"Ugh! This is getting annoying! Rotation!" Neji exclaimed in frustration as he allowed a rotating dome of chakra envelop him while all of the Dark Naruto clones attacking him flew off of him as if flung skyward, dispelling almost immediately after the collision with Neji's defensive Byakugan technique.
Meiko charged in, slashing her Reactor Gauntlets all over the place and leaving just clouds of smoke around her. She had taken the fact that Neji pronounced a shortened version of the name of his jutsu as a sign that he was noticing the chakra strain and beginning to feel troubled by the ceaseless assaults of the clones.
"I always knew Naruto to be energetic, but this is getting ridiculous!" Tenten complained while pulling on a few steel strings and setting a complicated web of steel wire in the process, all raised up through a handful of puny strings. Both clones that were airborne as well as those that intended to rush at her from below got stuck in the trap and could just grunt in the discomfort of trying to move a muscle through being bound by steel wire fully capable of rending flesh if the contact was crude enough.
"I am sorry, team, Meiko, I wish I could help you in this predicament but alas, I am held down by my mortal coil!" Rock Lee clenched his fist in front of him with burning passion in his eyes that, if anyone asked Meiko, should have been enough to put him back on his feet through sheer willpower alone, but wasn't.
"Reactor Breath!" Meiko slammed both of her gauntlets against each other, placing the two storage seals on the center of each glove right by the other so that they could share the combined pool of chakra in creating the fireball. While the storage seals flared with chakra stored inside, which it transformed into Fire Release chakra, Meiko's blowing gave the technique the life it needed to blow a group of clones up while shaking the foundation of the whole building in the process.
"Are you insane? You'll bring every clone in the building to us!" Neji complained, turning his pulsing Byakugan eyes at every nearby stairway to see if his haunting prediction hadn't come true.
"I dunno, I think we've made a dent in their numbers…" Meiko clapped the Reactor Gauntlets together, making the storage seals on them cough up puny sparks, trying to emit more searing masses of energy from chakra which simply wasn't there.
"I wouldn't be so certain…" Neji looked around with a grim expression. "The clones have turned their attention elsewhere, it seems, but who knows to what exactly."
"Kiyomi…" Meiko mumbled to herself.
"Might be," Neji nodded, "Or they might be pooling by the exits, knowing that we'll have to leave eventually. Let's just hope that's the case, we can just bust through somewhere else in that case…"
While Meiko doubted it would be this easy, Neji didn't look like he dismissed such a possibility outright. He must have incorporated the fact that Naruto he knew wasn't all that bright, meaning that a corrupted version of him would be similarly dim. From what Meiko could put her finger on, this Dark Naruto really didn't have too much resting in the belfry storage, talking some mad ramblings about hatred directed at him by everybody, or whatever…
"We need to pick Kiyomi up. Can you see where she is?" Meiko insisted.
"Not at the moment, no. There does seem to be a familiar flare of physical chakra down in the ward where the clones ambushed us but I'm not even sure that's Kiyomi. It's like her spiritual side had left this world altogether." Neji examined the lower floors with his ocular jutsu.
"She must have placed her mind inside one of the clones…" Meiko snapped her fingers. "She's always been clever like that!"
"If she has put her mind inside one of the clones, then she is no priority. The task of the greatest importance is still to find the pills and get out of here!" Neji declared. "The clones are all pooling toward the first floor, they're homing in on the other team of genin."
"We should go help them…" Meiko pointed her thoughts out before placing her index on her lower lip and looking up. "Wait… No…"
"M-Meiko?" Tenten scratched her head.
"Let her figure it out…" Neji closed his eyes with a solemn face.
"If you just said that our priority is the pills and evacuation, in that case, we need to go at the opposite direction from the clones, the top floor…" the Reactor Gauntlets on Meiko's hands lit up with bright, azure light which then spiraled around her hips before fading away, leaving the blacksmith's hands bare again. With the newly gained freedom in her hands, Meiko snapped her fingers.
