Hidden Leaf, Hidden Talents 54

Lotus House had a garden. Not a real garden, obviously. Real gardens don’t have drunken samurai sleeping under azalea bushes or courtesans smoking pipes by the koi pond. But it had gravel paths, lanterns, and koi that had probably seen more regrettable late-night confessions than any priest in Fire Country.

The sake was good. Too good. Which was a problem, because good sake made me honest, and honesty wasn’t part of the Kanzaki Ryouma package deal. I sat back on a cushioned chair at a garden table, the lanterns throwing soft light over the koi pond behind us. Across the table, Sumire, madam of Lotus House, poured another cup.

“So, young master Kanzaki,” she said, smiling like she was listening. “Are you satisfied with our service?”

I swirled my cup, put on my best spoiled-rich-boy grin, and said, “Very satisfied. Especially your women. And your sake.” I made sure to sound just tipsy enough to sell it. Kanzaki Ryouma, wealthy young master with a fondness for women and alcohol: flawless performance. Oscar-worthy, if Oscars existed here.

She laughed politely. Too politely. Which meant she didn’t buy it. Women like Sumire had seen too many men playact confidence. She could probably tell how much coin was in a man’s pocket just by how he said “thank you.”

I leaned conspiratorially. “Actually, Madam Sumire, I’m looking for someone. A cooper. Or maybe a carpenter.”

Her eyes narrowed just slightly. Like I’d asked her if she happened to know any necromancers. “A… cooper?”

“Mm.” I nodded. “Barrel-maker, cask-maker, someone who knows their way around wood and iron hoops.”

“Young master, may I ask… why?”

I widened my eyes the way only the truly stupid or truly rich can. “I recently purchased an old recipe. For sake. From a traveling merchant.” I lowered my voice like it was a scandal. “He claimed it was unearthed from old ruins. Said it might be a long-lost brew.”

If acting had a difficulty ranking, this was S-rank acting. Pretend to be naive while being cynical while pretending to be naive. Clone Oscars, again.

Her expression froze. Speechless. Madam Sumire had probably heard every scam between Fire and Lightning, and this one didn’t even make her top ten. Her lips parted, then closed again, because for half a second she almost nodded along. Easy money. A client too naïve to know better. Then she realized agreeing too fast might cost her more than she stood to gain. If this really was a scam, and he realized later, would he hold a grudge? Rich boys don’t forget slights; they pay them back with interest.

So instead of agreeing, she schooled her face back to neutral, lips parting like she was about to promise help, then closing again. Caution won over temptation. Better to warn him than take the coin and risk being remembered as the one who fed his humiliation.

“Young master… forgive me, but that sounds like—”

“A scam?” I cut in cheerfully. “Of course! But I have plenty of money. Father gives me more than I can spend. Even if it fails, it will be amusing. And if it succeeds—” I raised my cup like I was toasting destiny. “I will be the one who revived ancient sake. Imagine that story.”

She exhaled through her nose. That’s the sound women make when they’ve already given up on you but can’t stop themselves from trying anyway. “There are easier ways to waste money, Kanzaki-sama.”

“Ah, but none so entertaining.”

Her silence stretched, long enough for a koi to leap and splash like it was filling the awkward pause for us.

Not bad. Most merchants would’ve lunged at the bait already—greedy, predictable, drooling like dogs chasing scraps. But she? She bit her tongue, weighed the angles, let me sweat in my own silence. That kind of restraint is worth more than coin. If she were a con artist, she’d be the dangerous kind. If she were honest, she’d be rarer still. Either way, I almost liked her for it. Almost.

Finally, she shook her head. “Even if I knew such craftsmen, I shouldn’t encourage this. You’ll only lose coin.”

I waved her off like a man who’d never once checked a balance sheet. “Madam, please. Pocket change. A whim. If you help me, I’ll make sure you’re well paid for the headache.”

“…You really are persistent,” she sighed.

“Persistence is my best quality,” I said, savoring the sake, and slipped a folded sheet from my sleeve.

I set it on the table, and her fingers hesitated just slightly before taking it.

She unfolded it. Read. At first, polite interest. Then her brow faintly furrowed.

Mash Tun. Fermentation vessels. Distillation apparatus. Storage barrels. Funnels, cloth filters, glass jars...

By the time she reached the bottom, her smile had thinned into silence. The garden lanterns flickered against her face as she lowered the paper. “…This is… extensive. Some of these things I have never even heard of. To make them, if they can even be made, will take time. A great deal of time.”

