TenTen snapped her hand out to the side, a kunai slipping out of her fingers and into the throat of the Oto nin that had been half a second from ambushing her.

"Left, twenty meters!" Ino called. She and Hanabi were back to back, using eyes and sensor skills alike to make sure things were kept clear for Chouji and TenTen, sending warning well ahead of time for most of the attacks.

"You take care of it." TenTen ordered. As the oldest genin there (and, god, Hanabi was still an Academy student, wasn't she?), she had been given ad hoc leadership of the rest of the group, and taken it in stride. "Akamichi, you're helping me."

Chouji nodded, letting go of his technique and shrinking back down to normal size. "What do you need me to do?"

TenTen didn't answer immediately, too busy throwing a shuriken directly into the eyes of an attacking shinobi (her aim was impossibly accurate, really). She pulled out a scroll immediately afterwards, swiping a bloody thumb across and jumping out of the way to avoid the large metal weapon (and the cart it was on) that fell heavily to the ground, right on top of the scroll. Another scroll gave way to a half-dozen large iron balls, about the size of someone's head.

"You'll help me out with loading the cannon and moving it when necessary. I want to see if we can take care of those giant snakes at the north end." TenTen said, glancing once more at Ino and Hanabi. "You two get over here! It's safer in a group."

The girls scrambled over, and Ino grumbled to herself. "I kind of wish Shikamaru was here."

"The Nara guy that was fighting?" Hanabi asked, eyes still active. The strain was starting to get to her, but it was a matter of life or death, and she wasn't ready to die yet.

"Me and Chouji's teammate. We work well as a group, so it would have been good for all three of us to be together right now." Ino's eyes flickered over to a large Oto nin that was currently mowing down Konoha nin several dozen yards away. Large, but slow. "You'll have to do for now. Help guard my body. Chouji! Plan Hi-shin!"

"But Shika's not here!"

"Hanabi and TenTen can take care of his parts if necessary." Ino snapped back, putting her hands up and in the necessary sign. "Shintenshin no Jutsu!"

Hanabi stiffened as Ino's body flopped down, just barely moving in time to make sure that the older girl's head landed somewhere other than the ground, specifically Hanabi's hands. She pulled Ino's head onto her lap and looked over at the large Oto nin that Ino had been aiming at. The man had begun to attack Suna and Oto shinobi, if nowhere near as efficiently as before. She heard Chouji and TenTen fumbling around behind her, the scraping of metal especially loud as her back was resting just against the cart on which the cannon lay.

"Plug your ears with chakra. Cover Ino's. Get away from the cart. Ready? Fire!" TenTen yelled, and Hanabi eeped, clapping her hands over Ino's ears and making sure that her own were safe as an explosion happened just behind her. After a full second, she unplugged her ears, hearing TenTen whooping loudly. "Score!"

"One of the snakes is down." Chouji informed Hanabi, even as his arm grew larger, larger than her entire body, and slammed into a shinobi that had been attempting to ambush them after the attack, recognizing the danger of the new weapon. Oh. She'd let her Byakugan turn off. That was probably a good thing; she didn't have as much chakra as the people around her, being only seven, and it had been draining her rather quickly.

"Looks like someone else is taking care of the other snakes. There are some toads there now." TenTen shifted her attention to the large purple cube atop the Kage's box. "There aren't many other big targets, so let's see if we can get rid of that thing."

"That sounds like a goo—" Chouji was cut off as the part of the arena directly above and behind them blew up, an unintelligible shout echoing from above.

Hanabi squealed, not caring for how embarrassing it was, and bent forward to make sure Ino's body wasn't too badly damaged. It helped that the position protected Hanabi herself as well.

Chouji had been back next to them, landing heavily across Ino's legs, and was now groaning as he slowly got back to his feet. "What was that?"

TenTen grunted, lurching to her feet and leaning against the cannon with a kunai in one hand. "You mean other than the obvious? No clue."

"Found them!" An Oto nin yelled from far to the side, in an area the blast hadn't affected. Even now, there were more explosions going off around the village though most seemed to be occurring right in the arena. "Unconscious blonde chit with no visible injuries and an Akimichi nearby!"

