Ryūchi Cave (I)
1 month after leaving Konoha
Anko had no illusions about the odds of her actually finding Ryūchi Cave. In all likelihood, she would either spend the rest of her life searching for it or give up on this endeavour after some years and return to Konoha as a failure. There simply was no in-between.
But she also realized that this was the only way that might save her from being left behind.
She herself had been called talented, prodigious even, since her earliest childhood. That was why Orochimaru, one of Konoha's most powerful shinobi, had been willing to take her as an apprentice. And while it never came to that because it turned out her sensei was a slimy bastard who fled the village when it came out that he experimented on humans and even babes, the point still stood that someone of his calibre saw enough potential in her to warrant personal interest.
However, whatever talent she possessed paled compared to Itachi's. Next to him, she was average at best. That wasn't even an insult; being called average compared to someone who could do what Itachi did when he was just seven years old was in fact a compliment.
That didn't change the fact that Anko didn't want to fall behind him, though.
He, Yukio, and she were teammates. They were supposed to have each other's backs. Especially now after Yukio had confessed to her that he considered giving up on being a shinobi altogether was it important that she got strong enough to cover Itachi for them both. Sure, she knew that the younger boy had other friends as well, members of his clan that would look out for him if she couldn't, but Anko wasn't about to give up that easily. No, the only path she accepted for herself was one where she became strong enough to stand at his side.
Teams were like a family, especially those that had been formed between academy graduates, and while Itachi had joined them only later, he was just as much part of it as Yukio, Tanaka-sensei, and she herself. In her case, they were literally the only family she ever had, so there was no way she would become a burden.
Furthermore, Anko still intended to get revenge on Orochimaru for his betrayal. The Sannin was far stronger than any other enemy she had ever fought, and she knew that she didn't stand a chance against him as she was now. If she were completely honest with herself, she would probably never stand a chance against him either if she didn't take extraordinary steps to improve herself. The Chūnin Exams demonstrated how strong even enemies her own age could be; if she couldn't even beat them, how could she ever hope to bring Orochimaru to justice?
The best solution to all her problems was to find Ryūchi Cave and train under the White Snake Sage. That was unfortunately easier said than done, however.
Anko had even tried asking her summons to lead her there, but just as she had expected, they had refused. Apparently finding the way on their own was part of the test anyone who wanted to train under the sage needed to pass.
That meant she had no other choice but to wander through the continent with no clue whatsoever whether she was getting closer or not, basically hoping to just randomly stumble into it.
They're still snakes, she thought. That means they can't live just about everywhere. The climate must meet certain conditions to be a potential home to them, so I can exclude at least some places. Not nearly as many as I would like, but it's a start.
Who knew? Maybe she was lucky and really just ran into it within a few weeks. Now, wouldn't that be something?
3 months after leaving Konoha
Unfortunately, she was not so lucky.
With no other choice left, Anko decided to begin her search within the borders of the Land of Fire. The idea was that she would at least not need to deal with enemy shinobi this way. If she didn't find the cave here, however, she would be forced to look elsewhere and therefore enter foreign countries.
She really didn't look forward to hiding from patrols all the damn time.
The problem with searching for it in the Land of Fire was that there were a lot of places far enough away from any hotspot of civilization to possibly hide the cave. And as the entire country offered great conditions for snakes, Anko couldn't even limit the area she needed to look by taking that point into consideration.
The best thing she could do was asking in small, local villages and towns whether they had noticed an unusual number of snakes or if there were any folktales about them in the region.
So far, her search hadn't yielded any results yet. No, the only things Anko had found were countless insects that decided to nest in her sleeping back and hair as well as a newfound appreciation for baths.
9 months after leaving Konoha
She had known from the very beginning that there wouldn't be much for her to do during her travels, but Anko noticed mere days into her journey that it was even more boring than she could have ever predicted. Thus, with no other choice if she didn't want to die from boredom, she did the one thing she had always hated to do:
She studied.
Now, don't understand her wrong. She did study a lot in her life. The expectations that she and later Orochimaru set for herself didn't allow Anko to slack off. However, she initially was content with just mastering whatever was expected of her and never expanding on that on her own, the only "recent" exception being when she went out of her way to create a poison that wouldn't easily vaporize in flames for the Chūnin Exams.
