Enjoy!

Cassy was in over her head, and she knew it. Out of all the potential opponents who she could have defeated rather easily, there were two among the forces of her current enemies who could have presented a stiff challenge to her fighting style—Kakashi Hatake was the first, and Susumu Hyuga was the second. Her strings were meant to be invisible, impossible to predict and impossible to avoid; that was their strength. Two weeks prior, she had entertained herself by playing with Kaine until his Storm Release accidentally gobbled up the chakra that kept her strings formed; it was a bad time, but she wouldn't have fallen for that trap again. Susumu, on the other hand, could plainly see her strings and was even able to cut them with ease using his inherited Gentle Fist ability.

She could only hope to stall him, not defeat him; even though he was weakened by his battle with his student and still mildly disoriented by the grief of losing his village, there was burning rage in his white eyes. Cassy could see it clearly, and she gulped without meaning to, swallowing a thick lump in her throat and taking a step back from her stationary adversary. "So...you gonna make the first move, Susy boy?" she taunted him, tried to get under his skin with a sweet smile and an obnoxious nickname, but he was hardened. He had renounced the name Minoru, but he still carried some of those intimidating mannerisms that came along with the former title.

"I'll say it again, Cassy, and you should be thankful for my generous repetition..." Susumu flexed his brow, deepening his stance and pushing his right foot further backward, as if priming for a sprint. "Rethink your position."

"Are you going to kill me if I don't?" Cassy teased, slanting her head back and running the back of it lasciviously down her slender bronze neck.

"No...I won't kill you. I'll only break you. From there, I'll let Kakashi Hatake and the Leaf decide what to do with you..." Susumu's eyes gleamed in the sun, reflecting a vindictive glimmer.

"Ha! Listen to yourself, now...yesterday you wanted to crush the Leaf and absorb its power into yours...now you're going to turn me over to them? You've fallen, Susumu. No wonder Mamban couldn't stand to look at you any longer..." Cassy took her hand down from her neck and allowed her fingers to dance freely, threads extending off of every digit and wriggling unpredictably along the way to her target.

Susumu didn't fear her attack. His footing remained solid and his lids wide open. The veins of his Byakugan were deeply rooted in his face, the flesh scarred along their surface from constant strain and use. Though, what some might call overuse could also be called 'practice,' and his visual power was beyond that of what some might have expected. As Cassy's strings got closer, Susumu began to twirl about, fingers nimbly snatching the thin layers of thread out of the air and gathering five in each hand. The threads' wind-enhanced cutting power was neutralized by Susumu's own chakra, his grip holding onto her weapons without difficulty.

With all ten strings gripped and gathered, Susumu brought both arms down and back, aiming to yank Cassy with them and pull her close. Cassy was taken off guard by his speed, beginning to feel herself pulled, but her fingers gave up on her strings and they were cut ethereally, becoming nothing as Susumu's grip upon them became a grip upon empty air. That obviously won't work, then... Cassy deduced as she looked to her fingers. The sting of being yanked by the Gentle Fist was throbbing on her digits. She wasn't safe from that technique, even at a distance—it attacked the chakra, not the body, and strings made of chakra merely offered the Hyuga a chance to strike her from safety. I'll have to improvise.

She had nearly fallen on her face when she was tugged, but caught her own momentum after a brief second of uncertainty; she barely avoided a face plant. Trying to look undeterred, Cassy shrugged off her embarrassing misstep. "You asked if I've got any puppets, right? Well...truth is, I don't have my own puppet, yet. Thankfully, you've got what I need." Have to be quick, she finished her thought, throwing both hands in the air and firing strings from them, curving their paths so as to keep them unpredictable. Susumu stood in place, preparing for another attempt at his own body. Cassy had deliberately worded herself in a way that should make him believe that he was her target—and nine of the strings did eventually find their way to him. The tenth, however, veered to the left and dug into the rubble to find an unconscious plaything.

Pulled out of the shaken ground, Medo Shuria's unconscious body became Cassy's puppet as the other nine strings were easily knocked away by Susumu's powerful hands. "I remember this one!" Cassy giddily proclaimed as her capture was made successful. She scampered on skittish feet to get behind her new puppet, noting that Susumu was already on his way to intercept and slice the string that she had planted. As a deterrent, while Susumu charged, Cassy formed a seal with her other hand and blew a gust of windy pellets that were something like a shotgun blast, aiming to throw him off his path or stop him entirely. She had a particular target in mind, ensuring that a few of the small bullets would find it and test Susumu's new resolve.

