The world had shrunk to three sounds: Zabuza's mocking murmur from his water cage, the splash of liquid dripping from the sphere that imprisoned their sensei, and the deafening beat of their own hearts. The thick, milky fog choked not only their sight, but also their hope.
"Your sensei is out of the game," Zabuza's voice boomed, its origin unclear as if the air itself were speaking. "And this is an important lesson, kids: no matter how strong you are, there's a cage for every bird."
A closer splash. From the fog emerged a figure identical to the first, a clone made of water and malice, the gigantic Kubikiribōchō resting on its shoulder as if it weighed nothing.
"Now that the lesson is over," the clone's voice continued, its dark eyes fixed on them, cold and lethal, "it's time for your execution."
Panic seized Sakura, while Tazuna's legs trembled like leaves. Sasuke gripped the handle of his kunai, his rage fighting to crush the uncertainty flooding him. They were alone.
"Don't move!" a voice roared.
It wasn't Kakashi's, but Naruto's. His cry wasn't one of fear, but a command, a foothold in the middle of the storm that shook his teammates from their paralysis.
"We are not going to panic!" he yelled again, and his words weren't for Zabuza, they were for them, a reminder, an oath. "We have a plan! We're sticking to the plan!"
Poof. Poof.
Two more of Naruto's clones appeared in a burst of smoke. They didn't charge the enemy. In a disciplined move that surprised Sasuke, they flanked a trembling Tazuna, placing themselves between him and the water clone. They created an orange wall of pure determination.
"Hinata, you're our eyes! Don't take your eyes off him!" Naruto ordered, his voice ringing with a confidence that unsettled his own teammates.
"Sakura, get your wires ready! Create a perimeter, a web! Alert us to anything that moves in the fog!"
"Sasuke! Get ready to counterattack! The second they give us their position, you hit them with everything you've got!"
Zabuza's clone tilted its head, a gesture of mocking curiosity. "Orders? The team clown thinks he's a leader? How adorable."
And then, it moved.
It wasn't a sprint; it was a disappearance. One moment it was there, and the next, the massive edge of the Kubikiribōchō was descending on the group with the speed of a lightning bolt.
"He's coming from the front!" Hinata shouted, her voice losing almost all of its stutter, replaced by the urgency of combat.
But it wasn't a warning to flee. It was a signal.
Sasuke and Naruto leaped backward, protecting Tazuna. Sakura stood her ground, her hands already weaving invisible threads.
But Hinata didn't move back. She moved forward.
The blade, as wide as a man's torso, cut through the air with a deadly whistle. It seemed like an unavoidable strike of steel. But Hinata didn't dodge it with a desperate leap; she did something far more insulting.
She danced.
With a simple twist of her torso, a shift of her weight onto the balls of her feet, the sword passed millimeters from her jacket. There was no wasted effort, no panic in her movement; it was the pure efficiency of the Flowing Step turned into instinct. Zabuza's clone growled, surprise visible in its watery eyes.
"Beginner's luck?"
It recovered the sword with a fluid motion and launched a horizontal slash, designed to cut her in half.
Hinata, however, was no longer there. Her Byakugan, active and bright, didn't just see the attack; it anticipated it. She saw the tension in the clone's shoulder muscles, the flow of chakra preparing for the strike. Before the sword even began its arc, she had already ducked, her body flowing downward like water. The blade passed over her head, barely grazing her hair.
"Impossible!" the clone muttered. "How can you...?"
Hinata didn't give it time to finish. As she rose from her dodge, her fingers extended. The Gentle Fist. A delicate strike, almost a touch, to the elbow of the arm holding the sword.
It wasn't a blow meant to destroy; it was meant to unbalance. The clone's chakra flow was interrupted for a fraction of a second. The arm holding the heavy sword faltered.
It was a minimal opening, but for Hinata, it was an eternity.
Zabuza's clone backed away, frustration replacing its confidence. The girl wasn't fighting him; she was playing with him. Every one of his attacks, calculated to be lethal, was avoided with a grace that infuriated him.
"You damned brat!"
It lunged again, this time not with a single blow, but with a series of slashes, a storm of steel designed to overwhelm her.
While Hinata began her deadly dance, Sakura worked from the rear. Near Tazuna, with Naruto's clones as a shield, she had become an invisible puppeteer.
Her fingers moved with a feverish delicacy, extending dozens of nearly imperceptible chakra threads. They weren't meant to trap, but to obstruct. The threads anchored to the damp ground, to the roots of trees lost in the fog, to the loose stones on the path. She created a web, not of capture, but of subtle interference.
Zabuza's clone charged, its sword a blur. Hinata dodged again, her feet moving with a logic that defied sight. Suddenly, the clone's supporting foot felt... sticky. A chakra thread, anchored to a root, had created a minimal resistance. It was enough to make its turn a fraction of a second slower.
"Now, Hinata-chan!" Naruto yelled from his defensive position.
Hinata didn't need to be told. She saw the opening, the slight loss of balance. She slipped inside the clone's guard and struck again. Two fingers, straight to a tenketsu in its shoulder.
The water clone shuddered, the sword arm going momentarily numb.
"What the hell...?" it growled, looking at the ground and seeing nothing. "Why do I keep missing?"
