Naruto: The Outsider's Resolve: CH_385

All of it started very abruptly as the sun had just begun to fall from its peak, and temperatures began to cool. The people on the streets stopped in surprise when they saw heavily armed and armoured men appear on the street, moving quickly and with precision. They looked up to 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!"

A man's loud warning echoing in their heads startled the crowd because it felt as though it was spoken over a microphone, yet it seemed to be spoken directly near their ears.

They weren't given any time after the warning was issued. One of the masked men threw a kunai tagged with flashbang tags into the flour mill, which emitted harsh and disorienting light and sound that pierced even the ears of the people outside. Simultaneously, another man smashed the front window and threw in smoke bombs that flooded the building with opaque smoke.

Everything turning to eleven in seconds snapped them out of their stupors and kicked their survival instincts into high gear. A commotion of screams broke out as people on the streets began to run away, while those who owned shops began to shutter themselves inside the buildings. Even though people of Inahara were used to Leaf shinobi, they didn't recognise ANBU-nin because no one had even seen one or even knew about their existence, because ANBU wasn't known outside shinobi circles. Most shinobi themselves 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.

However, he needed to be in contact with the ground to cast the jutsu.

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.

His eye twitched in pain as the flashbang's burst hurt his ear while he was listening for footsteps.

The backdoor trio got ready and tense as the commotion, from the street over, reached them. The tentacle floating out from Takuma's back, all holding kunai, stilled. Yazo's body language changed as he leaned forward, as though he were getting ready to charge. Hopper didn't pull out his sword, but he dug his feet into the ground.

It was sudden, as expected. The door swung open so hard that it almost flew off the hinges. Takuma's finger twitched, but he held his breath to control himself as Krait's words echoed in his brain. What if it were 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. 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.

"...bang."

A shockwave rippled through the water globe as a bullet shot out. It hit the ground behind the agent. His lip twitched at the missed shot, but simultaneously, two tentacles moved wildly to build momentum to throw the kunai at the agent. He aimed ahead, and both kunai struck the ground in front of the man’s feet.

If a moving target was difficult, then all he had to do was stop it from moving.

A third shot, silent, ripped through the air and hit the agent's leg the moment he stopped. He didn't let the breath go and released a second 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.

There was a loud, dull crash followed by a singular scream somewhere nearby. Takuma wondered what was happening with the front door team as he turned to the second agent, who had turned in the opposite direction toward Yazo. The first thing he saw was the man throwing up a smoke bomb that exploded a story above ground, blocking his view. He released a blind shot in hopes that it would hit, but couldn't shoot anymore because of the risk of hitting Yazo.

The smoke quickly spread and completely blocked his view like a layer of cloud in the sky. He couldn't see Hopper, Yazo, or the agents. He tried to focus on his hearing and heard shuffling, but he couldn't make out anything concrete.

"Thirteen!" Yazo's voice pierced through the smoke. "One's getting away!"

He looked in Yazo's direction of the alley just as a man, who wasn't the second agent he had seen, appeared out of the fringes of the smokescreen. He was quick and had abandoned his comrades without a single thought. Escaping at no cost was the sole priority.

"Go!"

Takuma bolted. He recalled Yazo's words of not going after a target alone, but the reality was rarely ideal. He let off the remaining two bullets, but both of them 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.

He had gone through the same thing with Eight Tentacles—

The agent had brown hair tied in a ponytail. He turned his hazel eyes to look at Takuma running on the wall, and took out a mini-seal from his person that unsealed into a utility belt with gear and weapon packs. He exited the alley and turned the corner. Takuma gave chase and turned the corner on the wall only to see three kunai coming for his face.

—he had trained it so much with it that it was almost instinct at this point. The kunai bearing tentacles seemingly moved on their own to deflect the incoming kunai as he jumped down from the building to the road to chase 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. After turning the corner, he threw the kunai at the same height and continued to run without waiting to see if he hit his target. If not for the water tentacles, Takuma would need to slow down, something one couldn't afford to do during a chase.

While Takuma was airborne during the jump, the tentacles moved to fling kunai at the agent, but they couldn't find a clean shot. The agent didn't take civilians as hostages and just ran close by them, so they were always at risk of getting hit. As much confidence as 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, he 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.

"Hmm?"

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.

He knew where the agent was heading.

———
.

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. He had barely avoided getting trapped within the surprise attack. They 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, and they had thrown in smoke bombs, which obscured their view inside, allowing him an unexpected advantage.

He 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 at 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 not spot him. It immediately stank because 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. Even if 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 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 emerged on the wall he was running.

The ANBU-nin was smart, he thought as he leapt to the side at the last moment before the ANBU-nin leapt down from the neighbouring building to the spot where he was and smashed a fist into the bricks.

He felt a tremor from the building climb up his legs as a monstrous impact created widespread cracks and crevices, that compromised the structural integrity, into the side of the building. 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 internal 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 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, was blown away, his chakra adhesion unable to keep him stuck to the wall. However, just as his feet left the wall, one half of the 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. They soon snapped, blowing the short man away, which was when the ANBU-nin grabbed a third kunai, spat out from the tentacles, and stabbed 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.