Chapter 95: Kokuō!
The crater was quiet for seven heartbeats.
One. The dust hung in the air like fog. Two. The giant harpoon stood upright in the center of the pit, its metal fins catching the grey light. Three. Nothing beneath it moved. Four. Stone shinobi at the edges of the battlefield had stopped. Five. The Leaf forces who'd been running had stopped too. Six. Everyone was staring at the crater and the girl kneeling at its edge. Seven.
The ground lurched.
It started as a tremor, barely noticeable, a vibration in the stone beneath Tenten's knees. Then it became a pulse. Something beneath the rubble was beating, and each beat was stronger than the last, and the debris around the base of the harpoon was shifting, stones rattling, pebbles jumping like water on a hot pan.
The harpoon tilted.
Slowly at first. Then faster. Something was pushing from below, and the weapon that had crashed down with enough force to crack the earth was being shoved aside like a tent pole in a storm. Metal shrieked as it scraped through stone. The marlin skeleton ground through rubble and the harpoon toppled, shrinking as it fell, the thirty-meter monument collapsing back into a weapon the length of Tenten's arm before it clattered against the crater wall.
Red erupted from the pit.
It punched through the rubble in a column of raw chakra so dense the air itself crackled and bent around it, and the shockwave slammed into Tenten and threw her backward across the broken ground. She hit flat on her back. The sky spun overhead.
She got her arms under her. Pushed herself up. Looked.
Han stood in the center of the crater.
Something clung to his body like a second skin, dark and viscous. A cloak of chakra so thick it looked liquid, churning over him in slow waves of red and black, and it had changed him. Made him bigger. Wider. His face was gone behind the cloak, replaced by white eyes and sharp teeth. Five tails of the same dark chakra whipped behind him, each one thick as a tree trunk and moving on its own, curling and snapping at the air. The ground beneath his feet had cratered again from the weight of the transformation alone.
Tenten's stomach dropped.
Han tilted his head. The white eyes found her. One of the five tails behind him whipped forward, elongated, stretched, and reshaped itself into an arm of dark chakra that shot across the thirty meters between them faster than she could blink.
Tenten couldn't move. Her legs wouldn't answer. The Sixth Gate had eaten her body from the inside out and what was left barely had the strength to keep her upright on her knees, let alone dodge a chakra construct the size of a wagon bearing down on her with its fingers spread wide to crush her into the stone.
The Marlin Harpoon flew between Tenten and the descending arm of chakra with its marlin point leading, protecting its helpless master.
The chakra arm hit the harpoon.
And vanished.
The dark chakra contacted the harpoon's metal and the metal sucked. The arm dissolved from the point of contact outward, its substance pouring into the marlin skeleton like water into sand, the dark red energy unraveling into threads that were pulled into the weapon's surface and consumed. In the space of a breath, thirty meters of chakra arm had been reduced to nothing, and the harpoon hung in the air in front of Tenten, its metal warm and faintly glowing with the power it had just swallowed.
Han stared at the space where his chakra arm had been.
Tenten grabbed the harpoon.
Her fingers closed around the pole and the weapon writhed in her palm, heavy with stolen chakra, and she felt all that chakra flow into her. Her screaming muscles unclenched by a fraction and her vision sharpened at the edges and the blackness that had been creeping in from the periphery retreated just enough.
She forced her legs underneath her and stood.
It hurt. Everything hurt. Her calves, her thighs, her lower back, her shoulders. The Sixth Gate had torn her body apart and every movement felt like dragging broken glass through her muscles. But she was standing. She had the harpoon. And she was looking at a chakra-cloaked jinchuriki who was looking back at her with a face that could create nightmares.
Three more chakra arms erupted from Han's body. One from each shoulder, one from his back, all three converging on her from different angles.
Tenten leapt.
Her legs screamed and the jump was ugly, a graceless lunge sideways that put her behind a slab of upturned stone, and the three arms smashed into the ground where she'd been standing and the impact shattered the slab and sent fragments raining over her head. She rolled clear, came up with the harpoon braced against her forearm, and planted her feet.
Things had gotten worse. Much, much worse.
