Chapter 94: Morning Harpoon.
Tenten watched from fifty meters back, standing on a boulder with her main scroll across her shoulders. A hundred Leaf shinobi had been fighting on a battlefield, trading jutsu and steel with a Stone force twice their size since dawn, and they'd been winning. Slowly, painfully, losing people every hour, but winning.
Then the ground shook.
The shockwave rippled through the stone beneath Tenten's feet and made the boulder she was standing on crack down the middle.
Steam rose from the battlefield.
It came in a column, thick and white, billowing upward from a point somewhere behind the Stone line. The Stone shinobi who had been retreating stopped retreating. They turned around. Their faces changed. The panic that had been building in their ranks since Tenten had shredded their left side with a rain of shadow cloned weapons was gone. Replaced by relief.
A figure walked through the steam. His body was covered head to toe in red armor. The armor had a furnace on the back, a squat cylindrical structure that belched steam in rhythmic pulses, and the steam curled around his body like a living thing, wreathing him in white fog that parted only enough to show the flat, dark visor of his helmet and the forehead protector of the Hidden Stone Village.
Han. The Five-Tails jinchuriki.
Tenten had never seen him before. She'd read the briefings. She knew what he looked like on paper. A tall man in steam armor who fought with taijutsu and could enhance his strikes with pressurized steam to hit harder than anything human had a right to. Host of Kokuō, the Five-Tails, one of the nine tailed beasts.
They were not expecting him out here…
Han walked forward and the Stone shinobi parted for him like water around a boulder. His visor was pointed straight ahead, at the Leaf line, and he kept walking at the same pace, unhurried.
The first Leaf ninja who tried to stop him threw an earth jutsu. A wall of compressed stone rising from the ground to block his path. Han walked through it. His fist, wreathed in hissing steam, punched through the wall and kept going and hit the ninja behind it. The man's body left the ground and didn't come back down anywhere Tenten could see.
Han kept walking.
Three shinobi attacked together. One came from the left with a sword. One threw a volley of kunai from the right. The third was forming hand signs for a water jutsu.
Han's arm swept left. The shinobi's sword shattered against his armored forearm and the backswing caught the man across the chest and sent him flying. Steam erupted from his furnace in a pressurized burst and the kunai scattered in the blast before they reached him, the metal softening and curling into useless slag. The ninja with the water jutsu got one sign in before Han closed the distance in a single burst and his knee came up into the man's midsection. The ninja folded around the knee like wet cloth and when Han straightened, the body slid off and hit the ground and didn't move.
Three shinobi. Five seconds. Han hadn't even slowed down.
Someone on the Leaf side was shouting. A jonin commander, Tenten recognized his voice but couldn't see him through the smoke and the steam. "Fall back! Fall back to secondary positions! Don't engage the jinchuriki! FALL BACK!"
The retreat started.
Leaf shinobi turned and ran. Those who could. Those who were close enough to the rear to have a path clear. The ones at the front, the ones who were still locked in close combat with Stone forces, couldn't disengage. They tried. They turned their backs and the Stone shinobi behind them cut them down.
And Han walked through the middle of it, and everywhere he appeared, people died.
A group of Leaf-nin were running together, five of them, helping a wounded comrade between them. Han appeared beside them. One step. No warning. Steam vented from his armor and his fist drove through the first man's chest. Through his flak jacket and through his body and out the other side. Han pulled his arm free and the body dropped, and the other four scattered in blind terror, abandoning the wounded man on the ground. Han stepped on him as he passed. Tenten heard the screams cut short.
Another group. Eight Leaf shinobi sprinting for the tree line. Han planted his foot and the ground beneath them erupted, the stone cracking and heaving upward and throwing them off their feet. Before they could rise, he was among them, and his fists were faster than anything that size should be and each hit killed whoever it landed on.
Tenten watched from her boulder. Her hands were gripping the scroll across her shoulders so hard that her knuckles had gone white.
