Chapter 18.5- One Thousand Hands

XXXXXXX

Done reminiscing about how we had gotten here, I watched as my water release exploding colliding wave created a geyser of water that shot from the ground around us before crashing towards her like a tsunami. Few things could match the crushing force of water en masse, and the beach head we stood atop got to witness this fact firsthand. First of all, the water carried Asami ad whatever defence she’d formed around herself towards the sea, just as it swept around to get her teammate. I paid him no attention, trusting Uzume and Shika to handle the water and the distraction it was going to cause in their fight while I jumped towards Toshiro. He needed help, and he needed it yesterday.

I was only a few metres away from him when my eyes caught Asami appearing from beneath the waves. I hoped she’d be a bit slower on the uptake. But I was proven wrong as a hail of ice needles fell upon the ground that separated Toshiro and I, and forced me to bank away from my teammate. Her threat was clear. Focus on me, or I will target your teammate. I weaved two seals and clapped my hands in her direction. Against all odds, she leaned out of the way in time for y lightning release: thunderbolt to strike nothing but thin air.

She formed a series of seals, much less than the 44 that the jutsu was supposed to take, and the water around her began to take a very familiar ethereal form. This was a jutsu that Granduncle Tobirama had shown me some years ago, and I silently gulped as thew water dragon formed around her with glowing yellow eyes.

As the dragon dove down, I silently said a prayer to a god I did not believe in that I would manage to do this successfully this time. Hit with a bolt of inspiration that I could not for the life of me trace the source, I began with the elemental chakra first. From the same inspiration, I chose to begin with water release and not wind. The Wind release: Rasenshuriken was not my jutsu. It was not mine. This one, would be. Water first. More water release chakra than I’d ever made in my life. Water release chakra with only one concept in mind. Pressure. As much pressure as I could. I felt the chakra begin to destabilise, and the same guiding hand made me add earth release to the water release chakra. Not in high amounts. Just enough to pass along the concept of stability. Next came rotation. I forced the water release chakra to spin upon itself. Power came in the form of neutral chakra, and I then worked to contain everything either the same concept that the Kaiten worked on.

Millions of threads of chakra working together. This would not be a sphere. It would not be a shuriken either. Those weren’t my weapons. I counted myself lucky that Yuki made the brain dead decision to show off by making her dragon swim through the air in concentric circles to gain altitude before it began to dive down on me. On second thought, she probably did that to maximise the range of effect of the jutsu. It was probably not cheap to use chakra-wise and she wanted to take as many of us with it as possible. A shame that her jutsu would serve nothing more than the canvas on which I was going to paint my mark into this universe.

“Water Release: Arrow of Kami” I proclaimed, as the water release chakra took the shape of an arrowhead. The shaft was nowhere to be found, but that was a semantic that I doubted anyone would argue. The arrow head flew fast, and it flew through. I felt it shoot from my hand like a missile and it slammed right into the dragon’s head, before instantly exploding.

‘I didn’t think that through’ was my last thought before my body was slammed into by the resulting cascading waves of water. I felt my head blank as water rushed though my nose, and my mouth, and every place it could into my head for a few seconds as I was carried along by the water. It took me slamming into one of the trees miles from the beachhead where I’d been fighting for me to come to. My momentum stopped, and I flipped my body over to avoid choking as I began to vomit gallons upon gallons of water. How had so much water gotten into my body in the first place.

Toshiro! My mind went straight to my injured teammate, and regardless of how drained my body felt, I forced it to flood my eyes with chakra to activate the byakugan. I scanned my surroundings, searching out my teammates form, but everywhere I looked was destruction. The clash between Yuki’s water release jutsu and mine had devastated much of the area. The cave that was supposed to contain the kids was gone. The water had crushed it into nothingness, but the fact that I couldn’t see any remains there was probably a good sign.

I felt myself beginning to panic at not being able to find a single one of my teammates before I remembered the signal we were supposed to use in situations like this. I smashed my fist into the ground. Once. Twice. Three times. Her hands came out first. I would bless those hands for the rest of my life. It took a few seconds for her to come out carrying both my teammates.

Uzume was conscious, and looked like she wanted to begin tearing into me, but all my eyes were for Toshiro. Thankfully, he didn’t look much worse than he had earlier. I ran my eyes over him, making sure to understand the full scale of his injuries. With the byakugan, I had no need to use something as inelegant as a diagnostic jutsu, so I could move straight into treatment.