"Chiyo-chan..." Sakaki whispered. Not too much blood loss. But her face... "I'll just be a moment, okay?"
Sakaki opened her kit, pressed gauze pads to her friend's bloody head, wrapped it around gently, leaving space for her open mouth into which she slipped a blood pill to keep her going until this was settled. She took off her vest, laid it on top of Chiyo-chan. Her friend was so tiny she seemed to disappear beneath the thick leather. Lastly, she kicked at a stack of canned stuff, controlled the descent of the mountain of tins - it formed a series of hills around the little girl. She hoped that would be enough to protect her until the fight was done.
She straightened, turned to Sasuke. He was trembling, bouncing around on the balls of his feet. Darkness spun in the black and red whirlpool of his eyes.
"Come on then!" he said, "I'm excited already!"
She felt the energy coming, turned it away. A subtle genjutsu that would have affected her balance. Another one that would have displaced his image backwards by an inch. Again, she let the energy slide off her spirit, her mind. A third attempt to induce anxiety.
"What the... how are you doing that?" Sasuke said, frowned. "Did that teacher of ours give you some cheating bloodline?"
"...You should concern yourself with staying alive, Uchiha."
Sakaki had no special doujutsu. So she did not understand exactly how she was doing this. All that additional chakra training and she had never been able to do this before - to see the color of the wind, and taste the residual chi in the air. She could smell the bioelectricity in her opponent's body, hear the vibration of the ground under her feet. Did Sensei see the world this way all the time? Just two days ago, she would have succumbed to this cruel brat's genjutsu.
She unlocked the switch in her mind, removing the limiters on her body chemistry and muscle response. Her breathing was slow and powerful. Her muscles bulged, and the t-shirt and tights on her body stretched, tore in places. She stripped them off. She didn't give a shit about being just in her panties and bra. She wanted nothing holding her back, nothing slowing her down for this. She focused her spirit, combined it with the body energy already roaring through her coils. The dust on the ground around them was blasted back by waves of pressure that also pushed back at him.
"I'm under-aged, Sempai. And cow-tits like yours don't do it for me."
"I'm going to kill you, Uchiha Sasuke," Sakaki said quietly, taking a step forward. She wasn't going to be distracted by anything today.
Then, perhaps there was a flicker in his eyes that could have been fear. She crushed the part of her heart that empathized with his insecurities, his pain, his ambition. It was easy, seeing Chiyo's mutilated face.
A blast of heat as he leaped back and rained fireballs upon her. She swept them aside with her arms, disrupting the chakra manipulation holding the heat together in spheres that sustained the chemical reaction of combustion. They fizzled out with loud, hissing sounds. Easier than deflecting the deadly red light that Naruto wielded. Not even close to the same intensity, the compression of dense power that let Naruto form solid objects out of the light.
She took another step forward.
He danced around from shadow to shadow, drew throwing blades and sent them at her, gleaming flashes as they reflected the neon light coming in through the big empty windows of the warehouse. Up close, the mirror sheen blades caught the golden radiance around her body. There were chakra strings attached to the weapons, to control their paths if she should dodge.
She plucked them out of the air, and crushed them, twisting the steel between her fingers. He would not be using these toys again.
He turned to retreat deeper into the darkness among the piles of stockpiled cans and bottles of preserved vegetables and drums of cooking oil, detonated the explosive seals he had trapped the area with. As flames and smoke and flour and burning bits of wood and plastic billowed outwards from the main storage hall, he skipped past the tripwires and net traps and spike traps towards the stairs. But when he raced down a clear path between two tall rows of stacked pallets heavy with sacks of grain, she was suddenly there, right at the base of the stairwell. There had not even been the sound of her footsteps.
"Haven't you wanted this, Kohai? Haven't you been asking for this battle for months? Why are you putting it off now?" She almost didn't recognize the mangled voice forced out of her own mouth. "Anyway... you should give up trying to run. You don't have the speed to get away from me."
A puff of smoke and he seemingly split into three. The three Sasuke images leaped up into the air in different directions, doubling back towards the main hall, running into the smoke and the wet spray of the sprinkler system.
Her arms flicked forward, ribbons of chakra sliding out from her fingertips just brushing against the illusions before they could gain distance, again disrupting the energy holding Sasuke's technique together.
