Genma had been approved for active service for three full weeks, but so far the mission office was throwing him only the softest of assignments. He'd been cleared by his doctors: medically fit with all injuries healed. Cleared by Intel: nothing about Genma's actions on the mission that had claimed the lives of Hoashi Seijuro and Kamiyama Kobo had been anything but exemplary. He'd even been awarded a medal for valor, and commended for his superior ability to resist enemy interrogation. Only psych had held him back, giving him probationary status. His first three missions had been in the company of more senior agents, agents who were obviously on double duty: carry out the stated mission, and evaluate your partner who is just returning from extended medical leave.

Genma'd known it would be like that: he'd been warned by his psych handler, warned by Ito-sensei, warned by the small group of others in ANBU who had been through something like he'd been through (nothing like what he'd been through, because everyone's hell was private and personal, no matter how much they looked the same from the outside.) It was part of the process.

And then had come the summons to tea with the Hokage. A quiet moment in the old man's study, where Genma had been struck again by how such a physically small man could seem so very large. Tea, cakes, a quiet game of go, which Genma lost.

"You don't have to prove anything to me, Genma," Sandaime had said. "You have already more than proved it."

"I know, Sandaime-sama."

"You don't have to prove anything to Kamiyama Kobo or Hoashi Seijuro."

Genma had wished then he were wearing his mask to shield his face from wizened, penetrating brown eyes piercing to his core. To hide the salt-red edges of his own eyes.

"I took an oath, Sandaime-sama. I am your sharpest tool, your most dangerous blade." The ANBU creed.

"You are," the old man had agreed with a smile. "Thank you for the game, Genma. You show great promise as a go player."

Three days later, Genma was approved for full duty.

And now he was on a solo mission. Still a soft one, by ANBU standards. B-rank courier mission, to take a scroll to an undercover agent deep in Lightning country.

He wasn't going to complete the mission.

Sometimes in the field, an agent had to decide to abandon one mission in favor of another. The bloodied, half-dead chuunin Genma stumbled across reset his priorities. Genma spotted him well before he spotted Genma. A Leaf shinobi half a step from collapse, half a kilometer from a military trail that connected safehouse to safehouse, if you were of the Leaf and knew how to read the signs.

Genma materialized on the man's path. The chuunin staggered, drew and then dropped a weapon. "ANBU-san. Help me."

It had been a few hours. She wasn't quite sure how many. The sounds had mostly died down outside, except for the occasional deafening flares and cracklings of flame or lightning or shadow shuriken as they tested her defenses. Repurposing all of the inward-directed traps to defend against an external enemy had taken a long time and more finesse than she'd known she had, but it was mostly done now: Rina knelt in the center of interlocking rings of violence, the tiptoe dance of safe spaces among them known only to her.

She'd shown the safe route to Shouji and Yushiro, too, but if they'd survived they'd have taken it long ago. Rina saw them in her mind, pinned to the unforgiving stone by a brace of kunai or seared beyond recognition by an electric blast. Sacrificed, while she cowered here useless, a turtle within her shell of black ink.

She could hold out here for days, with the emergency food and water supplies squirreled away in the bunker. Weeks even, if she was careful, hoarding her energy and taking advantage of the thick, stormy air to top off the water barrels with simple jutsu. Eventually Konoha would wing a rescue team out here -- she hoped, she hoped -- but geography made it obvious that Cloud's far more lethal backup would arrive first.

She wouldn't even be missed back home until a few days from now, Rina thought, and felt achingly invisible. Like she'd fallen through the cracks in the world, and would be waiting here forever.

Surely, Cloud would send a seal specialist. One better than she, who could crack open her shell and scoop her out from the inside. And then it'll be turtle soup, she thought wildly, and had to choke down the wrench of laughter rising in her throat.

The chuunin's name was Tanaka Shouji. He was older than Genma, with short black hair and the beginnings of weathered creases at the corners of his eyes. Genma didn't know him. Shouji could barely speak, was shocky and shaking, chattering out his story while Genma bandaged what wounds he could, gave what pain medicine he dared, cast what stop-gap medical jutsu he knew. Enough to stabilize the man, maybe. Enough to keep him alive, if he was lucky, while Genma went for help. Except that wasn't what was going to happen, because Genma was help, and as badly as Shouji needed it, his partners Yushiro and Rina needed it more.

