Chapter 9: Sharingan Death Match
Tenten among the Akatsuki, Month Four
"Begin," the Leader commanded.
Before Uchiha Itachi's feet even hit the ground in front of her, Tenten looked away from his famous face. Rule #1: Make eye contact with a sharingan and you're already dead. Once her initial fear at facing her village's most famous nuke-nin faded, she realized that it could be worse. Yes, Itachi was a genius and one of the most dangerous shinobi alive, but she knew what to expect, at least. She knew how to fight a sharingan user. She couldn't get complacent, and the gap between his skill and hers was so wide that her survival prospects for the next three minutes weren't looking very good, but at least she wasn't up against an opponent with abilities unknown to her, like Tobi or Kisame.
Rule #2: Some of the sharingan's tricks don't require eye contact. The instructions in Tenten's head were in Maito Gai's voice, because he was the one who had passed on his hard-won knowledge of how to counter Konohagakure's deadliest dojutsu.
Itachi didn't move right away, but Tenten felt something foreign ticking at the edges of her chakra network. It was masterfully subtle, but Tenten knew her own chakra too well not to notice it. Eyes narrowing, she interrupted her chakra flow for a moment, and felt the genjutsu dissipate before it even started to affect her. "Please, give me some credit," she told Itachi. "You're not getting into my head."
In response, Itachi's fingers blurred as he formed hand signs faster than anyone Tenten had ever seen including his younger brother, but she recognized the signs and guessed what was coming her way. Before dodging or forming a jutsu of her own, Tenten's hand dipped into her pouch and came out with a handful of smoke bombs that she hurled onto the ground between herself and Itachi.
Rule #3: If the sharingan can see you, ninjutsu and taijutsu are pointless. The cloud of smoke was lit up with a ruddy orange light from Itachi's side, and Tenten knew she had about half a second before the man-sized fireball the Uchiha were so fond of hit her. She responded by hurling a kunai wrapped with a few explosive notes into its path before jumping back. Notes met fireball and detonated violently, dispelling the blazing attack, the shockwave propelling Tenten further back.
Before she landed she had a pair of small scrolls out of her pouch and leapt into the air as she unsealed them, letting the twin paper trails form a double helix around her as she rose up. Itachi darted through the smoke cloud below her, katana in hand and sharingan locking back onto her. Sorry Itachi, those eyes can't copy fuuinjutsu! Tenten forced her chakra into both scrolls, releasing their contents. One was a standard Rising Dragon scroll, and dozens of weapons started popping out of it, which Tenten hurled at Itachi with unerring accuracy. She didn't expect to hit him at this range, but her aim was good enough to prevent him from jumping at her, and that allowed the second scroll to do its work. Tenten grinned as it released dozens more smoke bombs that flew in every direction and detonated, filling the room with a thick haze; she could hear some coughing as the audience started retreating to escape.
At the apex of her leap she reached the statue's left hand and landed on it, noting that Kisame had surrounded himself with a shield of water vapor rather than retreat from the smoke. He grinned at her as she darted past him and jumped again, aiming for the ceiling this time. Landing upside down on the room's high ceiling, Tenten loosened her main sealing scroll from the straps holding it on the small of her back and pressed it to the ceiling where she adhered it with chakra, running along the ceiling and unrolling it as she went. When an entire section was attached to the ceiling it detached from the rest of the scroll, and she slung the rest of it back across her back.
Then she had to kick off of the ceiling and drop into the smoke as Itachi emerged from the haze barreling towards her. She twisted in midair but still felt the cold kiss of steel as the tip of his blade scored the back of her left thigh. Then their opposing momentum separated them for a second, and Tenten righted herself, ignoring the blood dampening her pants from the sword cut. Far enough away from Itachi that he couldn't see her hand signs, she formed them as she fell, and when she landed with both feet hitting the ground hard, called, "Doton: Choyakuiwa!" Itachi plummeted out of the smoke right at her, but instead of attacking he had to dodge or parry the dozen or so smaller stone projectiles that fired up from the floor around Tenten. One got past his defense and struck him in the shoulder, but instead of being wounded, Itachi disappeared in a cloud of smoke. Shadow clone!
Tenten didn't waste any time trying to figure out which direction the real Itachi would be coming from, instead making the hand signs for her next technique as quickly as possible. "Doton: Moguragakure no Jutsu!" [Hiding Like a Mole Technique] Itachi's flashing blade passed over Tenten's head close enough to shave off some hairs from her buns as she dropped into the ground. A split second after the earth closed over her head she felt a sting of a deep cut on her cheek as Itachi thrust his blade straight down into the stone after her, scoring her face before she sank deep enough that he couldn't hit her.