Her comrades were being slaughtered. Some of them faces she'd seen around camp, some of them names she knew, and they were being butchered by a single man as they ran. The retreat was turning into a rout. Bodies on the ground. Screaming. The Stone line pressing forward behind their jinchuriki, emboldened, hunting the fleeing Leaf forces like wolves running down scattered deer.
She thought about Lee.
She thought about the chunin exams, years ago. Lee standing in front of Shukaku. The One-Tailed Beast, a monster of sand the size of a building, and Lee, thirteen years old, looking up at it and not running. She remembered watching from the stands as he fought the thing and killed it. A genin. Against a tailed beast.
She still couldn't picture herself doing that even as a chunin.
She looked at her scroll. At the weapons sealed inside it. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Every type of blade and club and chain and projectile that existed, stored and organized and ready to be called out in an instant. Her entire life's collection.
None of it could probably kill a jinchuriki.
But the people running from Han were going to die if nobody did something. If nobody slowed him down, even for a few minutes, even for one minute, enough time for the ones still running to make it to the trees and keep going.
Tenten looked at the battlefield. She looked at the bodies. She looked at Han, who was killing a Leaf shinobi with each hand, one in each fist, holding them up by their flak jackets and boiling them alive inside their flak jackets.
She was scared.
Tenten was woman enough to admit that. Her heart was hammering so hard she could feel it in her teeth. Everything in her training, everything Lee and Guy had taught her about assessing a fight, about knowing when to engage and when to withdraw, was screaming at her to run. This was not her fight. This was a fight for S-rank shinobi, for jinchuriki killers, for people who could open seven gates. Not for a chunin with a scroll full of sharp objects.
A Leaf kunoichi stumbled past Tenten's boulder, clutching a wound in her side, blood running between her fingers. She was maybe twenty. Her eyes were wide and blank and she was running without seeing where she was going. Behind her, three Stone shinobi were closing in, grinning, taking their time because they knew she couldn't outrun them.
Tenten dropped off the boulder.
She unsealed a weighted three-section staff from a scroll on her hip. The weapon snapped into her hands in three jointed segments of iron, and she whipped it forward as she landed. The first segment caught the lead Stone shinobi across the temple and crushed his skull. The second segment arced around and whipped the next one in the throat. The third tried to dodge and the staff's final segment found his knee, shattering it, and he went down screaming.
"Go!" Tenten shouted at the kunoichi without looking back. "Get to the trees! Don't stop!"
The woman ran.
Tenten turned and looked at Han.
He was a hundred meters away. He had stopped walking. His visor was pointed at her. Through the haze of steam that surrounded his body, she could see the dark slit of his faceplate, and behind it, she could feel his eyes.
He'd noticed her. Out of every shinobi on this field, he'd noticed the one who was running toward him instead of away.
"You’re the girl from the chunin exams." His voice was deep and muffled by the armor. He recognized her...
Just my luck… Tenten didn't answer. She shifted her grip on the three-section staff and charged.
She covered the hundred meters in seconds, body flickering forward, the staff trailing behind her in a whipping arc. She brought it around in a full overhead swing aimed at the gap between his helmet and his shoulder plate, putting every ounce of strength and speed she had into the strike.
The staff connected with nothing.
Han was behind her. He'd moved so fast that Tenten hadn't seen it happen. One instant he was in front of her and the next he was gone, and the displaced steam from his movement burned her face a full second after he'd already repositioned.
His kick caught her in the spine.
The world went white. The impact felt like being hit by a falling building. Tenten's feet left the ground and her body became a projectile, the three-section staff spinning out of her grip and vanishing into the dirt. She was airborne, tumbling, the battlefield blurring around her in a smear of brown and grey and the distant green of the tree line.
She hit the ground forty meters away. Bounced. Hit again. Skipped across the stone like a thrown rock across water, each impact slamming the air from her lungs and cracking something new. She could feel ribs shifting. Her left shoulder screamed. Her vision was a mess of sky and dirt and sky again.
A cliff face was coming up fast.
Tenten twisted her body in midair. Her right hand found a kunai on her belt, she didn't remember reaching for it, and she drove it into the stone as she slid toward the wall. The blade screeched and threw sparks and slowed her just enough that when she hit the cliff face it was with her feet instead of her spine. The impact traveled up her legs and into her hips and she crumpled against the rock, sliding down to the ground in a heap.
