Let's start this from the beginning

Swordsmen of the Mist

VIII

While Ringo's injuries fortunately slowed her down enough for Kakashi to keep pace, he knew it wouldn't stay like this for too long. They might be more or less evenly matched for now, but with how much worse his state was than hers, his strength would leave him long before hers did. In fact, Kakashi could already feel his limbs growing numb while he grew more light-headed by the minute.

Yes, he definitively needed to do something soon if he wanted to not only win but also survive this confrontation.

Unfortunately, it wasn't exactly easy to come up with a plan when some crazy woman continued to relentlessly rush and swing swords at you.

It was good that he already had something in mind, then.

"C'mon, Kakashi Hatake!" she screamed in glee when he dodged another slash that would have decapitated him on the spot. "Stop running away and face me!"

Not bothering to reply, he instead reached into his pouch and pulled out a kunai with an explosion tag.

Not deterred by that in the slightest, Ringo merely laughed before throwing herself at him again. However, her expression quickly changed when instead of preparing himself to block or back further away, he jumped straight at her.

She had no time to do more than let out a surprised gasp before they both were enveloped in an explosion as the tag that was still in his hand went off.

Her figure jumped out of the resulting dust cloud a few moments later, an angry snarl on her face as she glanced at the light burns on her right arm. "So now you're trying to be sneaky, Hatake?" she asked into thin air. "Stop fooling around and come out! I don't know when you switched with a clone, but-"

Before Ringo could finish, Kakashi jumped at her from behind. However, having evidently expected such an attack, she jerked around with one smooth step and rammed one of her swords through his chest.

His body transformed into hardened earth almost immediatly, keeping her sword locked in place.

Ringo's eyes widened. "A rock clone…?"

Then, the clone exploded.

When she came out of the dust cloud this time, there weren't any new injuries to be seen. However, that had never been the real intention of his attacks; the fact that they had successfully achieved their true purpose became clear once one realized that Ringo currently carried only one sword.

She opened her mouth again only to find herself under attack before she had the chance to utter as much as a single word.

"Suiton: Suiryūdan no Jutsu!" (Water Release: Water Dragon Bullet Technique)

It looked for a moment as if Ringo would use a lightning technique to defend herself again, but then she remembered what happened the last time she did that and instead jumped away to avoid getting hit by the huge water dragon that crashed into the ground where she stood just a moment earlier with a loud explosion.

Even after dodging that attack, she had still been close enough for the resulting shockwave to knock her back, making her bounce across the ground several times before finally coming to a stop in a crouch with several new small cuts to show for it.

Ringo cautiously looked around and waited for another attack to follow the last one, but when nothing happened for several seconds, she slowly rose back up to her feet while analysing the new battleground; because the previous water technique had not only ripped through many trees to get to her but also uprooted several more when it crashed into the ground, she now stood in the middle of a small clearing, allowing her to observe her surrounding unhindered by any obstacles.

Deciding that she was safe for now, Ringo held her free hand out as if to grab something from thin air.

However, nothing happened.

She scoffed. "So that was your plan?" she called out, probably guessing that he would be close enough to hear her. "You went through all this trouble just to part me from one of my swords?" She laughed. "Weren't you saying something about not wasting chakra by stupidly throwing techniques around just a minute ago?"

Kakashi's response to that was to push his hands through the earth surface from beneath her, grab her ankles, and pull her into the ground until only her head stuck out before emerging in front of her.

"It's not wasted if it gets you right where I want you."

Even when he was saying that, Kakashi mentally prepared himself for what would surely happen any moment now. After all, even if his Sharingan hadn't caught Ringo's hand seals earlier, the smug expression on her face would have been more than enough to give away that something wasn't quite right.

He was proven right a second later when her body vanished in a puddle of water that sank into the ground.

"Raitō Jutsu: Rakurai!" (Thunderswords Technique: Thunderbolt)

A stream of lightning shot into the air from a few dozen meters to his left, making him inwardly sigh even when he was simultaneously waving hand seals of his own. Only once, I would like to be wrong about such a thing.

His own water technique had flooded the surrounding area with liquid, making it the perfect target for a lightning technique as it would conduct the electricity everywhere and consequently hit him no matter where he tried to escape to. Well, at least that was what he wanted Ringo to believe. After all, Kakashi wouldn't have used his chakra in such a wasteful manner if all it did was give his opponent such a perfect target.

"Suiton Dan: Oruka!" (Water Release Bullet: Orca)

All the liquid in the area instantly shot into the air and formed a ceiling of sorts that absorbed the incoming lightning and protected Kakashi from the deadly attack before beginning to crash through the trees towards where he had seen the lightning come from just a few short moments earlier.

