Chapter 58.4- One Thousand hands

This time, with a smile on her face to match mine, she mirrored my movements, coming for me just as I came for her.

She struck first or at least tired to, a sweeping kick that hit nothing but air as I jumped straight over it, and as I fell, I dropped two kunai aimed right at her. She deflected the both of them with immense force, sending them flying into the distance. One disadvantage of facing someone that knew all your tricks was that they knew all your tricks. I landed on the floor and blacked two straight punches from her before I flexedd my chakra, shattering the genjutsu just in time to dance away from a swing of her gunbai.

The next swing I met with my hands, clapping my hands with the gunbai’s flat edge between them, holding her off from her attempt to bisect me with the thing. She strained, but focused as I was, there was little she could do against my strength. So it wasn’t any surprise that she let go of the gunbai before backflipping.

As she did so, her fingers lashed out, sending a dozen shuriken in my direction with a flicker of motion. I spat out a gust of wind that sent the throwing stars flying awry, and forced her to come at me again. I pressed down on the gunbai for a second before tossing it off to the side and dodging backwards from a kunai aimed right between my eyes. Her movements brought her close enough that she could do little to prevent my snap kick sinking into her midsection. No effect once more, and this time, she retaliated with a familiar bit of red chakra forming around her.

Her sussano formed in a matter of seconds, a sign that she had been training it for a while. It was a full bodied one, a red specter of death. Humanoid with two legs and to long gangly hands, it reached so high that it was probably visible even above the treeline of the massive forest that surrounded us in all directions. I breathed out once and formed a single hand sign.

Hashirama’s notes were a fountain of knowledge on all sorts of things. But if there was one thing he rarely spoke about, it was his fights with Madara. Almost like he was not proud of them at all. But where he failed, his younger brother stepped up. And according to Tobirama Senju , there were two ways to beat the Sussano. Either match it with a construct of one’s own— something like Hisharama’s thousand hand buddha or even wood golem. The second way was to keep it off balance.

Thankfully, mud release gave me the opportunity to do both.

“Sage Art: Descent into the Underworld” I began.