Chapter 101: Lightning and Youth!

While a Leaf army marched on Iwagakure, the Raikage put his fist through his map table.

It was a heavy table. Oak, two hands thick, carried all the way from the Land of Lightning on the backs of four chunin because A refused to plan a war on anything that might break if he leaned on it. It still broke. The map of the Land of Hot Water folded down into the split along with every marker on it, and the ink pot rolled off the edge and burst on the floor of the command tent.

Nobody in the tent said anything.

Darui stood by the tent pole with his hands in his pockets and his eyes half-closed. C stood beside him with his arms folded. Two jonin by the entrance were trying very hard to look like part of the canvas.

The messenger on his knees in the middle of the tent had stopped talking when the table broke. He hadn't started again.

"Finish." A said.

"Y-yes, Lord Raikage." The messenger swallowed. "Mist has withdrawn from the Land of Fire entirely. Their ships left the southern coast four days ago. Our people in the south confirm it. Konoha returned one of their Seven Swords to them in exchange." He swallowed again. "The Leaf and Sand forces from that front are already moving north. Toward us. At their pace, a week. Perhaps less."

"And Stone."

"Stone has lost both its jinchuriki on its front. The Four-Tails is gone. The Five-Tails withdrew after fighting a pair of Leaf shinobi and has not returned to the front as of yet. And a Leaf army has crossed into the Land of Earth and is marching on Iwagakure." He hesitated. "The reports say the Green Devil is walking at the front of it."

The tent was quiet.

A straightened up from the ruined table. He was the largest man in the camp by a head and a half, broad as a door, his blond hair combed back. His white haori hung open over his bare chest. Heavy gold vambraces circled both his forearms, thick as a man's thigh.

"Three villages," he said. "Three villages marched on Konoha. Three fronts. We were supposed to crush them between us like a nut." He looked down at the map folded into the split oak. "Mist is gone. Stone is pushed back to their village. And in a week, every Leaf and Sand shinobi from the south will be standing on the other side of that crater."

"Boss." Darui said.

"I know what you're going to say."

"Then I'll say it anyway." Darui didn't open his eyes any wider. "That's what they want. They've been sitting in that camp for weeks letting us bleed into their lines. They want you to come to them."

"Then I'll go to them." A turned toward the tent flap. "Their Hokage is there. The one who opened this war by killing thousands of my men with one punch before most of them had finished their breakfast." His voice didn't rise. It got lower. "I have waited for weeks to see that man up close."

"Lord Raikage." C stepped forward. "The Fifth Hokage isn't alone. Senju Tsunade is with him. If you go in alone..."

"Who said he's going in alone?"

The voice came from outside the tent. Then the flap pushed open and a man ducked in under it, almost as big as A, dark skinned and blond haired like him, sunglasses over his eyes even though the sun had barely come up, a long white scarf around his neck and seven swords strapped across his back in a fan.

"Ya fool, ya fool, ya think ya go solo?" Killer B pointed at his brother with both hands. "Raikage on his own? That's a no-go, bro!"

"B."

"Lord Jinchuriki to you."

"B. Get out of my tent."

"Can't do it." B dropped his hands. The grin stayed on his face, but something under it had stopped smiling. "You go, I go. That's the deal. Been the deal since I was a kid."

A looked at his brother for a long moment.

"You heard C," A said finally. "Tsunade is there."

"I heard."

"You know who she is."

"Legendary Sannin. Strongest woman alive. Hits like a falling mountain, heals like it never happened." B shrugged. "So I don't let her hit me. Easy as dat."

"There's something else." A's voice dropped, low enough that the jonin by the entrance leaned in without meaning to. "Years ago. Before she went back to Konoha. I met her. We arm-wrestled for a favor."

B's eyebrows went up over his sunglasses. "You lost."

"I won," A said. "With speed. She beat me on strength. I'll admit that to nobody but you." He paused. "And afterward, one of my men was cut open in front of her, and she froze. White as paper. Hands shaking. The great Senju Tsunade couldn't look at a little blood without falling apart."

B was quiet.

"If you get in close to her," A said, "and she's on top of you, make her bleed. Or make her see it. She'll lock up. And then you finish her."

"Got it."

A turned to Darui and C. "Nobody follows us in. The army holds the east. If the Leaf comes across the crater after us, you hold them at the rim. But nobody goes down into that crater while we're in it." He looked at the jonin by the entrance. "Nobody, I don’t care what happens. When Kage fight, everything nearby dies. I'm not losing more of my men to these tree-hugging cowards!"