Knowing that he hadn't had much time left, he ignored the exhaustion he felt from using most of his remaining chakra and immediately rushed after it.

It took him scarcely five seconds to find her, just in time to see the protective water dome around her that she must have used to block his attack vanish and thus giving him the perfect opportunity to take her by surprise.

Ringo clumsily took a step back to avoid having her throat cut by his kunai, her face for once spotting an angry grimace instead of the giddy grin it had before when she reflexively brought her remaining sword up in an upwards slash. Sidestepping that, Kakashi closed in on her in an attempt to limit her movement and consequently the usage of her weapon before ramming his knee into her stomach.

She gasped in pain but still had the presence of mind to catch his wrist with the kunai before he could stab her. However, this meant that she couldn't back further away for the moment and thus allowed Kakashi to do what he had planned to from the beginning:

Using the brief respite of their fight, he grabbed her shoulder with his free hand and used it to push himself over her while also keeping a hold on her wrist in his hand, resulting in him landing behind her back half a second later while Ringo stumbled due to the unexpected move. He then let go of her, not caring that he lost his kunai in the process, before throwing his leg out in a roundhouse kick.

Eyes wide, Ringo jerked back to avoid the attack only to gasp in surprise when it went way past her head and instead connected with her hand that still clutched her single remaining sword.

The weapon immediate flew out of her hand, vanishing in the distance.

While certainly surprised by that, his opponent reacted quickly and used the short time when he was more focused on her weapon than on her to jump back and race through hand seals, well aware that she wouldn't have enough time to summon her weapon back before he was on her again.

"Raiton: Gian!" (Lightning Release: False Darkness)

Unfortunately for her, this was exactly the reaction Kakashi had been hoping for.

Not hesitating in the slightest, he jumped forward, ready to face the attack head-on.

To Itachi's silent relief, there wasn't anything special on the other side of that door. Just another corridor with even more doors on each side. With how it was connected to that operation theatre, he had expected the worst.

However, there were three things that stood out:

First, the doors here weren't the same wooden constructs he had seen in the rest of the complex so far but strong, heavy looking metal frames.

Second, this was the first corridor that showed signs of destruction without actually having collapsed completely in that it missed nearly a third of the wall on the right side while debris piled up on the floor in front of the hole.

Third, there was a strange sensation in the air. It almost felt like chakra, but not quite. It was also somewhat familiar, though Itachi couldn't put where he had felt it before. The only thing he knew for sure was that there was something sinister to it, something dark, and that he had to be wary of it.

That conclusion was confirmed a second later when a figure slowly crawled out of the hole in the wall.

He actually needed half a second to recognize it as a human. Or, well, as something that had certainly been a human at some point. With how deformed and distorted the figure's body appeared to be now, it was hard to say if that term could really still be used to describe it.

Crawling on all fours, the woman -for that's what the figure was- slowly looked around before her gaze landed on Itachi, revealing golden eyes in midst of a black sclera. Two curled horns like those of a ram emerged from her head that otherwise only spotted a few batches of blonde hair that once must have been bright and shining but now was nothing but a dirty mess. Her body, clad only in some torn gowns that did little to cover her body, was littered with scars and black blood strains while at least half of her visible skin had a brown colouring and scaly appearance. Only her arms retained most of their natural look, but even that ended once one glanced at her hands and spotted the claws that looked like they could cut steel. Her legs, on the other hand, were by far the worst; they didn't resemble anything human anymore, consisting of only scaly, leathery skin and deep cuts that Itachi thought went all the way to her bones. Other than that, what first caught one's eyes were the two big bulges on her back that were almost the same size as her head.

If all of this wouldn't have been enough to make Itachi realize what he was dealing with, the black, flame-like markings that spread out all over her body from her throat would have given it away.

This is one of Orochimaru's hideouts, he realized. That means-

However, before he could finish the thought, the figure let out a loud, inhuman howl before suddenly jumping straight at him, the force of it shattering the ground below her.

There were over thirty meters between them, but even with his Sharingan predicting her movements, he was almost too slow to dodge. Even then, he felt a breeze hit his face when the claws slashed through the air in front of him, and he could smell the rotten stench of decay that hang around the figure like a cloak.

Not disheartened by that miss at all, his opponent let out another shrill howl before jumping after him when he tried to retreat further back.

She's fast, he thought while raising his arms to perform a jutsu. Faster than Kushimaru, even. However, as long as she doesn't catch me by surprise, I should be able to evade her.