This far away from home, with no one to keep her busy and nothing else to do, she burrowed herself once again in her studies.
Fortunately, the Sandaime had allowed her to bring copies of Orochimaru's notes with her. That, together with various books she brought, she could keep herself at least somewhat busy during her journey. And honestly? Once she actually began to read, she found it quite interesting. Sure, a lot of her former sensei's experiments described in the notes were disgusting, but there was no denying that the information he got out of them were ground-breaking. If you asked Anko, the least thing they could do was to use this information to do something good with them and maybe give the victims some peace in the knowledge that their suffering wasn't for nought.
Furthermore, if this information somehow helped Anko in ultimately bringing Orochimaru down, they would also indirectly get their revenge on him through her. She knew that if she were in their position, she would like that idea.
Unfortunately, no matter how hard she tried to take her time going through the various materials, there came a point where there was nothing new left for her to read. Even writing her own notes down and cross-referring between the different sources only slowed her down that much.
I probably should buy some more books, she thought. Let's hope the next bookstore I find actually has something useful to offer rather than just fictional stories.
Though to be honest, Anko would probably get some of these as well. Not like she had anything better to do anyway, and even a mediocre story was still better than staring holes into the air.
With that in mind, she continued walking westwards until she finally crossed into the Land of Rivers.
1 ½ years after leaving Konoha
The highlight of every day was doubtlessly the training session in the evening. And although it was almost impossible to increase your own Taijutsu skills by training on your own, Anko found a few ways she could improve herself even in face of that.
For one thing, she began to wear weights. She wasn't so stupid as to overdo it like that weirdo Guy, of course, but she was confident that they would increase her speed and strength over time. If she continued to increase the burden little by little and if her search continued for as long as she feared it would, there should be quite the improvement when she finally returned to Konoha.
Another thing she did was to train with her clones. However, the only thing they were really good for was to test new techniques because in the end, they were exactly as strong, fast, and skilled as she was. Handicapping herself made up for that somewhat, but even that wasn't enough to truly help her train.
Anko also tried to incorporate new attacks into her katas by looking for inspiration in the various books and notes she had with her. Whenever she stumbled over a weak point in the human body that none of her attacks already targeted, she tried her best to change that.
Concerning the other ninja arts, well…
Genjutsu had never been something she was interested in. Training with Itachi meant she was forced to learn combatting it and it had also allowed her to pick up a thing or two about it as well, but that was it.
The thing she could train best was Ninjutsu.
There were quite a lot of Jutsu she technically knew but had never mastered, including but not limited to techniques she had seen Orochimaru use before he became a traitor. Now that she had so much free time at hand, she spent countless hours trying and eventually mastering as many of them as she could. There was quite a few of them she didn't get the hang of, unfortunately, and she assumed she would never be able to master them without someone else directly teaching them to her, but those she did master quickly became powerful aces in her arsenal.
Another thing she could also train even as she travelled was the speed with which she weaved hand signs. It didn't cost her any chakra, was something she could do practically all the time, and kept her hands busy; all in all, she counted this as an absolute win.
At this point, she was quite confident that everyone who didn't possess the Sharingan would struggle to predict what technique she was to unleash on them. That should give her a little edge even against otherwise superior opponents.
However, no matter how much Anko improved, nothing could distract her from the fact that she had been away from her home for 18 months now and still had nothing to show for it. It was one thing to be prepared to spend years on the road but something entirely different to actually do it.
It might have been easier to endure if she could at least communicate with her friends, but alas, the best thing she could do was sending them letters. Receiving them in return was pretty much impossible, though one of Itachi's crows had managed to find her once.
With a sigh, Anko cast these dark thoughts aside and continued her journey northwards, forming hand signs all the time.
3 years after leaving Konoha
She was a few miles away from the border to the Land of Wind when she saw a large cloud of black smoke rise into the sky.
Now, this was a foreign land filled with foreign people. Anko had no duty to anyone that lived here, nothing that would force her to intervene in whatever was going on. That being said, she also knew that this region of the Land of Rivers was poor and far away from the nearest city. It was unlikely that any other aid would arrive in time to help the people living here.
