...
~ It was almost more fun than she had expected it to be- the clothes, the hair, the dressing-up. Even if it was the second time around. ~
...
The air, Mai thought, should have been silent, charged, static. The atmosphere of a carefully planned ANBU assault, hinging on success or death, waiting for the command, the right moment. Fear bubbling underneath an attempt at stoicism, adrenaline pulsing just below the mask, but always with the detached knowledge that this was do or die so you couldn't think about screwing up, only, only, your orders.
But that wasn't what this was.
The air was charged, all right, but in the most opposite way: people were excited. It was loud, it was angry, there was noise everywhere; shouting and screaming and shoving like a party with all of the rawest emotions shinobi could scrounge through their trained-in emotional blocks.
It was...
Exciting.
She grinned, the feral grin she was so known for, and she could feel the way her face stretched, curling with adrenaline-sweat already.
"You okay?" Eishi said beside her. "You look a little... uh..."
Eishi looked tense and serious, face drawn into a lithe, flat stone. It could have passed for a porcelain mask, as pale as he was, despite his tan. He was gripping the handle of the war fan on his back. It seemed the energy in the air was making him nervous where it made her apprehensive, and she realized, again, how different she was from her friends. Innocent Eishi, who hadn't seen death until Pein's Assault...
"Yeah." She shook out her fists, dropped them on her hips. "We're heading out soon, guess I'm just getting a little anxious to start."
"Ten minutes," he muttered, then gave a wreak, wry little grin to match hers. His forehead protector flashed in the sun against his pink hair. "Ten minutes until the biggest war the shinobi world has ever seen. How about that, huh?"
"How about that," she agreed.
"Mai-chan, Eishi-kun!" someone called over the pure noise, the ruckus of excited ninja and terrified newbies and jostling crowds, and Mai glanced around until she caught the bob of tall Shiragiku's pale blond shoving through. He was probably being polite, too, saying excuse me and thank you as he did so. As he got closer, she could see the big brown pack on his shoulders, a symbol of the medical division, but she could also make out one of the pouches on the back of his belt that held the pointy knuckle duster poisoned blades.
"Shiragiku!" She waved three fingers in a halfish-way and Eishi blinked.
"Shiragiku's here?" he asked about two seconds before their teammate pushed past two or three more shinobi. "Oh!"
"Sakura-san said I could come over."
"Not to stay, I'm guessing," Mai sighed. "We could really use you, you know."
"What can I say, Mai-chan," he said in that soft, unassuming way that she could barely hear. "I'm not the fighting type."
"Bull," she said at the same time Eishi scoffed. "You're just not violent."
"There's not much of a difference, is there, Mai?"
He'd dropped the suffix, but that happened sometimes. At his statement, Mai's smile dropped and she thought of Fumiko, looking almost intimidating in her shinobi attire, seals ready and blood full of steel.
"Guess not." Then she grinned again, and punched his shoulder. Shiragiku winced but smiled. "Hey, we're Otokaze- Team Nine. If we cross up, we've gotta fight at least one fight together, yeah? Make a name for ourselves."
"Yeah, let's get in some bingo books," Eishi chimed, grinning now as well despite the adrenaline-blush in his face. "I'm sure all these shinobi are watching each other, might as well impress them now."
"Yeah, Shira," Mai said, and tugged on his low ponytail, knowing there would be no retaliation- hers was strung along with razor wire. "Shiragiku, the blond rattlesnake of the Sand."
Shiragiku laughed, a light little bell-sound. "Perhaps, Mai-chan. I think we should focus on surviving, though. Plenty of the dead are honored with battle-titles, and I would rather you both stay alive."
"I would rather we both stay alive, too," Mai quipped off, then almost flinched at the loud sound of the massive gong at the base of the mountain she couldn't see, signaling the beginning of the separation. Part of team nine- team Otokaze- Mai and Eishi- would be headed toward the Land of Lightning's peninsula, and the lone member, Shiragiku, would join the main medical camp somewhere else.
"Oi," Eishi said, reaching out and gripping Shiragiku's arm in some weird version of a handshake, and Shiragiku's fingers gripped back. "Good luck, man. And be careful. Medics are targets."
Shiragiku nodded. "Mai-chan," he said, and reached out with his free hand to hold her elbow. His skin was lukewarm and dry. In turn she reached for Eishi, and the three huddled. "Take care of yourself. And Eishi-kun."
"Hey!" Eishi protested, but before he could argue further, Mai had nodded and grinned sharp again and the gong had rung twice; and Shiragiku had to leave. He did so with all the grace of the hebi she'd accused him of being, and he vanished into the crowd.
"'Mai-chan, take care of Eishi-kun'," Eishi mimicked in a high pitch, grumbling. "Jerk."
Mai laughed, and put her elbow on his shoulder, as the shinobi around her started to move into ranks, swarming like bees. "Don't worry, Eishi-kun," she teased. "I've got your back."
Instead of scowling, his face hardened, indiscernible. "And I've got yours," he said, solemnly. "And when this is over, let's go to that stall you like, the one with all the fruit. My treat."
Mai studied his face, because he hated that place. His eyes were unreadable, a dark azure that almost looked grey if caught in the right light; and his lips were relaxed into a thin line. Eishi, she realized, was scared. For himself, for her, for Shiragiku, for everyone. But he was ready, and he was willing. Eishi, Mai knew, was brave.
"Let's," Mai agreed, but then there was no more time for talking, and they were going to get trampled if they didn't get a move on. "You ready?"
"As I'll ever be."
"Good enough for me," she said with a half-smirk, and she dropped her arm. "Let's run."
...
~ And even the festival itself- with the bright lights and the music and the games- especially the festival- was different, new, special. ~
...
Shiragiku hadn't been wrong to worry after their stupid, blockheaded, salmon-touched teammate, who had already almost died twice in the span of maybe thirty six hours or less.
The first time had been understandable. A minor pause for break after running so long, a quick step-off into the woods for food that had ended in nearly being killed by, well, some weird white thing that looked like a flytrap. Their division leader had immediately sent word to Intel about the breach, but thank Kami Mai had wandered into the woods afterwards to see what had taken him so long.
But the second time...
"Not even Fumiko has ever fallen during shunshin, you dolt," Mai groaned.
"I'm sorry!" he grouched, rubbing salve onto his broken wrist- the war hadn't even truly started yet and the idiot had a broken wrist- and his words were muffled by the long trail of white bandage fluttering between his teeth. "I just tripped, that's all! It's fine!"
They were running. They were running again with everyone else because Eishi had been an idiot and Mai was damn well not falling behind because of that, so he was bandaging his wrist along the way and hoping to find a medical ninja after they reached their destination at the peninsula cliffs.
...
~ It belonged to them, from the cotton candy to their first kiss. ~
...
Running took a lot more concentration for her than it ever had for anyone else.
Right-left-right-left became a mantra, a heartbeat. Bum-bum-bum, especially at shunshin speed. If she messed up or fell out of step, stumbled or tripped while she tried to eat a chakra pill, she could literally kill herself. It would be the equivalent of falling out of a full-speed train, only with less distance to the ground and a greater likelihood of snapping her own neck if she fell on her face.
The others talked while they ran, but Fumiko could only sometimes listen to their voices. Snippets of Neji and Hinata, a few terse words from Karui, the loud voice of their commander. She could barely think her own thoughts at this pace, faster than she'd ever moved before and longer. It only took them days to reach their destination- halfway across a country in days!
There was no time for rest, half a day at most. Not even time to make a campfire, only eat two chakra pills and hope it didn't make her sick. It hadn't been long before they got their first orders: Intercept the mobilization of white zetsu moving underground.
