TEENAGE GENIN NINJA HEROES
chapter 3
A Loss, a Hero, an Enemy and a Bridge
JUNE, TWELFTH YEAR AFTER THE ATTACK OF THE KYUUBI
"AAARRRGH! -WHY- does he -do- these things?!" howled Haruno Sakura as she scrubbed futilely at the stained fabric of the shirt a friend had loaned her.
"I think it's mostly based on the theory that bad attention is better than no attention," Bakusuta Neshan, the Jounin assigned to teach her and her two teammates the basics of ninja fieldcraft, observed as he leaned over her hunched shoulders and tugged the fabric out of her grip.
"Eh?" she said, then flinched away from the splatter as he snapped the shirt dry with a quick flick of the wrist.
"Hare, rat, rat, ram, hare..." The mud imbedded in the delicately patterned silk shivered slightly, then lifted away to collect into a glistening orb that hovered in mid-air between his hands. "Most useful jutsu in the world. It works on hair, cloth, metal... anything."
"Sugoi. I'll have to remember that. And you're stalling."
"Well, yes. It's not really my place to tell; I've already said more than I should have." And that, she knew, was the end of it.
"Tease."
"It'll do you two good to talk about it." He flicked the sphere of mud out into the center of the stream. "Let's get back."
"Hai!"
They walked through the forest the short distance from the stream to the road, and Uzumaki Naruto, who still had streaks of mud buried in his hair from when his enraged female teammate had ground his head into the same puddle he'd knocked -her- into, looked up, wearing an uncharictaristically chastened look on his childish, be-whiskered face. "Sakura-chan?"
"What!?" she snapped.
"I'm sorry." He bowed his head and figited a little.
She gave him a cockeyed look. "Do you even realize what you're sorry -for-?"
He hesitated. "Aaaahhh... Making you unhappy?"
She shook her head in a sort of horrified wonder. "I didn't-" a hand rested on her shoulder cut her off, and she looked up at her teacher's face. "Sensei?"
"Wouldn't any other answer just mean the same thing, at the very bottom?"
She blinked at him and thought about it for a moment, then sighed and gave Naruto a small smile. "All right. But if you do that again I -won't- be held responsible for the consequences."
Uchiha Sasuke, that year's Number One Rookie and three time winner of the Konohagakure Ultimate Teen Heartthrob Award (Under 15 division), snorted. "Wonderful. Let's go, then."
"Right!" Naruto and Sakura said, grinning, as their charge, bridge architect Umida Tazuna yawned and heaved himself upright from where he's been resting on a tree root.
"Wait." Neshan held up a hand. "Sasuke, heavy dispel."
The last of the Uchiha blinked in confusion, then nodded. "Hai!" Four quick seals, then- "Oukai no Jutsu!"
Two men dropped from the branches overhead to land in the scruffy grass along the south margin of the road. "Heh heh... You're pretty good, Mr. Leaf," said the taller of the two to the Jounin, adjusting his Hidden Mist headband slightly. "But don't think-"
"Kids, sic 'em. I'll play backstop."
All three Genin reacted to the command instantly - Sasuke lunged for one of the Mist-nin, leading his attack with a kunai that had appeared almost magically in his hand, and Sakura literally seemed to teleport from a standing ready stance to a spinning kick more than twelve feet away, right next to the other. Naruto didn't charge immediately, instead taking a moment to generate an escorting squad of Kage Bunshin before he went on the attack.
Sasuke's target flinched back out of range, then dived to one side with the edged chain built into his guantlet flickering out and free in an arc directly towards Sakura. She avoided it with ease, but the two Mist-nin used her momentary disengagement to cut and run, dissapearing into the forest.
"Pursue," the command rapped out, and they did, with Naruto's clones swinging out in a wide arc to cover more ground.
There was silence for a moment, and then Neshan spun and threw a plum-sized sphere in a classic fastball pitch at an apparantly innocuous branch. A couple of feet before impact, the ball burst like a confetti firework, scattering bits of paper barely larger than a speck of dust in a pale cloud around the bough. An instant later, the first spark caught and grew into a shattering explosion that knocked the tree over and sent burning splinters showering across the forest floor.
"You -are- good, spotting my clone like that," said the deep voice thrown to just behind his ear. "But I can't say I know your name."
"Bakusuta Neshan. And you are?" His eyes tracked slowly across the undergrowth of the forest, looking, looking.
