Chapter 54- Gamer of the Desert (Complete)

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To defeat Danzo, two things had to be done. One, the man himself had to die. Two, those loyal to him had to be either killed or coopted. With what she had come to learn about how Danzo trained his Ne operatives, she was forced to accept that the latter was not much of an option when it came to them. And then there was another group of people who would have to deal with to secure Danzo’s fall. The Elders. Sarutobi-sensei’s teammates. Those old fucks had been part of the reason Danzo’s rise in Konoha had been so smooth, and she had no doubts that they were fundamentally supporting his rule. That was why Orochimaru had been dispatched to deal with them. Even with their age, they had still been students of the Second Hokage, so sh hoped he exercised an acceptable level of caution when it came to dealing with them.

But that was beside the point. She leaned out of the way of a blade that tried to separate her head from her shoulders and stepped into the wielder’s guard before lashing out with a punch. She felt bones give way before her fist as the man was sent flying backwards, dead. Her, Jiraiya, and Naruto, against a collection of well-trained secret operatives beneath Konoha. It wasn’t even close to a fair fight.

She spied Jiraiya and his student out of the corner of her eyes as one used his white main technique to wield his hair like a club, bludgeoning everyone who got close. The other weaved seals continuously to deal with everyone who attempted to attack them from a distance. She didn’t trust Orochimaru farther than she could throw him, but she had to recognise that he was a far better teacher than most gave him credit for. He’d turned the brat into something of a ninjutsu powerhouse.

She felt someone drop to the ground before her and leaned out of the way of the gentle fist strikes the boy sent her way before she attempted a punch down at him. He jumped backwards in time to dodge, but she followed through with the movement and slammed her fist into the ground, sending those who had been trying to surround her flying off their feet.

“I am Hyuga Neji. I will be your opponent.” She almost scoffed at the idiot. It pained her to see one, so young brought in on Danzo’s mess.

“You are dead. Nothing more, nothing less” She replied to him. Instead of waiting for him to come at her, she covered the distance between them in less time than it would have taken him to blink, and then grabbed a hold of his head with his palm. The next to come at her was forced backwards as she used the Hyuga boy as a flail. In her next movement, she snapped the boy’s neck and dropped him to the ground, limp. Another came at her with a cloud of insects around him. Aburame. She held her breath a second to ensure that no insects used that way into her, and then drew her chakra upon herself like a shroud.

She hardened the shroud like Sensei had taught her to and then covered the distance between her and the masked shinobi. He dodged out of the way of her first punch, but missed the follow-up. They always missed the follow-up. She heard the sound of chirping birds and bent her head just in time to dodge an attack that had been aimed at separating said head from her neck. She stared at the eyes behind the mask. Sharingan. Uchiha Sasuke then.

She moved to deal with him, but before she could complete her approach, there was someone between her and the boy. Someone infinitely more dangerous. His black cloak with red clouds made him even more recognisable than his gleam ing red eyes and sharp aristocratic features. Their eyes met for an instant, and she snapped the genjutsu he tried to place her in less than a second. Dangerous, She thought. She ran right at him, and unlike every other man here, he did not move to run from her when she came. Instead, he stood his ground and allowed her to come. Foolish.

She lashed out with a punch to his head that he weaved out of the way of, and he retaliated with a kick that she was forced to block with both hands. She grunted at the impact. He had to have a good grasp of chakra enhancement because there was no way this wisp of a man was strong enough to kick like that.

He pulled his leg backwards as she aimed to take advantage of the fact that his balance was off. One leg in the air was no way to fight. Two punches were sent from her at razor speeds. Both were dodged as he completed his lean backwards and turned it into a backflip. As he flew through the air, he sent a series of shurinken at her. Stomping the ground with her feet forced a wedge of stone to cover her form and absorb the attack. She took two deep breaths and jumped around the stone wall she’d made.

She formed a single hand seal as she noticed him weave a few of his own. His great fireball travelled across the space between them with impressive speed, but she kneaded her chakra just as Uncle Tobirama had taught her all those decades ago. “Water Release: Water Bullet” The water release technique was smaller than the fire release jutsu as she did not have a strong affinity for the element. It mattered little, however. It was enough to force a path through the fireball for her to run through, and run through she did.

