The first thing you noticed about Ryūkōdai was how beautiful it was.
A flat-topped plateau rising three hundred meters above the surrounding land of Amegakure, its cliff faces so sheer they looked like someone had taken a blade to the earth and cut straight down. On a clear day you could see for forty kilometers in every direction from its crown. The Ame shinobi had a watchtower up there dating back generations, and from that watchtower you could watch all four of the main roads that fed into Amegakure's heart converging below like rivers into a single lake. Anyone holding Ryūkōdai could rain fire and stone and water down onto those roads the instant they spotted an enemy column moving along them. They could coordinate between their eastern and western forces without a single courier ever needing to move. They could watch the entire theatre of war from one spot and never lose the picture.
Which was exactly why four different hidden villages were currently trying to kill each other over it.
The Leaf had wanted the plateau to push its offensive deeper into Amegakure's territory without bleeding shinobi on every approach road. The Stone had wanted it to deny the Leaf that exact advantage and to do so with the kind of earth-release jutsu that became horrifically catastrophic when fired downhill from high ground. The Sand had its own reasons. And Amegakure's own forces, Hanzo's people, were not giving up the crown of their own land to any of the three.
So they all arrived within six hours of each other.
The battle that broke out at Ryūkōdai three days later had no definitive shape to it. No lines. No sides that stayed longer than the time it took someone to change that side. It had started at dawn with a Leaf advance up the plateau's single accessible path, a steep switchbacking climb with cliff walls on both sides that funneled shinobi into a corridor where every step forward meant walking over the person who had just died in front of you. The Stone hit the Leaf column from behind an hour into the climb because the Stone had come up a different route, one that didn't exist on any map, blasted fresh out of the cliff face with earth-release jutsu through the night. That attack pulled Rain forces away from the plateau's crown to deal with the Stone flanking move, which was when the Sand decided this was the moment to make their own push from the western approach.
By midmorning the plateau's crown was a nightmare that nobody owned.
Techniques tore through the air in every direction at once. A massive column of stone rose from the earth and collapsed across a cluster of Leaf shinobi before they could scatter. Three Rain shinobi in grey coats unleashed a three-headed water dragon that slammed through a mixed group of fighters and sent bodies spinning into the air like leaves off a branch in a storm. Sand puppets carved through the chaos on long chakra strings, their owners working from behind their allies. Fire, water, wind, and earth were going off simultaneously within spaces so small that the elements were meeting each other in the air and cancelling and exploding and the noise of it was nothing like anything a person could describe by the time they were standing in the middle of it.
People were dying.
A Stone chunin six meters to Bam's left simply disappeared into a column of sand that erupted from the ground, and by the time the sand settled there was nothing left of him at all. A Rain shinobi running past Bam at full speed tripped on nothing visible and when he hit the ground it was because a length of wire had taken his legs out at mid-shin and he was crawling before stopping still and the rain kept coming down regardless.
The rain never stopped on Ryūkōdai.
It came from clouds that hung so low and thick over Amegakure's territory that the plateau crown felt like the inside of a fist. It turned the rock underfoot to a grey slurry and it got inside your armor and it made every surface a bad place to try to find your footing. The sounds of the battle mixed with the rain until the whole plateau was a single roaring thing, a continuous noise that pressed against your eardrums from every direction and didn't leave room for anything calm.
Bam Akimichi had been on the plateau for forty minutes and he was the hungriest he had ever been in his entire life.
He was thirteen years old and objectively enormous for it, five feet eleven and built like the world's youngest mountain. He carried enough physical presence that the first Iwa shinobi who had come at him forty minutes ago had skidded to a stop and done a second look before committing to the charge. The kanji for food was stamped into the chest of his plate armor and his tetsubo was in his right hand, the iron studs dark with rain and worse things, and there was a gash across his left forearm that was bleeding enough to be annoying but not enough to actually worry about yet. His jonin captain had gone down twenty minutes ago to a Stone earth-release jutsu that Bam had not been able to reach in time to help with. After that there had been no plan, no direction, no one telling him what the right move was.
There was just the plateau. And the chaos. And the next person trying to kill him.
He was eating a rice ball with his free hand while he moved.
It was not the best time for it. He knew that. His mother would have had things to say about it. But his breakfast had been light and the rice ball was the fastest way to do something about that, and also he could not function properly when he was hungry and right now was not the time to try. He finished the last of it in two bites, tucked the wrapper into his armor without breaking stride, and raised his tetsubo back to a proper grip with both hands.
The Iwa swordsman found him thirty seconds later.
