Disclaimer – I do not own Naruto and make no claims on its copyright, original characters are mine.

Prologue – Red Devil Spoils

Marsh Country – 134 kilometers from Lightning Country Border

Active War Zone

9 Years Prior to Initial Manga Date

Kato Naotaka pulled his sword out of the leaf ninja's back with a quick jerk, and the slightest sigh of regret. It was hard to take joy at this moment, even though by all indications he was on his way to a great victory.

A triple blast of flame sounded in the distance, and Naotaka suppressed a slight smile. It was working. The trap had been successful in at least its first stage.

He jumped from his current rooftop to the next, keeping moving constantly, searching out additional targets. The town was full of them now; a huge portion of the Leaf army had been drawn in, all as he had anticipated. A fake opening, one just enough to seem a true oversight and not a trap, baited with the very biggest prize available, and the entire northern division of the Leaf advance had been drawn in.

Naotaka caught sight of a leaf ninja in the street below him, a young boy surely not more than fourteen. He flipped a shuriken across the road, striking a gutter there with a loud clang.

Predictably the boy turned, so he was not looking when Naotaka slammed a roofing tile into the back of his head. One moment stunned was all it took, and the jounin plunged his straight sword in and out, leaving yet another body to fall to the ground.

The leaf had been confident, no surprise there, the northern division had outnumbered everything he had by at least three to one, and they had a number of the red and white eyed devils, the Hyuuga and Uchiha with them. They must have been confident they could defeat any trap.

Certainly they could, had Naotaka used a trap involving ninjutsu, but he hadn't. Fireworks served more than well enough to blind bloodline eyes, and when he dropped the buildings on the whole eastern side of the town to create an isolating maze of rubble the advantage had flipped to him.

Now the town was flooded with small groups and individuals of the Cloud, men and women skilled in the arts of death, and further armed with knowledge of the massively complex array of traps scattered throughout the town, conventional, genjutsu, and more. All this because the bait, Kazumasu Togawa, the best ninja Cloud still had in the field, had been too much for the Leaf commanders to resist.

Naotaka came to a main road. Looking down he saw a quartet of ninja approaching the intersection from the west side, all in the characteristic animal masks of the Leaf ANBU. Dangerous, he decided, a group of ANBU that had managed to stay together must be skilled, and such a group represented a threat that must be neutralized, they could jeopardize his whole plan.

With long practiced and skilled technique the jounin analyzed the situation, taking in all the many layers of information he knew about every location in this town and integrating them together. The puzzle pieces shifted in his mind until he had viable strategy only moments later. A gas main ran under the street those ANBU would cross. If he blew it at the right moment he could destroy the whole group. The tricky part was he needed to overwhelm the ANBU's caution. It required being two places at once. Well, that was no real difficulty for a ninja. "Rai bushin no jutsu," Naotaka whispered, and then sent his massively charged double on its mission.

For him, it was time to be bait.

Naotaka jumped down into the street in front of the advancing ANBU, and in a bit of acting mimed that he had been planning to simply jump to the other side, but was now forced to face his enemies.

The ANBU in the center made single gesture of his hand, and the other three fanned out behind him, moving to encircle wide. It was quick, simple, and effective, and Naotaka was impressed, moreso because the ANBU's leader was nothing more than a lanky black haired youth, perhaps as young as twelve years old. Who was this child?

With blistering speed the youth charged, hurling a trio of shuriken as he came on. Naotaka whipped free his sword and blocked, though with more difficulty than he had anticipated, falling back before the strikes, then darting forward again. He knew he would have to halt the leader of the ANBU to enable his ploy of flight to succeed; otherwise the snare would overtake him before he reached the gas main.

The youth knocked his mask down from his face as he streaked in toward the cloud jounin, and Naotaka found himself staring into black and red eyes, baleful and furious. The sharingan, an Uchiha!

This was not anticipated, and not a good thing, but it was not insurmountable, Naotaka determined in a snap-assessment. He came on with his blade high.

Uchiha youth met Cloud jounin with a clash of steel on steel as sword met kunai. Naotaka jumped back from the contact, letting the kunai of his foe's companions pass through the space where he had stood. The Uchiha anticipated of course, ready the motions of his enemy using the sharingan, but Naotaka held his defense strong.

The jounin had one advantage against this foe in close combat, and he was quick to seize it. His opponent was a boy, and armed only with kunai, he had to lunge in to reach his taller, sword-wielding enemy.

