Chapter 1: Into the Swamp
Eternity is made up of moments, and so is a human life.
Hazō's earliest remembered moment, from before he knew his age: in his mother's arms, her smiling face looking down at him as she bounced him gently and made happy noises. Poppa stood behind her, arms around her waist and chin on her shoulder. He was quiet, his face calmer than hers, but all the joy in the world shone from his eyes.
When Hazō was two, he saw his mother getting out of the tub. The scars crisscrossed her body like lines on a map—a map of all the pain and hardship that is shinobi life.
"Ouch, momma!" he said. "Did those hurt?"
She smiled quietly and shrugged into her robe. "Yes, cricket," she said, using the pet name that always made him giggle. "But they were all worth it. I got those scars because I am a shinobi. Because I am a shinobi I met your father, and he is my heart. And because he is my heart, we had you."
It was at that moment that he knew he would become a shinobi, so that he could meet his own heart.
When he was three, poppa took him roof-running for the first time. He clung to his father's back, shrieking in glee as they raced at blinding speed across the rooftops. Poppa leapt between roofs like a joyful Monkey God, traveling in the blink of an eye from one to another. Sometimes he ran on the flat, sometimes he ran sideways on a wall, and once he hung upside down under the eaves of a tall building. Hazō's shirt flew up, baring his stomach, and he eeped in delight. His father laughed and slung him around in his arms so that he could blow a giant raspberry on the boy's stomach, drawing a giggling shriek.
When they got home momma scolded his father, wagging her finger at him. She didn't mean it though, and she laughed when poppa scooped her up and ran up the outside wall to sit on the roof. They didn't come down for a while, and when they did, momma's robe and hair were mussed and she was wearing a goofy smile.
When he was four and one-half, he and his parents sat in the garden under the branches of the plum tree. Poppa was making the mist dance, tiny dragons swirling and playing just to make the little boy laugh.
When he was five, a man in a formal uniform came to the house. He and momma sat in the outer room and talked quietly for several minutes. After he left, momma went into the bedroom and cried for an hour, quiet sobs that were just barely audible when Hazō pressed his ear to the door. Afterwards she came out and explained that poppa would not be coming home again.
It was at that moment that he knew he would become a shinobi, so that he could kill the man who kept his poppa from coming home.
When he was six, he begged his momma to let him apply to the Academy. She said no, he had to be eight. He begged and begged, and she still said no...but she took him into the garden and put a kunai in his hands.
"Stand like this," she said. "Strike up from underneath, through the stomach and into the heart."
He did it once and she corrected him. He did it again and she nodded in approval.
He did it perfectly from then on. Every time, he imagined that he was gutting the man who had taken his poppa away.
When he was eight, he joined the Academy. Momma's smile was complicated when she dropped him off at the gates—proud, but sad. He might have added "afraid", but his momma wasn't afraid of anything; things were afraid of her.
When he took his fourth taijutsu class, a man with grey hair and a scar stood on the sidelines, watching and frowning thoughtfully. The boy didn't know who the scarred man was, but sensei—a terrifying man who barked orders and brooked no backchat—spoke quietly and respectfully to him.
After that, the boy was pulled out of the class and moved into a different one, where he sparred with children a year older. Six months later, he was sparring with seniors. Two years later he was sparring only with instructors.
Countless moments: "Why, sensei?" "Sensei, wouldn't it make more sense like this?" "Sensei, that can't be right. Why would anyone..."
An equally countless number of moments: on his knees, scrubbing the stone floors of the Academy across which five hundred active children constantly tracked dirt. Or cleaning the kitchen grease trap. Or sweeping the chimneys.
For each chore, he learned the most efficient motions to complete it quickly, then did them perfectly.
When he was eleven, he came home to find momma sitting at the kitchen table, papers spread out around her and her face showing utter despair. She saw him and immediately smiled her perfect, happy smile.
"Hullo, cricket," she said. "How was school? What did you learn today?" He sat down beside her, babbling happily about the three ways to kill a man with a garotte and how he thought that the turn-and-throw method was much more efficient than the grapple-and-steady-pressure method that sensei recommended. After all, as long as you did the throw perfectly it was much faster. The whole time he was babbling, momma kept giving him her perfect smile and never once looked at the stack of bills with "OVERDUE" stamped across them in big red kanji.
