While the strength of the breaching sunlight through the ending winter clouds was nothing to note, even if for a fraction of a moment in time, the rogues noticed Hanasaku's figure dimming it out. The heaven piercing slam of Hanasaku's fist aimed at the weakest looking member – the creepy and pale, crazy hairdo rogue while the others scattered.
Coming from above, there was little to nothing Hanasaku could have done about her speed. She was as fast as gravity permitted her to be, in this case, too slow to crush her opponent from the get-go. That would have been a very good start to this assault but the woman merely flattened the ground where she aimed her strike, making it quake for miles around but generally managing to contain her strength without causing cosmic consequences. Something that was frequently a worry when Hanasaku was involved in a scuffle of any kind.
The creepy rogue, who was the target of Hanasaku's attack grinned at the miscalculated attack of his opponent. That was an amateurish mistake of someone who has never met Chestnut Hanasaku, a woman whose power was defined by her own poor understanding of the laws of the world in which she lived.
Two more copies of Hanasaku materialized from thin air in front and behind the rogue throwing a forceful cross his way. The body of the pale rogue shifted around like jelly. A rather gruesome sight, knowing that a living body was moving in such a manner. The shifting and twitching corpse then erupted into a bloody puddle, as if his body threw up its insides on the outside in a strangely implosive manner. The remains of the corpse liquefied in flames as every smallest drop turned to water before soaking the ground beneath it in an instant.
"I thought we told Hanasaku-sens…" Meiko spoke up surprised that her mentor could still use that ability when she accidentally had lost it during a training session when the team explained to Hanasaku that it was impossible to be at multiple places at once.
"Shhh…" Kiyomi hissed. "I think she forgot that. I can't believe there's a loophole like this in her abilities…"
"You did not need to cover for me with your clone, Hihei. You're the leader of our group." The man who was the original target of Hanasaku's before his body was substituted with an Elemental clone of his comrade spoke up.
"What are you talking about, man? If you die the Uchiha loses its worth to us so chill out." The man referred to as Hihei, a poncho-wearing man of western, Land of the Wind, descent spoke up. His tone was mellow and slow while his movements and techniques were anything but. Given that Hanasaku was pretty much as fast as she wanted to be out of ignorance, outracing her with cloning and substitution techniques was a notable sign of the man's strength.
"Oh well, those two got us into a real pickle!" the little dark skinned girl with the flowery headband placed her hands on her hips while leaning in an imposing manner towards the two rogues that attacked Meiko previously.
A pair of kunai flew in from the forest side, coming at the tall brawler who was among the pair that attacked Team Hokage previously. The man took a wild leap backward, avoiding the kunai entirely while keeping his eyes on the dark cover of the woods. Meiko appeared from the upper layer of the trees, leaping out with a flurry of shuriken covering her movements and forcing the man to move aside to avoid the cloud of shuriken flying his way.
By the time that the rogue heard the steel wire snapping sound it was too late. The dispensers Meiko placed in the cover of the woods unleashed a storm of senbon needles rushing at the man. The first kunai were merely meant to extend a line of wire attached to them to the other side, whereas the covering shuriken severed it on purpose to activate the dispensers. The brawler lit up his armor in blueish chakra flares cloaking it and protecting himself from harm. All senbon bounced off of him like sewing needles hitting a brick wall.
"It was foolish of you to chase us. Our first attack was to serve as a warning to prevent just this." The man addressed Meiko who landed out in the open and proceeded to unseal her father's sword immediately.
A bit further east, the talisman-using woman finally settled down after the mad initiation of the attack by Hanasaku but was immediately distracted by an all too familiar howling sound. The woman showed off her acrobatic skills by vaulting further back even though she could not fully see the conscious of her opponent floating at her.
A loud shriek alerted the woman once more but after diverting her attention for just a moment she realized that it was merely a hawk diving out from the forest and into the clearing. Here in the Land of Fire hawks preyed on both other large birds soaring above the treetops when in a forest and on small rodents and other similarly sized animals in clearings so the bird must have merely noticed a rodent rushing out from the forest into a crevice of the building behind the rogue.