Fumiko knew what a zetsu was. She knew all of the most recent intelligence, had scoured it, had reread every printed bingo book Sunagakure had for the whispers of the Reanimation Jutsu revived and researched every possibility for the white chakra-stealing creatures known as Zetsu, not that there was much of that. They might be human.
She didn't want to think about that, crouched in the bushes. She didn't want to think that she was about to try and murder a bunch of odd-looking human beings who could be being controlled just like the Reanimation ninjutsu victims.
"You alright?"
Her hands were wet, and at the voice Fumiko looked down from the main clearing where Kitsuchi and Kurotsuchi were preparing to unearth the entirety of a white zetsu army, and realized she was squishing the leaves between her fingers and getting green all over her hands. Chlorophyll, she remembered dimly from her civilian grade school science class.
Another test she had aced on photosynthesis. "Yeah," she said back, shaky. "Just... nervous."
Kumiko pursed her lips but said nothing else, turning her green eyes back to the clearing. To Fumiko's right was a man she didn't know who had the looks of an Oto shinobi, judging by his clothes. He said nothing, hadn't since they'd all been put in this specific place together to lie in wait.
Kind of an odd ambush, Fumiko knew. Why would they be hiding? It wasn't like, logically, the element of surprise would do anything against an army of white zetsu. She'd never realized there were so many- she thought maybe tens or twenties until word had come back that a Byakugan user- not Neji or Hinata, someone she'd never met- had seen thousands upon thousands moving under the earth.
Enough to match their Allied Forces, it seemed. Again she turned her eyes to the clearing, which had taken a few hours to clean so thoroughly. Fumiko had helped, knowing earth ninjutsu, while Neji scouted ahead with his Byakugan to predict the arrival of the swarm. They didn't have any chakra, that much was obvious, or she would have noticed them before.
There was chakra everywhere, of all different kinds of colors, vibrancies and states of anxiety. Hinata, Neji, she knew. The rest she didn't know, save for a few, Karui whom she'd just met, the two Rock ninja in front of her by a hundred yards on the other side of the clearing. It was enough to overwhelm her if she tried to pick them apart, like listening to too many radios playing different songs all at once.
Amazing, she thought, staring at the father-daughter duo, that there were so many already. So many zetsu. So many enemies. Where had they been all this time?
There wasn't time any more to ponder it, though. The war, her first real war- not her first battle, really, because she'd fought Akatsuki before and survived because she was a good liar- was about to start, and she was part of the first-lines, an insignificant part of the general melee. She reached back over her shoulder, and her staff made an odd sound as it withdrew, clack-clack-clack of wood on armored metal.
Deep breath in, long breath out. She could feel sweat beading on her face and ignored it, just like she ignored her already rampant exhaustion buried underneath the twitchy buzz of soldier pill overdose.
"Earth Style Erupt!"
The voices were unexpected in the quiet, but the rumble underneath her knees wasn't. Earth Style Erupt- Doton: Opening Earth Rising Excavation- a B-rank jutsu in which the earth rose, quickly enough to catch inside with jags and sharp edges and those who weren't destroyed were pulled up by the force of constantly undulating pulses of earth. A volcano, with victims as the lava.
The sky darkened with white as they spilled and flew, like discolored ants, from the bowels of the earth.
...
~ They immediately found their way to the dancing-floor, in the same place as before, which made it even better; Fumiko gravitated there even as she enjoyed the games and shows and sights. ~
...
Gaara couldn't, honestly, say he was surprised when Mu summoned his father back from the dead.
Rasa had been powerful. Arguably the most powerful Kazekage that had ever lived. It made sense that Kabuto, Orochimaru's old lackey, would summon him if he could, and no doubt his father's soul was conflicted enough to control.
But that didn't make it any easier. If his Third Eye could have cried, he might just have let it. His father, whom he'd never thought he would ever see again, not in this life or, hopefully, the next. His father who had betrayed him, hurt him, hated him, who had tried to kill him and destroyed him from the inside out until all he could think about the man was hate, hate, hate.
He watched, frozen, as his father crossed his arms, watching the other former Kage quarrel and bicker, his expression one of calm stoicism as though he wasn't surprised, either, at being brought back to life. Typical of his father Rasa, the Fourth Kazekage- just like Gaara remembered him being.
Arrogant, level-headed, cold. The same man who had calmly threatened the life of his best friend to coerce him into acting like a normal, well-developed child and controlled jinchuuriki at a dinner with the Wind Daimyo. The man in love with ideology, the survival of the village as a whole.
Gaara shivered, a twitch uncaught by those who followed him, and missed, missed, missed the radiating warmth and heat from Fumiko's skin. No doubt if she was here with him, she would be just inches foot-to-foot from him. "Kami," she would say. "Rasa. Gaara..."
But he was alone to face this man.
And he could not hesitate. Not if he wanted to save her life and Mai's life and his siblings' lives and the lives of everyone he cared about and everyone he didn't know. Not if he wanted to help save the world.
"There are four," he murmured to his surrounding company, far below him on the rocks. "And among them is my father."
...
~ They found a table, dropped their prizes and things, and a slow song was already on; Fumiko had jumped on the opportunity and less-than-dragged Gaara out on the mat. ~
...
The beach.
It wasn't the first time she'd seen it, but the second. Technically, the third, but the true second time, she'd been unconscious and trapped inside an eternal nightmare. The horrible memory- the pain, the rawness, the agony that came with her smeared recollection- conflicted with the memory of the first, of seeing her sister happy, pleased, dancing in the white froth as they waited for their boat.
So Mai, hiding behind her ANBU training, had no real attachment or detachment to the beach. It evened out, she reasoned to herself. Became nothing but a battlefield to be.
They had waited for hours. Hours and days, waiting for anything from headquarters. Mai knew her muscles were coiled tighter than the spooled razor wire she fought with- another harsh, revealing clue to her bastard lineage- but she couldn't help the automatic laziness to her limbs, the careful constructed image of who she used to be and was without her paranoia.
She wanted to fight, needed to. Needed to put a face on her punching bag.
She needed to be useful. Useless was unacceptable. She knew she was strong. And she wanted to use it. Her mind, her instincts, were hardwired for battle, for intuition, for death and killing and hurting. Not that she was cruel. One would think she was as a Katon user- but she didn't let anyone burn. At least, not for long. But she remembered darkness, heartbeat spiking with the gasp of her breath, drowned by the sparking crashes of metal-on-metal-on-skin.
Fighting for every inch, that was how she felt alive.
And the time wasn't wasted. After asking everyone they had found a ninja with Mystical Palm jutsu to fix her stupid best friend. There was already sand in her hair. At least there was sand- almost a home field advantage. ANBU- in training or not and especially then- were not above skidding, sliding, kneeling and swiping the ankles in a fakeout to kick up sand and blind the enemy. Eishi could do the same, make whirlwinds of yellow.
And Mai had helped fortify the shores with massive iron spikes, slammed them into the ground while Doton users trailed behind her, locking them in place with stones underneath the sand.
The peninsula was odd-looking, with a white, pristine beach bordering the intense crags of Lightning's rocks. Even stranger now that the spikes were laid about.
"I wonder when they're coming," Eishi whispered.
"I wonder who they send," Mai returned, and he frowned.
"Those white things," he said. "Reanimated shinobi?"
They were both leaned back against the rocks, facing each other. Eishi faced the beach, and Mai, the mountain of craggy stone. Routine for team Otokaze and their go-to three point star, never caught off guard- only with two points this time. Everyone, she noticed with distaste, was starting to relax.
