Previously: Kanta comes along; Tsubasa sends a letter; Tsunade starts a gambit and the Retrieval Team responds in kind.


Fifteen minutes later I was fighting for my life. My life and Tsunade's both, as it happened. How had things managed to escalate so much in a half of a half of an hour? The explanation was both simple and not: Kanta Kai.

Tsunade had waited until it was certain both Jiraiya and Kushina were out of range to turn and aim a disabling chop at my neck. I, having been advised by Jiraiya that such an attack was inevitable, was forewarned enough to kawarimi with a chair. Tsunade tsked at me before diving out the window, prompting me to fly out after her, and a wild chase ensued.

It became immediately clear that things would have been sticky had I not been a chakra sensor; I would have lost her the moment she broke my line of sight. But luckily for me I was, and though I had to maintain a five-minute sprint at my top chakra-enhanced speed to catch her, at the end of the stretch I finally managed to brush my hand across her back. With a burst of focus I shoved chakra through my fingertips and a seal bloomed into being on her back. Tsunade shortly found her arms and chest wrapped with wire, allowing me to briefly seize her by both wrists. She immediately used nawanuke to escape, so I activated the seal on her right wrist with my other hand and pulled the lines taut.

"Stop," I managed to gasp out through panting breaths. "Or I will cut your hand off."

"Do it, then," Tsunade challenged as she pulled back against the restraint—not hard enough to uproot me, but enough to threaten me with the possibility of it. "I dare you."

I scowled at her and, after I had caught my breath, swept my other hand out. Still grasping the first set of wires that she'd escaped from, I pulsed my chakra. The grass all along my side fell over in great swathes, shredded by wind.

"I'm not joking," I warned.

"You act as if I've never reattached limbs before," she snapped back at me even as she began to regard me with a warier eye. I returned her look with a hard one before I twisted my wires around one finger and then activated the seal on her left wrist with the same hand.

"Both, then," I said grimly as I flexed my palm so the wires would fall flat and neat across my index and middle fingers. I released my grip on the loose threads in my other hand and let the master seal suck them back into storage. Performing so many discreet chakra activations at once felt almost a little like playing the piano.

"I don't believe you," Tsunade said flatly, now standing with both arms stretched out by my threads. "You're bluffing. You wouldn't cut off a medic-nin's hands when you need her to heal your critical patient."

I just grimaced in reply. While that was true, it was also true that I had no other recourse than this to stop her. If she didn't believe me, would I really have to cut them off? I hoped Shizune would be on hand soon—if it came down to it, she would be able to reattach her teacher's hands, wouldn't she?

Apparently my thoughts must have shown on my face because Tsunade looked at me, realized that she had not in fact called my bluff, and immediately backpedaled from goading me on. She started trying to break my composure instead.

"You really were just nothing but show," she told me. "All smiles and sweet faces—but no matter how you polish your face you're just as much a killer as the rest of us."

As far as armor-piercing attacks went it wasn't a bad approach. If she'd said it to me a few days earlier, before I'd had my talk with Jiraiya and acknowledged that Intel shinobi's hands were just as dirty as any other ninja's, it might have unsettled me. But I had the resolve I needed to weather that fact now.

"I can't show mercy I'm not strong enough to give," was all I said in reply. Naiveté and idealism, when divorced from reality, helped no one and saved nothing. Until I had the strength to dispense leniency as it pleased me I could only act according to my ability. I didn't have the leisure of putting forth anything but my fiercest violence when it came to opponents like these.

Tsunade let out a long breath at that. Then she said, "So I guess that's the type Jiraiya's raising these days."

Now that did surprise me. "What?" I asked, eyebrows flying up. Since when had I suddenly become one of Jiraiya's protégés? Kanta had said something similar—

"Kanta?" I blurted as the boy in question suddenly descended in a light leap from the trees. But he was different. He was dressed all in black and gray with a pouch at his hip and a holster on his thigh—

"Tsunade-sama!" I shouted, yanking her down with my wires, when I saw him lift a kunai. But as she stumbled into a defensive crouch he did not attempt to attack her as I assumed he would. Instead he slashed its edge across his forearm and splattered her face with his own blood.

