Shimura Danzo moved through the upper branches as a flickering shadow, his bandages fluttering as he cut through the humid air with the sole purpose of evasion. Every subordinate he had brought with him had stayed behind to intercept the Hidden Leaf forces pursuing him. They had met his expectation, seeing that he didn’t have dozens of Leaf shinobi chasing after him.
Instead, there were only two.
Behind him, two streaks of green and blue-grey trailed in pursuit. Hatake Kakashi and Might Gai moved in unspoken synchronisation, shattering the bark of trees as they pushed to close the distance.
He didn’t expect his subordinates to stop two of the Hidden Leaf’s highly dangerous jōnin. However, he had expected as much from Orochimaru, but seeing that there was not a scratch on the two, the traitor without a loyal bone in his body had definitely let them pass just to spite him. Danzo pursed his lips, utterly displeased. The only silver lining was that escape would have been far more difficult if he had three instead of the current two jōnin after him. His last encounter with Itachi and his accursed eyes hadn’t been an enjoyable one and had forced him to recover for months, unable to use his own powers for extended periods of time.
He didn’t look back. He reached into his robes and flicked his wrist. Three shuriken hissed through the air, infused with wind chakra to boost their speed. Kakashi’s borrowed Sharingan spun, tracking the silver glint of the rotating blades. He didn’t slow and only tilted his head a fraction of an inch, allowing the blade to whistle past his ear, while his own kunai intercepted the other two in a shower of sparks. If it had been any other shinobi, the kunai would have been cut through, ending in decapitation.
The tree beneath Gai exploded, the trunk cracking as though it had been chopped by an axe as he turned into a green blur, launching himself like a cannonball.
“Early Leaf Gale!”
Danzo’s old body twisted mid-air, his cane sword unsheathed in a heartbeat. He channelled a razor-thin edge of wind into the blade and met Gai’s heel. The collision sent a circular shockwave through the leaves, stripping a dozen trees of their foliage. Gai used the momentum to flip backwards, landing on a lower branch, while Danzo used the force to propel himself further away, deeper into the thicket.
The forest was favouring Danzo’s evasive manoeuvres, so Kakashi finished the seals and slammed his hands together while mid-air. The terrain changed the moment his sandals hit the dirt. The ground roared as the soil rose up in the shape of three massive, lupine heads that lunged upwards, their jaws snapping at Danzo’s feet. To avoid the earthen maws, Danzo was forced to dive towards the forest floor.
However, Kakashi had already moved onto his next move, his hand glowing with a jagged, chirping blue light, reminiscent of a thousand birds.
Lightning Release: Chidori
Pure lightning chakra coalesced around his hand to the point of becoming visible. It was Hatake Kakashi’s special ninjutsu. The lightning cutter hummed with enough intensity to vibrate the air around it. His figure blurred as he zapped through the air, thrusting forward, aiming for the sternum.
Danzo weaved hand seals.
Wind Release: Vacuum Great Sphere
He exhaled a massive, invisible pocket of compressed air. The wind met the lightning head-on. Kakashi’s lightning cutter pierced through the vacuum sphere until most of his arm was inside, but then it stopped due to the resistance. The two B-rank jutsu energies buckled against each other, creating a pressurised dome that flattened the surrounding grass and cracked the bedrock beneath them. The vacuum began to suck the lightning away while the lightning scorched the elements, like oxygen, out of the air.
Wind triumphed over lightning, but the concentrated lightning chakra of Chidori and the skill behind the jutsu managed to burn enough oxygen that it caused an explosion inside the sphere. The fire blew up as the wind chakra caused it to grow stronger, blowing up in the faces of both parties.
As the fiery explosion cleared, Gai saw his window. He stood twenty paces away when he took a deep breath, and muscles all over his body expanded against his green jumpsuit. The air around him turned violent as he reached into his body and found the eight chakra gates along the tenketsu chakra pathway that regulated the flow of chakra and opened the first three gates in one go.
First Gate: Gate of Opening—located in the brain’s left hemisphere.
Second Gate: Gate of Healing—located in the brain’s right hemisphere.
And finally, located at the top of the spinal cord—
“Third Gate: Gate of Life—Open!”
A green glow covered his body while his skin turned red from the accelerated blood flow inside his body as the blood pressure was raised beyond human levels. The moisture on the ground around him evaporated instantly into white mist.
He disappeared.
Danzo’s decades of experience screamed at him that he was in grave danger. As he was mid-air, he ripped off the bandages over his eye to reveal the first of his borrowed powers. The Sharingan glowed red with its three tomoe, and suddenly, the world seemed to slow down for him. Danzo took in a deep breath; he had never experienced something like that, even in his prime as a jōnin. It was only a moment and only one ability of the eyes, but he truly understood why villages around the lands instructed their men to flee if they ran into Sharingan-bearing Uchiha.
