"WAKE UP!"
The word went off inside her skull like a struck bell, and the dark peeled back in a single blink. Hinata's Byakugan flared behind the visor, veins blooming at her temples, the world snapping into focus all at once. Her lower back was driven deep into the brick face of an old abandoned building on the edge of town, the masonry caved in a crater around the small of her spine, her armored upper body hung forward over open air, head lolled toward the muddy ground three meters below. The rain came down so hard it had drawn a gray curtain over everything, drumming on her plates, swallowing the town past arm's reach in a wall of falling water.
She let the Byakugan push out through the downpour, sweeping the streets in a slow spiraling arc as she opened the channel. "Report. All of you, report in." Her doubled voice rolled out over the channel, the deep resonance under her own alto steadying as it went. The blast had thrown her clear across the town to the northern outskirts. Around her, the scattered remains of one of the warehouses lay strewn through the alley, a buckled steel door folded over a cart, a length of rafter standing upright out of the mud like a grave marker.
She swept her sight south, down the streets, toward the docks. Where the three warehouses and the wharf had stood there was nothing now but a torn black gap in the town's edge, the pilings gone, the buildings gone, debris flung in a wide fan across every street that fed the waterfront. The sea had come in over the ruins and stood there in churning gray waves, sliding up the lower lanes, water glinting in the broken streets two and three blocks inland. The explosion had walked outward through the whole town ahead of it. Glass hung in jagged teeth from a window frames, and through them and over them the civilians moved in a panic, wading the flooded lanes, scrambling up onto the roofs, clutching children and clutching each other and staring back toward the water. The flood had risen to the lower sills and stopped there, the lanes left wet and stranded where they should have been drowned outright, the sea that Kisame had thrown at the town shoved back out into the ruined harbor by the force of the three buildings going up at once. Far out past it all, the sea was still a single wall of gray fog and storm, motionless and waiting.
Her squadmates were clean steady shapes spread across the rooftops between her and the water, each of them upright and moving, all of them alive, already turning back toward the docks.
Hinata set both armored palms flat against the brick to either side of her hips and pushed. The wall let her go with a low grinding crunch, masonry sloughing away as she dropped, and she landed in the alley mud in a heavy crouch, water sheeting off her plates. The bodies of the mutants were scattered around her, the warped things from the tanks flung loose by the blast and laid out broken in the muck, no glass left to hold them. She rose, and as she turned to look back at the wall she had been buried in, she went still.
A rogue bandit had hit the brick first. His body was crushed flat into the caved-in face of it, arms splayed, and where his head should have been there were two deep round concaves pressed into the wall on either side of a thin crushed ridge, his face split clean down the middle into the gap between them and driven inward to either side, frozen in a wide-eyed, open-mouthed mask of pure horror, two perfect globe-shaped hollows stamped into the brick over what was left of him. The man had landed against the wall, and then the heavy armored weight of her had come down on top of him rear-first, the solid round mass of her backside swallowing his head whole and folding his skull open down the deep cleft between her armored buttocks, printing the shape of itself into the masonry an inch deep and leaving his shattered, terror-struck face wedged in the seam between the two hollows. A single bead of sweat slid down the inside of her visor. Her head swiveled, slowly scanning the empty rain-lashed alley to be very certain that not one living soul had seen the manner of his passing.
"Okay, what is it with this mission and everything blowing up?!" Kiba's ragged voice tore across the comm. "That's twice now! Twice!"
"Neji here. I am unharmed. Regrouping."
Hinata straightened and turned south. "To the docks. Move." She did not wait for the rest of it. Her knees bent and she drove off the alley floor, the mud cratering under her boots, and she was up and over the first roofline, weaving low and fast across the slick tile through the curtain of rain. The civilians were already up on the rooftops below her shouting, and a dozen arms were flung out toward the water, pointing the same direction she was running, pointing at the sea. The replies came in over the channel one after another as she crossed the roofs, each of the others reporting in unhurt and already turning onto a converging line toward the wharf, Lee breathless with cheer, Tenten clipped, Shino flat, Akamaru's bark carrying behind Kiba's voice, all of them folding in toward the same point.
She came down on the bordering buildings just short of the torn ground where the warehouses had been, and a shape dropped onto the wet tile beside her, red hair plastered flat, glasses streaming. Karin landed in a low crouch and her head came up, relief cracking through the strain on her face.
"Hinata-sama, you're alive." She pushed her glasses up her nose with a shaking knuckle. "I lost your signature in the blast, I thought, I couldn't feel you for a second there…"
"I am fine." Hinata's gaze stayed on the streets below, on the water threading up the lanes out of the smoking gap where the docks had been, sliding street by street into the lower town. The flood had come in hard and then simply stopped halfway up the buildings, the blast that had hit her the only reason the town was not under three meters of harbor. "The explosion held the water back. It will not hold it long. We contain this now."
She kicked off the roof. Her hands snapped through the seals as she landed on the next ridge, the biomass at her wrists flaring white, chakra pouring down through her boots into the stone of the building.
"Doton: Doryūheki (Earth Release: Mud Wall)."
A slab of dark earth ripped up out of the flooded street between two buildings, climbing past the eaves into the rain, its face hardening to compressed stone as it rose, and the water that had been sliding up the lane piled against the back of it and stopped. She was already moving, bounding to the next gap, slamming another wall up across it, then another, sealing the lanes one by one against the creeping tide. Below and around her the rest of the squad came down onto the bordering roofs in ones and twos, Neji and Tenten on the eastern line, Kiba and Akamaru and Shino dropping in to the west, Lee and Guy folding in last, all of them turned to face the sea.
She drove the last wall up across the final open lane, and the moment the stone locked into place her Venom-sharpened senses lit with warning, a cold prickle racing the length of her spine. Her head snapped up toward the fog. The sea had closed into one solid gray wall from shore to sky. She let her sight slide off the Byakugan and onto the deeper spiritual channel, reaching past the breakwater, and she found his point of presence far out, deep on the open water. It had changed. The signature she had locked onto during the fight was wound tighter now, fused into something denser, his shape no longer reading the way it had on the dock. She filed it without a word. Across the whole face of the sea the chakra in the fog was thickening, the saturation climbing, the pressure of it building toward something.
"It's coming again." Karin's voice cracked over the comm on high tone. "Same as before, the big threat, it's, it's right on top of us…"
A vast chakra-wreathed shark erupted straight down out of the fog directly above Hinata, jaws spread wider than her body, eyes of white compressed chakra burning at the front of its skull. She threw herself sideways off the ridge as it came, and the thing smashed through the space she had stood in, crashing down onto the roof and the earth wall behind it, the wall shattering apart under the impact in a burst of stone and brown water. She was still in the air when the second one rose at her out of the rain below, bigger, climbing fast on her exposed flank. The lightning cloak ignited over her in a single crackling instant, white-hot arcs racing the length of every plate, and the biomass at her forearms surged and stretched into a pair of long scythe-blades, cerulean veins running their length, lightning snarling up the edges. Her wings snapped wide from her shoulder plates and beat once, kicking her into a hard backflip up and over, and the shark passed beneath her open and blind, and she brought both scythes down through it as it went. It came apart in a long crackling tear. The two failed sharks crashed down across the streets and the rooftops and burst, dissolving into great heaving volumes of brown water that came down and filled the lane she had just sealed, slopping up over the broken wall.
She landed and her hands were already moving. Another earth wall tore up across the reopened lane, choking the flood back, and she flipped her wings and threw herself toward her squad's line. As she crossed the gap her eyes caught the fog and her stomach dropped. Dozens of the giant sharks were rising out of the gray wall all along the waterfront, peeling up out of the fog in a school, and every one of them was driving in toward her teammates.
Kiba and Akamaru hit the first as a single spinning blur, the gray fang-vortex of them shredding through the chakra shark in a spray of dissolving water, and as they fell out of the spin toward the tile another shark was already on them, jaws yawning over Akamaru's flank with no room left to turn, and then Lee was there, dropping out of nowhere with a shout, the heel of his foot driving through the thing's skull and bursting it to spray. Tenten met two more on the fly with the twin blades drawn, blue-white current sheeting down the folded steel, and she slashed both apart in a crackling double arc as they passed her, the electricity unmaking their chakra cores. Neji took the next head-on, his palms a blur, his Vacuum Palm crushing one out of the air and his open hand driving clean through the body of another in a burst of force.
Karin twisted aside from a shark that came in low across her roof, and it tore past her and plowed straight through one of Hinata's earth walls, stone exploding outward, and as it went its great spined fin caught her across the leg and swept her feet from under her. She went down hard on the streaming tile, sliding, scrabbling for grip on the slick surface, and as she got a knee under herself the next one was already falling, an enormous open maw dropping straight down over her with nowhere left to roll. A long beam of white-cerulean light lanced in from the side and split the thing top to bottom, the Raikōhō (Lightning Cannon) carving it in half a hand's breadth above her head, and the two pieces sheeted apart into falling water to either side of her.
