Dust clouds spiralled about their feet, slowly sifting back to parched earth, the dead trail before them succeeded in killing excitement about their mission where the unrelenting beat of sunshine had not.
Summer humidity, hanging about their shoulders like dead weight, seeming to increase in oppressiveness as their travels brought them to these plains, intermittently spotted with skeletal shrubs and dead grey trees. Blazing sun shone down, revealing bones stripped and smouldering, melted faces frozen in screams lost to the ashes and muted embers banked about them.
In the distance, smoke, staining the sky for miles.
Three slouched genin and their laid back jounin instructor remained paused, his perpetually dangling cigarette unlit. Silence carried the crackle of tin foil and nervous foot shuffles with ease across charred landscape.
His kids stared, at this place, this situation. One, disguising the turn of stomach at the scent of burnt flesh behind salt and vinegar and potato chip; uneasy swish of blonde echoing the narrowed cool of blue eyes considering the considerable loss of native flora; slacker, taking in this and more, but choosing instead to lament over the sky, obscured by clouds unnatural.
“All it takes is one spark,” the elder Leaf shinobi uttered calmly, letting filter roll across his lips, before he moved off again, leading down the trail into the bare remains of dried meadow. No matter what their surroundings, they had a mission to complete and Asuma was just glad that the heat wave had already passed them by.
Their homeland was known as Fire Country for a reason, after all.