They moved through the forest in the order Shikamaru had set at the gate, single file, Kiba and Akamaru at the point.
For the first hour it was easy. Kiba had Sasuke's scent inside the first quarter mile, Sakura had brought one of his belongings from home, and he followed it at a steady pace with his nose tilted into the wind and Akamaru in his jacket. Behind him the line held its spacing. Naruto. Shikamaru in the middle. Choji. Tenten at the tail, walking half-turned, her eyes never quite forward, scrolls riding her hips.
Then Kiba stopped so suddenly that Naruto nearly crashed into him.
"Don't." Kiba's hand was up, flat, fingers spread. Akamaru had gone stiff-legged in the brush ahead, hackles climbing. "Nobody move where I haven't moved first."
"What is it?" Shikamaru asked, low.
"Hands." Kiba's lip curled off his teeth. "Somebody's been through here laying things and they were careful, and I can still smell exactly where they put their fingers." He pointed, and now that he had named it the others could almost see it too, a hair of wire strung shin-high between two trunks, and past it another, and past that a patch of disturbed earth that did not match the leaf litter around it. "It's not one trap. It's a field of them. They knew we'd track them and they prepped the whole approach."
"So we go around."
"So we go around slowly and you put your feet where I put mine." Kiba corrected.
They went around slowly.
Kiba threaded them through it a step at a time, his nose doing the work six pairs of eyes could not, calling each hazard before they reached it. Here a wire. Here an explosive tag seeded under the moss. Here a branch that would whip back loaded with tags if a shoulder so much as brushed it. The detour cost them time they did not have and there was nothing to do about it.
It nearly went wrong once.
Naruto, being Naruto, let his attention slide for half a second toward a flicker of movement that turned out to be a bird, and his foot came down in the wrong place, and the toe of his sandal kissed a wire Kiba had already called.
"NARUTO!"
Too late to stop. His weight was already committing forward, the wire already starting to draw taut, the whole grove a half-breath from going up.
Shikamaru's shadow crossed the distance before he could set it off.
It shot out along the ground and ran up into Naruto's own shadow and seized him there, mid-fall, one leg bent and both arms windmilling, frozen at an angle a body could not hold on its own. The wire stood a hair from full tension. Naruto's toe stood a hair from the ground past it.
"...Don't breathe." Shikamaru exhaled, sweat on his temple, holding the jutsu and his friend's entire weight at an angle that defied falling,
Slowly, slowly, he drew his own foot back, and Naruto's foot drew back with it, off the wire, and the grove did not go up.
Shikamaru released him. Naruto dropped the last inch onto safe ground and sat down hard.
"...That was a good catch, Shikamaru." Naruto said with some color drained out of him.
"That was annoying. Watch your feet. I'm not catching you twice." Shikamaru wiped his temple.
Kiba was already moving forward.
…
They smelled the enemy before they saw them, and then they saw them.
Four figures, halted in a clearing where the trapped ground gave way to open forest, and between them a thing that did not belong in any forest. A tall round cask, banded and sealed. It sat upright in the leaf litter like a coffin stood on end.
"Sasuke has to be in there. Sakura said they called him their boss, so there's no way they would travel without him." Tenten murmured.
"What if he went to take a leak or something?" Naruto suggested.
"I would've smelled that, idiot." Kiba told him.
"Oh, right…" Naruto rubbed the back of his head sheepishly. "So, what's the plan?"
"Yeah." Shikamaru's eyes moved across the four. He did not let them stop on any one face. He was reading the whole board at once. "We're not winning this by charging. Spread out and set up like we talked about."
The kunai came out of nowhere with three tags fluttering off its haft.
It struck the tree near Tenten and Shikamaru and the world turned white and started ringing. The blast threw the two of them up and out and into the open in a spray of dirt and leaf. Tenten hit the ground rolling and came up with her harpoon already in her grip. Shikamaru came up worse, ears ringing, exactly where the enemy had wanted him.
A laugh drifted down from above.
"Well, well." A blue-haired figure said. "The things you turn up in the underbrush. I was hoping for a snake. All I get is a handful of bugs."
The other three closed in around the coffin. The largest of them, a thick giant of a man, cracked his knuckles. A second, a girl, watched from the flank. The third with multiple arms hung back by the coffin.
"Wait." Shikamaru got a hand up, palm out, the other pressed to his ringing ear. "Wait. We didn't come out here to fight you. We came to negotiate. Hand the Uchiha back and nobody-"
"Negotiate." The six-armed one chuckled. "Then explain that."
His lowest right hand flicked.
Three threads Tenten had not seen snapped taut out of the brush, and Naruto, Choji, and Kiba were hauled stumbling into the open at the ends of them, trussed at the wrists by a glistening golden filament thinner than a hair.
Kiba got a hand free and slung a smoke bomb at the ground. Purple smoke billowed up and swallowed all three of them.
The laugh came again, delighted.
"Hee. And what do you imagine that buys you?" The six-armed one did not move from his branch. "There's no out from under me. My silk is finer than hair and stronger than steel cord, and I have it strung through every tree in this clearing. You're standing in my web. You've been standing in it since before you saw me." A thread plucked, somewhere, with a sound like a low note. "Smoke doesn't blind a hunter who feels you through the strands, dog boy."
