We passed the border with no complications, deciding to head onwards to the sites of attack, rather than try to find an outpost.
The coastline of Land of Wind was the most densely populated part of the entire region. There were shipping ports and fishing villages and other sea going businesses. The land in general was slightly more habitable too, a rockier, sandstone vista, with intimidating cliff faces and gullies. While there were villages further in the desert – Hidden Sand most importantly – they were in general fewer and less prosperous. If Haido's people had attacked here like they had in Land of Rivers, they could actually severely damage the nation.
Even the capital was down here, though it was much further along the coast than the attacks were to take place, and much more likely to be able to defend from an offensive.
The sun was well and truly up by the time we closed in on the first town, and even with chakra temperature regulation I was uncomfortably overheated. It was surprising how dramatically the conditions changed with less than a days travel.
"Looks like we're too late," Shikamaru commented lowly, as we halted on a high cliff with a good vantage point. Already we could see too much smoke spiraling in the air and too much movement.
"Maybe not," I mused. "It looks like Hidden Sand has already arrived." Either they had an outpost nearby with excellent response times, this wasn't the first attack, or they'd already been in the area.
Regardless, it meant we were walking into a firefight and not a massacre. It was more dangerous, perhaps, but more promising at the same time.
Naruto didn't pause, just launched himself forward, rocketing towards the village. Shika and I exchanged a look and followed.
The closer I got, the more I could see. It looked like we were only just arriving after the fight had started. There was a huge metal ship - the same design as the stronghold – hovering just offshore, likely having only just disembarked its soldiers onto land. Even as we watched, it fired cannons, dull hollow booms with rising smoke clouds. They would have devastated the shore, but never made it that far. The sand of the beach rose up, thick and fast, forming an impenetrable wall that they slapped against.
There were two or three squads of Sand ninja fighting, and there was a familiar looking puppet dancing through the chaos, though I couldn't spot the wielder. Much more visible was the white and purple of Temari's fan, and we angled ourselves towards her in order to make contact. Or Shikamaru and I did, Naruto simply entered the fray, splitting off shadow clones as he went.
"What are you doing here?" Temari demanding, heaving her fan in an arc. "I thought I told you not to get into trouble again."
"I dunno," Shikamaru said casually, hands folding into a rat seal and shadow spiraling outwards. "It kinda looks to me like you're the one in trouble. Thought we could help."
Temari barked a laugh. "You think Gaara needs help in the desert?"
Watching the way the coast line seemed to move, sand hovering above the waves and advancing outwards, ensnaring the ship and relentlessly dragging it ashore… made it clear that it wasn't Gaara that needed the help.
I was suddenly, extremely glad that we had faced Gaara on our turf and not his. In the desert, with effectively an infinite supply of sand and an infinite supply of chakra, his only limits were his frail mortal body.
It was a bit breathtaking to realize the sheer scope of that.
Kazekage.
Maybe he wasn't yet. And right now those limits were a lot lower than they could be, but with time and experience… he could make the whole desert bend to his will. Every dune a soldier, every grain of sand a weapon; how could anyone fight that?
I turned back to the fighting going on around us, sending my shadow out. The thing about having so many people in one place like this was that it made catching them easy. The tricky part was determining which ones you possessed and which ones you let move freely.
If there had been any stronger opponents like Fugai, it would have been a different story. But they were all Golems and it wasn't like Hidden Sand didn't know how to fight puppets. The usual method of 'attack the puppeteer' wouldn't work, of course, but they weren't on completely unfamiliar ground.
By the time we had finished, Gaara had beached the ship, dragging it ruthlessly and inevitably ashore. It disgorged another, greater, load of Golems, and a tall figure flickering with lightning that had to be one of the warriors.
Ranke?
Then the Golems were on us, and I fell into playing backup for a kenjutsu using Sand ninja. With so many bodies on the battlefield and not much time to pause and look around, it was hard to keep track of everything.
It was impossible to miss some of Gaara's fight, though, as sand rose up in giant waves, spinning and spiraling. The flicker-flash of Ranke's lightning techniques was just as distracting, creating momentary blindness if you were looking the wrong way.
Just from what I could see, I thought that Ranke might have been stronger than Fugai – or rather, better at combating ninja. There were definitely different techniques going on there, and the fact that she was fighting Gaara without being immediately annihilated had to mean something.
Belatedly, I realized that we should really tell them about the stones. The middle of combat wasn't exactly the best time for information sharing, but if the only way to stop the Gelel warriors permanently was to remove the stones-
The ground surged, sand whipping through the air and slamming down like a tsunami where Ranke had been standing. There was a brief crescendo of sound, as though it was gathering energy for one final burst, then fluttered out into silence, leaving only the fainter notes of the Golems. Which told me that I was getting better at distinguishing this, wasn't I?
Or, you could just crush them, I thought. That seems like it works too. Whether he'd actually crushed the stone, or merely 'just' reduced Ranke to such pulp that it wasn't actually connected to her anymore – and wasn't that a thought – it seemed like Gaara's favored tactics were pretty much right on cue to deal with these guys.
"By the gods," the ninja next to me breathed. I wasn't sure if it was in awe or in fear or a mixture of both.
Probably both.
After that it didn't take long to sweep up the rest of the Golems. Almost literally as Gaara proved.
"Chizuru!" Temari ordered, closing her fan and flipping it easily up onto her back. "Take Asano and scout the area. See if there were any other shore parties we missed. Mahana, wrap everything up here so we're ready to move out."
The named ninja – I presumed – snapped out affirmative replies and darted off to do as they were told. It was… interesting that Temari seemed to be in charge here, given that she, like me, was nominally a Genin. Gaara, I could see no one wanting to argue with, but Temari wasn't nearly so intimidating.