When he landed on the support trusses bracing the ceiling high above the dusty floor, he turned, and saw her right in front of him, in arm's reach again.
Sasuke's eyes were wide now. The confidence was long gone.
Slowly, Sakaki stretched out a hand towards his face. The light coming off her made his face seem paler, sickly.
He yelled, stepped back, kicked sideways at her right knee, again at the other knee. He recovered, wobbled on the slippery wet steel.
"Come on, Kohai. Haven't you attended the upperclassmen's demonstrations? You'll have to hit my legs a lot harder to hurt me. In fact, I felt the bones in your foot shift with those impacts. Did you hurt yourself? Doesn't feel good, does it?"
Her voice just kept getting lower.
Sasuke charged at her, started unloading a combination that opened with a feinted roundhouse kick at her temple, switched at the last minute into a handstand that let him alter the trajectory into a sweeping, upside-down thrust kick at her jaw. Well, it was going to be a combination. He could probably see her counter coming, an overhand right towards his head. Changing the angle of his strike to compensate, kicking at her hand instead.
Fool. She could guess that he thought his kick would hurt her fist more than the other way around. Had this been at the Academy, with other teachers watching, she would have just dodged back or side-stepped, or done one of the fancy flowing circular parries she had started to pick up from Neji.
Sakaki had no interest in making this a sparring match. Not now.
The dense, thick bones of the first two knuckles on her right hand smashed into his rising heel. The inch-thick rubber sole was compressed to the point of losing all elasticity. And then the force of her blow just kept going. It shattered his foot.
"Stop screaming. It's unbecoming," she said, holding him upside down by the other leg, over the floor, forty feet below.
He was sobbing. He kept looking at his demolished foot, at the way the exposed toes splayed out unnaturally through the front of his sandal, at the way the heel was just not there, and jagged bone ends had torn their way out of his ankle, white fragments exposed through bloody wounds opened up from the inside. His calf was swollen, bulging - the fibula had broken off of the knee from the way the force had traveled up the ankle and forced the bones back, one end of it poking out through the thick muscle. The blood trailed its way up his thighs, soaking his shorts.
She pulled her free hand back. The light around it became fierce, became white-hot sun-fire.
"That's enough, Sakaki-chan."
"Sensei..."
And then she felt tears burning their way along her cheeks. She had noticed his approach - he hadn't been hiding it. If she had gone just a bit faster, this prick would already be dead.
"Look at what he did to Chiyo-chan, Sensei." Her throat was closing in on itself.
"I know. You know I'm a good healer - I'll fix her right up. You give the brat to me now, Sakaki-chan."
Sakaki released the power, let it flow back in from her muscles. As always, she felt the slight crash afterwards as her body complained at all the chemicals it had burned through so quickly.
"O-okay. Sensei."
She grimaced, shoved the bawling kid into Iruka's big hands, crouched down on the steel beam, and hugged her knees against herself. This was not how she wanted a man to see her in her underwear for the first time.
"You... you go fix her now. Sensei. Please." She put her hands on her face. "I don't want her to wake up and see herself like that."
"Just one second, Sakaki-chan. I know you hate it, but if I don't fix this idiot's ankle right away, he'll be crippled permanently."
He dropped Sasuke hard on his ass, on the support truss.
"Stop that sniveling," Iruka said. "You got what you wanted. Deal with the consequences."
The fire was out, and the sprinklers ceased.
Part of Sakaki wanted to stay up there and listen to that little shit's screams as Sensei put his foot and leg back together. Instead, she slid off the cold, rusty steel, took the jump with just the slightest bit of chakra expended to spread out the force and keep from breaking her legs. She padded over to Chiyo-chan, who was still on her side, still tied up. She broke the chains easily, but as quietly as she could. Chiyo-chan murmured incoherently in her sleep, blood oozing out the hole in her cheek. Sakaki could see her friend's teeth through that hole. She could see some of the bones of her friend's skull, revealed by flaps of flesh peeled back. Slowly, Sakaki touched her friend's soft, brown hair.
Above them, she heard the Uchiha start shrieking louder.
"Noooo! No!" he said, "You can't do that!"
Then Sensei was down there with them, his big shadow covering both of the girls. But when Sakaki looked up, he was still next to that Uchiha, whispering fiercely into his ear.
"How are you doing that, Sensei?"
