Hey brother, there's an endless road to re-discover.
Hey sister, know the water's sweet but blood is thicker.
Oh, if the sky comes falling down for you,
There's nothing in this world I wouldn't do.
~Avicii; Hey Brother
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The Dead Wastes were probably more impressive to someone that knew anything at all about deserts. To me, they looked about the same as the rest of the desert that we'd passed through to get here. Granted, we had travelled through a few variations – rock, rocky sand, sandy sand, a dried out old creek bed to name a few – and this did seem to be on the rockier side of the equation.
Then again, there was something I noticed about it, and that was the complete and utter lack of chakra in the air.
Nothing lives here…
The desert had seemed pretty bare of life to my eye, with the exception of a few small and lonely plants, a spikey looking lizard or two, and a snake basking in the sun. (Kankurou had also suggested that our heavy footsteps might summon a giant sandworm - apparently straight out of Dune - but Temari had just scoffed and rolled her eyes at that, so I was pretty sure he was joking.) But the natural energy in the air had differed little in volume from any rural area in the Land of Fire, suggesting that there was a thriving ecosystem however little of it I could see.
The fact that this place had no chakra at all…
I shivered.
Tentatively, I gathered a little chakra into my hand, holding it up at eye level. The blue glow seemed to waver, like a candle flame in the wind, pulling inwards to the Wastes. Despite my tight control, it was peeling off, dispersing into the air and being sucked away.
"Interesting," I said, more unsettled than anything. It seemed… active. This wasn't just an area with no chakra, it was an area where no chakra could be.
"What was that?" Naruto asked puzzled, staring at the air.
"It's almost like something is drawing the chakra away," I said.
"Eh?" Naruto frowned. "But where would it go? Into a jutsu?"
I blanched a little. "Let's hope not." An area this size, for however long it had been empty? That would be an extraordinary amount of chakra. That would be… destructive.
"It's still a huge area," Temari was arguing with Shikamaru. "It'll take weeks to search."
"I should be able to get us close," I said, cutting in. "I can sort of sense the energy the stones use, so we won't have to search everywhere."
"That's better," Temari agreed, grudgingly.
I thought about pointing out that she had agreed to come this far without even that much of a plan, but it didn't look like she would appreciate the reminder.
We set off again, and suddenly I was in the lead, taking us deeper and deeper into the Wastes. My lungs didn't like breathing this lifeless air, which was rich considering how long it had taken them to realize that chakra wouldn't drown them.
The Wastes were flat, bare rock more than sand, with cracks and crevices reaching downwards that sometimes split it valleys or gulfs. That was interesting in its own way, and not just in making sure we didn't accidentally step off the edge of a cliff. It almost seemed like this had once been like Land of Rivers, since water erosion and underground rivers were the prime cause of such cave networks.
There was no water here now.
Sometime in the afternoon, I started hearing the song of Gelel grow louder and clearer, which was a relief as it meant we were going in the right direction. I followed it, until it was so loud my bones felt like they were vibrating, and it was so clear that I could have named each note, had the melody had recognizable notes. I couldn't have begun to describe it but it was beautiful.
"Somewhere here," I said, after a few circles around. It had grown dimmer in each direction, so it must have been here.
It could have been anywhere. This wasn't flat ground, and it could have been hidden in any number of crevices or caves, or buried a hundred feet underground. Even with Naruto's shadow clones, it would take us a long time to search them all.
"Quiet," Gaara rasped, crouching and pressing his hands flat against the ground. Specks of sand danced around him, as if caught in a breeze.
When he stood, he seemed to know exactly where we were going, and lead us down and through twists and turns with unerring certainty. We'd climbed through caves before, in Hidden Waterfall, but those had been built or repaired for human use, whereas these were just natural accidents. It made the trip… interesting, but we were ninja and were hardly about to be defeated by the natural world.
"I feel like this should have been harder," I mused. We weren't quite in a cave –there was still sunlight spilling down around us – but two giant stone slabs were wedged together to make the area virtually inaccessible. Beyond that, however, was a structure with clear signs of workmanship. It might have been half collapsed, pillars worn and engravings and patterns faded, the stairs covered with piles of sand… but it was here.
"Why?" Naruto asked, seeming to be honestly puzzled that I considered finding the remnants of a long lost civilization in a day 'too easy'.
I stared at him. He stared back.
"Never mind," I said, slumping.
He looked curious for a moment longer, before shrugging it off. "Let's go inside!" He called, running up the steps. "I want to see what it's like!"
"Idiot," Shikamaru groaned. "You deserve every trap you run into."
