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The sun had just begun to fall from its peak and the weather was beginning to cool. People on the streets stopped in surprise when they saw heavily armed and armoured men moving quickly through the streets. And were they to look up, they would see similarly dressed men jumping across rooftops. One of them had strange water appendages protruding from his back.
"Run away if you don't want to get hurt!"
The loud warning startled the crowd because it felt as though it were spoken over a microphone from right beside their ears.
Mere moments later, one of the masked men threw a kunai tagged with flashbang tags into the flour mill. The resulting screech and flash of disorienting light only made things worse for the people outside, who were falling head over heels to man smashed the front window and threw in smoke bombs that flooded. Screams broke out as people on the streets ran as far as their legs would take them. Those who owned shops in the street shuttered themselves inside in fear of the battle raging though people of Inahara were used to Leaf shinobi, they didn't recognise ANBU-nin because no one knew about their existence. The ANBU wasn't known outside shinobi circles. Most shinobi went without ever coming across one for their whole lives and wouldn't be able to recognise a real one from a row of fakes.
Behind the flour mill, the backdoor team was ready.
They decided that two of them would be on the ground, blocking the back alley from both sides, while the third would be positioned at a height for support and assistance. Takuma wanted to be on the ground, but Hopper rejected him because two teammates would work better on the ground.
He wanted to use Earth Release: Earth and Stone Bamboo Shoot, which condensed spikes that attacked the target from separate directions, attempting to skewer the opponent. It was the perfect jutsu to impair mobility, without a high risk of death, by crushing a leg bone. He wasn't skilled enough to target specific parts of the body, but as long as he aimed low, he would hit the legs.
But to do so, Takuma needed to be in contact with the ground.
He weaved hand seals for Water Release: Spirit Water Wave while kneeling on the wall of the building behind the flour mill with chakra adhesion. Water bubbled into existence in front of his finger and flowed as though filling an invisible globe.
If he couldn't crush the legs, he was going to shoot them. It was a shame that the initial flashbang had hurt his ears while he was listening out for footsteps.
The backdoor trio grew tense as the commotion, from the street over, reached them. Eight tentacles floating out from Takuma's back, all holding kunai, stilled. Yazo's body language changed as he leaned forward in anticipation. Hopper didn't pull out his sword, but he anchored his feet to the ground with his hand hovering above its hilt.
Then the door burst off its hinges. Takuma's finger twitched, but he held his breath to control himself as Krait's words echoed in his brain.
What if it was a civilian?
Just a second, he told himself.
A man caked in flour stepped out as the door swung back from the force it had been pushed open with. He didn't look at the door, nor did he raise a hand to push it back, because he had already cleared out of its way with a speed impossible for a civilian.
It was a ROOT agent.
Takuma held his breath and focused on his heartbeat as he aimed for the right leg.
A shockwave rippled through the water ball at his finger right before it shot out. His lip twitched at the missed shot, but simultaneously, two tentacles moved wildly to build enough momentum to launch kunai at the agent.
He aimed ahead, and both kunai struck the ground in front of the man's feet. Butf a moving target was difficult, then all Takuma had to do was stop the man from moving.
A second water bullet ripped through the air and hit the agent's leg the moment he stopped. Takuma didn't let the easing breath go and released a third shot that hit the left leg, causing the man to let out an ugly scream in pain.
He didn't know how much damage he had done, but it was enough for Hopper to take care of the rest with his sword.
A loud crash followed by a singular scream from somewhere nearby reached Takuma's ears. He wondered what was happening with the front door team as he turned to the second ROOT agent, who was moving toward Yazo.
Only, instead of engaging, the ROOT agent threw his bomb high into the air, obscuring Takuma's view. He released a blind shot in hopes that it would hit, but couldn't shoot anymore lest he risk hitting Yazo.
He couldn't see Hopper, Yazo, or the agents. Takuma tried to focus on his still-impaired hearing and heard shuffling, but he couldn't make out anything concrete.
"Thirteen!" Yazo's voice pierced through the smoke and immediately gave him a location. "One's getting away!"
Takuma's eyes swept the surrounding area until he saw a man, appear hurtle out of the fringes of the smokescreen. He was quick and had abandoned his comrades without a single thought.
"Go!"
Takuma bolted across the rooftop. He recalled Yazo's words of not going after a target alone, but reality was rarely ideal. He let off the remaining two water bullets he had left, but both missed by wide margins. Hitting moving targets was hard enough; adding running on top of it made things much more difficult.
One thing people often overlooked when discussing ninjutsu mastery was the practical skills. He could cast the jutsu, but that didn't mean anything if he missed his shots.