"Yes, Lord Raikage."

A stepped over the broken table and walked out into the grey dawn. B followed him.

Behind them, Darui finally opened his eyes all the way and looked at C.

"He's going to do something stupid." Darui said.

"As his aides, we’re here to clean up his mess." C said.

On the western side of the crater, the Fifth Hokage was crying.

He was sitting at the head of the long table in Konoha's command tent with a hawk's message spread open in front of him, and the tears were running down his face in two streams and dripping off his chin and soaking into the paper. His shoulders were shaking. His nose was running. He had both fists clenched on the table on either side of the message and every few seconds he let out a wet, hiccupping sob that rattled the tea cups.

"Tenten..." he wailed. "My sweet little girl..."

The six jonin standing around the table went on studying the maps.

"She drove off the Five-Tails..." Guy lifted the message and pressed it to his chest. "Then she went south, and she defeated one of the Seven Swordsmen of the Mist, and the Mist went home!" He slammed the paper down on the table. "My student! My little girl who used to throw a fit when she couldn’t get her way!"

"Guy."

"The springtime of her youth has bloomed into a summer of unparalleled glory!"

"Guy." Tsunade was standing at the other end of the table with her arms folded under her chest and a vein throbbing at her temple. "Pull yourself together. You're the Hokage."

"I am also her sensei!" Guy turned his streaming face toward her. "And she wants to surpass you, Tsunade-sama! She has said so since she was twelve years old! Doesn't that move you?!"

"No." Tsunade's eye twitched. "What moves me is watching a grown man, a Hokage, the strongest shinobi in the village, blubbering like a little girl in front of his own men in the middle of a war."

"I am not blubbering! I am expressing the overwhelming pride of a teacher!"

"You're dripping on the maps."

Guy looked down. He was. He pulled a handkerchief out of his vest and blew his nose.

The jonin went on studying the maps.

None of them looked up. None of them looked embarrassed. One of them, an older Inuzuka with a scar through his eyebrow, slid a fresh handkerchief across the table toward the Hokage without taking his eyes off the troop markers, and Guy took it with a grateful sob. They'd been on this front for weeks. They'd seen him emote more times than any man should. He was the most emotional person any of them had ever served under, and every single one of them would have walked into a fire if he asked them to.

Tsunade pinched the bridge of her nose. "Shameful," she muttered. "Absolutely shameful."

"Lord Hokage! Lady Tsunade!"

The tent flap snapped open. A Hyuga chunin stood in the entrance, her Byakugan still active, the veins at her temples standing out against her pale skin. She was breathing hard.

"The Raikage," she said. "He just left their camp. He's coming across the crater. Fast. The Eight-Tails' host is with him."

The tent went silent.

Guy lowered the handkerchief.

The tears were still wet on his face. His nose was still red. But something changed upon hearing that. And when he stood up from the table he was a different man than the one who'd been sitting at it.

"How far?"

"Three kilometers. Two and a half now." The Hyuga's eyes were unfocused, tracking something through the canvas. "The other one's chakra is..." She swallowed. "It's huge..."

"Everyone below jonin rank, back from the west," Guy said. "One kilometer. Now. Medics too. Pull the field hospital back past the second ridge." He looked at the six jonin around the table. "You six take the rim. If their army comes across after them, you hold them there. But nobody goes down into the crater. Nobody."

"Yes, Lord Hokage."

Guy stepped around the table. Tsunade was already moving toward the flap.

"Tsunade-sama."

"What?"

He held up his thumb at his side, where nobody else could see it.

She looked at it. She looked at his face, still wet, still red around the eyes, and dead serious underneath.

"Don't you dare make me need to heal you more than once." She groaned.

"No promises!"

They went out into the dawn together.

…

The crater was a kilometer across.

Guy had made it on the first morning of the war. The Seventh Gate, a single Daytime Tiger, and thousands of Cloud shinobi who'd been marching in formation across a valley in the Land of Hot Water had stopped existing. Where the valley had been there was now a crater of black glass and broken stone, its floor fused smooth by the heat of the blast, its walls jagged and steep. Weeks of rain had pooled in its lowest point and frozen at night into a skin of grey ice. Nothing grew in it. Nobody had set foot on its floor since.

Konoha held the west. Cloud held the east. Between them was a kilometer of nothing.

Across that nothing came a streak of white lightning.