They'd been trapping a bunker to deal with a threat from Kumogakure, when they were ambushed and surrounded by the very ninja they were trying to thwart. He'd left Yushiro, the special jounin commander of their mission, fighting a losing battle against overwhelming forces. But maybe if Genma got there soon... Their seal specialist was trapped inside, he told Genma. As long as her traps were holding...

A seal specialist named Rina. Could there be more than one of them? Akiyama Rina, who'd spent so much time creating intricate seals to repair Genma's hands that she'd been as much of a constant companion at the hospital as Ito-sensei the hand-surgeon and Genma's nurses. Rina who'd brought him sweets, and sat up long hours in the night talking to him when pain and nightmares made sleep treacherous. Rina who had, over the course of many weeks, become his friend.

"Akiyama Rina," Shouji confirmed. He coughed, and blood flecked his lips. When Genma pressed his hands against the man's chest, he could feel the crackle of air hissing through flooded chambers. When he gently probed Shouji's belly with the barest thread of chakra, Shouji grimaced and groaned, and lost what little color he had still clinging to his cheeks.

Dying. The chuunin was dying, and there was nothing a field medic like Genma could do to save him but transport him to the closest safehouse and summon a real doctor, and even then help would probably arrive too late. And there were two more Leaf ninja in peril, fighting for their lives. Last seen alive.

One of them was Genma's friend.

"I can get you to a safehouse further down the trail and then go back for your teammates," Genma told Shouji, in careful, grave tones. "But that will take at least an hour."

"Don't. I'll be fine. I feel better. Leave me here and go help Rina and Yushiro." A brave lie.

Genma nodded. He pushed his mask back, so Shouji could see his face. "You're sure?"

Shouji nodded. Coughed again. Genma dabbed at the man's lips with a folded square of gauze.

"You're so young," Shouji whispered.

Genma didn't know what to say to that.

The seconds trickled past painfully slowly, in tandem with the thin bead of sweat trickling down Rina's neck. It would have been appallingly tedious, if not for the constant pings and shivers pricking at her skin whenever the massed Cloud ninja scrabbled at the borders of her defenses. If not for the constant-running calculation tickling the back of her mind, evaluating and re-evaluating the probabilities that either Shouji or Yushiro had survived.

Right now, that practical corner assessing odds informed her that Shouji's chances were down below one percent, and Yushiro's were half that. Add them together, multiply by the probability of finding a roaming Konoha agent in this remote, unimportant corner of vast Lightning Country, factor in the chances of anyone being strong enough to actually help...

Rina squeezed her eyes shut, and braced herself against the stomach-churning wrench of someone attempting to unravel one of her traps. Deft-fingered patience might have compensated for lack of knowledge on the part of the Cloud-nin, but the limits of that became apparent as the under-trap took hold, a roaring gout of mixed flame and lightning tightly focused to incinerate anyone foolish enough to pick at the seemingly hidden vulnerability.

She heard screams again, and the prickling of her skin momentarily settled, an impasse reasserting itself. With fingers trembling from chakra-exhaustion and the threadbare dregs of her adrenaline rush, Rina lifted damp hair and wiped the sweat from the back of her neck.

After three hours, the chances that Shouji was still alive were...

There was a safe route through the traps in the bunker, Shouji had told him, gasping for air, sketching it out for Genma. As Genma raced through the woods, he went over it again and again. Enter through an air-shaft to the bunker's sleeping quarters, but then at the first juncture veer left. There is a trap there, which can be bypassed with the sequence dragon-dragon-rat and a wave of chakra applied slowly. Slowly was critical. Then another trap three meters in, this time blades... It was complex, frighteningly so, and any mistake was likely to be fatal.

He tried not to think about Shouji himself, wrapped in Genma's emergency blanket and drugged to unconsciousness. Dying alone. Would it have been kinder to have knocked him out with morphine and then given him a little too much? Maybe. But he'd been fading fast anyway. Genma had summoned a rat to take a message back to Konoha, to preserve the illusion that there was hope for the chuunin, before he left him.

He passed his first dead Kumo ninja right where Shouji had said he'd fought his last attacker and escaped. The dead man had a long scar down one side of his face that pulled his eyelid into a strangely gnome-like slant. The other side of his face was almost handsome, with a stubbled chin and a square jaw. He lay where Shouji had felled him, one arm half cleaved from his body, with bone and gristle glistening in the sticky wound. With his handome-ugly face turned to one side at a broken necked angle. There was a litter of shuriken, a dropped sword. Churned up earth where a jutsu had missed its human target.

