Time Braid

28. Battle

Disclaimer: I don’t own Naruto.

I stepped back into my mindscape, leaving an aspect behind to take care of my body, and examined again the changes my new seal had made. There were doors in my inner recesses that hadn’t existed before, leading to the mindscapes of my other aspects. Those would be of no help, since the Sakura I wanted was a version from another world. But there was still a tenuous sense of connection branching out further than my own aspects, across the space between worlds to other versions of myself. Could I use that somehow?

I dove deeper into the hidden depths of my soul, and found the path that had once led to the space between worlds blocked by a door. It was a massive affair, armored like a bank vault and still growing as I watched, and I realized that my Heaven Seal was directing a steady flow of energy through into it. But the door was only meant to keep out intruders, and it swung open at my touch.

I stepped through it, and found myself in a comfortable-looking study that felt almost entirely real. There was a window overlooking a rather bare lawn, and empty bookshelves covering two walls. A woman who looked exactly like me looked up from a stack of colorful brochures as I entered.

“Well, if it isn’t my first and strongest self,” she said warmly. “Come in. Sit down. I thought you’d be too busy kicking ass to chat anytime soon.”

“I am, actually,” I admitted. “I was trying to trace the connection to that other version of me that Sasuke is keeping enslaved. Um, are you my overself? Because if you are the info I got from my demon side’s briefing makes it sound like I’d just be your puppet or clone or something, and that doesn’t feel right.”

She laughed. “Hardly. Demons usually don’t like themselves very much, remember? I’m still figuring this out myself, but I think my job is supposed to be acting as a kind of living hub that manages the connections between all our different alternate-universe selves. Right now I’m mostly you, with a few slivers of the other versions of us who’ve found their names already through one fluke or another. But as the rest of us grow up I’ll become a blend of all of them, and I think my role is going to be making sure you can all get along without driving each other nuts.”

“Oh. Hey, that’s kind of neat,” I marveled. “So, this is going to be like a shared mindscape where versions of me from different worlds can meet?”

“Once I’m strong enough to solidify it, yes,” she confirmed. “It would help a lot if you can keep that Heaven Seal of yours running when you can. Once the other versions of us start growing up and finding themselves I’ll get much stronger, and I think I’ll be able to do things to help you out in a crisis at that point. But right now I’m as weak as an academy student, and the chakra you’re feeding me is almost all of my power.”

“No problem,” I reassured her. “Once this fight is over I’ll get Naruto to put me on a chakra feed and route the whole thing in here for you until you’ve got things stabilized. But first we have to actually win the fight. So, is there a path I can take to reach the me I’m looking for?”

She nodded seriously, and another door appeared on the opposite side of the room from where I’d entered.

“There you go,” she said. “Please, save her if you can. I’m the sum of my parts, and what he’s done to her is hurting me too. Don’t let him do it to too many of us, or he might be able to turn me against you.”

That was a sobering prospect. I bent over the desk to give what might one day become my older, wiser self a reassuring hug.

“I’ll be careful,” I said. “I’ll save her, and he won’t have a clue how I did it.”

Then I turned, and marched through the door.

I found myself in an oddly translucent version of the fake inner mindscape I’d had when I was under Sasuke’s control. The trees were withered and half-dead, the waters of the lake at low ebb, and where the stream of her chakra recovery should have been there was a maze of pipes and pumps festooned with haphazard seals. The whole thing felt thin and stretched, like it might pop if I poked it too hard.

A tired-looking teenage version of myself appeared next to me, and looked around wildly.

“You!” She gasped. “What are you doing here? You’re going to get me punished!”

“No.” I shook my head. “I’m going to show you how to make it so you never get punished again. You’re going to be a good girl, strong and useful, and you’ll never see the dark place again. Isn’t that what you want?”

She trembled slightly as I pushed the buttons of her programming, but she was too smart to be easily manipulated. “How?” She asked suspiciously. “Didn’t you betray Sasuke? You’re our enemy now.”

“I’ll never be your enemy,” I disagreed. “We’re both Sakura, and we should always help each other. Fighting with you would be as stupid as fighting my own aspects. Let me show you what you’ve forgotten, please?”

She hesitated. “You could just be trying to trick me into letting you do something to me.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Do you really not feel how much stronger I am? You’re a thirteen year old girl with my memories, trying to force yourself to be something you’re not ready for yet. Even here in your own mindscape I could beat you easily, and you know it. But I promise, if you let me help you I’ll do exactly what I said.”

She could feel the truth of my promise, and I think that was what convinced her.

“Alright, show me.”

