The corridor lit up in a flash of light as Naruto activated the seal on his palm. After a second’s focus he was able to use the transformation technique to condense the light into a beam that illuminated the stone walls stretching out before them, and he took several long seconds sweeping the beam across every inch of the stone passageway before finally allowing himself to breathe easy once more.

“I cannot hear or smell anyone,” Lee said. “We seem to be in the clear.”

The trio gingerly entered into the underground tunnel, the echoes of their footsteps kept company only by the distant rumble of explosive tags detonating intermittently above the surface. Naruto had not entered Konoha’s underground tunnel network since Kakashi had tricked him and Sasuke into going down there as a ‘practical lesson’ for their first genjutsu training session. Now that they were actually using them, it turned out that there was a pretty huge security risk in having secret tunnels going underneath crucial Village infrastructure, and so as a result they tended not to actually lead anywhere.

At least, not that Naruto knew at his level of clearance.

“We’ll split up here,” Sasuke said when they arrived at a side-passage. “I have to take care of something.”

“Take care of-” Naruto stopped, only barely remembering to keep his beam of light steady as he turned to face his pale companion. “Sasuke, we’re in the middle of a warzone. What are you talking about?”

“It’s important,” the Uchiha said distractedly. There was a hint of doubt on his face which if Naruto did not know any better he would have called fear. “This tunnel leads straight towards and under the Naka River. If you go up the next ladder you’ll come out in my part of the Uchiha district. You should be able to make it towards the evacuation point from there – nobody would bother to attack that part of town.”

Naruto looked at his teammate, at the person who had crumpled under pressure the last time they were caught in a village under siege, and decided that that was very definitely not what was going on here.

“Sasuke,” he said, “I dunno what you’re planning, but whatever it is, you can take care of it later. Kakashi trusted us to help evacuate the civilians, remember?” The fact that it had been Sasuke who stopped him from convincing Kakashi that they should stick together was not in any way lost on him.

“Naruto-san is right,” Lee said. “Kakashi-san gave us an important A-rank mission! We must not allow ourselves to fail in our duty.”

“Kakashi gave you a mission,” Sasuke said. “Not me.” He formed the seals for the transformation technique, and from out of nowhere a wave of pure darkness blasted towards them, so black and intense that it caused even Naruto’s beam of light to flicker and wane. Naruto gasped and stumbled backwards as the sheer nothingness threatened to overwhelm him, and it was only when he poured his full strength into the light seal that he managed to break through and chase away the shadow.

By the time he did, the corridor was already empty.

“He is gone,” Lee said, pointlessly. He turned from the side-passage to Naruto and back again, a helpless expression on his face. “If I go after him, I could still… but then I would have to leave you behind, and-” He clutched his head. “Ahh! It is one of those unwinnable, secret tests of character they made us do at the academy. I never figured out how to beat those!”

“Never mind that,” Naruto said. He pushed himself up against the tunnel wall, trying vainly to steady the beating of his heart. For a moment there, Sasuke’s chakra had felt like fire as it washed over his skin: Like an oil lamp that had just gone out, but which still radiated a smouldering heat long after it had lost all light. “Sasuke is a threat to just about anybody except himself. He’s the last person we should be worried about right now.”

Sakura was at the hospital with Tsunade of the Sannin, and Hinata and Neji would be safe at the Hyūga compound. But that still left five of his classmates including Tenten, who would either have been on their way to the meeting spot or already waiting for him there when the attack happened. He could not help but feel responsible if anything were to happen to them.

“Right,” Lee said, dubiously. “I suppose that if I only bring one of you back alive, it still counts as half a successful mission.”

“Or you could just bring back half of each of us and call it good,” Naruto said. “Come on, the sooner we get out of this stupid tunnel, the better.” It occurred to him that he was now the person with the highest rank in their team, not to mention the most common sense, and he did not feel at all comfortable with that situation.

The two of them kept going. There was a brief moment of panic when Lee spotted a shadow darting between the rafters, but it only turned out to be a rat. Naruto still threw a shuriken at it to be on the safe side: You never knew if someone out there owned the rat contract or something. Or if it had been mind-controlled by a rogue Yamanaka clan member to spy on them. It was a crazy world they lived in.

