Disclaimer: I tried and tried to find a way to prove that I don't own Naruto by induction, but that didn't work out.
Shinigan
Chapter 10
They gathered just outside of Training Ground 44, convenient to the tall, barbed-wire fence covered in dire warnings of doom and destruction. The area immediately outside the fence was a quarantine zone, designed specifically to be inhospitable to the occasionally noxious plants and animals of the forest; even so, it still had to be weeded occasionally for the more determinedly invasive specimens. They stood on low, tough turfy grass that held onto its ground for dear life, the first line of defense against the seedlings of, for instance, carnivorous trees.
Naruto had spent most of the previous afternoon alternately packing, frantically deciding what to pack, and obsessively looking over all the available information about the Forest in the Archive and his own memories. He had treated the place far more nonchalantly before the first incident with the giant spider, and the second incident with the overly affectionate hanging vine of unknown intentions. Knowing that the second part of the exam was to be held there set off all sort of alarm bells; for instance, there was the one that said, roughly, you can't even cross across it in less than a day at full speed, and there's no way the task is that simple. He had packed accordingly, by which was meant in paranoid awareness of everything he might possibly need. It took him four scrolls to fit it all, and he had switched to proper chakra-storing scrolls to rid himself of the drain, which was becoming annoying, if not actually a hindrance.
They arrived about five minutes before the specified time, and saw about half the teams who had passed the first exam present already. None of the other Konoha rookies had arrived yet, so Team Seven stood in an awkward clump among awkward clumps, none of the competitors knowing each other well enough to socialize.
Remembering something, Naruto dived into a pocket—not a storage scroll, he would prefer to keep himself unmaimed by explosions—and removed a sheaf of sealed tags, each a little bigger than an explosive note. The seal, identical on each one, was remarkably simple—just a large circle, actually—but a complex, convoluted knot bound it together at the bottom. He split the sheaf into three stacks and handed two of them to Sasuke and Sakura.
Sasuke glanced at the seal and raised an eyebrow. "What are these?"
"Well, I don't think they've really got a name yet, but I call them chakra tags," said Naruto, putting the third stack back in his pocket. "I was just thinking, now that I actually have access to a lot of proper sealing paper, maybe I could use it for something useful to us, instead of just selling stuff to the weapons shop. So what these are are kind of like soldier pills for chakra."
Sasuke glanced at him. "We have soldier pills, dobe."
"Sure, but you can't use more than like two in a row," said Naruto. "Otherwise you go all overdosy and start throwing up and die. These things just dump chakra straight into your system. So they're not quite as good as a soldier pill for if you're tired or need sleep, but if you've just been spamming a lot of big jutsu...it should make you good as new."
Sasuke raised both eyebrows, this time. "And you can use them over and over?"
Naruto nodded. "Yeah. You want to be careful with using them if you're not really low, because they might overload your chakra system and do unpleasant things to it, but you should be able to just use one, use it all up on fancy jutsu, and do it again as many times as you want. I'd be careful with testing that too far, though; I've only tested them for people using them one at a time."
Sakura had been peering intently at the knot that bound the circle of the seal. "How do we use them?"
"Just put it on your skin, like on your arm, and...well, Sasuke, you can probably just activate them. Just like an explosive tag, and then wait for a few seconds to let it dump, and then peel it off and you're done. Sakura...when you do it, how about instead you rip off the top half, that's the half without the fancy knot, once you've got it in contact. That only gives you half. I'm not sure what your chakra capacity is, but the full thing might overload you."
Sakura nodded, looking a bit crestfallen. Sasuke glanced at her, then at Naruto, then back. "Naruto, I imagine there's some inefficiency with these, with how much you spend to charge them versus how much they give us?"
Naruto nodded. "I figure it's about half of the total that actually gets through. I imagine that's why no one else appears to have ever come up with these; someone who isn't...you know...would have to put themselves in bed for a week to charge one to a useful level."
Sasuke continued in the same line. "And you said that one should just about fill me up to capacity?"
"Most likely," said Naruto with a shrug.
"And how many can you charge in one sitting?" said Sasuke.
Naruto looked sheepish. "I haven't found a limit. I did all of these in one night."
Sasuke, though, was not looking at him; he gave Sakura a rueful grin. She smiled back hesitantly.
After a moment of this, Sasuke looked back at Naruto. "Well, that does seem very helpful. Thanks, dobe." After a moment, Sakura nodded and murmured her thanks.
Naruto scratched the back of his head and grinned. "Well, I figured I might do something useful."
More teams had begun to arrive as they conversed, and Naruto saw a familiar tall, mostly-obscured figure in sunglasses some way away. He excused himself and set off between the teams gathered round, looking for Team Eight.
He approached them from behind. Hinata and Shino stood side by side, looking oddly similar but for their size, both in tan concealing jackets. Kiba was pacing back and forth around them; whenever he was turned towards Naruto, he could see an eager grin on his face.
Hinata turned around abruptly before he could get particularly close. Naruto marveled inwardly as always; even when her eyes were deactivated, she had an almost supernatural awareness of what was around her. Now, though, she was ducking her head, fiddling with her hands in front of her.
"A-ah...hello, Naruto-kun..."
Naruto grinned widely, forcing himself to express happiness even through his conflicted feelings; he had the idea that being hesitant around her wouldn't help Hinata at the moment. "Hey, Hinata-chan! How are you feeling about the test?"
"I-I suppose it'll be all right...I hope..." She seemed to shrink.
Naruto nodded vigorously. "You'll do fine! It should be a real advantage for you in this forest, there's not much visibility, so your Byakugan will be real useful." He reached into his pocket and pulled out the remaining stack of chakra tags. "Uh...I thought you might be able to use these," he said, slightly hesitantly. As she took them, Naruto quickly explained the use of the tags.
She stared at the tags with fascination. "Ah—thank you! Thank you very much! These are...very nice, thank you..."
Naruto grinned. "No problem!" He trailed off, uncertain what to say next, and was saved by the sudden appearance of that marginally-insane proctor from the day before in front of the crowd.
"All right, whelps!" she shouted, with a wide grin. Naruto was suddenly and forcibly reminded of the Kyuubi. "The fence behind me surrounds Konoha's Training Ground 44—also known as the Forest of Death!" She waited for the round of gasps and mutters to cease. Naruto shuddered, remembering that vine, and thinking of several other unpleasant nouns that the place could also be the Forest of.
