No TGNH at seven
TGNH -now-.
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TEENAGE GENIN NINJA HEROES
chapter 4
NIGHTMARE
JULY, TWELFTH YEAR AFTER THE ATTACK OF THE KYUUBI
"Who do you think you're talking to?" The tall woman in the bloodspattered dress leaned forward and mock-confided, "I'm the perfect killer!"
Bakusuta Neshan, the leader and most experienced of the four-man team facing her, smiled and shot back, "I take a lot of killing."
Haruno Sakura - the older person by that name - threw her head back and laughed in a way that seemed entirely too human and alive to be coming from the mouth of so soulless and evil a murderer. "well, I guess it's a good thing I brought backup, then."
Then, with a dramatic snap of her fingers, three massive stone sarcophagi erupted out of the dirt like as ominous trees, sprouting from the underworld through the wonders of time-lapse photography.
"N-nani... What the hell is this?" asked Uzumaki Naruto, the shortest of the Genin, whose uncharacteristically pale face was clashing with the fabric of his vibrant orange jumpsuit.
Neshan glanced across the three coffins out of the corner of his eye. "It's called Edo Tensei. It's a kinjutsu that uses the prepared corpse of a human sacrifice as a vessel to anchor a soul pulled from the underworld into this world. In short, it allows the user to raise the dead. It -is- possible to get a... complete ressurrection from it, but I've never heard of anyone actually using it that way. By the time someone is twisted enough to consider it, they're more interested in having a powerful puppet than they are in bringing back the dearly departed."
The coffins opened.
Sasuke flinched as the first of the ragged corpses stepped out of its container. After the way That Woman had kept mocking his memories, he really wasn't surprised to see that she had chosen the most disturbing summons she could think of, but that didn't really make it any easier to handle - although, at least it wasn't one of his parents.
"Well, then," that person who was not, could not be, Sakura, smiled. "I guess it's time for you to meet your ghosts." She cocked her head, affecting to just remember something. "Oh, and gomen-ne, Jounin-san - You'll have to make do with Kakashi's for now, since you've stolen his life."
"Bakusuta Neshan. My name is Bakusuta Neshan."
Six kunai came out and were in flight before any of the younger ninja could blink. Three, trailing seal-covered slips of paper in their wake, buried themselves in the haggard corpses she had summoned... and the other three barely missed deflecting them.
"Shit. Missed."
Again, that disturbing, impossibly natural laugh as their dead came alive in front of them and moved to attack.
* * * * *
Naruto couldn't move. He -could not-. His hands trembled, his mouth was dry, and his throat was squeezed shut tight. His most precious posession, when he was younger, had been a worn, faded photograph of a pretty young woman with blue eyes and a very familiar mischievious grin. He couldn't even regret having brought it to the academy, that day, because he had met Sakura-chan when she came to help him as he was frantically trying to pick up the shreds. "You... you're..."
"That's right." She was short and slender, probably the smallest adult woman he had ever seen, and even the fox-mask pushed high on her head wouldn't have been enough to make her distinctive presence into just another ANBU.
"'Kaasan..." he whispered.
"How touching," Sa- - no, dammit, that devil could -never- be his Sakura-chan - sneered. "Enjoy your reunion while it lasts, sweetie," she told his mother, "then kill him."
Summon and summoner traded a narrow-eyed glare, and then the smaller woman reached up and tossed her mask away. She looked at her son for a moment, drinking in the sight of him like a woman lost in the desert who has stumbled onto an oasis, and smiled warmly. "I can't be sorry for this..."
He flinched.
She laughed, and stepped forward to push his chin up and force him to meet her eyes. "The chance to see my beloved boy grow and become a man? Become a great ninja like his father?" She was only a couple of inches taller than he was, and had to lean -up- to press a kiss onto his forehead. "I could never regret that."
"Demo... if we fight..."
She laughed again and stepped back out of attack range. "I'm dead, remember? You can't hurt me any worse than that... No matter how much a wound hurts, it's just a physical sensation to work past. What kind of ninja would I be if I was afraid of a little pain?"
He took a deep breath and drew a kunai in either hand. "Okay... 'Kaasan. I'll do it."
The straight, tapering sword sheathed across her back slid out in a smooth, effortless arc. "Show me."
* * * * *
"Ohayo, Rin-sensei."
"Ohayo, Neshan-kun. How are Kabuto-kun and Konchuu-chan these days?"
"She... it was a mission, a couple months after you died. But he's doing fine; keeps throwing his Chuunin exams."
"Oh... and you?"
"I'm a Jounin."
"I knew you could. So, I guess we'll have to-" She blinked as his hands came up in a quick series of seals. "Kawarimi?"
The girl who dropped out of the cloud of smoke that technique left behind was fast and good - she caught her balance and evaluated her surroundings even before it had completely cleared. "Wha?"
Rin laughed. "My student seems to have thought you'd have a better chance against me than my summoner."
"Your... Oh." Her student's student - and how odd that felt to think, since the last she'd seen of him he'd still be younger than this girl was now - nodded slightly and settled into a taijutsu stance she didn't know. "Alright, Inuzuka-sensei. But I need to help my teammates, so I can't let you stop me."
"Ara? Inu- oh, the bandages. No, they're just... hiding something I don't like to be reminded of. But you're in a hurry, so let's go."
Sakura blinked. "Hai!"
There was a moment of tense watching, and then they moved. Sakura lunged straight forward, so quickly that the chakra she used to get the neccessary traction blew deep craters with each footfall, and Rin flipped up and back out of the way in a storm of Bunshin.
Being able to deploy jutsu without hand seals was a rare ability that relied on a combination of a certain natural talent at somatic memory and long years upon years of intensive practice - in short, in the user's being able to learn the desired skill so deeply and instinctively that it became as automatic as blinking.
The fact that -Rin- could do it, even for so basic a thing as Bunshin no Jutsu, told Sakura a great many things, none of them good. First, it meant that, despite her relative youth, the Jounin was extremely experienced, and would have a corresponding reserve of strategies and surprises. Second, it meant that the window of time she needed to produce a nin-or-genjutsu was drastically shorter than Sakura's battle plan had accounted for - even if she could only do that with the basic three, that would be enough to distract the younger ninja until she could deploy the more powerful attacks for which inexperience and simple lack of conditioning would allow no counter.
Arrogance and false modesty aside, Sakura knew that, in hand to hand combat, a Chuunin-level Taijutsu specialist - which she -was-, for all intents and purposes - could match or exceed most Jounin who didn't share their specialty. That being the case, her plan had been to push the intensity and proximity of their combat to such a degree that Rin would have no opportunity to pull away and form seals, forcing the competition onto her -own- home ground.
But Rin didn't -need- seals, and that made a difficult position nearly impossible. If the younger ninja wanted to win this, then she'd need to either lay a trap - with no time to prepare or concentrate - slip in and land a winning hit before the ghost could react - which sent her right back to her original problem - or somehow manage to survive until her opponent ran out of chakra.
The trap was probably her best bet. Wires or a shuriken launcher would take too long, a deadfall or pit was completely out of the question... she wasn't carrying enough explosion notes to rely on those... They'd be useful, of course, but her actual plan would have to be based around rolling from Rin's attacks and pretending greater injury than she had truly suffered - the broken wing gambit, as it was called.
For now, shuriken as a distraction, trying to push the Jounin over towards the edge of the clearing they were parallel to. In the woods, her opponent's superior training in stealth and misdirection should, theoretically, move the advantage that way, so unless Rin noticed her efforts and decided to fight them just out of paranoia or sheer cussedness, the other -should- cooperate.
The ghost -did- play along, flipping herself to the side and through a roll before coming up into a crouch and a rapid flicker of hand seals before slamming a fist into the ground before her. "DOTON: FUNKARENSA NO JUTSU!"
Sakura had never heard of the technique beforehand, but 'Eruption Chain' sounded like a name for something with both vertical and linear aspects - as indeed it proved to be, a narrow line of explosions that went off in sequence like a boat through watter, scattering sharp-edged chips of stone shrapnel into the air at perilous speeds. Fortunately, she was already evading, launching herself up and to one side then tumbling carefully away into the underbrush.
The shattered chips of rock stung her legs a bit, but not nearly enough so to justify the gambit she'd be using.
"FUUTON: FUUNOYA NO JUTSU!" -That-, on the other hand, would be perfect, if she could survive it.
The Wind Arrow wasn't terribly destructive, even for one of the relatively inefficient wind ninjutsu, but the slender spears of chakra-locked gas it threw were more than dense enoug to pierce flesh, and their relatively delicate shells had given the jutsu's inventor room to add something else entirely.
They could seek their targets.
Sakura perched on a branch in the lowest level of the forest canopy and waited. Leaf twitch - squirrel. Flutter - songbird taking flight. Faint whistle -
She had had her shuriken ready and used them to intercept most of the transparent distortions coming at her. A careful twist and backwards fall accounted for another's miss and she was able to swat the last two alon their 'shafts' as they tried to arc around to take another pass. A couple of quick, superficial slashes with a last shuriken and an understated yelp of pain, just like those she had kept releasing when Neshan-sensei started to walk the team through the basics of self-control in combat, as a final touch and she could let herself fall backwards into space.
Then she was busy trying to fall in a way that -looked- injured but didn't end up cracking her skull open when she hit the ground. Even -with- that caution the impact was stunning, and she had barely rolled to her feet - with an only half-feigned stagger - when the pop of a Kawarimi and the spearing pain of a stab wound announced her opponent's arrival.
She didn't need any more encouragement than that to lunge away and spin back up into a combat stance.
Rin smiled at her, and twitched a needle-thin blade of chakra out along each index finger. The younger kunoichi swatted her first strike aside effortlessly and intercepted the second with a blindingly quick kick to that elbow, but when she tried to counter-attack the jounin used that tiny opening to snake her uninjured arm around the limb that had deflected it and slash her fingertips across Sakura's triceps.
Then the shorter girl slipped a foot up between their centers of mass and kicked her through a tree. It didn't really slow Rin down and wouldn't have even if she'd still been alive, since that kind of kick, launched from so close, could never build up the speed it would need to injure someone with a Jounin's conditioning. But, it did do what Sakura had intended it to do and open the distance between them.
They paused and assessed each other for a moment, trying to determine the effects of injuries both real and imagined. Sakura's kunai wound had miraculously missed both the major organs and large blood vessels of her lower back, but it was still bleeding steadily. The bloodloss wasn't severe enough to affect her function yet, but likely would if she didn't get it bandaged within the next minute or so. The burning slash across her upper arm was more concerning, since it had required no weapon to inflict, but a carefully hidden tensing of that arm proved that, while it was weakened and would hurt like hell to use, it -did- still work. Best of all, though, she had managed to keep up the pretense of her illusory injuries during the short clash.