Genma vaulted over the corpse, turned east, and headed for the next landmark: a shrine to Inari, harvest goddess, attended by foxes. Slipping under the twisted rice rope marking the edge of the sacred space, he had to laugh at the irony of foxes protecting Konoha's bunker. And there was the air shaft, hidden behind Inari's mirror. He checked his weapons, felt for enemy chakra presence, and then wriggled in.

It was taking too much time. Way too much time. The smell of blood was blended with the searing tang of ozone from lightning jutsu, the bitterness of black powder from exploding tags. There were more bodies inside the bunker, including... Including another Konoha ninja. The jounin Shouji had left fighting. His throat was a charred black hole, his mouth grotesquely open, exposing broken teeth. Kumo ninja had evidently already stripped everything of use from him: scroll pouches on his vest hung open and empty, his belt and utility kits were gone, his weapons all missing.

Genma wanted to stop to take his dog tags, to bring something back to Konoha and this man's family. But Kumo ninja were everywhere. A woman appeared, bending over the jounin's body. She cut his clothes open, peeling them back from broken limbs, a scar-marked torso. "There's nothing else on him," she called to someone out of sight. "Leave him, then, we still have to find the other ones," came an answer. The woman stood up and kicked the jounin's leg out of her way.

Genma cursed her silently, and eased himself whisper-quiet along yet another claustrophobic corridor, worming his way in deeper and deeper. Rina was in here, at the heart of the maze. There was still hope. There had to be hope.

He turned another corner, slipped under a trip wire, dismissed a trap with another sequence of seals, another ninjutsu. And then... Was that her? Was that.. Yes. A huddled form in a Konoha vest, dim in the gloom, but moving. Alive. She even looked unhurt. But... But there was another seal slapped on the wall. Shouji hadn't told him there was a trap here.

Shouji who was probably dead by now.

He considered trying to disable the trap anyway, but that seemed like the road to ruin if he failed. Maybe if he could get her attention, but with the Kumo nin still so close Genma could hear them talking to each other, he didn't dare call out to her. Her back was turned. He plucked a senbon from his holster and sent it flying down the corridor, deliberately underthrowing. Deliberately missing.

Turn around, Rina.

The clatter of metal on stone, several feet behind her, made her whirl around, eyes wide. No tag, no glint of poison, just a needle rolling towards her along the roughened granite floor...
Crossing an inked black line.

She blinked. A figure in the shadows--

A glowing blue inferno, roaring to life, lit cavebound gloom into day. Rina's paintbrush was away and she was crouched in a defensive posture behind her sheld, her paired sai shifted into a protective grip, before she could even wonder how any of the Cloud-nin had made it into projectile range. There were at least six more traps in that corridor... The flash-trap, the paralysis jutsu, the sealed senbon--

A resounding twang, thunk, and cut-off yells indicated that the sealed-loop wire had tripped up at least one more victim. That was only halfway down the hallway. Then... who had set off her projectile shield?

The chakra-glow was already fading, intended to deflect only the first volley of weapons -- which had never come. She squinted through the shield, trying to see what she could expect before her protection faded away entirely. Shifted a thread of chakra to her eyes, enhancing night-vision contrast, usually used to make out black ink traces in the depths of a black twilight. There was something...

A gleam of light, from a shadowed bend in the hallway. Where she could see it, but anyone farther back could not. Another shine of metal poised to throw?

No. A mask. Red and white and feral.

ANBU.

Genma held up one gloved hand in gesture at Rina. Stay put, enemy coming. His other was already hurling shuriken down the corridor in the direction of the incoming fight. That damn chakra shield had messed with his dark vision--no doubt part of the design--so the ninja rushing towards him were indistinct blurs against a blacker background. And fuck, he was still wedged in, with his back to Rina's trap. Metal thunked against wood, shuddered against his vest, bit into his arm for a wild second, a glancing blow turned aside from causing serious injury by his long ANBU wrist guards.

Take down this seal!, he gestured to her, and then had to turn his attention back to his attackers. At least the narrow corridor was as hindering to them as it was to him. He heard a muted scream as another of Rina's traps claimed a victim further back. Dodged a hail of senbon crackling with electric fury that the Kumo ninja threw at him. Two could play at that game. Genma's defensive jutsu traced back along the path the lightning left in the air, staggering the Kumo ninja with a searing shockwave.

