Chimera

Chimera
Part 3
By Mieren

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Amazingly enough, Kakashi had listened for once and had shown up at the designated time in the morning along with the rest of the ninja. The only real grumbling came from Shikamaru, who was grumping about the bothers of a mission requesting sixteen people when they could have passed it off to one person, Kazekage or not, who could have gotten the job done faster than the lot of them and with less effort. Sasuke, Neji and Shino just looked bored. Ino and Sakura were already arguing over who had rights to Sasuke, who was steadfastly ignoring them. Some of the comments they exchanged served to make Hinata blush, which served to get Kiba to tease her, causing her to blush harder and stammer more noticeably. Chouji was too busy eating to notice anyone else. Most of the other chuunin just ignored them, except for Lee, who was doing his absolute best to prove that Gai had successfully been cloned.

“If we can’t kill this abomination, I will walk around Kohana one hundred times on my hands!” he yelled.

The adults were no better.

“Ah, youth,” Gai gushed, bright-eyed. “The time when they flower into their potential and become the pillars of strength that will carry the forces of the world to do good!”

“Did you say something?” Kakashi asked, his nose buried in a book. Icha Icha Paradise, Volume 8: The Manacles of *censored* *censored* and Glorious *censored*.

“AAH! My eternal rival! You have bested me again! For this, I will walk around Kohana two hundred times, using only the tips of my index fingers!”

Kurenai was currently trying to beat Jiraiya into the ground for trying to peep down her cleavage to ‘gather information’ for his latest book. Asuma was pretending that he didn’t know any of them.

Sighing, Kakashi was the first to start forward, much to the surprise of the rest of the group, the laziest and least time-oriented among them the first to start the mission. Though he had his book out and his nose stuffed in the pages, he wasn’t reading it, merely covering the remainder of his face. Four jounin with chuunin teams, and he was the only one there to have two students instead of three. His sensei, long dead, would have been disappointed in him. After swearing that he would never let any of his students die, he had done just that.

They had arrived to a scene of a massacre. Blood was everywhere. Bits of unidentifiable flesh had plastered the walls and ceiling. The largest thing they had found had been a foot in the corner, torn partially in half. The only identifiable thing they had located had been in a small blood stained cell, a child’s jaw, broken and trailing a length of skin. Skin that had three distinctive whisker marks on it, the very edge of the mess holding a wisp of bloodied golden hair sitting beside the remainder of the golden hair, sloppily scalped with some blunt object. Another tuft of blond hair laid closely beside.

Kakashi pulled his book closer to his face to ensure that the following shinobi couldn’t see the pained look in his uncovered eye. Every mission he went on, every training session he held, was nothing but a painful reminder that he had lost a student. Not only a student, but one he had sworn on his life to protect to his sensei, a man who he had respected more than anyone. Every time he closed his eyes, he could see nothing else than the horror of the brutal murder.

Sasuke tried to hide the pain, succeeding much better at it than himself, but Kakashi could see the strain in his eyes from losing his teammate, his best friend, his rival. Even Sakura, who claimed from the start that she hated the blond, still lost the fire in her soul when they were brought together, the blonde’s absence painfully apparent. They had never lost a friend in battle before. Kakashi had, but he still felt the pain as sharply as his remaining students.

The only thing the silver-haired man had was missions and training to keep his mind off the matter, but doing so just brought back the memories. He and maybe his students were the only ones looking forward to a real fight to get their minds off of the blond who couldn’t seem to leave their thoughts even after all the time since he had been lost.

Sasuke and Sakura flanked him as he walked, staying beside their sensei, something that just served to cause the jounin more pain. What if he couldn’t protect them either? Hidden behind his book, his visible eye took on a murderous gleam. He vowed at that moment that he would not lose another student, even at the cost of his own life.

At that moment, all that mattered to the silver-haired jounin was the upcoming fight, the battle that would take his mind off his guilt. Logically, he knew that there was no way he could have predicted that his students would be abducted in a friendly spar, but he still blamed himself. Sasuke had been in a coma for a little over two weeks after the blow to the head he had suffered. Naruto was gone forever. His severed jaw was enough to prove that.

Now, he would fight. There were enough monsters in the world, human or not, and he’d not allow another to exist. The white demon would die.

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To be continued…
Short again, I know, but it will get longer. Please R&R since I love it so much. That’s why I’m trying to update so quickly.