Rin made a pro-forma attempt to cover her charge with a swarm of shuriken, but neither of them were in the least surprised when Sakura twisted effortlessly around them and straight into another chakra-blade strike, this time aimed at the major blood vessels of her throat.
Which she ducked smoothly underneath evan as her good hand was reaching up to grab the Jounin's upper arm and use it as a pivot to swing up and around behind her. Rin probably could have escaped the hold without too much trouble, but since Sakura would have been too close for a dangerous kick and would have needed to let go and render a critical moment's warning for an open-hand or weapon-based attack, she chose not to, in favor of shedding momentum and readying herself for another spinning Chakra Mesu strike.
By the time she felt Sakura's knee coming to rest between her shoulderblades and her left hand under her chin, it was too late and they were already falling forwards as the Genin's weight threw her off balance.
Rin's neck broke with the wet, final 'cruch' which is unique to living bone, and her killer started to fish out a medical kit and its bandages as she stood and moved away.
* * * * *
He came out of the Kawarimi tense and ready and facing his opponent.
Her face twisted into a terrible snarl. "You."
"Yes."
"You interrupted me."
"Yes."
Her eyebrow twitched, and then she visibly reigned herself in. "You're going to pay for that," she told him. "Even if I -did- want to talk to you anyway."
"No," he said, and swapped places again, this time with a largish branch on the other side of the clearing.
She threw out a palm, launching a... ripple... of chakra, intense enough to be visible, that crashed through the tree he had landed in and sent its crown tumbling to earth. Fortunately, he had already been in motion, launching himself up and forward in an arc that peaked more than a hundred feet above the ground. Their gazes met for an instant as he seemed to hang in the air, and he smiled and launched both fistfuls of kunai - a full thirty, a personal record - in a ragged and none-to-accurate spray.
Then they multiplied, sixty, one hundred twenty, two hundred forty, more. "kagekunai no jutsu," he murmured, and carefully failed to keep smiling when a tightly controlled whirling sphere of chakra knocked them from the air and scattered them, tumbling, across the entire field.
He landed with a tap, and she laughed.
* * * * *
Sasuke stared, involuntarily meeting swirling red eyes in a face all too much like his own. The other was a young-looking man, seeming not more than twenty, and dressed in the black body-glove and gray armor that, for all of its wearers' usual reputation, came straight out of his own nightmares.
"Shisui-san?" he whispered.
Shisui chose to reply with a battoujutsu strike rather than words. Attacks like it were generally rare in Konoha's sword styles, but had come to be heavily favored against the Uchiha, since their speed meant that, Sharingan or no, they could often be executed before their target could react.
Sparring against Sakura, sasuke reflected as he ducked and rolled away from the flashing blade, had been -remarkably- good practice for dealing with this.
Shisui turned his blinding opening into a broad sweep, but the alteration cost him the split second his target needed to throw himself back and away. "Shisui-san... why are you so angry? What have I done?"
The older of the two pulled up short in disbelief. "What... why... -What- have you-?! You're the one who fucking -killed- me, -ITACHI-!"
Sasuke flinched, and his world seemed to go dim and spinning as his mind involutarily tried to run back through each and every memory of his life, checking and comparing to see if, if... "I'm not Itachi," he choked. "I'm -not-! I'm -Sasuke-! I'm-"
"BULLSHIT!" the other roared, with a handful of cast shuriken. "That face, those cold fucking eyes... You think I'll turn my back again?! I was a fool to think there was ever anything better in you!"
The small 3cm shuriken most Konoha ninja carried were intended more as a nuisance and a distraction than an actual threat. They were compact enough to be carried in large numbers, but their awkward shape and light mass made it extremely difficult to put enough force behind them to put their blades through any amount of flesh, let alone the tough fabric of a shinobi's field uniform. Unless sheer luck - or unlikely skill - put them into an eye or a major blood vessel, they were essentially harmless.
That was the only thing that saved Sasuke's life, since he was too shocked to even react to shisui's attack, let alone -dodge- it. One star buried itself in his thigh, and another slashe across his cheekbone, but all the rest only stabbed at bone or lacerated muscle too dense to penetrate.
Pain is a wonderful focusing agent, and despite his shock, some corner of Sasuke's mind more concerned with survival than emotion or self-worth was able to use his training, both in the Academy and after, to lock away the fear and pain and horror with an internal promise to deal with them later.
In the meantime, he had to either get away from that kodachi or get -it- away from its wielder. In melee combat the weapon gave Shisui more than twice his reach and many times his kiling power, and at longer ranges his active Sharingan would make him almost immune to the genjutsu that Sasuke had been specializing in since his graduation. He knew -some- new ninjutsu, of course, but his opponent would have at least as much and almost certainly more, so -that- was a wash, too.
He didn't bother with the Bunshin he would usually have used before ducking back into the undergrowth - again, because his opponent's Sharingan would have been able to identify the clones at a glance, and made its usual distraction value entirely worthless.
"KATON: HOUSENKA NO JUTSU!" Shisui roared from behind and below him, and the scattering stream of fist-sized fireballs barely missed him as he slipped away, leaving smoldering craters in the bark of the trees he had been standing in front of, and charred, drifting ashes where others had had low, leafy branches. He used the distraction to run up the far side of one of the larger nearby trees and went to 'ground' in its upper boughs, still and quiet as he tried to steady his breathing.
Nuke-Sakura was just as smart as his teammate - she had not only selected their opponents for the greatest possible emotional trauma, but had been careful to select options whose strengths neutralized their own. Most of his arsenal was useless against another Uchiha, and Naruto's... mother, he supposed... was obviously a melee-focused weapons user, which would make her extremely difficult for her range-focused son, and so on. Probably if he could trade off with even one of his teammates they would be able to defeat them and gang up on the remainder, but the woman's madness obviously hadn't affected her ability to plan, and she -had- to have known that just as well as he-
"I can hear you, you know," came the choked, hating voice from below, and even as he threw himself out of the way of the Ryuuka the figurative lightbulb of inspiration was going off over his head.
It was a well known maxim that a genjutsu could no affect a sense that its target did not have, and equally certain that a target who could percieve more with their targeted sense than the genjust's caster could - like a Yuuhi's ability to see the farther colors, or an Inuzuka's boosted sense of smell - would be able to use that greater acuity to break the illusion by picking out flaws that the caster couldn't habe known to correct.
From that, logically, one of the Sharingan's oft-suspected but never-admitted weaknesses could be deduced - because it was based in its owner's -visual- sense, it shouldn't be able to assist against genjutsu targeted at the other four senses. Admittedly, those other four represented less than ten percent of all known genjutsu techniques, but he still knew far more than ten techniques. If any of those others were suitable...
Ah. -That- one.
He lunged back into cover, slung off his pack, and used Kawarimi to swap it into a tree some several hundred feet away. As expected, Shisui caught the motion and sent his next attack after the pack. The shade would check, of course, if only to gloat, but the few moments of confusion that would take were enough for Sasuke to finish his seals, raise his fingers to his mouth, and-
*PHWEEEEET!*
"Calling for your dupes, -Itachi-? They can't help you!"
Sasuke checked his resources - shuriken, three kunai, and some wire. His tags and the Fuuma Shuriken had been in his pack, and there hadn't been time to retrieve them. Then he shouted back, repeating what he knew to be a useless argument. "I'm not Itachi! I'm Sasuke! You've been dead for four -years-, Shisui-san!"
He had prepared himself to dodge another attack, but Shisui chose to rage at him instead. "Bullshit! You think I don't recognize those soulless eyes?! You think I don't know that heartless face?! DO YOU REALLY THINK I'M STUPID ENOUGH TO LET YOU STAB ME IN THE BACK AGAIN?!"
To recognize his eyes... his were the same as he'd seen... Sasuke shook his shock off and tumbled forward and down out of the tree. It was a long fall, but a lasso of wire and a conveniently placed branch let him turn his vertical momentum into a precisely measured amount of the horizontal kind - by tugging the loop closed, he made the wire bite into and through the wood, cutting his anchor free at precisely the right moment.
Shisui sneered slightly, and set himself for a ducking cut that would combine Sasuke's momentum with the blade's edge and motion to quite literally cut the Genin in half.
The younger ninja smirked and bend himself double in midair with one of his remaining kunai in hand. When the inevitable moment came, he straightened and kicked out and bounced himself off of the kodachi's edge - safely, since the steel kunai acted as a shield for his sandal's relatively vulnerable sole.
The dead man had been thrown slightly off by the heavy impact where he had only planned for the usual resistance to a cut, and the time it took him to recover and come back on balance were enough for Sasuke to flip back and land and catch the kunai whose hilt dropped neatly into his hand. There was a deep, bright score along the flat of one side and the damage would weaken its structure enough that it wouldn't be worth keeping past the end of this battle, but it had come through the experience much better than his foot would have. They traded looks for an instant - Shisui snarling and bringing his sword up to strike, Sasuke calm and already poised to attack.
Then he drove the kunai into his heart.
Shisui grinned and coughed up a moutheful of an ugly black liquid that smoked in the open air and burned as it splattered across the living ninja's skin. "You can't kill a corpse, Itachi!"
And then he was swinging and Sasuke was flipping back out of the way as the kodachi came so close - -too- close - to his nose. "I've dealt with that before," he sneered, remembering those nightmarish puppets that had come for Tazuna as he threw his two remaining blades - not at Shisui, but into the trees on either side of them, where they served to anchor the glittering strands of wire stretched after them.
Shisui lunged again - and had he always been that slow, or was it being dead that was throwing him off? Or maybe he was just too used to Neshan-sensei and Sakura - and Sasuke ducked under it with a spin on his heel and a twist of his wrists as he passed them over his head and then he was sprinting away and pumping chakra into the singing strands of metal.
The revenant's eyes widened. "No," he said, in the spit-second before the wires went taunt and their closing loops sliced his body into a dozen different pieces.
Sasuke skidded to a halt and turned back to assess his handiwork, and his eyes widened as he saw the scattered chunks begin to melt back together inot a coherent whole. Dammit! What did it take to finish him?! It was like trying to fight some unstoppable juggernaught or...
His mind flashed back to the seal-laden tag that Nuke-Sakura had buried in each of the three ghosts.
...golem.
