Chapter 54.4- Gamer of the Desert

It was like night and day. Jiraiya had asked her once, what it felt like,. She’d told him that she couldn’t have describbed 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 he 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 top wear itself out 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 in 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 he 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 on account 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?