Genma could feel the skin on his shoulders blister, smell the scorching of his vest over the scent of burned grass. It was a miracle the whole shrine hadn't gone up in flames — maybe because of Inari's divine presence, or more likely because the enemy's fire jutsu had burned chakra more than wood.

He dove for what little cover there was: a gnarled and ancient cedar tree. Rina was still in the open, dammit, and they didn't know where the attacks were coming from. He called up more chakra of his own, bringing a pair of shadow clones into being, then cast another jutsu to create the illusion of a dozen more, and a henge to make half of them look like Rina. He sent the targets rushing out to meet her. The shadow clones frantically gestured for her to take cover.

Senbon filled the air: crackling, lightning-channeling senbon like the ones he'd been hit with earlier. Clones vanished as they were struck; shadow clones staggered and took heavier blows, but then evaporated with a back-blow of chakra when the needle-guided lightning surged into them.

Fuck. Fuck, where was Rina? But at least he had an idea where to direct his fire now. He slithered into another concealing jutsu, flowing through dry grass towards a rocky outcrop. When he was in range, he unleashed senbon of his own, watching with satisfaction when the poisoned needle sank home behind the Kumo ninja's ear. It was the woman who had kicked the Konoha corpse. Her death, clawing at her throat, bloody foam and spittle flecking her lips, was little compensation, but it was better than none at all.

He had no time to savor it. A roar of thunder shook the earth as a trap set by the Kumo nin went off. Genma was flung into the air, hurled backwards in a devil's grip when a hand as big as his whole torso formed from crackling plasma and squeezed the air, the very life, out of him. A swift substitution jutsu left a wooden log crumbling to splinters in his place.

Where the fuck was Rina?

Rina, currently, was huddled in a crouched heap underground, riding out the earthquake aftershocks of whatever monumental jutsu had just gone off, trying to conserve oxygen and keep her chakra bottled beneath her skin. Luckily--or very, very unluckily--there were enough high-powered jutsu being thrown around above her that she doubted her meager presence would be all that noticeable--unless they managed to eliminate the ANBU first, in which case she knew she'd have had no chance anyway.

The problem with hiding underground was that you couldn't see. With the explosions and muffled sounds she could more feel than hear, the effect was maddening. If she'd had traps up there, she'd at least have been able to feel them going off, but as it was she'd ducked under as soon as the senbon had started flying--no time to do anything at all. Back to being a turtle in a shell...

She pulled out a tag, fingering it idly, eyes closed and all attention focused on mapping out the chakra presences she could faintly feel above her. Dirt was exceedingly good at shielding chakra; that's why underground was such a good place to hide. On the other hand, she was sensitive, and the firefight currently going on above ground was not exactly subtle...

There. Turning towards four-o-clock, there was a chakra presence three meters ahead and two straight up. Not the ANBU, she recognized his signature by now--and hadn't she sensed it somewhere before?--so it must be one of the Cloud-nin. Feeling like some kind of deranged earthworm, she pressed her hands together in seals, and dirt swirled up around her.

Earth jutsu blew through her chakra at a ridiculous rate, but then, she had plenty to spare just now, surging through her channels with an unnatural tang. So, arriving just below her target, she shoved all she could fit into activating and enhancing the largest short-fuse tag she could find, then wrenched on the rest to take her away.

Three... two... one...

One minute there was a frighteningly skilled Kumo swordsman rushing at Genma, surrounded by a blur of chakra and light from a jutsu he'd never seen before. The next, the earth erupted under the attacker's feet with a blinding flash and a deafening roar. Genma was thrown back by the intensity of it, momentarily stunned, and lost track of where the other ninja landed. As he tucked and rolled away from the explosion, he felt his skin prickle, felt every hair rise.

Lightning jutsu, he thought, and tried to anticipate where it was coming from. When a streaking column of fire came straight down from the heavy clouds overhead, Genma was glad he was still hugging the ground. The thunderclap was immense and nearly simultaneous with the retina-searing bolt. A second flash arced across the treetops, blasting half a young cedar to pieces as the sap in its trunk boiled. Then the skies opened, pounding the earth with hailstones as large as walnuts.

Was it a jutsu? It had to be a jutsu, Genma thought frantically. Shuriken came streaking out of the chaos, and Genma just had time to draw his sword to deflect them, when the metal in his hand started to burn and tingle. Fuck if a katana wasn't an excellent lightning rod! He flung it as hard and far from himself as he could, rolling backwards in a frantic effort to distance himself from...

