Notice: I do not own Naruto, and make no claims of copyright on the
characters who are not my property. Original characters, however, are mine.
Author's Notes: Another day, another chapter. Thus begins the massive experiment in which will break first, my fingers, my sanity, or perhaps the story will reach its end. However, I'm finding that things continue to accelerate without letup, and I can't stop or stay away from the story, my brain practically bursts when I try. Here we move toward the resolution of the Shiren situation, and some key developments.
By the way, I wonder what people think of Dar's appearance in the story? I know it was kind of sudden, but there were reasons for it, and I tried to foreshadow as best I could.
My thanks to anyone who has the time to squeeze out a review!
One Irrevocable Step
In the morning Sirachi returned.
It was cold and grim in the morning, and a soft mist, almost cold enough to be snow, was falling. The three ninja were up before dawn, and each took a boulder as his own post. Xi stared to the northwest, to Konoha, the mountains, and eventually far off Hidden Waterfall. Dar was looking south, but often turned to glance back north, to the mountains, and spent most of his time glaring at his crystalline sword, secure in its scabbard once again. Neji looked nowhere but south, and so they waited.
The dragon was recognizable first as nothing but a streak of color, resembling an itinerant wisp of cloud, but one that moved faster than any bird a man had ever seen. He came streaking in with a howling gust of wind behind him, the messenger returning his report.
Sirachi streaked up to the boulder without losing any speed, moving so fast it seemed he would slam straight into Neji and obliterate both the ninja and much of the rock he stood upon. At the last moment Sirachi spun in midair, coiling upwards and rising high, before coming back down again. His great head now faced Neji.
"What is the word honored Sirachi?" Neji asked, his head bowed, only now remembering the forms he had utterly forgotten the day before.
"Senirai Shiren lies in a small wooden outpost perhaps forty kilometers south, at least a day's travel from this place. If you go straight south and then follow the river southeast you will find where she is hidden." Sirachi answered.
"Thank you." Neji said, and he meant it. "Is there any task I might undertake for you in return?" Neji asked.
"Indeed." Sirachi stared at him with alien eyes. "Perhaps, if you survive the recovery of this Shiren, the one who is to become a dragon ninja, then there is a task."
"What is that?" Neji asked, and he saw that Xi was watching him closely.
"In time you will go to Hidden Waterfall. There is a man there named Mizain Yuki. You must speak to him before you enter the village, and you must accept his request." With that Sirachi fell silent.
"You may go, honored Shen Lung." Neji managed through his shock. Accept the request of a Mizain? He would demand my head! What does the dragon mean? Neji thought about it, and then decided it didn't matter. The only important thing now is to go and get Shiren back. I know where she is now.
"I am going to get Shiren then." Neji said aloud. "Since I know where she is." He stepped off the boulder and began walking.
Draci Xi stood in front of him. "No you are not." The dragon ninja said, and his command was absolute.
"What!" Neji hissed. "I am going to save her, with or without you, Xi."
"I said you would not." Xi replied. "You are my student, I am your sensei. My command is absolute. You will obey, or you will lose the right to call yourself a ninja."
Neji heard the words, but could not believe them. No longer call myself a ninja? He repeated the cold phrase, with every bit of Xi's resolve behind it, and he knew that the older ninja spoke the truth. He would have to obey, anything else was rebellion, he would no longer be a leaf ninja, but a missing-nin. I cannot do that, but I cannot abandon Shiren. Neji saw her face then, and he knew she would not accept him becoming a missing-nin, even to save her. Yet, I swore I would, and Xi is not going to stop me. "You cannot demand that of me, I swore I would save her." Neji replied, the anger boiling in his voice.
"Yet I have demanded it." Xi replied. "I will not take back that statement. As long as you are my student, I will not allow it."
"Then release me!" Neji yelled. "I don't care to be a dragon ninja if it costs me Shiren's life."
"No." Xi said, and his voice was stone cold. "I will not allow a half- trained dragon ninja, able to use some of the techniques but not truly part of the way, not a dragon, to exist. I will kill you first Neji." Xi's eyes narrowed, and Neji could tell that the older ninja was serious.
"Then what am I supposed to do?" Neji hissed, anger and hatred guiding him, a cold fury that he had last felt when he almost killed Hinata during his first Chuunin exam, and when he had seen Naruto stand up after being struck down again and again.
"There is only one way to get your wish, Draci Neji." Xi answered. "The moment you cease being my student you are no longer bound by my orders. If you can prove that you are fully a dragon ninja, you may make your own choices."