I stepped closer, taking her gently into my arms as I touched our foreheads together, and showed her memories of love and acceptance and companionship. I showed her my own true feelings for Naruto and Hinata, and all of our time together. I pulled us both deeper into her mind while she was distracted by the experience, and reached into the spiral of devotion that dominated her thoughts to dissolve one key element.

Sasuke had spent endless weeks drilling obedience and an obsessive need to please into my psyche, but he apparently thought it was obvious who those urges should be directed at. It was laughably easy to dissolve the referent that said who that massive structure of brainwashed servitude was supposed to be fixed on, and the step out of the way while her mind reoriented in the most natural way it could.

“Oh,” she breathed. “I see now. I’m not supposed to be Sasuke’s broken toy. He tied to steal me. I’m Naruto’s girl!”

“That’s right, sweetie,” I told her. “And you know he’d never punish you the way Sasuke does. No matter how bad you screw up the worst he’ll ever do is look disappointed, and tell you how to do better next time. Now help me out, and I’ll bring you back to him with me.”

Her eyes lit up with a fanatic gleam.

“Anything for Naruto,” she declared. “What do you need?”

A moment later I was looking out of her eyes at Sasuke’s little ops center. Sasuke and Nagato were watching the monitor, Zetsu and Konan were oblivious, and the rest of the Akatsuki members were elsewhere. But Sasuke’s Hinata was turning towards me with the beginning of a frown. Yeah, she could probably see that something odd was going on. No time to waste.

I knew better than to try anything as fancy as making a real body when I was standing almost in reach of the fastest kunoichi on the planet. So instead I formed an earth clone and threw myself into it, leaving the version of me I’d just converted to provide a distraction. She went to full boost and tried to plant a Rasengan in Sasuke’s back, which was certainly an effective way to force Hinata to fight her instead of investigating what I was doing.

I reached my target in three bounding steps. The floor of the throne room was sealed against direct elemental manipulation, but it shattered easily with a punch. Below it was something big and crystalline-looking, filled with a three-dimensional array of seals. The outer layer was defensive, strength and chakra absorption and non-conductivity, along with more tricks I didn’t have time to sort through. Rasengan wasn’t going to work on that, and I didn’t have time to look for a weak spot.

I glanced up to see my copy and several of her clones engaged in a confused melee with Sasuke and his Hinata, while Nagato backed away under Konan’s guard. She was at full boost with all eight gates open, lunging at Sasuke with a lava whip in one hand and a fire-natured Rasengan in the other. He backed away frantically, but only Hinata’s interference gave him time to get his cursed seal active. My copy beat back Hinata’s counterattack with a spray of lava droplets, and wrapped herself in a screaming vortex of air-boosted flame before lunging at Sasuke again.

Damn, she was really going all out. She’d be out of chakra in a couple of minutes at that rate, but until then even those two would have trouble with her. Good, that should give me plenty of time.

I reached into the ground beneath the palace and pulled, bringing up several tons of hard stone that I merged into my clone body. I grew into a twenty-foot hulk in a matter of seconds, and slammed my stony fist into the orb.

The first blow just shattered my hand, so I reformed it and covered it in protective seals. My second blow cracked the thing, and drove it a foot deeper into the ground. I felt the warding waver, and hit it again.

The third blow shattered the crystal, and the ward collapsed.

“Time to go, little sister!” I shouted as I turned back towards the battle. I turned my clone’s other hand into a ball of lava and threw it into the melee, destroying the big monitor and forcing everyone to scatter. A couple of Zetsu clones were killed by flying droplets of liquid stone, and Sasuke simply vanished. My twin stayed where she was, letting the attack hit her as she used a Mind-Body Switch to throw herself into my mindscape.

I inscribed a maze of explosive seals into the surface of my earth clone with a thought, and set it running towards the row of bijuu containers as I bailed out. The resulting explosion blew out one wall of the throne room, and wrecked the place quite thoroughly.

I snapped back into my other aspect’s mindscape a moment later, and merged with her as my passenger tried to get her bearings. Naruto and my other aspect had been having quite a fight with the multi-headed dog things, but she’d finally figured out that they were vulnerable to drowning a minute ago. We’d promptly dug out a small lake and filled it with water, and Naruto’s dragon form was currently holding a snarling twelve-headed dog underwater while I watched for the next attack.

“Got it,” I announced. “The barrier is down, and I rescued anther version of me and caused a bunch of havoc.”

“That’s my girl,” he laughed. “One of these days you’ve got to tell me how you do things like that.”

