Fair warning: One part of this chapter got a bit icky on me. There's a summary at bottom if you want to skip to there and not take a chance. Just search for 'Summary'.

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Noburi plodded up, moving no faster than a tired civilian.

"Stupid zombie punched a hole in my barrel," he grumbled. "What did I miss?"

"Don't"—BOOM!—"try it," Mari said, her words interrupted by a massive narrow-angle explosion that made everyone wince. Fortunately the blast had been aimed in front of Arikada instead of at her; apparently Kagome was taking his promise to follow orders seriously, no matter how much he hated those orders.

"Try what?" Arikada asked innocently. "I wasn't doing anything."

"Glad to hear it," Mari said. Arikada's tentacle twitch had been hesitant, more a matter of temptation than intention, but it had been there. The sealmistress hadn't really bought the whole 'massive payment for easy medical work' story. She was going along because she knew that if she didn't the team would beat her into the ground, but she clearly intended to lash out or run the first chance she had. And right now, with a chakraless and vulnerable Noburi standing almost within tentacle reach, things were balanced on the edge of a knife. They needed to defuse the situation quickly; fortunately, the whole 'be courteous and solicitous' part of the lie played into that.

"Hey," Mari said, pitching her voice to make Arikada turn back to her and away from Noburi. "Anything you need to do before we head to Leaf?" Translation: I'm willing to trade you the chance to stall for a while in exchange for reducing the about-to-fight quotient. Not a very long while, though. Leaf was only a four-hour run and the sooner they got there and handed off Ms Crazypants the happier Mari would be.

Arikada cocked her head, clearly thinking. "I should clean up my—zombies," she said, the hitch in the sentence only drawing more attention to whatever it was she hadn't said. "Can't leave the remains of a technique like that just lying around where anyone could study them."

"Sounds like a plan. Collie, Blaster, why don't you escort our guest and make sure nothing interrupts her so that she can focus on her work without being distracted." Mari smiled with teeth. "Of course, I'm absolutely certain you won't have any issues and that the guard duty will be extremely boring."

"Of course," Arikada said blandly.

Mari eyed her for a moment, then nodded and gestured to the rest of the team. "The rest of you are on me; we'll clean up our own stuff."

Arikada's lips curled into a knowing leer. "On you, huh? Good choices. Nice musculature on that one." Her chin jerked towards Hazou. "As to the girls—"

A kunai went past Arikada's face so close that the wind of its passage stirred her hair.

Keiko's face was utterly blank. "Oops."

Arikada's leer got wider but she stopped talking.

"Come," Akane said politely, gesturing back the way she'd come. "I believe the first of your zombies is this way...?"

"Said we should just blow her up, but nooo," Kagome muttered as he fell in behind Arikada. "'Head on a plate is fine,' he said. 'Sounds good,' I said. Does anyone listen to me? Nooo. Boom. Squish. So much easier. Stinker."

Mari waited until Arikada was out of earshot (hopefully; godsdamned unknown bioseal abilities!) but still close enough to catch if there were any issues. She kept her gaze firmly on the biosealer while gesturing the kids in close; splitting the team like this was a risk, but they needed to get some chakra into Noburi so that he could run and fight. Almost as important, they needed to do it without Arikada seeing it happen—no way were they giving up that ace in the hole.

"That was really impressive, sensei," Hazou said. "I didn't expect you to actually talk her down."

Mari shrugged, not looking away from where Arikada was bent over the body of the corpse warrior that Hazou and Noburi had destroyed, digging around in its guts with a knife and a bottle of acid. Thankfully, Kagome and Akane were staying well out of reach and not talking. "Honestly? Neither did I. It was pre-battle smack talk to stall her while the rest of you caught up and to rattle her for the fight. I didn't expect her to actually stop and listen."

Noburi laughed. "Guess she's smarter than we thought."

"Yeah," Mari said. "Speaking of which, walking up into fight range when you're out of chakra wasn't the brightest. We'll talk about that later, though. For now, tap some chakra out of the three of us." She shifted a half-step to her left so that Noburi was between her and Arikada before extending her canteen, one finger tucked into the water. Keiko and Hazou shuffled in close and put their own fingers inside; Noburi was a second behind them but the moment his finger touched the water Mari felt the unpleasant tugging of the chakra being pulled out of her.

"While we're supplying energy to vampire boy, I'm taking input on what happens next. My basic plan is to run for Leaf and don't stop.'"

