Stagnant air pooled at the bottom of the pit, trapped by spruce roots that hemmed us into a vertical cage. The damp, compacted earth beneath my boots offered no give, and the smell of wood-rot sat heavy on the back of my tongue, mixed with the sharp, metallic zing of drying blood. Todoroki stood in the corner, a motionless silhouette against the orange flicker of the wall-mounted lanterns. He didn't acknowledge us; he simply gripped his blade, knuckles white and grit-stained, his focus locked on a patch of black moss.
Captain Tsuzumi occupied the center of the root-chamber. He looked scoured by the administrative weight of the village, his balding head catching the damp sheen of the air.
"The mission remains unchanged," Tsuzumi said, his voice carrying the weary authority of a man tired of managing blood. "You will escort Gantetsu to the capital for trial. Todoroki will accompany you. He knows the trails, even if his... methods lack refinement."
Kakashi adjusted his pack, the leather creaking in the silence. Anko stood beside him, her nostrils flaring. "Fine. But if he tries to turn this escort into an execution, I'll take his hand. Am I clear, Captain?"
Tsuzumi offered a slow, heavy nod, his circular eyebrows twitching.
Naruto ignored the adults. He stepped toward the iron bars, his hyper-vigilant blue eyes fixed on the man in the gray cloth. Gantetsu looked up. For a heartbeat, a sudden, sharp spike of density hit me—an inhibition so heavy it felt like being buried in cold peat. The prisoner's jaw tightened, his goatee damp with sweat, his shoulders locked in a silent, physical stiffness that made the air in the cell feel too thick to breathe.
"Why'd you do it?" Naruto asked, his voice shattering the silence. "The posters say you're a monster. What did you do with the treasure?"
Gantetsu offered no syllable. He looked away, his chains letting out a mournful clack-clatter against the root-wall, a final, jagged barricade of silence.
Todoroki let out a long, hissing exhale and turned, his armor clanking as he headed for the exit. Naruto's face flushed, and he spun on his heel to follow. I trailed behind, my quads beginning to burn as we hit the carved stairs.
The oxygen deficit hit halfway up. My gaiter fabric sucked against my lips with every desperate pull of the thinning air, and the cold mountain dampness turned my breath into a wet suction. I misjudged the height of a step, my boot scuffing the stone, and I had to catch the rough wall to keep from sliding back into the dark.
We broke through the upper platforms back into the yellow twilight of Mori no Sato. The sun had vanished, leaving the valley in a bruised purple haze. Pulleys screeched from the high firs, and the smell of pine resin hit my throat like a physical strike.
My lungs still felt scoured, a persistent wheeze rattling in my chest as I struggled to normalize my breathing. My left leg hummed with a fine, post-climb tremor that made the swaying suspension bridge feel even more unstable.
Naruto was a blur of high-frequency noise. He was so busy chasing Todoroki that he pivoted directly into my path, his shoulder catching mine and spinning me toward the rail.
"Hey!" Naruto yelled, his voice cracking with exhaustion. "I'm talking to you! Why were you beating him?! He's in a cage!"
"Justice isn't clean, boy," Todoroki called back, not even breaking stride. "Stay out of the way if you don't have the stomach for it."
He walked away, his yellow waist-cloth snapping in the wind. Naruto growled, leaning over the rail. "Just another butcher," he spat, his heat spiking so sharply I could taste the burnt-copper of his frustration. "Probably has a cage waiting for us too."
I tried to scan the villagers moving along the elevated platforms, but Naruto's constant pacing blocked my sightlines, forcing me to read the crowd through the gaps between his frantic movements. That's when the air changed. It didn't smell or sound different—it dragged.
I felt a viscous resistance in my peripheral field, as if the air had turned to invisible syrup. My skin crawled with a dragging sensation. Through a gap in the passing villagers, I saw the anomaly.
A dark-skinned man with shaggy black hair sat on a wooden bench. He wore a black, sleeveless shirt and a purple, rope-belt. But the architecture of his body defied the crowd. He possessed two extra pairs of arms, the appendages tucked against his sides, though one hand twitched with an asynchronous tremor. A black forehead protector sat low over his eyes.
"Anko-sama," I whispered, my voice flat and muffled. "Is it... normal for people here to have six arms?"
Anko pushed through the crowd, her pulse drumming against her teeth. She saw the shear in the crowd—a sudden, unnatural eddy in the foot traffic where people were subconsciously veering away from a specific shadow near the apothecary. A scent vector of wood-ash and something acrid—preservation fluid—displaced the smell of pine.
She lunged toward a textile shop, her kunai leading, but the sound shadow was a decoy; she hit the doorframe with a shoulder-check that sent a rack of wool spinning and cost her a half-second of momentum. Dammit. She doubled back, her boots skidding on the dormant moss of the walkway, and centered on the displacement. She cornered him in a small apothecary shop.
Kidōmaru didn't reach for a weapon. He was busy using multiple hands to inspect jars of medicinal powder. He held four different containers at once, though the shelf beneath him gave a sharp, dry crack under the uneven distribution of weight. A slight tremor ran through his upper right shoulder—the neural cost of the synchronization.
"Easy, Anko-sama," Kidōmaru said, his voice a laid-back hum with a sadistic edge. "I'm just doing a side-quest. You know how much I love games."
He tried to turn a jar in his lower left hand while reaching for a fifth on the top shelf, but the multitasking taxed his focus; the lower jar slipped through his fingers, shattering against the floor in a cloud of white dust. The mysterious powder bespeckled his lower arms, and the strange odor irritated his eyes: he didn't blink, he didn't flinch, but his eye contact with Anko lagged by a noticeable beat as his upper arms twitched to compensate for the loss.
"Kabuto-kun needs a few specific metrics," Kidōmaru continued, his grin widening. "Nothing violent. Honestly, I'm bored. You Konoha types are far too serious."
Anko didn't lower her kunai. "Where is he, you spider-bastard? If you're here, the rest of the Sound Four aren't far."
Kidōmaru laughed, a sharp, clicking sound. "Who knows? Maybe they're playing their own games. But if I were you, I'd worry less about me and more about the giant you're carrying. Some treasures aren't meant to last forever."