They clashed in taijutsu again. This time he was the first to attack. A kunai held in his right hand failed to stab into her shoulder as she leaned out of the way of the attack. The same kunai almost cut a line through her neck, but she was quick enough to punch at him and force him to abandon the attack with his dodge. He jumped backwards, and this time she followed instantly. Jumping into the air, she lifted one of her legs and brought it down first. Instead of dodging out of the way, he crossed his arms. She smirked. The fool was dead.

She felt her leg make contact, but unlike what she expected, there was no reaction. She used his arms as leverage to turn her motion into a backflip to avoid the small but sealless fireball he sent her way. She noted the cracks moving along the floor with a scowl. He’d redirected her chakra at the point of impact and funnelled it down into the ground. Dangerous.

She sensed a massive buildup of chakra to her side and turned to see Jiraiya running at her with his student wrapped in his mane. “Probably a good idea to run, Hime” He said to her, and she looked behind him to see a massive tidal wave of water making its way to them. A tidal wave being ridden by a recognisable blue skinned man with a very recognisable blade in his grasp. Of course, they moved in groups of two. She joined Jiraiya in his run as they sought a way out of the Root tunnel. That much water down here could drown them if they weren’t careful.

Left, right, they ran down the hallways chased by the water. Instead of reducing as they went further, it felt like the water mass was increasing. And not just that, it was gaining on them. She scowled and tried to place their position in the village. These tunnels were just repurposed versions of the old evacuation tunnels she had played in as a child. She noted a familiar bit of stone where she had formed three marks with her kunai and scowled at the memory before jumping up towards the roof of the tunnel with her fist cocked. She primed her chakra and released it just as she struck the smooth stone above her.

Everything above her exploded outward and sunlight raced into the tunnel. She felt herself get caught by Jiraiya’s hair before she could fall back into the tunnel, as he jumped outside along with her. She heard the water rush down the tunnel, passed their previous positions, and nodded to herself. Hopefully, nothing would remain of the markings her younger self had made all those years ago. T+O with a heart around the letters wasn’t the kind of thing she wanted to see again.

Now on the streets of Konoha, she turned to the left expecting to see the tower she’d spent much of her childhood playing in but was faced with only a giant sand pyramid. That rat bastard, she snarled to herself. And then she heard the sound of an explosion further in the city.

It was pure pandemonium. The entire village was in total chaos, and she managed to trace the source of the disturbance to two men. Two men with similar red hair and a seemingly similar lack of regard or care for keeping the village standing. One of them had come here with them and was ostensibly on her side. But she knew that he’d take whatever advantage over their village he could get to cement his village’s place at the top of the totem pole. An enemy they had to pretend to be friends with. She hated politics. But she did respect his strength. And so it was strange to watch him engaging another man in taijutsu and for it to seem like the other man was even the one winning.

“Nagato?” She heard Jiraiya ask in shock. Just like her, he was looking at the two men. So he recognised the other man. Nagato. She tried to remember where she had heard the name before, but Jiraiya kept talking, this time at a whisper.

“I know I saw Konan earlier, but for even Nagato to be involved, that means that…” He said to himself, trailing off as we watched both men barrel into and through a flat building as they traded powerful blows. The Kazekage was technically superior. Anyone could see the fight and come to that conclusion. But that was proving not to matter as much as Gaara oof the Desert would have otherwise hoped. The red haired man, Nagato, was proving to ave speed and strength just a shade beyond that of the Kazekage, and even worse for the young leader, he had to deal with a body that shifted without notice.

Where the man once had a hand, now appeared a canon, and Gaara did not even flinch at the transition, almost seeming used to it. The canon fired off at him, and he merely tilted his head to allow the attack pass him by and continue on to tear through both buildings that were behind him. After that interruption, they returned to trading blows.

Nagato punched at Gaara, sending him a few feet backwards, and as the Sand user ran at the other man, a blade appeared in his hands with nary a motion. Not a blade she recognised, so the silver lining was that it wasn’t stolen from them. On the other hand, it was a beautiful and well crafted, so it was a shame that she wouldn't get to claim it from him. Both of them clashed blades with a ringing sound as Nagato unveiled some sort of metal rod from thin air.