Two of the electric needles hit home, sending an agony of sparks cascading down Genma's shoulder. The current found a path through Genma's own weapons, heating the sword at his back, the kunai in his hand. He used it. It only took a minor metalwork jutsu to turn warm iron to blazing. The enemy rushed forward, hurling another volley at Genma. Genma dove to the right, hitting rough stone wall, flattening himself against it, and threw the red-hot kunai.

The scream of the man as the heated blade tore into his belly was almost as satisfying as the sudden death of the electric jutsu, the sound of senbon dropping to the ground. Relief was short lived. A fist-sized glowing ball shot from the prone ninja, catching Genma square in the chest, crushing him against the wall.

Rina had better fucking have that trap disabled, he thought desperately, and lunged down the corridor towards her.

Dammit, be careful! Rina threw herself at the ground, contorting around the curving trail of a stasis-seal, and deactivating with a flung palm one of the largest hidden explosive runes she'd ever had the opportunity to draw--mere moments before the ANBU's mud-encrusted sandal landed square in its center. A kunai already pierced the blast-note affixed to the chamber entrance, an attached nullifying tag swaying slowly from its hilt.

She'd already defused the drain-seal to her right, so she used the space to roll to her feet, taking the risk of lightly snagging the ANBU's arm to guide him with her in a leap back to the center of the chamber. A moment and a quick burst of chakra manipulation later, the humming blue glow surged back to life around them, emitting a rain-patter of piercing squeals as a flung volley of shuriken screeched to a sudden halt at its boundary. Rina didn't stop, already gesturing to the masked ANBU to follow her through the other side of the faltering shield.

Step where I step, she signaled behind her, already surveying the winding path ahead. There's another exit this way.

Genma plucked the senbon from his shoulder, stowing them away in a pocket of his vest. They seemed ordinary, and with the jutsu-caster's chakra no longer flowing through them, certainly felt ordinary, but there was always the threat of poison with senbon. Better to be safe and keep them for analysis, than sorry and dying. He patted himself down and took a quick inventory: plenty of senbon and kunai left, and enough shuriken to feel comfortable. Plus there was the sword at his back, which was useless in the narrow corridors, but might come in handy if the way Rina was leading them out was wider and taller.

Rina was definitely unhurt, from what he could see. Shaking and pale, but in the middle of a nest of Kumo ninja, that was hardly surprising. She wasn't a front-line battle type in the best of circumstances, from what he'd gathered during their long talks while he'd still been a patient. Shouji had said she'd been there to lay traps, that they hadn't expected any opposition. For all that, she was a quick thinker in the heat of the moment, and she clearly knew what she was doing with those seals. That barrier had been impressive.

He jerked his head at the kunai with its deactivation tag still dangling from the trap behind him, and she got it immediately, yanking on a vanishingly thin wire to dislodge the kunai. Not a moment too soon, either, as the lightning caster was back on his feet, rounding the corner. He sent another bolt roaring and crackling towards them. Genma leapt forward, careful to tread only where Rina's own feet had touched the ground, and spread his arms wide, shielding her, pushing her down. He threw up a defensive jutsu around them, a thin shell of charged dust drawn from the stone walls and floors.

Lightning sheeted over them, making every hair stand on end, fusing Genma's dust shell into brittle, opaque glass thinner than a hair. It shattered and cracked, falling to pieces around them. He glanced back to see the Kumo ninja readying another jutsu, hands in the air. "Go!" he shouted at Rina. The enemy ninja took another two steps forward, focused on his targets. Genma saw the script of Rina's seal flare bright, and he pushed her against the wall. There was a rumbling shudder through the stone, a searing wind blasting them from behind. A sound worse than a dying scream, as her explosive trap blew the Kumo jounin to pieces.

Huddled behind the masked ANBU, an arm flung across her face to shield her eyes from debris, Rina couldn't help her lips curving into a feral, satisfied grin despite her fear. She put both feelings aside though, straightening and leaping up to catch the low ceiling with chakra, swinging over a dense pit of curling ink to land securely on the other side. She moved away, one careful step further down, to allow the ANBU to follow her.

"There are more enemies at this exit, too. At least two of them; I can feel them meddling with my seals." One quick leap, balance on one leg, a gecko-like scuttle along the wall, then two solid feet on the ground again. "That's why I didn't go out this way before." Rina looked back, but the ANBU was right behind her, keeping a wary watch on the settling cloud of dust and what might be hidden behind it.

She didn't slow down.