"Momoichi Zabuza, once of Hidden Mist... I know that name... what is Konoha's legendary sealing genius doing going on a pissant field mission like escorting an architect?"
Not over -there-, which meant... "I'm hardly -that- great. And I have to teach my team fieldwork -somehow-."
"No," and now the voice was no longer disguised, and coming from behind him... next to Tazuna. "I guess you're not."
All five of Neshan's array of thrown kunai blasted straight through the architect's body and buried themselves deep within the missing-nin's. Both corpses stood for a moment longer, then vanished, one into a puff of smoke and the other into a splash of water.
The younger man brought one hand up and the other down and both back just in time for the massive sword blow aimed at his back to slam into his naginata's interposed pole. A split second later, the butt of the polearm came up and right as he ducked and stepped and spun to the left, slamming the heavy metal pipe into where Zabuza's ribs would have been had the swordsman not pushed down and forward with both blade and feet, hopping high and a little back, out of reach.
"A naginata, huh? That's not a veryWHOA!" Neshan had kept turning as the older Jounin spoke, and added a quick step to the side as the weapon rotated in his grip, trading ends to lead with the razor-edged blade as he came back into striking range and sent it flicking out in a lightning strike that Zabuza barely twisted away from.
The Mist-nin backflipped twice, opening the range before he paused to reevaluate his opponent. For his part, the other simply brought the deceptively slender polearm back into its standard sloping ready position and cocked his head. "What's Gatou paying you, anyway? 'Cause, y'know, we Leaves aren't so terribly pleased with the current Mizukage's 'accidental target misidentification' policy." 'And if you don't piss us off,' went the unspoken part of the message, 'we might be persuaded to see fit to provide some free agent like yourself with the means to do something about that common goal.'
In the blur of combat there hadn't been time for them to take a good look at each other, but in the pause both of them did so. Neshan saw a rangy man of about six feet in height, greasy black hair with a scored Mist hitai-ite, pants and sleeveless shirt in dark blue with the gray mufflers which so many shinobi liked to hide things in on calves and forearms. He knew what Zabuza was seeing, too: a boy or young man in his late teens, with spectacles, Leaf headband, and dark hair pulled back in a knee-length braid, wearing dark grey pants and buttoned shirt under a forest-green high-collared trenchcoat.
"No," the taller of the two said regretfully, "I can't. This time I'm only working for the sake of my hostage to fate." He planted his sword - a massive, squared-off blade almost as long as he was, -without- the arm-length hilt - firmly in the ground and brought his hands together in the first of a blurringly quick series of seals.
Neshan was caught between sympathy for his foe's unexpected motivation and contempt for his choice of tactics, and firmly supressed both as he launched another array of kunai and followed the flying blades in.
Horizontal sweep - he knew that pattern - spinning up and around his back and down from overhead as Zabuza keeps backpedaling - Suiryuudan no Jutsu, the water dragon, and they -were- close enough to the stream for him to use that - lunging forward with the naginata pivoting against the ground towards Zabuza's face like a rake that'd just been stepped on - dragon, snake, rat, he's got seven more to go - then pivoting around the vertical weapon like a pole vaulter to slam both feet into his opponent's chest and knock the larger man flying.
He let the reaction from that impact carry him up and over and back to land on his feet, but by the time he was anchored again Zabuza had recovered and come too close to fight with such a large weapon. He dismissed it, and they exchanged blows for a period that could have been a minute or could have been only a few seconds, and in any event ended with them locked in an awkward grapple with Neshan in a half crouch, one hand trapped between that shoulder and his opponent's chest and the other held outstretched, without the leverage to fight back.
He twitched his wrist back, tapping that hand's fingertips against his opponent's chest, and as he did, sixty-four brilliant streams of chakra erupted from his primary tenketsu and arced up and around to the point of impact. For a fraction of a second - just long enough for the taller man to begin to smile triumphantly - nothing happened.
The ring-shaped secondary shockwave which propagated out perpendicular to the line of the blow was intense enough to scorch skin and set cloth to smoldering, but most of the attack's energy was absorbed carving an eighteen-inch hole through Zabuza's chest and scattering its former contents across a comet-shaped splatter mark fifty feet long. Even the tiny proportion of that force which transferred into the flesh around the hole was enough to knock the fresh corpse flying twice its own length.
"You talk too much," Neshan told the gristly tableau, and then went to find his team.
----------------------------------
And now you've seen what the Shikouseibakuyaku looks like when it's applied -right-.