Always on your guard. Rule Eighteen of shinobi, two of Shadow Corps. But it couldn't be helped, not when so much time had passed. It was either relax, or be overrun with anxiety and paranoia.
"How many," she mused. "I hope a lot."
"I've never asked this before," Eishi said suddenly. "What do you like to do, Mai?"
"Do even do anything other than train?" Kankuro's face flashed in her mind, streaked with purple.
"And what else? You train, you hang out in the Tower?"
"I like to watch the sun," she said softly, uncharacteristically so- even she knew that. She drew up her knees. "Rise and set."
"Wow." Eishi sighed, like a collapsed shrug with his shoulders going down. "I kinda don't think I was expecting you to say something like that."
"Like what?" she snapped, and there went all the softness. "I can't be normal?"
"I kind of always thought," he said with a dry smirk, "that you weren't human. At least not entirely. I guess I was just making sure."
"Twenty questions," she said with a barking laugh. "What's your favorite color?"
"Red," he said.
"What? Seriously?" She laughed again, delighted. "Me too!"
"My turn," he said. "What-"
Mai's nerves zapped, spine zinging straight. Her muscles flexed, hands leaping to the rock behind her, but she didn't stand, crouching. She could feel the fishnet's pattern against her skin, her arms, the irregular bumps of her stomach and it's many scars. The temporary mirth in Eishi's eyes sputtered and died like she'd stepped on an ember.
"What is it?"
Odd, odd, odd things she could sense, odder and as rushed as the spikes in the sand. But it was chakra, and it was behind her, in the ocean.
"They're here," she said.
...
~ Their song didn't come on, but under the pretty lights of starlight and moonlight and lamplight and Gaara looking at her like she was starlight and moonlight and lamplight, every song felt like their song. ~
...
Despite being thrown and scattered and smashed onto open ground, it hadn't taken the zetsu long to recover and regroup, but by then the Allies were already among them, ripping and tearing and fighting.
They died just like people did, but they had no chakra so they couldn't, she wouldn't let them be human. So she spun and ducked and rammed her spear through them, bashed their skulls in with her weight, tripped them over with her prosthetic into other ninjas' attacks.
Medics, she knew, and learned, were dangerous, dangerous fighters.
She stumbled away from one, falling hard, but rolled on her shoulders as it swung some weapon it'd stolen from another dead ninja and pushed with her hands, ungracefully setting back on her feet and the thing was unbalanced, overshot, and she stood quickly and swung her unscrewed staff so the chain wrapped around it's throat and pulled and it came, not even looking startled when she flat-palmed it's forehead.
It's neck snapped, and the zetsu fell.
No time to dwell and she spun, screaming, pushing with one arm the kunai of her staff into a stomach. It hit her anyway- was there pain for these things?- and she reeled.
"Eight Trigrams- Air Palm!"
The zetsu along with several advancing others spiraled away, slamming into more of their kind. Fumiko winced, palming her already swelling cheek, but there wasn't even time to thank Hinata for her help before she was rotating, footdowngogogo- and slapped an exploding tag on the neck of another and- Tiger- Hare- Boar- Dog- earth slammed half a foot barely out of the ground underneath just one if it's feet.
Fumiko braced, ducked halfway, as it landed among it's own and exploded with the range of a flashbomb's light. That had hurt her reserves, she noticed with a numb observation. But she'd killed at least ten.
In the back of her mind, she just kept thinking, It's starting- it's starting- it's starting- gogogo- it's starting- and that pushed her forward like a pill. This was why Mai liked the fight, she realized now. There was no time for doubt, no time for fear, no time for anything but unconscious thought.
It made her heady, heartbeat like thump-thump-thump and blood like pulse-pulse-pulse and mind like move move move until she was just a hot, injured, nervy weapon.
She hated it, but there was, of course, no time to think.
She stabbed another and it grabbed her arm. Fumiko yelped, reeled, was trapped, and almost felt another zetsu slip beside her. She didn't even flinch, surprisingly enough, just reached desperately into her thigh pouch, ripped out her kunai with enough force to tear the fabric, and with a shaking, twitchy-vibrating grip she slammed it back into the zetsu's eye.
Enter through eye, into skull's hole, into brain. Death.
They had bones, they had parts. No intestines, she'd learned, no blood, but brains, hearts, lungs, larynxes.
It fell. And as it did she pulled out the kunai and it made an odd noise like sticky dango sauce that made her want to throw up, but instead, she flipped it in her fingers and impaled it in the chest of another coming at her left. Pulse-pulse-pulse and the leering zetsu's hands were freezing cold without chakra and she grabbed it with her now free hand and the hand of the arm it was trying to break and braced, pulled, slid it over her shoulder.
She'd gotten stronger since she had done that last, and it skidded a few inches to her other side, dying from her stab but she grabbed the staff anyway, yanked it out, and dropped on the creature with all the force of a girl with a seal in her hand. It twitched, jerked, straightened with the lightning's electricity, and was still.
Fumiko dropped the useless seal and ducked away as the body sparked and a zetsu came her way, one two three of them. But her balance failed her, prosthetic slipping on the loose soil, and she crashed face first into the ground.
Gasping, spitting, she tried to get up, and then pain blew up in her scalp as something yanked on her ponytail, throwing her on her back instead of her stomach. She slid, felt rocks pass by under her flak and then it was on her, hands around her throat, and she panicked because not again please-
Something white hit the zetsu and it was ripped violently away from her with a sound like grinding metal and earthquakes.
"Here," someone, Kiba, said, "Get up, come on!"
Dazed, she reached out her hand for his, and he pulled on her with enough force for her shoulder to burn, but she flew up and stumbled behind him and was thrown back into the fight the second, or before, that she caught her balance. There were so many, too many, but if she stopped she would die and violently because not a lot of them had weapons in their hands.
...
~ In the back of her mind, she knew it would end. But that was okay too- going back home. That only brought peace and love and safety under their sky-blue bedsheets, dreams. Maybe Gaara would rest too. ~
...
"Looks like enough," Mai commented, lined up on the shoreline's mountain. "To keep us busy for a while."
"Looks like enough," Eishi muttered, looking a little pale, "to wipe us out."
Mai sweeped it with a critical eye. She wished Fumiko was here, to gauge the strength of reanimated shinobi she didn't recognize at all. She would have been able to quip them all off, one-two-three, with a list of strengths and weaknesses to boot. There was no way to tell how well they would do- Mai knew none of these shinobi and none of those shinobi, only the numbers.
"Right," she hummed. "Wish I'd taken the time to learn Raiton; they're all soaking wet. My fire won't do much while they're all wet like that."
"Think they die?"
"Of course they die," she scoffed. "At least, the white ones do."
"Think they... think?"
"Eishi," she said sharply. "This is war. This is a real fight. This is like Konoha. People are gonna die, and a lot of them. If you don't want it to be you and everyone back home, focus. Mourn later, feel afterwards. You got it?"
Eishi flinched. "..."
"Did you hear me," Mai demanded, "Chuunin?"
"I hear you," he said.
"We'll win this."
"How do you know that?"
"If we went into this fight thinking we weren't gonna make it," she answered, drawing one sword out of it's sheath halfway and staring at her own reflection with hard eyes, "Then we wouldn't go into this fight, would we?" She scoffed. "Everyone thinks they're gonna be the only survivor."
They were getting closer. A few even stepping out of the frothy waves.