"I like that plan," Noburi said instantly. "She creeps me the hell out. I'm not going to be able to go all that way without a recharge, though. Probably two or three, actually—without my barrel it's a constant struggle to keep the chakra bound to the water. It'll leak out fast."

Mari nodded, hiding the grimace. "Okay, that's fine. Keiko, do you have enough juice for another summoning?"

Keiko nodded. "Yes, sensei. I don't know how functional Panchipaama will be, though. Forcible unsummoning is supposed to be quite debilitating. If I call and she can't or won't accept the summons I'll have burned the chakra for nothing."

Mari digested that rather sour morsel of knowledge with a calm expression. It would have been really nice to have a massive not-killable-for-realsies spiky ball of death on their side, but it sounded like that wasn't reliable. Things were just getting better and better, weren't they?

"Okay, no problem," she said. "Noburi, when you need to recharge I want you to rotate between Hazou, Akane, and Kagome. I want to keep my levels high for fighting and, just in case Arikada notices what's going on, I want her to believe that Keiko's levels are still high enough to summon. Just take enough that you can keep running. If fighting breaks out, get clear and do not engage. Understood?"

"Yes, sensei," Noburi said, taking his finger out of the canteen. She passed him the vessel and watched as he carefully stoppered it and slung the strap diagonally across his body, fiddling with the buckle for a moment to ensure that it was tightly affixed.

"Sensei, I have some ideas...?" Hazou offered. At her nod he continued. "Like you said, we need to clean up. Grab the PMYFs and the...misterators." (She grinned at his sour expression.) "Then we need to brief Arikada on what to expect. She isn't going to like the part about being tied up and taken into custody when we get to the border."

Mari puffed out her cheeks, sighing. "Boy howdy is that an understatement," she said. "It also really weakens the story I told her. Still, she didn't believe it anyway, so nothing lost." She watched Noburi and Hazou both look momentarily surprised. "Oh, come on," she said, "Ms Crazypants bought into that story for about ten seconds, and then she woke up and realized that I was full of crap. Didn't matter, though, because she was in a no-win situation and pretending to accept my line of horsehockey was her best option. Fortunately she bought it for just long enough to move out of fight-or-flight mode and think rationally enough that she realized standing down was her best move."

"Uh...right," Hazou said. "Anyway, after we've explained about the search and capture we should give her a chance to dump any stuff she doesn't want to have seen. I'll keep an eye on her while she's doing it; maybe I can memorize some of her seals."

"Kagome will explode if he finds you using seals that came from Arikada," Keiko noted.

"I'll deal with Kagome-sensei," Hazou said. "For now, it's too good a chance to miss. Besides, I can just not use them, right?"

"I feel certain that nothing bad will occur as a result of that plan," Keiko said calmly. She paused. "That was sarcasm."

"Yes, I got that," Hazou said. "Thank you. Anyway, Arikada may not take the chance but it's better to offer it. While she's doing that, we should stash our own stuff that we want to keep secret from Leaf. Keiko, you said that the pangolins would keep things for us?"

She nodded. "Yes, although they will inspect them. In particular, although they didn't explicitly say so I would expect that any seals we send them will be duplicated."

Hazou grimaced. "Not thrilled about that, but I care more about Leaf getting our tech than the pangolins. At least the Polemarch and his people are our allies."

Mari forbore to point out that there was a difference between being Keiko's ally and being the team's ally. Hazou's point was still valid, since Leaf wasn't even nominally an ally.

"You should have Pandaa reverse-summon you so you can take all the stuff," Hazou said. "While you're there, make sure that the pangolins know we're going to Leaf and that Jiraiya promised us we'd be under his protection. Also, give them a written message for Jiraiya explaining everything that's gone down so that we can use that as proof of our intentions if everything goes wrong. We'll write a couple of reports—"

Mari and Keiko both stared at him in astonishment. "Are you kidding?" Mari said. "We're not going to stop and sit here writing reports. We're going to do the cleanup and then full-sprint for Leaf. We'll do the reports verbally and in person. Having them written gains us nothing. Anyway, we'll undoubtedly be debriefed when we get there and we can write them then, in a stable situation. Which, for the record, this is not."