Lightning wrapped around the sword before it had even hit the ground.

"Rina!" he screamed over the din of hail and thunder. Ice cracked against his skull, pinged off his mask, left welts and bruises along his arms.

Astonishingly, the Kumo ninja let off their attack. In the clearing one lay crumpled and burned, face upturned to the merciless sky. Another darted in, racing towards her downed comrade, but she retreated before she reached him, as another bolt of lightning split the air. Genma could smell the ozone, almost see the steam as rain and hail wrapped around the coursing electricity.

When the lightning died, he hurled more of his dwindling supply of kunai at the Kumo woman, who had run again towards the fallen ninja and was trying to drag him away. Other Cloud ninja were shouting to each other in their own dialect, but Genma caught enough of their words to recognize "retreat" and "storm" and "danger". The wind was tremendous, lashing the falling water into a vision-obscuring mist. Lightning continued to shatter the sky, and the clouds, when Genma looked up, were a poisonous green-violet, roiling and tumultuous.

This wasn't a jutsu: it was one of Lightning Country's infamous killer tempests.

"Rina!" he screamed again. Retreat was definitely the right option, but where the hell was the woman he was supposed to be rescuing?

"Here!" Rina called, wrapping herself in chakra and mud and forcing the waterlogged ground to spew her out, coughing and sputtering and drenched. The earth here was loose and rich, accustomed and yielding to the sudden torrential deluge. Her small burrow had filled with water almost before she could gasp and hold a breath.

The avalanche of ice and battering wind made it hard to stand, hard to see. "Where are you?" she shouted into the flashing haze, stealth discarded in the face of urgency, but the air currents whipped her voice away into nothingness. She couldn't find him, couldn't find the Cloud-nin--

No, there, they were leaving, bursts of blinding ghost-light illuminating a haggard band of dark-clad shapes in silhouette, wounded comrades hoisted on their shoulders. Nearly within kunai-range, but as an ear-splitting simultaneous crack of thunder and lightning propelled Rina shuddering to the ground--too close!--the thought of chasing after them was unthinkable.

Closing her eyes against the water and ice pellets streaming down her back and the sides of her face, Rina felt out for chakra signatures once more. The charged crackling of elemental power above her was like a beacon, but she tried to filter it out, grasping for something weaker.

There.

"I'm over here!" she called out again, shoving to her feet and stumbling blindly towards the compact, steady pulse of energy that paled into insignificance next to what the storm could bring.

Genma sprinted towards Rina the moment he saw her. She was covered in mud, but unhurt. Mostly unhurt. There was a bruise already blooming where one of the hailstones had struck her cheek, but that was acceptable, under the circumstances. He caught at her wrist, a fleeting moment of touch to reassure himself she was no illusion, then signed to her to follow, sprinting for the paltry cover afforded by wind-whipped evergreens.

Retreat now was their best chance. Retreat before the Kumo ninja regrouped and resumed their pursuit. Retreat while the storm drove every sensible living thing to ground; while torrents falling from the sky could obscure their tracks and scent; while million volt surges of lightning masked their chakra. For a kilometer or so they ran like hunted deer, dodging falling branches, slipping on rain-slicked earth that threatened to give way to mudslides and flash floods, shuddering at thunder that split their ears, lightning that was still close enough to raise gooseflesh with every flash.

Genma took the lead, following a circuitous route into tree tops and out, through gullies flooded with icy rainwater, over bare rock and dangerous scree along steep hillsides. He didn't let up until he was nearly collapsing with fatigue, lungs burning, chest heaving. Rina looked exhausted, too, when he finally saw the landmark he'd been looking for: a cleft in one standing piece of granite, from which grew a single maple, still clinging tenaciously to its turning leaves, despite the hail storm's pelting.

In there, he signed, and made for the narrow crack in the rock's face. Inside there was a tiny hollow, excavated during the war years. Spiderwebs crisscrossed the entrance, and the smell of guano announced the presence of bats. Genma checked carefully, but there was no sign of any human activity. This hideout was, at least for now, still undiscovered. He waited for Rina to get safely inside, then pulled a standard concealment seal from his pouch and slapped it on the edge of the entrance. With a surge of chakra to activate it, he collapsed into a crouch, tearing his mask from his face and gulping air.

