Danzo's jaw tightened until the muscles in his face shook. He had thrown wind and wood in combinations that would have shredded most opponents.
Indra was still standing in front of him, breathing evenly, the Kusanagi resting against his shoulder as though the blade weighed nothing. The casual grin never left Indra's face. That expression was not just confidence—it was a deliberate taunt.
Danzo inhaled, then forced all remaining chakra into his palms. His hands blurred through seals. The ground beneath him shook. A heavy, low rumble rolled through the ruined street as a summoning formula flashed across the shattered stones.
"Summoning Jutsu."
Smoke burst outward with a cracking sound. When it peeled away, a massive chimera crouched in the dust—elephantine bulk, thick limbs, with a long, ridged trunk and jaws lined with coarse, grinding plates. Its eyes were small and alert.
This was the Baku. Air around its maw bent inward even while it stood still, as if the space itself were being pulled toward its throat by a constant pressure differential.
Danzo stepped back several paces, measuring the distance between himself, Indra, and the summon. "Baku," he ordered, voice hoarse but firm, "devour him."
The Baku's chest expanded. Its trunk rose. Then the suction hit.
It wasn't a wind technique in the normal sense; it was a sustained vacuum that grabbed everything not anchored down. Dust, splinters, pebbles, shuriken litter left from dead Root, even lingering tongues of flame—everything ripped forward toward the chimera's open mouth.
The noise was a continuous roar, a deep drag like a storm inhaling.
Indra's hair snapped backward. Cloak and sleeves pulled toward the beast.
The Kusanagi's point skated along the ground as the suction dragged at it. He slid his left foot forward, channeling chakra into both soles. His stance lowered.
His body stopped moving. The red tomoe of his Sharingan rotated slowly as he watched the flow lines in the air, reading microcurrents and timing.
Danzo moved farther back, gauging. He needed time to recover chakra. The Baku could provide it. If the summon could pin Indra in place, a single precise strike at the right moment might be enough.
The Baku's suction increased. Large slabs of charred wood and broken tiles scraped forward, grinding across one another. A severed Root mask skittered along the stones, then lifted and disappeared into the creature's maw.
The chimera took another step, heavy and deliberate, body adjusting to balance as the airflow intensified. It was trying to uproot Indra by the feet.
Indra slid his right foot half a step, then locked again. He didn't try to overpower the suction directly. Instead, he pivoted the Kusanagi up, flattened the blade, and used it like a stabilizing fin.
The sword bit into the stone with a controlled scrape, adding another anchor point. His grin didn't fade.
"So this is your answer, Danzo? Make it interesting."
Danzo didn't reply. He was already cycling slow breaths, letting chakra pools even out.
The Baku shifted tactics. Its trunk angled slightly. The suction vector changed. The force no longer came straight on—it pulled from a diagonal, trying to break Indra's planted stance.
Indra's hips turned and adjusted with small, exact corrections, like a craftsman aligning a tool.
The Kusanagi rotated with him, edge now facing the pull. When the next wave hit—a pulse stronger than the last—Indra's sword flashed.
A thin crescent of air split open the dust cloud: a compact, precise Wind Release slash thrown with the sword's motion, riding the suction forward.
It wasn't meant to hurt the Baku; it was a diagnostic strike, measuring resistance and surface elasticity inside the suction stream.
The blade wind vanished into the creature's mouth and was swallowed. No recoil. No deflection. The Baku had simply taken it in.
"Consumes airflow and anything riding it," Indra noted aloud, tone almost conversational. "As expected."
The chimera took another massive step. The suction spiked again. A toppled wall at Indra's left shuddered, then collapsed in one piece and slid toward the Baku like a raft on a river.
Indra side-stepped, still anchored, letting the debris sail past his knees. He inhaled shallowly, then formed a single seal.
"Katon. Short burst."
He snapped his head, exhaling a compact cone of flame, not wide and showy, but dense and hot. The Baku drank it the way it had drunk the wind blade. The flame vanished.
The suction didn't weaken. If anything, the air seemed to heat around the chimera's gullet, and it kept pulling.
Indra's eyes narrowed slightly. "Tolerates heat intake. Good endurance in the throat and lungs."
He bent, scooped a fistful of coarse rubble without looking, then flicked it forward into the suction in small, measured handfuls, varying the size and weight of the stones.