She would have continued watching the fight from a distance if not for the disturbance in the air behind her. She turned around and was met face to face with two people dressed in the same black and red cloaks as the one fighting the Kazekage. Akatsuki had come to Konoha, and they had come in force.

“Where is Uchiha Itachi?” She asked, noticing that the Clankiller had not joined the rest of his cohorts in their journey to the surface.

“He has some business to deal with. We’ll be more than enough to take the gaki with us.” The blue skinned one replied. Kisame Hoshigaki, the tailless tailed beast, she remembered from Jiraiya’s briefing.

She turned to Jiraiya and found him glaring daggers at the one with purple hair. That was the Konan he had been whispering about, then. She would leave him to handle his personal business on his own. There was no point in her intervening in that. Not when she was about to have her hands full. She just hoped he didn’t do anything stupid. Well, they had Naruto with him to handle that. Speaking of apprentices, she hoped her apprentice was dealing with her part of this mission.

She leaned forward an inch, and that was the only warning the Monster of the Mist got to put his blade between himself and her. She pushed off the ground with a precise application of chakra and smashed her fist right into the bandaged blade. “Chaaa” She screamed, and increased her force to power through the defence and send both man and sword flying.

She turned to her teammate and said, “I’ll handle that one”. And then she was off, jumping in the air to meet her opponent who had been sent across the village.

She found him half buried by the building he’d crashed into, but beyond that, he was relatively unscathed.

“That was a good one, Old Woman” He said, standing up with his grip on the weapon. She just tilted her head to make it clear how little his words had done to impress her. Really? Old woman? Of all the insults he could come up with? A dig at her age was just the least inventive thing he could think of.

The body in front of her dissolved into water, and then a blade smashed right into her form, tearing it apart to reveal nothing but splinters from her own substitution. He thought himself smarter than he really was. With his position unveiled, she covered the distance separating them in seconds and aimed another punch at him. This one, he managed to dodge. And then he came at her with the blade. Samehada. One of the seven legendary swords of the Mist. She’d never had the pleasure of facing a user of this particular blade, but she was more than familiar with how it worked.

She dodged underneath the swipe aimed at her head. Mid-motion, the sword came to a sudden stop and then dropped itself right on to her form. She quickly placed a hand on the ground and pushed herself to the right, allowing the weapon slam down where she had just been. She rolled along the ground for a few metres before stopping her momentum and pushing off the ground to dodge away from a water bullet that carved a line into the stone road.

She danced out of the way of the next two attacks he sent, and then squatted to avoid a stream of high pressured water that cut through the building behind her. She really hoped Shizune was doing her job because she’d be pissed if this fight ended up killing even more citizens of Konoha. She reared back her fist and slammed it into the ground, disrupting her opponent’s footing. That was all the opening she needed to blitz him and land another powerful punch to his midsection this time. She felt the bones break beneath her feet as he flew off into the distance. She chased further, knowing that things had never and would never be that easy with Shinobi of his caliber.

She was proven right as she found him waiting for her at the point he’d been tossed to. She spotted the handle of the blade retracting from being wrapped around his hand to the shape of a normal blade handle. So that was how he’d been doing it then. Because she’d known for sure that her first attack had to have done some damage.

“You hit hard. Let’s see how hard you hit in the water” He said, and then began to weave seals.

Nope. She told herself and then jumped right at him. He abandoned the seals in favour of lifting his sword to block her attack, and then she felt it when her fist impacted the blade. It was like she was suddenly hit with a wave of dizziness. She felt drained. She could feel it in her chakra network. Like half of it was just gone at once. Her opponent smirked, and then brought his sword to bear at her.

She jumped backwards. At least, she tried to. She was too slow. A second later, she was on the ground and could feel several weeping wounds all around her body.

“For a second there, I’d feared that you were somehow able to resist Samehada’s drain. Just needed a second to kick in, I guess” He said with a smirk that she felt the urge to wipe off his face. What was going on?

