"Fire Style: Dragon Flame Dance!"
Hanabi swung the hem of her skirt and launched a burst of fire—trying to drive back the Jingliu puppet as it charged—but a single sword stroke split the flames apart.
The puppet stepped forward, closed the gap instantly, and locked onto Hanabi's flank, cutting off her retreat before she could pull any distance.
Hanabi abandoned ninjutsu and switched to pure taijutsu.
Against the Jingliu puppet, Gentle Fist was useless—every strike had to land with real impact.
Her movements were sharp and agile—darting, evading, retaliating—Zhuixia flowing alongside her, lashing from every angle at the puppet.
The way Hanabi moved through the fight was incandescent, like flame.
But the puppet's movements were weightless and exact.
The whole puppet seemed submerged in a volcanic rage, yet its attacks came in like deep winter ice—cold and surgical.
It didn't even bother to block properly. A minor shift here, a fractional adjustment there in the attack rhythm, and Hanabi's offense came apart on its own.
Hanabi's restraints were off right now. In more poetic terms, every blow she threw carried infinite force—as if it could shatter anything.
And yet it still couldn't crack the ice in front of her.
That perfectly ordinary sword of crystallized ice—in the puppet's hands, it transformed each strike into something miraculous, something that simply shouldn't have been possible.
If she didn't know better, Hanabi would have thought she was fighting a Noble Phantasm straight out of the Nasuverse.
In the dream-resonance sessions with Jingliu, they had never actually sparred.
Now Hanabi understood why. Sparring with that version of herself would have been essentially pointless.
She didn't dare relax. She threw everything she had at holding the puppet's onslaught.
Gradually, as she adapted to its patterns, her movements grew more fluid—each small adjustment buying her a fraction more time to avoid the killing blow.
Finally, she found an opening. She hooked a rope around a ledge and launched herself into the air.
"Fire Style: Phoenix Dance!"
Her sleeves spread wide in the air, and she was, for just a moment, a phoenix mid-ascent—flames rolling and rising with the shape of her body.
Then she realized almost immediately.
It was a trap. She'd walked right into it.
No—
The Jingliu puppet raised its ice sword. Arcs of ice-blue light swept outward.
Cold River Reflecting the Moon!
Hanabi killed her own attack mid-execution, yanked herself sideways with the rope—barely clearing several of the ice blades as they flashed past—but the last one she simply couldn't avoid.
If Zhuixia hadn't covered her entire body as armor, the whiplash alone from that forced stop could have killed her.
To dodge Jingliu's attack, she'd had to force a dead halt. The impact blacked out her vision—even the Byakugan failed—and thankfully she'd long since adapted to fighting blind.
The final blade she couldn't intercept. She wrapped rope around herself as a second skin and just barely absorbed it.
"Cough… cough…"
She spat blood. But at least she'd put distance between them.
Across the cavern, the puppet didn't press the immediate advantage.
"Looks like I need to show a bit more of what I've got."
When the puppet had first broken free of her chakra control, Hanabi had already cut off its supply.
Stripped of external chakra—running on reserves alone, operating at one thin thread of the original's power, and still restricted on top of that—it had pushed Hanabi into genuine difficulty.
I wonder how long Kakashi or Zabuza would last against this, she thought privately. In terms of sheer oppressive weight, this puppet was the most oppressive presence she'd faced. But its actual strength was constrained. That was the craft speaking, not the raw power.
Hanabi pivoted—and switched her costume back to the kimono.
But not the wide-sleeved furisode draped over her like a blanket. What emerged this time was an off-shoulder kimono, cut closer to the body.
She snapped a length of red cord back into her hand—pulling in the red parasol that had fallen to the ground.
From the parasol, she drew two longswords.
"Time to get serious."
Hanabi hadn't planned to reveal the sword techniques this early. Her intention had been to hold them until the Chunin Exams—to pull them out against Orochimaru when that confrontation came.
But she had no margin left for that now.
Getting to cross swords with a version of Master Jingliu—even one that was only a tiny fraction of the original's power—demanded everything she had.
At that exact moment, the puppet's silhouette flickered and vanished into the cavern.
"Byakugan!"
Hanabi snapped her eyes open.
She caught it immediately—a sharp current of chakra rushing in from directly behind her.
The ice sword had already closed the distance, launching forward like a thunderbolt.
Hanabi crossed both longswords in an instant and caught the blade. The impact detonated into her—massive, bone-jarring force.
But unlike before, when she'd simply tanked the hit, this time Hanabi used both swords to redirect the force along its own line, absorbing the momentum and gliding with it, spinning on her heel to land a kick at the puppet's side. The puppet's free hand, however, produced a second ice sword from nowhere—Hanabi hadn't anticipated that at all, and she barely managed to turn back and catch it, but the puppet leveraged the opening to sweep her off her feet.
Master, you never mentioned dual-wielding was part of the package.
"I really haven't been in such a sorry state in a while."
The cavern was frigid, the air seemingly frozen solid from the ice sword's chill.
The makeshift sword had already crystallized. The puppet stood over Hanabi, holding its original blade, its gaze bearing down on her with endless, ruthless precision.
Feral, yes. But also impossibly technical. Not a single gap.
The puppet had higher raw output than Hanabi—but not so far beyond her that the fight was hopeless.
What she couldn't match, what she could only look up at from below—was that swordsmanship.
An enormous pressure bore down on her—as if she were being suppressed by the god of death.
She'd called a dark deity and a god of death down on Kushina Yukii in the story earlier. Hadn't expected the boomerang to come back and hit her first.
"—But this is exactly what I needed!"
Even Hanabi herself hadn't known until now that she had this in her—a part that wanted nothing more than a fight like this.
Or maybe—she'd had Jingliu's inheritance card since early on. Maybe that spark of obsession, bone-deep, had always been there.
Hanabi launched herself at the puppet.
Her body flashed in close. Both swords drove forward like diving dragons, and in the same motion she layered on Fire Style: Super Deadly Ninja Bees—fire chakra riding the blade edge.
Blade met blade. Ice and fire collided—the crash of two impossibilities—and sparks scattered.
The force of both released at once tore through the cavern. Rock shattered.
The cavern, never structurally stable, began to give way.
And Hanabi saw it: the puppet had developed fractures.
"An opening!"
She charged again.
This time she moved with more menace than any of her previous runs.
But the puppet read every move before she made it. As Hanabi came in from one direction, the puppet came in from the other.
They traded wounds. The ice sword punched through Hanabi's chest—and her twin swords wrapped in fire connected with the puppet.
Of course, in actuality, the puppet had already lost its power an instant before impact. The final dramatic shattering was for the cameras.
"Hm… wait—"
Hanabi reached up and touched her chest. No wound.
Zhuixia had repaired the damage.
"Ugh…"
But in the same breath, pain crossed her face.
Half real. Half performance.
"The whole thing's collapsing!"
She didn't have time to assess anything further. She bolted for the exit—and in a plume of dust and debris, she cleared the cavern mouth just in time.
Then she detonated the Riddler Doll from inside the rock face, caving the structure in completely. To the audience, it would look like she'd barely made it out.
She pulled the kimono open.
On her back, a strange, pulsing mark had appeared—glowing faintly red, a pattern unlike anything natural…
"The dark deity's brand…"
Hanabi murmured the line as she pushed herself upright.
She leaned against the wall, drew the Warring States Seal History scroll from her robes.