Which was fair. If someone handed me a recipe and it said step one: capture lightning in a bottle, I’d probably hesitate too.

I smiled like a fool who’d never failed at anything in his life. “That’s fine. My bodyguard used to be a rogue nin. Traveled everywhere, learned all sorts of tricks. If you’re unsure about something, he can guide you.”

And then I tilted my head slightly, just enough for her to follow my gaze.

He was already standing beside me.

A bulky man stood with arms folded, half his face swallowed by shadow, radiating a chill that made the koi in the pond forget how to swim.

Her fan slipped in her hand. She hadn’t seen him arrive. She hadn’t even felt him arrive. One second he wasn’t there, the next he was, as if he’d been cut-and-pasted into the scene.

Her back stiffened, eyes darting between me and the wall of muscle. Pretend-rich boys don’t have bodyguards like that. Real ones do. And just like that, her doubt cashed itself out.

Eighty percent convinced turned into full certainty. Her fingers tightened just a little on the fan. She looked burdened for a moment, and that was harder to miss than the smile she tried to cover it with.

I didn’t know why, but need reads louder than greed, and for just a second, I saw it.

She wanted the coin, no doubt. But it wasn’t the shiny-eyed hunger I’d seen a hundred times in merchants who thought they’d just found a walking ryo bag. This was different. Like the money wasn’t for her, but for something else pulling at her sleeve.

Something was up.

And maybe I should’ve cared. Maybe I should’ve asked. But Kanzaki Ryouma wasn’t here to care; he was here to throw money around and look naïve doing it. Still… desperation without greed? That was unusual—rare, like finding a merchant who didn’t haggle or a gambler who walked away winning. And my instincts itched.

Mm… Maybe I’d slip another clone into the house later, see what her story was. Nothing crazy, just enough to scratch the itch.

She lowered the list slowly, as if it weighed more than paper should. “Very well. I’ll do what I can. But this will take time, Kanzaki-sama.”

I nodded, sipping my sake like it could teach me patience. It couldn’t, but let’s not ruin the mood.

……

Meanwhile, in Lightning Country—

I counted fifty-three. Not by names, because naming your clones is how madness starts, but by shadows. Fifty-three bodies crouched under rocks, tucked in brush, clinging to ridges like barnacles pretending to be moss. Fifty-three copies of random haircut, each waiting for me to tell them what kind of bad idea we were about to commit.

“Boss,” one of me whispered. “We really going through with this?”

Not an unfair question. 3rd-gen Clones are me, but they’re also me with fewer filters. Which means they ask things I’d rather keep as subtext.

“If we screw this up, they trace it back to us,” the clone went on. “Konoha and Kumo stop glaring at each other from across the room and start throwing kunai. Are you sure?”

I thought about it. About Kumo’s resealing circus down in the clearing, about the old host coughing his lungs out while ink crawled over his body, about the new host staring like a deer already halfway gutted. About how many times we’ve said necessary evil with straight faces.

“There’s risk,” I said. “So we hand the bill to another village. We wrap ourselves in Iwa’s colors and let the world blame them.”

Murmurs. Not real murmurs, since all the mouths belonged to me, but echoes of doubt ping-ponging in my skull.

“Kiri? You sure? We don’t know their tells. What if they ask us to spit mist and we choke?”

Good point. A terrible point, but good.

A clone shifted behind a rock. “And what if a jonin sees through the Henge? Then what?”

Another me piped up right away. “Even if they notice it’s a Henge, so what? They don’t see the real face under it. Boss stays safe. Original stays safe.”

Safe. Funny word for shinobi work.

Still, the thought stuck. “Iwa makes more sense,” I said. “They’re a major village. Closest one here aside from Kiri. If anyone’s going to stick their fingers in, it’s Iwa.”

A clone crouched by the ridge shook his head. “Or maybe that’s too obvious. Anyone sees Iwa headbands, they’ll think frame job. We’ll be the kid caught with ink all over his hands standing next to the graffiti.”

Another me snorted. “And Kiri isn’t obvious? You want Mist? Then cough up the actual Mist Jutsu. Otherwise we’re tourists in cosplay.”

“So what then?” one muttered. “Disguise as missing-nin? Masked rogues?”

“Too vague,” I said. “Rogues draw questions. Villages draw blame. Iwa is a village people already expect to meddle. And if we’re lucky, it won’t just be Kumo pointing fingers at Iwa—it’ll get Kiri watching too. Or the other way around. Either works. Suspicion’s cheaper than kunai, and it cuts just as well.”