In the thinning smoke Kiba spat a curse. Naruto rubbed his backside where the silk had yanked him off his feet.
"The two-wire trap." Shikamaru's mind was already running it backward, fast, behind the ringing in his skull. The kunai, the tags, the hauling threads. "It was three-wired. The third was silk and I never saw it." He breathed out. "This is a pain. I have never had to plan around an enemy like this."
"No." The six-armed one's grin widened. "You haven't."
"W-What… My body…" He stopped with one foot still lifted, the grin still on, every one of his six arms locked at the angle it had been in, and the only thing that moved on him was his eyes.
Shikamaru stood in the smoke's edge with his fingers cupped and his shadow run out long across the dirt, threaded up into all four of the enemy shinobi.
"Shadow Possession complete. Nice work blabbing about your technique. All that talk about your webs and you walked right down into it." Shikamaru said.
"Yes! That's it, Shikamaru!" Naruto was back on his feet. "Chalk one up for the shadow guy!"
"You should know… I've got a few tricks of my own. Though I'll admit you made this one easy." Shikamaru grinned with sweat dripping down his forehead.
"Oh, dear. The thing is. I have a little something too." The blue-haired one spoke in a bored tone.
A shuriken came flying fast and buried itself in Shikamaru's forearm from out of nowhere. The pain broke his focus. The shadow snapped back into him like a cut line, and the enemy shinobi staggered free.
All four of them were held, so who threw that shuriken? Shikamaru thought to himself.
"Earth Style Barrier." The big one had his hands together. "Earth Dome Prison!"
The ground heaved. Earth rushed up and over and curved shut above their heads in the space of a breath, and the five of them, all of Team Shikamaru, were sealed inside a dome of packed stone with no door and no seam and no light but what leaked grey through the dirt.
"Crap…" Shikamaru whined.
"Let us OUT!" Naruto hammered the wall with a fist. The dome ate the blow.
"Move, Naruto." Kiba dropped low. "Tunneling Fang!"
He drilled into the wall in a dangerous spiral and bored a hole an arm deep, and the hole filled itself in behind him the instant he pulled back, the earth flowing closed like water.
"Hey." Kiba looked over his shoulder. "Tenten."
"Yeah." She was already reaching back. "I saw it."
She could feel it, too, what the others were only now noticing, a slow tugging drag at the edges of her chakra, the dome pulling at all of them through the stone, feeding on them to feed itself. The longer they stayed in it the weaker they got and the stronger the wall became. Whoever had built this had built it to be a slow torturous death.
Tenten had no patience for dying.
She pulled the harpoon off her back.
"Alright, boys." She rolled her shoulders, set her feet, and the first gate opened with a snap of heat down her spine. "Leave it to the kunoichi to save us."
She spun once for the room of it, reared back, and flickered forward into the wall.
The harpoon went through the Earth Dome Prison like it was nothing. It did not punch a hole that filled back in. It shattered the jutsu with a large amount of rubble flying out. Tenten's harpoon could drain the chakra that held the earth together, and earth with no chakra in it is just dirt, and dirt was nothing to the sharpness of this weapon. A section of the dome came apart and sloughed down into rubble and daylight poured through the gap.
Outside, the big man's eyes went wide. "She broke my…"
"Yeah." Tenten stepped out through the ruin of his jutsu, harpoon over her shoulder, and the rest of the team spilled out behind her into the light. "Build a better one next time."
"Now we're even," Kiba grinned, sliding into a stance, Akamaru bristling at his side. "Barrier's gone. Let's take him."
"Me! I want him!" Naruto was already winding up.
"Stop." Shikamaru's voice cut across both of them, flat and fast. "Listen to me. Every second we spend fighting this guy is a second that cask gets closer to the border. The moment Sasuke crosses into Sound country, none of our jutsu matters, because we'll be five Leaf genin standing in enemy territory with the whole village at our backs. We do not have time for a brawl. We have time for a plan."
"So what's the plan?!" Naruto demanded.
"You won't like it." The big man rolled his shoulders, and the ground muttered under his feet. "Because you don't get to leave. You're an appetizer, and I do not let my food walk out the door. Earth Style,"
He drove his palm into the earth.
The clearing bucked. They scattered, all five of them flung wide as the ground convulsed, and then the big man straightened with his arms spread and the earth came up with him, a hill, a mountain, a sphere of packed soil and stone the size of a house rising off the forest floor until its shadow swallowed the whole clearing and put out the sun.
"Earth Style: Sphere of Graves!"
"You have GOT to be kidding!" Naruto screamed, running.
Then Choji was past him, hands already flashing through seals.
"Human Boulder!"
He swelled and spun and hit the rising mountain like a cannonball, chewing straight into it, and for a moment it looked like he would punch clean through and take the big man's head off the far side. But the big man set his feet and caught the spinning boulder of his friend in both planted hands, soil packing up around his ankles as he braked it, the two of them locked and grinding, and then with a roar he wrenched Choji's momentum sideways and drove a knee up into the boulder hard enough to send it skipping across the clearing.