Hinata came down on the roof at Karin's back, boots planted, visor still leveled at the sea, her shoulder cannon hissing steam where the beam had vented. "Are you hurt?" She did not turn around.
"N-no." Karin was already pushing up onto her feet behind her. "I'm okay, I'm…"
Both of them felt it at once, the prickle climbing past warning into something cold, and both of their heads snapped toward the fog wall. Beyond the school of sharks still battering at the squad's line, something else was coming, a mass so vast it dwarfed the buildings, rising up out of the gray like a hill heaving itself off the sea floor, several times the height of the roofs they stood on, and the whole town's worth of sharks were a screen in front of it.
Hinata's hands came up. Earth was not hers, the element sat heavy and foreign in her chakra, and from the dark coiled length along her spine Venom flooded forward into the work, the co-processor seizing the seals, the alien will leaning its weight behind hers. Lean on us. Now. The two of them cast as one.
"Doton: Doryūheki (Earth Release: Mud Wall)."
The ruined ground where the docks had been ripped itself open. Walls of dark stone tore up out of the rubble and the standing water in a steep forward-angled rank, climbing higher than the building she stood on, one slab after another canting out over the waterfront like a breaking wave frozen in earth. Two of the rising walls caught sharks on their faces as they came and burst them flat against the stone, the chakra bodies sheeting away into water. The last slab locked home with a deep grinding boom.
The instant it finished, a wall of sound hit it from the far side, KRACK, a single colossal slamming blow that rolled in under the thunder and merged with it, the crack of a lightning strike and the crack of stone fusing into one enormous sound, and a fork of white splintered the sky overhead as a fresh web of cracks raced up the new walls.
"It's holding!" Tenten's taut voice came over the comm. "It's holding, the walls are taking it…"
The upper edges of the stone began to crumble. They sheared off the top of the rampart in great wet sheets, and over the broken crest, where the walls had stood tallest, the dark spined shapes were already pouring through, sharks by the dozen cresting the top of the barricade against the lightning-shot sky.
"Oh, come ON, not again!" Kiba howled across the channel.
Hinata's biomass surged. It boiled up out of the seams of her armor over her shoulders and back, twin cannons unfolding atop her shoulder plates, tendrils whipping out from her spine, the lightning cloak roaring back to full white life across every plate. The crest of the earth wall directly above her and the wide-eyed Karin at her back blew apart, and several dozen chakra sharks broke through the breach all at once and came down out of the dark toward their roof in a falling stampede.
The two cannons on her shoulders flared and fired. Two continuous beams of white-cerulean lightning roared up off her plates and connected to the falling mass, sweeping through it, and the sharks melted on the beams as they came, their bodies unmaking, but the chakra that held them gave way into water, and the whole stampede sheeted down into a colossal falling weight of it that blotted out the last of the gray sky and dropped the world into night-dark over the two of them.
"HINATA, ABOVE…" Tenten's voice broke and drowned.
Her tendrils were already moving, dozens of them whipping out from her back and shoulders in a blur, weaving the lattice overhead. "Hakkeshō: Klyntar Tenshū (Eight Trigrams: Klyntar Heavenly Dome)." Black hardened biomass spun out into a perfect ribbed shell above them and filled with a translucent crackling skin of lightning chakra, and the full crushing weight of the dispelled sea came down on top of it. The dome rang under the impact, the water slamming flat against it and sheeting away to every side, and through the noise of it Karin's voice came from close behind her shoulder, shaking but steady.
"Hinata-sama. We can't, we can't hold against that thing out there. We have to fall back right now."
Hinata drew the lightning inward to her core, all of it, the cloak and the dome both folding down into a single point of white pressure at her center, and let it go.
"Raiton: Hakai Shōgekiha (Lightning Release: Destructive Shockwave)."
The protective dome peeled outward off the two of them in a single cataclysmic ring of white electricity, blasting the standing water off the roof in a flat exploding sheet, hurling it back over the eaves in every direction, and her senses swept out riding the edge of the blast and found every one of her squadmates upright and clear, untouched, the shockwave breaking around them and dispelling a fresh cluster of sharks into bursting steam. In the same breath she and Karin both saw the next wave, another dozen of the things converging out of the fog and the rain, this time from every bearing at once, low and high, left and right.
Hinata's stance dropped and shifted, her shoulder cannons cycling up to fire again, and along her arms and back the biomass was already pulling itself into blades and clubs and scythes, a dozen weapons rising half-formed and lightning-laced, every one of them lining up on a different angle of attack. And under all of it she felt his presence arrive right on top of them, the spirit-point she had tracked out on the deep water suddenly here. For a single instant he stood revealed on the broken crest of her wall through the rain, stripped of his cloak and his shirt both, bigger than he had been on the dock, the muscle of him swollen dense across a wider frame, the shape of his skull pulled longer, smoothing back toward a point. Her fused senses read him and stuttered, because there were two lives wound into that single body, two presences braided into one the same way she and Venom were one, and the recognition landed cold. His massive fist was already drawing back to swing at her, and she was already turning her weight to meet it, and then a green blur came in from the side and a heel slammed across his elongated face with a sound like a dropped boulder.
"DYNAMIC ENTRY!"
BOOM
Kisame's head snapped sideways, his swing torn off its line, his whole reshaped body launched off the crest of the wall, and the look on what could be seen of his face was pure, blank astonishment, surprised off his feet a second time by the same green-clad fool.
Hinata let her cannons die and her gathered weapons fold and re-form, the whole storm of half-shaped biomass realigning in a blink, and she stepped into the falling sharks instead.
"Hakke Hyaku Nijūhachi Shō: Mugen Ranbu (Eight Trigrams 128 Palms: Infinite Wild Dance)."
She became a black squall. Her body blurred apart into a wild churning storm of strikes, palms and talons and tendrils and blades lashing out from every angle at once, hundreds of impacts a second, and the converging sharks came apart against her the instant they entered her reach, every one of them unmade mid-flight, the whole multi-angled wave of them disintegrating around the two figures on the roof and collapsing into nothing but falling, sheeting water.
It was not enough to save them from the water. The full crushing mass of every shark she had just dispelled came down at once across the rooftops in a violent wall, and Karin, half-risen and already turning to run, was swept off her feet by it and snatched sideways off the roof, tumbling, carried out over the eaves on the back of the wave as it raced down the broken lanes toward the open sea.
"KARIN!"
Hinata's wings flared and she threw herself off the roof after her, one hand snapping back through a seal as she went, a fresh earth wall tearing up across the lane behind her to choke the following water off the rest of the squad. She drove down through the rain along the lane that the flood was draining back into the harbor, her spiritual sight thrown wide. Far out over the open sea two bright points wheeled and clashed above the waves, Guy-sensei and Kisame, locked together out past the breakwater, neither of them sinking. And below her, close, Karin's trace was already in the water past the ruined wharf, the soft thread of her presence sliding down through the dark sea, deeper and fainter by the second. The whole harbor was a roar of saturated chakra, the lightning overhead jamming her electromagnetic sense into white noise, the spiritual channel the only thing she had left.
She folded her wings flat against her back, locked her arms to her sides, and drove herself headfirst down off the last broken piling into the black water after Karin.
The surface closed over her helmet and the storm went away. The thunder that had been hammering the town flattened into a dull pressure that rolled through the water and through her plates, the lightning above reaching down only as faint gray pulses that died a few meters under the chop. The world went cold and dark, and the weight of the chakra in it pressed against her from every side like a fog she could feel against her skin.
Venom answered before she had to ask. The biomass woke along the seams of her armor and remade itself for the water in the space of a breath, the spiracles in the silver Weave along her ribcage flaring open under the plates and drinking the sea straight into her, a soft cerulean pulse running the line of them as the alien gills took over her breathing. Long ribbed fins unfurled off her shoulders and forearms and down the backs of her calves, biomass spreading thin and wide to bite the water, and between her armored fingers translucent membranes snapped taut. She stopped being a thing that fell through the sea and became a thing that belonged to it.
Her spiritual sight found Karin below, the soft thread of her dragged farther out and farther down, tumbling in a slow helpless spiral away from the shore and into the deep. Around that small fading trace the water was thick with denser shapes wheeling in, half a dozen of the chakra-wreathed sharks already closing the circle, their compressed-chakra eyes the only hard points of light in all that black. Hinata locked on, swept her fins back, and fired herself down at Karin like a loosed harpoon, the abyss roaring past her visor.
Karin's lungs were burning. She had her lungs packed with the last air she had managed to grab off the surface and she was clawing at the water with both hands, trying to find which way was up, her glasses gone, her senses screaming with the saturation of the whole churning sea. Everything around her read as denser cold blobs sliding closer, circling, and the panic was climbing her throat past the burn in her chest. One of the dense shapes broke off and drove straight at her, jaws spreading wide enough to take her whole, and she had no air left to scream with.
