Time Braid

15. Akatsuki

Disclaimer: I don’t own Naruto, Oh! My Goddess, or anything else but the actual plot of this fic.

There was an organization called Akatsuki, whose members were all S-rank ninja that went around subduing jinchuuriki and ripping the bijuu out of them. Their leader was Pein, a man with the power of the Rinnegan who wanted the bijuu for some mad scheme that was supposed to terrify the world into peace, but was more likely to exterminate all of humanity. And three weeks ago he destroyed Konoha.

“He was as bad as the Kyuubi,” Tsunade confided. “Even the Professor couldn’t stop him. Jiraiya was still critically wounded from losing that arm trying to scout Amegakure, and I was exhausted from trying to save him. He had six bodies that seemed to share the same mind, each with different powers. Every time we killed one another would resurrect it, and his techniques were so powerful! He leveled most of the city with one attack. He thinks he’s a god, and I’m not sure he’s wrong.”

“What about Naruto?” I asked.

“He went missing months ago,” she sighed. “We think he went looking for his old teammate, Sasuke. I’m hoping if we can find him, and a few other people, we might have a chance.”

I stared at her. “Naruto left the village? Naruto? What did you people do, ban ramen and exile all his friends?”

“I don’t think he had many friends after he lost his team,” Tsunade said sadly. “After his falling out with Kakashi and that blowup with the Hyuuga heiress I don’t think there was much left to hold him to the village.”

“Hmp. If I was going to make someone a jinchuuriki I think I’d damned well make sure they had a good reason to fight for me. It isn’t that hard. Hell, if they’d known how dangerous he is half the girls in the village would have been chasing him instead of Sasuke. But maybe I’m asking too much. None of the villages even seem to think it’s a problem that their best people keep going nuke-nin.”

“I know what you mean,” Tsunade said sympathetically. “But how do you know so much about it? You can’t possibly be the Sakura who used to be his teammate.”

I sighed. I wished I could tell her, but she’d just think I was crazy.

“You’d be surprised. There was a time,” I said, “when I was the best infiltration specialist in Konoha. I know who all the players are and where the bodies are buried.”

“Why did you leave, then?”

“Like I said,” I replied. “I know who did what and where they buried the bodies. Root, the Uchiha, the Hyuuga, Naruto’s ancestry and the politics around his treatment… just because the other villages are even worse doesn’t make it right. Eventually there came a time when I couldn’t convince myself I was working for the good guys anymore.”

Tsunade gave me a speculative look. “I never heard of you, and I worked with ANBU for awhile.”

I grinned. “Like I said, I’m the best. I had a transformation technique that I could use to turn into anyone, and a sweet false-memory genjutsu, and after a few years I was a ghost with no past and no real identity. No one knew I existed unless I wanted them to, aside from the Hokage. The transformation is actually what led to my medical breakthrough. Once I got good enough at building quasi-stable chakra matrices to mimic living bodies I realized I could go all the way to full stability.”

She gave me a look that said she’d noticed the diversion, but was going to let me get away with it anyway. “That’s impossible. I’ve tried it before, and so has anyone else at our level, but there’s just too much detail to mimic. There has to be more to it than that.”

“Want to trade?” I asked her. “I’ll show you how it works, if you two will show me how to make a summoning contract. Throw in that chakra-storing seal design of yours and I’ll even show you how to reverse old age.”

She blinked in shock. “Reverse… you’re putting me on!”

I smiled sweetly, and reverted to a fifteen-year-old version of myself. “See for yourself,” I said. “This is one hundred percent real, and so is the form you first saw me in. I’ve never tried to teach it to someone else, but if anyone can learn it you can.”

She insisted on scanning me thoroughly in both forms, but in the end she was convinced.

I don’t know why Jiraiya ever thought combining spirit frog essence with his own body was a good idea. Oh, sure, it probably did all kinds of great things for his resilience, but it made healing his injuries a bitch. It took easily fifty times more chakra to transform him than it would a normal person, so I was forced to regenerate his arm in stages over the course of a week instead of all at once. Jiraiya thought my frustration was funny.

“I’m amazed you can do it at all, little lady,” he reassured me. “I won’t be good for much until I’m over this chakra exhaustion anyway, so don’t push yourself.”

I found myself admiring his chiseled abs and blushing when he patted my arm, and caught myself with a frown. Some part of me was thinking of a night I’d half-forgotten, and wondering what a repeat would be like. Maybe if I was helpful enough…

I shook my head with a laugh. “Good god, Jiraiya, I never even realized you’d done it. You are one smooth bastard.”

