The early autumn rain lent the half-ruined temple an air of gravitas, Kisame thought.
A sizeable structure on the edge of collapse, painted black by soot. He stepped through the open entrance and was immediately surprised by the smell.
In his search for the resistance cell known as the Fog, he'd been to many ruined temples like this one. And upon entering, the overpowering stench of the burned dead had been a loyal companion. The citizens had put a gruesome end to the monastic orders of the country. The ones who escaped stoning only did so because they burned with their temples, after all.
Here, it smelled of incense and herbs. Of people, too. He heard the footsteps of his three teammates, watched them fan out once inside.
"The trail's heating up, huh?" Imada asked behind him.
"Place looks lived in," Kaya commented.
And indeed it did. The Fog had left behind torn clothes and empty buckets. There was a makeshift fireplace on the far end. The trail wasn't just heating up, it was starting to burn.
Kisame eyed the aged wooden door up front with equal amounts excitement and caution. It had been weeks of torturing pirates, terrorists, and civilians alike for intel. He was itching for a fight.
"If there's anyone here, it's gotta be that Touka character, right?" Murai asked.
"Possible," Kisame hedged. "If it is - remember: unknown dojutsu. Wait and see, don't rush it."
He thought of the pot-bellied pirate sobbing like a child. "Those eyes! Who knows what those eyes can see? What if she's watching as we speak, waiting for you to leave?"
He thought of the haggard man who'd given up on life. "It was his soul. I swear it on all that's divine, she grabbed for his head, and what came was his soul!"
Likely guess was that they were dealing with a genjutsu specialist. Best case scenario: someone pretending to have a dojutsu by layering an illusion on top of her eyes.
"I'll take the door," Murai said. Kisame nodded his acceptance, blade in hand.
Murai was close enough to walk through when Kisame heard it. A quiet voice just beyond.
"-Tensei."
There was a brief second, and then- an explosion. Boulder-sized bits of wall thundered towards them. Wind jutsu?
Kisame had no time to consider alternatives. A leaping shunshin got him on top of a larger piece of debris flying through the air. From there, he vaulted off to land on the ground once more.
A fizzling noise had him ducking in time as a hail of actual fucking missiles flew right past his head. Murai had no such luck - he'd escaped the blast radius, though not without difficulty. He was lying on the ground when Kisame laid eyes on him, hurt but not maimed.
Kisame looked away as the missiles hit their target in a second grand explosion. Murai was dead, watching him die would change little. The game was on.
Kaya and Imada arrived next to him, though Kisame had no time to examine his team for injuries.
Where once was a wall was now nothing but rubble, and beyond the rubble, a figure. Ratty dark robes, no shoes, a hunter-nin's mask concealing their face. Short brown hair and pale skin, on the taller side. This must be...
"Yo," the figure said. "Name's Touka." She held her hand out in a peace sign. She sounded like she was smiling.
Kisame grinned despite himself. This wasn't some 'take care of baby rebels' type of genin level mission anymore. This was more.
He made a subtle sign with his hand. Maneuver 5. "Nice to meet ya," Kisame returned.
And then Kaya rushed forward, Kisame and Imada launching into hand seals.
Imada clapped her hands together as she finished, then grunted with displeasure. "Genjutsu not working," she exclaimed.
While Imada spoke, the woman - Touka - had said something as well, though Kisame hadn't caught it. She held out her hand, and Kaya's momentum accelerated. Then, she was flying through the air towards her assailant, not at all in control of the action.
Kisame didn't wait to figure out what would happen when she arrived.
"Water Prison Jutsu." A concentrated burst of water shot towards Touka, ready to lock her down.
It didn't arrive. Touka held out her free hand and the water disappeared as it hit some strange, translucent barrier. Meanwhile, her other hand shifted and unraveled like some type of machine. It folded apart, and from the stump sprouted a sword.
A sword Kaya impaled herself upon at breakneck speed.