Something flickered across the water in front of her face, and the shark came apart down its length and sheeted away into nothing. Then more blinks, light and dark together, white-cerulean flashes braided through a black shadow that flickered between the circling shapes faster than her eyes could hold, and one by one the dense forms burst and dissolved around her. The black shadow resolved in front of her, an armored giant crowned with horns, its face a blank plate, bigger than anything that should be down here with her, and her heart slammed once in pure animal terror, before the deeper sense under her panic recognized the serene drowning ocean and the silent predatory trench wound through it, and she knew it, and the terror folded into relief so sharp it almost made her sob out her air.
Hinata caught her by the harness of her vest and turned her, drawing Karin in against her own armored back and folding the smaller woman's arms forward over her shoulder plates, and Karin clamped on, legs and arms locking around her like a child onto a parent. Through the visor Hinata read the bright fading thread of the chakra in Karin's chest, the oxygen in her nearly spent, and read the black below them, no floor anywhere in it, the surface already a distant smear of dim gray far overhead, too far to climb on the breath Karin had left.
The biomass rose off her spine in slow tendrils between the bracing weight of Karin's arms, reaching up and back, and threaded toward the woman's face. Karin felt it touch her and flinched hard, a thin muffled sound of fright escaping her and trailing silver up into the dark, and she recoiled harder still when two fine threads of it found her ears and slid inside.
Be still. The voice did not come through the water. It came up from somewhere underneath Karin's own thoughts where nothing should have spoken, a melodic alto wound through a baritone so deep and so vast that it seemed to come from the bottom of the sea itself, an old resonance with too many voices folded into the one. Calm down. We have you. We are going to help you breathe.
Hinata? Karin's mind reached back, ragged with shock, the name breaking across the link. Hinata-sama, is, is that you…
Yes. Be still.
The thrashing went out of Karin by degrees, her grip easing from a death-clench into a hold, and as she stilled the biomass flowed up over her jaw and sealed across her nose and mouth in a soft warm membrane, cerulean light pulsing faintly inside it.
Breathe in.
Karin's whole body resisted it, every instinct she had refusing to pull water into her chest, until the burn in her lungs won and she dragged in a desperate breath through the membrane, and cool clean air filled her, and another breath came after it, and another.
I can breathe! The thought tore through the link so loud Hinata felt it ring. Oh, oh my, Hinata-sama, I can breathe, what is this, I can BREATHE down here…
Hinata did not answer. Her senses had already caught the next thing, a more concentrated knot of cold sliding in toward them through the murk, denser than the saturation everywhere else, picking up speed.
Behind you! Karin's mind cracked the warning out the same instant. Watch out, there is, there is something coming, big…
A large shark came out of the dark on their flank, longer than the others, and Hinata was already moving. She rolled off her line and shot in a tight spiraling helix around the length of its body, faster than it could turn, the biomass on her forearms snapping into a pair of long blades that lit cerulean and threw threads of white current crawling into the water around them, and she opened the construct down its whole flank as she spun past, fwsh, the body sheeting apart into a billow of dispersing chakra and ordinary seawater that shoved against her in a cold pulse.
There are more! Karin again, pressing flat to Hinata's back. Half a dozen, maybe more, coming in from out there, farther…
Hinata swept her fins and went at them. She wove through the deep water in long fast curves, cutting one apart with a scything blade as she crossed its path, twisting around the next and splitting it, and where two came in together too wide to reach she leveled an armored palm and let a burst of white lightning rip out through the water between them, the current snarling out in a branching net that touched both cores and burst them to nothing, the dull boom of it rolling away through the sea. She kept her body angled the whole time so that not one of them came near the young woman locked to her spine, taking each on her own armored front. Through it all the shapes read to her own sight as nothing more than vague denser smudges in the all-over fog of chakra, every one of them blurring into the saturated dark, and she only knew where each truly was because Venom had taken the whole of it, the co-processor along her spine running the cold water and the moving blobs and Karin's frantic warnings into a single clean stream her conscious mind could fight from.
How are you seeing them so clearly? She asked it down the link as she split another shark and banked. To us they are only denser water. You name them before they move.
It's my sensing. Karin's thought came back steadier now, settling into the thing she was good at. I don't see blobs, I see, I see the shapes of the chakra, and the flavors of it, every signature tastes different. The constructs are all the same flavor, dead and flat, the real water is, is nothing. That's how I sort them. That's all I'm doing, I'm sorting them for you…
Hinata turned that over for half a stroke. Then, without a word out loud or in, she reached inward along her spine and nudged the coiled presence there, a silent question pressed against the alien will, and felt it lean back against her in answer.
Then let us in. Open your sensing to us. Let me have what you have.
I, okay, yes, Karin sent, but how do I even, how am I supposed to…
The question never finished. A surge of something vast came across the link from the other side, a pressure of thought so much heavier than her own that it pushed the breath out of her, and for one suspended instant Karin felt the strength of the body she was clinging to land inside her own mind, the sheer dense weight and power of it, the cold patient depth of the second thing that lived in it. She took a deep shuddering breath through the membrane, her whole frame trembling against Hinata's plates.
Oh my God, she breathed into the link.
And then Hinata and Venom were through, threading down the contact and into the young woman's sense, into the Mind's Eye of Kagura. Over Hinata's own perception, her Byakugan and her electromagnetic feel and her deeper spiritual sight, a wholly new way of perceiving the world bled in and settled. The sea that had been one undifferentiated fog of chakra at a thousand densities suddenly sorted itself, the murk resolving, every dense smudge pulling into a defined shape with a clean edge and a distinct flavor she could taste apart from the rest. The flat dead signatures of the constructs separated cleanly from the living warmth of Karin on her back and the bright distant points far out across the water.
Interesting. Venom said it lowly inside her alone, kept clear of the shared link, and Hinata felt the symbiote's curiosity bloom through her like warmth, a delight wholly its own, the wonder of a creature that had just been shown a band of color it had never known the eye could hold.
Focus harder, Hinata sent down to Karin. Hold it open for me.
I've got it, I've got it, go, Karin answered, locking her grip and bending her whole sense to the task.
Hinata swept her fins and drove off in the direction she had chosen, and the sharks that came at her now she met with her sight running ahead of her, weaving between them where before she had only torn through them, cutting them open one after another with blade and burst as the school thinned in her wake. She marked, distantly, that the things had changed. When they had hit the docks they had moved as one coordinated wave, every one of them driving at a target. Now they wandered, sweeping the deep at random, casting through the black for anything at all, a net with no hand on it anymore.
What troubled her was the cost of them. She read the saturation pressing in from every direction, the immense standing volume of chakra that filled the whole bay and the whole deep beneath it, the great masses of water that had been conjured out of nothing, and now sharks rising out of that water without pause, a flood of constructs with no bottom to it. The amount of it was staggering. One man had poured this into the sea.
Their volume is as deep as our primary male partner's. Venom said inside her, meaning Naruto, the bright tireless one she was bonded to. This shark person carries an ocean of it, the same as our chosen mate carries his fox. And the sword. A cold thread of regard ran through the thought. The sword has more mind in it than we credited. It is not a tool. It functions as we. It feeds him, it mends him from wounds that should have ended him, it makes him more than he is. He carries a symbiote of his own, and does not know to call it that.
Hinata took it in and bent her concentration forward, past the wheeling sharks, out toward her destination. Far from the town's drowned shore, out over the very middle of the open sea, two points burned bright in her spiritual sight and stood sharp now in the borrowed sensing besides, two flavors of chakra she knew. Guy-sensei and Kisame. They were moving across the surface above the deep at a speed that turned them into stuttering flickers, blinking from one patch of water to the next, each touchdown blooming a great burst of chakra as fist met sword and sword met fist, the sea around them lit and churned with every exchange.
Karin. Hinata angled her body toward the two distant points and poured on speed, the abyss streaming past. The biomass rose off her shoulder plates in answer to her will, unfolding upward and out into rank after rank of slim cannon-barrels that grew, locked, and began to thrum with gathering cerulean light, arrays of them sprouting along both pauldrons. Get ready.
The sea went off like a struck anvil the size of a hill.
KABOOM
Kisame's lunging arm and the green fool's swinging leg met in the open air above the chop, his Samehada-thickened forearm against the man's shin, two slabs of bone-dense muscle slamming together with an unspeakable force. The shockwave punched outward from the point of contact in a flat white ring, and the rain-lashed water below them caved away from it on every side, a wide circle of sea simply shoved flat and out, spray hurled into the storm in a blooming crown. Kisame felt the blow run all the way up into his shoulder and rattle the teeth in his elongated jaw, and the bandaged weight of Samehada along his back hummed and drank the shock to keep his arm from breaking outright.
The bastard was still smiling.
Kisame snarled and brought his other arm around in a fast brutal hook, fast enough to take the man's head off his shoulders. The green blur was not there. It blinked, gone at a speed his eye could not follow, the air clapping shut where it had been, and reappeared a body's length higher with that same hideous shining grin fixed under the bowl of black hair, the leg already coming down, and the heel cracked across the side of Kisame's skull and threw his head hard to the side.
He let the snarl rip out of him on the turn and made his swimming the instant his neck reached its limit, his free hand snapping down and out and closing around the man's ankle before the leg could draw back. He had him. He swung the whole green-clad weight of him in a screaming arc and hurled him out across the storm, sent him cartwheeling thirty meters over the open water, and his hands were already moving through the seals.