After the reactions from the crowd had ceased, the proctor pulled a stack of papers from...somewhere, that ninja alternate dimension that everyone above jounin seemed to have, were they using specialized storage seals, or what?—and, breaking it into two, passed them around the crowd in two directions. "So these things coming around are waivers! Basically, they say that if you die in the exam, your parents aren't allowed to complain! So make no mistake, from now on people will die! They don't call it the Forest of Death to be ironic, and that's not even counting everyone else trying to kill you! Got it? If you don't have it, then don't sign the form!"
No one made a production of doubting her; Naruto supposed that "ninjas can die" was too obvious even for the average genin—which wasn't that great a qualification, given the first test—to miss. When the forms came around to him, he glanced about for Sasuke and Sakura, only to be startled when they turned out to be right behind him.
Sasuke noted his reaction and looked amused. "Shinobi must be aware of their surroundings," he said, taking a form and passing them to Sakura. Sakura took one slightly more hesitantly, then passed it to some other team further on. Naruto signed his on his knee using a pencil from a pocket, and scowled.
"Sure, sure," he said, standing again. He glanced around. The only people in the immediate vicinity were Teams Seven and Eight. Shino and Kiba stood with signed forms in hand; Hinata still crouched, the form on her knee, and though she had signed it, she stared at it uncertainly. Then Kiba made an impatient noise, and she straightened.
The flurry of noise produced by people fussing with waivers had largely abated before the proctor spoke again. "All right! The format of the second test is simple. The Forest is ten kilometers in radius. At the center, there is a large tower. When you come up here—" she indicated a table hidden by a draping curtain "—and exchange your waivers, you will receive a scroll, like one of these two!" She had gotten a pair of sealed scrolls from the same inexplicable space as the waivers, and held one in each hand. On one seal was the character for heaven, the other earth. "You will take this scroll with you into the forest! The goal is to arrive at the tower at the center of the forest, carrying two scrolls of opposite types, within five days! You may only continue past this round if you fulfill the goal within one hundred and twenty hours of the task's beginning and all your teammates are alive! You may not enter the forest before the task's beginning, nor may you leave the forest before one hundred and twenty hours have passed! Any questions? Good, because I wasn't going to answer them anyway! Now," the woman smirked, "form a line, no jostling!"
The contestants moved uncertainly towards the table, and contrary to the woman's order, there was indeed quite a bit of jostling. The two Konoha teams moved more or less as one, and ended up consecutive in the line.
As they were waiting, Hinata, directly in front of Naruto, glanced at her form again, and hesitated. Then turned to him. "Naruto-kun...are you...worried? About the test? They say people could die..."
Naruto grinned broadly. "Nah! I'm too awesome to die!" Hinata almost giggled, but her eyes were still fearful. Naruto saw, hesitated, then continued.
"I don't think it should be a problem. I know both of us are better fighters than just about anyone else here. Maybe not those Suna people, but I think they're the only real competition." He indicated the team with the homicidal redhead, which was the only team from Suna to have made it through the first exam, and had just left the tent. "We just have to make sure we fight our best. Remember not to pull any punches with those jyuuken things."
Hinata nodded, hesitantly at first, but gaining certainty as she continued. Then, her team had reached the head of the line, and disappeared behind the curtain. Several moments later, they reappeared, being led off around the perimeter of the forest by a Konoha chuunin. Naruto gave Hinata an enthusiastic wave, and she returned it more sedately.
They entered the curtained tent single file, and stood in a line in front of the small table inside. A nameless chuunin sat behind it, collecting the waivers; he took each one, cursorily checking the name and signature, and put it in a pile. The proctor—Anko, wasn't that what had been on the poster attached to those kunai?—stood beside him, handing out scrolls from one of two piles behind her. Sakura was handed a scroll, the kanji for earth engraved on the seal that kept it shut.
"You'll want to hide that now, so other teams don't see what you have," she said. A grin flashed across her face. "Oh, also, you can't open the scrolls before you get to the tower for any reason. Pretend they're classified documents that you're delivering. Good luck!"
Sakura passed the scroll to Sasuke, who passed it to Naruto, glancing at one of the scrolls at his waist. Naruto was about to unhook one when something about the scroll felt off; frowning, he channeled a bit of chakra to his hand, and felt it weakly soak it up. Chakra paper.
"Uh, are these things chakra-active?" he asked the proctor.
Anko raised an eyebrow, looking at the scrolls at Naruto's belt. "Storage scrolls, eh? You're an interesting whelp. Yes, they are. Put it in a backpack."
Naruto passed the scroll back to Sasuke, who opened his backpack and shoved the scroll down inside. As he reseated the pack on his back, the proctor waved them on out, and a chuunin came out from behind the tent and beckoned them along the fence—Naruto was disappointed to see that they were going the opposite way from Hinata's team beforehand, but he supposed they couldn't have counted on being able to find each other—nor on each other's help inside the forest, for that matter. They were competitors in this exam.
That thought made him uncomfortable, and he shoved it down inside his brain, instead paying attention to where the chuunin was leading them. There were gates spread all along the fence, and Naruto only really knew the forest in a small area around some two of them; unfortunately, it didn't seem as if they were headed for either of those. They eventually stopped at a gate that Naruto knew nothing about; from what he could tell, it was almost directly across from the main access gates that Naruto used, which led to marginally more friendly areas of the forest. Then, of course, it was an exercise in patient waiting until the chuunin got a call over the radio at his belt.
After a short conversation, the proctor turned to the team. "All right, you three," he said. "The exam is starting. You can go in...now."
There was only a blur as the three leapt up to the treetops.
XxXxX
They stopped in a circle on a high branch. The trees were really enormous; the branch where they now stood had split several times after leaving the trunk, and it was still wide enough that it seemed almost like the floor of a building. You could have set up a tent on it. The green canopy above filtered and colored the sunlight, though slowly weaving patches of it penetrated through and made bright white spots on the wood. The distance was a weaving of huge tree-trunks disappearing into infinity.
Sasuke spoke with low intensity. "So what's our plan?" he asked, glancing back and forth between the other two. "Go after others, or wait for them to come to us?"
"We should try to find someone," said Naruto. "I...don't want to stay in this forest for any longer than I need to."
Sasuke glanced at him. "Oh, right, you know this place a bit, don't you? Is there anything we should know?"
"I've never been in this area before—I was always in the kind of tamer bits around the other side," he said, indicating the direction. "But...it's safer up in the trees than on the ground, I know that. In some places there's tigers, or at least some sort of big cat, and in other places there are giant spiders, like the size of the tigers, and really creepy and I think poisonous. Oh, and," he shuddered, "watch out for hanging vines."
"Hanging vines?" said Sakura curiously, looking around. "What's wrong with them?"