The man came out of the smoke from a collapsed stone pillar to Bam's right, moving fast and low. He was tall, not as tall as Bam but taller than most, with an Iwa headband worn low over his forehead. He crossed the distance between them while Bam was still processing that he was there.
The blade came in flat at Bam's midsection, a quick horizontal sweep aimed for the gap between his chest plate and his hip plate. Bam dropped his rear hip and let the sword pass beneath his guard, felt the tip scrape across the underside of his chest plate and drag sparks. The swordsman pivoted off the swing and came up with a backhand cut toward Bam's neck.
Bam got the tetsubo shaft up and took the cut on the iron rod. The impact rang up both arms and the blade skidded along the shaft and knocked it sideways. The swordsman pulled back before Bam could bring the tetsubo around and recovered to his guard in a single motion, and now they were two meters apart in the rain, both reassessing.
The swordsman looked at Bam.
Bam looked at the swordsman.
He was tracking the sword. Not the man's feet, not his face, the sword, because the sword was the part that would kill him and everything else the swordsman did was in service of getting that blade somewhere Bam couldn't block it.
The swordsman came forward again. A stabbing thrust this time, straight at Bam's chest, fast enough that the rain broke around the blade's tip in a tiny wake. Bam stepped off the line and swept the tetsubo across to knock the blade wide. The swordsman had already anticipated the deflection and was torquing his wrists to redirect mid-thrust, bringing the blade back in a diagonal cut across Bam's deflecting arm.
The cut opened the gash on Bam's left forearm.
SKRASSH
Blood on the rain-slicked rock.
Bam stepped back. The arm hurt, not badly, but it hurt. He rolled the forearm over and looked at the cut for one second and then looked back at the swordsman.
They came together a third time. The swordsman opened with a different approach, a feinting half-cut to the right shoulder that was clearly a setup, and Bam covered it anyway because not covering it would be stupider than walking into the setup. The swordsman drove the real attack underneath the cover, a low thrust toward Bam's thigh. Bam took a half-step back and it caught the front of his thigh plate instead of flesh, a scraping impact that pushed his leg back but didn't cut him. He brought the tetsubo down hard at the swordsman's extended arms.
The swordsman pulled back and the tetsubo hit the rock where his wrists had been and put a divot in the wet stone.
BOOM
The swordsman's eyes slightly widened at that.
Bam pressed forward. He swung from the right, a driving horizontal sweep that forced the swordsman to sidestep and redirect, and in the sidestep Bam saw the rear foot plant and recognized the opening it created and pivoted the tetsubo into a rising diagonal swing before the swordsman had finished the redirect. The blade and the tetsubo met in the air with a screaming ring of metal and the force of Bam's upswing drove the sword high. For one full second the swordsman's guard was completely gone.
The swordsman recovered it. Bam had expected him to. The recovery was fast.
It was not fast enough.
By the time the guard was back up, Bam had already moved. Not swinging, not committing to anything the swordsman could read and respond to, just inside the range where a long blade needed room to be useful. The swordsman tried to create space and Bam closed it in the same step, and now the blade was too close to swing properly and Bam rammed the tetsubo shaft horizontally into the swordsman's chest.
The impact drove the air out of the man. He went back two steps and his heel found the edge of a cracked section of rock and he dropped to one knee.
They looked at each other across two meters of rain.
The swordsman was breathing hard. His grip on the sword had not loosened. He came forward again, faster this time, clearly committing to ending it before whatever was happening could happen any further.
The swordsman's opening move was a wide overhead cut, a strike with so much force behind it that blocking it cleanly would have been a bad idea. Bam stepped inside it.
Inside the arc. Inside the killing range, inside where the blade had no leverage. His left hand, the cut arm, caught the swordsman's right wrist. His right hand brought the tetsubo up short and drove the tip of it into the swordsman's ribs with everything behind it.
KRRACK
The crack was audible even through the rain and the surrounding roar of the battle.
The swordsman made a sound that wasn't a word. His body bent around the impact. His sword hand lost its grip for the first time in the fight and the blade swung loose in his weakened fingers. Bam held the wrist and did not let him recover.
The second blow was the tetsubo in a full swing. Horizontal. The swordsman tried to bring his free arm up and the tetsubo hit it aside and kept going.
The man's body caved in.
He did not get up.
Bam stood over him and breathed. The rain came down on both of them. The swordsman was looking up at the grey sky and his chest was moving, barely, and his eyes were still carrying the question that had appeared in them during the middle of their exchange.
