The port town of Kawaminato sat on the southeastern edge of Fire Country where the land met the sea. It was a modest place built around fishing and trade, the kind of town that existed because ships needed somewhere to dock and sailors needed somewhere to drink. The smell of salt and dried fish hung over everything.
The ship the Daimyo had chartered was a mid-sized trading vessel. Two masts, a broad deck, a private cabin below for the Daimyo and his aide, and enough room for the four shinobi escorts and the attendants.
Lee stood at the gangplank and looked at the ship.
The ship looked back.
"Lee?" Tenten noticed he had stopped walking.
"I'm fine." Lee's voice was a shade lighter than usual. "Just... appreciating the craftsmanship."
He made his way onto the deck one step at a time, moving with unusual carefulness. His feet found the deck. The deck moved. Lee's stomach lurched immediately.
He breathed through his nose. He breathed out through his mouth. He stood very still and waited for his insides to settle.
"You good?" Aoba asked from the railing.
"Perfectly fine, Aoba-san!" Lee's smile was wide. His face was a shade paler. But he was standing and the world was not spinning and his breakfast was where his breakfast was supposed to be. He just needed to adapt. Slowly.
Hana walked aboard without issue, the three Haimaru Brothers trotting up the gangplank behind her comfortably. They found a spot near the stern and settled into a pile, noses resting on the deck, ears still rotating.
By the time the ship cleared the harbor and the sails caught the offshore wind, Lee had found his balance. He positioned himself at the center of the deck where the rocking was least noticeable and kept his knees slightly bent. It was not unlike standing on unstable ground during a training exercise. His body will adapt. His stomach will do the same.
The port shrank behind them. The coastline of Fire Country thinned into a dark line. The sea opened in every direction, grey-blue and flat, the horizon unbroken.
The Daimyo had retired to his cabin the moment the ship left port. His aide stood on the deck for approximately four minutes before turning green and joining his employer below. The attendants handled the sails and the rigging with the experience of men who had done this crossing before. Aoba stood at the bow with a crow perched on his shoulder. He had sent three others into the sky as scouts, their black shapes circling the ship in wide arcs.
Lee and Tenten were practicing nature transformation. Lee sat cross-legged near the bow with a bucket of seawater in front of him, his hands submerged, trying to feel the element the way Aoba had described. Tenten was working with two kunai, attempting to channel wind chakra through the blades on top of the mast.
Hana watched them from the stern with mild interest while she ran a comb through one of the Haimaru Brothers' fur.
For a while, it was peaceful.
[Water Style Skill Gained!]
[Water Style has reached the next level!]
The sails appeared on the horizon three hours into the crossing.
Tenten saw them first because she was standing at the highest point of the ship with her hand shading her eyes, scanning the water to admire the sights.
"Aoba-san!" Tenten shouted. "Ships! A whole bunch!"
Aoba's crow returned to his shoulder and cawed once. The other three scouts were already wheeling back, abandoning their wider pattern for a tight defensive circle.
"How many?" Aoba's sunglasses reflected the water.
One of the crows cawed three times in rapid succession. Aoba listened. The crow cawed again, a longer sequence.
"Seven." Aoba's jaw set. "My crows count seven ships. All heading this way."
The Haimaru Brothers were on their feet, all three noses pointed northeast, hackles rising. A low growl came from the largest of the three.
"They smell blood," Hana said quietly. "These aren't merchants."
"Bandits?" Tenten hopped down and landed gently.
"Pirates." Aoba's crow had returned from a closer pass. "The lead ship is larger than the rest. There's someone on the bow." Aoba frowned. "Everyone, prepare for battle."
Tenten's scroll unfurled. She reached inside and pulled out a longbow, stringing it in a single motion. An arrow followed, then another, a quiver materializing from the scroll and settling across her back.
The first pirate ship was close enough now to make out individual figures on the deck. Rough men with rough weapons. They were shouting something across the water that the wind ate before it reached the escort vessel.
Tenten drew.
Her first arrow crossed the distance between the ships in a flat arc and took a pirate through the throat. He fell backward off the bow and hit the water without a sound.
Her second arrow took the man standing beside where the first had been. Through the eye.
Her third arrow hit the rigging of the nearest ship, severing a critical line. The sail sagged.
