The Clean Finish [Sasoriza, Asuka & Kabumi]
[[Takes place just after noon, 6ish hours after the caravan has left for the jounin exam, and 5 hours after Rin and Kureno leave Konoha.]]
A beautiful dawn was hours gone as Sasoriza paused to survey Kabumi's handiwork for the tenth time that day. The two of them had left the security of Sasoriza's hideout under the long rope bridge and gone into the surrounding forest opposite Fire Country's borders, to give the young woman an opportunity to train first hand with Sasoriza's puppets and improve her skills.
Her already quite well developed skills, as Sasoriza was very pleased to be discovering. Training today had consisted of teaching Kabumi how to use multiple puppets with each hand - and she had been loaned the precious use of Sasoriza's beloved Army of One Hundred Puppets to do so. It wasn't as though she had any puppets of her own, and going out and killing a dozen people so she could dance their corpses around simply seemed like far too much effort. It was like grocery shopping, and not having to bother with that anymore was one of the many reasons Sasoriza had happily turned herself into a puppet. She was not about to deal with such nuisances now.
Right now, Kabumi was learning to flit the dozen members of Sasoriza's Army she'd been entrusted with through the trees in pursuit of the Akatsuki woman. Sasoriza was deliberately moving at a slower speed, for if she moved as quickly as she could there was no way anybody could catch her. After an hour's long chase, meant to tax Kabumi's wits and strength (for it took an immense amount of chakra to keep such highly detailed puppets moving correctly) and her patience, the red-haired woman drew to a halt and smiled edgily as twelve wood and skin faces she knew better than her own instantly surrounded her in a killing stance.
Sasoriza glanced to where she knew Kabumi crouched hidden behind the trunk of a tree, and turned that smile to her favourite puppet of them all.
"Well done, Kabumi. We will stop for a break now and then head back. Return your troops to their scroll carefully and thank them for their service."
With those words she gave the girl a nod in respect of all she'd achieved in the time they'd had to train, and turned to look out into the forest and up towards the leaf-shadowed sky. Remembering the red dawn she'd watched earlier in the day, before leaving on this training with Kabumi, and wondering who would die tonight.
The training had honestly been difficult, and Kabumi relished the opportunity to tax herself to her physical limits. The amount of time she spent increasing her physical skills wasn't nearly as great as what she put into her medical ninjutsu. Sometimes it was good just to work until her body was slick with sweat.
And it was even better to drive someone into a trap.
Kabumi came out from behind the trunk of the tree and bowed at Sasoriza's praise. If it weren't for the vulnerability of a puppeteer, Kabumi might have considered learning more of that fighting style. But the idea of losing that much mobility in order to use an effective number of puppets wasn't an attractive option for her. If an enemy got close enough, the puppeteer's hands would still be tied up, too encumbered to act swiftly enough to prevent a stab in the back.
Kabumi did as she had been directed, carefully putting the puppets she had taken from the Army of One Hundred Puppets scroll back in their slots. Over the course of training she'd managed to work with all of them. She had been able to handle each of them in turn during her training. If there was one thing Sasoriza had been more than happy to do it was to pass her knowledge onto Kabumi.
She started rolling the scroll back up.
Eyes still settled on the sky, Sasoriza half-listened to Kabumi's movements and half-attuned herself to the sounds of the living forest around them. It was an odd moment, to find herself parallel to the finer points of life on this earth. To find them so very appreciable. Not something she indulged in often, yet comforting all the same.
She was just beginning to watch as the wind shifted the white clouds into shapes when her head snapped around at an inhuman speed and angle. The motion-sensing tags she had arranged to create a perimeter for a few miles around them during Kabumi's stay had just been tripped.
Somebody was coming.
Before most could blink, there was a swirl of white smoke that engulfed the girl's body she normally wore; and suddenly Sasoriza was stepping from the wisps of white in her fully articulated scorpion shell armour, Hiruko. She snapped to Kabumi and jerked her head up towards the trees, indicating the girl must hide.
"Secure yourself and give me the puppet scrolls, Kabumi-chan," she said, voice clicking through the scorpion's voicebox. Urgency powered her movements and it took a moment to realize its source.
Kabumi was weak and tired after her exertions. Whomever was coming could not be allowed to find her.
"Go now, Kabumi. Hide."
She didn't reply vocally, instead tossing the scroll to Sasoriza the instant it was rolled. Whatever defenses the puppet had put in place, they had been activated. By what was something Kabumi didn't know, but it was enough to make her "master" think she needed protection.
Kabumi scrambled up the tree, quietly, hiding in the shadows of the leaves. Whatever it was, being prepared was a good idea, so she slipped a hand into her hip pouch and searched for second to find the little pile of soldier pills. Sucking on them took longer and tasted worse, but it didn't make any noise and in the end it would help replenish her chakra.
The leaves sounded much louder in the faint breeze when she was hiding in them than when she was on the ground. It significantly hampered her hearing, though it would disguise her breathing to some extent... but not her smell. She didn't have nearly as good a sense of smell as an Inuzuka, but she knew that sweat had its own distinctive odor.
Ox, Ram, Dragon... a few more simple seals and her scent, sweat and all, vanished.
Nearly twenty minutes passed in silence this way. The birds did not quiet their singing; there was no change to the soft breeze that rustled the branches, no change in the light of the bright midday sun, no dramatic ambush from what shadows remained. It almost seemed as though they were holding their breath and waiting for nothing.
It might very well have continued to feel that way too, had Kabumi not been looking in just the right way to catch the faint glimpse of sun on white porcelain through the shifting leaves, not ten feet from where she herself hid in the trees.
When the word had come in that Akatsuki had been spotted at the edge of the Wind and Fire Countries, Asuka had not allowed herself to waste any time. She'd debated with Tsurude to immediately put together a chuunin team and leave the same night. If it hadn't been for the party that was being put together to go to Oto in the following days, Tsurude might have insisted she take more than two chuunin with her, but... The Oto team would need that kind of backup more than her. This, on the other hand, was just confirming a visual, she'd said (she'd lied); there was no need for the extra muscle. After all, no one could keep her in a fight she didn't want to be in.
With their agreement to her admittedly sound plan - had she intended on following it through to the letter - she'd then gotten six vials of the antivenin their medic-nin had whipped up after Sasoriza's original attack on headquarters. (Rin had handed them over with no arguments, bless his soul, just giving the warning that the protection these vials provided only lasted about five minutes.) Two for each of them, just in case, she'd said; but Asuka had a gut feeling that Sai and Sachiko, who she'd sent to the north side of the border (a detail she hadn't included in her discussions with Tsurude), wouldn't be running into Sasoriza, and she'd only given them one each. She, on the other hand....
This was very much a personal vendetta she'd kept to herself in the year since Sasoriza had originally laid waste to their ANBU headquarters, stealing a wanted prisoner off into the night and leaving dozens (and dozens) of dead and injured in her wake. Three times she should have met the Akatsuki and taken her down, and three times she'd failed, for various reasons. Those three times nagged at her enough to rejoin ANBU; enough to take advantage of her position, experience, and reputation to keep her ear to the ground; enough to realize what a fortune had dropped into her lap when Tsurude decided to put her on the Akatsuki tracking teams with Gaia and the others. Enough to realize that had she said a word of it to anyone, she'd have never been able to get where she was now - racing through the forests west of Konoha to take down an S-class bingo book entry by herself. She'd have been denied based on having too personal an interest in the matter.
This was flagrant abuse of the system. But frankly, Asuka really didn't care. And when she came back with Sasoriza's head in a bag, she'd just be congratulated for doing her job as an ANBU. After all, she had a responsibility to take down any bingo book entry she came across. Just doing what ANBU did best.
Not that she was interested in the praise. Only in the hit.
To be honest she hadn't expected to run into the woman so quickly. Without an expert tracker to take her straight down the Akatsuki's trail, she'd anticipated at least a week of tracking before finding her, if she found her at all. Asuka wasn't, after all, an Inuzuka, and she didn't have the advantage of having any summons with particularly talented noses. But the instant she found a motion sensing tag, she knew she was in the right place - and followed that shiver of chakra the tags sent back to their master like a dog on the trail of its prey. Carefully, silently, with the skill of an ANBU who could move through the forest without bending a leaf, scent hidden behind a jutsu that would conceal any presence she might have.
Unaware of any other presence but Sasoriza's, she took a moment to observe the beast hulking in the clearing alone. Black and red Akatsuki robes, a deformed face, hunched body hidden beneath folds of fabric. This was what Sasoriza looked like, the monster she'd failed to encounter three times almost a year ago. This was the person who'd gone out of her way to rescue Kabumi when they'd actually had their hands on her. This was the person who'd destroyed half of Konoha's ANBU force in mere minutes, the person who'd nearly killed Kureno and Hanato and put Tenzouko in a coma for so long no one thought she'd wake again.
This was the person she needed - wanted - to kill.
Asuka forced down the curl of anger that rose in her stomach at the sight of those red and black robes, forcing the cold impersonality of the ANBU to cover it like the mask that covered her face. An invisible presence in the trees, she waited and planned her attack.
Sasoriza was not the planet's most accomplished puppeteer for any small reason. She could sense and tune and twist the finest whisper of a chakra-line with the barest flit of a nerve if it came to it; and it had taken considerably less than that to pick up the fact that somebody was tracing the strings of chakra she'd employed to monitor her warning tags. Somebody not without some skill, but somebody who was obviously much dimmer than you had to be if you wanted to live after catching sight of this ninja's black and red cloak.
Because naturally, like any puppeteer's strings Sasoriza's led right back to the source like radials from a spider's web, leading the prey skilled enough to be a bother right back to her position. And she was well set to waiting like one, clearly detecting the approach. For a moment she considered how artistic that might have been; to have a spider's puppet armour waiting here for this fly. For the sheer visual poetry of it, not to mention the look on the poor bastard's face when they saw how literally they'd been taken in. But the eight legs were simply too fiddly to bother with; and anyway Sasoriza loved scorpions for the sting in their tail.
