A Note from the Author: Thank you for your patience with updates, everyone!
Chapter 20: Rip
Six minutes, Hitomi estimated.
She sensed Arata spring up behind her and the chakra gathering at the cross-point of his twin sickles. It was leaking into a vertical line, which then burst open into a flat sheet that jumped forward at her. Hitomi turned side-on and in a flash her chakra sliced through the sheet of half-formed salt and rose again to block any counters. Gravity was beginning to pull Arata downward.
The larger pieces of the salt-sheet abruptly took on life of their own and flung themselves at her, adhering to her body and starting to grow over it in an effort to join together. Arata surprised her by throwing a sickle at her. Enraged, her chakra massed at the designated impact point and lashed out, seizing it. She realized her mistake when Arata's own pulsed in the sickle, causing an explosion of salt. Before it completely enclosed her in a new flat plane, she saw Arata throw his second sickle to knock the first one loose, which he caught in his descent. She was falling now, too.
How dare you, how dare you…
"Hitomi!" she heard Noboru shout. He was closer than she'd realized, not that she could move.
She felt her control over her chakra waver, gutter. The longer she remained still, the worse it would get. The salt prism was eating at her skin; it struck the ground with a bone-shuddering thud but did not shatter. Arata stood in front of her grinning, while behind him the huge jellyfish Summon, free of Hitomi's pestering, seemed to be moving - she felt its chakra reaching out beyond the confines of the bubble, searching.
First one arrow then another whizzed by Arata and struck the salt prism. One merely chipped at the surface but the other stuck into it next to her right shoulder; a third split the second down the shaft, gauging deeper, creating a crack that Noboru's chakra diffused into.
Noboru. Another crack opened in her chest, releasing a wave of nostalgia, guilt, and desperation. She wanted to see his face. His actual face - however accomplished her view of chakra it would never show the little scar on his chin, the lines of his frown.
His chakra, a sizzling ice-blue and gold, was singing to her - reminding her who she was, reminding her that others were risking their lives for her, tearing down all of her grand designs into the pure need to get out of here alive. Hitomi tried to focus her own in its direction, through all of the minute lattices that tried to keep them from one another. A fourth arrow struck near the third.
Arata had turned his attention to Noboru now, but the older man had an injured leg and Noboru was still a fair distance away - she had to hurry. A fifth arrow. A sixth. All in the same vicinity. She remembered their games in the field, terrifying their attendants, where she would hold out something in her hand for him to try to pierce - how many sleeves ruined, how many untamed sparks of chakra spitting from the arrowheads and scarring her wrists.
You've gotten so much better, Nobu, Hitomi thought.
An eighth impacted, but after that no more came and she could see he was at last out. Hitomi pushed at the weak point as hard as she could until finally her chakra met Noboru's and the crack extended from top to bottom. The prism burst. She ran, grabbing her katana on the way, and cut Arata off before he could reach her childhood friend. One of the carbon-creatures had Noboru on the defensive with his short katana - it was up to Hitomi to block Arata's sickle-swipe with her own long arc, which she followed swiftly with a sharp re-curve and stab downward into his shoulder as she spun, entering his circle. Two of her hands seized his wrists while another two drove the katana downward; Arata sputtered blood but it looked more like a laugh.
Hitomi was already releasing her grip and turning when his pupils crackled into salt. The clone burst. The real Arata descended from above, landing on her. They both toppled and began a graceless struggle on the ground. Hitomi knew this wasn't what she should be wasting her time on but felt frenzied, desperate, and like she'd forgotten everything she'd learnt. It was made worse when Arata, easily double to three times her size, managed to pin her beneath him.
"Stay still, Radiant One," he sneered. "Just a little longer."
Something played at the periphery of her chakra-senses, like a loose thread in a breeze. Then, the thread began to unravel. But what was it that was unraveling?
Hitomi fought to concentrate. She focused on the pressing, the weight, the gravity. The space between them glowed. Gradually the force of gravity began to lighten, lift, and shift into the smallest of momentums. Hitomi heaved upward with what felt like sheer force of will, and Arata lifted off her by an inch. She freed one hand, stretched, grabbed her katana and heaved upward even more with a scream. As their positions reversed, she stabbed the katana into his chest.
"Too late," said Arata.
She didn't relinquish her grip, but turned to look at the source of the unraveling she'd felt earlier. To her horror the Summon had a tentacle around what looked like another made of light, flailing in the wind, around where they'd emerged from the Glade. The Summon pulled and kept pulling, and the sky was ripped asunder. Hitomi felt something at her core snap; something flashed over her vision once, twice, several times.
Like spilled water dripping off a table, first what she knew to be the Glade came leaking over into the real world. Then, the real world mottled and became a different version of the Glade - something stripped to its bones, ashen-looking and distorted. There were skeletons beside her. Her chakra struggled to know where to attempt to replenish from, where to anchor itself for substitutions and transformations - it was like a sudden fever and she felt weak in the knees. Her vision and hearing tried to return in patches, as though through murky water. The spill from the rip spread farther to encompass the entire ridge and only Arata seemed unsurprised.