Rina frowned at the simple seal, but left it, too bone-weary to add anything more complicated. Even with the unfamiliar chemical energy sparking through her system, just trying to keep the ANBU in sight on that breakneck dash--at far below his top speed, she was sure--left her abused limbs feeling like water and her mind clouded with a haze of exhaustion. She half-sat, half-fell onto the packed dirt, her concentration narrowed to filling her starved lungs with chill air, so watery it felt like drowning.

"Thank you," were the first words she choked out, breathless and panting, once she could speak again. So much more than just that, but it was a start. She repeated it, in case he had missed it the first time. "Thank you."

And looked up.

"Genma?"

"Yep," he panted, lips lifting into an open-mouthed grin. "Sorry I couldn't tell you before. I was a little busy." His smile was short-lived; there was too much to do. Warmth, for one thing, would be good. It was only September, but in the alpine heights of Lightning Country, the air was chilled enough that he could see his and Rina's breath frosting out like puffs of smoke.

He'd left his foil blanket with Shouji. If the chuunin was still alive — and he couldn't be, not by Genma's estimation — but if he was, that blanket and the trees Genma had left him under were his only shelter from this storm.

Genma knew a couple of warming jutsu; maybe one of those would help. Rina was shaking, almost looking shocky. Maybe he should get some food into her, too. "How long since you last ate?" he asked, already pulling a ration bar out of his kit. The movement pulled on his abused shoulders, and for the first time since they'd escaped, he winced.

"I don't like your new Kumo friends. I think you should stop seeing them."

Rina stared blankly for another second, then broke into weak, helpless giggles. What else was there to do? "I'll keep that in mind--"

The giggles turned into coughs mid-phrase, her throat catching on the impossibly dense air. Still halfway between mirth and struggling to breathe, she scooted over closer to him, hoping to share his warmth. "I can't believe-- They didn't even tell me you were back on active duty!" She'd have to have a few choice words with the hospital administration, when they got back.

When. Now, that was a nice word.

Accepting the ration bar gratefully, she fumbled at the wrapping with numb, eager fingers. "I did eat this morning," she told him, her implied apology rather spoiled by the way she devoured the bar in three desperate bites. Breakfast had been a long time ago, with Shouji and Yushiro, leftover rabbit around a campfire--

Don't think about it.

She pulled one of her own bars out of a pouch in her vest, and unwrapped it more slowly. Lemon poppyseed: not her favorite, but not bad.

"Hold still a second, okay?" Genma said. When she nodded, he ran his hands quickly over her, checking for injuries he couldn't see, chakra disruptions, anything amiss. Other than cold, soaked-to-the-skin, hungry, and running on dwindling chakra reserves bolstered by that soldier pill he'd given her, she seemed okay. He breathed a sharp sigh of relief and worked his stiff, aching fingers through another sequence of seals, channeling warmth into her and around her. Steam rose from her sopping uniform and his equally drenched gloves, which baked dry as he worked the jutsu.

A sharper pain in his left hand had him stopping abruptly, turning away from her with a curse. She looked up, pale face framing huge, worried eyes. "It's okay," he told her. "It's fine. Eat. Are you warmer now?"

He fished around in his medkit for a soldier pill for himself, popping it between his teeth and crunching down to speed absorption. That had been a lot of heavy-duty jutsu — more than he'd realized. And he'd taken more than a few hits. At least there was still no sign of any poison effect from those lightning-infused senbon. He glanced at his injured shoulder, but couldn't really see easily. A clone would be useful, but... But yeah, a clone would cost chakra he'd rather conserve, and another jutsu would hurt his hands like a son of a bitch.

With food in her stomach and Genma's jutsu thawing her extremities, Genma's flinch was enough to jolt Rina out of her half-frozen daze. "It's not fine," she told him sharply, watching him contort awkwardly to check himself over. Sudden chagrin made her retort harsher than it otherwise would have been. He'd been protecting her all this way--she hardly had a scratch on her, while she knew he'd been hit at least a few times--and now she was just sitting there like a useless genin, letting him take care of her.

"I must be in great shape, compared to you," she concluded reluctantly, finally looking at him. There were more than just a couple of isolated tears in that sleek ANBU uniform, and, now that she thought about it--stupid stupid stupid--his hands must be utterly killing him in this weather. In fact, she was shocked--and secretly just a little bit proud--that they were still working, considering all the abuse they'd just had piled on them.

"I may not be a field medic, but I do know some things." Plenty of anatomy, more first aid than just average bare-bones competence, and a considerable amount of other assorted medical knowledge gained from her recent months working as a seal assistant in the hospital. Ito-sensei hadn't been the only doctor she'd apprenticed with. "Will you let me look at that?" She was already leaning over to peer more closely at the scores across his shoulder, deep red slashes and angry welts mirroring the crimson of his tattoo below.