Agreement rolled through the group, not harmony, exactly, more like a coin tossed fifty-three times that just happened to keep landing the same way.

And once that many coins land the same way, you stop arguing probabilities and start acting like it’s fate.

They split because he said split.

Seven squads, seven lanes of trouble, seven wedges aimed at the ritual ring glittering down-valley. The boss stayed in the trees, hands already moving—one set to make more of them, one set to drop a few into meditation for reinforcement later. Fifty-three was a lot until it wasn’t. Numbers shrink fast in foreign country.

Masks on. Iwa faces. Headcloths, plates, the whole story. They moved.

They didn’t creep; they sprinted. Brush slapped their shins, slate grit slid under sandals, breath worked in time with the ground.

The first thing to break wasn’t a body, it was the silence. And when it broke, it broke into lightning. A thunderclap too close, not from the sky, Raiton jumped across the dirt like a thrown net. Four clones died wrong, bodies turning into chakra smoke mid-stride, momentum leaving nothing behind but a memory and scattered pebbles. The jonin who cast it stood up from a shallow ditch, fingers still locked at the last seal.

Squad Two reached him first.

Two clones met his kunai at once; a third came in low with a heel to the knee. The jonin flowed back, blade humming with chakra, batted the heel aside, cut through a wooden feint, pivoted into a short thrust that deleted a throat. A clone popped behind him, leaving a spray of glittering chakra dust.

He was good. Of course he was good. jonin are the answer to bad ideas.

They layered anyway. One clone flashed through seals—Katon: Gokakyu no Jutsu—and fire turned the ditch into a throat of heat. The jonin body-flickered out of the funnel and straight into the waiting space where two more clones were already moving. One dragged a forearm across the man’s wrist, chakra gathering thin and blue; the other went for eyes with a kunai feint and a snapping front kick.

Chakra Scalpel is quiet, which is why it’s unfair. It doesn’t scream. It just unthreads.

The jonin’s blade dropped for half a second when flexors lost the argument with anatomy. In that slip, the kick landed. His head snapped to the side, guard fractured, stance too square. The next clone’s tanto slid into ribs, angled up. He stabbed the clone’s face at the same time out of sheer professionalism; it still popped. He dropped anyway, because death also respects timing.

They ran on.

Squad Four hit a low stone rise and found three jonin waiting in a triangle. One launched Raiton: Jibashi—Electromagnetic Murder, a crawling sheet of crackle across the ground, while the other two flickered to the flanks, turning the approach into a funnel with teeth.

Clones scattered, then re-formed without a word: two up the middle to bait, two wide to draw angles, one high leaping off a trunk, three hanging back with shuriken already humming.

The two went in first, metronomes with fists. Their job wasn’t victory, it was percussion, keep the music loud enough that the real notes could slide in unnoticed. That was the point: to give the flanking clones a tempo to step into. A Kumo blade caught a forearm and stung it into smoke; the jonin stepped through the vanishing to finish the second bait, and that’s when a backline clone slid in on a low line and wrote a thin blue line across his hamstring. His stance died. He lived for three more heartbeats. Long enough to throw a kunai that erased another clone and make the finisher work for it.

The second jonin didn’t get greedy. He went to break contact—smart—but Squad Four had already turned the slope into a net. A clone with a short-sword opened with a straight-line iaidō draw, not to cut but to claim space; a second clone slammed a heel into the ground to throw grit up; the third clone came in on that micro-blind. The jonin parried steel and grit at once, then used Body Flicker to ghost a body-length away.

He flickered right into a fireball’s edge.

He tried to roll through it, and mostly did. Burned hair, smoking sleeve, eyes watering. One clone hurled three shuriken. The jonin slapped them aside, then realized the goal wasn’t to hit him; it was to make a path. Two clones sprinted that path and launched in perfect sync, a high fake knee, a low sweep, then an elbow that cracked into the clavicle. He grunted. The low clone’s hand flashed blue and drew a fast crescent across the jonin’s abdomen. Muscles failed to agree about what “brace” meant. The high clone’s tanto went home.

Two down at the slope. One more at that rise—still trading—no time to look.

Squad One found a jonin in a camo cloak hugging the base of a cedar. He dropped into their line like a thrown nail, lightning-laced kunai stitching the air. Two clones disappeared. The third clone stepped in with a boxing shell, shoulders tight, elbows carving, ate a shallow cut on the cheek and returned a hook under the ribs. The jonin didn’t flinch; trained bodies don’t flinch the same way. He punished the trade with a knee that erased the shelling clone.

