Multiple Layers of Tracking

On the fourth day after Cat Face vanished, Root detected something unusual.

Not through a body—Shinichi had made sure the cleanup was thorough. Nor through signs of a fight—not even a patch of wall plaster had been scraped off in the narrow alley. Root's alarm had been triggered by statistics. Cat Face had failed to report this week's supply transport to his immediate contact, "Snake Face," on schedule, something that had never happened among Root's peripheral members. Root's control over its members was so strict that every contact code had an expiration period. Failure to report by the deadline meant being marked as "out of contact." More than three days out of contact automatically escalated the status to "suspected elimination."

Before dawn on the fourth day, Snake Face submitted a missing-contact report to his superior. By that evening, a dossier marked "Urgent" had appeared on Danzo's desk. Danzo flipped through it, closed it, and tapped the cover twice with his index finger. Then he gave Elephant Face, standing before him, an order. "Send a tracking team to investigate. Do not alert the ANBU." Elephant Face accepted the order and withdrew. The dim corridor lights stretched and shortened the elephant pattern on his mask. An hour later, a three-man Root tracking squad departed from the underground base. The captain, code-named Dog Face, was a tracking-type sensory ninja specializing in following chakra traces. The other two were Crow Face, skilled in traps and ambushes, and Snake Face, a communications specialist responsible for maintaining contact with the base throughout the mission. They had only one task—find the prey that had recently targeted Root's peripheral members, determine whether it was a hostile force, a rogue ninja, or a spy from another hidden village, and then eliminate it.

Meanwhile, Shinichi was attending a theory class in the Ninja Academy classroom. Iruka Umino was explaining the classifications of chakra nature transformation, while Shinichi drew a tree diagram of Root's contact network in his notebook. Cat Face had been missing long enough to pass Root's standard safety confirmation period. If his estimate was correct, the search area would rapidly narrow over the next few days. Whoever they sent next would not be ordinary.

After school, he did not go to the training grounds. He had Naruto Uzumaki take Sasuke to the riverbank first to practice water walking—this pair could now barely coexist peacefully for ten minutes, provided a training assignment kept their mouths occupied. He then claimed he needed to make up notes from a moral education lesson and stayed in the classroom alone. One of them merely thought, "Shinichi has been late a lot lately," while the other thought, "Naruto will definitely slack off if he can't master water walking," so neither grew suspicious. Once everyone had left the classroom, he pulled the hand-drawn tree diagram of Root's contact network from the hidden compartment in his schoolbag and spread it across the desk.

Snake Face. Cat Face's direct superior, a communications specialist responsible for receiving intelligence from peripheral members and compiling it for submission. From Cat Face's memory fragments, Shinichi knew Snake Face's contact method—at midnight every day, he sent a safety signal by flashing chakra light at a specific frequency from the top of the old water tower west of the village. Shinichi had watched this signal several times in a row, and every time, it had been in its normal state before Cat Face's disappearance.

Tonight, Snake Face would most likely change the signal pattern. With Cat Face missing, Snake Face would switch from "receiving mode" to "search mode"—actively dispatching trackers to scan for chakra traces in the area where Cat Face had last appeared. And that was exactly what Shinichi wanted to see.

He did not need to seek out the tracking team himself. He only needed to wait for them to expose themselves—the tracking team would investigate where Cat Face had vanished, while he would investigate the tracking team's patterns of movement. Who was hunting whom was still uncertain.

At midnight, Shinichi lay prone atop the abandoned textile mill opposite the old water tower, his body pressed tightly against the roof tiles and his breathing reduced to its faintest. The moonlight was thin tonight, mostly veiled by clouds, leaving the ground with poor visibility—for sensory ninja, light was unimportant, but weaker moonlight meant better concealment in the shadows.

Exactly at midnight, Snake Face appeared atop the water tower. He stood exactly where Cat Face's memory fragments had indicated. The snake pattern on his mask glimmered faintly with a cold sheen beneath the moonlight, and a small chakra signal device was strapped to his left arm. A communications ninja, not suited for frontal combat, but the equipment on him could be the tracking team's eyes. Snake Face raised his left hand, and the chakra signal device began flashing at a specific frequency—not the previous safety signal, but another pattern of shorter, denser flashes. Search mode. Less than three minutes after the signal ended, three dark figures converged beneath the water tower from different directions.