"Oh. Um, right. Okay, well, uh, anyway, Keiko, while you're in the Summon Realm you should send a thank-you note to Panchipaama—"

"Thank you," Keiko said coldly. "I appreciate you suggesting that, since I certainly would not have thought of it on my own. We all know how my bloodline renders me incapable of basic social politeness. I am very grateful to you for covering my weaknesses like that." Long pause. "That was also sarcasm."

Hazou had the grace to blush. "Uh...right. Sorry."

"Would you like to get the other foot in there?" Mari asked. "I think if you push a little you could probably get them both in. I have some hot sauce if you want it—I'm told that it really cuts the taste of shoe leather."

The blush got deeper. "Sorry," he mumbled again, looking at his feet. "Just...um. Never mind. Right, moving on." He paused, gathering his thoughts. "Um...I had some other thoughts about that but, uh...never mind. Uh...anyway. Once we're moving I think I should try to strike up a conversation with Ari—"

"Vetoed," Mari said instantly. "We're going to be running balls-out and none of us is going to be close enough to talk to her. Besides, you'd only have four hours. You're not going to get her to open up and tell you anything really useful in that time, while running. Move along."

"Oh. Um...okay. Well, when we get to the border I think it might be a good idea to ask Kagome-sensei if he'd be willing to go under your happiness genjutsu, sensei. He's going to be seriously on edge, and getting searched and tied up might be enough to make him lash out."

Mari weighed that one. "I'll talk to him about it," she said. "It's a bad idea for a lot of reasons, but under these circumstances it might be less bad than the alt...." She trailed off and blinked at what was happening over by the rest of the team. Arikada had finished digging around in the corpse and watching it dissolve from the caustic liquids she'd been pouring over it. Now she was turning those tools on herself.

Much of Arikada's skin was diseased-looking or possibly rotten. The rotting had progressed rapidly through the tentacles that she'd peeled off her arms and back; now they hung around her in stinky black streamers. She was busily tearing them off her body, hacking with the knife and burning with the acid where necessary. She tossed the remains onto the slowly-dissolving corpse and added more of whatever was in the bottle.

"That is just disturbing," Mari murmured, receiving three nods in fervent agreement.

"On the bright side," Keiko said, "it would appear that most of her techniques are designed to work within her own body, and the extra flesh she had attached was important to them. She has already shed the mass from her legs, arms, and spinal region. This should limit her combat potential somewhat."

"Nice theory," Noburi said. "I hope you're right."

Keiko nodded. "So do I."

o-o-o-o

It only took ten minutes for the team to gather up all of their thrown weapons and seals except for two kunai and a misterator that no one could find. Mari was jittery and pushing for a rapid departure even at the cost of leaving the lost items behind—a paper tag wouldn't last past the next rainfall at most, so it wasn't that much of a risk—but Arikada was still combing with agonizing slowness through the remains of the corpse that Hazou and Noburi had fought.

"How much longer?" Mari demanded.

The sealmistress looked up. "As long as it takes," she said. "You can't rush seal work. If I do this wrong it means Bad Things."

Kagome backed up half a step and started to raise his hands before a quelling look from Mari made him put them down again.

"What are you doing?" Mari asked. This was the problem with dealing with someone else's area of expertise: she had no way to judge if Arikada was telling the truth, or how bad the potential consequences of a misstep were.

Arikada sniffed derisively. "Know a lot about seals, do you? Would you like a recitation of the nine-dimensional implications of cascade failure modalities, or do you think you could just stand there and look pretty while I work?"

"Eleven dimensions," Kagome said.

Arikada blinked. "What?" Her voice was nervous.

"Cascade failures run in eleven dimensions for anything except trivial cases. Thirteen if you're dealing with more than two but less than five interlinked nodes." He sniffed. "If you're dealing with five or more then you're a stinking idiot and we should just kill you now before you do something really stupid." He shot Mari a weaponized puppy-dog look. "In fact, killing her sounds great. Head on a plate is okay, right? One little—"

"Stand down, Blaster," Mari said, chuckling. "Well, Ms Arikada, it would appear that you are either stalling or insufficiently knowledgeable. Which is it?"

Arikada looked sour. "There's a piece of the array I need to find," she grumbled. "It was scratched into the end of one of the ribs. It's a mess in here and it's going to take a few minutes, okay?"