She held perfectly still, not even bothering to turn completely around and face whomever had come. Her hands were folded within her cloak, along with her tail and other weaponry.
Beneath her armour's fierce gaze, she smiled with serene insanity. It would be wonderful to fight again.
"I'm afraid you have me at a disadvantage." The scorpion's voice clicked and ground the words into the air. "Naturally everybody knows who I am, I am simply that spectacular." There was even a tone of light amusement in her voice, as though this was a tease. "But it is only fair that we be introduced, manners for manners?"
And with that she looked straight up and at the woman supposedly concealed by trees she hid in. Golden puppet eyes glittered in the shadows cast by the boughs overhead.
Despite that curl of anger, despite the cold ANBU shell and despite the mask she wore, Asuka's lips curled up in a vicious grin at that question. Manners for manners. Please. As though introductions had been made before she'd torn apart the ANBU headquarters to get to Kabumi. As though she'd paused to chit-chat before stabbing Kureno through his liver or trying to take Hanato and his dogs apart at the seams. Manners indeed.
What was the point in the idle banter and insults most ninja these days threw around before battling? It did nothing but waste time. And Asuka did not waste time if she could help it. She went in for the kill and she completed it as quickly as possible; while others talked, she got the job done. She would not waste her time with this bitch. After all, she only had twenty minutes tops to get this finished.
Sasoriza had not given Asuka much time to sit down and decide on a strategy, but the Leaf-nin wasn't too worried about this. She wasn't Shikako and able to come up with ten plans of action in the space of ten seconds. But she did know enough about the enemy to begin - Suna had given them plenty of information on Sasoriza and the kugutsu-nin techniques, information that Asuka had committed to memory a long time ago. Enough information to let her know that her preference to keep the fight up close and dirty would be for her benefit, and the antivenin Rin had supplied would take care of the advantage Sasoriza might have in close quarters.
Now it was just a matter of getting started.
Rather than replying with words, Asuka instead replied with jutsu: from the branches behind where she hid, scythes of chakra spiraled along a burst of wind aimed straight for Sasoriza. Were they to hit, they'd surely cleave straight through a limb, and do substantial damage to any armor not reinforced with chakra. And then she kawarimi'd away in a spiral of leaves, intending to reappear directly behind where she anticipated Sasoriza to dodge to.
What was wrong with these Konoha nin? Every single one of them lacked simple manners. The introductions, the motives, the face-to-face. All of life was a puppeteer's stage, after all; how was anyone meant to follow the proceedings without the names of the main characters? Well, without the name of the major character at least.
Well, if she wanted to die anonymous to Sasoriza's memory, that was her prerogative.
That wind jutsu was marvellously powerful, but nowhere near quick enough to catch the Akatsuki - even weighed down with her armour. Sasoriza was instantly wary though; of all the elemental jutsu to be put against it was the wind type which was most dangerous to a puppeteer. It could cut through chakra strings, it could easily slice wood from close range and at mid-range it would cause serious trouble. A puppeteer was a long range fighter - if this ninja had enough speed combined with those wind jutsu there would be much less scope for using her creations effectively.
If that happened she'd just have to hack the woman to pieces with a katana. There was precious little art in that. Unless Sasoriza settled down and rearranged her guts into neat pyramidal piles or somesuch.
Assimilating all this knowledge, Sasoriza adopted her strategy and went to the opposite element type to the wind jutsu user. When Asuka re-appeared where it would have been logical for the Akatsuki to appear, she found herself looking at nothing.
From under the earth beneath the ANBU's feet there was a twitch of chakra strings, and suddenly she was assailed from three sides by roaring, projectile-spitting and razor-claw-wielding scorpions and a salamander.
The Akatsuki was incredibly fast; she vanished the instant before Asuka's jutsu carved gouges into the earth, sending up a spray of dirt and leaves. Quick on her toes and a quick thinker, too, as she wasn't where the Leaf-nin had anticipated her to be. Instead of going head-on with one of the most dangerous puppeteers to come out of Suna, she was faced with the woman's creations instead.
Predictable. She'd have to go through the puppets before she'd get to meet the master. That was just the way this style of fighting worked, after all - so she'd have to be careful and quick and waste them as swiftly as possible. Asuka did not have the time to let herself be worn out by mere playthings of the real deal. So long as there were puppets, Sasoriza would not be far out of reach. She just had to make sure Sasoriza couldn't remain hidden for too long.
She met the weapons without hesitation, matching them speed for speed and refusing to be corralled between the three of them where they could do the most damage to her. Most of the projectiles she avoided, and those she could not avoid she blocked or sliced apart with her heian. The salamander she ignored, for the most part, as it did not have the more dangerous weapon: the dangerously sharp stinger or the crushing claws of the scorpion. Blunt trauma was preferable to being sliced in half or poisoned by one of those things.
The first scorpion she took out mostly by surprise, probably; usually people did not expect her chakra-blades to be capable of slicing straight through most kinds of wood and metal. Piece by piece she took it apart while avoiding the other two enemies - first the stinger, then each claw, then slicing the legs out from under it. The strain of maintaining such a sharp edge on her heian was hardly felt, adrenaline and tightly-controlled anger fueling her.
First one puppet. Now two more.
The second scorpion came down on her as she rolled away from the twitching remains of the first, ducking under a whistling sweep of the salamander's tail. She did not quite avoid the stinger of this one; it nicked her thigh instead of fully impaling her leg as she spun away.
The effect of the poison was almost immediate. Her vision blurred, lungs tightened, and Asuka stumbled to one knee unbidden.
Shame. The poison had tagged her so quickly. Sasoriza wasn't foolish enough to think it was over, not with somebody who had the calibre to summon such wind jutsus and wielded those chakra-blades skillfully enough to take apart one of her beautiful puppets. But she did anticipate a swift end to this little adventure when she sensed the poison had struck through skin.
Ah, the disadvantages of flesh. She didn't emerge from beneath the ground, not about to give away her successful attacking position - but she did cast her voice up above the soil (ventriloquism, naturally being a skill of a masterful performance puppeteer) and the gravelly tones of her scorpion's visage rumbled to the stricken woman's ears.
"Compliments on your style, but I fear you'll be completely immobilized within a few minutes. While you can still speak, would you mind telling me whom to ship your body back to?"
It would take less than just a few minutes for this poison to reach the immobilization stage; with her high metabolism and racing heart, Asuka's own body was working against her. Her fingers were suspiciously numb as one hand fumbled at her hip pouch, hardly able to open it and keep hold of her tekko at the same time. Sasoriza's voice was almost lost among the buzzing in her ears.
Too quick. Too fucking quick. She'd hoped to last longer before relying on the antivenin, but her style of fighting was working against her, too. If only she could work effectively from longer distances, but that would drain her chakra too quickly and leave her without any heavy-duty attacks should she need them at the end. Now she was down to just fifteen minutes - less, really - in which to kill the Akatsuki.
Hopefully she would only need ten minutes. Asuka wasn't sure if she'd make it back to Konoha without the buffer given by that last vial of antivenin.
She found the thick syringe in her pack, managed to wrap her fingers around it, and withdrew it; the puppets had paused around her as Sasoriza spoke, poised to attack, waiting for a response before stabbing and bludgeoning her to death. Asuka let herself kneel completely, fumbling the pouch back closed again, and then snapped off the bright yellow cap with two barely coordinated hands.
"Konoha," she said, and her voice was muffled both by her mask and her breathless lungs. The eyeholes she could see out of seemed to tighten with darkness, and the space between the smooth porcelain and her skin was almost too hot. "As if you have to guess, you fucking bitch."
Harshly, with enough strength that the needle would punch through the protective plastic covering, through her clothing, and deep enough to do some good, Asuka slammed the syringe into the side of her thigh. It hurt like a bitch - but with the same speed as the poison, the antivenin did its work. Abruptly her lungs opened up again, and the tinny ringing vanished from her ears.
The medics of Konoha had done as promised - and now she had to finish the job before their help ran out.
Asuka withdrew the injector, tossed it to the side, and rolled away just in time to avoid the scorpion's stabbing stinger.
Konoha. Well, yes - she had gathered that. Nowhere else did you find ninja quite so punctual about throwing themselves suicidally into death traps. She'd wondered about a family, a lover or whatnot - you know, just in case they wanted to have her stuffed and put on the roof to scare away pigeons or some such. No sense wasting material, and Sasoriza liked having her parents around. Death wasn't the handicap people said it was if you had a view of the world like Sasoriza.
Though right now, Sasoriza's view was not the one she hoped for. Her opponent was moving, still. Must have used an antivenin and now Sasoriza's puppets had to quickly finish her off before she recovered herself. What clever medics they must have back in that leafy, soft village... to have developed a catch-all-cure for the poisons using Sasoriza's preferred ingredients. They'd had a year or so to develop it but still--
Impressive. And that warranted some respect for their stupid little warrior at least.
Sasoriza broke ground in a shower of dirt clumps and razor blades. The strings of her two remaining animal puppets flickered and flashed bright blue in the sunlight and the attack began again in earnest. Intricacy and intelligence behind every move Sasoriza planned - though she had to admire the instinctiveness of the other nin's battle strategy. It made it hard to plan each puppet's moves when there was little discernible strategy to the opponent's attacks.
As she swung her salamander puppet into an artful arc, hatching its mouth open to blast a fireball towards the Konoha woman, Sasoriza felt an odd tenseness in her wrist. It was ignored and passed after a half-second as she flitted sideways and kept up her attack - but the sensation was odd enough to be remembered.
The antidote moved swiftly through her system, letting her breathe deep again, see clearly again, and dispersing the numbness in her limbs. She wasn't about to question the effectiveness of it, but a small part of her - in the back of her head, where she was still free to think - thought perhaps it might be too effective. That it, like the poison, was too quick.
Asuka chose to ignore this and started counting down the time instead.
