The boat was small, too small for six people, but they fit anyway, crowded together with their knees touching and their shoulders pressed against the wooden sides. The engine was off. The paddles dipped into the water without sound, slow and careful, pushing them forward through the thick grey mist that surrounded them on all sides and made the world beyond the boat feel like something imagined rather than something real.
Tazuna sat at the front with his hands on the plank beneath him and his knuckles white from gripping it. He had not spoken since they left the shore. His eyes were fixed on the water, on the mist, on anything that was not the faces of the shinobi who had agreed to protect him under false pretenses.
Naruto sat across from him. His eyes were on the bridge. It loomed in the distance, half finished, a skeleton of wood and rope and hope that stretched across the water like a promise no one had been brave enough to keep. The mist wrapped around its pillars like bandages on a wound, soft and white and somehow final.
"Tell me about Gatō."
Tazuna flinched. The movement was small, almost invisible, but Naruto saw it. He saw everything now.
"The chuunin mentioned him. Before he passed out." Naruto's voice was quiet, flat, the same voice he used for everything now. "You said someone wanted you dead. You did not say who. Now I am asking."
Tazuna looked down at the water. The paddle in his hands was still. The boat drifted. For a long moment, Naruto thought the man would not answer. Then Tazuna spoke, and his voice was different than it had been on the road. Softer. Older. The voice of a man who had been carrying something heavy for too long and had finally decided to put it down.
"Gatō is a businessman. Shipping. Trade. Money." Tazuna's words came slowly at first, then faster, as if the dam had broken and the water would not stop. "He owns most of the ports in the Land of Waves. The ones he does not own, he controls. Through fear. Through violence. Through money. If you want to move goods between the islands, you pay Gatō. If you do not pay, your goods do not arrive. Or you do not arrive. Or your family does not arrive."
Sakura's face went pale. Sasuke's jaw tightened. Kakashi kept paddling, his visible eye on the mist, his expression unreadable.
"The bridge changes everything." Tazuna looked up at the skeletal structure above them, his eyes wet with something that might have been hope or might have been grief. "If we finish it, ships can come from the mainland. They do not have to go through Gatō's ports. They do not have to pay his fees. The people can trade directly. Freely. Without him taking most of what they earn."
He looked back down at his hands. They were shaking.
"He cannot allow that. So he sends men. Ninja. To kill me. To stop the bridge. To keep the people afraid."
Naruto listened. His face did not change. His eyes did not blink. He looked at Tazuna the way he looked at everything now, as a problem to be understood and solved, as a variable in an equation he was still calculating.
"How many men? How many ninja has he sent before us?"
Tazuna's hands were shaking harder now. "I do not know. They come in the night. They kill and leave. My people are afraid to work on the bridge. Afraid to be seen with me. Afraid to even talk to me."
He looked at Kakashi, then at Naruto, then at Sasuke and Sakura, his eyes moving from face to face as if he was trying to memorize them before they disappeared back into the mist.
"I lied about the mission because I had no choice. No one would come if they knew the truth. And if no one came, the bridge would never be finished. And if the bridge is never finished, Gatō wins. And my people stay trapped."
The boat drifted in silence. The mist pressed against them from all sides. The incomplete bridge loomed above, waiting.
Naruto looked at Kakashi. Kakashi looked at Naruto. Neither spoke.
The paddles dipped into the water again.
They landed on the shore of an island an hour later, the boat scraping against grey sand that had not seen sun in weeks. The beach was scattered with rocks and the skeletons of old boats that had been pulled ashore and left to rot, their wooden ribs exposed like the bones of dead animals. The mist was thinner here, not gone, just less, enough that they could see the tree line and the narrow path that led inland.
Tazuna pointed toward the trees. "My home is that way. A few hours. Maybe less if we walk fast."
They walked.
The path was narrow and muddy and lined with trees that had not been trimmed in years, their branches reaching across the trail like fingers and their roots rising from the ground like tripwires waiting for someone who was not paying attention. Naruto paid attention. His feet found the gaps between the roots. His eyes found the shadows between the trees. He walked with his hands in his pockets and his headband around his forehead and his face completely blank, and Sasuke walked beside him, close enough to fight beside if it came to that.
"Hey." Sasuke's voice was quiet, almost a whisper, meant for Naruto's ears alone. "That thing you did. With the clones. Where did you learn about Shadow Clones?"
Naruto did not look at him. His eyes were on the trees, on the mist, on the spaces between.
"Nowhere."
"That is not an answer."
Naruto was silent for a moment. Then: "It is the only one you are getting."
Sasuke looked at him. The dead last was not making eye contact. The dead last was not nervous. The dead last was not anything. He was just walking, just breathing, just existing in the space beside him like a knife that had been sharpened and set aside and forgotten until someone needed to cut something.
"Fine," Sasuke said. "Keep your secrets."
They walked in silence.
The mist changed.
Naruto felt it before he saw it, the way you feel a storm coming in the back of your throat and the pit of your stomach. The temperature dropped. The air grew heavy. The kind of heavy that sat on your shoulders and pressed against your chest and made it hard to breathe, not because the air was thin but because something in the air did not want you to breathe it.
He stopped walking.
Sasuke stopped beside him, his hand already moving toward his kunai pouch. Sakura stopped behind them, her eyes wide, her mouth open. Kakashi closed his book and tucked it into his vest and looked out at the water with his visible eye narrowed and focused.
"The water's edge," he said. His voice was quiet. Calm. The voice of a man who had felt this kind of killing intent before and was no longer surprised by it. "Someone is here."
Zabuza stepped out of the mist.
He was huge, taller than Kakashi and broader than anyone Naruto had ever seen, his skin dark and his hair wild and his presence filling the space around him like a fire that had been burning for years and had no intention of going out. His sword was on his back, massive and thick and shaped like a butcher's blade, and he wore no forehead protector, no insignia, no mark of allegiance to any village or any cause or anyone except himself. His eyes were cold and empty and absolutely without fear, and when he looked at Team Seven, he looked at them the way a man looks at a meal he has not decided whether to eat.
He was not alone.
Two figures flanked him, one on each side, smaller and faster and somehow more dangerous because of it. Their faces were hidden behind animal masks, one carved in the shape of a wolf, the other in the shape of a fox, and their movements were synchronized in a way that was not quite natural, not quite human. They stepped when he stepped. Stopped when he stopped. Breathed when he breathed. Twins, Naruto realized, or close enough that the difference did not matter.
Zabuza grinned. His teeth were white and sharp and wrong, the teeth of something that had evolved to tear and not to chew.
"Kakashi of the Sharingan." His voice was low and rough and carried across the water like a blade being drawn from a sheath. "I have heard of you."
Kakashi reached up. His fingers found the edge of his headband, the metal plate that had been covering his left eye since the day Naruto had met him. He pulled it up.
The Sharingan was revealed. Red. Three tomoe spinning slowly around the pupil, watching everything, missing nothing.
Zabuza's grin widened. The expression did not reach his eyes.
"This will be fun."
The mist swirled around them, stirred by something that was not wind. The incomplete bridge loomed above, skeletal and dark against the grey sky, its wooden pillars disappearing into the white like the legs of a giant wading into deeper water. The water lapped at the shore, slow and steady and patient, the way water always lapped at shores when there was nothing else to do and no one to tell it to stop.
Naruto's hands came out of his pockets. His fingers found the handle of his kunai. He did not draw it. Not yet. But his fingers were on it.
Next Time: The Battle of Two Jonin