Chapter 38: Konoha’s Crimson Angel!

The column was retreating. Over four hundred shinobi, the survivors of the ridge assault, streaming north from the third ridge to the second in the fading light. Mikoto stood at the southern edge of the second ridge and watched them pass. Genin with wide eyes. Chunin with clenched fists. The walking wounded leaning on the people beside them. Her shadow clones moved through the column, healing as they went, green light flickering in the rain.

"Nawaki. Emi. Nonō."

Her genin turned.

"Go with the column. Help the wounded. Don't stop until you reach the first ridge."

"Sensei, what about you?" Nawaki asked.

"I'll be right behind you."

"But..."

"That's an order, Nawaki."

He looked at her. The scars on his face shifted as he remembered what happened the last time he didn't listen. He nodded.

"Yes, sensei."

Emi didn't argue. She read the situation quickly and accurately, and understood that Mikoto wasn't coming right behind them. She put the fan on her back and turned north.

Nonō hesitated. "Sensei... please be careful."

"Go on, Nonō."

They went. Three figures disappearing into the stream of retreating shinobi, moving north, moving to safety.

Mikoto turned south.

Her six jonin advisors were still on the ridge. Hayashi, the tall one with the scar across his nose. Mori, the woman with short grey hair who'd run the ambush attack without a single wasted order. Takeda, the broad-shouldered man who'd held the southern approach for thirty minutes with twelve genin and refused to give ground. Ueno, Fujita, Shibata. Six jonin who'd spent their time following a fourteen-year-old's orders and watching those orders succeed.

"You should go with the column." Mikoto said.

"No way." Hayashi said.

"I wasn’t suggesting..."

"And this isn't a discussion." He looked south. "Whatever's coming, you're not facing it alone."

"Hanzō of the Salamander is coming. You read the message. He defeated Jiraiya, Tsunade, and Orochimaru. All three of them. Together."

"We heard."

"Then you know what that means for us."

"It means someone needs to buy time." Hayashi said. "The column is still moving. If he reaches them before they're clear, hundreds die."

Mikoto looked at the six of them. Six faces. Six lives. Six people who were standing here because they'd decided this was where they would fight or die trying.

She reached into her pouch and pulled out six small glass gourds from her subconscious. The liquid inside was faintly luminescent, a pale blue-green that caught what little light remained in the grey sky.

"This is Hero Water," she said. "From Takigakure. Each bottle increases your chakra tenfold for a short time." She paused. "It also shortens your life. Proportional to the boost. If you drink this, it will take years off your lifespan. Maybe decades."

She held the bottles out.

Hayashi took his without hesitation. Mori did the same. Takeda, Ueno, Fujita, Shibata. One by one, without a word, without a question, six jonin took a bottle of Hero Water from a fourteen-year-old girl's hands.

"You guys really don’t have to do this…" Mikoto looked around at them.

Mori looked at her with a smile, rubbed her head. "We were already planning to die here, when we heard Hanzō was on the way." she said. "This way we'll be useful when we do."

Mikoto's throat closed. She nodded once.

Then she reached behind her back. But instead of drawing Shark Skin, she unslung the bandaged cleaver and set it on the ground against a rock.

From the scroll on her belt, she unsealed the Kusanagi Blade.

The legendary sword gleamed in the rain. Lighter than Shark Skin. Sharper. A weapon built for speed and precision.

She fed lightning style into the blade. The Kusanagi erupted in blue-white energy that crackled along the edge, turning every slash into something that would burn through armor and flesh alike.

Six jonin with Hero Water. One Uchiha with a legendary sword, the three-tomoe Sharingan, and every reason to make this count.

They drank.

The effect was immediate. Chakra surged through all six of them like water breaking through a dam. Their bodies straightened. Their eyes sharpened. The air around them thickened with visible chakra, six blue auras that hadn't been there a moment ago now burning bright enough to see in the rain.

Tenfold. For a short time. At the cost of years they'd never live.

Mikoto looked south. The rain fell. The darkness grew.

"Here he comes…" She said.

….

