Note to self: Orochimaru is one serious badass.
“Gaara, you’re supposed to be a strong opponent. Fight me.”
I’d intercepted his team in the Forest of Death, but Temari and Kankuro weren’t about to get involved in one of Gaara’s fights. They retreated into the trees as their brother strolled into the clearing where I stood and grinned at me.
“You want to prove my existence? Alright, I’ll kill you next.”
Naruto probably would have talked to the little psycho, but I’m happy to leave that warrior therapist crap to him. I don’t really care why crazy people go around killing everyone they meet. This time my earth armor was already in place, so when he sent his sand sweeping in to crush me I replied with my first idea for a counter-technique.
“Earth Flow River!”
Unfortunately the sand was so heavily charged with demonic chakra that my technique just slid off of it, turning the ground around it to mud but doing nothing to slow the attack. I had to do a quick replacement to escape being crushed.
“Damn. Ok, let’s try a different approach,” I muttered. I filled the clearing with illusionary mist and formed three earth clones, then went invisible and faded into the trees while they spread out to encircle him. He didn’t seem to realize the mist was an illusion, but it didn’t affect the sand. When my clones attacked the sand blocked their strikes effortlessly, and its counterattacks forced them to dodge and dance around him instead of pounding their way through.
I’m a lot faster and stronger than my earth clones, but would even my full strength penetrate his defenses? No, this called for a real armor-piercing attack.
I formed a Rasengan in one hand, and flashed across the clearing at full speed to strike at his side. A shield of sand formed in front of me barely a foot before I would have made contact, and I slammed the ball of whirling chakra into it with a burst of super-strength.
It cut through his sand like it wasn’t even there, and proceeded on to penetrate his armor, skin and ribs before it finally destabilized and exploded. The blast gouged out a crater twenty feet across and sent me sailing back nearly to the tree line, but my earth armor held. I even managed to flip in the air and land on my feet.
Little bits of Gaara rained down all over the area. Eww.
I looked up at the cringing pair of Sand nin in the trees. “So much for Sand’s jinchuuriki. You two get your asses down here and answer some questions or you’re next.”
A pale-faced Temari started to move, then gasped and took a step back. I followed her eyes, and found that the sand was still moving. In fact, it was growing. Pouring out of the ground in an endless stream, a haze of red chakra gathering around it as it began to assume a familiar shape.
“Oh, shit.”
The Shukaku was free.
The next loop I spent my time training my speed and chakra capacity, and placed earth clones at strategic points around the village to observe the details of the invasion.
“Ok, Naruto can take down Gaara without killing him and freeing the Shukaku. I’m not going to be beating Orochimaru anytime soon, and I’d probably just be in the Hokage’s way if I was trapped inside that barrier. What else can I affect?”
The three-headed snake smashing a breach in the wall caught my eye, and I nodded. “Yeah, I can kill that thing before it strikes. Big, slow and powerful just makes it an easy target for me. That means they have to take the wall the hard way, which gives me time to sneak around behind them and pick people off. I’m sure they’ve got a backup plan, but if I take a loop to find out what it is I bet I can screw it up too.”
I like it. Their assault gets stalled at the city wall, so Jiraiya doesn’t have to wear himself out stopping it. That gives him a shot at intercepting an injured Orochimaru as he flees the village.
I nodded. “Yeah. We still lose the Hokage and a lot of people at the stadium, not to mention the civilians at the shelters. But that’s still a much better outcome that usual.”
We’re pretty good with genjutsu too. Think we could set up a counter for the big sleep field at the stadium?
“Maybe, but we’d have to be there instead of the wall. We could have Naruto stop the assault instead, but then Gaara runs loose. What we really need is…a third person.”
Our Hinata couldn’t beat Gaara, but I think the looping one could.
“I was afraid you were going to say that. But we haven’t had a loop with three of us together, and if it’s random it would be…hmm…a long, long wait.”
Gaara’s monster form swelled out of the trees, and I smiled grimly. “Well, enough talk. That’s our cue.”
Usually I fought at the arena if I wanted to blow off steam, or just snuck out of town and waited for the loop to end otherwise. But it had finally occurred to me that the confusion of the invasion was the perfect cover for just about any sort of illicit mayhem I might want to get up to. So I cloaked myself in my best invisibility genjutsu, and ghosted into the Hokage’s tower.
Sure enough, the only guards left in the place were a pair of rookie ANBU who didn’t even see me before I took them down. The door to the secure records room was a more imposing obstacle, being a mass of chakra-forged steel several inches thick covered by a forest of security seals. It would take days to get through it, and I only had a few hours.
So I walked a few feet down the hall, formed a Rasengan in my hand, and carefully pressed it into the concrete wall while concentrating keeping the whirling ball of chakra stable. It bit into the concrete with a sound like a buzz saw, spewing bits of jagged stone and steel out of the hole, and in less than a minute my hand was all the way through the wall. I dismissed the technique, peered through the six-inch hole, and formed an earth clone on the other side of the wall.
Then I replaced myself with it.
Humming merrily, I set about cataloging the contents of the vault. Who knows? Maybe the reason why Orochimaru was so set on destroying Konoha was in here.
I was a lot less merry when I restored Hinata at the start of the next loop. But I didn’t want to get distracted and miss the test, so it wasn’t until that afternoon that I got to pass on my news. We met at our usual spot atop the Hokage monument after dealing with the test and our teams, and I filled her in on my fights with Gaara and Orochimaru.
“Then you’re making progress,” she observed. “So why are you upset?”
“Because I just spent the last six hours of the invasion going through the Hokage’s secure records vault, and I’m not happy about what I learned. Did you know that Itachi was acting on orders when he massacred his clan?”
“What?” Hinata gasped. “But, why?”
“Oh, it wasn’t the Hokage who told him to do it. It was the leader of some secret ANBU group called Root. Apparently the Uchiha were plotting to seize power, and Danzo decided the whole clan needed to die a tragic death.”
“But, they made Itachi do it?” Hinata protested. “And then take the blame himself, instead of admitting why? That’s…like something father would do.”
“Yeah, heaven forbid that we admit one of our clans was plotting a coup. The village would lose far too much face over that. Better to destroy our best ninja’s life, and let his little brother turn into a vengeance-obsessed lunatic. The crazy thing is, I’m pretty sure Itachi is still sending in reports.”
“After all that?” Hinata shook her head. “He’s more loyal than I am, then. Was it all like that?”
“No. But there was a lot more of it than I ever suspected, and I was already afraid of what I would find. Damn it, this whole village is built on lies and treachery,” I fumed.