"What does that mean?" Neji barked. "Do I have to demonstrate jutsus I have failed time and again to complete?"
"NO!" Xi howled, he continued in a voice terribly low, but filled with power and energy. His body sank backwards, and his feet spread apart, falling smoothly into the Jinnen fighting stance. "To prove what you are, you must defeat me."
Neji went totally silent from the shock.
"Denial means nothing, Neji." Xi continued. "You have the power to defeat me, you know all the dragon jutsus, you can do them all, your chakra is more than sufficient, your skill great, and your eyes grant you a superior edge. If you fight as a dragon ninja, with the true strength of What You Are, then I cannot win."
"What do you mean?" Neji said, confused.
"You are a Dragon Ninja!" Xi bellowed. "You know it, and I know it, you have denied what you are for too long. You are trying not to accept the person you are. You are a ninja who kills, Draci Neji. You wield the power of lethality that is the essence of the dragon, the absolute force that claims no half-measures, offers only life or death. You have shrunk away from that, but it is who you are." Xi went on, his voice not moderating in the slightest, as Neji blanched before him. "You have made the critical choices, you have acted to kill, I know, you summoned a dragon and eliminated those who fought you. Horrifying, yes, perhaps it was, but you cannot deny that it was you who did it! Whether by the hands of Wusashu or your own, the decision that those ninja must die was yours! That is not evil, it is simply what we are, the absolute. Shiren knows it, Dar knows it, even you know it, but until you accept that in yourself you are the pathetic thing that stands before me."
"What do you want from me?" Neji retorted, his voice hollow.
"I want you to accept the person you are, to recognize and embrace something you accepted months ago. Only then can you beat me." Xi gave Neji his final words, walling away all the mercy within him, pulling the mask over his face once again, even though it lay ready on his leg still. "This is not a test Neji, this is absolute. I will not hold back, but fight you with my full force. You must defeat me, or die here, on this empty hilltop. Now, guard yourself!"
Neji saw the twitch of Xi's limbs, and in that instant reflexively fell into the Jyouken stance, the Byakugan embracing his sight.
It was all the warning he had.
Xi attacked instantly, his assault utterly swift, and targeted with absolute perfection.
Neji blocked the blow, but he was already behind, and when Xi rained another and then another attack down at him even his eyes could not keep up with the hideous rapidity. Finally one blow broke through, and sharp fingers dug into Neji's shoulder, and he skidded back in pain.
"Pathetic." Xi spat, grasping a breath of air. "That is all you can muster. Where is your focus, your energy?" The dragon ninja reached down and pulled on his nekode. "You had best do better."
Neji pulled out his own nekode, and raised them to guard.
Xi leapt upwards, and Neji moved to counter. Why is he doing this? Neji didn't understand, could only attempt to defend as Xi knocked his nekode away, moving faster, better than he could predict. It's like fighting Gai, Neji recalled, remembering the one time his sensei had fought him. But this was not brilliant speed and Gai's tremendous strength, no this was the absolute effect of Xi's chakra control, honed to perfection from a month in snow and ice. This was the man who could hold himself upside down on the pinpoint of an icicle and then project chakra with enough precision to melt his way upwards even as he remained stuck. Every blow was targeted precisely, and every block Neji made, no matter that he could see every attack, was insufficient. Xi's attacks were so honed that the dragon ninja put full strength behind them, while Neji desperately attempted to block them, even as each successive blow made his position worse and worse, and he could regain nothing against that assault, there was no way to counter such moves.
Xi's nekode raked across Neji's leg then, cutting a long and wretched gash before he could manage to block, and when Neji attempted a counterstroke Xi was already out of position. "This is the boy who fought Kidomaru, and though out positioned and outgunned managed to win? Where is the innovation, the genius, and the ruthlessness? You had two gaping holes in your side when I found you next to that corpse. Were you a better dragon ninja then than now?" Xi's mockery was harsh, and Neji wondered if the dragon ninja was toying with him. No, those strikes are not a joke, they are absolutely serious. Only my eyes and endless practice have kept me alive even so far, and already my strength is waning. How am I supposed to beat him?
Neji dodged away, trying to create some space, but the effort was futile, Xi was after him instantly. Neji leapt high, careening off one of the upright stones to swiftly change direction, hoping to avoid the older ninja.
"Aerial reversal!" Xi used the first jutsu then, pulling a complete turn in midair, and hurling incredibly swift kunai at Neji.
There was only one option. "Kaiten!"
