An Imperial Influence

[Kakashi Hatake]

Kakashi furrowed his brow, pulling his attention away from the departing wardens and instead toward the familiar chakra just meters from where he sat. Finding himself taken prisoner so suddenly had been enough of a surprise; he had not expected that his cohort would have had similar misfortune. Though impeded by the jute bag cinched around his neck as well as several layers of wood-and-such walls, he could discern the boy’s energy with perfect clarity; although somewhat weakened, it was unmistakable. Kakashi watched the bickering pair of captors disappeared from his sensing range as he quietly set about freeing himself from his bindings. With some doing, he was able to open the clasp on one of his belt pockets and worm a gloved forefinger through the eyelet of a kunai. Several moments of struggling and contortion later, he managed to shred the roughspun rope and untruss himself.

The former captain rubbed his irritated wrists as he stepped cautiously toward the door. “Kito?” he whispered urgently, hoping his hushed tone would carry to the lad.

Silence.

”Kito?” he repeated, slightly louder. Though urgency in his tone could not compensate for his volume, he was sure that if the boy were as near as he felt, he would be able to hear. Still, no response came.

Having discarded the bits of rope and cloth that had so recently held him captive, Kakashi took time to examine his cell. Though quite dark, owing to the lack of windows or any sort of lighting fixture, he could see that his surroundings were indeed as he had noted with his sharingan. The walls seemed to be composed of some variety of sturdy composite, quite alien compared to those of the typical village abode. His senses told him the floor of the room was either a barren square of earth or else stone flooring filthy to the point of being indistinguishable from the former. Clearly whomever was holding the ninjas captive cared little for providing any homey touches. Through the walls, Kakashi saw that three or four more rooms roughly identical to his own ran along a hallway that stretched past the far end of his sensory range. To the best of his knowledge, only the room two doors down was occupied.

No sign of Minato, the silver-haired shinobi thought as he reached the door to his cell. He’d last seen the boy and his ward together, though he supposed it was possible the two had split up to spread the workload. Kakashi made a mental note to get a set of walkie-talkies for the trio when he saw them next.

The masked shinobi soon found his exit to be somewhat more difficult than expected. He frowned as the door refused to move despite his efforts, the man unable to so much as rattle the decrepit-looking thing on it’s hinges despite throwing his full weight against it. Puzzled, he tapped the adjoining walls experimentally. To his chagrin, he found the durability to be much the same as the door; the meager wood felt more like stone, despite the splinters that had embedded themselves in his shoulder during his earlier attempt to batter his way through. It did not take much mental effort to induce that there was clearly something else at work. Kakashi took a step back from the seemingly-impervious barricade, focusing on the doorway and surrounding walls with his sharingan. To his surprise, the walls looked to be made of nothing more than walnut timber and some variety of clay or plaster, with the door itself being fashioned from nearly-rotted teak. Nothing seemed to indicate such a sturdy impediment to his escape, yet there it was.

“I guess I have no choice,” the scarecrow muttered to himself. He unclasped the flap on his belt pouch, fishing a small sealed scroll from within. After a brief mental ‘hinges-versus-doorknob’ argument, he opened the rolled parchment and pressed the slip to the door beside the bronze handle. “I hope this doesn’t draw any attention,” he said, taking a few steps back and forming a hand seal before him.

Seconds later the scroll detonated with a thunderous crash, stirring a cloud of thick particulate from the room’s floor and generating a formidable plume of its own. For all of the scroll’s clamor, though, the door and walls around it remained completely intact. Kakashi stood dumbfounded for a moment before reactivating his sharingan. There has to be something here I’m missing.

No sooner had he taken to reexamining the masonry did he spy the likely cause of his struggle. Around the perimeter of the doorway the shinobi could make out the conspicuous shapes of some variety of alien runes located at each of the four corners of the jamb. Though exact identity or nature of the characters was completely unknown to him, he surmised that such shapes likely formed a protective seal around the exit, allowing nothing-even a concussive blast-from disturbing the area. A quick glance around his environment revealed similar scrawls around the edges of his enclosure and upon the ceiling and floor, hidden between the layers of brickwork. Some skilled individual had painstakingly etched sealing characters around the entire room, trapping him within. Kakashi reasoned that the formula must have been activated when his captors took their leave.

The silver-haired shinobi sighed heavily, crossing his arms tightly over his chest. He hadn’t the time to wait for the jailers to return; if he had been captured, it was not a stretch to assume that Minato may likewise soon fall to harm. Though Kakashi could sense Kito’s chakra from where he stood, the several layers of sealing magic impeded the usual clarity of the jonin’s sharingan; though he could feel the boy’s presence, he could not be sure of the his physical state. If the Miu clan, whatever their motivations were, could manage to subdue the three of Mokugakure’s finest, it would not be long before Tsunade and Galan were in their sights, the rest of the village following soon after. No, he hadn’t the time to wait patiently for a chance to slip out. He would have to improvise.

Kakashi quickly dropped to a knee, glancing to and from the door and the ground as he drew his own facsimiles of the sealing runes into the layer of freshly piled dust and soot. Though he couldn’t be sure, the former captain reasoned that the sealing glyphs likely worked in a similar fashion to those he learned back in Konoha. Simply layering another set of similar seals over those currently in place would do him no good, but there was another somewhat crude way to break through. Having sketched his version of the seal on the ground before him, Kakashi then set about scrawling a trio of kanji (heaven, earth, and air) in the center of the rectangle. Even if he couldn’t unseal the door, applying an odd-numbered seal over the existing even-numbered seal could imbalance the forces holding the seal together and provide him the opportunity needed to break through. His lips curled into a small smile as the dust began to tremble within the mini-seal, tumbling as if rocked by an unseen force. It would work.

I should really start carrying ink, the shinobi mused as he completed the final scrawl, smudging a bloody finger over the otherwise unpainted wall. The trio of symbols were imposed outside the archway, each around the middle of their respective edge. As he drew the final line, Kakashi could feel the doorway begin to tremble almost imperceptibly. Hope sprang up within his gut as he gave the door an experimental nudge with his shoulder, feeling door shudder as if something anchoring the door had been rattled. To complete the seal, and hopefully imbalance the seal to the point of fault, he would need to apply a significant amount of chakra and force; he had just such a technique to supply these needs. Taking a few steps back, Kakashi formed a azure orb within his right palm, allowing the sphere to swell to the size of a softball before turning his sights on the barricade. With a final grunt, the masked ninja dashed forward and slammed the rasengan into the center of the doorway. A satisfying crunch echoed through the room as the door and jamb separated from the wall, spraying into the vacant hallway in pieces.