Chapter 30

— Fugaku Uchiha —

The five rogues split the moment their leader gave his order. Four of the Chunin peeled toward Fugaku in a loose arc while the lone Jonin broke away after the man in the green jumpsuit.

He needed to finish this quickly so he could go help the kid before he got himself killed. The boy was already up against something far worse than five rogues out across the clearing.

Fugaku read them before they had fully committed. His Sharingan caught the small tells, the shift of weight, the tightening of a grip, the flick of an eye toward a target, and from their posture he could tell they believed their numbers gave them the advantage here. He understood the shape of it at once. They meant to tie him up with bodies, stall him long enough for their Jonin to put down the other one, and then turn all five blades on him together.

It was a reasonable plan. It would have worked on a lesser opponent.

The first Chunin came in fast with a kunai aimed at his throat. Fugaku didn't retreat from it, he met it, sliding inside the man's reach the instant before the strike landed and turning the wrist aside with the back of his hand so the blade passed through empty air. The Uchiha Interceptor Fist worked on a simple principle. With eyes that could see an attack take shape before it arrived, there was no need to defend. You simply struck the opening the attack made the moment it was committed. His palm drove into the Chunin's exposed sternum, and his other hand brought a kunai up and across the man's throat in the same motion. The Chunin dropped, choking on his own blood.

The death made the others wary. The remaining three pulled back a step and came again more carefully, fanning out so they could strike from three angles at once, trusting that he could not answer all of them. It was sound thinking. Against most opponents, a man could only watch one direction at a time.

Fugaku watched all three.

Two of them committed together, trying to bracket him. He stepped toward the left one, which forced the right to overextend to reach him, and in the moment the right Chunin lunged into the space his partner had left open, Fugaku pivoted and drove his blade up under the man's jaw and into the base of his skull. He died before he finished the lunge. The left Chunin's strike, aimed at where Fugaku had been standing, found nothing. Fugaku caught the dead man by the collar with his free hand and turned the body into the path of the follow-up, using it as a shield, then flung a pair of shuriken over its shoulder. Both found the left Chunin's eyes, and the man went down screaming.

The last of them, the one who had hung back through all of it, was already running through a string of seals. He spat a fireball across the gap. Fugaku understood what the man actually wanted. He wanted Fugaku to move, to throw up an Earth Wall, to relocate or block his own line of sight, anything that would buy distance and break the rhythm he was being cut down with. The notion of using a fire technique against an Uchiha was almost insulting.

So he simply matched it. His hands flashed through the seals and he exhaled a stream of flame that swallowed the smaller fireball whole and rolled on, forcing the Chunin to fling himself flat to keep from being cooked. As the man scrambled, Fugaku's Sharingan traced the arc of his movement and told him almost exactly where he would come up. He threw three kunai into that space before the Chunin reached it. The man rose into them and did not rise again.

Four breaths, four bodies.

Fugaku let the stance settle out of his shoulders and turned toward the far side of the open ground, where the so-called Eternal Genin had been left to face the rogue Jonin alone. The Chunin had thrown themselves at him all at once, betting they could hold him long enough for that Jonin to come back and even the odds against the him. He found himself hoping, in his own quiet way, that the man in the green jumpsuit had managed to hold his own and hadn't already been cut down. Losing him before the real fight even began would be a poor start.

— Maito Dai —

Dai felt fear and determination twist together in his chest as the broad man with the cleaver bore down on him.

A Jonin. He knew, without any illusions, that on his own two feet and nothing more he would lose this fight. But Yuuki-san had placed his faith in him, had pulled him out of a life of cat-chasing missions and quiet ridicule and called him worth something, and Dai would sooner break his own body than let that faith come to nothing. He had to be quick about this, too. If Fugaku-san or Yuuki-san needed him, he could not be standing here trading blows with a single man.

So he did not wait.

"Third Gate, Gate of Life, open!"

His body flushed red as the gate tore wide and strength flooded through him. Ordinarily he would never have leapt straight to the Third Gate so early, but with his body healed, the Restoration Pills Yuuki-san kept giving him and the treatment from Lady Tsunade letting him hold the Gates far longer and with far less strain than the broken version of him ever could, he had the room to spend.