The left foot came forward, leading the attack, and Naotaka did a quick two step. His own right foot snapped out, landing on his enemy's toes with a crunch. He let his sword fall from his right hand to drop into his left, blocking the incoming kunai low, with just enough strength to prevent it from penetrating his flak-jacket. This left him exposed to a follow-through, but his foe would not get the chance.

Naotaka's arm lashed out, grabbing the ANBU armor of the boy, and then he spun his whole body off his left foot, spinning around and with chakra-enhanced strength throwing the young Uchiha back down the street.

His enemy essentially removed from the encounter, the plan was complete, and it was time to run.

A flurry of kunai and shuriken pursued the jounin from the other ANBU, and though he wove and shifted away from most he took a light gash on the right thigh in the process, but it did not matter, one second ahead of his foes he crossed the line to the gas main.

All the mains in the village had been primed for explosive use; his bushin had only needed to turn a specially concealed crank to fill the air with methane. Naotaka held his breath as he passed through the invisible cloud, even as he bushin rushed out into it.

The ANBU were sensitive, the moment they smelled gas there was an outcry. "It's a trap!" one yelled, "Get clear!"

It was too late.

The ANBU would had time to run had he been forced to throw an explosion note to detonate his little device, but it was far quicker to make a single handseal.

The Rai bushin burst apart in a shower of crackling electrical energy.

The blast of power hurled Naotaka a long ways down the street, accompanied by scorched pieces of the unfortunate ANBU.

Rolling to his feet the Cloud jounin turned back to observe the ANBU's child leader had done likewise. The baleful stare of the sharingan reached out across the distance toward him.

"Bastard!" the boy hissed. "I'll rip you apart!"

"Will you?" Naotaka forced himself to act casually; serenely confident, even though he was anything but certain he could defeat this wrathful talent in one-on-one combat. "You're awfully careless with your life then."

Distant explosions rumbled through the square, a reminder of the ongoing fight elsewhere. There was a tense pause.

"You won't leave this town alive, I swear," the Uchiha boy hissed, but he jumped up to a rooftop and headed north.

Naotaka forbade himself to sigh in relief. Leaving that child loose was almost certain to cost lives, lives he was responsible to maintain.

The jounin jumped up to a rooftop, and surveyed the devastation. The town was crumbling around him, as trap after trap was used in the brutal conflict. He decided it was time to get additional information. He checked his radio headset first, only to be rewarded with a blast of static. That was good, the jamming was still in place, and the primary plan could go forward.

Though destroying radio communications would normally be a greater disadvantage to the outnumbered force in a battle, Naotaka had planned this out well, and all his kill-squads had pre-planned routes and contingencies to use. Additionally he had seeded a number of secure landlines in the town, ones only useable with the proper codes. It was to one of these hidden phones he traveled now.

"Saito, status," Naotaka demanded immediately upon dialing the proper code.

"I've got you Naotaka," the voice of another jounin responded, Ukita Saito, a thirty-year ninja and one of Naotaka's most trusted ninja. "The plan is proceeding, we took some casualties in the main holding force, but not bad, and so far everything has developed well in the Maze Game," he used the code word for Naotaka's plan. "Whatever our losses, they've been way less than the Leaf's."

"Then it's time to quit while we're ahead," Naotaka ordered. "Send out the signal for withdrawal, primary plan, and set True Red-Devil in motion," he suppressed a smile at that name, a mockery of the common name the Cloud ninja had long used for the feared Uchiha.

"Timeframe?" Saito queried.

"Twenty-five minutes," Naotaka answered, "I don't want to cut it close. We need to clear everyone out, we can't afford anymore losses."

"Understood," Saito replied. "Twenty-five minutes starting on my mark." A brief pause. "Mark!"

A brilliant purple rose appeared above the town, fireworks proving their worth once more.

Twenty-five minutes to get out off town, Naotaka knew. He had his route, as did all the ninja, there should be more than enough time, but he got moving all the same, it would be important to have time to spare in case he ran into any obstacles.

Proceeding northeast against the internal clock in his mind, Naotaka ran hard, his footsteps pounding on the dirt road. He was forsaking stealth, but it hardly mattered now, an opponent would have to be positioned perfectly to hit him in time to catch him now.

The cry stopped him short.

It came from his right, only to be quickly stifled, but there was no mistaking the frightened cry of a young child. This was an oddity, something out of place, and Naotaka didn't like it. He stopped, and drew his sword, cautious.