She was drawing and releasing at a pace that left the bow singing in her hands, each arrow finding its mark with perfect accuracy. Some of the ships being taken down by arrows with explosive tags wrapped around them.
"They're closing fast," Aoba reported from the crow's intelligence. "Five minutes before the first ships reach us."
Lee turned to Aoba. "Aoba-san. We can't let them surround us. Let us take the fight to their ships."
"We can cover more ground if we split," Hana agreed. The Haimaru Brothers were already at her sides, teeth bared, ready.
Aoba looked at the three of them. Two fourteen-year-old genin and an eighteen-year-old chunin asking permission to jump onto enemy warships in the middle of the open ocean and fight their way through the crews.
He nodded.
"Go. Tenten and I will stay with the Daimyo."
"Yes, sir!" Lee was already running for the railing.
Hana followed, the Haimaru Brothers launching over the railing in three grey streaks.
Lee leaped from the deck of the escort ship, crossing the gap of open water between their vessel and the nearest pirate ship in a single arc. He hit the pirate deck feet-first.
Hana and the Haimaru Brothers landed on a different ship entirely, four shapes hitting the deck together.
The pirates on those ships had approximately two seconds to understand what had just boarded them.
Hana's ship was the closest on the right flank.
She crossed the water on the backs of her dogs, the three Haimaru Brothers running across the surface with their chakra-coated paws, and they hit the pirate deck as a unit. Hana was already low, her hands forming the seal.
"All-Fours Jutsu!"
Her canines lengthened. Her nails sharpened into claws. Her pupils narrowed into slits. The feral transformation of the Inuzuka settled across her body in a wave that turned a veterinary medical-nin into something that belonged in the wild.
Fourteen pirates. Mixed weaponry.
The first pirate swung a cutlass at her. Hana dropped under the swing on all fours and raked her claws across his thigh, severing the artery. He screamed and fell. One of the Haimaru Brothers hit the man behind him in the chest, jaws closing on his collarbone, weight carrying them both to the deck.
"Fang Rotating Fang!"
Hana and the largest Haimaru Brother launched into a spinning drill. Two grey shapes rotating at blinding speed, buzzing across the deck in parallel lines that tore through everything in their path. Pirates. Crates. Railings. The deck itself splintered under the rotating passage, grooves carved through the wood in twin lines.
The remaining two Haimaru Brothers worked the flanks. One caught a pirate by the ankle and dragged him off his feet. The other intercepted a group of three trying to flee below deck, blocking the hatch with a snarling wall of fur and teeth.
It took her less than a minute.
Fourteen bodies lay across the deck. The Haimaru Brothers trotted through the aftermath, noses checking for anyone playing dead. One found a man pressed behind a barrel. A growl. A shriek. The man threw his weapon into the sea and pressed his face to the deck.
Hana straightened from her feral stance. She wiped blood from her claws on the nearest body's shirt and looked across at the next ship.
She jumped. The dogs followed.
Lee's ship was the one on the left side.
He landed on the deck with a grin and his fists up. The pirates, a crew of roughly twenty, turned toward him with mocking looks who had not been expecting a boy in a green jumpsuit to fall out of the sky onto their ship.
"Hello!" Lee waved. "I would recommend surrendering."
A pirate with a massive axe swung at his head.
"I tried..." Lee ducked, drove the back of his fist into the man's gut, and launched him over the railing into the sea.
The rest came at him in a rush.
Lee's nunchaku cleared two in the first second. A third caught a spinning kick that put him through the mast. A fourth and fifth received a combination that left them in a pile against the far railing. The ship rocked with every impact, the wooden deck splintering under the force of Lee's strikes.
He was smiling the entire time.
The pirates were not trained shinobi. They were men with swords and evil intentions, and they were facing someone who was quite a bit different from their average victims. The gap between them was a gulf that could not be reduced by any means, regardless of numbers. Lee cleared the deck in under a minute.
He stood among the unconscious and broken bodies and took a breath. Then the ship lurched.
Lee's stomach lurched along with it.
Lee made it to the railing in time.
He leaned over the side of the ship and lost his lunch to the sea in an embarrassing fashion. The pirates groaned as they weren't able to take advantage of the boy's momentary helplessness. Who could possibly fight while puking?! No one that they could think of.
"I don't like boats..." Lee wiped his mouth. His face was green.