The Jonin swung the cleaver in a flat arc meant to cut him in half. Dai dropped beneath it, the wind of the heavy blade passing over his hair, and came up on the inside with a fist buried in the man's gut. The Jonin grunted and snapped the cleaver's pommel down toward the back of his skull, but at this speed the strike felt slow as honey, and Dai simply slid out from under it before it could land.

The Jonin was no fool, though. He gave ground rather than overcommit, swinging the cleaver in tight, controlled arcs to keep Dai at the end of its reach and refusing to let him get set. The old version of Dai, the one whose body was always half-broken, might have struggled to close that gap before the next swing came around. But the Third Gate gave him speed the man could not hope to match. He waited out two of the careful arcs, watching the rhythm of them, and on the third he slipped past the edge of the blade as it came and caught the man's thick wrist in one hand to pin the weapon. Then he hammered his free fist into the Jonin's ribs, once, twice, a third time, each blow landing with everything the Gate gave him. Something gave way beneath the fourth. The Jonin staggered back wheezing, the cleaver dipping in his loosening grip, and Dai stepped in and drove a hooking strike into his temple that dropped him where he stood.

Dai exhaled hard, the heat of the Third Gate still rolling off his skin, a shallow cut on his cheek from a graze he barely remembered. Across the clearing, far off through the trees, the ground was trembling. He did not need to be a sensor to feel it shivering up through the soles of his feet even at this distance, faint but constant, the sign of something enormous happening over there.

Footsteps approached at a run, and Fugaku dropped down beside him, the bodies of four Chunin left behind him.

"We are needed," Fugaku said. "Let's go, Dai-san."

Dai blinked. It was the first time in the entire mission that the Uchiha had called him by his name. Something in his chest warmed at it, but he pushed the feeling aside and let his face go serious. He nodded once, and the two of them turned and ran toward the trembling ground.

— Yuuki Senju —

I took a slow breath and clamped down hard on the anger boiling under my skin, forcing it into something I could use instead of something that used me.

I knew exactly what I needed to do. The heart in his chest was the target. Everything else, the threads, the limbs, the body itself, he could stitch back together as fast as I tore it apart, so none of it mattered. Destroy the heart, and the rest of him died with it. That had to be my aim, and I couldn't let myself forget it for a second.

I shifted into Swift and went in.

I came in low under the first sweep of his threads and drove a Might-loaded fist toward the center of his chest. His skin hardened an instant before I connected, whatever jutsu he used turning his flesh into something like dark stone over the spot where the heart sat, and my knuckles cracked against it. The heart was right there, inches under my fist, and I couldn't touch it. His counterblow took me across the ribs and threw me back across the dirt.

I rolled out of it and came up already moving. That hardening had to be costing him. Keeping his whole body running as living thread had to burn chakra on its own, and layering that stone defense on top of it could not be cheap. He spent it carefully, hardening only where a blow was actually coming.

He proved that a breath later. He closed the distance and threw a heavy right at my head, and I dropped into Guard and crossed my arms to take it rather than risk slipping and eating something worse. The impact still drove me back a full step, far harder than it had any right to be, and I understood why a heartbeat too late. He'd hardened his fist. Whatever that technique was, it didn't only strengthen his defense, it let him put the same stone behind his strikes, and a hardened fist hit like a thrown boulder.

Good to know.

I slammed my palms down and roots tore up beneath him, a dozen sharpened points driving for his torso. His threads met them, wrapping and snapping the wood, but two punched through and slammed into his chest, and again the hardened skin turned them aside before they could bite deep. Not enough. A normal root construct wasn't sharp or strong enough to drive through that shell before he reinforced it, and a Might fist only cracked the surface.

And then a worse thought occurred to me. He controlled every fiber of his own body. If he could move and reshape it at will, what was stopping him from simply shifting where his heart sat the moment I got close? I might pour everything into one perfect strike and find nothing behind the stone but more thread.

I needed one technique with enough raw power to end it in a single blow, something that didn't care where the heart was hidden. A Sage-enhanced jutsu could do it, I was sure of that, but reaching the balance took focus I couldn't spare while I was busy keeping his threads off me. Sage Mode had to become my top priority after this. Assuming there was an after this.

