Notes: I had waaaay too much fun writing this, which is why it got so insanely long. Hell, this chapter is practically an entire fic unto itself. Hope it's not too much. It didn't quite turn out the way I'm sure most people expected it to, either, but I make no apologies for that. By the by, feel free to google any of the weapons I mentioned in Tenten's arsenal. Some of them are really cool. Also, I've been on kind of an Ino kick lately, and it shows.

Goals: A good fight scene, with some fun cameos from the Naruto cast.

Warnings: Blood, violence, and swearing. It's a fight scene, what do you expect?

Chapter 10

Control

Gai and Lee were already in Pose Number Three: You Can Do It! when Tenten arrived back at the training grounds. Word traveled fast in a shinobi village - not that they needed gossip to clue them when their usually good-natured friend strode into the clearing practically vibrating with Fury and Wrath that promised Pain, ye verily, unto total Annihilation. Lee, who was younger and therefore more reckless, spoke first. "Congratulations on finding a worthy opponent, Tenten! Surely this will be a great opportunity to show your true –"

With a snap of her wrist, Tenten imbedded fifteen shuriken in the post just beyond Lee's right shoulder. "What an asshole!" She exploded.

Lee stayed very still. Gai coughed quietly from where he stood, several feet to the left of where he'd been when she'd first arrived, and tried to look like he'd been there all along.

"Stop that," Neji said as he floated gracefully down from the branch above her. "You are just working yourself up more."

Gai flashed her a brilliant smile and two big thumbs up. "While I applaud your passion, Tenten, I must agree with Neji's cool insight –"

Tenten flicked her fingers again and a kyoketsu buried itself blade first into the dead center of the assorted shuriken. Gai's smile faltered briefly, but he bravely opened his mouth to try again.

"I cannot believe I went around almost all day with that total jerk," she cut him off, fingers winding angrily through the kyoketsu's thin chain, "and I was nice to him and everything and then he went and said that…that bullshit about Lee and Naruto and the Hokage and Shino and…argh!"

Neji leaned against his tree, arms crossed, face impassive (although his gaze stayed firmly on Tenten's hands.) Lee's elbows were a little stiff from the awkward angle of Pose Number Three (Gai-sensei's Poses of Truth, Beauty, and the Shinobi Way were never meant to be held for very long, because they were designed for youth and fluidity and grace but not necessarily comfort). All the same, he held them rock steady as he spoke in his best soothing voice. "Perhaps he was merely feeling a little out of place and was unsure how to-"

Tenten yanked the thin metal chain, sending the blade singing back into her hand, then threw it again. This time it whipped past Lee's left cheek in a deadly arc and neatly clipped all fifteen of the shuriken. The force of the blow knocked the partially embedded weapons out of the wood, and they fell to the ground with a cheerful tinkling sound. "Son of a bitch," she snarled.

"My teammate would take issue with that insult," a new voice interjected from the shadows of the trees.

"Gimme a second to think up a better cussword, then," she replied, turning to look back at the newcomer over her shoulder.

"Is it necessary to cuss at all?"

Tenten snorted and stomped over to her fallen shuriken without looking up. "Oh come on, you were there. You saw what that bastard did and said."

"I saw," Shino stepped into the clearing, nodding to the rest of her team, "how easily you allowed him to find a hole in your mental defenses."

"Here, I got one: he's a – wait, how easily I what?" She whirled on her heel and leveled a glare at the hooded man, eyes narrow and cheeks starting to flush red. "And what, exactly," she said slowly, her voice dropping into an alarmingly low tone, "was that supposed to mean?"

Suddenly, Lee found himself with a strong, hearty arm clamped around his shoulders. Nearby, Neji was frowning slightly as another arm pinned him tightly. Between them, Gai's smile was as wide and white and energetic as ever as he all but towed them across the field. "Come, my powerful and undaunted young friends!" he boomed, perhaps a little too quickly. "I have just been struck with great inspiration for our balancing exercises! Let us put them to good use immediately!"

"But, Captain-" Lee began, attempting to look back over the muscled green shoulder of his teacher and leader. "I have the distinct impression of danger. Should we leave our teammate when she is so…ah… vulnerable?"