Mari looked around, sweeping her eyes over the surrounding area, then took three steps and bent to pick something up from the grass. "Is this it?" she asked, holding out her hand

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Arikada pushed herself to her feet and stepped over to see what Mari was holding. The moment she moved away from the corpse there was an ear-shattering KABOOM! from behind her. She spun around to see Kagome crouched down, one hand held just in front of where the corpse's head had been. The body was entirely gone and a fan of blood and finely-ground guts was spread over the grass.

"Oh good, all your seals were destroyed," Mari said, calmly opening her fingers to reveal an empty hand. "Guess we can get moving."

o-o-o-o

The run to Leaf was an endless fountain of stress for Mari. The team had split into pairs and spread out in a loose arc behind Arikada, but they couldn't just run along. No, Noburi was going to need to periodically recharge from one of the others, and Mari was determined to hide what was happening. That meant she had to make the pairs reshuffle at random times. Sure, it added some unpredictability to where people would be at any given time, which made it harder for Arikada to plan an escape. It was what spec-ops teams would have done if they were escorting someone, but it wasn't something that the kids had trained for. Mari's nerves were getting frazzled by the constant fear that they'd exchange places a little too slowly and leave a hole in the perimeter through which Arikada could escape. She mitigated the problem slightly by signaling who should swap and when, then moving to where the hole was likely to be. All while running a steady thirty klicks an hour and maintaining careful station.

They were two miles out from the border, at the edge of the giant forest that was the Land of Fire. Mari was on the far right flank when she caught the nigh-imperceptible motion of Arikada palming an explosive tag out of her belt and dropping it on the ground as she ran.

"Bomb!" Mari and Keiko shouted almost simultaneously. Mari spun, leaping back towards Noburi with her heart in her mouth; he clearly hadn't seen the tag and was about to run right over it. If he was hurt she would—

Noburi heard the warning and reacted instantly, rolling away from the blast with the crabbed sideways roll of the barrel-wearing Wakahisa clan. The wave of relief that washed through Mari was so powerful it almost knocked her over. She spun on her heel and went after Arikada.

The biosealer had taken the brief moment of the team's distraction to strip her tunic off over her head. Still running, she dug her nails into the flesh of her chest and ripped it free, hurling two massive slabs of bloody meat backwards and to the side. The meat tumbled and spun, scattering thumb-sized carapaced maggots in their wake.

Everyone but Mari very wisely hit the deck, tumbling and rolling away from what could not more clearly have been a bio-weapon. Diving for cover was an excellent choice: the moment the maggots hit the ground they exploded, fragments of exoskeleton flying everywhere. Each blast was a tiny fraction of the power of an explosive tag, but there were over a dozen of them, and they went off in a rolling blast wave that kept the team busy dodging instead of pursuing.

While the others were diving for cover, Mari made a snap judgement and put on the speed, trusting her reflexes to keep herself safe while the others went to ground. It was a painful call but a necessary one. No one else had the speed to keep up with Arikada if she pulled out another trick like the flesh tentacles. The maggots were obviously there to buy time for their mistress to escape; if Mari went to ground, or went back to help the kids, Arikada would escape. If Arikada escaped, Jiraiya would kill the team. Simple as that.

With a half-remembered childhood prayer on her lips, Mari pushed chakra into her muscles and flew across the ground towards her target. Arikada must have heard her coming, because she glanced back and paled.

No. She wasn't paling; the flesh of her face and the rest of her body was melting, sinking in, and leaving her as a horse-faced woman of normal dimensions. She laughed and accelerated so fast Mari would have sworn it was impossible if she hadn't seen it happen.

From behind came a scream of pain, but Mari blocked that out and raced after her target, refusing to be distracted. Arikada opened the distance effortlessly, plunging into the edge of the forest; in seconds she would be out of sight and then gone.

With a snarl, Mari flicked a Wind Wall in front of herself and leaped through it. The helpful hands of the winds lifted her and hurled her after the bitch that she fully intended to break apart. She came out of the Wall and immediately cast another one, throwing away chakra as if it were free. This woman would not get away.

They were deep in the trees, dodging back and forth as Arikada desperately tried to break line of sight and Mari stubbornly clung to her heels. She was narrowing the distance, she should be able to get her hands on her opponent in just a few—

Between one step and the next, Arikada sprawled face-first on the ground and lay there, convulsing. Mari slowed down and approached warily, narrow-eyed and expecting an ambush.