For now, I'd settle for an opening.

I launched a spray of Cursed Buds at him. He swept most of them away with his threads, but three got through, biting deep into his left arm and shoulder, their tooth-lined bulbs anchoring in and starting to drink. I watched them burrow as they fed, sinking deeper into the thread-flesh by the second. His whole body was made of those threads, and those threads were always moving, always alive, always spending chakra to stay that way. The Buds were latched directly into that current, and every second they held, they pulled more of it out of him.

I suspected that he flooded chakra into the threads to detach the bulbs in an instant, ripping them out along with a chunk of his own flesh that sealed over the moment it was gone. It clearly hurt him, his jaw tightened and a hiss escaped him, but it cost him no time at all. He was already twisting clear of the root I'd sent at the opening I'd hoped to make, and the chance was gone before it formed.

"How long can you keep this up, boy?" he rasped.

I didn't answer. Through the link that tied my clones to me, I could feel them spread out across the clearing, each one locked onto one of the four creatures he'd pulled off his back.

One of them had the water creature hemmed against a wall of roots, and a second clone moved in from the side to crack the mask at its core. The creature spat a jet of pressurized water at the clone holding it down, and the clone had to throw itself clear or be punched through, and the moment the roots loosened the creature slithered free. It didn't get far. The second clone was already on it, and a spike of wood drove up through the mask. It shattered, and the whole creature came apart into a heap of dead thread.

The other two clones were having a worse time. The fire creature and the wind creature had stopped fighting separately. They pulled into one another, threads weaving together, and merged into a single larger beast that carried two masks instead of one, one set into its face and another riding its back. It reared up, and I felt the chakra gathering inside it, fire and wind winding together into something that made the air itself groan.

It loosed the combined technique across the clearing in a roaring wall of superheated wind, and I felt three of my clones wink out of the link one after another as the blast swept over them, too close and too slow to clear it.

That left one clone, and the lightning creature.

My last clone went straight at it, taking a glancing bolt across the shoulder. That would have popped it on the spot if it had been a Shadow Clone, but my Wood Clones were sturdier than that, and it had shifted into Guard besides, so it held together long enough to drive its fist through the lightning creature's mask before the thing could fire again. The mask shattered, the creature dissolved, and the clone, spent and battered from the exchange, came apart in the same instant. The link went quiet.

All four gone. Down to the merged creature and the man.

I never broke off from him through any of it, and he never broke off from me, the two of us trading blows the whole while. He didn't react openly to his creatures dying, but I caught the flicker in his expression each time another one winked out, like he could feel each heart going dark somewhere inside him. By the time the last of them was gone, something in the way he fought had changed. He stopped pressing me and pulled the merged beast in close beside him, holding his ground, careful now, guarding what he had left.

That was a problem. A cautious enemy was a slow one to crack. I needed him sloppy, and I needed him angry, and there was only one way I knew to get a man there.

I started talking.

"You've had decades to live, decades to train, all that experience packed into you," I said, circling, keeping him and the creature both in front of me. "And here I am, a kid, not even a teenager, kicking your teeth in."

"Talk," he said flatly. "It changes nothing."

Tch. Disciplined old bastard.

I kept circling and kept pushing. "I've been wondering why the First Hokage spared you," I said. "At first I figured it was mercy. Now, though, looking at you, I don't think that's it at all."

That got him. His threads erupted toward me in a thrashing wave, dozens of them lashing out to wrap me up and drag me down, or pin me where I stood. I couldn't let them catch me. I sent a gust of wind chakra to sever the leading edge and threw myself into a low roll beneath the rest, coming up several paces away as the threads snapped shut on empty air behind me. The merged creature loomed beside him the whole time, and I kept half my attention on it, wary of the technique I'd already watched tear three of my clones apart. As long as it had the few seconds it needed to wind that up, I couldn't afford to stand still.

I grinned at him anyway.

"All this time," I said, "and you still can't put down one kid. How disappointing." I tilted my head toward the creature. "I wonder how long it takes you to collect more of those, because at this rate you're going to need to."

That landed harder than the rest. The threads across his shoulders bristled, and the strike he sent next was heavier and wider than before, less the measured violence of the start and more something with temper behind it. I rolled under it and raked a root across his exposed side, and it drew a real sound out of him, a short grunt of pain and fury.