His hands, she'd leave until last.

"You were holed up in there pouring chakra into all those traps for how long? You're running on fumes as much as I am," Genma told her, but he crouched with a weary sigh and let her inspect his injuries. "It's not too bad, I don't think. Feels a little sunburny from that asshole with the fireball, and I got tagged with a couple of senbon on my way in to you that were chakra'd up with lightning. Don't think there was any poison on them, though, or I'd already be feeling it."

Her cold fingers probed at one of the deeper welts, and he flinched and hissed despite himself. "Sorry. Mission nerves. And I just took that soldier pill." Chemically supplied chakra coiled hot under his skin, speeding his heart, his breaths, his thoughts. Waking him up like a cup of that dense, inky coffee they drank in Wind Country. "You ever had one before? Sorry about the taste. Actually, yeah..." He interrupted her ministrations to uncap his canteen for a long swallow of water, then dug out another sour plum candy. "You want another? I'm gonna eat this one, but I have a few more."

Unwrapping it with fingers trembling and ablaze from within was harder and more telling than he wanted. He could feel her eyes on his hands, and oh, how those hands hurt. Like the chakra he'd channeled through them had scorched every nerve raw. Like the freshly-knit bones were cracking again, crazed and crumbling the way the wall of the bunker had been after Rina's obliterating firestorm.

Outside, the wind had settled into an unquiet rhythm, whipping the treetops, and driving rain in through the slit of a doorway to this tiny dugout. Lightning still flashed, though less frequently, preceding the thunder now by enough time to count. He glanced down at his hands, then up at her. "They worked."

"Yeah, they did," Rina agreed softly, pride warring with sharp concern in the pit of her stomach. Just looking at his hands, sheathed in thin and flexible black gloves, you couldn't tell. They looked just as they had before: broken. But when she focused, Rina could feel the way chakra strained to flow through weather-crimped channels, burned thick and fierce through fragile pathways cobbled together from sweat and blood and hope.

Hope wasn't as resilient as flesh, Rina knew.

Taking Genma's mention of his hands as acquiescence, Rina channeled a faint blue glow to the tips of her fingers and telegraphed a slow, steady reach to trace out the abused lines. The eighth sub-meridian hub was leaking acid chemical chakra all over the surrounding connections, she observed with a disconnected flinch, and the less said about the left proximal palmar circuit, the better--

"You should be more careful," Rina murmured, but the command had no strength behind it. Who was she to command him? The ghost-and-shadow uniform wrapping his pale limbs already told her that sometimes 'careful' wasn't possible.

She just had to put her trust in the Hokage and in Genma, and hope--frail, feeble hope--for the best.

Genma tolerated her questing fingers with growing unease, grinding back molars together in soldier pill-fueled tension while she probed beneath the non-armour of gloves hiding fresh red scars and aching, swollen joints. The gathering concern etched into her brow, and her soft little admonishment didn't help, and he finally yanked his hands away, rubbing one with the other unnecessarily roughly, as if further abuse could drive away the pain.

"I am careful. And I was released to full duty a couple weeks ago. I just had to do a lot of jutsu back there. Wasn't exactly sent on this mission. A rescue team is usually..." He swallowed and took a shallow breath. "Usually a two-to-one ratio." There had been six who'd come to retrieve him and his team from Iwagakure's hell hole just half a year ago. Six for three, but there had been only one left alive.

"I was on a courier. I aborted and redirected when I ran into your teammate." Something-or-other Shouji — Genma wasn't sure whether he should be ashamed he'd already forgotten the man's surname — who was probably dead by now. He jerked a haunted gaze back to Rina, taking solace in her wholeness. The worst mark on her was a bruise from a hailstone. He lifted one shaking fingertip to trace carefully over it, almost entranced.

Snatched his hand away again as soon as he realized what he'd done.

"I appreciate it," Rina told him quietly. "That you came for me." She stayed very still, inviting him to touch her if he wanted. Not moving when he pulled away.

Reassurance was hard to come by for someone like him, she guessed.

The storm was still trying its very best to hammer down their little shelter, the screeching winds whipping pine needles into miniature cyclones, lightning illuminating everything in harsh electric bursts. But inside, Genma's jutsu and their body heat were combining to warm the oppressive air into something almost tolerable. "If you don't let me look at that now," Rina continued in the same low and gentle tone, "it'll hurt a lot more when it warms up and the chakra starts to flow again."

