A/N: This is the scene you've all been waiting for! The big showdown, the final boss fight! Actually there's still quite a bit of story left after this but this is kinda the main crossing into the final third of the fic.

Disclaimer: I still don't own Naruto or any of its characters, yet.

The Dog and the Devil

The stench he carried was thick, musky and metallic, like stale blood. His charcoal-coloured cloak wrapped around his shoulders and trailed down his back and sides, dragging ever-so-slightly against the floor around him. The material was clearly well-worn, with jagged rips along the seams and shoulder-line. Beneath, he wore a forest coloured vest, much like that of a leaf chunin, and black ninja pants with loose ties around the hem of each leg.

His face hid behind a maroon, blood-splattered Oni mask, with a sabre-fanged front and heavily furrowed eyebrows over sightless eye sockets.

Luna's composure faltered and she shivered involuntarily. Kiba must have noticed as he inched closer to the she-wolf, almost sub-consciously. His nose scrunched several times as though smelling something awful, but there was some form of confusion on his features when she looked at him more closely.

She wanted to know what he was thinking, but before she got a chance to ask, the enemy made his first move.

A simple flick of the wrist was all it took, and the Inuzuka and his faithful companion sprang into action.

"Oh no you don't!" Kiba snarled as he crossed the cavern in seconds, just fast enough to delay the hunter use of his whistle. It gave Luna a moment to identify the object, noting its striking resemblance to the broken pipes found near her village entrance.

The attack from the dog trainer missed by a few inches, giving the trio a decent example of this enemies speed. He was fast. This was not going to be as easy as they had hoped.

The cloaked man reached for his weapon again, this time managing to bring it almost completely to his lips before having to dodge a string of kunai that narrowly missed his face, just clipping one ear.

Fresh blood spurted from the sudden wound, but the male didn't even flinch.

As Kiba and Akamaru transformed into their man-beast clone forms, Luna was able to shake herself from whatever state of immobility she had been in, and prowled forward slowly. Her movements were slow and calculated, as though one wrong step would alert the hunter of her already known presence, but she allowed her inner-wolf to take over.

Drawing close enough, she let out a snarl as her body was engulfed in smoke, a furious white wolf reappearing in her place. She could fight like this, she felt safer in this form.

Her animal senses kicked in, hearing and eyesight heightened, her red irises darting with each movement made by her choice of prey. It only took a minute for her to track the weakness in his gait, a slightly less elegant landing on his right leg, coming from a seemingly old injury to the knee that forbade him from straightening it smoothly. Her breath caught as she saw him move to land on that leg once again, and she pounced.

She caught his calf in her jaws and bit down hard, tearing through flesh and feeling the tender muscle rip beneath her fangs. Blood pooled around the limb but, as before, the male hardly seemed to notice. She tasted his chakra as it flooded to his feet, giving him enough strength to tear his leg from her mouth and leap into the air away from his assailants.

Luna shook her head, teeth still bared in a feral snarl as splashes of red flew from her mouth. Even Akamaru might have shuddered at the sight had he not been so focused on Kiba and disarming the intruder.

But somehow, he continued to evade them. For some reason, until now, he had been avoiding any attempt at fighting back. Perhaps he had been biding his time and letting them wear themselves out, or perhaps he'd been assessing his enemy's skills. Either way, when he did move to strike back, it was unexpected, fast, and effective.

He struck Akamaru with it first, a quick burst of chakra to a long nailed hand, looked almost like a combination of the gentle fist and the Inuzuka four-legs technique. Whatever the jutsu, it was enough to distract Kiba and Luna, even momentarily as they watched helplessly as the white canine landed in a quivering heap.

It only gave him one tiny window of time, but it was all he needed to regain control of the situation, quite literally.

Luna, remaining conscious for the first few seconds, was surprised to hear a soft melody play in her head, rather than the harsh call of an ordinary whistle she'd come to expect. It was almost hypnotising, the way it drilled into the darkest parts of her mind that even she didn't think she had access to. Her vision clouded, everything becoming blurred and estranged from reality. Fuzzy shapes moved in front of her face in a wave of colour and lines, which she struggled to identify. She had no clue whether the movement in front of her was friend or foe, and she lashed out suddenly when something touched her shoulder.