The kunai struck the spin, and Neji felt his motion instantly stopped dead, the power of his spin resisted for and eternal second, and he could see the kunai hovering there, stuck against the force of his chakra, boring in.
Then they passed through.
The two metal points smashed into Neji, driving a great distance along the ground, before he struck a scraggily tree hard. The kunai had been slowed, so they did not have the force to kill, but he now had two deep punctures in his side.
Standing against the tree, gasping for breath, Neji watched Xi advance. In a moment of pain the Byakugan slipped from his eyes. Xi was like some dark blue god of death advancing upon him, and Neji saw no way to stop him. Is this my fate? To die at my teacher's hands? I am a failure.
So it has come to this, Xi thought, as he advanced, his nekode held ready, the blades of chakra already formed in his mind. Either it is done here, or it is all rended unto nothing. "You loved Shiren didn't you." Xi said in a voice devoid of humanity, one not his own, but that Neji heard as the unearthly voice of the dragons, the melded words of Sirachi and Wusashu. "She surely loved you in return, and yet, you will die here." Xi's head snapped up and he stared Neji directly in the eyes. "And yet you will betray her, and die by throwing away that love and forgetting who you are, and what LOVE IS WORTH!"
Neji's eyes snapped back into the Byakugan, he did not know from whence the terrible vision came, but he heard Xi's words, and he analyzed them in a single unfragemented instant. Shiren loves Draci Neji, not Hyuuga Neji. That was the first step. I would die before betraying her, he recalled, and he recognized what his heart had been trying to tell him for sometime. She has killed for me, and I will kill for her. That is how we protect each other.
Three Hundred and Sixty degrees revealed themselves to Neji, and he focused on the small pocket of that occupied by Draci Xi.
Xi charged. The barest hint of tears could be seen in his eyes.
"Rend!" Neji's nekode slammed into the ground, and it cracked apart beneath Xi's feet, a torrent of destruction that spilt the hilltop and sent boulders flying aside.
Xi and Neji leapt above it, to meet in midair. Nekode struck nekode, blades of chakra projecting from both, and the weapons slashed each other to no effect, but Neji manipulated the chakra then, forming hooks instead of blades, his eyes guiding him to separate the form from that of the nekode, and ripped the nekode free of Xi's hands.
The older ninja's hands slapped across Neji's arms but the pain was instantly channeled away, past his thoughts. His hands snapped down and grabbed kunai, two in each hand, sitting between the fingers. Chakra flowed into the weapons, from the fingers, a complex and ever-shifting pattern, so that they vibrated and waved about in the tiniest of increments, hissing through the air with the sound of water shearing through rock. "Dragon Spines!" Neji brought the weapons in toward Xi.
The older ninja was too close to dodge aside, and without weapons his arms and legs could not block this attack, the kunai would slice through any obstacle and cut so deep they buried themselves in the victim.
"Enough!" Four kunai, two from the left and two from the right, slammed into something they could not break, not flesh or steel, but diamond hard crystal.
Dar's sword hung between the two dragon ninja. "Enough! You two are not enemies!" Dar said, his own breath ragged, the skin on his palms burned from the speed with which he'd drawn his weapon.
The three ninja crashed back to the ground, and stared at each other. Dar looked at both of them, but Xi and Neji focused only on the other.
"So you win Neji." Xi said. "Now, do you see that you don't need my help to save Shiren?"
"Xi." Neji let a tremendous amount of feeling out in that single syllable. Xi saw Neji's eyes, and he saw that Neji understood what Xi had done, how he had forced the issue. "From this point forward, we owe each other nothing."
No forgiveness, though it was your fault in the first place Neji. Don't worry, I understand. That is the price we pay. "As you wish." Xi answered. "I assume Dar is going with you." Xi did not wait for Neji to nod. "Very well, we will meet in Konoha before the week is out."
Neji nodded, and Xi turned and began to walk northwest. "Bring Shiren back Neji." Xi said over his shoulder. "You are not allowed to fail anymore."
"I will bring her back." Neji replied. "Be absolutely certain of it."
Dar slid down beside Neji. "Now what?" The stone ninja asked.
Neji was silent for a moment, as he pulled loose kunai and wrapped the bandages from his arms about those and his gash. "We go south, and free Shiren tonight."
"With those injuries?" Dar asked.
"They are already healing, I have enough chakra to spare." Neji replied, and he knew that was the truth, as violent as the fight with Xi had been, they had used up only a small portion of their reserves. "And we will not go quickly."