"Mai-"
"By the pricking of my thumbs," she murmured, and she felt her mouth stretch again into that anticipating grin. "Something wicked this way comes."
"Move in!" Darui below them snapped, and she tensed before Eishi could even ask what she'd meant by that, dropping her sword back down into it's sheath. "Lightning style-" Yes. "Black Panther!"
It shot like a sentient bolt of real lightning, darkened as though in the middle of the night, and snarled like a wild animal. The jutsu dove into the ocean, and the air filled with the sound of screaming as they fried alive, and one by one they fell fell fell, save for one or two that burst in the neck and shoulders like popcorn.
"Hell yeah!" Mai screamed and it ripped like fire out of her throat. "Take that!"
"Never mind," Eishi managed, and readied his fan, click, click, two moons. "They can definitely die."
Black Panther struck again, but lost it's advantage as the zetsu and hundreds of shinobi and creatures leapt, water raining down like the beginning of a Suna downpour. "Above us!" someone screamed needlessly and suddenly, there were weapons everywhere, and upside-down hailstorm of kunai and senbon and expendable swords.
Well, she thought. Maybe better dry them off a little.
Tiger, her fingers twisted, Boar, Horse.
Breathe breathe breathe!
Eishi realized what was going on and braced, leaning back against the rock as she brought her hands up.
"Katon: Fire Piercing Annihilation!"
...
~ Even so... she wouldn't have minded if this dance- or this one, or this one- just happened to last forever. ~
...
Neji burned like a lantern flame, blue and wide and flickering.
Fumiko could see him out of the corner of her eye as she fought, scraping for every inch and every breath. Everything hurt- the kunai wound in her forearm she'd mistakenly blocked with, the bruises on her face and everywhere else, the burn from her own exploding tag that left embers in her flak vest. At least she was alive.
They were coming out of the ground like they were made of it, sometimes right under her foot, and it was impossible to tell sometimes whether she was stepping on bodies or emerging zetsu and it almost made her cry to admit she'd stabbed both and there was eye fluid on her wrist and fingers and blood on her skin.
The ground bubbled to her right, three shinobi in the midst of it screamed and were taken out immediately. Fumiko flinched, pivoted, and brought down her arm, slamming the fingers of her opposite hand against the seal on her glove. Water exploded freely and it almost pushed her down but she stayed up, and with a Dragon she had it up and suspended to their knees and rushing like a whirlpool.
Her control failed and it fell but they were soaked and it still flowed at their ankles, and she reached into her satchel with a hurried gasp and brought out a rolled scroll, let go with two fingers so it unfurled in front of her, bit her thumb and swiped it.
The air crackled with lightning.
"I'm sorry!" she screamed to the dead ninja in the way and the water fizzled.
Fourteen zetsu dropped. The other two sunk back into the ground. Again, she dropped the useless seal.
For a second she wasn't surrounded, and it was long enough to hear another cry, close. Gripping the kunai wound, she ducked and stumbled-slash-ran to the injured woman with two zetsu falling on her like they were going to eat her.
Fumiko dropped her bloody palm to her glove and ran through the smoke that followed, fingers grabbing securely around a new staff. Her old one had been swallowed underground by another's Doton attack, taking down her zetsu opponent with it. Fumiko set her jaw and swung without a sound. The first zetsu fell like a smashed pumpkin without issue, and the other turned on her and leapt.
Rolling, rolling, rolling, the breath beating out of her with every collision, she tumbled with the zetsu, losing her staff in the process. They stopped and it was on top and weapon kunai crap-!
Fumiko jerked her head sideways, and the blade skimmed the side of her face and ear. It burned along the trail like fire.
"Get off!" she yelled at it, and it grinned in a leery way, teeth bigger than they should be and gappy. One of her hands shoved against it's jaw because she knew already it would literally eat her chakra away and the other dug through her satchel for another seal or something and instead as it's stomach opened into tendrils; she grabbed a scalpel and she yanked it out and shoved it and-
Hesitated before sticking it through it's white neck. That was wrong, that was cruel, that was-
It grabbed her wrist against it's face and slammed it into the rock, against a stone and she screamed and plunged the scalpel through it's throat. The zetsu wheezed, and she swung up her prosthetic leg to off-balance it and they rolled, and she was on top, and she punched it and punched it and punched it until it stopped moving.
Shakily, she stood, pulling the scalpel out as she did. Her knuckles pulsed, and from the sting, she knew the skin there had split and bruised. The groaning caught her attention again and she turned away from the beaten grotesque thing on the ground to the beaten, breathing person writhing on the dirt, laid out from shoulder to hip, eyes pinballing.
Fumiko dropped to her knees, knowing she might not get up again. "I got you," she shouted, and pulled her satchel on her lap and tore it open. "I'm sorry, I'm really sorry this is going to hurt."
She cut away the flak, threaded a needle, stuck four inflammation and clotting seals against the woman's skin, and set to work. The woman screamed and spat and Fumiko had no other choice but to slap a knockout tag on her forehead and she quieted, lolling.
Another three shinobi had found her and, from the sound of it, were warding off the zetsu, so with barely shaking fingers Fumiko finished the job. She couldn't use ninjutsu without wasting chakra but she could help this person survive to get to the medical unit. She hadn't wanted to knock her out, now it would be maybe an hour before she even woke up and they couldn't spare a shinobi to bring her away.
But she had been in pain. Just an average woman, with brown hair and tortured blue eyes.
Fumiko's eyes widened, and she gasped.
Fingers closed around the woman's neck, with just a wrist out of the earth, white and cold. And then it jerked, and the upper half of the woman's body shoved through the earth.
"No!" she screamed, but she was already dead.
The first patient Fumiko had ever lost.
...
~ Gaara smiled at her lightly, face flushed both from the attention of the crowd and from all the dancing. "Having fun?" ~
...
Mai jumped off that cliff like she had wings, smashing it to pieces with her chakra, and Eishi followed.
And they fought like demons from hell in those spikes, twisting and twirling and she was pretty sure she jumped off his fan once, focusing entirely on the white zetsu.
No different than me, she thought. No different from anyone else I've killed.
Mai spun and dropped, kicked the footing from an enemy. There was a waver from behind and she left the fallen opponent to Eishi, whirling and bringing up both crossed blades to meet another.
The zetsu sneered at her.
"Who'd you steal that from?" she grunted, angry, pushing.
"Someone," it rasped, and she nearly lost her grip on her blades in shock.
"Shit!" Mai cursed. "You talk? Are you human or not?"
It's creepy yellow eyes glimmered with vicious intent, like it wanted to rip her throat out, which it probably did. "Not exactly," it hissed, like it wanted to be intimidating. Mai huffed, blowing a bit of hair out of her face, then grinned.
"Good," she said. "I don't even have to feel bad about this, then."
Mai slanted the angle of her top sword, and it slid across the zetsu's blade to run straight through it's chest.
It gurgled, and slid away.
Whirlwind fighting. Hitting, kicking, punching, hissing and spitting, rolling like cats across the ground, but mostly stabbing and slicing and decapitating. Mai lit the ground under their feet and they burned like torches, screaming until Eishi or someone else or even herself killed them for good, blew fire in their faces. The came in droves, in hundreds, and she attacked them like an animal.
A zetsu grabbed her arm in the melee, and she grabbed it right back around the wrist and yanked hard, grunting, and the creature came off it's feet and swung like a baseball bat into two others and then the ground, and there was the twiggish sound of snapping in it's arm and back and the thing fell limp.
Eishi appeared at her back, handheld fans out. "Tired, yet?"
"Not on your life," she breathed, screamed, maybe. "I'm ducking!"
