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Senju Naruto by Baal of Yarns

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Chapter 7: Rescue at the Beach

 

Naruto felt like he’d been walking for ages. His chest hurt with every breath and even using his good arm to pin his bad one against his side wasn’t killing the ache each jarring step sent through his injured limb. He’d stopped calling out to the lost Nina several minutes ago, when it got harder to catch his breath.

He paused a moment, thinking he heard a whimpering from up ahead, and the sound of soft crying.

“Nina? Is that you?”

“Hello! Yes! Is someone there?” a high, raspy voice choked with tears, cut through the darkness, and he strengthened his light in response, “I see you!” she called, and he heard shuffling sounds from the tunnel in front of him as well as cheerful yipping. A tiny, furry white blur came tearing into his small circle of light and jumped around happily. He couldn’t make her out yet, but it hadn’t taken the dog long to get to him, so she must be pretty close. His light ruined his night vision or he was sure he’d have been able to see her.

“A-Are you hurt?” He called, inching forwards. The sounds were getting closer, but he couldn’t make her out yet. It was even harder to keep putting one foot in front of the other with Muffy dancing around his ankles.

“Yes! I tripped in a hole in the dark after I slid down here, and I hurt my ankle! It was so awful, and I was so scared!” A miniature version of the dark haired woman he’d seen on the surface before this adventure began, finally limped into his light’s small oasis, and the little girl gasped, “Your hand is glowing!”

“Huh?” His head was a little foggy from the light chakra-sickness Kyuubi had induced in him before he’d tried to heal himself after the cave-in, so it took him a minute to think of why she’d think that was odd. “Oh…yeah, it’s a jutsu. It’s the only thing I have for light.”

“A-Are you a ninja? Can you get us out of here?” She looked so hopeful even with her dirt and tear streaked face that he couldn’t bring himself to be anything but entirely optimistic with her…

“Of course I can! We’ve just got to get back out the way I came in. If we don’t take any of the branches off of this tunnel, we should be fine.” He tried to give her his best grin, but she seemed to sense he was bluffing.

“Um, aren’t you kind of young to be a ninja? You can’t be much older than me, and I’m only 7!...and you look kind of hurt.”

“Well, I’m still in training, but this is nothing I can’t handle. My Kaa-san is a legendary medic-nin, you know!”

She frowned, beginning to sniffle once more as the prospects of sudden rescue seemed to dim, “If your mom is such a great medic-nin, why haven’t you healed yourself?”

Naruto sighed and slumped back against the wall. So much for downplaying his injuries, “My jutsu aren’t that good yet, but I could probably heal your ankle some, and take away most of the pain!”

“Really?” She brightened up a little again.

“Help me sit down here, for a minute, and I’ll take a look at it.”

“Okay.” She gently took his arm and aided him into a sitting position, then lowered herself down beside him. “Should I take off my shoe?”

“No! These rocks are sharp, and you’d never get it back on again if it’s swollen. Just let me see it.” He’d had lots of practice with sprained joints. It was a really common injury during training. He’d even eventually gotten the trick of the inflammation reducing jutsu his kaa-san had wanted to teach him instead of the chakra scalpel. Unfortunately, it involved a few more hand-signs than the jutsu he’d used on himself, and he was pretty sure he couldn’t manage it in the state he was in.

“The light’s going to cut out for a minute, so don’t be scared okay? I gotta stop this technique to start up the healing one, but I’ll get it going again as soon as I’m done.” He saw her nod in understanding, and he tried to give her a reassuring grin. She looked pretty scared, “My name’s Naruto, by the way.”

“Th-Thank you for coming to find me, Naruto-kun.”

He nodded, and painfully fumbled through the hand-signs to activate the diagnostic jutsu. He had to make sure her ankle was the worst of it. Unfortunately, this one didn’t give off any light, and Nina whimpered again in fear, “I want my Daddy.”

Naruto knew the feeling, “He’s up top, but he couldn’t fit down here…Your family is waiting for you when we get out.” She was really being braver than his former experience with civilian kids had led him to expect. Her dad had been pretty calm too. He wondered if the guy had a high-stress job.

Aside from the ankle, she was covered in cuts and bruises. If he had to guess, he’d say she probably stumbled right to the edge of that nasty drop off and rolled down because she couldn’t see it in the dark. Her fall probably caused the rocks at the opening to come loose as well as weakened the floor enough to cause it to crumble on him when he’d gotten there, and she’d probably run in fear from the sound of his fall, ending up here. Her shins and hands were cut from feeling her way along the walls and bumping into rocks in the darkness.

It only took him three tries to get the healing jutsu working this time, and when his hands began to glow green, he could see Muffy pressed comfortingly against his mistress’s side. The dog’s presence was probably why she wasn’t as scared as he thought she’d be. She hadn’t really been all alone in the dark like he had. “It’s okay, I’m going to heal you now.” She nodded and he placed his hands on her ankle. The swelling went down a little and she stopped whimpering so much, so it must have hurt less.

“That’s the best I can do when I’m like this.” He murmured. “I’ve got to switch back to the other technique now, so the light is going to go off again.”