One moment the southern ridge was empty. The next, a figure stood on it. Tall. Armored. A breathing mask covering the lower half of his face. A kusarigama in one hand, the chain coiled at his hip.

The three-tomoe Sharingan locked onto him and what it saw made Mikoto's blood go cold.

She saw something, visible only to the Sharingan, a haze. Poison, seeping from his pores, from his breath even through the mask's filtration, killing the grass beneath his sandals with every step.

He'd already fought Jiraiya, Orochimaru, and Tsunade. There were marks on his armor. A dent in the left shoulder guard. A slash across the chest plate. A scorch mark on his back where someone's fire jutsu had found him. He was not untouched.

But he was Hanzō of the Salamander, and the marks of three legendary shinobi had not slowed him down.

"You're the one." Hanzō said.

His voice carried across the distance between them without effort. Deep. Calm.

"The girl with the red eyes. The one who took my ridges in a single day." He descended from the third ridge. "Three months of fortification. Six hundred defenders. And a child broke through them before sunset."

He stopped seventy meters from their line. Close enough to see their faces. Far enough to give himself room to fight.

His eyes moved across the six jonin. Then to the auras of tenfold chakra burning around them. Then to the lightning-coated sword in Mikoto's hand.

“I haven’t heard of any of you. I’m not sure what allowed you to grow your chakra to this level, but it isn’t enough. Not against me.”

"I know." Mikoto said.

"And you stand anyway."

"We stand." Hayashi said. His Hero Water chakra was burning so bright, the rain couldn’t touch him.

Hanzō respected them.

"Interesting," he said. "Then show me what that faith is worth."

Hayashi ran in first. He launched forward and the Hero Water turned his jonin speed into something beyond the average jonin. A fire jutsu erupted from his hands, the tenfold chakra amplifying a technique that should have been a medium fireball into a wall of flame that covered a twenty-meter front.

Hanzō flicked his kusarigama. The sickle end cut through the fire wall in a single arc, the blade trailing poison that vaporized in the flames and created a toxic cloud behind the dissipating jutsu. Hayashi came through the fire after his attack and Hanzō's chain caught his arm, wrapped twice, and whipped him sideways into Takeda's charge.

But Takeda had expected it. He dropped low, let Hayashi fly over him, and drove an earth jutsu upward from the ground. A stone fist the size of a barrel erupted beneath Hanzō's feet.

Hanzō stepped off the stone fist as it rose, using it as a platform to gain height, and from the air he swung the kusarigama in a wide arc that covered a fifteen-meter killing radius.

Mikoto intercepted.

Her sword met the kusarigama's chain in a clash that sent a shockwave through the rain. Lightning against poison. The Sharingan had read the arc's trajectory and she'd placed herself exactly where the chain's momentum was weakest, the point where a deflection was possible.

The chain deflected. Hanzō's eyes found hers through the rain.

For half a second, they looked at each other. Three red tomoe meeting whatever lived behind that mask.

Then he was on her.

The kusarigama came in from three angles in less than a second. The sickle from the left. The chain from below. The weighted end from behind, whipping around his body in a motion so fast that even the Sharingan could barely track the full arc. Mikoto parried the sickle with the Kusanagi, dodged the chain by twisting her torso, and the weighted end grazed her vest close enough to tear fabric.

She countered. An iai draw from a stance she hadn't been in a moment ago, the Kusanagi sheathing and re-drawing in a motion so fast that the blade was already through its arc before the eye could register the draw. Lightning-coated steel carved toward Hanzō's ribcage.

He blocked with the kusarigama's haft. The lightning bit into the metal and scorched his gloves. He pushed her off with raw strength that sent her skidding backward.

Fujita and Shibata hit him from both sides simultaneously. Twin water jutsu, amplified tenfold by Hero Water, compressed into lances that would have punched through walls. Hanzō spun the kusarigama in a full circle. The chain created a barrier of spinning metal that shattered both lances in a spray of mist.

Ueno came from above. An axe kick with Hero Water strength behind it, aimed at Hanzō's skull. Hanzō caught the leg with his free hand, and the impact from tenfold chakra actually drove him down an inch into the stone. His arm flexed. He threw Ueno thirty meters into the ridge face.