Susumu made to dodge the scattered wind, but there were too many pellets for his body to properly squeeze between or dance around. With a scowl, he realized that he couldn't keep running forward—he had to stop and exert chakra in all directions, forcing out the blue sphere of heavenly rotation that easily deflected her attack. In essence, his defense was a concession—he was allowing her to take a prisoner, but at the same time he was avoiding the damage that must be avoided.

Susumu's chest wound from Kaine's wooden blade had been closed, and his healing had taken him nearly to full strength again, but Kaine himself was still lying unconscious in the dirt at his mentor's back. Just when Susumu had thought that Cassy's attack had been deflected completely, his Byakugan caught sight of a few stray projectiles headed toward that unconscious young man, and he cursed his opponent's tactics. He turn his waist, yanked a hand back, and gave it a thrust forward to create a rush of air that funneled into a line and intercepted those last few particles.

With the shotgun attack dispelled into useless air, Cassy's distraction paid off. Medo was her new puppet, and she was situated behind his unconscious, strung-up body to use him as a shield. Stalling, still. There was nothing she could actually do to defeat the man who was her chosen opponent. I've only got to distract him long enough for Mamban to come back; shouldn't be much longer, She thought, perhaps kidding herself—she knew that Mamban was unlikely to return for her, despite all his proclamations of her importance. He had recently started to say things he didn't really mean, and she hated it about him. He seemed so plain, so easy to read in his simple childishness, but it sometimes felt like his mouth was saying things with total confidence, while his body refused to listen to them; he had seemed like two people living in the same body even before he took Goda's arm.

"You'd take a human shield, Cassy? You were never so cold, before..." Susumu hoped to call out to her, to reach the girl who was still starving and afraid inside, but he could not find her. Medo was suspended in his way, the unmoving body of a loyal and long-manipulated friend. Were he still Minoru, he would have cut Medo down in a moment to get to the other side—but Susumu was actively trying to change himself; he was trying to become different from the person whom he had long ago and incorrectly convinced himself that he was. Rather than charge forward, Susumu forced himself to see value in the life that dangled in front of him. The conflicted, disgraced leader shook his head, turning his physical eyes down toward the ground, although his gifted vision was still everywhere. "What has he done to you? What has this world done to you, Cassy!?" There was clear anguish in his trembling questions, eyes glossed over and lids puffy red with a want to cry. He saw her as a little girl with missing teeth and a strange happiness on her face. Though he was saddened, no tears had managed toform...though they fought hard to squeeze themselves out.

Cassy felt a peculiar ping of remorse strike near the center of her chest. The shaky, unabashedly raw power of Susumu's voice caused her lip to quiver for a split second. She felt something, there and then; she didn't want to admit it, but she felt regret. Unfortunately, it was too late for regrets. Rather than answer him with speech, Cassy answered him with an assault—Medo's suspended body was covered by strings, and she used them to control every aspect of his body. One of them even extended into his mouth and down his throat to secure total control, in case he woke up and had something to say. For the moment, he was dormant and easily swayed. He was used to fly toward Susumu with kunai in both of his hands, his limbs awkwardly jerking left and right, behaving like a marionette and not at all like a man.

Susumu knocked away both kunai with his fingers, slicing them down the center and blunting their edges before jamming his chakra-layered digits into his former subordinate's wrists, pin-pointing the spot where Cassy's strings were making their attachments. The first one severed easily, as did the second; each time he cut one, the girl at the other end could feel pain tingling down her limbs, but she continued the futile assault with as much ferocity as her experience allowed. Medo's movements were more deadly than they would have been if the man were in his own control, but Susumu was better still than the puppet was. Within a span of seconds, all of the strings had been detached, though Cassy continued applying new ones and hoping to get in a good hit.

Her effort was futile. Staring at Susumu in defiance, Cassy's jaw was trembling, her fists were tightly clenched, and a slender branch of black was rising out from beneath her collar to taint the pillow-soft skin of her face. Her curse mark was beginning to spread as she got more and more agitated, and Medo was frustratingly tossed aside by the final thread that had managed to stay attached, one that was deftly wrapped between his toes and around his ankle. The still-living puppet would do her no good, not with Susumu's speed and precision.