"We've lost precious time while you were standing here and figuring this out," Neji sighed before opening his eyes and turning toward the nearest ward. "Quick, search for pills. I'll try to rest my eyes a bit, it will be a long night, after all…"
With an energetic nod, Tenten and Meiko flickered into the room by their right and began searching it for pills. Rock Lee mirrored the lively nod of the girls but then he realized that he was a bit too tied down by his injuries to join them.
"I… Will then remain here and stand… Sit guard!" he declared without missing a beat or squandering any of the energy he'd have mustered up.
"Yes, do that…" Neji shrugged without feeling any difference toward what his incapacitated teammate would do while the others search for pills.
Meiko tore through the storage furniture, pulling the entire drawers out and flipping the beds, despite there being little chance in them containing anything of value, let alone any medical food pills if the drawers contained none. It didn't take long for an entire pack of red medical food pills to find its place by Meiko's side, attached to her belt by her pouch. It wasn't single for too long as blue and yellow pills in varied quantities joined them and before long the grand total of the medical supplies was too much for Meiko to hold in her grasp. It was not a matter of weight she could carry, more so of space she could hold in her possession.
"I can give you some storage seals, you know." Tenten played with a purple scroll that fit nicely inside her hand, even going as far as to extend it to Meiko. Judging by the scroll-shaped belt around her waist, she sealed off a decent bunch of pills she had found herself.
"Please, storage seals are my thing," Meiko grinned and dropped the pills onto the nearest unflipped bed before reaching up and unzipping her tracksuit to show a bunch of armor pieces underneath it. "This isn't just normal armor, you know, each piece is stored to the brim with weaponry and ninjutsu of their own."
"Okay, big shot, how many storage scrolls do you have?" Tenten placed her hands over her hips, feeling challenged and offended even by the implication that this genin from a different universe implied she was better at the thing Tenten focused on.
"I've got like four medium-sized scrolls sealed inside the liver piece connecting my breastplates to the abdomen plates and two more on the pieces covering my shoulder blades…" Meiko pouted. "It's a trick question, I seal my stuff inside my armor, not into storage scrolls that I seal inside my armor. It's impractical to seal a storage unit inside another storage unit."
"I know that!" Tenten leaned to the front with incinerating sparks in her eyes.
"I was just making sure I wasn't dealing with some storage rookie here…" Meiko waved her hand. She then stared for a short while at the massive pile of medicine and turned back to Tenten. "Although… My armor is a bit packed… Do you think you could spare a few scrolls?"
"Of course, I've got at least eight medium ones and a pair of custom-made storage scrolls I call my "Twin Dragons"! I can spare a few for an initiate such as yourself!" Tenten squinted after turning to Meiko and then letting out a laugh which was as cartoonish and over the top as it was fake.
"Tell me, were you surprised to see me disperse, frustrated, maybe, you know?" an aggressive grumble stopped Team Guy and Meiko from their little dash across the top floor of the hospital. A Dark Naruto stood confidently with his back by the staircase sealed off with an iron bar door which Meiko knew must have led down to the first floor and the fire exit from the building.
"Hmph… Nobody was surprised by the fact that a ripoff would be hiding his face behind his clone lackeys, just like the real thing." Neji crossed his arms over his chest.
"So then…?" Tenten turned to Neji who just nodded.
"Yes, this one seems to be the real one." He confirmed. "Then again, he isn't as much a person as he is an avatar of gloom and darkness. That's why it was so troublesome to sense anything about those clones of his before."
"At least you finally admit it. That I'm the real one. The true object of your hatred, you know!" Dark Naruto pushed his back off the wall he was resting it by and began approaching the team with a confident but slow-paced strut.
"Beware, teammates, this foul Naruto appears to be approaching us with the intent of pummeling us to pulps!" Rock Lee stepped out in front of the rest of the team. He had taken a few red pills and a blue pill not too long ago which was teetering on the edge of what one should have self-medicated themselves with and was, therefore, beginning to regain some of his vitality.