It wasn't that I doubted her skills, exactly, but several of the other ninja were wearing Sand style Chunin vests.
We shuffled out of the way, regrouping to the side. Shikamaru was slouching, hands tucked into his pockets, but didn't look much more ruffled than usual. Naruto was Naruto. Apart from the grime, you could hardly tell they'd been fighting. Next to them I felt supremely battered.
"So," Temari said, stopping in front of us and cocking her hip.
"So," Shikamaru echoed.
"You're not seriously going to play the 'it was a social visit' card, are you?" Kankurou cut in, walking up to us, his puppet rewrapped and settled on his back. Gaara arrived shortly after, sweeping in with a swirl of sand. "No one is going to buy it."
Naruto chuckled, scratching the back of his neck nervously. "Ah, we're not really supposed to be here," he admitted. "But we found out these guys were going to attack, so we came to give you a warning."
"The thought is appreciated," Temari said dryly. "But you're several days too late."
"Our mission was in the Land of Rivers," Shikamaru clarified. "We ran into these guys after they'd attacked a village there. It's … pretty bad." He gave a quick but thorough run through of the situation.
"Well, shit," Kankurou summed up. "We thought it was Hidden Mist at first, but it didn't fit." Mist was the only one of the shinobi villages that really did any of their attacking by sea, so yeah, I could see the initial assumption.
"They're from further away than that," I said. "They're not from the Elemental Nations at all. They're looking for the mine that produces those crystals; that gives them that power."
I spread our map out, flat on the ground. A curl of sand wound over the edges, holding it flat so it didn't roll back up and I spared a quick smile for Gaara.
"They're working off an old map, pre-Hidden Village," I said vaguely. "There used to be an old trade route through here." There'd been major cities, by the look of the map, which had probably affected the locations that Haido had dropped his men and stronghold. He might have assumed that, even if the cities themselves hadn't lasted, the resources that had made them ideal locations to build in the first place would have remained.
"That's where they attacked," Temari noted, crouching down beside me. She tapped the circles I'd drawn.
"Right," I said. "Well, where they were planning to attack anyway. We confirmed a few, but the stronghold was moving in this direction so they likely started at the far end." I shook off the thought as irrelevant. "Anyway. This is where they're looking, but I don't think it was on the trade route itself."
If you went to all the trouble of never mentioning the location of the mine, you probably didn't sell stones out of the door. Yeah, if I had time to read the rest of the book, I could probably do more than make educated guesses, but I didn't. Then again, Haido had read it and this was the best he had. I wouldn't presume to think he was an idiot.
"Given the other landmarks… I think it's more likely to be up here somewhere." I circled another area with my finger.
"There's nothing there," Kankurou said instantly. "That's the Dead Wastes."
"Dead Wastes?" I repeated blankly. It wasn't a name I was familiar with at all.
He shrugged. "What it sounds like, man. The whole area is completely dead. There's no water, no shelter; nothing grows there and nothing lives. They say if you leave a corpse there it won't even rot."
"That's… interesting," I said with a frown, considering the map again. It was possible he meant that a body would simply dehydrate and mummify, but that wouldn't be unusual by the standards of the desert, surely?
"So no one lives there at all?" Shikamaru asked. "No one explores it?"
"No," Temari agreed. "It's avoided." She looked thoughtful too. It helped explain how something could remain a secret if it was in an area that people simply wouldn't go. "It's still a big area though."
"Then let's go!" Naruto declared. "We'll find this stupid mine before anyone else gets hurt!"
I chewed on my lower lip, considering. The mine wasn't really our goal, except in terms of keeping it out of their hands. "What's the status on the outposts?" I asked. "Have your clones reached it yet?" They ought to have, if they'd been moving quickly. Land of Rivers wasn't that wide, and we'd come further in the other direction than they'd had to travel.
"Huh?" Naruto blinked in surprise. "My clones? Oh, right." He looked like he was mentally shifting gears, attention focusing from one topic to another. "Yeah, they got to the outpost. But Hayama-taicho said they can't leave the outpost to help!"
"What did he say exactly?" I asked patiently. I hadn't expected they would mount an attack, given the current focus on maintaining border patrols, but a flat 'nothing' was a bit… extreme. At the very least I would have expected an extraction team for us.
"Um, that they had to look after the border first, in case they decided to go to Land of Fire. And that they weren't supposed to be in Land of Rivers anyway. But they were going to send a message to Baa-chan to see what she wanted to do. And that we should stay out of trouble…"
Well, it was a bit late for that.
It would probably take a few days or more for anything to happen, either way. Messages had to be passed, decisions had to be made, ninja had to be found and deployed. And they weren't even directly attacking Fire Country, so the level of priority wasn't as high as the mess with Cloud. There'd probably be messages to Hidden Valley, which would take even more time…
We'd already seen the amount of damage that these guys could do in a few days.
I didn't really want to see more villages destroyed.
"Okay…" I said slowly. "What about Hidden Sand?"
"We're defending the coast," Kankurou said. "But we can't exactly take the fight to them out there. We can't fight them until they come close to shore, and we never know where that going to be."
"Unless we do…" Temari mused. "If the mine is their goal, then all we have to do is defend that instead of the whole coastline. They won't bother attacking the villages when their real objective is so close at hand."
I wasn't so sure about that, if they were using the villagers to power their equipment, but it would still be less than what it currently was.
"And," she continued, staring down at the map. "If the location is so obvious, they're likely going to discover it very shortly. It's better if we're there first."
And wasn't that an ominous thought.
"We'll go," Gaara rasped in agreement. "Mahana will continue the patrol."
"Awesome! Let's go!" Naruto cheered, pointing off into the distance. Then he paused and looked around. "Wait. Which direction are we going?"