Ja, -n
===========
===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."
chapter 3
A Loss, a Hero, an Enemy and a Bridge
JUNE, TWELFTH YEAR AFTER THE ATTACK OF THE KYUUBI
"AAARRRGH! -WHY- does he -do- these things?!" howled Haruno Sakura as she scrubbed futilely at the stained fabric of the shirt a friend had loaned her.
"I think it's mostly based on the theory that bad attention is better than no attention," Bakusuta Neshan, the Jounin assigned to teach her and her two teammates the basics of ninja fieldcraft, observed as he leaned over her hunched shoulders and tugged the fabric out of her grip.
"Eh?" she said, then flinched away from the splatter as he snapped the shirt dry with a quick flick of the wrist.
"Hare, rat, rat, ram, hare..." The mud imbedded in the delicately patterned silk shivered slightly, then lifted away to collect into a glistening orb that hovered in mid-air between his hands. "Most useful jutsu in the world. It works on hair, cloth, metal... anything."
"Sugoi. I'll have to remember that. And you're stalling."
"Well, yes. It's not really my place to tell; I've already said more than I should have." And that, she knew, was the end of it.
"Tease."
"It'll do you two good to talk about it." He flicked the sphere of mud out into the center of the stream. "Let's get back."
"Hai!"
They walked through the forest the short distance from the stream to the road, and Uzumaki Naruto, who still had streaks of mud buried in his hair from when his enraged female teammate had ground his head into the same puddle he'd knocked -her- into, looked up, wearing an uncharictaristically chastened look on his childish, be-whiskered face. "Sakura-chan?"
"What!?" she snapped.
"I'm sorry." He bowed his head and figited a little.
She gave him a cockeyed look. "Do you even realize what you're sorry -for-?"
He hesitated. "Aaaahhh... Making you unhappy?"
She shook her head in a sort of horrified wonder. "I didn't-" a hand rested on her shoulder cut her off, and she looked up at her teacher's face. "Sensei?"
"Wouldn't any other answer just mean the same thing, at the very bottom?"
She blinked at him and thought about it for a moment, then sighed and gave Naruto a small smile. "All right. But if you do that again I -won't- be held responsible for the consequences."
Uchiha Sasuke, that year's Number One Rookie and three time winner of the Konohagakure Ultimate Teen Heartthrob Award (Under 15 division), snorted. "Wonderful. Let's go, then."
"Right!" Naruto and Sakura said, grinning, as their charge, bridge architect Umida Tazuna yawned and heaved himself upright from where he's been resting on a tree root.
"Wait." Neshan held up a hand. "Sasuke, heavy dispel."
The last of the Uchiha blinked in confusion, then nodded. "Hai!" Four quick seals, then- "Oukai no Jutsu!"
Two men dropped from the branches overhead to land in the scruffy grass along the south margin of the road. "Heh heh... You're pretty good, Mr. Leaf," said the taller of the two to the Jounin, adjusting his Hidden Mist headband slightly. "But don't think-"
"Kids, sic 'em. I'll play backstop."
All three Genin reacted to the command instantly - Sasuke lunged for one of the Mist-nin, leading his attack with a kunai that had appeared almost magically in his hand, and Sakura literally seemed to teleport from a standing ready stance to a spinning kick more than twelve feet away, right next to the other. Naruto didn't charge immediately, instead taking a moment to generate an escorting squad of Kage Bunshin before he went on the attack.
Sasuke's target flinched back out of range, then dived to one side with the edged chain built into his guantlet flickering out and free in an arc directly towards Sakura. She avoided it with ease, but the two Mist-nin used her momentary disengagement to cut and run, dissapearing into the forest.
"Pursue," the command rapped out, and they did, with Naruto's clones swinging out in a wide arc to cover more ground.
There was silence for a moment, and then Neshan spun and threw a plum-sized sphere in a classic fastball pitch at an apparantly innocuous branch. A couple of feet before impact, the ball burst like a confetti firework, scattering bits of paper barely larger than a speck of dust in a pale cloud around the bough. An instant later, the first spark caught and grew into a shattering explosion that knocked the tree over and sent burning splinters showering across the forest floor.
"You -are- good, spotting my clone like that," said the deep voice thrown to just behind his ear. "But I can't say I know your name."
"Bakusuta Neshan. And you are?" His eyes tracked slowly across the undergrowth of the forest, looking, looking.