He looked across the water toward the next ship. His stomach turned at the thought.
Instead of jumping to the next ship, he decided to attack it and sink it with a single kick. Then he would deal with whoever came back up from the sea if he had to.
On the escort vessel, Aoba and Tenten watched the lead ship close the distance.
The man on its bow had not moved from his position. He stood with his arms crossed, his massive frame silhouetted against the grey sky. He was taller than any man Tenten had seen outside of the Akimichi clan, and he definitely looked like a pirate. Tanned skin, broad shoulders, strawberry blond hair in a high ponytail, a grey bandanna, and a scar running down his right eye.
The sea around his ship was behaving strangely.
Around the lead ship, the water was smooth. Organized. Moving in patterns that did not match the current or the wind, as if the ocean itself had decided to cooperate with the man standing on the bow.
"Tenten." Aoba's voice had lost its casual edge. "Get ready."
"Ready as can be."
"His chakra is doing something to the water. I can feel it from here. It's like the ocean is... listening to him."
The lead ship pulled alongside the escort vessel.
The man stepped from his bow to the escort ship's railing and from the railing to the deck in two unhurried steps, the wood groaning under his weight. He landed heavy. The deck vibrated.
He looked at Aoba. He looked at Tenten. He looked past them at the door to the lower cabin where the Daimyo was hiding.
"So." His voice was deep enough to feel in the chest. "This is what Konoha sends to guard the Water Daimyo." He smiled. "A man in sunglasses and a little girl."
"Araumi Funato," Aoba said. Not a question.
"You've heard of me. I'm flattered."
"Pirate lord. Controls these waters. Wanted in the Land of Water for decades of piracy, abduction, murder, and more." Aoba's hand moved to his kunai pouch.
"Did you know that I've been planning this since the Daimyo left his capital?" Araumi's arms unfolded. "I have eyes in every port town in the Land of Water. The moment that coward stepped onto a ship, I knew about it. The moment he docked in Konoha, I knew about it. And the moment he boarded this ship to sail home, I was already waiting."
The water around the escort vessel began to rise.
Walls. Smooth vertical surfaces of seawater climbing on either side of the hull, three meters, four meters, five meters, the ship settling deeper into a trench of its own making as the ocean rearranged itself around Araumi's will.
"Aoba-san." Tenten's scroll was in her hand. "He didn't use any hand signs..."
"I see that."
Araumi raised his right hand. The water wall on the port side collapsed inward.
The wall hit the deck like a battering ram. Aoba shoved Tenten sideways and threw himself in the opposite direction. The water smashed through the space where they had been standing, tore a section of railing away, and drained off the stern in a rushing cascade.
Aoba recovered first. His hands were already in seals.
"Fire Style: Fire Dragon Bomb!"
A stream of flames screamed across the deck toward Araumi. The pirate lord raised his hand and a curtain of water rose between them, absorbing the fire in a hissing cloud of steam.
"Fire against a man with the ocean at his back." Araumi shook his head with a laugh. "Ridiculous."
Aoba's second technique was already in motion. Kunai flew from his hands, strings trailing behind them.
"Hidden Jutsu: Stone Needles!"
Three kunai embedded themselves in Araumi's vest. Chakra ran through the strings. The paralysis should have locked his body within a second.
Araumi looked down at the strings.
He cut them with his harpoon.
The strings snapped. The kunai fell from his vest. The chakra that had been running through them dissipated when having contact with the weapon.
"Your tricks can't reach me."
A column of water erupted from the deck behind Aoba. It caught him in the back and launched him off the ship entirely. Aoba's body cleared the railing, cleared the water wall, and disappeared into the open sea thirty meters from the vessel.
His crows exploded into the sky, scattering in a burst of black feathers.
Tenten was alone now.
She did not waste time looking at where Aoba had gone. He was alive. He was a Special Jonin. He would recover and return. She just had to stall long enough for that to happen.
Her opponent was standing ten meters from her with the entire ocean under his command.
And behind her, below the deck, the Water Daimyo was cowering for his life.
"Lord Daimyo!" Tenten's voice punched through the cabin door. "Go to the bottom of the ship! Now! Do not come back up no matter what you hear!"
