These two were dangerous.
The masked figure stood with his weight on his back foot and his right hand raised, palm out. The plant-thing to his left hadn't moved at all since they'd crested the ridge, and its split face watched the Akatsuki column with yellow eyes that tracked too many things at once.
Sukuna turned his head just enough to address the group behind him without taking his eyes off the two figures ahead.
"Listen to me very carefully," Sukuna said, and his voice was flat and quiet and carried across the rain. "Do not assume you understand what these two can do based on what you see. Stay coordinated, and if one of them does something you don't recognize, assume it will kill you and move accordingly."
Nobody spoke. Sora shifted her grip on her sword, and Hideo's hands paused mid-seal, and Daisuke took a half step backward and placed his hand on the medical pouch at his hip.
Wasuke stepped up beside Sukuna and leveled the yari toward the masked figure. Rain struck the chakra-reactive steel and ran down the central blade in thin streams.
"Wasuke, the masked one is ours," Sukuna said. "Everyone else takes the plant creature. Stay together and don't let it isolate you."
The single eyehole in the orange spiral mask angled slightly.
"How rude," the masked man said, pleasant and unhurried. "You could at least hear me out before you start giving tactical orders."
Sukuna drew the katana and crossed thirty meters of open grassland in a single Body Flicker. He didn't circle or feint or measure his opponent's reactions. There were three people he cared about south of this ridge and they might already be dead.
His chakra shaped itself into Cleave as he closed the distance. The technique read the masked figure's right arm and scaled its force, and Sukuna released it.
The arm came off clean. It tumbled through the air and hit the wet grass three meters away, and the rain landed on the exposed stump, and there was no blood. The tissue inside was white and fibrous and strange. Whatever that arm had been made of, it wasn't human.
Sukuna registered the wrongness and filed it and kept moving.
The masked figure leaped backward and his remaining hand came up in a guard position. His single visible eye had widened.
Good.
Sukuna pressed forward. The katana came around in a horizontal arc aimed at the masked figure's midsection. The masked man ducked beneath the slash and tried to create distance, but Wasuke was already there. His brother had followed Sukuna's charge by three seconds and circled wide to the masked figure's blind side, and the yari thrust toward his ribs.
The masked man twisted between both attacks. The katana passed over his shoulders and the yari missed his hip by centimeters, and he planted his remaining hand on the wet grass and kicked himself into a sideways roll. He came up in a crouch and his eye found Sukuna and then Wasuke and then moved back to Sukuna.
"Well," the masked man said, and his voice had lost some of its pleasant quality. "That was unexpected."
Behind them, the engagement with the plant creature had begun. Sukuna heard it through the rain; steel and jutsu and shouting. He didn't look.
Sukuna surged forward again. The katana led with a diagonal slash aimed at the masked man's remaining shoulder, and his chakra gathered for another Cleave in his free hand. The masked man's eye tracked the blade and his body moved to evade.
The katana entered the masked man's torso and exited his back without resistance. Where flesh should have been, there was nothing. The figure stood in the path of the strike and the blade went through him as if he were smoke.
Sukuna pulled the katana back and shifted his weight. The Cleave in his free hand released anyway, aimed at the masked man's left leg, and the invisible slash passed through the same way.
"What the hell," Sukuna said.
The masked man straightened from his crouch, and behind the mask his eye was a little too smug for someone who'd just lost an arm.
He reached up with his remaining hand and adjusted the mask's position on his face. "That won't happen again."
The foreign chakra hit his system before the visual distortion began. The eye behind the mask was red, the pattern in the iris something Sukuna didn't recognize; three elongated shapes spinning around the pupil in a pinwheel. The anti-genjutsu seal activated instantly, and the world dimmed and the sounds dulled, and the illusion shattered before it could take hold.
Beside him, Wasuke's seal fired at the same moment. His brother flinched as his enhanced senses dropped, then he was fine, and the yari came around in a sweeping arc at the masked man's legs.
The masked man's eye widened again.
"Genjutsu immunity," he said, and his voice carried real surprise this time. "Both of you. That's... inconvenient."
Wasuke's yari passed through his legs. Wasuke reversed the sweep and thrust at the masked man's chest, and the prong went through him and came out his back and Wasuke's momentum carried him past the figure.
"It's selective," Sukuna said, turning to his brother. "Whatever he's doing, he can choose what passes through him. But he couldn't stop my first Cleave. There's a reaction time."
“I see."
They attacked together. Sukuna came from the left with the katana and Wasuke drove in from the right with the yari. The masked man phased through the first exchange, and then the second, and Sukuna's eyes narrowed.
Except it did have a weakness.
The masked man phased through a third exchange, and Sukuna watched him sidestep while intangible, moving even as the katana passed through his torso.
But on the fourth exchange, the masked man tried to counter. His remaining hand shot out toward Sukuna's throat, and in the instant before his fingers made contact his body flickered solid, and the displacement of air hit Sukuna's neck as the grab missed by centimeters.
There. That flicker.
Sukuna came at him again with two rapid slashes, and the masked man phased through both and circled right, and then his hand came forward in a palm strike at Wasuke's ribs and there it was again. Wasuke twisted away and the masked man's palm caught only his cloak, and then he phased out.