Two weeks later, he bet one of the other students that he could make the impossible jump from the cliff to Mizukage Tower. He had practiced that jump hundreds of times before making the bet, the bruises and scrapes on his body the proof of it. It was worth it though, for the feeling of triumph he had when he was able to come home in victory with money in his hands to give to momma for the bills. She saw the money and heard what he'd done to earn it, how he'd battered himself bloody against the rocks because he wanted so much to help her. She burst into tears. His eyes went wide in panic, but she fell to her knees and hugged him so tight his ribs creaked. "Thank you, cricket," she said, and gave him a not-quite-perfect smile.
It didn't take long before the other students learned not to bet against him, so he went into the city and started betting civilians. The Academy left him little time and no energy, but momma's bills were piling up. He trained all day, then raced into the city before sundown so he could make some ryō. Soon enough, the civilians stopped betting against him and he had to go to different parts of the city, parts that were far enough away that he couldn't get there and back before dinner. Momma insisted he be home for dinner, so he went afterwards, slipping out the window after momma put him to bed.
It wasn't long before he discovered craps. The first time he played, he lost all his money, but afterwards he went home and practiced throwing the dice until he rolled each of the numbers. After that, he did it perfectly. He was careful to always keep that pair with him from then on.
He'd lost all his money the first time, but he scraped up six ryō in change and went back to the tables. His six ryō rapidly turned into six hundred, then six thousand. The owner of the table told him to get lost. Hazō went and found another table at the back of another bar.
There were still too many moment of "why?" and "but!"; his demerits cost him Rookie of the Year and put him in the seventh decile. When he graduated, he was given D-rank missions: babysitting, dog walking, splitting firewood, guarding the market. Each mission was a (mostly) friendly competition with his team; he could always split more wood than his teammates, because every stroke of the axe was perfect. He was never as good with the dogs as his teammate Junko, though.
Momma loved hearing about the missions, and she laughed her bell-like laugh when he grumped. He grumped a lot; not because the missions bothered him—they did, but not as much as he let on—but because her laughs had gotten rare as plums in fall since poppa died and the bills started piling up.
He kept playing the tables to bring in money. Momma scolded him and told him to stop, that it was dangerous, but he continued anyway. He continued until the man with the dragon tattoo took him into the back of the casino and had a long talk with him. The man placed a hammer on the table at the beginning of the talk, but never touched it.
Two weeks later, he was taken off his team and assigned to a new team. His new team and a dozen others were being sent on a mission, an exciting mission, a mission that showed he'd earned the respect of his superiors.
His momma heard about the mission and smiled a perfect smile, kneeling down so she could hug him so tight and ruffle his hair. "Do your poppa and me proud, cricket," she said. "And come home to me." He'd promised he would.
And then the bad moments started.
It was a bad moment when Shikigami-sensei came out of the commander's tent covered in blood and told them it was a suicide mission. There'd been angry shouting, the various jōnin and chūnin arguing loudly while the genin stood back, quiet as frightened mice.
It was a bad moment when shouting turned to killing.
One of the jōnin, Shenzi-san, threw the first blow. His fingers twitched in a furious chain of hand seals and the mist surged into Fukama-san's mouth and nose like snakes. An instant later, Fukama-san exploded, the mist ripping its way out of him in a fountain of gore.
The moments that followed were full of blood and death. When jōnin fight, the very land suffers, and they were fighting with all they had. Centennial oaks exploded as chakra-reinforced fists blasted them apart. Water from the river lashed back and forth, whips and dragons and sling bullets smashing fragile human bodies to pulp. Fists and feet and kunai flew everywhere. Genin dove for cover; the ones who dove too slowly died.
Battles between jōnin rarely last long, especially when they start at arm's length. The moments of the battle were not quite countable, but that was more a lacking of perception than numbers.
A few jōnin escaped and returned to Mist, hoping to bargain the news of the others' defection for their own salvation; Hazō and the other survivors fled.
Shikigami-sensei had a plan. It wasn't a good plan—he admitted that himself—but it was the only one they had with a prayer of working. A decade earlier, he had been assigned an infiltration mission against Fire. He'd succeeded, but a Leaf ranger squad was right in his shadow on the way out. He'd run for a week, using every trick he knew to hide and break trail, but nothing had worked until he'd entered the swamp on the northwestern corner of Fire. The place was lethal; Shikigami-sensei showed them the back of his calf, where something had scooped out two cherry-sized balls of flesh. The rangers had refused to follow him in.
"Lethal or not, there's nowhere in the world better to hide," Shikigami-sensei said. And then he'd laid out the full plan: the founding of a new village.