"Suiton: Suikōdan no Jutsu! (Water Release: Water Shark Projectile!)"
The sea heaved up under the flying man and resolved into a charging shark of solid water, driving up his line of flight. This was getting very old.
The man twisted in the air, kicked off the rising face of the shark itself, whump, burst it apart into falling rain and flipped clear of the spray, landing on the surface of the heaving sea in a low crouch with his fingertips brushing the water, grinning at him through the downpour.
Fine. Kisame dropped. He let himself fall straight back into the sea, into the cold and the dark and the pressure where he was a god and the green man was a drowning ape, the water closing over his shoulders, the storm flattening into a dull roar above the surface. He was a collar-deep when the water in front of his face folded inward and the man was simply there, having crossed the open water faster than Kisame could submerge, and the fist drove into his sternum like a dropped boulder and launched him straight back up out of the sea, breaching into the rain on a fountain of white water.
How the hell?! It tore through him on the way up furiously.
He flipped backward on the fly, the rain hammering his exposed back, his hands already racing through seals as he gathered a fat heavy mass of chakra into his palms to dump down onto the man the instant he reappeared. And he reappeared. He blinked in directly before Kisame's tumbling form, already inside his guard, that infuriating grin a hand's breadth from his face, and the fist was on its way to the jaw Samehada was still busy knitting back together from the last kick.
Kisame aborted the jutsu. He flung the gathered chakra wide and got his thick forearm up across the punch instead, took it on the bone, krak, and drove his own fist back into the man's grinning teeth. For all his bulk he was not slow, the sea-honed body of him snapping through the rain with a speed that surprised even the green man for half a heartbeat, and the two of them traded blows mid-fall and across the chop, Kisame weaving his huge frame around the man's strikes, the man twisting around his, the rain bursting off both of them with every near miss. Kisame swung a wide hooking arm meant to fold the bastard in two. The man dropped under it and snapped up into a flipping backward kick that came together with a sound like two palms cracking flat, KRACK, and out past the breakwater a fork of lightning split the sky and the thunder answered it in the same instant, so the kick and the storm spoke as one voice.
And the Kisame that took the kick across the jaw came apart into a sheeting collapse of water.
The water clone burst and rained down, and from every quarter at once the others rose, a dozen Kisames surging up out of the sea around the man and lunging in from above and below, two of them breaching at his flanks with arms already swinging, more of them driving up at him through the water. The man did not fall for any of them. He twisted himself sideways in the air between the two flanking swings, folding his body around them so they passed through nothing, and came down with both hands planted flat on the surface of the heaving sea, and then he spun.
He drove his whole body around on his palms, legs whipping out level above the water, a screaming horizontal whirlwind of green, and his feet carved through clone after clone in a single rotating sweep that only gained speed, his hands walking the spin on the water's skin, the kick-line of him a flat scything blade that took the legs out of two clones and the heads off two more and burst the breaching pair in the same revolution. He kicked up off his hands at the crest of the spin into a rising corkscrew jump, still turning and cutting, and the last of the clones dissolved around him into nothing but falling brine, a whole dozen of them unmade in one obscene flourish of a dance.
He came down out of the spin already locked on, his head snapping toward the one real Kisame standing further off across the water, and he launched himself across the gap.
Kisame grinned.
Because the little fool had finally given him the half second he needed, and because it was raining hard everywhere across the whole heaving face of the sea. Every drop of it was his.
The green man blinked in close, the devastating kick already uncoiling toward Kisame's ribs, and then the kick slowed. The whole flying weight of him slowed, the leg drifting in toward Kisame's side at a crawl, the rain around the two of them hanging in the air. The man blinked, the grin faltering for the first time, his eyes going wide as he felt his own body turn to honey, as he felt himself simply floating.
"What's the matter, bastard?" Kisame's voice came out thick and gleeful, his sharp teeth bared. "Done running?"
The sphere was vast. The whole churning volume of sea and air around the two of them, ten meters across and more, had gone over to a single suspended globe of water the storm feeding it, the man hanging in the dead center of it like an insect in amber. He opened his mouth to shout and only a fat string of bubbles climbed away from his lips. He hauled at his own arms and they would not come. He was caught.
The gills along Kisame's cheeks and the sides of his neck split open, flaring wide, drinking the water straight into him, and the grin on his reshaped face pulled back into something past human, gleaming with hunger. He kicked off the floor of his own prison and lunged through the dense water at the floating man, his thickened arm drawn back, the killing blow already swinging.
A spear of white light came up through the bottom of the sea and hit him in the chest.
The Raikōhō (Lightning Cannon) punched up out of the deep dark water below the sphere and took Kisame full in the torso, and the front of him came apart, flesh stripping off his ribs in a boiling cloud, the blow throwing his whole bulk sideways out of his own jutsu in a tumbling spray. The water prison lost its master and burst, the entire sphere collapsing into a falling deluge that dropped the green man back into open air, and the man landed light on the chop and was already gone, launching himself after the spinning Kisame before the spray had cleared.
Kisame righted himself on the fly, the cold rain sheeting into the steaming ruin of his chest, his hands flashing to wall the bastard off with another sphere, and a second beam of white lanced up out of the freaking water and clipped him and spun him bodily around, and out of the spin the green heel arrived and caught him square across the face, snapping his head back. He rode it. He let the kick throw him where it would and turned the throw into a dive, casting as he fell, a fistful of water clones tearing into being around him to swarm the man, and he hit the surface and went under and started to swim fast and zig-zagging away through the deep.
And under the water, Kisame finally saw the rest of it.
His sharks were gone. The school he had filled the deep with, most of them simply dispelled, hanging shreds of water where his constructs had been, and down below all of it, deeper than he had gone, a long black smear was moving through the dark at a speed that made no sense, weaving, trailing pale blue light.
That. He swam, and the cold deduction landed in him with flat certainty as he went. That is the overgrown Hyuuga bitch in the black armor. The one from the dock. The same monstrous height, the same insectoid plating, the same searing white-blue jutsu. Down here. In the deep. Under the water, where nothing breathed but him.
How? He cut hard left as a lightning beam drilled past where he had been. How is she down here? How long has she been down here? There was nothing in the bingo book about it. There was nothing in the file Itachi had pulled, nothing from other network, no whisper that the Konoha freak could draw breath at the bottom of the sea. He knew the abilities of the foreign shinobi worth knowing. He had never heard of this.
He swam harder, throwing his huge body into tight darting cuts through the black, and the beams kept coming, white lances of lightning spearing up at him through the water from below. He slipped most of them, but lightning in water did not need to hit him, it walked outward through the sea on its own, and even his clean dodges left the current biting into him, crawling over his hide. Samehada, fused into the meat of his back now, drank the worst of it, eating the charge before it could lock his muscles, hissing against his spine each time the water lit. He twisted through a near miss and threw his hands together and seeded the deep behind him.
"Suiton: Senjikizame! (Water Release: Thousand Hungry Sharks!)"
Several dozen sharks of compressed water boiled out of the murk and shot away down into the dark toward the black smear, jaws snapping, and Kisame turned off them and started to climb, drawing a dome of water in tight around himself as he rose, meaning to breach and snatch the green bastard off the surface while the bitch was busy dying below. He locked onto the man's chakra up top, still wheeling and lashing through the last of the water clones on the storming surface.
A beam of lightning slid past his face close enough to boil the water against his cheek.
He wrenched aside on instinct, the dome warping with him. Already? The thought came sharp and disbelieving. She is through them already? Three dozen sharks, and she was already firing up at him. More beams came, one after another, and Kisame threw his climbing body into wild explosive cuts through the deep, the dome shredding and reforming, the lances of white walking past him on every side and never quite missing clean, the current crawling into him with every one. He spun into a tight rising helix to shake the angle of them, corkscrewing up through the black, and as he came out of the last turn of it there was already a ball of blinding white light the size of his own body hanging in the water right in front of his face.
That was new.
The deep went white.
The blast threw a shockwave out through the whole sea, a hammer of pressure that punched the dark in every direction and heaved a vast dome of water up off the surface, and Kisame went up with it, blown clear out of the sea on the rising column, tumbling back into the storm.
Again? AGAIN?!
A lightning beam chased him up out of the water and he slipped it on the fly, his torso a single screaming sheet of stripped meat and seawater where her first cannon had opened him, the rain pouring into the wound. He twisted in the air and found the green man far across the chop, still locked in his stupid dance with the last of the water clones, still grinning and untouched. Fine! Kisame's hands tore through seal after seal, faster than they had moved all night, pulling the whole storm down into his palms, the heavy rain, the fog hanging on the sea, all of it.
"Suiton: Bakusui Shōha! (Water Release: Exploding Water Colliding Wave!)"
The sea reared. A wall of water taller than the breakwater stood up out of the churn along his whole front and began to fold forward, a moving cliff aimed straight down the green man's bearing, and Kisame slammed his hands together one more time inside the rising face of it.
