Vizem
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Chapter 48 - Whistles in the Silence
🕑 Added 2025-05-24 13:25:12 +0000 UTCHaving a clone forcibly dispersed was a shit show. There was no subtle way to put it. It was jarring and violent; a full-body punch that didn’t bruise the skin, but hammered the brain with a sledge.
Even intended and planned dispersals suck. Memories come in hot and unorganized, like someone dumping raw footage into your head. Every sound, every goddamn detail—complete with a pulsing migraine and sometimes nausea.
Had the jutsu not already been forbidden, that one was a reason enough to be. That only elevated my respect for the resident sunshine. Naruto, from the original universe, could get fifty or more clones stabbed and still bounce around like he'd just eaten too much ramen. Thick as a brick. Bless him.
I had learned to pace the node bleed, inducing pain. Trick I had picked up around the eighteenth time a clone melted in the middle of a fight and left me with visions of someone’s entrails instead of my lunch. The secret was not to dive into the memories too soon. Let them settle. Let the blood dry in your mind a bit before you go poking around. Skimming too early is a great way to vomit and get shitty day.
Still, that’s a nice theory when you’re on a bench sucking on tea and trauma at the same time. It’s not as elegant mid-mission, when your head’s pounding and the world keeps moving.
The trees blurred past as we ran. We weren’t tree-hopping and kept to the ground. To stay low, avoid line-of-sight, and to not give the illusion of flash and targets.
I would have still gone for that, but I had company. Sakura.
The stubborn pink brat had decided to babysit her babysitter. Claimed it was against field protocol to deploy a lone operative beyond line-of-sight without a support element. Standard two-man cell doctrine, she quoted, like she’d swallowed the mission manual. And yeah, fine, doctrine did call for paired movement outside secure zones. Technically, she wasn’t wrong.
Didn’t make her less annoying.
I'd tried to shake her off. She didn’t budge. And unfortunately, I couldn’t slap her mouth shut in front of the kids. Sai might not care—he’d probably take notes because Root was full of psychos—but Naruto would throw a tantrum, and then I’d have to manage two headaches instead of one. And I already had the clone death digging hooks behind my eyes.
So here I was, moving at a tenth speed for the sake of teamwork and female perseverance.
In any other situation, I would’ve been thrilled.
Just her and I, again. She clearly want something. And that always, always gave room to play. Push her buttons. Coil closer. Confuse her further to make her pliable. Shirp a her mental walls.
But not now.
Now wasn’t for mind games and half-flirted control and slow-burning manipulation.
It wasn’t that bad of a pairing.
If you asked me half, I’d have sold the idea of saddling Sakura to someone else. But if I had to split the four of us cleanly, I’d still have grouped us like this.
Strategically, it makes sense.
Would it have made me feel better to have Naruto with me? While I would rather not deal with his shenanigans, my mind would be more at ease if I had him in my vision. Fox-less as he was, the child of prophecy will not die in my watch.
But we play the mission, not the feelings.
Strongest with weakest—textbook. If Naruto had gone with her, he’d get distracted the second she screamed too loud, and Sai… Sai needs direction, not babysitting. She would’ve gotten in his way. Or gotten herself—and her partner—killed in the most boring fucking way possible: panic, trip, bleed out. Can’t exactly draw enemies to their knees with sparkling personality and a thick skull.
I know I’m harsh.
I know I’m being a dick.
But I keep looking for something in her tool kit I'd consider useful. And the truth is, I keep coming up short.
Unless you count existing as emotional fuel for the shounen protagonist to unlock Super Depression Mode in the middle of a war zone…
Hey. She can wall-walk. That was a good thing, right…..
Then again, that’s part of the standard academic curriculum now. Even Naruto figured it out eventually. So no, wall-walking does not go under “redeeming qualities.” It's like bragging you can tie your shoes and wipe your ass.
She’s lucky she’s got the looks, even if the chest department leaves things to be desired.
Still, she was keeping up. Barely.
We moved in relatively quiet cadence, cutting through the trees until we arrived at the edge of a small clearing, just where the memories from my clone cut off in a smear of pain and panic. The hairs on the back of my neck tingled. Clone died fast.
I slowed down, boots crunching the brittle leaf-covered ground as I stepped ahead of her, not that she noticed. Her breath was louder than it should’ve been. She didn’t belong out here.
I crouched. Footprints—deep enough to be sloppy. Bandit-shaped. It was a thing. Every time they get lucky, they start walking like gods.
But then... ten feet out? They vanished. Not worn away, faded. Gone.
That was interesting.
I scanned the ground again. No scorch marks, no bloody drag trails, no scent-traps. Whoever cleaned this up actually had some discipline. The question was... which one of those fuckers learned to cover traces like this?
"They went that way, right?" Sakura’s voice broke in, blunt and a little too loud.
I hummed.
Nothing from my assessment and the clone’s feed said they were that skilled.
And if they could do this? Why not earlier?
"I mean… they could double back.” she said, “We shouldn’t stay here too long. Especially not alone. They might be setting something up."
Was she having second thoughts? Scared? Of the bandit or of….I?
I was tempted to jab at her, get a reaction I could take advanted. But now wasn’t the time.
Slowly, inhaling, I flicked my fingers through the familiar seals—dog, tiger, ram—and pushed a ripple of chakra from my center outward.