Obviously, the flesh shell didn't matter - he could cut it into as many pieces as he liked and it would still recover. But damage the tag and, like any fuuinjutsu, it would be shattered.
Easy enough.
Shisui was pulling himself upright now, face a mask of rage and his kodachi lying forgotten to one side as his fingers flexed through involuntary strangling motions. Sasuke met his eyes and smiled anyway, and triggered the genjutsu he had set up earlier.
From as far away as its caster was standing the noise was merely skull-splitting, but at point-blank range it had an almost physical impact - Shisui doubled over and invluntarily brought his hands up to try and protect his ears, and Sasuke could see more of that acidic black ooze trickling out from beneath their protection.
The late ANBU was tough and well-trained and his fall went no farther than his knees, but it gave Sasuke the time to take three long bounds backwards and run through the rapid seals needed to...
"KATON: RYUUKA NO JUTSU!" The Dragon Flame was the most intense ninjutsu he knew, and its burning spear carved straight though its target's chest and skull. He had already started to dissolve when Sasuke's control relaxed and let the stream of flame spread out and flare over the corpse.
* * * * *
When she got ahold of that 'Black Guardian' character, she was going to give him one of her special treatments. Perhaps something along the lines of what she'd given Shino, with the ants and the sulfuric acid and that -lovely- amplification jutsu.
Still, while he might have sold her a line about having a -real- second chance, since this place was so warped and deluded from what had actually happened, it -was- a halfway decent playground, so maybe she'd only regenerate him once.
Nah.
She had to laugh, though - this guy might be an imposter trying to fill shoes too big for him, but he wasn't actually half bad for all that. Not too smart, maybe - he obviously didn't know when it was time to run - and real short on actual -power-, but he had some skills and he was no slouch at applying them.
Still. She had questions to ask him, so she started working up a heavy binding jutsu - Senei Jashuu should do the trick. He crouched, just slightly, and her Byakugan saw a minute flicker of chakra arc down and ground itself into the earth a tiny split second before he vanished in a brilliant yellow flash.
Two flashes, actually - one where he had been standing and the other right behind her back, and very close, so close that his entire face was hidden in her blind spot. His hands opened, releasing a cloud of tiny slips of paper to flutter in the air, each of them bearing... Her hands flickered through the seals automatically. Kawa-
*flickerFLASH*
-rimi and he was there -before- her, grinning, with more Explosion Notes drifting on the breeze and already flaring-
*flickerFLASH*
*BA-BOOOM*
She rolled forward out of the burning tree and landed on her feet with a slam. Pieces of charred flesh tore free at the impact, leaving blood to ooze out for the few moments before her regeneration seal repaired the damage and generated new skin underneath the old, leaving entire blackened sheets to crackle and dissolve away.
He was standing on the other side of the field, watching her, and as he raised his hand to point straight at her one of the complex knots of chakra bound to five of his Heavenly Gates spun free and up and out of his arm and finger.
*GA-KAM!*
What she'd just seen was impossible - a jutsu being triggered without any external hand seals or internal chakra control - and that preoccupied her for the fraction of a second it took for the attack to hit her.
Raide no Jutsu was a powerful elemental attack, one of the most dangerous of the Lightning types, but it had been a long time since she was weak and pathetic enough to roll over after only a single blow. She came back upright, ignoring the quickly fading burn through her chest, set herself... and moved.
She had things she wanted to know, so she didn't hit him full force. Just enough to liquify his intestines, rather than scattering fragments of his extremeties across the landscape. He doubled over most satisfactorilly, but then vanished with another yellow flash and flicker of chakra.
Vanished to behind her, where he was lunging forward with kunai in hand. She twisted to respond, but-
*flickerFLASH*
-he was crouching down low to her right and exploding upward, blade-first, and this time she was too slow to stop it going home but not too slow to bring that elbow down, hard-
*flickerFLASH*
-and he was falling towards her with another kunai in hand for a killing stroke as she turned her momentum from the previous two blows into additional speed that brought her foot up and across before he could react and blasted him across the field and through three seperate trees.
"ow, ow, ow, -shit-," she heard in the distance, and then-
*flickerFLASH*
-he was standing across the field, glaring. His hand came up - another slight flicker of chakra around it - and then he was holding a slip of paper, which he threw with a triggering chakra burst like for an Explosion Note and as the Jutsu unwrapped and expanded to take effect she recognized it, another Raide but this time she wasn't shocked and twisted aside.
He threw a second Raide, and a third, four, five, six, seven and then she was in the right position and the right balance to launch herself forward and under the eighth and slam a full-power blow into his chest and knock him flying while the ninth Raide Note fluttered harmlessly to the ground.
Something was bothering her. Something she hadn't recognized, something she was missing... wait.
A slight flicker of chakra... Her eyes widened. "Oh." And if that was, then... her eyes darted around, cateloging the kunai he had scattered across the battlefield with that entirely too obvious leap. "Oh."
He blinked as she formed the first seal - his hand came up - second - twisted slightly - third - molded the chakra - fourth - caught the Raide Note as it slid out into his palm - fifth - threw it - sixth...
She smiled, and the now blank sheet of paper fluttered to the ground. He swore in a language she didn't recognize.
* * * * *
Naruto's eyes narrowed as he rushed forwards, and somehow he wasn't surprised when that straight, tapered sword flicked through the space where he ahd been the moment before his instincts threw him sideways.
"Ne, Naruto-kun," his mother said. "That won't be enough. I know you can do better."
He grinned and flicked both of his kunai at her, then sprinted to the right as he ran through the seals for- "FUUTON: SHIROKAZE NO JUTSU!"
She batted the physical blades casually aside and wrapped her sword in a brilliant sheath of chakra to slice the rushing stream of the White Wind and divert it harmlessly to either side, then laughed. "So quick! That's excellent!"
He narrowed his eyes. She might or might not be able to do the same thing with more concentrated jutsu types like water or earth, but keeping that heavy blade in hand would keep her from forming hand seals - which would mean that -
Oh. Or she could do that.
His mother finsihed her jutsu's last seal - tiger, with her sword balanced between thumb and forefingers the way Sensei had taught him to do with sealing scrolls and drew back and inhaled as she brought her fingertips to her lips.
He knew what came after -that-, and wasted no time hustling through Kawarimi - and not a moment too soon, as the Goukakyu's blast shattered the tree he had been standing in front of. Kagebunshin as he landed - his new location was closer than his last, and she was sprinting rapidly across what distance there was - and then straight into another Kawarimi as she ducked under one clone's kick and casually speared another in passing as she spun in close so quickly that her next killing thrust scattered sparks off the small boulder he had switched with.
She spun quickly to face where he was standing on the other side of the clearing as his clones scattered and pelted into the trees. "Naruto-kun," she said, almost whispered in the still quiet of Naminokuni's late afternoon. "Kage Bunshin is dangerous. If you..."
Her son shook his head quickly and tried to grin reassuringly. "No, no! I've got the endurance for it, 'Kaachan, and..." abruptly, he dropped the mask and let one hand rest gently across his belly - and the seal branded on it. "It's not like I can mistake which one's the real me, is it?"
She sighed in relief. "All right," she said, then shook off the reflective mood and chages stances - body perpendicular to him, knees bent and feet spread wide, right hand holding the sword's hilt above that shoulder and the other steadying the blade as it sloped forward and down. Her smile widened to a grin, and her eyes gleamed devilishly. "So, what next?"
Naruto took a deep, pained breath, and braced himself. "This," he said, and then his clones launched a savage barrage of ninjutsu from all sides.
For a moment or two, it was hard to see anything past the washing tides of air and water chakra and the billowing clouds of Katon flame and Doton dust, with all of it lit from within by the blinding glare of lightning jutsu. Then the obscurement cleared and he could see her tattered, bedraggled form standing with that long spearpoint blad held weakly in one hand.
She was smiling. "Ranged ninjutsu applied at a rate I can't match, and from too many different directions to deflect or counter. Well done. But, I'm already dead, Naruto-kun. -Neither- of us can stop me as while her seal is still buried in my neck."
Naruto's thoughts hiccuped as he realized the implications of her words. Sensei had said that Edo Tensei anchored the spirits of the dead to specially prepared corpses, and in retrospect it was obvious that he and that -nightmare- that had stolen Sakura-chan's face had gone through with the thrown kunai was about whether or not she was going to be able to apply the final elements of the anchoring process. His mother's words had not only called that to his attention, but had also as much as flat-out -told- him that breaking that final seal would shatter the jutsu and...
He could see in her eyes that she knew -exactly- what she'd just told him.
He knew, he could tell half a dozen different ways to take advantage of that fact, and twice as many ways to get close enough to do so. Knowning how the thing was possible made it suddenly, horribly real. "I understand, 'Kaa-chan," he whispered. "But... I can't."
She looked stricken. "Can't?"
"I can't hurt someone I love like that. I can't... be alone again. I can't let you die again."
"Naruto-kun..." his mother cast about for a moment, desperately. "This won't las forever." As she spoke, she was walking towards him - slowly, haltingly, unwillingly closing the distance between them. "There's only so much chakra in the seal - I can... feel it running out."
"But..." he was crying freely, now.
Their eyes met, and hers were no drier than his. "I have to try," she choked, "but, to kill my own son... I'd -rather- die."
"'Kaa-chan..."
"Please," she begged... and struck.
He ducked away, but not quickly enough, and however talented he might have been, she was better-trained and far more experienced. If the clones he had dispatched for his earlier attempt at ninjutsu hadn't come piling out of the trees and swarmed over her, then he almost certainly would have died.
She fought brilliantly, he thought as he scrabbled back out of her immediate reach. There wasn't a single motion she made that didn't end in the sharp 'pop' o a dispersing bunshin, and his eyes widened in horror as he saw the last of them vanish.
His mother stepped forwards, sword raised. "You -are- a great ninja, Naruto-kun. More than your father and I ever dared to dream." She took a slow, wavering breath. "Is there... anything... anything you'd like to say?"
He met her eyes, and saw that they were as wet as his own. "I love you, 'Kaachan."
The explosion note the last clone had wrapped around the kunai it had buried in the back of her neck was only a small one, and that batch of Kagebunshin couldn't have had much power left, so its detonation was only enough to outline her figure in flame and create a shallow crater in her... substance.
But that crater went deep enough.
She staggered, eyes wide and shocked, then fell to her knees and raised one hand to watch as a wash of earth-brown seemed to flow up from her fingertips, as though the life in her was being drained away through some point higher on her body. Then, as the earth and sand of that hand began to dissolve away into dust and the brown reached her shoulders, she looked up and met his eyes with a smile. "Naruto..." she said, and now her neck was covered. "I'm... so proud..."
