"The village was infiltrated by an elite jonin. I will report to the Hokage right away."
"No need."
Before the voice had even faded, a deep, slightly hoarse tone rolled across the camp.
In a puff of Body Flicker smoke, Sarutobi Hiruzen appeared, clad in a black close-fitting battle suit, the Hokage hat resting on his head.
"Lord Hokage!"
Everyone jolted, then their faces lit up with relief.
The strongest Hokage in Konoha's history had arrived in person.
Forget an elite jonin from the Hidden Cloud. Even if the intruder had been the Raikage himself, he would not be leaving this forest alive.
"Lord Hokage, the enemy appeared in the eastern sector of the training field four minutes ago…"
"I already know where he is."
Time was tight.
Hiruzen cut the report short with a wave of his hand and went straight to giving orders.
"I have already called medical ninja over from Konoha Hospital. They will arrive soon.
You will all stay here and protect the children. From this point on, no one is allowed to approach Training Field Zero."
"Yes, sir!"
Every instructor answered at once.
Only Iruka's voice carried a faint hesitation.
Several of his students still had not returned.
How could a homeroom teacher be at ease?
"Lord Hokage, I still have five students inside the training field."
"They are together."
Hiruzen gave him a long look after he said that.
Then he did not waste another second.
Face hard, the Third Hokage strode alone into the trees of Training Field Zero, leaping from branch to branch until his figure vanished.
The camp fell silent.
Everyone stared into the dark woods.
Neji crushed his bread into a lump in his hand, his expression dark as still water.
He understood what the Third had meant.
"They are together."
The enemy was with them.
An elite jonin. The kind of shinobi any village could count on one hand.
Even Hyuga Hiashi, head of the Hyuga clan and main family patriarch, was only around that level.
Could Haori really survive this?
…
At that same moment, in the center of Training Field Zero.
The ground had been carved into craters and trenches as if some titanic beast had plowed through it.
The broken moon was veiled by steam born from Isobu's power, only able to push a thin wash of light through.
Banyan trees lay toppled at the edge of the battlefield.
Blackened trunks struck by lightning had caught fire and burned in ragged lines of orange.
The beasts, their minds finally cleared, were held at bay by the flames.
They eyed the shattered crimson flesh scattered around the battlefield with ravenous hunger, pacing around the firelight and unwilling to leave.
At the center of those flames,
one blue and two red figures faced off in a triangle.
Yotsuki Isao's sword-hand crackled with lightning, aimed squarely at her.
Haori lifted her left hand straight out in front of her, while her right palm rested by her right hip.
Razor-sharp wind surged into the tenketsu at the center of that hidden palm.
First Form: Sky-Cleaving Fist.
Using the raw, explosive power of the Strong Fist style to hammer Wind Release directly into the enemy's acupoints, like driving a nail with a sledgehammer.
You needed the wide, brutal power of Strong Fist and the pinpoint accuracy of Gentle Fist at the same time.
It was like using a shot put stance and a spiked club to perform delicate brain surgery.
The difficulty was monstrous.
Only someone who possessed both the Byakugan and Shikotsumyaku could master this.
You could call it a taijutsu on the level of a bloodline-synthesis technique.
Naruto hunched low beside her.
The slit pupils of his fox eyes glowed with a ferocity he had never shown before.
The transformation of his body had dragged his mind with it, leaving his thoughts half-clouded.
But Haori's instructions still echoed over and over in his heart, sinking deeper and deeper.
"Listen carefully.
As long as we are not standing in a straight line, he can only ever attack one of us. No matter which of us he goes for, he will have to open a gap.
That gap is our one chance."
Yotsuki Isao stalked forward with his sword-fingers raised, shifting his position, trying to find an angle where he could hit both targets at once.
Haori and Naruto refused to give him that chance.
They kept moving in perfect sync, shoulders almost touching.
No matter which one he lined up on, the other would always be in position to cover.
The three of them circled each other.
The air around them felt heavy as a rising tide.
Crackle.
Snakes of lightning coiled around Isao's arm, converging again and again at his fingertips.
The voltage built until it tore holes in the air, shaping a spear of living thunder.
He felt his chakra being poured into a funnel, draining out of his body without pause.
His stamina plummeted.
His already wounded chest heaved up and down as he fought to draw enough oxygen from the thin, humid air.
Why is Hell Stab draining so much more than usual?
The moment the thought crossed his mind, he noticed something wrong and looked down the length of his arm.
Under the dim light of the moon, it was hard to see, but a thin skin of transparent moisture clung to the surface of the lightning.
The Lightning Release chakra was being led away by those invisible currents, bleeding into the ground.
Haori's lips curled in a cold smile.
Near-invisible mist jetted from her tenketsu, swirling around the lightning spear and silently draining its power.