He gave me a quizzical look. “Have we met before? I think I’d remember such a beautiful face.”

I glanced at Tsunade, who groaned theatrically. “Tell me he didn’t,” she protested.

“Oh, yeah, he did,” I giggled. “I wasn’t wearing this face at the time, and I wasn’t nearly as good at scanning myself. What is that, some kind of ‘fall in love with me without realizing it’ genjutsu? But it’s been years, so how is it still running?”

Jiraiya looked a bit shame-faced. “No, it’s a shiatsu technique. It convinces the subject’s subconscious that she’s completely head-over-heels whenever she’s in close proximity to the user, without having much effect the rest of the time. But I only use that on enemy agents,” he insisted.

Tsunade frowned at him, but I waved her off. “It’s ok, I can see why he’d have thought I was a spy at the time. And I’m not going to tell you who I was, so don’t ask.” I split off an aspect, and set her to tracing the subtle trail of emotion through my subconscious. Damn, I’d never realized that kind of thing was even possible.

“Alright, but he’s still going to take it off you,” Tsunade grumbled. “Damned perverted techniques.”

“No, I’ll do it myself,” I insisted. “I’m a bit of a hentaijutsu expert myself, so I want to make sure I know how to deal with it if it ever happens again.”

“It better not happen again,” she growled. “Why aren’t you upset over this, anyway?”

I shrugged. “Do you get mad when someone tags you in a sparring match? This was back when I still believed his perverted idiot act and thought I could lead him around by his hormones, so it’s not like I didn’t have it coming. Besides… ah, there we go. Tricky, if I couldn’t aspect myself that little ‘what am I doing, I like being in love!’ thing at the end might have stopped me. Anyway, it’s not like he was trying to hurt me even at the time. I’ve mind-walked a couple of his agents before, and they’re usually pretty happy.”

Jiraiya raised an eyebrow. “Have you, now? So you’re really a Yamanaka?”

I grinned at him. “No, I just seduced their clan secrets out of one. You don’t really need a bloodline to learn their techniques. You just need to be… flexible.”

“Oh, really?” Jiraiya wiggled his eyebrows at me. “Tell me more.”

“Perverts,” Tsunade sniffed.

I frowned at her. Why was she so grumpy about a little harmless flirting? Jiraiya protested weakly, and they feel to bickering like… my god, it was like watching me and Naruto, if we’d never grown up. But how could a man like Jiraiya possibly have that much trouble with a woman? When he’s not being a goofball he can be quite attractive, and with his techniques he could make a statue fall in love.

“Why is someone with your kind of talent wasting her time with that nonsense, anyway?” Tsunade grumbled at me. And suddenly, it all became clear.

Many ninja are afraid of anything that resembles mind control, especially something as seductively appealing as the erotic arts, and Tsunade must be one of them. Maybe someone had tried to control her that way in the past, or maybe she just had a vivid imagination, but either way she one of those ninja who think that that if they ever let someone use hentaijutsu on them they’ll end up as a mindless puppet.

She had nothing to fear on that score from Jiraiya, because he was just the kind of man who’d see using his techniques to seduce her as a betrayal of their friendship. It was obvious to me that he had feelings for her, and I doubt they were entirely unrequited. But she didn’t trust him, and she knew about his skills, so she’d never be able to believe that anything she felt for him was real.

How sad.

“Honestly?” I replied. “I started because the basic techniques are a lot of fun, and I was kind of a slut when I was a teenager. I kept with it because I wanted to know how to defend myself, especially since certain incidents in my past have made me paranoid about mind control. But I made an important discovery along the way.”

“What’s that?” Tsunade asked skeptically.

“One of the nice things about being a kunoichi is that you don’t have to always stay in control,” I said gently. “There is nothing more liberating that being able to let down your defenses completely with a lover you can trust, and know that after a night or a weekend or a long vacation of bliss you’ll return to yourself just as you were before.”

I caught the haunted look in her eye before she managed to hide it again, and knew I’d struck a nerve. But she wasn’t going to be convinced so easily.

“Some of us actually have responsibilities,” she insisted. “I’ve seen what happens to ninja who let their guard down with the wrong person. There’s no way you can ever be that sure of anyone.”