It went over the crater floor. Long low jumps, the ground cracking every time it touched down, the air behind it splitting with a sound like a whip, and it wasn't coming toward the center of the crater. It was coming straight across at the west. Straight at the command tent.

Guy stepped to the edge of the rim.

"First Gate. Gate of Opening. Open."

The world got sharper.

"Second Gate. Gate of Healing. Open. Third Gate. Gate of Life. Open."

His skin flushed red from his scalp to his feet. Veins rose across his arms and neck and face. His pupils vanished.

"Fourth Gate. Gate of Pain. Open. Fifth Gate. Gate of Limit. Open."

The rim cracked under his sandals.

Something wet and cool settled on the back of his neck. Guy didn't look. He knew what it was. A slug the size of a kitten, white and blue, clinging to the skin between his shoulder blades, sent there by the woman walking up beside him with her sleeves rolled to the elbow and the diamond on her forehead glowing faintly violet.

"Katsuyu will keep you together," Tsunade said. "Try not to make her work too hard."

"Thank you, Katsuyu-sama!"

"You're welcome, Konoha’s new Hokage." A small polite voice from the back of his neck said.

The streak of lightning was four hundred meters away. Three hundred.

Guy jumped.

He shot off the rim. Out over the crater, high, the wind tearing at his robes, and the lightning streak saw him coming and changed its angle and came up to meet him, and for one instant Guy saw the man inside the lightning. Huge. Blond-haired. White haori snapping out behind him. The lightning crawled across his whole body like a living thing, standing his hair straight up off his scalp, crackling across the gold vambraces on his forearms, and his right arm was cocked out wide and stiff at shoulder height.

A lariat. Aimed at Guy's throat.

Guy ducked under it.

In midair, there was nothing to duck with but his own body, so he pulled his knees to his chest and dropped his head and the Raikage's forearm went over the top of his skull close enough to singe his hair. Guy unfolded on the other side of the arm, inside A's guard, chest to chest with him, and his arms went around the Raikage's waist.

The lightning burned. It came through his robes and into his skin in a hundred small bites. Guy held on anyway.

He arched his back.

The two of them turned over in the air. Guy bent backward from the waist and pulled A over with him, the Raikage's legs going up and over Guy's head, a suplex with nothing under it but a hundred meters of empty air and the black glass of the crater floor rushing up at them both.

“HOOOOOHHHH!!!” Guy shouted.

They crashed. Guy drove A into the crater floor head and shoulders first. The black glass shattered in a star thirty meters wide. Shards went up in a glittering spray and a shockwave rolled out across the floor and broke the ice on the frozen pool into a thousand floating plates. Guy let go and rolled clear and came up on his feet.

A was already up.

He pushed himself out of the crater he'd made with both hands, shook his head once like a dog shaking off water, and stood. There was a cut along his scalp where the glass had opened it. The lightning around his body crackled over the wound and sealed it shut with a hiss of cauterized skin. He rolled his shoulders. He looked at Guy.

"So you're the new Hokage for Konoha…" A glared.

"Might Guy! The Fifth Hokage of the Hidden Leaf! Konoha's Sublime Green Beast!" Guy shouted as he gave him a serious look and a thumbs down. "It isn’t a pleasure to meet you, Lord Raikage!"

A's lip curled back from his teeth. "You killed thousands of my men,” He pointed out.

"Yes." Guy's thumb lowered. "And you planned to destroy my home and everyone I've sworn to protect. I don’t regret it."

A came at him at incredible speeds. One moment A was standing twenty meters away and the next his fist was in front of Guy's face, a straight right with the whole weight of his body behind it and lightning screaming off the knuckles, and the afterimage of him was still standing where he'd started.

Guy slipped it. Left. The fist went past his right ear and the wind of it alone split the skin of his cheek. Guy came back with a left elbow up into A's jaw. It landed. The lightning around A's face flared white where Guy's elbow hit it and something crunched, and Guy's own elbow screamed as the current went up his arm into his shoulder. A's head snapped sideways. He didn't stagger. He turned his head back like he'd been lightly slapped and grabbed Guy's left wrist with his right hand.

His hand closed like a vise.

He pulled Guy in and his left hand came up flat and open toward Guy's face, fingers spread to grab, to crush. Guy turned his head and caught the palm on his forehead instead of his eyes and A's fingers closed on his skull anyway and squeezed.

The bones of his skull creaking under fingers that could crush stone. Lightning running into his scalp.

Guy kicked him in the knee. 

