Foreword: You know the drill by now.
Scene One: Rurouni Kenshin - Fallen Grey Angel
Scene Two: Wolf's Rain - Heaven's Not Enough
Scene Three: Hack Sign - The World
Scene Four: Inuyasha - Flying in the Sky, Sango
Scene Five:
Berserk - Forces(God Hand Remix)
Gundam Seed - Flickering Truth
Part Six: Starfall Serenade
Maelstrom's Elegy
A simple question from an infinitely complex man.
"No. Nothing's wrong."
He made it a point to tuck his hands into his pockets and look down at the city. As if he could will destiny to change with just a look.
"Do you still think you can get through life in this business without killing people?"
He grimaced.
"Don't. Just don't bother with that kind of thinking. That's an order."
"Yes sir."
Apparently satisfied for the moment, the Toad Hermit looked forward again. When he did, Naruto fought a surge of what felt like bile in the back of his throat. The fact that they were ascending a small path up the side of the cliff had nothing to do with it.
The trip back to the hotel had been short, and when he arrived, Jiraiya was waiting for him. From there, they had made their way out of the city, taking seperate paths and then converging again at its limits. Naruto had arrived first, and the wait had taken him a few minutes before Jiraiya showed up, wreaking of bad perfume, a bit of booze and with a few lipstick marks on his face. When Naruto had asked, the man had brushed the question off with a wave of his hand. After that, the two made their way up to the path at the base of the cliff and started walking.
It had been a path Jiraiya denied Naruto until now, and now that he was allowed to walk it, he knew why: The view was a dangerous distraction. It was hard to pry his eyes off it.
Even empty, it was still an alluring sight. A sprawling hive of spires and pagodas, old and new, ramshackle and pristine. Beyond the port at its edge, he could see the ocean, sparkling blue, red and orange, and utterly teaming with life, especially now that the sun was starting to set. Further still, he could see the stars coming out as if to make way for the moon. Beyond it, he knew the path back to Konoha waited...
As much as he had acknowledged that the place was breathtaking, he was quickly coming to loathe it. Hate it, in fact, if only because his love affair with the city had been so short and turned so sour.
"Nervous?" An unusually calm voice asked from ahead of him. A few seconds later, Naruto took note of Jiraiya's sudden lag in speed, until they were walking side by side.
"Not really," he lied. It was a moot point admitting it this close to a battle.
The Toad Hermit -- his mentor and almost his grandfather and uncle at once -- was someone who kept more secrets than Naruto could ever hope to keep track of. Perhaps not for lack of honesty, but for his abundance of it. It was something the two were starting to have in common.
"You're tense," he noted upon glancing at the man.
"I'd be insane if I wasn't," Jiraiya replied. His eyes were seemingly nailed to the path before them, but Naruto knew his focus was on him anyway.
Of the Sannin, in spite of their time together as master and student, Jiraiya was still the one that Naruto knew the least about. He was also the only familiar face that Naruto had been able to keep after leaving Konoha, though he had known it would be that way from the start. He was everything a ninja was supposed to be, and yet he was anything but at the same time. He dressed outlandishly and mostly wrote porn for a living. He looked nothing like any ninja Naruto had ever really dealt with.
How ironic it was, then, that he was the most competent teacher Naruto had ever had.
"I'm tense because my life is in your hands," he finally said. It was almost a measure of trust in Naruto that he had even admitted it.
"I'll do my best," he said, unable, or perhaps simply unwilling, to psych himself up after his encounter with Kazuma's sister.
"If you fail, we're both gonna die," Jiraiya replied in a matter of fact tone.
It made him wince.
When he was twelve years old, a pair of Akatsuki members named Kisame and Itachi had sought to kidnap him. Sasuke had arrived and tried to help, but Itachi -- his brother -- had dispatched him without even bothering to put any effort into it. Naruto had tried to fight back, but Kisame's sword had siphoned off his chakra just as fast as he had started gathering it up. It had been one of the only times in his life where Naruto was genuinely scared. More so, perhaps, than when he had fought Kabuto, because Kisame had taken his entire ability to fight back in the first place. Then Jiraiya had showed up, and if not for his intervention...
He had to suppress a shudder at the thought of what they would have done to him, even without tearing the Nine-Tails out of him. It was something that occasionally gave him nightmares.
