NARUTO: Kakashi’s Story

  “So then, these guys are Garyo’s lackeys?”

  “Probably.”

  “So? What’re we doing?”

  “Hold on. They’re moving.”

  “We are volunteers with the Ryuha Armed Alliance!” the large leader shouted. “All non-ninja passengers gather in the center of the room immediately!”

  When he was finished, his underlings jabbed at the fearful, weeping passengers with kunai and herded them into the center of the dining lounge.

  Another four or so newcomers came rushing into the lounge. Kakashi assumed the group had split into two groups to set up explosive tags within the ship.

  The attackers deployed in pairs around the passengers and set up a monitoring system.

  “Our demand is the immediate release of Lord Garyo, unjustly imprisoned at Hozuki Castle!” The leader roared thunderously. “If our demand is not met by precisely noon today, we will execute a passenger every ten minutes!”

  Shrieks rose up from amongst the passengers.

  “We know that Konohagakure serves as escort for this sightseeing tour! And we are well aware of the abilities of Uzumaki Naruto. If Konoha should attempt to use Uzumaki Naruto to regain control of this situation, you will be forever scorned as the village that abandoned these hostages to their deaths!”

  Kakashi and Guy exchanged looks.

  “We have already set up explosive tags in several places on this ship. If any one of us confirms the presence of Uzumaki Naruto—even if we falsely confirm the presence of a bird that resembles Uzumaki Naruto—Tobishachimaru will explode in the sky and fall to earth as nothing but flaming cinders!”

  By noon—thirty minutes left.

  At 11:35 a.m., a letter attached to an arrow was shot into the wall of the Konohagakure Hokage office.

  The demand on it was identical to the one the passengers on the Tobishachimaru had been forced to listen to five minutes earlier. The letter also clarified exactly how the attackers had snuck onto the ship.

  In the Hokage office, Tsunade immediately moved to get confirmation of the situation—she contacted the Land of Waves with the wireless that had been introduced after the Fourth Great Ninja War and asked them to investigate the area noted in the letter.

  There, twelve people were found stripped naked, hands and feet bound—the people originally invited to ride on the Tobishachimaru. They had been locked up in a small hut quite close to the plaza where the sightseeing flight ceremony had been held.

  By the time all of this had been sorted out, they were down to twenty minutes before noon.

  “In other words, the letter is not a joke,” Tsunade announced to Shikamaru at Hozuki Castle after having Shizune align the frequencies. “Dammit! What are we supposed to do here?”

  “Are we going to release Garyo?” Shikamaru asked forcefully over the wireless. “I don’t know anything about this armed alliance or whatever it is, but if you give in to the demands of guys like this once, more people trying the same trick’ll come out of the woodwork.”

  “Then what do you propose we do about the lives of the fifty-seven passengers on board?”

  “Also, the other villages are not going to take it lying down if we go ahead and set a prisoner free because of our own problems.”

  “This is not the time for such talk!”

  “P-p-please calm down, Lady Tsunade. At any rate, please make sure that Naruto at least does not find out about this. That idiot’ll just charge in there by himself without thinking of anything past the end of his nose.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  Another voice came through Tsunade’s wireless.

  “Um, excuse me? Lady Tsunade? It’s Lee.”

  “What is it, Lee?”

  “Umm. The truth is, well…”

  “What? If you have something to say, then simply say it!”

  “Right. The truth is, Master Guy and Master Kakashi are on board the Tobishachimaru.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Master Guy said he really wanted to ride on the ship. So I brought him there in secret today. Master Kakashi went after him… I’m sorry!”

  “That Guy!” Tsunade’s voice shook with anger. “I will murder him.”

  “You… Are you serious, Lee?” Shikamaru’s gaze flew over to Ino. “Then that means—”

  “Yup.” Ino nodded. “I’ll try contacting them via Mind Transmission.”