Formation three, one Shiragiku had come up with to name what the trio did often. Mai dropped, lithe, and the zetsu overstepped, expecting a face to punch and it found nothing but Eishi's handheld fan, blinding it, and the other, across it's stomach.
Mai rolled back, stood on Eishi's new other side, and stabbed another, ripped the blade out through it's side into another soft white body, but stopped when she hit a rib. It screamed at her and she snarled, throwing herself at it, and they fell in the ocean. The water was cold and shocking and drenching as she drove her elbow into it's nose, once, twice, and it died, brain slushed.
She yanked her sword out and sheathed them, whirled and punched a zetsu in the face despite it's towering height. The tide sloshed over her feet, back and forth, up and down the sand.
Eishi was in trouble on the beach sand with four and pinned by spikes, and she rushed them with a battle cry, fingers dipping into her back pouch and coming out with wire that snagged and bit her fingers as she unspooled, weaving in between Eishi and one zetsu, dropping the middle of the wire and wrapping it around and around the base of a spike.
Shunshin, and she was air, a breeze, death.
She stopped, panting, smiling, wire twined around her fingers.
Eishi glanced her way, bleeding from a shallow would on his arm, clutching it. Just for theatrics, she grinned wider, said, "Burn in hell if you have souls," and pulled the wire taut before clasping the fingers of one hand.
Tiger.
Flames ran along it's length, cauterizing and cutting and burning through and they fell in charred pieces with a smell like BBQ and a sound like a thousand dying cats. The wire fell loose, and Eishi threw her a wild-eyed but steady look. "Thanks."
"Don't thank me yet," she said, and her wild triumph slated slightly as she glanced. Barely anyone left on the beach, zetsu or no, and there were bodies in the ocean. There were places filled with dust and raised sand, and jutsu sparked among it. The rest of the fighting was on the cliffs.
The sand melted underneath her feet, and suddenly they were surrounded.
"Did you seriously just say that?" Eishi protested, snapping his hand fans shut and tucking them away before grabbing the fan at his back. "Did you seriously just jinx us, again?"
"Hey, this is not my fault!"
She stabbed one and it fell.
Eishi blew three away.
They kept coming.
They fought and snarled but this was the last of whatever force was pushing somehow, and they separated, swarmed. It wasn't life threatening yet- she fought and burned and sliced and burned and-
Oh.
Burned.
...
~ "Always having fun," she agreed, and giggled. ~
...
There was a hole in Fumiko's flak jacket, and if she didn't get three seconds to heal herself, she was going to bleed out.
But that wasn't important. At least now she knew the jagged lines on their stomachs could do more than just wrap, they could actually stab. Not that she could do much with that information, trapped like she was like a bird in a gilded cage against the dirt.
Her body burned as it lost chakra and she wanted to scream like she was on fire, but she couldn't only gasped.
Last jutsu until she took another pill, and she was out, but she was also about to die.
She wiped her glove and stuck a fist straight into the zetsu's gaping open stomach, and it exploded. Submerged, Fumiko barely managed to keep the water together and it wanted to run free, but it went spherical and she floated in the center of it for less than a second, barely lifted from the ground, cloudy red streaming from her wounds. She choked, and it burst free on her command, blasting like a soundwave.
As it bowled over zetsu, even though she was lying on her back, she curled her fingers into Tiger.
"Doton: Earth Flow River!"
She hoped, somewhere, that they drowned.
Her ears rang and for a second, the world swam out of focus, finally quiet, and she laid there in the mud, feeling it seep into her clothes and hair and open wounds. Oops, she thought distantly. Too much chakra.
"-iko-sensei! Fumiko-sensei!"
The world didn't snap back into focus so much as slide there, dirty and blurred. Numbness coated her side, where the zetsu had impaled her. But she recognized the voice. Where...?
"I thought you were dead!"
"Ame?" Her vision was clearing, warmth seeping into her bones as Ame shared her chakra. "Aren't you at the- the... medical..."
"No," she shouted over the noise of an explosion somewhere. "I moved!"
"Soldier pill," Fumiko muttered.
Not seconds later she felt it on her tongue and grimaced, accidentally swallowed it whole, but that was fine. And she flooded again, with warmth and fatigue and pain but electricity, and she sat up.
"-knew something was going to go wrong, so Sakura-san asked some of us to fan out to the other divisions," Ame was saying. "I'm so glad I got here in time, sensei. I saw you, you're great- ugh!"
Fumiko continued to roll, taking Ame with her and leaving another shinobi to take on the zetsu, still exhausted. Fumiko sat up, dizzy, aided by a still-surprised Ame. "Move into the back," she said. "You don't know how to fight, Ame. I need another pill or more."
"I have a medic's rations." Fumiko ate two more from the proffered pack, ignoring the way it hurt, and stowed the rest away. Now she could stand without trouble since Ame had fixed her stomach, although it seemed that was all she'd fixed, if not boosted her chakra a little.
Something touched her shoulder, and Fumiko flinched, whirling.
The shinobi grabbed her kunai hand before she could stab him in the solar plexus. "Fumiko-chan!" he barked. "You're on the go- reinforcements to the first division! Get moving! You, medic-"
Flustered, Fumiko stumbled through the ranks, buzzed like she'd drunk black coffee and ready to fight but confused, until she saw shinobi gathering, regrouping toward the edge of the battlezone. Reinforcements, she thought. To the First Division?
Her eyes widened, and she picked up her pace.
Mai.
...
~ "Good," he said, all velvet and softness and quiet. ~
...
"Eishi! Right here, right now- formation seven!"
"Now?" came his squeaky shout. "You want to do it here?"
"No, Eishi," she yelled, "I want to let them regroup and surround us like kindling and kill us both! Yes I want to do it here!"
"Okay!" Mai heard, and probably he muttered jeez under his breath, and a batch of clouds darkened over their heads, wind whipping from a space to her left. Several zetsu bowled into the sky, only to be slammed down by the forming currents of wind.
Mai mostly aimed her oil at the tornadoes as they came down but she wasn't exactly perfect in her aim, and she watched with satisfaction as it splattered all over the zetsus' stupid green heads. More picked up in the blast of wind, flying up.
And Mai bit down on a soldier pill, breathed, and let herself explode.
The air turned hot and searing, tornadoes catching fire and ripping havoc and they screamed and burned and smashed into the ground. Mai's grin vanished, and she had half a second to hear the roar of rushing water and feel that awful pulse-pulse of pure hatred.
"Eishi, fly!" she screeched over the vortexes, and did probably the stupidest thing she'd ever done in her life: jumped into a tornado of fire.
It burned, blistered and ripped but threw her into the air as it vaporized into steam, colliding with the water that gushed into the clearing with the force of ten hundred Lees smashing into the ground, demolishing stone and disfiguring everyone there, squashing them like ants under a boot, zetsu and shinobi alike.
In the air, she hovered, mouth dropped open, and couldn't breathe for the pain on her skin.
And then she fell, spiraling towards the water where she would drown because she would either black out from pain or be slammed against a rock and be knocked out and either way, she was inhaling water and being crushed.
But she jerked in midair, screamed.
"I got you," Eishi said from atop his fan as it swooped towards the stone, fingers clasped around her wrist. "Thanks for the warning."
She gasped then they slammed into a wall, Eishi having closed his fan at the last second, and she barely caught her footing on the edge of the cliff but again, Eishi caught her before she went pinwheeling into the frothing, rushing water below. Mai almost swallowed her tongue and grabbed the burn on her shoulder, wincing, and turned is disbelief towards whatever it was that had just taken out more than a third of their forces.