"Do you want to be in the blast radius when she goes thermal?" Neji asked, a tad sulkily as he twisted neatly out of Gai's grasp. "If Aburame wants to pick a fight with her, let him."

"Some things," Gai agreed sagely, "must be allowed to run their own course."

"How did you give him the key to your defenses?" Shino's head tilted down a little, somehow drawing deeper into the shadow of his hood. It was an unnecessary move – the setting sun was almost directly behind him by that point, making it difficult for her to see him anyway. Somehow, this only served to irritate Tenten further. "You became angry when he insulted people," Shino told her flatly. "And you allowed him to see that anger."

"He was a rude little prick long before I snapped at him!" Tenten shot back, mentally willing her fists to unclench. "Besides, what does it matter now? Tomorrow I'll kick his scrawny butt and he'll go home crying. And if you," she jabbed a finger at him accusingly, "aren't going to say anything helpful, you can do the same."

He regarded her outstretched finger. "Cry?"

"No, go home – oh!" Tenten dropped her hand in frustration. "Forget it, okay?" He was right, though, the rational part of her mind told her. She was probably overreacting, letting her annoyance at the visiting shinobi work itself up into a bigger lather than she should. Still, it had been kind of a rotten day, and the guy had been a total disappointment as well as shockingly obnoxious, and now here was someone she thought was her friend being weird and grumpy at her like this was all her fault and…."And what are you even doing here anyway?" she continued the thought out loud. "It's not like this is any of your business."

Shino didn't move, but something in his stance seemed to turn the evening-cool air a few degrees chillier than before. "You entangled yourself in a potentially lethal fight with an unknown quantity for the sake of some irrational concept on my behalf," he said sharply. "That makes it very much my business."

Tenten stared at him. "What the hell are you talking about? What irrational concept?"

"Neither I nor my clan require your help in preserving our name."

"What?" Vaguely, Tenten was aware that she was definitely shouting now, and despite her best efforts, her fists were clenched anyway. But at this particular moment, she did not care "This isn't about that!" she exploded. "It's not about defending your…your honor, or your clan's honor, or even you."

She took a deep breath, forcing herself to lower her voice. "I'm not so arrogant or stupid to think that you or your family needs someone like me to do that anyway," she bit out, pacing across the clearing irritably. "Look, it's one thing when he's just some arrogant prick insulting your abilities or your bloodline or whatever. But he took it too far." She whirled, stamped back across the clearing until she was inches from his face. "He went after you." This time she didn't just point, she smashed her finger into his chest, in case he had any doubts who she meant. "And it wasn't just an insult, it was a threat." Again, she pushed her finger against the heavy green cloth of his long sweatshirt, hard. "It was a threat to you and it was a threat to Konoha, and that," she jerked her hand away and made a decisive cutting motion through the air, "I will not tolerate."

"You are letting your emotions direct your actions," he said, watching her turn to pace some more. "You allowed him to provoke you into a fight that he is better equipped to win."

That stopped her in her tracks.

So that was it.

He wasn't here because he thought she was getting a little high-handed on his account. He was here because he had done the math and decided she was going to get herself killed. He'd been fighting with and alongside her for almost a year now, he was a hailed genius and a master of analysis. And he thought she was going to lose. Something in Tenten – something a little dark and jealous that normally slept deep down in the belly of her subconscious – stirred and started to growl. She glared at his face but saw only her own narrow eyes and tense jaw reflected in his glasses.

"Better equipped," she repeated tightly.

"The Taneda clan does have some reputation in the north." If Shino picked up on any of the warnings in Tenten's tone, he gave no sign of it. "His father had a reportedly powerful bloodline limit that his son has developed into a very dangerous technique."

"So he's a notorious fighter with a fancy bloodline and I'm a nameless chunin with no special abilities," she said, flinging the words at him like shuriken and nearly snarling as they seemed to whistle right past him without striking.

"Why would I say these things? I am not trying to hurt you," he took a step forward, and for a moment she actually thought he was going to pull his hand from his pocket and grab her arm. But he didn't, merely stepped a little closer and regarded her some more. "He will beat you," Shino continued. "He is older, more experienced, and yes, more powerful. Forfeiting this match will hurt your pride, but you are a good enough judge of yourself to know that fighting him as you are will hurt more than that."