A fourth clone slid by his blind spot and drew a scalpel across the back of the knee. The jonin twisted out and would have made it if a fifth clone hadn’t checked his hip with a driving shoulder. The angle stole balance for one breath. The sixth clone, who’d been waiting that entire time took that breath and made it final with a short blade to the kidney. The jonin jammed a kunai into the killer’s collarbone in the same moment. Both popped, one permanent, one temporary. Numbers still did the math.

They kept running.

They cut downhill through shin-high ferns where water flashed over stone. Lightning cracked again from the left—someone on the ridge throwing needles of current through the air. Three clones disappeared into white smoke as the needles found joints and throats. The rest hit the stream in stride and rolled to break line of fire, then surged up the opposite bank. A clone drew a tag-lined kunai and skated it under a root toward the ridge’s base. The explosion folded the earth. Close, but no funeral. Targets don’t stay down unless you make them, and these ones weren’t finished yet.

Squad Three climbed the broken slope in a flanking push. A jonin rose from the dust with a short staff and wrote a fast set of circles in the air, clean staff work, hips doing the math, enough to make clones regret being issued standard bones. He cracked one off the jaw, knocked a second out of a dash, stuffed a third with a toe-pick to the thigh, and reset with the staff tucked and his shoulders squared. Trained. Dangerous.

So they cheated properly: one clone went airborne as decoy, a second slid in low to tempt the staff down, a third got behind him by going the long way, and a fourth didn’t show at all until the moment he needed to, dropping out of a cedar with a down-cut. The staff tracked the airborne decoy and punished him into smoke, then bounced off the low slider’s forearms, then snapped toward the down-cut. It still bit—but the clone accepted the pain, rode the rebound close, and glued himself to the jonin’s chest as the clone behind laid a scalpel line across the man’s shoulder girdle. Power leaked out of one arm instantly. The staff went light. The next beat was pure Shotokan: snap punch, step, hip, thrust. A clone’s fist hammered the jonin into the trunk hard enough to rattle both. Bone met bark. Ugly, yes, but it ended the argument.

They bled numbers to speed.

Nine jonin wasn’t one enemy, it was nine. Each needed a separate answer, and every answer cost something. Two more Kumo veterans came in on cross angles, coordinated without speaking, one throwing Raiton through a throwing-knife pattern, the other closing to punish any dodge that looked lazy. Three clones died trying to do something clever; another two died doing something simple. The survivors stopped trying to be heroic. Heroism is what you call it when a tactic lacks a second step.

They went back to steps. Feint, layer, pry, cut.

A pair rolled in with basic taijutsu, nothing special—jab, cross, level change—except the footwork was honest and the hips stayed behind the strikes. The jonin parried both hands with the same forearm, rippling current along skin to punish contact. It worked once. It didn’t work the second time, because the second beat didn’t offer him flesh, it offered him steel: a tanto that kissed along the inside of his forearm, just shallow enough to demand attention. He gave it. The third clone’s scalpel traced the lat; the fourth clone’s heel stamped the ankle. When joints stop agreeing, balance becomes a rumor. A shuriken took his ear. The finishing thrust found the clean triangle between ribs.

The partner tried to grab the moment back with another Jibashi, current crawling across wet roots toward the clones’ sandals. One clone solved the problem the only way clones can, by dying first. He stepped into the charge, let the current chew him apart, and turned into smoke while the rest of us kept running. Disposable heroism, the cheapest kind.

The others were already moving; one clone closed while the jutsu was still arcing, slid in off-line, and cracked the jaw with a short hook. The jonin’s head bounced, and he tried to punish the crowd with a spinning slash, but the low clone inside his spin wrote a fast scalpel across the hip flexor and left. The spin ended early. The high clone placed a tanto behind the collarbone and pushed down. The close clone caught the wrist and wrenched it at the same time. Someone hissed through teeth. It might have been any of them.

They saw the ring.

The sealing site was a bright wound in the trees—ink lines, shouting, a stretcher, masks, the awful symmetry that only ritual creates in a forest. The clones kept moving; stopping is where fear lives. They flickered between trunks and boulders, used roots as springboards, treated gravity more like a suggestion than a law. Their breath was a rope. They hauled on it.

Two more jonin stood between them and the circle: one on a branch, one kneeling in ferns. The kneeler was the problem, hands mid-seal. He pointed. The branch-man moved.