"Thanks for the vote of confidence," he said, sardonic and insincere.
"Anytime," Jiraiya replied with the same tone.
In the lull between words, something made him want to barge back into town, hunt down Hinata and have a word with her. He didn't know why, but the last time he had spoken with her -- really spoken with her -- it had resulted in him having the confidence to take down the greatest genius the Hyuuga Clan had produced in generations.
That confidence would've been useful right about now.
He didn't speak of it though, and if Jiraiya had noticed, the man didn't have the wherewithall to point it out.
"We're here," he announced, pulling Naruto's eyes off of the city and forward again. Together, they stood atop the cliff that could yet become the final battlefield for both of them. It was windy, and Naruto could hear Jiraiya's hair rustling about. "From here on out, it'll be kill or be killed. Don't let me down."
"I'm not a killer," Naruto mumbled, looking back over his shoulder at the ocean.
"You're a better killer than you give yourself credit for. I just wish you'd admit it and stop holding yourself back after this."
Jiraiya was already walking towards the same rock he had used earlier today.
Naruto remained anchored to his spot, staring out at the sea. Sunset would last a while longer, but it was almost twilight and the night promised to be a long one.
In perhaps as little as a few minutes time, he and Shunseito Kazuma -- the Cloud Jounin known as Chimi Tensho -- would be locked into mortal combat. They would fight to the death, and where Gama Kensei had been able to survive another battle that was supposed to be to the death...
Well, Naruto was starting to doubt his own prospects.
Kazuma felt his smile go dead the moment the door slid shut. In its place, his expression hardened considerably, becoming so stony that it may as well have rivaled a statue. Kenji, apparently oblivious to this, turned and faced him with that stupid looking grin on his face.
"What did you wanna talk to me about?" He asked, a hand reaching up towards the back of his head.
"Do you love my sister?" Kazuma asked, blunt as a sledgehammer. He wasn't up to playing games right now.
"Yes," Kenji answered so quickly that it was almost like a pure reflex to get the words out.
For a long moment, the two regarded each other. For perhaps the first time, maybe the last as well, Kazuma saw his sister's suitor -- really saw him for who and what he was.
Kurosawa Kenji was a third-generation samurai. He was all of a year and a day older than Ayane, and in virtually every way, he was an aesthetic nightmare for Kazuma's senses. Orange-haired, blue-eyed and cursed to wear the ugly golden clothing of a samurai until he was transfered to another place, Kenji was everything a ninja wasn't. His only saving graces were that he was a casual practitioner of Tekken and an expert swordsman who could actually beat Kazuma himself in a proper duel. He was somewhat overconfident, more perceptive than Kazuma had originally thought and far tougher than he looked. Above that though, he was loyal.
And that was the only reason Kazuma did what he did next.
"If I fail to return tonight, you have my permission to marry her on the strict condition that you remain together until both of you die," he stated, leaving no room for arguement.
If Kenji accepted it, his options to marry into a higher-ranking samurai clan would be gone. If he didn't, Kazuma was resolved to kill him on the spot and dispose of the body before the duel.
The response he got, in hindsight, shouldn't have been all that much of a surprise. Kenji cracked a grin that was entirely too defiant for Kazuma's tastes, yet so honest that he found himself forgiving it almost instantly.
"I'm gonna do that even if you come back alive."
For the first time since he had met the man, Shunseito Kazuma actually found himself liking Kurosawa Kenji.
"Take care of her then," he ordered with a nod.
After Kenji bowed in agreement, Kazuma crossed the room and made his way up the ladder one more time. He pushed the panel aside, stepped onto the roof and then gently eased it into place. Then he turned towards the cliff and cracked his neck and knuckles.
Finally, after a long pause to breathe in the city air -- it was unusually clean today -- Chimi Tensho started towards the cliff, and towards whatever destiny had planned for him...
As luck would have it, Naruto once again found himself waiting on a masked Jounin. The difference between waiting on Hatake Kakashi and waiting on Shunseito Kazuma was as stark as it was simple: He hadn't ever waited on Kakashi in order to fight him to the death.
Somehow, that made all the difference in the world.
When Tensho finally did arrive, Naruto hadn't greeted him with more than a glare. Why had he bothered showing up? And why didn't Jiraiya just try to run away?