"Well, it's probably not all of them, but...some of them are like the appendages of some sort of nasty plant that's either carnivorous or...I'm just going to really hope it's carnivorous. I had a bad experience with one once while I was in here." He fell emphatically silent.
Sasuke nodded. "Tigers, spiders, hanging vines. Right. Stay in the trees. We should look for others?"
Naruto nodded in turn. "I've got food and tents and stuff here," he said, indicating the scrolls on his belt. "If we end up needing to stay the night, we can, but it would be nice to get out of here sooner than that. We should try to find someone."
"Probably find people quickest if we follow the perimeter," said Sasuke, glancing at both of them. Naruto nodded, and so did Sakura a moment later. Sasuke jumped off around the circle, and the rest of the team followed.
They had been running—well, jumping through the trees, but that basically was running, to a shinobi—for some half an hour, and by Naruto's reckoning gone almost a quarter of the way around the perimeter of the forest, when Sasuke, looking disgruntled, landed and stopped.
"This isn't working," he said. "Maybe no one else got your memo about staying in the trees?"
Naruto glanced down over the edge of the branch. It was a good two hundred feet down, and the branches in between kept the actual ground from being visible more than intermittently. He had to admit he might easily have missed someone walking at ground level.
"I suppose," he said. "I guess a lot of them are foreigners...wouldn't know anything about forests even generally, let alone this place. Maybe a little lower down?" There were branches all the way from the ground to where they were, but they had gravitated to the higher ones because of the pleasant, open effect left by the clear space under the canopy. Sasuke nodded at this, and they dropped down several tiers, ending up about halfway down.
Naruto looked around. The atmosphere was much more...cramped down here, with branches above as well as below. The ground was much more visible, but they were also much more visible from the ground. Ah, well; that would be unavoidable, and they were after all looking for a fight.
They had continued on for several more minutes, still seeing no one, when Naruto stopped again. Sasuke looked at him questioningly, and he scratched the back of his head with a nervous grin.
"Uh...sorry, but I really kind of need to..." He waved vaguely over the edge of the branch towards the ground.
"Um...you need to...oh. Don't take too long, dobe."
Sakura spoke before he could leave. "Um...what if someone tries to impersonate you coming back? Shouldn't we have some sort of signal?"
Naruto shrugged. "Just quiz me about something like Wave. I'll be right back." He leapt around a tree and disappeared.
Sakura sat down and seemingly started meditating, or something. Sasuke paced. After one minute he growled in frustration; after two he snarled and threw himself down on the branch. "How long can the dobe take?"
Sakura glanced up. "I don't know," she said, absently. Sasuke looked at her. In the Academy, he had been convinced that she was nothing but an annoyance, and that would be the sum total of her character and interactions with him until he managed to find a way to leave her behind. She had surprised him first in Wave, when she managed to leave him behind in their chakra control exercises, and then again, when she had actually seemed prepared to fight on the bridge. True enough, she had never needed to, but he had seen her in passing before his Sharingan had activated itself, and without those eyes he never would have guessed that she was hiding under a genjutsu. If anyone had attacked the image...she would have been in a position to kill them instantly, but any attack less than that would simply have broken the illusion and left her desperately outclassed. Would she have killed?
His reverie was broken by Naruto stumbling back around the tree trunk. "All right, I'm back, guys!" he said boisterously. Sasuke nodded and stood, but something was wrong. He glanced around again, then back at Naruto, and saw it.
"You know, I don't even need to bother quizzing you," he said, squaring into a stance. "That isn't even a good henge. Pay more attention to your target next time! Who are you?" His eyes flared red, and sure enough, the faint haze of chakra usage spread itself over the false Naruto's body, indicating some transformation technique. Sakura's eyes had snapped open at his words, and she now stood, a kunai in one hand, wary.
'Naruto' suddenly grinned, an expression very much unlike anything he had ever seen Naruto make. "Oh, I suppose," he said, his voice strange. "It would have been disappointing if you were fooled by the first thing I tried. Here you are." He suddenly changed, without even any smoke or sound, into someone else entirely, and Sasuke's eyes narrowed.
He's pretty good. A henge usually makes some sort of noticeable flare when it goes down; that's really good control to get it like that.
The infiltrator wore a Grass-nin's headband and a wide straw hat. He—no, it was a she—had long black hair down her back, and stood on the branch against the trunk of the tree, laughing.
Sasuke studied her, his eyes taking in and memorizing every detail. His mouth tightened immeasurably. "After our scroll, I take it? Where is Naruto?"
The enemy stared at him with creepy, slitted eyes, still laughing. "The idiot? He has more than enough to deal with on his own. As do you, Uchiha Sasuke-kun."
Sasuke growled, taking a kunai out of his pouch. "Do I? We'll see about that."
"I suppose we shall," said she, and suddenly there was pressure.
Sasuke's arms fell from their ready stances to his sides as a phantom weight bore down on his mind. He was tiny, helpless, worthless, a crawling insect that would soon be destroyed by his betters. Whoever this person was, Zabuza had nothing on her for pure terror. The kunai in his hand dropped from limp fingers, as his world shrank: all he could see was the face of his enemy, half hidden by the straw hat, her eyes smug and satisfied, smirking in the knowledge that Sasuke was nothing to her, no more a threat than the insects that crawled about on the branch. And Sasuke could only admit that it was true.
"Is this all? Really? The famous Uchiha Clan doesn't seem to amount to much," said the Kusa-nin, still smirking. She deliberately reached into the holster on her leg and drew a kunai. "If you can't even survive this, brat, you're not worth marking. Catch." She tossed the kunai—not even at him, but up, so that it flew in a high arc. Sasuke looked up at it, which took far more effort than it should have, and saw it reach its peak and fall, and it was coming directly toward him, and he could not move.
Oddly enough, it was thoughts of Naruto that saved him. The oppressive killing intent that his enemy projected was stronger than any he had ever felt—from a human. But Naruto, when he had lost control in the dome of mirrors, had focused a terror that far outstripped even this, a terror born in the power of the unimaginably strong demon locked inside of him. He remembered the faint echoes of that power that appeared when Naruto fought him as hard as his single body could, and pitted that strength against the pressure that held him in position—and it abated, just the slightest bit. Sasuke moved aside, far slower than he should have, and the descending kunai almost cut his shirt as it fell. Then it thunked into the wood beneath him, alongside his own kunai that he had dropped. Sasuke bent quickly and grabbed it, winging it at the enemy as hard as he could. She dodged aside easily—Sasuke had not had time for any of the wire or deflection tricks that might have actually caught such an enemy—but it broke her focus. Sasuke composed his mind, breathing heavily, and retrieved the other kunai that lay at his feet.