"No Nara?"

"No, but it's good enough!" The man jumped down closer, and every move he made showed that he was clearly in another league than the cannon fodder (oh, that saying made so much sense now… how had it come to be here in their own world, though?) they had fought 'til now. "We found the Yamanaka that took out Genji-san and turned him against us."

TenTen cursed quietly under her breath, and Hanabi pressed herself closer to the cannon, though she knew it probably wouldn't do much good. "Akimichi…"

"I'll need help." Chouji muttered. "Without Shika here, and with Ino unconscious, my attacks are a lot harder to pull off. I can still do some stuff, but…"

"Good enough." TenTen's hands drifted down to her belt, right where her scrolls were stored. Her eyes were still trained on the enemy, who was watching them with calm, mocking amusement, and her voice was still soft enough to not carry. "Keep him occupied for ten seconds, then clear out."

"Roger." Chouji flashed through a few handsigns. "Baika no Jutsu!"

Hanabi hadn't received any orders (not that she'd expected them), but she felt that it would be alright for her to drag Ino and herself around to the other side of the cannon, away from where the more difficult battle was about to take place. Even before Chouji made his way into the fight, she had begun to move.

She'd just barely made it to the other side (seven seconds into TenTen's time limit, in fact), when she heard an anguished scream. An anguished scream from a familiar voice, in fact.

"Byakugan," she whispered, voice trembling. Ino lay unmoving in her lap, mind maybe miles away by now. She had to come back soon.

Chouji's left arm was gone, cut messily across the bone in the upper arm. He was backpedalling away from the Oto nin (a Jounin, he had to be, for Chouji to last not even ten seconds, though the shinobi he had been talking to was unconscious), back towards the cannon, and TenTen was hurrying, but—

"Soushouryuu!" TenTen yelled, leaping into the air with a pair of scrolls coming up and twisting around her. With unerring accuracy, she plucked the weapons out of the air as the appeared from the scrolls and hurled them at the Oto nin.

The Oto nin did not have any Fuuton techniques.

The Oto nin was not wearing much armor.

The Oto nin could not avoid everything.

The Oto nin did not survive.

Hanabi's attention was focused on Chouji's arm. Her hands twitched in her lap, Byakugan turning off immediately as her mind flew back to lessons with Kabuto. If it was a clean cut, the arteries would curl back in on themselves to prevent excess blood loss, but the person would still lose consciousness quickly. For Chouji, who was still just a young teen, the blacking-out would happen earlier, and besides, the cut wasn't clean. The bleeding could be halted by cauterizing the wound, but that would ruin chances of reattaching the arm with chakra pathways intact. The bleeding and pathways could both be halted with medical ninjutsu, but that was high-level stuff. There was still a chance that the arm could be saved by an experienced medic nin, but there wasn't anyone around. There weren't even normal Konoha nin that could help them out with anything right now, or this wouldn't have happened in the first place.

A loud roar echoed behind her, unnoticed.

TenTen was dragging Chouji back, even as the boy was quickly losing consciousness. His arm was tucked under hers, and her face was pale with worry.

"I've never been any good at medical techniques. I tried, a lot, but I can't." TenTen was choking the words out. "I can't just… oh kami, this is my fault."

"I… I can try." Hanabi bit her lip, heart pounding wildly in her chest. "I'm not bad at it. This is… this is really bad, but it's a normal wound, just a cut, even if it's messy, so… I can try?"

"It's better than nothing." TenTen grit her teeth, breath escaping in sharp gasps. Chouji was completely unconscious, now. "Don't hurt yourself doing this, though. Your sister would never forgive me."

"I know my limits." Hanabi tried to grin, though it came out as a grimace.

She didn't.