"It's my amazing Slippery Floor Genjutsu!" Naruto shouted as a diversion. "It's invincible, believe it!"
"It's not a genjutsu, you idiot!" Sakura hissed in a furious whisper. "And shut up or you'll give away my position!"
The battle continued, a surreal ballet. Hinata was the lead dancer, a lavender apparition flowing around the fury of Zabuza's clone. Her predictive Byakugan made her a ghost, always one step ahead, and her Gentle Fist strikes sought not victory, but control, frustrating and disarming the enemy piece by piece, nerve by nerve.
And Sakura was the invisible choreographer. Her threads pulled a small branch here, lifted a stone there, creating stumbles and imbalances the clone couldn't explain. Every failure, every miscalculation by the enemy, was a silent victory for her.
From his position, Sasuke watched it all with a mixture of fury and astonishment. He had been waiting for an order to attack, to unleash his Great Fireball and finish the clone in a single blow. But the order never came. And it wasn't needed.
Hinata and Sakura, the two girls he had considered burdens, were controlling a clone of an elite jōnin. Not with brute force, but with a synergy and skill he couldn't comprehend. Humiliation flooded him. He wasn't being excluded; he was simply, in this dance of subtlety and prediction, the wrong tool for the job.
The real Zabuza, inside his water prison, watched through his clone's eyes. The smile had vanished from his voice.
This isn't normal, he thought. The Hyuga girl... she moves like she's reading my mind. And the other one... she's manipulating the battlefield without me being able to see how. What kind of genin are these? Kakashi... what have you taught them?
The clone, sick of being humiliated, felt a surge of irrational anger. The Hyuga girl was untouchable, an annoying ghost. He had to change targets. Break their rhythm.
His watery gaze swept across the field. He saw Naruto's clones protecting the old man. He saw Sasuke, tense and ready, but waiting. And then he saw her. The pink-haired girl. She was standing still, her hands in a strange position, concentrating. She wasn't moving.
The weak point.
"The game is over!" the clone roared.
It ignored Hinata completely. With a burst of speed, it shot forward in a straight line—not toward Sasuke, not toward Naruto, but toward Sakura. The bloodthirsty sword aimed directly for her heart.
Hinata saw the intention a second before it happened. "Sakura-san, look out!"
Sakura looked up, her green eyes widening in horror at the mass of water and steel bearing down on her. It was too far, too fast. Her threads were for subtlety, not for stopping a frontal assault. Panic threatened to paralyze her.
Sasuke moved, a black flash. "Don't you dare!" But even he knew he wouldn't make it in time.
Time slowed down. The image of Sakura, her face pale with terror, was seared into Naruto's mind. The knowledge of his other life, the vision of the countless times his comrades had been in danger, the memory of every failure and every loss—it all merged into a single, overwhelming instinct.
Protect.
There was no plan. There was no strategy. Only a single movement.
Naruto got in the way.
He left his defensive position, abandoning the relative safety of the clones, and threw himself into the path of the attack. He didn't even draw a kunai. He had no time to think about blocking. He could only do one thing.
Be the shield.
"NARUTO!" Sakura's scream tore through the air.
He shoved her hard, pushing her out of the attack's path. She stumbled and fell backward, safe.
And Naruto took the full impact.
The Kubikiribōchō, wielded by the clone, didn't cut him in two. At the last instant, the clone, perhaps surprised by the suicidal act, turned the blade. It didn't use the edge. It used the flat of the sword in a blunt, brutal blow.
But even without a sharp edge, the force was monstrous. The blow struck his left shoulder with a sickening, dull thud of bone and flesh giving way.
A choked cry escaped Naruto's lips as he was thrown backward like a rag doll, landing heavily several meters away.
For a second, there was absolute silence. The fog seemed to hold its breath.
Then, Naruto moved. He knelt slowly, a trembling hand gripping his left shoulder. The orange fabric of his jacket darkened quickly, soaking through with a deep red. Blood dripped between his fingers, forming a small crimson puddle on the ground.
"Naruto-kun..." Sakura's whisper was barely audible. The horror on her face was absolute. He had saved her. The idiot, the clown, the boy she had always despised, had just taken a blow that was meant for her.
Sasuke stopped dead, his black eyes fixed on Naruto's wound. An emotion he couldn't identify—a mixture of shock, rage, and a strange, reluctant form of respect—shook him. The dobe... the dobe hadn't hesitated.
Zabuza's clone looked at the blood on its sword, then at the kneeling boy. "A useless sacrifice. Now you'll both die."
It prepared to finish Naruto off.
But it stopped.
It felt a change in the air. A pressure. One that didn't come from it, nor from the real Zabuza.
It came from behind.
Slowly, the clone turned around.
Hinata Hyuga was still standing in the same spot, but she was no longer the same person. The shyness, the doubt, the fear... it had all been wiped from her face. Her posture was the same, relaxed, but now it vibrated with a contained energy that seemed to push the surrounding fog back.
Her face was impassive, but her eyes... her lavender eyes were no longer gentle. They burned with a white-hot, icy fury, an anger so pure it seemed capable of freezing the very air.
She saw Naruto's blood.
She saw the enemy who had wounded him.
And in that instant, the ability Naruto had given her, the power born from her soul, responded to the one and only trigger for which it was created.
The Lioness Heart had activated.