"He has to become solid to hit us," Sukuna said. "Every time he attacks, there's a gap."
Wasuke's eyes sharpened. "That’s a very small window."
They stopped pressing and started leaving openings. Sukuna dropped his katana guard low, and the masked man went for it, his hand driving toward Sukuna's ribs, solid.
Sukuna released a Cleave at point-blank range.
The intangibility snapped back on before the slash reached him, and the counterattack died as he phased out. He moved sideways through the rain and Sukuna tracked him.
Close. They needed to bait harder.
Wasuke understood. He planted the yari butt-first and left himself wide open, weight forward, nowhere to retreat. The masked man hesitated.
Then he took it anyway.
His body flickered solid as he drove a kick at Wasuke, and Wasuke moved, and Sukuna moved, both converging during that sliver of solidity.
The intangibility snapped back on before either strike could land. But the evasion cost him his footing, and when he rematerialized three meters to the right his weight landed unevenly on his remaining leg.
Sukuna was already there. The Body Flicker carried him to the landing point, and his chakra shaped itself into Cleave.
The invisible slash caught the masked man's right leg at mid-thigh and cut through. The leg separated and dropped to the grass, and just like the arm there was no blood. The same white and fibrous tissue. Both limbs from the same side of his body.
“Son of a bitch!” The masked man let out an annoyed and frustrated yell. The space around his remaining foot twisted inward and his body folded into a point and the point collapsed and he was gone. The air rushed in to fill the space with a sharp pop that scattered raindrops.
Sukuna stood with the katana extended. The severed arm and leg lay on the wet grass thirty meters apart.
The masked man reappeared twenty meters to the north. Space twisted outward and his body unfolded from the distortion, and he stood on his remaining leg with his remaining arm braced against his thigh. The orange mask was still in place but the pleasant casualness was gone. His single visible eye, red with that strange pinwheel pattern still spinning, fixed on Sukuna.
"You took two of my limbs," the masked man said, and his voice was quiet and furious. "In less than a minute. I won’t forget this."
Sukuna shifted his grip on the katana and started walking toward him.
The space around the masked man warped again, and his body spiraled and folded and vanished. The rain fell through the space he'd occupied and hit the grass undisturbed.
He didn't reappear.
Sukuna extended his chakra perception. The masked man's signature was gone. Whatever that technique was, it had taken him somewhere Sukuna couldn't follow.
He let out a breath and turned south.
On the far side of the plateau, the engagement with the plant creature was ending.
The plant-thing had split into two halves, and the Akatsuki had been forced to divide their attention between two targets that moved through the earth and grass. Sora's sword had carved deep wounds into the white half's torso, but the tissue regenerated almost as fast as it was cut. Hideo's wind techniques had better luck; the compressed air pinned the white half against a rise in the ground long enough for three fighters to converge on it, and the accumulated damage overwhelmed its regeneration before it melted into the earth and reemerged thirty meters away.
The black half was faster and harder to track. It slipped between the grass and the soil, surfacing briefly to strike before vanishing again. Fumiko had caught it with a jutsu that slowed its movements for a few seconds, and Daisuke had driven a kunai into its shoulder during the opening, but the wound closed around the blade and the creature pulled it free and threw it aside.
Wasuke reached the engagement before Sukuna did and spread a genjutsu across the area. The technique pressed down on the plant creature's awareness and its movements slowed, just a fraction, just enough for the fighters around it to get inside its reaction window.
Sora's sword found the white half's neck and drove through, and the head separated from the body and rolled across the grass, and the body collapsed into something shapeless that sank partway into the mud.
The black half saw the white half fall and made a decision. Its body flattened against the earth and thinned until it was barely visible against the dark grass, and then it moved. It slid across the ground at a speed that none of the fighters could match, heading north, and within seconds it had disappeared over the plateau's edge.
Three of the Akatsuki members tried to pursue. Sukuna raised his hand and they stopped.
"Let it go," Sukuna said. "We don't have time."
Sora turned back from the ridge's edge, her sword still drawn and her breathing hard. Her clothes were torn along the left shoulder where the black half had caught her, and blood ran down her arm beneath the rain. Hideo stood beside her with his hands shaking, and Daisuke was already moving between the fighters, checking for injuries.
Nobody had died. That was something, at least.
Wasuke appeared beside Sukuna and planted the yari butt-first in the wet earth. His face was tight and his eyes moved south.
"Those two were a delaying force," Wasuke said. "Whoever sent them wanted to keep us from reaching the summit."
Sukuna looked at the severed limbs behind them. The same tissue as the plant creature, or something close to it. Both from the same side of his body. Whatever had happened to the man behind that mask, the damage had been concentrated.
They weren’t a delaying force. If he and Wasuke hadn’t been here, the rest of the Akatsuki would’ve been slaughtered f
"Can we still make it?" Sora asked. She held pressure against her shoulder wound with her free hand.
Sukuna looked south. The rain fell in sheets and the plateau's grass merged with the clouds at the far edge. Hanzo's compound sat somewhere beyond that gray, forty-some kilometers distant, and Yahiko and Konan and Nagato were there, and the summit was a trap.
"We move," Sukuna said. "Now. Nobody stops."
Twenty-three people turned south and started running through the rain.