For the first time in his life, Naruto had been tasked with protecting someone against an opponent and was given time enough to think about it. It had been easy enough when he had taken on Zabuza to save Kakashi, or when he had fought Gaara tooth and nail for the life of Sakura, or even when he had taken on Kabuto for the sake of Tsunade...
But now that he had been given time to actually think about it, he didn't really know if it was worth it anymore. Whoever wanted Jiraiya dead must have had a good reason and--
And he stopped himself from going down that line of thought.
Once, he had sworn on the blood of his own hand that he would never run away. Not too long after that, he had sworn on the lives of his comrades that he would protect them. If he was to become Hokage, he could not run away from this.
Chimi Tensho didn't acknowledge the inner strife that Naruto was facing, but perhaps that made it all the more difficult when he finally spoke up.
"Uzumaki Naruto!" The man called. They now stood across from each other, seperated by thirty or forty feet.
When he didn't call back, Tensho continued.
"Where is your forehead protector?" He demanded.
Naruto stared at him.
"Put it on. I want to fight a fellow shinobi, not a misguided welp with delusions of grandeur."
An acknowledgement.
In his own way, Tensho -- Kazuma -- was acknowledging him. Jounin to Genin, Cloud-nin to Leaf-nin, man to man. Perhaps he wasn't calling him an equal, but he was giving him a kind of respect that Naruto had simply never been granted before. Not even by Sasuke in the Valley of the End.
To show his gratitude, Naruto complied without hesitation.
His jacket came unzipped, and a hand plundered into it. When he finally drew out the protector, it had somehow become bonded to the strip of cloth that Jiraiya had bought him. Almost instantly, his mind wandered to the thought that maybe the protector had somehow done this on its own, but a few moments later, he remembered that Jiraiya had repaired his clothing. In doing so, he had probably put together the protector.
Without a word, Naruto lifted it up to his head and wrapped the bandana around. Then he tied it into a tight knot, leaving two sections to hang down from the back of his head. At first, it felt a little annoying, but as he straightened the piece over his forehead, he found it more and more comfortable by the moment...
For the first time in what felt like an eternity, Uzumaki Naruto was a Leaf ninja again.
"Much better," Kazuma said, and by the tone of his voice, he meant it. "You have the pride of a ninja, Uzumaki. It's a shame you weren't born to the Cloud."
"Thanks," Naruto replied. "For what it's worth, you're not a bad guy either."
Almost as one, the two tensed. Naruto's hand shot towards his shuriken holster, Kazuma's right went for his sword and his left for his own holster.
Less than a second later, the battle began...
She was alone. More and more, she was glad to be. Sakura had gone off to practice with Tsunade and Kiba was off doing whatever he did with Akamaru that constituted training. They had all been given the same virtual internment that everyone else from the Leaf was being given. It was the Godaime's orders: Until tomorrow, they were to stay put in the hotels and not leave unless it was to visit another Leaf-nin who happened to be in a different hotel.
With Sakura gone, Hinata had tried to resume a habit that Neji had helped her form. Every sunset, just before the evening twilight, she would assume a meditative position and activated the Byakugan. Without anyone or anything to distract her, she would strive to increase its ability -- field of vision, telescopic range, spotting tenketsu...
This afternoon was meant to be nothing different. It didn't turn out that way.
She had knelt down onto the floor, using a folded up blanket in place of a mat. Then, she had performed the correct order of seals and closed her eyes. The familiar sensation of a network of veins bulging around her face and eyes hadn't been long in coming, and it resulted in the unique view of seeing through her own eyelids. Tonight, she had decided to focus on seeing through things with telescopic vision, and...
Well...
She hadn't meant to see it. Really. She didn't even know it was going to happen, but the moment her Byakugan caught it, it remained glued to the scene. It was so far away, but felt so close that she could almost reach out and touch him...
But she couldn't.
Like so many other times, all she could do was watch from a distance, and this time, even more so than it had when he fought Neji for what she'd been told was for her honor, it hurt.
It hurt because his opponent looked to be a Cloud-nin with a sword.
As one, the two struck out at each other, and Hinata felt herself wincing on reflex when Naruto came out on the losing end of the exchange. He dodged the shuriken, and he dodged the blade to follow them, but he couldn't avoid the kick that came after the sword. It caught him in the chest in mid-sweep, just as he had ducked beneath the sword and gotten to his opponent's side.