A sound passed over him as of distant thunder, and the enemy stood facing him again, laughing softly. "I congratulate you, Sasuke-kun. You can dodge a slowly thrown kunai."
Sasuke grit his teeth. "Shut up," he hissed, and threw the kunai at her. She dodged it again, but missed Sasuke's three handseals, and the burst of fire he spat next caught her full-on.
When the fireball dispersed, he saw the enemy's body collapse into a mound of mud, and her voice spoke from behind. "Oh, very nice, Sasuke-kun. Well done. Grossly insufficient, of course, but well done."
Sasuke whipped around, and saw her standing just as arrogantly on the branch further out. He readied himself again, only to feel something familiar running up the trunk behind him. He glanced behind to see Naruto landing beside.
"You're late to the party, dobe," he said tightly, indicating the enemy. Naruto growled.
"Some bastard knocked me off the branch with a wind jutsu, and then set a giant snake on me," he said angrily. "I suppose I should be honored that they felt me dangerous enough to try and split me off, but really I'm just pissed."
"Really, I expected you to be dead," said the Kusa-nin. "Pray, what happened to my snake? He should have been enough to easily destroy a brat like you." This with a grin that made the hair on Sasuke's neck rise.
"Like most things I've found, it turned out to be fatally allergic to explosions," snapped Naruto. "Now, what do you want? There's no way a genin should be able to use summons like that."
The enemy merely laughed. "A wonderful deduction. I'm afraid all you need to know is that I intend to kill you."
Naruto snarled and launched himself at the enemy, moving with a speed that told Sasuke he was boosting hard. Sasuke dodged around to the side, watching the fight while he looked for an opportunity to help Naruto out.
The enemy blocked Naruto's first blow, but the block collapsed several inches under the punch, and a look of surprise flashed across her face. By that time, Naruto was attacking again, but this time the enemy's block held. Naruto kept attacking frenziedly, each blow strong enough to break one of your smaller trees, but it did not avail him. After several seconds, the Kusa-nin slipped a punch through his basically non-existent defense, sending Naruto flying backwards into the tree-trunk.
"Oh, you're a more interesting brat than I'd expected," she said. "Not so interesting as the Uchiha, perhaps, but interesting nonetheless. Not that it matters..."
Sasuke had seen enough. Naruto had tried the brute-force method, and this unknown shinobi had not fallen. Time to see what finesse could do.
He charged forward, his eyes flickering over the enemy, watching her responses, as he opened with a two-part strike, carried out at such speed that no one he knew—except, maybe, that kid in green—could have avoided it. The first sweep knocked her arm aside, but the slamming punch that followed...missed. His eyes narrowed as he recovered, blocking a counterattack to his head. She had twisted aside with inhuman flexibility to avoid his punch—a move he had never seen before, and for good reason. It should have dislocated her hip.
By Sharingan-inspired reflex he blocked her next three strikes, waiting for a chance. It seemed that obvious attacks would not succeed. Outside the fight, he noted Naruto, slowly standing up from his fall with murder in his eyes, and Sakura, hovering uncertainly around the edge, still prepared with her kunai. Those were background concerns, as he noticed an opening and, sliding a punch around her side to attract a block on that side, switched flawlessly into a hard spinning kick.
Again, she dodged it, this time by bending backwards ninety degrees at the waist. Sasuke gaped inwardly as he took up his stance again; one anatomically-impossible dodge was one thing, but two implied a pattern. Who was she? Did she have some sort of crazy kekkei genkai that let her dislocate her joints?
"You seem confused," she said, the same creepy grin on her face. "Are you wondering, Sasuke-kun? Are you set back by impossibilities?"
Sasuke attacked her again, keeping his blows aimed at her center, where she should not have been easily able to move aside. All failed—the majority conventionally blocked, but on occasion, she would pull some dodge that required grossly impossible motions of the hips, shoulders, knees. What is she doing?
"I suppose that will be enough," the Kusa-nin said. Then, suddenly impossibly fast, she snaked a punch through his defense, and he flew back into the tree just as Naruto had, nursing his stomach.
"You disappoint me, Sasuke-kun," she said. "I heard so much about the Uchiha genius, I suppose I was building up my expectations." She walked slowly toward him as Sasuke struggled to stand. "Ah, well. I suppose I'll just kill you."
"NO!" came a shout, and the Kusa-nin dodged aside as Naruto passed through the space where she had stood. Her face was contemptuous as Naruto continued. "Fuck you, you BASTARD!"
She curled her lip and made as if to attack Naruto, but he skipped backward and crossed his hands, and in an eruption of smoke they were surrounded to a hundred yards away by clones.
XxXxX
Naruto dodged backwards from the creepy Kusa-nin's first two strikes, but he knew he couldn't keep that up for long, and these blows were aimed to kill or seriously incapacitate. They probably wouldn't, not on him, but even with the fox's healing factor they'd put him out of the fight, and he couldn't afford that. Whoever she was, this freakishly strong opponent wanted to kill Sasuke. It would not happen.
He crossed his hands and slammed chakra through a very familiar pattern, and clones filled the forest, clones on their branch, clones on the other branches, clones clinging to the tree trunks, even clones on the ground far below. Two clones jumped forwards to intercept the next two blows, and that was enough time to do a quick sealless switch with another clone, one off near the end of the branch they were on. All the clones had started moving, jumping from place to place around the battlefield, and Naruto followed suit, trying to get closer without standing out too much from the crowd.
Memories dropped into his head, and he swore. The Kusa-nin knew how to deal with shadow clones—any clone that came within five feet was dispersed by a lightning-fast single blow, while all the others were ignored. But Sasuke had gotten up, and regardless of the danger, started attacking the enemy again. This time, it was not so apparently equal. The Kusa-nin was not testing Sasuke's power; she was simply trying to kill him, if not particularly dedicatedly. It was obvious that all of Sasuke's ability went into his frantic dodges and blocks, and she was not even breathing hard.
Naruto did another kawarimi, this time with one of the clones just behind the Kusa-nin. The world had been patterned in lines since first he saw the snake rise to attack him; he drew on the boost again, as much as he could use, and shot forward to attack the enemy.
He did no better now than he had before—every blow he unleashed, no matter their boosted power, was simply blocked as nonchalantly as if he were an Academy student in his first year. But the Kusa-nin had turned her attention away from Sasuke, and he saw a clone grab him and jump away, finding another branch. A burst of memory hit him, showing him Sakura already gone, surrounded by a few other clones.