"You overloaded that jutsu, from what I can tell. It's why it was so slow to reach me," Touka said. She hurled Kaya's limp body towards the pair of Kisame and Imada. As soon as the body slid off the blade, her hand transformed back into its original form.
What the actual fuck?
"Thanks for the advice," Kisame answered. "Any more to share?"
Talking to an enemy wasn't a particularly intelligent move, he knew. But in this case, the enemy had abilities he'd never even heard of and no clue how to prepare for them. He needed time to... think, prepare, do something.
"You should abandon Kirigakure," was her reply, so earnest and prompt that it shocked him.
"Are you for real?" Imada answered with gritted teeth. "Who the fuck do you think you are? What, we'll leave behind the village we went to war for at the word of some lowlife terrorist?"
"You went to war for the Mist," Touka said. "And yet it's weaker than it has ever been."
"Because of people like you! While we went to war, you fucking vultures feasted on the land!" Imada shouted.
"People like me, yes," she said, unbothered by the accusation. "Have you never wondered where all these people come from? One doesn't suddenly wake up a revolutionary, ya know? The caste system was outdated when Byakuren introduced it, yet it persists to this day. The economy is crumbling, its shinobi forces lacking quality and quantity both. Why did the Mist have so many deserters during wartime, they ask. I have the answer: corruption, weak leadership, a lack of principle at the top that leads to a lack of faith at the bottom."
Kisame's breathing grew rapid for reasons he couldn't fathom. Her tone had a flat edge to it, reminiscent of a feeling he couldn't quite grasp, but seemed so familiar. It sounded like him lying in ambush, thinking 'what's the point?'. It sounded like him waiting to feel elated at his promotion, yet the world was as colorless as it had always been. It sounded like- truth, truth, truth.
Imada's subtle signs ripped him out of his inner turmoil at once. He blinked, forced the feeling away, far away, to the back of his mind.
"Fuck you," Imada responded. And then, she went on the offensive.
She ran through hand seals while Kisame engaged, mind racing against his will.
And once he did, he spotted the weakness immediately. She was- slow, in a way. Inexperienced. Her head swiveled towards him as he approached, but her body couldn't react as fast. She blocked his first strike with a strange black rod that sprouted from her palm just in time. But her arm shook from the strain, he saw. She couldn't hold him off for long.
She held out her free hand - to push him away with that wind jutsu, he guessed. But at the same time, Imada launched her jutsu. Heavy mist settled upon the large room. Her outstretched hand formed a fist, and the mist spiraled into it as soon as it had appeared.
The second was all Kisame needed. He launched a strike at her shoulder while she dealt with the mist, and it connected. Steel bit into flesh and Touka screamed, raw and guttural. Kisame braced himself, pumped chakra into the point where his soles met the floor. Stick, don't move, don't flinch. If he could finish the movement, he'd be ripping her arm clean off.
"Shinra Tensei!"
It was useless. The wave hit harder than any of the preceeding ones. It wasn't wind but sheer, primal force that blasted him out of the temple. He collided with the ground, with debris, with the grass outside, and yet he kept flying. He tried to right himself, but it was too much, he was flying too fast, his momentum too great. A second later, it was over. He was in a lake just outside, bleeding, wounded and nauseous.
And yet, his first thought was: Why didn't you aim for the head?
He got back up slower than he would've liked, but he did get back up to limp inside once more.
Kisame knew he could beat her, then. Those strange powers of hers, they were new. Her instincts were amateurish. If she'd used that force jutsu before getting rid of the mist, he wouldn't have been able to get a hit in at all. And she'd screamed when he'd done so in a way that made it clear it had never happened to her before. Unused to combat. No prior training. She could absorb any jutsu thrown her way, but up close, she was weak.
She certainly didn't look it, though. Through the dizziness, he saw Imada trapped in a bubble of water, Touka's hand on her forehead. Water Prison Jutsu, his mind supplied. How?
Imada wasn't panicking, to her credit. She looked resolute, mouth set in a grim line. Then, Touka pulled. A transparent, ethereal fog escaped Imada's head, shaped very much like her.