"I'm so glad we have a taijutsu expert with us to provide these invaluable insights!" Tenten snapped back at her teammate with a kunai knife in hand.
"Hey, hey… Can you even use that thing?" Meiko smirked at her newly met rival. "Better leave the armed fighting to more experienced ninja."
Dark Naruto's image flickered, his foot would have dug into Meiko's chest and rocked her to the back of the room, knocking all wind out of her with a single kick had Rock Lee not stepped in and raised a cross-armed block underneath the kick, elevating Naruto's leg and guiding the attacker to lose all balance in his approach.
"Leaf Gale!" Rock Lee yelled out with what of his regained energy spilled over the top of the figurative glass, sweeping the supporting leg of Dark Naruto with a low kick from behind.
"Tsk, you little!" Dark Naruto emerged from the hole he had left in the demolished top floor wall leading to a broom closet and weaved the signature hand seal of the Shadow Clone technique. "Shadow Clone Jutsu!" he hissed.
With a cascade of popping sounds, clones of Dark Naruto began emerging from all around him. Rock Lee bobbed and weaved, dancing around the clones with little to no trouble as he simply outpaced the clones by having so much more taijutsu experience and skill that it had appeared as if he was a time traveler of sorts with knowledge of where the clones would be in the nearest future.
Truthfully, Rock Lee was not even faster than Dark Naruto but merely more skilled and therefore could plan out and execute his limited movements much closer to perfection. Shadow clones got dispatched left and right as Lee's smacks, slaps, and high kicks ran rampant across the group. Lee looked like he was enjoying his superiority in close quarters a bit too much as he failed to notice the fact that these clones were a mere distraction.
"Rasengan Barrage!" Dark Naruto yelled out as he emerged from the group, sprouting in between two clones that were all too happy with themselves to deliver a double Rasengan, one in each hand, by crashing them into his opponent.
Despite managing to catch Lee unaware, the green ball of vitality just rolled aside with possibly the goofiest looking yet best executed evasive roll that Meiko had ever seen, re-establishing his standing position with an upside spinning kick which dispatched at least four more shocked clones while the twin Rasengan faded away in Dark Naruto's hands.
"I have not had the chance to witness this maneuver of yours previously, Naruto, however, it appears to still depend a great deal on how well you can connect it to your opponent which means it will be of no threat to me as long as I am your superior in hand to hand combat!" Rock Lee declared while entering his defensive Strong Fist stance.
Meiko hadn't even seen anyone with such perfect execution of the textbook Konohagakure taijutsu. Strong Fist was a practiced and taught fighting style in the Ninja Academy but it was simple, elementary and should not have worked on a battlefield between someone as skilled as Lee and as experienced as Dark Naruto, supposing he had the same level of experience as the Naruto Meiko had met, given how the two wore the same clothes and looked to be almost the same age.
"Looking down on me, are you?" Dark Naruto growled. Despite having just split his chakra into dozens of pieces and conjuring up a pair of A-Rank ninjutsu, he had no fatigue or shortness of breath in any of his body language, meaning he was either insanely good at faking pretty much infinite stamina or he actually had one. "Yeah… It hurts when someone like you is looking down on me too, you know…"
"Someone like me?" Rock Lee repeated. "Whatever can you mean, Naruto?"
"Yeah… People disliked you too, didn't they? They looked down on you because you couldn't mold chakra right, that's right, Bushier-Brow told us during the Chuunin Exams, you know. And yet even you, a reject, is rejecting us… Feels bad, it hurts but… It also feels right, just like something you'd do, you know!" Dark Naruto scratched his abdomen with an infuriated and unstable look in his eyes.
Something felt wrong about this. He made almost no sense whatsoever, even if what Neji suggested earlier about Dark Naruto being a reflection of Naruto's fears and negative feelings that he had accumulated throughout his life given form, these weren't rational fears or dislikes. He was just rambling, he seemed like he was delirious at best with that nightmarish expression on his twisted face.
