Broken

Chapter Thirty-Seven: Sensei Mizuki

Naruto jumped at the man's cruel tone of voice. Sensei Mizuki was always very soft spoken at school. He reached up and scratched his throat in a nervous looking gesture. "What are you doing here sensei Mizuki?" he asked loudly, "I was supposed to meet up with you a mile from here. You're early."

"Give me the scroll, Naruto."

"No, I can't sensei. We have to follow the mission parameters. The Hokage said that I would be put on a team with Sai and Sasuke if I proved that I was mature enough to graduate. He said that I had to complete this mission and follow the rules exactly and that means I can't give you the scroll yet."

"Give it to me now, Uzumaki!"

"No! I'll give it to you at our designated contact point." Naruto jumped into a tree to hurry towards the meeting spot. He was little worried, this was not the way his dad and the Hokage planned it out. Kakashi was hidden and waiting for them there. Although liked to talk big, he knew he wouldn't hold up long against the chunin. He tried to stall the instructor, "Come on sensei Mizuki, come and get the scroll!"

Mizuki gave a shout of frustration and chased after the boy.

***BREAK***

A shadow floated overhead, treading air as though it were water. Naruto gasped, looked up. The silvery glow of the moon peering through the denuded branches of the massive trees provided a luminescence to the forest. The boy could see the figure flying across the branches above him, wingless but more graceful than a bird, leaping with a quick and weightless form.

He landed on a thick branch and pivoted towards Naruto. With his imagination going into overdrive, it seemed like he swooped down from his high perch, grinning exactly as Naruto imagined some kind of evil murdering fiend, hungry for a child's flesh, would grin.

Naruto spun around, dropped to the ground, and fled the other way. He quickly made the new hand seal he had just learned and from the cloud of smoke, popped twenty clones. They tried to block the man, but he threw his fuma shuriken. With an ominous whistling sound, it flew through the air with deadly accuracy. Half of his clones that were in its path were dispelled when it struck them.

Mizuki was suddenly there in front of him in a lightning fast body flicker. Naruto turned again, but it was too late. The chunin instructor seized the real Naruto from behind, one arm around his chest, one over his face.

Naruto tried desperately to wrench loose but was lifted off his feet as a mouse might be snatched off the ground by the talons of a hunting hawk. For an instant, he thought that Mizuki would fly up into the trees with him, there to rip at him with fierce appetite.

"Back off," the chunin growled to the clones. Using his feet, he kicked and dispelled two more. The hold he had on the boy tightened even more as he leapt over to another clone and dropped kicked it in the head. He whispered in Naruto's ear in cold mockery, "Get rid of them or you will suffer a pain so deep you will beg me to kill you."

Naruto; refusing to give up, struggled, kicked, and bit, but seemed to be fighting nothing more substantial than water, caught in the dreamy currents of a nightmare.

The hand on his face pressed up from beneath his chin, a clamp that jammed his teeth together, forcing him to swallow his scream, and pinching shut his nose. He quickly grew dizzy from lack of air. Nearly overcome by panic from the suffocation, he almost didn't hear the whistle of flying shuriken.

The remaining clones did as he instructed. One of them caught the eye of another and began to speak to him in a series of rapid hand signs. The other nodded and formed the boar and tiger seals of the Swamp of the Underworld jutsu. The frozen earth beneath Mizuki's feet turned into a muddy quagmire that was nearly impossible to escape. The chunin leapt back into the trees before it fully formed and could capture him in its tar-like depths, dropping the still struggling Naruto in the process.