Kidomaru rated every opponent the moment he saw them, and he was almost never wrong.
It was a habit older than the cursed seal. Back in the pits, when Orochimaru still made them fight other prisoners for survival, Kidomaru had learned to read a man's whole life in the first three seconds. He read them like difficulty ratings. Most people came up low. Most people were minor goons, trash, the kind of fight you cleared on the way to a real one without putting your snacks down.
He had looked at all five of the Leaf brats and rated them in a glance. The loud orange one, annoying, probably an arrogant mob. The dog boy, fast and arrogant. The shadow user, with somewhat of a brain.
And the girl at the back with the buns in her hair and the strange spear across her shoulders.
He spat a web in a wide net, a starting jutsu that had ended more frontal attackers than he could count. It pushed out of his mouth and spread in the air into a sheet of white silk wide enough to swallow her whole, sticky enough to glue a man to a wall, strong enough that a kunai could not cut through it. He was already deciding how he'd string her up afterward, where the good light was for it, when the net reached her.
She slashed it apart with her spear.
And the net was gone.
Kidomaru's grin held for exactly as long as it took his brain to refuse what his eyes reported. The silk wasn't supposed to tear or snap.
But it did this time.
There was something wrong with that weapon.
Okay, Kidomaru thought, and the grin came back smaller. Okay. New information. The spear eats web. Fine. Webs aren't everything I got.
He hardened a fistful of Sticky Gold in his mouth, chewed it sharp, and spat three of them, the golden metal projectiles screaming across the clearing faster than the eye, the stuff that punched through trees, the stuff that didn't care about your armor because it was armor.
She knocked all three out of the air with the spear without moving her feet, and where the spear kissed them the gold went dull and dropped like spent slugs.
That one she didn't even seem to think about.
The difficulty meter, the one that lived in the back of Kidomaru's skull and had never once been wrong, ticked up a notch. Then another. He did not like the direction it was moving.
He decided to test the thing properly because patience was how a hunter found the seam in anything.
So he played the whole opening hand.
He spat sticking ropes to fling her into the trees and she severed them at the root and the rope went dead in the air. He laid Spider Web Flower nets in fast little volleys, five, ten, a dozen, the more the stronger, and she walked through the cloud of them with the spear turning lazy circles and every net that touched it unspooled into nothing. He dropped out of the treetop behind her, because maybe the answer was just taijutsu and she pivoted into him with the butt of the pole and very nearly took his head off, and she taken one of his good arms blocking it and felt the chakra in his own armor thin where the harpoon made contact and Kidomaru flickered back up into the trees with his heart going faster than he wanted to admit.
She wasn't just a spear girl.
Up close she'd nearly brained him. The spear out-reached his arms and ate his armor on contact, so taijutsu was a death sentence. And every chakra thing he owned, the webs, the nets, the gold, the armor that was supposed to be his answer to exactly this kind of fighter, she drank like she was thirsty. He ran the matchups in his brain. A dozen lines branching out from here, and every single branch that put him within her reach ended with him dead.
For the first time since the pits, Kidomaru was not playing a game he already knew how to win.
He was, he realized with something that was not quite fear yet but was related to it, the wrong shinobi for this fight. He'd been built for one thing. Long range. Pick the prey apart from a distance it couldn't answer, study it, find the seam, end it on his terms. Up close he was a spider out of its web, and she was the only opponent he'd ever met who could make a web mean nothing.
Fine, he thought, and the grin was entirely gone now, replaced by the flat focus he usually saved for the back half of a hunt. Fine. Then I do the only thing I'm actually good at. I get far away from you, brat, and I make you bleed from somewhere you can't see.
He flickered, and the clearing was suddenly empty of him.
This was the part he was good at. The best, maybe.
Kidomaru went quiet in the high treetops and the underbrush and the deep shadow, moving in body flickers between one heartbeat and the next, and he turned the whole stretch of forest into his board. He strung touch-threads through the branches so he'd feel her before he saw her. He buried explosive tags under the leaf litter where she'd step. He layered sticky nets across the obvious paths and salted the clearing with hardened gold caltrops, and then he started his work.
