Chapter 7.4- One Thousand Hands

I could tell Uzume wanted to either punch her in the face or roast her to death with a Great Fireball so I stepped in to stand in front of my cousin. “What are you doing, Shikahime?” I asked her, voice stern.

“What do you think? I saw that plan of yours and decided I wanted in” She said.

“This doesn’t work with three teams, Shika. The split isn’t profitable like that” I pointed out.

She smiled. “Not necessarily. We just have to be in the top five teams to make it out of this mess. Choni and Inoken ae outside this nifty barrier, working to get points for us any way they can. This is just insurance.”

“Well, your insurance seems to be ruining things for us” Izuku butted in.

“Consider it revenge for my cute little cousin almost killing us at the end of the first task”

“I apologised for that already. I had no real way to know that you’d be the ones to make it first. And I had every confidence that anyone in our year group would have been able to escape that with ease” I said. I’d played much worse pranks on the class as a whole during our time at the academy.

“Well, I accepted your apology. This is just payback. We’re even now” She said.

I turned towards the scoreboard, noticing that our teams were nowhere near the top 5, receiving six and a half points every thirty seconds would add up to about 130 points for the 10 minute task, but that was assuming we had the whole 10 minutes. The seal had taken me two minutes and some change to put up. That meant we lot some points from that period as a result of having so many teams around.

Calculating it, I figured we’d have about 110 points at the whole task if nothing changed. On the other hill, both the Kumo and Iwa teams were duking it out with a reckless abandon. The kind of abandon that spurred something in me. That hill’s flag was currently in the possession of the Kumo team, but they were under consistent pressure from the Iwa team. None of the other teams were even choosing to contest that particular hill. Beyond those wasting their energy against my barrier, the rest were fighting over the other flag for those two hundred points.

It was a tense standoff as all seven of us stared at each other in the barrier. After a minute, even the Mizu nin had abandoned trying to break the barrier to try their hands at acquiring the flag.

The fight between the Iwa and Kumo teams remained at a consistent hot point. Every eye was on the exchange. The free for all that had begun on the stage for the other flag was also another source of tension. From the way things looked, at least one Kusa genin had been killed. A Suna genin with some affinity with poisons had incapacitated a whole Kiri team, and the remaining Kiri team was teaming up to launch some devastating combo jutsu to wear down the Suna group. Choni and Inoken weren’t easy to find, but I was sure they were waiting and biding their time to snatch that flag at the last moment. It was the kind of thing they’d do. I’d love to see how it would pan out though, since it was clear that Uraume’s team was winning the free for all as it stood now.

I’d always wondered what a Hyuga who took ninjutsu seriously would look like, and Uraume was showing me that. Her wind ninjutsu were punishing. Kuro was a whirlwind as he and Shiro swept through the approaching horde with devastating taijutsu. They never let themselves get bogged down for too long, and they used both the beast-man and man-beast transformations to great effect. The boy you were fighting could become a dog at any second and vice versa. They were almost singlehandedly displaying the power of Konoha’s rich tekkie genkai arsenal. Shiba was the one placed in charge of physically keeping hold of the flag, and he was doing that with ease. Whoever managed to make it past either of his teammates would find themself swallowed in a storm of insects. Not just any insects, but bugs bred with a special taste for flesh. One Taki genin had forfeited after having his arm eating down to the bone as he tried to fight through Shiba’s cloud.

Everyone had given him a wide berth since then.

Another minute passed, and I made up my mind. The barrier would consume way less chakra than predicted since no one was even bothering to attack it. I crossed my fingers, and a clone appeared in a puff of smoke. He sat down in seiza to focus on maintaining and altering the barrier as I needed.

“I’m leaving.” I told my teammates. They’d both clearly been doing the same calculations as me so Toshiro nodded while Uzume stepped up to join me. If there was anyone who understood my battlelust, it would he her. If there was anyone who would support my actions, it would be her.

The barrier shifted to make a small gap that I wasted no time passing through. I ignored Izuku and Kizuru as they joined Uzume and I in crossing the barrier. For this, it would be every team for themselves.

“I assume you know what we’ll be hunting” I said, turning to her.

Her smile was sharp. We jumped off the hill as one.

A/N; Chaos is a ladder. It’s also a cage- and a shark-infested pond, and a million other things because that’s how chaos works.