Mikoto was already there. She'd read the throw, predicted where Hanzō's guard would be open in the follow-through, and the Kusanagi came in from his right side in a lightning-fast draw that he had to abandon his stance to dodge.

The blade caught his arm guard. Cut through it, drawing blood.

Hanzō looked at the cut on his forearm. A thin line of red welling up beneath ruined armor. He looked at Mikoto. The Kusanagi's lightning chakra crackled in the rain.

"Commendable." His eyebrow raised.

He came at her and she could feel the shift. The kusarigama became a blur of metal and poison. Sickle and chain and weighted end, all three moving independently, all three aimed at different parts of her body, all three trailing purple-black venom that would kill on contact. Mikoto's Sharingan tracked them. Her body moved before her mind could process the full picture, the prediction turning her into something that flowed between the attacks like water through a net.

But she wasn't alone. Hayashi charged back in, his arm freed from the chain, Hero Water chakra blazing. His fist caught Hanzō's shoulder and the impact was real. Hanzō shifted from the blow. Mori followed with a wind jutsu that compressed the air into a cutting disc. Hanzō deflected it with the chain but the deflection left his left side open for a fraction of a second.

Mikoto took it. The Kusanagi extended mid-thrust, adding two meters of reach that hadn't been there, and the lightning-coated point punched through the edge of his chest plate. An inch into the muscle beneath the armor. But another wound. Another mark.

Hanzō swept the area with a chain arc that forced everyone back. He touched the new wound on his chest. Looked at the blood on his fingers.

"The Uchiha girl is quite the swordsman." He sounded pleased.

Then with a bite of his thumb, drawing blood, he slammed his palm on the ground.

"Summoning Jutsu."

The earth beneath them erupted.

Ibuse was enormous.

The salamander burst from the ground in an explosion of mud and stone, its massive body displacing the earth in a wave that knocked Takeda and Fujita off their feet. It was the size of a building. Brown-scaled. Eyeless. And from its gaping mouth, a cloud of poison mist was already pouring.

The battlefield changed in an instant.

The poison mist spread in a rolling wave that covered the ridge in seconds. Mikoto's Sharingan could see it, a visible cloud of death expanding outward, filling every gap, pooling in every depression. She held her breath and moved, leaping to higher ground where the mist was thinner. The Hero Water jonin scattered, some fast enough to escape the initial cloud, others catching a breath of it before they cleared the area.

Fujita caught too much. His movements stuttered. His Hero Water chakra flared as his body fought the toxin, but the poison was attacking his nervous system and even tenfold reserves couldn't purge what was already in his bloodstream. He staggered, went to one knee.

Hanzō was on him in two steps. The sickle opened his throat.

"A brave fallen warrior." Hanzō said over the body.

Five jonin left.

Ibuse swung its massive tail in an arc that cleared the ridgetop. Shibata dodged the tail but landed in a pocket of pooled mist. He inhaled once. His eyes went wide. His hands went to his throat. The poison worked fast. His Hero Water aura guttered like a candle in wind.

Mikoto landed beside him. Kusanagi in one hand, the other pulling him by his collar out of the mist pocket. But the damage was done. The poison was in his lungs.

"I'll hold the big one," he rasped. "Go."

He turned toward Ibuse. Hero Water chakra surging one last time. He ran at the salamander with an earth jutsu building between his hands, a boulder the size of a wagon that he hurled into Ibuse's face with tenfold force. The boulder cracked against the salamander's skull and Ibuse recoiled. Shibata followed the boulder in, driving a second jutsu into the gap between the creature's scales.

Ibuse's tail caught him on the return swing. Shibata flew off the ridge and didn't come back.

Four jonin left.

Mikoto couldn't fight Hanzō and deal with Ibuse at the same time. The salamander was too large, too toxic, too present. Every time she engaged Hanzō, Ibuse's poison mist crept closer. Every time she created distance to avoid the mist, Hanzō closed it.

She looked at Ibuse. Three tomoe spinning.

The Sharingan was famous for many things. Speed prediction. Jutsu copying. Genjutsu.