With Sasoriza now revealing herself, opening herself up to attack again, the kunoichi changed her attack strategy. Before she was more careful with her movements, playing a game of dodge and attack, trying to land blows without receiving any damage herself. But that had been an effort to prolong how long she had before using the antivenin, and now that she had, well... there was no need to be careful anymore. Now it was all about brute damage. And Asuka's style reflected that: avoiding some attacks while allowing others to slip through, willing to take a slice to a bare shoulder here, dancing dangerously close to the stingers there (and almost getting crushed twice), all to land far harder hits than she was receiving herself. She didn't have to worry about the poison for four more minutes, after all.
The second scorpion came apart far more brutally than the first; she didn't bother with removing its weapons before smashing it to pieces. There was little point when all they could do now was make her bleed. Blood already wet her left thigh and shoulder, invisible against the black cloth of her pants and nearly obscuring the faded black of her old tattoo. Unremarkable wounds, really; she usually ended up with worse.
And then with five minutes left it was just the salamander, who was already yawning its jaws open far too wide to cough out a fireball. Not a katon, but dangerous enough in its own right, and Asuka wasn't going to get burned along with stabbed and poisoned. For the second time that morning, the jounin paused long enough to channel chakra into her hands, into the air, and sliced.
The worst of a fireball blew apart, cut down the middle with the force of the kamaitachi, scythes of chakra spiraling back toward the last puppet. And being only wood and metal, it too came apart, much like a hot knife through butter - with most of the chakra continuing straight through it, back toward the puppeteer who'd let herself get lined up for this attack.
The loss of her puppets stung, but not as badly as the queer sensation in Sasoriza's wrist. She could and would rebuild them; you could never really destroy the tools of art. The strange seizing sensation in her jointed wrist - wrists - though was alarming, even though her shielded face surely didn't let it show.
She easily dodged the rebounded fireball; scuttling and gliding her Hiruko scorpion's carapace into the trees.
There was silence. She stalked silent and undetectable though the trees; attention fully on this small and singular ANBU. She was proving a challenging and interesting opponent, but it was entirely her own fortune that her fighting style and chakra types were so favourable against Akasuna no Sasoriza.
Her fortunes would have trouble holding against the Sandaime Kazekage. Without a word of announcement (the drama was in the surprise) she summoned and launched her most formidable single battle puppet.
Her towering form, long spikes of dark hair jutting behind her, swept like the most distressing apparition into the clearing. Sasoriza wasted no time in funnelling her chakra into the abilities that still lay in the hitokugutsu. Black iron sand spewed from her jointed mouth and swirled around her in a lethal ribbon before...
Satetsu Shigure!
The iron sand compressed into lethal droplets, edged with microscopic razor sharpness, and slammed in an all encompassing burst from the puppet's location. Like her weapons, the sand was laced with the poison too.
Having the puppet master disappear again was hardly a surprise; it was already clear that this one preferred operating in the dark. At some point soon, though, she was going to have to get up in Sasoriza's face and finish this. She couldn't afford to continue going through puppet after puppet, getting worn down until a simple slip would cost her life. It was supposed to be the other way around, after all.
So when the new puppet emerged from the trees, she was prepared to continue the battle, breather over with and weapons rising once again before her in a defensive stance. The attack, however, was not like anything she had ever seen before - a black cloud of grit was breathed out of the puppet's mouth, swirling and coiling in the air in a way that... didn't look very good. Didn't look very good at all.
Asuka's normal method of dealing with most attacks was to barrel through it and make sure she didn't lose too much of her skin in the process. But this time her instincts screamed at her to get the fuck out of the way.
The use of her kamaitachi was starting to become old already, but it was the quickest wind jutsu she could whip up before immediately kawarimi'ing out of the path of destruction. In that instant before the cloud of black - sand? grit? - reached her, she saw the blades of chakra bounce off the - pellets? what the hell was it? - and scatter in a dozen directions. The cloud scattered too, dispersing in the air not unlike balls on a pool table, the individual grains of whatever that had come out of that puppet's mouth pinging off the ground and hitting nearby trees with a sound not unlike kunai. The tree behind which she'd vanished after her swift kawarimi shuddered with the impact.
The kunoichi hissed behind her mask and put her hand to her side. The warmth of blood was obvious through her gloves. She'd moved fast, but not fast enough; several of those pellet-things had nicked her in the scatter, and one had the fortune of hitting her dead-on. Missed the kidney, thankfully. That meant she could keep moving.
Still. Asuka had put her usual amount of chakra behind that attack, which was usually enough to cut through solid rock and many metals. If her jutsu had bounced right off the cloud, it must have been a well-tempered bit of steel, or specially re-enforced with chakra.
Damn. It was too early for her to have to pull out the big guns.
Sliding down into a squat, the bole of the tree a study brace to her back, Asuka started moving her gloved, bloody fingers through a steady stream of seals.
Her opponent was not getting off that easily. There was a thickness of cover provided by the trees which worked to any ninja's advantage, and yet - Sasoriza wasn't worried about it.
It wasn't as though trees would stop what was coming next. Her fingers and wrists flickered, her chakra was funnelled down the whisper-thin blue strings that led to the Sandaime Kazekage and the tall woman's puppet threw her arms abroad.
The Autumnal Showers of Iron Sand were a lethal and beautiful attack in their own right; but they were merely the groundwork.
Time for the extension of that jutsu which no wind maneuvers would misdirect.
Kabumi had best make sure she was out of the way for this one.
Satetsu Kaihou!
The black sand embedded in the trees, the soil, and even still falling through the air was suddenly jerked by magnetism and chakra into a lethal lattice of razor spikes. A garden of death sprouted from every angle, skewered every thing in its path with extensions fine as needles and wide as katana blades and all that fell in between.
Snake, Dragon, Tiger -
This was a more complicated jutsu only because she didn't have the means of starting the air currents artificially. It had taken her years to be able to summon up something as (relatively) simple as the kamaitachi without needing seals; anything stronger typically required more oomph, so to speak. And in a place like this, where the air currents were already wild and knocked astray from their fight, from her previous kamaitachi, there was no way she could draw this together without help.
Ox, Boar, Ox -
She'd seen how easily the sibling of the Kazekage had been able to manipulate the wind elements with that fan of his. Pity she hadn't chosen something more suited to her elemental speciality, like he had. But then, no one really had the time to train on weapons that specialized during the war.
Dog, Snake, Rabbit -
Just meant she was a little slower on the draw. Made her jutsu that much more powerful, though.
Dragon, Sheep, Bi-
The surge of chakra from Sasoriza's next attack coincided almost exactly with the sudden tearing pain in her abdomen. Wood bark groaned and snapped and protested under the sudden assault of steel, the sounds dangerously loud by her ear. Asuka tried to react and ignore the stabbing assault on her side at the same time, but it was a little difficult when she suddenly couldn't lean away from the tree, and trying to do so only made the pain worse.
She ducked over her clasped hands in an instant, holding her breath to hold back a gasp. Something shuddered and hummed by her ear, shivering against her exposed skin. That faint hum seemed to echo across through the woods.
Asuka held on to her gathered chakra as tightly (desperately) as she could, and dropped the half-formed Bird seal to grasp the twelve-inch needle that now protruded from her side. The once-pellet was now a weapon that had sprouted from the inside and pinned her to the tree as surely as though she'd been stabbed. (Thank god it had chosen to do so horizontally, she thought fleetingly, and then dropped the thought as quickly as it had come.) The metal was cold and slick with blood.
With a grunt, the kunoichi wrapped both hands around the iron needle and forcibly jerked the far end out of the tree, leaning her weight against it to do so, holding her breath against the pain. And then, quickly, drew the weapon straight through her side and discarded it. The wound would be small, no more than the width of a finger judging by the diameter of the weapon, but that did not stop the blood from flowing freely. It was not enough to be a major wound (that she could tell just yet), and it was also not enough to explain the sudden dizziness, the numbness in her limbs, and the shortness of breath that didn't come from holding it.
Five minutes.
With speed now borne from desperation, Asuka turned to leave the safety of her tree (noting in an off-hand, dispassionate way the needles that would have skewered her through the skull had she not ducked), formed the last Bird seal, and sent a destructive blast of wind that rivaled that of ten kamaitachis. Winds howled across the clearing like those of a hurricane, blades of chakra swirling amongst it, taking down trees and anything else in its path.
Asuka stabbed the second vial of antivenin in her thigh as the jutsu did its work.
Well now, that was bracing.
Sasoriza had rather hoped to have lethally skewered the Konoha kunoichi by this point; but alas - she had an air of perpetuity about her. If anything, Sasoriza could appreciate that. From her hiding place beneath the earth (the one place the wind could never cut to - embedded with chakra or not) she waited until the storm howled into the distance (it took several minutes) and then chose to re-appear.
A teal eyed, rust haired young girl materialized like an apparition amongst Asuka's destruction - spikes of hair rustled softly in the after-gusts of the wind jutsu. A dead-eyed porcelain smile was sent to the woman bleeding and panting and dying opposite her. All activities that Sasoriza no longer had to concern herself with.
Sasoriza had left Hiruko below ground; the scorpion had something wrong with him that was hampering her movements and it could no longer be afforded in this battle. Sasoriza didn't mind. This would be all the sweeter for the drama of the moment.
A lovely clearing had been carved nearly a quarter-mile wide behind her under the force of the wind jutsu, and the girl Sasoriza would forever be raised her hand and snapped her fingers. A soft sound of command which echoed in the morning's air.
The earth behind and beside her shook and rustled - beginning to crack and splinter raw. A hand appeared. Then another. Then another. Then... too many for one set of eyes to count. It only took a few moments for her summoned companions to break the surface, and she smiled serenely as they took their places at her bidding. One hundred and one puppets stood, ranged shoulder and claw behind their mistress, including the Kazekage - who was collecting wisps of her black sand slowly back into her cracked maw. Sasoriza flexed her fingers - sent chakra spinning into each of her creations - and the summer air was lit blue and beautiful, gossamer and grace, the symbiosis of puppet and puppeteer.