Without hesitation, Anko began to run.
It wasn't before long that she began to hear people screaming, though were it just that, she might have continued to hope that all she was going to find were people trying to extinguish a house that had caught fire or something like that. However, Anko was unfortunately all too familiar with the sound of crashing metal and the crazy laugh of men that enjoyed the slaughter of innocents, so she had no illusions regarding what was happening.
Her expectations were met a moment later when she came into sight of the little town:
People in tattered and flicked clothes ran for their lives while brutish looking men hunted after them, swinging their weapons above their heads and hollering jeers and insults towards their prey. There were already countless corpses spotting the area; from old men to mothers with their children, no one had been spared so far and Anko doubted the assailants planned to change that approach any time soon.
Anko had no intention of being any more merciful with them than they were with the townspeople.
She didn't know how many enemies there were, but it hardly mattered. None of them appeared to be shinobi and thus none of them was a threat to her. So, confident in her own superiority and with anger burning in her stomach, she jumped into the fight.
The first few bandits didn't even realize what was going on before they died. Two of them were running after a young girl with what must be a younger sibling in her arms when Anko appeared next to him and drove a kunai through his throat. The other one was a few steps behind and too close to stop, so before his brain even caught up with the events, she took the fallen bandit's rusty sword to end his comrade's life with it as well. Instead of stopping there, she spun around and threw the weapon, instantly killing a bandit a few dozen meters away that was just about to do the same to an old man that sat on the ground in front of him.
"Kage Bunshin no Jutsu!" (Shadow Clone Technique)
Half a second after making the necessary hand seals, half a dozen versions of her rushed into different directions to save as many people as possible.
One man that had cornered a girl in an alley suddenly found his head bashed against the stone wall to his right before being thrown backwards into one of his comrades. Befuddled as he was by the attack, he didn't even get to scream before a fireball consumed them both.
Another group of five were running after a family of three when Anko appeared between the two parties; the bandits, not judging her a threat, only laughed harder and rushed at her, making it all the easier for her summoned snakes to kill the first four by sinking their fangs into their throats. The fifth one, being fortunate enough to be a bit behind, managed to come to a stop before the same could happen to him, but he was still too slow to dodge the kunai that sunk into his forehead a second later.
A few smarter ones were realizing what was happening and tried to flee, but all it took to stop them was a simple earth wall to block their path. None of them survived long enough to search for another way out.
However, she and her clones didn't just target the aggressors but also helped the residents.
An old woman buried under some fallen over cart had already given up hope when Anko appeared and pushed the vehicle off her.
A young couple trapped in a burning building and almost unconscious from all the smoke cried in relief when she broke through the wall, extinguished the flames in their path, and then carried them to safety.
The most challenging thing that happened was when she found a middle-aged man with a slash wound on his chest; he was still alive and the injury wasn't as bad as it could have, but it was still the worst wound she had ever attempted to heal. Never had she been more thankful for reading the notes Orochimaru had left behind, as for all that many of them contained gruesome content, the information regarding how to keep prisoners alive for as long as possible while experimenting on them could also be used for situations like this.
I should try to get my hands on some real books about healing, though. Who knows when that will become handy.
In the end, Anko couldn't save everyone. She appeared too late for that. But even if she had arrived earlier, she couldn't be everywhere at once, so she decided to be grateful for having been able to help as many as she did instead of crying for those that had died. It was thanks to her interference that there were still enough people left to rebuild, so it wasn't as if nothing good came out of this. The people would mourn for the dead, yes, but they would recover and continue to live from these lands as they had done for generations.
None of the bandits survived, of course.
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Anko stayed at the destroyed town for almost a week to help with burying the corpses, rebuilding the houses, and healing the injured. She didn't need to, but she did it anyway.
She was rewarded for that in the end when it turned out that one of the townspeople, an old man that once travelled the continent as a merchant, knew a housewife's tale about "a kingdom where gigantic snakes rule supreme" he was more than willing to share with her.
It wasn't much, but considering it was also the first real clue she got, Anko was unsurprisingly excited to continue her journey.
She departed the very next day.