"T-Tenten-chan please, call the others! Call Rock Lee! You can't possibly-"
"Go! Now! If you stay up here, I have to protect you and fight him at the same time, and that will get us both killed!"
The sound of scrambling feet. The aide's voice, high-pitched, urging the Daimyo deeper. The cabin door slammed.
Tenten turned back to Araumi.
He was watching her with the amusement of a man who had been killing people on these waters since before she was born.
"A little girl." He laughed. "They left a little girl to protect the Water Daimyo. Konoha's really scraping the bottom of the barrel after being invaded."
Tenten unrolled her scroll.
"Sorry to disappoint." She smiled. "My name is Tenten." She pulled out two kunai, one in each hand. "And I'm going to be the one who kills you today."
Araumi's smile widened.
"Big words from a little girl."
He raised both hands.
The ocean answered.
Two waves hit the ship from opposite sides simultaneously. Tenten leaped as the deck flooded, landing on the mast's crossbeam. The water crashed beneath her and drained through the scuppers, but the next wave was already forming.
Araumi was pulling the sea onto the ship, each one designed to sweep the deck clear and drag whoever was on it into the water where he had total control. On the open ocean, he was not fighting Tenten. He was fighting Tenten while standing in the middle of his own weapon.
She hurled both kunai in intersecting arcs toward Araumi's throat. He raised a hand and a disc of compressed water caught both blades, swallowed them, and spat them out sideways into the deck.
Tenten was already moving. Her scrolls unfurled as she dropped from the crossbeam, and she weaved hand signs rapidly.
"Rising Twin Dragons!"
The two smaller scrolls shot upward from the main scroll, spiraling around each other in twin columns of smoke. Tenten leaped between them and the weapons began to fly as she tossed them.
Kunai. Shuriken. Senbon. Swords. Axes. A hail of steel that screamed across the deck toward Araumi in a spread that covered every angle of approach. Tenten's hands moved in a blur, each finger sending a weapon on its trajectory with wire strings trailing behind them for redirection.
Araumi raised both arms.
A dome of water rose around him, spinning. The weapons hit the dome's surface and were caught in the rotation, some deflected outward, some swallowed into the water. A spear made it through the barrier and grazed his shoulder, drawing a thin line of blood before the water closed the gap.
"You drew blood." Araumi sounded genuinely surprised. "A little girl managed to get past my water barrier."
Tenten pulled the wire strings. The deflected weapons reversed course, coming at him from behind now. Araumi spun his dome and caught them again, but Tenten was already throwing the next volley, and the next, the scrolls feeding her an endless supply of steel.
The deck of the ship was becoming a graveyard of embedded weapons. Kunai in the railings. Swords in the deck. Shuriken in the mast. Every missed throw and every deflected weapon added to the field.
Araumi's patience ran out.
He dropped the water dome and thrust both palms forward. The ocean behind the ship rose in a wall twenty meters high and collapsed onto the vessel from above.
Tiger. Boar. Ox. Dog. Snake.
"Substitution Jutsu!" Tenten vanished, swapping herself with a kunai embedded in the deck behind Araumi. She appeared at his back with a spiked iron bat already summoned from her scroll, mid-swing.
The bat connected with Araumi's shoulder before he could turn. He stumbled forward a step. His harpoon came around in a sweeping counter. Tenten caught the shaft on the flat of the bat and shoved it wide, stepping into the opening with a rising knee aimed at his chin. Araumi leaned back. The knee grazed his jaw.
He thrust the harpoon at her chest. She deflected the point with the bat's handle and felt something wrong the instant the weapons touched. A pull. A suction at the edge of her chakra. The harpoon was trying to drink from her through the contact.
She broke the clash immediately, dropping the bat and launching into a backflip kick that caught Araumi across the chin. His head snapped back. His feet slid on the wet deck.
A water tentacle the size of a tree trunk rose from the flooded deck behind her and hammered down. Tenten crossed her arms to block and the impact sent her skidding backward across the ship, her sandals tearing grooves through the waterlogged wood. Pain ran up both forearms.
"You're more annoying than the mist genin." Araumi rubbed his aching chin. "I'll give you that."
Tenten pulled herself up.
She needed more.
"Gate of Opening!"
"Gate of what?"
The First Gate flared inside her. The chakra surge hit her body like a furnace igniting, the heat spreading from her chest outward through every limb. Her muscles swelled. Her speed increased fivefold. Her strength multiplied.