Cassy took a deep breath, and Susumu was kind enough to keep himself distant while she formed a few seals and put her hands together underneath the swell of her breasts. "Why don't you just come closer and kill me, Susy?" She looked confident, but Susumu could see into her—he knew that she wasn't expecting to win, and he figured it out by the way her muscles twitched with hesitation every time she moved. She was high on adrenaline—adrenaline and the black chakra of her mark. She was also straining herself by producing so many threads and taking so many jolts of the Gentle Fist's indirect strikes onto her hands. "You're not afraid of someone like me, are you?"

"Do you really want it to end this way? I had hoped to get through to you, but my time and my patience are running thin—Mamban has done something that I cannot forgive by destroying this village, and I will not allow him to continue as he is right now. Know that I will kill him for what he has done, whether you're still alive, or not. Tell me right now, Cassy: Do you want to die, or would you prefer to survive? Whatever you decide, it will be carried out with my next attack."

"So, that's how it is? You think you can just end this fight at your leisure?" Cassy tilted her head, looking strong and goading, but inside she knew he was right. Her strings were her only weapon. They were more than enough to deal with almost every opponent she could face, but for some inexplicable reason, Mamban had ordered her to fight one of the few men on the planet who could easily resist both her attacks and her seductions. "I'm not going to make a choice because you're never going to reach me!" She lashed her arms out, finally looking frustrated as her curse continued to fill out her face, reaching onto the whites of her eyes and tainting the pure gold of her irises.

"Fine," Susumu relented, emptying his lungs of their air. "Then I will decide for you."

"Just try it!" Cassy wanted to say, but she didn't get to finish. Instead, it was more like a single-syllable jus that was cut off by a gasp. Susumu was within her personal space within the span of that gasp. His white eyes were looking up at her slowly-cursed face. As he saw her so close up, so ruined by the darkness, a single tear was finally produced by his ducts, the salty globe rolling gently down his pale cheek and then roughly lifted away by the force of his twisting motion.

He assumed a deep stance, picturing a series of circles on the ground upon which Cassy was standing. In his mind, she was inside the secondary ring of his envisioned pattern. He was its center; he predicted the act to come, and before he could be stopped, he set it into motion: "Eight Trigrams, Sixty-Four Palms!" He pointed out two fingers of each hand, shoving them into two of his target's chakra points, then reeling back and striking four with double the speed, then eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and finally sixty-four until the final blow was struck with both hands as open palms, launching her away with the colossal power of his bloodline.

Ordinarily, Cassy was beyond fast enough to react to and deal with such an attack, but over the course of their fight, the tiny impacts from the cut strings were building up, gradually slowing her chakra network to a near-standstill, making her moves sluggish and her thought processes slower. She was being reduced to a standstill without ever catching on. Susumu used that sluggishness against her to produce an opening for himself; she had tried to make more strings, tried to stop his approach, but she found her system to be totally unresponsive—and then she was on her back, paralyzed and unable to believe it. Among Susumu's targets was her curse mark, located on the inner thigh of her right leg. Its chakra was suddenly sealed away from spreading any further along her body—temporarily, at least.

"Y-you're an ass," Cassy forced herself to say through a half-collapsed throat, trying to spit up at the face that was then looking down upon her. She tried to move, but her system was fully locked down. Each of her major chakra points had been stiffly clamped, and as she was lying on the ground without even the ability to twitch her fingers, she focused everything on trying to breathe. Why am I struggling so hard to get air? Shouldn't I just let myself die, now? She thought to herself, but she realized like so many others that she still wanted to live, even in defeat.

The single, glistening tear that had fallen from Susumu's cheek and been suspended in the air then finally struck the dirt. He spoke to her quickly, "Live for your own sake from now on, Cassy. Mamban won't be there for you anymore after what he did today...and I might not be there, either." Afterward, he leaned down to give her an apologetic kiss to the forehead that she found to be horribly patronizing, but her attempt to insult him over it was choked up by the sensation of sorrow all the same. He was the very same man who had callously left her to die a few years prior to that day; she couldn't understand why he was suddenly leaving her there to live. She watched him go, trying to move her hands, trying to trip him up with her mind, but finding no strength to do it.

Moments after Susumu was gone, a shadow came over her, a smaller frame than Susumu's but not by much. His face was darkened by the position of the sun behind his head, but she recognized the mop on his head. "Awake now, little brat?" Cassy chuckled up at him, closing her eyes and taking a deeper breath. The paralysis was going to last for a long time, she knew—she had never fought a Hyuga before, but she knew how bad it was to get hit by one, even with a glancing blow. She continued: "He spared my life...isn't that just the funniest joke? Minoru, the merciless bastard who threw his own damned children into fighting pits to test their worth, just refused to finish off a miserable wretch like me who doesn't even want to live anymore..." She had wasted a lot of breath, and found herself gasping for more air in the aftermath.

