"Do you see now, Lee? It's just as I said! They've already apprehended the target themselves!"
"Yes, Gai-sensei! I'm sorry for ever doubting you!"
I rub at my head, groaning as the twin bellowing voices drift to me through the thin hotel walls. Ignoring them, I grab the red-speckled bar of soap from the tray jutting out below the showerhead and set to scrubbing my body down for a second time.
The "extermination" as detailed in the mission scroll went well. Very well. Sakura and I took down the priest while Hatake and Neji handled the followers. The guy wasn't lying when he said he wasn't a shinobi- I beat him down by myself, and all Sakura had to do was tie him up. Neji swept through his half of the cultists in a blur, dispatching each of them with a tap to the forehead or a poke to the chest. And Hatake...
I scrub harder.
When it was all said and done, and the crowd of bystanders had fled in terror, Hatake gathered all the followers up in scrolls and threw the priest over his shoulder. Rather than wait on Gai to show back up with our other two teammates, he decided to head back to the hotel so we could start packing our supplies up for the trip back. If it had been any other time I would have needled him for a little time at the festival before we left, but as it was I just wanted to take a shower.
I shuffle out of the bathroom a while later in my orange pants, scrubbing my hair dry. Everyone else looks ready to go. I quickly throw the rest of my clothes on and sling my backpack over my shoulders.
"Ready?" Hatake asks, glancing up from his conversation with Sakura. I nod.
Really, I'm not mad or scared or anything like that. This is what the old man told us to do, after all. And it's not like I haven't seen death before. This is actually the first mission I've been on that involved taking a prisoner alive.
It's just that I've never been slapped in the face with it before. Literally slapped in the face.
My stomach does a few flips, remembering the smell and the feel and the taste, and I pull out a rations bar. For all that they taste like the underside of a worn out sandal, they're easy on the stomach. I bite into it as we file out of the room, idly realizing that I never even got the chance to eat my ramen at that stand.
"A job well done, my precious students!" Gai congratulates us when we walk out of the southern gate.
Lee cheers and even Neji looks satisfied, but I can't help but wonder. When Sasuke goes back to that leaf of his and Sakura drifts away to start fiddling with a kunai and a slip of paper, I fall into step beside Hatake. He's still carrying the priest slung over his shoulder.
"Hey, Hatake," I say quietly.
"Hmm?"
"Why'd we get this mission?"
Hatake looks down at me, visible eye unreadable. "What do you mean?"
"I mean why did we get sent to take down a bunch of civilians? All of our other missions have involved other shinobi, or at least bandits. Why didn't the old man send a hunter team or something instead?" I don't actually know if hunter team is something you can be assigned to as a genin, but it seems like it would exist.
"Because like it or not, we're shinobi and sometimes we have to kill civilians. They can be just as dangerous as shinobi." He looks up through the treetops, and sighs. "And also because you can never be sure they're just civilians. Not when these cults are involved."
"Cults? As in more than one?" My mouth falls open. "There are more of those?"
Hatake nods grimly. "One for every Bijuu."
I exhale a shaky breath. A cult for every Bijuu. Wow. "Why have I never heard of them before?" That's probably something they should have covered in the Academy, right?
"They're not respected much, for obvious reasons. Mist is the only hidden village that's acknowledged one of them as an official religion, and that was only a couple decades ago. They keep to themselves most times because of the animosity they face, and Shodai knows we've been trying just as hard to ignore their existence."
He sighs. "Sometimes, though, they rise back up to prominence. Whether it's an illegal pilgrimage into a Daimyo's domain or a campaign near a hidden village to gather followers, they become too great a threat to ignore."
"Why hasn't anyone just... wiped them out?"
"Two reasons," Hatake says. "The first is that they're very good at hiding. They're easy enough to track down when they're doing something public like this one-" He shrugs the side of his shoulder the priest is slung over. "But when they're trying to lay low, you can never quite tell if you've managed to get them all or if there's another sect hiding away in a different cave somewhere.
"The second reason is that they're dangerous."
I make to object, but he raises a hand. "These ones were weak, yes, and I'd be willing to bet that the majority of these Bijuu cultists are little more than crazed civilians, but some of them are different."
I eye the prisoner hunched over his back, unconscious. "Like him."
"Like him," Hatake agrees.
"What's different about them?"
"I don't know," he admits. "What I just told you is most of what I know about them. All I can say is that some of them, mostly the head priests and similarly high-ranking members of their respective cults, have abilities that can't be explained without factoring jutsu or bloodlines into the equation. And since the vast majority of these cultists are civilians, and these abilities are shared between people with no familial ties to speak of..."
I narrow my eyes. "What kind of abilities?"
He chuckles. "Well, you've seen this one's. Why don't you take a guess as to the others?"
It doesn't take me long to see what he's getting at. "So they get powers that mirror their Bijuu?" That sounds... terrifying.
"Powers that match their perspective of their Bijuu," Hatake corrects. "It's just as likely that they discovered their abilities and decided that they must be gifts from their god."
"So what are the dangerous powers?" I ask. Because for all that being able to digest a fast-acting poison that has no known cure without breaking a sweat is incredible, it doesn't exactly pose a threat to an advancing shinobi.
"Well, there's the Yonbi's followers, who-" All of the sudden he pauses, head snapping sharply to the side. Up ahead Gai goes rigid, looking off in the same direction. I stop walking, glancing at Team 9, but they look just as confused as I feel. A little shiver runs down the back of my neck.
"Gai," Kakashi says, his voice low.
"Get behind me, Lee," Gai says, and the normally boisterous genin falls into line beside Neji, wide eyed. I move cautiously behind Hatake, gesturing for Sasuke and Sakura to do the same, and Hatake nods in approval. A tense silence falls over our group.
And then six shinobi garbed in black cloaks and porcelain masks appear from thin air in front of Gai and Hatake, all crouched but for one. He's wearing a grinning cat mask, and when he raises his hand to point at Hatake his cloak shifts, revealing full body armor underneath it.
ANBU. I'm looking at a squad of ANBU.
"You are in possession of a criminal wanted by the Hidden Village of Iwagakure," he drones. "By orders of the Sandaime Tsuchikage it is my duty to detain that man and his accomplices, by any means necessary."
Iwa ANBU. These are Iwa ANBU, and they're after our target.
"We too are on a mission to detain this man and his followers," Gai says, unperturbed. He brandishes our mission scroll and with a flick of his wrist unfurls it, holding it out for the ANBU to see. The official seal of the Hokage is clear as day.
"That man is guilty of illegally spreading the influence of a cult within the borders of the Land of Earth, causing riots and stealing civilians from their homes to join his following."
Gai steps forward. "He is also guilty of doing the same inside the Land of Grass, a staunch ally of the Land of Fire, as well as on her border itself. A border which, I will remind you, we are very close to right now." The message is clear. This isn't your mission anymore.
The ANBU doesn't respond. In fact, he doesn't move.
Gai suddenly stiffens, turning to look at us. His gaze flickers to Sasuke, who's been revealed to the squad by his step forward.
"Easy now," Hatake says, slowly raising his hand in a placating gesture. "I'm sure we can resolve this without any ruffled feathers."
"Hatake Kakashi," The ANBU murmurs. "Copy Cat nin of Konoha. Maito Gai, Konoha's Green Beast." A vague memory of the nukenin I'd fought on my first mission resurfaces in my mind. I hadn't even registered it at the time, but he'd called Hatake by that title too. I've never heard of any Green Beast of Konoha, though.
It'd be hilarious if anyone else had said it.
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