High above the Land of Fire, a blur streaked northeast, trailing a stream of air.
At an altitude of three thousand meters, it moved so fast that even birds could not keep up with its shadow. Below, the wake pressed swaths of treetops down to either side, carving a straight dividing line through the green.
Goten carried Yamato over his left shoulder, the fully grown man weighing over two hundred pounds no more of a burden than a sack of flour.
Yamato was still unconscious. His head bobbed in the airflow, and a long strand of drool stretched from the corner of his mouth, whipping in the wind onto the back of Goten's collar.
"..."
The ruins of Orochimaru's base came into view below.
Goten slowed and hovered in midair, looking down.
Something was wrong.
The last time he had come, a single Kamehameha had blasted through the roof, leaving a hole a hundred meters across in the mountainside and rubble scattered everywhere-a typical abandoned battlefield.
Now all that rubble was covered in a layer of something black.
Not mud. Not moss. A thin layer of frost.
Black frost.
It was the height of summer, with temperatures above thirty degrees in the northeastern Land of Fire, yet black frost coated the ground. Its edges were still expanding, already spreading twenty meters beyond the base's ruins.
Goten sniffed.
That smell rose from underground, cold and rotten.
"You sewer-crawling bastards again."
Muttering that, he lifted Yamato off his shoulder with his left hand, found an old tree untouched by the black frost, and hung him from a thick branch.
Yamato's collar caught in the fork. His entire body dangled like a slab of cured meat, slowly swaying in an utterly undignified pose.
Goten dusted off his hands and jumped down from the