It was the most audacious idea imaginable. Oh, there were contingencies—diplomatic approaches for dealing with Leaf if they were discovered too early, escape plans if it became necessary, a plethora of fallbacks. Shikigami-sensei was old for a ninja, at least fifty, and that age and experience showed in his planning. It also showed in the respect he was given; despite his age, no one wanted to spar with him except the most senior instructors at the Academy. He was fast, vicious, and utterly ruthless in a fight, and he barely held back. While he calmly laid out his plan he was focused on cleaning his hand; it was soaked in blood to the elbow from where he'd cut a kunoichi jōnin's head off with a thrust of his kunai that went completely through her neck.
There were more moments after that. Most of those moments were full of terror, and all of them were full of exhaustion. Shikigami-sensei had driven them mercilessly.
"Captain Zabuza will be on our trail as soon as the escapees reach Mist," he said. "He moves like the wind and is the most skilled tracker I've ever seen. We must move faster."
Getting such a large group through the Leaf patrols was terrifying. They managed only because one of the chūnin was a falconer, and his hawk could scout ahead. It wasn't enough; they managed to avoid actually being seen, but the patrols found their trail somehow. The former Mist nin reached the swamp barely an hour ahead of their pursuers.
The excitement hadn't stopped there, though. The swamp was overflowing with chakra, and life had adapted to it. The first alligator to attack had surged out of the water, clapping its jaws as it came for Akabane Izumi, the jōnin guarding the left flank. A blast of wind chakra flew from the animal's jaws and sliced Izumi's leg off at the thigh. An instant later, the lightning-fast predator clamped onto the screaming jōnin's torso and vanished under the water.
The swamp was waist-deep on the adults, chest-deep for the genin. The bottom was mud, and there were frequent deep spots where a person could lose their footing and fall out of their depth. Everyone who could waterwalk wanted to, but Shikigami-sensei allowed only a small group up at a time, not wanting everyone to be drained of chakra at once. Soon enough, everyone was soaked and exhausted. Many were bleeding and pale from where chakra leeches had stealthily clamped on to exposed skin and siphoned them nearly dry.
They lost six genin and another chūnin in the first hour—two more gator attacks before they learned to spot the sort of places the gators would lie in wait. A small water burst under the surface would alarm the creatures enough to make them give away their position. Chakra-enhanced alligators were the apex predators of the swamp, but against experienced ninja? They were meat.
The next three gators were met with killing jutsu; after that, the rest stayed clear. No one was entirely comfortable with the level of intelligence that suggested.
Less than two minutes after the last gator attack, a clump of innocent-looking reeds suddenly lashed out at one of the chūnin, sticking into Morobuni's neck and pulling him in. His genin reacted immediately, cutting the reeds, but the wounds were too severe. The two medic-nin, Fu and his apprentice Hotaru, had done all they could, but Morobuni bled out in seconds.
Shikigami-sensei ordered Fu to water-walk and took Hotaru onto his own back. It was important to keep the two of them alive, he said, detailing three chūnin to protect Fu. Despite the precautions, Fu was dead thirty minutes later; a lilly pad two full yards from his path suddenly turned itself inside out, exposing barb-like spines that it fired into his chest and face. He was dead before he hit the water. After that, any lily pad that came in sight was reconnoitered with some ninja wire and a kunai.
The first night they'd found a clump of trees rising from the water and slept high. In the morning, two of the genin were dead, covered in insect bites and completely exsanguinated. They'd never made a sound.
By the time the group reached the island in the center of the swamp they were down to twenty-seven survivors, all of them wounded and so exhausted they were barely able to keep on their feet. Fortunately, there was a cave in which they could all fit. The island was large and solid, an upthrust of igneous rock with sandstone inclusions; the igneous rock gave a firm foundation and the limestone made for plenty of interconnected caves. Not all easily navigable—the water got in everywhere, and many of the passages were low—but there was room.
"Eat some ration bars and then sleep," Shikigami-sensei said to the group, once the cave had been declared animal-free and a fire was started. "Three watches, one team each. I'll take first." He waved to Hazō and the other two and moved for the mouth of the cave. The three genin lined up without being told, one knee down and their backs to the outside so that Shikigami-sensei could see the entire arc behind them while he spoke.
