A/N: There's been some confusion as to who exactly Yoku is, so let me clarify that she is my very own OC. She has no connection to Sakura whatsoever, apart from the fact that she attempted to learn medical jutsu from her. Yoku passed from our dimension into the Naruto one. If you read the fic attentively from the very beginning until now, you would know the whos, whys, and hows.
Hope this helps, and enjoy the battle with the Nibi. It might be quite a long chapter, because I'm going to include the entire battle in it.
~*~ Chapter 24 - A Two Tailed Battle ~*~
With my heart beating at a pace I cannot even keep up with, the travel process to wherever it is we're going seems to take ages. Finally, the smoke disappears and my blindfold is removed. The same is done to Yume-chan. I am surprised that she does not bitch about the surprise travel, but given the circumstances, it is somewhat understandable...
We are standing in a dark tunnel. To be honest, it looks more like a sewer than a tunnel, and the only light seems to be coming from my left. I can hear running water.
"We're going to trap her," Hidan tells me. For once, he's completely serious. "We'll be chasing her until she's trapped in there." he points in the direction of the light source. "She'll think she's won, but that's where you come in. These walls were made hundreds of years ago, so they can sustain quite an amount of power. The two of us will strengthen them more with chakra. They can sustain Deidara's explosions, so they should hold for your battle with this cat."
"What if they don't?" I ask.
"Then we chase her to another enclosure," he says simply, "You have to kill her before she can escape. She can already go into her Tailed Mode, so you have to be prepared."
That's just it, you see, I think to myself, we're not prepared.
"Go as near to that entrance as you can without being seen," Kakuzu tells us, "Hidan and I will prevent her from escaping as much as we can, but it is essential that you finish her off as soon as possible."
"Good luck," Hidan tells us, and both of them disappear.
Yume-chan and I are both dead quiet as we walk to the edge of the tunnel, and stop where the shadows stop. The only sound it the gentle pit pat of our shoes in the shallow water as we walk, and the gently running water in the massive room in front of us.
"We should link the moment she's trapped," I tell Yume-chan. She only nods.
It doesn't take long before we hear footsteps underneath us, approaching fast. Seconds more and Yugito appears. She stops, turns and faces Hidan and Kakuzu.
While they chatter on, Yume-chan and I form our chakra, push it out from our bodies, form threads and connect. The tattoos on our wrists start glowing slightly, and my mind starts whirling with battle strategies.
We should have set traps, I scold myself.
Images flash before my eyes, but none of them seem appropriate right this minute. I start panicking again. But then I see a few scenes that we can use.
We can each make ten Clones of ourselves, and divide the chakra between each Clone to mask our location, and attack like that.
No. I feel Yume-chan's mind pressing against mine. Her chakra is too strong. She'll identify us in seconds.
Well, her natural element is fire, so if I can just - no, I realise, I have to reserve that power for when she strikes with her fireballs. Come on! I yell at myself, secretly cursing Itachi-san for not allowing us to practice this beforehand.
Hidan talks for several seconds longer than I thought he would, most likely giving us more time to prepare, but none of the images flashing about behind my eyelids are of any help. No one in our family has ever fought a Bijuu, so none of the images passed down through the generations will be of much help to us. We'll have to figure this one out on our own.
When Hidan signals for us to start attacking, I will make a Water Prison. It's supposed to be absolutely inescapable for humans, so it might hold her for a minute or two. I feel Yume-chan agree with this plan.
"You're up!"
With a rush of panic, I form more chakra inside my as fast as I can, form the necessary hand seals and say, "Suiton, Suirou no jutsu!"
I watch as the water around her covers Yugito and imprisons her. In her few seconds of surprise, Yume-chan had jumped from our hiding place and started going about the entire room in a blur, setting up booby-traps all around the place. I cover the wall I'm at, setting exploding tags and hidden kunai's as fast as I can.
"Did you really think an attack like this would contain me?" she asks. She seems to have gotten over her surprise, and I urge myself to work faster.
