Chapter 12
Rukona was running through crowds of people and trying not to seethe. It was a hard task, as the civilian infiltration clones had just uncovered important information. 'The Kazekage is an asshole. He's an asshole and he deserves to die. What kind of person orders their subordinates to mentally abuse their own son and jinchuuriki as a test? What kind of person orders assassination attempts when they fail?' She just couldn't handle the thought of it. She had to see this boy, Gaara. From what the infiltrating clones had seen, the city and everyone in it treated Gaara like shit. Sure, like highly volatile, murderous shit, but that didn't make a difference. Even his siblings gave him a wide berth whenever possible, and just acted like scared, disgusted puppies when it wasn't possible. As things stood, there was a murderous eleven year old with a bijuu's powers that could go on a bloodlust filled rampage at any moment. When Rukona finally found the redhead standing in front of the Kazekage's office, she had no idea what to do. She just had to do… something. "...Gaara?"
He barely turned his head to face her. His siblings were with him, but they just worked on staying out of his sight. Pathetic. "What."
"I'd… like to talk to you. About your mother." Gaara's eyes widened, then narrowed. "And your uncle. And your father." Rukona found a surprisingly large wave of sand barreling towards her and she jumped back to dodge it. It began grabbing at her, and Rukona dashed nimbly with small flips and tucks. The crowd around the city started screaming and panicking, running as far away from Gaara as possible. Apparently, him using his sand was not a good sign.
"What do you know about my mother?!" Gaara growled, his insomnia-laden eyes becoming bloodshot. "My mother's always with me! And she's telling me to kill you! I will crush you!"
Rukona sighed as she had a harder and harder time dodging with her weights on. It was as she'd feared. "That's not her! That's the monster inside of you, the Ichibi! That demon is controlling you!"
"Shut up! Killing you will prove my existence!" As Gaara's available sand seemed to double in size, Rukona took her weights off and started taking the fight seriously. She knew that Gaara had never been wounded before, but she was willing to take up the challenge. She didn't care if he had a bijuu in him or what. If she had to take him and a tailed beast down just to get through to him, so be it.
This crossed Rukona's mind as she got engulfed by Gaara's sand. "Sand Coffin..." Gaara whispered. Gaara raised his hand deliberately. "Sand Burial!" He crushed her.
Flashback
Rukona was practicing using only one finger to construct a puppet the second day of being Chiyo's apprentice. She'd read every book in the city about the construction and creation of puppets, and she couldn't get one question off her mind.
"Why aren't puppets made of metal?" She asked a surprised Chiyo suddenly.
"Well… mostly the cost of creation. Clay and hardened wood, among other things, are easier to mold than melting and smelting the intricate parts of a puppet. And even if you got it made, you'd need the sheer chakra to lug it around all the time." Rukona looked at Chiyo blankly. "But I'm sure that if it were be made, as well as it's joints and traps made of the same material… your puppet would be almost indestructible. Only high level jutsu, usually involving elemental chakra flow, can truly break through metal. Why do you ask?"
Rukona grinned mischievously. "No reason."
End Flashback
The real Rukona sighed from a nearby rooftop as she watched her "indestructible" puppet get engulfed by sand. She doubted Gaara had the pressure to pull off crushing something made of the hardest mineral Rukona could look up in a book. Rukona wasn't arrogant enough to think that what she'd created was any great leap of insight. Naruto was, after all, the only person in the elemental nations who could truly turn into anything with some chakra and an imagination. She'd known it was invaluable the first time she talked to Makima the night they were made. She just didn't know how far it could be taken, then, and now she was seeing real results.
Of course, real puppets weren't the sum of their parts in the slightest. She could've plausibly taken one clone, made it transform into a simple puppet with no tricks and traps, transform it into metal and voilá: Awesome metal soldiers. But doing that was easy. What was more fun and, quite frankly, took more skill, was taking twenty clones for each puppet and filling them with all kinds of destructive and disastrous parts. One puppet made of twenty clones could easily break apart to make two less complex puppets made of ten clones and so on, but using the one puppet was always good to start with. The more things a puppet could do, the more likely the opponent was to get surprised. Besides, if she needed numbers, she had shadow clones. The only thing better than one person using one hundred puppets at a time was one hundred people using one hundred separate puppets. Give her a few months of shadow clone training, and she'd be able to use one hundred clones with one hundred puppets each, but that was far off, and quite frankly overkill.