"As I am." Tenten took a step back. Almost ten years a kunoichi, and in her whole vast arsenal, Shino didn't see one thing that he thought worthy of beating an obnoxious pit-stain like Taneda Shun. An image of Lee's concerned face and the slight strain in even Gai's encouraging smile flashed in her mind. Neji's reaction had more closely mirrored Shino's – calm, logical, impassive to the untrained eye – but there was still that note of displeasure, the faint sense that she had done something foolish. Four geniuses (in one respect or another) who all thought she was, in a word, weak.

Well, maybe it was time for the geniuses to learn a lesson or two.

"Okay," she said at last, and even she could hear the quiet fury rippling in her voice. "You place your bets where you want. Go ahead and think I'm just an arrogant idiot who can't let an insult go." Tenten turned on her heel and marched out of the clearing, blood still boiling. "But for the record," she called back over her shoulder. "This isn't going to go how you think it is. I'm angry, not retarded."

Word got around fast in a shinobi village. When Shino arrived at the arena the next morning, he found the majority of Konoha crammed into the high stands around the open battle space. Most of the crowd seemed to be there for the sake of the entertainment – there was a healthy betting pool going on the lower levels, and several vendors moving up and down the stands. Quite the party for a single fight.

But there were several individuals in the audience that were definitely not there for the entertainment value. There were a handful of serious-looking evaluators grouped quietly near the Hokage's box; Academy instructors, quality control administrators, and village elders, all of whom had a very vested interest in measuring a Konoha shinobi' abilities against a freelance outsider. Another serious (if not nearly as quiet) group of individuals sat about halfway down the stands near the fighters' entrance: pale eyes, sharp teeth, blond, grumpy, and of course, green. His team, Tenten's team, and a handful of others in their generation apparently had come to show their support for their comrade in arms. "After all," Kiba bellowed to Shino over the general roar of the crowd, "we want see one of ours kick that loser's ass to the moon!"

"Yeah!" Naruto jammed a fist into the air. "She's gonna beat the crap outta that stupid little snot! Konoha shinobi are way better than some creep-face Blue Fish Crapper!"

"Black Flash Cannon, dummy," Sakura rolled her eyes at him. "It's not that hard to remember."

"It's kind of a pity, though," Ino sighed, leaning forward to rest her folded arms on Chouji's head as he sat munching in the row in front of her. "I mean, I heard he was a jerk, but you gotta admit the man is hot."

Shino ignored the general uproar that statement caused and moved to sit by Hinata. She offered him a quiet smile that had just an edge of nervousness behind it. She flicked her wide eyes up at the grim evaluators, and the Hokage who by contrast lounged in her seat with one leg hooked indolently over the arm rest. "It's like a…a trial," she murmured.

"Hm."

"Heh," Kiba snorted as he plopped down on Shino's other side and Akamaru wiggled his large white body between Kiba's knees and panted happily. "They're not the judges I'd be worried about, if I were her," he smirked. Shino frowned at him, knowing that Kiba was well adapted to reading those expressions on him without having to see his face. But the dog nin merely grinned toothily at him. "Aw c'mon," he flapped a hand at the stands. "Like it's not kinda obvious."

Shino scanned the crowd, his eyes confirming what his kikkai had told him the moment he arrived. Throughout the crowd, several heavily-coated figures sat in small groups of two or three, faces mostly hidden, sunglasses flashing in the afternoon sun. He had expected some to be there, of course. He had been unprepared for the actual count, however.

He had not expected the entire Aburame clan to be come.

"I mean, wasn't your dad even on a mission?" Kiba scratched his head. "And I swear that one lady from the, uh, Sita branch, your aunt? Doesn't she have like a thing about big crowds? And even she's here, I can smell her over there with your gramps."

"Maybe they're just interested in the fight," Hinata offered.

"Yeah, three guesses why," Kiba smirked at Shino, who merely nodded to the fighters' entrance.