But we couldn't not follow, so after a moments pause we started up the stairs too. Whatever I'd imagined inside, it wasn't like that. The outside might have been crumbled and time worn, but the inside was as clean and fresh as if people had only left the day before. It was wide open, a central hub with many branching corridors off it, and every available surface was heavily decorated. The columns were carved, there were mosaics across the floor and picture frames on the walls, like the most extravagant of temples or palaces. It wasn't dark, either, like it should have been with no sunlight. I couldn't see any light sources, nothing glowing, but it was like broad daylight in here.
"Creepy," Kankurou said, stopping beside me.
I barely heard him. If the Gelel was a song, then this room was a masterpiece of acoustics. It pushed at me from all sides, and I could feel the stone in my pocket beating in time like a second heart.
And despite Shikamaru's mutterings, it didn't look like there were any traps. Naruto was darting in and out of the corridors, exploring with eagerness, and we broke up and spread out to have a look around. I paused to look at all the carvings, which were incredibly detailed. Like the mosaic patterns on the floor, they seemed very geometric, but not rigid and repeating.
I couldn't help but reach out an awed hand to brush over them.
And then yelped, jumping backwards and pulling my fingers away as though burned.
It had taken my chakra! Just pulled it straight out of my hand! It had been so strong, like the pull of a riptide sucking you out to sea just when you thought that the water was safe. I hadn't been able to fight it, or resist it, chakra to chakra, and it was lucky I could back away.
"It's a seal," I said, astounded. The others had stopped at my first exclamation, wary of traps and dangers. "This whole place is a seal…"
With a new eye, I looked over the patterns and carvings.
And swallowed.
It was huge. It was complex. I didn't even understand what it was for. But it made sense. The Dead Wastes, completely lacking in chakra because it was all here, sucked out of the air to feed this monster of a seal, for centuries. Millennia.
Shikamaru cursed, low and vicious. "Do you know what it does?"
I shook my head. If seals were like languages, then this was written in some long dead tongue, and I had no Rosetta stone. And even if I could translate it, it would be like babelfish, a mess of poorly aligned words with no context or explanation.
People only think in so many ways, Jiraiya had said. But what about a different civilization altogether? I was different enough, and I had still grown up here a second time.
"I vote for not staying in the cursed and abandoned temple," Kankurou said, almost immediately.
Even if Naruto wanted to explore, no one was really arguing with that.
We set up a small camp just outside, with no small amount of relief. We'd been moving non-stop since yesterday, and a rest was long overdue.
"They're not going to be able to get the boats here," Temari said in satisfaction, perched on a rock and still somehow managing to look sophisticated. "Which means all we have to contend with is the mobile fortress that you described. We don't know how many soldiers they can deploy, but this is an excellent area for ambushes. We should at least be able to engage without suffering too many losses."
Especially since they had Gaara on their side. Once they stopped playing hit and run with the coast line, they were done for.
I was starting to feel good about our chances for dealing with this, which is why I probably should have expected things to start going wrong. A beam of bright white light cut through the air above us, visible in the small parts of open sky we could see.
"Lightning?" I tried, not even sounding like I believed that.
We went up, sticking to the walls to ascend vertically, and cautiously peering out in case of a trap.
"You!" Naruto shouted, jumping up and pointing angrily at Temujin.
I blinked. How on earth had Temujin got here? Had he followed us?
He wasn't alone either, but the man with him wasn't one I had seen before. He didn't look like any member of Haido's entourage, older, shabbier and less well dressed. He was carrying the ferret that had started this whole mess of a mission, cradling it dearly to his chest.
I wasn't exactly worried about this descending into a fight. Temujin was so outnumbered, and unless he was leagues above the other Gelel warriors, we'd be able to handle him.
"Oh, the unparalleled shinobi of the Leaf and Sand," the old man wheezed. "You must help me-"
"Be silent," Temujin commanded, shoving him in the shoulder and forcing him to stumble a few steps forward. "Haido-sama is already on his way. There is no need for you to resist any longer."
"Leave him alone!" Naruto shouted. "Are you alright, old man? What'd this freak do to you?"
"Tricked, tricked and betrayed!" the old man said, sniffling dramatically. "He came to us in friendship, as though he were the ninja hired to bring Nerugui home-" He hefted the ferret to demonstrate his point. "Then forced us to give up the secret location known only to our clan!"
I raised an eyebrow. This was the man who hired us? And he knew the location of the Gelel mine? This was utterly, utterly ridiculous.
… but I had started hearing the Gelel when we met the ferret, hadn't I. Not when we ran into the base, or into the golems, but the ferret.
"It has one of the stones, doesn't it," I asked, woodenly. It wasn't even a real question.
"Nerugui has been with our clan for generations," the old man confirmed. "He was once the companion to the kings of the empire, and we were trusted with guarding him." He looked dolefully at us all. "The mine must never be recovered, do you understand? It's power is beyond anything humans can handle. Those stones are the reason that the empire was destroyed!"
