Naruto: Dreaming of Sunshine

Akamaru barked.

"Bad news," I went on. "Is that there's also three ANBU and two other hostages."

"Yeah," Kiba said, and tapped his nose. "I knew there was more than one…" he trailed off and shifted awkwardly. "So. Real question. Can you take them?"

I experienced a jolt of actual terror at the question. Oh no. Kiba actually thought I could do it. He was seriously considering that in a matchup of 'Shikako vs three ANBU' I would come out ahead. Not just ahead but comfortably enough that it wasn't our last choice.

I blew out a breath. "Collateral damage, remember?" I said, even though that wasn't quite an answer.

I wasn't exactly filled with joy at the prospect. Any fight was a risk, and multiple opponents with unknown skills was riskier than most.

I had fought groups of people on my own before, but it had not been nearly so intentional. Well, mostly. Then again, it wasn't like we had a lot of choice right now either. It wasn't like we had any backup coming.

We could try just taking the kids and running – thus avoiding the 'fight' portion of the evening – but that hadn't worked out too well for us last time and they knew where we lived. Or the kids lived. Whatever.

Getting the ANBU out of the way seemed… necessary.

"It'll be sunrise soon," I said slowly, squinting at the trees. "That'll help. I could probably tag them with Shadow Possession…" Kiba would have to stay back because his stealth wasn't good enough to get close without being noticed. Then he'd have to deal with getting through all the traps in a hurry, which would be dangerous and give away his position.

I squinted thoughtfully at him. "How's your aim in Fang Over Fang? For throwing stuff, I mean, not for yourself."

He blinked, blank faced. "I … don't normally throw things," he settled on.

"Scrap that idea then," I murmured, though it was about what I expected. I had a barrier seal with me, so we could set up protection around the kids. It'd have to be implemented though and fast. I hadn't wanted to split my attention between trapping the ANBU and setting it up, but it looked like I would probably have to. "It was a long shot, anyway."

And then, suddenly, everything was go.

I slipped back towards the camp, undoing as many traps as I could to give him a clear run for it (and setting a few of my own, just in case). It wasn't actually much – evading traps was one thing, undoing them was quite another and not something I'd focused on learning.

Kiba followed a little closer, but stayed far enough to be undetected by the ANBU. Hopefully. We were relying on having the element of surprise and taking them all out at once and that would be ruined if we didn't, actually, have the element of surprise.

Unfortunately, when I got to the camp, they seemed to be packing up.

Not good.

It would be much harder to ambush them on the move.

Safer, maybe, because they wouldn't be so defended and they would be hampered by carrying the children, but it would be harder for us to choose a choke point when we didn't know where they were going and more dangerous for the children.

Before they leave, then.

I waited, watching the sun creep slowly over the horizon. A little bit of sun was all I needed.

There was no perfect moment and I was aware of the clock ticking down. The three ANBU were spread out around the camp, not nicely grouped together as a target. The three kids were huddled together, which was the only bright spot.

It'll have to do.

My shadow crept quietly down the tree trunks and across the ground, a dark snake barely noticeable in the dawn light. Grass didn't rustle in its passing, there was no sign or signal and none of the ANBU were looking down.

Somehow, I still only managed to catch two of them.

The third vanished from my hold the instant the jutsu took shape, intangible like smoke and then gone. It felt like closing my fist over empty air, expecting to grab something and finding nothing.

Shit.

I set off the signal – an exploding note in one of the more dangerous perimeter traps – and threw my four scrolls around the kids.

"Sealing Style; Four Corner Barrier Seal!"

Kiba and Akamaru crashed out of the forest in a twin Tunneling Fang, two spirals of destruction crashing into the clearing and wiping out my captives. I let them go at the last second, as the impact of the attack started to shudder through the connection.

Only one of them went down. Akamaru rebounded off the other, ricocheting at an ugly angle and into the ground with a startled yelp.

Double shit.

Some kind of defensive technique? A barrier? There was a sheen of chakra, but I didn't have time to contemplate it – I needed to catch the third ANBU, the one who had escaped my Shadow Possession. His chakra was jumping around, here then here then there, impossibly fast. Teleportation? Body Flicker?

The jumps were fast but small.

And moving away from the camp, like he was fleeing.

Or like a trap.

I twisted, pivoting on the spot and bringing my kunai up to block the sword aimed at my neck. For a split second, I stared into that blank featureless mask and was afraid. It was creepy – no wonder these things were given to black ops. The eye holes were just black voids, no eyes, nothing to say there was a person behind it at all.

Then I kicked out and booted him in the stomach, foot charged to deliver a Touch Blast and make sure it took. Only it didn't, but only because my entire foot went through him.

Illusion or incorporeality?

No. Too fast – he was gone again. It was no genjutsu, that much I could tell. The sword I was blocking had been real enough. It had had weight and power. He'd flickered away, that was it. I was kicking an afterimage, too late to be of use. His chakra signal and position bounced around, rapid fire bursts. But I was starting to see a pattern now – it was like body flicker. Short, fast, straight-line bursts.