And then there was sound, echoing in a distant tongue, like she was only catching vague white noise of a fuzzy foreign language. She felt her feet move on their own, and then she was running, leaping, growling and panting.

Her vision blurred again, black, brown and a flash of red dancing before her in swift, jagged movements, like pieces of a darkened rainbow falling from the sky.

Her mind was foggy with confusion, the vast variety of jolting movements and zig-zagged colours making her brain throb so hard she could barely stand it. She felt her entire body weight grow heavy, like in those last few moments before succumbing to slumber, but the darkness never came. Just a constant stream of messy light and dark. And it frightened her.

Luna tried to shake her head, to clear the vision, but her body just wouldn't comply. The last time she remembered feeling such a fear as this was when she had last awoken to her wolf form towering over her brunette friend, giant paws pinning him to the ground and her open jaw hovered above his bared throat. She'd been horrified.

So horrified in fact, that as this memory became more prominent in her mind, the more her vision started to clear. And then, the dull noises she'd been hearing began to make more sense.

"Lu…"

And then, "Na…"

Luna. That was her name. She could hear her name. Vaguely aware that her body had stopped moving of its own accord, she let chakra flow to her eyes and nose, diverting as much as possible from her ears.

That scent… Seemed so familiar. It made her feel safe, and warm. It made her want to inhale deeply, and be comforted around it.

And then, there was a face. Onyx eyes so wide and filled with concern, surrounded by two flashes of red and spikes of brown.

Kiba…

It took more effort than she cared to show, but somehow, she pulled away from where she had backed him against a wall. She even managed to turn away, vision refocusing on someone else, who really made her see red.

Fangs snapping threateningly, she lifted one paw, then another, stalking towards the vile demon who had put them in this whole situation. The melody increased to a near-impossible pitch, and she was vaguely aware of blood trickling from her ears that lay flat against the back of her head.

The next few events happened too quickly for her tortured brain to react to.

The music relinquished it's hold on her so swiftly that she almost collapsed in the relief. Her eyesight returned blindingly fast, and she had to blink several times to readjust to the cavern's dim light. And lastly, a deep pain shot up her spine as she let out an agonizingly shrill yelp.

By the time she realized that it was Akamaru's fangs now clamped over her back, the she-wolf was ready to buckle under the giant white dog that, even in her full wolf form, still towered above her. Her shoulders shook and her chest heaved as her body tried to repel the burning sensation that was flooding her veins, but it was only when Kiba had managed to pry his dog's jaw from her back that she allowed her legs to crumple beneath her.

"Luna! Get up, now!" His words were far from comforting, strained and desperate as he was forced to defend her against his life-long best friend.

Luna responded with a whimper, fighting her protesting limbs as she heaved herself up. Her stance was wobbly at best, but she was standing.

"The Hihanta, always has an arsenal up his sleeve." The enemy's voice was unnervingly ordinary, sounding much like an average civilian male and not at all as evil or conniving as he was.

And Luna couldn't shake the term he had referred to. The Hihanta. So, the legends were true…

Enough. She had had enough of this. Throwing back her head with as much strength as she could muster, Luna let loose all of her aching and hurt into a ear-splitting howl. In the cavernous room, the cry echoed and resounded throughout every cell in Kiba's body, but he knew this was a good plan. He knew the leaf would hear her.

She was calling for backup, something he would have been proud of her for, had the situation allowed him time to. Luna was finally opening herself up and trusting that her friends would come to her aid when she needed them the most. She was finally breaking the barriers.

In his moment of understanding, the Inuzuka heir made a grave mistake, taking his eyes of Akamaru just a second too long. The dog leapt at him, claws protruding the fur around his toes and his open-mouthed snarl ready to tear him apart, had it not been for Luna.

Despite being almost half the dog's size, she barrelled into his already dirtied side with enough force to throw him off course. His attack then redirected at her, which she responded to instantly.

