The slate had three lines on it now, and four crosses, and a curving track that ended where Kazuhiko's piece of charcoal was tapping the rock.
"Six in the convoy," he said. "Maybe seven. Lead has a fan. Courier in the middle holds the scroll. Three escorts on the flanks. Maybe a fourth on cleanup."
Yuki leaned over the slate. Her hair was tied back tight against the rain and her wire spool was unclipped from her belt now, a coil of dark steel resting against her thigh.
"They came through here on Tuesday."
"Tuesday and a Saturday three weeks ago. Same shape both times. Same direction. They are coming back from a forward dropoff, not going to one. Their courier will be lighter than the outbound, but they will still have a scroll in him because they always do."
"What's on it?"
"Orders. Whatever they came up to deliver. We won't know until we snatch the scroll."
Genmai was sharpening the steel cap on the head of his bo with a small grey stone. He had not looked up from it in twenty minutes. He looked up now.
"Where do you want her?"
"Downslope flank. Same position I'd give any new member. Hold the south side, prevent escape that way, pick off anyone the wires don't take who tries to break in your direction."
Genmai nodded and went back to the stone.
Mikoto sat where she had sat for the last hour, on the flat stone near the fire, with her hands wrapped around a clay cup of hot water she had been drinking in small slow sips. Her sword lay on the ground beside her.
Kazuhiko looked across the fire at her.
"You'll have the south flank. There's a cypress stand twelve metres downslope from the wire line. You set up behind the third trunk on the left. You don't move from that position until you have something to kill. When you have something to kill, you kill it and you go back to the trunk. Understood."
"Understood, Kazuhiko-san."
"Have you killed before?"
"Yes."
"A person?"
"Yes."
He looked at her one more second. Then he tapped the slate.
"Then the south flank is the right position because it's the one with the fewest of them coming through it. We use you for what we have until we know what else you are. Understood."
"Understood."
"Eat something before we move. Genmai, give her a strip."
Genmai pulled a length of dried meat out of his pack and handed it across the fire. He did not say anything.
She took the meat. She chewed it. The fire ate down to coals and the rain ran in long thin lines off the lip of the overhang and the slate sat between them with the line of the convoy's path drying in the charcoal.
They moved out at the hour after dusk.
The forest gave way to the chokepoint exactly where the slate had said it would, a place where the trail narrowed between a rock face on the north side and a fall of broken stones on the south.
Yuki rigged her wires across the trail at ankle and chest and a third height that was waist-high on the kind of person Yuki expected most Suna shinobi to be. The wires were dark and they sat in the rain and they did not catch the light. She set the trigger spool behind a fallen log on the upslope side. She lay down behind the log and she did not move again for the next two hours.
Genmai positioned behind the great moss-covered boulder ten metres past the wires. He set the bo across his lap. He utilized the Disguise Jutsu, blending in with his surroundings and became motionless.
Kazuhiko took the back of the kill zone, downstream where the trail curved and a fallen tree gave him cover. He set himself with his sword loose in his hand.
Mikoto walked down to the cypress stand twelve metres below the wires. The third trunk on the left was a tall straight pine with a curtain of low branches that came down to her shoulder. She set herself behind it. She made herself small.
She took Shark Skin from her back.
She set the sword's tip down in the soft wet ground. She made the seals. Dog, Boar, Ram.
The wrappings became cleaner wrappings. The shape under them changed. To any pair of eyes that managed to see underneath the bandages, the bandaged living greatsword was a thick cleaver-like blade. The weight in her hands did not change. The bite of the scales did not change.
The bandages around the hilt rolled themselves a little tighter against her palms.
She set it back across her back. She brought her hands together in a single seal.
She had been thinking about whether to do this since the slate.
One thing she could do was give the team a little more cover than they had. It was a relatively simple jutsu.
Tiger. Boar. Dog.
"Water Style: Hidden Mist Jutsu."
It came out of her quietly. The mist that came after it came out quieter still. It rolled off the soaked earth around her feet and it climbed up through the cypress branches and it spread along the trail in a thin grey skin that any Suna sensor would call rain mist and ignore. It did not roll up the slope to where Kazuhiko was. It did not roll up to Yuki's position. It sat where Mikoto wanted it to sit, across the south flank and the kill zone, between waist height and shoulder height, exactly thick enough that a person standing in it could not be seen clearly from more than four metres away.
She felt it cost her almost nothing.
She made herself small again behind the trunk.
She waited.
The convoy came down the trail an hour after full dark.
They came through the mist before they saw her.
The fan user was first. He was tall and thin with a war fan was strapped across his back. He had his hand near his hilt and his eyes were scanning their surroundings carefully.
He looked into the mist. He did not see her. The cypress trunk took up most of what he could see in that direction, and what mist was not the cypress was just mist.
The courier came after him at five paces back. The courier was younger, smaller, and his hand was inside his vest where the scroll would be. He had a senbon pouch on his hip and the senbon pouch was open at the top.
The cloth binder walked third with a coil of dark cloth wound around her right forearm. She was thin. Her eyes were the only thing about her that did not look young.
