Naruto crossed his index and middle fingers in the Shadow Clone Jutsu hand seal formation, multiplying himself a handful of times. Minato tightened the grip on his kunai, having replaced the one he had just lost and the two prepared to engage the enemy together. Despite being faced with a momentous team-up, Danzo looked thoroughly unimpressed by his opposition.
"Is this the only thing you can do?" he wondered with a dry and bitter remark meant for Naruto.
"I recall it having worked the last time I tried it, you know!" Naruto cheeked the old veteran after creating a couple of dozens of Shadow Clones all around him, further muddling up the chaos of this engagement.
"You're a failure, Naruto, even if you are a hero to the people, they don't know you've failed in your heroic theatrics against Sasuke. They don't know that because you weren't important back then…" Danzo taunted Naruto when the clones all rushed at him almost wishing to die. A couple of them attacked Danzo head-on, providing the others with the opportunity to skid around the veteran ninja and surround him, baring their fangs like mad dogs looking to maul the hate-spewing enemy.
One clone took a bold chance by attacking Danzo all by his lonesome. The bandaged ninja turned to protect against the attack while the Sharingan orbs implanted over his arm raced across the fighting stage, keeping close track of all the clones around him and preparing Danzo for a timely counterattack. The clone submerged in a cloud of smoke after a popping sound, revealing himself to be Minato while the future Fourth blinked away in mid-offensive.
A strong and forceful push hit Danzo square in the back from Minato having used the Body Flicker to move behind the veteran who stumbled right into the combination of four Naruto clones rolling into the fray. The four all shot their feet up at the same time, sending Danzo flying. The four simultaneously shouted out syllables to Naruto's name while assumedly the real Naruto flew in from below, using the boost of another clone as support for his rolling aerial foot drop right into Danzo's head.
"Uzumaki Barrage!" Naruto completed the chant of his technique himself while immense pressure resonated through Danzo's body. Just as Naruto smirked to himself, beginning to feel proud of the beatdown he laid on the smack-talking enemy, Danzo's body faded away and Naruto dropped on his knees unceremoniously, struggling to balance himself after the thing he could have sworn he just kicked just disappeared from existence.
"What the fuck!?" Kawaki's voice boomed from further away, Naruto and Minato turned around in sync, just to witness Danzo having slipped behind the boy and grabbed hold of him. Something was wrong, Kawaki should have been tough enough to slip out of Danzo's grip but the boy's resistance appeared to be somewhat half-assed.
"Do not resist. It is within your best interests to serve Konoha and I am the only one who knows what's best for it. It matters not where you've come from, Konoha is your future and using your power to serve Konoha is the best way to achieve that!" Danzo whispered his venomous words right into Kawaki's ear. Something was wrong, the more the bandaged shinobi spoke, the more Kawaki's resistance faded.
"Serve… Konoha…" Kawaki mumbled.
"Danzo-sama! That jutsu…!" Fuu turned at the scene, despite his own involvement in clashing with Kushina and Kiyomi being in its heat.
"Indeed I had planned on using it to manipulate the other Kage during the Kage Summit but their cooperation is meaningless compared to the potential of this child. If Konoha, if the Root can secure this child and his secrets, it won't matter if those old fools cooperate or not. They will be hostages to our whim anyway. Peace will be ensured, most importantly – prosperity!" Danzo barked back at his subordinate and, seemingly, everyone present in the engagement.
"Shit!" Naruto cursed. "I was certain I hit him, I could feel my foot connect to his skull and… Then he just vanished, you know."
"It appears Danzo-san possesses more abilities than we've known. What's worse, he is in no rush to educate us on what exactly those abilities are." Minato grit his teeth as well. "If I had to guess, one of his abilities lets him escape damage, the other one appears to be capable of subtle mind control of sorts. However, judging by the reaction of Danzo's allies – it must be very limited in terms of use. It is unlikely we'll need to worry about it again."
"I see… You're pretty amazing, Future Dad!" Naruto wiped his nose with the sleeve of his tracksuit.
