Misconceptions
He stood across the clearing, his midnight hair gently lifting from his face by the breeze. He looked so soft, so lonely, but he was proof that looks are often deceptive in an injurious way to the perceiver. This man was lethal—most would run to cower in the shadows at the instant of recognition.
This was the moment that she had spent the last four years training for. Every drop of sweat shed by her pores and every ounce of blood released by her cuts were sacrifices for this battle. She was no fool, and knew full well that this would be the most challenging fight that she would ever be honored enough to participate in.
Losing was not an option. She had been in pursuit of this stone-hearted demon for many years that had long since passed. This person was at fault for one great mishap in her life story, and he racked up another debt by continuing to be a threat to what happiness she had left.
When she told people why she trained so hard, they laughed and replied, "But don't you specialize in genjutsu, honey? You'll be useless against him. I mean, he uses the sharingan. You should dedicate your time to working in the hospital more."
The lack of faith in her skills was something that had not changed since her early childhood; eventually, she became apathetic to it. It stopped hurting each new time that someone doubted her abilities simply because it was not something truly new.
She should really be more excited—instead, her thoughts were governed by apathy. The many years of training hardened her heart and aged her soul. She should be thrilled, overwhelmed, or nervous; this was the fight that all her efforts were put toward. Regardless of how she should feel, her current state-of-mind was preferable for the task ahead; she was here to win, and her mindset would enable that.
Justice would reign on this day. This wretch would pay for his vile sins. Surely, he would not beg for his life, and he would not show his pain, but he would feel it. She did not need a display of agony to achieve satisfaction—she simply needed to have solid knowledge of its presence.
She turned her attention to her foe; he seemed to be waiting for her to do something. Perhaps he was unsure of her malicious intentions, or maybe he was another doubtful being that decided that she did not warrant his interest. Either way, he was her enemy; his current thoughts were not of her concern—his actions, however, were.
With the deadness of a thousand ancient corpses lurking in her eyes she announced, "This is the day that a great prodigy shall fall to never rise again."
At these words, his head shot up and his coal eyes narrowed. Yet, still, he seemed to wait for her to take action—and so she complied. Without hesitation, she clapped her hands together in front of her, folding all her fingers down except her pointers. Onlookers would probably be confused—a normal person would not be able to see what she was doing. However, from those fingers a slice of air raced out and soared in the direction of the man's heart.
This would not do the job, but it would certainly force him to come out and play. The ground where he had been standing exploded into a cloud of dust as her jutsu made contact. Without waiting to see the results, she lifted her leg in the air and slammed it down onto the ground in front of her; she wanted to lay out the limits for their battlefield, and was successful when an enormous crater spread from the focal point of where her heel had come into contact with the ground.
When she looked up, he was in front of her—she smirked. It was highly beneficial that he came to her since, after all, close-ranged battles were her specialty. Wasting no time, he stepped on the ankle of the foot that still rested on the ground from where she had landed the kick and launched his fist into her gut while he had her trapped.
Her grin did not falter as she grabbed hold of the wrist of the hand that was sinking into her stomach and sent a jolt of electricity through his body. He went wide-eyed and silent as the volts coursed through his system, only to poof into a cloud.
A clone. Her eyes narrowed and she sent out a kick behind her. To her surprise and satisfaction, she felt cloth brush up against that foot; she had almost landed a deadly blow. She spun around to face him, and there he was.
"Who are you?" he asked.
She sneered in response, "A girl who doesn't enjoy small-talk." His sharingan flashed on.
Slipping into stance, she punched the air in front of her and sent out of a wave of tornado-like winds.
He stood to her right, "I don't know you."
"Ah, yes. But I know all about you," she smiled wistfully, then specified, "Kakashi and Jiraiya told me quite a bit of useful information. Oh, and I had to deal with a particular someone pissing and moaning about you at every chance. Really, I know you enough that you could be my best friend."
She decided to be upfront about her desires; leaning in and hissed with that ill-begotten smirk on her face, "Use it, I dare you. Take me to the land of the dead, the place so miserable that even the devil cries, where angels turn to dust and souls are sucked out of the mouths of the living. Show me."
His chest grew full and his cheeks puffed out, until a large ball of fire came roaring in her direction. She did a flip to the side in order to dodge and the flame darted on past her, continuing on its path into the distance.
