Splish.
The sound was small, irritatingly rhythmic, and totally out of place in a death match.
Naruto's sandal skid across the stone floor, kicking up a spray of pinkish water. The castle groaned around them, a deep, subsonic vibration that rattled his teeth, but Kabuto didn't even blink. The grey-haired medic moved like he was sliding on ice—smooth, efficient, and annoying.
"Too slow," Kabuto stated, his voice calm.
He stepped inside Naruto's guard. A palm glowing with blue medical chakra slammed into Naruto's shoulder.
It didn't feel like a punch; it felt like someone had snipped a wire inside his bicep. Naruto's arm went dead for a second, dropping his kunai.
"Damn it!" Naruto gritted his teeth, forcing his numb fingers to make a fist. He swung with his left, a wild haymaker aimed at Kabuto's smug grin.
Kabuto ducked. He didn't just dodge; he moved under the punch with such minimal effort it felt like an insult. He adjusted his glasses with one finger while Naruto's fist hit empty air.
"You're flailing," Kabuto said, pivoting on his heel. "This is what I mean, Naruto. You're wearing the headband, you're shouting the slogans, but you're just a child playing dress-up."
Splish. Splish.
Water—or something thicker—was dripping from the ceiling cracks, pooling rapidly around their feet. It smelled metallic. Copper and old rust.
Naruto ignored it. He ignored the numbness in his shoulder. He focused on the rotation.
Spin. Power. Contain.
He leaped back, creating space. He brought his left hand over his right palm.
"I'm not playing!" Naruto roared.
Chakra surged. It wasn't the smooth blue sphere Jiraiya had shown him. It was jagged, wild, spinning so fast it hissed like a angry cat. The air distorted around his hand.
Rasengan!
He lunged. He shoved the swirling ball of destruction toward Kabuto's chest.
Kabuto didn't look scared. He looked disappointed.
"Unfinished," Kabuto sighed.
He didn't block it. He stepped into it, his hand coated in a razor-sharp layer of electric blue chakra—the Chakra Scalpel. He slashed upward, not at Naruto, but at the wrist.
Snap.
He hit the pressure point. The flow of chakra to Naruto's hand was severed instantly. The Rasengan didn't explode; it unraveled. The energy dissipated into a harmless puff of wind that blew Kabuto's bangs back.
In the same motion, Kabuto's other palm slammed into Naruto's chest.
WHAM.
The force lifted Naruto off his feet. The wind left his lungs in a painful wheeze. He flew backward and upward, crashing hard into the vaulted ceiling of the hallway.
Plaster rained down. Dust coated his tongue, tasting of dry rot.
Gravity took over. Naruto fell, twisting in the air like a cat, and slammed into the wet floorboards on his hands and knees.
Splish.
He gasped, trying to force air back into his crushed chest.
"The code of the ninja," Kabuto lectured, walking slowly toward him, his boots making wet sucking sounds on the stones. "Honor. Dreams. Being Hokage. They're just bedtime stories to keep tools like you marching toward your death."
A heavy drop of liquid hit Naruto's cheek. It was warm.
He looked up.
The crack in the ceiling where his body had just hit was widening. But it wasn't dust coming down anymore.
It was red.
A thick, viscous curtain of purple-red blood poured through the masonry, splashing onto the floor between them. It steamed in the cool air. The smell of sulfur and iron filled the hallway instantly, drowning out the dust.
Naruto wiped his cheek. His hand came away red.
He looked at Kabuto through the falling curtain of blood. The medic stopped, watching the flow with clinical interest.
"See?" Kabuto said softly. "Even the castle is bleeding out. Give up, Naruto."
Naruto pushed himself up from the slick floorboards. His palms slipped in the mixture of water and Manda's blood, but he dug his fingers into the cracks of the stone. His chest burned where Kabuto had hit him, a dull throb that synced with his heartbeat.
"I'm NOT running away!" Naruto snarled, wiping the red sludge from his chin.
He stood up, swaying slightly. The blood rain hissed around them, steaming as it hit the colder air of the hallway.
"And I'm not going back on my word!"
He bit his thumb again. Hard. He didn't care about the pain; the pain was grounding. It was real. He slammed his hand down onto the wet stone, splashing blood and water across his knees.
"Summoning Jutsu!"
He needed Gamakichi. He needed backup. He needed someone who could spit oil or water or something useful.
Poof.
The smoke cleared.
It wasn't Gamakichi.
Sitting in the puddle, blinking large, confused yellow eyes, was a small, round, intensely yellow toad. He looked like a lemon with legs. He didn't have a sword. He didn't look like he knew what a sword was.
"Hello!" the yellow toad chirped. "I'm Gamatatsu! Do you have snacks?"
Naruto stared. His brain stuttered to a halt.
"WRONG FROG!" Naruto screamed, grabbing his head. "I meant for Gamakichi! Where's your brother?!"
"He's busy," Gamatatsu said cheerfully. "I'm here to help! I'll try really hard!"
To emphasize this, Gamatatsu stood on his hind legs and flexed. Nothing happened. His round belly didn't even ripple. He just looked like a very determined citrus fruit.
