The Zero Tails Jinchuriki #27

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Land of Fire

–Kenta Senju–

“So?” He prompted the leader of the trio, the strongest Jounin here, who was looking at him with a fearful expression on his face, and yet, his other senses told him something completely different from his eyes. His heartbeat was stable, no fear in his eyes and he was cycling his chakra for something.

The other two were different, normal somehow, not cold and unfeeling like the shinobi in front of him. Whatever it was he expected from the shinobi, it was not him taking out a kunai, lacing it with Wind Chakra, and stabbing it towards his comrade.

He expected an assault on himself and so was a beat too late to act, as the Kunai found itself in the other person’s arm, having reacted at the last moment. The next moment, he had the head of the attacker in his palm, smashed him into the ground, cratering it. Having knocked him out, he straightened up and looked at the now panicking duo.

“Names! Now!”

The one who was not stabbed spoke, “Uh–sir, his name," He pointed at the unconscious shinobi, “Is Masato Inoue.”

“I am Tetsuya Morimoto and he is,” Tetsuya gestured at the stabbed man who was desperately keeping himself steady, “Renji Takemura.”

“Okay, Tetsuya, get me some binds, restrain Masato here and do not move from this place until I am back. Do you understand?” he asked, his chakra leaking out towards the end, rooting the two of them in their place as they hurriedly nodded at him. 

He eyed the Kunai still stuck in the man’s arm. The bleeding had stopped but he clearly needed some medical attention. Thankfully, it did not seem to be poisoned in any way. He wondered what drove Masato to do it. He should have known that it would be impossible to realistically hide anything from him and just killing people to erase any evidence would have just brought more scrutiny over the entire situation and once T&I got involved, they usually did get to the root of most things.

“Patch him up, I’ll be back by sundown. Until then, no one gets in or out, relay my orders.”

“Yes, sir!”

With that, he made his way down and ordered every Uchiha to be moved further into the outpost, as he ran towards the border. Who knows what was the situation to have so many Uchiha, shinobi who were generally stronger than their non-Doujutsu counterparts simply because of their Sharingan.

Within minutes, he had reached the duo headed towards the border, checked their condition, and deeming them capable of going back. His sudden appearance in their vision must have spooked them as they promptly drew on their kunai, and activated their sharingan. 

Two Tomoe and Three Tomow. Hmm, decent.

“Halt! You are to return to the outpost at once. I have new orders in place, Tetsuya will relay them to you. For now, you are to return and rest at the outpost until I return. Remember, no one gets out without my say so,” He threw his command seal at him, as one of them read it, sagged in relief, showed it to the other who promptly deactivated his Sharingan and all but collapsed on the spot, the tension leaving his body.

“I understand you guys are not in the optimal condition, therefore you can go back and rest. Also, guard your clan members. The rate of injury amongst your clan has been much higher than expected. I will be back,” Saying so, he took the command seal back and then he blurred from the spot, using Ninjutsu–no–Sage Mode Ninjutsu to reach the borders faster than anyone else could. Within a few minutes, he already encountered the first batch of shinobi from Konoha, a veteran Chunin from the looks of it, flanked by another Chunin, though the other seemed recently graduated.

He ignored them, since they were nowhere near any enemy shinobi and also, the chances of them knowing anything important was close to null. So, he moved around, spotting patrolling shinobi after shinobi, tagging them in his mind, noting their condition before moving onto the next squad he could sense.

So far, he had come across 20 plus shinobi, of which only 4 were Jounin, while the rest were Chunin, with no Genin in sight, at least based on the chakra levels he could sense. Knowing that just the amount of chakra someone had was not the sole metric with which one could gauge a shinobi’s strength, he was confident that there were no Genin here, which made sense.

It was still an active conflict zone.

Most of them were in rough shape, not because of injuries but because of exhaustion. Little bruises, cuts here and there but the most important of them all were the bags under their eyes, even for the Jounins here. He noted another 5 Uchiha shinobi here, which was somewhat understandable since the Lightning Based techniques of most Kumo shinobi could be easily countered by the Sharingan of the Uchiha Clan.

Either by their Sharingan seeing the chakra buildup before the jutsu could be executed or by their eyes’ precognitive abilities, allowing them to predict their opponent’s moves before they were executed, giving the Uchiha shinobi a leg up in terms of Close quarter combat, another specialty of Kumo shinobi.

Still, if things were done correctly in his opinion, a border front with heavy Uchiha presence should have someone higher up who was also an Uchiha, right? All three Jounin who were supposed to be relaying orders from the village were civilian shinobi, no clan origin whatsoever. He checked on the way here, as major points of contact were listed in the mission scroll.

As he moved across the border area, noting the areas with scorched earth, trees and otherwise large craters, he felt no shinobi whose chakra nature was lightning. Not even a minor one, proving his theory correct. They were just doing this to harass the shinobi here.

Hit and run attacks during the night and probably one attack during the way for every three or more attacks during the night, keeping all the shinobi on their toes. Plus, all the damage he could see meant that the Kumo shinobi had only attacked the fringes of the border, never venturing deep inside.

Due to that, the higher ups did not deem it important enough to send in any serious reinforcements here, with only Orochimaru’s sighting being alarming enough for Sarutobi to send him here. He wondered how he would kill Orochimaru if they fought.

The Sannin was a master of Ninjutsu and Kinjutsu as well, on top of being a Snake Summoner, giving him a massive advantage over him if Orochimaru just wanted to flee. Not to mention the team that was reportedly moving with him.

Orochimaru’s standards could not have possibly been low enough for him to carry around low calibre shinobi. With his obsession of Kekkei Genkai well known across the Elemental Nations, there was a really high chance that some, if not most, of the members of his team were shinobi with bloodline limits, and fighting those was always tricky if the exact nature of their bloodline was not known in advance.

So, he kept watch, over the entire line of patrol route that the Konoha shinobi followed, over the caves that were known to Konoha and the ones he found, with traces of chakra still in them.

Which meant those caves were recently made. He could see the exhaustion in Konoha’s forces but he did not tell them he was here or to go back since he could handle most of this by himself. Only because he did not want to spook the Kumo shinobi. Once they were here and he could see someone important enough, he would move in to interrogate them.

Thankfully, the nature of the Zero Tails made it easy to interrogate most people, given that they were already mentally disoriented. Disorienting someone was far easier than torture, which did not work much if a Yamanaka specialist was not nearby to confirm if the information that was being given was true or just trash blurted out to stop the pain.

It was one of the main reasons why the shinobi from enemy villages, especially the important ones, never really surrendered to Konoha. Konoha was well known to be a village full of tree huggers, a slur used to denote shinobi who were soft, who did not take advantage of the ruthless tactics that the other villages used.

Because Konoha did not target the lower grunts, which was useless anyway. The people up at the top were another story entirely. There were horror stories, some spread by Konoha itself, about the interrogation prowess of Konoha, some of which was true and some which was patently false, which helped cement Konoha’s terrifying perception.

It made information gathering infinitely easier, once they were already in Konoha’s hands, since the threat of getting to T&I was sometimes enough to get people talking.

As expected, for the entirety of the day, they did not see any Kumo shinobi, and no activity from Orochimaru either. 

The real game would begin at night, then.