Naruto rolled back and sprang back up to his feet, but he was again put on the defensive. It didn't seem fair.
It didn't seem fair to her that he had to fight another uphill battle, especially not when he looked to be in such distress. It didn't seem fair to her that his opponent had a weapon when he seemed unarmed.
It especially didn't feel fair to her that she couldn't be there to finally pay him back for all that he had done for her...
But life was unfair, and all that Hinata could do now was watch and wait...
Watch, wait and pray.
Duck, sidestep, jump, block.
It happened so fast that he couldn't even react in any other way but to defend himself; ducking the blade as it cut to the side, sidestepping it as it thrust for his chest, then jumping the slash aimed for his legs. Then, as he was huddled up in the air, Kazuma caught him with an upwards kick straight out of a crouch. It was all that Naruto could do to block the hit with his forearms, and after it was made, he immediately flew back.
Several times, he flipped in mid-air, then landed in a bent posture with a backwards skid. Tensho seemed frozen for all of a second after Naruto landed, then he fell forward onto his outstretched leg and virtually flowed -- just as wind might in a storm -- into a spin, drawing the sword in and--
Naruto saw the sparks. On instinct, he jumped to the side...
"RAIHEIJIN!"
There was a thunderous crack, but Naruto wasn't the only one hurting this time. As the sword slit its way across his cheek and spilled evaporating blood into the air, his knee caught Kazuma directly in the stomach, halting him with such force that the man's entire body curled up around his knee. A split second later, Naruto's elbow crashed across Tensho's temple and jarred him into a spin.
The sword came around again, but Naruto was ready for it. Wielding a kunai pulled just before his jump, he struck the side of the blade and released the weapon on impact, ducking down as he did so. In an instant, the kunai liquified and splattered across the ground nearby, but the sword had lost its charge and passed harmlessly overhead with a whistling cry. Reflexively, Naruto hurtled forward and slammed his forehead into Chimi's own, cracking protector against protector and bringing them eye to eye--
Kazuma faltered back.
Naruto caught him in the jaw with an uppercut and used the momentum to spin his way up into the air and follow with a downwards sweeping kick. This time, Tensho was the one blocking, catching Naruto's heel on the angle where handguard and blade met, causing the sword to literally sing with the shock of the blow. Without missing a beat, Naruto followed through by tilting forward and bringing a fist down.
Kazuma caught this one on his forehead protector. It was such a hard collision that Naruto felt his knuckles cracking against the metal.
For all of a moment, the two were frozen like that, and then Naruto noticed Kazuma pulling something from his thigh...
He didn't wait to find out what it was. As a series of bladed projectiles flashed through the air where he had been, Naruto used his fist as a spring to handstand on Kazuma's head, roll off and land in a crouch behind him. He had already drawn another kunai, and was in mid-spin to stab it into the man's back when the sole of a sandal hit him in the face.
Naruto didn't fly back though. He felt chakra surge between the rubber and his skin, even though he was belatedly noticing that the area around the cut on his cheek had gone numb.
With that, Kazuma spun around and used his foot to drag Naruto right through the air in the same way one might swing a ribbon. A split second later, he let go, hurling the youth straight up overhead and flowing back into another stance--
Naruto looked down and saw Tensho poised to strike. The man was crouched down as if about to jump, the sword was aimed straight up at his face and its blade was sparkling blue. One of Tensho's hands swept out in front of it, then pulled back and he was airborn.
"KAGE BUNSHI-"
The instant there were two Naruto's, one of them exploded on impact with the blade. The other, hurled aside just before impact, felt something slap across his chest as Kazuma blurred by. A second later, he hit the ground with a skid on his back and rolled right up to his feet in time to see Chimi Tensho pulling his hands through a set of seals that were utterly alien to him. When it was done, the man held out his left hand, index and middle fingers pointing at Naruto and--
"RAITON: BENIKIAI!"
The next thing he knew, his world turned red.