As I go about setting my traps, I notice something hidden in the wall, through a thin crack. I take a second to identify it, and grin as a plan comes to mind. As I work, I identify more and more of the familiar substance. The wall is covered in it. In the second that I took, Yugito gave a great yell that turned into a cat's roar as, in seconds, her skin tore and she turned into a great big black and blue cat.
"Holy shit," I hear Yume-chan swear, and I agree. This was more than what I signed up for. The Nibi takes up almost half of the room itself, barely giving space for battle. The power of her chakra seems to suffocate me. I can feel the threads from mine and Yume-chan's chakra begin to thin from our lack of concentration.
I ball my hands into tight fists to regain myself, and I imagine the battle strategy I just formulated. I feel Yume-chan agree with it. She starts distracting the Nibi, and I help her, while we make a few tweaks to the plan to make it fool-proof.
"You really think you're going to defeat me like this?" Yugito's voice echoes from the cat's mouth.
Both Yume-chan and I decide to simply ignore her trash-talk and focus on the plan. A half-second long glance at Hidan and Kakuzu show that they aren't impressed either. Then they are in for one hell of a surprise.
It is difficult to maintain our cover attack, and I get thrown against the wall several times. My head throbs painfully, but I preservere. If I can go through a lifetime of banging my head against a wall if I'm angry at myself, I can survive this.
Yugito doesn't use her fireballs once. She evades our attacks with both of her tails, and our booby traps with her claws. When she is standing halfway over a thin stream of water, Yume-chan keeps her looking up while I make two Water Clones, each of which jump the minute they are formed, stabbing her in the stomach on two different places.
It hurts her, making her growl angrily, but not enough for her to become weaker. She gives a great swipe with one of her claws and catches me on the right shoulder.
"Shit!" I whisper, unable to do more because of the lump in my throat. I try to use medical chakra and my special ability with Yume-chan at once, but I nearly sever the link. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Yume-chan and I both attack her from the front, driving her backward, but slowly. The pain on my shoulder is nearly unbearable, so much so that my arm becomes all but numb. I have to manage the dual-bladed sword with only my left hand now. I start feeling a sharp pull in my strength.
When the Nibi is nearly against the wall, I use the water leaking down from the ceiling to make three more Water Clones just as Yume-chan makes Shadow Clones underneath her. As I had hoped, she jumped to avoid the Shadow Clones, just high enough for my Water Clones to reach her. I send them toward her, each stabbing her with a kunai in each hand. As the Nibi tries to get them off by moving around, the knives slice her open. She gives a great big growl. Our needed distraction.
I nod at Yume-chan, signalling her. She comes toward me. We each throw a kunai with an exploding tag into the cracks in the wall.
"Suiton, Suirou no jutsu!" I say, and a Water Prison forms around us just as Dei-kun's clay explodes from inside the walls.
The heat is unbelievable. It swallows the Nibi whole. For several seconds, she starts firing her own fireballs, but she hurts too much for her to aim properly. She thrashes inside the flames, trying to escape them, but to no avail.
Finally, the earth vibrates underneath me as she falls sideways and onto the ground.
"It's over?" Yume-chan asks from within my Water Prison. I release the technique.
"Seems like it," I reply. I release the connection between us. It's sapping my chakra too quickly. My legs tremble from excitement and panic, and now finally relief after it all.
She nears the body of the giant cat. It's massive, and seems even bigger up close. She stands proud and tall and kicks the creature on the spine.
"Bitch."
Before I know it, I am wrenched into the air and thrown hard on the ground. Arm sized teeth are framed about my vision as the cat's ear-splitting growl fill what is left of the building. I am screaming worse than I could ever remember doing. Fear and panic is all I know.
"KAKUZU-SAMA!" I scream, only realising that I had done so after it already happened.
The cat stops growling, and falls over once more, hundreds of black tendrils sticking out all over its body. There is blood everywhere. After a few moments the black tendrils retreat into the stitched opening in Kakuzu's arm. He is standing mere feet from me.
I mainly use my left arm to get back up. A wave of dizziness washes over me. I just want to sit down. But I need to know where Yume-chan is. With my blurry vision, I finally locate her in the far corner of the room, unconscious.
Together, with my shaking legs and blurry vision, I fall to the ground and pass out.