His eyes snapped to the right, where he saw Gai flying through the air towards him. The Sharingan's vision, which slowed everything, could only make the Leaf’s Noble Green Beast appear to move at a normal pace, which was still blazingly fast for everyone else.
Danzo asked himself: did he have the body capable of reacting to his improved vision? He was far too old to be on the battlefield, and unlike Hiruzen, the passage of time hadn’t been charitable to him. It had already been over a decade since he had been able to move at the speeds he could reach in his prime.
That would have been a problem a few days ago.
But now?
Gai struck with a barrage of a dozen strikes delivered in the span of a second, each one thrown with the specific intent to kill and carrying enough energy to shatter the biggest boulders like they were made of foam. Danzo raised his cane sword and parried each strike that came, matching every move as though his age had no bearing on his physique.
Despite the pressure, Danzo remained clinical. He allowed Gai’s final kick to connect with his forearm, using the impact to slide backwards while retrieving a pair of shuriken and breathing wind chakra directly onto them, causing them to turn into widespread fan blades that spun rapidly to gain a lethal edge.
Wind Release: Vacuum Blade
The wind-infused shuriken sliced through the air as they headed for Gai, who reached into his back for a pair of nunchaku, but before he could whip them out in his defence, Kakashi appeared in front of him, precisely jamming a kunai in the centre hole of the first shuriken and then using it to stop the second shuriken.
Kakashi closed his left eye, his breathing steady. He gazed at Danzo’s right eye, which now bore a Sharingan like the one in his left eye.
“That is…”
Kakashi nodded at Gai’s trailing statement. That eye was Uchiha Shisui’s stolen eye. For the first time, the Hidden Leaf had concrete proof that Danzo had stolen a Sharingan and, thus, conclusive proof that he was the one behind Shisui’s death. However, the question was: why only one eye? Both of Shisui’s eyes were missing, so why had he only transplanted one?
Was it because of the chakra burden? Those outside of the Uchiha bloodline with a transplanted eye couldn’t turn off the Sharingan, making maintaining one eye a burden in itself; two eyes would be twice as much of a drain. Kakashi also thought back to Orochimaru’s sudden appearance, which raised a question. Had Danzo sold the eyes to him or someone else? There could be a number of possibilities about what had happened to that singular eye.
“Something else is wrong as well,” Kakashi said, reopening his left eye.
The flow of chakra inside Danzo was unlike that of a man of his age. Even though Danzo was a jōnin, Kakashi had a chance to observe other jōnin of advanced age.
Chakra was a product of equal parts physical and spiritual energy. The decline of the physique was a normal part of ageing, and with it came a reduction of physical energy; when one of the two energies declined, a shinobi couldn’t make as much chakra as they could in their prime. Moreover, an imbalance between the two energies caused the quality of the chakra to decline, which meant that the reduced amount of chakra wasn’t even of the same quality as it would have been in a shinobi’s prime. Shinobi or chakra users couldn’t escape the ravaging effects of age. They could defer those effects through diligent training and self-evaluation, but they couldn’t be avoided. Some people had a peak during their prime so absurdly high that they remained relevantly strong even during their decline.
What Kakashi saw inside Danzo was a flow and vitality of chakra that would be present in a jōnin fifteen years younger than him. However, Kakashi clearly recalled looking at Danzo several years back during a certain incident, and the man from the Hokage’s generation did not have the flow of chakra he was showing now.
Something had changed in the man since he had fled the village.
“I did feel that he blocked my previous attack a little too easily,” Gai said. It would have seemed arrogant from anyone else, but it was a genuine statement coming from him. “I guess we just have to work harder! This is a challenge, and we must overcome it so that we can be better than the version of ourselves from yesterday!”
Kakashi sighed. Just hearing those words made him tired.
Just then, Danzo resumed running away from them instead of choosing to fight them directly, prompting the two Leaf jōnin to follow him.
“I don’t know what he has done to himself, but with his chakra and the stolen eye, we have to treat him as a much stronger opponent,” Kakashi said.
“Want me to probe him?” Gai asked as more mist rose around his body.
Kakashi nodded, his native eye affixed on his target.
“Go at him. I’ll look for openings to strike or create openings for you. We can’t allow him to escape here alive.”
———
.
OMAKE:
As the fiery explosion cleared, Gai saw his window. He stood twenty paces away when he took a deep breath, and leaned down to put a fist on the ground before his muscles all over his body expanded against his green jumpsuit.
His skin turned red from the accelerated blood flow inside his body as the blood pressure was raised beyond human levels and while his body began to emit a white mist.
"Gear Second!"
He disappeared.
——
.
A/N: So, I noticed how similar the Gai's Third Gate is similar to One Piece's Luffy's Gear Second. Same red skin due to blood and white mist. Lol.