What… Hitomi thought in despair.
Then Ku, suddenly very close. Pieces of carbon-creature shattered over Hitomi and her head turned wildly. A blade-like leg headed for her back fell to one side. Ku's great wings filled her vision. Arata backhanded her and wrestled free, pulling the katana out with his bare hand and swinging it at Ku. The moth screeched - a rapidly-rippling wave of chakra disturbance soaring outward - and blocked and latched onto the blade with one horned foot.
"The sickles, Hitomi," Ku ordered in her head. She ripped the blade from Arata's hand with surprising strength.
Hitomi grabbed them.
"Destroy them just as he'd destroyed our home." She was bearing down on Arata, her far larger weight easily pushing him underneath first one leg and then two like a paper doll. No longer was she the clean soft white, but a dirty parchment color and ragged-looking, missing part of one of her back legs and half of an antennae - more of a creature from a nightmare.
"Ku -"
"The genjutsu has collapsed - there's no time to explain. Destroy the sickles!"
"Jurou! Crack the ridge!" Arata yelled.
A few seconds passed. The carbon creatures let out a simultaneous, gleeful call and the ground underneath Hitomi trembled. There were whispers and hisses underfoot, followed by a haze she couldn't quite see released into the air - but she smelt the graphite, nearly choked on it. Hitomi wobbled as the ground became abruptly soft. Then it cracked with a deep sound Hitomi knew she'd remembered forever. Some distance away the bubble that held the Summon flickered, dissipated, and the great jellyfish itself paled and lost shape until it was gone. With an almighty slosh all of the water fell on the ridge, sweeping everyone off their feet into a maelstrom.
Hitomi was bashed around a little and lost her grip on the sickles, and cursed to herself. She was pummeled into Ku's great spindly body and they were both pulled into a vicious current until Ku anchored them. Ku's body felt like it was shrinking. Pieces of the Glade she knew - or thought she knew - swept by: lantern lids, floorboards, a latticed door of the nursery, broken hachimitsu vines with fat spoiled orbs of fruit. She saw it all with blurry eyes, while the roar of crumbling stone and rushing water that she knew should be deafening was merely a low rumble. She was failing.
I was never going to be ready for this. What have I done? She watched it all swirl past her as though in a dream. I've destroyed what I fought to save.
The saltwater soaked into the dust and deeper, churned by some invisible hand. It began to burn.
"Higher ground!" Ku commanded.
Hitomi turned, only to find herself staring back at her. She blinked. Had she always looked like that?
"It will help us," she - Ku - said by way of explanation.
Hitomi looked around wildly, squinting her inner eye at all of the rushing and muddied nuances of chakra to try to make sense of things, while she and the disguised Ku clambered onto a sizzling lump of harder rock. Tiredness was seeping into her along with the dehydration. The tang of salt grew ever more potent and with it, the sound of Arata laughing not too far away.
"Focus," Ku said. "We are not done yet."
How much time do I have left? How much time?
Neji grimaced as he pulled himself up the ancient cedar beside what was once the gate to the Takara Glade. From what he could see, the entire ridge was becoming a saltmarsh of sorts, halted at the very edges. Though at first it appeared like the edges were rising, he realized that in fact it was the marsh and its contents that were gradually sinking as the sludge became ever hungrier, ever more caustic. Every combatant had been dispersed; the samurai were struggling in the middle, vaguely separate from one another; the archer was being pulled up on the edge by Tenten; Lee was opposite them, pulling himself up on the other edge; the ice-user struggled below him, while the kid he'd been fighting was wading to an island created by another trembling treetop.
That left Hitomi at the center, with Arata not too far away. The cursed sickles were staked in the ground and almost blinding with chakra as they poured what Neji could only guess was more salt into the mire.
I'm closest, he thought. I can get to her. Even as he thought it the samurai were trying to regroup and head her way; he heard the archer call her name.
Hitomi seemed to step out of her own shadow and Neji realized he was looking at two of them. He couldn't tell them apart, Byakugan or not.
"Ku," he uttered, remembering the surreal sight of the skeletal moth being pulled through the rip in the sky by the Summon.
One of the Hitomis leapt toward Arata. The other was putting her additional hands to use and weaving three hand signs at once.
Neji jolted as the ground collapsed again, and he kept falling. Saltwater and debris and sludge fell with him until abruptly he was halted, while the rest of it kept going. Something was pressed against him, keeping him in midair.
Some several yards below him the mess finally reached a stopping point; a glance around him told him they were in an immense cavern created where the cliff had been. He could still hear Arata laughing, but the ice-user's wail soared over it and strangled into pain before being silenced. He strained, and found her floating face-down on the mire's surface. It wasn't long before the mire began to eat at her clothes and flesh, slowly turning them black and dissolving them.
Hitomi, he thought, his search becoming more frantic. The six samurai were crawling onto tiny islands of bedrock imbued with Sage chakra and stripping off sizzling armor - the kid was clinging to a niche in the cavern's side. Everyone's chakra was suffering from the mire, but surely hers -
He found her directly below him, forcing herself to her feet, one arm raised above her and her face turned up to his. He could swear she was smiling. Chakra tunneled upward out of her palm, keeping him aloft. But was it her or was it Ku?
