As the cloud of smoke dissipates a large vibrant red and black snake rears its head. It has to be six meters long and it's thick body is made of pure muscle.
"Sasuke-sama?" The snake says as its forked tongue flick out of its mouth to taste the air. "How may I be of service?"
"Capture him." Sasuke points at me with a smirk. "Don't bother using poison, he's immune. You'll have to physically restrain him. Any kind of illusion is out too."
"Of course." The red snake coils up on itself and rises into the air. It's intently looking at me, waiting for the opportune moment to strike.
"Beginning as in when I got to Snow or when shit started going wrong?" Two small pools of blood form in each of my palms. My hands are masked in a cloud of smoke for a brief instant, once it clears I'm holding two large balls of webbing, one in each hand. I lob the first one high in the air above the snake and it curiously tracks the innocent looking orb. Then I launch the other web ball as hard as I can at the first.
The two web balls collide and break apart above the snake. Out of the broken orbs come thousands of tiny spiders, they rain down on the snake and mercilessly attack it. There's every kind of spider imaginable and they're all moving around the scales biting into the snake's flesh to inject their poisons.
The large snake starts thrashing in agony, slamming its body into the ground and the walls in a vain attempt to crush the spiders. It rolls while hissing in pain, venom flies from its mouth involuntarily. Quickly it becomes too much for it and the snake flees in a cloud of smoke, leaving a mass of spiders where it was.
"When it all started to go wrong I guess." Sasuke flies through hand signs and his cheeks swell. He launches out a blisteringly hot fireball towards the mound of scuttling spiders. Before it can connect the spiders are replaced with a cloud of smoke, I sent them back.
"Hm. That would be in the ship's cargo hold, the one I took to get to Snow." I send my own wave of fire at Sasuke, scorching the ground itself as it rages towards him. I'm rewarded with a blackened log. "How the hell do you always find logs in out of place areas? Whatever, not important. So basically I was putting the cargo in seals for the Captain to earn my passage and guess who decided to attack me?"
~He's hiding off to your left on the ceiling behind a stalactite.~
"Anko, Shikamaru and Ino of all people." I fly through hand signs for False Darkness and let it rip. The lightning streaks out of my mouth and straight through the stalactite moments after a blur drops from the ceiling. "Dammit. I hoped I'd get you with that."
"And how is she?" Sasuke casually asks but I can sense a hint of eagerness in his voice. But that eagerness is overshadowed by the sound of a thousand birds chirping. "Chidori Senbon! Dodge that!"
Countless senbon of pure electricity launch themselves at me with no hope of dodging. The spread is far too great, going left or right or even upwards is still going to get me impaled.
"Okay." I casually say as I twist my entire body around and the earth beneath me softens and I sink into it. All of the deadly senbon fly over me but I don't stop there. While underground I push out my earth heart and give it a bunch of tags. A bunch of explosive tags to be more precise. Then once the barrage of senbon halts I have the monster push me back topside. "You really should plan for something like that to happen. I have at least two other ways to stop that and that's after only a moment's consideration. Lightning may trump earth but that's only if I use a wall to stop it. Hell give me one minute and I bet I can come up with more."
"I knew you could stop it." Sasuke has moved positions since I was topside. "I just needed to lock you down for a moment. I wanted my sword back." Sure enough he's holding the blade again.
"You played me." I accuse him and he chuckles to himself. Or to piss me off, I wouldn't put it past him. "Back to your question though. Ino is… well it's complicated."
"Complicated how?" Sasuke's good mood lessen slightly.
"Complicated enough for it's own conversation, we can talk about that more in depth after I tell you everything else that happened. Deal?"
"Deal." Sasuke readily agrees. "So you bumped into Anko, Shikamaru and Ino?"
"Yep. We scuffled in the ship and I attempted to bail. Made it past them and onto the deck then Naruto and Kakashi were there. Ended up throwing Naruto into the water, Shikamaru caught me in his shadows and then blackmailed me to help them on their mission before I broke out of them."
"He blackmailed you?" Sasuke asks in surprise. "How'd he do that? I can't do that."
"I owed him a favor. Remember the Rookie Nine vs ANBU?"
"Ah. Continue."
