Chapter 17.3- One Thousand Hands

She reached down with a diagnostic jutsu and breathed a sigh of relief at the fact that Sensei had seen it fit to only knock him out with blunt force trauma to the temple. Nothing was broken. Broken bones took longer to heal than most other injuries, and time was a luxury she doubted her sensei would allow them to have for long. The jutsu already felt like it was reaching its final stages as she watched sections of the ground begin to lift up and take form into something that she felt like she should have recognised. That alone was enough to scare her a bit.

She pumped her chakra into Orochimaru’s body, letting out an involuntary gasp at the way his body accepted hr chakra with no hesitation or resistance. She had long outgrown her schoolgirl crush on her teammate but the level of access she was getting here still did bring some happiness to her soul. No other person would have Orochimaru’s unconscious body respond to them in quite this way, accepting their ministrations with full trust. Regardless of how standoffish her might have been in their interactions, this was enough to show her the light in which she was being held. The mouth could lie, but the chakra could not. Chakra told all in the end.

 She worked on him with the mystic palm jutsu, using it to soothe the internal swelling that Sensei’s fists had caused and stoking his mind into wakefulness. Like she’d told Shori, there was no other jutsu in the world as versatile as the mystic palm jutsu. It existed on one simple principle. The body wanted to heal itself. The body knew what it was like before, and so with the right application of chakra, she could stoke and guide it to accelerate the healing that it already wanted to do. That was why the jutsu could reattach a limb kept in the right conditions but would fail woefully at trying to generate a whole new one.

He began to stir beneath her as the final bits of Sensei’s jutsu ran their course. When it did, she tried her hardest to swallow the instinctive urge to sigh in frustration.

“How do you like this one, Tsu-chan?” He asked, revealing himself to be standing right on top the head of a massive stone golem. Now that it was complete, she could recognise the same jutsu that the Tsuchikage had used in the fight to subdue the Four Tails. A fact that did nothing to lessen the headache she could feel building.

“How did you even learn that?” She asked.

“I saw Onoki use it, and I’ve been trying to figure it out since then. Took me over a year, but I think this should be more than a passable attempt” He said to her. She ignored him, and turned to her teammate who had finally regained consciousness.

“Are you thinking what I am thinking?” She asked him as he also swallowed upon seeing the stone giant.

“Yes” He said to her, and they both scrambled over themselves to return to heir feet and begin to run.

The golem’s hand slammed right into the ground they’d just been been on, and she did her beat to ignore the way the ground shook behind her as they continued to run.

“Jiraiya” She shouted, to get her third teammate’s attention. He leaned underneath a swipe from the Monkey King and retaliated with a roundhouse kick to his opponent’s head that forced Enma to take a step back. Jiraiya used the space to disengage and jump towards them.

“What the hell is that?” He asked, pointing towards Sensei’s jutsu.

“Sarutobii-sensei’s latest toy” Orochimaru said with audible frustration.