It was his soul, Kisame remembered a man saying. There was no genjutsu at work. It was real.
The fog exited her body, and the light in Imada's eyes died. The bubble of water burst, forming a puddle on the floor.
There was a lot he wanted to say, but little that felt appropriate. "You copied my technique," he said instead. "But that mask isn't hiding a sharingan, is it?"
She turned towards him, robe painted red. The hand she could still move pulled off the mask.
Beneath was an unassuming face, matted by sweat and grime. A woman who looked like countless others in the Land of Water, save for the jagged scar resting in the center of her forehead. A bit paler than most, perhaps. But then there were the eyes.
Her eyes were purple, with concentric circles all throughout. Kisame had never heard of anything like them.
"I didn't copy," she rasped, holding her injured shoulder. "I saw, I understood."
Every time those eyes met his, he felt the need to step back.
"That's some ability," he responded, unsure of how to proceed. "Could've still killed you, though."
She laughed. "I haven't been at this for very long. A month or two. And still, I won."
A month or two, and she was strong enough to take on a team full of war-hardened chunin.
"I'm still standing."
"Different goals, my guy. I stayed behind so my people could escape, not so I could kill you."
Kisame's gaze flitted around the temple, at the rubble and the corpses. "Did a good job of it regardless."
"Heh. So, what now? You're not beating me on your own. Are you returning to Kiri?"
"You're not going to kill me?" Kisame asked.
"I owe you that much for not taking my head off when you had the chance. Man, what an end that would've been. Brought low by a chunin."
"Not very smart to show me mercy," Kisame said. Was he arguing for his own death? Perhaps. But he couldn't help it, was desperate to see where this conversation would go. "I know all your tricks, now. I could find you again in a few months and finish what I started."
Again, she laughed. "In a few months, I'll be far enough beyond you for nothing you know to matter." An amused smile played on her lips.
"That's some confidence. But if your little resistance cell keeps growing, it won't be chunin they send. They'll send jonin, maybe even the Seven."
"What's left of the Seven, you mean? Most of 'em got wasted by a Konoha genin, after all."
"What?" Kisame asked, baffled despite himself. "Where the fuck are you getting your intel? The Seven got ambushed by the majority of their Anbu, and most of them died in the assault still."
"I was there," she replied. "Watched it happen. The three that're still around survived cause they ran away. I even have the swords to prove it."
"You can't be serious."
"You could see them," she replied. "If you come with me."
That feeling from earlier returned full force, that sensation he couldn't place.
"You're trying to bribe me?" he asked with a grin.
"I'm trying to convince you," she replied. "If you return to the Mist, what do you think you'll find? A village constantly on the brink of collapse. A geriatric tyrant for a leader. A society resistant to change. What good is it to rise through the ranks if the ranks are all filled with trash? Don't you think this country deserves more? I told you, a few months from now I'll be far beyond you. A few more, and I'll be beyond the Mizukage."
Kisame thought for a moment, tried to envision. I didn't copy, I comprehended. If this was what she was capable of after a month...
"And then?" He asked. "You'll fix all of Kiri's problems, just like that? What's different with you at the top?"
"Everything," she said. "I despise that it's the truth, but this world runs on power. It's the strong that rule, the powerful that have a say. And I have the capacity to eclipse them all."
She started walking towards him, and Kisame found himself rooted to the spot. That feeling, he could name it now, he thought. Something like longing for a better tomorrow.
"So why form a resistance at all, if you can do it all on your own?"
She stood before him, purple eyes boring into his own with quiet authority. "I'm not delusional enough to think I can bring peace to the entire world, but I can bring peace to this country. I know I can. And I've lived in its temples and under its bridges for long enough to know this country deserves it. . But these hands can only hold so much. A single person can only do so much."
She held out her hand, and Kisame could do little but stare at it. Gaze upon the promise held within.
"I'll do my best to pick up the slack, then."
Could do little but take it in his own.