And paled.
Eishi's eyes followed her line of sight.
"Shit," he swore. "Is that-"
"Naruto?" Mai breathed. "No- it can't be."
"That's a nine tails," Eishi gasped. "Yeah, that's definitely a nine-tails."
But it was small, looking the way Naruto had when he transformed during the Invasion of Pein. Fatter than Naruto was, and with wild-looking hair swallowed by the tails. The entire thing was a pulsing, writhing mass of red and black swirling, giving off that horrible hate that tried to bring Mai to her knees. It was standing on the water, looking pissed as hell.
"What did Darui do to tick that thing off?" she groaned, then gasped slightly, looked down to assess the damage.
Okay, so she hadn't jumped into the fire. She would've lit like an oiled lamp. But she'd been close to it, swirled into the vortex of hot air between the two as they neared each other, and it'd left nasty burns on her right shoulder and face and both forearms. Her legs were hot against the superheated leather but it hadn't caught and instead had protected her skin.
Manageable.
The water below ebbed and fell away into the ocean, leaving behind bodies impaled on the spikes and laid out in the sand, more dragged out into the saltwater.
"I don't know," Eishi said. "But whatever it is I already don't like it."
"It's too late for that!" the thing screamed, boomed in a way that rang between her ears like she was inside a bell, and she clapped her hands over her ears along with Eishi. But then her eyes widened and she sucked in a breath when it's tail moved, wavered.
"Break your fall with chakra!"
"What?"
Mai braced herself and tackled Eishi over the side of the cliff, rocketing toward the sand and feeling the power burn her back like flames as the tail tore up the middle of the beach below them and then smashed through the stone, dragging through where they had just been standing.
Oh, this was going to hurt too, wasn't it?
Bam! The air punched out of her lungs and the sand mushroomed around them as they hit hard, Mai under Eishi, but nothing snapped. There was going to be a bruise the size of her entire body in a few hours but she could stand, and she did, stumbling to the side and heaving up a wheezing Eishi by the arm.
It wreaked havoc on the beach, tails slapping and grinding and smashing. Mai knew better than to let it touch her even with a grazing glance, and so she ducked and springboarded off rocks and dragged, dragged, dragged Eishi's ass around with her, him yelping all the way.
She could sense it. In flashes, if she closed her eyes, she could see it, and so for once she relied entirely on the sensory skills she'd been taught by Yami, Squirrel-taicho, and didn't open her eyes, focusing on the chakras, her chakra and Eishi's and the nine tails' and everyone on the beach and zigged and zagged, like she was watching the screen of a video game and dodging with her characters.
There was the small business of inanimate objects, but she let her intuition flood, her last-second senses. And Eishi yelled at her every now and then to watch out for that spike!
People screamed and died.
Mai thought nothing of engaging the thing.
Finally she tumbled as Eishi shoved her down, into the ocean. She rolled to scream at him, but then blinked when she saw him locked with a still-alive zetsu, hand-fans open and blocking attacks. Mai whirled against the water, chakra buoying her hands above it, spun like a dancer so that her legs swept the zetsu's out, and Eishi came down like an avenging angel and the zetsu's grinning head rolled into the surf.
He stared and stared and stared at the headless, bloodless corpse with the spine sticking out, and she reached up, grabbed his wrist, and yanked him into the water, letting herself sink.
The nine-tails thing had stopped, and was surveying a part of the barricade to her far left, just off the center of the beach. She didn't know if it could sense chakra or not, but she masked her weak reserves anyway and Eishi, sensing this, did the same. They huddled on their stomachs in the shallows, letting the waves flow and ebb over the backs of their heads.
Her lungs screamed for air with exhaustion and water, but the salt felt good against her burns after a while.
"The Kohaku no Johei. That used to be ours," it rumbled. "I see. They're going to try to seal me away, are they?"
"What's the plan, Mai?"
Her mind spun with pain, exhaustion and bubbling hatred the nine tails chakra evoked, but she tried, because they always relied on her. Mai, what's the plan? Eishi and Shiragiku had followed her against orders to a mission end. She always, always got them through.
"I- I don't know yet," she admitted gruffly. "We can't fight it. It's talking to someone, though- someone who can seal it away. Just wait, and don't let it see you."
"Yeah," Eishi said. "Okay. Sounds good-"
The monster lashed out, made the ground shake along the beach. But when the dust settled, hiding rocks gone, Mai could pick out Darui- five Darui's, actually, each with some weird barrel thing. The Kohaku no Johei? It didn't look like much- but where had he even gotten it?
"Hey."
Mai jolted and spun, catching the surprised-looking kunoichi around the neck with her legs and knocking her over before Mai realized it wasn't a zetsu, just another ninja who had crawled through the surf and masked their chakra to avoid the nine tails' wrath. Mai immediately untangled herself, sitting up in the water on her knees.
"What? Who are you?"
The girl coughed. She looked maybe sixteen. She picked herself up from the water. "Mitsuwa, yes? You're on fire unit, let's go."
"New plan," she told Eishi. "I'll be right back."
Eishi nodded, and Mai rose above the water. The chakra pill she pulled out was mostly dissolved, but she ate it anyway, got half a boost, and followed the girl who moved like a pixie across the water, tap-tap-tap and then leaped as the call rang out and they joined their remaining comrades.
"Fire-style squad- protect Darui!" Mai raised a hand in unison in half a Ram and took a deep, deep breath, hoping to Kami she wasn't about to die but ready. "Now!" the man yelled. "Let's go!"
There was a rush like her and Eishi's fire tornadoes, rumbling and heady, and a blast of heat like mirage waves in Suna. The monster screamed as it blasted him in the face, and as soon as her stream ran out Mai disrupted her chakra, grabbed the two on either side of her and disrupted theirs too, and fell like a stone through the surface of the water just in time to feel the tail of chakra smash into the space above the water, slapping shinobi and destroying their bodies.
For a second she trailed bubbles, stared with narrowed eyes at the milky white-blue surface of the water despite the way it burned her eyes, heard the screams. Then she let the shinobi she had saved go and swam back up to the surface, praying neither of them were from Suna and thanking every Kami she'd ever learned about that she'd taught herself to swim.
Her head broke water and she gasped, treading water. The nine tails thing was stumbling around under the force of a water style unit's attack, and the water sloshed under it's feet like cyclones. It wasn't long before she heard two more gasps, and the people she'd saved bobbed beside her in the water, the sea streaming through their hair and down their faces.
A man and a woman, both older than her. She couldn't tell where they were from.
"You okay?" she gasped in a way that she meant to snap.
"Yes," the woman rasped.
"Yes, thank you," the man said shakily. Bodies floated about them in the water, dead and almost-dead, from the nine tails creature's attack. Again the water bubbled and rumbled as the earth rose, trapping the beast in a cage of earth. It started to close, and Mai shook her head to rid her bangs of blinding seawater and started to swim towards the shore.
She felt the other two follow close behind her. There was a tingle in the water as Darui's screamed Double Black Panther zapped the inside of the trap, but it wasn't enough to hurt her in the surrounding water as they reached solid footing and stumbled out of the sea. Things were quiet for a second longer, and Mai scanned the beach to take count of shinobi.
The cube of stone exploded, and Mai found herself thrown into the ground with a searing pain in the small of her back.
Not searing, she supposed. Mildly agonizing. Shrapnel must have gotten through; maybe her fishnet had ridden up or torn. She reached back, crouched on her hands and knees in the sand, and pulled out a fist-sized chunk of stone, feeling warmth on her skin as blood trickled free.