A's leg buckled half an inch. His grip slipped half an inch. Guy tore his head out of the hand, twisted his wrist free, dropped, swept with his right leg at A's ankles. A jumped it. Guy came up out of the sweep and drove a fist into the Raikage's stomach with his hips behind it.

A's abdomen was like hitting a wall wrapped in a storm. The lightning flared. The force went through anyway, and A slid backward three meters across the glass with his heels gouging furrows.

"Not bad!" A said. He’d heard of Might Guy’s reputation before but to think he was capable of keeping up with him.

A blitzed forward again. This time Guy met him in the middle. They collided like two rockslides meeting. Fists, forearms, shins, knees. A threw a backhanded chop at Guy's neck with lightning streaming off the edge of his hand. Guy blocked it with his forearm and the impact shattered the glass under both their feet. Guy hooked his free arm under A's armpit and tried to turn him for a hip throw. A planted, wouldn't move, and drove a knee up into Guy's ribs. Guy felt one crack. He felt Katsuyu pulse against the back of his neck and the crack knit closed again almost before the pain arrived.

He grabbed the knee as it came down. Trapped it against his side. Turned.

A went over his hip and hit the glass on his back.

Guy went for the arm. Down on top of him, legs across his chest, A's right arm trapped between Guy's thighs, Guy's hands locked around the Raikage's wrist and pulling back against the elbow.

A sat up.

With Guy on top of him. With his arm locked. He just sat up, all that weight and muscle and lightning lifting Guy off the ground like a child, and he got his feet under him and stood, Guy still wrapped around his arm, and lifted that arm over his head with Guy hanging off it.

Then he brought it down.

Guy let go a moment before the slam and hit the glass on his own, and the floor cratered under him. A’s fist came down where his face had been.

Guy rolled. Kicked off. Came up ten meters away.

"You really are Konoha’s greatest taijutsu specialist." A scoffed.

"Taijutsu is my whole life, Lord Raikage. I'm not about to let another man beat me at it without dying at the very least."

A looked at him. Then he reached for his right forearm with his left hand and undid the clasp on the gold vambrace.

It fell. It hit the glass and sank into it, a full hand's depth, with a sound like a temple bell dropped from a roof. A undid the left. It fell beside the first and cracked the floor in a ring.

He rolled his wrists. The lightning around his arms brightened. His hair stood up straighter.

“I can arrange that.”

Guy smirked.

"Weights," he said. "You fight with weights too."

"Since I was a boy."

"So have I!" Guy shrugged off his Hokage robes. They hit the glass and cracked it wider than both vambraces together.

A frowned at the sight before vanishing.

"Sixth Gate. Gate of Joy. Open."

A green aura blazed off Guy's skin.

He turned and caught the Raikage's fist on his crossed forearms a heartbeat before it would have taken his head off, and the two of them went skidding sideways across the crater floor together, and the fight sped up past anything the people on the rims could follow.

On the far side of the crater, near the frozen pool, B came down out of the sky. He landed on one knee in the black glass and stood up slowly. The scarf around his neck stirred in the wind. The seven swords had come off his back somewhere in the air, and now they were in places swords didn't belong: one tucked under his left arm, one in the crook of each elbow, one behind his right knee, one pressed flat against his stomach, one under his jaw against the side of his neck, one clenched in his teeth. All of them crackling faintly with lightning. All of them pointed in different directions.

He wasn't rapping and he wasn't smiling.

Tsunade landed thirty meters in front of him. She took her green haori off her shoulders, folded it once, and dropped it on the ice behind her. Underneath, her arms were bare.

"Killer B." She greeted.

B didn't take the sword out of his teeth to answer. He just looked at her through his sunglasses.

Then he took it out.

"Queen of Slugs. Tsunade of the Leaf." he said.

"Head of Konoha’s Hospital nowadays." She cracked her knuckles.

"Hospital Director, huh." He turned the sword from his mouth over in his fingers. "Then maybe you know something. Konoha took somebody from us. On the Sand front, last year. Yugito Nii. My teammate." His voice didn't change. "Is she alive?"

Tsunade looked at him.

"She's alive." Tsunade said.

B didn't move.

"She's in Konoha. Under guard." Tsunade's voice was flat. "And me and that guy are the only ones standing on this battlefield who know exactly where we’re keeping her."

He was quiet for a moment. Then B put the sword back between his teeth. He flipped toward her. He spun as he came, a looping, lurching, stuttering movement that didn't look like it should be possible, and the seven blades swung with him, from his elbows, his knees, his neck, from under his arm, every one of them on a different arc, at a different height, coming from a different direction.