Fifteen minutes into her first time as a field medic, unofficial as it was, Hyuuga Hanabi lost consciousness and entered a coma as chakra exhaustion overtook her during the healing of Akimichi Chouji's arm. The arm would be saved, but the chakra pathways would not. Hyuuga Hanabi would not wake up for another three weeks. Five minutes later, Yamanaka Ino would wake up to find the situation that had unfolded while she was gone, and attempt to aid TenTen in protecting the incapacitated comrades. She would escape unscathed, as would TenTen, but the guilt would stay with them for a long time afterwards.

o.o.o.o.o

Robin took a deep breath as her clone successfully bloomed an arm inside the shield. With the exhale, she dissolved the clone and steadied herself, taking another deep breath and blooming her entire body inside the shield, hidden in one of the branches. That were there. She stayed quiet, very quiet, her eyes focused on the people inside. It was odd, really. There should have been someone putting the shield up, shouldn't there have been? The ANBU would have killed them had they been outside, and Sarutobi likely hadn't noticed them if they were in here.

Robin doubted she could help much with the fight that was going on below her. It was in a league beyond her, loathe as she was to admit it. She had an eighty-one million beli bounty on her head, though she felt that it would have raised to at least a hundred by this point had the marines known of her progress. The men below her… they were beyond that level. At Luffy's perhaps. They would be able to hold their own against all but the most dangerous pirates and marines alive, back home. All but the Yonkou and the Admirals, and perhaps several of the Shichibukai.

Perhaps she should have brought Crocodile along.

Though that roar she'd just heard implied otherwise...

While she could not fight the men below her, she could find the ones creating the shield. After all, if she could bloom herself through this shield, she could get through whatever shield was hiding the ones that had put it up in the first place.

Eyes grew out of the trees at all four corners, searching, searching, searching.

o.o.o.o.o

Kinishi took a shallow, rattling breath, blood seeping into her lungs, and her eyes wide. Through her chest was a sword.

Slowly, she turned around to see the crouched form of her current employer, and between them, the puppet that had stabbed her.

"You seek to kill me?" She coughed. "I should have known."

"You did your job well." Sasori could admit that much. "I'll make it quick."

"You won't make it happen at all." Kinishi yanked herself from the sword, her chest already glowing gold as the wound healed itself. "Medics rarely make it to Jounin anywhere. You know that. I know that. Everyone knows that. So what makes you think that killing one of the few that did would be easy?"

"The fact that I've done it before, and will do it again." Sasori's tail (or the tail of whichever puppet he inhabited) lashed through the air. "Don't worry, you'll be dead before long, and then I can collect the specimens I came for, yourself included."

"No." Kinishi growled. "You won't."

"Need some help?"

Both Kinishi and Sasori's heads snapped to the side. A lazy eye above a mask and an orange book stared back, silver hair defying gravity as it always did. Kakashi raised a hand. "Yo."

"Hatake." Kinishi shifted her weight, buying time as her chest knit itself back together. "Why are you offering?"

"I know what those cloaks mean, for one thing. And even if you did work for him, he literally just stabbed you in the back. I have a bigger reason to hate him than to hate you, and besides, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, right?" Kakashi's eye crinkled in a small, fake smile.

"Hatake Kakashi. Son of the White Fang… your father was the one that killed my parents." Sasori's voice was deceptively calm. "It's time I've returned the favor."

Ah. A grudge. Just what Kakashi was looking for.

o.o.o.o.o

A/N: Trust me, the first scene is extremely important. Just… trust me, okay?

The reason Robin's had so little time in the chapters recently is because I'm showing the effects of her presence, both good and bad. Right now? Right now, the effects are mostly bad.

Though I do so enjoy having Kakashi and Sasori in a battle. Such a wasted opportunity in canon, just having it as a one-off joke with Chiyo.

Ja ne,

Phoenix

P.S.

I'm hosting a panel on fanfiction at a convention. Where?

The Baruch Anime Asylum Convention!

This is a free anime convention being hosted in the middle of New York City, so if you live in or near the area and are free on Friday, April 25th, you should come!

There is a link to my deviantArt page on my FFnet profile, and the first journal there has a link that will show you where to get tickets, as well as information on contests, prizes, and more.

Hurry, because there are less than eighty normal tickets left, and cosplay entry tickets are running out, though if they do run out, contact me directly.