Dar looked at Neji's injuries carefully, but said nothing more. When Neji turned and started walking, he followed.
Author's Notes: Another day, another chapter. Thus begins the massive experiment in which will break first, my fingers, my sanity, or perhaps the story will reach its end. However, I'm finding that things continue to accelerate without letup, and I can't stop or stay away from the story, my brain practically bursts when I try. Here we move toward the resolution of the Shiren situation, and some key developments.
By the way, I wonder what people think of Dar's appearance in the story? I know it was kind of sudden, but there were reasons for it, and I tried to foreshadow as best I could.
My thanks to anyone who has the time to squeeze out a review!
One Irrevocable Step
In the morning Sirachi returned.
It was cold and grim in the morning, and a soft mist, almost cold enough to be snow, was falling. The three ninja were up before dawn, and each took a boulder as his own post. Xi stared to the northwest, to Konoha, the mountains, and eventually far off Hidden Waterfall. Dar was looking south, but often turned to glance back north, to the mountains, and spent most of his time glaring at his crystalline sword, secure in its scabbard once again. Neji looked nowhere but south, and so they waited.
The dragon was recognizable first as nothing but a streak of color, resembling an itinerant wisp of cloud, but one that moved faster than any bird a man had ever seen. He came streaking in with a howling gust of wind behind him, the messenger returning his report.
Sirachi streaked up to the boulder without losing any speed, moving so fast it seemed he would slam straight into Neji and obliterate both the ninja and much of the rock he stood upon. At the last moment Sirachi spun in midair, coiling upwards and rising high, before coming back down again. His great head now faced Neji.
"What is the word honored Sirachi?" Neji asked, his head bowed, only now remembering the forms he had utterly forgotten the day before.
"Senirai Shiren lies in a small wooden outpost perhaps forty kilometers south, at least a day's travel from this place. If you go straight south and then follow the river southeast you will find where she is hidden." Sirachi answered.
"Thank you." Neji said, and he meant it. "Is there any task I might undertake for you in return?" Neji asked.
"Indeed." Sirachi stared at him with alien eyes. "Perhaps, if you survive the recovery of this Shiren, the one who is to become a dragon ninja, then there is a task."
"What is that?" Neji asked, and he saw that Xi was watching him closely.
"In time you will go to Hidden Waterfall. There is a man there named Mizain Yuki. You must speak to him before you enter the village, and you must accept his request." With that Sirachi fell silent.
"You may go, honored Shen Lung." Neji managed through his shock. Accept the request of a Mizain? He would demand my head! What does the dragon mean? Neji thought about it, and then decided it didn't matter. The only important thing now is to go and get Shiren back. I know where she is now.
"I am going to get Shiren then." Neji said aloud. "Since I know where she is." He stepped off the boulder and began walking.
Draci Xi stood in front of him. "No you are not." The dragon ninja said, and his command was absolute.
"What!" Neji hissed. "I am going to save her, with or without you, Xi."
"I said you would not." Xi replied. "You are my student, I am your sensei. My command is absolute. You will obey, or you will lose the right to call yourself a ninja."
Neji heard the words, but could not believe them. No longer call myself a ninja? He repeated the cold phrase, with every bit of Xi's resolve behind it, and he knew that the older ninja spoke the truth. He would have to obey, anything else was rebellion, he would no longer be a leaf ninja, but a missing-nin. I cannot do that, but I cannot abandon Shiren. Neji saw her face then, and he knew she would not accept him becoming a missing-nin, even to save her. Yet, I swore I would, and Xi is not going to stop me. "You cannot demand that of me, I swore I would save her." Neji replied, the anger boiling in his voice.
"Yet I have demanded it." Xi replied. "I will not take back that statement. As long as you are my student, I will not allow it."
"Then release me!" Neji yelled. "I don't care to be a dragon ninja if it costs me Shiren's life."
"No." Xi said, and his voice was stone cold. "I will not allow a half- trained dragon ninja, able to use some of the techniques but not truly part of the way, not a dragon, to exist. I will kill you first Neji." Xi's eyes narrowed, and Neji could tell that the older ninja was serious.
"Then what am I supposed to do?" Neji hissed, anger and hatred guiding him, a cold fury that he had last felt when he almost killed Hinata during his first Chuunin exam, and when he had seen Naruto stand up after being struck down again and again.
"There is only one way to get your wish, Draci Neji." Xi answered. "The moment you cease being my student you are no longer bound by my orders. If you can prove that you are fully a dragon ninja, you may make your own choices."