For all that we had just been engaged in such a gritty, cynical standoff, the scream that Tsunade let out just then was a thing of utter trauma. It was a sound that I had not heard in quite a while—not since the likes of it had come out of my own mouth, missions ago, when I'd earned my Bingo Book entry by slaughtering Iwa shinobi in a hysteric flashback. I resealed my wires and leaped forward to place myself between her and Kanta, heart racing.

We met gazes. He had a hitai-ate on his forehead. The Leaf mon was engraved at its center, slashed through with one decisive stroke.

"Missing-nin," I breathed, and then it made sense. Intel reports jangled about in my head until a single piece of information, sparse and dated, floated up to the surface. The B-rank spotted in Urahira—Urahira, the city just a half-day's travel away from the first town we'd heard news of Tsunade's flight from the yakuza enforcers.

"Who hired you?" I demanded, holding myself loose and ready to engage as Tsunade collapsed whimpering on the ground behind me. "The Golden Vine House?"

"Nominally," Kanta replied indifferently as he lit his hand with a green glow and held it over the gash in his arm. It sealed itself in a matter of seconds. "Though I have been following behind Tsunade of the Sannin long before they ever thought to hire my services. In all this time I never figured out her weakness—not until your group revealed it for me, that is."

Of course. Kushina's fight with Tsunade. Who else wandering the countryside would have been skilled enough to draw blood in a duel with the Slug Princess? It made sense that her hemophobia never surfaced until now.

"You have a personal grudge, then?" I probed.

"Will you move aside, Misuzu-san?" he asked, ignoring this bait. "I have no quarrel with you."

He'd purposefully lured Jiraiya and Kushina away, I realized with dismay. He'd been following her long enough to know that she'd try to take off the first opportunity she got so he, alongside the hitmen, had engineered a situation in which she would think she could give us the slip.

"But you didn't lure me away," I wondered aloud, lowly. He heard me anyway and shrugged.

"I didn't really believe that you would be in the picture, either," he said. "There was always a chance, of course. But I thought it was more likely she'd knock you out and you'd be left at the inn. I mean what I say, Misuzu-san—I have no quarrel with you and I never intended for us to come to blows. Will you move aside?" he repeated himself.

Well. This was not looking good. If he was a B-rank—the same rating I had received from the international community—then he was at least as strong as I was, if not stronger. And even if it could be called an even match, the one playing bodyguard is always at a disadvantage.

"I will not," I said anyway.

"We are pressed for time, Misuzu-san," Kanta warned. "The others will not be able to delay your companions forever. I have a limited window to accomplish my goal."

"Then I suppose you won't hold back," I said. He looked at me. Then he sighed.

"I suppose you won't, either."

There was a short silence. And then that was all the preamble we had before we launched into battle. We sprang into motion. Fists and feet blurred as we launched into a taijutsu bout, but it seemed he'd been watching when I'd gotten my seals onto Tsunade; rather than risking any of his limbs with blocks he dodged exclusively instead.

I kicked and aimed a foot for his ribs. When he deflected I spun to keep my momentum while bending my other knee, dropping down to try and uproot his stance with a sweeping kick. He avoided me by jumping up into the air. Then, in the two-second gap in which I had to recover my balance, he threw a punch towards my face.

Because I lacked upper body strength I disliked using blocks in general, but at that moment I had neither the time nor the positioning to dodge so I was forced to raise my arms while still half-crouched on the ground. I was immediately pushed onto my back by the force of his strike, so I quickly brought my knee up to prevent him from locking me on the ground. Wishing to avoid a hit to the groin, Kanta threw out his off-hand and cartwheeled over me. Straightaway I put my palms on the grass and kicked myself upwards with my other leg, flipping feet over head in an attempt to clip him with my foot. He evaded this as well; I let myself fall backwards to right myself before he could strike again.

Just as I had situated myself back into a proper stance my opponent launched a vicious series of punches at me. As expected of a male teen who was both older and taller than me: his strength was significant. I was instantly on the defensive, ducking and dodging and taking several steps backwards.

Recognizing that I was being herded, I swept his fist over my head and disengaged, stepping around his back to buy time. As he swiveled to meet me we pivoted in a half-circle back-to-back, and I took the few precious seconds to mold my chakra. Sensing that I was shifting to ninjutsu, he immediately drew away and launched a volley of thin needles at me.