There was a scream of pure rage from the water, a growl mixed with an explosion. "ARRGH! I'LL TEAR YOU APART!"
All hell broke lose then.
Rock exploded and beach exploded and water exploded and it wasn't just tails, the thing was running around like an avenging angel on four legs and destroying everything in sight. She was standing out in the open on the beach with two water-logged shinobi. The entire face of the mountain burst in a massive mushroom cloud of dust and collapsed.
Mai didn't scream, and she didn't flee in panic. She took a deep breath, assessed the situation, and then she put her hands together.
"Kage Bunshin no jutsu!" she yelled, loudly enough to draw the rampaging thing's attention, and felt her throat go dry as it focused it's entire seething energy on her little cloud of smoke and then she ran, hoping, praying despite the tingling tiredness in her chakra coils that it would go after any of her other seven clones and not her.
Where the other clones ran back toward the ocean, fanned and climbed spikes along the beach, she herself ran towards the people. Draw away, draw away, draw away...
It bellowed and barreled towards the water.
She stumbled straight into a set of arms. "Baka," Eishi yelled at her, "What's wrong with you, are you insane?"
She let herself fall against his side, scanned with her chakra as he jumped the mountain face. She was shoved behind a crop of rocks off to the side, passed from hand to hand until she was lying on a towel and someone had their hands on her back wound and her burns. Mai gritted her teeth, and felt the bursting of each and every one of her shadow clones after less than seconds.
She didn't lie for long, as soon as the muscle healed and she had a little more chakra to spare, Mai got up, waved them off. Her soldier pills still sung in her blood despite her shadow clones, she had room for more.
Mai froze at the cliffside, knowing when she did that she shouldn't, that she was a target.
The beach was gone.
It was just water, water and a few outcroppings of stone. Far below the nine tails ripoff roared, standing on a bit of rock just big enough to hold it, tails writhing. Far below, dust speck bodies floated and hung off the rocks, and Mai could see severed and only-visible limbs scattered like sprinkles across the battleground.
"Damn it," she whispered. "It took out everyone."
A hand clapped her shoulder. "You're nuts, I hope you know."
"I know." She shook her head, sensing the masses of shinobi still hiding, fighting somewhere in the rocks, and there were still even zetsu alive. "Those two that came out of the water with me- did you see them?"
"With the medics," Eishi said. "Funny, they were asking about you, too."
...
~ "Good," she echoed, and smiled, leaned in on her tippiest toes. ~
...
It was chaos.
Fumiko had seen pictures of the Land of Lightning's peninsula. A long white, sandy, pristine beach, with seashells and dolphins and sunsets, winding along a ragged cliffside. Picture-perfect, a place on anyone's bucket list.
Those pictures were precious now- relics of the past.
Because the peninsula was nothing but a bowl of water, collapsed stone, and dead people, with a nine-tails cloaked Gold or maybe Silver brother thrashing through the survivors.
She'd healed herself somewhat along the way- and wasn't that a feat, water-walking in shunshin while healing cell damage, it was enough to make her eyes cross. But the only thought in her head now was Mai Mai Mai Mai. Her sister was alive, had to be, wouldn't let herself get killed.
The ninja waiting at the peninsula started to scream at the sight of her unit, broken away from the fight against the zetsu to reinforce them.
"Reinforcements!"
"We've been waiting!"
"Now we can keep fighting!"
Her foot hit the sand, and immediately she had to twist away from a zetsu that tried to punch her, ducking and kicking up sand with her prosthetic, but before she could reach up for her final replacement staff in it's sheath, another shinobi took it down.
Kitsuchi, their division leader, had gone ahead; she could feel him near the explosion that was the nine tails cloak, and while it was distracted she followed the rest towards the white-haired man Darui, who gathered them behind a massive outcropping of stone. Fumiko could see when she turned around the masses of injured, in the open save for the blocking stones at the edge of the cliffs.
She would go there when the fighting was done, but for now, she joined the others on the water's surface. Below the water, shifting in rays of sunlight, she could see the ruined beach. Kitsuchi soon joined them as the former first division held a perimeter.
"HQ has a plan," Darui announced. "We'll strike at Kinkaku with the Ino-Shika-Cho formation. Until they get here, we have to hold- this- location!"
Six days into the war and another massive battle, but if Ino, Shikamaru and Choji were coming, then it would be over soon. So she cheered with the rest, without a smile but with a swell. She'd survived this much already.
She leapt into the fight with the rest of them- stumbled, anyway- and engaged along with one other shinobi she didn't know from Mist with three zetsu, whose stomachs opened threateningly. One gashed forward, but she sliced the ribby looking flesh with the kunai and they fell limp like dead snakes, sinking into the water. And then it hit her, and she was grappling. The Kiri nin called the water to drown the other two.
Good idea, she thought, and let herself fall through the surface, grabbing the zetsu' ankles as she did so, a mirror of their own attacks. It plunged, and the bubbles streaming her mouth congealed like a mouthpiece over her lips.
The zetsu retaliated, but even though Fumiko couldn't swim, she could breathe. Eventually it stopped struggling, but Fumiko found herself too low to buoy herself back up.
Even before she could start to panic, she was floating back towards the surface at a speed faster than natural as her air turned stale, and she broke the surface like a cannonball, flailing into the air and screaming, but before she could crash back into the water on her way down she felt arms underneath her knees and shoulder in an abrupt, slightly painful jerking stop.
She gasped, looked around, and realized the Kiri nin had saved her.
He set her back on her feet on the water. Her chakra was burning out, and she ate a soaking wet pill. As soon as she could properly breathe again, she gasped and put a hand to his shoulder. "Thank you," she wheezed.
He nodded. "Tenshin," he said.
"Fumiko. Duck!"
He did, and she swung her staff as a spear, but the water bobbed and she flew off balance, impaling the shoulder instead. The zetsu screamed but his stomach opened and moved to break every rib under her useless flak-
Two glints of light appeared, like magic, through the hole of the zetsu's gaping stomach, and it gurgled, and one of the light streaks withdrew and reappeared in the chest, and the zetsu was skewered like pork.
Both lines withdrew, and the zetsu fell into the water, mostly dead, drifting away underneath Tenshin's feet.
"Hell," she heard. "I'm so damn glad you're still alive."
Fumiko felt her lips break out in a smile despite the situation, and she gasped with relief. "Mai!"
Mai grinned, a sword in either hand, looking like she was glowing, burned to blisters on one side of her face and parts of her arms, bruised, bleeding; her shirt was torn, and the low ponytail had come loose, although it still sparkled with razor wire. And then Eishi was behind her, equally beaten up but not burnt, with a nasty looking scratch through the side of his flak, from a zetsu, most likely.
"Fumiko-san!" he yelped. "You're reinforcements?"
"Let's hug later!" Tenshin yelled, and the three from Suna nodded before dashing off and Fumiko felt the hurt deep in her heart to go opposite her sister, but Mai didn't need her help, and someone else might.
It was five minutes later and she was backed against a cliff one-on-two when Ino-Shika-Cho arrived, and she watched them stare the monster down hundreds of yards away in the bowl of the new ocean pool.
"Everyone, cover them!" Darui yelled, and when everyone reached into their pouches or kunai, Fumiko (who had neither the range nor the skill, nor the supply for that) pulled out a seal labeled shrapnel on the outside of the roll.
She opened it up with a sound like loosened string, braced it against the length of her half-raised arm, and gave an almost apologetic look to the zetsu in front of her before biting her thumb and sliding blood across the seals length.