Further to the north of the future father and son, Meiko placed her hands out in front of her, letting the Reactor Gauntlets generate another Reactor Breath blast, albeit far weaker than before. Torune leaped aside but some brunt of the blast caught him and tossed him to the side. The half-bare Aburame grunted in pain as his flight got broken up by a sudden appearance of a rather thick branch he hit haphazardly without busting through it. After flattening against it like a pancake, Torune fell down face-first, covered in bruises over his purple nano-insect armor.
Kotaro's own hands went through a collection of hand seals as well as Minato's teammate breathed in and out, unleashing a volley of smaller fireballs covering a wider range and potentially threatening all of the enemy combatants at the same time. Fuu caught a nasty fireball to the chest and skid back through the dirt. A burning puppet fell out from Fuu's hands with a paper tag attached to its forehead, spelling out "Curse" that promptly faded from the white paper, leaving nothing but a blank.
Torune evaded the fireballs directed at him and put his hands together. When the Aburame prodigy once more extended his hands at the direction of the enemy, a solid cloud of nano-insects swarmed from between his hands. With a mere blow, Torune spread the rinkaichu he controlled all across the battlefield, drowning the ring of space underneath the treetops out in his ink-colored smokescreen.
Meiko slammed her Reactor Gauntlets together, sparking what little chakra her ninja tool had stored so far after firing her last Reactor Breath to expel it all in a puny blast shockwave that was just enough to push the swarming insects to pass around her. Meiko tried to gander at the murky smokescreen of death-bringing rinkaichu to see how her teammates had dealt with the combination attack but she couldn't see a damned thing. It was only when Torune's Poison Mist Jutsu faded out that Meiko saw Kiyomi panting while holding her limp arm by her side, corrupted with the violet rot. Minato had it the worst – the young man was down on one knee and panting with sweat running down his face as the poison of the nano-insects had managed to overwhelm a critical patch of his body.
Kotaro wheezed as well, having just been released from the Mind Puppet Switch curse that Fuu had placed him in. What seemed like a standard long-range offensive to keep the enemy away and at the same time burn them off of their stamina and will to fight became a drastic turn for the situation of the two teams.
"Nice work, Torune…" Danzo nodded. "The Fourth shouldn't last long with this much of his body affected."
"I've also cleared the field for you of those clones, Danzo-sama." Torune acknowledged the praise. "I am glad to see that Fuu-senpai was able to cancel out his jutsu at perfect timing too, our coordinated training didn't go to waste, it seems."
"Shoot, we can't get in close at all…" Meiko grit her teeth as the situation was beginning to seem quite dire. This entire exam was meant to just be fun and games, both she and Kiyomi were meant to be so far beyond the level of a Chuunin to make this promotion an easy grab and yet… Yet again everything was going to shit.
"Meiko…" Kiyomi wanted to calm her teammate down but she only made the matters worse. Just a glance at the case of heavy eyelids and the skyrocketing fever that Meiko could sense all the way from where she was only made her more desperate.
"This is just what happened to Mana too…" Meiko grumbled. "These sorts of situations, things going wrong all the time but she was always by herself, always working alone because we weren't there by her side. Because we didn't get promoted like she was. It was the pressure, it all must have gotten to her and… I won't just sit back and waste our promotion again. There's only one thing we can do right now and that's to fight on, screw precaution and being careful. Hold on, Mana… Next time things get rough, I'll be right there by your side!"
Naruto turned to Meiko with shock and fearful respect gleaming off of the young man's face. He chuckled to himself before getting control over the butterflies of excitement in his stomach and pounding his own palm as an expression of the feelings he didn't want inhibiting the anger his fists were meant to deliver.
"You're right, I've been holding something back for a dire moment but there's no more point, is it?" Naruto smiled while a pillar of booming orange chakra burst from underground and rustled the young man's clothes while his eyes turned yellow and his irises turned more toad-like. Orange markings formed around Naruto's eyes. "Sage Mode!" he declared.
"Hmph… So, the power that the Hero of the Hidden Leaf used to earn his title rears its ugly head." Danzo hissed. The appearance of Sage Mode riled him up, even a spy in nature whose heart was lost decades ago could not disguise that.