“Okay, thank you, Naruto-kun. It really does feel a little better, now.” She hugged her puppy and squintched her eyes shut when the green glow stopped.

After a few moments, she felt him touch her arm and peeked open an eye to see he’d gotten the blue light back. “It’s alright.”

She impulsively lunged at him in a hug, and he did his best to stifle a cry of pain.

Back on the beach a whole crew of men were working with Tsunade to clear the rocks from the entrance to the cave. It wasn’t easy going. The second collapse had caused most of the downward tunnel to fall in, so there was a long stretch of boulders to clear, and they had no idea how much farther they had to go before it opened back up. On top of that, they had to be extremely careful not to cause further damage to the area as they worked or everything they’d done so far could be undone in moments.

None of them were giving up hope because they hadn’t found any bodies yes, but the families of both missing children were getting more and more frantic by the hour. Each rock they moved that only lead to more rocks felt like another ton of weight on Tsunade’s heart.

Naruto didn’t know if he could get up so soon after those jutsu, so they sat huddled in the blue glow of his chakra. Nina leaned against him along the cave’s wall, shoulders touching, with her little dog sitting quietly for once in her lap. The ninja in training had his head back and his eyes closed, not looking forward to trying to get them all the way back to the hole they’d fallen down, let alone back up to the surface. He could only hope that his kaa-san would find them before that became necessary. He almost joined his companion in sniffling, but he was a shinobi and crying wouldn’t help anyone.

He decided to distract them both with conversation. Talking kind of hurt with his ribs like they were, but it would be worth a little pain to dispel this shitty atmosphere!

“If Daddy were here, everything would be fine.” Nina whispered obviously having been thinking along the same lines.

Naruto was pretty sure his kaa-san would have been a lot more help in this situation than some richly dressed civilian tourist, but who knew, maybe dads had some special super power to make everything better. It’s not like he’d know, he thought bitterly. “I’m sure they are on their way. You probably didn’t notice since you were running in the dark, but we covered a lot of ground between here and the opening.”

“I don’t care! I want my mom and dad! I’m hungry, and wet, and cold, and I want my daddy!”

Naruto’s eyes shot open, now that she mentioned it…he was wet too and it wasn’t the lingering dampness from his training that morning. He lowered his hand a bit to better see the cave floor and found a thin layer of water seeping up from the pores in the stone. “Fuck.”

Nina turned to glare at him, “Don’t use that kind of language in front of a lady, baka!”

From hero to ‘baka’ in under an hour. Naruto was pretty sure his life sucked. “The cave is getting wetter, which means the tide must be coming in or something, making it fill up. We’ve got to get back to higher ground as fast as we can.” He gritted out through clenched teeth.

“Oh…fuck.” She repeated him. He refrained from commenting.

Nina had a much easier time standing up than he did, despite her still slightly injured ankle, but he eventually managed to make it back to his feet. Little Muffy went scampering up back towards the entrance, his tiny paws splashing in the rising water. “Muffy! Wait!” The little girl gasped, “You’ll get lost again!” She grabbed Naruto’s good arm and drug him off in that direction must faster than his injuries were comfortable with, but at least they were headed in the right direction. If they kept going uphill, he figured they’d have to find their way to the surface eventually. It was just a matter of moving faster than the water could fill the cavern.

After about 100 yards they caught up to the little dog and Naruto’s ribs were really burning. He wondered if he’d managed to damage them more with all of his movement. His chakra scalpel was starting to waiver and water was leaking in through the walls as well as the floor. Both children were shivering and soaked clear through. Muffy whimpered and backed up against Nina’s legs, tail tucked firmly underneath him, and Naruto got a really bad feeling about this…

There was a snapping noise and one of the side tunnels they’d passed through earlier suddenly spewed a wave of frigid saltwater into the main passage. One of the walls in that direction had obviously been weakened and worn through. “Run!” He gasped, forcing himself to scoop up Muffy, and he and Nina took off as fast as they could away from the rising water.

“We’ve got to hurry.” One of the workmen said, “It’s getting late and the tide is coming in. Most of these caves flood to one degree or another whenever that happens! We haven’t seen signs of flooding in this passage yet, but there’s no telling what those collapses earlier might have caused. This igneous rock is never the same two days in a row, anyway. It’s so porous the ocean washes it right away half the time.

Shizune tried to keep her calm, and nodded, glancing over to where Tsunade was doing the work of three larger men with her chakra-enhanced strength. It didn’t look like she’d heard the worker’s comment, and that could only be a good thing. Her hands were already bloody from the sharp edges of the stones and she was currently only stopping to heal herself when she was cut deeply enough to slow her down. The workmen had only brought enough gloves for themselves. There was no telling what this news might do to Shizune’s emotionally fragile mentor. She didn’t think any of them could work faster than they already were.

“We’re through!” Someone called from the front of the line, and both medic-nin took off down the passage like their feet were on fire. Nina’s father was as tight on their heels as a civilian man could be. Behind them, the gathered crowd from the village that had come to see what the excitement was all about, and then stayed to find out if they could help and see how things turned out, began to buzz with the news.