Around them, the crowd went quiet with anticipation, then erupted in cheering as both combatants appeared. Taneda strode out into the arena, smiling and waving at the crowd. "Hey, don't cheer for that jerkoff!" Naruto was yelling from further down Shino's row. "Traitors!"

"They probably bet on him to win," Shikamaru said darkly.

"And he's cute," Ino added, pointing to a group of young girls who were waving and cheering loudly. Naruto made a gagging noise, and Sakura beaned him smartly on the head, but before she could reprimand him further, Tenten walked smoothly into the arena.

She moved to stand a few feet from Taneda, looking much more serious and professional than her opponent. She did smile and wave a little at the suddenly explosively loud group of shinobi all around Shino, but instantly her face was all business as Taneda turned to sneer at her. She responded by sweeping him with a brief, assessing look, then turned away and moved towards her side of the arena. "That's right!" Ino shouted approvingly, using Chouji's head to lever herself higher. "Give 'im the brush off, girl!"

Taneda spat at the ground, then turned on his heel and marched to the opposite side. When they turned to face each other, his sneer was gone and his face was a cold, emotionless mask. Tenten merely looked calm.

"The fight goes until either combatant gives up, is knocked unconscious, or is killed," the referee said from the center of the arena. "There is no prize for this fight, nor are you being graded or judged on your performance."

"Right," Kiba snorted derisively.

"You may not leave the arena, and you may not involve anyone else in the fight," the referee finished. He jumped back until he was perched on the walls of the arena, and raised his hand. "Begin!"

"Give up, girl," Taneda said loudly, crouching and holding up his bandaged hand towards her, the other hidden behind his back. "I am the son of the Black-"

Behind him, Tenten dug her hand into his hair and pulled. The man fell back, but twisted in the air before he could land on the wakizashi she held in her other hand. He used the momentum to try and slam a fist into her throat, but she was already several feet away, the wakizashi already vanished to be replaced with two wickedly sharp wind-and-fire wheels. Anger flashed across Taneda's expression – he had obviously been about to start well-rehearsed speech about his life-story and goals and why he would never lose to someone like her and so on, and Tenten's refusal to let him had rained on his parade.

"That's my girl!" Ino all but screamed, practically standing on Chouji's head now as she cheered.

"You've had like one mission with her," Shikamaru grumbled, pulling her back down. "How does that make her your girl?"

"We had ice cream together and we talked about boys," Ino shot back, her tone indicating that her genius teammate was clearly an idiot. "That makes us practically sisters."

"So you don't want to talk?" Taneda yelled, balling his outstretched hand into a fist. "Fine with me!" He practically shouted the last word, and thrust his arm forward. There was a sound like a giant fuse hissing, and a cloud of blue-black smoke billowed up around Taneda's arm.

Which flew across the arena and exploded in Tenten's face.

"Tenten!" Lee shouted, springing from his seat. He looked poised to leap into the arena immediately, and only Neji's hand clamped around his wrist seemed to be holding him back.

"Holy shit!" Kiba barked, and Akamaru growled. "Did his arm just come off?"

Hinata's hands were clasped tightly in her lap, and Neji shifted his weight. The rest of the crowd, however, struggled to see through the smoke and dust that temporarily filled the arena. Shino leaned forward. Briefly, he felt a surge of anger that his kikkai could not get close enough to the combatants to keep better track of her, but he dismissed that thought as immaterial.

The flames of the explosion blew themselves out quickly enough, but the heavy black smoke swirled for a long time before it cleared. When it dissipated at last, Taneda Shun stood in the center of the arena, smirking. He stretched his shoulders languidly, showing off his right arm that had regenerated almost immediately.

A fifteen foot crater smoked gently where Tenten had stood.

Taneda turned to the Hokage's box. "In a heartbeat," he called smugly.

The Hokage raised one manicured finger into the air. Then, almost lazily, she pointed. Taneda started to turn his head to see what she was pointing -

Tenten slammed into Taneda's back feet first. The man went flying, rolled gracelessly across the ground, and landed on his back, arms crossed before his face and straining to block the sharp blades of her wind-and-fire wheels. Tenten jumped back and away from him, but sent one wheel flying at his neck as she spun to dodge his roundhouse kick. Taneda threw up his right arm and the spinning wheel glanced off his forearm with a clang.