“Naruto-san,” Lee said after a while. “Now that we are alone, I should thank you for all that you have done for Tenten and myself. All my life I wanted to use ninjutsu, to be more like the others… But I had given up on that dream. Gai-sensei convinced me that true strength lies in finding your own path, but it was you who taught me that only by acknowledging reality may you find a way to overcome it.”

“Don’t mention it,” Naruto mumbled. Those words had come back to haunt him so many times now that he could scarcely think them worth it. Somehow, winning Lee over had cost him Hinata, and Tenten had almost ended up hating him as well. It was like the world existed in a balance and raising one end of the scale only caused the other to dip, until it seemed like all his best intentions made no difference at all.

“Please do not dismiss my words so easily, Naruto-sensei.” Lee tugged on his shoulder and turned him until the two of them were eye to eye. “If I had given you everything you ever wanted, would you really think of it as nothing?”

Everything I ever wanted…

Once more, he was back on top of the hillock overlooking the Land of Waves, standing in front of those silently accusing graves. Back then he had lashed out at Sasuke, blaming his teammate for everything that had gone wrong. “I never asked for you to save me! All I wanted was to protect Tazuna-san, but you, you blew him up! All I wanted… all I ever wanted was to save somebody.”

As Naruto looked at Lee, he could feel himself ever so slowly starting to smile. “The thing I want most right now is to get out of this tunnel,” he said. “Come on, Lee. Let’s complete your mission.”

Lee grinned. “Yes sir, Naruto-sensei!”

“And don’t call me that. You’re older than me and it’s super weird.”

“As you wish, Taichō!”

Naruto let out a groan. Perhaps being trapped down there with Sasuke had not been so bad after all.

-o-

High up and above the mist that had filled the streets and alleys of Konoha, elder Chiyo of the Honoured Siblings surveyed the corpse-strewn battlefield. Now that she was firmly on the back of her great horned puppet, floating high up in the air and with two more white-robed puppets guarding her flanks and rear in an approximation of the Manji formation, using the body-flicker technique to get within striking range of her again would be essentially impossible. In truth she really should have assumed this formation right from the start, but close familiarity with life had altogether removed her fear of death.

Now all that is left is to get revenge for my children, and then I will finally be at peace, she thought. Or failing that, perhaps I could aspire to cease turning in my grave before the end of this era.

Almost immediately after she revealed Monzaemon’s ten white puppets, Hatake Kakashi had cast the Hiding in Mist technique and resorted to ambush tactics. As a strategy it made sense: With the Sharingan he would still be able to see her chakra, while her own tired old eyes could scarcely make out the ground beneath her feet. She took some satisfaction in imagining how frustrating it must be for her opponent, to be outmanoeuvred at every turn by an old woman who by all rights should be nearly blind.

There was a crawling sensation across her skin underneath her right sleeve, and she quickly deciphered the information it provided. Beneath me, coming from behind at one-hundred-sixty degrees and approaching swiftly. She pulled on one of her chakra strings, and the female puppet below her spun around and swung its chakra blades at the unseen assailant. She could practically hear the White Fang cursing in frustration as he withdrew once more, his chakra expended to no effect.

She smiled in grim satisfaction. There was no way the man would just leave her to slaughter more Leaf ninjas unopposed, no matter how sensible a decision that would be. At one point, a team of Leaf chūnin had actually broken from their fight against the Kazekage’s forces to try and assist the White Fang, only to run straight into the wire-string traps that he had set up for her. There was something almost poetic about that, she thought – not that she had ever cared much for poetry.

A sudden explosion shook her out of her thoughts. The White Fang had burst out of the mist from another angle and struck one of her puppets with a swirling ball of blue energy, blasting straight through its shimmering chakra shield and shattering the priceless masterpiece into a thousand fragments. In response her nine remaining puppets launched a hail of needles and knives at the White Fang from every direction at once, shredding his body and pinning it to the wall of a nearby civilian structure.