“It’s a mystery,” I said impishly. “Now send a clone down here so I can hug you, you big lug. Oh, and I’m sure my passenger will want to meet you. She’s still brainwashed, but I made it so she’s fixated on you and maybe Hinata instead of Sasuke.”

A human Naruto appeared in front of me in a tiny puff of smoke, and gave me a look. “Only you, Sakura,” he chided. “Are you trying to make a personality for each of my clones, or what?”

I swatted him playfully, and he swept me into a hug.

“God, I was so worried about you,” he admitted. “Are you sure you’re ok now? When you ran from me I was terrified he’d done something to you.”

“He did,” I said tightly. “It was worse that the first time, Naruto. If not for you and Hinata and that last-ditch plan I don’t know if I ever would have gotten free. I owe you both my sanity.”

Naruto hugged me tighter.

“I was afraid of that,” he said after a moment. “Are you really ok now? We can pull out and try to get your scroll later, maybe summon his version of Hinata and take it from her.”

“No, if we do that he’ll just find a better place to hide it and try something else on us. I used a fancy seal trick to undo everything he did to me, and right now I’m stronger than ever. I’ve still got plenty of chakra thanks to that storage seal you filled for me, and if they’re dumb enough to stick around and fight us I think we can beat them and end this once and for all. Let’s finish it.”

“You got it, Sakura,” he said firmly. “That bastard is going to pay for what he’s done, and that’s a promise. So where’s this other version of you?”

“In my head. Let’s see… oh. Um, then again, maybe we should give her some time. It looks like she just met our Hinata in there, and right now she’s crying on her shoulder and promising to be a good girl for her. She’s about out of chakra anyway, so maybe we should just let her rest.”

“Poor thing. Make sure she knows we’re going to take care of her, ok?”

The dog summon finally stopped struggling and vanished in a giant puff of smoke, and Naruto abandoned his dragon form. He bounced across the lake in human form to hug me in person, and I was amazed to realize that he was actually running low on chakra.

“Hey, are you going to be up to this?” I asked, concerned. “I’ve never seen you actually tired before, and Sasuke’s whole strategy was to try to wear you down enough to make an unconsciousness genjutsu work on you.”

“Those statue things took a lot of killing,” he admitted. “But I’ll be fine. I’ve got a lot of tricks I haven’t pulled out yet, and you wouldn’t believe how fast I can recover chakra. If you’re worried about it maybe you should leave an aspect in my mindscape, just in case you need to wake me back up or something?”

“Good idea,” I said. “Here, I’m sending in a shadow clone. I doubt he’ll be able to tell unless she actually does something, but I bet we can lure him into exposing himself to a quick knockout if he thinks he’s beaten us. We just need to clear out all the riffraff first.”

One of Hinata’s shadow clones appeared next to us.

“Maybe you should let us fight for awhile, Naruto?” She suggested. “I can see the Akatsuki preparing to face us themselves right now, but I think Sakura and I can handle them.”

“Good idea,” I agreed. “Let us clear out the riffraff, and you can step back in for the main event. Most of these guys won’t be any challenge for me now anyway.”

“If that’s what you want,” Naruto agreed reluctantly. “You’re right, I could use a few minutes to recharge. But I’m going to stay close in case you need me.”

I noticed he was still channeling natural energy as we ran for the palace, and spared a moment to wonder how before I realized the obvious answer. He had clones out somewhere beyond the edges of the battle, gathering the potent energy and funneling it back to him through that connection all shadow clones share with their maker. Then he took the power and meshed it into his mental and physical energies to form a three-phase chakra, allowing him to maintain sage mode indefinitely.

I studied it as we ran, noting that it was mostly just a matter of knowing how to control the natural energy. Well, that and having an absurdly huge chakra capacity, so you don’t explode from such a massive energy input. Oh, and now he was using the excess power to replenish his own chakra faster, that was a neat trick. At the rate he was going it would take a good twenty minutes to replenish what he’d spent, but that was a heck of an improvement on the day or two most ninja would have needed.

I was starting to wonder if they were going to let us get all the way to the palace when another wave of Deidara’s creations dive bombed us. Hinata threw out a half-dozen shadow clones that surrounded Naruto and me just before they appeared, and started knocking them out of the air with shuriken. We were in no danger with her playing defense, so I just watched for a moment.

The little clay constructs were an earth technique, charged with chakra and set to explode when they contacted a chakra other than their maker’s. They had command links leading back to another construct, some sort of clay clone riding a clay dragon high over our heads. Apparently Deidara was trying to lure Naruto into blowing off another of those big attack jutsu to kill it.