Dog Face, Crow Face, Snake Face—a three-man squad, a standard Root tracking formation. After Dog Face landed, he gave no unnecessary instructions. With a hand signal, Crow Face and Snake Face automatically dispersed, each darting toward the drainage channel. Within a few breaths, the entire tracking team had left the water tower's vicinity and vanished in the direction of the narrow alley.

Shinichi did not move immediately. He remained pressed against the tiles a while longer, confirming that no one from the tracking team had stayed near the water tower to set an ambush. Only then did he silently slide down from the roof, pass through the pile of clutter behind the textile mill, and choose a residential alley running parallel to the tracking team's route—patrol squads followed fixed routes through residential districts, and Root operatives instinctively avoided patrols. Moving through the residential area gave him an extra layer of protection. He had already mastered the acceleration of Gale Body Flicker to perfection. It took only the briefest instant to slip from one shadow into another. Under the moonlight, there was only the faintest afterimage, and when he landed, he did not stir even the slightest sound of wind.

He stopped in a large camphor tree on the outskirts of the drainage alley. From this position, through gaps in the branches and leaves, he could see the entire eastern half of the alley—the place where Cat Face had been eliminated last time. Dog Face was half-kneeling in the middle of the alley, his hands forming seals as he performed some kind of sensory tracking. Chakra seeped from his palms into the ground, forming circles of pale violet detection ripples that slowly spread along the stone-paved road. Sense Tracking Art: Earth Pattern. It did not track footprints or scents, but residual chakra used recently. The traces of cold wind-nature blades, remnants of earth-nature tunneling, and even subtler Wood Release fluctuations—these should normally have dispersed completely days after the battle, but the wave frequency Dog Face injected was clearly more refined than ordinary tracking arts. Even the faint earth-nature chakra lingering between the stones of the drainage ditch was drawn from the dust by the ripples.

Dog Face stood and removed his mask to wipe the sweat from his brow. Beneath it was the face of a man around forty, with high cheekbones, deeply sunken eye sockets, and an old knife scar beneath his left eye. He stared toward the drainage ditch for a moment before putting his mask back on.

"One," he said, his voice muffled behind the mask. "Only one person's chakra. Very faint. But it was used in varied ways—precisely compressed wind nature, earth nature used to travel underground for a stretch, and another earth-nature technique buried underground as a marker. I nearly missed it." He paused. "This person layered the traces—using wind blades to strike vital points, then seeping away through the drainage ditch with earth nature. There was almost no transition between nature changes."

Crow Face returned from the alley entrance. "Can you identify them?"

"The residual chakra is too faint to match a specific identity. But this degree of nature control is beyond a genin. We cannot rule out a special jonin who infiltrated from another hidden village."

"A special jonin? Someone who can silently eliminate a peripheral member in a short time without leaving any traces?" Crow Face turned to glance at Snake Face. "Lord Danzo will probably add someone to the long-term surveillance list."

Snake Face said nothing, merely recording the entry in the contact log. The three investigated the alley further, then left after confirming there were no additional traces.

From the camphor tree, Shinichi watched the three dark figures disappear at the end of the drainage channel before slowly loosening his grip on the branch. The tracking team's sensory abilities were stronger than he had estimated. Dog Face's Earth Pattern tracking could read the minute residual earth-nature chakra in the drainage pipes—that was the part Shinichi had previously considered almost impossible to trace. The risk assessment had to be raised by half a level. But he had also learned a critical piece of information—they still judged him to be "a lone ninja from another village," rather than "someone within Konoha." Their misdirected search direction gave him room to continue acting.

He slid down from the camphor tree and walked back through the residential alleys. Mist had condensed into a slick layer of dew over the paving stones, and the air smelled of earth and old wood soaked by the night dew. The next elimination plan needed an added layer of counter-tracking measures: increase the interval after every hunt by thirty percent, use underground earth tunneling to take detours, and cover and neutralize surface chakra residue with heated fine sand. If Dog Face could track earth-nature remnants, then Shinichi would let him follow them all the way into the mud at the bottom of the river.

The orphanage was as quiet as ever before dawn. He climbed in through the kitchen's back window, stepped over the third stair, took off his coat, hid his kunai, and lay down.