They were two steps from the narrowing of the center chamber, about to enter the winding back passage that would eventually bring them back above ground, when Rina saw the heads of two of the Kumo jounin's comrades poke up above the dissipating smoke. They looked a little the worse for wear, coughing and bloodied, but didn't show any signs of ending their pursuit. The one on the left started to press gloved fingers into seals.

"Here--" She caught the ANBU's attention, holding a kunai in her teeth and rapidly looping a seal-tag onto its hilt in one deft motion. She handed it to him; he was behind her, so he had to throw it. The attached tag was larger than a typical explosive note, and there were multiple colors of kanji thickly inked on each side. "We'll have five seconds until it goes off."

Genma had never seen such an intricate tag before, but given the size of the explosion her other tag had generated, he had no doubt this one was nasty, too. Five seconds could be an eternity, or no time at all. He wanted to ask her if the timer had already started, but given how close their pursuers were, he just had to trust blindly, throw, and run. Although maybe a little extra insurance that the kunai stayed where he threw it would be good. His fingers flew through seals: ox, snake, rat, dragon, tiger... The kunai tip started to glow.

A fresh rain of steel clattered against his armoured back; five-pointed shuriken raked across his shoulders. He swore and hurled Rina's kunai, aiming for a forehead protector etched with Kumogakure's distinctive cloud emblem. The targeted ninja brought up a kunai of his own to deflect it, and screamed when the near-molten steel of the Leaf blade fused instantly to his own weapon.

Rina was already running down the passage, wall-walking to the left, hands on the ceiling for a body-length, then back to the floor, dodging hidden traps and concealed trip wires. Genma did his best to follow her exact path. He hoped there was a fairly generous margin of error, especially when it was tested a half-second later, as one of the Kumo ninja's jutsu connected, knocking Genma forward with a blast of electric-charged water. He slammed chakra to his feet and hands, grabbing for rough stone walls, anchoring his skid. Rina looked back, face aghast, as he swayed a few centimeters from a darkly inked line concealed in a crag in the rock floor.

Then, behind them, her tag detonated and the chaos started.

They were already around a corner, so she couldn't see anything. Rina didn't need to see, though, to feel the shuddering remnants of the fuse fade, and the tag ignite.

A burst of chakra erupted, rippling the air in a silent explosion, roaring forth from the rigid confines of paper and ink. It surged outward, a pressure wave disturbing neither stone nor flesh. Five meters in radius; Rina felt the tail edges of its effects tickle her skin.

In its wake, everywhere it touched, ink sprang to life.

"Let's go!" Rina shouted, her voice barely audible over the cacaphony of sound behind them.

Explosive traps. Paralysis traps. Wire traps, needle traps, stone traps. Lightning traps, and traps within traps. Most of her seal portfolio, and more that she'd made up on the spot. Half a day of solid seal-work to booby-trap the bunker, and three -- four? -- more hours of terror, building herself shell upon shell of protection, encasing herself in ink to ward off the predators lurking outside.

All of her defenses, exploding at once into an inferno of destruction behind her.

With the heat scorching her back, and the ground trembling beneath her, Rina sank stabilizing chakra into her hands and feet, and ran.

There were two sounds Genma listened for over the thunder of unleashed jutsu behind them: a scream cut short, as the screamer's lungs collapsed; a low, wet, rattling moan. The sounds of death. The air was choked with smoke now, crackling with chakra, and the passageway which had been dim before became labyrinthine and treacherously black, as the few electric lights overhead surged and winked out.

He followed the sound of Rina's feet, pushed chakra to his eyes. She was a dim figure ahead of him, signaling something, too indistinct to see. He grabbed a glow-stick from his belt and snapped it, washing them in eerie green light.

He still couldn't see what she was pointing to, but it had to be another trap to be avoided. It was safest to simply nod and follow, let her lead. They came to a juncture half blocked by sacks of rice, boxes of turnips and potatoes, barrels of some unknown liquid. Food storage for this bunker. She skirted around them, flipping up to the ceiling again with a lithe move that made her look weightless.

He could hear her ragged breathing, feel his own lungs laboring in the dust and smoke, as they scuttled through the dark. Over the stench of explosives and damp earth, he caught the tang of blood. A lot of blood. Too much to be coming from the shallow scratches on his own shoulders. Rina paused at a turning, jerked her head in an odd gesture, and pressed back against the wall, allowing Genma to move past her. At the end of the passageway, he could see two figures bent over a third. Several meters closer to them, a decapitated head stared sightlessly into the gloom, under lank grey hair and a Kumogakure hitai-ate.

