We chewed on that one the rest of the morning, but came to no conclusions.
I was sorely tempted to propose a string of vacation loops together, but I knew Naruto was even more sick of that damned chuunin exam than I was. So when it came time to decide on our next more I pushed for something constructive instead.
“Obviously we need to figure out how to deal with Akatsuki,” I pointed out. “But there are some other leads we should follow up too. I’m starting to think it would be a good idea to find out exactly what Orochimaru’s cursed seal does, and maybe figure out how to remove it. We might need to get Naruto promoted to satisfy the wish, so someone needs to work on who’s blocking that and how to get rid of them.”
“What about the other Hinata?” Naruto asked. “There’s no way I can just leave her like she is now, and I’ve never had any luck getting into someone else’s loop.”
“I’ve got some ideas on that front, but it’s going to take me a few loops to get them worked out,” I replied. “I can actually see the link that lets you summon me here if I’m meditating deeply enough, and if I can dig up the right bits of sealing lore I may be able to figure out how it works and duplicate the effect. Mind you, Hinata’s the easy one. I’ve got no idea what we’re going to do about Sasuke even if we could get at him.”
“Me neither.” Naruto shook his head. “We’ll have to keep thinking about that one. Hinata, I hate for us to part again so soon, but do you think you’d be ok if you did a few long loops with Sakura? I’d love to keep you with me instead, but I think she’s going to have the harder job to do.”
“Yes,” she replied. “I’ll miss you terribly, but Sakura and I have become much closer over the last few years. As long as I have at least one of you near I think I’ll be alright.”
“Alright, then here’s what we’re going to do. Sakura, I want you to take Hinata and do some recon on Akatsuki. We need to know who their members are, what they’re after, how to fight them, all that fun stuff. While you’re doing that I’ll see if I can crack Orochimaru’s security and find out about that seal. We’ll probably both have a lot of dying and forced loop resets doing that, but we don’t have to finish before we meet again. So I’ll summon you again in, say, eight loops.”
“You got it,” I said. “Don’t worry, Naruto. I don’t care how tough these guys are, Hinata and I together can crack anyone’s security.”
19. Infiltration
Obligatory Disclaimer: I don’t own Naruto.
We started with the meager information that was available from the ANBU files. Akatsuki members rarely bothered to hide their affiliation, and although the organization was only a few years old they were already gaining a reputation as an exceptionally nasty group. Unfortunately agents who actually identified an Akatsuki member rarely lived to report it, but the pattern of sightings made a few things clear. The group didn’t have many members, but they were all S-rank opponents. There were probably about a dozen of them, and there was a good chance they had some instant means of communication. I knew from Jiraiya that they wanted to collect the bijuu, but they wouldn’t actually start for another couple of years.
Unfortunately none of that offered a good starting point. Itachi was a member, so in theory I could have gone back to my ‘lost Uchiha’ ploy, but even stealing Sasuke’s eyes instead of growing my own might not be safe for me now. There was still a scar on my soul where my demon self’s Nidhogg connection had been, and that was one brand of fire I wasn’t eager to play with again.
Hinata and I discussed angles repeatedly during one long loop of covert research, as we systematically ferreted out every scrap of information Konoha had about the elusive group. Then we went to work.
Our first try at infiltrating Amegakure was an obvious route. I left an aspect at home to carry on with the chuunin exam, while Hinata and went to scout the farms and villages around the enemy stronghold to get a feel for how they did things. You can’t really seal off all access to a major city for long unless you want all the inhabitants to starve, so there had to be a process for shipping in goods. Once we knew their procedures it shouldn’t be hard to put together a cover that would get us inside.
Except that the little paper angel charms the locals hung everywhere were actually tied into some sort of elaborate spying jutsu that spanned the entire country, and it was only a matter of hours before Pein showed up to deal with us. If not for Hinata’s eyes I wouldn’t even have known what gave us away. So we let him kill us without doing anything to reveal that we weren’t some random chuunin spy team, and went back for another look. This time we started with a careful examination of one of those charms.
“It’s very convenient to be able to try again without resetting,” Hinata commented as she examined the folded slip of paper. “I’d hate to have to redo the written exam every time we get this wrong. I don’t know how you used to do it.”
“I didn’t have much choice,” I pointed out as I probed the delicate weave of chakra. “Oh, and are you sure this thing doesn’t transmit sound?”
“Oops.” She had the grace to look chagrined. “You’re right, it probably does. Sorry.”
I shrugged. “No worries. Unless he can teleport he isn’t going to catch us before we get back over the border, anyway. So, is it just me or is this thing actually a quasi-stable chakra matrix?”
She nodded. “Yes, it’s a clone of a transformation, very elaborate. I see a connection branching off into summon-space, so I think it’s live, but I can’t trace what it’s connected to. You’re better at seals than I am, can you tell what this part here does?”
I focused my perception as best I could out here in the real world, and got a fuzzy impression of the maze of seals that made up the technique. “Hmm. I think that’s an eye. Yeah, these things are definitely sensing devices. But there’s another stretch that looks like an animation technique, and probably a locator. That means… oh. Wow. That’s amazing.”
“What?”
“Picture someone who can transform themselves into paper, dissolve it into a swarm of little origami birds or butterflies or something, and clone parts of the swarm pretty much indefinitely. I think that’s what we’re up against.”
“You’re kidding,” Hinata protested. “I know swarm transformations are possible, but to clone the parts and hold them permanently? There are thousands of these things, Sakura. How does she handle the sensory input?”
“You got a gender off the chakra? Good, that helps. I think she’s cloning her mind too, or at least part of it. The paper charms are like a swarm of Shadow Clones, except that they can send reports back to their maker without dispelling.”
“That’s amazing,” Hinata said. “I wish she was on our side. Oh, here comes Pein. Six miles out on a flying summon, under an A-rank cloaking genjutsu.”
This time we ran, but he proved perfectly willing to follow us across the border. We were a couple of miles inside Fire Country when his six bodies dropped out of the sky around us and started taking us apart in full view of a small farming village.
I wanted to find out a bit more about his abilities, so this time we pretended to be jounin instead of chuunin. That was enough to force him to actually use a few techniques, but even on that level he beat us with startling ease. First one of him blew Hinata into a rock face with some kind of invisible repulsion field, and another reached over and… ripped her soul from her body? Holy crap.
I invoked our contract to pull her out of his grip and into my mindscape, but the instant of distraction was enough for another one to stab me in the gut with one of those odd metal rods they fought with. My chakra immediately went haywire in a rather familiar manner.