Chapter 34.4- One Thousand Hands

He remained stationary as I approached and my fingers stretched out at him. Just like earlier, his cane moved in place to block my attack, and then I kept going. “Two palms” I muttered, “Four”, “Eight” I kept going until I reached ‘Sixty-Four palms and he kept pace with me all the while, blocking each and every attack as it came. I settled into a scowl and then kept going after that. The next sixty four strikes to complete the one hundred and twenty eight palms jutsu came out with perfect form even as I tried to swallow the disappointment that came with having one of my most dangerous taijutsu combos basically brushed aside. Still, it was not all disappointment. I could see my clone as he went through seals and wrote down various scripts at various points around us.

Pincer Two was one of my more eccentric strategies. That was because it wasn’t a pincer attack as the name suggested. Most shinobi had really good hearing so they’d hear that and fight with the expectation that the clone would jump in at some point, but that was not the case. Pincer Two had me confronting the target with the first stage of my fire armour and taijutsu while my clone prepared a unique barrier that would basically close us off from the surrounding environment.

“Your jutsu works with some sort of radius. Everything that gets within a certain distance of you gets slower and slower. What I can’t tell is if you’re messing with time itself or just our shared perception of it. But if it was just a matter of perception, then your old bones would have struggled to block those shuriken from earlier. They would have still been moving as quickly as they had been in reality and perception alone can not account for the shit you pulled back there” I said while we traded blows. Now that I knew that he was going to be much faster than I was, after one hundred and twenty eight palms, I’d been content with falling back into defence.

When I felt the barrier come up, I smiled internally while trying not to give anything away. I slapped his cane away at the very last second and dashed right into the attack, while intensifying the amount of chakra I pumped into my chakra armour. I turned my chakra into fire natured chakra as quickly as I released it from my body and just kept going. His cane blocked each attack I sent. He was keen to allow me exhaust myself against his defenses I’d noticed. Even when I fell back and allowed him to attack, he barely did so, preferring to bait me with fake openings. All in all, his taijutsu was good, but I was a Hyuga. Good would not be enough. Only this jutsu kept us at anything even resembling equality. But that was what my plan was going to overcome.

My next attack did not come from stretched fingers as I abandoned the gentle fist in favour of the academy taijutsu style. I punched at his head, forcing his cane up to block, and this time I could hear the wood creak from the force in the attack. My knee rose to smash into his midsection and the same cane was in the way again. I breathed in and out, flaring the flames that cloaked me even more, noting how the floor beneath me was beginning to crack.