As if to prove him wrong, it was then that steam-like chakra shot out from a hole in her elbow, propelling her arm forward and consequently transforming an attack he would have been able to dodge into one impossible to avoid. All he could do was to use his already raised arms to block the incoming fist.

While that indeed softened the blow, it didn't mean that the impact wasn't devastating.

Although Itachi was by no means weak and had even reinforced his arms with chakra, the blow not only knocked all the air from his lungs but also immediately catapulted him backwards, making him cross the entirely of the corridor in less than a second, crash through the wall back into the operation theatre, and then continue to fly until he finally came to a stop when he slammed against the wall at the other end of the room.

However, even such a blow didn't stop him from keeping an eye on his opponent. After all, one of the most important rules for a shinobi was to be aware of what your enemy was doing at all times if somehow possible. No matter how much pain a shinobi was in, they needed to stay alert if they didn't want to be surprised by a fatal attack.

It was this mentality that allowed him to spot the female figure jumping after him through the hole in the wall the very moment it came out of the dust cloud. This, combined with the facts she was obviously not capable of rational thinking and looking straight into his eyes, meant that he could cast a Genjutsu on her while she was still far away.

The recoil of his illusion being broken happened almost at the exact same time he cast it. In fact, it happened so fast that Itachi didn't think the technique had even taken hold of her mind in the first place.

He didn't need long to understand why; a Genjutsu worked by controlling the chakra flow of a target's cerebral nervous system, meaning a disorderly and erratic chakra network would make it impossible for illusions to work. That was usually not a problem, of course, as such a network would make it impossible for a person to cast any sort of technique or even mould chakra effectively at all.

It was just too bad that his current opponent wasn't a regular person but the result of human experiments.

It seems I can't depend on Genjutsu in this fight.

Even with the recoil of his failed technique, he still managed to duck under the punch that destroyed the wall behind him without too much trouble before he jumped back into the now open corridor while weaving hand seals.

"Katon: Gōkakyū no Jutsu!" (Fire Release: Great Fireball Technique)

As he had predicted, the figure continued to rush straight at him, meaning that his attack would probably have connected even if he hadn't fled into the narrow corridor where dodging such a big technique would have been impossible anyway.

Going by the high-pitched screams, he assumed the attack had been a full success.

Unfortunately, just when he thought that, the figure jumped out of the flames, the burns that marked her skin -her normal one, not the scaly parts- not even slowing it down.

Itachi once again couldn't do anything but raise his arms to soften the blow before he was thrown backwards by the force of the punch and consider himself lucky that at least she hadn't slashed at him with her claws instead.

It was fortunate that the corridor they were in now was much longer than the previous one, meaning there weren't any walls for him to crash through. Instead, Itachi flew through the air for a bit until his feet touched the ground again, making him slid over the floor some more before he finally came to a stop.

Still, he thought with a short glance at his throbbing arms. From now on, I should avoid her punches rather than try to block them. He wasn't sure what would happen if his arms took two or three more of these punches, and he didn't plan on finding out. Redirecting and dodging it is, then.

Itachi was forced to put these plans into reality a second later when his opponent appeared in front of him, claws extended and ready to cut him into pieces.

Letting himself fall backwards, he dodged the crude attack with a flick-flack during which he used his upwards swinging legs to kick both her arms into the air, leaving her entire body open for attack. Then, not waiting for her to recover, he drew a kunai and tried to pierce her heart, intending to end this fight in an instant.

The emphasis was on 'tried', however.

Itachi hadn't much time to be surprised by the fact that his weapon couldn't pierce her skin before his opponent brought both her arms down in an attempt to crush him into the ground, forcing him to abandon his position and jump aside before twisting his body to connect a roundhouse-kick with her head to throw her backwards and buy himself some more time.

His attack might have failed, but this short confrontation hadn't been completely useless. The modifications are definitive results of Orochimaru's Curse Mark, but it's still quite different from Sasuke's version. Aside from the obvious fact that Sasuke had been in complete control until Orochimaru took over his body instead of being basically a mindless beast, the chakra of his current opponent felt completely different from his brother's during their fight. There was simply something primal and vicious about hers that he had lacked. It's probably safe to assume that this is an earlier and less successful version. However, that doesn't explain why she has more raw power than Sasuke. If anything, it should be the other way around…

As much as he would like to look more into this mystery, and as much as he knew that this could very well prove useful in future confrontations with the rogue Sannin, there just wasn't any time for any of that right now. If his suspicion was true, Orochimaru was much closer than he was comfortable with considering they already had two of the Seven Swordsmen as opponents; he would prefer to meet up with his team now instead of potentially facing two enemies of such calibre at once all by himself.

