Naruto : Chapter 52

The Iwa nins stood in Gato's office listening to his ranting.

"I want you to take them out as soon as possible. They killed nine hundred of my thugs last night while I was out.

The whole base on the other side of the island was taken out. From what the investigation turned out it happened even before this base was attacked. I don't care about lulling them to safety, I want them dead.

I offer a million ryo for their heads." Gato said.

"We would have killed Kakashi anyway, but we have a deal. Though we will take the Uchiha with us to Iwa. But the Yamanaka and the girl are toast. Do you have better pictures of the group by now?" Tomoharu asked.

"Yes, we got some from closer up." Gato said and handed them the pictures of the group.

The Iwa nins looked over the pictures. The Uchiha and the pink haired girl were easy to recognize now, and Kakashi was well-known already, but the face of the blond boy could not be seen on any photo.

And he seemed to have taken to put up his hood. Why would he do that? Well, it didn't really matter. He would be with the others and therefore easy to find. Then Ichikawa noticed a small crest on the boy's collar.

"Hey, Tomoharu, isn't that the Uzumaki crest? I mean that clan from Whirlpool Country that was killed by Iwa before the third war?" Ichikawa asked.

"Let me see. It could be, but it could also just be a decoration on his clothes. It's too small to really say. And from what I know there were no survivors of Uzushio. And all Uzumakis had red hair, not blond." Tomoharu said.

"Either way, it doesn't matter if he is an Uzumaki. He is at most thirteen, so there would be no way he could be that good at fuinjutsu already. You need thousands of hours of training to become really good.

We should probably prepare for some seals used against us, but nothing above intermediate level. Even that bastard Namikaze needed until he was twenty to become a seal master and he was a genius."

"So when do we attack?" Mikiko asked eagerly.

"In two hours. We will prepare for a hard decisive strike against them. They should be at the bridge builder's house. With how many thugs they killed last night the genin should be pretty traumatized.

I didn't think Kakashi would go this far, but probably he had found out about the two full bases and wanted to reduce his opposition as long as he had an advantage. That's not the normal style those tree-huggers use." Tomoharu commented.

"Yes." The other two answered.

...

Two hours later Sakura shook Kakashi awake.

"Sensei, they are here." She informed him.

"Hm? That's earlier than I thought. Don't worry, I trust Naruto's seals. Let them try getting through them for a while. If Naruto is right, they will need twenty hours to get through the seals. I had four hours of sleep, not bad." Kakashi commented.

"Should we wake Naruto?" Sakura asked.

"No, he will wake up soon anyway. The antidote would need ten minutes to work and he normally will wake up in thirty minutes anyway. There is no reason to hurry." Kakashi said.

"Why are you so sure his seals will keep the Iwa nins out?" Sakura asked.

"Naruto is an Uzumaki." Kakashi simply stated.

...

About forty minutes later Naruto was completely awake again and was briefed on the situation.

"They are earlier than we thought they would be but not overly so." Naruto stated.

"Yes. I don't know how fast back-up from Konoha can come here. Probably not fast enough for us to avoid a fight with them. Two of them are jonin and one is a chunin.

That won't be a big problem to deal with. Normally I would take on Tomoharu and let Naruto deal with Mikiko and Sasuke would fight Ichikawa. But with her being intent on killing me they won't let us do it like that.

So the only fight we can probably stir that way will be the one of Sasuke. The main problem will be Tomoharu and his wide scale earth jutsus. Earth users in general are difficult to fight as they are really good at hiding and using the ground you walk on as their weapon." Kakashi said.

"His earth jutsus will be blocked by lightning based seals. They hold enough chakra for twenty hours, sensei. That's the reason I said I could guarantee the seals holding for twenty hours.

If I manage to sneak out later and recharge the seals, we could last longer. But recharging all the seals will probably be impossible. It takes a lot of chakra. But if we are lucky the back-up will be here by then." Naruto said.

"So they have to get through lightning based seals? But what if they used wind jutsus?" Sakura asked.

"They would need a massively strong wind user to even make a dent in my seals. And wind users are really rare. Even Suna doesn't have many.

The only one with higher skills is Baki. And even he doesn't have great area effect jutsus. Wind is the rarest of all elements to have." Naruto explained.

"How do you know so much?" Sasuke asked.

"I read the bingo book." Naruto answered.

Tazuna and his family wondered how long it would take until help would be here. Tazuna especially was really glad now that it was this team that had got the mission.

To find a team like that was a very big coincidence. Who would have thought that ninjas could keep out intruders this efficiently?

...

Outside the Iwa nins were getting frustrated.

"Damn it all. We can't get through." Mikiko yelled in frustration. "I want to kill Kakashi!"

"Well, that seems to answer the question if the boy is an Uzumaki. Damn, I didn't think one had survived in Konoha. And it seems to be a prodigy if theses seals are any indication." Tomoharu said annoyed.

"What are we going to do? All our earth jutsus are stopped cold by that lightning seal barrier or whatever that may be. And even I know that there are some other seals too." Ichikawa commented.

"Keep your calm. No matter how good this boy is, there are limits to how long seals can constantly keep up a protection if they are based on an element.

Even Uzushio itself was worn down after three days and they had chakra stored for years. Even if the boy prepared these seals beforehand and now just placed them in his whole protection array, they won't last forever if we attack them constantly. But we don't even need to.

Konoha ninjas have one major weakness, they care too much. If we start attacking the civilians outside the protective sphere, they will try to protect them." Tomoharu said.