He wanted to look away. He wanted to cry. But every moment, every memory, was precious as nothing else in his life could ever be, and so he forced himself to watch as the life in her face was swallowed and the reflection of it swept away as dust on the evening wind.
* * * * *
"Checkmate," Sakura said. Her opponent knew what jutsu that was, from his expression, and he knew what it did, and knew there was no point in pushing things until -she- came to -him-.
He started to walk across the battlefield. "Fuuinshuku no Jutsu. Not many people know that. I'd figured Orochimaru might think of it, but... Damn."
She giggled. "Oh, you -are- ambitious, planning to fight one of the Sannin."
"I'm already doing that, or close enough. Besides, you never know if you don't try."
"Y'know, I think you might have managed it," she thought out loud. "Do they tell you you're a genius? Because they should - figuring out how to bind complex Ninjutsu to written Notes, let alone your own Heavenly Gates, and that fake Shunshin of yours... Using seals built into kunai which you could throw where you wanted to go as anchors for an instantaneous transposition jutsu... That was brilliant."
"Fake, hell. This's all the Body Flicker ever was."
Her eyes widened, and she tapped her chin. "Really? You must have started very early, to have Yondaime there to teach you."
"He didn't." Neshan's patient progress stopped just outside that range which she could cover in a single lunge.
"Sugoi." She cocked her head as his eyes narrowed in concentration. "Where's Kakashi? Because you know you're impossible."
"Elsewhere."
Her eyes flashed at his evasion, and then she sniffed. "This is -wrong-. Even -he- isn't a big enough hypocrite to run away and leave a team without their sensei. So -where- the -fuck- is Team 7's -real- Jounin!?" she asked herself.
Raiken, the Lightning Blade, funneled a constant stream of chakra out of the user's palm, which extended out to a distance of perhaps a foot before arcing back into the user's Inner Coil System. It wasn't really anywhere close to as destructive as the Chidori it had inspired, nor any technique on that level, but in close combat it was more flexible, and it added noticably to the user's reach - which, in combination, was why he kept a single execution of it as one of his precious eight reserve techniques.
*GAZAZAKRAKZAKRAKZAZA*
"RIGHT HERE!" He lunged, sweeping the flaring, popping blade of raw chakra up and around. She dodged, leaning back - barely - out of the way, and he brought his other foot forward to come on balance and transferred the jutsu from right hand to left - ignoring the shocking bolt of pain as his Inner Coils system protested the unaccustomed load - and into a blinding thrust that she ducked under by falling back onto her hands then flipped back up and over as he brought the Raiken back down and then she was upright and he was coming forward again as she turned, started to spin...
"HAKKESHOU KAITEN!"
And then he was flying through the air and everything along the front of his body was a single mass of pain.
He crashed to the ground and came back up on all fours with his uniform coat and vest fluttering in tatters over gleaming, unscratched armor from head to toe, but she was standing twenty feet away and smiling, and he met her eyes defiantly and the world was black and green and blue and red and spinning and melting and merging and...
He was lying on a table, with his limbs and head tied down. The sky was red, and the sun black.
"Tsukiyomi," he said. "An offensive visual genjutsu based on the fully activated function of the Madoiringan bloodline. It allows the user to take full control of the target's senses, including that of time. However, due to the complexity of the task and the delicacy of the neccessary pupil charictaristics when compared to the neccessary chakra load, subjective duration is limited to a maximum of seventy-two hours." A pause. "Tsukiyomi, and -you-. Fuck."
She leaned forward into his vision and laughed. "Isn't it, though? And now, would you like to tell me everything you know before, or -after- I start?"
"I'm stubborn. After, please - but do remember you're on a time limit." He grinned like a death's head. "I will."
She laughed again, and picked up the first scalpel.
* * * * *
"You're very good," said a woman's voice from behind her, and Sakura froze and spun to look when she heard it.
Rin smiled and twisted her head as though trying to relieve a sore neck. "You would have killed a ninja two full grades above you and walked away without any major injuries... if I were really alive."
The Genin stared in shock, but her racing mind came up with a plan in almost the same instant that instinct had her hop over the sweeping low kick Rin had launched after replacing the shrub behind her. It was desperate, stupid, and almost completely suicidal, but it was also the only way she could think of to stop and opponent who could regenerate like -that-.
"You seemed too alive to be just a construct - but I guess that that would make sense, from what Sensei said about this 'Edo Tensei' thing." She brush a lock of hair that had escaped its braid back out of her eyes and resolutely ignored the bolt of pain the motion sent stabbing out from the upper edge of the patch of chill stickiness she could feel starting to creep down her leg. "Che!" she sniffed, for once relishing the departure from the femine speech her mother had worked so hard to teach her. "Now I -really- don't have time for this!"
"No, I guess you don't," agreed the woman who had made it so. "But if your control is always as good as it was while you were tweaking your core chakra to mislead me like that, you might want to look into learning some medical ninjutsu before the next time you go out in the field."
Sakura laughed, and this time the pain was too deep to completely ignore and so sharp she winced visibly. "I'll do that. But let's do this, first."
"Right!" Rin laughed too, then began to seal.
Even with chakra anchoring them to the ground, there was a strict physical limit to the amount of traction that Sakura's feet could exert. Against most opponents, what she -could- do to increase the usual amount was more than enough, but her ressurected foe's ability to carry out an essentially instantaneous replacement mean that even the time it would take her to accellerate though her target's reach would be too long.
Which was why she'd dragged this into the forest in the first place. Rather than forwards, she sprang -back-, bringing her legs up as she did so to plant them flat against the trunk of the tree behind her.
And, abruptly, traction was no longer an issue.
She hung in that gravity-defying crouch for the moment or so it took to draw a kunai in each hand - not long enough for Rin to think and suspect what she intended - then launched herselfin a flatt, blurring arc quicker than even -she- had expected.
The sudden lightness where her braid's weight had been and the chill, liquid hiss of a water ninjutsu an inch or so from her ear told her that she had moved not a moment too soon - and then her body mass and the speed of her flight were concentrating all their inertia behind the razor-fine points of her kunait and driving them forcibly into the gaps between the dead woman's shoulder bones.
There was no chance of bleeding her out, of course, and she'd be able to pull the weapons free with her teeth if nothing else, but all Sakura needed was a moment.
And, as she vaulted upand over the weapons and Rin tried to turn her own fall intoa vertical couble-kick, she knew that she had it. The Jounin's sandals caughter her on her earlier wound, but the pain wasn't enough to spoil her landing as she sank down low to the ground and slapped a hand against the small of her opponent's back.
Then she ran like hell.
Rin had only a small moment to smile and say, "Bravo!" before the stack of seven overcharged explosion notes went off as one.
* * * * *
The nightmare wearing his student's face was glaring as the world finally spun back into reality around him. "How the fuck did you do that?!"
Neshan chuckled, drily, and forced his screaming body back into a combat stance. "Think about it."
She crouched and went through three quick seals before extending her clawed hand in front of her, with the other bracing that wrist.
*BACHICHICHICHICHICHICHI*
Nothing else in all the world sounded quite like that. Even at his best, he couldn't dodge a Chidori - and after the Tsukiyomi, he wasn't anywhere even -close- to that. Which meant that he'd have to endure it. The flip side of that, of course, was to carry the Lightning Edge home, she'd have to enter -his- range... As vicious and destructive as Kakashi's brainchild might be, it still couldn't equal the Shikouseibaku's shattering power - and he had three of those left.
He set himself, and waited.
"I don't care what you know anymore," she yelled over the roar of escaping chakra. "You've become a problem."
*CHICHICHICHICHICHICHICHI*
Seen in animation, Chidori looked stupid and obvious - simply running, clutching a ball of lightning. The difference between that and reality, he had a split second to think, not for the first time, was really nothing more than simple speed - speed that drove the eyes to tearing slits from wind force, speed that shifted the entire world around the attacker into a flashing blur - speed that could cover hundreds of feet literally in the blink of an eye.
He knew, as he made it, that she would see and react to his counterstrike. Fortunately - from one point of view - her response was as he had expected.
The Shikouseibaku received its effectiveness thanks to the way its individual component streams converged - the first, and most obvious effect, was that having a number of different forces acting inwards in a ring combined their overall effect to transfer the greatest amount of energy to that portion of the target. The second was that, by having several different rings going off in sequence, not only would the overall energy be amplified again, but it - and the physical matter being incidentally carried along in the rush - would be driven and directed -into- and -through- the target, with such intensity that no realistic defense could hope to resist it.
Chidori disrupted other jutsu by applying such intense energies that the organization of the opponent's effort dissolved like butter dropped in a fire. The Shikou's finely tuned timing made it -more- vulnerable, not less, and the strike she had adjusted to meet his own blasted it outwards into scattered shreds - and then continued on to do the same along the entire line of his arm, from wrist to shoulder.
And then her momentum carried her hand out past his body and, as he had planned all along, he was spinning as he fell and bringing his right leg up and out -just- quickly enough to brush his toe across the skin over her nearer kidney.
Again, the sixty-four streams. Again, the flare. Again, the concussion.
It threw her up and away as momentum and gravity slammed him down to skid along the ground, and even before he looked to follow her he was forcing the one-handed seals for a basic medical ninjutsu past the building pain. Even the greatest medic-nin would take time to recover from having half of her internal organs explosively relocated, and -this- kind of bleeding couldn't wait.
It hurt, cauterizing his shoulder like that, but he didn't have more than a moment before she recovered and he had to make his move in that window. Her stomach looked like raw meat and he landed on it with one knee, and his hand stabbed down as her eyes widened...
The Shikouseibaku annihilated her head and most of her shoulders, and dug a deep hole into the soft earth.
Then she poofed away into smoke and a freight train hit him in the chest and knocked him tumbling.
He rolled back upright and kneeled where he had landed, remaining hand splayed out, while his chest heaved as he tried to regain his breath. When he looked up to meet her eyes again - no danger of a second Tsukiyomi, since the shock of performing that technique would have stunned the fine muscles neccessary to control it for some time yet - her lips were drawn back from her teeth in a horrible snarl, and, for the first time, her hunched posture told him that she hadn't completely repaired the damage he had done her.
They stared at each other for a long, hating moment, and then she drew herself up and spoke. "You'd have eaten Orochimaru alive. But I'm better than he is, and now you're mine."
TO BE CONTINUED...