"The three of you are a scratch team," he said. "You were not put together by a bunch of limp-wristed Academy bureaucrats in the city because you had the right grades. You were put together by me, the toughest bastard for a hundred miles, because you are survivors. You survived the Bloody Mist Academy, the harshest gods-damned ninja school on this or any other planet. You survived a close-range battle between a dozen jōnin. You survived a grueling race across enemy territory, hounded by the forces of the most powerful ninja village in existence. You survived this murderous fucking swamp, which killed experienced jōnin in the blink of an eye. Now you are my genin and you will by every god continue to survive, or I will kill you myself. Are we crystal clear on that point?"
"Sensei! Yes, sensei!" the three chorused, their voices carefully lowered in respect for the night.
"Good," he said with a firm nod. "Now, we don't have time for bullshit, and I won't put up with it. There's no D-rank time wasters here to let you 'develop your interpersonal connections' and all that crap. You will work as a team from this moment on. You will cover each other's backs. You will eat, sleep, and train together. You will be, at every moment, so close to one another that you're smelling what the other two had for breakfast. And If anything happens to one of you, I will literally tear strips off the other two, so you had better look out for each other. Are we clear?!"
"Sensei! Yes, sensei!"
"Good. Now, there's a hell of a lot to do. We've got enough trail rations for two weeks, we've got plenty of water"he gestured wryly at the swampâ"and we've got shelter. The trail rations are going to get mighty old mighty fast; we're going to need to scout, hunt, gather, and trade. We need more firewood, and lots of it; I only had enough in my scroll for a couple nights. Medicine, clothing, money, maps, rope, building supplies, tools...a thousand things.
"Fortunately, we came through the swamp the hard way; it's only a couple of hours to get to dry land if you head that way"—he pointed off into the darkness—"and there should be a lumber town another two hours on from there. We've got six teams; tomorrow is a rest day, but the following morning I'm going to send two teams out hunting and two to go into town. The other two will stay here and train their asses off; we need to turn you all into jōnin as fast as can be done and I intend to work you into the ground to make that happen. For tonight, though, we need to make sure we don't get eaten by surprise. Let me show you a trick. Grab some of those rocks." He waved at the scree pile to the left, where a long-ago slide brought down everything from pebbles to rocks the size of a person's head.
The mouth of the cave was perhaps six feet wide; it went in a few feet, then dog-legged sharply to the left before opening out into a larger space. It was nearly the perfect camp site, as the dog-leg would catch most of the light from a fire, as well as render the cave more defensible. It was at the edge of the island, about twenty feet from the water's edge and only barely above the water level. The ground was strewn with sand and gravel and devoid of plant life.
Shikigami-sensei directed the genin to build two cairns of rocks, one to the left and one to the right of the cave mouth, both about halfway to the water's edge. The first step was to lay a bed of gravel, then an explosive tag, then pile more rocks and gravel and sand on top.
"The bedding keeps the tag from getting wet and ruined by ground water," the jōnin explained. "The stuff you put on top keeps it from getting wet from rain or condensation. More importantly, when you set the tag off, all the crap you piled on top blasts outwards and turns everything in the area into mulch. Now, since that includes us, we'll need a couple hides, one on either side of the cave."
It took half an hour of sweaty, grunting labor to pile enough rocks up to make a blast shield that sensei was happy with. By the time they finished, all three genin were exhausted.
"My turn," Shikigami-sensei said. He snapped his fingers and half a dozen water clones rose up from the swamp. They promptly begin collecting rocks and piling them up on the other side of the cave mouth.
"Here's a lesson for you," Shikigami-sensei said. "When you're given a task, check all your assumptions and examine all your assets. You could have asked me to make clones and then you wouldn't have been so sweaty."
Fortunately for Shikigami-sensei, none of the genin had yet mastered the ancient art of the Bloody Mist Technique: River's Dragon Dance of Doom, more commonly known as the "Kill-You-With-My-Brain Technique". They gave it their absolute best effort, though.
The jōnin laughed. "That's the spirit. Now, I know you haven't had any time to talk while we've been on the run. Sit down in that hide and talk. Find out who you are and what you can do. Figure out how you're going to fight together most efficiently. And figure out which of the missions you think you'd be best suited for—scout and hunt, or scout and trade. I won't promise you'll get what you want, but it's a good exercise in tactical analysis. You can't stay in and train; you're my students and I can't afford to seem like I'm showing favoritism. Don't worry, me and my friends here will keep watch."
The three genin bowed respectfully and retreated to their assigned position, settling in to talk as ordered.
