While naruto trained in the land of fire in preparation of his training trip with jiraya.
The sand village was on its last legs, now leaf held the power to cut its strings and let it fall or make an alliance where in pretty much only sand benefits of in the moment and let them rebuild in wait of another betrayal.
Many would say that it would not happen, sand would be too utterly shameless to do such a thing.
But those people forgot one thing, this was the shinobi world. A world built on ninja that stabbed the other in the back.
There was no such thing as betrayal in alliances, because that would mean that there was trust between the villages.
Utterly ridiculous!
Trusting the other villages? Never.
Everything was for one's village, everyone was for their own. The village of sand would betray later down the line again.
So there was one more option... take over.
To make the sand a puppet state.
Not too hard, but to keep it hidden to the other three villages would be a challenge. Each of the villages has a number of spies in the other villages.
Konoha too had those spies across the continent, and the state of the sand was more than likely already revealed across the world to each of the great hidden villages.
So they needed to work fast.
The ones sent to do that was none other than Jiraya, Shikaku, Asuma and Shikamaru.
Shikamaru wasn't truly needed but Shikaku wanted to take his son for this mission to show him the ropes if the boy decided in the future he would want to become a jonin commander and pretty much hokage's right hand man.
And thus they walked through the desert, the gold like sand shining with the hellish sun above. It was scorching hot, shikamaru was absolutely fed up.
He shouldn't have come here. His skin was red from the sun. He should have taken more protection from that dawned thing.
He already missed his cloudy sky and wanted to be away from this he'll with no cloud in sight above. Did it even rain over here?
He gazed at his father, sensei and the sannin who did not seem to care at all about the heat...
His mood became even worse, those bastards for sure used some Chakra technique and they did not bother to teach or use it on him.
Was this simply retribution for the deaths he caused to the teammates in his care?
Maybe...
He just sighed, and made a hand seal and using his Chakra to use a shadow jutsu, he started to learn to use it to grab things being able to choke things but he never thought that he would use it to keep his body in a self created shadow.
The heat started to lessen from the scorching sun trying to pray away those shadows but his jutsu resisted.
His father a couple paces ahead looked back, his eyes widening slightly and a soft smile blooming on his face as he looked back ahead.
On the other hand, a rough voice from beside him came.
A voice rough from smoking cigarettes for years, "Shikamaru, I know that you are lazy and I can't make you do anything really but you should start training harder."
Shikamaru scoffed, his eyes rolled. He knew that, he knew that this was not the academy anymore or his junior ninja year.
He was not a genin no more but a chunin...
He was the leader of his future squads, and he needed to become strong enough to not let what happened be an everyday occurrence.
He needed to become strong enough to not let it happen again. He wished to do so.
He was about to say, no. He was gonna focus on his clan jutsu's...
But before that...
Jiraya that led the way, stopped. His hand raised, signaling for the rest to do so as way.
A hand grabbed Jiraya's leg from beneath the sand. Than a spike of earth shot forward towards the sannin that weaved his hands.
A ball of fire shot out of his mouth, touching the spike and exploding.
The man grabbing jiraya's leg finally rose from beneath, getting kicked back by jiraya.
The rest arrived too, rising from beneath the sand. A total of eight shinobi in standard stone attire with their stone headbands.
"Get back home, treehuggers. This is our place now!"
Jiraya gazed at the person that spoke, assuming him to be the team leader.
"Your place? Is the sand village aware of this development?"
"Does that matter? Go hug some trees."
Asuma sighed, sharpening one blade over the other.
"It does. We are sand's allies, you bunch should just go back and play with your stones."
The opposing shinobi did not exactly appreciate that comment.
Both parties ready to fight, beside shikamaru.
All opposing shinobi were probably tokubetsu jonin to elite jonin sent to kill any leaf village shinobi that would come.
This was bullshit. Shikamaru just dropped down to the floor behind jiraya's large frame his hands forming a hand seal as the shinobi from either village watched the other.
A shadow connected from the side of konoha shinobi to that of stone and as the leader realized and tried to step back, he couldn't.
Jiraya moved forward, a rasengan forming in his hand and slamming into his head as shikamaru withdrew his shadow.
The team leader of the stone smashed back, his skull cracking and so did his spine as blood splashed put of his head...
One down... seven to go and they had the numerical advantage.
Shikamaru cursed as each of them made a wall rise beneath their feet and continued weaving seals.
Spitting out large swaths of earth that pushed the leaf shinobi back and created solid ground.