Author's notes: There it is! I finally finished des next chapter! FIGHT TIME!
Review whore suffering from withdrawal.
Disclaimer: Masashi Kishimoto (owner of Naruto) would have written this a lot faster than me! Get thee behind me!
Building fights were always fast, vicious, and much more lethal than fighting outdoors. Even something as benign as a totally empty room was a potentially deadly trap. Shinobi had various ways of hiding or concealing traps in plain sight, even without the use of chakra.
The three Kirigakure no Sato shinobi, ready to assault the lonely house deep in the woods, quickly readied their weapons and came silently to a halt. They hugged the walls around the door, and one of them hunched in the cover of a nearby tree as backup for the other two.
With more care than was absolutely necessary, but was probably prudent for the task, one of the shinobi by the door took a small bottle from a pouch on his belt, and drew a tiny wire from it. It came out covered in a thin film of oil, and the shinobi painstakingly applied it to the socket of the door handle, reapplying oil as needed. When he was done, he passed the bottle across to his associate, who carefully threaded the wire through the gap between the opposite side of the door and the frame, and dabbed oil on the hinges. They may have destroyed their element of surprise by stepping into those trip-lines, but they could still surprise whoever was inside by entering silently. As long as they weren't watching the front door. A long shot, maybe, but if an advantage could be exploited, it should be.
Tentatively, one of them tried the handle. It turned with a satisfying lack of squeak or grind, and the hinges moved with no more than a groan- which was barely audible, even with an ear pressed against it. The shinobi slowly returned the handle to its original position, and let the door fall most of the way inward before stopping it with a finger. No sign of anyone inside, so there may not have been anybody home- but since there had been traps set up in the surrounding area, they had to assume that anybody inside would be hiding.
They started off down the entry hall, stopping to check each doorway they came to in turn. The first one was a bathroom; empty. The second one…caused a stir. As the first one of them glanced into the room, he froze so suddenly that the two behind him, thinking he had been hit by some kind of trap, jumped back instinctively.
The lead shinobi, frozen in the doorway, apparently breaking from his trance, squinted into the room. He leaned in a little more, glanced around, and turned back to his colleagues. He indicated that the room was empty with a single, curt nod and took a measured step towards the main room. Assuming he must have thought he had stepped into a trap when he actually hadn't, the other two followed him obediently, and were surprised when he suddenly turned on them, knife glittering through the air.
The shinobi directly behind him realised what was happening, and realised that he was going to die. Though he had tried many times to find a way of avoiding that knife in training sessions, and suffered various injuries for his troubles, he had never managed to work out a way of successfully dodging it. It was a custom-made knife by a long-dead weapon smith, which altered the perceptions of whoever it was swung towards. It could confuse people just enough to make them be unable to use Bunshin, Kawarimi, or any other techniques which might be able to enable someone to avoid it. And though he had felt its effects many times before, facing a blow meant to kill instead of injure was something else altogether. He knew that even trying to move was pointless, he knew that his fate had been assured with the slightly sloppy slash that didn't seem like its wielder's style at all, and he knew that he wouldn't be missed by many people. He wasn't sure if that was entirely the knife meddling with his mind or his own weakness, but he was sure that he wouldn't be in pain for very long…
Taken by surprise, but already pulling strings of shuriken and kunai out of his belt pouches, the second shinobi doubled back and tried to understand what had just happened. He didn't remember seeing their leader talking to anybody who may have bribed him into betraying them, nor could he think of a reason why Hourai might have ordered him to do this. But one look at him, trying to free his own knife from the corpse of their late comrade made him think it may not have been quite so simple.
Shit.
Ino tried one last time to free the knife. After slicing cleanly through several ribs, it had become pinched between the severed halves of one and didn't want to budge. She might have been able to do it with her own body, but she just wasn't used to this one yet. It had only been a few seconds, and the sparkling of the knife had temporarily made her bleary.
The third invading shinobi was about five feet away, and looked like he was about a second from figuring out that she had hijacked his friend's body. Given that he was poised to throw about forty projectiles at her, she'd rather not give him that second.
She wasn't too sure about using techniques in a body she wasn't used to yet, but she was going to have to try. Giving up on the knife, she quickly made a few symbols with her hands and dived into the bedroom.
Shit! Someone's taken control of him!
He was already swinging his strings of projectiles when he saw his former comrade turn to look at him. He saw the familiar hard, scathing gleam in his eye, but it was a shadow of what it normally was. Then his hands moved.
It was kill or be killed now. The shinobi redoubled his efforts, lashing the strings like whips and sending a hail of steel down the hall. They briefly came in contact with several illusionary copies of their intended target, before continuing on and peppering the far wall with flying knives.
His former leader was nowhere to be seen. He had, most likely, slipped through the open door he had been standing next to.
Tossing aside the spent projectile cords, the remaining shinobi took a double-ended kunai from one of his belt pouches and crept down the hall, hugging the wall that would keep him hidden from view of the door. He considered taking "Hiken" from the corpse to his left, but grabbing the handle was probably akin to asking his enemy (whoever it was) to "please cut my hand off."