Getting there. Slowly. But I was running low. Every construct I'd raised and reinforced, every clone I'd made and lost, had dug a deep hole in my reserves, and I'd been a breath from spending what little I had left making a fresh set when I heard them.

Footsteps, heavy and fast, coming through the treeline behind me. I glanced back, and something in my chest loosened. Fugaku and Dai broke into the clearing at a dead sprint.

"Quick," I called out, my voice rough through the fangs. "Focus everything on the two masks on that creature beside him, one on its face, one on its back. Until they're both destroyed, he can't be killed, his body just stitches itself back together. And watch it. It can fire a fire-and-wind combo that hits like an S-rank jutsu."

— Fugaku Uchiha —

Fugaku took in the boy's words and the shape of the thing standing beside the tall man, and gave a single nod.

He had seen the merged creature begin to draw in its chakra once already, in the moment before they'd cleared the trees, and the wall of fire and wind that followed had told him everything he needed to know about what it could do. It also told him the technique was not instant. The beast needed a few seconds to gather it. That was the window.

Beside him, Dai's chakra surged again, climbing higher than Fugaku had yet seen it, the air around the man seeming to compress with it.

"Fifth Gate, Gate of Limit, open!"

The ground cratered under Dai's first step, and he closed on the creature before it could finish winding up its technique, forcing it to abandon the charge and defend. He was fast, faster than anything Fugaku had expected out of the so-called Eternal Genin, even after having seen him defeat the Jonin, the creature found itself giving ground under a storm of blows it could barely track.

Fugaku did not stand idle. He moved with Dai, circling wide to take the creature from a second angle, flinging shuriken to herd it and spitting smaller fireballs to cut off its lines of retreat, keeping it boxed so it could never find the space it needed to loose its technique. Between the two of them the thing had no room to breathe. Dai drove in toward the mask set in its face, and for a moment Fugaku thought he had it, his fist a hair from the surface.

The creature twisted aside at the last instant, just enough that the strike skated past, and lashed out with a thick mass of threads that caught Dai across the chest and hurled him into the air. But Dai had not come away empty. His other fist had found the second mask, the one riding the creature's back, and shattered it on the way past.

One down. One left, and Dai sailing backward off his feet with no ground beneath him.

The creature landed in a low crouch and sprang clear of the next volley of shuriken Fugaku had already put in the air, and in the same motion it began to gather its technique, now it could only use wind. Fugaku saw the technique being charged up far quicker as it turned toward Dai, who was still airborne, still rising, with no footing to push off from and no way to twist out of the line. The beast was aiming the blast exactly where he would come down.

Dai could not dodge it. The certainty of it landed in Fugaku's gut all at once.

He moved without letting himself weigh the cost. Body Flicker carried him across the gap in an instant, putting him close to the creature, and he forced his eyes open into the Mangekyo as blood welled hot down his cheek.

"Amaterasu."

Black flame erupted across the creature a split second before its technique could leave it. The fire caught the last mask and the gathered chakra both, and from the handful of times he had been forced to call on this, Fugaku knew what it would do. The flames devoured the technique before it could form, swallowed it whole, and went on burning. They climbed the thread-body without pause, immune to anything the creature did to shake them, and the last mask blackened and split apart under them. The whole beast collapsed into a pyre of dark fire that ate it down to nothing.

The strain dug into the backs of his eyes, his vision swimming and graying at the edges, blood running freely down the side of his face. But his eyes still worked, and he was still standing, and Dai hit the ground in a roll a few meters away and came up alive.

— Yuuki Senju —

The creature burned down to ash, and just like that, it was only him.

Kakuzu stood alone at the center of the churned clearing, every creature gone, and for the first time the cold patience he'd worn since the start cracked into something close to fear.

"This isn't possible," he said, his voice gone thin.

I didn't give him time to find his feet again.

"Keep him locked down for a few seconds," I called to the other two, my eyes never leaving the man. "Just hold him in place and don't let him move. If you can give me that, I can finish this in one go."

Fugaku was already moving to my flank, his ruined eyes streaming, his breath ragged but his voice steady. "Give me a signal when you are ready," he said to me, then to Dai, "Keep him occupied. Buy me the time to prepare."