I wove an illusion of foreign chakra around the flying bugs, and the entire swarm detonated at once. Ah, so that’s how the detonation part of the technique worked. Sweet. While the explosions still obscured his view I made a shadow clone, henged her into a kunai and threw it at the dragon-rider with my full strength. My clone wrapped herself in concealment genjutsu as she flew, and struck the dragon construct’s belly a half-second later. Then she detonated it.

“Cute,” Naruto commented as he observed the fireball in the sky far above us. “You’re really on top of your game right now.”

“It’s this Heaven Seal on my forehead,” I admitted. “I’m basically in super-Sakura mode until I turn it off. My true sight lets me see right through the tricks these guys rely on, and I can improvise the perfect technique to counter them on the fly. I’ve got enough stored chakra to stay like this for a couple of hours, so until then Pein, Sasuke and the other Hinata are the only ones I’m worried about.”

“What about Zetsu?” Hinata asked, with an undertone of amusement.

“I don’t actually know much about him,” I replied. “Why?”

A swarm of Zetsu clones emerged from the main doors of the palace, now barely a half-mile away, and charged us. At first I thought it was a few dozen of them, a tactic a normal ninja might use if he had the chakra, but they just kept coming. I paused for a second as my mental estimate went from dozens to hundreds and just kept climbing.

“There are about six thousand of them, and he’s still turning out more,” Hinata said conversationally. “So, how are you going to shut down this little trick?”

“Umm….” I thought furiously. Zetsu’s clones were solid enough to take some damage, and they were about as strong as he was. Less chakra, but enough to fight well and use a little ninjutsu. I’d seen them fight my Hinata earlier, and it looked like they were good enough to make it take some effort to kill them. A small group I could handle easily, but thousands?

“So much for my break,” Naruto grumbled.

“No, I’ve got this,” Hinata said confidently. “Sakura, I need a real body with armor like that suit you’re wearing and some kind of air purification trick. Can you do that?”

“Sure,” I replied. I didn’t have any of her blood to use as a template, but it was easy enough to create some in my mindscape and pull it out into the physical world. Then I grew it into a body and armored it the same way I had myself a few minutes before. After that the air-purification seal was a simple improvisation.

But I really didn’t see where she was going with this.

“Are you sure this is going to be enough, sweetie?” I asked worriedly. “I know you’re better than he is, but there are thousands of him right now.”

“Seventeen thousand and growing,” she corrected. “Don’t worry, my love. You’re not the only one who’s learned new tricks. You just relax, and let me protect you for once.”

Then she turned to the approaching horde, and tapped her chakra storage seal as her hands flew through a familiar series of motions.

“Mass Shadow Clone!”

A thousand copies of Hinata appeared, in a line stretching across half a mile of broken rubble. They dropped into her typical ready stance in perfect unison, and a spray of swirling water sprung up around each of them. I gasped.

“Hinata! What about the psychic shock when they dispel?”

“Naruto showed me how he handles it,” the original reassured me. “Now, watch this.”

The whole battlefield vanished under a dense haze of mist, but my true sight penetrated it as easily as anything else. The army of Hinata clones split up into hundreds of four-woman teams, and blurred towards the approaching horde.

It was a massacre.

Zetsu was good, but Hinata was a kage-level taijutsu specialist with a style built on evasion and speed. Each of her clones was every bit as deadly as the original, and the environment she’d created only increased her advantage. In melee Zetsu’s clones were manhandled like genin, engaged without warning and struck down with a few lighting blows to vital points. They laid down barrages of spore clouds, demonstrating in the process that they were immune to their own attacks, but it did them no good. Hinata’s clones flickered from point to point, dodging the majority of the attacks and emerging unscathed from the occasional grazing hit thanks to the protection I’d made for her. Thousands of opponents fell in the first minutes of the battle, at the cost of only a handful of Hinata’s clones.

As I watched them fight I realized that Hinata had just demonstrated the ability to destroy an entire hidden village single-handed. I’d seen the armies of Sound, Suna and Konoha fight more times than I could count, and this force would sweep them all from the field with ease.

Of course, the same was true of Naruto’s dragon sage trick. Was I actually back to being the weak member of the team?

No, I was being silly. If I wanted to destroy a hidden village I’d do it with genjutsu and poisons and my transformation disguise, and they’d never have a clue what was happening. But it gave me a warm feeling, to know that my Hinata actually strong enough to beat me at her own specialty now.

