Konoha's summer was still sweltering, but the tail end of Great Britain's rainy season carried a ruthless finality, unleashing its last few torrential downpours and washing the world into a heavy expanse of inky green. The rain saturated the hills, making the gullies and caves the Black Rock Tribe relied on even more slippery and difficult to traverse, but it also diluted the accumulated stench of blood and despairing groans in the forest.
The siege had already lasted two months.
The hills occupied by the Black Rock Tribe resembled a giant beast crouching at the edge of the rainforest. Dark rocks lay exposed, and caves gaped like a monster's eye sockets and mouth, exuding primitive ferocity and stubbornness. Unlike the plains tribes, they had not scattered at the first charge. Relying on complicated terrain, interconnected caves, and a few "Rock Shamans" capable of crudely manipulating earth and stone, they had weathered Great Britain's first several attacks and inflicted considerable losses on the Atonement Camp's slaves and the small Rifle Squad vanguard.
But that was as far as they would get.
The siege tightened slowly like a coarse noose. Their salt supply was cut off. The iron tools, clay pots, and medicines traded from the plains were all gone. Hunting parties either never returned or brought back barely enough game to fill a mouth. The caves began to fill with the stench of festering wounds, children's wails, and despairing silence.
Rainwater could quench thirst, but not hunger, much less the growing chill deep in their hearts. They could hear the camp belonging to "Great Britain" beyond the hills growing noisier by the day: the work chants of men ramming earth, the clang of ironworking, and the synchronized marching steps and sharp gunshots they hated and feared to their very bones. Lately,