How many more traps between here and there? he signed. Can I cast jutsu safely?

Rina squinted at his gloved fingers, channeled chakra to her eyes to make out his signals more clearly in the dim green glow. She leaned against the wall for a moment, thinking back. Three, she signed finally, pointing at each. One pressure activated, on the ground way over there, one tripwire halfway down the passage-- see there? And a binding seal, floor-to-ceiling, closest to us.

Considering his question, she evaluated each of the seals. Should be fine, if you keep it above the tripwire. The binding seal wouldn't go off for anything less than physical presence, but the tripwire was fragile, and she'd rather not set off another conflagration if she could help it. Well, unless it was a conflagration that was burning Kumo-nin...

With that thought, she riffled through a few more tags stashed in her chuunin vest. Plucking one out by feel--thick paper, three notches in the border--she offered it to the shadowed ANBU. Short range, intense blast, she signed, with a tilt of her head that left the choice up to him. She didn't know what jutsu he had in his arsenal, after all. Three second fuse, if you want it.

Genma nodded and took the tag, wrapping its wire-stiff strings around the handle of a small kunai. He signaled to her to step further back into the shadows, then raised his hands in seals, setting a concealing jutsu on himself that let him move along the surface of the stone wall like a ripple of sand. He needed to be closer to the targets if he was going to cast his jutsu narrowly enough to avoid that trip wire. He got as close as he dared to the binding seal Rina had pointed out, and carefully dropped his jutsu. Neither Kumo ninja looked up.

A glance back told him Rina was safe. She held her body tense, weapons at the ready. Genma nodded again, pushed chakra into the explosive tag to arm it, and sent the kunai hurtling down the hallway towards the exit. Then he cast the fastest, most carefully focused fire jutsu of his life, sending a thin stream of flame spitting over the trip wire and into the Cloud ninja's midst.

They responded with frightening speed, hurling weapons back at Genma with a shout. One of them started to run towards them, but the other caught him, hauling him back. "We haven't disabled the trap!" she screamed. Her companion fell heavily back against her, while she flashed through handseals, then slammed her hands against the wall. The stones near Genma's head trembled and started to come down.

"Fuck!" He retreated, dodging stones and crumbling mortar. The whole hallway shook. Then Rina's slow fuse burned down and the tag exploded. There was another shuddering rumble, a surge of chakra from the far end of the hall, and Genma was thrown off his feet. He scrambled back up, grabbed at Rina's arm, and ran back the way they'd come. When they got to the juncture with the turnips and rice again, he stopped long enough to cast an earth jutsu behind them, filling the unstable hallway with what he hoped was enough stone to keep this end of the ceiling from collapsing.

"OK, which way out now?"

Rina laughed weakly. "Well, that didn't quite go as well as I'd planned..." She leaned against a barrel of water and tried to catch her breath. Funny, the ANBU's voice, though muffled by that creepy mask, sounded strangely familiar...

"I guess we have to go back to the other exit." She twitched a shoulder towards the way they came, where the scent of smoke, scorched flesh, and blood was still emanating from the hallway. "Unless you know an Earth jutsu that'll clear out that passage?"

Silence, and a shake of the head.

"Yeah, I don't either." She shrugged a little sheepishly, though maybe he couldn't see it in the dark, and began picking her way back down the hall. "I should've been more careful with those traps, but I didn't exactly expect to be in here when they were going off... I'm surprised the whole thing hasn't come down on our heads yet. Good craftsmanship, I guess."

An ominous rumble behind her made her wince, and sped her feet. She took a deep breath, wrinkling her nose at the stench, and let it out in a short, sharp exhale, trying to calm herself. Left wall, leap to the ceiling, land toe between the lines, and leap again--

The main chamber looked like a cracked eggshell, smooth and hollowed out and empty. A haze of smoke still hung in the air, and crazed fractures ran along the stone. Spattered across the floor and one of the walls, there were scorch marks that might have taken the vague outlines of human bodies, and a fine ash littered the floor. The tracings of ink had been burnt into the granite.

None of the seals in here are active anymore, Rina signed, reluctant to speak, as they stood on the threshold. We can just walk through.