“Actually, there are two solutions to that problem,” I replied. “Although I’ll admit I hadn’t realized it myself until recently. My own solution is to have so many layers of tricky mental defenses that even an expert couldn’t keep me turned for long. But that’s only feasible because I’ve got an odd bloodline that lets me split myself and treat my own mind like a physical place.”

The Sannin exchanged a speculative glance. “Kami blood?” Jiraiya guessed.

I nodded. “You two are good. Yeah, I can split my mind into aspects, and I know my true name, and my mindscape is a fortress anyway. So while it’s always possible I’ll run into someone even better than I am, the odds are low enough that I’m not too worried about it these days. But obviously that approach is only viable for someone with a special advantage in mental defense.”

“The other solution is the one that my dearest friend adopted. She was a Hyuuga, and I think she must have been a natural sub as well, so she went a bit overboard. But the fundamental concept is sound. If you truly, deeply love someone, your first loyalty is always going to be to them instead of your clan or country. So accept that. Pick a man who has the same ideals you do, who respects your opinion and who you trust to make good decisions, and let yourself go. He doesn’t need to control you if you’re already willing to follow him anywhere, and if you listen to each other the rest will work itself out.”

“You make it sound so easy,” Tsunade said bitterly. “But I notice you’re out here alone.”

“Things happen,” I said heavily. “There aren’t a lot of sane S-rank ninja to choose from, and anyone below that level wouldn’t survive being near me for long. But hey, you guys were practically my heroes when I was an impressionable kid. Maybe things are looking up for me!”

“Oh, ho!” Jiraiya chuckled with a playful leer. “Sounds like a challenge to me!”

Tsunade growled warningly at him.

“Hey, who says it’s him I have my eye on?” I teased her. “My first crush was a girl, you know.”

Tsunade gave me a shocked look, and I laughed. Oh, I probably couldn’t really get them together like this, but some day…

“Oh, I get it!” I exclaimed. “The blood signature pulse from the technique gets picked up by the blood binding seal here, then you run it through the splitter and amplifier stages and compare it to all the signatures on the scroll in parallel. That’s neat! I never realized you could re-shuffle the individual meta-seals like that.”

“How could you miss that?” Jiraiya asked in exasperation. “That’s one of the first things you learn once you get into serious seal engineering. Who was your teacher, anyway?”

“Like I said before, I didn’t really have one,” I explained. “I didn’t get interested in anything beyond basic explosive tags and storage scrolls until after I left Konoha, and I’ve just been picking up bits and pieces as I could.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t make any sense,” he protested. “You shouldn’t even be able to read that array without years of training that you obviously don’t have. You certainly shouldn’t be able to just glance at it and see how the seals combine. Even with talent it takes years to reach that point with a decent selection of seal arrays, and you didn’t even know what half these were until a few days ago.”

“Really?” I cocked my head and considered the issue. “I don’t see why. It’s just like reading, isn’t it? The seals are words, their relationships are syntax and grammar, and.. oh, that’s why you can mix-and-match them! I see, it’s just like forming sentences. Hey, does that mean that designing a new seal array is just a matter of writing out what you want it do? Um, why are you staring at me like that?”

“Sakura,” he said slowly. “In theory that’s true, but no one understands the meanings of the seals or their grammar anywhere near well enough to work with seal arrays like that. Is this one of those things that just came naturally for you? Because if it is I’m going to have to hunt down your old jounin sensei and kill him for wasting such potential.”

I blushed a little. “Um, thanks. But no, I don’t think it’s a bloodline thing, or at least not entirely. I used to struggle with seals before I learned the celestial tongue, but after that it was suddenly easy. Seals are just the written form of the same language, after all.”

His eyebrows looked like they were about to take flight, so I stopped there.

“You speak the celestial tongue?” He asked urgently. “How? That knowledge was lost when the Sage of Six Paths died! Did you find a surviving scroll? Can you teach it?”

“I have no idea if I could teach it,” I answered honestly. “It would be a big project, but I’d be happy to give it a shot if we ever have a few years to spare. As to how I learned it? I wouldn’t recommend trying my method. I was experimenting with some exotic techniques, and I… well, I guess you could say that I saw beyond the Veil of Maya. I’m pretty sure my soul would have just dissolved into the cosmos if it weren’t for my bloodline.”

He winced. “Definitely not something I want to try. Well then, I’ll just have to show you how to use some of that lost knowledge you’ve got locked in your head, and once we’ve won this war you can return the favor.”