"Power is only power," Temujin shrugged. "What matters is who wields it. In the hands of Haido-sama, we will build a utopia. A world without wars, where the weak are never trampled by the strong… That is all that matters. That is our dream."
"There is so much wrong with that that I don't even know where to start," I said, annoyed. It was good that he was talking, it gave us more information, but it was still utter bullshit. "What part of devastating helpless villages and kidnapping people leads to peace? That's exactly what you're telling me you hate. Utterly hypocritical."
"We had no choice," Temujin insisted. "Sometimes sacrifices must be made. We have made sacrifices too, noble sacrifices to make the world better. That is what it means to accomplish something."
"You don't get to decide what sacrifices other people should make!" Naruto yelled, which was exactly the same thing I would have said. "It's not noble, and you should stop acting like you know better than everyone else!"
I really kind of hated that all these bad guys used 'world peace' as their explanation. It seemed to tarnish the whole concept, as though every time they were proven wrong, it was proven wrong.
"The ends don't justify the means," I continued, tag teaming off of Naruto. "The means create the ends. Any rule that's built with such needless bloodshed will continue that way. You think Haido will stop giving orders to kill people, just because he has what he wants?"
That one at least seemed to strike home, and Temujin faltered for a moment. "Don't talk about Haido-sama that way!" he snapped. Not deep enough, then, it seemed.
"This… Haido," Gaara rasped slowly. "Who is he?"
"Haido-sama is a great lord of Rikujou," Temujin said, earnestly for one who was so stoic. "He is noble and very wise and has achieved many great things in uniting the nations of our warring country. Even I… My friends and I were rescued by Haido-sama when bandits destroyed our village. That's why we believe so strongly in his dream to free the world of wars. That is why I must recover the mine of Gelel."
I couldn't say the revelation made me terribly sympathetic. "Your village was destroyed by bandits?" I asked, deliberately softly. "So you're just doing to others what was done to you?"
There was a bit of vicious satisfaction at watching the words hit home.
It had probably blown the small progress we were making. But there was satisfaction.
"He must be one of the descendants of the royal family," the old man said dolefully. "They left across the sea many years ago and took with them the Book of Gelel and the last of the stones. Only the blood of the royal family can destroy the stones, so we were never able to do more than hide the mine. Maybe now it can finally be destroyed…"
"Incredibly interesting," Temari said drolly, looking anything but interested. "Are you going to come quietly?"
Temujin raised his sword, but the sand that Gaara had been steadily piling around his feet as we talked spread up and immobilized him. A ninja would have expected that.
"I would have preferred to have greater forces here," Temari said critically. "But I suppose we don't have to worry about how to lure them in anymore."
Haido being on his way might have been accelerated from our plans, but it was basically what we were hoping to achieve in any case.
We tied Temujin up and went back down to our makeshift campsite. Now we were on a timetable, there were plans to make and traps to set. I didn't have much to offer, as the barren nature of the area made all my seals useless, so I spoke with the old man a little. His name was Kahiko, and he was part of a caravan of nomads that had been in River Country. He had been the one to hire us to retrieve the ferret – named Nerugui- which made me slightly regret our decision to abandon the original mission. If we'd ended up meeting him first, could we have learnt all about the stones and Gelel beforehand? Then again, the decision we'd made had been reasonable with the knowledge that we'd had and who knows what other events might have occurred.
All offers to take him to a safe distance, however, were rebuffed with melodrama that reminded me sharply of Tazuna. As much as I'd ended up liking the bridge builder, it was clear that Kahiko had his own agenda, whatever it might have been. I felt like throwing my hands up in frustration.
After that, it was mostly just waiting, and we took the opportunity to rest as much as we could.
"They're coming," Gaara rasped, just as the next day's dawn peeked over the horizon. The night had been freezing and I was almost glad for the return of the searing desert heat.
"Finally!" Naruto said, hopping up and peering around. There was nothing to be seen, but that didn't stop him from trying.
I made one last attempt to get Kahiko to safety – which he refused – and followed the others out to the places we'd chosen for fighting.
Like Temari, I rather wished we had more people with us. Especially when the stronghold came back into view, rumbling the ground like an earthquake and towering against the sky. It was moving quickly over the flatter ground; far faster than it had been in River Country.
We waited, tensely, until it hit one of the spots we had readied, and the ground caved in, a bare crust of rock hiding crumbly sand and open space beneath. It pitched forward, nose sinking down into the ground, treads circling without grabbing, and ground to a halt.
"Perfect," Temari said, heaving her fan in a wide circle. Winds blasted out, only gaining speed and strength as lashed across the open space, so that they carved deeply into the metal of the machine, more than one pipe bursting and spilling steam or simply being sliced straight off and clattering to the ground.