"Momoichi Zabuza, once of Hidden Mist... I know that name... what is Konoha's legendary sealing genius doing going on a pissant field mission like escorting an architect?"
Not over -there-, which meant... "I'm hardly -that- great. And I have to teach my team fieldwork -somehow-."
"No," and now the voice was no longer disguised, and coming from behind him... next to Tazuna. "I guess you're not."
All five of Neshan's array of thrown kunai blasted straight through the architect's body and buried themselves deep within the missing-nin's. Both corpses stood for a moment longer, then vanished, one into a puff of smoke and the other into a splash of water.
The younger man brought one hand up and the other down and both back just in time for the massive sword blow aimed at his back to slam into his naginata's interposed pole. A split second later, the butt of the polearm came up and right as he ducked and stepped and spun to the left, slamming the heavy metal pipe into where Zabuza's ribs would have been had the swordsman not pushed down and forward with both blade and feet, hopping high and a little back, out of reach.
"A naginata, huh? That's not a veryWHOA!" Neshan had kept turning as the older Jounin spoke, and added a quick step to the side as the weapon rotated in his grip, trading ends to lead with the razor-edged blade as he came back into striking range and sent it flicking out in a lightning strike that Zabuza barely twisted away from.
The Mist-nin backflipped twice, opening the range before he paused to reevaluate his opponent. For his part, the other simply brought the deceptively slender polearm back into its standard sloping ready position and cocked his head. "What's Gatou paying you, anyway? 'Cause, y'know, we Leaves aren't so terribly pleased with the current Mizukage's 'accidental target misidentification' policy." 'And if you don't piss us off,' went the unspoken part of the message, 'we might be persuaded to see fit to provide some free agent like yourself with the means to do something about that common goal.'
In the blur of combat there hadn't been time for them to take a good look at each other, but in the pause both of them did so. Neshan saw a rangy man of about six feet in height, greasy black hair with a scored Mist hitai-ite, pants and sleeveless shirt in dark blue with the gray mufflers which so many shinobi liked to hide things in on calves and forearms. He knew what Zabuza was seeing, too: a boy or young man in his late teens, with spectacles, Leaf headband, and dark hair pulled back in a knee-length braid, wearing dark grey pants and buttoned shirt under a forest-green high-collared trenchcoat.
"No," the taller of the two said regretfully, "I can't. This time I'm only working for the sake of my hostage to fate." He planted his sword - a massive, squared-off blade almost as long as he was, -without- the arm-length hilt - firmly in the ground and brought his hands together in the first of a blurringly quick series of seals.
Neshan was caught between sympathy for his foe's unexpected motivation and contempt for his choice of tactics, and firmly supressed both as he launched another array of kunai and followed the flying blades in.
Horizontal sweep - he knew that pattern - spinning up and around his back and down from overhead as Zabuza keeps backpedaling - Suiryuudan no Jutsu, the water dragon, and they -were- close enough to the stream for him to use that - lunging forward with the naginata pivoting against the ground towards Zabuza's face like a rake that'd just been stepped on - dragon, snake, rat, he's got seven more to go - then pivoting around the vertical weapon like a pole vaulter to slam both feet into his opponent's chest and knock the larger man flying.
He let the reaction from that impact carry him up and over and back to land on his feet, but by the time he was anchored again Zabuza had recovered and come too close to fight with such a large weapon. He dismissed it, and they exchanged blows for a period that could have been a minute or could have been only a few seconds, and in any event ended with them locked in an awkward grapple with Neshan in a half crouch, one hand trapped between that shoulder and his opponent's chest and the other held outstretched, without the leverage to fight back.
He twitched his wrist back, tapping that hand's fingertips against his opponent's chest, and as he did, sixty-four brilliant streams of chakra erupted from his primary tenketsu and arced up and around to the point of impact. For a fraction of a second - just long enough for the taller man to begin to smile triumphantly - nothing happened.
The ring-shaped secondary shockwave which propagated out perpendicular to the line of the blow was intense enough to scorch skin and set cloth to smoldering, but most of the attack's energy was absorbed carving an eighteen-inch hole through Zabuza's chest and scattering its former contents across a comet-shaped splatter mark fifty feet long. Even the tiny proportion of that force which transferred into the flesh around the hole was enough to knock the fresh corpse flying twice its own length.
"You talk too much," Neshan told the gristly tableau, and then went to find his team.
----------------------------------
And now you've seen what the Shikouseibakuyaku looks like when it's applied -right-.
Ja, -n
===========
===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."