Chapter 91: Could You Leave Me a Little Dignity?
Panic. Confusion. A cold that started in the chest and spread outward.
Tsunade stood frozen, knuckles white around her clenched fists, and couldn't make herself move.
The Giantification Technique had released. The iron ball was just iron again. And there, directly in her line of sight, where Sakon and Jirōbō had been—
She didn't want to look at it. Didn't want to hear anything. Didn't want to touch anything.
The red. The smell — iron and sweetness. The way things that had been people became something that stuck to surfaces.
The greatest medical ninja the shinobi world had ever produced. Broken before the Third War even started.
Hemophobia.
It was enough to end any shinobi's career. For a medic who spent her life with the wounded, it was something closer to a slow execution.
"Tsunade. What are you waiting for?"
"Get in there and fight alongside her!"
The voice — familiar and wrong at the same time, a voice that belonged to a different era — came from the direction of the fighting. Tsunade felt it move through her like a tremor. She forced her eyes open, forced them to find something that wasn't the ground, and looked toward her family.
Her grandfather. Her great-grandfather. The people who had been her shelter when she was small enough to need one.
She still remembered exactly what it felt like — being young enough that she could press her face into that warmth and let the world be someone else's problem for a while.
She gathered herself and looked.
And found a massive demon-faced iron gate blocking her view, and nothing beyond it but a pink-haired figure.
Sakura felt something shift behind her and glanced back instinctively.
That single look made Tsunade step back.
Sakura wiped her cheek, looked at the blood on her fingers, and exhaled quietly.
If there were any way — could Hashirama possibly do something about the hemophobia?
She turned back to the fight and kept moving, buying whatever time she could for Hashirama and Tsunade to have their moment.
Orochimaru wasn't interested in giving her that time.
The control on both Hokages spiked. Hashirama's body vaulted the Rashōmon gate and came at Sakura without him.
BOOM.
She caught the punch one-handed. The roof beneath her feet turned to gravel.
And behind her, Tobirama was already mid-seal.
"Genjutsu: Dark Heartbeat!"
The world went black.
Not dimmer. Black. Complete. Sound and light, gone simultaneously.
Damn it—
Tobirama's teeth were grinding. Every line of his face was fury.
He had chosen to die so that Konoha's next generation could live. He had made that decision and held it. And now he was being used as a weapon against that same generation, and he could do nothing but watch himself do it.
He charged.
CRACK.
An invisible shockwave detonated from Sakura's fist. Tobirama's blue-armored silhouette flew backward like he'd been hit by something much larger than a girl.
But what Tobirama saw in that moment made him feel something unexpected.
Relief.
Those green eyes, wide open, unfocused — she couldn't see him. The genjutsu had absolutely landed.
And she'd hit him anyway.
Sensory-type combat technique. Actual combat-viable sensing, not theoretical — real-time battlefield application.
Excellent.
Hashirama seized the opening and drove his fist down toward her skull.
Sakura didn't dodge.
Chakra surged to her forehead. She headbutted his fist.
"Tsunade! I don't know what's happened to you!"
Hashirama — simultaneously slamming his own granddaughter with his own hands, unable to stop — shouted past her toward where Tsunade stood.
Sakura was behind the Dark Heartbeat's veil. Deaf and blind. He wasn't talking to her.
"But I am the First Hokage!"
"And you are my granddaughter!"
"This child is fighting with everything she has!"
Tsunade flinched. Her head came up.
"Great-great-grandfather..."
Her voice was shaking. Hashirama heard it with the precision of a man who had spent a lifetime reading battlefields and the people on them.
"She is the finest person I have seen!"
"And not just her — every person in this village is fighting right now!"
He was still attacking Sakura. His body wasn't his to command. He kept shouting.
"Tsunade!"
"This is not the girl I knew!"
"Tsunade — that young man is trying to use me and Tobirama to erase this village's future!"
"That is something I would rather die than do!"
"Tsunade!"
"Stop me!"
"Stop all of this!"
"You are Hashirama Senju's granddaughter!"
"Please!"
"Tsunade!"
At the edge of his awareness, he felt what Tobirama was doing.
A hand reached into a pocket. A slip of paper came out. Seals beginning.
No. No—
Tobirama had more forbidden techniques crammed into his head than any reasonable person needed. First the Flying Thunder God, then the Dark Heartbeat, and now—
If that tag goes off, the radius takes everything.
Hashirama's fury at his brother was a secondary problem. He kept pushing at the Edo Tensei's control and kept failing. The body was too weak. He'd burned everything he had forcing Tobirama's kunai to deviate earlier, and that had been his total reserve.
"Tsunade!"
"Stop Tobirama!"
"A Mutually Multiplying Explosive Tag doesn't weaken under Edo Tensei — a tag is a tag, it doesn't scale down because the user is compromised—"
"Tsunade!"
"Tsuna—"
Tobirama's voice came out through his teeth like each syllable was being dragged:
"Mutually Multiplying Explo—"
CRACK.
One punch. Lightning-fast. Half of Tobirama's torso exploded into confetti.
"Oh, would you stop going on." Tsunade's jaw was set. She was blinking hard, refusing to let anything fall. Her voice came out like she was angry at everyone including herself. "Every other word out of your mouth is Tsunade this, Tsunade that — could you leave me a little dignity?!"
(End of Chapter)