The medical-nin was fourth. She was older than the cloth binder by maybe ten years. She had a vest cinched tight against her ribs and a flat pouch across her belly.
Two escorts behind. One with a tantō. One with a small dark bow.
Six.
Yuki had said five to six. She had been right about six.
Mikoto pressed her shoulder into the trunk and held her breath and waited for the wires.
The chunin lead crossed the line at the head of the kill zone.
The wires snapped up.
The chest-high wire took the tantō escort across the throat at exactly the angle Yuki had set it for. He did not have time to make a sound as his head rolled forward on its own.
The waist-high wire caught the second escort. He saw it; he tried to jump it; he caught it across the thighs with both legs already in the air. He went down on the trail with most of his weight on top of his own opened legs.
Genmai was already moving when the second body hit the ground.
He came over the boulder in one motion and his bo was already swinging when he came down out of the air. The courier was the closest. The courier was Genmai's first cut, because Genmai had been told the courier was the target and Genmai did what he was told. The bo caught the courier high on the upper back, exactly where the spine met the skull, with the full force of a hundred and ten kilos of Konoha shinobi coming down out of a leap.
The courier folded forward into the trail. He went one way, his senbon went another, and the small flick of his hand toward the pouch never finished because his hand had stopped working halfway.
Kazuhiko was already engaging the fan leader by then. Sword against fan. The lead was wide-eyed, surprised, but he was a chunin and he was opening his fan with one hand and reaching for a senbon with the other and the wind that came out of the fan was a one-star wind, sharp and aimed, and Kazuhiko was ducking under it before it could land.
The cloth binder turned. Her cloth was uncoiling from her arm.
She was looking up the slope. She was looking at where Genmai had come from. She was not looking at the cypress stand.
The medical-nin was.
She had her eyes locked on the place where the trail curved and the mist thickened, and her hand was already in the poison pouch, and the senbon that came out of it was darker than it should have been at the point.
She broke from the formation at her own decision and she moved low and fast across the trail.
Mikoto watched her come.
The medical-nin closed five metres of distance in a heartbeat.
She came through the mist at four metres and Mikoto came out from behind the trunk and met her.
There was no wind-up or a scream. There was only Shark Skin coming up from low at Mikoto's right hip and crossing the medical-nin's chest from below in a single short cut that went in at the bottom of her sternum and came out at her collarbone.
The medical-nin took one more half-step. The senbon dropped from her hand. Her eyes opened wider than they had been and she couldn’t scream.
Mikoto thought, in the space of a breath, that she was glad the woman had not had time to be afraid or feel much pain.
She moved.
The cloth binder was screaming now. The wires and the bo and the missing medical-nin had all happened in the same six seconds and her training was unspooling. Her cloth came at Genmai's left arm in a strike. Genmai brought the bo around to block it. The cloth wrapped the bo instead. The binder yanked. Genmai's left arm came across his body at the wrist and the cloth slid up past the bo and caught his arm.
Mikoto saw the moment his face changed. The arm had gone stiff. He still had the right side. He still had the bo. He swung. He caught the binder across the side of her face with the steel cap and her wrist broke when she threw her hand up to catch it. She went down to one knee.
That was when the puppet came out of the trees.
It dropped on Yuki's position from a branch she had not been watching. Wood-on-wood, the click of an internal joint adjusting in flight, six arms, two blades along the inside of each arm. It hit the log she was hiding behind hard enough to break the log in half and Yuki rolled out from under it in a way that left her wire trigger spool behind.
She came up with senbon in both hands.
The trees moved on the far side of the trail.
Mikoto saw the second man come out of them at a run. He was tall. He was older than anyone else on this trail. He had a long straight sword in a long straight scabbard and he had already drawn the sword and the way he was carrying it told Mikoto everything she needed to know about what he was going to do with it.
He was heading for Genmai.
Genmai was on one knee with one arm stiff and a broken-wristed cloth binder in front of him.
Yuki was fighting a six-armed puppet at four metres' range with senbon.
Kazuhiko was locked up with the chunin lead.
Mikoto took one breath.
The puppeteer was somewhere in the trees on the far side of the trail. The kenjutsu user was closer, and the kenjutsu user was the one about to put a sword through Genmai. But the puppeteer was the one whose puppet was about to put a blade through Yuki, and a dead Yuki meant a dead wire trigger and a dead overwatch, and Kazuhiko could not break from the chunin lead without taking the fan to his back.
She picked the puppeteer.
She body flickered.
She had been thinking, specifically, about the moment when the threads had gone out and the puppet had dropped and the man in the tree had seen her see him. She had been thinking about the half-second of his face going pale before he tried to move and his hands coming up because hands were what puppeteers had.
She had a different way to do it now.
She came up the slope at full body flicker and she did not waste her chakra on slippage because Perfect Chakra Control did not let chakra waste on anything anymore. She went up the trunk of a tree on the far side of the puppeteer's tree and she put herself behind him before he knew she was on his side of the trail.