The jutsu took down a huge section of the forest, ancient oaks and pines dropping like so much kindling, the earth shuddering beneath their fall. Leaves tumbled like rain, and trunks and large branches rolled with the wind. Asuka was in no danger from the falling foliage, but anyone not behind the wind would be.
As the wind continued to wreak its destruction, weakening the further away it got, the kneeling kunoichi jerked the vial out of her thigh with a faint grunt of pain. That jutsu had been too costly - but there was relatively little that could stand in front of that much chaos. The only thing left in front of her now was a wind-swept clearing dotted with scarred stumps, tree-trunks piled up against one another in an eventual wind-break many meters away. Any sign of the master and puppet would have been swept away along with the -
Almost like magic, though she was always loathe to use such a term, a girl appeared not a hundred feet away. Young, wide-eyed not unlike Tenz, surprisingly fresh looking. Nothing at all like the puppets that had been pulled out before. Something about her, none the less, felt still and dead. Where the hell had she come from? Why had there been no sense of chakra to betray her approaching presence?
And then, with a snap of small fingers, it was made obvious: this was Sasoriza. Whatever that hulking beast before had been, that was not the master. This was the master, a wisp of a thing that looked as though Asuka could snap her over one knee.
A wisp of a thing that was calling up more puppets from beneath the scarred ground in a disturbing parody of the dead.
The kunoichi took the time to thumb a soldier pill into her mouth as more and more... and more... continued to gather. This was the time to admit that she didn't have the strength to pull out another daikamaitachi and wipe these sons of bitches off the face of this clearing. Not even with six soldier pills would she have enough. With the constant drain of her heian there was a limit to the kind of nasty, landscape altering jutsu she could summon, and right now... that had been it. There was another she could try, but that...
And what the hell would another daikamaitachi do her when even that same fucking puppet with the sand-pellet-things was still there?! How the hell had it survived that attack? Asuka could see how perhaps Sasoriza might have been shielded by whatever monstrous form she'd taken before, but that puppet? It had to have taken the brunt of the attack. There was no fucking way.
Except, of course, there was. Or it wouldn't still be standing there.
Asuka pushed herself back to her feet and re-activated the heian, letting herself slide once more into a defensive posture. It was too late to be second-guessing her decision now. So what if she only had ten more minutes to finish this if she expected to get home in one piece? So what if she'd never faced these kinds of odds before, not when already so tired? Didn't matter. It was too late for fear and pain now, so she pushed it aside and focused on being pissed that this goddamn bitch wouldn't just lay down and die.
"Come and get me," she muttered behind the hot confines of her mask, and waited for the first strike to come.
Not a word was needed. The Army of One Hundred Puppets charged as one.
Sasoriza split her mind, body and soul into a hundred and one pieces and each held the innate lethality to destroy a town all on its own. Together in concert, focused on one simple goal, there was no way in which all of her could fail to rend this Konoha kunoichi limb from limb.
She should feel honoured, Sasoriza imagined; having earned a fate such as this in battle with Akasuna no Sasoriza. Bravo, bravo - but there would be no encore.
A rush of wood and skin and crackling chakra filled the air and both their senses. The first wave of Sasoriza's soldiers lunged and swiped for the ANBU as Sasoriza danced their movements in guided symmetry with her fingertips behind them. A perfect finish. She hoped Kabumi was taking notes.
One of her puppets fell to the ground.
The ricochet of disconnection snapped right back to Sasoriza's being and her teal eyes flared wide with shock and pain. One of her puppets' strings had snapped. Sasoriza would have lost her breath had she had any. It couldn't have. It wouldn't have. It--
There was another ache and snap, another strain and break, another stab back into her own body and soul.
Sasoriza moved quickly, too quickly, trying to cross the distance and finish the job, but her army was dying and falling like a jumble of toys and corpses. Her movements weren't enough to power them, and faster and faster her chakra strings that bound all of them together as one were broken and beyond repairing.
What was happening?
This many enemies was out of her league. She had to admit that to herself, if no one else. She'd never taken these odds on before, and if these were anything like the two scorpions and the salamander she'd taken on before, she would never wade her way through all of them. Perhaps if she'd been fresh, but she wasn't fresh. She was bleeding from at least three wounds (probably more; no, certainly more), was half gone on her chakra, poisoned...
Asuka tighted her grip on her weapons, pushed the distractions aside, and let them come.
The first one fell long before it could reach her.
Sasoriza was hidden behind the multitude of puppets racing forward; she could not see what the Akatsuki was doing. She had to be doing something, though, otherwise why - ?
A second puppet fell. And a third. And quickly more and more fell, momentum moving their bodies and tripping other puppets who also fell and slid forward, a deadly tangle of wood and weapons that never touched her. Like dominos, almost, they hit some invisible line and just stopped
What... the hell was happening?
She took one step backwards, and then two. Before her, even the black puppet and its sand fell, and in mere moments the cleared area looked as though the fallen trees had been replaced with fallen puppets. Nothing moved between her and Sasoriza. Aside from the rustle of leaves, nothing made a sound.
Well. That... evened the odds, a little.
Sasoriza was not accustomed to being confused. Somebody with a mind sharp and precise as hers could never afford to be. But she was now. And she was injured. Her puppets. Her precious puppets. Her homemade family. They were lifeless. She couldn't understand why, what was happening? It had nothing to do with this Konoha ANBU, she knew that much, but it...
...there was no time to wonder or to discover. Sasoriza had to end this now and then Kabumi could help her solve this terrifying problem.
Flamethrower time. No need for her chakra strings then, her soul battery would see her through. See this little Konoha brat to toast, too. Suddenly flitting like wind and fire over the fallen bodies of her puppets, Sasoriza snagged a katana from her leg compartment and shot her snaking tube from her chest compartment - and then all hell properly broke loose.
For a moment the two stared at each other, and Asuka could see confusion as clear as day in those too-wide eyes. What the hell had happened? Asuka wondered, and saw that Sasoriza was thinking much the same thing.
Not that the puppet-master gave her much time before she vanished in a flicker of black fabric and fire.
Reaction was all the Akatsuki gave her. The woman - puppet - thing - was too fast to be human, and considering that Asuka was damn fast, especially when she was using chakra, this was still almost too much to keep up with. She hardly had time to do more than dodge - between the streams of fire that lanced like spears from Sasoriza's hands, the coiled metal snake that stabbed independently of Sasoriza like it had a mind of its own, and the expertly wielded katana, she was forced so far on the defensive that all she could do was give ground.
And every step she gave was another step taken away from the time she had left on this vial of antivenin. She only had two vials left, only one she could count on, she couldn't waste her time. Otherwise she'd just fucked herself worse than she had already.
Sparkles flew as she brought her tekko up to block the arrow-tipped weapon that snaked out of Sasoriza's robes, no longer able to power her heian enough to try and cut through it, not when she was using so much chakra just trying to keep up. There was no guarantee she could cut through metal anymore, after all, and she needed to preserve what precious chakra she had left. And then, in the second of space she had between, kawarimi'd away from another jet of fire. Thirty feet wasn't far, but it would be far enough for her to gain perspective and try to launch another attack, rather than getting her ass pounded and stabbed and burnt nine ways from Konoha. Adreneline kept her from feeling how much everything hurt right now, but she'd taken way too many hits to -
Less than half a second after she'd relocated, Sasoriza's metal snake hit her dead in the face.
Asuka didn't even have much of a chance to be surprised - she was too busy dealing with the whiplash and the shattering porcelain of her ANBU mask and the disorientation of not being able to see in the instant before she hit the ground. Breath vanished in an instant, branches - no, the limbs of dead puppets - cracking under the weight of her fall, preventing her from even pretending to land anything other than awkward. Her grip slipped on one of her tekko-blades in the fall, losing it in the tangle of limbs beneath her. Had she gone two inches more to the right, she would have impaled herself on a katana, armor or not.
Thirty feet away, Sasoriza retracted her prehensile weapon back into the depths of her robes, gripped her katana, and flickered out of existence - for real, not because of the blood in one eye and the blurriness in the other as the kunoichi gasped her breath back. She was coming. And this ninja was too screwed to even run away.
Come back, came the thought, unbidden. I have to come back.
She grabbed the discarded katana. And when Sasoriza reappeared, right on top of her, she aimed for the heart.
One thing Sasoriza recalled her family telling her over and over was to give everything she did a clean finish. Be it constructing her puppets or performing her katas or inking a letter: everything should be elegant and accurate but most importantly of all when it was finished there could be no doubt.
As she dropped from the air, skittering like a shadowed piece of wind over jutting limbs and blanked, dead faces, she saw the raised katana as she drove down with her own. One last act of defiance from the ANBU - it made her smile, she loved last acts of defiance. They never did anything in battles against Sasoriza no Akasuna but serve her own sense of dramatic irony.
Her katana cut the air easily as it would cut this woman's life, the angle perfectly judged to splice straight through the center of her beating heart. A clean finish.
Oddly it was the sound she heard before she felt what had happened. A hollow thunk, like an axe through a log. Then she saw what had happened. Her katana was in the ANBU's chest, driven straight through armour and bone and earth - but not through her heart.
Sasoriza was four inches to the right of where she had meant to strike. The blade was in the lung, not the heart.
The ANBU's katana was in her soul battery, not deflected easily to the side.
Sasoriza's teal eyes blinked slowly, her forever young face frozen in a flare of disbelief. Of surprise. Of betrayal.
No longer under her own control, Sasoriza watched as her hand delicately unwound finger by finger from the hilt of the katana in the other kunoichi's chest, and realized she couldn't wrench the blade to the side and slit the ANBU open like an envelope. She watched as everything shifted sideways and she felt nothing but air as she collapsed to the side, unable to move. Unable to do anything. Even to speak.
A clean finish. Dramatic irony. As the last life bled into the air from Sasoriza no Akasuna's unbeating heart she realized that she had taught her favourite puppet beautifully... and that she had died at the hands of someone to be proud of. Then there was nothing more, though her expression and eyes remained unchanged.