She approached warily, suspecting another trap, but the figure did not disappear as she and her floating puppet bodyguards drew closer. The young red-headed man in front of her looked up, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth as he looked at her in horror. “…mother? Mother, why did you-”

She dispelled the image in frank disgust, already raising her puppets’ shields to block the volley of mist-shrouded shuriken that had been coming at her from every direction. “Do you think you’re the first genjutsu user to use the image of my dead son against me, White Fang? I have faced the Sharingan before, and I know how to deal with it.” Right at that moment, a spiked chain shot out of the mist and wrapped itself around her and her puppet bodyguard, shields and all. At the same time a silver-haired figure burst out of the ground beneath her and breathed a grand fireball directly at her exposed feet.

She tore her left arm free from the chains with no heed for the spikes that ripped across her flesh, and channelled chakra through the chakra shield tattoo on her skin to block the great gout of fire. Right as she did so a flash of blue lightning raced along the chain to the sound of a thousand chirping birds, and all of a sudden the chain was cutting straight through the shields and the puppets that carried them. Left with no other way out, she let go of her great horned puppet and leaped up into the air and away from the three white puppets beneath her even as they disappeared in a storm of fire and thunder.

She used her chakra strings to guide her fall towards the earth, but no sooner did she touch the ground or a dozen ravenous dogs came bursting out of the mist from all directions. She slammed her hands upon the ground and summoned all remaining puppets to her location, only to realize that two of them now had explosive tags attached to them. She tore the tags off one of them and used her chakra strings to hurl them directly at the slavering hounds along with the second puppet, causing them to scatter and disappear to the sound of howls and yelps as they vanished back to the place from which they came.

She watched the scene of devastation breathlessly, some of the explosions still going off around her. A seven-tiered attack. Was the previous White Fang this strong? My poor children never stood a chance…

At last the White Fang himself appeared behind her, chakra sword outstretched and aiming for her neck, but the crawling sensation on her right arm easily let her intercept the attack with one of her puppets. She calmly turned to regard her opponent, who was stalking her warily as he tried to get around the red-headed puppet girl that had parried him. He was breathing heavily and looked visibly tired despite his mask.

She cocked her head. “Is that all? Come now, White Fang, there’s no need to hold back just because I’m a tired old woman.”

He looked at her with an unreadable expression for another second, and then vanished into thin air.

Looks like he’s finally had enough. She rolled up her sleeve to confirm that the golden sand on her right arm was still pointing towards the same location as before: Hatake Kakashi’s true body was still underground, at a distance of what appeared to be about ten meters and digging slowly away from her. He should be nearly out of chakra by now, she thought. Time to bring this to a close.

Without making any sound that might alarm the White Fang as to what she was doing, her remaining white puppets drifted towards the indicated spot like ghosts. One with a head carved like that of a horse began planting explosives into the dirt street, while another drilled the bombs deep into the earth using cables that extended from deep within its bald white head. The moment they reached the White Fang’s tunnel she detonated the explosives with a spark of chakra, and then the earth shook beneath their feet.

There was a twitch on her right arm as the Kazekage’s golden sand picked up on the White Fang’s panicked movements, and then her target burst out of the ground and was instantly met by a hail of poisoned projectiles from every direction. Even then, even then the White Fang somehow managed to evade all but a few of them, but it was enough. Her target landed in the dirt, bleeding from shallow yet still ultimately poisoned wounds, surrounded on all sides by four white puppets bearing down on him.

“There you are, White Fang. Finally done playing hide-and-seek?”

-o-

She can track my location? How?

Kakashi leaped directly on top of the great horned puppet even as it bore down on him, using it as a platform to vault away from the rest of his attackers. He formed the seals for the body-flicker technique, and the world blurred around him as his body was almost hurled towards the nearest alley with breakneck speed.

Is she a sensor? Possible, but more likely –

Not a second later the puppets were flying after him again, pushing and squirming past each other through the narrow alleyway in their haste to get at him. Chiyo was riding on the back of her great horned puppet, pausing only to glance at some dust on her right arm which glowed faintly with chakra.