The suffocating fog around them also thinned the oxygen in the air.
They needed total focus if they wanted any hope of reacting to an attack at this speed.
If they let up for even a moment, they would die.
The old man, holding the initiative, was clearly abusing that fact.
He kept the lightning spear charged without striking, constantly shifting his aim.
He was trying to grind them down under the pressure.
The moment they broke and tried to rush him, he would seize on the flaw and kill them in a single blow.
Now that she had seen through him, Haori had no intention of playing along.
Her Byakugan-driven control gathered the mist into fine threads.
One end wrapped around the lightning spear.
The other sank into the ground.
Under the guidance of her Water Release, the gathered Lightning chakra was drawn out of his hand and bled into the earth.
You like playing mind games and applying pressure, old man?
Then die tired and empty.
Moonlight pierced the thickening mist.
The oppressive fog closed around Yotsuki Isao like a giant spiderweb.
He could feel his chakra flowing out of him faster and faster.
When he looked at Haori again, impatience had crept into his gaze.
His mental gambit had failed and even backfired.
The water threads were invisible and shapeless, yet they clung to his spear like sticky spider silk, constantly bleeding away its strength.
On the surface, it still looked as if he was the attacker.
In truth, control of the battlefield had already changed hands.
Sizzle.
A violent surge of lightning vaporized part of the water, but more vapor closed in to replace it.
Haori's red cloaks shifted and thickened.
She compressed the energy of her Tailed Beast Cloak into two dense nodes, one over her head and one over her chest, painting those places a deep, blood red and completely sealing off the most obvious paths of attack.
A wave of helplessness washed over Yotsuki Isao.
In the final chimes of his life, he had run into the most infuriating opponent imaginable.
Someone who had the raw power to fight head on, but insisted on playing tricks in the shadows.
Someone who would torment you until your nerves frayed and only then reveal that she could brawl and tank hits just fine.
And just when you finally cracked that damned shell with your trump card, she would call for backup and start a war of attrition, shamelessly stalling for reinforcements.
For the first time in his long career, the man who had always enjoyed battle felt sick to his stomach.
No matter what, he could not allow himself to be slowly drained to death.
He made his decision.
His sword-fingers trembled as another finger folded down.
The lightning on his hand went wild.
Crackling thunder gathered on a single finger, and Isao felt as if he was holding up a mountain with that one digit.
In his youth, this had been his killing stroke.
Now, even showing it hurt.
Hell Stab: One-Finger Assault.
His Lightning Release Armour was stripped down to a translucent film.
Every last drop of Lightning chakra poured into his fingertip.
A half-meter spear of electricity formed in front of him, ripping the air open.
The surge of lightning instantly burned away every water thread wrapped around it and even set the air alight.
Blue-white flames bloomed in the mist.
Drops of that cerulean fire fell onto Isao's own body.
With his Lightning Armour nearly gone, he could not block the heat.
Blisters rose along his charred skin in sick bulges.
His index finger still shook uncontrollably as he aimed it at Haori's chest.
The head was too small a target.
He no longer had the fine control left to aim that precisely.
Haori's heart clenched.
The One-Finger Assault at full power.
She knew as clearly as he did that his next move would be his last.
That murderous intent and the will to pierce everything in front of him were so thick even she could feel it without her Byakugan.
The Tailed Beast Cloak over her heart darkened to blackish red.
The reinforced bone membrane under her skin thickened, layer after layer, and she burned what life force she had left to push herself to the peak.
Then the ground shuddered.
Yotsuki Isao's figure vanished from her field of view.
When she caught sight of him again, his burned, wrinkled face was less than a meter away.
Haori's eyes flew wide.
The lightning-wreathed fingertip was already pressed against the bone membrane beneath her skin.
In that instant, the cloak over her heart was pierced.
He is so fast.
The thought had barely formed when the roar hit her ears.
The merciless spear of thunder punched straight through her chest.
Crackle.
Lightning wrapped around the spear as it burst out of her back.
No blood flowed.
The heat had already cauterized the wound.
With Haori skewered on his arm, Yotsuki Isao hurled himself into the forest.
Crash.
He plowed through tree after tree before the force of the impact finally ebbed.
Crack.
His hand drove all the way through a thick trunk.
Haori hung in midair, feet not touching the ground, nailed to the wood by his arm through her chest.
"Haori!"
Naruto's howl warped into a strangled animal sound.
Her name was nearly lost inside it.
He leaped forward, the Tailed Beast Cloak propelling him, and slammed into Isao's back.
Fists hammered down in a rainstorm.
Yotsuki Isao looked at the girl dangling from his arm, hands limp at her sides, a hole through her heart.
Joy twisted his mouth.
Lightning flickered over his body as the armour flared back to life.
"Ahhh!"