Even her mild scrapes were starting to ache as they thawed; she didn't want to think about how his hands must be feeling. And she couldn't use any of her numbing seals or chakra dampening techniques, not here in the field. Not when they had no idea what could be out there.

Trying to appear unthreatening, she busied herself with antibiotic ointment and a bandage for his shoulder.

"Is there anything you can even do out here?" Genma asked. He sat unflinching while she applied ointment and gauze, with his toes curled tight inside his boots. When she patted the last bit of tape into place, he shivered and stood up, pacing away from her to peer out into the storm. No sign of pursuit, so far, but even the most foolhardy of Lightning Country's ninja were unlikely to venture into that maelstrom.

He spun back to find her looking at him. "Here. Here, let me see that," he said a little more gently, and took the tube of ointment from her to apply a smear to her bruised cheek. His hands were still shaking, and he dropped the cap.

"Fuck. Okay, fuck. Here." He checked over his shoulder again, then unbuckled his arm guards, stripped off his gloves, and held his reddened, scar-tracked hands out to her. "They always shake like that when I'm tired and I've just taken a soldier pill," he told her. "Ignore it."

Rina nodded absently, her attention already caught in the mangled and twisted chakra networks laid bare in front of her, by now as familiar to her as her own. "Sit down and rest them on your leg," she instructed, and arranged him to her liking.

The physical tracery of seals was gone now, of course, but she could still feel the scaffolding around which unnatural linkages had been forced to grow. It resonated with her own signature, a light and agile cursive, and with Ito-sensei's clear, strong hand. The patterns themselves were beautiful, Rina thought, even if the end result was not.

The repair work she could do in the field was minimal, certainly, but it was better than nothing. Soothing burns, smoothing kinks, patching leaks with stopgap precision. She parceled out her own energy in a steady, even flow, her paintbrush dancing in delicate lines, and watched some semblance of order reform from the shambles.

When the last swirl of ink snapped it all into place, Genma made a strangled choking noise, the tension in his shoulders running down to twist his palms into knots. Before he could jerk away, Rina drew her hands back.

"You'll thank me later," she told him clinically, cleaning her brushes and putting away her inks in swift, economical motions. Giving him a chance to recover himself. "Ito-sensei would have had you for another week, if you'd left that until we got home."

"Lucky for me it was you I had to save, then," Genma said through a tight jaw. He took shallow breaths, in through the nose, blowing out through pursed lips, while the bone-deep ache of Rina's jutsu settled into the meat of his hands. Crouching, he curled his fingers experimentally, hissing sharply at every crackle, every degree of flexion he coaxed out of them.

Seals, being able to do all twelve seals was the main thing. He ran through the entire zodiac: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, the twisting of dragon, snake, the angled tension of horse, ram, monkey--the easiest, and bird--the hardest, gentle dog, and the wrist-contorting double fist of boar. By the time he finished, his upper lip was beaded with sweat, and his stomach was churning.

He dropped back onto the ground, stretched one leg out in front on him, and uncapped his canteen, taking a long, steadying swallow. He wished he dared take one of those little yellow pain tablets from his med kit, but in a barely secure foxhole, in the middle of Kumogakure's territory, in a raging storm, with enemy ninja on their trail... He'd be more than a fool to prioritize comfort over alertness.

"I'm sorry I didn't get there sooner," he said instead. Rina, who had put away her tools, still looked a little shell-shocked. "Come sit over next to me and conserve some heat. I'm gonna have to write up a mission report about this, so you may as well tell me what the hell happened back there."

Right. Back there, in that hole in the ground, penned in on all sides by approaching enemies with no way to escape--

Rina laughed weakly and shifted closer to Genma, pressing her side against his when he allowed it. "We weren't supposed to see any action. There were three of us just to be safe, because I would be vulnerable--" Her nerve-charged images of Shouji and Yushiro skewered by kunai, peppered with shuriken, blown apart like Yushiro had been, flashed behind her eyes, clear as life. "Well. You know how that turned out."

A ninja shouldn't have a good imagination, Toshiro-sensei had told her several times, always with a weight behind it that she hadn't been able to decipher.

"We were just supposed to trap the bunker and leave. I guess they were going to leak the location, that some important intel was being stored there, to draw in the Cloud-nin? I don't know, it wasn't in my briefing..." She took a deep, shaky breath. "Anyway, something must have gone wrong, because they were suddenly on our backs. Yushiro managed to get out the warning, so I was able to hole up, but..."