"Hey, Hinata," Naruto reached across Sakura to snag the Hyuuga's sleeve, though his eyes never left the arena. "What the hell's that guy made of, iron or something?"

Hinata turned a brilliant shade of red, then swallowed. "J-just his arm, I think. It's, um, it's reinforced with some k-kind of metal."

"Hey, watch that hand, perv!" Sakura smacked her teammate's arm away from her chest and Hinata's sleeve, almost sending him flying across the stands.

Tenten's second wheel flashed in the sun as it spun at Taneda's ankles, but the man leaped over it. She's got him, Shino thought with grim satisfaction. Sure enough, Tenten yanked the thin wire connecting the wheel to her hand, bringing it whirling towards Taneda's back as he arced through the air. As he spun to counter it with his right arm, she rolled across the dirt underneath him, snatching up her first wheel and flinging it upward. Taneda knocked the second wheel aside, but the wheel from the ground came too fast and from too extreme of an angle for him to sufficiently block it in time. He managed to avoid getting his leg sliced off, but the flame-shaped blades on the wheel's circumference sliced through his left boot, almost cutting it entirely off.

"Aw, I liked those boots," Sakura sighed.

"Where did he get them, you think?" Ino wondered.

"Women," Shikamaru grunted.

Taneda hit the ground just as Tenten rolled back to her feet. The wind-and-fire wheels lay scattered on the ground nearby again, one shattered from the impact with Taneda's arm and the other with a scrap of black leather hanging on it's jagged edge. Tenten reached for her scroll, but before she could summon anything, Taneda raised his arms at her and fired again. He small cloud of black smoke bloomed around his right arm as the limb detached and hurtled towards Tenten. The kunoichi was already leaping to the side, twisting to throw a francisca at his head.

The missile swerved in the air and followed her. Shino saw the brief look of surprise and horror on Tenten's face, a moment before she was engulfed in flame and smoke.

This time, Neji had to grab Lee's shoulders and slam him back into his seat, and Sakura belted Naruto on the head for the series of extremely graphic curses he let loose.

Shino felt Hinata's soft hand on his arm and Kiba's rougher grip on his shoulder and realized that several kikkai were seething across his chest and down his arms with agitation. Irritably, he ordered them back to the hive and scanned the smoky arena.

There she was – kneeling against the damaged wall and breathing heavily. She was covered in dirt, her hair had come loose from one of her buns, and her right leg was bleeding from multiple cuts. "It's okay," Hinata murmured soothingly. "She diverted it in time."

"Diverted?" Kiba frowned. "You mean dodged?"

"No," Neji answered, voice carefully level. "She threw a shuriken infused with some of her chakra. The missile locked on to the shuriken instead of her."

"So his arm can come off and follow people's chakra?" Naruto scratched his head. "What a weirdo."

"It still looks like she got hit," Kiba grunted.

"She was in the blast radius," Neji explained. "Though far enough from the center to avoid major injury."

"Avoid major injury? Do you not see all that blood all over her leg?"

"Shrapnel," Shikamaru shrugged.

"The cuts aren't deep," Sakura said, with the confident air of a professional. "The blood is the wrong color for major artery damage, and from the way she's moving it doesn't look like any tendons or ligaments were cut."

"That won't work again," Taneda shouted from across the arena, watching as Tenten pushed herself back to her feet. "All I have to do is adjust my seeker to your body's chakra level, and then no decoy could ever have enough chakra to fool my missiles again."

Tenten ignored him, still leaning on the wall and breathing deeply. Her eyes were closed, her head was down, and she seemed unaware of the world around her. Trying to get control of the pain, Shino realized. The blast probably disoriented her too. She was lucky Taneda was such a boastful idiot who preferred to stroke his own ego rather than finish things quickly.

Taneda raised his right arm again. "You should feel honored," he yelled. "I've never had to shoot someone more than once before. I guess you're just a tough little bitch to kill, eh?"

"Look out!" Lee shouted, as the black smoke flashed and the missile shot across the arena.