"Nice plan, but nope, it won't work." They heard a young voice behind them.

They turned around and saw a boy, clothed completely in grey with no recognisable features thanks to a hood and lower face mask sitting on a tree-branch.

"So you have come out, either you are very brave or very stupid." Tomoharu said.

"Or I'm just a clone and a messenger and therefore neither of your theories is correct." The boy said.

The Iwa nins had to admit that that would be a very probable option.

"What do you want?" Mikiko asked.

"Oh, for one, I wanted to ask you to just leave. We can avoid so much hassle. Fighting would be just so troublesome." The boy said.

'A Nara?' Ichikawa thought confused.

"I will kill Kakashi! No snot nosed brat will get me to leave!" Mikiko exclaimed.

"Ah, I feared there would be old grudges. Well, I also wanted to tell you that kidnapping the villagers won't do you any good. You're here on a mission for the Tsuchikage.

If you don't return to Iwa soon, he will get cranky, and the old man already has problems with his hip. That will not please him.

If you add an unprovoked attack on civilians, what do you think will happen to Iwa's mission income?" The boy asked.

Tomoharu had to grit his teeth. The boy was right. They couldn't afford to risk losing clients if these news got out. In war killing civilians was one thing, but while they had peace it was something entirely else.

Even their militaristic leader wouldn't accept that. Especially as they couldn't just kill all witnesses that would tell about Iwa being the culprit. This wasn't a sanctioned mission after all.

"You see, you'll lose if you attack the civilians here. It would be better if you just finished your normal mission here and returned to Iwa. Take the information you have collected and go." The boy said.

"Who do you think you are to tell us what we should do?" Mikiko asked seething.

"Only a messenger. Which is good. Having to fight would be so troublesome." He said and dispelled in a cloud of smoke.

"So he really was a clone. That looked suspiciously like a shadow clone." Ichikawa said.

"It was one. That boy must have massive chakra reserves to pull that off. We need to consider our way of attack. We can wear down the seals, but we don't know if it will be enough.

They are very safe in there. And if we exhaust our reserves to get the barrier down, we will also lose because fighting Kakashi after having to use up earth chakra for hours will be suicide." Tomoharu said.

"You really think that barrier will hold that long?" Ichikawa asked.

"You saw that shadow clone. Only those with jonin level chakra reserves can pull that jutsu off. And they have really good information on us. They knew what techniques we used. We can't even get one of Mikiko's bees through.

They knew we would come for them, so they acted before we would. I guess they had another shadow clone spying on Gato when we decided to attack them. They got the information of how much time they would have and took out the camp and the base in one night.

This team seems to be a genin team; there is no way that they could pull that off. The only one with experience in assassination is Kakashi and even he can't manage that scale of kills on his own. There must be another specialist or even a team that we don't know about.

We need more information before we act. We can't risk losing one of us to an unauthorised fight as well, as much as I want to kill his student." Tomoharu analysed.

"So we are blocking them from getting out and wait until they have nothing to eat? That can take weeks." Mikiko complained.

"We don't have the time for that. If we had backup that could help us overpower this seal barrier we would be able to get them.

But you can be sure that Kakashi already has his call for backup reach Konoha. He is smart like that and if they knew about us coming we can expect to have more opposition soon.

They are biding their time in there. They are obviously convinced that they can last long enough for backup from Konoha to arrive. And face it; any chunin team would tip the scales against us.

If they knew who we were before we came here, they will call for those that have the abilities to counter our specialties perfectly.

They would need a high chunin Aburame or a good fire user for Mikiko, a good lightning user against Ichikawa and they already have Kakashi here to take on me.

Or they simply send a team that has enough strength to keep you two on your toes while Kakashi and I have another battle. And don't forget that Konoha now seems to have another seal specialist.

I think we can be relatively sure that the boy is an Uzumaki. Which means he will have more surprises that he didn't use yet." Tomoharu continued his analyse.

"So we are just giving up?" Mikiko asked.

"What else could we do that won't compromise our own mission? I can only keep up with the earth jutsus we would need to wear the lightning seals down for four hours. Ichikawa could do so for two hours.

From what I estimate those seals will manage to keep us out for about fifteen hours if we went at full power against them. I read the report on the attack on Uzushio. They needed constant wearing down of the seals that protected the village for two days to start fighting.

And even then our ninjas fell like the flies. The only reason Uzushio fell was that Konoha couldn't get there soon enough and that we had more than ten times the number of ninjas they had.

And even then we lost the complete battalion that was there to the cursed Yellow Flash and the Red Devil when they arrived. The fall of Uzushio cost Iwa massively.

"Right now we can go back to Iwa, give Tsuchikage Sama our report and inform him that Konoha has an Uzumaki in their ranks that is damn good with seals and that there is a new assassination specialist.

I don't know if that specialist is within Kakashi's team or not. It could also be that Konoha knew about Gato and his criminal activities and sent another person whose presence was concealed by that team coming here.

We simply can't be sure and we don't have the means to kill the team as long as they are holed up in there." Tomoharu said.

"Shit, I hate it when you are right." Mikiko said.

"So we can probably also report that Wave won't be a good location for business for us soon. Kakashi seems to be intent on liberating the country from Gato. Otherwise he wouldn't have taken out the camp and the base." Ichikawa added.

"Yes, it seems like that." Tomoharu agreed.

"What do you think about destroying the bridge at least?" Mikiko asked.

"Not a bad idea. Perhaps we could even get them out of there to protect it." Tomoharu pondered. "Okay, we do it. Let's see if they won't come out then."

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