…
The atmosphere in the camp was tense with scattered groups of shinobi standing in clusters holding conversations in hushed tones.
Murakami scanned the gathering as he took his position beside Hideki and Sora.
Four teams swimming up to fifteen shinobi in total.
He committed the faces to memory without appearing to. If they were going into the same operation, knowing who was beside him mattered.
Team Yoshida stood to their right, Sakumo's white hair was easy to pick out among them alongside Ren and Mio.
Yoshida was broad-shouldered, a scar running down one cheek, with the composed bearing of someone long accustomed to war.
His team was young, but there was nothing inexperienced about the way they carried themselves.
Team Naoko flanked them, three chūnin led by a short-haired kunoichi whose quiet composure spoke of someone who had taken teams into danger and brought them home.
The last team was Team Shiba. Shiba had a lean and quiet build, the kind of quiet that made the space around him feel smaller.
His chunin looked like they'd been on the wrong end of a hundred missions and come back sharper each time.
Kaito stepped forward.
"You've all been briefed." His voice carried without rising. "We move in separate squads. The objective is the same; eliminate the enemy's forward scouts and disable their communication network before reinforcements can be called." He paused and swept his gaze over the gathered group. "Quite simple on paper."
Nobody said anything. Everyone knew what simple on paper meant in wartime.
"We leave in five minutes. Stay sharp."
Murakami looked at his teammates. Hideki's jaw was set. Sora's eyes had the look of someone already planning ahead.
His gaze moved on to Sakumo and his teammates and caught them looking at him. He gave them a solemn nod to which they returned.
…
The forest swallowed them as the teams split without signal, each taking their assigned approach.
Shiba's squad disappeared into the denser growth to the left. Naoko's team moved up the ridge to the right, taking the high ground above the objective. Yoshida's team angled parallel.
Kaito led his team straight down the center.
The objective sat at the end of this approach, the enemy's primary communication post, lightly patrolled from the rear which was the thinnest point of their perimeter.
That was the plan.
Kaito raised a fist and the group stopped and crouched in the undergrowth. Ahead, the faint orange glow of a campfire bled through the trees.
Four figures moved around it, unhurried and relaxed despite being behind enemy lines.
A mistake.
Kaito looked at Sora. Sora nodded and disappeared into the dark without a sound.
Hideki drew a kunai and held it low while Murakami summoned his staff and tracked the four guards, mapping the gaps between them, the order they'd need to go down in order to keep any of them from raising the alarm.
A flicker in the dark indicated Sora in position.
Kaito's hand dropped.
Sora's kunai found the first one before the man knew he was a target.
Hideki moved on the second, blades locked for half a second before Hideki broke the guard and drove his kunai home.
Murakami came in on the third, staff swinging low then up, the weighted end connecting with the guard's throat before he could draw breath.
The fourth was already turning when Kaito reached him and buried a kunai in his throat.
Four bodies brought down soundlessly.
And without pausing to admire their work, they moved on.
…
The air grew heavier the deeper they went.
Murakami's senses spread outward as they moved and caught fragments of what was going on with the other squads.
Yoshida's team were engaging another patrol unit somewhere to the left, the brief spike of chakra marked the exchange before it went quiet again.
'Something is wrong.' Murakami thought and frowned slightly.
He couldn't place a finger on it yet, just a pressure against his awareness that didn't match what his perception was feeding him.
He glanced at Kaito.
Kaito didn't seem to have felt anything as they kept moving, but Murakami knew better.
Minutes passed before the communication post became visible through the last line of trees.
Kaito raised his fist then made a couple signals with his fingers to which the trio nodded and moved into position.
But just then the ground exploded as a kunai hit the dirt three feet ahead of where Murakami crouched and detonated, the shockwave throwing stone debris across the clearing before the dust had settled.
Figures surged out of the dark from multiple directions simultaneously, their chakra signatures flaring to life all around them, signatures that had been there, Murakami realized in shock, the entire time, but masked so well that his perception hadn't penetrated.
He hadn't felt them coming.
"Ambush!" Kaito's voice cut through the noise, but they were already too late.
The clearing erupted with a flurry of kunai and shuriken raining down on them.
Steel clashed against steel as the group made an effort to deflect the incoming projectiles.
Murakami had just finished deflecting a couple of them when he sensed someone approaching him.
He spun on his feet and got a good look at the opponent, a lean shinobi with dark markings across his face, kunai driving toward his ribs.
He parried the hand, redirecting the strike downward, and put the staff's weighted end across the man's jaw. The man staggered but didn't go down.
'Chunin level at least.' Murakami concluded considering the force he used for that attack. 'Maybe higher.'
He adjusted and drove the staff forward in a straight thrust toward the man's exposed chest.
The shinobi twisted, trying to knock the shaft aside with his forearm, but he was a fraction too slow as the tip crashed through his guard and struck squarely over the sternum.
A dull crack echoed between them.