Bam crouched down, not to check the man but to look at his face for a moment.
"Thank you," he said. He meant it. "You were good."
He stood up and swung the tetsubo down. The iron studs made contact with the top of the swordsman's skull, and the skull exploded. The crunch of it was wet and deep. What had been a face a moment ago became something unrecognizable, flattened, the grey rain already washing red off the iron studs in thin ribbons while the body twitched once and then went still. Bam held the grip, looked at it for one second, and turned away.
…
He heard them before he saw them.
The voices of Leaf nin somewhere in the smoke shouting at each other to fall back and then shouting at each other not to because there was nowhere to fall back to. Bam pushed through the curtain of smoke left by a collapsed earth pillar and found the picture.
Six Leaf shinobi, some of them bleeding, all of them being pushed toward a sheer drop at the plateau's eastern edge by four Suna puppets the size of large animals. The puppeteers were back behind a line of broken stone, four of them working their strings, and the puppets were carving the Leaf nin apart. One of the Leaf shinobi tried to create distance and a puppet arm extended four meters and slapped him so hard he skidded across the wet rock and stopped only when he hit the legs of his own teammate. The Leaf nin were throwing kunai and the kunai were going into puppet bodies and doing nothing, and the poisoned weapons the puppeteers kept launching from the puppets' hidden compartments were forcing the Leaf nin to keep breaking their positions to dodge them.
Bam looked at the gap between him and the puppeteers. Forty meters of open rock covered in the debris of the ongoing battle, other fights happening in pockets across it, the rain coming down hard enough to halve your visibility beyond twenty meters.
He looked at the puppets.
He looked at the drop.
His hands formed the seals and he felt the chakra pour out of him, a rush of converted calories and physical energy that spread from his core outward in a wave. He grew. Three meters, four, the tetsubo lengthening with him. Five meters. He stopped there. Big enough for what he needed.
He tucked.
Arms in. Head down. Legs pulled to chest. A human boulder of fourteen hundred kilograms of expanded Akimichi weight, and then his legs fired once against the rock and he was rolling.
VRRRRMMMM
The spin built fast. The wet rock that should have been a problem for traction was not a problem because at this weight and this speed there was no surface that was truly a problem. He angled toward the puppeteers, toward the line of broken stone they were working from, and the roaring spin put everything else at the edges of hearing.
From behind that line of stone, someone saw him coming.
The puppeteers broke from their work on the Leaf nin. All four of them, at once. Hands connected to chakra strings, puppets turned and shot out with weapons that launched. Senbon needles in a cloud, coated in something that glistened even in the rain. A spread of shuriken that spun toward him in a wall. Two kunai trailing smoke, a gas release on contact. More senbon.
It was not nothing. Anyone who knew what was coating those weapons would scatter because you did not want any of that touching you.
Bam was forty meters away and twenty meters away and fifteen and the arc of his path shifted. Not violently, not a sudden lurch, a smooth curving drift that took him sideways off his original line while the rolling continued, and the entire storm of poisoned weapons tore through the space where he had been a moment before and hit nothing but air and rain.
The Leaf nin who had survived the puppet assault were watching. The puppeteers were watching. For half a second the entire small theatre of that corner of the battle stopped because nobody on either side knew what they had just seen. A rolling boulder the size of a small building had redirected in mid-roll like it had a thought about where it wanted to be.
Then the Leaf nin understood they needed to get clear and moved.
The puppeteers understood too late.
KRRRRRAAAAASSHHHHH
The line of broken stone that had been their cover exploded outward in a spray of shattered rock and dust and human pieces. Two puppets caught in the direct path folded and burst apart, carved limbs and metal mechanisms and hollow torsos scattering across the plateau in every direction. The puppeteers themselves had no time to do anything meaningful. The first one disappeared under Bam before the man had even finished drawing breath to shout. The second managed half a step before the rolling mass took him at the hip and the sound he made was high-pitched and brief, a crack of pelvis and spine giving out simultaneously, his top half and bottom half briefly facing different directions before the momentum ground him into the rock entirely. The third tried to jump clear and made it halfway off the ground before the edge of the roll caught his legs and the plateau surface met the back of his skull at a combined speed that left a long dark smear across the wet stone. The fourth was already running and was the only one who had the right idea and was also not fast enough, the roll catching him in the back and driving him forward and flat in a single instant, ribs and everything behind them.
Bam let himself expand another meter as he hit the main cluster, maximum weight, maximum devastation, and then the edge of the plateau was coming up fast and he killed his momentum, dropped his legs, and came down on both feet in a crater of broken rock at the edge of the sheer drop with the grey valley of Amegakure sprawling three hundred meters below him.