Each sample vanished the same way: held together until the last half-meter, then torn into a fragmented stream and swallowed. The Baku adjusted the aperture at its mouth to prevent clogging.
This wasn't a mindless beast. It was managing intake intelligently.
Far behind, Itachi watched, leaning against a cracked pillar, blood drying at the edge of his mouth. Even in that state, he tracked each motion, each shift of chakra. Indra wasn't simply resisting; he was testing, like a surgeon probing tissue before a cut.
Danzo's hands lifted, but not to attack yet. He took one more step back and sank into a crouch, pulling air into his lungs, rebuilding his reserves.
The Baku opened wider. The suction zone expanded. Loose tiles under Indra's feet twitched. The pressure difference was high enough now that even chakra adhesion to the soles felt the strain. Indra let his stance sink another degree—then moved.
He pushed off the ground obliquely, not directly away from the pull but at a calculated angle that used the suction's vector to curve his trajectory.
The motion looked counterintuitive for a moment—he seemed to be jumping into danger—but the curve snapped him up and around in an arc that carried him along the shear line at the edge of the strongest pull.
He landed on a shattered lintel half-buried in dust, a meter higher. His right hand cut down. The Kusanagi slammed into the stone at a shallow angle, anchoring him again.
The Baku adjusted immediately, trunk lifting to align. Its bulk pivoted with speed surprising for its size.
"Doton," Indra said, flicking a quick seal with his left hand. A low earth ridge popped up in front of him—not a wall to block the suction, which would fail, but a deflector shaped like a wedge.
The constant pull hit the wedge and split, creating a less violent channel at Indra's immediate position.
Indra stepped through that low-pressure seam, moved two paces, then kicked the wedge aside himself before the Baku could compensate. His sword spun, flattened again, and his body realigned.
More debris tore past. The chimera's small eyes stayed fixed on him, tracking without blinking. Its lungs kept the intake steady.
The dream-eater's second property—consuming nightmares—wasn't a flashy battlefield effect like the suction, but its presence was a steady, unnerving pressure at the edge of awareness, a numbing tug against mental sharpness.
For a weaker target, that haze could slow reaction time by a handful of beats—enough to ruin rhythm.
Indra's Sharingan cut through the drag. His focus didn't waver.
He tried water next. A quick series of seals, a compressed stream from his mouth—the Water Release jet shot into the suction like a spear.
The Baku swallowed that, too. For three seconds, nothing changed. Then the chimera's intake hitched once, a small skip that most observers would have missed. It recovered immediately.
"Moisture presence increases internal turbulence. Not enough," Indra said, as if taking notes. His tone stayed bored. His eyes were alert.
He went again. This time he combined a shorter water jet with two palm-sized clods of earth thrown at different timings. The water went first, the earth followed half a second apart. The Baku swallowed all of it. Another tiny hitch.
The second clod fragmented into muddy grit just before the maw, but enough mass stayed cohesive to strike the soft palate region behind the grinding plates.
A stutter. Then full suction restored.
"Partial clogging possible with granular slurry, but it auto-corrects airflow with position changes. Mouth mechanics are robust." Indra rotated his wrist, loosened his elbow, and yanked the Kusanagi free of the stone.
The chimera, annoyed by the lack of immediate success, changed approach. Its trunk curled inward, then snapped down like a whip.
The suction pulse that followed wasn't constant; it was a sudden, savage tug, a spike designed to break anchors and rip prey off their feet.
Indra didn't resist the spike directly. He rode it.
When the pulse hit, he loosened his knees and let the pull lift him off the lintel. Halfway into the drag, he twisted, kicked off a chunk of passing masonry as if it were a springboard, and redirected the momentum into a line that took him along the left side of the Baku's skull.
He passed the maw by less than a meter, heat licking his cheek, air tearing at his clothes.
The Kusanagi flashed. Not a killing thrust. A shallow, controlled cut along the thick hide at the base of the trunk—testing tissue density and bleed rate. The edge bit, sparks of pain flickered in the chimera's eyes, and a dark line opened.
The Baku recoiled, trunk curling protectively for a heartbeat before it forced itself to extend again.
Danzo's lips peeled back in something between anger and relief. The summon felt pain, but it was still resolute.
He pumped a little chakra into the summoning link to steady it, then let his hands fall again, conserving. He needed two more minutes to return to combat strength.