But he hadn't stuck around to fight at speed, if he could keep that up in a taijutsu match then there would have been a follow up slash that I'd have had more trouble avoiding.

So fast, unpredictable jabs. And he'd gone after me – not the kids in their barrier, not Kiba and Akamaru who were fighting their own opponent. Me.

A plan slid into place. I charged chakra into the stone on my chest, pulled it out and held it. I felt cold, instantly and suddenly, the world layered in shades of grey and shadow. But I held onto an impression of myself, not quite a transformation but close, the kind that let water clones look real until they were disrupted, so that I didn't look any different from the outside.

Then I shouted 'Kiba' and jumped down to join in his fight.

It was folly to ignore an opponent. Complete foolishness to turn your back on one.

So I really did deserve the sword that slid neatly through my back.

Too neatly to be passing through flesh and blood.I was made entirely of shadow. I clamped down, pinning the sword in place and sprang shadow stitching tendrils out from around it – sharp spikes that lengthened and aimed for weak points – throat, eyes, wrists, elbows.

He dropped.

I reversed their momentum, flipping them through my torso and out the front, to tangle the second ANBU. The ones that tried to stab were deflected but those that wound around and restrained were not. Definitely a jutsu. Redirecting kinetic force?

He backpedaled, away from me, but Kiba was there and spat one of his tangled hairball things straight into his face.

The hairball thing - Keukegen, I remembered – squelched onto the mask, stretching and sucking around the edges like it was trying to smother him. Good plan. My tendrils crept up, around his neck and tightened. And then they pulled sharply to the side.

There was a crack. He stopped fighting.

"That was probably-" Kiba said and the stopped. He stared at me in horror. At my front. Oh, right.

"Uh," I said, and pulled the sword out through my chest, handle and all. It felt… strange. I let the technique go, changing back from shadow to mortal flesh and blood. "How are the kids?"

I sealed the bodies into a scroll – both to make sure they were actually dead and to remove the dead bodies from terrified civilian children – and cancelled the protective barrier seal.

Kiba's horror transmuted into something a bit like sheepishness as he inhaled deeply. "You want the good news or the bad news?" he asked.

Oh, great.

"What is it?" I asked, quietly. Now we had to actually interact with the kids and it seemed a good idea to try to seem not-menacing. Given I had just killed people, it might not have worked.

"That's not Makoto Kan," Kiba said.

The words took a second to penetrate. "What do you mean 'that's not Makoto Kan'?" I asked, dully. I felt like I should have expressed surprise because… it sure looked like the girl we were supposed to be finding.

And more importantly, if this wasn't her…then where was she?

"I haven't exactly got around to asking yet," Kiba said wryly. "I'm just telling you that this isn't the same girl."

I sighed and crouched down, ruffling Akamaru's ears with one hand. "Hey kids," I said, voice soft. "My name is Shikako Nara. I'm a ninja from Konoha. We're here to help you, but we need you to tell us what happened, okay?"

Not-Makoto burst into tears and buried her face into her hands. The older of the other two children raised her chin bravely, though. "They kidnapped us!"

I nodded, encouragingly.

"They wanted my dad to give them food," the boy said. "That's why they took me away."

"Your dad is a merchant?" I asked. It was a start to unravelling this puzzle. Because this was much more than just one child being taken. Obviously.

"A rice farmer," he corrected. "We have the biggest rice farm in Fire Country!"

His name was Nori and the girl was Reiko. Not-Makoto turned out to be named Shinju. Reiko was also the daughter of a rice farmer, and Shinju's parents owned an orchard. Apart from the similarities, it really didn't add up to a lot for me.

"Okay," I said slowly. "Did you see another girl? One who looked like Shinju?"

Shinju sniffed. "When they took me away," she said and her voice broke. I patted her shoulder awkwardly. "She was there."

"So no one knows they're missing," Kiba rumbled.

It fit – in a really convoluted sort of way. Or, no. If I twisted my head to look at it from the other direction, as if I was planning the mission and not trying to sort it out from this angle, it made sense.

You needed resources from people (presumably) that they weren't willing to give you. Holding hostages probably wasn't the first answer but it was a pretty time honoured sort of solution. But then you needed to make sure no one noticed that you had taken hostages and hired ninja on your ass (i.e. us) so you went and stuck a similar looking kid in their place. They'd probably been threatened not to hire ninja, but it only took a family friend noticing that your child was gone to work out that something was happening.

Which meant Makoto had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time – they hadn't been aiming for the daughter of an ambassador, they'd been aiming for a street kid.

No, that's still convoluted as fucking hell.

"Okay, well," I said, with very little idea of where we were going to go from there. "Let's get you home, then."

.

.

It wasn't actually difficult to do all the child swapping.

Or. Well. It was but we managed. We had no idea if the farms were actually being watched or not and even if I could have snuck past observers there was no way to take the kids with us. Walking in as ninja wasn't a great plan, so it took some creative transformation jutsu and sweet talking to get us where we needed to be.