Naruto groaned. This was it. He was going to die in a collapsing castle because he summoned the snack-frog instead of the ninja-frog.
Kabuto chuckled. It was a low, mocking sound. "Another failed experiment. Fitting."
Naruto's eyes narrowed. He looked at the useless yellow toad. He looked at Kabuto, who was adjusting his stance, ready to end this farce.
Then he looked at the blood raining from the ceiling.
An idea sparked. It was stupid. It was desperate. It was exactly his style.
Naruto reached into his pouch and pulled out a kunai. He grabbed Gamatatsu by the arm.
"Listen to me," Naruto whispered urgently into the toad's ear, too low for Kabuto to hear over the din of the falling blood. "Hold this. Don't let go. And look scary."
Gamatatsu blinked, then nodded solemnly. He gripped the kunai with both webbed hands, holding it like a sacred artifact.
Naruto stood up. He grabbed the yellow toad around the waist.
"GET EM BUDDY!"
He wound up like a baseball pitcher and launched Gamatatsu directly at Kabuto's face.
"RAAAAA!" Gamatatsu screamed, wiggling his legs in the air as he flew.
Kabuto didn't laugh this time. His expression flipped instantly to deadly seriousness. He saw a summon being thrown; he assumed it was a technique. He assumed there was a trap.
"Alright, Naruto," Kabuto said, his chakra scalpel flaring back to life around his hand. "If you want to treat ninja life as a joke, I'll show you what happens to toad legs after I cut this one in half."
He stepped forward, raising his hand to bisect the flying toad in mid-air.
POOF.
Gamatatsu vanished in a cloud of smoke right before impact. He had reverse-summoned himself out of pure panic.
Kabuto's scalpel sliced through the smoke, hitting nothing but air.
Then came the sound.
TINKTINKTINKTINKTINKTINK.
It wasn't the sound of a weapon. It was the sound of metal hitting stone. Lots of small metal.
PLOOP.
Kabuto paused. His eyes shifted down for a split second, tracking the noise.
Lying in the puddle of blood at his feet was a green, frog-shaped wallet. It had been sliced clean in half by his chakra blade.
Copper and silver coins were spilling out of its guts, rolling across the uneven floor and splashing into the shallow red liquid.
What?
Kabuto's brow furrowed. He had expected an explosion. He had expected a hidden shuriken. He hadn't expected loose change.
Then he heard the shifting of rubble above him.
His eyes darted up.
The crack in the ceiling—the one pouring blood—was wider now. And framed in the jagged hole, peering down through the crimson waterfall, was a girl with pink ribbons and glasses that reflected the chaos below.
Sylvie.
Kabuto's eyes widened. Wait—
I didn't have a flood. I didn't have a tsunami.
I had Manda's blood, damp stone, and a desperate theory.
I leaned over the edge of the broken floor, my hands already forming the seal. The headache behind my eyes was blinding, a white-hot spike driving into my skull, but I pushed through it. I pushed my chakra down, not as a wave, but as a blanket.
I grabbed the chaotic, splashing, flowing mess of the room below and I told it to stop.
"SUPER FROG JACKPOT!" Naruto screamed from below.
It was the signal. The stupidest, most brilliant signal in the world.
Kabuto's eyes flicked back to Naruto. He was close. But in his mind, he was safe. He had speed. He had reflexes. He could dodge a messy brawler like Naruto in his sleep.
I slammed my chakra into the liquid covering the floor.
"Water Style: Stillwater Domain."
The air pressure in the room dropped. The splashing stopped. The ripples ceased.
The mixture of water and thick blood covering the floor didn't freeze; it turned to syrup. It became heavy, dense, and unnaturally still. It wasn't just sticky; it was a localized physics violation. It was a refusal to let momentum exist.
Kabuto shifted his weight to dodge.
His feet didn't move.
His eyes widened in genuine shock. He looked down. The liquid around his ankles wasn't flowing anymore. It was gripping him, dampening his kinetic energy, absorbing the push-off he needed to evade. It was like trying to run in a nightmare where the ground turns to molasses.
He jerked his leg. It moved an inch, sluggish and heavy.
He turned back, panic finally cracking his calm mask.
He was just in time to see Naruto launch himself off a dry patch of rubble.
Naruto wasn't slowed. He was airborne. He was spinning. And in his hand, the blue sphere of chakra wasn't unraveling this time. It was screaming.
"RASENGAN!"
Kabuto tried to bring his hands up. He tried to twist. But the Stillwater held his stance firm, locking his feet to the floor for the crucial fraction of a second he needed to escape.
Naruto slammed the sphere into Kabuto's chest.
CRACK.
The sound of ribs shattering echoed louder than the castle groaning.
The rotation caught Kabuto. It spun him. It ground him. And then it launched him.
Kabuto flew backward, tearing free of my domain's grip only because physics had been overridden by brute force. He smashed through the stone wall of the corridor, turning into a blur of grey and blood, and disappeared out into the forest air.
I slumped against the edge of the hole, gasping for breath. The domain collapsed, the blood splashing naturally again.
Naruto landed in the puddle, breathing hard. He looked up at me, grinning through the gore on his face.
"Jackpot," he wheezed.