Kaine was awake, walking, and clutching his sword of wood. He looked down at Cassy, pictured a shuriken held on Makoto's neck, and flexed his hands around the solid hilt of his blade. "He shouldn't have spared you, I agree..." He was angry when he saw that she was alive. He had witnessed the tail end of the battle, seen Cassy thoroughly dismantled by the man whom Kaine himself had supposedly defeated. More and more, it felt like a hollow victory, some kind of symbolic surrender. He came to the conclusion that he hadn't beaten Susumu Hyuga after all—he had only defeated Minoru, the phantom of revenge that claimed to have taken the young boy's place over a decade ago.

"If you think he shouldn't have spared me, then kill me, kid," Cassy tried to cough, but her whole self was too seized up for the reflex to even kick in. "Just get me out of this world, help me forget all the bad things that happen to good people...He wasn't doing me any favors by keeping me alive...right now I feel pitiful." She wanted to writhe, to flirt, to give Kaine a coy expression, but even moving her mouth and tongue to speak was taxing her system to its brink.

"If you want to die, you're going to have to die on your own time...right now, I'm just going to make sure you stay where you are." Kaine collapsed beside her, falling into a crippled seat, and for the first time the woman on the ground could see his face in the light. He was beaten up terribly, likely by the explosion of the barrier. His cheek was sagging like its skin had been torn away from the muscle beneath, one eye sealed shut by swelling along his forehead, and a dozen or more deep wounds all along his arms and chest, no doubt cut by flying debris.

"You're weak, kid..." Cassy found herself saying with spite. "Looking like that, you should've just let yourself vanish..."

"I honestly thought about just letting it all go, but I heard that voice again...I don't know if you get what I'm talking about, or if you even care, but I heard it clearly this time. I saw her face, too. Makoto Mori is the girl you were threatening, the girl you could've killed...and she's the one who called out to me, who woke me up just a minute ago. She said 'Kaine, you're my hero, and I want you to be with me forever. That means you don't get to die yet, okay?' I can't die yet; that's what she was telling me...and now I don't know if I'm delusional, or if I'm having dreams that tell me what I want to hear, or if she's somehow actually telling me all this from a hundred miles away, but...I know that I want to survive for her." Kaine looked to Cassy with remorse on his expression, his hands chewed up and their gloves having fallen off in scraps a few steps away. His vest was hardly in shape. Susumu had put him to the ground and tried to keep him from being damaged by the blast, but it had only just barely been enough to keep him alive.

"That's lovely, kid...but while you live for her, I live for Mamban. I already know that Mamban's not going to survive the day, Kaine Hamasaki—I'm not gonna have anything to live for once the sun sets tonight." Cassy was crying freely out of both eyes, but she could only feel the anguish, not the tears as they streamed. All her nerves were in a state of total numbness. "That man who kept me safe, told me he loved me, carried me when I was hurt, and fed me when I was hungry...the perfect man, the one who picked the name Mamban for himself, is the only reason I ever wanted to survive as such a monster...do you know what I mean, kid?"

Kaine perked a brow, seated sloppily along a row of mounded earth. He hadn't seen the total decimation of the village, but the state of the former training fields served as a good primer. "I actually do know what you mean, and for a while I thought Master Minoru was the person who I wanted to serve and protect forever...turns out that Minoru as I knew him was never a person at all, just a mask. When the mask fell off, I think I finally saw the person I actually respected underneath it all...Susumu Hyuga isn't a terrible man, inherently, just a man with a terrible past. It makes me think about people...what kind of woman are you, Cassy? Beneath this mask, I mean."

Cassy rolled her eyes, at least able to do that much freely. "You're a trip, kid...when'd you start getting so thoughtful? I swear it's only been two weeks since you were trying to kill that other girl for looking at your girlfriend the wrong way..."

"Honestly, it feels like it has been a lot longer...I've been talking with Kakashi and Tenzo. They're good men; strong men. Their people are kind and generous, from what they've told me...you're from the Leaf, too, right?" Kaine pondered down at her. His whole body hurt, but he was awake and he intended to keep his mind busy so he didn't get tempted to cart his half-destroyed self uselessly into the fights he could hear clashing in the distance. "Tenzo told me something that really didn't make sense, at the time, but I think I get it now...'You don't have to be the strongest in the world to be strong enough to make a difference.' Do you think I made a difference today?"