But Shinju's parents were really, really happy to see her again and did spill out the rest of the story. Or as much as they knew.

They had current contracts to supply various places in Land of Fire, which included Konoha, and had been approached by people wishing to transfer those contracts, in part or in full. They'd declined, and then found their daughter missing, a shell shocked replacement and threats.

We swapped out Makoto and took her home. I summoned Heijomaru to help carry the kids because three of them between the two of us wasn't going to be easy. He took the summons with good grace and not for the first time I thought that I had really, really lucked out with my contract.

The other two didn't live so close, so I made the executive decision to take them back to Konoha and then organize their return from there. It made more sense, especially if we had to also return their 'replacements' home as well, which was another step.

"Okay," Izumo said, when we showed up at the gates. "So we can sign them in with a temporary pass, but they'll need supervision. And you'll need to work something out after that expires."

"Yeah, thanks," I agreed, scribbling on the paper where he pointed. "It shouldn't take long."

"What's the plan?" Kiba asked, holding one kid with each hand so they didn't wander off.

"I want to grab some paperwork quickly," I said. "Get their parents names. Find out how much they supply us with. That sort of thing."

"There are people in the tower who do that," he said, not protesting as much as confused. "You know, as their jobs. We can just hand it over."

"Yeah," I said patiently. "And those people are me. Look. I just… want to make sure. Can you watch them for a bit? Maybe get some food?"

We had fed them on the way, but it had clearly been a long day for them. It had been a long day for us, too, and I could understand why Kiba wanted to be finished with it.

"Alright, alright," he said. "Don't take too long, okay?"

I didn't plan on it. I just wanted to make sure all the i's were dotted and all the t's were crossed. And I was pretty sure that since ANBU were involved, we were never going to hear about this again once it was out of our hands.

Luckily I had so much experience in navigating the tower paperwork system, because I managed to track down invoices from the relevant farms. Or at least, track down someone who could track them down.

We found Nori's easily enough but not Reiko's.

"Hmm, it's not here… oh, right. It'll be with the negotiators. They defaulted or withdrew or something like that," he said, shrugging.

"That happen a lot?" I asked, casually.

"Sometimes. Places go under. There's a bad harvest – I think it must be a bad year this year. We've had a few. Which sucks, because we're supposed to be increasing our orders so we can start stockpiling. We've had to go looking for new suppliers, which is not an easy task, let me tell you!"

A few? It niggled.

"Do you have a list?" I asked. "Of recent changes?"

"No," he shook his head. "Or, well, I guess we could compare total purchases and work out which ones have decreased… What did you say this was for, again?"

"Intel summary," I said, smiling easily. "Like you said, we're supposed to be starting to stockpile."

I swung by missions desk, booked a briefing room and asked them to dispatch a runner to collect Kiba and the 'clients'. Then I hit up Intel to find Aoba.

"I'd like a second opinion, Aoba-sempai," I said carefully. "So that I'm not blowing this out of proportion."

I didn't think I was, but I had no evidence to it being more than what we'd seen. And I didn't want it to be dismissed out of hand just because I was occasionally slightly paranoid.

"Sure," he said, shifting his glasses. "What's up?"

I waited until we were in the briefing room before I started. The comparison of purchases that I'd managed to get quickly was just a bunch of photocopied pages with highlights, so it was messy and a little hard to follow.

"Okay, so," I started, pressing my hands flat on the table. "During my last mission we ran into a non-Konoha ANBU team that had kidnapped three children. They were the children of nearby farms – ones that supply Konoha. We were able to determine that they were being held hostage in order to force the farms to stop selling to us."

Aoba opened his mouth then closed it again. Then said, "you found an ANBU team? No wait. Never mind. What's the problem?"

I pushed forward the papers. "These three are the farms," I said. "Only one of them had time to contact Konoha about the situation" -which meant Reiko had been kidnapped for close to a week at the least- "but when I compared previous volumes of purchases to what we're currently getting, there are at least fifteen other dramatic decreases. It strikes me as slightly suspicious in light of the fact that there is known enemy action in this area."

Aoba nodded, looking over the papers. "Not all of these will be related," he cautioned. "But it's a good call to reassess them. I'll assign someone to go over the records and look for discrepancies. And send people out to investigate."

I nodded back. "They were replacing the kidnapped children with lookalikes so that it wasn't noticeable that they were missing," I said. "I'm not sure if there were people in place to watch them, but the parents were warned against contacting shinobi."

"Do you know where they were taking the hostages?" Aoba asked, leaning forward. "That's probably more important at this stage."

I shook my head and shrugged. "I don't even know where they're from," I said. "But I did retrieve the bodies so, uh, I guess you can identify them?" Then I frowned. "I mean, I'd guess they were taking them out of the country. If they were planning on keeping them long term, it would be safer. Other than that…"

I shrugged again.

Aoba sighed and sat back in his chair. "Well, I guess we better kick it up the chain. Let's go see the Hokage."