Letting the hawk move behind her and outside her field of vision was a mistake. The bird lunged with its claws straight at the exposed back of the talisman user without alert or its signature shriek. In her state of heightened alertness and expecting an enemy of a whole other manner, the talisman-using rogue allowed herself to get scratched in the back before crushing the avian with a simple elbow strike.
"What a dangerous idea, transferring your conscious into something so brittle and slow. Then again, what other choices do you have after I showed you the gap between us last time?" the talisman woman taunted her opponent but her voice quickly went silent to investigate another odd sound – sizzling that came in from behind her.
A loud explosion temporarily interrupted all the separate battles in the territory around the black market point as all the criminals looked in shock at their comrade being swallowed by the blast of a bunch of explosive tags that the bird had previously placed on her.
"Omase!" the chakra cloak-using rogue yelled out. He must have known that a couple of explosive tags would only have killed his partner if the woman purposefully instructed her body not to augment itself through mental self-control. The uttering of the woman's name merely suggested that the man took over both battles and let his partner recover from whatever injuries she had sustained.
"What is your name, girl?" Omase coughed out while the dust and rubble raised by the blast cleared out, revealing her combat vest to be halfway torn up on the back and several busted areas on her head and nasty burns on her back. She was injured but hers were by no means the battle deciding injuries someone looked for in such a surprise attack.
"It doesn't matter. The bounty on my head won't pay for as much as a drink." Kiyomi replied while revealing herself, stepping out of the forest and into the clearing where she had more space to move around in, in case her opponent decided to respond with one of her talismans.
"I see… Not even a chuunin. We expected that much when we heard from a mercenary gang that a group of ninja are interested in this black market meeting." Omase smiled through the pain that still resonated in her body. Once she started actually fighting and moving around, that was likely to dull out when the adrenaline of the combat situation takes over.
"I have nothing to talk to you about. I'd rather just kill you." Kiyomi stated, taking an evasive fighting stance of hers, preparing to evade her opponent's attacks and look for her opening.
"I guess you really are an immature child if you still foster such hopes after the last time." Omase's expression soured and talismans slipped out from under her long black sleeves, filling her hands like wind fans.
"I have nothing to fear from small-timers that run away after they realize they bit more than they can chew." Kiyomi tried to piss the woman off. Even if she did not want to further talk to the rogue and would have rather just settled things with her, the Yamanaka needed her opponent to make the first move and, for that move to provide her with an opening, it needed to be one she invested a lot of momentum into.
"So I guess you're here to spoil our meeting, huh? That's a bummer…" Hihei, the poncho-wearing leader of the group with long dark hair scattering about addressed Hanasaku in a very mellow manner. It was more the tone children used when addressing their mothers when they told them to stop their playing and come back inside than a criminal talking to a Sannin.
"I don't really care about you guys, to be honest. I just need the body you're carrying back. A pair of Sharingan eyes is not something Konoha will let go of easily." Hanasaku replied while weighing the situation with her eyes. The face of this Hihei did seem familiar so he probably was in her custom edition of the Bingo Book however even the woman herself did not expect the mental clarity to recall much about him.
Breaking up the stare down, Hanasaku reached for her pouch and removed her Bingo Book to browse through it and look Hihei up.
"Huh? What is she doing?" the rogue Sin Eater pointed at Hanasaku in bemusement while looking at his group leader.
"I think she's… Like… Looking me up or something." Hihei laughed out in a gleeful, simian-like manner, not unlike that in which Meiko used to laugh in. "Are you sure you want to leave yourself open like this to all of us?" the man asked her while scanning through all of his comrades that surrounded Hanasaku.
"Oh? Yeah sure, go ahead. Don't talk though, reading good is difficult enough as it is…" Hanasaku waved her hand with indifference.