The second Hitomi was hopping from dissolving island to dissolving island along with Arata, the two of them reduced to hand-to-hand combat with an occasional flare of chakra. Even with a chest wound Arata was only just managing to keep up with the four extra arms, but Neji wasn't sure how long it'd last. The thought had barely concluded when Arata got lucky; the one sickle he had left raked through Hitomi's chest. She called out and Arata hooked her legs out from under her. Hitomi, however, grabbed him with all six arms and held fast, bringing him with her into the collapse. They struggled as the mire began to eat at them, but Hitomi seemed intent to drag Arata away from shore. As Neji watched in horror, the disguise began to fracture and flake away, Hitomi's body growing, distorting and paling into that of Ku.
"Jurou!" Arata bellowed. "She cannot sense the carbon! Kill her, now!"
Neji located the kid that could only be Jurou. His mask was down, his goggles up, his face distressed and on the verge of a teary scream at Arata.
"Do it! Avenge me!" Arata commanded. Ku dragged him under.
Jurou raised a shaking arm. Two carbons leapt from the sides of the cavern, splintering and reforming into spears.
Neji's heart clenched tight. "Hitomi! Let me fall!" He begged her to hear him, but no matter how many times he shouted, struggled, her grip was tight, her blind eyes unblinking. He likely wouldn't survive it, but he was willing to take that chance. "Let me fall!" He felt the plea in his bones, riddling them, trying to rip out of him along with all those unnamed dreams glimpsed in the cave and back further still, before he'd ever met her.
The spears struck her through the back and side; her step faltered, as did the grip on Neji. He fell a couple of feet before she righted them both. She screamed in anger, throwing up her remaining arms to help. He could feel the air and chakra around him changing - he was moving slowly left - he saw a ledge - but not only was her Sage mode dying, the island beneath her was crumbling and sinking.
Another wordless yell and Hitomi threw him with the last of her strength at the ledge; Neji threw his bodyweight into the momentum and caught it with a hand, hauled himself up. He turned and saw another spear shoot through the air toward her, wobble, and fall short. The kid tried again but he was at his limit. Hitomi sliced the fourth spear with her katana and collapsed on her hands and knees, breathing heavily, and ripped out the other two. Her flame was guttering out.
"Hitomi!" Neji yelled across the mire. "Don't give up! Come to me!"
She sank ever more awkwardly downward, though she tried to prop herself up with the katana. Her head rose to look in his direction. Her additional arms vanished, her eyes went back to green - the only green thing in this hell - even as they closed.
"Hitomi!" he yelled, his breath ragged. He searched for a way down and across, but there was barely anything solid left.
"Samurai! Fulfil your duty! Get her to our lord!"
The samurai closest to her, an older man in white, ran over the mire to her side, yelling too for courage, scooped her up, and began running to another on a disappearing foothold. One in red took her and kept running in the same fashion toward the one in black, even as the one in white stumbled and sank screaming into the mire. Neji watched in further horror as this self-sacrificing chain continued.
They're getting her to shore, he realized. The one in blue was still on the edge, waiting for her.
Neji climbed upward as quickly and safely as he could, and once he reached the rim despite his thirst and aching muscles he began to run. He tried to keep her in sight through the twisted trees wilting in the briny air. She was almost across - would they make it? He wasn't sure what he'd do if they didn't.
His hand dug into the needle tacked in his sleeve. Please.
But this was swiftly followed with, She is a mission. A failing mission -
- She can come back to the Leaf -
- "And what would I do there?" -
- I should have said -
- Nothing, there's nothing to say -
- She will not -
- If she lives -
- She has to live -
- For the mission -
- For me - she should come back to me -
- Not for you -
- She cannot die for me -
- If she does you will have sinned beyond anything -
- Don't flatter yourself -
- She will live. She has to live. She's going to come back. She's going to be just Hitomi. Not a Sage, not a general's daughter, not a pawn, not a wife. -
- Not a wife? -
- If there's a chance -
- Let me see if she's my chance and I'm hers. -
Neji had reached the final curve. He was distantly aware that Lee had fallen into step behind him and was firing one question after another. He thought he could make out Tenten with the samurai in blue -
- Her intended. Her fiance. -
- No -
- and the last samurai in red collapsed at his feet - a woman, Neji realized. Tenten was supporting Hitomi while the samurai and the archer exchanged a few tense words before her head fell to the scree. He and Tenten began to climb; Neji and Lee rushed to help them.
Neji moved to Hitomi, to return her weight to his back where he felt it belonged, but the archer was already there. He didn't seem to know how to carry her at first but eventually had her on his back too. Hitomi had one eye lazily open, looking at him. She was smiling.
How can she be smiling? How can she be smiling at me?
No one spoke while they struggled down the slope toward what remained of the river and Suguri. Neji thought he saw the kid, Jurou, stumbling into pristine forest but it could have easily been a shadow.