With a grunt of effort and a thin puff of smoke, a wolf appeared. It was lean and grey-furred, taller than average, its eyes darker than fresh blood in snow. Anko’s words, she could be surprisingly poetic sometimes... in her own way.
Sakura startled visibly, blinking at the spot where the smoke hadn't even fully cleared yet. “Wait—was that a summoning jutsu?” She bit her lip, she did that often, I noticed. Her green eyes flicked from the construct’s quivering fur to my hands.
It’s not. It was a trick, I wouldn’t even call it a jutsu. Something I came up with when I was too obsessed with transformation jutsu to touch grass for three months.
Obsessed was an understatement.
The trick was merely a clone transformed before materialising. To save time.
The wolf-clone sniffed a patch of flattened grass, paws barely making sound. Then it jerked its head east and bolted.
I followed.
“Wait—!” Sakura snapped behind me, frustrated. Not scared, this time, just pissed at being ignored. She moved, chasing after with more kinetic energy than grace. But at least she didn’t stumble. I’ll give her that much.
That was the good thing about transformation jutsu, though it was technically E-rank, it was one of the most magical shit in a shinobi’s arsenal and the most underrated. You really feel different. You didn’t just look the part.
The bad thing was when the jutsu disperses... especially layered over a clone, It was a fucking death samba in the skull. Like waking up inside a blender. With emotion flashbacks and muscle memory from something that wasn’t human but also wasn’t not-you.
Dozens of sensations all pouring sideways into a brain that was never meant to process raw instinct and ultrasonic frequency range.
I still could’ve tracked the bandits without it, if I had the luxury of time.
But every second I spent smelling footprints and licking leaves was another second Naruto spent unshielded. He was just one fireball away from dead and this world fucked.
And I wasn’t letting that happen.
“Where….” Sakura asked through her breath. “Where’d you learn to do that?“
Stop talking, if you can’t even keep up. I didn’t say that; the trick in ignoring someone was to ignore them. And if I were to be fair, it was working like a charm on her. She was awfully chatty all of a sudden.
The wolf veered suddenly left, nose low, tail high, ears flicking back once before refocusing. I followed, matching its angle, stepping over a fallen log half-swallowed in moss.
“With the wolf. Iruka-sensei said you need blood, and…. and you didn’t call it. I’ve never seen anybody—”
I didn’t slow. “Experimented.” I need her to shut up, though.
“Huh?”
She waited. Wanted more. I didn’t elaborate.
“You know, you could show me,” she said with annoying casualness. "I can use clone jutsu. And transformation jutsu.”
Huh? Was this what she was after? She wanted me to teach her?
The corner of my lips raised slightly. Brave little thing. Must have taken everything she had to ask the man she caught balls-deep in her mother for help. No wonder she was dancing around it, biting her tongue like it might slip and betray what was left of her dignity.
I opened my mouth —
I felt it. A hiss in the air.
Whistles sliced through the silence—
Fuck I got destracted. Four projectiles. Small. Precise. Coordinated.
Two straight for the wolf.
Two for me.
Four—for Sakura.
The bastards had assessed correctly. Kill the weakest first, and the rest fall with less noise.
“Down!” I bellowed, pivoting off instinct.
I slammed into her before she could make a noise, grabbing fabric and flesh, twisting her out of the fucking air — she screamed.
The wolf yelped, then vanished in a pointed puff.
Something hot and cold kissed the flesh of my shoulder.
A hiss of air. A stab.
I grunted, twisting mid-motion and landing hard, with Sakura beneath my arm, too stunned to scream again. The wolf’s dispersal was the second hit; a glass chewing through my frontal lobe. I bit my tongue not to retch.
I jerked myself upright, pulling Sakura with me as she blinked wildly, face pale as snowcap powder.
Something protruded from my upper arm.
Reflecting muted sunlight off pale shimmer. Not a metal senbon. An ice needle.
I snatched the needle free, ignoring the flinch of pain. It melted promptly between my fingers, too refined to be natural. I shifted Sakura behind me with a subtle push of the arm, never taking my eyes off the overhanging branches.
“You know,” I said, tone casual, the pain a dull throb drowned by chakra and focus, "if you’d senbon instead and dipped them in poison… you could’ve made more damage.”
High above, cloaked by foliage shadow and that pale shimmer of dusklight, the figure stirred. They dropped effortlessly, catching the next branch lower without friction, and landed a short distance away.
Sakura tensed behind me. I felt it in the air, her fear shifting into brittle readiness.
My breath caught—not in panic.
The figure was slender. Lithe. Wrapped in greens and pale browns and elegant grace.
A green haori hung from narrow shoulders over soft pinstriped cloth, cut at the knees. The sleeves swayed with precision, not slop. Around their waist a brown sash, fringe flowing. Long black hair, too lush for a hostile shinobi, was pulled into a bun ringed in white. But two tendrils fell loose, perfectly framing face hidden behind a hunter-nin mask.
Long legs wrapped in cleanward cotton kissed with touches of dust. Slim waist. High collar. Gentle fingers—painted nails matching the gentle turquoise of morning frost.
I didn’t even see the face but…. Fuck. Beautiful.
Fuck, it’s Haku.
There wasn’t one part of them that wasn’t artfully arranged. Male, female—it didn’t matter. It was like looking at the embodiment of elegance, summoned into shinobi form.
“I will take that into account,” he said, no, she said, uh, they said.
Not this again. I like women. And that was a woman, since otherwise….
There was no otherwise.