She forced herself to her feet, ignoring the lightheadedness. Surely, the blade couldn’t drain that much chakra so quickly.

“I can already see the thoughts written right on your face. You wonder how it’s possible for me to drain your chakra quick quick like this. I’ll tell you, since you’re already about to die anyway, Tsunade Senju. They call me the tailless tailed beast for a reason. Even without Samehada, I have enough chakra to compare with a tailed beast. That means that from the day I got her, she has been feeding on my chakra consistently. That gives her one hell of an appetite, you see? Samehada never gets full. But she can get starved. When we first clashed, I hadn’t anticipated your power, so I used Samehada in her normal state, and you managed to overpower me. But then I decided to dial things up a notch. You see, since all the chakra in Samehada is mine, I can have her return it at any time. And that makes her very empty, and just at the edge of starving. Bye bye, Tsunade Senju” He said, walking towards her and raising the sword.

She swallowed and forced her body to cooperate with the limited amount of chakra she had. She lifted herself backwards on her hands and used them to boost her jump backwards. She landed on her feet and began to rack her mind for a solution.

A solution that she wouldn’t be getting the time to think up as he ran right at her. She took up her stance and dodged out of the way of the first swipe, and then stepped backwards to avoid the next two. The fourth one was a downwards slash that he overextended on. She took the chance. Dodged out of the way, and then stepped into his guard before he could bring the sword around. She lashed out with a punch and timed the explosion of her chakra to perfectly coincide with the second her fist landed.

“Thwack” The punch landed on his chest. Beyond the dull sound, there was nothing to show for it. Samehada came around, intent on encircling her. She looked at the shark-like weapon and jumped upwards to avoid the trap.

There was nothing she could think of. No way to avoid the creature’s chakra drain. If even his main body could absorb chakra just by virtue of being connected to the sword, then there was no way to fight against him while avoiding the drain. “Who says you need to avoid it?” A voice in her head that sounded suspiciously like Uncle Tobirama whispered. It was the same voice that helped her come up with all her best plans.

Samehada could absorb chakra. Absorb, not nullify. That was important. Kisame Hoshigaki claimed the blade had no limits on its capacity, but she knew that could not be true. Her Granduncle was the smartest man to ever exist, and everything he’d taught her about chakra told her it was impossible. Everything had a maximum. The question now became, ‘would she be able to find it?’ Kisame said he had the strength of a tailed beast, but she could sense his chakra. Not nearly as much as the Nine tails in Naruto. It was about twice as much as what Naruto had when he was drawing on four tails of the Nine tails’ chakra. Each tail scaled exponentially, so that was only about Six tails worth of chakra.

Did she have that much? Not right now. But in her seal, probably. She’d funnelled all her extra chakra every single day for close to three decades uninterrupted. She hadn’t had to open the seal since the end of the Second War. Thinking of how much time had passed since then almost gave her a headache. Either way, she could feel how much chakra she had in there. More than she’d ever sensed before.

Enough? Maybe. It would have to be.

He started walking towards her again, and she closed her eyes for a second while forming the Ram seal. “Strength of a hundred seal: Release” She intoned.

It was like night and day. Jiraiya had asked her, once, what it felt like. She’d told him that she couldn’t have described it to him. It was like being God. It was like being god, and not God at the same time, if that made any sense. She could feel immense power welling up within her. Released all into her body, she had more power in her now than entire tailed beasts, and all that chakra was hers to control and use to her desires. The only problem was that it hurt like a motherfucker. What prevented her from feeling like god was the pain that spread through her body. So much pain.

She’d asked Mito once about it. Why it hurt her, but not the older woman. The answer had enraged her, but she understood it. She was no Uzumaki. Only a quarter of the way there. She had more Senju blood in her than Uzumaki blood, and it showed. It showed in that her body simply wasn’t built to hold this much chakra. Any other person would have taken the unspoken warning for what it was and never bothered to open the seal again, but Tsunade had more stubbornness in her than good sense. Enough stubbornness to come up with the thousand healings. Her greatest jutsu. If only those who honoured her knew that the jutsu had originated as nothing but an initial workaround to a problem that the seal’s creators had never even foreseen. Someone having enough chakra to use the seal to its peak, but not the body to handle pushing things that far. And so she created a way for the chakra from the seal to be instantly converted to medical chakra within her body and heal every single injury that came from her body trying to tear itself apart with the chakra.