"There's nothing disgusting about the power that Pervy Sage left behind for me to save the village with, you know!" Naruto declared, pointing his finger at Danzo as a declaration that he'd use all of his channeled Sage Mode power to defeat the accomplished veteran.
"It is the source of the misplaced trust that Konoha has placed on your shoulders, boy. As such, there is only disgust to be found in it. The only way to alleviate the pressure falsely placed on your shoulders as the Hero of the Hidden Leaf is to alleviate the weight of your head at the same time." Danzo replied. "Any great power that the Root does not control is a potential security threat and I have devoted my entire life to eliminating security threats rearing its fangs against my village."
"Your village?" Naruto's mouth twitched in rage at that statement. "Konoha doesn't belong to you, you know! It isn't yours to protect because it needs to be protected from you!"
"I had hoped to reserve my Izanagi to show just how misplaced and pointless your Sage Mode truly is, it is a pity that you've forced my hand at using it earlier." Danzo sighed and then bit his thumb, working through hand seals.
Meiko's Reactor Gauntlets lit up with chakra flares that would have incinerated it had the gauntlets been just blocks of wood and the chakra been just ordinary fire, however, the flares did not incinerate or destroy the gauntlets, but instead, sealed them away. From what had been sealed away got born a new power, that of a two-edged short sword that Meiko coated with chakra immediately. The coating took a stronger and stronger effect until it had nearly doubled the width of the blade as well as its length.
"Summoning Jutsu!" Danzo chanted while placing his bleeding thumb firmly onto the forest floor and covering the ground-level in smoke. A towering elephantine, tapir-like beast of dark orange fur covering the upper parts of its body while its lower body displayed its tiger-like strikes proudly bore its tusks at the enemy as it loomed behind its master, ready to jump into for the assist.
Sage Naruto blitzed right into Danzo's face with a fist reared back. A blow of unmatched power socked Danzo right in the jaw, throwing the veteran back into his tapir titan and stumbling the epic-sized beast that crashed the Forest of Death around him with its mere motion. Not feeling content with just decking Danzo once, Naruto disappeared and flashed right up to Torune. Shaking, the Root member turned around with there being no need for his mask to be removed in order for his terror to become apparent.
"Touch me, Hero of the Hidden Leaf, I dare you…" Torune tried to taunt Naruto into falling for his nano-insect trap, knowing full-well that if he attempted to touch Naruto himself, the Toad Sage would just appear behind him in a blink, having a complete advantage in speed and destructive power.
Naruto's back-handed fist flashed right up to Torune's face but froze inches short of it. Torune's entire life must have flashed through his eyes before the Aburame prodigy could breathe again and he took a slow stumble back. That was when invisible pressure malformed Torune's face in an overwhelming force of impact. An all-encompassing power that blasted right through his mask, reducing it to just meaningless plastic pieces scattered on the floor while the Aburame flew like a rag across the battlefield, crashing through the trees on the other side of the area.
Fuu's hand stopped in mid-motion when the hand of Sage Naruto suddenly grabbed his wrist, having moved faster than Fuu's eye could track. The Sage flipped Fuu over his head and then slammed the man back-first into the ground, leaving a crater double the size of the man before raising his fist and driving it downward, stopping it just inches shy of crushing Fuu's chest cavity, leaving the rib-busting job for the invisible force that followed each blow he made and made his punches seemingly impossible to dodge due to its presence. Fuu cried out in pain but his gurgling got drowned out by the rumbling of the forest that cried out in pain.
Naruto placed his hands by his side, forming a pair of bright and turbulent, windmill shuriken shaped Rasengan and then swung both of them at the stumbled titanic beast that he had just sent Danzo smashing into, encompassing the entire thing in a sphere of howling destruction following the Rasenshuriken in their wake, a duo of colliding, twisting destruction of merciless wind that cut every single cell found within its range of destruction on a cellular level.
"B-Baku…" Danzo lamented the loss of his beast from an entirely different location than he was earlier. Sage Naruto turned to Danzo with a new set of eyes. Eyes that were less confused and devastated by the lack of knowledge he had of the enemy's abilities, but eyes that were capable of seeing through Danzo's technique, a pair of eyes that could shed light on the two closed Sharingan eyes on Danzo's arm that were previously open and a dead side of his face that brimmed with chakra earlier.