It had come from his right, a child's cry, and now his vision traced down the source as a large building, one whose former service had clearly been a brothel. It had been damaged and scarred by the fighting, all the windows were shattered, and much of the wood was bent and warped, but it still stood. Then, even in the pale light of this clouded day, Naotaka saw a flicker of shadowy movement against the wall through a broken window.

The arrow that followed was not what he had anticipated.

It streaked toward him with brilliant accuracy, poised to take him in the chest, and if his sword had not been drawn it would have been terribly difficult to dodge. Instead, the sharp blade slashed the arrow aside, splitting it apart and carrying it down.

Another arrow was already following the first, and Naotaka had barely any time to observe a thin, willowy figure, white and ghostly, flip through a shattered window to launch a third arrow toward him.

He dashed right, nimbly slashing the second arrow aside with his sword, and rolling away from the third, but more followed, coming at him in a stream of brutally accurate and swift strikes. He drew a kunai in his left hand and between arrows, jumped backwards and launched it at his foe, following it with a second and a third.

His foe was a young girl, Naotaka saw in a moment's pause between arrows, and at the oncoming kunai she was unperturbed, but only sent another arrow through the air.

It struck the first kunai, ricocheted to strike the second, and then again to hit the third, and returned to a flightpath aimed at his heart.

The jounin's jaw dropped. Just who was he facing? With a quick move he managed to deflect this arrow, and then jumped up above, sheathing his sword as he landed on a rooftop.

A trio of arrows, seemingly launched at once, streaked toward him.

"Raiton: Denkou Tate no Jutsu!" A brilliant wall of coruscating energy materialized before the jounin, hurling the arrows back. He followed this move by darting forward quickly; throwing three shuriken, each from widely separated angles, there would be no way to deflect them all with arrows.

The girl waited until the shuriken approached, and then, without seeming to exert any effort, took an arrow from her quiver in her left hand, and simply passed the shaft through the center hole of each shuriken. She flipped the arrow around and launched it then, the trio of shuriken whistling off the back in wrathful arcs, yet somehow capable of hitting their target.

No longer surprised by this unusual opponent, Naotaka was ready, and he used his own shuriken to knock these projectiles out of the air, darting forward as he did so.

The girl jumped aside, and two arrows streaked toward the jounin, but his body was held low in running posture, and he knocked them aside with little trouble. Now only a few steps remained.

The girl was not without tricks of her own remaining, she jumped back as the ninja came on, flipping her bow forward as she did so, forcing Naotaka to raise his sword to block.

It was nothing more than a feint, for a flexible leg kicked out, and suddenly the bow was a weapon again, held by foot and left arm, needing only an arrow. The girl reached back, knowing she had caught her opponent at last.

Her hands closed on nothing.

Naotaka's left hand reached out, grabbed the dirty white smock the girl wore, and pulled her upright, her throat meeting his sword. "I kept count," he whispered cuttingly into her ear.

A child's cry split the air again.

Naotaka saw his captive's head turn involuntarily toward the shattered windows, where the sound had come from. His own eyes followed.

Huddled against the wall was a group of children, all save one a girl, young, hungry, and dirty to the last. "What is this?" Naotaka hissed. "This town was completely evacuated!" he had demanded it, and made sure of compliance, or so he thought.

"They said we would slow them down, and so they locked us in the cellar instead," the girl before him answered.

These girls and the young boy were servants of the brothel Naotaka realized, the property of the house, and the owners had chosen to leave them to die instead of take them along in a frightful spit of cold-blooded mercantilism.

The jounin made a snap decision. "Get them to stand," he told the girl, releasing her.

"What?" she was clearly shocked beyond simple confusion.

"Get them up," he ordered again, his voice wielding absolute authority. "This town will burn to ash in minutes only, and everyone will die, we must get them out." He would not allow these children to die, not because he failed to insure his own orders were followed completely, he would not.

"But how can we…"

"Just get them to stand," he ordered.

The girl nodded, and opening the battered door began ushering the other ten children out into the open.

Now Naotaka was faced with a choice. He had barely twelve minutes remaining, and these young ones, ranging from perhaps six to eleven, would never make it by themselves, even the girl he had just fought could not be more than thirteen. He would have to help them, but to do so would be dangerous. Nevertheless, he was responsible, he was in command, and so he made the choice without hesitating. "Kage bushin no jutsu."

Ten copies of the jounin materialized about him, reducing his chakra critically, he would not be performing any more jutsus today. That was a grave risk, but it need not matter if everything went as planned. "Everyone, you're going to ride piggyback," he told the children, as his copies helped them up.