“Is having more chakra supposed to scare me?” She heard his voice, but paid him no heed. Too concentrated on feeling out her body and the way things had changed. More strength than she had ever possessed in her life before. Enough strength to kill the man before her, she was sure.

“Not going to answer? Then I’ll make you” He jumped at her with the sentient weapon levelled at her head. Before, they had been around the same speed. She’d been faster, but not by much. Now, he was just so slow. It felt like she had forever to decide what action to take. She jumped and met him mid-air. The shock on his face took forever to form. She stopped waiting for it and punched him in the chest. Beyond the physical impact, he did not move. They both landed on the ground. She committed herself to her next course of action with a determined smile.

This time, she was the one to move after him. Whatever movement he planned was too slow. Nothing but the decision to move was visible on his face by the time she reached him. She punched him in the chest again. She felt Samehada pull at her chakra. She did not resist. Punch after punch. She lost count after a hundred, but she was sure he would not have even been able to tell the first dozen apart. That was the speed at which she operated.

She felt like a genin again. Executing punch after punch on a wooden post under Sarutobi-sensei’s watchful gaze. If he could see her now, she was sure he would be wearing that thin lipped smile of his. The same one he wore when he saw them solve a problem in a way that worked, but still wasn’t exactly what he would have done. He could probably think up a dozen ways to have defeated this particular enemy without resorting to such ‘brutishness’. But she wasn’t him. Her arsenal was much more limited than his. This was her only resort.

Chakra absorption meant that no part of her admittedly shallow ninjutsu repertoire would be any use against him. It also meant that her strength would fail against him, no matter how it was applied. Perhaps a decade or two ago, she might have risked facing him in taijutsu bereft of chakra enhancement, but she was being realistic here, and those days were far behind her. And that did not even take the healing factor the blade enabled into account. Her first plan of just tossing rocks at him until she managed to kill him with a shot would have failed. Both because of the healing factor, and the fact that this man was also a skilled shinobi in and of himself. He was not a mediocre with only a single trick to his name. He was S-ranked in every meaning of the world.

It took six hundred punches for her to begin to feel that the blade’s rate of absorption had begun to slow. It was nigh unnoticeable, but she was keeping a careful eye on her chakra, and her nature as a medical nin made it easier for her to notice such things. It wasn’t definitive proof that her plan had any chance of succeeding, but it was enough. Enough to add more resolve to her punches. She felt the next thousand punches land before she noted that the chakra from her seal had reduced to just a quarter of what it once was. And where before Kisame had relaxedly taken every punch with a smirk, she could now see his struggle to escape her. That was another sign.

“What are you doing, woman?” She heard his voice. It was panicked. She saw him about to form a seal with one of his hands. No. She commanded. Without even completely intending it, she reached out with one hand and grabbed hold of the hand that was not holding on to the blade. She felt the blade struggle to pull at her chakra, to drain her. Pathetic. She crushed the hand in her grip in one squeeze. Enjoying the way the bones felt as they turned to nothing but powder beneath my grip. The sword tried to flood him with chakra to heal him.

She wondered if it could do both. Absorb chakra and heal at the same time. It started, and she maintained hr grip on his crushed hand, using it to drag him closer to her and unloaded a full power punch into his chest. She felt it now. Only part of the chakra in that punch had been absorbed. Not all of it. The sword was failing. She punched again. Same effect. And again. She felt bones break and repair beneath her fists, but the speed was nothing to write home about.

Nothing when compared to her mitotic regeneration. She punched again. That one landed. Fully. She heard a strange sound, and looked to see the sword audibly groaning on the floor. It had separated itself from its master. She turned to him. He was so wracked with pain that he was barely even conscious. With a heaving punch, she tore his head from his shoulders.

A/N; How’s it?

A/N; Did I steal the basic plot of this from All Might vs Nomu? Hell yes.

A/N; Today’s bit

A/N; Much better now, ey?