“Deal,” I smiled. “So, about that return circuit?”

Tsunade absently wiped the sweat from her forehead as she scowled at the mirror, which stubbornly continued to show a seventyish Slug Sannin instead of a younger one. “How do you juggle so many details at once?” She complained.

“Practice, of course,” I answered. “It’s just like training to do taijutsu while water-walking with a couple of clones out. Well, to be honest I originally came at it from the direction of making a funky special-purpose transformation technique more flexible, but I figured this way would make more sense for you. I’m not sure why this is so hard. You’re just trying to change your age and nothing else, right?”

She nodded. “Believe me, that alone is enough. Trying to juggle muscle tone and bone density and skin condition and all the biochemistry and… gah! Even with my genes as a reference, it’s too much!”

“Oh, no wonder!” I exclaimed. “No, you’re right, doing it like that is much too difficult. I can barely do anything that way, and I’ve been training for years. No, what you need to do is reverse your focus on that second boar seal, so the chakra flows through the genetic template instead of just referencing it. That way nature does almost all of the work for you…”

“That looks suspiciously like my strength boost technique,” Tsunade said as she wiped the sweat from her brow. She’d been gradually getting the hang of my medical transformation techniques, and her biological age was back in the mid-thirties now, but she was still miles behind me in physical conditioning. We’d been sparring for less than an hour, and she was already getting tired.

“Pure coincidence,” I replied innocently. “Besides, my version is optimized for fluid adjustment of the power output, and yours is all about maximum peak boost. I peak out at around six megawatts, but you can probably manage thirty or forty for a couple of seconds at a time.”

“But you don’t have to telegraph your punches to get full force,” she pointed out. “Your version is more refined than mine, and it’s a lot more useful against anything but a bijuu. But how are you so fast? You don’t have the Byakugan, so you can’t be using the Hyuuga speed boost.”

“It’s all the same technique,” I told her with a smile. “I’ve rebuilt all my muscles to have a freakish tolerance for chakra boosting, and trained myself to enhance all the muscles that are actually exerting force at any given instant while resting everything else. Of course, moving around at full boost is a whole different world. I can break the sound barrier with a leap or a punch, so changing direction quickly can be a problem. I use a lot of Flash Step and Earth Anchor to manage my momentum, but traction is still a major limiting factor for me.”

She shook her head ruefully. “You are one serious taijutsu monster, Sakura. I don’t suppose I could convince you to help us?”

I blinked in surprise. “Of course I’m coming with you! What, did you think I was going to leave you to save the world by yourselves? Konoha was my home for most of my life. I want a piece of the asshole who destroyed it.”

That, and I wanted to collected as much info as I could about this new threat. It would be pretty embarrassing if we finally managed to end the loops, only to get killed by some overpowered psycho a couple of years later. Oh yes, I was looking forward to trying my new skills on these Akatsuki guys.

“So, Tsunade tells me you’re going to help us?”

Two weeks of recovery had done wonders for the old pervert. His regrown hand was just about fully functional, and his other injuries were long since healed. Tsunade was looking much better as well, although I was amused to note that she was still de-aging herself as part of her daily physical enhancement transformation. Her apparent age was down into the late twenties now, and I had to admit she was getting hot enough it was actually a distraction for me when we sparred. I’d spent a long time alone on my mountain, and I’d had a soft spot for her ever since my old training loops with her.

But she’d spent decades living under an illusion disguise that she’d intentionally set up to look ten years older than she did now, so why the change? Was she trying to catch Jiraiya’s eye? Or did she feel some need to compete with me?

Whatever it was, Jiraiya was certainly appreciating the change.

But it looked like they were finally ready to discuss more serious matters. “Yes,” I confirmed. “If you plan to avenge Konoha and stop Akatsuki, then I’m with you all the way. I’ll even stick around for the rebuilding if we end up picking someone sane as the next kage. So what’s the plan?”

“It isn’t going to be easy,” Jiraiya said with a frown. “Akatsuki is made up entirely of S-rank missing nin, so they’re all serious opponents. Sasori and Deidara, Itachi and Kisame, Hidan and Kakuzu — those aren’t all of them, but they’re the ones we know about. They work in two-man teams, and most of them aren’t quite on our level, but even so I don’t think we can fight more than two teams at once. What’s worse is that even together I don’t think we can take Pein, unless he has some weakness we haven’t identified yet. We’re going to need help.”