  Tsunade closed her eyes. Only the rustling sound of static emitted by the wireless broke the silence.

  “Shizune.” Tsunade opened her eyes and ordered, “Get everyone in the village—everyone besides Naruto—together immediately.”

  They had twenty minutes until the first execution.

  Watching the enemy from inside the air duct for the last ten minutes, Kakashi had learned that their companions were also on standby on the ground and that this attack had already been communicated to Konohagakure.

  And that wasn’t all.

  They had blown off the door to the pilothouse and gotten the pilots under their control as well.

  “You the Hokage?” He could hear the leader’s angry roar slipping out. “What’s happening with Lord Garyo’s release?!” Apparently, he had begun negotiating with Tsunade. “We can’t wait that long! You have twenty minutes left. In twenty minutes, we do the first execution!”

  He couldn’t hear her reply.

  “We are serious! If Lord Garyo is not released by noon, we will execute a passenger every ten minutes!” After this angry shout, the leader came out of the pilothouse and spoke to the passengers. “You heard what I said! Whether you live or die is on the head of Konohagakure!”

  A shiver raced through the group of passengers shrunken and huddled together.

  “What’re we going to do, Kakashi?” Guy whispered sharply. “We bungle this, and they’ll blow up the ship.”

  “We need to lower the ship’s altitude somehow. This air duct connects with the pilothouse, too. You should be able to get there if you keep crawling. Can I leave that to you?”

  “What are you going to do? The first thing we need to do is collect all those explosive tag—Urp!”

  “Ah! Idiot! At a time like this—”

  Guy vomited magnificently, leading the attackers occupying the dining lounge to suspect that something was off.

  “What was that, just now?!” Instantly, a huge commotion arose—a hornet’s nest jabbed with a stick. “Urgh! What’s that sour smell?!”

  “The ceiling! Someone’s hiding in the ceiling!”

  At once, several kunai shot through the ceiling—thk! thk! thk!—grazing the tip of Kakashi’s nose.

  Kakashi and an ashen-faced Guy immediately fled to either side. In no time, lances were thrust into the ceiling, ripping Guy’s cheek open.

  “You okay, Guy?!”

  “What, this little—Urp!”

  Wait. That’s not a lance. It’s an icicle, an ice sword.

  The ice sword ripped through the air duct and chased after them.

  “Guy! You’re in charge of the pilothouse!”

  “L-leave it to me…”

  They turned their backs on each other and crawled frantically through the air duct.

  Kakashi had to twist his body up any number of times to avoid the ice swords. They just kept coming after him, like sharp fangs sprouting up from below. And they came to assault him from the front as well.

  “Hngh!” He momentarily summoned his chakra to release a jutsu. “Lightning Style! Violet Bolt!”

  A pale purple tongue of lightning gushed from Kakashi’s hand. Zzzmp! Together with the sound, the ice sword coming at him was vaporized and blown away.

  Lightning Style, Violet Bolt. This was a new jutsu Kakashi had learned after losing his Lightning Blade.

  In a narrow escape, an ice sword shredded the lingering aft
erimage of Kakashi fleeing through the hole in the air duct.

  He had fallen into the washroom. By the time he grasped this, he was tangled up with a woman wearing a blue dress. Kakashi gently covered her mouth as she opened it to scream.

  “Shh!”

  “Mmmm!” The gagged woman struggled fiercely to try and get away from him somehow. “Mmmm… Mmmm!”

  “I’m not going to hurt you!”

  It was at that moment that he realized it was her. The long, flowing, curly hair, the large, wide-open eyes—they belonged to her, the woman still fresh in his memory.

  “We met once before!” Kakashi told her. “You were about to fall and I caught you. Do you remember?”

  And here it seemed the woman finally remembered who Kakashi was.

  “I’m going to take my hand away. Can you stay quiet?”

  The woman nodded with fearful eyes.

