Return of the Flash by Kamikaze132

Chapter 28

Kabuto's face showed an annoyed facial expression as he jumped through the trees. It had been almost an hour since he sent Kimimaro to retrieve Sasuke in case the sound four had been delayed by Konoha's own retrieval team, but no one had returned.

He had been forced to organize a death match on a short notice to select a new body for Orochimaru-sama. While he may have been adamant that he will only have Sasuke's body, he could not deny that the current body had been failing rapidly, despite his insistence that he could hold on. Kabuto had Orochimaru-sama change bodies with the lone survivor of the death match, and on his orders, immediately departed from the base to get Sasuke-kun. And like most of his missions, he had gone alone.

While Kabuto had confidence that he could hold his own against someone of Kakashi's caliber, he was not a spy for nothing. His observational and analytical skills were unparalleled, and so he put it to good use.

Konoha had recently survived an invasion, which was what Orochimaru-sama had based the retrieval mission on. With Konoha rebuilding itself, it would no doubt be sending most of its elite force out of the village on missions, to maintain its image. The point being, Konoha had no team at the moment that could stand up to Sound four and retrieve Sasuke, which meant that the missions should have gone off without a problem.

However, Kabuto suspected that Tsunade had sent a retrieval team, and a competent one at that, if it could hold out Sound four for this long. The jonin and chunin would be out on missions, and genin had no chance of going on an A-rank missions such as this one.....or did they?

Knowing how paranoid the village was about the Sharingan being under their control, they would send out any shinobi that they had.

The only genin that Kabuto could think of were Shikamaru, Chouji, Neji, Shino, Kiba and Naruto. Of all of them, only Neji and Naruto stood a decent chance against one of the sound four. But Naruto had large reserves of chakra, large enough to spam shadow clones without worry, and he had a good idea of what stealth was about, if the way he saved Hayate from Baki was any indication. And, he was ridiculously good, as he had been able to dispatch him off without any trouble.

That had been a painful day.

Kabuto dropped to the ground and continued running. He was about half a mile away from the border that separated fire and rice country. He only hoped that Kimimaro had succeeded. That guy was on a whole another level from the Sound four, so there should be no reason to worry. But Kabuto couldn't shake the bad feeling from his stomach.

He arrived at the valley of the end, and his eyes widened.

The valley had honestly seen better days. Chunks of rocks had been torn from the walls, and Kabuto's attention was instantly drawn to a specific part of the valley.

A whole section of the wall had collapsed, from the looks of it. There was a small mountain of rocks on the ground, but that wasn't all. Kabuto spotted his target for the first time, and was utterly shocked. In fact, now that he thought, he miscalculated just how formidable Naruto was.

It looked like Sasuke had tried to beat Naruto and lost, badly. The poor guy looked like he had been through the grinder, and then some. Naruto, on his side, gave Kabuto quite a shock. He hadn't known that Naruto had been promoted, to jonin no less. Though it made sense, since it was Naruto who took him out of the fight with a single move, and it was probably Naruto who felled the wall with his Rasengan.

There hadn't been such a devastating fight in this valley since the legendary statues were alive. Then Naruto looked at him, and he gave a sneer. Best case scenario, he was worn out after his fight with Sasuke, and he could probably take him. To his astonishment, Naruto grinned and lifted his three-pronged kunai and lifted his palm, in a very familiar gesture.