Araumi felt some sort of change and his eyes narrowed.
Tenten ripped a giant spiked sphere from her scroll. The massive spiked flail, twice her height, solid metal, appeared in her hands with a weight that would have staggered her without the gate. She held it by a large chain and swung in a rising arc that caught Araumi's water barrier and shattered through it, the flail's mass too great for the water to catch.
The weapon connected with Araumi's ribs.
He went sideways. Skidding across the flooded deck, one hand dragging through the water to slow himself. He coughed. Blood came out.
"What the hell was that?!" He straightened. He spat blood into the water at his feet. "Let me show you the true power of the sea dragon!"
He pressed both palms against the deck. The ship vibrated. The water around the hull began to climb the sides, in organized streams that crawled over the railing and spread across the deck like living things. The dragon streams converged on Tenten's position from every direction.
She swung the sphere in a full circle, detonating the explosive tags plastered around it. The explosions scattered the water streams temporarily but they reformed within seconds, pulling themselves back together.
The water clawed at her ankles.
It failed.
Tenten was already moving. She unsummoned the weapon and rushed toward Araumi with two blades. He walked toward her through the flooded deck. The water parted for him. It reached for her.
Her blades met his harpoon. The first clash sent sparks across the wet deck. She pressed in with a second strike, angling her left blade at his wrist while the right held the harpoon's shaft in place. The instant the blade touched the harpoon's surface, she felt the drain again. Stronger this time. The harpoon drained the chakra strengthening the blade.
She disengaged in a single backward leap, her feet finding solid ground on the crest of a wave that had been aiming to crush her from behind. She rode the wave's momentum upward, creating five hand signs at the peak, and substituted with a shuriken embedded in the mast behind Araumi.
She appeared above him. Her scroll was already unfurling.
"Rising Twin Dragons!"
The scroll circled around her. From it rained a storm of weapons so dense that they appeared as white streaks against the grey sky. Hundreds more weapons with points and edges fell toward the deck in a spread that covered the entire ship.
Araumi raised both hands and the water around the deck rose to meet the falling weapons. Most were caught. Most were deflected. Most embedded harmlessly in the water barrier or the deck.
Most.
A dozen got through.
They hit the deck around Araumi's feet in a tight cluster, embedding in the wood at varying angles. He looked down at them. Halberds. Swords. Spears. A trident. All stuck in the deck, blades up, forming a bristling forest of steel around his position.
Tenten's eyes locked on the field of weapons she had just planted.
Araumi pulled his foot free of a kunai that had pinned his sandal to the deck and charged at her with his harpoon the moment she landed.
Tenten did not retreat.
She summoned a manriki-gusari from her scroll. The weighted chain whipped out and wrapped around Araumi's extended arm, looping twice around his wrist. He tried to yank free. Tenten's gate-enhanced grip held.
He pulled harder. She slid toward him on the wet deck, her feet leaving grooves in the wood.
She let herself slide.
As she reached him, she dropped low, passed under his arm, and wrapped the chain around his torso on the way through. Once around his chest. Twice around his arms. The chain cinched. Araumi's arms locked against his sides.
"You think chains can hold me?!" He flexed. The chains creaked. The metal strained.
Tenten summoned a second chain. A third. A fourth. Each one wrapping around a different section of his body, locking his arms, his shoulders, his legs. Chains shot out from her scroll in a continuous pour. Chain after chain after chain.
Araumi's water surged toward the chains. The ocean tried to erode them, to slip between the links and pry them apart. Tenten could feel the chains weakening under the water's constant pressure.
She did not have long.
She grabbed the consolidated mass of chains in both hands, planted her feet on the deck, and pulled.
The First Gate screamed through her muscles. Everything she had went into her arms and her back and her legs. Araumi's body lifted off the deck.
She leaped into the air and began to spin.
The chains went taut. Araumi's massive frame swung outward as they rotated, the speed building with every revolution. The wet deck sprayed water in a ring beneath them. Araumi's body blurred as the rotation accelerated, his shouts swallowed by the wind of the spin.
Faster.
Faster.
The air around them whipped violently from the centrifugal force. The rigging snapped. The remaining mast cracked and toppled.