"Suiton: Senjikizame! (Water Release: Thousand Hungry Sharks!)"
Hundreds of them this time, a teeming flood of compressed-water sharks born right inside the rising tide and racing down its forward face, the whole monstrous wave alive with snapping jaws, driving toward the man still fighting on the surface. Then Kisame turned and dove for the dark, falling back toward the sea, and the sea threw things at him on the way down. Drills of white lightning corkscrewed up out of the water at him and he slipped between them. Then balls of fire, actual freaking fire, rising up out of the sea against all sense and bursting in the rain around him, and he wrenched his huge frame through the gaps in them with a snarl on his ruined face.
He hit the water and went under in a single heavy crash of spray, the storm sealing shut above him, and far below in the cold black the long black smear was still there, trailing its pale blue light through his domain.
Kisame leveled his body toward it, bared every tooth, and launched himself down into the deep after her.
The deep had two monsters in it now, and they were closing on each other.
Kisame drove himself down through the black with Samehada flattened along his spine, his reshaped body cutting the water faster than anything alive had a right to move, a long contrail of disturbed sea trailing white behind his shoulders. The dark armored shape far below him stopped running and turned. It came up to meet him instead, fins sweeping back, biomass boiling out over its right gauntlet and hardening into an enormous fist veined with crawling cerulean light, a fist grown several times its size. His own had swollen the same way, knuckle and bone wrapped in dense water-fed muscle, and the two of them met in the middle of all that dark with their arms drawn back and their whole weight behind the blow.
The fists met.
WHUDOOM
The sound of it was a flat concussive thud that punched out through the sea in a single expanding sphere, the water itself caving away from the point of impact and then slamming back, a wall of pressure that rolled up over both of them and kept going. It threw them apart like two stones spat from a sling, Kisame hurled up and back into the murk, Hinata flung down and away, the shockwave booming off into the deep and dying somewhere far out in the dark.
She turned the throw into a backflip without losing a stroke, tucked, and shot herself deeper, fins raked flat, the abyss screaming past her visor. Her sight ran ahead of her body. Through the Byakugan, and through the borrowed clarity of Karin's sensing layered over it, she watched Kisame arrest his tumble in half a heartbeat and right himself, his reshaped skull swiveling, locking back onto her trace before she had even leveled out, recovered and already hunting again.
Along her shoulders and her waist and down the backs of her thighs the biomass surged and reshaped itself, ranks of slim ribbed barrels locking into place and angling upward toward him, dozens of them, blooming open along her armored frame like the spines of some deep-sea thing turned outward. They began to fire. Drills of white-cerulean lightning corkscrewed up through the dark at Kisame in a rising swarm, Rendan Raikōsen (Barrage of Lightning Drills), several dozen of them grinding upward at once, forcing him off his line and to throw his huge body into hard darting cuts to slip between them. Each one she missed clean still bit at him, the lightning walking outward through the water on its own, biting into his hide, snapping his muscles taut for a half-second before Samehada drank the worst of it off his spine. He climbed away from the barrage, driven up out of the deep dark and into the higher, paler layers of the sea where the storm-light reached, and every stagger cost him.
She felt Venom already moving underneath her, the co-processor running the whole churning sea at once, leaving her conscious mind free to choose. She needed her next steps, and she was reaching for them when a denser shape peeled up out of the black on her lower right and drove straight at her.
Bottom right! Karin's thought cracked bright across the shared link. Big one, coming up at you!
Hinata was already rolling. She let her body twist into a tight spiraling helix around the thing's charge, faster than the construct could turn, the biomass on her left forearm snapping out into a long curved scythe that lit cerulean and trailed white current into the water, and she opened the shark down its entire length as it passed beneath her, fwsh, the body sheeting apart into a billow of dispersing chakra. Her eyes never left the climbing Kisame above. Her cannons never stopped.
Oh, this one is going to be fun. Venom's voice rolled up through her delightfully, the predator leaning eagerly into the work. The arrays along her body fired again, a fresh barrage chasing up after the first, and woven through the lightning drills this time came something new, fat glowing spheres of compressed Raiton rising slow and bright among the fast white needles.
Above her, in the paler water, Kisame was working hard. The drills came up at him without pause from below and he wove between them with the shark's ugly grace, slipping and cutting, but there were always more, and now the slow bright balls were rising into his space as well. He snarled out a rope of bubbles and brought both swollen arms around in front of him and slammed his palms together with everything he had.
WHUMP
A flat shockwave punched down out of the clap and caved the water open in a cone beneath him, knocking a whole swath of the rising drills off their lines, scattering them sideways into the dark, dispersing the nearest of the lightning balls before they could reach him. The water cleared in front of his face for one breath.
The next wave was already there to fill it. More drills, and more of the glowing balls among them, and the balls did not need to touch him. They burst. One after another they detonated through the dark in great soundless blooms of white, each one throwing out a flash so bright it stamped the whole deep into a flat blank glare, and Kisame wrenched his huge frame through the gaps between them, dodging the bodies of the blasts but never the light. Detonation chained into another, and the black sea around him went from a thing he ruled by sight into a drowning field of pure white blindness, the whole deep lit up white from end to end.
He never saw her cross the last of the distance.
By the time the glare cleared enough for him to find her, she was already on him, wreathed head to fin in the crackling white of her lightning cloak, her whole body spun down into a single grinding drill of light, and she struck him dead in the center of his chest. The Hakkeshō: Raikō Kaiten (Eight Trigrams: Lightning Drill Revolving Heaven) bored into his sternum and bit, and he convulsed around it, a thick gout of blood torn loose from his mouth and clouding dark into the water. She did not slow. Still drilling, she drove upward off the impact and dragged the whole massive weight of him with her, hauling his reshaped bulk up through the layers of the sea behind the screaming corkscrew of her body, the surface rushing down to meet them quicker with every heartbeat, a wild silver ceiling churning with rain.
Kisame's body broke out of the sea first, flung up into the storm on a fountain of white water, and Hinata came out of the surface a half-beat behind him.
Her right arm had already become something monstrous. The biomass had flooded down over it and built it out into a single glowing fist several times the size of her own head, lightning chakra pouring into it, gathering with a rising roar until it lit the rain around her blue-white, and on her elbow a second mouth of black biomass, a snarling Venom head, opened wide and pointed back and ignited, white fire blasting out of it like the throat of a rocket. She slammed a fan of chakra down through her boots and anchored herself flat against the heaving surface of the water as if it were stone, and then the nozzle on her elbow roared and threw the whole charged weight of that titan fist forward, straight into the cratered ruin of Kisame's chest.
KRA-BOOOM
The punch went off like cannonball. The shockwave of it tore outward across the sea in a flat white ring that flattened the chop for a hundred meters in every direction and shoved the falling rain back up into the sky, and Kisame was simply gone off the end of her knuckles, launched straight up into the storm on a column of spray and steam, tumbling, dwindling. Short ribbed wings snapped open off Hinata's shoulder plates, beat once against the rain, and she went up after him.
The world had gone darker while they fought.
Hinata noticed it the moment she cleared the surface into clean air, the storm-light thinning toward a deep bruised grey, the sun somewhere behind the wall of cloud sliding down toward the sea. Evening was coming on. Far off across the open water, past the breakwater and the rolling fog, a single bright point still wheeled and clashed against a swarming knot of cold shapes, Guy-sensei, alone out there, hanging on by himself against a school of chakra sharks that would not stop coming. She marked him, and she pulled her attention back. He could hold. Her target was the thing falling above her.
Karin. She sent it down the link as she beat her wings and climbed. Are you hurt?
I, I think I'm okay, came the rattled answer, the smaller woman's arms locked hard around the front of her shoulder plates, legs clamped at her waist. I'm okay. Maybe. Just, just don't, don't let go of me up here.
Never. Hinata flapped once more, hard, and closed the gap on the tumbling Kisame, and as she rose the biomass boiled up over both her pauldrons and unfolded into a pair of cannons. They opened fire. A rapid barrage of lightning drills tore up off her shoulders and raced after him, and then she narrowed her focus, poured her will down into the work, and one of the cannons cultivated something larger at its mouth, a sphere of hardened white fire wrapped around a screaming plasma core, and spat it free. "Katon: Tentai no Tsuiseki-sha. (Fire Release: Celestial Trackers.)" Her doubled voice rang out under the thunder, and a single brilliant white fireball missile streaked up into the rain on a thin invisible thread of chakra spun back to her mind.
High above, Kisame righted himself in the falling rain, and the lightning drills came into him in a swarm. He took two of them across his ruined torso and snarled and started backhanding the rest out of the air with his swollen forearms, batting them aside in bursts of white, and even as he did his hands flashed and a thick dome of water folded into being around him out of the storm, a shell of churning sea to break the barrage on. Then he saw the fireball. It came up at him out of the dark far faster than the drills, a hard point of white growing by the instant, and his eyes went wide and his hands snapped through a fast seal. A lance of highly pressurized water blasted out of his mouth to meet it, a tight screaming jet aimed dead at the missile to knock it from the sky.