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."
TGNH -now-.
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TEENAGE GENIN NINJA HEROES
chapter 4
NIGHTMARE
JULY, TWELFTH YEAR AFTER THE ATTACK OF THE KYUUBI
"Who do you think you're talking to?" The tall woman in the bloodspattered dress leaned forward and mock-confided, "I'm the perfect killer!"
Bakusuta Neshan, the leader and most experienced of the four-man team facing her, smiled and shot back, "I take a lot of killing."
Haruno Sakura - the older person by that name - threw her head back and laughed in a way that seemed entirely too human and alive to be coming from the mouth of so soulless and evil a murderer. "well, I guess it's a good thing I brought backup, then."
Then, with a dramatic snap of her fingers, three massive stone sarcophagi erupted out of the dirt like as ominous trees, sprouting from the underworld through the wonders of time-lapse photography.
"N-nani... What the hell is this?" asked Uzumaki Naruto, the shortest of the Genin, whose uncharacteristically pale face was clashing with the fabric of his vibrant orange jumpsuit.
Neshan glanced across the three coffins out of the corner of his eye. "It's called Edo Tensei. It's a kinjutsu that uses the prepared corpse of a human sacrifice as a vessel to anchor a soul pulled from the underworld into this world. In short, it allows the user to raise the dead. It -is- possible to get a... complete ressurrection from it, but I've never heard of anyone actually using it that way. By the time someone is twisted enough to consider it, they're more interested in having a powerful puppet than they are in bringing back the dearly departed."
The coffins opened.
Sasuke flinched as the first of the ragged corpses stepped out of its container. After the way That Woman had kept mocking his memories, he really wasn't surprised to see that she had chosen the most disturbing summons she could think of, but that didn't really make it any easier to handle - although, at least it wasn't one of his parents.
"Well, then," that person who was not, could not be, Sakura, smiled. "I guess it's time for you to meet your ghosts." She cocked her head, affecting to just remember something. "Oh, and gomen-ne, Jounin-san - You'll have to make do with Kakashi's for now, since you've stolen his life."
"Bakusuta Neshan. My name is Bakusuta Neshan."
Six kunai came out and were in flight before any of the younger ninja could blink. Three, trailing seal-covered slips of paper in their wake, buried themselves in the haggard corpses she had summoned... and the other three barely missed deflecting them.
"Shit. Missed."
Again, that disturbing, impossibly natural laugh as their dead came alive in front of them and moved to attack.
* * * * *
Naruto couldn't move. He -could not-. His hands trembled, his mouth was dry, and his throat was squeezed shut tight. His most precious posession, when he was younger, had been a worn, faded photograph of a pretty young woman with blue eyes and a very familiar mischievious grin. He couldn't even regret having brought it to the academy, that day, because he had met Sakura-chan when she came to help him as he was frantically trying to pick up the shreds. "You... you're..."
"That's right." She was short and slender, probably the smallest adult woman he had ever seen, and even the fox-mask pushed high on her head wouldn't have been enough to make her distinctive presence into just another ANBU.
"'Kaasan..." he whispered.
"How touching," Sa- - no, dammit, that devil could -never- be his Sakura-chan - sneered. "Enjoy your reunion while it lasts, sweetie," she told his mother, "then kill him."
Summon and summoner traded a narrow-eyed glare, and then the smaller woman reached up and tossed her mask away. She looked at her son for a moment, drinking in the sight of him like a woman lost in the desert who has stumbled onto an oasis, and smiled warmly. "I can't be sorry for this..."
He flinched.
She laughed, and stepped forward to push his chin up and force him to meet her eyes. "The chance to see my beloved boy grow and become a man? Become a great ninja like his father?" She was only a couple of inches taller than he was, and had to lean -up- to press a kiss onto his forehead. "I could never regret that."
"Demo... if we fight..."
She laughed again and stepped back out of attack range. "I'm dead, remember? You can't hurt me any worse than that... No matter how much a wound hurts, it's just a physical sensation to work past. What kind of ninja would I be if I was afraid of a little pain?"
He took a deep breath and drew a kunai in either hand. "Okay... 'Kaasan. I'll do it."
The straight, tapering sword sheathed across her back slid out in a smooth, effortless arc. "Show me."
* * * * *
"Ohayo, Rin-sensei."
"Ohayo, Neshan-kun. How are Kabuto-kun and Konchuu-chan these days?"
"She... it was a mission, a couple months after you died. But he's doing fine; keeps throwing his Chuunin exams."
"Oh... and you?"
"I'm a Jounin."
"I knew you could. So, I guess we'll have to-" She blinked as his hands came up in a quick series of seals. "Kawarimi?"
The girl who dropped out of the cloud of smoke that technique left behind was fast and good - she caught her balance and evaluated her surroundings even before it had completely cleared. "Wha?"
Rin laughed. "My student seems to have thought you'd have a better chance against me than my summoner."
"Your... Oh." Her student's student - and how odd that felt to think, since the last she'd seen of him he'd still be younger than this girl was now - nodded slightly and settled into a taijutsu stance she didn't know. "Alright, Inuzuka-sensei. But I need to help my teammates, so I can't let you stop me."
"Ara? Inu- oh, the bandages. No, they're just... hiding something I don't like to be reminded of. But you're in a hurry, so let's go."
Sakura blinked. "Hai!"
There was a moment of tense watching, and then they moved. Sakura lunged straight forward, so quickly that the chakra she used to get the neccessary traction blew deep craters with each footfall, and Rin flipped up and back out of the way in a storm of Bunshin.
Being able to deploy jutsu without hand seals was a rare ability that relied on a combination of a certain natural talent at somatic memory and long years upon years of intensive practice - in short, in the user's being able to learn the desired skill so deeply and instinctively that it became as automatic as blinking.
The fact that -Rin- could do it, even for so basic a thing as Bunshin no Jutsu, told Sakura a great many things, none of them good. First, it meant that, despite her relative youth, the Jounin was extremely experienced, and would have a corresponding reserve of strategies and surprises. Second, it meant that the window of time she needed to produce a nin-or-genjutsu was drastically shorter than Sakura's battle plan had accounted for - even if she could only do that with the basic three, that would be enough to distract the younger ninja until she could deploy the more powerful attacks for which inexperience and simple lack of conditioning would allow no counter.
Arrogance and false modesty aside, Sakura knew that, in hand to hand combat, a Chuunin-level Taijutsu specialist - which she -was-, for all intents and purposes - could match or exceed most Jounin who didn't share their specialty. That being the case, her plan had been to push the intensity and proximity of their combat to such a degree that Rin would have no opportunity to pull away and form seals, forcing the competition onto her -own- home ground.
But Rin didn't -need- seals, and that made a difficult position nearly impossible. If the younger ninja wanted to win this, then she'd need to either lay a trap - with no time to prepare or concentrate - slip in and land a winning hit before the ghost could react - which sent her right back to her original problem - or somehow manage to survive until her opponent ran out of chakra.
The trap was probably her best bet. Wires or a shuriken launcher would take too long, a deadfall or pit was completely out of the question... she wasn't carrying enough explosion notes to rely on those... They'd be useful, of course, but her actual plan would have to be based around rolling from Rin's attacks and pretending greater injury than she had truly suffered - the broken wing gambit, as it was called.
For now, shuriken as a distraction, trying to push the Jounin over towards the edge of the clearing they were parallel to. In the woods, her opponent's superior training in stealth and misdirection should, theoretically, move the advantage that way, so unless Rin noticed her efforts and decided to fight them just out of paranoia or sheer cussedness, the other -should- cooperate.
The ghost -did- play along, flipping herself to the side and through a roll before coming up into a crouch and a rapid flicker of hand seals before slamming a fist into the ground before her. "DOTON: FUNKARENSA NO JUTSU!"
Sakura had never heard of the technique beforehand, but 'Eruption Chain' sounded like a name for something with both vertical and linear aspects - as indeed it proved to be, a narrow line of explosions that went off in sequence like a boat through watter, scattering sharp-edged chips of stone shrapnel into the air at perilous speeds. Fortunately, she was already evading, launching herself up and to one side then tumbling carefully away into the underbrush.
The shattered chips of rock stung her legs a bit, but not nearly enough so to justify the gambit she'd be using.
"FUUTON: FUUNOYA NO JUTSU!" -That-, on the other hand, would be perfect, if she could survive it.
The Wind Arrow wasn't terribly destructive, even for one of the relatively inefficient wind ninjutsu, but the slender spears of chakra-locked gas it threw were more than dense enoug to pierce flesh, and their relatively delicate shells had given the jutsu's inventor room to add something else entirely.
They could seek their targets.
Sakura perched on a branch in the lowest level of the forest canopy and waited. Leaf twitch - squirrel. Flutter - songbird taking flight. Faint whistle -
She had had her shuriken ready and used them to intercept most of the transparent distortions coming at her. A careful twist and backwards fall accounted for another's miss and she was able to swat the last two alon their 'shafts' as they tried to arc around to take another pass. A couple of quick, superficial slashes with a last shuriken and an understated yelp of pain, just like those she had kept releasing when Neshan-sensei started to walk the team through the basics of self-control in combat, as a final touch and she could let herself fall backwards into space.
Then she was busy trying to fall in a way that -looked- injured but didn't end up cracking her skull open when she hit the ground. Even -with- that caution the impact was stunning, and she had barely rolled to her feet - with an only half-feigned stagger - when the pop of a Kawarimi and the spearing pain of a stab wound announced her opponent's arrival.
She didn't need any more encouragement than that to lunge away and spin back up into a combat stance.
Rin smiled at her, and twitched a needle-thin blade of chakra out along each index finger. The younger kunoichi swatted her first strike aside effortlessly and intercepted the second with a blindingly quick kick to that elbow, but when she tried to counter-attack the jounin used that tiny opening to snake her uninjured arm around the limb that had deflected it and slash her fingertips across Sakura's triceps.
Then the shorter girl slipped a foot up between their centers of mass and kicked her through a tree. It didn't really slow Rin down and wouldn't have even if she'd still been alive, since that kind of kick, launched from so close, could never build up the speed it would need to injure someone with a Jounin's conditioning. But, it did do what Sakura had intended it to do and open the distance between them.
They paused and assessed each other for a moment, trying to determine the effects of injuries both real and imagined. Sakura's kunai wound had miraculously missed both the major organs and large blood vessels of her lower back, but it was still bleeding steadily. The bloodloss wasn't severe enough to affect her function yet, but likely would if she didn't get it bandaged within the next minute or so. The burning slash across her upper arm was more concerning, since it had required no weapon to inflict, but a carefully hidden tensing of that arm proved that, while it was weakened and would hurt like hell to use, it -did- still work. Best of all, though, she had managed to keep up the pretense of her illusory injuries during the short clash.