Hinata frowned. “He’s making more clones as fast as I can kill them,” she complained, her voice beginning to sound strained. “I think he’s draining power from those sealed bijuu they have in there. Well, fine. Let’s see how they like this!”

She called another hundred shadow clones, and the entire group began a long series of hand signs in unison. I saw water nature, summoning, a massive elemental manipulation field spreading across the whole group.

“Water Dragon Stampede!”

A wall of water rose out of the ground and roared towards the battle, and I realized it was made up of hundreds of overlapping Grand Water Dragon attacks. They crashed through the mist and into the blinded army within, crushing Zetsu clones in the hundreds. Hinata’s shadow clones all saw it coming, of course, and darted around and among the roaring dragon heads with ease. A few of Zetsu’s clones evaded the attack by blind luck, only to be picked off by the kunoichi teams that danced across the waves.

A normal attack would have traveled a couple hundred yards and petered out, but the clones that had generated the wave were still feeding water into it. The tsunami roared deep into the ranks of the Zetsu army, to crash against the doors of the palace itself. The majority of the enemy army was destroyed in moments.

“Now!” The real Hinata said, and darted forward. Naruto and me followed.

We crossed the last half-mile to the palace doors quickly, leaving behind hundreds of battling clones. A company of Hinata’s clones gathered around us, pouncing on any Zetsu clone unfortunate enough to get in our way and dispatching them before they could try to interfere. Another mass of them flickered past us as we entered the vast halls of the palace of the gods, engaging a thick crowd of Zetsu clones that was gathered within.

It was too good a target to resist. As Hinata filled the hall with mist I cast a jutsu of my own, creating a cloud of herbicidal poisons that filled the same space. Zetsu’s clones dropped like flies, and our column pressed on into the palace.

We burst out into the throne room to find a swarm of Hinata clones descending on the bijuu containers, who had apparently been protected from my bomb somehow. What I presumed was the real Zetsu called up one final group of clones, and began to sink into the floor as she engaged them.

But as Orochimaru had learned, it was hard to get away from Hinata once she got within body flicker range. A team of her clones appeared around him and launched a flurry of attacks, some of which seemed to hit before he could fully dematerialize. Then I body flickered over and jammed his phasing technique.

Two seconds later he was thoroughly dead, and a moment after that the room was clear.

The real Hinata sank to her knees with a gasp, and the clone army began to dispel by squads. “That was harder than I expected,” she admitted. “But I’ve got enough chakra for one more big fight. Most of the remaining Akatsuki members are on the roof, but I don’t see Sasuke or Nagato’s real body. I’m not sure what they’re waiting for…”

That question was answered as a rip in space opened in the middle of the room, and Sasuke stepped out. His Hinata followed, guarding his back as usual.

“Hello, Naruto,” he said confidently. “Ready to end this?”

“Sasuke.” Naruto growled, his fists clenching and unclenching. His eyes turned red, and wisps of the Kyuubi’s poisonous chakra curled around him.

“What the hell is wrong with you, you bastard?” He spat.

“I do what is necessary,” Sasuke replied coldly. “Now, are you going to stop me? Or will you run away, and leave the real Hinata in my hands? Don’t forget, my loops can run as long as I wish. I could make her torture herself for years before you could try again.”

“Monster!” Naruto roared, and stepped forward as a red aura blossomed around him. “This ends here, Sasuke! I’m going to beat you until your grandparents feel it, and then Sakura is going to figure out how to make you stay dead.”

“Will she?” Sasuke glanced my way. “Bad girl.”

I gave him the finger. “Fuck you, Sasuke. All your brainwashing accomplished was to make me learn to be even stronger. You can’t beat the three of us, even with Nagato’s help.”

“Ah, but I don’t have to,” he said triumphantly. “That’s their job.”

Three teenaged copies of Naruto stepped through the rift. Each wore a seal my copy had invented for Sasuke during their last months of preparation, designed to suppress the will of the person it was applied to. There was nothing human looking out of their blood-red eyes, and the crackling auras of red chakra surrounding their bodies already had four visible tails.

The portal closed behind them.

“My Sharingan can control even the Kyuubi,” Sasuke boasted. “Can you defeat the most powerful of the bijuu? Can you do it three times at once? I’d have brought more, but I have to admit this is my limit.”

“Crap,” I muttered. “Naruto, do we need to bug out? Your chakra still isn’t recovered, and…”

“No,” he said harshly. “You wanted to finish this, and that’s what we’re going to do. I’ll handle these boys. You two take care of the others.”