Araumi's body flew in a tight arc, spinning from the residual momentum, and reached the peak of the throw directly above the cluster of embedded weapons. For one suspended moment, the pirate lord of the Funato clan hung in the grey sky above his own ocean, his chains trailing, his body rotating, and below him a forest of steel points aimed at the sky.
Tenten's eyes found the field of weapons she had planted on the deck.
She swung down.
He came down on the weapons blades-first. The water rising up to catch him was pointless. He was coming down too fast.
A dozen blades entered his body simultaneously. Swords, spears, kunai, the trident. Each one found a different part of him. The impact drove the weapons deeper, some of them punching through his body and into the deck beneath him. The ship shuddered from the force.
Araumi's mouth opened. Blood ran from it in a line that reached his chin and dripped onto the kunai embedded in his chest.
His eyes, icy blue, found Tenten on the deck below him.
"A... mere girl." He coughed. More blood. "You..."
His head dropped.
The water that had been climbing the ship, that had been responding to his will, that had been the extension of his body for forty years, went still.
Then it drained away.
The ocean receded from the deck in a slow withdrawal, sliding over the railings and back to where it belonged. The organized streams became ordinary water. The walls collapsed into waves. The sea returned to being the sea.
Araumi Funato hung on the weapons he had been dropped onto, motionless.
Tenten stood on the deck with the First Gate still open and her chest heaving. She was soaked from head to toe. Her shirt was torn at the collar where Araumi had grabbed her. Blood ran from a cut on her forearm that she did not remember getting. Her hands were raw from the chains.
She let the First Gate close.
The exhaustion hit her immediately. Her knees buckled. She caught herself with one hand on the deck and stayed there for a moment, breathing as her body wracked with terrible pain.
This was what Lee and Guy-sensei went through every time they opened the gates?!
This is only the first freaking gate and I already feel like crying!
But at least, she had won.
A sound came from Araumi's body.
Wait, no not from the pirate. He was dead. The sound came from beside him, from something that had been in his hand.
The harpoon.
It was not an ordinary harpoon. It was shaped like a marlin skeleton, pike-like, mounted on a long pole with a rope trailing from its base. It lay on the deck among the weapons and the blood and it was vibrating.
Tenten's eyes found it.
The harpoon moved.
It slid across the deck toward her, moving of its own will. The marlin shape at its head was opening and closing as if tasting the air.
It reached her hand.
The moment her fingers closed around the pole, she felt it.
The drain.
Her chakra, already depleted from the First Gate and the fight, began flowing out of her body and into the weapon at a rate that turned her arms cold within seconds. The harpoon was drinking her. Consuming her. Taking everything she had and pulling for more.
Tenten's vision blurred.
She fumbled at her pouch with her free hand. The food pill was near the bottom. Her fingers were going numb. She could feel the edges of consciousness darkening.
The pill found her mouth.
She bit down. The rush of supplementary chakra flooded her system, buying time. The harpoon was still pulling, still drinking, and the food pill's boost was a stopgap, not a solution.
Tenten's mind, even through the drain, was clear enough to understand what she was dealing with.
A sentient weapon! Its wielder was dead. It was looking for a new source. And it was going to kill her if she let it decide the terms.
She bit her hand, producing blood. Her fingers moved through the familiar patterns of fuinjutsu, the brush strokes she had practiced a thousand times on scrolls and weapons and storage seals, but this time applied to something that was fighting back.
The harpoon's drain intensified. It did not want to be sealed. It did not want to be tamed. It wanted to consume.
Tenten's teeth clenched. Sweat mixed with seawater on her face.
She slapped her bloody hand onto the harpoon's shaft.
The harpoon glowed as the on-the-spot sealing jutsu took effect. The drain stuttered. The harpoon vibrated violently, the marlin head snapping open and closed.
Tenten poured her recovered chakra from the food pill into the seal. Every scrap of energy went into the inscription, feeding the seal's structure while the harpoon tried to eat through it from the other side.
The seal held.
The drain slowed.
Slowed.
Stopped.
The harpoon went still in her hand. The marlin head closed. The vibration faded. Contained but not broken.
The black seal patterns on the shaft glowed a faint blue, then settled into dormancy.
Tenten sprawled out on the deck of the ruined ship with a dead pirate lord hanging on a forest of her own weapons behind her, a sentient harpoon sealed and quiet in her lap, and the taste of a food pill dissolving on her tongue.