Rukona saw with slight satisfaction that Gaara couldn't crush her puppet. Not that Gaara knew it was a puppet. She'd made it to look exactly like her, painted face with clothes and everything (after all, you can control what you look like when you can transform into anything), just to confuse her opponents. It worked perfectly, as Gaara repeatedly tried to crush the hard minerals into bits. Little did Gaara know that Rukona had looked up the hardest mineral discovered to make clones of, and that made them almost invulnerable. She watched Gaara attempt to demolish her puppet uselessly before she got bored.
The puppet exploded with such force that it broke out of the crushing sand. Rukona laughed openly at that because she'd wondered what the clones were going to transform into to get out of their mess. They had the choice of either channeling extremely hot fire natured chakra or surrounding themselves with exploding seals. Rukona was happy they chose the latter, as the former took a lot more chakra. Markings could be seen all over the individual pieces of the puppet as they blasted out, but they reassembled right afterwards and began their assault on Gaara's famous defense. It was only at this point that Gaara realized that whatever he was fighting wasn't human, but he still made no move to defend himself. His sand tried to trap the look-alike puppet, but the marionette just punched through the sand that was enveloping her while activating the seals on her fists. Force alone would hardly deter the sand, but force with an explosion either melted it or sent it away long enough for an opening. Gaara seemed to realize this as Rukona rapidly got closer, making a beeline towards him. As she got in front of him, his sand rose to defend but she punched through it with an explosion, and moved fast enough to follow up with an uppercut to the jaw with another explosion. Gaara was sent flying over the Kazekage's dome, and Rukona's puppet followed.
As her puppet reached the roof of the dome, she saw Gaara's face dripping a slight amount of blood and sand. Under his mask, Rukona could see that Gaara was quickly panicking. She knew he'd never seen blood before. She wondered how he would take it.
"...Blood." Rukona blinked. "IT'S MY BLOOOOOOOOD!" He gave a blood curdling screech. Rukona sighed. She really didn't want to fight the bijuu, but apparently it had to be done. Gaara continued screaming. "You... you are my prey..." As he stared at the puppet, a huge sand arm with purple veins protruded out of his gourd. Rukona's puppet got into a strong taijutsu stance, waiting for the attack. The arm shot at the puppet from Gaara with surprising speed, but the puppet dodged it and ran along the arm, exploding slightly with every step for speed and destruction. Gaara cried out, but with his demon out and no sand to protect him, received a kick in the chest that was barely protected by a layer of sand. The puppet waited as Gaara continued screaming in pain and finished his partial transformation, his eyes a demonic yellow and black and his entire body minus his legs covered with sand. This sand tried to overpower the puppet with it's attacks, but with explosions and high density minerals it was not an easy task. Rukona figured they'd have to get off the Kazekage's dome or the Suna ninja would try to take things into their own hands. She made the puppet kick Gaara with an explosion to launch him out of the city. He rose, but didn't get out of the city walls, so the puppet flew towards him because of the chakra strings Rukona used to guide it and continued kicking until it sailed completely out beyond the city walls. Rukona and her twin puppet followed, but narrowed their eyes at what they saw.
Some ways from Suna's castle walls was Gaara on top of the Ichibi. His eyes widened in fear at seeing Rukona's puppet pursue him and he fell asleep, finally doing what Rukona knew he'd do.
"Haha! I'm out again! I want to kill! I NEED to kill!" The monster immediately started yelling.