A blinding flare of chakra blazed up around him, refilling his reserves with an ocean of power that made even the massive stores of my own chakra seal seem like nothing in comparison. It took me a moment to realize what I was seeing, and then I had to shake my head. Somehow he’d managed to copy my trick and make a chakra storage seal hidden in his mindscape, despite the fact that his mindscape was just a mental construct instead of a quasi-physical pocket dimension. Only Naruto.

Then he brought his hands together in a seal I didn’t recognize.

“Demonic Sage Mode,” he growled. My jaw dropped as he sucked in the Kyuubi’s chakra and blended it with his own, still augmented by the natural energy of Sage Mode, to make a four-phase chakra. My god. That would be as big a step above normal Sage Mode as that was above an ordinary ninja.

That’s my man.

“We’re on it, Naruto. Kick his ass for me.” I backed away from what was about to be a very bad place to be. Hinata went with me, automatically positioning herself to guard my back as we moved. My mind flashed through everything I knew about our remaining opponents, considering how to beat them.

Sasuke’s Hinata was the hardest of them for me to fight, and the one most likely to take me out without having to deplete my chakra first. My Hinata could keep her busy for awhile, but she probably wouldn’t win that fight. Strong as she was, her older self was even more skilled. I’d have to finish off what was left of Akatsuki in time to help her.

I’d never come close to beating Nagato, and that was when his ‘Six Paths of Pain’ were animated corpses. Now they were alive, much faster and stronger than before, and he had S-rank cannon fodder to throw at me as well. Could I really do this?

I had to.

I set myself, mustered my will, and increased the flow of chakra through my Heaven Seal. I was myself. Centered and strong, every aspect of my body and mind operating in perfect harmony. Aware of the true nature every detail of my surroundings. Ready to spring into action in an instant, bringing irresistible violence to bear on the weakest point of any force foolish enough to oppose me.

It might not be enough, but I’d give them a hell of a fight.

A slight flickering of my chakra in our personal code told Hinata what I needed her to do, and she nodded firmly. I reached back to touch her cheek with a strand of animated hair, and wove the seals for a chakra repulsion array across her skin. It would only stop normal jyuuken, not the elaborate spikes and armor-piercing lances of the higher forms, but it was all the advantage I had time to give her.

“Let’s do this, Sasuke,” Naruto said grimly.

Sasuke nodded, and gestured to his Kyuubi-possessed minions. “Kill him!”

Everything happened very quickly after that.

Hinata and I leaped back as Naruto threw a huge youki-charged Rasenshuriken into their midst and charged. One of them met his attack head-on, and the shockwave from their first exchange of blows cracked the walls and blew away every shadow clone in the building. That was apparently Akatsuki’s cue, because the ceiling above me was blown apart from above an instant later.

I dodged through the rain of multi-ton stone blocks, noting as I did that they were moving a lot faster than terminal velocity. Hundreds of Deidara’s explosive bugs crawled among them, leaping out to attack me when I passed nearby, and I caught a glimpse of puppets appearing in the air above me to swoop down with weapons bared.

I caught a glimpse of the two Hinatas locked in combat some distance away, and angled away from them. The elder Hinata’s divination zone was more than a hundred yards across, an absurdly huge volume of space, but I was already near the edge. A quick body flicker got me the rest of the way out, and I breathed a sigh of relief. As long as I kept my distance and stayed mobile I wouldn’t have to worry too much about her suddenly appearing behind me to launch one of her impossibly fast special attacks, and I’d be able to concentrate on my own opponents.

I ducked under a flailing tail of red chakra so intense it could have killed with a touch, and sent out an indiscriminate detonation command that set off all the constructs Deidara had dropped around me. A body flicker took me above the explosions and into the path of Sasori’s puppets, where I could see the chakra strings that controlled them clearly. A hail of poisoned senbon rattled off my armor as I traced the strings back to their origin, and a cloud of iron particles began to coalesce around me.

I opened six gates, and threw a tight bolt of wind-boosted flame at the puppet master. As I’d hoped he replaced himself with a falling rock to escape, and I met him at his landing point and slammed a fist into the cylindrical artifact that his chakra strings emerged from. It exploded in a spray of blood and grey matter, and his puppets collapsed.

Kisame appeared behind me in the same instant, and I felt Samehada slashing through my armor and into the flesh and bone beneath. The blow sent me flying into the path of a barrage of rockets launched by Pein’s mechanical body, and the explosions sent shrapnel tearing through my limbs. I healed that damage with a thought and flickered back to the floor, before throwing a spread of supersonic shuriken wrapped in invisibility illusions back at the enemies above me.