He exchanged only a few more blows with the Kusa-nin, who appeared to be getting impatient, before dodging back. Without the seal—he did not need it for such a small application—he created another clone and dispersed it immediately, making sure that all the clones around knew his plan. Then he swapped out again, with one of the clones surrounding Sasuke and Sakura on a branch several hundred feet away.
Sasuke turned to him as soon as he swapped in—he could probably see the kawarimi with his Sharingan. "Dobe, what was the idea of dragging us off like that?" he said. Naruto did not answer, but pointed at the branch he had just vacated.
There was a slight glow—Sasuke's jaw dropped, and he figured it was much more noticeable to fancy chakra eyes—and then a brilliant flash of light. A fraction later, there was a deafening roar combined with a noticeable pressure wave, as the nearest thirty clones jumped on the Kusa-nin and detonated themselves. Memories flashed into his mind—some three had been destroyed by those same lightning-fast blows before they could finish the technique, two dozen or so had the impression of careful chakra shaping followed by pain that came with detonation, and then the surrounding several score had the crushing impact of a pressure wave, or painful collision with a tree trunk or the ground after being thrown. He stared at the branch for a moment, which was obscured by smoke, then looked below it. Saw nothing. His clones, somewhat thinned by now, moved in agitated patterns, looking for any hint of what had happened.
One dispersed itself, having caught a view of the branch. He winced—the branch had been pulverized completely at its stump, and the remaining fifty-foot span of it had fallen and broken several more below. He scanned the area below the explosion, getting several clones' views in the meantime, and saw nothing. She can't have survived that...was there a body at all? Or was she just...vaporized?
He winced at the thought, but not as much as he might have. She had tried to kill a comrade. Certainly she was more deserving than any individual one of the mercenaries he had killed in Wave, however mad the mob had made them. He turned to his team with a sigh.
"I guess she's—wait!" That was another clone's memories. Something was moving on a tree trunk far below. He turned to the place, and got another clone's memories in the meanwhile. It was...something. What was it?
A clone jumped down to the spot, and was immediately dispersed by something it didn't see. Naruto stiffened.
"Careful! There's still something around!"
Then it appeared. It dropped out of thin air on the same branch where they stood, in the best-controlled shunshin Naruto had ever seen, and it was grotesque. The hair and skin of the Kusa kunoichi they had fought remained...somehow. But it was burned and blasted away in many places, exposing...something below, bleached white skin and amber, snakelike eyes. Where it remained, it dangled in sickening folds, as if the skin was peeling off the enemy's body. Naruto was speechless—the enemy, who he no longer felt comfortable referring to by personal pronouns, had taken the blow of two dozen clones exploding right on top of it. What could kill it?
He stepped forward, in front of Sasuke and Sakura, and crossed his hands. "Kage bunshin—"
"No."
As it spoke, the enemy flashed forwards in an incomprehensible blur to bury a fist wrist-deep in his stomach. He flew backwards ten feet and crashed to the branch, choking, trying to get his breath, his stomach in more pain than he had ever felt. It was all he could do not to black out.
Sasuke stepped forward himself, and stood in his stance, his eyes red and spinning. Naruto would have cried out for him to run, but he could not get a breath. The enemy ignored his preparation for battle, but turned to him, looking him up and down.
"So what am I to do with you? You are stronger than the average, yes, but no genius. If you had been Itachi...but no." He ignored Sasuke's vehement glare. "It might almost be worth it anyway...but a vessel cannot be weak, that would be foolish. Are your eyes worth your weakness? To mark you or to dispose of you?"
It raised a hand to its chin and glanced Sasuke over again. It was so...so comfortable. Naruto was sure that the punch that had knocked him down had been the first real exertion the...the thing had put forth during the whole fight—and he still could barely breath, let alone speak or move. He knew with a dreadful certainty that nothing Sasuke could do would scratch this enemy, and he was out of the fight and had already put forth his best. The only thing that had accomplished was to force the enemy to drop its facade of humanity.
Not your best, not yet, whispered a voice in his mind, and he flinched away from it at first. His mind flickered to the memory of Haku in his mask dodging away from the red claws of the fox's shroud, and away in fear.
No? Why not?
He remembered Haku, remembered the corrosive anger that had filled him and driven his attacks, the unthinking assaults—
Do you not need this power now?
He remembered the seal stirring within him as he made the decision to cut down two hundred defenseless men—
What else will you do?
The pain in his stomach was not going away. The enemy still stood in consideration of Sasuke, whose defiant stance was tinged with despair.
What other choice do you have?
He clenched his teeth and acquiesced.
The seal was still open, lines and points still patterned the world, and he spoke in his mind. Fox, give me power!
And power flowed through him.
As the chakra shroud formed, he felt it working within his abdomen, and the pain subsided. Able to breathe again, he stood, and saw red.
The enemy saw, and cocked its head to the side. "Oh? What are you, then? You don't seem amenable to my trying to kill you today."
Naruto ignored its words, but lunged forwards as quickly as he could, reveling in the fox's speed. He slashed at the enemy with a wide sweep of his arm, and the shroud around his hand raced forward in answer, forming long red claws that sliced through the air towards the enemy's chest. It leapt backward with the same speed that had stuck Naruto down just moments before, and he cursed mentally as he realized that it was faster than he even with his shroud.
Have to keep it off guard, surprise it, press it or we'll all die! he thought frantically, crouching on the branch to face the enemy. He saw it recovering and preparing to strike, and some instinct prompted him to look around again. And this time, he saw what he had tried to ignore for so long, and an instinct like that which told him to slash rather than strike told him how to use it.
A twisting black line ran along the branch between himself and the enemy, and as it readied another dashing killing blow, he slashed again, and the chakra shroud jumped to his will. Its claws traced the line from end to end, and the whole hundred-foot remaining length of the branch he stood on broke off and began to fall.
The enemy froze, and glanced from side to side in momentary surprise before leaping up and backwards off the falling branch. Naruto roared in triumph and lunged forward in a long jump off the broken end, high and towards the enemy. Then, in mid-air, he crossed his hands and made clones again, dumping the red chakra into the technique. Five clones appeared around him, and each had the face and hands of madness that the fox lent him, and each had its own shroud. All of them grabbed each other and pushed off for nearby branches, aiming to surround the enemy and hem it in.