The fireball slid aside.
It canted off its line at the last instant, the water stream tearing through empty rain where it had been, and Kisame had time for one furious bared-teeth snarl before he flung his whole bulk sideways to dodge it himself. The missile turned again, mid-flight, the thin chakra thread hauling it around after him, and it found his side and struck.
KABOOM
The fuel-air detonation bloomed white and enormous in the rain, swallowing the water dome whole and flashing it to steam in a single breath, and the blast threw Kisame's reshaped body up and away, higher into the storm, trailing smoke off the freshly charred meat of his flank.
Hinata's right arm flowed and lengthened, the biomass running down past her gauntlet and hardening into a long lightning-sheathed longsword, white current crawling its edge. She folded her wings and beat them once, hard, careful of the weight on her back, and shot herself up across the gap after the airborne Kisame, her cannons still working as she came, fire drills and lightning drills alternating out of her shoulders in a flickering stutter of orange and white. Kisame took two of the drills across his shoulder before he got his arm up, and then the great Samehada-thickened forearm came across his body and caught her descending blade on the bone. She bore down on it. The lightning edge bit through into the muscle of his arm and opened a long deep cut to the bone, and he roared, and his other leg came up and around in a snapping backflip kick that caught her across the chest plate and threw her tumbling back through the rain.
She caught herself on a hard backflip of her own, snapped level, and drove straight back in, fire drills hammering off her cannons ahead of her. The flames burst across his face and chest and charred him, blinding him for a stuttering half-second, and still he got the thick arm up and caught her sword a second time. The instant the swing landed she was already pulling it back and loading the next, and as her blade came down again Kisame spat a fat blast of pressurized water under himself and rode it backward, kicking his whole frame away through the rain, so that her second swing whistled through nothing but falling water.
Then the sword kept coming. Black biomass surged down the length of the blade and elongated it, the edge stretching out across the gap on a whipping ribbon of hardened symbiote, doubling its reach and more, and the extended tip caught Kisame across both arms where he had thrown them up to guard and laid him open in a long crackling line. Her sword had become a sword-whip, and there was nowhere far enough to retreat from it.
She drew it back and the cannons on her shoulders cultivated a fresh fireball, larger this time, the white core swelling at the muzzle, and she was a breath from launching it when Kisame threw his head back and bellowed.
"ANNOYING BITCH!" The water roared up out of him as he screamed it, both arms and both legs flung wide to every quarter. "You're WORSE than that green bastard!"
A dome of high-pressure water erupted off his whole body at once, a violent expanding bubble of sea conjured straight from the storm, hurled outward in every direction with enough force to crush bone. Hinata banked off the swelling face of it, wings hauling her hard backward and down, the edge of the blast catching nothing but the trailing tips of her fins as she peeled away across the rain. She righted herself two strong flaps out, level over the heaving sea, and looked back. He was already gone under.
The dome had been a curtain. Behind it Kisame had dropped clean back into the water, and even as fast as it had happened her sight caught the wounds along his arms and chest knitting closed at an ugly speed, flesh crawling back over bone, Samehada feeding him and mending him from the deep. The whole sea was a roar of saturated chakra now, the lightning overhead jamming her electromagnetic sense flat, but her spiritual vision and the borrowed flavor-sense of Karin's together still painted him for her, a single dense knot of cold moving haphazardly through the black far below, darting with no pattern to it, healing as he ran.
And she had spent a great deal. She felt the floor of her reserves, deeper than any human's and lower than it should be all the same, the long fight pulling at it. She reached inward along her spine without a word and pressed a silent question against the coiled presence there, and felt it answer. Along her back, threading up carefully through the bracing weight of Karin's arms and around her without fouling the smaller woman's grip, a fresh array of long ribbed tubes grew up out of the biomass and flared open to the saturated sea. She opened the siphon. The whole drowned bay was thick with conjured, ownerless chakra, Kisame's spent ocean of it standing in the water and the air, and her tubes began to drink it down, dragging the loose energy into her in slow pulling streams while Venom seized each mouthful and filtered the foreign signature out of it and rendered it clean, refueling her by the breath.
This is getting old. Venom's voice came up lowly, kept clear of the link so Karin would not hear. He runs back to the water every time and the water gives him everything back. We will trade blows with this fish until the sun comes up and gets no closer to killing it. We have to take the sea away from him. Pull him out, hold him out, and end it in one strike, or this drags on forever.
She kept her silence and climbed, turning slow circles over the heaving water, letting the tubes drink while she thought.
It was while she was circling that the other thing reached her broken up under the thunder, faint threads of voice crackling in over the comm from far across the bay where the storm still stood over the drowned fishing town like a wall. Fragments of her squad. Kiba's bark of a laugh cut to static, Tenten's clipped, Neji's flat voice, Lee somewhere bright underneath, all of them small and chopped to pieces by the discharge in the air. The wall of rain over the town had grown darker and more violent while she fought, the storm out there feeding on itself. And under the familiar voices there were new ones now, more of them, woven in, voices she did not have time to sort. Then one more cut across all of it, loud even shredded to fragments, and her whole chest pulled tight before her mind had even named it. She knew that voice. Naruto.
LOOK! Karin's thought slammed across the shared link, the calm of the borrowed sensing gone. He's, he's making them again, look down, there's so many of them, how is he, how is he even going to reach us up here?
Below, the deep had filled again with cold dense shapes, dozens of them peeling up out of the black, and Hinata had half a heartbeat to wonder the same thing Karin had before one of them answered it. A shark the size of a house tore itself straight up out of the sea beneath her with a speed nothing in the water should have, breaching the surface and rocketing up into the rain on a column of spray, jaws spread, climbing right at her. Karin's frightened cry rang down the link and out of her throat both. Hinata rolled hard, slid herself sideways around the thing's snapping ascent, and put a quick lance of white lightning through the front of its skull as it passed, the head bursting apart into dispersing water. Another came up behind it. Then another. She threw herself into a tight string of evasive turns over the bay, wings hammering, the breaching sharks rising at her one after another out of the chop, and she beat hard for altitude to climb out of their reach, and saw, even as she dodged one rising knot of them, that another had already breached far higher and arced over the top of her climb and was falling now, a house of teeth and chakra dropping straight down onto her back.
Karin, brace! she sent, and the tubes still drank from the sea as she did it.
Tendrils erupted from her shoulders and spine in a blur and lashed out into the rain, and they spun her. Her whole body whipped around on its own center, gaining speed with every turn, wings folding in, and the lightning roared up to sheathe her. "Hakkeshō: Raikō Kaiten. (Eight Trigrams: Lightning Drill Revolving Heaven.)" This time she held the spin in place, a roaring vertical wheel of white-hot lightning, and threw the rotation outward into a wide grinding dome of electricity that swelled around her and Karin both. Every shark in the air met it at once. The falling one and the climbing ones and the half-dozen still arcing in from the flanks all hit the spinning wall of light together and came apart, the whole airborne school of them unmade in a single revolution and falling away as nothing but rain.
She kept going. The instant the last of them was gone she let the spin bleed off and the biomass was already moving again, fresh cannons growing up out of her stomach plate and her chest and angling down toward the sea, and inside their throats her lightning and her fire chakra wound together and fused into something that burned pure white. "Kōseiton: Tentai Hōraku. (Stellar Release: Celestial Body Collapse.)" The battery opened fire. Large balls of incandescent plasma, miniature suns, poured down out of her toward the deep where Kisame ran, each one trailing a thin invisible chakra string back to her mind, and she steered the whole falling swarm with her sight, hauling each star around in the air to bend down onto his haphazard, weaving position below the waves.
The plasma balls hit the sea and drove under.
KRUMP-KRUMP-KRUMP
The water erupted, towering white columns of it blasting up off the surface across a wide swath of the bay, one after another, the booms of the underwater blasts rolling together into one long shuddering roar. Through her sight Hinata watched them land. She saw Kisame's chakra stutter and break apart each time he tried to gather it, the channeling collapsing under blast after blast, and she saw the explosions themselves tearing into him, ripping great chunks of meat loose from his frame and flinging his huge body through the black like a doll. One blast caught his arm and tore the hand clean off it. Another took a foot. The water around him went dark with his blood.
And then, half torn apart, his chakra detonated upward all at once.
It came so violently that both of them flinched. The sea below simply ripped itself open. A vast mountain of water heaved up off the surface, still rising, already taller than the warehouses had been, a black wall of churning sea climbing into the storm, and out of every face of it the sharks came. Hundreds of them, each the size of a house, shooting out of the rising tide-mountain from its flanks and its crown and its base, a whole sea's worth of teeth flung skyward at once. Hinata threw herself into a hard climbing turn, beating for altitude, but the mountain was too vast to outrun, spreading wide as it rose, sharks already breaching off every quarter of it and dozens more arcing up higher than her own line to come raining down. At the very peak of the rising water she could see him, cradled in the heart of his own colossal jutsu, bleeding and already knitting back together, riding the mountain straight up toward her. The biomass was already crawling across her frame, thickening, building her up for what was coming.