Rin made a pro-forma attempt to cover her charge with a swarm of shuriken, but neither of them were in the least surprised when Sakura twisted effortlessly around them and straight into another chakra-blade strike, this time aimed at the major blood vessels of her throat.
Which she ducked smoothly underneath evan as her good hand was reaching up to grab the Jounin's upper arm and use it as a pivot to swing up and around behind her. Rin probably could have escaped the hold without too much trouble, but since Sakura would have been too close for a dangerous kick and would have needed to let go and render a critical moment's warning for an open-hand or weapon-based attack, she chose not to, in favor of shedding momentum and readying herself for another spinning Chakra Mesu strike.
By the time she felt Sakura's knee coming to rest between her shoulderblades and her left hand under her chin, it was too late and they were already falling forwards as the Genin's weight threw her off balance.
Rin's neck broke with the wet, final 'cruch' which is unique to living bone, and her killer started to fish out a medical kit and its bandages as she stood and moved away.
* * * * *
He came out of the Kawarimi tense and ready and facing his opponent.
Her face twisted into a terrible snarl. "You."
"Yes."
"You interrupted me."
"Yes."
Her eyebrow twitched, and then she visibly reigned herself in. "You're going to pay for that," she told him. "Even if I -did- want to talk to you anyway."
"No," he said, and swapped places again, this time with a largish branch on the other side of the clearing.
She threw out a palm, launching a... ripple... of chakra, intense enough to be visible, that crashed through the tree he had landed in and sent its crown tumbling to earth. Fortunately, he had already been in motion, launching himself up and forward in an arc that peaked more than a hundred feet above the ground. Their gazes met for an instant as he seemed to hang in the air, and he smiled and launched both fistfuls of kunai - a full thirty, a personal record - in a ragged and none-to-accurate spray.
Then they multiplied, sixty, one hundred twenty, two hundred forty, more. "kagekunai no jutsu," he murmured, and carefully failed to keep smiling when a tightly controlled whirling sphere of chakra knocked them from the air and scattered them, tumbling, across the entire field.
He landed with a tap, and she laughed.
* * * * *
Sasuke stared, involuntarily meeting swirling red eyes in a face all too much like his own. The other was a young-looking man, seeming not more than twenty, and dressed in the black body-glove and gray armor that, for all of its wearers' usual reputation, came straight out of his own nightmares.
"Shisui-san?" he whispered.
Shisui chose to reply with a battoujutsu strike rather than words. Attacks like it were generally rare in Konoha's sword styles, but had come to be heavily favored against the Uchiha, since their speed meant that, Sharingan or no, they could often be executed before their target could react.
Sparring against Sakura, sasuke reflected as he ducked and rolled away from the flashing blade, had been -remarkably- good practice for dealing with this.
Shisui turned his blinding opening into a broad sweep, but the alteration cost him the split second his target needed to throw himself back and away. "Shisui-san... why are you so angry? What have I done?"
The older of the two pulled up short in disbelief. "What... why... -What- have you-?! You're the one who fucking -killed- me, -ITACHI-!"
Sasuke flinched, and his world seemed to go dim and spinning as his mind involutarily tried to run back through each and every memory of his life, checking and comparing to see if, if... "I'm not Itachi," he choked. "I'm -not-! I'm -Sasuke-! I'm-"
"BULLSHIT!" the other roared, with a handful of cast shuriken. "That face, those cold fucking eyes... You think I'll turn my back again?! I was a fool to think there was ever anything better in you!"
The small 3cm shuriken most Konoha ninja carried were intended more as a nuisance and a distraction than an actual threat. They were compact enough to be carried in large numbers, but their awkward shape and light mass made it extremely difficult to put enough force behind them to put their blades through any amount of flesh, let alone the tough fabric of a shinobi's field uniform. Unless sheer luck - or unlikely skill - put them into an eye or a major blood vessel, they were essentially harmless.
That was the only thing that saved Sasuke's life, since he was too shocked to even react to shisui's attack, let alone -dodge- it. One star buried itself in his thigh, and another slashe across his cheekbone, but all the rest only stabbed at bone or lacerated muscle too dense to penetrate.
Pain is a wonderful focusing agent, and despite his shock, some corner of Sasuke's mind more concerned with survival than emotion or self-worth was able to use his training, both in the Academy and after, to lock away the fear and pain and horror with an internal promise to deal with them later.
In the meantime, he had to either get away from that kodachi or get -it- away from its wielder. In melee combat the weapon gave Shisui more than twice his reach and many times his kiling power, and at longer ranges his active Sharingan would make him almost immune to the genjutsu that Sasuke had been specializing in since his graduation. He knew -some- new ninjutsu, of course, but his opponent would have at least as much and almost certainly more, so -that- was a wash, too.
He didn't bother with the Bunshin he would usually have used before ducking back into the undergrowth - again, because his opponent's Sharingan would have been able to identify the clones at a glance, and made its usual distraction value entirely worthless.
"KATON: HOUSENKA NO JUTSU!" Shisui roared from behind and below him, and the scattering stream of fist-sized fireballs barely missed him as he slipped away, leaving smoldering craters in the bark of the trees he had been standing in front of, and charred, drifting ashes where others had had low, leafy branches. He used the distraction to run up the far side of one of the larger nearby trees and went to 'ground' in its upper boughs, still and quiet as he tried to steady his breathing.
Nuke-Sakura was just as smart as his teammate - she had not only selected their opponents for the greatest possible emotional trauma, but had been careful to select options whose strengths neutralized their own. Most of his arsenal was useless against another Uchiha, and Naruto's... mother, he supposed... was obviously a melee-focused weapons user, which would make her extremely difficult for her range-focused son, and so on. Probably if he could trade off with even one of his teammates they would be able to defeat them and gang up on the remainder, but the woman's madness obviously hadn't affected her ability to plan, and she -had- to have known that just as well as he-
"I can hear you, you know," came the choked, hating voice from below, and even as he threw himself out of the way of the Ryuuka the figurative lightbulb of inspiration was going off over his head.
It was a well known maxim that a genjutsu could no affect a sense that its target did not have, and equally certain that a target who could percieve more with their targeted sense than the genjust's caster could - like a Yuuhi's ability to see the farther colors, or an Inuzuka's boosted sense of smell - would be able to use that greater acuity to break the illusion by picking out flaws that the caster couldn't habe known to correct.
From that, logically, one of the Sharingan's oft-suspected but never-admitted weaknesses could be deduced - because it was based in its owner's -visual- sense, it shouldn't be able to assist against genjutsu targeted at the other four senses. Admittedly, those other four represented less than ten percent of all known genjutsu techniques, but he still knew far more than ten techniques. If any of those others were suitable...
Ah. -That- one.
He lunged back into cover, slung off his pack, and used Kawarimi to swap it into a tree some several hundred feet away. As expected, Shisui caught the motion and sent his next attack after the pack. The shade would check, of course, if only to gloat, but the few moments of confusion that would take were enough for Sasuke to finish his seals, raise his fingers to his mouth, and-
*PHWEEEEET!*
"Calling for your dupes, -Itachi-? They can't help you!"
Sasuke checked his resources - shuriken, three kunai, and some wire. His tags and the Fuuma Shuriken had been in his pack, and there hadn't been time to retrieve them. Then he shouted back, repeating what he knew to be a useless argument. "I'm not Itachi! I'm Sasuke! You've been dead for four -years-, Shisui-san!"
He had prepared himself to dodge another attack, but Shisui chose to rage at him instead. "Bullshit! You think I don't recognize those soulless eyes?! You think I don't know that heartless face?! DO YOU REALLY THINK I'M STUPID ENOUGH TO LET YOU STAB ME IN THE BACK AGAIN?!"
To recognize his eyes... his were the same as he'd seen... Sasuke shook his shock off and tumbled forward and down out of the tree. It was a long fall, but a lasso of wire and a conveniently placed branch let him turn his vertical momentum into a precisely measured amount of the horizontal kind - by tugging the loop closed, he made the wire bite into and through the wood, cutting his anchor free at precisely the right moment.
Shisui sneered slightly, and set himself for a ducking cut that would combine Sasuke's momentum with the blade's edge and motion to quite literally cut the Genin in half.
The younger ninja smirked and bend himself double in midair with one of his remaining kunai in hand. When the inevitable moment came, he straightened and kicked out and bounced himself off of the kodachi's edge - safely, since the steel kunai acted as a shield for his sandal's relatively vulnerable sole.
The dead man had been thrown slightly off by the heavy impact where he had only planned for the usual resistance to a cut, and the time it took him to recover and come back on balance were enough for Sasuke to flip back and land and catch the kunai whose hilt dropped neatly into his hand. There was a deep, bright score along the flat of one side and the damage would weaken its structure enough that it wouldn't be worth keeping past the end of this battle, but it had come through the experience much better than his foot would have. They traded looks for an instant - Shisui snarling and bringing his sword up to strike, Sasuke calm and already poised to attack.
Then he drove the kunai into his heart.
Shisui grinned and coughed up a moutheful of an ugly black liquid that smoked in the open air and burned as it splattered across the living ninja's skin. "You can't kill a corpse, Itachi!"
And then he was swinging and Sasuke was flipping back out of the way as the kodachi came so close - -too- close - to his nose. "I've dealt with that before," he sneered, remembering those nightmarish puppets that had come for Tazuna as he threw his two remaining blades - not at Shisui, but into the trees on either side of them, where they served to anchor the glittering strands of wire stretched after them.
Shisui lunged again - and had he always been that slow, or was it being dead that was throwing him off? Or maybe he was just too used to Neshan-sensei and Sakura - and Sasuke ducked under it with a spin on his heel and a twist of his wrists as he passed them over his head and then he was sprinting away and pumping chakra into the singing strands of metal.
The revenant's eyes widened. "No," he said, in the spit-second before the wires went taunt and their closing loops sliced his body into a dozen different pieces.
Sasuke skidded to a halt and turned back to assess his handiwork, and his eyes widened as he saw the scattered chunks begin to melt back together inot a coherent whole. Dammit! What did it take to finish him?! It was like trying to fight some unstoppable juggernaught or...
His mind flashed back to the seal-laden tag that Nuke-Sakura had buried in each of the three ghosts.
...golem.