He hadn't known such humiliation since his days in the Academy. He couldn't remember how long it had been since he'd allowed himself to become this angry. What he did know was that it had been years since he'd had such a strong itch to kill someone. And he wasn't even sure if it was the woman from Konoha that he was dealing with.
One advantage he probably still had was his ability for blind fighting, which was considered quite high-level even in his village, which was famous for it.
Ino's first clue that something very dangerous was about to happen was a thick bank of fog wafting through the door. She had seen Kirigakure no Jutsu before, but didn't know of any countermeasure for it.
Taking a long-shot anyway, she attached an exploding seal (taken from her captive body's numerous pockets and bags) to a kunai and threw it into the floor where she assumed the door to be. It was hard to tell already, such was the density of the fog.
The tag detonated, sending a weak shockwave out from a point she couldn't even see anymore and, based on the lack of a scream or grunt of pain, failed to do anything to attacker number three.
She was quite happy with herself for being able to set up a few simple traps and stash her unconscious body (and some weapons) out of sight in the time it had taken the other shinobi to try and rush her, and she hoped she did a good enough job on the traps to deal with the shinobi by themselves.
A second small explosion and associated shockwave told her that the exploding tag she had put on the wall right next to the doorframe had gone off- still no sign of pain being inflicted.
Next, a trip-wire on the floor was snagged, dropping two kunai bandoliers to the floor. They weren't mean to cause injury, but to get snagged on the shinobi to give away his position long enough for Ino to find him by hearing alone. If any part of the strings hit him, she couldn't tell. Everything seemed to clatter to the floor impotently.
And, finally, the last trap was: her stolen body itself.
She had a kunai in each hand, and a determination to do some damage before she had to flee the body a second or two before being killed.
A small, nondescript noise directly in front of her made her lash out with the kunai before she realised she had been stupid to fall for the ploy so easily.
The brutal kick to the side of her head almost dislocated her jaw.
He felt his foot hit something solid and heard the satisfying thud of something heavy hitting the wall. Trying to push his advantage, he darted forward and lunged at the place the body would have fallen with both the daggers in his hands. He was slightly surprised to not find his target lying prone, but not so surprised that he didn't have a backup plan.
The expected counter attack came at him from the side, and caught him just below the ribs.
But that was fine.
Ino was taken aback when the shinobi she had just managed to stab burst like a water-filled balloon and cascaded over her hands. A second's warning let her use the momentum of her swing to turn herself around and hit the shinobi as he tried to kill her from behind. Again, he collapsed into water- but now Ino was dangerously off-balance and vulnerable. This was it. The shinobi she had been fighting- already stepping for the killing blow- had her.
It was time to leave.
His final moment of triumph turned to sour grapes when he heard that one word.
"Kai!"
...Crap, it was too late to stop now. Oh well, he had forced the puppeteer out of his comrade's body- merely at the cost of his comrade's life. He shared an agonising moment with his squad leader- clearly back to himself again- as he died, gasping painfully and grabbing at his familiar killer in a hopeless attempt to hang onto life. Then he was dead, and the only remaining Mizugakure no Sato shinobi remaining, astonished at his own lack of insight, realised that he had just wasted a valuable moment. A moment enough to allow the one that had been controlling his squad leader to come out of hiding and attack him while he was occupied.
Moving with instincts honed by many battles and years of training, he released his grip on his daggers and rolled to one side, barely managing to avoid a row of kunai which appeared in the floor and the body of his late squad leader, clearly thrown from an elevated position. He did, however, roll right into the widely-dispersed path of one of five shuriken- probably thrown to block his escape route.
The shuriken had been thrown hard enough to embed itself in the back of his left calf, only the tips of two points protruding from his skin. That meant he couldn't rely on his left leg too much, but it didn't mean he couldn't move or walk. He'd suffered through worse pain before.
Barking out a wordless sound that spoke only of pain and rage, he pivoted on his good leg, half-rose to his feet and accepted the figure descending on him with open arms.
As he let the fog saturating the house gradually dissipate, he reached up and caught both wrists of his enemy, who he recognised instantly: the woman from Konoha.
Having been denied the act of falling on him kunai-first, her legs started to drop in an accelerating arc like a pendulum towards his sternum. She put a little extra weight into it and hit him full in the chest knee-first. The blow impacted the ribs on his left side and didn't faze him in the slightest. She hadn't been able to put enough force into it, and the pain in his leg was overriding anything else she could have done to him at that moment.
Dangling by her wrists and struggling against his grip, the woman tried to knee him in the groin feebly a few times, without much success. He failed to notice that she was absolutely naked and that her chest was heaving from exertion- nor would he have cared had he noticed. Using sex appeal to disarm your opponent was an old trick of kunoichi, and he had been trained to not notice such things out-of-hand.
In a last-ditch effort to escape his grasp, the kunoichi tried to head butt him, but couldn't move enough to make contact. He decided to save her the trouble, smashing his own head into hers and nearly making her black-out.
He let go of her arms, letting her flop to the floor, head spinning. He reached for his last dagger and-
-Went flying out the window.