She moved. She threw herself through the sky in tight cuts, slipping the falling sharks, putting quick lances of lightning through the ones she could not slip, and all the while she bent her will inward and poured chakra into a gathering heat between her hands, channeling harder, building something large. Through the comm, chopped by the static and unmistakably him, Naruto's frantic voice broke into both her ears and Karin's at once, close as if he stood beside them.
"Hinata! Hinata, can you hear m…?! I'm almost there, just hang on, hang ON, I'm coming!"
And as she banked away from a falling shark she saw it happen. The thick wall of fog and rain that had stood over the drowned town since the fight began tore itself apart down the middle, peeled open, and through the gap, moving fast over the heaving sea, came flying Naruto. Cutting straight through the storm toward her, and a moment behind him several hundred of his clones boiled out of the torn fog in his wake, a streaming host of them tearing across the bay. She felt his chakra before she could think, that bright tireless burning thing, a sun cut loose and dragged low over the water, blazing a clean path through all the cold saturation Kisame had drowned the world in.
In one stolen breath, mid-dodge with sharks falling all around her, the cold knot of the fight loosened at the feel of him, and her next wingbeat came lighter.
Then it turned. The feel of his chakra, the warm spiritual trace of him pouring across the bay toward her, slid sideways in her, the bright clean happiness sinking into something lower and hotter, his presence soaking through her senses like warmth bleeding through deep water, a slow molten coil drawing tight low in her belly and aching outward through her core until her thighs pressed together inside the plates of her armor, and the glowing lines mapped across her skin flushed for a breath from bright cerulean to a deep pulsing violet.
O-oh, oh God, what, what is that?! Karin's thought tore down the shared link in a strangled, gasping rush, somewhere between a squeak and a moan, the smaller woman's whole body jerking hard against her back. Hinata-sama, w-what, what is that? I can't, oh, oh God!
Hinata's mind snapped back into itself all at once. She remembered that she was not alone behind her own eyes, that the link ran both ways, that what she felt bled straight into the young woman clinging to her spine. The violet guttered back to cerulean. I, forgive me, she sent, clamping down hard on the heat, walling it off, the embarrassment of it sharp and hot under her helmet even with a mountain of sharks falling on her. That was, that should not have, I am sorry. Hold on. Just hold on.
Out across the bay, Naruto reached the open water before the mountain, and his eyes and the eyes of every clone behind him burned a hard toad-orange. His hands came up, and hundreds of pairs of hands behind him mirrored the seal in the same instant.
"Fūton: Atsugai! (Wind Release: Pressure Damage!)"
The roar went up from the whole host of them as one, and they loosed a single vast concentrated blast of wind down the length of the bay. It tore through the rain like a blade through cloth, scattered the falling sharks out of the air by the dozen, flattened the raining water sideways into nothing, and slammed into the rising mountain of sea at its base. The wind sheared the thing apart. The mountain shuddered, buckled, and came apart down its flank in a vast collapsing roar, its crown shattering, the hundreds of sharks on its faces blown to spray, and the gap it left opened the sky over it clean.
Hinata beat hard and climbed up over the wreck of the mountain, and the great ball of fire she had been building all this time came loose from her hands and fell. It dropped into the heart of Naruto's wind, and the wind took it. Air and flame fused into a single rolling firestorm that bloomed across the whole ruin of the collapsing mountain, the wind feeding the fire and the fire riding the wind, and the firestorm boiled the rain out of the air and swallowed what was left of the water mountain whole and burned the great reshaped shape of Kisame inside it, a roaring inferno standing up off the bay where the sea had reared a breath before.
How convenient, Venom murmured up through her dryly, that he should arrive at precisely this moment. We had this fish nearly grilled ourselves.
The blast rolled a wide tide outward across the bay in every direction. She hoped, distantly, that it would lose its height before it reached the town.
The firestorm had finished her channeling for her, lightning and fire both come to a full, screaming charge. Flying a slow tight circle over the inferno, Hinata threw both hands out in front of her and locked her fingers together, and the biomass flooded down over her joined arms and sealed them into a single enormous cannon, one barrel built of two arms, its silver channels blazing. At its base she cultivated a hyper-dense seed of pure plasma, and the electromagnetic field wound up around it with a rising whine.
Inside the dying firestorm, through the flame, Kisame's charred ruin of a body was hauling itself back together one more time, his remaining hand rising, his chakra scraping itself off the floor to try for something more.
"Kōseiton: Hoshi no Shisen. (Stellar Release: Gaze of the Star.)"
The cannon fired. A streak of white light too fast to track punched out of the muzzle and crossed the bay in the same instant and slammed into Kisame's chest, and the chest ruptured around it, the projectile driving clean through him and hammering his whole burning bulk down toward the sea faster than gravity could pull it. And before he had fallen a body's length, a high thin whistle screamed in from behind him, a second projectile, spinning as it came. Naruto's Rasenshuriken.
The two attacks reached him together.
KRA-THOOOM
For one impossible instant the whole dark bruised evening over the bay went bright as noon, white light flooding out across the rain and the fog and the heaving water, throwing every drop into hard relief. In the heart of it Hinata saw her own strike obliterate Kisame's lower abdomen, blowing it apart, and saw Naruto's screaming disc of wind tear into the rest of him from the far side and come apart in a sphere of countless microscopic blades, ripping through his flesh and shredding the very chakra inside him on a level too fine to see. The combined detonation went off like a second sun, and the shockwave of it slammed outward and caught both of them where they hung on the same side of the blast, Hinata and Karin and the nearest of Naruto's clones, and threw them all backward through the rain.
Hinata righted herself two beats out, wings hauling against the wash, Karin still locked hard to her spine. Through the dying glare she found the falling thing that had been Kisame. His body was still coming apart as it dropped, flame and wind and plasma still eating it. And on the deeper channel, the slow spiritual sight that nothing in the storm could jam, she watched the two lives braided into that single body tear apart from one another. The man's own light guttered and went out, snuffed down past the point where any healing could call a host back.
The other still burned. The second mind wound through the great sword pulsed bright and undimmed inside the falling corpse, clawing at the dead channels, fighting to drag its master's ruined flesh back up into a life that had already left it.
That stopped her cold, and she felt Karin go rigid against her back as the same impossible reading lit the smaller woman's senses. The man was finished and the weapon would not let him be, hauling at him through the air, straining to wake what could not be woken.
Hinata's wings bit into the storm and steadied her, and she hung level over the heaving sea while the rain came down in a solid grey weight and the wind hauled at her plates. Out past the breakwater a fork of lightning split the cloud and the thunder rolled in behind it a breath later, a long shuddering boom she felt in her chest more than heard. The storm had not eased at all. Below her the water was full of Naruto. Dozens of his clones stood scattered across the churning surface, riding the chop through the downpour, a knot of them gathered close around the patch of foam where the firestorm had drowned. She picked a clear stretch of sea among them and tilted her wings down into it.
I still can't believe it. Karin's thought trembled down the link, the smaller woman's arms locked hard over her shoulder plates. We won. We actually beat that thing. I keep waiting for it to come back up out of the water, but it's just, it's gone. We won, Hinata-sama!
Hinata folded her wings and dropped the last of the distance. Her sabatons touched the surface and chakra bloomed flat beneath them, holding her on the heaving sea as though it were stone, the rain driving off her in the wind. Three clones were already running at her across the chop before she had her balance, slipping on the rolling water, arms waving through the curtain of rain.
"Hinata-chan!" "Hinata-chan, hey, over here, over here!" They had to shout it over the storm, and they reached her in a tangle, talking on top of one another, hands half-raised toward her and the woman clinging to her spine. "Are you okay?! You're not hurt, talk to me, are ya hurt?" "Is that Karin?! Is she breathing, hey, is she…"
Another shape came down behind them in a hard slap of water, and the original rose out of his crouch, the orange sage-marks still ringing his eyes, his gaze sweeping the whole soaked knot of them at once as the thunder cracked overhead. "Hey, hey, you guys alright?! Everybody in one piece?"
Along Hinata's back the last of the biomass that had kept Karin breathing and bound to her mind drew back into the armor, the fine threads sliding free of the young woman's ears, and the link guttered out between one breath and the next. Hinata reached behind her, caught Karin under the arm, and lowered her down off her spine onto the surface of the sea. Karin's sandals found the water and held, swaying in the wind, and a clone was on her at once, hands on her shoulders to steady her against the chop.
"Whoa, easy, easy, I got ya. You good? You're good."
Karin shoved a sheet of soaked hair off her face, her glasses long gone, her eyes wide and not quite focused as the rain ran down them. The words came out of her in a rush, half to the clone and half to the storm, tumbling over each other, about the cold and the dark and the sharks circling in the deep, about breathing down there with something warm sealed over her face, about the great sword that had come apart and stitched itself back together and would not stay dead. "…and the wound just closed while he was still running, the whole arm grew back, and the sword, the sword has a mind, it has its own, you don't understand what it felt like down there…" The clone holding her nodded along over the noise of the rain, plainly understanding none of it.