He was holding both hands out in front of him with five threads running off his fingers down to the puppet. His back was to her. His chakra was suppressed but his hands were not, because his hands had to work to do what he was doing.
She did not go for his neck first.
She came down off the branch and her sword came down with her and the first cut took both his hands at the wrists in a single horizontal sweep. Both. At once. The wrists were close together because the threads needed his fingers to work as a pair. The cut went through.
The hands fell. The threads went out. The puppet, mid-strike at Yuki, dropped out of the air like a stringless thing.
The puppeteer screamed.
The next cut went across the side of his neck. Single stroke. Right to left.
He died on his feet. He fell sideways off the branch and he hit the ground below the tree at the same moment Mikoto was already turning, already moving, already body flickering back down the slope to where the kenjutsu user was about to put a sword through Genmai.
She came in low.
The kenjutsu user was three steps from Genmai. He had not seen her come up the slope. He had not seen her come back. He was a man with a long sword on a wounded enemy on one knee and there was nothing in his world for half a second except the finishing cut.
Mikoto's sword caught his sword two centimetres above Genmai's head.
The clash rang. It rang loud in the rain. He looked at her. And then he was already cutting at her with a second slash of his blade.
She caught it on Shark Skin. She felt his chakra in his blade, the chakra that all weapon users use for their weapons to make it stronger and sharper. Shark Skin drank it.
His next cut came in lighter than the last one.
He felt it too. He did not understand why but he felt it. His face changed again. He pressed the next attack harder. He came at her with three cuts in succession, high low high, and she caught the first two on the body of her cleaver and turned the third under her arm and let his blade slide past her hip and her counter went in.
It went across the side of his neck.
She stepped back as his head went flying into the air.
Kazuhiko, on the far side of the kill zone, was putting his sword through the chunin lead's chest. The chunin lead had been wounded twice by then. He went down. Kazuhiko had a long cut down his left forearm from the fan and a cut across his ribs from a senbon and he was alive.
Yuki had killed the second puppet half. There had been two halves once the threads had gone out and she had taken them apart with senbon and a kunai while Mikoto had been with the kenjutsu user.
Genmai was on the ground on one elbow with his good hand pressed flat over his side where the kenjutsu user's first cut had caught him before Mikoto's body flicker. His teeth were grinding. He was not making a sound. The cut was bad.
The cloth binder was still on one knee five metres away, breathing fast, her broken wrist cradled against her chest, her good hand up.
Her eyes went from Kazuhiko to Yuki to Mikoto. She surrendered.
Mikoto turned away.
She walked over to Genmai. She knelt next to him. She put her hands flat over his side where his hand was, and Yuki, who had already started moving across the kill zone with the field medic pouch in her teeth and a strip of gauze coming out of it, dropped down on the other side of him and started working.
Mikoto did not look back when she heard Kazuhiko walk over to the binder and kill them.
They walked two hours to the fallback camp.
Genmai walked with his good arm across Mikoto's shoulders on one side and Yuki's on the other, and Kazuhiko walked behind them with both swords drawn, his and the kenjutsu user's, watching the rear.
No one came after them.
The fallback camp was a small rock hollow under a great overhang of mossy stone where Kazuhiko had pre-staged a roll of medical supplies and a small dry firewood cache and three blankets sealed in oilcloth. Yuki put Genmai down on the blankets. She got the side wound packed properly with clean linen and a paste. She closed it with silk. Genmai slept almost as soon as her hands came off him.
Mikoto sat by the small fire that Kazuhiko had allowed them to light because the overhang hid the smoke. She had blood on both her hands. She had blood up her left forearm to the elbow. She had blood, she realised after a minute, dried at her hairline and along her jaw.
She washed in the small runoff stream behind the overhang. The water was cold. She washed her hands and her forearms and her face and then she came back to the fire and she sat down.
Yuki sat down across the fire from her.
She did not say anything for a while. She had a small wire cutter in her hands and a coil of broken wire from her trigger spool and she was working the bent length of it back into a useable shape, one short bend at a time.
"How do you kill someone with a bandaged sword," she said.
"It's still sharp," Mikoto answered.
"Bandages dull a blade."
"It’s sharper than the average sword."
Yuki turned the wire. She put another bend in it. She did not look at the sword on the ground between them.
"Hm."
She got up. She went to check on Genmai. Mikoto watched her go.
Kazuhiko came back from wherever he had been. He had the courier's scroll in his hand. He had cracked the seal and read what was inside and resealed it; the wax on the outside of it was a different colour now where his thumb had pressed the new seal into it.
He sat down by the fire. He did not say anything for a minute. He looked at the scroll and he looked at Genmai across the hollow and he looked at Yuki crouched beside him and he looked at Mikoto.
"This scroll needs to be in Konoha tomorrow night."
"I can run it," Yuki said, without looking up.
"You need to stay here."
"What, why?"
"You’re not injured.
He turned the scroll over in his hands.
He looked at Mikoto.
"You're going home with some luggage, kid." he said while looking at Genmai.