She coughed. Blood came up. She spat it out and blinked until the world stopped spinning.
Across the field, Han was looking at her. His visor hadn't moved. He was standing exactly where he'd been, one foot slightly forward from the kick, and he was watching her, surprised she was still alive.
Deciding whether to bother.
Then he vanished.
No blur. No movement she could track. One second he was there and the next the space was empty and the air where he'd been standing rushed in to fill the gap with a crack.
Tenten opened the Sixth Gate.
She didn't hesitate, knowing that he wouldn’t just let her be.
The Gate of Joy tore open.
Her skin went red. The blood vessels across her arms and neck and face swelled until they stood out like ropes beneath the surface. Her pupils vanished, leaving her eyes white and blank. Green chakra tore off her skin like a flame. Her hair ripped free of its buns and stood on end, the dark strands rising like they were caught in an updraft. The air around her body displaced outward, a visible shockwave that cracked the cliff face behind her and sent a ring of dust rushing across the ground.
She felt the power flood through her. The Sixth Gate was different from the first five. The First Gate removed the mind's inhibitions. The Second restored the body. The Third, Fourth, and Fifth pushed speed and strength beyond human limits in escalating stages. The Sixth Gate went past all of that. Every ability she had, multiplied beyond anything she could access at any other level. Her muscles burned. Her bones vibrated. Her body was consuming itself and she could feel it and she didn't care because Han was coming and she had maybe half a second.
Her hand moved to the scroll on her hip.
She unsealed the Marlin Harpoon.
It materialized in her hand in its dormant form: a long pole with a marlin-shaped skeleton of metal on its end, skeletal fins and a pointed bill, connected to her wrist by a length of rope. The metal was dark and cold and the weapon took in the massive chakra output of the Sixth Gate before awakening.
Han's kick came from behind. Left side. Aimed at the base of her skull. A blow that would have separated her head from her spine.
Tenten dropped straight down, her knees folding, her body collapsing beneath the arc of his shin. The armored leg passed over her head close enough that the steam venting from his greaves singed the tips of her rising hair. The heat was blistering. The speed was something she could only track because the Sixth Gate had pushed her perception to its absolute limit.
She stabbed upward.
The harpoon's point drove toward Han's exposed underarm, the gap between his chest plate and his shoulder guard, the one place where the red armor didn't cover. Han twisted. The point missed the gap and scraped across his chest plate instead, tearing through it.
But Tenten didn't stop with one thrust.
The Sixth Gate was burning through her and she could feel the clock ticking, could feel her body tearing with every passing second, and she had so little time before her body gave out. So she didn't pace herself. She stabbed again. And again. And again. Rising from her crouch into a standing barrage, the harpoon driving forward in rapid thrusts, each one faster than the last, each one aimed at a different part of his body, and the speed of the thrusts increased until the tip of the harpoon was moving so fast that the air around it couldn't get out of the way.
Friction.
The air ignited.
Tiny tongues of flame bloomed around the harpoon's tip, trailing behind each thrust like the afterimage of a match being struck. The flames multiplied as Tenten's speed increased, each stab leaving a streak of fire in the air, until the space between Tenten and Han was filled with criss-crossing trails of flame and the smell of burning air and the rapid, percussive crack of superheated wind being displaced faster than it could move.
“Morning Harpoon!!!” Tenten shouted.
Han's arms came up. He attempted to block and deflect. His speed was terrifying, his armored forearms catching thrusts that would have pierced stone, and the steam from his furnace erupted in pressurized bursts meant to push her back. But his speed came in bursts. She could feel it. He'd move impossibly fast for a half-second, faster than even the Sixth Gate could match, and then there was a gap, a fraction of a moment where the steam pressure rebuilt, and in those gaps the harpoon found him.
The first clean hit punched through his right forearm guard and out the other side.
Han grunted. It was the first sound he'd made that wasn't casual. The harpoon's tip had gone clean through the armor and the arm inside it, and when it did, the harpoon pulled his chakra. And Han felt it, because Han’s head snapped toward the wound.
