"Hinata!" Shikamaru called urgently. "What's the situation? Where's Sasuke gone?"
"Sakura-chan and the others are continuing the mission, but Neji-niisan is coming back to help!" Hinata said, her gaze fixed on the sky. "Sasuke-kun has taken to the skies on his summoned beast to confront them!"
Shikamaru exhaled deeply and closed his eyes to think.
Sakura had told them to prioritise their own lives over the mission, but it was too early to give up now. According to Hinata, the enemy were not too numerous, so if Sasuke could handle Danzō, it would not be impossible for them to achieve both objectives. After all, he and Neji were proper monsters…
"Tenten, Hinata," Shikamaru said decisively. "Go fetch Neji and return as soon as possible."
Hinata hesitated. "But, Shikamaru-kun…"
If she and Hinata left, then Shikamaru would be left all alone. As the team's tactician, he was the weakest amongst them, and with it being nighttime in the middle of nowhere, his ability to manipulate shadows would be severely inhibited.
"I'll be fine," Shikamaru said urgently. "Now, go!"
Hinata took Tenten's hand, but no sooner had they vanished than an enormous, orange fireball lit up the sky above, briefly illuminating the night. As the light faded, Shikamaru caught sight of multiple flaming meteors streaking across the heavens before crashing around the rocky outcrop beneath which he stood, falling both near and far from him.
Evidently, Sasuke had made his move.
"What a drag," Shikamaru muttered to himself, regretfully patting his pouch of explosive tags. "If it weren't for this being a stealth mission, I could have set up a defensive perimeter ahead of time… a real one."
Shielded by their master's sand, most of the Root operatives survived their fiery crash landings. Within moments, they had extinguished the flickers of flame still licking at their bodies and turned their gazes in Shikamaru's direction…
"I wouldn't come any closer, if I were you," Shikamaru called out lazily. "I've set up mines all around myself, and only I know where they are…"
"He's bluffing," a voice rang out from the darkness almost at once. "I don't see any buried explosive tags."
Shikamaru remained impassive, one hand tightly clutching a small paper-wrapped ball behind his back. He could barely see his black-robed, animal-masked opponents in the darkness, but although they could use chakra to attenuate the sound of their footsteps, they could not completely silence the rustle of tall grass as they moved through it.
"Argh!" Shikamaru grunted as several kunai came flying towards him through the darkness, cutting into his sleeves and embedding themselves in his flak jacket. "...not… yet!"
In a flash, three Root shinobi appeared around him, following through with the initial wave of attacks, but Shikamaru abruptly raised his hand and crushed the paper-wrapped ball in his fist. The flash bomb erupted in a torrent of brilliant white light spilling through his fingers, and blinded by the miniature sun in his palm, the Root shinobi recoiled, reflexively shielding their eyes.
"Hiden: Shadow Strangle Jutsu!"
Ignoring the searing pain in his palm, Shikamaru manipulated strands of pure darkness into bursting out from the shadows cast by his fingers in the lingering light, tightly winding them around his attackers' bodies and stopping them in their tracks.
However, the light from the bomb was fading fast, and without light, there could be no shadow…
"Hiden: Shadow Possession Jutsu!"
Still holding the rat hand sign, Shikamaru flattened out the dark bindings into their collective shadows, releasing the Root shinobi from their strangleholds but forcing them to imitate his every move. In their minds, his opponents believed he was simply buying time, so they simply bided their own time.
"Let's go for a walk, shall we?" Shikamaru grunted. "To the minefield we go…"
One step…
Two steps…
Three steps…
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Three ear-shattering explosions tore through the night as Shikamaru walked the three Root shinobi into their companions, who had remained on standby at a safe distance to avoid accidentally hitting their allies or being caught by his shadows, in case Shikamaru managed to conjure himself some light, as he had just done.
'What the…!?'
Yamanaka Fū's pupils contracted slightly. He could have sworn there was no such minefield, his implanted Byakugan had shown him no signs of buried explosive tags. He cast his penetrating gaze around the battlefield, but once again, he saw no such booby traps.
The Root shinobi, who had been about to pounce on Shikamaru the moment he stopped using their comrades as human shields, suddenly hesitated to approach him. They had no qualms about throwing away their lives if necessary, but now that their leader, Danzō, had been banished from the village and lost his ability to recruit more soldiers, they were no longer quite as expendable as before… and getting themselves blown up for no reason was not going to be of much help to his cause.
Blown away by the shockwave, Shikamaru fell onto his butt.
"What's… the matter…?" he gasped through the pain, a snide grin tugging at his lips as his opponents hesitated. "Scared… or something?"
Thanks to Hinata's warning that the enemy had the Byakugan, Shikamaru had thought up a little scheme to fool his opponents. The reason he had led with the Shadow Strangle Jutsu was because it could do something the Shadow Possession Jutsu couldn't do: it could make his shadow act like an extension of his own body!
Using the blinding flash of light as cover, Shikamaru had secretly sent tendrils of darkness snaking into his pouch of explosive tags, before using the shadow tentacles to fix the bombs beneath his opponents' feet, creating the illusion that they had stepped on mines when he forced them to walk into their friends!
Unfortunately, Shadow Possession was a two-way street.
Although Shikamaru had timed the paper bomb's detonation well, he had still been a fraction of a second too slow to retract his shadow. When his victims' bodies were torn apart by the explosion, his body was forced to mimic the shadows of their limbs flying away, dislocating his shoulder and breaking his legs!
Without wasting any more time, the remaining Root shinobi flung their kunai at him, but badly injured, Shikamaru would not be able to save himself this time. He closed his eyes, expecting the worst…
"Rotation!"
…and heard a series of metallic peals.
Shikamaru cracked open an eye. Neji, Hinata and Tenten were standing before him in the middle of a ring of flattened grass.
"Took your sweet time," he croaked, eyes rolling back into his head.