A massive explosion from Naruto’s battle blew out the side of the palace nearest me, and I body flickered under a falling mass of stone for a moment to heal the wound on my back. One of Deidara’s clay clones appeared in the same space and detonated itself, sending me flying back through the remains of the wall. One of Nagato’s chakra disrupting blades speared through my left thigh as I flew, but I forced my chakra to flow normally around it and tumbled to my feet in time to block another attack from Kisame.

Strength! I sang as I planted my feet, weaving new seals around my right arm. I punched him, and sure enough he reflexively blocked instead of replacing out of the way. My fist met his legendary sword with a thunderous crash, and every bone in my hand shattered despite all the tricks I used to prevent that. But the blow actually bent his sword, slamming it back into his chest hard enough to collapse his rib cage and sending him flying. Sword and wielder sailed far into the air, their trajectories separating as he lost hold of the blade.

Hopefully he wouldn’t get back up.

But I’d been stationary for nearly a second, and it cost me. A beam of light from Nagato’s mechanical body speared through my chest, melting a neat hole through the armor plates that should have protected me and actually setting them on fire. A flurry of paper sheets wrapped around my arms and began to jam my chakra, and a sudden blow from an unseen force knocked me into the flailing tails of one of Naruto’s opponents.

The poisonous red youki ate deep into my flesh, tainting my chakra pathways and burning my tenketsu before batting me away with enough force to break bones. I struck a mass of rubble headfirst, and died instantly.

“Damn it,” I complained. “I am not going to let my family down. I don’t care how many times you kill me, I’ll keep getting back up until I’ve won.”

I kept my body animated, using it as a puppet as I body flickered away amid a flurry of distracting illusions. I split off an aspect to concentrate on healing myself, flickered away from another Deidara clone before it could explode, and threw myself into the ground as one of Naruto’s opponents lit off an energy blast so big it gouged out a trench all the way to the edge of the plateau.

All across the ruins the ‘shuriken’ I’d thrown moments ago finally fell to the ground. The blood clones dropped their henges as they landed, and wrapped themselves in invisibility instead. Nagato’s Rinnegan was hard to fool at close range, but at a distance the concealment might actually keep him from spotting them. Most of them immediately began a careful search of the plateau, looking for Nagato’s real body.

I had a few seconds to heal myself before someone tried to phase lock me into the ground, and I had to emerge. A glance around revealed that Naruto’s battle had already reduced the palace to a smoking crater, but he and his Kyuubi-possessed copies were still going at it in a barrage of increasingly large attacks. They were up to six tails now, but I saw him punch one of them so hard it went flying into the air right through Sasuke’s intangible form.

Then I was too busy fighting to watch.

Pein’s Preta, Human and Asura paths all engaged me at close range, while the others hung back and watched for good opportunities to snipe me. That meant no ninjutsu unless I wanted to get drained, so I pulled a pair of ninjato from my mindscape and wove my hair into a forest of slender braids tipped with poisoned spikes. Somehow I managed to hold them off for more than a minute, until I finally managed to tag the Asura path with a spinning high kick.

My foot took the mechanical ninja’s head right off, but the risky move gave the Preta path an opening. His fingers brushed along my left arm, ripping out a river of chakra that left the limb momentarily unenhanced and nearly useless. That left me unable to block a kick from the Human path that sent me sailing into the air, only to be blown back into the ground by the invisible impact of the Deva path’s gravity control.

I rolled back to my feet with my arm already recovering, and gutted the Preta path as he tried to pin me. But while my hands were busy the Human path reached right through the snake-like mass of my hair, taking a dozen poisonous hits in the process, to lay his hand on my head.

Then he ripped my soul out of my body.

The pain was agonizing, but it was over in an instant. I found myself hanging from his hand as a ghost, pinned by his technique and unable to slip away. He made a series of signs with his free hand, and the chains of a binding began to wrap around me.

“No!” I shouted. “You won’t take me so easily. Freedom!”

I poured the full force of my stored chakra into my song, and the chains burst. I wrenched myself free, and fell back into my body just as the Deva path pierced my chest with a chakra disruption blade. I pulled my body into my mindscape before he could impale me on enough of the things to freeze me, and took a moment to remove it and heal up.

“Damn, this guy is good,” I muttered. “Ok, he’ll have his other bodies back up before I can catch him, but I can’t just hide in here or he’ll go after Hinata. Time for another new trick.”

I repaired my tattered armor, added seal arrays to generate a chakra shield, and wreathed myself in a whirlwind of air-boosted flame. I discarded one ninjato while growing the other into a proper katana, with seals for sharpness and durability and a nice thick coating of cutting wind chakra. Then I stepped back out into the real world.