The thing was huge. The gargantuan body was as big as three buildings, with a face shaped like a raccoon, but the huge swaying tail looked like many purple-veined sand tails put together. Rukona sighed at it, wondering exactly how she was going to take it down. She saw it eyeing the village, but Rukona made clones to create earth walls in order to barricade it from wind attacks. They would stay there, fueling their walls with hopefully enough chakra to defend from the huge wind bullets. Then she got an idea. As the sand demon frustratedly sent gigantic wind bullets at her earth walls, Rukona made a few hundred clones after mentally constructing a complicated puppet plan. They transformed quickly, and began to assemble themselves with the help of Rukona herself. Some clones stayed human in order to control the finer parts of the puppet on the inside. When she was done, there was a looming Rukona puppet as large as the Ichibi itself, poised and ready for action. Rukona stood on top of it, looking down on the monster.
"Ohhh! What's this? Has someone come out to play?! Has someone come out to DIE?" The Ichibi laughed maniacally and blew wind bullets all over the towering puppet. The first ones had no effect, as the puppet moved surprisingly quickly for it's size, but the last one impacted it's stomach, blowing it back a little. The puppet stepped forward and gave a sweeping roundhouse kick to it's face, then exploded its foot as the clones on the outside of the foot knew to cover themselves in seals. Even with this huge explosion, the head was only partially destroyed, and was reforming itself with sand from the desert just as quickly.
At this point, villagers and ninja guards alike could see the battle of the titans, and some were pointing at the 12 year old girl at the top of her giant puppet copy. It was surprisingly quiet in the crowd, save for gasps, screaming, children crying and people wondering where the rest of the Suna ninja were. Nobody knew that the Suna ninja, the Kazekage included, were on the city walls, also watching the fight occur.
The Ichibi didn't take his kick to the face lightly. He hit his stomach multiple times with his fists, spewing out increasingly large balls of wind at the puppet. The puppet dodged and jumped with unreal speed, but eventually had to jump back to distance itself. The Ichibi visibly smiled at this and gathered chakra outside of its mouth, pure white chakra. Rukona stared at it. 'Ah, crap. Not even my puppet can get hit with that. It'll tear through the chakra in the transformation itself!'' The puppet made a motion to punch the Ichibi, but it was too far away, so the fist detached itself and flew towards the Ichibi's jaw, exploding on contact. This broke the Ichibi's concentration and the ball of chakra blasted off into a huge ray that exploded in the air. It temporarily blocked out the sun, and the people gasped collectively at it. Rukona blanched at the explosion it made in the distance while the fist returned to the puppet body via chakra strings. '...Right. Well, time to end this.'
As the puppet charged forward, Rukona started making seals. The puppet got close enough and unleashed a massive amount of thick toad oil from it's mouth on the Ichibi, much to it's chagrin. A plume of fire came out of Rukona's mouth as she poured the majority of her available chakra into the attack. "Katon: Gamayu Endan!" The flames completely engulfed the Shukaku, making it scream in pain and burn from flaming oil. Rukona waited for the sand to get hot enough to turn to glass before stopping the chakra flow to the fire, and she rapidly switched gears. Her clones turned from puppet parts to regular clones and body flickered off each other to surround the burning and hardening sand monster. She and her clones struggled to pull off the jutsu, but figured the sheer numbers would put off the fact that fire was her affinity instead of water.
"Suiton: Bakusui Shōha!" All of her clones yelled, as water erupted from their mouths and froze the sand into hot glass. As steam rose from the hardened shell that was the Ichibi, Rukona and her clones expended the last of their chakra in one final Tsunade like punch.
"Break!" The real Rukona screamed as the clones impacted the monster. The monster cracked with the first punches, then shattered as power showered it. Glass and sand fell everywhere, and the copies now completely out of chakra dispelled themselves. Rukona was panting from exertion, but walked slowly over to where the biggest mound of sand was to find Gaara laying there. He was coughing and struggling to breathe, and could barely get up. Rukona walked as the Suna village watched carefully.
When she got in front of him, she crossed her arms. He looked up at her fearfully, and only said one word. "...Why?"
She scoffed. "Because I want to be friends with you. I know what it's like to be alone. You don't deserve that." She extended a hand towards him, that he struggled to take. As they began towards the village, Rukona walking and Gaara limping alongside her, they started talking as Sunagakure rejoiced at the savior of their city.