  “I’m a shinobi from Konohagakure,” Kakashi said as he released the woman’s mouth. “I’m guarding this sightseeing flight. What are you doing in here?”

  “I…” She got her breathing under control before replying. “I had just gone into the washroom when they attacked.”

  “And so you stayed hidden like this?”

  The woman nodded again.

  In the small washroom, they were standing with their bodies very nearly pressed up against each other. A faint scent of lavender drifted up to Kakashi’s nose.

  “At any rate, it’d be better to get out of here.”

  He looked up at the hole in the ceiling of the washroom, but the ice sword had disappeared without a trace. The user had released the jutsu.

  Did Guy manage to escape okay?

  “We’ll go out through this hole.” Kakashi flashed a smile at the reluctant woman to reassure her. “It’s fine. We’ll come out in the kitchen next door soon enough.”

  The woman blinked eyes wide with surprise.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, no…” She hurriedly looked away. “Let’s go.”

  So Kakashi lifted her up and pushed her into the air duct, and then followed after her himself.

  They crawled along, and in no time at all they were dropping down into the kitchen through the opening he and Guy had used to climb into the ducts. Guy’s wheelchair was still there, right where it had landed when they tossed it aside.

  The woman started to say something, but Kakashi held her back, suddenly bit his thumb, and pressed her to the floor.

  “Shinobi Conjuration!”

  Poof! White smoke surged up, and eight ninja hounds appeared—Pakkun, Buru, Urushi, Guruko, Shiba, Biscuit, Uhei, and Akino.

  “W-what?” The woman’s eyes widened. “What are these dogs?”

  “Where are we?” Buru shouted. “Oh, if it isn’t Kakashi! Been a while!”

  “Shh!” Kakashi held his index finger up to his mouth. “You’re always so loud, Buru.”

  “Seeing you looking all gloomy like this…” Akino grinned from behind sunglasses. “Looks like you’re still hesitating about formally becoming the Hokage, huh, Kakashi?”

  “Sorry for being gloomy.” Even dogs are getting on my case. “Anyway, to get right to it, I need your help.”

  “What’s up, Kakashi?” Pakkun asked. “It’s not like you to be in such a hurry.”

  “I don’t have time to explain everything. Right now, you guys are five thousand meters above the ground.”

  The faces of the dogs all tightened up immediately.

  “Explosive tags have been set up all over this ship,” Kakashi added, rapid-fire. “I need you to find all of them without the enemy noticing.”

  “Got it!”

  With Pakkun in the lead, the dogs flew out of the room.

  “You hide here,” he told the woman as he went to return to the air vents once more.

  She grabbed on to his jacket. “What are you going to do?”

  “They’re going to start executing people in just a little bit,” Kakashi said. “I have to stop them.”

  “They’re demanding Garyo’s release, right?”

  “Uh...”

  “Even hiding in the washroom, I could hear that raspy voice of his.”

  Kakashi nodded.

  “Then all you have to do is release Garyo,” the woman said, almost clinging to him. “The longer you all hesitate, the more victims there will be.”

  “We can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “If we do what that lot says even just once, order will collapse.”

  “Order?” The woman laughed through her nose. “You all were at war a mere year ago, and now you talk about order?”

  He simply stared at her.

  “I’m sorry.” The woman lowered her eyes. “But anyone who talks about a world of order usually thinks that they’re the ones who are right, on the side of justice. War happens when two rights clash. And history only recognizes the rightness of the winner. Which is to say that the one with the most power is always right.”

  “I understand what you’re trying to say. I mean, the Ryuha Armed Alliance is right in their own way.”

  “So then…”

  “Even so, we can’t release Garyo.”

  “Even if it means the lives of every passenger on board?”

  “I am definitely not going to let that happen—or at least,” Kakashi shrugged, “it would be so great if I could actually say that.”

  Now it was her turn to stay silent.

  “I’ll probably end up making some people victims myself. But I still want to save as many of the lives before me as I can.”