"No, stop! Don't hurt him, he can't control himself!" The dog-trainer shouted, the urgency evident in his voice.

Thankfully, Luna had already realised this, growling as Akamaru swiped at her front, catching the same front leg that had been injured previously. Kiba stood in shock as he watched the two white beasts circle each other, completely unsure as to whom to worry more about. It was like his own personal hell, something he refused to allow to continue.

Rounding on the person responsible, Kiba struck lucky as he registered the demon's concentration focused entirely on the canine and the wolf, and he timed his moment perfectly.

The force of his singular fang over fang move knocked the Hihanta almost the entire width of the room, his whistle tumbling away from him upon landing. Kiba and the demon-masked man both made a dash for the object, and although the Hihanta was the first to snatch it into his grasp, he grunted at the weight of Kiba foot on his hand. The boy wasted no time in stomping as hard as all of his chakra induced leg would allow, a feeling of brief satisfaction overcoming him at the sound of bones shattering.

"Kiba!" The new voice that joined the fray was beyond relieving, as he turned to find team guy, minus the mentor, racing towards them, Tenten to him, and the boys to Luna and Akamaru.

Since the whistle's tune had been broken, the white furry pair were now sat panting beside each other, Luna's red stained fur looking much worse than the canine's, but at least she was managing to remain conscious.

Tenten swooped in like a fountain in a desert, releasing a scroll from it's bindings and throwing it overhead. Chakra binding chains ripped from the paper surface, clanging together as they twisted in seemingly endless loops around the cloaked male on the ground.

"Are you alright?" The weapons-wielder questioned, noticing a trickle of blood running down the side of his face from beneath his headband.

"I'm fine…" He brushed off distractedly, otherwise ignoring his female comrade and rushing to the side of his best friend and wolf hybrid.

Luna, upon his arrival, returned to her mostly human form, hissing as she readjusted so that the strain on her back was lighter. Lee shifted so she could lean on his shoulder, while Akamaru licked her bloodied forearm, which had been reopened in his attack. The girl rubbed the top of his large head softly, their eyes meeting just long enough for each to convey their apologies.

And then, scarlet irises flickered to meet Kiba's, his breath hitching as he absorbed the tense expression she held the agony behind. But before he could process that horror any further, Tenten's voice rang out again.

"Erm, guys? You might want to come see this…"

She was crouching over the restrained figure on the floor, one hand against the ground, one holding up a blood-splattered Oni mask.

She inched to the side, revealing the man's face, and Luna had to quint to drink in all the features of her attacker.

The first thing she noticed were his eyes, like coal, dark and shaded and impossibly blank. It was as though the world could lie burning at his feet and he would barely bat an eyelid, their cold, unseeing gaze focused dead ahead in a trance-like stare. His shaggy brown hair hung in clumps over his face, light remains of tan lines ran across his eyebrow line as though there had once been some material fastened around his forehead. A hitai-ate, perhaps? Thin mouth set in a hard line, the man's vivid jaw line ran firm along the edge of his face, leading back to his hairline and cheek bones.

And then, there were his cheeks. His left displayed one clear, upside down crimson triangle, the colour of blood sending chills down Luna's spine as her eyes widened dramatically. His right cheek also bore a similar mark, although this one had been broken into four, angry red blotches, separated by three jagged scars. They looked like claw marks.

He was an Inuzuka?! Luna had barely put two and two together when she suddenly felt a rush of air as Kiba fled the scene, a heart-wrenching snarl ripping from his throat as he left.

"K-Kiba!" She cried out, more in surprise than to stop him, but there was not a chance in hell he was listening.

The hybrid stared after him for a long moment, confusion etched on her face until another horrified realisation struck. This man before her, the Hihanta, held such a striking resemblance to the Inuzuka heir that she almost staggered backward in shock. The air completely left her lungs as she stared, fixated on the figure bound in Tenten's weaponry.

Could he be… Kiba's father?

A/N: So, I'm curious. Did anyone see that coming? I did try to drop a few hints, but I was being pretty vague, obviously didn't want to ruin the plot right off the bat!