There was nothing left of the crowded room they'd last seen. No enemies, no weapons, no furniture, not even a blood stain. It was chilling to stare at the sheer absence, to see hints and suggestions of the lives that had been obliterated in Rina's maelstrom. How much chakra had she poured into those traps and seals? He gave her a worried look now, and saw the lines of fatigue, the pallor. She paced soundlessly across the room, carefully treading around the shadow-remnants of ash and char that showed where the Kumo ninja had met their fates. He followed her steps, and when he caught up to her, wordlessly pressed a soldier pill into her hand.

When she looked at him, he mimed taking it. The last thing he needed was her passing out from chakra depletion. He lifted his canteen in offer. She took it with a grateful smile, washing the pill down with a long swallow of water. When she handed him the canteen back, she made a face. Genma nodded in sympathy: soldier pills tasted terrible, and she was just a chuunin--probably had almost no experience of them. When he hooked his canteen back to his belt, he fished out a sour plum candy for her, giving it to her with another nod of the head.

There was no sound from the passage ahead of them, but there had been plenty of enemies he'd passed on his silent way in to the heart of this trap, and it would be the height of foolishness to assume Rina's traps had gotten them all. Let me lead, he signed to her. From here to the air shaft he'd wormed his way in through, he knew the safe route.

He hoped.

Right, there was a snare...

Oh. There. Where another Kumo ninja lay, unmoving, face turned black from the wire around her neck. That trap, at least, was safely detonated.

Rina shuddered and skirted wide, edging as far as she could around the bloated flesh and accusing eyes of the latest death on her conscience. So many--there were so many! Why did Kumogakure care so much? She and her teammates weren't that important...

Probably Intel had dropped rumors to bait the trap, she decided, some kind of codebreaking goldmine or something stored here. But she shied away from thinking about it further, pressing herself against the wall to let the ANBU pass. Shouji must have told him the route, if he'd gotten in here safely the first time, but she watched his steps just to make sure.

The syrupy candy and the residue from the soldier pill blended together in her mouth into something not entirely unpleasant: like sugared lightning, it trickled down her throat and made her lips tingle. She placed her feet with easy confidence, careful not to overshoot on her leaps, and when she felt a trap pull taut farther down the hallway, she had a one-second explosive tag ready and wrapped almost before she could blink in recognition.

"Enemy," she hissed over the ANBU's shoulder, where he clung to the wall, in case he hadn't sensed it. When he turned halfway towards her--did he have peripheral vision through that mask?--she switched to sign. Caught in my paralysis-drain seal, near the entrance. Pulls power for a blast tag just beyond it. Her fingers flashed quickly, frantically, only pausing for a moment to make sure he understood. The paired seals had been one of her better designs, she'd always thought, but just now...

They couldn't afford to collapse this exit too.

She felt the chemical energy searing through her channels kick-start her heart up into a higher beat. Despite herself, her lips curved into a desperate, adrenaline-fueled grin. You deal with the enemies, I'll deactivate the tag. She was already speeding down the hallway, and felt him beside her, her shadow. Two minutes.

Two minutes. That would be plenty of time. Genma puled out a kunai and translocated to where the trapped enemy lay against the wall, struggling against seals that held him bound. His eyes widened in terror when Genma appeared in front of him. Exhausted terror. Rina's trap held him fast, paralyzing all but heart and diaphragm, so the man couldn't shout, couldn't struggle, could do nothing but feel his chakra draining away with every passing second. He was dark-skinned, a native of Lightning Country's lowland, and his eyes were blood-shot and tinted even where they showed whites. His blood, when Genma slit his throat, was as red as any man's, flowing from a jugular as vulnerable as Genma's or Rina's.

He glanced at her, still busy with her trap. Safe to proceed? he signed. She nodded hesitantly. Safe enough, he guessed. They were nearing the exit. There was the Konoha jounin's body. He should have warned Rina, but it was too late now. At least he could take the man's tags back with him. He yanked the chain free without even looking at the name, stuffing the tags into the same pocket where he'd stashed the Kumo senbon.

Rina was just catching up to him when he stood. There was no battle sign for I'm sorry.

She looked stricken, and he wanted to comfort her, but there was another ominous crumble, the sound of stone falling. The bunker was weakened, starting to fail. If they waited it would be their crypt as well as the grave of Rina's partner and the Kumo corpses they were leaving behind. He grabbed for her wrist and pulled her after him.

Same way out as in, and just as blind and precarious. He jumped up, grabbing at nearly impossible hand-holds in the ductwork, and started climbing the vent shaft that would lead them to safety.