Obviously, the flesh shell didn't matter - he could cut it into as many pieces as he liked and it would still recover. But damage the tag and, like any fuuinjutsu, it would be shattered.
Easy enough.
Shisui was pulling himself upright now, face a mask of rage and his kodachi lying forgotten to one side as his fingers flexed through involuntary strangling motions. Sasuke met his eyes and smiled anyway, and triggered the genjutsu he had set up earlier.
From as far away as its caster was standing the noise was merely skull-splitting, but at point-blank range it had an almost physical impact - Shisui doubled over and invluntarily brought his hands up to try and protect his ears, and Sasuke could see more of that acidic black ooze trickling out from beneath their protection.
The late ANBU was tough and well-trained and his fall went no farther than his knees, but it gave Sasuke the time to take three long bounds backwards and run through the rapid seals needed to...
"KATON: RYUUKA NO JUTSU!" The Dragon Flame was the most intense ninjutsu he knew, and its burning spear carved straight though its target's chest and skull. He had already started to dissolve when Sasuke's control relaxed and let the stream of flame spread out and flare over the corpse.
* * * * *
When she got ahold of that 'Black Guardian' character, she was going to give him one of her special treatments. Perhaps something along the lines of what she'd given Shino, with the ants and the sulfuric acid and that -lovely- amplification jutsu.
Still, while he might have sold her a line about having a -real- second chance, since this place was so warped and deluded from what had actually happened, it -was- a halfway decent playground, so maybe she'd only regenerate him once.
Nah.
She had to laugh, though - this guy might be an imposter trying to fill shoes too big for him, but he wasn't actually half bad for all that. Not too smart, maybe - he obviously didn't know when it was time to run - and real short on actual -power-, but he had some skills and he was no slouch at applying them.
Still. She had questions to ask him, so she started working up a heavy binding jutsu - Senei Jashuu should do the trick. He crouched, just slightly, and her Byakugan saw a minute flicker of chakra arc down and ground itself into the earth a tiny split second before he vanished in a brilliant yellow flash.
Two flashes, actually - one where he had been standing and the other right behind her back, and very close, so close that his entire face was hidden in her blind spot. His hands opened, releasing a cloud of tiny slips of paper to flutter in the air, each of them bearing... Her hands flickered through the seals automatically. Kawa-
*flickerFLASH*
-rimi and he was there -before- her, grinning, with more Explosion Notes drifting on the breeze and already flaring-
*flickerFLASH*
*BA-BOOOM*
She rolled forward out of the burning tree and landed on her feet with a slam. Pieces of charred flesh tore free at the impact, leaving blood to ooze out for the few moments before her regeneration seal repaired the damage and generated new skin underneath the old, leaving entire blackened sheets to crackle and dissolve away.
He was standing on the other side of the field, watching her, and as he raised his hand to point straight at her one of the complex knots of chakra bound to five of his Heavenly Gates spun free and up and out of his arm and finger.
*GA-KAM!*
What she'd just seen was impossible - a jutsu being triggered without any external hand seals or internal chakra control - and that preoccupied her for the fraction of a second it took for the attack to hit her.
Raide no Jutsu was a powerful elemental attack, one of the most dangerous of the Lightning types, but it had been a long time since she was weak and pathetic enough to roll over after only a single blow. She came back upright, ignoring the quickly fading burn through her chest, set herself... and moved.
She had things she wanted to know, so she didn't hit him full force. Just enough to liquify his intestines, rather than scattering fragments of his extremeties across the landscape. He doubled over most satisfactorilly, but then vanished with another yellow flash and flicker of chakra.
Vanished to behind her, where he was lunging forward with kunai in hand. She twisted to respond, but-
*flickerFLASH*
-he was crouching down low to her right and exploding upward, blade-first, and this time she was too slow to stop it going home but not too slow to bring that elbow down, hard-
*flickerFLASH*
-and he was falling towards her with another kunai in hand for a killing stroke as she turned her momentum from the previous two blows into additional speed that brought her foot up and across before he could react and blasted him across the field and through three seperate trees.
"ow, ow, ow, -shit-," she heard in the distance, and then-
*flickerFLASH*
-he was standing across the field, glaring. His hand came up - another slight flicker of chakra around it - and then he was holding a slip of paper, which he threw with a triggering chakra burst like for an Explosion Note and as the Jutsu unwrapped and expanded to take effect she recognized it, another Raide but this time she wasn't shocked and twisted aside.
He threw a second Raide, and a third, four, five, six, seven and then she was in the right position and the right balance to launch herself forward and under the eighth and slam a full-power blow into his chest and knock him flying while the ninth Raide Note fluttered harmlessly to the ground.
Something was bothering her. Something she hadn't recognized, something she was missing... wait.
A slight flicker of chakra... Her eyes widened. "Oh." And if that was, then... her eyes darted around, cateloging the kunai he had scattered across the battlefield with that entirely too obvious leap. "Oh."
He blinked as she formed the first seal - his hand came up - second - twisted slightly - third - molded the chakra - fourth - caught the Raide Note as it slid out into his palm - fifth - threw it - sixth...
She smiled, and the now blank sheet of paper fluttered to the ground. He swore in a language she didn't recognize.
* * * * *
Naruto's eyes narrowed as he rushed forwards, and somehow he wasn't surprised when that straight, tapered sword flicked through the space where he ahd been the moment before his instincts threw him sideways.
"Ne, Naruto-kun," his mother said. "That won't be enough. I know you can do better."
He grinned and flicked both of his kunai at her, then sprinted to the right as he ran through the seals for- "FUUTON: SHIROKAZE NO JUTSU!"
She batted the physical blades casually aside and wrapped her sword in a brilliant sheath of chakra to slice the rushing stream of the White Wind and divert it harmlessly to either side, then laughed. "So quick! That's excellent!"
He narrowed his eyes. She might or might not be able to do the same thing with more concentrated jutsu types like water or earth, but keeping that heavy blade in hand would keep her from forming hand seals - which would mean that -
Oh. Or she could do that.
His mother finsihed her jutsu's last seal - tiger, with her sword balanced between thumb and forefingers the way Sensei had taught him to do with sealing scrolls and drew back and inhaled as she brought her fingertips to her lips.
He knew what came after -that-, and wasted no time hustling through Kawarimi - and not a moment too soon, as the Goukakyu's blast shattered the tree he had been standing in front of. Kagebunshin as he landed - his new location was closer than his last, and she was sprinting rapidly across what distance there was - and then straight into another Kawarimi as she ducked under one clone's kick and casually speared another in passing as she spun in close so quickly that her next killing thrust scattered sparks off the small boulder he had switched with.
She spun quickly to face where he was standing on the other side of the clearing as his clones scattered and pelted into the trees. "Naruto-kun," she said, almost whispered in the still quiet of Naminokuni's late afternoon. "Kage Bunshin is dangerous. If you..."
Her son shook his head quickly and tried to grin reassuringly. "No, no! I've got the endurance for it, 'Kaachan, and..." abruptly, he dropped the mask and let one hand rest gently across his belly - and the seal branded on it. "It's not like I can mistake which one's the real me, is it?"
She sighed in relief. "All right," she said, then shook off the reflective mood and chages stances - body perpendicular to him, knees bent and feet spread wide, right hand holding the sword's hilt above that shoulder and the other steadying the blade as it sloped forward and down. Her smile widened to a grin, and her eyes gleamed devilishly. "So, what next?"
Naruto took a deep, pained breath, and braced himself. "This," he said, and then his clones launched a savage barrage of ninjutsu from all sides.
For a moment or two, it was hard to see anything past the washing tides of air and water chakra and the billowing clouds of Katon flame and Doton dust, with all of it lit from within by the blinding glare of lightning jutsu. Then the obscurement cleared and he could see her tattered, bedraggled form standing with that long spearpoint blad held weakly in one hand.
She was smiling. "Ranged ninjutsu applied at a rate I can't match, and from too many different directions to deflect or counter. Well done. But, I'm already dead, Naruto-kun. -Neither- of us can stop me as while her seal is still buried in my neck."
Naruto's thoughts hiccuped as he realized the implications of her words. Sensei had said that Edo Tensei anchored the spirits of the dead to specially prepared corpses, and in retrospect it was obvious that he and that -nightmare- that had stolen Sakura-chan's face had gone through with the thrown kunai was about whether or not she was going to be able to apply the final elements of the anchoring process. His mother's words had not only called that to his attention, but had also as much as flat-out -told- him that breaking that final seal would shatter the jutsu and...
He could see in her eyes that she knew -exactly- what she'd just told him.
He knew, he could tell half a dozen different ways to take advantage of that fact, and twice as many ways to get close enough to do so. Knowning how the thing was possible made it suddenly, horribly real. "I understand, 'Kaa-chan," he whispered. "But... I can't."
She looked stricken. "Can't?"
"I can't hurt someone I love like that. I can't... be alone again. I can't let you die again."
"Naruto-kun..." his mother cast about for a moment, desperately. "This won't las forever." As she spoke, she was walking towards him - slowly, haltingly, unwillingly closing the distance between them. "There's only so much chakra in the seal - I can... feel it running out."
"But..." he was crying freely, now.
Their eyes met, and hers were no drier than his. "I have to try," she choked, "but, to kill my own son... I'd -rather- die."
"'Kaa-chan..."
"Please," she begged... and struck.
He ducked away, but not quickly enough, and however talented he might have been, she was better-trained and far more experienced. If the clones he had dispatched for his earlier attempt at ninjutsu hadn't come piling out of the trees and swarmed over her, then he almost certainly would have died.
She fought brilliantly, he thought as he scrabbled back out of her immediate reach. There wasn't a single motion she made that didn't end in the sharp 'pop' o a dispersing bunshin, and his eyes widened in horror as he saw the last of them vanish.
His mother stepped forwards, sword raised. "You -are- a great ninja, Naruto-kun. More than your father and I ever dared to dream." She took a slow, wavering breath. "Is there... anything... anything you'd like to say?"
He met her eyes, and saw that they were as wet as his own. "I love you, 'Kaachan."
The explosion note the last clone had wrapped around the kunai it had buried in the back of her neck was only a small one, and that batch of Kagebunshin couldn't have had much power left, so its detonation was only enough to outline her figure in flame and create a shallow crater in her... substance.
But that crater went deep enough.
She staggered, eyes wide and shocked, then fell to her knees and raised one hand to watch as a wash of earth-brown seemed to flow up from her fingertips, as though the life in her was being drained away through some point higher on her body. Then, as the earth and sand of that hand began to dissolve away into dust and the brown reached her shoulders, she looked up and met his eyes with a smile. "Naruto..." she said, and now her neck was covered. "I'm... so proud..."
