I Will Become the Wind

CHAPTER 3 | Toad, Fox, Crow

Jiraiya was the first to find the location of Orochimaru's base. At least, that's what he claimed.

They were in the woods on the outskirts of the fishing town, far enough from the shore that they couldn't hear the sea. Buttery daylight filtered through the trees onto the autumn leaves scattered all over the ground.

It would have been a nice place to camp, but there wasn't anything here that suggested the evil lair of a snake-controlling criminal.

"Hm," Jiraiya said, arms crossed. He looked vaguely disappointed. "We might have been too late, after all. I didn't think it'd be that easy. But we might still find something, even if there's no one here."

"This is supposed to be the place?" Naruto asked, squinting around the wooded area. "I can't see anything."

"The last time I was here, I had a pretty good idea of where it was. I took note of it so that I'd be able to come back later," Jiraiya said.

"What? So you already knew where it was? That's cheating! Then what were you doing yesterday?"

"Hey, I wasn't a hundred percent sure. I was originally trying to find a way in that wouldn't tip him off to what I was doing. But that can't be helped now. Things will probably get out of hand anyway if we do find Sasuke, so no point worrying about that. We still want to be careful, though. We'll go in via toad."

"Uh...?"

Jiraiya stepped a few paces away from Naruto and bit his thumb.

"Kuchiyose no Jutsu!"

Minutes later, Naruto was a mixture of impressed and grossed out as they rode inside of a toad's belly, or whatever they were in. The walls, floor and ceiling were all made of the same soft and sticky material Naruto had seen in Jiraiya's other technique, the one he used against Itachi and Kisame in their first confrontation. But it was dark, and the entire thing jostled around with the toad's movements.

"Ugh, do we really have to do this?" Naruto fell against a wall and immediately had to extract himself from some slime. "Didn't you say that Orochimaru probably wasn't here?"

"I said it looks that way from the outside. If I messed up last time, and he realized I was on his trail, it's possible he might have set something up to fool me. But even if he's not here, there might be some of his people left behind. Or traps specifically set around the most obvious entrances and exits. So we go in the unconventional way."

"I can't see where we're going. How do you steer this thing?"

"I don't steer it. It steers us. Now pipe down. I'm trying to listen."

Naruto did as asked, though he had no idea what Jiraiya was trying to listen for. All he could hear was the faint thud of each landing as they bounced, supposedly, to infiltrate the base. Were they shrunk somehow? Or was the toad's stomach huge? Or maybe everything outside of it got bigger?

The movement stopped.

The hinges of the toad's jaw opened and deposited them unceremoniously into a dark hallway. Naruto had to suppress his yechh of disgust as he was covered in slime. He pulled the hem of his shirt down from under his jacket and used it to wipe his face.

The floor was made of flat, interlocking stones, and the walls looked almost like plaster or packed earth. A network of roots rippled inside the ceiling, thicker ones poking through at intervals, and thinner ones hanging down like cobwebs.

A dim, rusty-brown glow barely illuminated the place, though Naruto couldn't see the source of it. It was completely quiet here. It felt like being inside a grave.