Neither side wanted the battle to stretch long. For Gai and Kakashi, the longer they fought, the greater the chances for Danzo to find an opportunity to give them the slip in the chaos of the battle. For Danzo, a prolonged battle increased the chances of injury or the arrival of reinforcements on the Hidden Leaf’s side.
The battle was to end quickly. Both sides moved with that in mind.
Danzo felt a lightness he hadn’t felt in decades. The grafted cells of the First Hokage filled his body with a renewed, vigorous life. He ran through the forest like the wind. No matter how he pushed, his body seemed to have more to give. His chakra sang. When was the last time he could move so freely? On top of that, Uchiha Shisui’s Sharingan granted him a level of kinetic perception that he had never possessed in his prime. He didn’t need to slow down in fear of tunnel vision as he weaved around the trees like a ribbon of silk.
He could tell undoubtedly: the current him was greater than his strongest self.
“Fourth Gate: Gate of Pain—Open!”
And yet, when he turned around, Might Gai was a blur of emerald light, the white mist rolling off his body as he ran across the earth that shattered with each step. He had somehow gotten faster than before. Danzo could track him before, but now, even with the Sharingan, the man was a ghost whose mere steps brought about destruction.
“What a ridiculous man!”
Danzo didn’t want to be hunted. His chest expanded like a bellows as he inhaled.
Wind Release: Vacuum Blast
He spun around while exhaling the air compressed into a solitary blade of wind that covered a wide area. The wide crescent of pressurised air screamed across the forest, cutting through dozens of trees in its path and reaching Gai where it seemed to slice through his waist as he was about to push off a tree. But there was no scream or spray of crimson as the afterimage blurred and stretched, melting into a meaningless smear at the same time the trees realised they had been cut and their trunks began to slide.
Danzo’s fingers twitched when he heard wood exploding, and he only had the time to snap his eyes to the side to catch Gai shooting towards him in his periphery. He aggressively swung his cane sword with a burst of wind chakra that surged like a gust of wind.
“Strong Fist: The Fist of Vajra!”
A fist with a swirling green glow around it crashed into the dense gust of wind with the sole purpose of not letting anything pass. The dense wind spasmed under the pressure from the single fist before erupting in every direction, causing the leaves to violently dance and fly.
Danzo’s defence worked, but Gai didn’t slow down. He leaned into a low spring, his hand slamming into the dirt to pivot into a rapid spin while performing a handstand with his legs outstretched.
“Leaf Coiling Wind!”
It created enough wind to clear out the fallen leaves on the ground, rip off the grass, and cause the soil to fly. The first kick was blocked by Danzo’s cane sword, but it sent him backwards, causing the second strike to miss. Danzo managed to convert the momentum of his stumble to keep out of the third kick, but the fourth one landed squarely on his hip. Gai was spinning so fast that he had already landed three more strikes before Danzo went flying.
Danzo felt his hip and lower waist explode in pain that reached the bone. He coughed involuntarily with tremors spiking through his body, but he managed to keep his balance mid-air, allowing him to weave hand seals when he saw Gai get to his feet and launch towards him, all with terrifying speed and body control.
Just as Danzo was completing his hand seals, three kunai with explosive tags tied to them whistled towards him. They were thrown at the perfect time. Gai was upon him, and he needed to complete his jutsu if he wanted to defend against the jōnin, but he couldn’t just ignore the explosive tags.
Fortunately for Danzo, his chakra was singing. He abandoned the practised speed at which he usually controlled his chakra. Push it too fast and one risked losing control. His ability to physically wrangle his chakra had declined as it did with age. Danzo hadn’t tested it, but he knew there was a possibility with the cell grafts. He pushed his chakra much faster, and it obeyed his control perfectly as it once did when he was young.
The ninjutsu was a success as wind chakra gathered in his lungs while he inhaled. Simultaneously, he flicked his cane sword to release a razor-thin edge of wind that cut through the paper tags before they could detonate.
Wind Release: Vacuum Great Sphere
Danzo exhaled a massive, distorted pocket of air that acted as a physical wall the moment his feet touched the ground. However, the kunai were a feint.
Earth Release: Headhunter Jutsu
The earth beneath Danzo’s sandals erupted. Kakashi’s hands shot up to grab Danzo’s ankle, intending to immobilise him. The intention was to pull him down to at least his waist, but Danzo managed to stop it before it reached his knees. He jabbed his sword towards Kakashi, only for it to hit the ground, so he stabbed an intense burst of wind right underground. The ground exploded upward. Kakashi, who had come up, immediately flickered away at the last moment, but not unscathed.