"Advanced clone technique, took me forever to learn. Energy's not meant to stay static like that. It's enough to deal with the boy for now. Let's see here. Yes. He used a sharp knife, that will make it easier."
First, her pressed his fingers into spots under Chiyo-chan's jaw. Sakaki could hear her friend's breathing settling down, sense the younger girl easing into a deeper sleep.
He opened up a kit, pulled sterile pads out and wiped and cleaned the wounds. And then his hands were glowing, pulsing soft white and green and blue as he traced the lacerations and incisions on his student's face, pressed the flaps of torn flesh into place, layer by layer. It was magical, the way edges met and closed, connective tissues, muscle and membranes knitting together.
Sakaki cleared her throat, bit her lip. Normally, she would be watching closely, fascinated at the tremendous, flowing energy held tightly and controlled with such efficiency. She was the only genin at the Academy that could manage any healing jutsu so soon, but this was another level. He was doing magnificent fine work, not just restoring the flesh but also preventing any scarring, a lot harder to do with the delicate skin on the face. It was a master version of what she did to herself all the time after getting banged up at the Dojo or with Naruto - she had to take so much more time to heal much easier cuts. Sensei was doing days' worth of cosmetic surgery in minutes.
They stayed like that for an hour, and all the while, the Uchiha in the rafters was crying out.
The relief was bubbling up through her so hard it made her weak at the knees. Chiyo-chan would be fine. And... Sakaki had not killed that boy.
Above them, the Uchiha was really going crazy. Iruka-sensei's clone picked him up, bounded out through the skylight into the starry night.
"What's his problem?" Sakaki muttered. "He got off lucky."
"I just sealed away his Sharingan. Permanently. He can still be a ninja, but this horseshit made me realize I've been neglecting him, just because he ticks me off. This is my fault," and Sensei's twisted, angry face made something in Sakaki want to... pat his back or something.
"It's not - "
"As a teacher of ninja. I should've been able to tell something like this was coming. His jealousy, the way he felt he was falling behind even Naruto... I should have noticed. I have an obligation now, to that moron. I need to be a better teacher to him."
Sometimes, she felt like she understood him better than anyone else, but right now, she didn't get it at all.
"There. All done."
After wiping the last traces of blood off her face, it was like Chiyo-chan had never been cut at all, and then Sakaki put her arms around the little girl and sighed as she felt Chiyo-chan starting to stir.
"...Aki-chan? Wh-where am... Is my mom okay?"
"She's," and then Sakaki was smiling, though the tears hadn't quite stopped yet, "Yeah, she's just fine."
Chiyo-chan's eyes changed, then her little hands were up and touching her cheeks, her eyelids, her mouth. "I thought... I thought he did stuff. To me."
"Sensei just finished fixing it. I'll take you home now, huh?"
She was starting to drift off again, embraced Sakaki tight. "'Kay. Knew... knew you would find me. 'M sorry. He had his hands on Mom's life support. Couldn't... couldn't fight, after. Cheap-shotted by that Sharingan."
"It's okay, Chiyo-chan. She's fine. You did what you could to protect her."
"I'll... protect you too... someday. Kinda sleepy now."
Of course. Regardless of Sensei's healing skills, she had still lost blood. Sakaki's kit was still there where she had left it, next to Chiyo-chan. She pulled out a couple of bottles, popped them open.
"Take this blood pill, and this one is a painkiller. Then sleep. Okay?"
"Okay." Chiyo-chan gulped it down with some effort, waved sleepily at the dark shadow of Iruka-sensei. "Thanks, Aki-chan. Thanks, Sensei."
Sakaki felt hot, was bright red, actually. She wondered if Chiyo-chan noticed. She could feel Sensei's eyes on her.
Did Sensei just look at her butt? No way. She resisted the urge try to hide herself, very aware of her white cotton underthings clinging to her skin.
She felt very warm as he put the jacket over her shoulders.
"You get her home, Sakaki-chan. I'm going to have to fill out some paperwork because of this."
"It was all his fault, wasn't it Sensei? I guess it all goes back to normal tomorrow, doesn't it?"
"Hrmm. You know that's not what's going to happen."
Chiyo-chan wailed the next day in class, when Mizuki-sensei came in and announced that Onizuka-sensei had been dismissed from his teaching post.