“Why?!” Naruto glared at him. “What’s it to you?!”
“I also want that applicator. And when one goes up against a person whose true identity is unknown, one must pin down their hideout and exterminate them. Otherwise, there’s no point. Calm yourself. This is very unbecoming behavior for the head of the village.”
While they stood there glaring at each other, the men and Chihare were getting farther and farther away.
“Fiiiiiiiine! I’ll just watch for now!” Naruto spat, giving up. “In exchange, you help me. We’re killing our auras and going after them.”
The men arrived at the airship depot on the outskirts of the new city. It was closed that day, and there wasn’t a soul around.
The premises included an enormous hangar that housed the Land of Fire’s airships and a research facility built in cooperation with Kengakuin. The two men went into the research facility.
“Hey. What are you doing?” Orochimaru hurried to stop Naruto from yanking open a window.
“What do you mean, what?” Naruto said. “We gotta get inside.”
“If you waltz in through the window, an alarm will sound, and we will face a world of complications,” Orochimaru said sharply, apparently a break-and-enter expert. “Have you never broken into an international facility before?”
Of course I haven’t.
Naruto gave up on going in through the window and agreed that Orochimaru would hack the security system. When they went around to the entrance, the two men were just coming out. Without Chihare.
Naruto and Orochimaru exchanged a look and kicked at the ground at the same time.
“What’d you do with Chihare?” Naruto asked, pressing on their shoulders from behind so they couldn’t see his face.
Both men threw their hands in the air without the least resistance.
“If you mean that researcher, she’s on the twenty-seventh floor. Electromagnet laboratory, right by the emergency stairs.”
“We’re just hired hands. We don’t even know anything about who the boss is.”
“Thanks,” Orochimaru said gently and bit each of the men’s necks in turn.
Naruto hurried to catch their bodies as they swooned and fell. “Hey! You didn’t kill them, right?!”
With the entry card they took from the men, Naruto and Orochimaru marched right through the security gate at the entrance and snuck into the research facility. The building doubled as the control tower and was thirty stories high, but the floors in the middle were deserted. Naruto and Orochimaru raced up the emergency stairs and flew into the electromagnet laboratory on the twenty-seventh floor.
“Lord Seventh!”
Chihare was sitting on the floor in the middle of the room. She wasn’t tied up or restrained in any way. She looked just as she had when she’d been abducted, like she could run out at any moment.
“You can move, can’t you?” Naruto asked. “So why aren’t you escaping?”
“I can’t move!”
“Huh?” He dropped his gaze and saw caltrops scattered on the floor, except in a neat circle around Chihare. They weren’t the usual iron ones, but reddish-brown copper caltrops.
Wait, what? In this day and age, plain old caltrops?
“You just have to avoid the edges on these things—” Naruto lifted a foot to step into the room, and the caltrops leaped up. One shot out with a whistle and grazed his toes, so he hurriedly pulled his foot back. “Aungh?! What are they?!”
The caltrops began to fly around the room, whistling through the air. What he’d thought was a boring trap that could only hurt you if you stepped on one of the chunks of metal turned out to be a contraption that moved three-dimensionally when intruders were detected.
The sight of the copper-colored fragments whirling around in all directions was almost beautiful, like a meteor shower. Although if he carelessly stretched out even a finger, these hooked stars would strip the flesh from his bone.
“Right?! I can’t move!” Chihare cried.
Apparently, the place where she was sitting was the only safe zone; no caltrops passed through it. Which meant that she was surrounded by a chaotic sphere of flying caltrops and was stuck exactly where she was.
“I’m all right,” she said. “The two of you, please go to the hangar! Right away!”
“What’s in the hangar?” Naruto shouted.
“Director Furieh lied to me!” she said. “He’s going to use the pluripotent applicator to replicate the ultra particles and scatter them in the sky above Konoha!”
“The ultra particles?” Naruto raised his shoulders curiously. “Why would he do that?”
“To target the shinobi, yes?” Orochimaru noted in his husky voice. “Ultra particles are harmless to the average person, but for shinobi with the large amount of chakra they possess, it’s essentially a powerful poison. If it touches them, the increased amount of chakra will block the chakra channels and bring about all kinds of damage.”
“What?!” Naruto yelped. “That’s not great. We gotta stop him!”
“Please hurry!” Chihare begged. “Furieh’s already equipped the airship with the device!”
Naruto looked back at Orochimaru. “I’m guessing there’ll be security at the hangar too. You go ahead of me and break in. I’ll join up with you after I rescue Chihare.”
Orochimaru looked at Naruto like he wanted to say something, but then turned silently and left.
Unable to hear their conversation, Chihare raised her voice and urged Naruto to hurry. “Lord Seventh! You have to go too! To the hangar!”
“After I get you out of here!” he replied. “I can’t just leave you.”
Chihare was stunned and froze with her mouth open. “That’s … This is no time to be prioritizing me. And how are you going to get through this trap anyway?”
“Force my way through! A hundred or so of these little caltrops hitting me isn’t gonna kill me.”
Naruto was about to jump into the fray, and Chihare quickly stopped him. “Aaah! Stop! Stop!”
The Hokage getting seriously injured because of her was no joke.