A gold projectile out of the green, no warning, aimed at the back of her neck.
She turned and ate it on the spear without looking, like she'd heard it coming.
An explosive tag under her heel. She was gone before it went, the blast chewing empty dirt.
A net from the left and a spike from the right at the same instant, the old trap, dodge one into the other, and she planted the spear and spun, and a wall of her own thrown steel went out from her in a ring, kunai and shuriken and things he didn't have names for blurring out in every direction at once, knocking his net and his spike both out of the sky, and three of her blades came whipping back on wires to chop the touch-thread he'd been tracking her with.
Kidomaru froze in his tree.
She'd found the thread. She'd cut his eyes. And she'd done it while answering two attacks from opposite sides without taking a step she didn't choose.
She fights at every range, he thought, and the realization had a chill in it. He had spent his whole career exploiting the one distance an opponent was weak at. This girl did not have one. He'd been so sure she was a long-range fight's free meal, a specialist he'd starve out from the dark, and instead the dark was the only place he was still alive, and she was shrinking it.
The difficulty meter in his skull had run out of notches.
He stopped thinking about winning easily. He started thinking about winning period.
"Summoning Jutsu."
He slammed a bloodied palm down on the branch and Kyodaigumo came down out of the smoke above the clearing, his giant, the black-and-orange bulk of her filling the treetop, legs the size of tree trunks finding footholds across a dozen limbs at once. He felt better the instant she arrived. This was a different game. This was the game where the prey didn't get to fight back, only run, and there was nowhere far enough to run.
"You've been very impressive, little girl," Kidomaru called down, and some of the sing-song came back into his voice now that he had a mountain of spider over her. "Genuinely. Best prey I've had since I don't know when. But here's the thing about a hunter." Kyodaigumo's abdomen swelled, the egg sac bulging fat and pale beneath her. "We don't need you to come close, and we don't need to find you in the dark. We just need the sky."
He sliced the sac open with a gold blade.
The Rain of Spiders came down.
A thousand of them, each the size of a small dog, hatched and falling and trailing chakra silk as they came, and this, this was the one, this was the answer he'd been hunting through the whole fight, because she had one spear and there were a thousand falling threads and one spear cannot drain a sky.
The spiders fell on her in a living curtain. The silk spun out and wrapped and the chakra threads cinched and the whole clearing under Kyodaigumo became a churning web with a girl somewhere inside it, and Kidomaru already had a gold spike chewed sharp in his mouth, ready to start the potshots, ready to fire into the cocoon over and over from the dark until the cocoon stopped moving,
and then something inside the web screamed.
But it wasn't the girl.
It was the spear.
A sound like metal tearing its own throat open, and the curtain of spiders and silk blew apart from the inside as the thing in the girl's hands stopped being a spear.
Kidomaru watched the pale pike come apart and stand up.
It unfolded. There was no other word his brain could find. The marlin skull at the end of the pole peeled open and the whole length of it bloomed outward into a long living body of bright metal, ribbed, finned, the spine of a deep-sea fish rendered in metal, and at the front of it both eyes were red.
Tenten spun, sliced, slashed, and pierced through the raining spiders.
She went through the falling thousand like a shark through bait and they did not slow her, they fed her, every thread that touched her weapon died, the chakra that spun them sucked into that bright awful body as it passed, and Kyodaigumo's whole web, the entire technique, sloughed off the girl in a dead curtain and girl came out of it spotless.
For a long, long moment, Kidomaru simply stared.
Whatis that?!
He had been playing the wrong game. He understood that, finally, completely, and far too late. He'd thought he was the hunter the whole time. He'd thought the dark was his and the sky was his and she was the thing in the web.
He should have run. Break off and leave this brat and her freakish weapon and rejoin the others and let the Uchiha cross the border and call it a loss. A real hunter cut a bad fight.