The push sent Naruto on a trajectory to intercept the enemy just as it landed on another branch across a large gap. He dropped down from above, the shroud around his hand flaring in preparation, and he saw the enemy brace to receive his attack. Roaring, he sliced downward, the immaterial claws forming to his will, focusing tightly on the arm that the enemy used to block. The blow landed just as Naruto crashed down on the thing's head. Then things happened very quickly. Its other arm came up and threw Naruto off to the side with terrible force, but the fall that would have at least knocked him out otherwise came slowly enough that in the shroud he was able to tuck, roll and slide to his feet. He turned to the enemy and growled defiance, and saw it staring fixedly at its arm, which was dripping blood.
Naruto cut off its introspection with another charge, swinging the claws of his shroud, but the enemy jumped backwards again, dodging effortlessly. It seemed leery to come within his range again, but that by no means exhausted its options; Naruto saw it flicking through seals and dodged around the underside of the branch like a squirrel. Above him, he heard a roar and smelled burning wood. As he rounded the branch again and faced the enemy, the wood was hot beneath his feet, and a hole two feet deep was burned in the branch behind him, right where he had stood.
He could not cut the branch again—this time, the enemy was between him and the trunk—so he simply charged. But the enemy had gotten his measure now, and flicked through the same seals again. Naruto jumped up and over its head, and saw a raging stream of fire shoot out of the enemy's mouth, first striking the branch where he had stood, then turning to track on him. It had almost brushed the edge of the shroud before the technique ended, and Naruto landed on the trunk of the tree with a growl. He had not yet decided what to do when the enemy used the same technique again. Having no option, he let go of the trunk with the short claws on his hands and dropped.
The trunk was nearly cut in two by the impact of the firestorm above him, and he had dropped some ten feet below the branch before he got his grip again. Then, without warning, he saw a flash of red as one of his clones dropped in to attack the enemy from above, and after several seconds there was another burst of memory: the clone's chakra shroud had deflected the enemy's first thrown weapons, but it had gotten around that by simply entering the clone's guard and stabbing it with a kunai.
He had no more time to think about it before the enemy ran around to the bottom of the branch and, taking aim at Naruto, shot the same stream of fire at him again. Naruto ran frantically around the trunk, hoping desperately that the technique wouldn't burn through and hit him anyway, and became puzzled when the burning red glow of the jutsu ceased after only a moment.
It could have burned through and gotten me...but that would have dropped the tree where it was standing! Of course!
He darted around the tree's trunk again and glanced up at the enemy, who was still hanging from the underside of the branch. The lines on the branch were out of reach...but...
An echo ran through his mind, one of the Kyuubi's typically unhelpful replies. If you stab a thing in its points, it will be destroyed.
He dodged around the trunk, yet again, just ahead of another of those infuriating katon flamethrowers. Seriously, did this thing have only that one trick? Not that it wasn't effective, but still!
The trunk of the tree was patterned with lines, in a grid wider than he had ever seen on anything else. There were a good ten feet between the closest ones he could see; he picked the nearer one and ran along it, and—there! Three lines met in an ugly little blotch.
He did not even consider drawing a kunai; after all, didn't he have claws? They were perhaps an inch long, and looked almost as if he had simply grown his nails out and filed them to points, but he knew for a fact that that gimmick would not have lasted a moment under the stresses of clinging to a tree. Without further thought, he buried his right index finger in the point as far as it would go.
The result was dramatic. There was no sound, but the tree in its entirety seemed to stiffen somehow, as if drawing itself up—then, without warning, it collapsed.
It split along every line upon it, falling straight down in a clatter of pieces. Naruto felt himself falling, and jumped, pushing off the bit of tree that he had clung to. The enemy had done the same, intermittently visible between the hail of huge boles.
Then, suddenly, there was a clear space. Naruto's eyes locked on the enemy just as the enemy saw him, and its grotesque face twisted in what might have been an attempt at anger, and it flicked through a now-familiar string of seals. Naruto glanced around in sudden panic, but there was nothing around to push against, and no time to make a clone—
And Naruto felt something that he had never felt before, a strange lifting-tugging-pulling, and suddenly he was elsewhere, clinging to the branch of a tree high above the falling chunks of wood. Then, below him and off to the left, he saw a familiar burst of glowing red, and he quickly oriented himself. And only a second later, he received a burst of memories, with the clone's point of view on the tree's destruction, its quick intuition of what had happened, its desperate kawarimi when it saw Naruto in danger, and then heat and pain when the enemy's attack struck. Naruto bared his teeth and snarled. The clone's secondhand chakra shroud had held for almost a second before the fire burned through, but he did not want to test out the real thing.
He jumped off and down, to another branch that overlooked the destroyed tree from closer by, and tried to keep an eye on the location of the falling enemy. He watched it for several seconds, then lost it in the chaos of falling wood and growled. The thing was dangerous, and knowing that it was in free-fall far away from him was a good thing. Having it skulking around preparing a counterattack was not.
He jumped again, gaining altitude this time, searching all the while. All his searching was in vain, however, until another burst of rather painful memory broke over him, almost making him miss his landing.
There. That was where the clone that the enemy had just dispelled had been. He was close—
It came out from around a trunk in its full grotesque fury. Naruto landed on the branch in front of it, growling, and it charged at him, flicking through the same seals that it had been using all along. Naruto ran around the bottom of the branch in a twisty maneuver, and came up behind the enemy, the branch in front of it smoldering.
It was just turning around as he finished the kawarimi, and the clone exploded only a moment later.
Naruto had thought that he had given himself plenty of distance from the clone, but apparently demonic chakra did strange and power-boosting things to explosive techniques. He was stripped from the branch he clung to as the shockwave passed him, making the branch itself bend precipitously to the side and creak in protest. He oriented himself quickly and aimed for another branch far below.
As he landed, the thing appeared in front of him with another shunshin.
"That's twice you've made me run," it said, its voice impossible to distinguish by gender, but cold as ice and angrier. "No more."
It started flickering through another chain of seals, this one longer, and, Naruto realized, almost certainly deadlier than any before.
He charged at the enemy, swinging with the claws of the shroud, but it disappeared, and in a desperate whirl Naruto found it behind him. His mind screamed in protest. It did a shunshin while it was in the middle of another technique? How—that's impossible—
The enemy obviously did not care for Naruto's definitions of possible or impossible; it finished the sequence, and fire from no discernible source flared up around him, burning through the shroud in seconds. He screamed in pain, and at the same time memories crashed over him, each of his clones expiring in similar pain. Though the fire ceased in only a few more seconds, it left him bent over, the shroud flickering around him as it attempted to heal the burns.
He never saw what happened next.