My mind flashed back to the report. He was known to use poisons. Senbon were piercing weapons and were far more effective at delivering toxins than bladed weapons—they were an essential vehicle for any iryou-ninjutsu-inclined combatant's fighting style. Rather than risk grazing myself while deflecting or dodging these, I flew through a set of hand seals before thrusting my palms out.

The blast of wind scattered the needles in all directions and I made note of where they fell in the grass to avoid accidentally stepping on, landing in, or otherwise rolling through that area. Kanta, thinking that he had found a preferable alternative to engaging me in close quarters combat—the threat of dismemberment, he had realized, was a permanent concern with my touch-sealing ability—immediately began flinging volleys of throwing weapons at me. In a moment we were in a full-on bukijutsu showdown, pelting one another with kunai, senbon, and shuriken.

He was clever with trajectories, bending arcs to try and hit me from odd angles with not only his own weapons, but by deflecting some of mine as well. I responded with unashamed genjutsu trickery. I was not skilled enough to use the actual Shuriken Shadow Clone technique—I lacked both the knowledge and the ridiculous amount of chakra necessary—but I did know enough of basic noncorporeal bunshin to imitate the visual effect. Counting on him to dodge, I simultaneously layered on a rudimentary audio genjutsu to disguise the lack of sound as the imaginary weapons embedded themselves in the trees.

As hoped Kanta dove wildly out of the way. The sudden appearance of a supposedly A-rank jutsu threw him off his rhythm and lent me the illusion of ninjutsu prowess—with luck, that would be enough to lure him back into range of my actual combat proficiency, taijutsu. As it was, I continued to harass him with throwing weapons, not only applying my fake shuriken kage bunshin as appropriate, but planting seals on my actual weapons and letting wires explode in his face for optimum chaos. Then, to up the ante, I began varying the seal components themselves—some I continued to make into wire bombs that he was forced to cut his way through, but others I used to create my own version of an Uchiha's shuriken-led wires. Kanta then shortly discovered a need to keep track of every single one of my projectiles or else risk being assaulted by nigh-invisible chakra-filled threads of dismemberment from nowhere. And then, just to add a cherry on top, I also began peppering in an Academy favorite: the Shadow Shuriken Technique, the delightful jutsu with which one hides an additional shuriken in the shadow of another. Kanta, wishing to keep as many weapons out of the air as possible, was hit several times in the legs and the sides before he learned to start deflecting indirectly.

The battle turned in my favor. I managed to skin his sleeve right off of his arm with one of my led wires and the shadow shuriken shenanigans also resulted in several direct hits. I pushed him back and back into the clearing, away from Tsunade and from cover, with single-minded focus. The sound of my chakra singing through the air, popping at my fingertips and chiming from seals in every direction, made me feel as if I were playing a concerto in three dimensions. I just had to stall, I thought determinedly. If I could hold him here in the chaos long enough Kushina or Jiraiya or someone would arrive and I wouldn't have to fight him alone.

If I had to name the failing point, I think, that would be it. Focus was one thing, but tunnel vision was another. I was so occupied with the intricate throwing techniques and chakra control needed to keep up this assault that I didn't notice the rising of a mud clone behind my back. By the time I did it was close enough to be holding a poison-dripping needle right up to the back of my neck.

In a panic I sent a wire sailing straight through its torso. Though a normal human would have been bisected, the mud it was made of was so thick and oozing that it retained its shape while the wire sailed cleanly through its midsection. I experienced a moment of pure horror as I felt piercing metal sink into the side of my neck. Frantically and far too late, I pulled the chakra for a suiton technique together and blasted the clone away, but it was done.

My immediate thought was to cut over the site and try to bleed it out. But—did I really want to risk opening a wound on my own neck now that there was an unknown chemical agent in my system? There were plenty of fast-acting poisons that targeted motor control, and one slip would mean slitting my own throat. And it was clear that this was indeed a very fast-acting poison—I was swaying on my feet almost instantly. Thirty seconds later I was so overcome with dizziness that I groaned and fell over in the dirt.

"There," Kanta panted, at last given a break from defending against my shuriken assault. "There, it's done."

"What is it?" I ground out, nauseated, as I weakly tried to pull myself up onto my elbows.

"Don't panic too much," he replied. "The disorientation is more a side effect—the real killing mechanism of that specific poison is the anticoagulant. If you're careful not to cut or bruise yourself, you won't bleed to death."