Tenten ripped the harpoon back and thrust again.
The second hit caught his left side, below the ribs, punching through an opening. The harpoon drained more chakra. Han staggered. His furnace sputtered, the steam output dropping for just a moment, and in that moment Tenten drove forward and the third thrust took him through the right thigh.
The fourth through his shoulder.
The fifth glanced off his chest plate but caught the edge of his neck guard and opened a gash across his collarbone.
The sixth went through his chest.
The harpoon's point entered below his left pectoral and came out through his back, between his furnace and his spine, and the weapon grew, drinking Han's massive chakra.
Han's knees buckled.
Tenten gripped the harpoon with both hands and pulled. The weapon came free with a wet, sucking sound and a spray of blood that sizzled against the heated metal. Han dropped to one knee. His armor was punctured in six places with blood leaking from his body.
Tenten threw the harpoon straight up.
The weapon spun end over end, rising into the grey sky above the battlefield, the marlin skeleton at its tip catching the dull light as it tumbled. It reached the peak of its arc thirty meters up and hung there for a single heartbeat.
Tenten closed the Sixth Gate.
The red drained from her skin. The veins receded. Her pupils returned and her hair fell limp around her face and her body screamed at her, every muscle fiber torn and burning, every joint swollen, her lungs on fire, her vision narrowing at the edges. She could barely stand. Her legs were shaking so badly she could feel her knees knocking together.
But her hands were still moving.
Ram. Tiger. Snake. Horse.
"Ninja Art: Giant Body Technique!"
She thrust her hands toward the falling harpoon, and the chakra it had drunk from Han, the Five-Tails’ own chakra, came back into her, and she poured all of it upward into the weapon. The harpoon expanded. The marlin skeleton swelled, its bones thickening, its frame widening, the pole beneath it growing longer and thicker until the weapon was no longer a harpoon but a monument. Ten meters long. Twenty. Thirty. The shadow it cast as it reached the top of its growth covered the battlefield below in darkness.
Tenten brought her hands down.
The harpoon fell.
Han looked up. His visor tilted toward the sky and the massive marlin-shaped weapon descending toward him, its point aimed at his body, growing larger with every meter it dropped. He tried to move. His right leg pushed against the ground and the leg that the harpoon had punctured buckled under him. His arms came up, steam erupting from his furnace in a desperate burst, and his fists rose to meet the falling weapon.
The harpoon crashed.
The impact sent a shockwave across the field that knocked everyone within two hundred meters off their feet, Leaf and Stone alike. The ground cratered. Dust erupted in a column that rose fifty meters into the air and spread outward in a rolling cloud that swallowed the battlefield. The sound was like thunder compressed into a single instant, a crack so loud it left Tenten's ears ringing.
Then silence.
Tenten was on her knees. She didn't remember falling. Her body had given out somewhere between the hand signs and the impact and now she was kneeling on broken stone with her arms limp at her sides and her chest heaving and every breath tasting like blood.
The dust settled slowly.
The crater was enormous. A ragged pit in the earth, twenty meters across, with the massive harpoon standing upright in its center like a monument driven into the ground. The marlin skeleton at its tip was buried, its metal fins jutting from the rubble at sharp angles.
Beneath it, nothing moved.
The battlefield was still. Leaf and Stone shinobi alike had stopped fighting, stopped running, stopped everything, and they were all staring at the crater and the enormous weapon and the girl on her knees at its edge.
Tenten stared at the harpoon. At the crater. At the silence where Han had been.
Did I...
She couldn't finish the thought. Her body wouldn't let her. The edges of her vision were going dark and her hands were trembling against the ground and every heartbeat felt like it was trying to break through her ribs from the inside.
But the crater was quiet. The harpoon stood. Nothing moved beneath it.
The Stone shinobi closest to the impact zone were backing away. Slowly at first, then faster, their faces twisted with something that looked a lot like fear, because they had just watched a single kunoichi, a girl with her hair torn loose and a scroll on her back, bury their jinchuriki in the ground.