XxXxX
Sasuke held his stance out of habit and an edge of stony stubbornness, but he did not flatter himself that he had the slightest chance. The Kusa-nin had survived the biggest explosion Sasuke had ever seen Naruto make, and despite the fact that her skin was sloughing off in strips, she still stood nonchalantly as ever in front of him, thinking him over aloud as if the witnesses were less than ants. Naruto lay hacking on the ground ten feet away—she had put him down with a single punch, and from experience Sasuke did not want to take the blow that could do that.
And then a feeling manifested and started to grow, and after only a few seconds became oppressive. It was familiar, this power, though he had only felt it in full when already incapacitated. As the pressure of the aura increased, it started affecting him—his hands dropped from their positions as his concentration went to maintaining his Sharingan—the back of his mind yelped frantically for him to run, run, run until his legs collapsed—but there was an obscure sort of comfort, even in the terror of the fox's presence, in knowing that its anger was not focused on him, but on his enemy in his defense.
Naruto had stood, throwing off his previous damage like a cloak, and the mauled Kusa-nin turned her attention to him, looking away from Sasuke for a moment. Then he lunged forward with frightening speed; the slash that the Kusa-nin dodged nearly caught Sasuke as well, and he danced backward toward the tree's trunk. Sakura was behind him, looking frightened, and he grabbed her by the hand.
"Come on! Run! They're both beyond us now!"
He jumped, just as Naruto somehow sliced the whole branch off at its thickest, and the Kusa-nin jumped away. He landed just ahead of Sakura on another branch, higher up, and Sasuke watched over the edge for a moment as Naruto, visible as a red flame in the comparative darkness of the forest, created clones that glowed with their own shrouds and jumped for the enemy's throat again.
He straightened and turned to Sakura. "We should try to stay out of the way. Naruto is...I don't know, but I think he might hurt us by accident, when he's in that form, and the other...whatever she is...well, we don't want to get between them."
Sakura nodded quite readily at this.
Sasuke glanced over the edge again as a flare of fire lit up the vicinity. That was a katon jutsu, and a big one—not Naruto, then. What was happening?
He managed to stand for less than a minute before he began pacing, and after that it was only another few seconds before he lost his patience completely. A look over the edge saw another few of the same fire technique, but the real surprise came a few seconds later, when the entire tree nearest where the fire had flared last seemed to shiver and collapse.
Sasuke jumped convulsively as the tree broke, then again to the side as a huge chunk of former branch dropped down past him, far too close for comfort. He stared down again, but couldn't see anything.
That's it—
He turned back to Sakura. "I'm going to go see what's going on. Stay here."
She nodded, looking equal parts frightened and bewildered. Sasuke, after a moment's thought, crossed his hands in a seal that he had only used a few times since he learned it, and pushed chakra through the pattern, deliberately driving himself as far as he could. It took just about all the chakra he could muster, but he finished it, and when the technique released itself three clones appeared beside him on the branch.
Sasuke bent over, panting furiously. It took several seconds for him to be able to stand properly, and still he felt as if he had just run thrice around the forest at speed.
He fumbled something out of a pocket, stared at it. A circle bound by a sealed knot looked back at him, and after a moment's thought, he pressed it to his arm and triggered it with a minuscule application of chakra.
Power rushed through him, addicting and strengthening. The flow ceased after a few moments, but the power remained; Sasuke's former fatigue had disappeared without a trace, and now he felt like he was practically buzzing. He laughed involuntarily.
"Note to self: Thank the dobe for the tags," he said. Sakura looked on with an analytical stare.
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
"Recon," he said briefly in reply. One of his clones had glanced at him and raised an eyebrow.
"Experiment?" it inquired, in precisely his voice. Sasuke passed it one of the tags, and it imitated him with its application. There was a subtle change in its stance as the tag fuelled it, and it dropped the empty tag—the circle now broken at the top—with a predatory grin.
"Oh, yes," it said, and Sasuke returned the grin as he passed tags to the other two clones.
A quick exchange of glances assigned the clones to their duties: two of them stayed behind with Sakura, and one followed Sasuke as he leapt off the branch. He scanned around for movement or the red flare of Naruto's shroud, and saw both just at the juncture of trunk and branch on another tree, below him and not far away. Naruto—or one of his clones—clung to the branch, scanning the area urgently. The Kusa-nin came out of a shunshin just behind him along the branch; Naruto whirled in a blur of speed, and lunged for her, but she ran through a sequence of four seals—Sasuke narrowed his eyes as he memorized it—and blew a scorching stream of fire at him.
The fire engulfed him, and he vanished with a puff of smoke. A clone, then... Sasuke wondered about that fire technique, even as he ran along the branch to keep the Kusa-nin in sight as she jumped around the tree. It was obviously being shortened; his Goukakyuu took eight seals in full, and it was one of the simplest fire techniques, emphasizing pure power over any clever or efficient chakra shaping. Something with more finesse would require more seals—and he still couldn't copy techniques that were being shortened; his eyes as yet could only copy the handseals, not the chakra shaping itself.
Another Naruto landed on the branch in front of the Kusa-nin, and she flashed through the same seals again. Sasuke stared at her more closely this time. He could see the glow of chakra being concentrated as she inhaled to release the technique, and he could see the flow as she blew it out in a line of blazing flame. But it was like trying to analyze the movements of that ice-user on the bridge before his Sharingan activated—moving too fast, too much happening, for him to see.
This time, Naruto ran around the underside of the branch to dodge the technique, and came up behind the Kusa-nin. Chakra moved within him, this time, before quickly resolving in apparent futility; Sasuke had seen this pattern before, though, and it was trivial compared to that fire technique. Naruto had just done another of his sealless replacements, which meant that what was standing there now was probably a clone—
Even as the Kusa-nin started through her four seals again, chakra built up around the clone, moving in convoluted and intricate swirls more complex even than her fire technique, but also familiar. Sasuke's eyes widened, and he ducked around behind the branch that he stood on, the clone alongside him following suit. Then just a moment later, the entire forest around them was momentarily illuminated as if the sun had penetrated the canopy, and the branch that they clung to whipped back and forth in creaking protest. Sasuke shook his head convulsively, his ears messed up again from the sound of the pressure wave, and as the branch stilled again he walked around the top of it and stared at the place where the explosion had been. The branch was gone, obliterated; nothing else was in evidence. He frowned, glancing around the area—movement—
He stared at the place where he had seen it: Naruto stood there, or one of him, anyway, and the Kusa-nin had just come out of a shunshin. It was too far to see—he had to get closer—he pointed to the place and glanced at his clone, who nodded, and then he formed a ram seal and concentrated, and he was on a branch that overlooked them from closer by.