[[Theme song for this fight: Pompeii, by E.S. Posthumus.]]
A beautiful dawn was hours gone as Sasoriza paused to survey Kabumi's handiwork for the tenth time that day. The two of them had left the security of Sasoriza's hideout under the long rope bridge and gone into the surrounding forest opposite Fire Country's borders, to give the young woman an opportunity to train first hand with Sasoriza's puppets and improve her skills.
Her already quite well developed skills, as Sasoriza was very pleased to be discovering. Training today had consisted of teaching Kabumi how to use multiple puppets with each hand - and she had been loaned the precious use of Sasoriza's beloved Army of One Hundred Puppets to do so. It wasn't as though she had any puppets of her own, and going out and killing a dozen people so she could dance their corpses around simply seemed like far too much effort. It was like grocery shopping, and not having to bother with that anymore was one of the many reasons Sasoriza had happily turned herself into a puppet. She was not about to deal with such nuisances now.
Right now, Kabumi was learning to flit the dozen members of Sasoriza's Army she'd been entrusted with through the trees in pursuit of the Akatsuki woman. Sasoriza was deliberately moving at a slower speed, for if she moved as quickly as she could there was no way anybody could catch her. After an hour's long chase, meant to tax Kabumi's wits and strength (for it took an immense amount of chakra to keep such highly detailed puppets moving correctly) and her patience, the red-haired woman drew to a halt and smiled edgily as twelve wood and skin faces she knew better than her own instantly surrounded her in a killing stance.
Sasoriza glanced to where she knew Kabumi crouched hidden behind the trunk of a tree, and turned that smile to her favourite puppet of them all.
"Well done, Kabumi. We will stop for a break now and then head back. Return your troops to their scroll carefully and thank them for their service."
With those words she gave the girl a nod in respect of all she'd achieved in the time they'd had to train, and turned to look out into the forest and up towards the leaf-shadowed sky. Remembering the red dawn she'd watched earlier in the day, before leaving on this training with Kabumi, and wondering who would die tonight.
The training had honestly been difficult, and Kabumi relished the opportunity to tax herself to her physical limits. The amount of time she spent increasing her physical skills wasn't nearly as great as what she put into her medical ninjutsu. Sometimes it was good just to work until her body was slick with sweat.
And it was even better to drive someone into a trap.
Kabumi came out from behind the trunk of the tree and bowed at Sasoriza's praise. If it weren't for the vulnerability of a puppeteer, Kabumi might have considered learning more of that fighting style. But the idea of losing that much mobility in order to use an effective number of puppets wasn't an attractive option for her. If an enemy got close enough, the puppeteer's hands would still be tied up, too encumbered to act swiftly enough to prevent a stab in the back.
Kabumi did as she had been directed, carefully putting the puppets she had taken from the Army of One Hundred Puppets scroll back in their slots. Over the course of training she'd managed to work with all of them. She had been able to handle each of them in turn during her training. If there was one thing Sasoriza had been more than happy to do it was to pass her knowledge onto Kabumi.
She started rolling the scroll back up.
Eyes still settled on the sky, Sasoriza half-listened to Kabumi's movements and half-attuned herself to the sounds of the living forest around them. It was an odd moment, to find herself parallel to the finer points of life on this earth. To find them so very appreciable. Not something she indulged in often, yet comforting all the same.
She was just beginning to watch as the wind shifted the white clouds into shapes when her head snapped around at an inhuman speed and angle. The motion-sensing tags she had arranged to create a perimeter for a few miles around them during Kabumi's stay had just been tripped.
Somebody was coming.
Before most could blink, there was a swirl of white smoke that engulfed the girl's body she normally wore; and suddenly Sasoriza was stepping from the wisps of white in her fully articulated scorpion shell armour, Hiruko. She snapped to Kabumi and jerked her head up towards the trees, indicating the girl must hide.
"Secure yourself and give me the puppet scrolls, Kabumi-chan," she said, voice clicking through the scorpion's voicebox. Urgency powered her movements and it took a moment to realize its source.
Kabumi was weak and tired after her exertions. Whomever was coming could not be allowed to find her.
"Go now, Kabumi. Hide."
She didn't reply vocally, instead tossing the scroll to Sasoriza the instant it was rolled. Whatever defenses the puppet had put in place, they had been activated. By what was something Kabumi didn't know, but it was enough to make her "master" think she needed protection.
Kabumi scrambled up the tree, quietly, hiding in the shadows of the leaves. Whatever it was, being prepared was a good idea, so she slipped a hand into her hip pouch and searched for second to find the little pile of soldier pills. Sucking on them took longer and tasted worse, but it didn't make any noise and in the end it would help replenish her chakra.
The leaves sounded much louder in the faint breeze when she was hiding in them than when she was on the ground. It significantly hampered her hearing, though it would disguise her breathing to some extent... but not her smell. She didn't have nearly as good a sense of smell as an Inuzuka, but she knew that sweat had its own distinctive odor.
Ox, Ram, Dragon... a few more simple seals and her scent, sweat and all, vanished.
Nearly twenty minutes passed in silence this way. The birds did not quiet their singing; there was no change to the soft breeze that rustled the branches, no change in the light of the bright midday sun, no dramatic ambush from what shadows remained. It almost seemed as though they were holding their breath and waiting for nothing.
It might very well have continued to feel that way too, had Kabumi not been looking in just the right way to catch the faint glimpse of sun on white porcelain through the shifting leaves, not ten feet from where she herself hid in the trees.
When the word had come in that Akatsuki had been spotted at the edge of the Wind and Fire Countries, Asuka had not allowed herself to waste any time. She'd debated with Tsurude to immediately put together a chuunin team and leave the same night. If it hadn't been for the party that was being put together to go to Oto in the following days, Tsurude might have insisted she take more than two chuunin with her, but... The Oto team would need that kind of backup more than her. This, on the other hand, was just confirming a visual, she'd said (she'd lied); there was no need for the extra muscle. After all, no one could keep her in a fight she didn't want to be in.
With their agreement to her admittedly sound plan - had she intended on following it through to the letter - she'd then gotten six vials of the antivenin their medic-nin had whipped up after Sasoriza's original attack on headquarters. (Rin had handed them over with no arguments, bless his soul, just giving the warning that the protection these vials provided only lasted about five minutes.) Two for each of them, just in case, she'd said; but Asuka had a gut feeling that Sai and Sachiko, who she'd sent to the north side of the border (a detail she hadn't included in her discussions with Tsurude), wouldn't be running into Sasoriza, and she'd only given them one each. She, on the other hand....
This was very much a personal vendetta she'd kept to herself in the year since Sasoriza had originally laid waste to their ANBU headquarters, stealing a wanted prisoner off into the night and leaving dozens (and dozens) of dead and injured in her wake. Three times she should have met the Akatsuki and taken her down, and three times she'd failed, for various reasons. Those three times nagged at her enough to rejoin ANBU; enough to take advantage of her position, experience, and reputation to keep her ear to the ground; enough to realize what a fortune had dropped into her lap when Tsurude decided to put her on the Akatsuki tracking teams with Gaia and the others. Enough to realize that had she said a word of it to anyone, she'd have never been able to get where she was now - racing through the forests west of Konoha to take down an S-class bingo book entry by herself. She'd have been denied based on having too personal an interest in the matter.
This was flagrant abuse of the system. But frankly, Asuka really didn't care. And when she came back with Sasoriza's head in a bag, she'd just be congratulated for doing her job as an ANBU. After all, she had a responsibility to take down any bingo book entry she came across. Just doing what ANBU did best.
Not that she was interested in the praise. Only in the hit.
To be honest she hadn't expected to run into the woman so quickly. Without an expert tracker to take her straight down the Akatsuki's trail, she'd anticipated at least a week of tracking before finding her, if she found her at all. Asuka wasn't, after all, an Inuzuka, and she didn't have the advantage of having any summons with particularly talented noses. But the instant she found a motion sensing tag, she knew she was in the right place - and followed that shiver of chakra the tags sent back to their master like a dog on the trail of its prey. Carefully, silently, with the skill of an ANBU who could move through the forest without bending a leaf, scent hidden behind a jutsu that would conceal any presence she might have.
Unaware of any other presence but Sasoriza's, she took a moment to observe the beast hulking in the clearing alone. Black and red Akatsuki robes, a deformed face, hunched body hidden beneath folds of fabric. This was what Sasoriza looked like, the monster she'd failed to encounter three times almost a year ago. This was the person who'd gone out of her way to rescue Kabumi when they'd actually had their hands on her. This was the person who'd destroyed half of Konoha's ANBU force in mere minutes, the person who'd nearly killed Kureno and Hanato and put Tenzouko in a coma for so long no one thought she'd wake again.
This was the person she needed - wanted - to kill.
Asuka forced down the curl of anger that rose in her stomach at the sight of those red and black robes, forcing the cold impersonality of the ANBU to cover it like the mask that covered her face. An invisible presence in the trees, she waited and planned her attack.
Sasoriza was not the planet's most accomplished puppeteer for any small reason. She could sense and tune and twist the finest whisper of a chakra-line with the barest flit of a nerve if it came to it; and it had taken considerably less than that to pick up the fact that somebody was tracing the strings of chakra she'd employed to monitor her warning tags. Somebody not without some skill, but somebody who was obviously much dimmer than you had to be if you wanted to live after catching sight of this ninja's black and red cloak.
Because naturally, like any puppeteer's strings Sasoriza's led right back to the source like radials from a spider's web, leading the prey skilled enough to be a bother right back to her position. And she was well set to waiting like one, clearly detecting the approach. For a moment she considered how artistic that might have been; to have a spider's puppet armour waiting here for this fly. For the sheer visual poetry of it, not to mention the look on the poor bastard's face when they saw how literally they'd been taken in. But the eight legs were simply too fiddly to bother with; and anyway Sasoriza loved scorpions for the sting in their tail.
She held perfectly still, not even bothering to turn completely around and face whomever had come. Her hands were folded within her cloak, along with her tail and other weaponry.