"So I was forced to help. After a couple days journey we made it to Snow, a stupid movie Director made us shoot a scene on an iceberg where we confronted the most ridiculously stupid shinobi ever. They cut holes into their hats. Holes. Moving on! Shit went down, I made sure the Princess stayed alive - oh that was the mission they were on, keeping the Princess alive - and we fled back to the ship. Some dumbass used a narwhal jutsu, Kakashi mimicked it and we made our escape."
"You're leaving a lot of details out." Sasuke points out.
"Yeah most of it was boring or the Konoha shinobi trying to convince me to go back to Konoha. Add a dash of trying to get me to talk about Orochimaru and Oto on top and you got the whole trip in a nutshell."
"Fun." Sasuke sarcastically says.
"Loads." I match his tone. "Then we made it to the mainland, they staged an intervention with me, I didn't take it well and actually bolted for real but hung around to keep my word to Shikamaru, Princess ran away from them and I tailed her, Sureddo started messing with my mind to fix me by using Tsunade's and Orochimaru's voices and boy did that convince me I was insane! Then Naruto found Koyuki the Princess, brought her back to the group but bumped into Doto's train before they got there, a bunch of rebels picked this moment to attack the train and Doto used a bunch of mounted Kunai launchers to kill them all. I had a massive change of heart and saved everyone, then the Konoha group saved me cuz I used all my chakra to save the rebels, and we had a nice sappy reunion moment."
"The next day Koyuki goes and gets herself kidnapped on a blimp and I'm the only one who could follow her on it so I did, killed a few people, found Koyuki and Doto and exchanged some words with them, Doto forced me to surrender or he'd kill Koyuki, I jailbroke us both, killed Doto with a pebble which was fucking hilarious by the way, claimed my armor which was the real reason I went there, then protected Koyuki for a couple more days because I had time to kill. Also stole a key off of her that I thought lead to a superweapon but it turned out to be a giant heater so I had to break it. Then I came back here. That's it in a very, very, simplified version."
"Wow." Sasuke is staring at me in bewilderment. "Maybe it's just you that has the bad luck, I mean I had to deal with a jailbreak but it was easy. Nothing else went wrong while you were gone."
"I am forever cursed by the luck gods." I hang my head in shame. "I have no idea how I pissed them off but apparently what I did is unforgivable. They throw heaping mounds of bad luck my way then give me just enough good luck to make it out so they can continue to torture my poor soul."
"Seriously you should have died like a hundred times by now." Sasuke bluntly says, not pulling his words in the slightest.
"I know right?" I whine. Kicker is I already have died once, I'm the only person who gets to die twice.
"So are you good then?" He asks me. "You left in a really bad spot."
"Am I good?" I repeat the question to give myself a bit of time to form an answer. "No. I'm not good. I'm still kinda fucked in the head about a lot of stuff and am really violent when the situation calls for it. But I am loads better now than when I left. Sureddo of all people talked some sense into me, compared me to both Tsunade and Orochimaru to illustrate my own actions. He forced me to confront who I am becoming. I was too much like Orochimaru for my tastes so I've decided to change things up."
"Good." Sasuke shares a true smile with me. "I'm tired of taking care of your dumb ass."
"Oh shut up it's not like I haven't dealt with any of your bullshit!" I aggressively point at him. "Which one of us ran off to attack an S-rank shinobi again?"
"And which one of us does Orochimaru call child?"
"Which one of us needed saving from a coma?"
"Which one of us is constantly bumping into other S-rank shinobi?"
"Which one of us is… uh… reliant on a bloodline?"
"Like you don't massively rely on the Jiongu."
"Okay how about we agree that we're both pretty fucked up and have to look out for each other a lot?" I offer a compromise.
"I can agree to that." Sasuke sharply nods once.
"Cool. So just a heads up, while we were talking I had my earth minion lace the ground with explosives." Said minion bursts from the ground behind me as I finish my sentence. "So have fun with that."
"You suck." Sasuke lamely insults me. "I was waiting until we were done talking to start again! You cheated!"
"If you aren't cheating you aren't trying." I quip to him and he sighs. "Come on, we're shinobi. It's literally in the job description."
"Fine." Sasuke leaps up from the ground and lands feet first on the ceiling. "I'll just stay up here."
"I'm going to guess you didn't get the ceiling?" I ask while looking at my earth minion. It shakes its head no. "Brilliant. What a waste of seals."
After pulling my earth heart back inside me I spring up to the ceiling, we're now fighting upside down.