The blast inadvertently freed Danzo, but it wasn’t enough.
“Fifth Gate: Gate of Limit—Open!”
A chill went down Danzo’s spine when the B-rank wind sphere exploded like it were a children’s balloon. Gai emerged from behind it. Danzo’s Sharingan blinked, and Gai went from being metres away to arm’s distance right in front of him.
Danzo knew he couldn’t do much with the short distance. There wasn’t enough time to weave hand seals. He clenched his cane sword—constructed from chakra-conductive metal and forged by master weaponsmiths in conjunction with fuinjutsu to facilitate kenjutsu—and pushed in chakra as he flicked it, sending out a small but compressed mass of air instead of parrying the strikes. When Gai’s fist came close to connecting with his jaw, a sudden burst of high-pressure wind shoved Gai’s arm an inch to the left while Danzo moved his face in the other direction.
But it wasn’t enough, as the next three punches were already on their way. Danzo managed to block one, but the next two hit him: one in the stomach, the second in the upper chest. The latter caused Gai to frown.
The impact sent a shockwave that cratered the ground. Danzo was sent skidding backwards, his boots carving deep furrows in the vitrified glass. However, it wasn’t over; the ground shook and a triangular rocky wall shot up from behind. The moment he slammed into it, earthen arms and hands appeared from the surface and pinned him to the ground.
A few metres away, Kakashi was kneeling with his palms pressed to the ground.
“Now!” he yelled.
The chakra around Gai turned violent as he disappeared like he had used the Body Flicker Jutsu, but it was a purely physical movement.
“Leaf Rock-Destroying Rise!”
Gai smashed his elbow into Danzo’s chest, using his other arm as support. The earth wall behind them exploded as the sheer force travelled through the body. Danzo’s ribs caved under the pressure before he was sent flying like a cannonball, smashing through trees and cratering the ground on impact.
Danzo felt an enormous amount of pain as he forced himself to stand up. His clothes were shredded, revealing his upper body, which gave the Leaf jōnin duo—about to move to their next attack—a pause.
From the right pectoral, white branch-like marks spread outwards throughout his body. The branches split into smaller sub-branches and extended down to his lower waist and even down to his legs, seeing that his arms had similar markings. That itself wouldn’t make the two jōnin stop. What made them stop was the completely white right pec, where a man’s face was sticking out of the skin.
“So, that’s what it was,” Gai said. “I felt something strange when I hit him there.”
“What is that?” Kakashi asked.
He gazed at the distorted face on the deformed pec with his Sharingan, noting a very faint foreign chakra signature that he had missed when he had looked into Danzo’s body. It merged with Danzo’s own chakra to create a new combined chakra that predominantly circulated throughout the body. The new chakra was the vigorous chakra Kakashi had noticed before.
“He doesn’t seem injured. You think that creepy face has something to do with it?” Gai said, frowning.
Kakashi didn’t know, but he could guess that was exactly the case.
Danzo had been hit by a move that would injure even the most physically durable jōnin, but he looked rather fresh, other than the blood on the corner of his mouth and some redness on his chest that was fading.
Danzo wasn’t happy about getting hit, but he was internally feeling pleasant as he felt his body actively healing itself. He noticed that the pain in his hip from the previous attack had already vanished, with no stiffness. It was like he hadn’t been hit at all. When Orochimaru transplanted the First Hokage’s cells into him, the Snake had warned him of the risks and that any benefits would entirely depend on how well his body accepted the cells. The invigorated chakra, its effects on his body, and now an innate healing factor—it seemed that his body was compatible with the First Hokage’s cells.
It was even helpful with the Sharingan, which seemed to be a constant chakra sink. He gazed towards Kakashi and wondered how the youngster lived with his implanted Sharingan, given how much chakra the eye ate.
It was worth it. If it weren’t for the eyes, he didn’t think he would have been able to track Gai as well and would have been in a worse situation. He could track the movement of chakra in the taijutsu specialist’s body to roughly predict his moves and react accordingly.
The two young jōnin were a threat. They were playing the ‘Hammer and Chisel’ tactic. Gai was the hammer, relentless and powerful. Kakashi was the chisel, the calmer and colder mind who made sure that the hammer’s force was focused and true to the target. Fighting them any longer was dangerous despite his improved condition. Kakashi was a great mind, a brilliant battle tactician—given enough time, he would spin up a lethal plan. He knew they wouldn’t break. He had to clear the board if he wanted a chance to escape.