Beneath her armour's fierce gaze, she smiled with serene insanity. It would be wonderful to fight again.
"I'm afraid you have me at a disadvantage." The scorpion's voice clicked and ground the words into the air. "Naturally everybody knows who I am, I am simply that spectacular." There was even a tone of light amusement in her voice, as though this was a tease. "But it is only fair that we be introduced, manners for manners?"
And with that she looked straight up and at the woman supposedly concealed by trees she hid in. Golden puppet eyes glittered in the shadows cast by the boughs overhead.
Despite that curl of anger, despite the cold ANBU shell and despite the mask she wore, Asuka's lips curled up in a vicious grin at that question. Manners for manners. Please. As though introductions had been made before she'd torn apart the ANBU headquarters to get to Kabumi. As though she'd paused to chit-chat before stabbing Kureno through his liver or trying to take Hanato and his dogs apart at the seams. Manners indeed.
What was the point in the idle banter and insults most ninja these days threw around before battling? It did nothing but waste time. And Asuka did not waste time if she could help it. She went in for the kill and she completed it as quickly as possible; while others talked, she got the job done. She would not waste her time with this bitch. After all, she only had twenty minutes tops to get this finished.
Sasoriza had not given Asuka much time to sit down and decide on a strategy, but the Leaf-nin wasn't too worried about this. She wasn't Shikako and able to come up with ten plans of action in the space of ten seconds. But she did know enough about the enemy to begin - Suna had given them plenty of information on Sasoriza and the kugutsu-nin techniques, information that Asuka had committed to memory a long time ago. Enough information to let her know that her preference to keep the fight up close and dirty would be for her benefit, and the antivenin Rin had supplied would take care of the advantage Sasoriza might have in close quarters.
Now it was just a matter of getting started.
Rather than replying with words, Asuka instead replied with jutsu: from the branches behind where she hid, scythes of chakra spiraled along a burst of wind aimed straight for Sasoriza. Were they to hit, they'd surely cleave straight through a limb, and do substantial damage to any armor not reinforced with chakra. And then she kawarimi'd away in a spiral of leaves, intending to reappear directly behind where she anticipated Sasoriza to dodge to.
What was wrong with these Konoha nin? Every single one of them lacked simple manners. The introductions, the motives, the face-to-face. All of life was a puppeteer's stage, after all; how was anyone meant to follow the proceedings without the names of the main characters? Well, without the name of the major character at least.
Well, if she wanted to die anonymous to Sasoriza's memory, that was her prerogative.
That wind jutsu was marvellously powerful, but nowhere near quick enough to catch the Akatsuki - even weighed down with her armour. Sasoriza was instantly wary though; of all the elemental jutsu to be put against it was the wind type which was most dangerous to a puppeteer. It could cut through chakra strings, it could easily slice wood from close range and at mid-range it would cause serious trouble. A puppeteer was a long range fighter - if this ninja had enough speed combined with those wind jutsu there would be much less scope for using her creations effectively.
If that happened she'd just have to hack the woman to pieces with a katana. There was precious little art in that. Unless Sasoriza settled down and rearranged her guts into neat pyramidal piles or somesuch.
Assimilating all this knowledge, Sasoriza adopted her strategy and went to the opposite element type to the wind jutsu user. When Asuka re-appeared where it would have been logical for the Akatsuki to appear, she found herself looking at nothing.
From under the earth beneath the ANBU's feet there was a twitch of chakra strings, and suddenly she was assailed from three sides by roaring, projectile-spitting and razor-claw-wielding scorpions and a salamander.
The Akatsuki was incredibly fast; she vanished the instant before Asuka's jutsu carved gouges into the earth, sending up a spray of dirt and leaves. Quick on her toes and a quick thinker, too, as she wasn't where the Leaf-nin had anticipated her to be. Instead of going head-on with one of the most dangerous puppeteers to come out of Suna, she was faced with the woman's creations instead.
Predictable. She'd have to go through the puppets before she'd get to meet the master. That was just the way this style of fighting worked, after all - so she'd have to be careful and quick and waste them as swiftly as possible. Asuka did not have the time to let herself be worn out by mere playthings of the real deal. So long as there were puppets, Sasoriza would not be far out of reach. She just had to make sure Sasoriza couldn't remain hidden for too long.
She met the weapons without hesitation, matching them speed for speed and refusing to be corralled between the three of them where they could do the most damage to her. Most of the projectiles she avoided, and those she could not avoid she blocked or sliced apart with her heian. The salamander she ignored, for the most part, as it did not have the more dangerous weapon: the dangerously sharp stinger or the crushing claws of the scorpion. Blunt trauma was preferable to being sliced in half or poisoned by one of those things.
The first scorpion she took out mostly by surprise, probably; usually people did not expect her chakra-blades to be capable of slicing straight through most kinds of wood and metal. Piece by piece she took it apart while avoiding the other two enemies - first the stinger, then each claw, then slicing the legs out from under it. The strain of maintaining such a sharp edge on her heian was hardly felt, adrenaline and tightly-controlled anger fueling her.
First one puppet. Now two more.
The second scorpion came down on her as she rolled away from the twitching remains of the first, ducking under a whistling sweep of the salamander's tail. She did not quite avoid the stinger of this one; it nicked her thigh instead of fully impaling her leg as she spun away.
The effect of the poison was almost immediate. Her vision blurred, lungs tightened, and Asuka stumbled to one knee unbidden.
Shame. The poison had tagged her so quickly. Sasoriza wasn't foolish enough to think it was over, not with somebody who had the calibre to summon such wind jutsus and wielded those chakra-blades skillfully enough to take apart one of her beautiful puppets. But she did anticipate a swift end to this little adventure when she sensed the poison had struck through skin.
Ah, the disadvantages of flesh. She didn't emerge from beneath the ground, not about to give away her successful attacking position - but she did cast her voice up above the soil (ventriloquism, naturally being a skill of a masterful performance puppeteer) and the gravelly tones of her scorpion's visage rumbled to the stricken woman's ears.
"Compliments on your style, but I fear you'll be completely immobilized within a few minutes. While you can still speak, would you mind telling me whom to ship your body back to?"
It would take less than just a few minutes for this poison to reach the immobilization stage; with her high metabolism and racing heart, Asuka's own body was working against her. Her fingers were suspiciously numb as one hand fumbled at her hip pouch, hardly able to open it and keep hold of her tekko at the same time. Sasoriza's voice was almost lost among the buzzing in her ears.
Too quick. Too fucking quick. She'd hoped to last longer before relying on the antivenin, but her style of fighting was working against her, too. If only she could work effectively from longer distances, but that would drain her chakra too quickly and leave her without any heavy-duty attacks should she need them at the end. Now she was down to just fifteen minutes - less, really - in which to kill the Akatsuki.
Hopefully she would only need ten minutes. Asuka wasn't sure if she'd make it back to Konoha without the buffer given by that last vial of antivenin.
She found the thick syringe in her pack, managed to wrap her fingers around it, and withdrew it; the puppets had paused around her as Sasoriza spoke, poised to attack, waiting for a response before stabbing and bludgeoning her to death. Asuka let herself kneel completely, fumbling the pouch back closed again, and then snapped off the bright yellow cap with two barely coordinated hands.
"Konoha," she said, and her voice was muffled both by her mask and her breathless lungs. The eyeholes she could see out of seemed to tighten with darkness, and the space between the smooth porcelain and her skin was almost too hot. "As if you have to guess, you fucking bitch."
Harshly, with enough strength that the needle would punch through the protective plastic covering, through her clothing, and deep enough to do some good, Asuka slammed the syringe into the side of her thigh. It hurt like a bitch - but with the same speed as the poison, the antivenin did its work. Abruptly her lungs opened up again, and the tinny ringing vanished from her ears.
The medics of Konoha had done as promised - and now she had to finish the job before their help ran out.
Asuka withdrew the injector, tossed it to the side, and rolled away just in time to avoid the scorpion's stabbing stinger.
Konoha. Well, yes - she had gathered that. Nowhere else did you find ninja quite so punctual about throwing themselves suicidally into death traps. She'd wondered about a family, a lover or whatnot - you know, just in case they wanted to have her stuffed and put on the roof to scare away pigeons or some such. No sense wasting material, and Sasoriza liked having her parents around. Death wasn't the handicap people said it was if you had a view of the world like Sasoriza.
Though right now, Sasoriza's view was not the one she hoped for. Her opponent was moving, still. Must have used an antivenin and now Sasoriza's puppets had to quickly finish her off before she recovered herself. What clever medics they must have back in that leafy, soft village... to have developed a catch-all-cure for the poisons using Sasoriza's preferred ingredients. They'd had a year or so to develop it but still--
Impressive. And that warranted some respect for their stupid little warrior at least.
Sasoriza broke ground in a shower of dirt clumps and razor blades. The strings of her two remaining animal puppets flickered and flashed bright blue in the sunlight and the attack began again in earnest. Intricacy and intelligence behind every move Sasoriza planned - though she had to admire the instinctiveness of the other nin's battle strategy. It made it hard to plan each puppet's moves when there was little discernible strategy to the opponent's attacks.
As she swung her salamander puppet into an artful arc, hatching its mouth open to blast a fireball towards the Konoha woman, Sasoriza felt an odd tenseness in her wrist. It was ignored and passed after a half-second as she flitted sideways and kept up her attack - but the sensation was odd enough to be remembered.
The antidote moved swiftly through her system, letting her breathe deep again, see clearly again, and dispersing the numbness in her limbs. She wasn't about to question the effectiveness of it, but a small part of her - in the back of her head, where she was still free to think - thought perhaps it might be too effective. That it, like the poison, was too quick.
Asuka chose to ignore this and started counting down the time instead.