Tenten opened her eyes, and moved.

The missile swerved and followed as she jumped straight up in the air. She tapped a foot against the top of the wall, almost level with the bottom rows of the stands, and shot in towards the center of the arena. The missile followed again, looking almost comical as it skid in the air and angled after her.

Taneda smirked as she flew towards him, his missile close on her heels. "Nice try," he shouted, and raised his left arm. Greenish-grey smoke blossomed around it, and then his left arm erupted towards her face.

"She's caught!" Kiba snarled.

"No," Shino replied.

Tenten twisted.

The two missiles hit each other head-on. The walls of the arena shook slightly at the blast, and everyone in the lower seats gasped as the shock wave slammed over them in a gust of hot air and dust.

Taneda gaped at Tenten as she stood calmly on an uprooted tree stump a few feet away. A naginata stood quivering in the ground behind him, splattered with blood from where it had sliced through his side. Dumbly, Taneda looked down at the ragged gouge the spear had made in his ribcage and the blood soaking his shirt.

"How the hell did she do that?" Kiba demanded. "She changed her trajectory in mid-freaking-air! She didn't even use a wire or a chain or a clone or anything!"

Lee's teeth gleamed madly in the sunlight. "Ah hah!" he proclaimed grandly, bouncing out of his seat and striking some highly ridiculous and slightly uncomfortable-looking pose. "That is one of the secrets of my strong and vibrant teammate! A technique she has mastered with the wise and powerful guidance of our beloved sensei, who is-"

"Gai taught her," Neji interrupted.

"GO TENTEN!" Naruto roared, fists pumping and smile almost as painfully bright as Lee's. "KICK HIS ASS!"

Taneda was not nearly as impressed. "Bitch!" he spat, and raised his arms again. "You think this is over yet? You think you can beat me with your fancy little gymnastics? I'm not done with you yet! And when I am done, I'm going to kill all your precious little friends, too. All those worthless guys who think they're shinobi." Taneda curled his hands into fists and snarled. "You can dodge and jump around all you want, but I'm going to kill you and all your little boyfriends, too. You can't even touch me, you…you little whore!"

Shino heard several of the others around him yelling in outrage, even proper Haruno Sakura, but the roaring blood in his ears drowned out the words. Get a grip, he told himself firmly. Insults means Taneda's worried, means he's angry, means he's off guard. She's going to win. She's going to kill him, if he keeps it up.

And if she doesn't, a small, dark voice in the back of his mind whispered, it's a long, dangerous trip back to the north, isn't it? And Taneda Shun traveled alone.

"Dodge this!" Taneda screamed, and fired.

Into the stands.

Shino's arms were outstretched before he was fully aware of standing up, and the kikkai were boiling out of his body in a great black cloud. Akamaru was already midair, Kiba on his back as they hurled themselves at the incoming missile. Hinata's hands were poised and glowing subtly, and on the other side of Kiba's now empty seat, so were Neji's. That was all Shino had time to register when abruptly the missile veered off, smashing harmlessly into the ground in the arena.

Kiba and Akamaru landed heavily amongst the people in the targeted stands, and several of the stunned civilians latched on to them in terror. Suddenly, they simultaneously released the dog and his shinobi and collectively sat down. Kiba stared at them, bewildered, but Shino saw Ino lowering her hands. Crowd control, he thought. Useful. All of this registered only with a small part of his mind – the rest was occupied with the arena.

Tenten released the end of the shattered chain she had used to hook the missile in flight. Her fingers were cut and bloody where the links had dug into the flesh as she redirected it's path, away from the crowds. Her face was no longer calm.

"Taneda Shun," the Hokage's voice rang out from her box, silencing the last few frightened screams and furious shouts of the crowd. "You have broken the rules of the arena, and by attacking the citizens of my village, you have renounced any protection your status as a guest may have offered you." Tsunade rose from her chair, one hand on her hip.

"Tenten," she said. "End it."

Taneda barked a laugh, a short, ugly sound. "That little bitch can't-"

He gagged as something dark shot by his face.