Han was already forming more arms. Two, four, six. They sprouted from the chakra cloak, reaching and grasping and searching for her. His five tails were spreading wide behind him, anchoring him to the ground, and the white mouth on his mask had opened into something that could have been a grin.
Tenten looked at the harpoon in her hands and realized something. She looked at the arms of chakra reaching for her, and at the cloak of the same chakra covering Han's body, and at the tails, and the chakra forming the mask on his face.
Everything about his new form was chakra. Every weapon he had, every defense, every enhancement. All of it was the beast's power, drawn out and shaped around his body.
And her harpoon ate chakra.
Tenten shifted her grip. She brought the harpoon up in front of her, point forward, and despite the pain and the terror and the very reasonable part of her brain that was still screaming at her to run, the corner of her mouth twitched.
"Guy-sensei always said the springtime of youth is about finding your moment…" She muttered.
She wove through hand signs.
Ram. Dog. Boar. Tiger.
"Shuriken Shadow Clone Jutsu!"
The harpoon in her hands multiplied.
The single marlin skeleton became dozens, each copy materializing from poofs of smoke, each one identical to the original down to the skeletal fins and the pointed bill and the rope trailing from its base. Forty harpoons swam in the air around Tenten in a loose sphere, their points facing outward in every direction.
The harpoons swam at incredible speeds. The marlin skeletons tilted their pointed bills forward and glided through the air in sweeping arcs, circling Tenten like a school of fish.
Han's six chakra arms lunged at her simultaneously.
The harpoons intercepted.
Six marlins drove straight into the oncoming arms, point first, and the result was the same as the first time. Contact. Absorption. The chakra arms unraveled from the points of impact, their substance pouring into the harpoons' metal and disappearing. Six arms, gone in under a second.
Han roared as the five tails behind him whipped forward and slammed into the ground and launched him toward Tenten in a burst of speed that cracked the earth where he'd been standing.
Too fast.
Tenten was knocked sideways by a harpoon and Han's fist, wreathed in dark chakra, passed close enough to her face that the heat of it blistered her cheek. The ground behind her exploded from the force of the miss. She hit the dirt, rolled, and the harpoons followed her like a flock of starlings wheeling after their leader, and four of them shot toward Han before she'd finished rolling.
He swatted two aside with a tail. The other two hit him. One caught his left arm, its bill punching through the chakra cloak. The other grazed his side, tearing a streak through the cloak that closed almost immediately as more chakra flowed in to replace what was lost.
But the two that hit him sucked. Each harpoon that contacted Han's cloak pulled chakra from it.
Han ripped the embedded harpoon from his arm and crushed it. The shadow clone burst into smoke. But the damage was done. The patch of his arm where the harpoon had been showed bare red armor beneath, the chakra cloak stripped away in a circle the size of Tenten's fist.
His head snapped toward her. The white eyes glared.
Tenten grinned. It was a shaky grin, the grin of a girl standing on legs that could barely hold her up, in front of a monster that could kill her with a single clean hit. But it was a grin.
"It looks like I’m a jinchuriki’s worst nightmare…"
Han answered with a tailed beast bomb.
It formed in front of his face, a sphere of compressed chakra, black and blue and spinning, pulling in air and light and everything around it as the energy condensed to a point no bigger than a fist. The ground beneath Han sank three inches from the sheer pressure of the thing growing in front of his face.
Tenten’s eyes widened as she put up a single hand sign, body flickering backwards. She cried out in pain from forcing her already injured body to continue moving past its limits. Every harpoon in the swarm answered. Forty marlin skeletons wheeled together and dove, their bills pointed at the forming sphere, converging from every angle like a school of fish closing on prey. They hit the tailed beast bomb from forty directions at once.
The sphere shuddered.
The spinning faltered. Threads of chakra began peeling away from the bomb's surface where the harpoons made contact, dark energy unspooling like yarn from a ball, pulled into forty separate weapons simultaneously. The bomb shrank. Han roared and pushed more chakra into it, his five tails curling forward to feed the sphere from their tips, but the harpoons ate faster than he could feed, and the bomb continued to shrink, unraveling from the outside in, its light dimming as the energy was devoured.
Five seconds later, there was no bomb.