Her back slammed against the rock with the force of three sealing marks bulleting sharpened rocks the size of zetsu heads, and she couldn't even force it to aim a particular direction but it joined the hailstorm of kunai and weapons as exploding tags in the barrage started to explode. The zetsu had been shredded.
"You're wimps," she heard from the cloud of dust and chakra-smoke. "As if you could take me down!"
But Choji had already rolled in, and he vacuumed the dust away to reveal a startled-looking grappling Kinkaku. He was thrown away, but immediately the monster-man froze with his hands in the air, and Fumiko smiled triumphantly at the sight- Shikamaru's Kagemane jutsu activated. Even that didn't last, though, and Kinkaku roared.
"One petty trick after anotheeerrr!" He struggled, twitched, moved, and then snapped free. "This is nothing! I can break this!" And he did, stumbling back with heavy footing with a smug roar. "Die!"
"Shikamaru!" Fumiko yelled, but the tail stopped by what looked like inches or less from cleaving her shogi buddy's head clean out of existence.
"Phew," the monster said. "I got him. Mind Transfer Jutsu complete!"
Darui hefted a barrel, and close as she was to him she recognized it instantly. The Kohaku no Johei, one of the five treasured tools of the Gold and Silver Brothers. She'd done an essay on those tools once. Now everything made sense, and she gave a relieved grin and sighed.
Ino-Shika-Cho.
"Kinkaku!" Darui called.
"Yes!" Ino called back quickly, and then Kinkaku screamed as he started to warp, clinging to everything he possibly could, from rocks to skidding water, so loudly that Fumiko's ears rang and rocks fell from the shattered cliffside.
"Ino, come back now!" Shikamaru yelled sharply, and then all was quiet as Darui sealed the last of the Gold and Silver brothers inside for good.
There were a few minutes of regrouping, and noise from the remaining ninja, and then Kitsuchi stepped forward. "Units six through ten, you help the injured get to the rear! And the rest of you- follow me!"
Fumiko, of unit Five, darted through the cheering shinobi to help and head back to the medical unit set up on the top of the cliff.
...
~ The kiss was light and soft and playful, and not all-consuming like the last time they kissed here. It tasted a little more like dango sauce, and she could feel the sores on her mouth against his flawless one, but they didn't stop kissing and they didn't stop dancing. ~
...
"Eishi, now!"
"Right!"
She wished she knew what the masked, frothing mass of black wires was, but it spat air and was surrounded by zetsu so it was probably an important thing to take out.
Eishi threw the war fan, and it spun like a straight-shot boomerang on the wind, clearing a path through the zetsu and blasting through the creature's wind attack. Mai's clone that had shouted straightened, smirked, and exploded into smoke as a zetsu stabbed her through the middle.
She had to say, being a fan felt odd, wind sliding over not-quite skin until she blinded the mask with another burst of smoke and then there was fire and it burned and made an unholy not-screaming sound and she brought her foot forward with a grunt, grinding her heel into the porcelain.
It shattered under her sandal and dissipated in a way that she wasn't expecting, so she tumbled into the side of a cliff, spinning until she hit back-first into the rock with her feet in the air and slid towards the ground headfirst.
Rather than helping, Eishi just laughed and let her scrabble backwards at the rock, yelping and managing to land on her stomach in a pretty solid faceplant, dust rising around her. The water lapped around her shoulders, barely more than a few inches above ground level.
She grumbled swearwords at him as he finally moved to help her, still laughing his stupid jerk ass off, grabbing his hand and letting herself be hauled back to her feet, after which she prompty swept out his ankle and sent him toppling into the water.
"Not so funny now, eh?" She laughed at his wet-puppy shocked expression, but as he shook out his stringy wet hair, she looked back toward the battlefield. Seeing nothing on the water save for a few dying zetsu, she closed her eyes and flared. Ino-Shika-Cho was fighting a reanimated shinobi. At least thirty of the original First Division remained fighting unknown enemies; chakraless zetsu, and a hundred more from the reinforcements, fighting more of the black-bodied masks and the similar-natured reanimated shinobi she didn't know the name of.
The most people were flickering away by one of the masks, probably water-natured, and she let her eyes open.
"All right, Eishi, up and at'em," she ordered, swiveling to face her chuunin teammate. "We've got another mask and-"
"Jackal-chan, your execution was perfect."
Every muscle in her body locked, and Eishi's eyes, which she stared at, darkened with confusion and then alarm, staring past her shoulders toward the ocean. No way, he wasn't, she would've sensed him, her skills had to have improved enough to-
There was a sound, another waver, a feeling, and Mai whipped, twisting to the side and raising one hand with a kunai from nowhere- liar, her back belt pouch- and blocked. The shuriken clanged, both of them, one shooting down and slicing into the water and the ground underneath, the other careening away and smacking broadside into the cliff.
It clattered, the noise sharp in Mai's ears, and she let her kunai fall to her side.
The ANBU funeral was a cruel one, at least in Suna. The body was preserved by unknown means until the time came, and was attended only by the Captain and the deceased member's teammates, their taicho, shishou or students. The most vulnerable of those- the students, or perhaps just the newbies- were tasked to destroy them, preferably by burning with jutsu, but also by matches if the nature was wrong, which it tended to be in the Land of Wind.
But there was a reason. Mourning, guilt... it was harder to be haunted by someone you knew was dead- no, gone- someone who was dust as dust as dust.
She'd watched his mask and his skin crumble away under her own fire.
Yami was gone.
This man, with his achingly familiar armor- the dark brown half-sleeved jacket covering the shadows of collapsible breastplate, the arm guards bigger than hers, loose tan pants that bunched at the ankles, hiding his shinobi sandals with the steel bottoms. Two pouches, one on either leg, and she knew there were two other big ones on his belt. His mask was missing.
A gaunt face, not thin, not round, no pointed chin. Very plain and ordinary with military cropped black hair in a slight widows peak that spiked slightly, shaggy at the back of his head. Unshaved stubble dotted his face, and for the first time she got a really good look at his facial features, blunt nose, thin lips, yes; but particularly his eyes, almond shaped and a deep, unusual shade of burgundy.
Olive skin, she noted, but she'd known that already; he didn't wear gloves.
"Great form as always," he said, "Mai."
"You know this one?" Eishi said warily, and her throat went even drier. This one. One of many.
Nothing in his life/Became him like the leaving it. The words came unbidden to her mind, but she kept them stubbornly off her tongue. He died/As one that had been studied in his death...
When she said nothing, Yami sighed.
"I would like," he said in his drawling way, "for you to stop me, Mai."
And then he blurred, moving for the kill.
...
~ And so they danced through the rest of the night. ~
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HEY GUYS! I MISSED YOU!
MERRY CHRISTMASHANNUKAHOTHERXMASTIMEDHOLIDAYSSSSSSS
OK so first things first, I cant find the original summary for this, but I KNOW I sent it in a PM to someone. If you could all look through your PMs with me and look for it, I would be ETERNALLY GRATEFUL. Serious.
Um... So remember how I ranted that shippuden would be long... err... maybe like 13-14 chaps. Woops. Miscalculation. ^.^ TWO QUESTIONS: FUMIKO VERSUS DEIDARA, YES OR NO? and DO YOU WANT A MAI'S PAST CHAPTER?
I KNOW the tweener story is missing! I left them at my dads by accident and didn't write it in! T.T I'll post chap 2 FRIDAY, and at that time add the tween to chap 1 if you want to read it!
Edit: I added the in-between- their second festival together.
Welcome to Flames of War... dundunDUN...
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