As he watched, the grotesque enemy began another series of seals, and he stared at her more closely. Then, as he realized what was happening, he watched with a sudden furious intensity: fire-natured chakra was building up in the Kusa-nin, but also around Naruto. Then, as Naruto lunged forward, many things happened at once, and his eyes began to hurt. The chakra that tracked Naruto, building up ominously by now, stayed with him as he attacked; but there was no one where he struck. The enemy had disappeared in a shunshin just from one side of Naruto to the other, and the chakra pattern of the shunshin in her body resonated uneasily with the fire technique that was still forming. Sasuke stared at the interaction, fascinated; there was no way it should have been possible to do a sealless shunshin while in the middle of another technique, not without collapsing the other one with unknown consequences. But the Kusa-nin had done it.
Then the technique finished, the chakra in the Kusa-nin's body making that peculiar resolving twist that most techniques seemed to share, and sun-bright flames burst into existence around Naruto. He screamed, the sound made more like a roar of anger by the fox's influence, as he fell into a crouch, the red shroud around him contending with the flames. Sasuke watched as the technique ended, Naruto still bent over, and wondered if it had managed to put him out of the fight—incredibly difficult, when he was in his shroud. Then the Kusa-nin began another technique, and Sasuke suddenly focused intently on the chakra within her; it was not a fire technique, this time. The pain in his eyes spiked, but he ignored it, watching the few seals, but focusing on the chakra molding. He could almost see it—it was just there, hiding behind a door in his mind—
He saw, and knew what would happen, and jumped forward in fruitless intervention, too late. "Crushing Impact," he whispered, almost in despair, and saw the Kusa-nin release the technique, and thrust forward a hand. And Naruto was caught and smashed backwards, as if by a sledgehammer the size of one of those trees, and in seeming slow motion Sasuke watched him fly off the branch, at least one arm bent somewhere it shouldn't be, his legs flailing, and there was something wrong in his ribs or something, and was his head pointed the right way?—
He landed on the branch in front of the Kusa-nin, and she laughed, the sound high and eerie. He turned to her, his face set. A glance up to where his clone still waited, and it got his message, and vanished in a shunshin.
"Your teammate was more interesting than you," she said. "Who would have guessed it? The genius Uchiha, surpassed by a clanless orphan. Of course, he does have his certain advantages..."
Sasuke slowly, deliberately, set his feet in position, and locked his hands where the stance demanded them. He could see, now, and as the Kusa-nin laughed and charged him, she seemed to be moving in even slower motion than usual when he fought with the Sharingan. The first blow she sent out was formidable, but he could see it, and he dodged down and aside and returned with a strike at her hip. And then, when she twisted aside in the same impossible move that she had used so liberally when he had fought her before, he could see chakra moving there, and see how her body moved aside, and he turned the punch into a sideways chop that caught her off-guard.
He disengaged, leaving the range of her dangerously strong blows, and she stared at him with more interest than before, her grotesque face making it difficult to precisely discern her intent. Sasuke gritted his teeth. It wasn't working—taijutsu wouldn't work on this level of opponent, he just wasn't strong enough to do enough damage to put her down. He needed to catch her with something big—but she wouldn't give him enough time. But how...
He put his hands together and disappeared, landing on the branch next to Sakura and his two remaining clones. He pointed at one of them at random, and it nodded, following him as he disappeared again back to another branch, this one overlooking the enemy, who was glancing around almost casually. They then split up—Sasuke jumped off to one side, while his clone landed directly in front of the Kusa-nin. She saw the clone, grinned, and charged it, and it leapt backwards, pulling kunai and shuriken out of pouches and throwing them. The enemy grinned and dodged, avoiding each one perfectly. The clone was getting hard pressed to keep the range open when it successfully pulled a deflexion; three shuriken collided in midair, and one of them, deflected from its original course just the tiniest bit, struck the enemy in the side.
She only laughed and ignored it, closing quickly on the clone. It was hugely outclassed in taijutsu; Sasuke, watching, could tell that it was not actually attacking at all, and only just barely managing to dodge each strike. Time to move.
He shunshinned just behind her and flicked through seals. The Goukakyuu no Jutsu had eight seals in its full invocation, how he had learned it, and by the time he had used it against Kakashi during their tests he had been able to do it in five. After much practice, both before and after the mission to Wave, he had gotten it down to three seals, and he finished them as fast as he ever had. She was just turning around, having heard or sensed his shunshin, when he finished the technique and blew fire at her to engulf her entirely. He was still buzzing with energy from Naruto's chakra tag earlier, and he pushed as much chakra into the technique as he could, more than he had ever used on an attack. The fireball could have melted a kunai.
He was panting as he finished it, and he contemplated using another chakra tag, but decided that it could wait until he was sure there was no threat. The fire had dissipated, and the dust it kicked up was clearing; Sasuke stared fixedly into the circle, trying to get a glimpse of the enemy, and saw nothing at first.
Then there was a swirl in the dust, and he saw it. The enemy—but was it her? It was not the same person. The skin that had been coming off in strips was now completely gone, leaving behind unblemished white. The face was entirely different, unmistakably male with long, black hair. Her—no, his eyes were snakelike and golden green, and his clothes were burned away in patches, showing undamaged skin beneath.
Sasuke boggled. What? How? I suppose if he could take Naruto's explosion—but why does he look different now? Was that some sort of disguise?
The enemy was laughing delightedly now, unabashedly amused. "Oh ho! So you are interesting, after all, Sasuke-kun! I suppose you are worth your mark. I congratulate you!"
Sasuke growled and began hand seals again, but he was preempted. Without seals, without anything but a strange burst of chakra, the man's head rose up towards the canopy above, his neck stretching out like rubber, and dived toward him. He gaped for a moment, then tried to dodge aside, but it did no good. The enemy's head followed him, homing in with dreadful precision on his neck, and bit him hard with snakelike fangs just above his shoulder.
He felt the bite strike him, and weakness shot through his legs, and he fell to his knees, a hand clamped on his neck to stem the needlelike pain. Then, abruptly, there was a new pain, a thousand times worse; his neck was on fire, and it was bleeding fire throughout his body, spreading. He tried to shout, but it came out as a gasp. As darkness closed in over his vision, the last thing he saw was the head returning to the shoulders of the man who had bitten him, and his long, malevolent laugh.
XxXxX
A/N: Hey, it's a chapter!
Last update broke 100 reviews, and this update breaks 100,000 words. So many milestones! I now have a story that is actually long enough to be worth reading, by my own standards. Joy.
This one took a while; I have no idea how long the next one will take, but it's unlikely to take longer than this one as far as I can predict. Of course, I didn't expect this one to take two weeks...sigh. At least it's not a month.