Hihei reached for his belt under his poncho, when he pulled out his hand, holding not a weapon but a bottle of water, his team launched their assault. The fat rogue with a standing ponytail rushed in first, he thrust his palm in a wild smack. The rogue probably expected this attack to be stopped so that he could continue his planned combination of strikes but Hanasaku just bounced off of his palm and flew right into the black market building, greatly damaging it in the process.
"Eh? She got hit? Is she dead?" the little flowery girl wondered looking gleeful but a bit confused about how easy it was to take down their opponent who was pretty much legendary for her skill and untamed power.
"I wouldn't count on it, little Yutsubu, Chitabo is pretty strong but not that strong." Hihei laughed after downing a good third of his water bottle and putting it back to where he pulled it from.
"I thought reading while you guys were talking was tough, but reading in that dark place while I'm being thrown around is even tougher." Hanasaku's voice echoed from inside the giant hole in the building. The woman walked out with her Bingo Book in hand, completely unfazed by the attack and having no visible injuries on her.
"Chitabo is out of your range now, you can attack too." Hihei looked at little Yutsubu who just nodded with enthusiasm and smacked her palms together. The little girl then extended them forward.
"Degeneration Art: Decay Bullet!" the little girl gruffed out through physical effort as black spheres with glowing and rotating particles inside of it, comprising a very enlarged and darkened model of an atom fired at Hanasaku in a rush.
The woman shut her book with a snap and then smacked the bullets aside, using it like a paddle to deflect the numerous projectiles. Oddly enough, it did not appear to do any damage whatsoever on her book or the environment where the spheres bounced off and detonated to.
"That's a lot of fancy words for such a weak technique," Hanasaku noted with a bland expression while focusing her stare on Hihei. "You're in my Bingo Book, Senju Hihei."
"There's no need to use that name." Hihei smiled while shyly trying to shake off the gravitas of his clan heritage being revealed. "I am kind of a black sheep in our clan, just like you. Just like little Yutsubu here."
"Stop calling me little, I'm fifty-four years old." Yutsubu puffed her cheeks. "It's demeaning."
"Huh? This little shrimp is older than me? I guess all of us age similarly…" Hanasaku sighed. "Still, you're pretty bad news if I, at some point, did not rip out your page trying to minimize the size of my Bingo Book for easier reading."
"Oh, I wouldn't say that…" Hihei blushed while shyly rubbing his foot against the ground. "It is more the company that I kept around. You've heard of them, haven't you? The rejects… I'm surprised they haven't reached out to you. In terms of being rejected by one's clan and someone's strength being entirely misunderstood by this broken, traditionalist clan system, you're the person to recruit."
"I've heard a whisper here and there. The Root was very secretive about them, even to their Hokage." Hanasaku admitted. It appeared that the heated fighting was only transpiring between her students and the two rogues they were engaged with whereas the situation had cooled off into a state of heated staredowns in the main battlefield.
"That is odd…" Hihei pouted. "I guess even the rejects are afraid of you. Guess it would be a hassle for Tenma to keep controlling your mind all the time if you refused to join them."
"So you're still with them? Whoever these rejects are?" Hanasaku wondered.
"Oh, no. They would never allow me to do something like this, kill an Uchiha just to pawn off their body out in the open. They use their own channels, much more secretive. Isn't it hilarious how both nukenin and village ninja know of the black market points yet have their own secrets from one another? The black market is a charade, like a bridge that connects us…" Hihei looked at the sky with a longing glare.
"So why do you need the body? Just to pawn it off?" Hanasaku wondered.
"Oh, no. I guess you wouldn't know. Nobody in the village would dare to tell you about it, they'd be too scared of what someone with your power would do after they found out. The key to the Rinnegan is through the combination of both the Senju cells and the Sharingan." Hihei appeared to be more passionate when talking about the exalted eye technique than talking about anything else.
"That old thing?" Hanasaku twisted the corner of her lips up as she struggled to recall where she had heard the name. "I don't think it is worth the hassle of transplantation."
Hihei laughed with a warm and genuine laughter. "Ah, yes. I forgot you have actually killed someone with those very same eyes. I must say, the power of a God is a bit too much to resist to anyone lacking your particular mutation of the Senju gene."