Safe for the moment, Tenten considered her next move while she moved laterally through the ground. Itachi would undoubtedly be waiting wherever she emerged from the rock. Tenten formed a pair of rock clones around a handful of explosive tags from her pouch and equalized her chakra with them. Then she made a final set of hand signs, triggering the scroll she'd left attached to the ceiling. Pausing just long enough to draw her tanto, Tenten and both of her clones emerged from the ground.
Judging from the poofs of white smoke she saw, triggering the Heavenly Chain of Destruction on the ceiling and calling down a rain of fast-moving weapons had dispelled more of Itachi's clones. A pair of kunai hit one of her rock clones, which detonated spectacularly. A spray of small fireballs destroyed the other clone a moment later with a similarly pyrotechnic result, and then Tenten found herself under attack once more. Tenten blocked a few of Itachi's lightning-fast strikes with the tanto before missing a parry and feeling his blade open a gash on her left arm.
"Any more tricks?" Itachi inquired conversationally as he drove her back in a steady retreat from the whirling storm of death his katana had become.
"Oh, lots," Tenten panted. "You sure you should be breathing this smoke?" she inquired, referring to the haze that still filled the room. It was a bluff, but it made him hesitate, which gave Tenten the moment she needed to tear open her grenade pouch and hurl half a dozen spiked metal balls in his direction. Itachi leapt away while Tenten dropped to one knee and pressed a hand to the floor, exerting her earth chakra without hand signs to pull up a waist-high wall of rock to shield herself from the explosion that showered her surroundings with shrapnel. Then she was rolling away into the haze as Itachi closed in from a new angle.
Tenten had been keeping time in her head, and Itachi's window was running out, but she couldn't get overconfident; she was bleeding from cuts on her arm, leg and face, and she was running out of ninja tools and chakra. The problem came into focus when two more Itachis shot out of the haze from different directions, one unleashing a storm of fist-sized fireballs at her while the other closed with its sword. Tenten threaded her body through the rain of fire in a leaping dodge and felt the cold kiss of Itachi's blade slicing her right shoulder open. That clone succeeded in dodging a kick to the head but failed to avoid a tanto strike to the chest that made it vanish in a puff of smoke.
A kick from the remaining Itachi caught Tenten in the stomach before she landed, and she fell into a roll away from Itachi as his blade clanged off of the floor. Struggling for breath, Tenten got to her feet and transferred her tanto to her left hand as she started losing feeling in the right. A quick glance at her shoulder showed that the cut was deep, down to the bone, and blood was flowing down her limp arm.
With Itachi closing in again, and blood loss becoming a serious issue, Tenten needed something to give her some more time, and she grimaced. Kami I hate doing this, she thought before reaching into her own chakra network and wrenching open both of the Inner Gates at her command.
Itachi's charge faltered as Tenten's chakra expanded, wreathing her body in a pale green glow. Her eyes turned pure white, and her hair burst free from its buns, surrounding her head in a shimmering halo for a moment before falling free around her shoulders, moving in waves as her chakra pulsed against it.
Strength flowed into her body from the Gate of Opening, and the Gate of Healing caused her muscle fibers to flex and draw her wounds closed for the time being. Tenten battled the sense of euphoria that came with the opening of Inner Gates, focusing on Itachi, who took less than a second to react to Tenten's actions before inclining his head in respect and blurring through hand signs that formed two more clones that charged her while he hurled a handful of shuriken at her that turned into a cloud of dozens after another jutsu.
Tenten simply made use of her enhanced strength to jump straight up before the clones or shuriken got close, deflecting a few kunai with her tanto before reaching the ceiling, flipping and kicking off of that in a new direction, leaving the pursuing clones behind. Reaching the wall, she stuck to it for a fraction of a second before hurling throwing a few kunai at where Itachi had been standing, then jumping back towards the ceiling in the direction she'd come. As expected, the clones were in hot pursuit, but not prepared for her to be engaging them, when she'd spent the length of the bout trying to avoid Itachi. One took a kick to the head that snapped its neck around 180 degrees, while the other got a tanto slash that opened up its neck before momentum carried Tenten past them.
Tenten's only warning was twin flashes of light behind her as the clones exploded violently instead of dissipating. She couldn't avoid the shockwave, which added to her momentum and knocked her out of position. She hit the ceiling with painful force, and then was falling through the smoke. Struggling to right herself, Tenten was kicked from behind and above by the real Itachi, and hit the ground poorly, biting back a cry of pain as bones in her right leg broke from the landing.
Pushing past the pain she rolled to the side as Itachi descended, driving the blade of his katana down where her torso had been, slicing open a long gash along a rib. He dodged a handful of shuriken with contemptuous ease, then his foot came down on her broken leg, hard, and Tenten screamed, her vision blurring from the pain as she saw Itachi draw back his blade and thrust at her head. She threw up her arm, gasping as the razor blade slid between the bones of her forearm, the bloody tip emerging and sliding inexorably toward her.