Dai didn't hesitate. He hurled himself at Kakuzu, fists flying at Fifth Gate speed, and Kakuzu's threads rose to meet him in a thrashing tangle. The man was forced to split his attention, fending off Dai's relentless assault, his focus dragged away from me and onto the green blur tearing at his guard.

I stopped thinking about my body and reached for the balance instead.

I pulled Nature Energy in from everything around me, the torn trees, the trampled grass, the deep roots still threading the soil beneath the clearing, drawing it in fast and heavy. Physical, spiritual, natural, all three folding toward the point where they aligned. It fought me. The nature side wanted to surge past the others and drown the balance, and I held it back by sheer will, feeling for the knife's edge where the three became one.

"Now, Fugaku!" I shouted.

Fugaku's gaze snapped onto Kakuzu, and even with one eye half-failing, even bleeding, he didn't miss.

"Magatsuhi: Sight and Touch."

Kakuzu went rigid mid-motion. I saw it happen, the sudden, total stillness of a man whose world had just gone dark and numb at once. No sight. No feeling. He couldn't see Dai in front of him, couldn't feel the ground under his own feet or the threads that made up his own body, cut down to nothing but the sound of his own ragged breathing and whatever scent hung in the air. For a creature that fought on reflex and control, it was a cage, and it froze him solid.

It was all I needed.

The balance snapped into place, perfect and complete for the space of two seconds, Sage chakra flooding every coil in my body, dense and total, and I forced all of it down into the earth through my palms.

"Wood Release: Wood Dragon Jutsu."

The ground erupted.

The dragon that tore up out of the earth was colossal. Its body was so vast around that you could have stacked three of Kakuzu head to foot across its width and still not seen past it, a mountain of moving wood rising and coiling into the sky over the clearing. The earth heaved and split as it came, deep fractures racing out across the ground in every direction, and the trees ringing the open space were torn clean out of the soil and flung aside or snapped off at the trunk by the sheer force of its rising. It blotted out the afternoon light beneath it, its head alone larger than a house, jaws yawning wide.

Kakuzu, blind and numb and frozen, never moved. He couldn't have defended himself even if he'd understood what was bearing down on him.

The jaws closed around him and swallowed him whole, and the dragon surged forward, carrying him away from the three of us, racing low across the broken ground toward the far treeline with its prey sealed inside its head.

Then it detonated.

The head of the dragon and the long stretch of its neck blew apart in a single concussive burst, a dome of shattered wood and fire and pulverized earth erupting at the edge of the clearing, the shockwave rolling back over us hard enough to stagger Dai and tear a fresh wave of dirt into the air. Whatever was left of Kakuzu went with it, crushed and burst and scattered in the heart of the blast, with nothing whole enough left behind to ever stitch back together.

The rest of the dragon, the vast body still coiled across the ruined clearing, lost its charge all at once and slumped, length by length, into plain, dead, ordinary wood.

I didn't know if he was truly dead. In that moment, I couldn't bring myself to care. I let the transformation go, the strength draining out of me with it, and as my legs folded I fell back into the torn dirt, as I collapsed, unable to move my limbs or really focus on anything. It would take a bit before I could do anything else, still, I let out a weak smile as I heard Dai groan in pain and let out an excited whoop at the victory.

AN: I wrote the entirety of this chapter in a single sitting, I said that I’d get it out and I god damn it! Momma ain’t raised a liar. Frankly speaking, I'm so tired and burnt out at this moment that I can't even think of what to write in the AN since it’s exactly 5:57 AM as I write this. Fugaku’s Mangekyo and its abilities, as I have said in the previous chapter, is from the anime. I really hope that you enjoyed the fight! It was rather difficult to do, to be honest. I tried to make it a fairly even fight, well at least until Sage-enhanced technique and Mangekyo bullshit rolled into the mix. I hope it makes sense why Yuuki didn’t mollywhop him, I’m certain I’ve scaled him up a bit for the sake of a fun battle, but I hope it didn’t end up in Yuuki looking weak. 

If you enjoyed the fight, please leave a like and comment, it really helps out a ton! I'm going to go crash. Cya