With Sasoriza now revealing herself, opening herself up to attack again, the kunoichi changed her attack strategy. Before she was more careful with her movements, playing a game of dodge and attack, trying to land blows without receiving any damage herself. But that had been an effort to prolong how long she had before using the antivenin, and now that she had, well... there was no need to be careful anymore. Now it was all about brute damage. And Asuka's style reflected that: avoiding some attacks while allowing others to slip through, willing to take a slice to a bare shoulder here, dancing dangerously close to the stingers there (and almost getting crushed twice), all to land far harder hits than she was receiving herself. She didn't have to worry about the poison for four more minutes, after all.
The second scorpion came apart far more brutally than the first; she didn't bother with removing its weapons before smashing it to pieces. There was little point when all they could do now was make her bleed. Blood already wet her left thigh and shoulder, invisible against the black cloth of her pants and nearly obscuring the faded black of her old tattoo. Unremarkable wounds, really; she usually ended up with worse.
And then with five minutes left it was just the salamander, who was already yawning its jaws open far too wide to cough out a fireball. Not a katon, but dangerous enough in its own right, and Asuka wasn't going to get burned along with stabbed and poisoned. For the second time that morning, the jounin paused long enough to channel chakra into her hands, into the air, and sliced.
The worst of a fireball blew apart, cut down the middle with the force of the kamaitachi, scythes of chakra spiraling back toward the last puppet. And being only wood and metal, it too came apart, much like a hot knife through butter - with most of the chakra continuing straight through it, back toward the puppeteer who'd let herself get lined up for this attack.
The loss of her puppets stung, but not as badly as the queer sensation in Sasoriza's wrist. She could and would rebuild them; you could never really destroy the tools of art. The strange seizing sensation in her jointed wrist - wrists - though was alarming, even though her shielded face surely didn't let it show.
She easily dodged the rebounded fireball; scuttling and gliding her Hiruko scorpion's carapace into the trees.
There was silence. She stalked silent and undetectable though the trees; attention fully on this small and singular ANBU. She was proving a challenging and interesting opponent, but it was entirely her own fortune that her fighting style and chakra types were so favourable against Akasuna no Sasoriza.
Her fortunes would have trouble holding against the Sandaime Kazekage. Without a word of announcement (the drama was in the surprise) she summoned and launched her most formidable single battle puppet.
Her towering form, long spikes of dark hair jutting behind her, swept like the most distressing apparition into the clearing. Sasoriza wasted no time in funnelling her chakra into the abilities that still lay in the hitokugutsu. Black iron sand spewed from her jointed mouth and swirled around her in a lethal ribbon before...
Satetsu Shigure!
The iron sand compressed into lethal droplets, edged with microscopic razor sharpness, and slammed in an all encompassing burst from the puppet's location. Like her weapons, the sand was laced with the poison too.
Having the puppet master disappear again was hardly a surprise; it was already clear that this one preferred operating in the dark. At some point soon, though, she was going to have to get up in Sasoriza's face and finish this. She couldn't afford to continue going through puppet after puppet, getting worn down until a simple slip would cost her life. It was supposed to be the other way around, after all.
So when the new puppet emerged from the trees, she was prepared to continue the battle, breather over with and weapons rising once again before her in a defensive stance. The attack, however, was not like anything she had ever seen before - a black cloud of grit was breathed out of the puppet's mouth, swirling and coiling in the air in a way that... didn't look very good. Didn't look very good at all.
Asuka's normal method of dealing with most attacks was to barrel through it and make sure she didn't lose too much of her skin in the process. But this time her instincts screamed at her to get the fuck out of the way.
The use of her kamaitachi was starting to become old already, but it was the quickest wind jutsu she could whip up before immediately kawarimi'ing out of the path of destruction. In that instant before the cloud of black - sand? grit? - reached her, she saw the blades of chakra bounce off the - pellets? what the hell was it? - and scatter in a dozen directions. The cloud scattered too, dispersing in the air not unlike balls on a pool table, the individual grains of whatever that had come out of that puppet's mouth pinging off the ground and hitting nearby trees with a sound not unlike kunai. The tree behind which she'd vanished after her swift kawarimi shuddered with the impact.
The kunoichi hissed behind her mask and put her hand to her side. The warmth of blood was obvious through her gloves. She'd moved fast, but not fast enough; several of those pellet-things had nicked her in the scatter, and one had the fortune of hitting her dead-on. Missed the kidney, thankfully. That meant she could keep moving.
Still. Asuka had put her usual amount of chakra behind that attack, which was usually enough to cut through solid rock and many metals. If her jutsu had bounced right off the cloud, it must have been a well-tempered bit of steel, or specially re-enforced with chakra.
Damn. It was too early for her to have to pull out the big guns.
Sliding down into a squat, the bole of the tree a study brace to her back, Asuka started moving her gloved, bloody fingers through a steady stream of seals.
Her opponent was not getting off that easily. There was a thickness of cover provided by the trees which worked to any ninja's advantage, and yet - Sasoriza wasn't worried about it.
It wasn't as though trees would stop what was coming next. Her fingers and wrists flickered, her chakra was funnelled down the whisper-thin blue strings that led to the Sandaime Kazekage and the tall woman's puppet threw her arms abroad.
The Autumnal Showers of Iron Sand were a lethal and beautiful attack in their own right; but they were merely the groundwork.
Time for the extension of that jutsu which no wind maneuvers would misdirect.
Kabumi had best make sure she was out of the way for this one.
Satetsu Kaihou!
The black sand embedded in the trees, the soil, and even still falling through the air was suddenly jerked by magnetism and chakra into a lethal lattice of razor spikes. A garden of death sprouted from every angle, skewered every thing in its path with extensions fine as needles and wide as katana blades and all that fell in between.
Snake, Dragon, Tiger -
This was a more complicated jutsu only because she didn't have the means of starting the air currents artificially. It had taken her years to be able to summon up something as (relatively) simple as the kamaitachi without needing seals; anything stronger typically required more oomph, so to speak. And in a place like this, where the air currents were already wild and knocked astray from their fight, from her previous kamaitachi, there was no way she could draw this together without help.
Ox, Boar, Ox -
She'd seen how easily the sibling of the Kazekage had been able to manipulate the wind elements with that fan of his. Pity she hadn't chosen something more suited to her elemental speciality, like he had. But then, no one really had the time to train on weapons that specialized during the war.
Dog, Snake, Rabbit -
Just meant she was a little slower on the draw. Made her jutsu that much more powerful, though.
Dragon, Sheep, Bi-
The surge of chakra from Sasoriza's next attack coincided almost exactly with the sudden tearing pain in her abdomen. Wood bark groaned and snapped and protested under the sudden assault of steel, the sounds dangerously loud by her ear. Asuka tried to react and ignore the stabbing assault on her side at the same time, but it was a little difficult when she suddenly couldn't lean away from the tree, and trying to do so only made the pain worse.
She ducked over her clasped hands in an instant, holding her breath to hold back a gasp. Something shuddered and hummed by her ear, shivering against her exposed skin. That faint hum seemed to echo across through the woods.
Asuka held on to her gathered chakra as tightly (desperately) as she could, and dropped the half-formed Bird seal to grasp the twelve-inch needle that now protruded from her side. The once-pellet was now a weapon that had sprouted from the inside and pinned her to the tree as surely as though she'd been stabbed. (Thank god it had chosen to do so horizontally, she thought fleetingly, and then dropped the thought as quickly as it had come.) The metal was cold and slick with blood.
With a grunt, the kunoichi wrapped both hands around the iron needle and forcibly jerked the far end out of the tree, leaning her weight against it to do so, holding her breath against the pain. And then, quickly, drew the weapon straight through her side and discarded it. The wound would be small, no more than the width of a finger judging by the diameter of the weapon, but that did not stop the blood from flowing freely. It was not enough to be a major wound (that she could tell just yet), and it was also not enough to explain the sudden dizziness, the numbness in her limbs, and the shortness of breath that didn't come from holding it.
Five minutes.
With speed now borne from desperation, Asuka turned to leave the safety of her tree (noting in an off-hand, dispassionate way the needles that would have skewered her through the skull had she not ducked), formed the last Bird seal, and sent a destructive blast of wind that rivaled that of ten kamaitachis. Winds howled across the clearing like those of a hurricane, blades of chakra swirling amongst it, taking down trees and anything else in its path.
Asuka stabbed the second vial of antivenin in her thigh as the jutsu did its work.
Well now, that was bracing.
Sasoriza had rather hoped to have lethally skewered the Konoha kunoichi by this point; but alas - she had an air of perpetuity about her. If anything, Sasoriza could appreciate that. From her hiding place beneath the earth (the one place the wind could never cut to - embedded with chakra or not) she waited until the storm howled into the distance (it took several minutes) and then chose to re-appear.
A teal eyed, rust haired young girl materialized like an apparition amongst Asuka's destruction - spikes of hair rustled softly in the after-gusts of the wind jutsu. A dead-eyed porcelain smile was sent to the woman bleeding and panting and dying opposite her. All activities that Sasoriza no longer had to concern herself with.
Sasoriza had left Hiruko below ground; the scorpion had something wrong with him that was hampering her movements and it could no longer be afforded in this battle. Sasoriza didn't mind. This would be all the sweeter for the drama of the moment.
A lovely clearing had been carved nearly a quarter-mile wide behind her under the force of the wind jutsu, and the girl Sasoriza would forever be raised her hand and snapped her fingers. A soft sound of command which echoed in the morning's air.
The earth behind and beside her shook and rustled - beginning to crack and splinter raw. A hand appeared. Then another. Then another. Then... too many for one set of eyes to count. It only took a few moments for her summoned companions to break the surface, and she smiled serenely as they took their places at her bidding. One hundred and one puppets stood, ranged shoulder and claw behind their mistress, including the Kazekage - who was collecting wisps of her black sand slowly back into her cracked maw. Sasoriza flexed her fingers - sent chakra spinning into each of her creations - and the summer air was lit blue and beautiful, gossamer and grace, the symbiosis of puppet and puppeteer.