"You are wrong, Dark Naruto, I feel no hatred towards you, on the contrary, I admire you. Yes, we are very similar, while you do not possess a similar physical condition to mine, you also work hard to overcome the obstacles in your life. Ever since meeting you, I was always looking up to you and your example helped me work as hard as I have." Rock Lee still fostered hope of getting to Dark Naruto, even though it might have been impossible.
"Liar…" Dark Naruto mumbled, "Liar, liar, liar liar…!" he roared out, streams of crimson began bursting forth from his body, just like before with the Naruto from Team Hokage.
"Quick, Lee, don't let him transform!" Meiko stepped up, placing her hands by her hips to arm herself with Reactor Gauntlets out of sheer instinct, despite feeling that if Naruto did cloak himself with that boiling coat of madness and unbridled rage, she'd need something far stronger if she hoped to even survive that clash.
"Leaf Whirlwind!" Rock Lee proclaimed while charging at Naruto with a flying kick. Dark Naruto roared out, sending a shockwave that bent and sent ripples throughout the entire building just by hosting the raging Jinchuuriki inside of it. The blast deflected Rock Lee's physical attack and sent the taijutsu user flying back into the same broom closet that Dark Naruto found himself in recently but had him making a larger hole since he didn't enter the exact same way in as his predecessor.
Meiko, Neji, and Tenten clutched for the ground while the resonating shockwave forced them on the defensive and had them sliding back. Similar boiling jets of smoke that turned crimson before long and then began transitioning into a partial transformation of bodily features which included red irises, primal and bestial, extended pupils and elongated canines as well as a shift in fighting stance amongst the clones.
"Only it understands, only it doesn't hate me, you know!" Dark Naruto cried out. "The other me would use that stupid Sage power, borrow strength from the world that hates and rejects us! Why!? Why would he do that, you know!?"
"Something's wrong…" Meiko shook her head after the intense pressure resonating from Dark Naruto let up a bit. Silence before the turbulent storm. "He's completely mad. He's not just a darker version of Naruto at all!"
"Maybe he is?" Tenten turned to Meiko. "Maybe he just misses his host? Maybe Seventh Naruto didn't think things through by pulling it out of the real Naruto like that?"
"Then we're shit out of luck…" Meiko grunted. "We have no idea where the real Naruto is and if he's even okay…"
"That is not quite true…" Neji smirked. "Not only is he okay, he won his fight. The three Snow Country jokers got themselves knocked out but that Akatsuki ninja is nowhere to be seen. It is more likely Naruto repelled him. Not only that, he's coming here… Not too fast, beating around the bush like he's lost but… He will get here soon enough."
"Hear that!?" Tenten taunted Dark Naruto. "You're already outnumbered, soon enough you'll have no chance to win at all!"
"Heh…" Dark Naruto cracked a grin. "Friendship… Team bonds… Other me keeps rambling about that bullshit as if it matters, as if it's true, you know! You're right, you do outnumber me and even with it by my side, I might not have what it takes. He has it working with him too, after all… Although, it's ironic, isn't it? That I would also call for a little bit of cooperation, make an alliance of my own. But this is how intense my hatred is for you, those that hate me, you know…"
Dark Naruto bit his thumb and weaved a collection of hand seals before driving his hand onto the floor. The entire Konohagakure Hospital shook from its foundation and a deafening rumble signaled the complete demise of the roof over everybody's head as a colossal, rusty red toad with black eyes of red irises, matching those of his summoner, surrounded by at least half a dozen of smaller toads of different sizes and colors with matching eyes.
The arrival of the Dark Toads quite literally tore the roof down!
Author's Note: Yes, Rock Lee talks weird on purpose. I tried meshing together his speech mannerisms in Japanese and the dub together to make him sound more unique. I prefer the original Japanese voices all the way but I can't help but hear Brian Donovan whenever I imagine Rock Lee speak which has led me to this creative decision :D