And the ability to control creatures was far easier than controlling humans.

Mikoto's eyes locked onto Ibuse's eyeless face. The genjutsu didn't need visible eyes to work, it needed a chakra network and senses. The three tomoe spun and the Sharingan's genjutsu poured through that connection.

Ibuse froze.

The massive salamander's body went rigid. Its tail stopped mid-swing. Its mouth closed, trapping the poison mist inside. For three seconds, the most dangerous summon on the battlefield was a statue.

Three seconds was enough.

Mikoto fed lightning into the Kusanagi until the blade screamed with electricity. She leaped thirty meters into the air, higher than Ibuse's head, and she came down with the Kusanagi aimed at the center of the salamander's skull.

The blade hit. Lightning punched through scale and bone. Ibuse shrieked, a sound that shook the ridge, and the massive body dissolved in an explosion of white smoke that blasted outward in all directions, clearing the poison mist from the ridge in a single massive displacement.

Hanzō watched his partner vanish. His eyes narrowed behind the mask.

"Truly amazing," He said "To think a mere child is capable of so much."

"I’m nothing special." Mikoto responded, which was her truth. She landed on the cleared ridge. The Kusanagi crackled in her hand. The Sharingan spun.

" I will have to take you seriously, now." Hanzō informed them.

The difference was instant. His chakra output surged. The poison haze around his body thickened until the rain that touched him hissed and evaporated. His speed, which had already been terrifying, increased to a level that the Sharingan could track but her body could barely answer.

Hayashi charged in with his chakra surging. Hanzō's sickle cut him open in a single swing. Hayashi hit the ground and didn't move.

Three jonin left.

Takeda and Ueno attacked together. Coordinated. A taijutsu combination that came from both sides with tenfold force behind their blows. Hanzō caught Takeda's fist with his palm, a fist amplified by Hero Water that should have shattered bones, and his grip held. His other hand whipped the chain around Ueno's neck. He pulled in opposite directions. Takeda's wrist broke. Ueno's neck didn't, but the chain's poison entered through the skin where the metal bit in.

Mikoto intercepted. The Kusanagi came in from Hanzō's blind side, a lightning-coated draw aimed at his spine. He released both jonin and spun, the kusarigama meeting the Kusanagi in a clash that cratered the stone beneath their feet.

They exchanged. Kusanagi against kusarigama. Lightning against poison. Speed against speed. The Sharingan let Mikoto read his movements a half-second before they happened and she used every fraction of that advantage. Parry the sickle, dodge the chain, counter with a draw, reset, repeat. The rain between them hung in the air from the displaced wind of their swings, droplets frozen mid-fall as two fighters moved faster than water could descend.

She landed a kick to his midsection that pushed him back two meters. She caught the chain with the Kusanagi's blade and sent lightning through it, the shock traveling up the metal toward his hands. He dropped the chain for one-third of a second, long enough for Mikoto's follow-up slash to score a line across his chest plate. Metal parted. Skin opened. Blood.

But he was faster. He was always faster. For every hit she landed, he gained a position. Each exchange left her slightly worse off, slightly more exposed, slightly closer to the edge of the ridge or the reach of a poison-haze pocket. He was herding her. The strategy of a man who'd been fighting wars longer than she'd been alive.

Ueno was dying. The chain poison had entered his bloodstream and his Hero Water chakra was burning itself out fighting the toxin instead of Hanzō. He fell to his knees, then to his face.

Two jonin left. Takeda, with a broken wrist, fighting one-handed. Mori, grey hair plastered to her face, Hero Water aura still burning bright.

Mikoto looked at the two survivors. At the four bodies around them. At Hanzō standing in the rain with her blood on his armor and his blood on her sword and the calm patience of a man who was winning.

She inhaled.

Deep. Deeper than deep. Past the lungs, past the blood, into the bones. The oxygen saturated everything. Every cell. Every fiber. Every nerve ending in her body flooded with a concentration of oxygen that pushed her physical capability to a place it had never been.

Fifth Activation.