“Pass us some more light! The worker called, while Tsunade took over for him, shoving stones out of the way, and passing them backwards to teams of men behind them. The tiny hole grew bigger and with the added light sources, they could finally see a room of rock opening up on the other side of the piled barrier.

Two more large stones shuffled back to be carried clear, and the passage was large enough to squeeze through. “Go on ahead! The worker said, we’ll shore up the entrance and send more people in after you.”

“Good. Make sure there’s food and blankets waiting up here. They’ll be tired and hungry, and probably dehydrated when we get them out.” He nodded and passed the word along as the two women and one worried father crawled head first into the cave clutching flashlights and carrying ropes.

They hadn’t gone very far when Tsunade, who had been in front, suddenly called a halt, “There’s a big hole here leading down! There’s nothing on the other side of it! They must be down there!”

Shizune inched forward and looked over the ledge, shining her flashlight down the nearly vertical incline.

“My poor Nina! Do you think they fell?!”

Tsunade looked grim, but years of stressful medical work dealing with life and death situations let her regain some semblance of calm now that it felt like they were making progress towards saving the kids. “Yes, and there’s water down there, which means at least part of the tunnel system is flooded. Find something sturdy to tie the rope to, and then you’re going to stay up here to haul us up once we find the children.” An untrained man would be useless down there and probably get them all killed.

“O-Okay.” He jumped to do as he was told, desperate to do something to help his daughter. Shizune gave her mentor a look, and then easily leapt down into the water below. 20 feet wasn’t anything for a well-trained ninja as long as they were expecting it. The water came up to her waist. Tsunade easily leapt down beside her and after exchanging quick glances, they took off down the tunnel.

The water got higher and higher on them as they walked, but the ceilings were high too. Hopefully the children had found a ledge or something to climb on and wait out the worst of it since they hadn’t made it this far.

“N-Naruto! Naruto-kun! Please wake up.” He felt someone shaking his shoulder and a sudden urge to throw up made him turn away from the voice. He nearly fell off the side of a rock ledge, but a hand caught at what was left of his shirt and kept him from going over while he emptied the contents of his stomach. A horribly painful coughing fit took him right afterwards and by the time the person with him managed to ease him back onto his back, he kind of wanted to die. His good hand fumbled for his ninja pouch, hoping to wash the taste of blood out of his mouth with one of the bottles of water he kept there, but it was missing.

“If you’re looking for your water, I think you lost your pouch in the flood.” The voice said. He thought she must have heard him searching for it. It was too dark to see, but his fuzzy mind provided him with a picture of a girl just younger than him with dark hair and eyes in clothes ragged from her impromptu spelunking trip and a fuzzy white puppy.

“N-Nina?” He managed to gasp. “What happened?”

“You don’t remember?” She sounded really worried and fumbled to touch his forehead in the dark. It was the only thing even slightly warm in the entire place. She shivered and wrapped her arms back around her freezing body, pressing a bit closer to Muffy.

“We didn’t make it out of that part of the cave before it flooded! It was really scary, but you grabbed me and we followed Muffy! We were underwater for a long time, and I thought he’d drowned, but he got out before the opening was covered. We swam through it into this cave where the ceiling is higher, but the currents down there are really bad and we kept banging into things! Y-you seemed to be trying to keep yourself between me and the walls. Eventually we finally surfaced, and I heard Muffy barking. I was so tired and couldn’t swim anymore, and it was so dark. I was sure we were going to die, but you pulled us over towards the noise and found some ledges after you got your hand to glow again! There’s littler ones all along the walls and we managed to get all the way up here, but now we’re trapped and it’s still dark and I don’t think we can get any higher! I felt around the wall after we reached this one and you passed out, but I couldn’t find anything.”

He heard tears in her voice, and it was shaky with fear. “After you stopped moving, I thought you were dead! This weird red smoke started rising up from your body, and after a while, it stopped, but then you started shaking really badly and acted like you couldn’t breathe! You’ve been coughing like that ever since.”

“Chakra-sickness.” He gasped his Kaa-san’s name for what Kyuubi’s energy fighting with his own did to his system. He must have had to use chakra to reinforce his body to get them through the currents and take the hits against the cave walls when the currents she talked about had taken them. Now that he knew what had happened, flashes of stone and water and pain flooded back into his memory. He’d cushioned them against several pretty bad hits. It was no wonder Kyuubi had had to step in, but this was really really bad timing…

“Umm, okay. What can I do?” She whimpered. “Can you make the light again?”

“N-n-no.” His teeth had begun to chatter. “S-s—s-sorry…g-get-closer – warmth.”

“Oh! Oh, of course!”

He felt her arms go around him and even though she wasn’t careful of the injuries the Kyuubi hadn’t been able to fully heal before his system had pushed it back, he felt a little better for the tangible human presence and what little warmth she could give him. Muffy whined softly in the darkness.

A/N: The pic this time isn't a title art, but I hope you'll forgive me even if it doesn't match the chapter. ;) I hope you are still enjoying the fic, and the image of Naruto in Senju armor with a coat based on his father's! :)
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