Foxhound Chapter 1: Part 7

The Fifth Hokage, the Slug Hermit Tsunade, would have agreed with Ino that mornings were evil incarnate. She had managed to get totally drunk last night and, as Shizune had warned her, she was now paying for it. She slouched at the desk of her office and glared at the paperwork that refused to go away. It was morning, she had a hangover, and now she had a treaty with a minor feudal lord to negotiate on top of it all. What else could go wrong?

“Hokage-sama!” An ANBU yelled as he burst through the door.

Tsunade’s eye twitched as the noise reverberated in her skull.

“Yes?” She managed to hiss out between gritted teeth. The ANBU ignored the tone that had made stronger men than him flinch away in terror.

“Hokage-sama, Jiraiya-sama has returned.”

“So soon?” Tsunade asked, some apprehension growing in her voice. Her old teammate had said he wasn’t going to return for another year or so. If he was back now…

“He came in riding on Gamabunta-sama just five minutes ago. He told me to get you. Hokage-sama…His student is wounded,” The ANBU finished carefully, knowing the Godaime’s relationship with the Uzumaki brat.

“What!” Tsunade tried to yell, but it came out as more of a strangled gasp. Her hangover was forgotten in a rush of adrenaline.

“How badly?”

“Hokage-sama…He’s critical. Jiraiya had to restart his heart once on the way back to the village. Shizune-san is trying to treat him now, but sh-,” The ANBU was cut off as Tsunade left. She didn’t leave through the door though. The Hokage had turned and simply smashed through the window as she leapt to the streets below. The ANBU rushed to the empty window, along with the guards who had came in at the loud crashing noise. One of them let out an impressed whistle as they watched their leader blur across the rooftops to the hospital.

“Damn…I’m never getting between her and that kid. Ever,” The man said in awe.

The other two ANBU could only nod in reply.

Shizune worked desperately to save her young friend’s life. She had cut away his clothes to see the injuries underneath. Naruto’s gaudy orange outfit now lay in a pile of red strips next to her. Behind her, Jiraiya hovered well out of the way, but ready to assist if he could. He was present mostly to see if there was anything he could do about that seal on the boy. As long as it was on him, the fox wouldn’t be able to heal Naruto. The hermit had figured that out on the way back when he realized his student wasn’t healing right. The genin had given him a terrible scare when his breathing had suddenly stopped ten miles out from the village. Performing CPR on his student while on top of a gigantic, anxious toad was not a pleasant memory to the man.

It did seem like the fox was able to at least slow the boy’s bleeding and to force him to produce more blood. Naruto had lost more blood than there was in the bodies of two full grown men over the course of the trip. Jiraiya was covered in it up and down his front and Gamabunta’s forehead had been a darker stain of red before he’d disappeared. The Toad Hermit only hoped Tsunade had totally gotten over her blood fear. He was worried about developing a phobia to the stuff himself.

He’d watched as Shizune gently laid the boy out in the center of the large room. They were in the largest healing room in the building. The room itself was fifty by fifty feet in size and the entire floor was covered in extremely complex seals and rune script. It was probably the largest and most complicated set of seals Jiraiya had ever seen. Naruto lay in the center of it all. His deathly pale face contrasted sharply with the seals lying all around him. Shizune was trying her strongest healing jutsu on the boy’s chest, trying to repair his most vital areas. Jiraiya worried that the seal might interfere even with that, but he didn’t have the power alone to break the damn thing. He’d have to let Shizune do her best to heal the boy until Tsu-

The doors of the room burst open with enough force to drive them into the walls where the hinges had swung them.

‘Speak of the devil,’ Jiraiya thought in relief. For the first time in hours, he felt that Naruto might actually have a chance at survival.

Tsunade hadn’t even paused as she rushed into the room, several medic-nins trailing behind her. Shizune’s back was to her and she couldn’t truly see Naruto from this angle. She crossed over and walked around her student, ignoring Jiraiya’s warning. She dropped her medical bag (which she had swiped from a passing nurse earlier.)