Cassy was trying to ignore him, because she couldn't punch him in the mouth and shut him up like she wanted to. Instead, she sighed and gave him an answer. "For all the good it'll do when the whole world crumbles, yeah, I think you made a difference for Susumu. He was cold, like Mamban, but after he fought you...he actually shed a tear for me. I saw it falling when he made his choice to knock me down. Earlier, I heard you talking to him about that girl and her tears, and what it all meant to you. It sounded like a load of crap to me, but you know something...? Master Mamban doesn't cry. I don't even think he can. No matter what evils he's done, or how badly he hurts himself, or how arrogant he is for trying to defy Lord Danzo, he doesn't cry for anyone...in the end, I don't know if he really loves me...but I know that I love him...because I have to love him."

"You don't have to do anything...besides, weren't you trying to seduce me and Akemi back by Monolith Point? Seems to me like you've got plenty of love to give out to others..." Kaine was smirking, trying to crack jokes, but he felt the weight of the day. It only barely struck him that he was making small-talk in the middle of a war zone with a woman who had been—and still was—his enemy. Though the dust from the blast had settled, he got the sense that the real battle had only just begun. Maybe that's why he was cherishing the chatter.

"What can I say...?" Cassy replied, licking the rim of her naturally-red lips and pointing her gold eyes over toward Kaine. "You two are pretty alluring...each for different reasons."

"Yeah, well...I think I can safely say that both of us are taken. Besides, I still think you're a cruel bitch." He wasn't joking when he said that, but although he should have wanted to kill her on the spot, he realized that he simply didn't have the urge anymore. When he had first used his Storm Release, the goal of its voyage had been to strike that very same woman dead on her feet. On that earlier day, he had cherished the sound of desperate pain that shrieked out of her...but two weeks later, there she was, lying weak and defeated and quietly crying her eyes out. She wasn't just a faceless enemy, or some creature to slay anymore—she was human, with all the faults and delusions that such a heritage entails, and she had always been human. She was still the woman who threatened his Makoto, still the woman who had tossed him and Akemi around like playthings, still the woman who wanted to gouge his eyes out and rip him apart at that very moment.

Yet somehow he couldn't see that woman anymore. He saw the tears, he felt the spoken and unspoken regrets. She had made mistakes; Kaine realized that she was just a little girl who was forced into a life that didn't suit her, and that she had adapted to it for the sake of survival. She spoke to him, her voice husky and quiet. "Don't expect me to stay friendly with you, kid; if I could move you'd be dead right now."

Kaine nodded, looking up to the afternoon sun. It was a warm day without the clouds. "Yeah, I know that...but since we're not killing each other right now, can't we just pretend that life isn't so bad?"

"It's always going to be bad...being merciful like your idiotic mentor isn't going to make things better, it's just going to get you killed when somebody comes looking to avenge their loss. We kill others because there's no better way to make sure the bad guys are gone for good..." as she lamented, Cassy finally felt the tears on her cheeks as they followed her upper jawline and dripped over her ears and hair. She wanted to wipe them off, but her arms were still very thoroughly disabled. "Bad people should die, kid; that's why Mamban promised to kill Danzo and Orochimaru for me. He told me that he'd make Susumu suffer for abandoning us all, but...now I wonder if he even cares about us anymore. This morning, he told me he loved me and cherished me and would do anything for me, like always, but I didn't believe him this time...even so, I still smiled and kissed him, hoping maybe that he'd somehow remember what things used to be like when we were part of Root. I wanted him to go back to who he was."

Kaine chuckled, shaking his head and rubbing his hand down his bloody cheek. "To think there's a person alive who'd wish they could go back to being part of Root..."

Cassy hummed thoughtfully. An explosion sounded in the distance, muffled by terrain and trees. "Does it sound silly, kid? I guess it might to someone like you, with friends and family, but life for us was never a peach...when I met Susumu and Mamban, I was just a starving kid with no combat experience. At least with Root, we had a place to belong and comrades who watched our backs...Though, looking back a lot further, I guess it was bad luck that I survived getting this curse mark in the first place, yeah? Should've just died back then, back when I was scared but still myself."

"You told Susumu that you still are yourself, didn't you?" Kaine wondered.