"What does that mean?" Neji barked. "Do I have to demonstrate jutsus I have failed time and again to complete?"
"NO!" Xi howled, he continued in a voice terribly low, but filled with power and energy. His body sank backwards, and his feet spread apart, falling smoothly into the Jinnen fighting stance. "To prove what you are, you must defeat me."
Neji went totally silent from the shock.
"Denial means nothing, Neji." Xi continued. "You have the power to defeat me, you know all the dragon jutsus, you can do them all, your chakra is more than sufficient, your skill great, and your eyes grant you a superior edge. If you fight as a dragon ninja, with the true strength of What You Are, then I cannot win."
"What do you mean?" Neji said, confused.
"You are a Dragon Ninja!" Xi bellowed. "You know it, and I know it, you have denied what you are for too long. You are trying not to accept the person you are. You are a ninja who kills, Draci Neji. You wield the power of lethality that is the essence of the dragon, the absolute force that claims no half-measures, offers only life or death. You have shrunk away from that, but it is who you are." Xi went on, his voice not moderating in the slightest, as Neji blanched before him. "You have made the critical choices, you have acted to kill, I know, you summoned a dragon and eliminated those who fought you. Horrifying, yes, perhaps it was, but you cannot deny that it was you who did it! Whether by the hands of Wusashu or your own, the decision that those ninja must die was yours! That is not evil, it is simply what we are, the absolute. Shiren knows it, Dar knows it, even you know it, but until you accept that in yourself you are the pathetic thing that stands before me."
"What do you want from me?" Neji retorted, his voice hollow.
"I want you to accept the person you are, to recognize and embrace something you accepted months ago. Only then can you beat me." Xi gave Neji his final words, walling away all the mercy within him, pulling the mask over his face once again, even though it lay ready on his leg still. "This is not a test Neji, this is absolute. I will not hold back, but fight you with my full force. You must defeat me, or die here, on this empty hilltop. Now, guard yourself!"
Neji saw the twitch of Xi's limbs, and in that instant reflexively fell into the Jyouken stance, the Byakugan embracing his sight.
It was all the warning he had.
Xi attacked instantly, his assault utterly swift, and targeted with absolute perfection.
Neji blocked the blow, but he was already behind, and when Xi rained another and then another attack down at him even his eyes could not keep up with the hideous rapidity. Finally one blow broke through, and sharp fingers dug into Neji's shoulder, and he skidded back in pain.
"Pathetic." Xi spat, grasping a breath of air. "That is all you can muster. Where is your focus, your energy?" The dragon ninja reached down and pulled on his nekode. "You had best do better."
Neji pulled out his own nekode, and raised them to guard.
Xi leapt upwards, and Neji moved to counter. Why is he doing this? Neji didn't understand, could only attempt to defend as Xi knocked his nekode away, moving faster, better than he could predict. It's like fighting Gai, Neji recalled, remembering the one time his sensei had fought him. But this was not brilliant speed and Gai's tremendous strength, no this was the absolute effect of Xi's chakra control, honed to perfection from a month in snow and ice. This was the man who could hold himself upside down on the pinpoint of an icicle and then project chakra with enough precision to melt his way upwards even as he remained stuck. Every blow was targeted precisely, and every block Neji made, no matter that he could see every attack, was insufficient. Xi's attacks were so honed that the dragon ninja put full strength behind them, while Neji desperately attempted to block them, even as each successive blow made his position worse and worse, and he could regain nothing against that assault, there was no way to counter such moves.
Xi's nekode raked across Neji's leg then, cutting a long and wretched gash before he could manage to block, and when Neji attempted a counterstroke Xi was already out of position. "This is the boy who fought Kidomaru, and though out positioned and outgunned managed to win? Where is the innovation, the genius, and the ruthlessness? You had two gaping holes in your side when I found you next to that corpse. Were you a better dragon ninja then than now?" Xi's mockery was harsh, and Neji wondered if the dragon ninja was toying with him. No, those strikes are not a joke, they are absolutely serious. Only my eyes and endless practice have kept me alive even so far, and already my strength is waning. How am I supposed to beat him?
Neji dodged away, trying to create some space, but the effort was futile, Xi was after him instantly. Neji leapt high, careening off one of the upright stones to swiftly change direction, hoping to avoid the older ninja.
"Aerial reversal!" Xi used the first jutsu then, pulling a complete turn in midair, and hurling incredibly swift kunai at Neji.
There was only one option. "Kaiten!"