It was a kind of pain that dwarfed even being stabbed with Raiheijin and pierced with Chidori. Red lightning blew up from the ground around him, arcing high into the cloudless night sky like a bloody crack in reality. In an instant, it rendered him blind, deaf, numb and burnt, searing through his body and melting the soles of his sandals so quickly that he couldn't register it even before pain overloaded the rest of his senses. It felt as if it dragged on for a thousand years, defying all logic and mercy as his hair singed black at the tips, his eyes were rendered a monotone blood red and his heart repeatedly stopped beating.
Then it ended, and Naruto collapsed forward to his knees.
He couldn't see. His body was so wracked with pain that it hurt just to exist, and only distantly did he even register the feeling of something sharp pressing against his back...
From inside his chest.
As his hearing returned, clouded with the sound of a million drums pounding furiously all at once, Naruto heard the all too close sound of the back of his jacket tearing and a splatter of blood across the ground behind him. When his vision returned, he was staring up into Chimi Tensho's eyes at near point blank, though the world was still tinted red.
"It's over," Kazuma said, his voice muffled in Naruto's ears.
But for all the pain, for all the agony and everything else, he couldn't help but smile. Blood trickled down from his lips, steaming a fine red tint across his teeth as he bared them. When he spoke, it was in a cracked voice, but...
"That's... A real... Nice... Tassle ya got there," he said, grinning like a fox.
Kazuma's eyes widened, and in an instant, the Uzumaki Naruto he had run through exploded into a cloud of pinkish smoke as another one burst out of a second cloud at the bottom of the hilt of his sword.
The real Naruto swung around, his left hand clinging desperately to Chimi's forearm as his right hooked through the air and came flying in at full speed. His feet never hit the ground, and the Rasengan that formed in his grasp was fast, furious and blue as the very lightning that clung to Kazuma's blade during Raiheijin. It was a spectacular turnaround, to say the least...
But the reversal dwarfed it.
Kazuma's reactions were as frenzied and accurate as that of a berserker who knew what it meant to stay alive in battle. Rather than try to retreat, he threw himself forward and ducked beneath Naruto's right arm, dragging the left along with him by default. As Naruto struggled to maintain his grasp on the vortex of chakra whipping about in his hand, Kazuma spun around and slashed free of his grasp, sinking the blade inches deep through his side and slicing back out in a spray of blood.
Instantly, he lost control, and the subsequent explosion of the Rasengan hurled him into the ground with enough force to leave a shallow imprint around his body.
Chimi staggered back several steps and fell over backwards into a seating position. Naruto couldn't bring himself to move.
"Shit," he bit out, feeling warmth spread across his side as he started bleeding.
"Performing Kage Bunshin, transforming into a sword tassle and masking the switch with a Blast Note... What the hell are you?" Kazuma sputtered out from nearby, his mask faltering a bit.
"I'm from Konoha," Naruto answered, unsteadily pushing himself up onto one arm as his other tried to hold the sword wound shut. "I'm gonna be Hokage!"
With that, he heaved until he was sitting up, then heaved again until he was kneeling before finally pushing himself up to his feet on willpower alone.
"... You're insane," Kazuma replied, easing back up to his feet with far less trouble than the bloodied youth before him. "Completely insane to think that you're going to live long enough to do that."
With that, the man drew his sword up and made ready for another Raiheijin thrust...
An instant later, the attack came.
And, far removed from the battle, locked away inside of a hotel room, Hyuuga Hinata felt her eyes water.
The blade slipped through.
She wanted to scream.
Eyes went wide.
She wanted to get up and run to his aid.
The attack hit home.
But above all...
He couldn't avoid it...
She just wanted him to be okay.
And so he didn't.
Three seconds later, a body hit the ground and the contest was over.
And for the record: Benikiai means Crimson Release. Since I didn't get to describe it properly during the fight, I'll explain a bit of it now: It's performed by slapping a Note onto the target, then triggering it remotely with hand seals and chakra. Once triggered, a colossal bolt of red lightning shoots up around the victim and, as Naruto can tell you, fries their asses to a crisp. It's a Cloud-nin technique I devised.
And since I likely didn't ever mention it, Raiheijin means something like Lightning Sword Blade. Obvious, ain't it?
Hopefully I wrote Hinata well for the snippet she appeared in this Part. I had originally intended to end her involvement back with the scene in the alleyway, but she's an infectious little wench.
Now... Who lived? Who died? Won't you just wanna kill me while you wait to find out?