It was a matter of moments to get all ten youngsters in place, and here Naotaka turned to the girl in the tattered white dress. "I will guide you out of the village, but it will be dangerous. You must trust me, now, do you?"

"Yes my lord," she answered without hesitation, and Naotaka, with the trained insight of a commander, knew it was true.

"Then take these," he handed her his weapon pouch, with its remaining shuriken and kunai. "You are out of arrows, but I suspect you can throw can't you?"

She nodded.

"Stay close then," he ordered, and wrapped his left arm about her. "Let's go!"

They dashed onto the rooftops, a strange convoy of children and copies, surging toward the eastern edge of the town as the clock counted down in the jounin's head. Still, they could make it, and with time to spare. It was going to work.

Then a kunai came out from the north.

There was little time to react, the projectile had been launched secretly and from cover, and aimed not at Naotaka, but the girl he was carrying along.

He spun her loose then, throwing the girl roughly to the ground, and reached out to grab the weapon with his right hand.

It cut a bloody gash along his palm, but he stopped it, and brought his sword up in his right hand. He had only time to see the red eyes and black hair vault up to the rooftop.

"Katon: Goukakyuu no Jutsu!" A massive blast of flame roared toward Naotaka. He rolled away and took cover close to the ground, holding his mouth and nose shut, but he could feel the skin on his back and face redden and burn from the intense heat. The Uchiha brat had returned.

The cloud jounin did not stay down, that would have been death. He ignored the pain and ran along the roof, trying to pinpoint his opponent and likewise by time for his clones to escape.

"I told you wouldn't leave alive old man," the youth hissed, advancing with a kunai in each hand.

Naotaka took his sword in hand and counter-charged.

The youth was a fast learner, and when the blades met he jabbed out with the second kunai to neutralize the reach advantage, using the vision of the sharingan to deftly avoid the jounin's attempt to grasp the weapon and pin the young man in place. Naotaka was forced to jump back and take a serious gash across his left arm from the sequence.

Breath was hard to come by as the burns coursed their painful agony through the cloud ninja's body. He ignored the pain with practiced skill, but with his limited chakra he could not endure for long. Still, the charge had accomplished its primary objective, his clones had escaped.

Had he been alone, Naotaka would have turned and run himself, but he saw the white-dressed girl kneeling on the rooftop behind the Uchiha and knew he could not. This battle was not inherently hopeless, he must try and win and save his subordinate.

"Is that all you have old man?" the Uchiha taunted, advancing slowly, presumably planning another jutsu. "Just a few tricks?"

The boy is talented, but cocky, like most Uchiha, Naotaka reasoned. He could see a possible method.

Slowly the Cloud jounin brought his left hand to his chest, miming a seal, and then spun away from the Uchiha, presenting his back to the boy.

"Katon: Karyuu Endan!" the Uchiha invoked another powerful fire jutsu.

Naotaka ripped his hand down the zipper of his flak jacket as he turned, pulling it free and then hurling it back toward the Uchiha's fire blast as he completed the spin.

The blast of fire devoured the flak jacket, and in doing so, triggered the explosion note hidden within, Naotaka's insurance against capture.

Blast canceled blast, and an opening, superheated though it was, appeared.

The jounin's completed spin launched his sword through it.

His body would follow.

The young Uchiha blocked the sword, but Naotaka came on like a missile behind as the fire blast dissipated, body-tackling his enemy and driving him to the ground.

They fell to the rooftop with a thud, struggling with hideous chaos. The sharingan was useless this close in, something Naotaka had counted on, and his superior size and strength worked in his favor. Unfortunately the Uchiha boy was no fool, and he retained his kunai, no now it was a struggle to inflict damage quickly before the boy could create space and stab.

Naotaka smashed his face against the Uchiha's, and drove his knees into the stomach, being rewarded with a grunt, but the boy was fast and slick as a snake, and he managed to rake one foot across the jounin's burnt back.

Involuntary reflex drew the older ninja back off his foe, and the youth kicked out with the other foot, driving Naotaka upright and backwards even as he vaulted upwards to stab.

Then he spun with a look of terrific surprise.

Kunai flashed in, striking each of his kunai, one at eye level, the other at the bottom edge of the armor. These two were blocked, but the timing had been offset just slightly, and the third that followed behind split the difference between them. The Uchiha could see the path, could predict it with his sharingan, but he could do nothing but take the strike in his shoulder.

There was a lurch of pain, and his return spin was too slow, Naotaka's fist smashed him in the side of the head and carried him off the rooftop to slam into the ground.