The Baku slid its forelimbs forward and widened its stance. The suction resumed, now layered with those punishing pulses at irregular intervals. It tried to disrupt Indra's timing.
Each time the spike came, the chimera moved a half-step, altering angles, not letting Indra build a predictable cadence.
Indra's reply was movement economy. He stopped standing in one spot at all. He turned the entire broken street into an obstacle course: landing on a stone post for a second, then on a split beam, then on a half-toppled wall, always anchoring in a way that used geometry, never fighting the suction head-on.
Each landing, a small gouge of the Kusanagi into stone. Each movement, a look into how the beast responded.
He began to flick micro-slashes into the suction stream—thin, dense, compressed blade winds launched from angles that would force the Baku to adjust its intake shape internally to maintain pressure.
The chimera's body did so, with disciplined, almost trained reactions. It had done this with Danzo many times.
"Good partner," Indra said, eyes flicking once toward the old man who was still crouched beyond the melee. "If you had been this steady decades ago, Danzo, you might have become something else."
He didn't say "Hokage." He didn't need to. The implication was enough to put another twist into Danzo's expression.
The chimera tried a direct rush. For the first time, it moved to close the distance instead of just pulling. The ground shook under its weight. The maw opened wider. The suction force grew to a near-physical wall.
Indra stepped into it.
He brought the Kusanagi up in a two-handed grip, not to cut the maw, but to set the flat across it, blade perpendicular to the airflow. The sword shuddered under the force. Indra's arms locked, shoulders set, stance rooted with chakra.
The blade bent a fraction—thin steel screaming softly as it held. The suction deflected around the blade's flat, creating a turbulent eddy right in front of Indra's chest.
The eddy reduced net pull on his center of mass by a precise amount, exactly what he needed to move.
He slid to the right, then to the left, forcing the Baku to track a lateral target. Each sidestep came with a low, ripping slash along the lip of the maw, adding shallow cuts that bled and irritated. The chimera swung its head, angry now, the trunk lashing.
Indra ducked the trunk and cut it again, same depth, same place as before. Precision. Repetition. He was wearing down a joint.
The dream-eater pressure in the air thickened, a mental haze like distant static. Indra's focus cut through it. He didn't brute-force the haze away; he simply ignored it as irrelevant input.
He tried one more composite probe: a short water jet, followed immediately by a narrow Fire Release lance injected into the same stream a hand-span later, creating flash steam milliseconds before intake.
The vapor cloud got sucked in and disrupted, but the short-term pressure change inside the maw made the chimera's next pulse misfire. Its chest stuttered. The suction dipped for a fraction.
Indra didn't try to end it. He could have. Instead, he stepped back, wiped the flat of the Kusanagi on his sleeve, and met the beast's small eyes with a cool look.
"You've shown me enough."
He pivoted, walked two steps, and planted the blade again. He was playing, exactly as Danzo feared. The Baku roared—not a sound created by vocal cords, but the amplified rush of air slamming through its body. It charged again.
Indra's face didn't change. His grin returned.
In the distance, Danzo flexed his fingers. Chakra had climbed back to a usable level. He rose from his crouch, eyes fixed on Indra's back. One more minute, he calculated. He would reenter and coordinate with the Baku: suction to fix the target, Wind Release to sever. Indra had to commit eventually. No one could dance forever.
The chimera's trunk snapped. The suction spike hit. Indra moved with it, then against it, then stepped off a flying slab and rode the edge of the pressure wave like a rail, landing atop the Baku's forelimb.
The skin was thick and rough, but the sword found purchase. One quick, controlled cut at a tendon—again, not deep, not crippling. Enough to change gait. Enough to create an exploitable pattern later.
He dropped back to the ground, slid a meter, and set his stance just as another spike came. He allowed the pull to carry him a half-step, then locked again, unshaken.
The dance continued. Suction. Anchor. Redirect. Probe. Cut. Reset.
Danzo's breathing steadied. The tremor in his hands faded. He stepped forward, lips peeling back over his teeth.
"Enough."
He lifted his arms. Wind chakra gathered at his fingertips, sharp and clean. The Baku's chest swelled for the next pulse. Danzo timed his step—
Indra's eyes flicked once toward him. The smile widened, very slightly.
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End of Chapter
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