The Kazekage’s gold-sensing technique! When did he place his dust on me? During the Chūnin exams? More importantly…

He dove into the nearest building and slapped explosive tags along the walls as he ran, before dashing out the door on the other side and detonating the explosives behind him. He could feel the heat of the shockwave on his back as it virtually hurled his body out onto the street, and as he rolled back onto his feet he could see the entire structure collapse on top of his pursuers. Not even two seconds later the puppets began to rise out of the smoking wreckage, blue chakra shields raised against the cascade of brick and mortar, the angry clacking of their puppet parts taking on an almost vengeful tone.

How do I get rid of the sand? Likely locations: Hair, clothes, skin. Wash it off? He cast the waterfall technique and let the torrent wash over him as he ran, but though it drenched him from head to toe he already knew deep down that it would not avail him. If I were the Kazekage, I would have pushed that golden sand deep inside my pores so that it could never be made to leave…

He ran up the wall of a civilian store as projectiles impacted the ground behind him, before leaping from roof to roof until he reached the top of a large apartment complex. The sound of fighting had been growing louder as he moved, he realized, and as he looked around he saw that he had found his way into the centre of Konoha, a place that had once been bustling with life but which was now a cacophony of death. All around him the fighting stretched, fireballs blazing overhead and igniting trees and rooftops wherever they struck, while blades of wind passed through the air and sliced through ninjas and civilians alike. With the Sharingan blazing in his eye he could see the smoke rising from where the armoury had been ransacked, could see a trail of corpses that led into the Hyūga compound on the other side of the Village, even as more and more bodies were carried in the direction of Konoha’s only hospital.

How? How is this possible? The Kazekage was not supposed to have access to these kinds of forces…

The puppets rose up behind him once more, and he leaped down into the streets below. He flashed through the seals for the transformation technique without thinking, bending all light around him so that he was all but invisible by the time he touched the ground. He created a simple illusory clone to move in the opposite direction while he ran straight towards the centre of the fighting, ducking underneath stray shuriken and darting between Leaf and Wind chūnin alike. Not that it would make any difference: He had known from the moment he looked into her eyes that Chiyo would cut straight through her own people if it helped her reach him faster. She was his perfect nemesis, having had twenty years to study his techniques and caring for nothing but her vengeance, as if the spirits had sculpted her from clay to be his undoing…

Was this how it felt, Minato-sensei? Seeing the Nine-tails rise up in front of you, knowing exactly what was about to happen but realizing that there was nothing you could do to stop it?

He had never even seen the real enemy. Nobody except Jiraiya and the Third would imagine that these events were anything but what they appeared to be. They had been so perfectly orchestrated to seem natural that they could only be anything but. For that was the Enemy’s mark; that was the one and only way that they could see his movements, that they could know that he was even real.

As far as weaknesses went, it was not much of one.

Kakashi stumbled to a halt in front of another dark alley. He faintly realized that he was completely out of breath, and his invisibility technique was getting harder and harder to hold on to. He was almost out of chakra of course, but… No, wait, her weapons are poisoned. He had known that, had told himself that right from the start, and yet somehow he had forgotten. A mind-affecting drug? Or something worse?

He looked up and saw that Chiyo was hovering directly above the roof of the apartment complex from which he had leaped down. She was fending off a few brave chūnin who had seen in her a desperate chance to turn the tide of battle – or else they were simply fools who did not realize how outmatched they were. As her puppets slew the last of them she glanced back at her right arm, where the golden sand could still be seen radiating through the power of his Sharingan as it searched for his location.

Obito… you said this eye would not just be useless dead weight, remember? Please make true on that promise, one last time.

He channelled every last bit of his chakra into his left eye, forcing it and holding it there until at last he could feel the valve behind it open: The chakra gate which his self-professed rival had taught him to control, powering the eye that had been gifted to him, fuelled by the will of those he had sworn to protect. The world grew black around him, until that one sliver of light was all that he could still see.

Kamui!