Consequently, he would need to take care of his current opponent quickly. Preferable without wasting any more chakra than absolutely necessary. He pitied the poor girl -and that was what she was. While all the deformations made it impossible to tell her exact age, he didn't think she was all that much older than fifteen or sixteen. It was not her fault that she fell into the Sannin's clutches, but he couldn't let that stop him.

It was at least a small relief that a quick death would probably be a mercy at this point.

Itachi was pulled back into the present by another high-pitched howl, spurring him on to fly through hand seals before his incoming opponent could reach him.

A second later, his body was torn into two pieces when her claws went straight through his torso.

His body devolved into a murder of crows just a heartbeat later.

The disfigured girl shrieked in surprise and began to lash out at the birds around her, trying to swap them away with clumsy and uncoordinated slashes of her claws not too different to how a small child would swing their hands at a bee. That was exactly what Itachi had hoped for, though, as he wanted her to be distracted for the moment.

While his crows continued to swarm around her to block her sigh and keep her attention away from him, Itachi quickly drew several shuriken with attached steel wire.

That wasn't the most notable thing, however. What truly mattered were the explosion tags that were fastened to it in periodic intervals.

Itachi had always been talented with shurikenjutsu, and he hadn't slacked off in this life either. The weapons barely touched his hands before he threw them, letting them fly great arcs through the air before colliding with each other and changing their trajectory to reach whatever target he had in mind for them. When all was said and done just about three seconds later, all of his opponent's limbs were wrapped in steel wire and explosion tags. Similarly, there were even more explosion tags now pinned to the wall and the ceiling around her as well.

Were her previous shriek one of surprise, the howl she let out now expressed nothing but furious rage.

Itachi wasn't foolish enough to believe that his wires would hold her for long. With how much physical strength she had already demonstrated, she could probably tear them apart with the same ease with which he could destroy grass helms. This was another reason for why he wouldn't try to capture her; the efforts he would need to put into that were too great as to be worth it.

Without any further delay, he jumped as far away from his opponent as he could before making a single hand seal.

A moment later, the corridor was engulfed in an explosion.

Kakashi watched as Ringo coughed out some blood from where she lied to his feet. "H-how did you-" Another cough forced her to stop midsentence. "How did you do that?"

Just speaking that much visibly exhausted her already, but he could hardly blame her. While she had somehow managed to avoid having either her heart or her lungs pierced by his attack, the hole in her torso was clearly a lethal wound. Not enough to kill someone as strong as her immediately, no, but still very much deadly. Kakashi gave her a minute or two at most.

"You were saying you heard a lot of stories about me," he reminded her while trying to get his own breathing under control. His sight was already getting blurry from blood loss and his legs felt like jelly; the last thing he needed right now was to collapse next to her and give Rango the chance to take him with her. "Can't you figure it out yourself?"

He thought he saw a flash of confusion behind the painfilled haze that had lied itself over her eyes before it was replaced by understanding. "Y-you cut through it…"

"I did."

Kakashi had concluded that if pressed without her two swords and with no way to run away, Ringo would naturally fall back on using a lightning technique in her defence. If he could overcome that, the odds were in his favour that he could finish her with one single strike.

As it turned out, he had been correct.

"T-the Copy Ninja," Ringo chuckled before quickly falling into another coughing fit. "A-and the man who cut through lightning. Should have thought of that…"

"You should," he agreed. "But I'm grateful you did not."

He thought she wanted to chuckle again, but in the end, all she could muster was a bloody smile. "Good fight…" she said, her voice barely above a whisper. "H-had… fun."

Kakashi looked at her for several more seconds even after Ringo had closed her eyes for the last time before allowing himself to collapse against a nearby tree with an exhausted sigh.

"This could have gone better," he muttered to himself while pushing his forehead protector back down to cover his Sharingan. "Let's hope that Itachi and Zabuza had more luck than I…"

Right now, he would have loved nothing more than to give in to the blackness that currently tried to envelop his mind, but he couldn't let that happen. First, he needed to patch himself up somewhat to avoid bleeding out on the spot, and then he would need to look for his teammates -primarily Itachi- to see if they were alright or needed help. Only after that could he allow himself to rest.

That being said, a glance down his body made him grimace. I really shouldn't have postponed attending some of Tsunade-sama's lessons until after this mission, should I?

Some medical Ninjutsu would have been pretty useful just about now.

Preoccupied with his thoughts and the treatment of his wounds, as well as impaired by the numbness that still seized his senses, Kakashi did not notice the rumbling in the distance that grew louder and louder by the second.

... you have no idea how excited I am for the next chapter. Believe me, you can look forward to it! :)