‘Our level’, he’d said. As in Tsunade, Jiraiya or Sakura. I felt a thrill of pride at the realization that the Sannin considered me an equal, and had to suppress a sudden urge to do a victory dance. It’s one thing to call yourself an S-rank ninja, but quite another to have your childhood heroes agree.

“If we can find Naruto, I can convince him to help,” I said confidently. At Jiraiya’s skeptical look I turned myself fifteen, and smiled. “I’ll just tell him the truth about who I am and why I left, and ask him for help.”

They thought I meant the story I’d told them, but knowing Naruto I wouldn’t need to lie. I’d tell him about the time loop and my need to put myself back together, and ask him to forgive me for leaving him alone, and that would be that. Although it was tempting to throw in a little seduction as well — having the Sannin around had woken up my sleeping hormones, and they were loudly complaining that I’d spent way too long alone on this mountain.

“If you’re really as good at infiltration as you claim, investigating Pein is probably more urgent,” Tsunade put in. “Jiraiya’s the only agent we’ve been able to get into Amegakure in years, and he was found out almost immediately. Pein has to have a weakness, but we’ll never beat him unless we can find out what it is.”

“That’s a good point, but we need help too,” Jiraiya objected. “We don’t have very many allies who can contribute much in a fight like this. Naruto’s the only one with the raw power to match Pein, and he’s also a natural leader for the other jinchuuriki. If he can recruit the ones who are still alive we might have a chance.”

“Well, we don’t have to pick one or the other,” I said. “I can be in two places at once. Check this out.”

Tsunade looked pretty impressed when I built a second body from my blood, and they were both intrigued when I split myself and dropped my water aspect into it.

“There,” I said. “Now there are two of me. I’ll handle Naruto, and she can infiltrate Amegakure.”

“Sounds like a plan,” the other me agreed.

“I don’t see anything that would give you away,” Tsunade grudgingly admitted. “What is that, some kind of flesh clone? Can you really manage that for weeks at a time, with hundreds of miles between you?”

“I’m not a clone,” the other me said. “I split my mind in half, and made a body for this half to live in. We each have less chakra that the whole, but we’re both completely real. If I get caught and Pein kills me I’ll just snap back to our shared mindscape, and I can try again.”

Tsunade looked dumbfounded. Jiraiya chortled. “I’m glad you’re on our side,” he said. “Hey, do you think Pein could be doing the same thing?”

I shook my head. “I hope not. Even three aspects at once takes massive amounts of chakra. To maintain a six-way split for any length of time? If he were that powerful, even the Kyuubi unleashed couldn’t stand against him.”

Three weeks after they first arrived on my mountain the four of us set out for civilization. We’d planned to stay together as far as Yoshiro, an obscure port in Lightning Country that Jiraiya claimed was our best bet for getting back to less frozen climes unnoticed. Then one of me would take a crack at Amegakure, while the rest of our party looked for leads on Naruto.

Pein found us first.

You’d think two of the Sannin plus me would be enough firepower to handle any opponent, but the last Rinnegan user proved my assumption wrong. The Sannin both began summoning the instant they realized who was attacking us, and in a matter of seconds a half-dozen massive toads and slugs filled most of the wide valley where we’d been intercepted. But our opponent had summons of his own, an endless variety of monstrous creatures decorated with strange spikes and piercings that charged recklessly into our allies and proceeded to unleash massive levels of destruction on them. Jiraiya was on the defensive from the beginning, and Tsunade was hard-pressed to even stay alive.

I joined the fight by body flickering behind one of Pein’s bodies to plunge a Flame Rasengan through his back, only to find out firsthand how insanely fast he was when he dodged my attack and beheaded me in one lightning move. My overpowered Rasengan detonated an instant later, which at least threw my opponent off the slope and into the river below.

I found myself in my other aspect’s head as she tried to disrupt our opponent’s summoning with a barrage of water attacks, only to have them intercepted by the big guy that absorbed ninjutsu. Frustrated, she retreated momentarily to rez me.

Building a complete body on the fly took a lot out of me, and the only way I had a chance of hurting these guys would be to push my speed and strength boost techniques to the limit. But at that level I’d be out of chakra in a matter of minutes, especially if I was spamming high-level techniques at the same time. Jiraiya could fight on that level too if he got his Sage Mode running, but Tsunade couldn’t.

“I don’t think we’re going to win this one,” my water aspect said.

I nodded. “Yeah, but maybe we can find a weakness. The absorption guy?”

