Defection

Very soon, orderly shouts rang out.

"Everyone's been wiped out! The plan has failed! Shukaku is out of control! Level-one alert activated..."

The voices were instantly swallowed halfway by the sand, followed by the crisp metallic clatter of kunai hitting the ground.

Then came more screams. Every cry was cut off halfway, as if something had strangled it, followed by another long stretch of silence.

Lin Chongshu lay prone in the sand, his face pressed to the ground.

He did not dare open his eyes or move. Blood was still seeping from his wounds. With every heartbeat, he could feel warm liquid running down his skin from his back and chest.

The sand had soaked up his blood, turning sticky and cold against his chest and belly, like a layer of wet mud plastered to his body.

It hurt. The piercing pain gradually became a throbbing ache across his entire upper body.

His consciousness drifted back and forth between pain and cold. Several times, he felt his mind about to float into a mass of white light, only to wrench himself back.

He could not pass out. If he did, he would truly die.

He heard sand falling, a soft rustling like rain.

Then the world suddenly spun.

The sand beneath the ground surged upward as though it had come alive, tossing his whole body out of the ruins.

Lin Chongshu spun twice in midair before landing with a dull thud, then fell into another pile of soft sand.

His chin struck his knee, and his teeth bit through the inside of his lip, but he did not dare move at all.

Sand poured into his ears and collar, worming up his pant legs, getting everywhere.

Then, a huge shadow rose from the center of the ruins.

It was so enormous that it blocked half the moonlight, shrouding the entire ruin in darkness.

That thing's body was made of quicksand, its surface covered in layer after layer of patterns.

Its eyes were two glowing hollows, and its mouth was a crack spanning its entire face. When it opened, sand poured from it like a waterfall.

Shukaku had been completely released.

Every roar it gave made the grains of sand across the land tremble, as though the desert itself had suddenly come alive.

The sand in the air hung suspended, buzzing and vibrating.

Lin Chongshu lay amid the ruins, squinting as he got his bearings again.

Under the moonlight, Shukaku's colossal form stood right before him.

He had seen Shukaku in the manga, but seeing it through paper and seeing it through dozens of meters of sand and dust were two completely different things.

This thing was right above him. Every breath it took stirred up a sandstorm, and every roar sounded as though it had been forced up from deep within the earth's crust.

If Shukaku was already this fierce, then what kind of monster was the Nine-Tails?

Naruto had been hated by the entire village for so many years without overturning the Hidden Leaf Village. That was practically a miracle.

The sand on the ground suddenly began to move. All the sand beneath the ruins flowed in a certain direction, like a receding tide, sucked underground by something.

Lin Chongshu's chance had come! His mind raced.

The village was directly east. They could not possibly lure Shukaku toward the village, and Temari had told him that where they lived was northwest.

Since they had a plan, there had to be preparations in the northwest to suppress the tailed beast.

Lin Chongshu looked southwest. The sand there was dark. That was the direction of the Land of Rain.

He took a deep breath and pressed the thin strand of sand in his palm into the ground beneath him. After bullying Gaara earlier, he seemed to have become much more proficient at controlling sand.

The sensation of the sand traveled back through his fingertips. He could feel the grains around him moving. The closer they were to Shukaku's body, the less willing the sand was to obey him.

But when he probed southwest, the sand loosened slightly, and the resistance weakened.

This was the direction.

He did not get up. Instead, he wrapped sand around the soles of his feet and along his sides, sliding outward close to the ground like a sand rat burrowing underground.

The sand carried his body through cracks in the ruins. Splintered wood and clumps of dirt scraped across his face and shoulders, making it look as though Shukaku's sandstorm had buried him as well.

The farther he crawled, the weaker Shukaku's control over the sand became.

He felt his precision in manipulating sand slowly returning, though he had no idea how long he had crawled.

Shukaku's roars changed from thunder close at hand to muffled drums in the distance, until only the wind remained.

The desert night was cold as another world. The wind blew over his sweat-soaked clothes, making him shiver violently.

Blood loss made his fingers go numb, and strange spots of light occasionally flickered before his eyes.

Gritting his teeth, he slid down one dune on all fours, then climbed another.

Two points of firelight appeared in the distance. Two people were patrolling, wearing Hidden Sand Village forehead protectors and vests coated in yellow sand.

They were border sentries of the Land of Wind.

Lin Chongshu lay atop the dune and watched for several seconds. It was too late to turn back and take a detour. He did not have the strength for it.

He touched his face. His hand came away covered in sand and half-dried blood. There were two holes in his clothes, one in front and one behind, and the cloth around his wounds had stiffened with blood.

He was already skinny as a rake. With these injuries, he looked exactly like someone who had been stabbed twice and thrown into the desert to die.

There was no need to act. His appearance was the truest evidence.

He took a deep breath, then rolled crookedly down the dune.

Like an out-of-control sack of sand, he rolled all the way to the two sentries' feet. He lay facedown on the ground, his fingers clawing at the sand, his voice so hoarse it was nearly inaudible.

"Shukaku... went berserk... The village... something happened to the village..."

The two sentries bent down at the same time.

One of them was older. He crouched and turned Lin Chongshu over. When he saw the mangled wounds on Lin Chongshu's chest and back, still packed with grains of sand and seemingly quite deep, his expression changed.

"Kid, how did you get out?"

"The training ground... collapsed..." Lin Chongshu's lips trembled. "I was at the very edge... the sand pushed me out... I didn't know where to run..."

The older sentry stared at him for two seconds.

The kid had black hair, was skinny as a rake, wore tattered clothes, and had nothing on him but injuries.

No one in the Hidden Sand Village would raise their own child like this, unless he was one of those war orphans with no one to look after them.

Those orphans lived at the edge of the village, not far from the training ground. It made perfect sense that they would have been caught up in Shukaku's rampage.

Besides, this was a kid who could not even refine chakra. He had no hidden weapons or ninja tools on him. What threat could he possibly pose?

"Keep an eye on him." The older sentry pulled a signal flare from his waist pouch and said to his companion, "Shukaku going berserk is no small matter. I'll report it first."

The signal flare exploded in the night sky, releasing a cloud of dark red smoke.

The older sentry vanished into the night in a flash, his footsteps quickly swallowed by the windblown sand.

The younger sentry crouched down and helped Lin Chongshu up from the ground.

He looked to be in his early twenties, with fresh stubble on his chin and only faint lines at the corners of his eyes.

He reached out and pressed around the wound on Lin Chongshu's chest. His brow furrowed, then he dug out a roll of bandages from his ninja tool pouch and began wrapping him up.

Lin Chongshu closed his eyes and slowly steadied his breathing.

"You're damn lucky," the younger sentry said as he wrapped the bandages. "The sand pierced straight through both sides of you. If either wound had been half an inch off, you wouldn't have made it here."

Lin Chongshu opened his eyes halfway, his voice soft. "Good luck."

The sentry chuckled, tied off the bandage, then turned around and crouched with his back to Lin Chongshu.

"Get on. I'll carry you to the outpost. Those legs of yours won't get you far."