She had scored a direct hit, slicing through the man's left cheek, across his upper lip, and over to the right side of his jaw. "Shit," Shino heard Naruto say. "That's more'n an ugly scar, that's a freaking debilitating blow." Sakura nodded gravely. From the amount of blood and the intense pain on Taneda's face, it was likely she had struck his tongue, too. Debilitating indeed.

Tenten came to rest a few feet outside her opponent's reach, and looked him right in the eye. Her clear voice carried all the way up to the top of the arena. "You," she said simply, "talk too much."

Then she closed her eyes and moved into a stance Shino had never seen before.

"Hm," Neji said quietly. "That move."

"What is that?" Chouji asked, his hands shrunk back to normal size again and buried deep in a potato chip bag.

"A move she invented herself, a few months ago," Lee explained. "She calls it Meatgrinder. I'm not sure where the inspiration came from, but to use it now means…" he trailed off, uncharacteristically quiet.

"Means what?" Ino asked tensely, gripping Chouji's hair as she leaned forward.

"It means," Neji said, "that she is very angry. And this fight is over."

Tenten closed her eyes and thought, this is my home. A few feet away stood a man who had first derided, then openly scorned her home, her people, her family and friends.

Tenten closed her eyes and thought, this man is a threat. He had attacked innocent civilians, uninvolved shinobi, broken the rules of hospitality and honor. Nobody did that to her village.

Tenten closed her eyes and thought, end it. Use that move, that technique that you never thought to use against a single person before. They won't look at you the same afterwards, but that doesn't matter.

How dare he.

How dare he?

Tenten opened her eyes and thought, now.

For a moment, the world around Tenten came into complete, perfect focus. She heard the gentle murmuring of the crowd. She saw the vicious, bloodstained snarl on Taneda's face give way to suspicion, then fear. She could smell the sharp tang of blood so clearly that she could almost taste it, too. She felt the air around her still, as if the world were holding it's breath as she molded her chakra. A handful of leaves tumbled gently from the trees at the far end of the arena, the earth groaned beneath her enemy's feet, and her body tingled where a thousand tiny wires were bound to her skin with her chakra. It was like all five of her senses had combined forces to turn her entire body into one seamless, perfectly tuned sensor. For just a moment, Tenten saw and heard and smelled and felt.

Then she closed her eyes, and let it go.

The world seemed to narrow and disappear, and then narrow down some more until nothing at all existed except the razor fine wires that coiled and spun around her. She was spinning, fast then faster, and then not spinning anymore but stretching and growing and dancing. Her body was not a single solid object but a thousand long, thin lines bound in a knot at the center, and each line was tipped with a heavy, lethal blade that each danced out to exactly where she commanded them to go and no farther. The blades – her mind automatically thought of them as her blades, the same way it thought of her feet, her hands, her eyes – twisted and lashed and spiraled through the air. She was in a thousand places at once and utterly whole.

She felt the impacts (sixteen direct point strikes, four scoring cuts, three blunt-side glancing blows, forty-three near misses) as her opponent – her prey – failed to dodge fast enough. Twenty-three hits in all, seventy-eight percent of which were debilitating, eight percent merely damaging, the remaining fourteen percent cosmetic. The bruises on her back throbbed suddenly, and as her mind became aware that she had a back, that it was merely a part of the rest of her body – because yes, she had a body again, a singular unit with a lots of wires currently attached – she felt the edges of the Meatgrinder coming apart around her. It was just too damn hard to maintain that fractured, multi-awareness. She was too used to thinking in terms of the whole, not a thousand pieces. This is what he must feel like all the time, she thought irrelevantly.

But even as she felt the jutsu coming apart, she was already moving to correct it. Her left foot had barely hit the ground before she was turning quickly on her heel, using her momentum and leverage to pull the blades on the far ends of the wires back towards herself. As soon as the multitude of weapons reversed back towards her, she let go of the chakra seals that bound the wire ends to her body. They detached and fell away, taking the sensation of having way too many limbs with them and leaving her feeling suddenly small and a little weightless. The super-sharpened sensory overload faded just as fast – the wires had acted as extra sensor inputs, like having a thousand long ears, eyes, noses, and tongues. In their absence, she felt amazingly blind, deaf, and clumsy. This was the major drawback, she had time to think to herself. If the attack had failed, she would have been utterly helpless in front of her enemy for a few agonizing seconds as her mind tried to re-adjust to one ordinary set of ears, eyes, and nose.