The original Naruto came to her through the downpour and stopped close, and he had to tip his head all the way back to find her visor. She had not moved. She stood over them with the storm breaking across her plates and her helmet angled down at the black water, very still in the middle of all that lashing weather, looking at something none of them could see, and the stillness of her pulled the grin off his face.
"Hinata-chan." His voice dropped under the rain, careful now. "I felt that shark freak go out. His whole chakra just, snuffed, like a candle. It's done, right?" He searched the blank obsidian of her visor, and a stroke of lightning whitened it for an instant. "Is there… is there somethin' else?"
Her visor came around to him all at once. "There is one thing I still have to do." Her doubled voice rolled out under the thunder, the deep resonance steady beneath her own. "Wait here. All of you. I will not be long."
She bent and drove herself down through the surface before the nearest clone could shout after her.
The storm sealed shut over her helmet and the deep took her. The thunder that had been hammering the bay flattened into a slow pressure rolling through the water, a distant boom she felt in her chestplate more than heard, the lightning reaching down after her only as faint grey pulses that died a few meters under the chop. Her spiracles flared open along her ribs without being asked, drinking the sea straight into her before she had finished her first stroke down, and her fins swept back to drive her into the dark.
The saturation had begun to thin at last. With the great heart stopped above her, the ocean of conjured chakra Kisame had drowned the bay in was coming undone, the all-over fog of it pulling apart into clear cold water, and her sight returned to her by degrees, the Byakugan pushing clean through the black where an hour ago it had drowned in white noise. She found the wreck of him fast, far below and still sinking, turning slow as it went, trailing a dark ribbon of itself down toward a floor she could not see. She swept her fins and went after it.
She slowed as she closed, and her sight resolved the thing wound around the corpse. The great sword had come off his back. It had unwrapped itself from its bandages and crawled the length of his sinking body and clenched around his chest like a thing in grief, its scaled hide rippling, and she watched it push thin pulses of its own chakra down into the dead meat of him, still trying to call a host back across a line already crossed.
Hinata drew alongside and reached for the hilt.
The sword answered. Its whole hide bristled at once, every scale standing on end, and a crown of short blades snapped out around the handle, shnk, and it spun on the body faster than her eye could follow and drove its bladed butt straight at her visor. She got a forearm up on instinct and the strike rang off the hardened biomass and shoved her back through the water, surprise jolting through her before her mind had caught up to it.
She caught herself a stroke out and stilled, fins flared, blades half-formed along her arms. The sword did not come after her. It hung over its dead master one beat longer, scales settling, the bladed crown sinking back into the handle, and then it let him go, uncoiling off the sinking corpse and turning away into the deep on its own, a long ribbed shadow making for darker water, leaving behind the body it could not save. Hinata blinked behind her visor, watching it go until the black swallowed it.
Then she went down to the body. The right arm was gone, torn away at the shoulder in one of the last blasts, the stump trailing dark into the current. The left still hung at his side, drifting with the slow turn of his fall. She caught the cold heavy hand and turned it over, and there on the ring finger sat the band she had come down for. She worked it off the swollen knuckle and opened her grip on the rest of him, and the great ruined shape slid past her hand and on down, dwindling into the black until it was gone.
She held the ring up to her visor and let her enhanced sight pour over it in the dark. It was the same as the others, the same as the three she had already taken and locked away, cut from that pale off-world bio-crystal that read under the Byakugan as kin to the great Husk in the Akatsuki's cave. A single character stood carved in its face, 南, South. And where the three she carried had gone dark and dead the moment their bearers fell, locked inert, this one still lived. A faint pulse moved in the crystal slowly, a thread of something running through it yet.
It was still working.
The Hivemind had told her this hour would come. An active ring, and the way to open it folded down into her the same way the Klyntar folded everything, waiting under her thoughts for the moment she would need it. She closed her hand around the band, stilled herself in the cold water, and reached for that knowledge. Venom rose to meet her. Fine tendrils of black biomass slid from the seams of her gauntlet and wound around the ring, threading into its pulse, finding the live current and pressing in.
The connection took, and her mind went out of her all at once.
It was torn off its mooring and flung forward at a speed that had no body in it, the black water and the dwindling corpse and her own armored shape dropping away behind her, pulled down a long bright channel faster than thought while the world streamed past. Then it opened, and a vast cavern stood around her.
She was there and not there both, her whole self projected into a place her body had never entered, standing high in the dark on something cold and curved. She looked down and found it was a finger. She stood near the tip of an enormous stone finger, one of a pair of great cupped hands thrust up out of the cavern floor, and above the hands rose the rest of it, the colossal seated shape of the Husk, the same dead void-statue her sight had found once before through miles of solid rock, the day they came for the Kazekage. Even projected, even at this distance, the wrongness of it pressed on her, that void-like absence where a presence should sit, the shed shell of something vast and long gone.
Something had begun to fill it. Deep in the hollow dark inside the Husk a light had kindled, and one of the great carved eyes in its face had come alive and rolled slow in its socket, sweeping the cavern, while the others around it hung dark. The light at its core looked small against the size of the thing, a single coal in a cathedral, and she pushed her sight in toward it, and her stomach dropped.
It only looked small because the dark that held it was so much greater. The light itself was enormous, a roiling well of chakra she could have drowned the whole town inside, and she knew its tone. She had felt it once on a lake, in a monster the size of a hill that spat water like a god, and it lived in her every day banked low behind the navel of the man she had claimed, his inner beast burning quiet in its cage. The same fire. A Tailed Beast, vast past reckoning, and even so it was dwarfed, a single bright drop rolling in the bottom of that immense and patient void.
They have one already, the understanding landed. One taken, and shut inside that thing.
She tore her sight off the light and swept the cavern, and found the body. It lay sprawled in the open on the floor far below the cupped hands, a big armored man, dead, his limbs flung wrong. A heavy plated visor and a winding of white cloth hid his face whole, every line of him broken, the armor staved in, whatever had lived in him gone up into the dark above and left the husk of him behind.
Other shapes stood out along the fingers around her, figures spaced along the great stone digits, each of them keyed into this same projected dark the way she was, and one by one their heads were turning. They had felt her arrive, felt a wrong presence stand up among them where one of their own should have stood.
Her sight locked onto one of them and held. He stood on the far side of the great cupped hands from her, his eyes lavender and ringed, spreading out from the pupil. She had met those eyes once before. That same calm ringed gaze had swung onto her across all that stone the day they breached the Akatsuki's cave, finding her remote sight clean through the rock as though no rock stood between them, and since then Jiraiya had given the eyes a name in the Hokage's office, the doujutsu of the student he had long thought dead. The Rinnegan. And here it was, turned full on her again across the cavern.
Then his signature reached her. It was alien, older and stranger than anything human had a right to be, a structure to it that fit no shinobi she had ever read. And through all that strangeness it was familiar. In the way a stranger's face can be familiar, some echo buried in it of a person she could not place, as though she had stumbled on a relative she never knew she had, or the kin of someone she did know. The resonance rang against her own bones and against a memory she could not reach down to, and she could not name it.
His chakra was enormous, and more dangerous than anything else in that cavern. Around him the very space seemed to lean. She felt it even through the projection, a fine wrongness in the pull of things near his still form, gravity itself flexing and resettling around him, exactly as Jiraiya had warned them it would.
A voice moved through the cavern in unhurried tone, no more weight in it than a man remarking on the rain.
"It seems Kisame is out of commission."
The words had barely settled before the dark began to wobble around her, the whole projected cavern shivering at its edges, the cold footing of the stone finger coming loose beneath her. He was pushing her out.
Hinata and Venom snapped into motion as one, their combined minds both clutching at everything in reach at once, dragging in every line and shadow of the place, the shape of the cavern, the count of the figures, the tone of the buried beast, the cold familiar weight of the ringed-eyed man, hauling all of it down into memory before the door could close. It closed anyway. The cavern tore away from her, the bright channel reversed, and her mind snapped back down its length at that same bodiless speed and slammed home behind her eyes.
The cold black water was around her again. Hinata blinked inside her visor. The ring sat dark in her fist now, the live thread gone out of it, and she had drifted while she was under, sinking with the body she had let go, the dim grey smear of the surface a long way up.
They have taken one. Venom's voice came up through her. At least one of the beasts is inside that thing now. We felt it the same as you, and we felt more, small lives moving through the stone of it, faint signatures running all through the Husk like blood through a body. It is starting to wake.
Then they have already begun. Hinata answered grimly inside the water. One beast taken, and that thing stirring around it. This is worse than we feared. We need to move.
She turned her sight up and found them, the bright scattered knot of Naruto and his clones riding the heaving surface, the small steady flame of Karin among them, all of them waiting where she had left them. She drew the ring back into the biomass at her wrist, swept her fins, and drove herself up toward the distant light.
We pulled the Three-Tails out of their hands, she thought as she climbed, the grey ceiling growing nearer with every stroke. Sealed it away where they will never reach it. And it has not cost them a single step. They simply went on without it, and took another.
She drove upward through the cold toward the storm waiting on the surface.