Pre-Chapter A/N: Here we go with another chapter. Next four chapters on my patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)— same username as here and link in bio.
XXXXX- TOSHIRO TAKEHADA
The swim to Kiri was both longer and shorter than expected. On one hand, it was marvellous just how much they could achieve without using their own chakra. The suits handled their breathing, enhanced their strokes, and helped them cut through the water like arrows through the air. On the other hand, they were forced to take a somewhat circuitous route. If their path was ever traced backwards, it would be ideal if it were never traced back to the Wave Village.
What they were going to do was undoubtedly going to stir the hornet's nest. It would be best if whatever traces they left behind had no chance of burning other Konoha operations in the region.
Once the guidance device placed on his suit informed him that he was right underneath Kiri, Toshiro signalled to the others. The suits had some rudimentary means of communication between them to account for the fact that they were swimming at depths so deep that even the light of the sun did not penetrate. He received confirmations from the rest of the team and began to ascend, swimming upwards.
Isagi was the first to reach the bottom of the island and with two weaved signs, he then began to swim through the earth beneath the surface of Kiri like it was water as well. His manipulation of the earth remained in place long enough for all four of them to take advantage of it, following in his wake as they swam through the earth rather than the water now.
He would ideally lead them away from the village itself and towards its outskirts so they could find someone who was separate from the rest of the village so they could get the information they needed. First things first in a mission like this one was information and that was what they needed to get now.
They swam up the earth, moving through several tons of stone like it was water. Isagi's chakra permeated the very earth around them, making all their paltry attempts at sealless earth manipulation effective enough to work here. The Akimichi had a lot of chakra. More than Toshiro could ever have despite his years of training his own capacity. Every single other member of this team had more chakra than Toshiro would ever have. That was just the difference created by genetics. He saw it happen over and over again in the academy.
When he was younger, he had deceived himself that his potential was just the same as that of all his classmates. That there was no soft ceiling created by the fact that neither his parents nor his grandparents on either side had nurtured their ability to use chakra. The fact that he had managed to make it this far was a minor miracle on its own, and it was a miracle he had spent the last few years lying to impressionable children about. It was the part of his job he hated the most. Telling them that they would one day be where he was even if their parents had not plied this trade. It was as difficult as threading a needle while wearing thick winter gloves in the middle of a dark snow storm.
Possible, but not all that likely. Isagi reached the surface and the rest followed after. Toshiro's eyes scanned the alley they found themselves in. It was narrow, dark, and had only one way out. That way out lay behind them. Before them was a man leaning over on his knees, vomiting for all he was worth. Toshiro tried not to wrinkle his nose at the smell of alcohol. The underwater exploration suits had begun to allow in the surrounding air now that they could tell they were no longer underwater.
"Uh.." the man slurred, turning to look at them now. None had made a sound, but no shinobi would fail to sense their presence so close. No matter how drunk he was.
Credit to him, he was swift. His eyes sharpened mere seconds before his chakra flared. Toshiro watched every motion, cataloguing the inefficiencies. He snapped out with his wrist. A single kunai flew forth, explosive tag attached to it. Uzumaki snatched it right out of the air. Fumikage had done something to its path, diverting it towards the fuinjutsu master. He stared at the tag for a second, and then he weaved his fingers across the seal. Seconds later, the ignition died. The Mist Chunin who had hoped to use this as a distraction to escape had already begun running up the wooden frame of the building to their right.
He made it to the second floor before his momentum came to a sharp stop. Fumikage slammed her hand downwards, and he came crashing right back to the ground. Toshiro body flickered forwards before he could do something ill-advised.
"We just have a few questions, Mist shinobi-san. Just tell us what we want and we'll leave you to your...fun."
"Fuck off," he snarled. Of course, the bastard just wouldn't make this easy for them. Far be it from a Kiri shinobi to do the logical thing. He shot upwards, somehow managing to have placed a kunai in his hand since he hit the ground. Toshiro stepped into his guard as the kunai came up and was about to stab him through the eye. The man stopped just short, frozen in place.
"Wh-what?" he stumbled out. Toshiro looked down at his fingers lodged deep in the flesh of his opponent's arm, paralysing the limb. His next strike was to the chest, and the man hit the ground a second later.
Toshiro reached down for his collar, forcing him upwards even as he weaved seals with one hand. When he was finished, he stabbed the index and middle fingers of said hand straight into his head. The yin chakra gathered there went into his opponent's brain as his lesser version of the Yamanaka technique began to do its work.
