Even if I -am- a bit worried that it makes Neshan come off as a little too badass.
Ah, well.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
"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. "Your sensei thought you'd have a better chance against me than my summoner."
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 vs. Rin here]
* * * * *
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 away that tiny fraction of the blades that would have actually hit their target.
He landed with a tap, and she laughed.
* * * * *
[Sasuke vs. SPOILER DELETED goes here]
* * * * *
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 to 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.
"Checkmate," she said. He 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.
And then he was flying through the air and everything between knees and neck was a single blinding flare of agony.
He crashed to the ground and came back up, 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.
* * * * *
[Naruto vs. SPOILER DELETED goes here]
* * * * *
She was glaring as the world finally spun back into reality around him. "How the fuck did you do that?!"
He 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 right 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 slammed them together like a kamikaze into an aircraft carrier.
For the moment, it didn't hurt - endorphins, shock, and simple overload combining to filter out what would have otherwise been overwhelming - and before she had even had time to realize that he wasn't dead he had slammed his -other- hand up from the side and into her floating ribs - triggering a second Shikou as he did so.
It threw her up and away, 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."
[And while there -is- more already written after this line, you're going to have to wait until I've got -much- more of the chapter ready before you see it.]
Ja, -n
===========
===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."
Ah, well.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
"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. "Your sensei thought you'd have a better chance against me than my summoner."
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 vs. Rin here]
* * * * *
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 away that tiny fraction of the blades that would have actually hit their target.
He landed with a tap, and she laughed.
* * * * *
[Sasuke vs. SPOILER DELETED goes here]
* * * * *
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 to 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.
"Checkmate," she said. He 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.
And then he was flying through the air and everything between knees and neck was a single blinding flare of agony.
He crashed to the ground and came back up, 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.
* * * * *
[Naruto vs. SPOILER DELETED goes here]
* * * * *
She was glaring as the world finally spun back into reality around him. "How the fuck did you do that?!"
He 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 right 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 slammed them together like a kamikaze into an aircraft carrier.
For the moment, it didn't hurt - endorphins, shock, and simple overload combining to filter out what would have otherwise been overwhelming - and before she had even had time to realize that he wasn't dead he had slammed his -other- hand up from the side and into her floating ribs - triggering a second Shikou as he did so.
It threw her up and away, 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."
[And while there -is- more already written after this line, you're going to have to wait until I've got -much- more of the chapter ready before you see it.]
Ja, -n
===========
===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."