He wanted to look away. He wanted to cry. But every moment, every memory, was precious as nothing else in his life could ever be, and so he forced himself to watch as the life in her face was swallowed and the reflection of it swept away as dust on the evening wind.
* * * * *
"Checkmate," Sakura said. Her opponent knew what jutsu that was, from his expression, and he knew what it did, and knew there was no point in pushing things until -she- came to -him-.
He started to walk across the battlefield. "Fuuinshuku no Jutsu. Not many people know that. I'd figured Orochimaru might think of it, but... Damn."
She giggled. "Oh, you -are- ambitious, planning to fight one of the Sannin."
"I'm already doing that, or close enough. Besides, you never know if you don't try."
"Y'know, I think you might have managed it," she thought out loud. "Do they tell you you're a genius? Because they should - figuring out how to bind complex Ninjutsu to written Notes, let alone your own Heavenly Gates, and that fake Shunshin of yours... Using seals built into kunai which you could throw where you wanted to go as anchors for an instantaneous transposition jutsu... That was brilliant."
"Fake, hell. This's all the Body Flicker ever was."
Her eyes widened, and she tapped her chin. "Really? You must have started very early, to have Yondaime there to teach you."
"He didn't." Neshan's patient progress stopped just outside that range which she could cover in a single lunge.
"Sugoi." She cocked her head as his eyes narrowed in concentration. "Where's Kakashi? Because you know you're impossible."
"Elsewhere."
Her eyes flashed at his evasion, and then she sniffed. "This is -wrong-. Even -he- isn't a big enough hypocrite to run away and leave a team without their sensei. So -where- the -fuck- is Team 7's -real- Jounin!?" she asked herself.
Raiken, the Lightning Blade, funneled a constant stream of chakra out of the user's palm, which extended out to a distance of perhaps a foot before arcing back into the user's Inner Coil System. It wasn't really anywhere close to as destructive as the Chidori it had inspired, nor any technique on that level, but in close combat it was more flexible, and it added noticably to the user's reach - which, in combination, was why he kept a single execution of it as one of his precious eight reserve techniques.
*GAZAZAKRAKZAKRAKZAZA*
"RIGHT HERE!" He lunged, sweeping the flaring, popping blade of raw chakra up and around. She dodged, leaning back - barely - out of the way, and he brought his other foot forward to come on balance and transferred the jutsu from right hand to left - ignoring the shocking bolt of pain as his Inner Coils system protested the unaccustomed load - and into a blinding thrust that she ducked under by falling back onto her hands then flipped back up and over as he brought the Raiken back down and then she was upright and he was coming forward again as she turned, started to spin...
"HAKKESHOU KAITEN!"
And then he was flying through the air and everything along the front of his body was a single mass of pain.
He crashed to the ground and came back up on all fours with his uniform coat and vest fluttering in tatters over gleaming, unscratched armor from head to toe, but she was standing twenty feet away and smiling, and he met her eyes defiantly and the world was black and green and blue and red and spinning and melting and merging and...
He was lying on a table, with his limbs and head tied down. The sky was red, and the sun black.
"Tsukiyomi," he said. "An offensive visual genjutsu based on the fully activated function of the Madoiringan bloodline. It allows the user to take full control of the target's senses, including that of time. However, due to the complexity of the task and the delicacy of the neccessary pupil charictaristics when compared to the neccessary chakra load, subjective duration is limited to a maximum of seventy-two hours." A pause. "Tsukiyomi, and -you-. Fuck."
She leaned forward into his vision and laughed. "Isn't it, though? And now, would you like to tell me everything you know before, or -after- I start?"
"I'm stubborn. After, please - but do remember you're on a time limit." He grinned like a death's head. "I will."
She laughed again, and picked up the first scalpel.
* * * * *
"You're very good," said a woman's voice from behind her, and Sakura froze and spun to look when she heard it.
Rin smiled and twisted her head as though trying to relieve a sore neck. "You would have killed a ninja two full grades above you and walked away without any major injuries... if I were really alive."
The Genin stared in shock, but her racing mind came up with a plan in almost the same instant that instinct had her hop over the sweeping low kick Rin had launched after replacing the shrub behind her. It was desperate, stupid, and almost completely suicidal, but it was also the only way she could think of to stop and opponent who could regenerate like -that-.
"You seemed too alive to be just a construct - but I guess that that would make sense, from what Sensei said about this 'Edo Tensei' thing." She brush a lock of hair that had escaped its braid back out of her eyes and resolutely ignored the bolt of pain the motion sent stabbing out from the upper edge of the patch of chill stickiness she could feel starting to creep down her leg. "Che!" she sniffed, for once relishing the departure from the femine speech her mother had worked so hard to teach her. "Now I -really- don't have time for this!"
"No, I guess you don't," agreed the woman who had made it so. "But if your control is always as good as it was while you were tweaking your core chakra to mislead me like that, you might want to look into learning some medical ninjutsu before the next time you go out in the field."
Sakura laughed, and this time the pain was too deep to completely ignore and so sharp she winced visibly. "I'll do that. But let's do this, first."
"Right!" Rin laughed too, then began to seal.
Even with chakra anchoring them to the ground, there was a strict physical limit to the amount of traction that Sakura's feet could exert. Against most opponents, what she -could- do to increase the usual amount was more than enough, but her ressurected foe's ability to carry out an essentially instantaneous replacement mean that even the time it would take her to accellerate though her target's reach would be too long.
Which was why she'd dragged this into the forest in the first place. Rather than forwards, she sprang -back-, bringing her legs up as she did so to plant them flat against the trunk of the tree behind her.
And, abruptly, traction was no longer an issue.
She hung in that gravity-defying crouch for the moment or so it took to draw a kunai in each hand - not long enough for Rin to think and suspect what she intended - then launched herselfin a flatt, blurring arc quicker than even -she- had expected.
The sudden lightness where her braid's weight had been and the chill, liquid hiss of a water ninjutsu an inch or so from her ear told her that she had moved not a moment too soon - and then her body mass and the speed of her flight were concentrating all their inertia behind the razor-fine points of her kunait and driving them forcibly into the gaps between the dead woman's shoulder bones.
There was no chance of bleeding her out, of course, and she'd be able to pull the weapons free with her teeth if nothing else, but all Sakura needed was a moment.
And, as she vaulted upand over the weapons and Rin tried to turn her own fall intoa vertical couble-kick, she knew that she had it. The Jounin's sandals caughter her on her earlier wound, but the pain wasn't enough to spoil her landing as she sank down low to the ground and slapped a hand against the small of her opponent's back.
Then she ran like hell.
Rin had only a small moment to smile and say, "Bravo!" before the stack of seven overcharged explosion notes went off as one.
* * * * *
The nightmare wearing his student's face was glaring as the world finally spun back into reality around him. "How the fuck did you do that?!"
Neshan chuckled, drily, and forced his screaming body back into a combat stance. "Think about it."
She crouched and went through three quick seals before extending her clawed hand in front of her, with the other bracing that wrist.
*BACHICHICHICHICHICHICHI*
Nothing else in all the world sounded quite like that. Even at his best, he couldn't dodge a Chidori - and after the Tsukiyomi, he wasn't anywhere even -close- to that. Which meant that he'd have to endure it. The flip side of that, of course, was to carry the Lightning Edge home, she'd have to enter -his- range... As vicious and destructive as Kakashi's brainchild might be, it still couldn't equal the Shikouseibaku's shattering power - and he had three of those left.
He set himself, and waited.
"I don't care what you know anymore," she yelled over the roar of escaping chakra. "You've become a problem."
*CHICHICHICHICHICHICHICHI*
Seen in animation, Chidori looked stupid and obvious - simply running, clutching a ball of lightning. The difference between that and reality, he had a split second to think, not for the first time, was really nothing more than simple speed - speed that drove the eyes to tearing slits from wind force, speed that shifted the entire world around the attacker into a flashing blur - speed that could cover hundreds of feet literally in the blink of an eye.
He knew, as he made it, that she would see and react to his counterstrike. Fortunately - from one point of view - her response was as he had expected.
The Shikouseibaku received its effectiveness thanks to the way its individual component streams converged - the first, and most obvious effect, was that having a number of different forces acting inwards in a ring combined their overall effect to transfer the greatest amount of energy to that portion of the target. The second was that, by having several different rings going off in sequence, not only would the overall energy be amplified again, but it - and the physical matter being incidentally carried along in the rush - would be driven and directed -into- and -through- the target, with such intensity that no realistic defense could hope to resist it.
Chidori disrupted other jutsu by applying such intense energies that the organization of the opponent's effort dissolved like butter dropped in a fire. The Shikou's finely tuned timing made it -more- vulnerable, not less, and the strike she had adjusted to meet his own blasted it outwards into scattered shreds - and then continued on to do the same along the entire line of his arm, from wrist to shoulder.
And then her momentum carried her hand out past his body and, as he had planned all along, he was spinning as he fell and bringing his right leg up and out -just- quickly enough to brush his toe across the skin over her nearer kidney.
Again, the sixty-four streams. Again, the flare. Again, the concussion.
It threw her up and away as momentum and gravity slammed him down to skid along the ground, and even before he looked to follow her he was forcing the one-handed seals for a basic medical ninjutsu past the building pain. Even the greatest medic-nin would take time to recover from having half of her internal organs explosively relocated, and -this- kind of bleeding couldn't wait.
It hurt, cauterizing his shoulder like that, but he didn't have more than a moment before she recovered and he had to make his move in that window. Her stomach looked like raw meat and he landed on it with one knee, and his hand stabbed down as her eyes widened...
The Shikouseibaku annihilated her head and most of her shoulders, and dug a deep hole into the soft earth.
Then she poofed away into smoke and a freight train hit him in the chest and knocked him tumbling.
He rolled back upright and kneeled where he had landed, remaining hand splayed out, while his chest heaved as he tried to regain his breath. When he looked up to meet her eyes again - no danger of a second Tsukiyomi, since the shock of performing that technique would have stunned the fine muscles neccessary to control it for some time yet - her lips were drawn back from her teeth in a horrible snarl, and, for the first time, her hunched posture told him that she hadn't completely repaired the damage he had done her.
They stared at each other for a long, hating moment, and then she drew herself up and spoke. "You'd have eaten Orochimaru alive. But I'm better than he is, and now you're mine."
TO BE CONTINUED...
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."
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