The girl was already running to meet the jounin. "Run?" she asked simply.

"Right," he grabbed her arm and pulled her along.

"Damn you!" the Uchiha shouted from below them, but he would not be able to pursue in time.

Every part of Naotaka's body hurt as he pushed himself to go fast enough to make the walls, to escape the destruction only moments away now, but even through the pain he could only marvel at the girl beside him. To make the attack she did she would have had to anticipate the movements of both ninja in their clutched position, and know exactly how her enemy could respond, and even then she had timed the attacks perfectly, so that even the vaunted sharingan had been bypassed.

They landed in the woods beyond the town walls with thirty seconds to go. "Take cover," Naotaka told the girl. "And don't look back."

"Why?" she whispered.

"You'll know," he answered between gasping breaths.

Exactly twenty-five minutes from his mark Ukita Saito cut a single line of wire with an extension of his chakra, and the restraining circle that had held back the True Red Devil was gone.

Energy flashed out from batteries, racing down wires and lines of chakra throughout the town, running through a hidden network of buried explosion notes and stores of fuel, all precisely timed to go off at once.

A wall of fire materialized on the walls of the town, roaring and raging, red anger fifty feet in height. A cacophony of explosions burst within, and all the world seemed to roar and crackle and shake for long moments.

When the initial burst had subsided, Naotaka grabbed the girl. "Let's move," he told her and then started walking toward the rendezvous point he knew his clones would had gone toward. The white-dressed girl, despite the destruction of the town behind her, made no complaints.

"Where did you learn to shoot?" the jounin asked her over the roar of the ongoing conflagration.

"I was taught by a ninja," the girl explained. "He came to the house often," she referred to the brothel by a simple name that way. "He thought I looked like his dead son, and it amused him to treat me that way, teaching me."

"I see," Naotaka managed. It was reasonable, an older ninja who had been a jounin could be quite rich, and many ninja became eccentric as they got old, as the duties wore them down. He said nothing more until they reached the others.

The girls and one boy stood quietly in a line before his shadow clones, dirty and with tears on their cheeks, but clear eyed and attentive.

Naotaka dismissed his clones and looked at them, this range of children, all now orphaned and without caretakers. "All of you would have died today if I had not saved you," he began frankly, and gestured toward the red sky behind them for emphasis. "As I saved you, and no one else can claim you, your lives are now mine; they belong to jounin Kato Naotaka of Hidden Cloud. Do you understand?"

Slowly each child nodded, brought up in a brothel, they understood obedience.

"Good," he told them. "Your old lives have ended, from today forward you serve Hidden Cloud. I have not yet decided how, but I will make use of you. For now, follow me, I will take you to a safe place." He created another bushin then, a simple basic clone, and even that was a struggle with his depleted chakra. This copy he had lead the children on, taking the point position so he could guard the rear, for whatever that was worth in his state.

The white-dressed girl fell back beside him. "What will you do with us?" She asked him carefully, and curiosity reached out from her startlingly sharp eyes.

"You saw war today,' Naotaka told her. "It is terrible yes?"

She nodded.

"Good, you know that," he nodded as well. "War is terrible, but it is part of our world, and it will not go away, but it can perhaps be changed. I wish to change the way we fight, so that we can win wars and prevent new ones, so no one dares to threaten Hidden Cloud. You, and your siblings," he gestured to the others, using that term to bind them together even though they were clearly not related by blood. "Shall be a part of this. I have many ideas, and you yourself have given me a good one, for you are very talented."

She nodded, but wisely said nothing.

Something struck Naotaka then, and he asked a spontaneous question. "What is your name girl?"

"Yaeko," she replied softly.

"Too simple, and not suited for you," Naotaka told her, for it did not suit her, and he somehow knew what she should be called, the name of the ninja she would become. "That was the name of your old life, and that life is ended. From today on you are Yadome."

"Yadome," she whispered. "Yes, I am Yadome."

Chapter Notes:

Kato Naotaka is named after two generals of the Sengoku period, Kato Kiyomasa (one of the leaders of the Korean invasion under Hideyoshi) and Ii Naotaka (general under Ieyasu and son of Ii Naomasa, the family was famous for dressing its warriors in all red armor).

Denkou Tate no Jutsu – this means 'lightning shield.'

For those who can't guess, the Uchiha Naotaka is fighting is the young Uchiha Itachi.

Yadome means 'arrow cutter' and is the art of knocking or catching projectiles in midair, something she is demonstrably good at.