He shrank to his normal size, the tetsubo contracting with him, and he rolled his neck and took a breath. He was incredibly, terribly, angrily hungry.
He had been right at the edge of wondering if he was about to have to continue fighting when something long and hard and moving very fast went past his left ear.
Bam ducked by instinct and the weapon that would have gone through his skull instead clipped the top of his head and took a fistful of hair with it. He spun, tetsubo already rising, and caught the Rain ninja mid-lunge with the shaft across the forearms in a block that stopped both of them.
The Rain shinobi was young. Dark grey coat, Amegakure headband, breathing hard from however far he had come at a run to try and put that strike into the back of Bam's neck. The weapon, a flat-headed short blade, had nearly done exactly what it was supposed to do and he had covered enough distance quietly enough that Bam had not heard him coming at all, which in the middle of this noise was actually impressive.
They shoved against each other through the locked block.
The Rain chunin pushed off the block and opened the distance with a quick back-step, blade shifting to a guard. He looked at Bam's tired figure and came in again immediately to press whatever advantage he thought that gave him.
First attack: a high cut toward the left shoulder. Bam rolled the shoulder back and it went wide. Second: a low cut at the right knee, a cut that tried to use the high cut's overextension to disguise itself. Bam pulled the knee back and the blade skimmed his shin. He answered with a wide tetsubo sweep that wasn't trying to land, just trying to push the chunin back and reset the gap.
The chunin stepped around it instead of back, circling to Bam's right, and threw a straight stab at the ribs from the new angle. Bam twisted and the blade hit his side and found no armor there and pain flared sharp across his ribs but the blade had come in at an angle and skated off instead of driving in. He locked his elbow over the blade on the way past, trapping the chunin's weapon arm, and drove a short downward punch with the tetsubo's butt into the chunin's wrist.
The grip didn't break but the arm went numb. The chunin yanked free before the follow-up and was back at range again in an instant, shaking feeling back into his weapon hand, and for a moment they were still.
The chunin was faster than he had been at the start of the exchange.
But it didn't matter because every time the chunin's blade found a line of attack Bam's body answered it. Three exchanges in, he was reacting. Six exchanges in, he was anticipating.
The chunin felt it. You could see it in the tightening around his eyes. He tried a feint sequence, four moves designed to chain into each other and disrupt a defender's timing. Bam walked through the first three and on the fourth the chunin found a tetsubo shaft already between him and where his blade was heading.
The chunin made a decision. He shoved Bam with his empty hand, hard, using the contact to create separation, and as the distance opened he was already weaving through hand signs.
His cheeks puffed. His chest moved. He was kneading chakra from his stomach, pulling the water chakra up through his body for the shape it needed.
"Water Style: Water Bomb Jutsu!"
The formed mass of water launched in a torrent, a roaring concentrated surge aimed at the large target in front of the chunin, and the chunin was already tracking it, watching where it would hit, and his eyes were following the jutsu forward.
Which was why they were not looking behind him.
Bam was already in motion before the jutsu reached where he had been standing. Not running sideways, not back. The hand signs had been enough warning and the distance the shove had created had been exactly what he needed. The Body Flicker technique consumed some chakra and the plateau blurred and he arrived behind the chunin with the exact gap he needed, already reading where the man's feet would land when he touched down from his back-step, already choosing the angle.
The chunin's jutsu hit empty air and rock and exploded outward in a torrent of water that knocked two other fighters off their feet thirty meters away.
The chunin's feet touched the rock.
The tetsubo was already coming down.
It came down with every bit of Bam's weight and both hands behind it and the full drop of his extended reach. There was no chance to turn. No chance to look. The chunin simply arrived on the ground and then the tetsubo arrived a fraction of a second after him, iron studs first into the top of the skull, and the skull popped.
The sound it had made was devastating and brutal. The sound of metal colliding with flesh, bone, and everything housed behind both.
Bam straightened up. He held the tetsubo at his side and looked at what he had done and felt the deep hungry pull in his gut that the chakra expenditure had opened up and was not close to finished opening. The rain came down on his face. Around him the battle of Ryūkōdai was still going in every direction, still roaring, still throwing light and noise and death across the wet stone of the plateau crown, and he was thirteen years old and bleeding from his forearm and his ribs and he had never been this hungry in his entire life.
He reached into the inner pocket of his shirt.
Rice ball. Slightly crushed. Still edible.
He ate it in three bites, already turning to find what came next.