Thump.
Thump.
All three of them collapsed into the pool of blood at the same time.
Yotsuki Isao's neck had been bitten through from above and below. His head rolled off his shoulders and tumbled far across the ground.
Stripped of skin, his skull long and fox-like, Nine-Tails Naruto stared past Yotsuki Isao's snapped white vertebrae at Haori, whose half-torn face gaped open, fangs dripping red.
His slit pupils trembled violently.
"Haori, how are you…?"
"Cough… give me your hand."
Haori spat out a lump of scorched black blood.
Her condition could not have been worse.
Her chest had been pierced clean through. Even though she had moved her heart and organs in advance, that had only changed a mortal wound into a crippling one. Then Yotsuki Isao's dying counterattack had filled her belly with Lightning Release, frying half her organs until they were cooked.
Fortunately, she had already shut off her pain.
Right now, all she felt was a crushing weakness, not the kind of agony that would knock her out cold.
She was running on pure adrenaline.
"Give me your hand."
"Huh?"
"Hurry."
Naruto had no idea why she looked so monstrous now, but her voice was the same, and the split, nightmare face in front of him was undeniably Haori.
He stretched out his hand.
What appeared in his vision was no longer a normal arm, but a blood-red claw.
The fascia and muscle lay exposed. Cruel, warped nails jutted from his fingertips.
So I really am a monster…
For the first time, Naruto understood exactly where the villagers' hatred came from.
"Peh."
Haori spat out a scrap of enemy flesh, then squeezed out the last of her chakra to straighten her mismatched teeth.
Then she sank her fangs into Naruto's arm.
"Ah…!"
His whole body jerked from the pain, but he forced himself to endure it and let her bite.
The sharp teeth split open his arm, yet somehow avoided the tendons, piercing only the veins.
The metallic sweetness of blood filled Haori's mouth in an instant.
Gulp.
Gulp.
Her throat worked as she drank.
Haori drew greedily on Naruto's blood, and on the remaining traces of Nine-Tails chakra carried within it.
Drip.
Drip.
The searing chakra of a Tailed Beast flowed down her throat along with his blood, then leaked back out through the hole in her chest, running along Yotsuki Isao's arm.
The Nine-Tails' power, however, had already been stripped away inside her.
A molten wave of chakra, blazing hot yet overflowing with life, poured into Haori's burned-out body.
Sizzle.
Her esophagus and tenketsu were scorched again and again by Kurama's savage power, but each time the Tailed Beast chakra turned into vibrant life force and regenerated what it had just destroyed.
Destruction and restoration fell into an endless cycle.
Her chakra seed pulsed with joy.
Her pathways drank in the foreign chakra like roots sucking water, the deep blue of her own energy crashing against the crimson torrent.
Haori carefully divided and guided the Nine-Tails' chakra.
Back in Haikawa Port, she had devoured Tailed Beast chakra once before.
That first time had mutated her chakra seed from blue into a deeper ocean shade and transformed her own chakra from simple sky-blue into abyssal dark, while granting her unsealed Water Release and the power to cloak herself like a Tailed Beast.
The strange Ice Release power she got at the same time had almost frozen her into a sculpture.
That entire devouring had been more dangerous than a life-or-death battle.
This time she had prepared thoroughly, yet things still did not go as expected.
Her deep blue chakra split the Nine-Tails' power and moved to eat it in pieces.
Before she could crush each fragment, though, the raging Kurama chakra reacted as if it had met kin. It stopped fighting so violently.
In fact, it drifted toward Haori's chakra of its own accord, blue and red twining together, struggling but no longer needing her hands-on control to merge.
In the blink of an eye, the interlocked streams of blue and red chakra glimmered at their contact points with a faint violet glow.
The Nine-Tails chakra was nothing like Isobu's had been, no rejection at all.
So this is what being tsundere looks like?
Haori kept her teeth in Naruto's arm, sucking until the fox cloak around him finally thinned and faded away. When she could no longer draw any of Kurama's chakra from his blood, she reluctantly let go.
Naruto was completely exhausted.
He had split into dozens of shadow clones to fight the beasts, then gone into fox mode to clash with Yotsuki Isao, an opponent wildly beyond his current level.
On top of that, Haori had just taken a huge amount of blood from him.
His blue eyes drifted one last time to the hole in Haori's chest.
Crack.
Her ribs rotated along Yotsuki Isao's arm like a pencil sharpener blade, carving him apart with a butcher's ease.
Flesh and bone parted ways.
His arm fell out of the cavity in her chest.
Thump, thump.
Her heart, now glowing with a faint violet sheen, pulsed rapidly. In Naruto's blurring vision, it rose slowly from her abdomen, floating back into the yawning hole in her chest.
