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"Oh, good job there~" Asuma whistled, impressed, as Momoe's sword beam pierced Shiso's shoulder. She was his cousin's student, and he had trained her well. Allowing her to organise the troops and implement battle tactics was the right decision, even if Asuma had only agreed to lessen his workload.
He gazed at the trap web of wires; it was among the suggestions he had given her back at the village, and she had procured the equipment and now successfully set it up by commanding the people she had met for the first time. There was nothing he liked more than delegating work and having it turn out well. He was planning to take it easy, leaving all the fighting to the mad dog, thirsty for battle. Then, Gaku had split up from the group, going after another target on his own, and left him to deal with a jōnin.
Shiso immediately got up, blood staining his shoulder. His figure blurred as he shot towards his subordinates, who were currently being butchered. Asuma couldn't allow him to escape and grabbed the wire nearest to him after weaving a short set of hand seals.
The wire wasn't made of a chakra-conductive metal, but it was strong and well-made by a skilled craftsman. It groaned under the strain of a jōnin's chakra coursing through it but held. Three lengths of wire, crossing each other to form a triangle, shone a dull green before rapid winds howled forth.
Shiso's eyes widened as a triangular wind wall consolidated right in front of him. He couldn't change his direction, nor could he stop himself. He could only cross his arms as he slammed into the wall that couldn't have been any more solid and was thrown to the ground.
"I need a cigarette," Asuma sighed.
He pulled on an invisible chakra thread tied around his middle finger, and summoned his trench knife into his hand. Asuma recharged the wind chakra in the blade to a sharpened point and hurled it at Shiso's blind spot. The ROOT jōnin didn't see it coming until it was too late but, to his credit, moved out of the way. The blade split the top of his ear rather than plunging into his nape as it had before.
"Ready!" Momoe yelled, her voice straining. She had managed to land outside the web and was now commanding a dozen chūnin surrounding the wire web from three sides.
All of them looked terrified as they stared at their downed enemy, but they followed the command despite being ready to flee at a moment's notice if the jōnin so much as twitched.
"GO!"
On Momoe's command, the chūnin finished their various Fire Release ninjutsu. Only two of the dozen knew B-rank techniques, while the other ten shot C-rank ninjutsu, boosted to the best of their ability, flooding the wire web with intensely hot fire. Simultaneously, Asuma grabbed nearby wires in both hands. He watched the rolling flames, felt the fire-natured chakra spreading around him, and then, according to the plan, flooded the entire wire web with wind-natured chakra.
Instantly, the blaze of fire flooding into the wire web screamed and exploded in volume. The chūnin, despite knowing it was coming, were taken aback as the fire they conjured reached temperatures they were simply unable to produce. Some had to leap back in a hurry to avoid being swallowed by the flames.
Sparks of lightning shot out from within the inferno before the fire exploded from within, hitting the Leaf shinobi around the wire web. The chūnin standing closest were all bathed in hot fire, while the genin behind them flinched away from the wisps.
The empty space in the middle of the web revealed a slightly burned Shiso standing on scorched ground. He glared at Asuma with electric sparks shooting out of his body and readied his chain, charging it with more lightning through each rotation.
Asuma dropped the cigarette he had lit from the jutsu's flame with a sigh, releasing the one drag he had managed to take. He flexed his fingers, and his trench knives returned to his hand and flooded them with wind chakras, increasing the effective length of the blades' cutting edge.
The wires between them had turned molten from the intense heat and dripped down to the ground.
The two opposing jōnin charged each other, closing the gap in an instant with Asuma's trench knife aimed at Shiso's throat. The weight at the end of the chain smashed into the blade from below, carving a deep furrow into the porcelain. It cracked in half, revealing a thin, diagonal line of blood across Shiso's now bare face.
Despite the close call, Shiso's reaction was not to retreat. He leaned into the strike and grabbed the second arm that came down with the other knife. The wind chakra dug into his arm above his wrist, ripping the muscles and grinding into his bones. He gritted his teeth and tightened his grip. Shiso's Lightning Release ninjutsu surged, flowing back from his chain into his arm and right into Asuma's body, who was thrown backwards.
As Shiso landed, he wove hand seals with one of his hands critically injured, a sheer testament to willpower and pain tolerance. However, before he could complete his ninjutsu, a cloud of dark ash surged his way, completely covering him. Most strangely, the ash didn't spread out towards the Leaf shinobi and remained concentrated around the target.