The Yamanaka could use their Yin release to walk through the minds of others and see their thoughts and memories as if they were leafing through pages from a book. Toshiro could not quite manage that. For one, he was no Yamanaka, so where could he have learned the technique from in the first place? For another, the Yamanaka were trained almost from birth to be able to manage mindwalks. Someone without that combination of genetics, training, and upbringing would run mad after trying their first mindwalk. There was a reason one rarely saw Yamanaka children out and about, after all. They needed to be raised in a way to make sure that they could survive the work their clan technique was so good for.
Toshiro, lacking such advantages, had to rely on something a tad less elegant but with the potential to be just as effective for certain purposes. Purposes like this one, for example.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"Hideo," his captive responded, voice monotonous and lacking any sort of life. His eyes were glassy, but his lids were nearly unnaturally opened. Wide open like he was in a state of permanent surprise. Good. That was a sign that the technique had taken hold.
"Where is the Jinchuriki of the Three Tails?" he asked.
"I do not know," the captive responded. Of course, he did not. If Kiri had any sense, they would hide the identity of their jinchuriki until it was too late for anyone to do anything about it. Only problem was that Shori had somehow found out and now they were here.
"Where is Suiren Hozuki?" he asked next.
"I do not know for sure," he said.
"Take a guess."
"Training Ground Zeta. There, he trains with his apprentice from sunrise to sunset," he said.
Toshiro turned to his team, receiving nods from all of them. They had a lead now.
He sighed and, channeling more chakra through his arms, he stabbed straight into his captive's chest, stilling the heartbeat with an application of the gentle fist and bringing the conversation to an abrupt end.
"So...uh, how do we find Training Ground Zeta?" Uzumaki asked a few seconds later while Isagi stepped forward to begin pushing the body into the ground.
Toshiro froze. The others did the same. This was indeed a different village. A village that their spies had still been unable to adequately map.
"We find someone else and ask them," he decided.
"We could have just asked this guy before killing him," he pointed out.
"Well, you could have mentioned that before I killed him, couldn't you?" Toshiro turned, giving him a deadpan look. The Uzumaki was turning out to be far more mouthy than he had expected.
"Let's just get on with it." Fugaku stepped between them before body flickering upwards. Those eyes of his would probably help him in finding either someone they could interrogate or the jinchuriki himself. An Inuzuka, Aburame, or Hyuga would have made this mission much easier but Shori could be quite stingy with those trackers of his. He was up to something on that account, and not even his position on the Council had allowed Toshiro to find out just what it was.
Not like he had tried all that hard. Shori was always up to something—multiple somethings. Learning which of those things mattered and which did not was a vital skill for any person in his orbit to learn. Toshiro had learned it back in the academy even.
The Uchiha returned a few seconds later and then not long after, a young girl, academy age but wearing a hitai-ate that marked her as a legitimate target, walked heedlessly into the alley. She didn't even know she'd been ensnared in genjutsu. Toshiro sighed. Another one for his conscience then. At least the children he killed in the academy, he did so indirectly by putting dreams in their heads. This one would fall to his own hands.
----
Training Ground Zeta, it turned out, was on the other side of the village. Almost directly opposite where they had surfaced. They would have to make the journey underground again.
Isagi began to sink and they followed his lead, falling deeper and deeper until they were close to the sea once again. Toshiro silently decided that he would need to have words with Renji about this when they returned to the village. Did the Konoha barrier extend even underground? He sure hoped so. It wouldn't do for someone to make use of the exact same vulnerabilities they were exposing in the Kiri system against them. But then again, Kiri was a much less advanced village than theirs. His brief look at the village's insides from that alley had told him all he needed to know about that. They were easily decades behind where Konoha was now. Their buildings still made of as much wood as stone, their alleys still dark and ramshackle, their streets lit only by light cast off from lanterns in the houses that sat astride them. Not like Konoha. Not planned perfectly, not filled with a network of street lights that ensured they were not servants to the rising and falling of the sun. Not beautiful.
They rose from the ground again, and this time, Toshiro could tell they were in the right place. The caustic chakra of the tailed beast the boy held within him seemed to almost rake its way across their skin. A confrontation within the village proper would be a disaster. They had found him now. Now to work on luring him out of the village.
"Hello, Konoha shinobi," the voice came from behind them. Toshiro spun around, hand already moving to his blade, but he was not the first to react. Two shuriken from Fumikage were already covering the distance between them and the man in the blank ANBU mask. He caught them in the air, fingers moving so quickly that it was near a blur.
