spurted from the wound, and the demon larva stopped moving.

Genma’s woman died the same way, without a word. Genma closed her eyes gently and shook blood off his kunai, moving to the next person. A middle-aged man who barely stirred.

Kakashi’s next was an older woman with paper-thin skin and hollow eyes. When he touched her, her whole body trembled, and tears spilled down her sunken cheeks. She was probably someone’s grandmother. He put a careful hand on her shoulder, and made it as fast. Her larva didn’t get a chance to squirm.

Genma had his hand cupped gently around the last person’s cheek, whispering something soft and probably-comforting into their ear. The person was tall, slim-limbed, and generally unremarkable, with a gender-blurring face like Katsuko’s. A handsome woman, a delicate man—Kakashi couldn’t tell. They died with the faint whistle of a severed windpipe, and the air in the tiny chamber became even less breathable when Genma gutted them.

And that was five.

Kakashi drew a slow breath through his mouth, trying to spare his nose, and expanded his senses. Two fast-moving ANBU sparks up above, leading a dozen twisted chakra signatures on a long chase. A third spark directly west, moving cautiously; Raidou at the main entrance. And further down, deeper into the mountain, five more human signatures. And more demons.

“There’s at least one more hatching chamber,” Kakashi said quietly. “You feel that?”

Genma’s mask tipped in a nod, blood droplets sliding off the rain-wet ceramic. “These looked like they'd been here a long time. We might find the ones taken yesterday in better shape. Maybe we can still save one or two.”

“Maybe,” Kakashi said.

There was almost nothing left of the bodies that had already been hatched from. It looked like a larva’s first newborn act was to turn around and eat the remains of its host; everything from knees to shoulders was just gone, except for bones. He tried to pull a shred of identification from what was left of the faces; something to carry home to the relatives that wondered.

Thirty-three people taken.

That was a lot of new demons to bulk whatever numbers were already there. How fast did the babies grow?

Well, there were five less now.

He left his tanto unsheathed and slipped out of the room, feeling Genma ghost up behind him. Even this close, the other man’s chakra signature was so clamped down Kakashi couldn’t sense it, but the ANBU spark was a constant, steady beacon.

Moving silently, they went deeper into the mountain.