The sealed kunai

Chapter 63: Rose-Colored Glasses

Jiraiya was fighting with Sasuke. A reanimated Sasuke. What the hell was this world coming to? What happened to the days when wars between ninjas were fought between living beings? The thought of the undead being foot soldiers for someone's army, and that army being in the hands of Otogakure apparently. The thought was terrifying.

Team 8 had been given the opening to advance on with their mission to find the source of the Oto raids and the purpose behind them, and they weren't going to waste the chance to keep going that Jiraiya had given them.

It had taken a while, but eventually they managed to reach the entrance to the hideout they had been looking for. They knew it as such because Kiba and Akamaru could smell the original scent that they had been tracking along with a particularly powerful scent of snakes. A dead giveaway for any Inuzuka tracker that a place had something to do with Orochimaru or had been Orochimaru-affiliated at some point in time.

"We've got to get in there." Kiba said, standing at the entrance with Hinata, Shino, and Akamaru, "Jiraiya's back there fighting a zombie Sasuke. That's wrong on five different levels, so we've got to figure out what's down there and get back before something really fucked up happens and Konoha's down a legend."

"Jiraiya-sama can take care of himself." Shino assured his teammate as he pushed his glasses up on his face, "If there is anyone that is equipped to deal with the supernatural it is him. Hinata, do you have the layout of the base mapped out?"

"Yes." Hinata said, her Byakugan letting her see through most of what was inside of the cave that served as a base, "It's not booby-trapped... and there are no sentries inside." What? That was odd, "It seems like a temporary location. The only chakra signatures I can see are apparently prisoners."

Kiba didn't need to hear anymore, deciding to lead the way and head on inside. There were people inside that needed help. These were Konoha ninjas that had been captured by Otogakure raiding parties, and while he'd hoped that some of them would be inside so he could show them just what he thought of taking prisoners behind the front lines, he was willing to settle for taking out the place that they brought the prisoners to.

That would make his day, and put a cherry on top of the sundae that was the Konoha northeast campaign. He'd worked his ass off, so maybe he'd get a field promotion from his actions?

As cool as that would be, there was nothing more important at that moment than stopping the threat that existed away from the front lines for Konoha's forces. The seemingly endless tunnels eventually opened up into a large room with bars on the walls, cells behind them filled with trapped masses of humanity.

Everyone being held prisoner was shackled, usually in trios, and seemed to have been heavily injured in their captures due to the lack of treatment that many had seemed to have gotten. Some parts of the trios chained together were dead. Chain gangs sometimes had one or two of the three members chained together no longer amongst the living.

No one there seemed to have been interrogated though (see: tortured), but every last one of them seemed completely terrified of being in their current position for some reason.

Kiba reached for the bars but got a nasty shock for his trouble, "Ow! Damn it." He complained as he shook his jolted hand out, "How do we get these guys out? It's not a seal doing this. I think it's a generator."

"We need to find it, even if it will take some time." Shino said, analyzing the prisons. Even though he was very level-headed on the surface, his hive of insects were buzzing internally along with his temper at seeing living beings subjected intentionally to such conditions. He sorely wished for the dark soul that had masterminded this to pay dearly for it.

For one of them there was something else wrong with the situation. While there were plenty of people there, numbering past the fifties, there had been more reported as taken. Many more. Kiba hadn't smelled enough blood while they had been going through it for all of those people to have been executed, and capturing all of those people just to kill them seemed like a complete waste.