The convulsions went on for at least a minute before the sealmistress's body finally went completely limp. As much as she wanted to run back and check on her team, Mari forced herself to wait. She searched around for a long treelimb and poked the sealmistress in the ribs, hard. When there was no reaction she poked harder, then smacked her in the head none too gently. Still no reaction.

Carefully, she approached and knelt down, one knee on the ground and one on Arikada's neck. One hand on the shoulderblade, one on the bicep. A quick yank and the shoulder joint was dislocated. There was no scream, so presumably Arikada really was thoroughly unconscious. Mari nodded grim satisfaction.

With efficient motions, Mari worked her way down Arikada's body, dislocating shoulders, hips, and thumbs. From a sealing scroll the red-headed jounin produced a bag containing rope and cloth. Wadded-up cloth plus a length of rope became a gag. It wasn't safe to gag an unconscious person, but given all the surprises she'd given them so far, Mari was perfectly willing to take the risk. As Kagome had been so frequently reminding her, 'head on a plate' was a perfectly valid option.

The bag went over Arikada's head and was tied tightly to her neck. An arm binder with attached mitten rendered the sealmistress unable to move fingers or arms, and fastening wrists and ankles in a nasty hogtie meant the bitch wasn't going to be struggling free. With a grunt of satisfaction, Mari lifted the unconscious body to her shoulder and headed back to rejoin the team at the best speed she could make while carrying a larger and heavier woman.

When she arrived, Mari dropped Arikada to the ground without a thought for the unpleasant crunch that resulted; she was far too horrified to see the rest of the team gathered around a screaming, thrashing Akane, most of whose torso was covered in blood that pumped sluggishly from the hole in her abdomen. Under the skin, something writhed.

Keiko and Kagome were struggling to pin the taller girl's arms down while Hazou lay across Akane's lower body, keeping her vaguely still and preventing her from accidentally kicking anyone. He was liberally splashed with the girl's blood. Noburi crouched beside her, ash-white but steady. His left hand hovered over the skin of her belly, green medical chakra bathing the region. His right thumb and forefinger were stuck into her wound, trying and failing to get hold of the worm that was eating his teammate from the inside.

Kagome's head came up when Arikada hit the ground "There she is!" he snapped, eyes wild and wide. "She must have an answer, let's—"

"Kagome, stay where you are," Mari snapped in full command voice. "Noburi, stop what you're doing. There's no way to know if grabbing the worm is safe. Try to just keep her stable for a minute. Everyone keep your eyes on Akane, let me know if anything changes."

Mari knelt down beside Arikada and rolled her to the side, pulling the hood off and taking the gag out. She slapped the woman's face to wake her, but got no response. Grabbing the dislocated shoulder joint and wrenching it got a moan and a roll of the head but nothing more. Grimly, Mari pulled out her scroll of cooking supplies.

A thimbleful of hot sauce in the right eye and one in each nostril woke Arikada up with a shout. Mari snapped a hand over her mouth, forcibly turning the woman's head so she could look her in the still-functional eye.

"One of your worms got my student," Mari said calmly. "How do we fix it?" She removed her hand.

"You can't," Arikada said immediately. "It'll eat until—" She screamed as Mari used the tip of a kunai to scoop out Arikada's hot-sauce-reddened eye.

"One of your worms got my student," Mari said calmly. "How do we fix it?"

"You crazy bitch!" Arikada shouted. "I'll fucking kill you!" She screamed louder as the kunai took her nose off with one clean stroke.

"If you say anything else that is not helpful, I will shove this kunai through your eye and kill you," Mari said, still in that calm voice. "One of your worms got my student. How do we fix it?"

"Acid!" Arikada sobbed. "There's acid in one of my scrolls! If you cut or crush the worm it'll spill toxin and kill her, but the acid will neutralize the poison as it kills the worm!"

Mari nodded and patted Arikada on the head. "Very good. Now, let me make something clear: Collie is a sweet girl and all of us love her very much. Right now I am the only thing standing between you and my highly creative and overprotective explosives master. If you do or say anything at all that does not help my girl, I will kill you instantly. If something unpleasant happens to me, he will kill you eventually. Do we have an understanding?"

"Yes, yes, yes...." the sealmistress sobbed, weeping tears of blood and salt into the grass.

"Excellent. Now, which scroll?"