Shikamaru caught the body as it unrolled. Choji, dazed, heavy in his arms.
"You little pig!" Naruto snarled, the seal half-formed. Kiba beside him, Tenten's harpoon already coming up to point.
"Everyone, hold." Shikamaru did not raise his voice and somehow that was worse. He set Choji on his feet and stood. "We're out of time, and we're out of room, and if we all stand here and die together that helps Sasuke exactly none. We split. Now." His good hand moved, assigning as it went, ten moves already run and a hundred discarded. "Tenten. You're my second-in-command. Take the team, follow the cask, get Sasuke back. The big one's mine and Naruto's. Go." His shadow stretched forward.
"That Shadow Possession Jutsu again? It's a useless technique. It's no better than a cheap trick." The enemy mocked. "Heh… and you're the squad leader, right? Do you honestly think splitting up puts you in a better position? Having a nitwit for a leader sure makes things tough for his subordinates. Well, scumbags, given the shadow-loving, depressing moron you work under. I'll be nice and kill you before you even notice what you're suffering." He started walking toward them.
"He's mine." The voice came from behind Shikamaru, a different tone from how it was usually.
Choji was on his feet.
He stepped past Shikamaru and planted himself between the team and the mountain of a man, and he did not look away.
"Choji,"
"Shikamaru. Split the food pills with the others. Boost your chakra and go." Choji pressed a pouch into Shikamaru's chest without turning around.
"Wait. Choji, you don't-"
"I do." Choji's voice did not shake. "I've still got my last one. The one we don't talk about."
"That pill is-"
"GO, Shikamaru!" Choji bellowed it. "Take everyone and run!"
"Are you out of your MIND?" Naruto shouted. "You can't fight this guy alone, he tossed you like-"
"Why did we come out here together?" Choji rounded on them for one second, and the question shut Naruto's mouth. "If we lose Sasuke now, then everything that fat creep said about us is true. A nitwit leader towing a pack of scumbags. I'm not letting that be true. Not about Shikamaru. Not about any of us." He turned back to the big man. "So go be the leader, Shikamaru. I'll be the guy who bought you the time."
For a moment Shikamaru could not move.
Then he took the pouch.
"Eat these," he said roughly, passing them down the line, his voice not entirely steady. "All of you. Choji's treat. Don't waste it."
The pills went around. Naruto waved his off, his reserves already huge, his eyes still on Choji. Tenten looked at the pellet in Shikamaru's hand and shook her head; her chakra was barely touched, they weren't in that strange jutsu for long.
"You catch up to us, Choji." Shikamaru's hand closed hard on his friend's shoulder once. "That's an order from your leader. You hear me?"
"Yeah." Choji popped the green pill into his mouth and faced the mountain. "Go on. Good luck, you guys."
"Hah! Fine by me!" The big man broke into a charge, the earth shaking under him. "I'll grind you into the dirt and then chase the rest down for dessert!"
Choji ran to meet him, already swelling, already roaring, and the two of them came together with a crack that shook leaves from the trees, and the team turned and ran for the cask and did not look back, because Choji had asked them not to and the least they could do was let his gift mean something.
…
They had not gone far when they ran into silk.
It came down out of the high branches in a curtain, golden threads dropping across the gaps between the trees ahead, sealing the way forward into a funnel with only one mouth, and at the mouth, perched easy on a limb with all six arms loose and a fresh grin on, waited the spider.
"Going somewhere?" Kidomaru spun a thread idly between two fingers. "I'm afraid the leader's little plan ends with me. Nobody clever gets past a hunter. That's sort of the whole point of being a hunter." His eyes moved over the three of them, the loudmouth, the dog, the girl with the strange pale spear, and stopped on the spear. "Though I'll be honest. I've only got eyes for one of you."
The team slowed.
"Go on without me guys." Tenten said.
"Tenten,"
"I can handle a little spider." She was already turning, already stepping off the path and squaring up toward the tree line, the harpoon coming down off her shoulder into one hand.
"A little spider, huh? I'm going to enjoy tearing you apart, chick."
Shikamaru looked at her for one second longer. Tenten's showing in the Preliminary Exam wasn't bad. She just had an unfavorable matchup. Not to mention, anyone who could survive being on the same team as Rock Lee and the current Hokage. He doubted he really knew the true extent of her strength. So, he trusted her, perhaps even more so than he did his own best friend.
He grabbed Kiba by the shoulder and ran away with Naruto, and the three of them broke through the gap before the silk could close it, and then it was only the kunoichi and the hunter, alone in a clearing strung wall to wall with chakra he had spun.
Kidomaru dropped from his branch and landed light, all six hands flexing.
"You know," he said, and the grin came back, wider, hungrier, a hunter who had just been told his prey had teeth, "I'm happy I got the strongest out of you all."
"You really think I'm the strongest out of all of them?" Tenten blushed before shaking her head. She had to focus. "Complimenting me won't save you. I have to do my job and make sure my mission is a success!"