"Time," the Leader's voice said as it emerged from the smoke that filled the room, and even though Tenten heard it, she found it difficult to focus on anything other than the tip of the katana blade centimeters from her left eye, her own blood running down its length and dripping onto her face from her skewered arm.
Breaking rule number one, she looked Itachi in the eye, and saw the knowledge in his spinning tomoe. None of the other Akatsuki could see them. He could finish the thrust into her brain and none of them would know. But he didn't. Instead he knelt, took ahold of her wrist and carefully drew his blade out of her arm without widening the wound before stepping back
Figures in the haze resolved into members of the Akatsuki, who closed around her in a ring, and she saw some of their faces for the first time, including Zetsu, whose venus fly trap head was weird enough that Tenten wasn't sure she wasn't hallucinating. Her breath caught when she saw that the Leader had also revealed himself, a tall young man with a number of thick metal piercings who almost looked like Naruto, but older and with orange hair instead of blond, his Rinnegan staring into her soul.
Sasori and Kakuzu moved forward as Tenten lost hold of the Inner Gates and her wounds started bleeding again. Sasori started bandaging some wounds and feeding green healing chakra into them, while Kakuzu's black threads started knitting others together. As soon as she lost the Gates the pain hit, all over her body, from dozens of sprains and muscle tears. This was the part she hated about the Inner Gates, and Neji shared her opinion that Gai and Lee were both masochists at heart to use them in combat so often. Adding in the pain of her other wounds, the broken leg knitting as Sasori mended it and the lost blood, Tenten considered it a victory that she was managing not to pass out as the Leader weighed her with those impossible eyes.
"Itachi, is she fit to be one of us in truth?" The Leader posed the question, and Tenten's breath caught in her throat. The rules of the test had been survival, but another second and she would have been dead.
Sharingan met Rinnegan, and Itachi shrugged before breaking the Leader's gaze, producing a rag from under his robe and using it to clean her blood from his sword. "It's been three minutes and she's still alive. I wasn't holding back." That was all he said before sheathing his sword.
"So be it. Tenten, welcome to the true Akatsuki," the Leader said. Deidara slipped her good arm over his shoulder and helped her to her feet, steadying her as she got her balance. She shook the Leader's hand when he offered it amid murmured congratulations from Hidan, Kisame, Konan and her mentors. Konan handed her a folded cloak with the red clouds embroidered on it.
"Thank you," Tenten replied gratefully, to the Leader and the others. "I won't let you down." With nods of acknowledgement most of them dispersed, though Sasori, Deidara, Kakuzu, Hidan and Konan lingered.
Tenten looked at the cloak in her arms and then at Deidara, who wore a relieved smile. "This is an honor, but unfortunately I can't wear it or risk having it in my possession where I'm going." Reaching up with her free hand Tenten untied her scored Leaf hitai-ate and put it on top of the cloak before extending both to Deidara. "Will you hold onto these for me until the day I come back for them?"
Deidara looked at the items, then her, his eyes a mystery as he took them in his hands. "Of course," he replied.
Then Kakuzu's meaty hand clapped her on the shoulder he had just finished sewing back together and she winced at the fresh pain. "Sasori's filled us in on your plan," he informed her in an amused tone.
"And you're crazy for coming up with it," Konan added tartly.
"But since Itachi's already done half the work of making you look like you're on death's door, there's no time like the present to finish the job," Kakuzu concluded. "C'mon, step into my parlor and we'll give you a look that will give your friends back in the Leaf village nightmares!"
Tenten swallowed hard as Kakuzu's arm engulfed her shoulders and he guided her towards his quarters, Hidan and Konan trailing behind. "As long as it doesn't give me nightmares," Tenten shot back.
Kakuzu's harsh laughter was not reassuring.
"I'm going to get started on the necessary seals, Tenten," Sasori informed her. "They'll be ready by the time Kakuzu and Konan are done."
"Great," Tenten muttered, limping along and trying not to think about how much pain she was already in, and how much more she had signed up for.
Author's Note: Another short chapter and we're done with Tenten's initial time with the Akatsuki. Now, on to the Chuunin Exams!
Itachi's such a beast that writing a fight between him and Tenten (that she survives) isn't easy. I hope I did it justice.
Yes, it occurred to me that he could have fried her with Amaterasu or torn her apart with Susanoo, but bear in mind that a) none of the senior Akatsuki are going to bust out their best tricks to test an initiate, and b) that shit damages his eyes, so he's sparing in its use.
Tenten also had a few advantages, like resistance to genjutsu and knowing better than looking him in the damn eyes. Maybe Sasuke gets a pass since he's rocking the Eyes of Infinite Cheat Codes too, but Naruto had no excuse to fall into the sharingan every damn time he met Itachi.