XXXXX- OROCHIMARU
The first two caves had yielded naught but dust and sand. His dirty sandals were the only thing he had to show for the time spent, but he was still far from dissuaded. The Sarutobi had some of the best historians and researchers in the world. If any group could narrow down the location of a treasure as sought after as the Ryuchi cave, then it would be them. And out of the sites he had been tasked with searching, those two were considered some of the least promising. Only their proximity to Konoha made it worth the search in the first place.
The next few were rated more likely to contain what he sought and so he approached them with more enthusiasm in his spirit. The sooner he found the cave, the sooner he would be blessed with the secrets of Senjutsu. While his enemy was a powerful sage in his own right, Orochimaru had little doubt that snake sage mode would be greater than whale sage mode.
How Manda spoke of the Great White Snake Sage was sign enough of that. That a boss summon as prideful and strong as Manda would not even consider getting on the bad side of a Snake Sage said something about the power inherent in that form.
The third cave was nestled between two hills, and was somewhat obscured from view by the surrounding foliage. He was deep in the Land of Grass now, closer to Iwa—or what had once been Iwa—than he was to Konoha. A flick of his sword parted some of the overhanging vines that covered the entrance and allowed him to make his way inside. This cave was pitch black just like the others, the only light piercing it being the light he brought in with him. It was large, but like the other two it was empty. At least, that was how it seemed until his flarestick cast some of its light against the wall. There was a marking etched into the stone itself.
That was a sort of inscription—far too deliberate to be the work of an animal or nature. He picked another flarestick out from his holster and lit it by channelling chakra into it. It began to glow as well, spreading more light over the cavern, revealing the inscription in full.
It was a set of images. A giant beast with ten tails standing beneath the moon, a woman with a third eye, two men facing the woman, one of the men (or it could have been a different man) standing before a crowd of people, said man flying towards the moon with that crowd in tow, the other man standing before multiple beasts now. Nine of them. Orochimaru's attention sharpened at that. Then the images began to become less unique. Every one featuring the same man but in different places.
One had him in front of a large amount of people wearing what looked to be desert robes, and then the next was him standing in front of a shrine of some sort that was just gushing out what looked to be water in all directions. The carvings continued in that same vein, the man who Orochimaru was now almost certain was supposed to be the Sage of Six Paths carrying out different deeds all over the world. This was like a history of his deeds and acts. And if that was the case, then who was that woman in the second carving?
The carvings covered the entire cave and continued on upwards into the ceiling but by the time he was done looking at what he could easily see, he was done with it already. The Sage of Six Paths mattered only to historians or the very religious. What business did he have thinking about a man that probably had never existed, and even if he had, would have done so centuries ago? Ninjutsu only got better and more advanced with time. Whatever this man would have had to offer would probably mean nothing in the modern world.
That was the nature of progress and human advancement, after all. He turned to leave, but placed a mental pin on this location. If he ever found free time maybe...
----
The next five caves had nothing of note. Not even the dirt had been interesting. The carvings were all he had for his time and besides telling what was perhaps an interesting story, they gave him nothing of value. Now he was deep in the Land of Earth. He had already passed where Iwa had once been and made the customary detour to the corpse of the village.
The scar that Tsunade's cousin had torn through the village still stood there, cleaving the land mass into two halves. The rest of the village had suffered and withered to time. Konoha had levelled the place before leaving with a series of explosive tags and no one had come to do anything about the rubble. It was a testament. Something the world could look at and be in awe of Konoha's power for. Something like the Valley of the End that was a testament to his grandfather's power. Shorirama Senju meant for the world to be reminded of the time when gods walked the realm of men, but he was no god.
Orochimaru would see that he was reminded of that. A god would never have let Tsuna and Jiraiya die because of a grudge with a Sand nin he could never put to rest.
A god would have taken care of business and not left others to suffer the consequences of his actions.
This cave was special, he thought on setting his eyes on it. For one, he had skipped it over twice already. It was only the fact that he had a map that kept him coming back even though he had managed to miss it already. There was no foreign chakra in his system so it was not a genjutsu as it was traditionally known, but something kept making him skip it over.
Even now, gazing right at it, his eyes were tempted to glance right off it and into the surroundings. Almost like the entrance was actively obscuring itself from his attention. This was it, he decided. He walked straight in, into the belly of the beast.
A/N: This chapter took a minute. Not because it was hard to write or anything like that, but just because of life things. I hate it when life gets in the way of things and I promise it's going to be the last time this happens for a while. Back and here to stay, kids. Discount on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga) for those interested. Next chapter comes on here on Wednesday night/Thursday morning (depending on your timezone). Next four chapters up on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga) (same username as here and link in bio), support me there and read them early.