"I am, but I'm not...I'm me, but the me that I wish I never became. I love myself, but I hate who I am...actually, just shut up about it, I don't care what you think of me..." Cassy closed her eyes, hoping to stem the flow of her watery eyes but failing to do it. She hadn't cried so much since the day she was run out of her home by war and forced to take shelter in the old schoolhouse. She didn't like the look of her skin after tears had traveled on it, either. It marred her perfection.

Kaine watched her from the side, debating with himself before he brought something up. "I heard Susumu ask if you wanted to survive or die, but you didn't say anything...so I'll ask you, and I won't go away until you answer honestly: Do you want to live, or do you want to die?" Kaine was clutching his sword with determination, despite being mangled from head to toe and confined to a seated position.

Cassy was silent for a long time, the sun lazily drifting through the cloudless sky above. A final tear dropped from her left eye before she had completely run out of them. "I just want to be a kid again..."

Seshu felt pretty cramped in his new residence: the massive three-ton globe of wood and dirt that encircled him on all sides and pressed inward. He could feel his face scrunched and couldn't breathe, but it was alright—it would be fine. The dirt closest to him had already begun to freeze and crumble, giving him room to wriggle as it was molted and began to flow down and gather at his feet. The whole sphere was gradually turned to crispy ice, broken with a single satisfying kick from within. The shards of frozen wood and mud fell down into a small pyramid which the former prisoner was standing atop, arms crossed angrily. "Did that bastard really just run away from me? Damn it...now I have to go looking for him." Seshu muttered to himself as he blew a strand of hair away from his face, the long white locks mangled and coated with more ice than usual.

Though he was panting, he wasn't tired—it was an eager, crazed breathing that drove him. Each of his exhales emerged visibly as water vapor, but fell into nothingness as the air took them and warmed them. "Come out, come out, Kinoe..." Seshu whispered, keeping his head low and finding risen fragments of earth to cling to. He was caught off guard by his opponent's enormous earth technique, and he suddenly felt rather vulnerable beneath his feet. Wherever he stepped, he made sure to freeze the ground beneath—it might not have been enough. The lump that had captured Seshu, even though it was temporary, had come from deep, deep underground. It was so quick, so smooth, that he never even felt a tremor until the two halves slammed together around him.

He was still having trouble feeling his own face. He imagined that there would be bruises all over his body thanks to the crushing force, and he had been hoping for his enemy to get cocky and thrust a weapon inward to try to finish the job—he could have worked with that. Instead, he felt like a rat surrounded by traps, every speck of dirt—and there were many specks—potentially fuel for Kinoe's next move. He was strong, and he knew he wasn't going to get killed by a few slabs of mud, but it hurt like hell and made it hard to breathe, so he wanted to avoid it at all costs.

While he wandered, he kept both eyes open and he eventually saw a figure clinging to a tree on the other side of a massive rock that had been unearthed by the turmoil all around it. "Found you..." Seshu whispered, pleased with himself as he snuck up on his prey. His steps were silent, the bottoms of his rubbery boots touching the ground with the lightness of a feather as he circled around and found a vantage point behind his target. It was Kinoe, and he looked worn out—clutching an arm and panting. He must have used a lot of chakra on the earthen prison.

No games, not this time. Seshu was in it for the kill, and he brandished a frozen rod with a sharpened tip in his right hand, laying himself out across the soft earth under his belly. He was in a ground-level sniper's nest with an overhang of displaced earth at his back and behind his feet. Rather than throw the rod like a spear with his hand, he called upon his wind nature to give it a gust, guiding it silently but precisely through the air to strike Kinoe through the side, already beginning to freeze him. Ha...direct hit!

By the time the impaled target was revealed to be a wood clone, Seshu already felt a stabbing pain in the rear of his right thigh, practically skewered through to the dirt by the impaling force. "Gah! What...!? That's not possible..." Seshu turned his head to see what had hit him, finding a wooden stake jammed into his leg but not drawing blood. That's not right...it should have been frozen. He reached back and grabbed the stake, pulling it out of his flesh and grunting. Regularly, such a wound would have leaked a lot of blood, but the man was nearly frozen inside; the blood barely flowed at all. Examining the wood, it began to crystallize in his grip and then crumble away into ice like it should have. Why did it take so long?