Her breath became visible. White plumes of compressed air pouring from her mouth and nose regardless of the temperature, each exhale a visible cloud of force. Her skin flushed red. The flush of blood pushing through vessels that were expanding to carry more oxygen than they were designed to hold. Veins stood visible across her forearms, her neck, her temples. Her muscles tightened and defined themselves further as the oxygen saturation pushed them past their natural limits.

The first step cracked the stone beneath her foot.

The second step left an afterimage where she'd been standing.

By the third step, she was on Hanzō.

The Kusanagi came in faster than it had all fight. The lightning-coated blade screamed through the air and Hanzō's kusarigama came up to block and the impact sent a shockwave through the rain that flattened the grass for thirty meters in every direction.

Hanzō's feet slid backward. He slid. For the first time in the fight, her strike had physically moved him.

His eyes changed. She could see it through the Sharingan. The pupils contracting. The recognition of something that was a genuine threat.

She pressed. Iai draws that left afterimages of lightning in the air. The Kusanagi sheathing and drawing so fast that the eye registered only the arcs of blue-white energy where the blade had been. She slashed across his chest and the armor split open. She stabbed at his thigh and the blade punched through the greave and into flesh. She swung at his head and he ducked, but the wind pressure from the miss alone carved a furrow in the stone behind him.

Hanzō's lightning-scored armor smoked in the rain. Blood from the chest wound ran down his side. The greave on his right leg was ruined.

He was threatened.

She could see it. He was no longer fighting to win. He was fighting to survive the next thirty seconds because the girl in front of him was hitting harder than two of the Sannin combined.

But he was Hanzō. And he could see what the Fifth Activation was doing to her.

The veins on her arms weren't just visible. They were pulsing. The muscles in her legs quivered between strikes. Her breath, visible as compressed air, came in shorter and sharper intervals. The technique was eating her alive from the inside. Muscle fibers tearing. Tendons straining. Her body was running past its limits and every second brought it closer to collapse.

Hanzō shifted. His stance changed. The kusarigama retracted to a defensive configuration, the chain wrapping close to his body, the sickle held in a guard position. He stopped attacking.

He was going to outlast her.

Mikoto felt it. The clock ticking. The Fifth Activation's window closing. Her body sending signals that it was going to shut down whether she wanted it to or not. The muscles in her right arm, her sword arm, were screaming. The tendons in her legs felt like fraying rope.

She hit harder. The Kusanagi crashed against his guard. Each impact sent lightning through his kusarigama, through his arms, into his body. She scored another cut across his arm. Another slash that opened his side. She kicked his ribs and heard something crack beneath the armor.

He weathered it. Blocking what he needed to block. Dodging what he needed to dodge. Taking the hits he could afford to take. Patient. Enduring. Waiting for the storm to burn itself out.

And it was burning out. She could feel the Fifth Activation's grip loosening. The oxygen saturation dropping. The power fading. Five more seconds. Maybe ten.

"Mikoto!"

Mori's voice.

Mikoto's Sharingan caught the movement. Mori, the last advisor standing. Takeda had fallen sometime in the last twenty seconds, his broken wrist and the accumulated poison finally taking him down. Mori was alone. Hero Water blazing its final reserves. Her body trembling, not from the cold, from the water consuming her from within.

Mori ran at Hanzō from behind.

She didn't aim to wound him. She aimed to occupy him. Her entire body hit him, arms wrapping around his kusarigama arm, legs tangling with his, her Hero Water strength locking him in place. One second. Two seconds.

Hanzō twisted. The chain whipped around Mori's torso. The sickle found her back.

But she held on. Through the blade in her spine. Through the poison on the chain. Through the Hero Water burning the last of her life away.

"There's only one of you," she whispered. "Remember that."

She held him for three seconds.

Three seconds was everything.

Mikoto extended the Kusanagi.

The blade shot forward, tripling its length, and punched through Hanzō's right side beneath the ribs. In one side. Out the other. The legendary sword, the blade that could cut through nearly anything, driven through the body of the strongest shinobi alive.

Mikoto fed everything she had left into the blade. Every drop of lightning. Every remaining wisp of the Fifth Activation's fading power. The Kusanagi became a conduit and Hanzō's body became the ground, and lightning erupted through him in a cascade of blue-white energy that lit up the ridge like daylight.

