The Naruto franchise is the property of Masashi Kishimoto.
Chapter 55: Parting Shadows
The scarlet will-o'-the-wisp floated steadily in the consuming shadows, gradually nearing at a slow but inexorable pace. As the concealing darkness began to shy away from the light, a face came to view to frame the eye, one Sakura recognized all too well.
Sasuke.
"Oi, Sasuke!" Naruto beamed, hope kindling fiercely in his blue eyes, "Took you a few years, but it's good to have you back! Did you come here to hel–"
"Who are you?" Sasuke asked in a dispassionate voice, hardly bothering to look at the exuberant jinchūriki.
The blond hesitated, his smile losing some of its luster.
"H-Hey... that's not funny," Naruto said, his hand lifting halfheartedly toward the shinobi he once considered his brother as he took a step closer, "C'mon Sasu–"
His words cut short as the Uchiha traitor delivered a shattering kick to his ribs, tumbling him in an uncontrolled backward roll until he collided with a protruding clump of roots, his body smashing them to bits. He lay there disbelievingly for a moment, his expression one of open hurt.
"Rogue Konoha shinobi Uchiha Sasuke," Kakuzu intoned, "You have quite the bounty on your head. Dead or alive."
Thorny vines began to tangle around Sasuke's feet and he inspected them almost apathetically before lifting his eye to regard the red-eyed criminal. As immortal and enduring as his body was, the cowled shinobi was nearly defenseless against the superlatively powerful genjutsu the Uchiha unleashed on his psyche.
Sakura could only imagine what nightmarish planes the S-class criminal's mind had been transported to as the whole of the forest convulsed as one in untold agony, the heartbeats of the black thread organ in the center of it all becoming erratic and labored. The scream that ripped free of Kakuzu's throat was nothing short of unearthly and caused the hair on the back of her neck to prickle.
After what seemed like an eternity, the red-eyed immortal slumped over, the pulsing of his heart dwindling to a barely-present throbbing. His clones fell abruptly, like marionettes whose strings had been cut, reabsorbed into the earth as they collapsed.
"TTrrAASShh," Sasuke sneered, ignoring the blood that oozed out of his eye from ruptured capillaries. Sakura was surprised that he could even see through the ghastly film of red as he turned to her.
"Now, where were we?"
~o ( 卍 ) o~
Hinata hit the wall at a sharp angle and rebounded, hurling a handful of flash bombs at the monster, the majority of them detonating right before its eyes. Before its vision could clear, she launched herself in a high arc to settle between its horns, driving her katana deep into the wood.
The reaction was instantaneous. It uttered an earsplitting roar, tossing its head to try to dislodge the heiress. She set her feet apart, bracing herself, and held on for dear life. The beast swung around, ramming its head against the nearest wall, and she just barely managed to duck behind the horns in time to avoid being flattened. Her sword, which had been left embedded in its forehead, shattered.
The white-eyed kunoichi had already drawn a kunai, though, and with one decisive movement, ripped through the minotaur's eye.
This time, the bellow was of pain, and Hinata was forced from her perch as its hand came up to smash the side of its face, taking horn and armor with it. Her feet skidded several times over the water as she landed, and she maintained the presence of mind to jump clear before another blast of electricity turned her temporary foothold into crackling death.
Shino caught her in mid-jump, bearing her to safe ground.
"Is it done?" the heiress asked, slightly out of breath.
"It is unfathomable for me to fail," the bug host replied. Indeed, the monster was now clawing furiously at the exposed side of its head, where kikaichū were beginning to invade by virtue of its compromised armor. They died by the hundreds, but the thousands that survived burrowed further still into the gouges cut by its talons.
It had been a perfect execution of one of their most reliable maneuvers, where Shino would hide in the blind spot in the enemy's vision created by Hinata's body while leaving behind a simple bunshin to travel in the opposite direction. When attention no longer on him, he would cripple the enemy with his destruction bugs.
"Six seconds," the Aburame warned. Six seconds before his bugs would reach the heart, and six seconds for Hinata to destroy the other two hearts. There was no time to think twice.
"Throw me."
Years of working side by side had taught the bug host better than to question the Hyūga heiress' occasional Naruto-esque "strategies". He reached out behind him to take the hand he knew was there and swung the kunoichi around once before launching her toward the crazed minotaur.
Hinata's eyes watered from the speed, but she maintained her focus, forming two fists and activating her jutsu as she flew. The air around her hands began to shimmer with suffused power before igniting blue and shaping into the ghostly specters of twin lion heads, each easily as big as the heiress' body.
"Jūho Sōshiken!"
The Hyūga kunoichi struck with superb power and accuracy, each shot slamming home into the minotaur's chest and issuing azure plumes of flame from its back. It stumbled back from the sheer force of impact, legs buckling, marking the simultaneous destruction of all three of its hearts. Hinata rode the behemoth all the way down, watching the life seep out of its tendrils and the armor simply fall apart, no longer held by anything substantial.
The lake underfoot roiled, boiling away into nothingness, as the heiress stood. She allowed herself a mental three count of rest before turning to face the Aburame and nodding.
"Let's keep moving."
~o TBC o~
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