She returned my nod, and set herself. I popped up and tried to roast one of the others with a Fire Dragon, and sure enough the absorption guy suddenly appeared in the way. I went to full boost and charged him while he was occupied with the flame jet, a kunai of white-hot lava forming in each hand as I ran.

At full boost I crossed the two hundred yards between us in less than a second, but my water aspect was even faster. She passed me with a thunderclap of displaced air to engage the Pein that tried to intercept me, and I reached my target unopposed. He actually parried my first blow with that metal rod he used as a weapon, but that just made my lava kunai come apart into a spray of white-hot liquid that washed across it and into his chest. Even chakra-reinforced tissue is no obstacle to that much heat, and the droplets burned dozens of holes right through him. One down.

I threw the other blade at my water aspect’s opponent, who dodged of course. She sensed my intent and replaced herself with a water clone that stepped into the flying blade as it passed. The clone instantly exploded into a cloud of superheated steam, and her opponent staggered back with third-degree burns over half his body. But when we both closed in for the kill he body flickered away.

She followed him. I turned to the summoner.

The boss toad was gone by then, but Jiraiya still had a half-dozen giant toads carving their way through a small army of monstrous dogs and birds and stranger things. The summoner noticed my approach, but his techniques were the wrong weapon against me. A gigantic rhinoceros appeared between us, but I just threw my arms over my face and leaped into its charge with my full strength. Stone shattered beneath my feet as I launched myself with a thunderclap, and I penetrated twenty feet into its chest before the damage broke the summoning and it dissipated in a massive cloud of smoke. I flicked most of the gore off my arms as I landed and leaped again, this time headed straight for the summoner with a Flame Rasengan forming in my hand.

Some unseen force slapped me out of the air like a bug, and I slammed into the ground so hard I made a crater in the stone. I felt the flare of chakra that told me Tsunade had triggered her Creation Rebirth seal, and most of the toads went down as well. I found myself pinned to the ground by an immense weight, as if gravity had suddenly become hundreds of times stronger than normal.

My water aspect’s body died, and she appeared in my mindscape. Damn it. I needed help, but I couldn’t spare the chakra to make yet another real body.

I replaced myself with a rock on the mountainside far above me, and took a split-second to take in the situation. Tsunade’s control of her strength boost might be less fluid than mine but she was definitely stronger, since she was on her feet and fighting. But she was badly loosing against the guy I’d blown off the mountain earlier, and at this rate she’d be dead in seconds once her regeneration technique ran out of chakra. Jiraiya had gotten his Sage Mode running at least, and he was holding his own against two of the others with the help of the weird little frog elders sitting on his shoulders. The last enemy was floating in the air above us, apparently doing nothing, so the gravity field was probably his fault.

I spotted my own beheaded corpse just beyond the edge of the gravity field and smiled. It was the work of a few seconds to flicker down to it, re-attach the head, and drop my water aspect into it as I re-started the heart and repaired the incidental damage. I gave her a hand up, and we turned back to the fight.

Pein’s last two bodies appeared between us and the others.

“That wasn’t a clone,” he said. “You actually restored yourself to life. But you don’t have the Rinnegan. Who… what are you?”

“An answer for an answer,” I shot back with a grin. “How can you run six aspects at once when your chakra is only human?”

“I am a god,” he declared arrogantly. “Nothing is beyond my power. But I can be merciful. Answer my question, and I may let you live to serve the cause.”

“I’ve met kami, Pein. You’re only a man, and for all your power there is nothing you can do that will stop me for long.” I knew better than to repeat a trick against an opponent on this level, so I wrapped myself in chakra-hardened stone and summoned a pair of shadow clones who immediately did the same. A swirling vortex of water sprung up around my double as she blurred into a dozen overlapping images, a distraction to hide the fact that the water itself was her weapon. Oh, this was going to be fun.

“Do your worst,” I taunted him, “and maybe you can banish me for awhile. But I wouldn’t count on it.”

He growled in frustration, and attacked.

I gave him a good fight for a couple of minutes, until my chakra ran low and I had to ease off on my speed boost. But by then Tsunade was dead and Jiraiya was desperately working some forbidden suicide technique that I was sure wouldn’t make any difference. With no clue how to stop his resurrection ability all the dirty tricks in the world weren’t going to win this fight, and we didn’t have the raw power to just kill all his bodies at once.

For that, we’d need a man with the power of a bijuu.