Inside the ash cloud, Shiso recognised the ash to be chakra-infused gunpowder, and the moment he completed his Lightning Release ninjutsu, it would spark the ash, and the explosion would blow up in his face.
However, he didn't need to worry about it because as the ash settled down, it neared the still-lit cigarette Asuma had thrown onto the ground. The little heat in the cigarette wouldn't have been enough to ignite the ash, but the residual heat from the previous Fire Release ninjutsu primed the ash, so when it came into contact with the cigarette…
Fire Release: Ash Pile Burning
A rod of lightning-natured chakra shot through the explosion the moment the ash detonated and crashed into a tree twenty meters away, setting fire to the neighbouring trees.
Lightning Release: Thunder God's Fang
Asuma calmly got up from the ground. He had simply moved out of the way the moment he was done spewing out the ash to avoid whatever Shiso was going to throw at him.
He readied his trench knives, frowning at the fires. At any moment, the ROOT jōnin could break through the fire and attack him. He strained his ears as well, ready to move in case the enemy targeted his subordinates. He hoped that Momoe had moved everyone away as per the protocol they had come up with.
"Move back, everyone. Look to the sky and make sure that you don't get hit."
Asuma blinked when he heard Kawamochi's voice sound in his head and looked up at the cloudy sky. He narrowed his eyes at something in the air before the tension drained from his body. Instead of moving back, he remained standing and pulled out a cigarette.
"Eh. It's not like she's going to miss," he said. "Might as well risk it..."
As Asuma predicted, Shiso did charge through the fire. Only, he didn't head for any Leaf shinobi and single-mindedly focused on escape. He even rushed past some of his injured agents who could have benefited from his help, but he ignored them and thought solely about himself. In a dangerous situation, the priority of survival always lied with the jōnin. Standard agents could be trained again to fill ROOT's ranks, but the probability of training another jōnin was astronomically lower than training a chūnin.
However, just as he cleared out from the battlefield and entered the untouched part of the forest, his body jolted in shock.
"Huh…?"
Shiso looked down to see a rod of wind chakra embedded in his body, with the spurt of blood that leaked out of the wound turning into blood mist. His legs gave out, and he fell to his knees. The wind rod had come in from his back, gone through his spine, pierced his heart, and punctured a lung. The rod sticking out of his body was grinding the wound and his internal organs as the winds swirled inside his body.
With his body growing cold and his sight dimming, Shiso looked around to see who had hit him, but there was no one around him, only to realise the entry angle of the rod and how it had come down at him from above. The angle was too steep for it to be from the Hokage's son or anyone close by unless they had purposefully created a high arc, which meant that the enemy was…
None of that mattered, Shiso thought as he let himself fall to the ground.
The sound of footsteps caused him to turn his head to the side to see Sarutobi Asuma coming his way. Shiso's body, strengthened by decades of training and his understanding of chakra, was keeping him alive, but it couldn't save him. Unless the best iryō-nin in the land were beside him at this moment, he knew that he was dead.
"Any last words?" Asuma asked.
"… It was a life of splendid service," Shiso managed, his voice wheezing from the punctured lung and blood pooling in his throat.
"Do you regret it?"
Never, Shiso wanted to reply, but as death approached, he looked back at his life, and for the first time, he wondered if there was something more to life than what he had lived. But as those thoughts surfaced, he pushed them down. He had lived his life without being resolute in his beliefs; he didn't want regrets as his life was coming to an end.
"No."
And those would be his last words as Shiso closed his eyes and allowed his body to let go, with his enemy looking over him in his last moments. A few hundred meters away from them, Hyūga Utsuse smoothed her sleeves. She raised her eyes in the direction she had released her long-range ninjutsu, and her Byakugan showed her target dead as though he were only a couple of paces away. She nodded, satisfied with the outcome.
When she was told that Yamanaka Kawamochi was on the roster, she knew that her contribution would be via looking over the battlefield using her eyes and relaying the information to the mind-walker. However, that didn't mean she couldn't try to kill at least one jōnin.
Lord Hokage's youngest son seemed to be the one most likely not to mind her interference in his fight. And as she looked at Asuma raising two thumbs up to no one in particular, which could only mean it was for her, it seemed that he was more than happy to allow her to claim the target as her prey.
She chuckled to herself. "Lord Hokage is fortunate to have such talented and wise sons."
Utsuse turned her eye to another part of the battlefield to resume the duty she had been brought on to do.
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