New flesh sprouted and grew, filling in the cavity.
Watching Haori's life return to her eyes, Naruto managed a crooked smile.
Then he finally blacked out.
Haori turned her gaze inward.
The four emerald points of light in her head and chest had dulled, their glow gone.
The four gates closed in sequence.
Her body grew heavier and heavier.
At her heart, the violet light slowly swallowed the blue and red.
Once the blue chakra had been completely devoured, the red would not merge any further.
Haori tried to force the new chakra to assimilate the rest.
But the energy that had always moved at her command suddenly refused to obey.
The violet stream was smothered by the sheer volume of Kurama's power.
Foxification spread rapidly inside her, and she hurriedly slammed the process to a halt and drove the excess Nine-Tails chakra out of her heart.
Her chakra and body returned to normal, feeding energy back into her Shikotsumyaku, which went to work repairing the damage.
The charred organs shed their blackened shells, revealing fresh pink tissue beneath.
Sizzle.
Steam rose off her skin.
The fused violet chakra ran through her pathways, clearly inheriting the Yang Release property of the Nine-Tails as it accelerated her recovery.
Her pale Byakugan irises filled with violet.
Her Shikotsumyaku surged as well, fighting to claim what remained of Kurama's chakra.
Pure white bone drank in the Tailed Beast's power.
Bone that had already been hard as steel grew denser and thicker, dead-ash markings crawling slowly across its surface.
Everything inside her was evolving.
Power surged from the deepest parts of her flesh like a rising tide.
The joy in Haori's chest flooded her even faster than the regrown blood and tissue.
The Nine-Tails' chakra was a perfect tonic, and the portion size was absurd.
Just the remnants in Naruto's blood alone already exceeded all the chakra Haori could muster at her peak.
More importantly, that life-rich chakra did not just repair her injuries.
Combined with her Shikotsumyaku, it kicked her regeneration up to something close to a Sage Body.
In just a few breaths, her body went from the brink of death back to something like a heavy Grade Two injury.
She was still badly hurt, but her life was no longer in danger.
That was enough.
Once her body had been patched up, the chakra inside her was almost entirely spent.
Her mind, which she had been forcing to stay clear, began to swim.
The world blurred at the edges.
Her head grew heavier and heavier.
Darkness closed in on her vision, and she toppled forward, completely spent.
Thud.
Her small, deceptively heavy body hit the ground and sent dust into the air.
Moonlight spilled down.
Silver-blue radiance flowed over broken branches.
The smell of rich soil and blood tangled with the chill of night dew.
The once-roaring battlefield had fallen almost completely silent.
Only the crackle of fire still came from the burning branches.
Summer had only just passed, the vegetation still lush and green.
The flames had little to feed on.
Before long the open fire died down, leaving only plumes of thick, choking blue smoke.
The bugs could not stand the fumes.
They fled along the damp grass, disappearing into the dark.
Time slipped by.
Even the usual chorus of insects in the deep forest faded away, as if life itself were holding its breath.
Rustle.
Swish.
A shadow moved swiftly along the treetops.
Whoosh.
Like a single falling leaf,
an old man in a black battle suit dropped gently into the ruined clearing.
His combat boots crunched on dead branches and then stopped dead.
Sarutobi Hiruzen had finally arrived, only to be stunned into stillness by the scene before him.
The once grassy ground was now torn into trenches and shattered pits, as if it had tried to heave itself inside out.
Charred tree trunks lay everywhere, split as though struck by heavenly thunder.
The flames had died, but smoke still rolled in heavy waves.
In the very center, three bodies lay quietly side by side.
The huge man over two meters tall no longer looked human at all.
His chest had been ripped wide open, his heart exposed to the air.
The red stump of his neck showed bare vertebrae, the ragged wound clearly chewed by some unknown beast.
His head rested on the ground, features twisted in a final snarl.
His legs were limp as noodles, his arms shredded beyond recognition.
Hiruzen frowned in thought.
Each village had only a handful of elite jonin.
This man's face was familiar, and that towering, muscular frame spoke of a warrior who had been imposing even in death.
After a moment, the matching intelligence surfaced from his memory.
Yotsuki Isao, the Wild Thunder of the Hidden Cloud.
An old-guard elite jonin of the Yotsuki clan who had been active more than forty years ago.
Back when the Second Hokage took him to the Hidden Cloud to sign a peace treaty, Yotsuki Isao had already been a famous name. They had even met once in person.
He had never imagined that decades later, this old monster would sneak into Konoha by unknown means, only to die at the hands of two Academy students.