I tried to respond to this but my words only came out as a sickened groan. The world spun and my limbs felt heavy. "Anticoagulant," I muttered.

"Fitting, don't you think?" Kanta asked. He came forward to crouch beside me. "Whenever I imagined her death, I knew it would be poison, but I never could decide what kind. This, though… this is perfect. The only thing better would be Black Fire itself," he added under his breath.

My mind, through the dizzy haze, suddenly whirled. Black Fire—from the Battle of the Black Sands? The battle that killed my parents, Kazue and Yasunari, who died from a toxin that was said to have been so painful that its survivors called it liquid fire—a toxin that made its victims bleed black from every orifice—

"Wait," I gasped, breathing heavily, as I reached out and caught his ankle when he stood and turned to make his way over to Tsunade. "Don't… don't go. I'm a Black Sands orphan, too."

"Are you?" Surprise flickered across Kanta's face. But it settled in less than a moment. "Then I'll avenge your parents as well. Let go of me."

He tried to yank his foot away but I clumsily shot my other arm out and clung to it with all might. "Stop!" I cried. "It's not worth—it's not worth it. It won't bring my mom and dad back, and—and, and—and it won't bring yours back, either!"

"You think this is just about my parents?" Kanta laughed hollowly. "You think that's why I'm doing this? Because I miss my parents?"

"Then why?" I croaked weakly. Kanta swiftly bent down and seized the back of my vest. Then he pulled me up and leaned forward to whisper in my ear.

"After they died," he told me softly, "I was raised by my sister. She was a medic-nin. But after the end of the war the shortage of iryou-nin was unprecedented, and it was only half a year before medics were dying of overwork."

"That's… that's not Tsunade-sama's fault," I protested.

"No," Kanta agreed. "Not for the others. But my sister's death? It was."

"What do you…?"

"When Tsunade of the Sannin left Konoha she abandoned a certain critical patient," Kanta explained coldly. "The village needed this person to live no matter what. They were willing to sacrifice anything to save that patient. And when it became known that my sister was one of the only remaining medics capable of performing chakra alteration and transfusions, they decided to have her perform the operation in Tsunade's place. But Tsunade left at the wrong time and my sister had yet to take her mandated recovery period before she was made to treat this patient, and in the aftermath of that operation, she died of acute chakra exhaustion."

"She died… saving Tsunade-sama's patient?" I repeated.

"That's right. It's more than just my parents," Kanta uttered. "It's my whole family, and yours, and every life she damned when she abandoned her work. She made herself the head of the medic program, sold herself as the new hero of iryou-nin, and then just dropped it all. As if she were the only one who had lost someone—as if she didn't ruin thousands of lives by doing it—she just used her status as a shield and ran away without facing any of the consequences. So don't you dare tell me it's not worth it. This is justice."

I blinked. Then I blinked again, and he dropped me, and I looked down and saw a knife sticking out of my gut, driven up under my flak jacket.

"Wait… wait," I gasped breathlessly, curling up, pressing one hand to my midsection even as I was stretching out the other towards his back. "You can't…"

"I didn't want to have to kill you, Misuzu-san," Kanta said over his shoulder. "For what it's worth, I'm sorry. But you shouldn't have stood in my way."

The world seemed to slow down. As I watched him walk away, back towards the trees where Tsunade was still kneeling, trembling, on the ground, I saw it. His sandaled feet crushed the green grass under heel as he strode forward, determined, with his senbon held between his knuckles. Senbon—senbon just like those needles I'd knocked into the ground when our fight had begun—

I held my breath. I watched him take one more step, two, three, and then I twisted chakra in my outstretched palm and yanked with all the strength I had left. The seal on Kanta's ankle bloomed with silver thread and he crashed face-first into the ground atop his own poisoned weapons. He let out a curse, and then a pained yell, and then he was writhing on the ground as he found that his foot had been taken right out from under him. I breathed out shallowly and turned my attention back towards my stomach.

I clumsily managed to unzip my jacket and roll onto my back. Panting with the effort of it, I lifted a hand and stared at the bright red blood coating my palm. I hadn't even removed the blade yet. I lifted my other hand as well. It was dripping. The world began to spin again and my head felt strange and far away. I coughed once and saw scarlet droplets go flying.

Then I passed out.