  The woman’s eyes teared up, and her lips trembled.

  “When two rights clash, the most important thing is to risk your life and put yourself in your opponent’s position,” Kakashi said, before he jumped back into the ducts. “Anyone who would easily take the lives of innocent bystanders in order to have their own words recognized has no right to talk about justice.”

  Kakashi crawled back through the ducts, punched the vent cover out, and dropped down into the dining lounge.

  Thud!

  The ninja of the Ryuha Armed Alliance were completely unsettled by the shinobi appearing from the ceiling. Several pulled out kunai and charged toward Kakashi.

  He crouched down, and as he knocked aside enemy kunai with his arms, he shot out quick blows in succession. As soon as he sent one flying, he launched a kick at the next one, and without pausing to take a breath, he sent his barrage at a third.

  In the blink of an eye, three enemies had fallen at his feet.

  “Quit fooling around already!” The remaining enemies came at him with bloodshot eyes. “Come at me all at once!”

  “Stop!” came the leader’s angry roar.

  The enemy ninja stopped moving.

  “Back to your positions! Don’t forget you’re responsible for watching over the hostages. That’s the copy ninja Hatake Kakashi. You’re no match for him even in a group.”

  Kakashi sent his eyes racing around the room. Nine people, including the ones that had fallen. That was the number of the enemy as far as his eyes could see.

  The passengers in a huddle in the center of the lounge watched how this would play out with looks of both fear and hope.

  “The copy ninja Kakashi, hm?” The leader grinned. “Although now that you’ve lost the sharingan, I guess you’re just plain old Kakashi.”

  “Well, even plain old Kakashi has some tricks up his sleeve.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like chasing off vermin like you guys.”

  “So you say.”

  “Enough talk,” Kakashi said. “Konoha does not negotiate with outlaws like you.”

  “I wonder.” A daring smile spread across the enemy’s lips, and he casually selected a passeng
er, pointing.

  That was all.

  “Aah…aah, th-that’s…” The body of the selected passenger was enclosed in ice before their eyes. “W-what’s this? What’s happening?”

  “?!”

  The man, with a look of terror plastered on his face, was frozen.

  “Aaaaaah!”

  Screams rose up from among the passengers. They collapsed as if trying to get just a little farther away from the leader of the Ryuha Armed Alliance.

  “So you still won’t negotiate with us?”

  “Stop it!” Kakashi shouted like he was spitting blood, but to this man, with a dull light shining in both eyes, the cry was like a heart-pleasing compliment.

  Closing his eyes and looking satisfied, the leader raised his arms as if he were the conductor of a symphony and pointed to the next victim.

  The man he pointed at tried to run away but was frozen mid-stride, arms up and one leg on the ground.

  Only the sound of the female passengers sobbing could be heard in the lounge.

  “That was a little early, but it was getting to be time at any rate.” The leader turned back to Kakashi. “I really had intended to kill only one, but because of you, Hatake Kakashi, I ended up killing two.”

  “You…”

  “I think you now understand, but the hostages already have a jutsu cast on them. If I felt like it, I could freeze every one of them all at once.”

  “If you do that,” Kakashi glared at his opponent, “you lose your bargaining power.”

  “You do say the strangest things.”

  Kakashi gave him a puzzled look.

  “Konoha doesn’t negotiate with terrorists like us, yes? So then it shouldn’t matter whether we have bargaining power or not. Konoha will not respond to negotiations.” The leader grinned. “And when they don’t, we will take everyone here with us, and the sightseeing tour will continue to the next world.”

  “Ngh!” Kakashi gritted his teeth.

  “Take one of the hostages to the pilothouse and make them report to Konoha on what they saw just now,” the leader ordered a subordinate before turning his back to Kakashi. “Hatake Kakashi, if you allow us to quietly capture you now, I can let the hostages live for the next ten minutes.”

  Kakashi’s eyes flew open.