"Are you afraid to use it? Or am I so weak that you would simply be putting your mighty abilities to waste?" she called with contempt and challenge dripping from her words.
A flock of ravens flew overhead. Her knees collapsed inward under sudden pressure and he stood in front of her, offering her a hand up. Not her opponent, but him. She sighed heavily—she was tired.
"Kai."
He was no longer there; he was never there to begin with. It was only genjutsu.
Her laughter rang—it lacked heartiness, "Are your eyes soul searchers that dig out my deepest desires and use them against me? Or do you just have a developed intuition? Are you part-time murderer, part-time heartbreaker?"
She found herself suddenly surrounded by a ring of black fire. She had been warned about this—this was serious. However, she quickly noticed something strange about the situation: her opponent stood in this fiery circle with her. He should be standing on the outside, safely watching her, smirking as the flames engulfed and smothered her, as they melted off her skin until there was nothing left of her but ashes.
However, if he felt safe enough to be standing in the circle, that either meant he had a death wish, or an escape route—the latter sounded more likely. And if he could make it out of the blazing inferno, then she could as well.
"Welcome to hell," he announced. And then he disappeared.
She knew that she was going to have to do something drastic to escape her current predicament. Her eyebrows furrowed as she quickly formed a lengthy series of hand seals. With her last seal, everything became very still; the wind no longer blew and the air seemed perfectly unmoving. In two swift movements, she pushed her palms outward, and then flipped them to face her body. The ground shook and she felt nauseous. Her world was spinning as her lungs were overwhelmed with the air that she had drawn toward herself.
Immediately, the wall of flames surrounding her collapsed into nothingness—she had starved them of oxygen and overwhelmed their power with carbon dioxide. Her breathing was labored from the crushing force that she had induced upon her lungs.
He was nowhere to be seen. Just as she jumped backward, a fist popped out of the ground from where she had just been standing—following that fist was a body. Her hand reached out, grabbed his arm, and pulled him toward her; she seized his vulnerable moment and jabbed her knee into his stomach. The hand in which she held his arm clenched and bones cracked.
Their eyes met. Her heart raced. Nothing happened; he continued to deny her request.
He pulled out of her grip and hopped backward until he felt secure with the distance between them. He seemed to recognize that any more closed-ranged combat with her would be hazardous for his wellbeing.
She flung kunai in his direction—he easily dodged each one as it came. Unlike him, she was not quite as lucky. Blades from behind ripped through her clothing and dragged across her back. Her still-laborious breathing had lowered her vigilance; this was quickly becoming dangerous.
The open wounds on her back burned with a fierceness that harkened ill news—those daggers had been poison-tipped. She had to act fast before she ended up in a comatose state or, more likely, dead. Closing her eyes, she concentrated her chakra around the cuts and worked to push out the toxins.
As she maneuvered the intruding substance out of her bloodstream, she found herself wishing that she had been born to the Hyuuga clan—X-ray vision would be incredibly helpful when fighting an Akatsuki member with her eyes closed.
"Vigilance," she mentally reminded herself. Considering that she had not been dismembered in the few seconds that her eyes had been sealed shut, there might be a chance that he was kindly giving her a personal moment. The more likely reason that she was still alive, however, was that he was waiting for something—and that was enough to make anyone uneasy.
As soon as she was certain that the poison had been expelled from her body, her eyes popped open to meet the swirling red of her opponent's. He was finally going to appease her previous demands; he was giving in; he was going all-out. This made her heart beat erratically. She knew it would be painful and that it would surely leave behind a mental agony so powerful that it might drive her to suicide, but she wanted to experience it—to walk through the land of the dead in order to know that she was alive.
"Are you sure this is what you want?" he whispered. His face was so close to hers that his breath caressed her cheek.
The corner of her mouth twitched. "Absolutely."
"It is most unfortunate that," he paused, "in these tedious lives we are forced to live that we do not receive everything we want."
Just as the last utterance floated past his grim lips, he disappeared from sight.
Time wandered aimlessly, passing her by while she gazed into her inner abyss, not quite thinking, breathing, moving, or even feeling. All she knew is that she just watched years of focus and training vanish; she should have known that such things were evanescent. Life and purpose warped in her mind, warped into spoken words, laboriously pressing against her lips.
"Perhaps…perhaps when I said 'prodigy,' I was referring to myself."