Sand whirled through the air, stirred up by the winds, but luckily was directed away more than toward us.
It made visibility poor, however, and when the golems came crashing towards us, it was only luck that one of us spotted the one flying overhead. Temari slashed at it with a sweeping gust of wind, but it dived agilely out of the way, low enough to see that it was not one but two; a twisted feminine warrior carrying the lord himself.
And they were headed towards the mine.
Temari broke off from the fighting to follow them, and I shared a quick glance with my brother before doing the same.
I wasn't exactly happy to leave the fighting when there were so many of them, but Haido outranked them in order of priority. And with both Naruto and Gaara there, they were unlikely to be overpowered.
Temari took another swing at the flying figures, and even standing behind her, I felt the kick back of the technique, then seemed to … falter. She stared ahead, eyes blank, wrists bending awkwardly under the weight of her Tessen.
Genjutsu?
I didn't know Temari well enough to know if she had a plan – pretend to be helpless under the effects and reel the attacker into a trap – or what her level of genjutsu defence was, but the Gelel warriors were fleeing, not attacking, and it was better to offend her with help than leave her stuck in it.
I altered my course, skidding to a stop beside her and clamping a hand down on her shoulder to disrupt the genjutsu. It was stubborn, and not-quite-chakra and I probably rattled her slightly harder than strictly necessary to break her free of it.
Then I took off towards the mine, because our targets had made great time while we were occupied.
By the time I got within range again, Haido was gone, Temujin was freed – again – and the disturbingly vampiric flying woman was swooping overhead.
"You must be really desperate to get your ass kicked by us," I sighed, as Temujin drew his sword.
"Rising Thunder!" A line of pure green light blasted out of the blade, curving along the path of his strike, as though the air itself was being cut apart. A note of Gelel sang out, pure and refined, ringing with strength and power.
"Wind Release: Wind Cutter Technique!" Temari called out, and as the two jutsu clashed they hung frozen in the air, just for a second, and I swore I could see where they met.
Then the blades of wind shattered and broke, flying back towards us on the wave of green light.
This is going to hurt, I thought grimly as I threw myself at the ground – into the ground, though I barely scratched the surface as the leading edge of the attack passed overhead. But it had widened out into a wedge as it travelled, and I couldn't avoid it totally. Temari's scattered wind blades stabbed into the ground haphazardly, dangerous and uncontrolled.
I rolled unsteadily to my feet, feeling scraped and raw. Temari had sheltered behind the open lee of her Tessen, though she didn't look happy with the damage it had taken, and there was a nasty gash in the stone behind us that would make Shikamaru very annoyed to have to cross when it came time for them to follow us.
The vampire laughed, nauseatingly sharp and high pitched, looping overhead. "You said they were dangerous," she jeered at Temujin.
"Wind Release," Temari growled. "Great Task of the Dragon." The sky – I kid you not – went dark, with what was apparently just wind, which then descended upon us like some kind of tornado from hell.
I took one look at it and went 'nope'. I wasn't staying out in this. Temujin was standing between me and the mine entrance, but that was too bad for him because he was going to have to move.
Temujin might have been fast and had great reflexes, but a ninja moving at Body Flicker speed is all but invisible to the naked eye. Body Flicker was a burst of pure speed, almost sliding over the world, pulling yourself from one spot to another, done with chakra alone. You could start at a standstill, and finish at a standstill, in a different position to the one you started in, without having to do all that pesky running in between.
So when I mirrored one of Lee's favourite openings, appearing in a low crouch in front of him, and sweeping his legs out with a roundhouse kick, he was taken by surprise.
Then I made for the mines with as second Body Flicker, and didn't even look back to see whether he was following me, or caught in Temari's tornado.
The inside of the mine was just as eerie as before – maybe more so now that there was actual fighting going on and I knew that the Gelel was drowning out my ability to sense enemies. Which meant I couldn't rely on sensing to find Haido, and would have to use the old fashioned method of looking.
Ruefully, I wished we had investigated more closely, then at least I would have had a map and an idea of which way he would have been likely to go.
As I ducked into one of the side tunnels, there was a clatter of metal against stone, which at least told me that Temujin had followed. I wasn't exactly eager to confront him, regardless of what I'd said outside. We'd been running and fighting and running with little pause for days, and I was starting to flag. My hand, barely healed and then sorely abused once more, was a hindrance, my seals would not work due to lack of natural chakra, and unwary brushes against the seal work of the mine would result in chakra loss. It was not an ideal situation for fighting.
Hopefully, there would be a good spot or two for an ambush, and I'd be able to take him out that way.
I wasn't actually sure what I would do once I found Haido. 'Stall' seemed appropriate.
This is a right mess.