What followed were the absolute worst four minutes of Mari's life. Turning her emotions off so that she could do what was necessary to quickly extract the necessary information from the psychopathic sealmistress was going to have its own costs later. Keeping them off so that she could pour a measured quantity of acid over her student's writhing body was a living nightmare. The one tiny sliver of brightness in the picture was that Kagome had a pair of stretchers in a storage seal ("What? You mean you don't?"), so they didn't have to waste time making them. They dosed Arikada with the paralytic, stripped her, gagged and hooded her again, summoned Pandaa and sent him off with their secret gear, and then ran for Leaf as fast as they could with Akane on one stretcher and Arikada on the other.

As they ran, the team took turns shouting "Monkey Salmon! Monkey Salmon! Monkey Salmon!" The sooner the Leaf patrols found them, the better. And, since the team wasn't about to slow down to a speed that would look more like "traveling" as opposed to "raiding", it would be best if the first thing the Leaf nin heard was Jiraiya's passcode.

It was a good thing they did, because Leaf had stepped up their border security since the last time Team Uplift passed through. They were only a mile past the notional border when an overstrength squad of eight ninja melted out of the trees around them.

"We're agents of Jiraiya's," Mari said, before anyone could speak. "I'm Inoue Mari and this is Arikada Sugako, a sealmistress with an emphasis on bioseals. We're bringing her in at Jiraiya's order. My student is badly wounded and needs urgent medical care. We'll do whatever you want, accept being tied or whatever, as long as you get her help soon."

"Put them down and back up," the team leader said, gesturing to the ground in front of them. Kagome and Hazou, the two currently carrying Akane, set her stretcher down without a word and stepped back. Kagome was wringing his hands, but showed no sign of attacking as one of the Leaf ninja bent down and inspected both Akane and Arikada.

"She's got foreign biomatter intrusion into the lower right abdomen, high risk of peritonitis," Noburi said. "The foreign body was a chakra-enhanced worm that ate flesh starting at point of insertion and moving laterally—"

The leader of the Leaf squad turned a little green and held up a hand. "We'll get her to the hospital," he said. He jerked his head at one of his squad; the man bent down and scooped Akane up in his arms before racing off into the woods, a second ninja falling in behind him.

"Get on the ground, face-down, hands behind your backs," the Leaf team leader said. "Your password is good, but we're still going to have to tie you and search you."

"Whatever, just get it done and take us in," Mari said, doing as ordered. The others dropped down beside her, even Kagome hardly hesitating. The need to get through the preliminaries so they could be reunited with Akane as quickly as possible overrode any other concerns.

The team leader nodded sympathetically. "We'll go as fast as we can, I promise." He flicked through a series of hand seals and moments later an Earth Clone was binding the team's fingers and hands.

o-o-o-o

Growing up in Mist, Konoha had always occupied a strange position in Hazou's worldview. It was simultaneously a fortress of horrible, baby-eating enemies and a village populated by fighters too soft-hearted to be ninja. It was the home of Jiraiya, a sneaky trickster who was, granted, the best sealmaster in the world. And, well, yes, the God of Shinobi. And the Copy Ninja. And an entire clan of All Seeing Eyes. And the last scion of the Uchiha. And...

You know, maybe there was a reason that Mist had carefully avoided going to war with Fire.

In practice, the walls of Konoha were impressive but nothing like what Hazou's fevered imagination had dreamed up. They were not soaring pinnacles of bone dripping with ancient seals of eldritch knowledge and guarded by demons. They were stone, thirty feet high and thick enough that two ninja could pass each other while patrolling along their tops. They stretched off into the distance, their winding course disappearing rapidly into the distance.

That was what really brought it home; the walls stretched out of sight. Clearly, they surrounded the entire city. A city larger than Mist, and nestled inside a miles-wide ring of trees vastly larger than any others in the forest. Trees that had been created from nothing by a ninja of legend.

While Hazou was lost in his half-awed musings, the Leaf commander exchanged sign-and-countersign with the gate guards before leading the still-bound team inside the walls.

"Welcome to Konoha," he said. "I'm Anami Hachiro, leader of Patrol Team Six. I'll send someone to the hospital to check on your teammate but, in the meantime, Jiraiya's waiting for you in Hokage Tower."

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Summary: In case you wanted to skip the gross bits, the chapter basically covers Arikada's attempt to escape and Mari's pursuit and capture. Akane was badly injured in the process, taking a poison worm to the belly. The team saved her but she will be in hospital for quite a while. You made it to Konoha safely.