Hanzō screamed.

The lightning coursed through his body for two full seconds. A legendary blade impaling him while lightning chakra scorched his insides.

Mikoto's hand tightened on the hilt. She tried to push more. Tried to find another volt, another spark, another fraction of chakra to pour through the blade and finish what she'd started.

There was nothing left.

The Fifth Activation died. The lightning flickered and went out. Her muscles gave. Her grip loosened on the Kusanagi's handle. Her legs buckled.

She fell.

Face-down on the ridge stone. The rain hitting her back. Her body refusing to move. Every muscle fiber in her arms and legs was torn. Her tendons were frayed. Her chakra reserves, her massive, seemingly bottomless reserves, were empty for the first time in her life.

She could see the stone in front of her nose. That was all she could see. The Sharingan was still active, three tomoe spinning, showing her the individual minerals in the rock beneath her face.

She heard the sound of the Kusanagi being pulled from flesh.

A wet, grinding sound. Then a cough. Then footsteps. Slow. Heavy. Coming closer.

Hanzō's sandals appeared in front of her face.

He was standing. The blade wound in his side was pouring blood. His armor was ruined across the chest and right leg. Lightning burns marked his exposed skin in branching patterns. He was breathing hard, each exhale filtered through the mask in a rasp that hadn't been there at the start of the fight.

She actually managed to injure me…

He looked down at her. Then at the Kusanagi in his hand, pulled from his own body, her blood and his blood mixed on the blade. Then at the six bodies scattered across the ridge. Six jonin who'd dosed themselves willingly to fight beside this girl.

"Your people drank some sort of drug for you," he said. His voice was strained. Pain underneath the calm. "It increased their power but shortened their lives, all to stand between you and me. And when they fell, you activated a technique that was tearing you apart from the inside." He paused. "Why?"

Mikoto's mouth moved. The words came out as a whisper against the stone.

"Because... they're my comrades. I couldn't... let them die alone."

"They chose to die. For you."

"I wanted… them to run…."

Hanzō was quiet for a long time. The rain fell on both of them.

"I have fought many shinobi," he said. "Strong people. Dangerous people." He knelt beside her. She could see his mask up close. The scratches on the metal. The village symbol engraved on the forehead plate.

"But I have never fought someone whose subordinates would give their lives so willingly," he said. "That is not strength. That is not skill. That is something else."

He set the Kusanagi on the ground beside her hand.

"That is faith," he said. "And faith does not die when the faithful fall. It lives on in the one they believed in."

He stood. The wound in his side bled freely. He pressed one hand against it.

"I fought Jiraiya, Tsunade, and Orochimaru of the Leaf tonight," Hanzō said. "I named them the Sannin for surviving me. Three legendary ninja." He looked down at her. "But you are something different. You did not merely survive. You drew my blood. You dismissed my partner. You put a blade through my body. And you did it for your people, not for glory."

He turned away. Took a step south. Stopped.

"From this moment, you will be known to me and to all who hear my name," he said. "Konoha's Crimson Angel. Refer to yourself as such, in exchange for your life."

He walked south into the rain and the darkness, leaving behind a ridge of dead jonin and a fourteen-year-old girl who couldn't move.

Mikoto lay on the stone. The rain washed the blood from the ground around her. The Kusanagi lay beside her hand. Six bodies lay around her.

She couldn't move. She couldn't heal. She couldn't do anything except breathe and feel the rain and listen to the silence that the dead leave behind.

She closed her eyes. Unaware the bandaged sword she placed on a rock beforehand was slowly crawling its way over to its foolish owner. The price of her defeat was simply because she didn’t use it! If she used it instead of that stupid skinny blade, she would’ve won! Or at least, not have lost so badly. Hmph. Next time its stupid owner tries to fight without out, it won’t even bother healing her afterward!

Shark Skin plopped itself onto Mikoto and slowly helped her recover.

Until then, the rain fell, and the ridge was quiet, and Konoha's Crimson Angel lay among the bodies of the people who'd believed in her future potential enough to die.