I have the slight advantage though, all of my summons are capable of fighting up here. That alone gives me a huge advantage.
"Let's take this to the next level." Sasuke grins superiorly at me as inky marks spread all over his skin. "I want to see how far we can go."
"Uh that's a bad idea." I carefully say. Last time he used the curse seal he stabbed me in the heart.
"Don't tell me you're scared. I know last time didn't go that well but I've gained more control since then." Sasuke experimentally flexes an arm to get used to how he moves with the boost.
"Really? You think I'm scared of you? Please, that's not it at all. If we really want to see how far we can go we're in the wrong spot. Sasuke I've broken a fucking island. We're still inside the base. I don't know about you but I don't particularly want to explain to Orochimaru why his base suddenly came down around his shoulders. When we push ourselves we get destructive. There's a reason I haven't been tossing around my ninjutsu like crazy."
"Oh. Yeah good point." The inky black marks recede back to his shoulder. "We'll have to go to an island or something next time. Seriously though I do want to go all out against you sometime. It'll be interesting to see which one of us is better at which skills."
"I guarantee you have me beat in genjutsu. Can't use them and whatnot."
"Couldn't you just limit yourself to one heart? Get rid of the conflicting types of chakras?" Sasuke offers me a solution.
"Yeah that would work but I'd rather have four spare lives. Genjutsu vs not dying when someone kills me? I'll take not dying any day of the week." I reach into a pant pocket and pull out a scroll. "Now what should I use against you next? This one?"
I weigh the scroll in my hand and study it. Then I toss it in the air and catch it to taunt Sasuke. But the scroll only went up, it never came back down.
"Huh? Where'd it go?" I look up.
BANG
"AH!" I squeak out and flinch rather badly.
"Holy shit." Sasuke is staring at me weirdly. "You forgot we are on the ceiling."
"NO I DIDN'T!"
BANG
"Uh… so we might have a little problem." I nervously look at the floor.
"They're all going to go off now, aren't they?" Sasuke says with a touch of fear.
"Yep. We should run."
BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG
"MOVE MOVE MOVE!" Sasuke shouts.
Konoha, Hokage's Office
There are currently six people in the office of the most powerful person in Konoha. Obviously the Hokage herself is present and she's staring down a team that just returned.
She's very displeased with this team.
"So let me get this straight." Tsunade leads forward without a hint of mercy in her eyes. "You come in contact with an A-rank missing nin and don't even attempt to attack him?"
"Well we all did attack him at first, I think only Kakashi didn't. You did forget something though." Naruto chimes in with a smile. "The part where we completed the mission."
"Naruto Uzumaki!" Tsunade roars at the genin and slams her fist into her table. The feeble wood snaps in two, sending everything on it crashing to the ground. Tsunade rises up from her chair and stares down the team before her. "You don't have any idea of what you've done! None of you realize how dangerous Alvarcus is! None of you know what he's capable of. You all let him walk away."
"Hokage-sama I accept full responsibility." Kakashi steps forward to face his Hokage's wrath. "It was because of my connection to him that I convinced the others to let him go. I couldn't bring myself to harm my student."
"You are staying after." Tsunade snarls at the jonin. "I gave you specific orders to bring him back or kill him. You disobeyed me. You disobeyed your Kage. Because of your mistake more people will die. Our allies will die. My very own shinobi will die. You let one of Orochimaru's best shinobi return to him without raising a hand against him. Because you couldn't harm him."
"Alvarcus is a lot of things." Kakashi softly says. "He is not -"
"SILENCE!" Tsunade roars once again and everyone flinches away from the enraged woman.
She intently stares down each individual. She rests her livid gaze on everyone in turn, lingering for ten seconds on each. It's one of the most terrifying experiences some of them have ever had.
"Kakashi." Tsunade breaks the silence. Her anger has only gotten worse. "Fetch the rest of the Rookie Nine and team Gai. You have ten minutes."
"Yes Hokage-sama." No one sees Kakashi leave, one moment he was there the next he wasn't.
"Hokage-sama?" Anko timidly speaks up, her usual air of confidence is long gone. "Why do you want the rest of the Rookie Nine and team Gai here?"
"Because I will make sure he won't get away twice." Tsunade crosses her arms and glares at Anko, daring her to ask another question. Anko doesn't. "Now shut up and wait."