Seshu stood up, looking around for where it had come from...his opponent was smart, staying out of sight and attacking from a distance with long-ranged weapons that could somehow bypass his freezing aura. "Come on out, Kinoe...don't be such a coward!" Seshu was blowing smoke—he knew what a shinobi was supposed to fight like, but he hadn't felt cornered by a proper stealth assault for years. Sneak attacks hadn't worked on him since he obtained his ice release through Orochimaru's experiments. It was an odd thrill to know that a painful attack could come out of any direction, and that his position had already been revealed.

I could raise a dome, but that would take a lot of chakra...my mark should be giving me plenty, but I can feel it straining already. I must have taken a bigger hit from that earth prison than I thought I had. He flexed his arms to test their tenacity, and he didn't feel especially weakened...so why hadn't the aura frozen the spear? As he was wondering, another one found his back and sliced through his robe and into the skin beneath, opening a small gash through his side before striking the ground in front of him. The pain shot through him, but again the blood didn't leak from his body. He turned to face the direction of the assault, bringing both hands together and thrusting them forward to fire off a wave of chilling air. The gust was like a snow flurry, and everything that was touched by one of the tiny flakes turned to ice and then fractured into little piles under its own weight.

With a huge swath of the forest frozen over, there was no sign of his target anywhere in the rubble. "Damn it...this is starting to annoy me!" He heard one single footstep behind him, and he turned to lash his hand out, forcing another wave of freezing chakra to overtake the air at his back, but it was a false alarm. He could have sworn that he heard something, but his imagination was playing tricks on him and Kinoe was nowhere to be found.

But then he was there, the wood-user's movements impossible to hear against the wet mud as he stifled the sound of his steps with his chakra. Seshu rose a fresh lance to fight off the wooden one that was being thrust his way, and when their weapons clashed, the wooden one held—it didn't freeze over. "How in the...? Kinoe, what kind of game is this!?"

"It's Tenzo, nowadays," the smirking, vestless Jonin said through a light strain. His weapon was thick and heavy, weaved into having a sharp blade. "Have you ever made a campfire, Seshu?" Tenzo asked coyly, pulling his weapon away from the lock it had with his opponent's and then striking at the enemy's wrist, forcing him to drop his spear after the bladed impact cut another hole in his clothing, the glove nearly ripped in half by the harsh cut.

"A campfire...what the hell does a campfire have to do with anything?" Seshu picked up his spear and started to freeze the ground at his feet with its tip, focusing his chakra on expanding a patch of ice to cover the immediate area. Tenzo reacted quickly by hopping into the air and pressing his heels together; when he landed, there were wooden spikes created by his chakra jutting into the frigid surface from the bottoms of his shoes, allowing him to keep his traction. Much to Seshu's chagrin, Tenzo still wasn't freezing.

Tenzo cleared his throat, explaining his meaning: "Well...we shinobi have a lot of tools to make fires. Some of us can breathe it out of our mouths, others have matches, others carry flint and tinder...but to make a fire without any of that, do you know what you have to do?" Tenzo's dense wooden pole was still firmly grasped in his hands, pointed threateningly toward Seshu.

"Tch, never had to learn...I always had Goda or Mamban to light the fires when we were on missions together," Seshu claimed, guarded and keeping his distance. The rules changed when his enemy was capable of getting closer without the cold side effects; there was no denying that Tenzo was a better fighter overall than Seshu was, and the only true advantage the man in the black robe once had was his ability to slow things down and turn them useless. It seemed with a sobering suddenness that his advantage no longer existed.

"That's no good, Seshu; every ninja should know how to make his own fire...first, you take one stick," he said, hoisting his bladed rod with a demonstrative hum. "Then, you rub another stick against it, so that it heats up and eventually catches fire...It takes a lot of time and a lot of effort to get one going that way, but fortunately I have a shortcut." He strained his forehead underneath its protector and opened the tip of his weapon to reveal its inner core with his chakra—there was a separate, thinner stick twirling rapidly inside, heating the wood from within and keeping it too hot to freeze over. "This wood responds to my will...all I have to do is tell it to keep spinning, and my weapon stays too hot for you to stop."

Seshu bared his fangs, shaking his head and loosening some of the ice that clumped his hair together. "That's a load of bull, Kinoe! You're not about to defeat me just because you know how to make a damned campfire!"

"Then come here, Seshu...I'll prove it's not just my survival skills that make me strong." Tenzo had his confidence back. All it had taken him was a moment to think about it; the answer seemed pretty obvious to him in hindsight, and it was seemingly the silver bullet that would allow him to win the battle. Seshu did indeed come, and his attack was frenzied and skilled, but Tenzo was stronger, a bit faster, and certainly better equipped. Ice would occasionally flake along the edges of his weapon, but before it could reach the core and slow its spin, the heat would turn it away and thaw the outer edges.