The mountain trembled. Great cracks appeared across the surface of the plateau, massive expanses of stone shifting and tilting in response to the forces being unleashed nearby. But my opponents were easy to find.

I spotted the Naraka path not far away, and send a half-dozen flame clones surrounded in distracting illusions after him while I suppressed my presence. He had to take that attack seriously, since that was the body that could rez the others. I saw the Animal path leap in front of him and start a summoning as I turned and sprinted up a sloping expanse of rubble towards the Deva path perched on top.

A flame aura is hard to hide, and he spotted me before I was halfway there. He gestured, and an unseen force blew me off the slope to slam into a boulder hard enough to shatter it. But I just smiled. He had a five-second recharge time on that ability, and that’s practically forever to me. I flickered high into the air, threw a blast of cutting wind that he avoided with a replacement, and used a replacement of my own to meet him at his landing spot.

The Deva path was the strongest of the six, and he actually blocked my sword with some kind of close-range repulsion armor that also kept my flame vortex at bay. But it didn’t do him any good against the four-element Rasengan in my off hand. My attack exploded against his barrier, the backblast straining my chakra shield as it tore through his defense and reduced his body to finely shredded ash. I staggered back, noting that my left hand had been destroyed as well, and started regenerating it as I turned to face some kind of tentacle beast summoned by the Animal path.

A titanic shock wave blew all of us away.

I managed to snag a boulder in mid-flight, dropping my flame shield and anchoring myself to the ground. The whole area was engulfed in flame, and the ground shook so violently we could have been caught in an earthquake. The heat was like a blast furnace, so intense I would have been flash-fried if not for my fire resistance. But between that and my chakra shield I’d be fine.

Then one of my searching clones sent me the location of a dome of fireproof paper on the other side of the ruins.

“Got you,” I crowed triumphantly. I stepped into my mindscape, possessed my clone’s body for a moment, and pulled my body back out at her location.

Sure enough, I could see Konan and Nagato’s chakra inside. The fire resistance jutsu that kept the paper from being burned away by the surrounding flames was as flawless as all of Konan’s work, and for a moment I regretted that we always seemed to be on opposite sides. Maybe I could change that when the loops were done.

But right now she and the man she followed needed to go down hard. The fireball was beginning to thin, and she could probably sense my presence. I’d better work fast. I laid my hand against the paper dome, extending my senses to get a feel for the space within, and filled it with a cloud of nerve gas.

The dome came apart instantly, forming a cloud of flying paper that quickly blew the gas away. I stayed low as I moved in, weaving through a barrage of chakra disruption blades as I called up a storm of cutting wind. A barrage of Konan’s papers exploded around me, but my wind kept them from getting close enough for the blasts to penetrate my chakra shield. Realizing that her ranged attacks weren’t going to stop me she darted between me and my target.

A supremely effective spy she may have been, but Konan was no match for me at taijutsu. We exchanged a brief flurry of blows before I got a hand on her shoulder, and scrambled her paper transformation technique. Half her body mass dissolved into sheets of inanimate paper, and what was left died instantly.

Nagato gestured, and the same invisible force the Deva path commanded tried to blow me away. But I was anchored to the ground and expecting it, so the technique just made my chakra shield erupt in a flare of blue pyrotechnics. When the pressure stopped I darted under the machine he rode in, and planted my fist in the underside.

It blew apart like it was packed with explosives, a cloud of twisted metal flying high into the air before tumbling back down to rain onto the earth around me. I could see Nagato tumbling through the air, trying to form hand seals for some kind of creation technique, but his hands were trembling from the nerve gas. He was still forming seals when my cutting wind vortex ripped him apart.

I sagged, panting with exertion. My whole chakra system ached with the effort of channeling so many high-level techniques so quickly, and my storage seal had shrunk alarmingly. Still, I spared a moment to grin.

“Hell, yeah! ‘Not a front-line combatant’ my ass, Sasuke! I am the champion of ass-kicking, you arrogant nutjob.”

I turned towards Naruto’s fight just in time to get flash-blinded by a series of gigantic explosions. With my true sight I could make out a pair of eight-tailed foxes trying to pin down a humanoid form that bounced madly around them throwing supercharged Rasenshuriken like they were free.

The third fox was down, the dense chakra that had made up its body slowly dissipating to reveal the unconscious jinchuuriki within.

“…ok, maybe I’m the runner-up. That’s alright, I can live with being second to a guy that can knock out the damned Kyuubi.”