Naruto was…shredded. His whole body had rips and tears along it, like some wild animal had done its best to make him into ground meat. She could even see bone exposed in some places. And the blood…

The beginnings of the old fear began to well up in the Sannin. In her mind’s eye she saw Nawaki and Dan’s faces floating past her in a sea of red. Now Naruto’s face was joining them. Another of her loved ones dying…

Shizune’s frustrated tears snapped her out of it. Tsunade shook her head a bit and looked to her student’s progress. It wasn’t much. No matter how hard she was trying, her apprentice couldn’t get Naruto’s flesh to mend for more than a second before it reopened. The Godaime kneeled down and, needing her considerable strength, pulled Shizune’s hands away from the boy. The young medic-nin gasped at the sight of her mentor, not even noticing her loud entrance in her concentration.

“I’m sorry, Tsunade-sama! Nothing I do is working! Something seems to be blocking any jutsu I try,” The dark haired woman said, almost hysterical at the lack of progress. Now that Shizune was leaning back, the Hokage could actually see the extent of Naruto’s injuries. A chill ran through her as she realized the boy should’ve been dead minutes after he was wounded. Something seemed to be forcing his blood production into overdrive to keep up with the constant loss.

“Must be Kyuubi…” Tsunade muttered, channeling chakra into her hands and using a diagnostic jutsu. Sweeping her hands across the boy’s body, she realized why Shizune was so damn upset. Something was blocking her jutsu and disrupting the chakra as it entered Naruto’s body. Her eyes drifted past the red-black wound on his chest and to his surprisingly uninjured abdomen. She wasn’t exactly sure what she was seeing, but she knew that the Kyuubi’s seal shouldn’t look like that. There was a glowing red seal surrounding it and worming its way through the original like a parasitic worm. The chakra in her hand disrupted further the lower she moved her hand until her entire jutsu dispelled as she passed over the seal.

Tsunade stared at it in shock. If that thing disrupted chakra so badly that it messed up jutsu for other people, what the hell was it doing to Naruto’s body on the inside? She made a couple quick conclusions as she stared at the script.

“Somebody get Jiraiya!” She bellowed to the medic-nins that were staring at the boy.

“I’m right here, Tsunade-hime, no need to yell,” The hermit grumbled as he stepped forward.

“Why the hell did you leave this thing on him?” The Sannin yelled.

“Because I wanted you to look him over first before I tried anything. You’re the medic, not me,” Jiraiya replied with a calm he didn’t feel.

“Then get your bleeding ass over here and help me break this seal!” The Hokage roared at the top of her lungs. Everyone in the room jumped, except the person she was yelling at. Her old teammate walked up and bit his thumb, while pulling a small brush from his pocket. Tsunade grabbed a sponge from her bag and began to clean away the blood on Naruto’s abdomen.

“Did you try blood stopping pills?” She asked Shizune in a terse voice (though far gentler than the one she used with Jiraiya.) Her apprentice shook her head.

“No. Jiraiya-sama said he’s already given him six on the way here. I didn’t want to risk blood clots since he’s not healing right. If one should lodge in his brain…” Shizune trailed off, not needed to finish her statement. She scooted back so Jiraiya had enough room to start making seals surrounding the sigil on the boy’s stomach. Tsunade gave a worried glance to her old teammate.

“Six?” She asked in disbelief. The Toad Hermit only nodded shortly.

The Godaime shook her head and said to Shizune, “Get some sutures, clamps, and any sort of advanced healing solution you can find. We need to stop the bleeding as soon as possible.”

Her apprentice nodded and rushed out of the room.

“You know…To break this thing, it’s gonna drain all of our chakra. You won’t have enough energy left for healing jutsu afterwards,” Jiraiya commented casually as he wrote.

“I know, but that thing is screwing up his inner coils somehow and keeping the fox from healing him. I think it caused the Kyuubi’s chakra and Naruto’s own to react violently to each other. If we can’t use jutsu, then we’ll stitch him up manually until the fox can heal him,” Tsunade said. She used a scalpel to make a cut in her own finger and began to ink out seals of her own onto the boy.

Jiraiya nodded. His old teammate’s analysis of the seal just supported his own conclusions. Orochimaru would be salivating if he knew these things existed. Shrugging off thoughts of his old rival, the Sannin bent down and continued his work.