The man's eyes widened as the force lifted him off his feet before he hit the ground hard, blood spilling from his mouth as the impact caved his chest inward.
He convulsed once, then he lay still.
Murakami withdrew the staff without hesitation and shifted his attention to the rest of the battlefield.
Beside him Hideki caught an attacker mid-lunge, blades locking, then broke through the guard with raw force and drove his kunai into the shinobi's side.
Another took the fallen man's place before the body finished hitting the ground.
Sora took advantage of the darkness and moved through the chaos like he belonged in it, a kunai from his fingers found itself in an enemy's throat, and he was gone before the body dropped, reappearing behind another target.
Murakami scanned the field and picked up on a whooping thirty chakra signature spread in coordinated positions, not the loose formation of a surprised patrol but the deliberate geometry of a prepared kill zone.
Five chakra signatures stood out from the rest.
Definitely Jonin level Shinobi all on par with Kaito-sensei.
His mind caught up with what his senses had already processed.
This wasn't a communication post.
It was a trap.
He disengaged from a second attacker with a sharp redirection, buying two seconds of space, and scanned for Kaito and found him already deep in the press, moving through opponents with the efficiency of someone who had done this in worse conditions and survived.
"Kaito-sensei!" he called.
Kaito caught his gaze and nodded. "Fall back! It's a trap! Regroup!"
He had used his chakra to amplify his voice so his words passed through to the other teams.
He had no intention of fighting a battle the enemy had prepared for. Survival came before pride, and there was nothing honorable about dying to satisfy someone else's plan.
Murakami began pulling back, staff clearing space as he moved, when something flared at the edge of his senses.
The world seemed to slow down as he picked up on it. 'Shit! Looks like I drew their attention.'
The attack was close, fast and already committed in its trajectory.
It was a blade thrust toward the gap between his neck and shoulder from directly behind, the kind of strike meant to sever the spine before the victim even realized they had been targeted.
He started to turn, but even that was futile.
Whoever had struck had timed the attack perfectly, waiting until his attention was elsewhere.
The blade was already upon him.
In the next instant, Kaito stepped into its path.
His kunai intercepted the strike, deflected it, and followed through without pause in one motion into the enemy's throat.
The shinobi dropped.
Murakami steadied himself as his heart drummed in his chest.
For all his preparations, he had missed that. Completely.
He tightened his grip on the staff and pushed the thought down.
There was no time to sit with it.
Then Sora screamed.
It was brief, cut short almost immediately, and that made it worse.
Murakami turned towards the sound and froze at the sight.
Sora was on the ground, a kunai buried deep in his chest.
His body didn't move again. The shinobi who had struck him had already shifted to another target, treating Sora's death as nothing more than another completed exchange.
Hideki moved before Murakami could process the full picture with his kunai cutting the shinobi down.
The noise of the battlefield continued around him.
Murakami stood very still for exactly one second.
Sora wasn't moving.
The part of him that had been trained to keep moving in exactly this situation was already calculating the distance to the body, whether extraction was possible, whether the perimeter had closed enough to make it impossible.
The other part was doing something else entirely.
He had seen people die, he had killed his own fair share of them, especially on the escort mission.
Strangers, enemies, faces he'd catalogued and filed away without attachment.
That had been clean by comparison.
This was not clean.
He looked at Sora for one more second.
Then he turned away.
Not because it didn't matter.
Because the alternative was standing still, and standing still would make him the next body on the ground. Then Sora's death, and Kaito's timely intervention in saving his life would have meant nothing.
He locked it behind something and kept moving.
"Move!" Kaito's voice again, sharper now.
The retreat began in earnest.
But how could the enemy allow such an action?
The sound of shuriken cut through the air behind them and in the next instant, an explosion rocked the ground some meters back and the shockwave pushed them forward.
A Kumo shinobi burst out from Murakami's left, matching his pace in three quick strides before slashing a kunai toward his ribs.
Murakami caught the attacking wrist with the lower half of his staff and rolled it outward, causing the blade to skim harmlessly past his side as the man's balance shifted with the redirected momentum.
Murakami stepped into the opening without breaking stride, the end of the staff snapped up in a short, brutal arc beneath the man's jaw.
CRACK!
The shinobi's head whipped back, his feet leaving the ground for an instant before he collapsed into the dirt.
Murakami didn't spare the man a glance and continued on his sprint.
Through the trees ahead he could see the rest of the teams falling back, Sakumo's white hair visible for a moment before the dark swallowed him again.
He didn't sight Mio but Ren ran a few paces behind Sakumo with a limp arm hanging by his side.
Murakami felt a sinking feeling at the thought of Mio ending up in the same state as Sora.
However, he didn't allow himself to entertain the feeling as he ran with them, the staff in his hand and something locked behind a door he couldn't afford to open yet.
Later.
He would open it later.
If there was a later.
_-_-_-_-_-_-_
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