The jutsu took down a huge section of the forest, ancient oaks and pines dropping like so much kindling, the earth shuddering beneath their fall. Leaves tumbled like rain, and trunks and large branches rolled with the wind. Asuka was in no danger from the falling foliage, but anyone not behind the wind would be.
As the wind continued to wreak its destruction, weakening the further away it got, the kneeling kunoichi jerked the vial out of her thigh with a faint grunt of pain. That jutsu had been too costly - but there was relatively little that could stand in front of that much chaos. The only thing left in front of her now was a wind-swept clearing dotted with scarred stumps, tree-trunks piled up against one another in an eventual wind-break many meters away. Any sign of the master and puppet would have been swept away along with the -
Almost like magic, though she was always loathe to use such a term, a girl appeared not a hundred feet away. Young, wide-eyed not unlike Tenz, surprisingly fresh looking. Nothing at all like the puppets that had been pulled out before. Something about her, none the less, felt still and dead. Where the hell had she come from? Why had there been no sense of chakra to betray her approaching presence?
And then, with a snap of small fingers, it was made obvious: this was Sasoriza. Whatever that hulking beast before had been, that was not the master. This was the master, a wisp of a thing that looked as though Asuka could snap her over one knee.
A wisp of a thing that was calling up more puppets from beneath the scarred ground in a disturbing parody of the dead.
The kunoichi took the time to thumb a soldier pill into her mouth as more and more... and more... continued to gather. This was the time to admit that she didn't have the strength to pull out another daikamaitachi and wipe these sons of bitches off the face of this clearing. Not even with six soldier pills would she have enough. With the constant drain of her heian there was a limit to the kind of nasty, landscape altering jutsu she could summon, and right now... that had been it. There was another she could try, but that...
And what the hell would another daikamaitachi do her when even that same fucking puppet with the sand-pellet-things was still there?! How the hell had it survived that attack? Asuka could see how perhaps Sasoriza might have been shielded by whatever monstrous form she'd taken before, but that puppet? It had to have taken the brunt of the attack. There was no fucking way.
Except, of course, there was. Or it wouldn't still be standing there.
Asuka pushed herself back to her feet and re-activated the heian, letting herself slide once more into a defensive posture. It was too late to be second-guessing her decision now. So what if she only had ten more minutes to finish this if she expected to get home in one piece? So what if she'd never faced these kinds of odds before, not when already so tired? Didn't matter. It was too late for fear and pain now, so she pushed it aside and focused on being pissed that this goddamn bitch wouldn't just lay down and die.
"Come and get me," she muttered behind the hot confines of her mask, and waited for the first strike to come.
Not a word was needed. The Army of One Hundred Puppets charged as one.
Sasoriza split her mind, body and soul into a hundred and one pieces and each held the innate lethality to destroy a town all on its own. Together in concert, focused on one simple goal, there was no way in which all of her could fail to rend this Konoha kunoichi limb from limb.
She should feel honoured, Sasoriza imagined; having earned a fate such as this in battle with Akasuna no Sasoriza. Bravo, bravo - but there would be no encore.
A rush of wood and skin and crackling chakra filled the air and both their senses. The first wave of Sasoriza's soldiers lunged and swiped for the ANBU as Sasoriza danced their movements in guided symmetry with her fingertips behind them. A perfect finish. She hoped Kabumi was taking notes.
One of her puppets fell to the ground.
The ricochet of disconnection snapped right back to Sasoriza's being and her teal eyes flared wide with shock and pain. One of her puppets' strings had snapped. Sasoriza would have lost her breath had she had any. It couldn't have. It wouldn't have. It--
There was another ache and snap, another strain and break, another stab back into her own body and soul.
Sasoriza moved quickly, too quickly, trying to cross the distance and finish the job, but her army was dying and falling like a jumble of toys and corpses. Her movements weren't enough to power them, and faster and faster her chakra strings that bound all of them together as one were broken and beyond repairing.
What was happening?
This many enemies was out of her league. She had to admit that to herself, if no one else. She'd never taken these odds on before, and if these were anything like the two scorpions and the salamander she'd taken on before, she would never wade her way through all of them. Perhaps if she'd been fresh, but she wasn't fresh. She was bleeding from at least three wounds (probably more; no, certainly more), was half gone on her chakra, poisoned...
Asuka tighted her grip on her weapons, pushed the distractions aside, and let them come.
The first one fell long before it could reach her.
Sasoriza was hidden behind the multitude of puppets racing forward; she could not see what the Akatsuki was doing. She had to be doing something, though, otherwise why - ?
A second puppet fell. And a third. And quickly more and more fell, momentum moving their bodies and tripping other puppets who also fell and slid forward, a deadly tangle of wood and weapons that never touched her. Like dominos, almost, they hit some invisible line and just stopped
What... the hell was happening?
She took one step backwards, and then two. Before her, even the black puppet and its sand fell, and in mere moments the cleared area looked as though the fallen trees had been replaced with fallen puppets. Nothing moved between her and Sasoriza. Aside from the rustle of leaves, nothing made a sound.
Well. That... evened the odds, a little.
Sasoriza was not accustomed to being confused. Somebody with a mind sharp and precise as hers could never afford to be. But she was now. And she was injured. Her puppets. Her precious puppets. Her homemade family. They were lifeless. She couldn't understand why, what was happening? It had nothing to do with this Konoha ANBU, she knew that much, but it...
...there was no time to wonder or to discover. Sasoriza had to end this now and then Kabumi could help her solve this terrifying problem.
Flamethrower time. No need for her chakra strings then, her soul battery would see her through. See this little Konoha brat to toast, too. Suddenly flitting like wind and fire over the fallen bodies of her puppets, Sasoriza snagged a katana from her leg compartment and shot her snaking tube from her chest compartment - and then all hell properly broke loose.
For a moment the two stared at each other, and Asuka could see confusion as clear as day in those too-wide eyes. What the hell had happened? Asuka wondered, and saw that Sasoriza was thinking much the same thing.
Not that the puppet-master gave her much time before she vanished in a flicker of black fabric and fire.
Reaction was all the Akatsuki gave her. The woman - puppet - thing - was too fast to be human, and considering that Asuka was damn fast, especially when she was using chakra, this was still almost too much to keep up with. She hardly had time to do more than dodge - between the streams of fire that lanced like spears from Sasoriza's hands, the coiled metal snake that stabbed independently of Sasoriza like it had a mind of its own, and the expertly wielded katana, she was forced so far on the defensive that all she could do was give ground.
And every step she gave was another step taken away from the time she had left on this vial of antivenin. She only had two vials left, only one she could count on, she couldn't waste her time. Otherwise she'd just fucked herself worse than she had already.
Sparkles flew as she brought her tekko up to block the arrow-tipped weapon that snaked out of Sasoriza's robes, no longer able to power her heian enough to try and cut through it, not when she was using so much chakra just trying to keep up. There was no guarantee she could cut through metal anymore, after all, and she needed to preserve what precious chakra she had left. And then, in the second of space she had between, kawarimi'd away from another jet of fire. Thirty feet wasn't far, but it would be far enough for her to gain perspective and try to launch another attack, rather than getting her ass pounded and stabbed and burnt nine ways from Konoha. Adreneline kept her from feeling how much everything hurt right now, but she'd taken way too many hits to -
Less than half a second after she'd relocated, Sasoriza's metal snake hit her dead in the face.
Asuka didn't even have much of a chance to be surprised - she was too busy dealing with the whiplash and the shattering porcelain of her ANBU mask and the disorientation of not being able to see in the instant before she hit the ground. Breath vanished in an instant, branches - no, the limbs of dead puppets - cracking under the weight of her fall, preventing her from even pretending to land anything other than awkward. Her grip slipped on one of her tekko-blades in the fall, losing it in the tangle of limbs beneath her. Had she gone two inches more to the right, she would have impaled herself on a katana, armor or not.
Thirty feet away, Sasoriza retracted her prehensile weapon back into the depths of her robes, gripped her katana, and flickered out of existence - for real, not because of the blood in one eye and the blurriness in the other as the kunoichi gasped her breath back. She was coming. And this ninja was too screwed to even run away.
Come back, came the thought, unbidden. I have to come back.
She grabbed the discarded katana. And when Sasoriza reappeared, right on top of her, she aimed for the heart.
One thing Sasoriza recalled her family telling her over and over was to give everything she did a clean finish. Be it constructing her puppets or performing her katas or inking a letter: everything should be elegant and accurate but most importantly of all when it was finished there could be no doubt.
As she dropped from the air, skittering like a shadowed piece of wind over jutting limbs and blanked, dead faces, she saw the raised katana as she drove down with her own. One last act of defiance from the ANBU - it made her smile, she loved last acts of defiance. They never did anything in battles against Sasoriza no Akasuna but serve her own sense of dramatic irony.
Her katana cut the air easily as it would cut this woman's life, the angle perfectly judged to splice straight through the center of her beating heart. A clean finish.
Oddly it was the sound she heard before she felt what had happened. A hollow thunk, like an axe through a log. Then she saw what had happened. Her katana was in the ANBU's chest, driven straight through armour and bone and earth - but not through her heart.
Sasoriza was four inches to the right of where she had meant to strike. The blade was in the lung, not the heart.
The ANBU's katana was in her soul battery, not deflected easily to the side.
Sasoriza's teal eyes blinked slowly, her forever young face frozen in a flare of disbelief. Of surprise. Of betrayal.
No longer under her own control, Sasoriza watched as her hand delicately unwound finger by finger from the hilt of the katana in the other kunoichi's chest, and realized she couldn't wrench the blade to the side and slit the ANBU open like an envelope. She watched as everything shifted sideways and she felt nothing but air as she collapsed to the side, unable to move. Unable to do anything. Even to speak.
A clean finish. Dramatic irony. As the last life bled into the air from Sasoriza no Akasuna's unbeating heart she realized that she had taught her favourite puppet beautifully... and that she had died at the hands of someone to be proud of. Then there was nothing more, though her expression and eyes remained unchanged.
[[Theme song for this fight: Pompeii, by E.S. Posthumus.]]