He didn't run.
Because she had eaten everything he had, every move, every level, the whole kit he'd spent his life perfecting, and she'd done it easily, and the thought of leaving this clearing as the spider who lost to a spear girl was worse than the thought of dying in it. Pride was the oldest difficulty setting of all, and Kidomaru had never once managed to lower it.
He transformed.
A flood of black marks racing over his skin and his skin going deep crimson under them, his hair bleeding out long and grey, horns shoving up through his forehead and his elbows, the third eye on his brow tearing open, and the world got sharp. Ten times. The seal multiplied everything by ten, his chakra, his speed, the gold he could spin, and best of all the eye, the third eye, the one that could pick a target's vital point out of the air from hundreds of meters and put a shot through it.
He didn't have to win up close. He never had. He just had to land one.
He spat the bow.
It came out of his mouth in a careful ribbon of Sticky Gold and hardened in the air into the war bow, the long awesome curve of it, the one-hit kill, the game over. He set his lowest hands to the grip and his upper arms to the string and drew it back with the strength of all of them at once, tension no human arm could manage, and the third eye on his forehead locked onto the girl down in the clearing and found the soft spot under her sternum where an arrow would go in and not come out.
He nocked a bolt of solid gold.
He did not gloat. He had watched this girl answer every single thing he'd shown her and he was done showing her things. He would put one arrow through her heart faster than she could see it leave the string and then he would never have to think about that spear again.
Game over, Kidomaru thought, and loosed.
The arrow left the bow too fast for the air to argue with it.
And the girl, reached out with her bare off hand and grabbed the guide thread trailing off the back of the bolt.
She's not fast enough to stop it, Kidomaru's mind said, calm, certain, the analyst to the very end. The arrow's already gone. Grabbing the thread does nothing. Grabbing the thread is a dead girl's reflex. I've already won.
The thread lit up.
White. Blue-white. A crack and a smell of storm, and the lightning went up his own guide thread from her hand toward his faster than the arrow had left the bow, she was running lightning through it, and Kidomaru's last clear thought, the final reading of the only instrument he had ever trusted, was that he had never once seen this girl use a single nature transformation, not one, not a spark, the whole fight.
The lightning hit him.
It came up the thread and through the bow and into all eight of his limbs at once, and every muscle in his crimson body seized and locked and cooked, the third eye rolling white, the bow falling from hands that had clenched too hard to hold anything, and Kidomaru screamed, and came off his branch.
He fell.
He saw the clearing turn over beneath him, the dead grey ruin of all his beautiful web, his spider already bursting into smoke somewhere behind him, and the girl, the weapons girl, coming up to meet him through the air with the red-eyed monster in her hand and a length of bright metal already lined up on his chest.
His body would not answer him. The seal had nothing left to give a frame that couldn't move. He fell head-down toward the dirt and could not so much as turn his face from it.
The harpoon took him before the ground did.
It went through his chest, the bright finned length of it punching in under his collarbone and out through his back, and the instant it was in him the red eye flared and the drain started, and Kidomaru felt the second state go out of him like a tide running off a beach. The crimson drained from his skin. The horns crumbled. The grey washed out of his hair and the third eye sagged shut, the ten-times strength and the ten-times chakra pouring out of him and into that awful bright body faster than his heart could mourn it, until he was just Kidomaru again, plain, six-armed, fourteen years old, pinned in the air on the end of a dead girl's spear with a girl's calm face on the other side of it.
He looked at her. He wanted, stupidly, to ask how. How the web, how the armor, how the rain, how the lightning out of nowhere. How someone like her.
What came out, on the last of the air he had, was the only review he'd ever given that he knew for certain was right.
"...rigged," Kidomaru said. "The whole game. Rigged from the-"
The harpoon drained the rest.
The light went out of his eyes and Kidomaru of the Sound Four hung empty on the spear for one second more before she let him slide off it into the dead grey ruin of everything he'd made, and did not look at him again.
Game over.