"Stop chatting with this woman and kill her! We'll be lucky if this stupid bitch didn't already scare away the people in this building." Yutsubu flipped out on her leader. Hihei appeared to be slightly thrown aback by the sudden nature of his comrade's anger and even leaned back in intimidation a bit. After taking a moment to regain his composure he then grinned.
"Come on, Yutsubu, she's a fellow Senju. Not even the stiffly stifferson tree using person but a genetic freak like us. Isn't that kind of fun?" he tried to reason with the elder woman in a little girl's body.
"You're too much of a goof, Hihei." Yutsubu crossed her arms over her chest.
"Oh, come on, even if the black market folks in this building run away in fear, Nejin can perform the transplant himself using their equipment and the facilities in this building. You just need to chill." Hihei laughed.
The giant rogue, named Chitabo, separated from his peers, encouraged by his earlier success at slapping the Konoha Sannin, the silent giant attacked. He swung his hand from high up downward in the squishing motion. The size of his palm was definitely sufficient to crush Chestnut Hanasaku where she stood if she was someone of such feeble strength.
The man's palm completely swallowed up Chestnut Hanasaku, smashing her up to the ground and creating a powerful, ground shifting pulse of earthquakes that got stronger the further it traveled along.
The massive palm jerked a little, then flew back violently, throwing Chitabo's entire body off balance as Chestnut Hanasaku appeared from under it, completely unscathed if one ignored the dirt on her from being shuffled to the ground.
"Wind Style: Ozone BB!" the woman chanted out, throwing a strong roundhouse kick and fired off a strong, slicing wind projectile. The Wind Release projectile dug in deep into Chitabo's body, making the man grunt in pain and pressure that the concentrated wind blade applied to his body. The blade forced the man backward as it pressed on and failed to cut into Chitabo's skin but the man did not move either.
The struggle of the two forces working against each other started to have the oddest chain reactions with Chitabo's body blurring and appearing distorted. Light began to bend all around his clash with Hanasaku's technique and the silhouette of the man extended into black spaghetti like contours that extended a great distance in the dimming and bending light making him look like a man drawn by an experimenting abstract artist.
In the oddest case imaginable, Hanasaku's projectile simply passed right through Chitabo without leaving a cut or a visible injury. It merely stopped cutting into the man's body and phased right through it.
"Chitabo takes pride in his inability to be accelerated. I was a little worried there when the light started bending it all started to grow dim for a second." Hihei laughed out.
What an odd troupe of misfits this rogue had assembled. It may have been a while since Hanasaku had an opportunity to stretch out like this.
Author's Note: Wow, that's a lot of new named characters... Some of you may have noticed that don't really like naming characters that much. That's mostly because I dislike the manner in which manga and anime tend to name them, having characters just namedrop them in the most unnatural manner at the end of the sentence. Most of the time dropping the name of that character does not even make sense in the context too! Still, an even greater pain than to work someone's name into a dialogue that sounds natural is referring to unnamed characters in all those convoluted ways that identify the character for the audience so I had to commit a sin to save myself from that trouble.
Also, it may be way too late to drop this but I am aware that Senju + Uchiha does not = Rinnegan, it has more to do with the reincarnations of Asura and Indra but I really dislike that whole part of the story and the backstory of the world is one of those things that I retconned in this story (even though my own backstory is ambiguous and, most likely, wrong to the way it happened as well). I find it that backstories of the world work best when they are hinted at but not fully explored, like namedropping and telling the audience a little about the Sage of Six Paths is fine but not derailing the entire story for the sake of complicating it even more needlessly. As far as this story is concerned, Senju of certain genetic make-up + Uchiha of certain genetic make-up = Rinnegan. Sorry if some of you expected the whole "You are secretly reincarnated ninja Jesus" twist...
I hope my journey of learning to write and working through cloudy thoughts by spilling a bunch of Naruto-related stuff on digital paper continues to entertain you. If you got this far - thanks for reading 3