"Those eyes, you know." Naruto raised his arm and pointed at Danzo's modified arm. "Those belonged to Uchiha you've killed, didn't they? They're responsible for that invincibility jutsu you're using, aren't they?"
"They belonged to meddlesome traitors who have served their village one favor that redeemed their despicable bloodline," Danzo replied with much more weight to his tone. The turning tides of battle were now beginning to get to him. At last, Team Hokage and Team Minato felt like they were getting somewhere.
Meiko charged through the chaos of the raging battle, she pointed her sword at Danzo in a straightforward charge. The veteran prepared himself for his close-range defense, feeling more strain in his body than he was used to but ready to fight for his vision of Konoha to be protected and the one being brought to life. Danzo's mouth gapped in shock and blood streaked from his mouth when Meiko's chakra coat thinned out around her blade, extending its length drastically and stabbing through Danzo's chest earlier than the injured shinobi had thought the attack would come. Danzo disappeared as if he had never been there, to begin with, and met Meiko one on one, throwing a pair of palm strikes at the young lady while dancing around the shifting shape, length, and width of her sword.
A palm strike hit Meiko square in the chest, sending her sliding off and crashing down below to the forest floor. The blacksmith swung her sword away from her chest, revealing herself to have used the chakra coated blade to cushion the blow and take no damage from it. Danzo just sneered at the redhead youth in disdain, quietly commending that she had learned something of value from her previous engagement hand-to-hand with him.
Kiyomi coughed up. She could see the nano-insect coverage expand drastically on the surface of her skin and judging by the streak of nasty effects she felt deep down at the moment, she didn't think she'd even survive a full skin of those buggers, meaning that she had to find a way to stop those insects before it got to that. Right now, she needed to provide her side with all the use she could before she couldn't fight anymore, the kunoichi went hard to work on her hand seals.
"Earth Style: Travelling Pillar!" Kiyomi chanted while slamming her foot on the ground and forcing a sharp pillar of rock burst from underground, one that she'd drive her foot into and push onward to Danzo. The bandaged shinobi just observed the attack coming at him as the pillar moved in straight line homing in on the ancient tree he took respite on. "Burst! Wind Style: Great Breakthrough!" Kiyomi slammed her hands together, revealing a sealing glyph on the stone pillar.
"She sealed a jutsu into another jutsu!?" Danzo's eyes shot open in surprise when the top of the stone pillar blew up like an erupting volcano, except, instead of hot lava showers, Kiyomi's stone pillar sent a concentrated stream of mighty winds right at Danzo. The veteran took a bountiful leap to the side, avoiding the stream altogether due to the concentrated beam-like shape of it. It was only then that Danzo noticed a small paper tag floating beside his face, the rest of the explosive tags that Kiyomi's Great Breakthrough had scattered were easier to spot after the first one.
A chain resonance of explosions colored the exposed skies that showed the full beauty of full-moon after Baku had leveled the entire area worth of trees with its giant buttocks when emerging on the battlefield. The explosions covered up Danzo entirely and rustled the old and thick trees of the Forest of Death as well, causing a great downfall of burning up leaves that were reduced to ashes by the flames before they reached the ground.
"Nice, Kiyomi-san!" Minato coughed up a mass of black, rotten bile from his mouth as his corruption spread far faster and stronger, compared to Kiyomi's and Kotaro's. His condition would be the one to deteriorate to the point of no return and awful consequences the fastest so there was not a single ninja amongst Team Hokage or Team Minato that wasn't worried about the leader of Team Minato.
"No. Danzo's slipped away again, keep your eyes open. It was a nice effort though, his chakra has taken a massive dip, you know…" Sage Naruto saw through the coverage of smoke and wooden shrapnel raining from above. More and more he observed Danzo's Izanagi being used, the more flaws to the jutsu he found. Not to mention that only six Sharingan remained open on Danzo's arm at that point… Although it was doubtful if Danzo had the chakra for six more Izanagi uses.
The battle might have been approaching its climax, though, if Naruto's gut nudged him the right way, it would provide ample more twists and surprises before it was over.