But the attack had not failed.

Though her mind was still reeling a little from the abrupt and dramatic shift in perspective, Tenten's well-trained instincts were still superb. Her hands came up and neatly snagged a scythe and a katana from the profusion of weaponry that she had pulled in towards herself. The rest of the bladed weapons fell to the ground behind her like a lethal rain shower. Many of them stuck point first in the ground and stayed there, quivering.

Her regular senses finally kicked in properly. There was blood on the scythe blade (it had been the third hit, a scoring hit, cutting through flesh and leaving a long, bloody gash in it's wake), but the katana was clean (nineteenth near miss, probably, but she was already forgetting some of the details from inside the Meatgrinder...her normal perception couldn't cope with the memory of so many simultaneous sensory inputs). The ground was slightly slick where she stood. Blood had pooled to her left, and a little trickle of it was working it's way under her right foot. The crowd was silent.

Taneda Shun was on his hands and knees several feet away, probably where he had landed when he'd tried to dodge her attack. There was a large cut several inches long and very deep on his back, two deep cuts on his right arm and another on his left, and half of his right ear was gone. The rest of his injuries were too hard to see because of her angle and distance.

And because the man was coated in blood.

His clothes were sticking to his chest and legs, and his dark hair was matted wetly down against his head. His bare arms were almost completely red. And when he lifted his face towards her, she saw that one of her blades had sliced diagonally down his forehead, over his nose, and all the way to his chin. The cut neatly bisected the slash she had made across his mouth and cheek. His eyes were open and wild with pain and rage, but she knew he could not see her.

"That's enough," she said, and wondered at how steady her voice sounded. It was almost like someone else entirely was speaking through her now, as she stood to the side and listened. Another side effect of the Meatgrinder, maybe – having been so insanely aware of everything inside and out of herself, her body now compensated by cutting her off and making her feel oddly detached from it all.

That could also have been a huge disadvantage, had the attack failed.

But it didn't fail. Her success was staring her (a blood-blinded wreck of a human being) in the face.

"That's enough," she said again, quieter, and turned her back on him. Something in her muscles warned her that she would regret all this very soon, but she had to get out of the arena before she disgraced herself by fainting or something equally pathetic. In the fighters' entrance to the arena, Sakura was already standing with her arms crossed as a few lower-ranked medic-nins flitted around with bandages. Tenten began the long, weary trudge towards the exit, where hopefully Sakura and her helpers would have some clean, non-bloody clthes she could change into. Her outfit was soaked...oh god, she was going to have nightmares about this for a freaking month -

An inhuman scream three inches behind her ear and the overpowering stench of blood as something came hurtling towards her back -

Tenten threw herself to the side, rolling on one shoulder, flowing up to her feet, thrusting out with the katana. She felt it connect (not as keenly as she'd felt the Meatgrinder's strikes; this was just a sword in her hand, not an extension of her physical self) and felt the soft flesh give way to the point of the blade. The momentum from her roll brought her weight up against the hilt, slamming the blade all the way through the body until the circular hilt-guard was flush against the skin.

She was almost a foot shorter than Taneda, which put her eyeline just above his collarbone. But she didn't need to see his face to know that his eyes were sightless for another reason now. After all, she'd just rammed a katana through his heart.

Fuck, she thought tiredly. Make that two months.

The weight on her blade shifted as the body on it started to fall forward. Tenten pulled back, sliding the metal out of the bloody remains of her enemy and flicking the gore from it with a practiced twist of her wrist. The body slumped against her chest, and she let it slide off and down to her feet, leaving a large smear of blood across her shirt. Tiredly, she turned to face the Hokage's seat, lifted her blade, and saluted sharply with it.

Then without a backwards look, she walked out of the arena.

**

"Hey, Sakura?"

"Yes?"

"Can anyone see me? From the arena?"

"No."

"Good."

"…Here. Drink some tea. It'll wash out the taste, and settle your stomach."

**