It was rapidly made apparent that Seshu wasn't going to win the head-on battle, and after Tenzo's thrusts and swings were getting closer, landing hits, occasionally causing bruises and cut skin, Seshu dove backward to separate himself from the skirmish. "I'm not gonna lose to you, Kinoe, I swear it...even if I have to play dirty!" He brought his fingers up to his mouth, pressing them together and breathing out a harsh breath—it was a whistle, a shrill one. From the few leafless trees that were still standing, a complement of masked figures hopped obediently out from their hiding places to gather at Seshu's side. There were a few dozen of them, though barely a tenth of Mamban's total army. "Get him!" Seshu ordered, pointing a harsh finger toward Tenzo and smiling wickedly.

Tenzo quickly formed a seal for wood style, erecting pillars of timber from beneath the earth and aiming them for the feet of the reinforcements. Many of them were captured, but Seshu's thick layer of ice began to creep up the edges of his technique. Spinning the cores took a lot of focus, and he could only do it for a few planks at a time—all the rest were frozen before they caught their intended opponents. The dozens began to swarm him, and his staff did a lot of good for him as he managed to toss away more than half of the assailants with broad sweeps.

After a while, though, Seshu joined in beside them and overwhelmed Tenzo's capabilities. The sole Leaf ninja in a sea of forced defectors was caught from behind by the slash of a sword, but before it cut his skin he produced a layer of wood to push it out from his back. Another hit his side, but it was similarly pushed out. He backed up, trying to filter his opponents to his front, but many of them were playing support from behind and keeping his options limited by throwing kunai.

Tenzo's eyes were shooting in every direction, and he found himself wishing that he had a Byakugan to keep track of all the different angles of attack. He was capable of fighting them off, and he did so admirably, but their tenacity for battle—brought on by their existence as mindless slaves—made the reinforcements very difficult to manage. Tenzo killed a few of them, slashes through the neck or impalement through the chest, but there were still many more. After a mighty struggle that survived for several minutes, he was brought down by Seshu, a sweeping kick taking his spiked boots out from underneath him and putting him on his back atop the ice.

Tenzo groaned as he collided with solid, frozen earth, the impact rattling his bones and chilling his spine. He smelled blood that belonged to his fallen enemies, and his weapon was finally kicked away from his hand while a group of Seshu's lackeys grabbed him by the wrists and ankles, holding him down and displaying him as a prisoner for their commander all sprawled across the dirt. "Good work, lads," Seshu said, clapping his hand to one of their shoulders—the unfortunate soldier was frozen at the joint, but he made no cries of pain or any attempt to reel back as the ice completely overtook his body and turned him into dusty snow that blew away. "How's it feel to get ganged up on and beaten, Kinoe?" Seshu asked, twirling his spear over his head and giving a sigh of victory. "Not how I wanted to win, but it's all the same at the end—this is war, after all. We can't afford to play nice forever."

Tenzo struggled against those who were holding him, but there were two men at each of his limbs and he wasn't quite strong enough to get rid of them on his own. Seshu put one foot on each side of Tenzo's waist, standing over him and holding the icy lance above his own head, the implement now fastened into both of his hands and pointed downward. "If you beg for your life, I'll really enjoy it...it won't help, but go ahead and do it anyway...you may not be Kakashi, but I want to hear someone beg."

"I won't beg, Seshu...if you're going to kill me, you had better do it fast...because Kakashi is coming, and you don't want to miss your moment because you've been gloating, do you?" Tenzo defiantly mocked the man above him. He wasn't ready to die; far from it—he still had a lot of things he needed to do, especially involving the Fourth Hokage's Legacy. It would be a rude thing to do if he died before Naruto even grew into needing his help. Still, he was beaten and outnumbered; for all he knew Kaine, Rika, and Akemi were all killed in the blast already.

"Fair point, but I'll kill Kakashi, too, if he wants to show up...I doubt he can do your little campfire trick, so I'll have fun with him." Seshu moved to thrust his spear downward, aiming right for Tenzo's heart. The latter tensed, keeping his eyes open and facing death with the kind of dignity that a shinobi deserved. And then Tenzo heard the absolute last two words that he ever thought he'd hear in his dying moment:

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"DYNAMIC ENTRY!"

Thanks for reading! The next chapter is coming soon.