Naruto poured his rage into every punch, but no matter how hard he hit he could not break through the apparently thin layer of Lightning Armour.
As his blows fell yet again,
"Lightning Ox Lariat."
Isao's deep voice rumbled with killing intent.
His left hand flashed, blade-edge glowing with lightning, and chopped backward.
The terrifying hand strike crushed Naruto's Tailed Beast Cloak out of shape and slammed into the back of his neck.
Sizzle.
The thunderbolt tore through the cloak and into Naruto's flesh.
"Aaaahhh!"
His scream ripped out of him.
The skin at his neck split open like old rubber left out in the sun.
Lightning speared inward, promising to fry his brain to ash.
Thump.
The raging thunder was blocked by Kurama's chakra.
"Naruto!"
A familiar voice rang in his ear.
He looked up.
Haori, with a hole in her chest, lifted her head.
She coughed, spat blood, and snarled, "Naruto, hold him."
There was no time to ask how she was still alive.
Naruto tightened his grip around Isao's left arm without hesitation, ignoring the lightning that ravaged his own body.
The Tailed Beast Cloak writhed, turning into a tangle of blood-red tendrils that wrapped around Isao again and again.
At the same time, two long water-serpents writhed out of the grass and coiled around his legs, constricting hard.
"You are not dead?"
Pinned down, chakra depleted and muscles exhausted, Yotsuki Isao could only stare at the girl hanging from his arm.
The monster whose heart he had stabbed through was still talking.
Lightning burst again and again from his right hand, but he could not pull free.
"The only one dying here is you."
Blood dripped from the corner of Haori's mouth.
Bones creaked inside her chest.
Her ribs exploded outward like growing branches.
The hole in her chest widened into a cavernous tunnel.
The tangling bone thorns inside wrapped around Isao's thick arm like a cage.
Flashes of lightning battered the bone, but could not travel through it.
Thump.
Thump.
Her heart, which she had quietly shifted into her abdomen earlier, pumped hard, squeezing out the last of her chakra.
Every muscle in her body bulged.
She slapped her palm against the center of his chest.
Wind Release surged.
First Form: Sky-Cleaving Fist.
Crack.
The sound that ran through Yotsuki Isao's body was like glass breaking.
The Lightning Armour on his skin fractured like a glazed tile that had been dropped on stone.
"Aaaaaahhh!"
Wind Release detonated inside his body with a roar.
He screamed, high and raw, completely unable to hold the sound back.
His chest split from the inside.
Muscles and blood vessels tore apart like snapped wires.
His heart, huge and heavy as a bull's, bounced out into the open air.
Lightning danced over the beating flesh.
A second of desperate vitality flickered back into his dying body.
The Lightning Armour surged again over his skin.
He is trying to save himself.
"Raaahh!"
Naruto roared and locked his arms tighter, holding Isao's left arm in a crushing grip.
Lightning ripped his skin apart, shredding the Tailed Beast Cloak wherever they met.
Strips of flesh peeled away, revealing bloody meat beneath.
Kurama's chakra blocked the current from reaching his brain, but it sent Naruto's rage even higher.
His fox transformation deepened.
The shape of a canine skull pushed up beneath his skin, and his fangs fully emerged.
Crack.
He sank those fangs into the man's neck.
"Aaahhh!"
The pain snapped Isao's sanity.
He spewed chakra in all directions in a last-ditch struggle.
Lightning battered everything around them.
Haori, chest still impaled, took the worst of it.
Bolt after bolt tore into her abdomen.
Her organs blackened under the onslaught.
Her life was in more danger than ever, and the crisis woke something savage in her as well.
She drove both hands into his chest and clawed at the muscle.
Her face split and twisted.
Her teeth lengthened without end.
Invisible wind coated those knife-like fangs.
Jaw opening in a grotesque snarl, Haori climbed up the arm spearing her chest and sank her teeth into his throat.
Crack.
His windpipe shattered.
The lightning faltered and broke apart.
Naruto howled and bit through the vertebrae at the back of his neck.
Pop.
The water-serpents tightened at the same time, twisting his legs into knots.
Bones pierced the skin, white points poking through as blood spurted from the torn flesh.
"Raaahhh…"
Yotsuki Isao's clouded eyes turned to the sky.
In his mind, a towering back wrapped in lightning still stood unbowed.
Thunder rolled somewhere far away.
The world spun upside down.
His head lolled to one side, connected to his body by only a strip of skin.
His frame shuddered twice in a last reflex, then went limp.
A stray wind gusted through the forest, blowing away the clinging mist.
The old man's face stayed twisted in fury, eyes bulging toward the bright moon.
The herd scattered in panic.
Trees toppled.
The fire burned higher.
On either side of the corpse,
two beasts, torn and bloody from head to toe, seemed to meet in a kiss under the moon.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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