Hiruzen's feelings were complicated.
He was shaken by the massive hole in Konoha's defenses that had allowed such a man to enter the village undetected.
He was furious that the Hidden Cloud would dare dispatch a ninja to target the Nine-Tails in peacetime, clearly willing to risk war.
And he was deeply relieved that the village's saplings had grown so strong.
Haori and Naruto together had managed to kill a man like that.
His gaze shifted to the other two figures.
Naruto, with his mop of blond hair, lay sprawled on the dirt.
His blood-slick muscles were exposed, new skin slowly knitting over them.
Haori's state was even more terrifying.
Her white cloak was soaked completely red, and her chest had caved in to form a massive hole of torn flesh.
Hiruzen could clearly see her lungs moving, swelling and shrinking in that cavity.
His throat tightened.
Even with all his battlefield experience, their injuries made his heart clench.
But considering who their opponent had been, the fact that neither of them was dead was already a miracle.
He could not help wondering what kind of brutal fight could have carved such wounds into all three.
There was no time to dwell on it.
Hiruzen flashed through hand seals and spat out a stream of water, dousing the smoking trunks and stamping out the last embers.
Then he slung Naruto and Haori over his shoulders, one on each side.
Their very different weights almost made him stagger, but he adjusted, grabbed Yotsuki Isao's severed head by the hair, and turned back the way he had come.
A light wind passed over the battlefield.
Only a twisted, headless corpse remained in the shattered clearing.
Training Field Zero, south gate.
The firelight lit up the crowd.
Medical ninja moved among the injured students with medicine boxes, bandaging wounds from the day's disaster.
Teachers with clipboards wrote down each name, quietly compiling another, darker list as well.
"Theo… Theo got… got…"
Yuta and Ryuya sobbed uncontrollably as they choked out their report.
The tall, sturdy Yuta had none of his usual swagger.
His face was flushed, his breath hitching in ragged gasps.
Iruka had already learned the worst of it.
He wrote Taiji's name heavily into the notebook, his expression dark and unreadable.
Every time they faced death, it weighed the same.
He could not help thinking of the family he had lost in the Nine-Tails' attack.
Iruka's eyes drifted toward Training Field Zero.
Naruto carried the Nine-Tails.
From what Shino had told him, the enemy's target was clearly the fox sealed inside that boy.
If the Third Hokage could not make it in time, if the enemy had already unleashed the Nine-Tails,
the nightmare from six years ago would return to Konoha.
How many more people would die this time?
Iruka did not dare think about it.
He could only close his eyes and pray, begging that the Third would resolve everything, that his students would all come back alive.
Hyuga Neji was praying too.
"Neji, aren't you hungry?"
Tenten eyed the bread in his hand, which he had squeezed so hard moisture was beginning to seep out.
Her big eyes were full of confusion.
Was it that bad?
Even if it tasted awful, he did not have to strangle it like that.
Politeness was etched into Neji's bones.
He wanted to answer, but when he opened his mouth, he realized he could not make a sound.
Instructor Kazama's arms had been completely destroyed.
Even the head of the hospital's medical department had barely been able to save one of them.
That alone showed how terrifying the enemy had been.
An elite jonin, one of only a handful in any village.
Haori's talent and strength might be extraordinary, but her age was what it was.
How long could she possibly hold out until the Hokage arrived?
The odds were vanishingly slim.
And yet she was the first hope the branch family had had in a thousand years.
Neji shut his eyes in agony.
His fingers pressed against his forehead, rubbing the seal hidden beneath the bandages, the cursed caged bird.
The worst thing in this world was not living in darkness.
It was seeing the light, then being thrown back into the dark.
Hinata, the main family heiress, had faced the enemy head on, small and fragile but completely unharmed.
Haori, the branch family's one chance to escape the caged bird, was missing still, her odds of survival slim.
So this was fate.
An inescapable cage hovering over every branch member's head.
A destiny you could never escape.
For something so vague, it felt painfully real right now.
"They're here."
"Someone's coming out."
"That's…!"
Neji's misery was broken by a wave of excited shouting from the teachers.
"Medical ninja, over here!"
"This girl is badly injured!"
In a blur, Neji's eyes snapped open.
The crowd in front of him surged, bodies pressing together so tightly that he could not see a thing.
Byakugan, open.
He had never formed the seals so fast in his life.
The scene at the center of the crowd burst into view.
That pulsing violet chakra at the edge of death filled his vision.
He had never seen that color before, and it was the most beautiful chakra he had ever seen, for a single reason.
That power was clinging stubbornly to its dying owner, refusing to let her go.
A brilliant smile tugged at his lips.
She had beaten fate once again.
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