The escaping ROOT agent's brown hair was tied in a ponytail. He turned brown eyes onto look at Takuma running up a wall and unsealing a utility belt from a small scroll he removed from his pocket. Only, instead of ascending it completely, he jumped off the wall when he was halfway up and used the momentum to round the corner and exit the alleyway.
When Takuma turned the corner three kunai were flying straight for his face. Seemingly on instinct, the kunai-bearing moved on their own to deflect the incoming salvos as he chased the agent running through the middle of the street.
He's good, thought Takuma.
In that one glance, the agent had seen how high up the building Takuma was running along. After turning the corner, he threw the kunai at that same height and continued to run without waiting to see whether he hit his not for his water tentacles, Takuma would have need to slow down, something one couldn't afford to do during a chase.
As Takuma fell, the tentacles moved to fling kunai at the agent, but couldn't find a clean shot that didn't risk killing civilians. Though the agent didn't take civilians as hostages and just ran close by them, so they were always at risk of getting hit if he let his tentacles loose.
Despite how much confidence he had in his practical skill with the tentacles, he couldn't make that throw with complete surety that he wouldn't hit a civilian.
While his eyes were fixed on the agent, Takuma took in the street, the shops, and the people scattering away in fear, and instantly recognised it from when he was mapping the area before. An eagle eye view of a fairly limited area around the flour mill appeared in his mind.
He glanced at an alley the agent had skipped and where he was heading right now.
There was only one way to go from there.
Almost immediately, Takuma figured out where the agent was heading.
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Rui pushed a woman, who had frozen from surprise, out of his way as he ran through the street of the place he had been living for the past three years. He had an ANBU-nin on his tail after barely avoiding being trapped within their surprise attack. The ANBU had tried to flush them out from the back, which meant they were only manning and expecting exit from the mill's front and back entrances.
They weren't expecting him to use the building next door.
Rui couldn't be sure how the ANBU had found them, but if he had to guess, it had something to do with the lab located in Taiheiyo Evergreen Forest. Their man was a day late, which wasn't unusual for their youngest, who liked to sightsee, but it was still his best guess.
As he turned a corner into an alley, he glanced at the ANBU-nin, only to find that he wasn't there. Unease rippled through him because he knew he couldn't have lost a tail so quickly. So, the question to be asked: where had his pursuer gone? He caught a glance of how the people farther from him were all looking in the same direction.
He was already on the next street when his thoughts clicked together to complete the puzzle. The ANBU-nin had taken an alternate route. It seemed his pursuer was planning to surprise him. But even if the ANBU had scouted the place, he had lived and worked in Inahara for three years; he knew the streets better.
It was a poor decision, Rui thought as he decided to change latitude by running up a building—Or maybe it wasn't a poor decision. His opinion changed mid-thought as he realised there was only one good direction if one wanted to escape. If the ANBU-nin recognised that, then the route his pursuer could take was faster than his own.
Rui's eyes widened a fraction when a shadow suddenly bloomed on the wall he was running along.
The ANBU-nin was smart, he thought as he leapt to the side at the last moment before the ANBU-nin descended on him and smashed a fist into the bricks.
He felt the tremor from the building climb up his legs as a monstrous impact created widespread cracks and crevices. The force was so great that ANBU-nin drove his arm up to his elbow into the building.
He's strong, Rui noted as he weaved hand seals for the advanced C-rank derivative of the parent D-rank jutsu, Wind Release: Breakthrough—that reworked the jutsu's to make it more powerful, efficient, and more importantly, turned it into a scalable ninjutsu, which meant it could be pushed beyond its rank without penalty depending on the user's skill.
Wind Release: Great Breakthrough
Rui breathed out a concentrated stream of wind towards the ANBU-nin to blow him away. The winds were so strong that they tore away the shattered bricks. It was one of his favourite jutsu, having spent a lot of time mastering it.
As expected, the ANBU-nin, who had quickly pulled his arm out of the building, was blown away. Not even chakra adhesion was unable to keep him stuck to the wall. However, just as his feet left the wall, one half of the eight tentacles behind his back wrapped around him, and the other half merged into two thicker tentacles that stabbed the kunai into the wall, creating a hold.
That jutsu isn't supposed to bear that much force, Rui thought as he resumed scaling the building. He recognised the niche jutsu—and he was right because the tentacles were rippling and convulsing under the strain of withstanding Rui's jutsu. They soon snapped, blowing the short man away, which was when the ANBU-nin grabbed a third kunai, spat out from the destroyed tentacles, and stabbed himself into the wall.
Rui realised that the ANBU-nin was going to endure and not be blown away.
As he scaled up the building, he glanced at the struggling ANBU-nin's mask.
"Badger, huh," he muttered to himself as he quickened his escape to get as far as possible while his pursuer was still locked inside the winds.
Something told him that escaping wouldn't be easy.
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The link is in the synopsis!