Projectiles met midair, shuriken chattering in bright arcs. A clone body-flickered past that noise and straight at the kneeler. The branch-man’s kunai whipped down on a line that would have cut the clone in half, except that clone wasn’t there anymore: a puff of wood and smoke—their Substitution had traded him with a stump already tagged with low chakra. The real clone reappeared off-line and drew a blue line across the kneeler’s triceps. The seals broke. The kneeler slammed palms to earth to throw a shock, and the clone above him ate it and vanished. That left the jonin still kneeling, half-scorched, one arm gone to static.

The branch-man hit the ground like a hammer, lightning running the length of his forearm. He smashed through one clone, then two, then three—momentum plus technique makes messes fast. The fourth clone didn’t try to stop him; he redirected, shoulder to shoulder, turning the line into a slide. The fifth clone stole the ankle. The sixth drew scalpel across the back while the seventh opened the throat—so clean it looked like a lesson in anatomy, if lessons ended with people gurgling on the ground. The branch-man fell without a speech.

The kneeler tried to get up and didn’t. A clone helped him finish not getting up.

They counted on the run because not counting gets you killed. Twenty-eight. That number meant twenty-five clones ended as smoke on the wind in under a minute. They didn’t linger on it. Linger later, if later exists.

Screams bloomed from the clearing.

But they weren’t Kumo screams. They were ours.

The Third Raikage appeared—no, “appeared” was too gentle. He ripped into existence like a thunderbolt stapled into human shape. One blink, and clones were already bursting. Not cut, not broken—erased. His fist drew arcs of black lightning, and each swing collapsed five bodies into smoke before they even had time to remember they were supposed to hurt.

We screamed as we died, Twenty-eight mouths in stereo, all Shinji, all echoing through the clearing like a choir that never asked to sing. A sound nobody in Konoha would ever hear, and maybe that was mercy.

The wave was gone in seconds.

But the boss was cautious. The boss had always been cautious. He’d already stacked another twelve shadows, released them like arrows right behind the first. Weak arrows, though. Rushed. Half-filled, quarter-filled, sometimes just sparks wearing faces. Disposable in a way even clones rarely admitted.

Timing saved them. While the Raikage stormed through the first crowd, the second slipped by, like minnows darting past a shark’s teeth.

They hit the circle.

The sealing masters didn’t even have time to shout. Paper tags fluttered like snow, brushes snapped under sandals. A scalpel carved across one wrist, splintering the seals in his fingers. A kunai opened a throat mid-shout. Fireballs roared over the ink, boiling it into a black smear.

And the boy—the new host-to-be—was caught in the crossfire. He didn’t even look old enough to shave, eyes wide with terror and veins of sealing script still crawling over his skin. One clone’s blade slipped across his belly as the formation collapsed, and he opened like a wineskin. He died without meaning, but with plenty of blood. Enough blood to make the ground slick underfoot, enough blood to matter.

That was enough.

The Eight-Tails broke free.

There’s no polite way to describe it. The ink snapped like cut veins, light geysered from the boy’s corpse, and then the forest was full of it—flesh swelling, bones elongating, eight tails blooming like obscene flowers from a mountain-sized carcass that screamed louder than anything human has a right to scream.

The rampage was instant. The first sealing master was caught mid-step and swatted into paste. Just a red splash across a rock. The second tried to weave seals and was eaten, waist to head, by a mouth the size of a wagon. His legs fell twitching, still making half-seals. The third ran and got lanced through by a tail, pinned to the dirt like a butterfly, writhing until the ground caved under the pressure.

Clones died too, of course. Flattened by tails, drowned in chakra pressure, or simply erased by the beast’s raw hate. Their memories streamed back to the original like burning wires, one after another after another, until it stopped mattering which death was whose.

Everyone else on site? Gone. Sucked into gore, ground into mud, scattered like toys after a tantrum. The Eight-Tails painted the clearing with shinobi blood, and the only one left standing after the first minute was the Raikage.

He didn’t flinch.

He didn’t back up.

He charged.

Lightning poured down his body in a black cloak, making every muscle into iron, every step into thunder. The Eight-Tails met him with a roar that stank of rot and ozone, eight tails snapping forward like executioners’ whips.

And when flesh met lightning, the forest shook.

……

Meanwhile, in Fire Country near the Suna border.

I turned east without meaning to. The clone memories slammed in, screams, blood, the Raikage, and the Eight-Tails breaking free like a nightmare given muscle.

My mouth went dry. I honestly didn’t know whether to clap for them or slap myself. Great feat or reckless stunt? Both. Always both.

Sakumo gave me a look, and Tsunade’s brow dipped. I waved it off. “Nothing. Thought I heard something in the brush.”

Inside, though, I was speechless.