She exhaled.
"Lee... Hana..." she spoke to herself. "Come look at what I did..."
I'm not a freaking nobody… Tenten was on the cusp of fainting.
[Taijutsu Proficiency +168 points!]
[Nunchaku Mastery Proficiency +94 points!]
[Chakra Control Proficiency +62 points!]
Lee arrived back on the escort ship by jumping across three pirate vessels, each of which he had already cleared. His face was green. His mouth tasted terrible. His stomach was still recovering.
He saw the state of the Daimyo's ship and stopped.
The mast was gone. The deck was covered in embedded weapons. The railings were shattered. And Tenten was laid out in the middle of it all, holding something, with a body impaled behind her.
"Tenten?!" Lee sprinted across the deck. "Are you okay?! What happened?! Is that-"
"I'm fine…" She looked up at him. She was exhausted and soaked and bleeding and she was smiling. "I handled it…"
Hana and the Haimaru Brothers landed on the deck a moment later. Hana had blood matted in her ponytail and a scratch across her cheek. The dogs were panting but uninjured. She surveyed the scene.
She looked at Araumi's body. She looked at the weapons. She looked at the chains. She looked at Tenten on the deck and her eyebrows rose.
"You did all of this?" Hana asked.
"My first Primary Lotus..." Tenten grinned. Half pride, half exhaustion. "Chained him up, spun him around, and dropped him on a forest of my own weapons..."
Lee's eyes went wide.
"Your first Primary Lotus?! Tenten, that is incredible!" His fist shot into the air. "You adapted it for your fighting style! Instead of pile-driving the enemy into the ground, you dropped them onto your weapons! That is genius!"
"Figured I couldn't exactly use the original version." Tenten laughed, then winced. Everything hurt. "Against that guy, it wouldn't have worked. But I've got weapons. Lots of weapons."
"You used the Gate to power the spin?"
"Had to... Couldn't have lifted him without it." She held up her raw hands. "Still can't believe I pulled it off."
Hana crouched beside Tenten and healed her with the Mystical Palm Jutsu.
"You're depleted. Muscle damage in both arms. Minor tears in your shoulders from the spin. You're not fighting again today." Hana's assessment sounded cold but her tone was warmer than her words. "But you'll recover." She grinned at her.
"I know." Tenten leaned back. "Worth it."
"What's that?" Hana nodded at the harpoon in Tenten's lap.
"A sentient weapon. It tried to eat my chakra after its owner died. I took it."
Hana stared at her.
"A sentient weapon?"
"Yeah. It's alive. Look." She poked it and it shook.
Hana looked at Lee. Lee just smiled at the new weapon his friend gained.
Hana looked back at Tenten.
"Homura and Koharu called you unexceptional?"
"To my face."
"They're idiots."
Tenten's grin widened.
Aoba pulled himself over the railing, soaked, his sunglasses cracked, one of his crows perched on his shoulder looking equally bedraggled. He took one look at the deck.
"Oh, kids. Thank god, you're alright. That's great..." Aoba puked out a bunch of water. "What happened here? Is the Water Daimyo safe?"
"Tenten saved the day!" Lee answered.
"The Water Daimyo is safe." Hana confirmed.
Aoba looked at Tenten. Looked at Araumi. Looked at the harpoon in her lap. Pushed his cracked sunglasses up.
"Guy wasn't exaggerating about you kids, huh?" Aoba laughed. "Sorry about leaving you to deal with that guy, Tenten. I was hit a lot harder and sent much further than I thought."
"It's cool. I got him…" Pride radiating from Tenten's body.
The Water Daimyo's head appeared cautiously from the cabin hatch. His small black eyes took in the destroyed deck, the impaled pirate, the weapons, the blood, the four shinobi standing in the middle of it all.
"Is it... is it safe?" His voice was very small.
"It's safe, Lord Daimyo." Tenten barely stood up, the harpoon in her hand, and bowed. "Your escort is secure."
The Daimyo looked at her.
He looked at Araumi.
He looked at the teenage girl who had killed the pirate lord who had terrorized his country's waters for longer than she had been alive, and he did not know what to say, so he said the only thing that came to mind.
"Thank you, Tenten."
Tenten smiled.
"Just doing my job."