Danzo breathed in, only to feel something hard in the back of his throat. He reached into his mouth and pulled out the strange object. His heart felt cold as he gazed at a piece of a wooden branch with a single green leaf in his hand. For a moment, he wondered if he had swallowed the branch while fighting, but then he saw the pink flesh and red blood on the bottom of the branch, as though it had been attached to the lining of his throat until he pulled it out.
He felt the taste of iron on his tongue and spat out more blood into his palm, only for the red liquid to instantly turn into coarse sawdust. He rubbed the spit-covered sawdust between his fingers, and there was no doubt that it was wood.
First Hokage’s special bloodline limit: Wood Release. It couldn’t be anything else. He touched one of the white branches covering his body. Just a few hours ago, it was nothing but white skin, no different from the skin beside it, but now it felt slightly more stiff. It had only been a few days since he had undergone the operation, and he recalled the words Orochimaru had said to him the day after.
“The chances of rejection will remain high until your body gets used to the new cells. It may take a while, so if you don’t want things to go wrong, take the medicine and don’t exert yourself.”
All the previous excitement about being compatible with the grafted cells drained away.
He had to finish this fight now.
Danzo breathed in and felt that his chakra pathways were already warm and pliable. With his age, it would have taken much longer, but the grafted cells had even greatly quickened his body.
“It has been a while,” he said in a gruff voice as he slammed his hands together to weave hand seals, causing gusts of wind to lash out as his chakra was pushed to the limit.
The forest began to vibrate as the winds began to pick up, as though it were a hurricane. He gathered a massive amount of chakra into his lungs, his chest expanding to twice its normal size. It had been a very long time since he had used an A-rank ninjutsu, and he braced for the strain and stress that it always put on his body, only for it not to come—at least not to the levels he remembered. Instead, casting one of his most demanding ninjutsu seemed to give him the feeling of exhilaration that most felt when they used B-rank, only much greater.
Did the First Hokage feel like this every time he used A-rank ninjutsu?
Wind Release: Demonic Hurricane Massacre
———
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A/N:
[1]: In the last chapter, there was a discussion about Chidori and its canon classification as an A-rank ninjutsu. With how I have portrayed A-rank ninjutsu in TOR, I don't think the canon classification fits.
I have re-classified it as a B-rank ninjutsu, which feels more appropriate. Similarly, Rasengan will also be re-classified as a B-rank ninjutsu.
[2]: On the topic of Danzo
I'm ignoring the existence of Uchiha Shin. I don't know his position in the canon, but I dislike his existence.Before Shin, the source behind the Sharingan in Danzo's arm was from the Uchiha Massacre. It was implied, but never confirmed, which wasn't a problem because there was no other source where anyone could get so many Sharingan. But with Shin's introduction, the eyes could have come him as well.Even if he's firmly canon, I think we can have an explanation why he's not present in TOR.Orochimaru's obsession with Itachi started when he saw him as a child in the village. It increased when they met at Akatsuki, but simultaneously, Orochimaru realised he wouldn't be able to get Itachi's Sharingan because the difference in strength. At that point, he would have settled for another Uchiha with Sharingan, but with the massacre, all of them were dead (NOTE: At that point, Sasuke didn't have the Sharingan, and unlike Byakugan, there's no guarantee that a Uchiha will unlock their dōjutsu.)Given those circumstances, I believed he started experimentation on the Uchiha and Sharingan.But, with TOR, the Uchiha clan is alive, Orochimaru already has Gaku's body and he is confident that he can take over Itachi.Thus, I don't think he has started that line of experimentation in TOR.
The new Hashirama cell graft. Because there isn't a supply of Sharingan, he doesn't need an arm, so I made it similar to what Madara had. It's really giving him a boost and a rejuvenating effect. However, Danzo is still a old fart and there's only so much Hashirama's cell can do.Not to mention, it's unstable and we are already seeing the negative side-effects. They are tamer than his canon arm exploding into a tree, but with the cells all over his body, if things go wrong, he won't just loose an arm, it'll be much, much worse.
[3]: Might Gai
Gai isn't a pussy like all other TOR shinobi who don't shout out their jutsu name. He states the move of his names out loud and proud. Unafraid and full of youth.That's my GOAT!