Trailing off, Rina picked at the shredded knee of her uniform pants, not looking at Genma. "Shouji... That was hours ago." She had to ask. "He didn't... He told you where I was, and the safe route, right? But..."

Ribs blasted bare and bleeding. A head injury, skull cracked and pupils blown wide. Skin crackled black with burns. So many ways to be fatally injured and yet carry on for that last little bit longer.

"Shouji... did he make it?"

"I don't know," Genma answered truthfully. Felt her start to take a breath. "But I doubt it. He had some really bad internal bleeding. I made him as comfortable as I could, did what I could to keep him stable." He could feel her head turn against his chest, eyes drawn to a flash of lightning, to the gap through the stone where they could see the tempest raging. Shouji was out there, dead or dying, in that storm. Alone.

"The mission priority was to get you out. The worst thing would have been for you to be captured. He understood that. I let him make the call, whether I took the time to get him to a safe house, or headed out to get you immediately." It was far from comforting, he knew. Far from comforting.

He still woke up some nights with Kobo's order to get down! ringing in his ears. Kobo's startled, shocked expression as an Iwa blade tore his head from his neck. That blade had been intended for Genma's throat. Knowing your teammate had died to save you was no comfort at all.

He curled his arm around Rina's shoulder, pulled her closer, until he could hear her heartbeat, until he could lean his cheek down to touch the crown of her head.

"It's in the hands of merciful Amida Buddha," he said, and whispered the prayer for the dead.

The melodic phrases and susurrating syllables, full of hope and grace and utter blind faith, washed over Rina without taking hold. Even so, it was comforting to just let herself be cradled in Genma's arm, for this one moment. To let, for a moment, his strength and safety, his unshakable belief, sustain her.

When the prayer drew to a close, she pushed away.

The storm showed no signs of slacking, and absent Genma's warmth against her side, Rina shivered, covering the involuntary reaction by briskly checking through her gear. "I can at least put up some better concealment seals, since it looks like we'll be stuck here a while," she said to break the silence. Keeping busy was good, and if she could manage to be useful, so much the better.

It was a well-known fact that the more complex the seal, the less amenable it was to being sealed, itself, inside a storage scroll. It was something of a tired joke among the few seal specialists who took field missions--because paper was thin and light, but there really were only so many scrolls you could carry--and an endless annoyance for Inventory.

Right now, it was a real pain.

Still, Rina had found that it was possible to manage if you were patient and tried hard enough. So it was with some resignation that she pulled out a scroll as long as her forearm and thick as her wrist, rolled from rich, velvety paper. It had taken her an entire afternoon to seal away these more elaborate components of her arsenal, but she slid a finger along the scroll without hesitation, creating compact puffs of smoke and unfurling as she went. She'd depleted most of her ready inventory back at the bunker--don't think about it--and her bottles of ink were useless in the rain.

Packing away the fresh assortment of tumbledown scrolls in a careful order, she picked out one and fingered the slick, waterproofed parchment with proprietary satisfaction. "I've never seen anyone defeat this one," she said lightly, turning to Genma with a weary grin that still held more bravado than genuine cheer. "And then maybe we can take shifts on sleep?" Hope feathered her tone and lifted her shoulders.

Sleep was a luxury, but it was also a necessity. With a fresh soldier pill still humming through his system, it was one Genma could forgo. He could see the weariness in Rina's posture, almost feel her fatigue. Even her chakra presence felt frayed and pale: a light, shimmering apricot instead of her usual vibrancy.

"How much chakra is it going to take for you to put that up?" he asked, reaching for the tag. "And I don't want us to end up trapped in here, if they catch our scent again. There's not a back way out, unless we want to translocate blind. Fuck, I wish we had a Hyuuga with us."

"Not much chakra," she answered. "Most of it is in the preparation. And it's just a layered genjutsu, no traps. A good genjutsu, though," she added, with a hint of pride.

Genma had to smile. "Okay, you're the seal expert. I'm just the muscle." He watched her affix the seal to the tiny cave's entrance and press her palm to it diagonally. It activated with a faint greenish flare curling around the edges of the elaborate black script.

"You sleep, I've got watch. I'll wake you in three hours, as long as everything stays sane."

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Connect the Wii Motionplus accessory to your Wii Remote controller to increase accuracy and enhance play control on compatible games.PS3 Wired Dual Shock Controller