Tsunade didn't bother trying to read it. She stepped back from the first blade and the second blade cut her across the forearm. She turned from the third and the fourth opened a line along her ribs. She didn't care. She was watching for two things only: anything coming at her heart, anything coming at her head. Everything else, she let slice.

A blade came at her throat from under B's jaw. She leaned. It missed. A blade came at her chest from his left elbow. She turned her shoulder. It went in under her collarbone instead. Deep. She felt it scrape bone.

She punched at him. He wasn't there. He'd already spun away, the sword pulling out of her shoulder as he went, and her fist went through empty air and the air cracked like thunder and the frozen pool behind him split in half from the wind of it alone. Her injuries healed automatically.

He came back. Spinning, lurching, swinging. She let him cut her. Her arm. Her thigh. Her side. Every cut was shallow, and a second later she saw the pattern. He kept going for her legs. Her arms. Her shoulders. Places that would bleed and slow her and not kill her. Twice his blade came at her heart. Twice it turned at the last instant and went into muscle instead.

He's holding back, Tsunade thought. He thinks if he kills me, he'll never find her. Heh… and they call me a sucker.

She stopped dodging. She walked into him. B saw it and swung harder. A blade went into her stomach. A blade opened her cheek. A blade punched through her right forearm and out the other side. She kept walking. She was close enough that he couldn't spin away without turning his back. He dragged the blade in the crook of his right elbow across his own left forearm, and blood spurted out of him in a thick red rope.

He flung it into her face.

It hit her across the eyes. Hot. Running down her nose and into the corners of her mouth. She could taste it.

B was already moving. Spinning in close, the blade in his teeth turned at her throat, the blades at his elbows coming for her heart from both sides, all of it timed for the moment she froze.

Tsunade didn't freeze like he expected. She'd beaten it thanks to that blond knucklehead. She didn't even blink. She closed her hand on his shoulder and didn't let go. The two blades from his elbows went into her. One in her side. One in her shoulder. Neither in her heart.

B's eyes went wide behind his sunglasses.

Tsunade drew back her right arm, the one with the hole through the forearm.

"That problem of mine has already been beaten, sucker." She grinned.

She hit him in the center of the chest. The sound was like a mountain splitting. The black glass of the crater floor underneath them caved in a twenty-meter bowl. The frozen pool exploded into a geyser of ice and water. And B left the ground.

He went backward through the air so fast he looked like a blur. His sunglasses went one way and four of his swords went another and he hit the wall of the crater three hundred meters away and didn't stop. He went through it. Stone and glass and dirt exploded out of the crater wall and he kept going, out over the rim, over the heads of the Cloud army on the eastern ridge, who ducked as he passed over them screaming, over the ridge, over the forest beyond it, the trees bending flat in a line under the wind of his passing.

He came down a kilometer and a half away in a grove of cedars and took eleven of them down with him.

Then nothing.

Tsunade straightened up. She pulled the sword out of her shoulder and dropped it. She pulled the one out of her side and dropped it. She wiped his blood off her face with the back of her wrist.

"Idiot." She chuckled.

A was locked with Guy in the middle of the crater, his hands locked with Guy's, both of them shoving with everything they had, the glass under their feet cracking in a spreading web, when the eastern wall of the crater blew apart and something went over the rim screaming in a familiar voice.

His head turned.

He couldn't help it. Half an inch. Toward the east. Toward the hole in the crater wall and the line of flattened trees beyond it.

Guy hit him.

A knee into the stomach, under the ribs. A folded around it. Guy brought both fists down on the back of his neck like a hammer and drove him face first into the glass.

A came up roaring. He grabbed Guy by the front of the suit with one hand and threw him away. Guy went flying a hundred meters and hit the crater floor and rolled and came up on one knee, and A didn't follow him.

A was looking east.

"B…" He muttered.

Then, out past the eastern ridge, out past the line of flattened cedars, something lit up the sky. Red. Dark red, almost black, rising off the forest in a column like smoke from a fire.

The column moved. It came back toward the crater. Fast.

It came over the eastern ridge and the Cloud shinobi there scattered from it. It came down into the crater and hit the glass beside A in a burst of shattering black stone.

It was B. Or it was B's shape. A cloak of chakra covered him from head to foot, red and bubbling and seething, two long horns rising from the top of it where his head was. Under the cloak, A could see what her punch had done. His chest was caved in. His ribs were pushed in toward his spine. His breathing was a wet rattle. One arm was broken.