The kunai struck the spin, and Neji felt his motion instantly stopped dead, the power of his spin resisted for and eternal second, and he could see the kunai hovering there, stuck against the force of his chakra, boring in.
Then they passed through.
The two metal points smashed into Neji, driving a great distance along the ground, before he struck a scraggily tree hard. The kunai had been slowed, so they did not have the force to kill, but he now had two deep punctures in his side.
Standing against the tree, gasping for breath, Neji watched Xi advance. In a moment of pain the Byakugan slipped from his eyes. Xi was like some dark blue god of death advancing upon him, and Neji saw no way to stop him. Is this my fate? To die at my teacher's hands? I am a failure.
So it has come to this, Xi thought, as he advanced, his nekode held ready, the blades of chakra already formed in his mind. Either it is done here, or it is all rended unto nothing. "You loved Shiren didn't you." Xi said in a voice devoid of humanity, one not his own, but that Neji heard as the unearthly voice of the dragons, the melded words of Sirachi and Wusashu. "She surely loved you in return, and yet, you will die here." Xi's head snapped up and he stared Neji directly in the eyes. "And yet you will betray her, and die by throwing away that love and forgetting who you are, and what LOVE IS WORTH!"
Neji's eyes snapped back into the Byakugan, he did not know from whence the terrible vision came, but he heard Xi's words, and he analyzed them in a single unfragemented instant. Shiren loves Draci Neji, not Hyuuga Neji. That was the first step. I would die before betraying her, he recalled, and he recognized what his heart had been trying to tell him for sometime. She has killed for me, and I will kill for her. That is how we protect each other.
Three Hundred and Sixty degrees revealed themselves to Neji, and he focused on the small pocket of that occupied by Draci Xi.
Xi charged. The barest hint of tears could be seen in his eyes.
"Rend!" Neji's nekode slammed into the ground, and it cracked apart beneath Xi's feet, a torrent of destruction that spilt the hilltop and sent boulders flying aside.
Xi and Neji leapt above it, to meet in midair. Nekode struck nekode, blades of chakra projecting from both, and the weapons slashed each other to no effect, but Neji manipulated the chakra then, forming hooks instead of blades, his eyes guiding him to separate the form from that of the nekode, and ripped the nekode free of Xi's hands.
The older ninja's hands slapped across Neji's arms but the pain was instantly channeled away, past his thoughts. His hands snapped down and grabbed kunai, two in each hand, sitting between the fingers. Chakra flowed into the weapons, from the fingers, a complex and ever-shifting pattern, so that they vibrated and waved about in the tiniest of increments, hissing through the air with the sound of water shearing through rock. "Dragon Spines!" Neji brought the weapons in toward Xi.
The older ninja was too close to dodge aside, and without weapons his arms and legs could not block this attack, the kunai would slice through any obstacle and cut so deep they buried themselves in the victim.
"Enough!" Four kunai, two from the left and two from the right, slammed into something they could not break, not flesh or steel, but diamond hard crystal.
Dar's sword hung between the two dragon ninja. "Enough! You two are not enemies!" Dar said, his own breath ragged, the skin on his palms burned from the speed with which he'd drawn his weapon.
The three ninja crashed back to the ground, and stared at each other. Dar looked at both of them, but Xi and Neji focused only on the other.
"So you win Neji." Xi said. "Now, do you see that you don't need my help to save Shiren?"
"Xi." Neji let a tremendous amount of feeling out in that single syllable. Xi saw Neji's eyes, and he saw that Neji understood what Xi had done, how he had forced the issue. "From this point forward, we owe each other nothing."
No forgiveness, though it was your fault in the first place Neji. Don't worry, I understand. That is the price we pay. "As you wish." Xi answered. "I assume Dar is going with you." Xi did not wait for Neji to nod. "Very well, we will meet in Konoha before the week is out."
Neji nodded, and Xi turned and began to walk northwest. "Bring Shiren back Neji." Xi said over his shoulder. "You are not allowed to fail anymore."
"I will bring her back." Neji replied. "Be absolutely certain of it."
Dar slid down beside Neji. "Now what?" The stone ninja asked.
Neji was silent for a moment, as he pulled loose kunai and wrapped the bandages from his arms about those and his gash. "We go south, and free Shiren tonight."
"With those injuries?" Dar asked.
"They are already healing, I have enough chakra to spare." Neji replied, and he knew that was the truth, as violent as the fight with Xi had been, they had used up only a small portion of their reserves. "And we will not go quickly."
Dar looked at Neji's injuries carefully, but said nothing more. When Neji turned and started walking, he followed.