Vertigo gripped him; the Land of Forests tilted as Kakashi leaned against a white, skeletal trunk.
He exhaled a long, thin breath that smelled of bile and cold dampness, his stomach finally settling after the mechanical torture of the boat ride. The world felt unmoored, the ground beneath his boots vibrating with a rhythmic, geothermal thrum that he couldn't quite separate from the pulse in his own temples.
"Better?" Anko asked.
She stood five paces away, her posture loose and predatory.
A sharp, wooden snap punctuated the silence as Anko ground a branch under her boot, her shoulders locked in a rigid line of avoidance.
She had seen his face while he was leaning over the railing—the mask pulled back just enough to breathe—and the memory seemed to have sparked a violent, defensive shyness in her.
"I'll survive," Kakashi said, his voice a weary rasp.
The pressure in his ears, compounded by the acrid sulfur and the biological tax of his illness, turned the distant sounds of the skirmish into a distorted roar.
To Kakashi, the sharp crackle of Naruto's chakra-infused kunai sounded like the detonation of heavy ordinance. The subsequent thud of shadow clones materializing didn't register as a standard jutsu; he misread it as the physical impact of a much larger ambush.
He reached for a kunai, his fingers fumbling against the cold iron, his brain convinced he was hearing a coordinated three-man strike rather than the frantic intervention of a single boy.
By the time the vertigo cleared, the fight had already moved past the point of his intervention.
Anko scoffed and delivered a quick, stinging slap to the back of his head.
"Don't get sentimental, Scarecrow. Your face looked like a boiled turnip."
Anko didn't just see a fight; she saw a breach in her team that she was supposed to be managing.
To her, the lingering scent of syrupy, artificial floral oil and charred metal sat on her tongue like a direct insult to the dango in her mouth.
The way the wires lay on the moss—severed with jagged, desperate precision—told her that the forest had already started its inventory. Her hand drifted to her neck, where the crawling heat of the mark mocked her. She hadn't anticipated the trap because the steam had buffered the signal, and that failure of anticipation sat coiled around her guts and constricted.
The vertical labyrinth of firs and spruces shredded the morning light into a jagged maze of charcoal shadow—the flick-flash of white and black making every lateral step feel like a flicker in a broken film. She tracked the raw, heavy heat ahead—Naruto's chakra was burning through the sulfurous mist like a bonfire. They reached the clearing just as the bandit's presence faded into the conifers. They took in the scene: the severed wires on the ground, the marks on Sylvie's vest, and the way Naruto stood guard over her.
"We're late," Kakashi muttered, his visible eye narrowing as he scanned the blood-red maples above.
"No," Anko corrected, her hand hovering over her kunai as she watched Sylvie pull away from Naruto. "We're right on time for the fallout."
She stepped into the center of the clearing, her boots crunching through the thick layer of fallen needles that muffled the forest floor. The air shifted, a sulfurous steam pillar erupting from a nearby vent and turning the air into a shimmering lens.
"Spit it out," Anko commanded, her voice a dry, nicotine-tinted rasp. "What happened? Who was the intrusion?"
"This blue-haired girl jumped her!" Naruto shouted, his hands waving in the air to mimic the singing wires. His nostrils flared, fighting the sulfurous static of the mist. "She came out of nowhere with these crazy strings, and then shrip, she had Sylvie all tied up like a roast chicken! I had to hack her out before she could peel the skin off!"
Sylvie adjusted the hem of her gaiter, her fingers twitching at her face in a default gesture of stress.
"He was a boy, Naruto," Sylvie corrected, her voice flat and muffled behind the fabric. "Or a very feminine, androgynous man. Like Haku."
Naruto's jaw dropped, his hyper-vigilant blue eyes widening as he looked from Sylvie to the dark shadows of the trees where the bandit had vanished.
"WAIT, WHAT?!" he yelled, his voice echoing over the flat silence of the marsh behind them. "AGAIN!? How does that keep happening?!"
"He had painted nails," Sylvie added, her fingers still yanking the hem of her gaiter higher. "The smell was artificial floral oil. It wasn't a girl."
Anko looked at the severed wires, then back at the phalanx of jagged timber that hemmed them in. The forest didn't offer a response, only the low-pitched, mournful whistle of the wind through the needles.
"Great," Anko muttered, her thumb tracing the dry friction of her arm-wraps. "We've got a professional weaver in the woods, and the Scarecrow is burping bile. Tighten the formation. We aren't just moving now; we're being inventoried."
The team fell into their slots—Naruto's frantic heat anchoring the flank while Sylvie mapped the thermal weight of the air to find the safest path through the vents. Dark green shadows swallowed them as they pushed further into the volcanic highlands, the heavy scent of crushed needles and volcanic ash closing in behind them.