But the cloak was holding him together. Every time his chest tried to fall in on itself, the red chakra pushed back. The Eight-Tails was holding its host's body in one piece with its own power, by force, cell by cell, like a man holding a broken pot together with both hands.

B’s voice came out of the cloak. It was rough. “She played me, bro.”

A looked at his brother’s healing chest. At the cloak. At the blood running out of the corners of the cloak’s mouth.

“Is the Nii girl alive?”

“Don’t know. Don’t care right now.” B straightened, and something inside his chest made a sound like gravel being ground under a boot. "She's gonna tell me the truth after or we’ll get it from the green guy."

A turned his head and looked across the crater at Tsunade. She'd walked up beside Guy. She was standing with her arms folded, covered in her own blood and B's, completely unhurt.

"You should've stayed at the camp." A said to his brother.

“And let you go solo? Still a no-go, bro.” 

A laughed.

Then he raised his right arm out to the side, straight, stiff, at shoulder height. And B, beside him, raised his left.

Guy saw the shape of it.

"Lady Tsunade, get ready!"

"I see it."

"Lightning Style," the brothers said together, "Double Lariat!"

They rushed in.

Side by side. Together, so close that A's lightning and B's red chakra touched at the shoulders and spat sparks between them. Two arms out, two walls of muscle and chakra and lightning, crossing the crater floor in a single straight line, and the glass under their feet exploded behind them in a trail.

Guy and Tsunade split. She went left. He went right. The brothers split with them. A angling toward Guy and B angling toward Tsunade.

Guy got his forearms up. A's arm hit them like a falling tree. Both of Guy's forearms broke. The lariat went through his guard and into his chest and lifted him off his feet and carried him, and fifty meters to his left he saw Tsunade take B’s lariat across her crossed arms and get carried off the ground the same way, and then the two of them hit the western crater wall at the same moment fifty meters apart and went into it.

Rocks came down on top of them.

Katsuyu pulsed against the back of Guy’s neck. He felt the bones in his forearms grind and knit. He felt the rib that had cracked again close up. It hurt more coming back together than it had breaking. He pushed the rock off and stood up. Fifty meters down the wall, a pile of stone burst outward and Tsunade stepped out of it, spitting blood. Her arms were bending in the wrong direction. She looked at them, and they cracked back into place.

She walked over to him. Neither of them was in a hurry. Across the crater, the brothers had stopped in the middle of the floor and were waiting.

"We’ve never fought together, Guy. "

"We'll just have to learn on the fly!" Guy chuckled with blood on his teeth. "That's what youth is for, Tsunade-sama!"

"I'm older than I look, you know."

"Youth is a state of mind!"

Tsunade looked at him like she wanted to hit him harder than she'd hit B. Then she sighed and rolled her shoulders.

"Fine," She said. "Do your thing."

Guy stepped forward. He planted his feet on the glass. Behind him, Katsuyu clung tight to the back of his neck.

"Seventh Gate," Guy said quietly. "Gate of Wonder. Open."

The sweat came out of every pore in his body at once, and it was blue, and it turned to steam the instant it touched the air. It rose off him in a column. Pale blue, roaring, bending the light around him so his outline wavered like something seen through heat over a summer road. His muscles tore. All of them. Every fiber in his body screamed and split. Katsuyu pulsed and pulsed and pulsed against his neck, stitching, mending, keeping up.

Across the crater, the brothers watched the blue column rise. B looked at it. Then he looked down at his healing body under the red cloak.

"Eighto, we’re gonna need more power." B said.

His cloak changed. The red went darker. Darker. Almost black, the color of dried blood, and it thickened, and it spread, and it stopped being a cloak and became a skin. White patches opened in it where his eyes were. The two horns grew. Curved. Lengthened. And behind him, one after another, tails began to rise out of the dark chakra, long and thick and tapering like the arms of an octopus, four, six, eight of them, coiling and uncoiling in the air.

Beside him, A's lightning surged. It went from a crackle to a roar. It stood off his body in sheets. His hair went straight up off his scalp like a candle flame and his shadow on the black glass flickered white and black and white again.

On the west, Leaf shinobi took an involuntary step back. On the east, so did Cloud’s. In the middle of the crater, Might Guy smiled through the blue steam pouring off his face, and pointed.

"Lord Raikage! Eight-Tails!" he called. "Let's see whose springtime burns brighter!"

The four rushed at each other.