The harpoons pulled away, forty glowing weapons hanging in the air around the empty space where the sphere had been, and Han was standing behind the nothing with his arms still raised and the white mask contorted into an expression that might have been disbelief.
Tenten brought her hands together after shooting chakra strings at certain harpoons. The stolen chakra was surging inside her. She could work with this.
"Ninja Art: Giant Body Technique!"
Ten of the harpoons swelled. Their marlin skeletons expanded, bones thickening, frames widening, until ten of the forty were the size of small buildings, their shadows falling across the battlefield like the fingers of a giant hand. The remaining thirty stayed small, fast, darting between the giants like pilot fish around whales.
Han charged on all fours, his five tails streaming behind him. He was fast. In the gaps between bursts he was still faster than anything human, and in the bursts themselves, when steam pressure and tailed beast chakra combined, he was a blur that Tenten's eyes couldn't follow.
But the harpoons could track the chakra, like sharks to blood.
Three giants swung down from above. Han dodged the first, vaulted over the second, and the third caught him across the back and drove him into the ground. The marlin skeleton's bill punched through his cloak and into the armor beneath, and Han screamed. Something being pulled out of him that he hadn't consented to losing.
He grabbed the giant harpoon's shaft and snapped it. The clone vanished in a burst of smoke. But in the half second it took him to break free, six small harpoons had found him. Two in his legs. One in each arm. One in his back. One skewering through the base of his leftmost tail.
The tail dissolved. Its chakra poured into the embedded harpoon and the tail simply ceased to exist, unraveling from the point of contact like smoke in a wind, and suddenly Han had four tails instead of five.
He tore the harpoons out. Crushed them. More clones popping into smoke. But Tenten was already forming hand signs again, and the remaining harpoons multiplied, forty becoming sixty, and the ten giants that had been reduced to nine were replenished back to ten, because she had chakra to burn now. His chakra. Every harpoon that touched him stole more power and fed it back to her and she poured it into more copies, more enlargements, an escalating cycle that punished Han for every attack and rewarded her for every hit.
Wind chakra.
She shaped it, coating the tips of a dozen harpoons in cutting wind that extended their range by a meter, invisible blades of air that sliced through the things the metal couldn't reach. The wind-coated harpoons cut Han's chakra cloak at distance, never touching him, shearing away strips of the shroud that the remaining harpoons swooped in to eat before the cloak could reform.
Han was losing ground.
He was faster. Stronger. Every individual strike he threw could kill her, and he was throwing them constantly, fists and tails and chakra arms and bursts of steam-enhanced speed that shattered the ground and scattered the smaller harpoons like leaves in a gale. But for every harpoon he destroyed, two more took its place. For every arm he formed, three marlins devoured it. The cloak was thinning. Bare patches of red armor showed through where the harpoons had stripped it faster than it could regenerate, and a second tail dissolved when a giant harpoon pinned it to the ground and held it long enough to drain it dry.
Three tails.
Tenten was on one knee due to simultaneously cloning, enlarging, and coating the harpoons in nature transformation. She attached chakra strings despite the harpoons being capable of moving on their own. Without the strings, she would be unable to coat them in lightning or wind chakra.
But she was winning.
She was winning against a jinchuriki.
"Guy-sensei would be so proud right now…" She breathed. Her lips curled. She stuck her tongue out at Han.
Han didn't see it. He was too busy ripping a giant harpoon in half with both hands, the cloned weapon bursting around him in a cloud of smoke, and four regular harpoons drove into his chest before he could dodge through the smoke.
Two tails.
His cloak was more gaps than substance now. The dark chakra clung to him in patches, concentrated around his chest and head and the furnace on his back, and the two remaining tails were shorter than the original five had been, thinner, the energy that sustained them being siphoned away faster than it could replenish.
Han stopped.
He stood in the middle of the ruined battlefield, surrounded by circling harpoons, his cloak in tatters and his mask flickering, and he stopped moving. The white slits of his eyes found Tenten where she knelt among her swarm.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the two remaining tails went rigid. They stood straight up behind him, trembling, and the patches of dark chakra on his body began to pulse.
Han’s back arched while on all fours. The furnace on his back cracked open, splitting along seams that had never been visible before, and steam billowed out in a torrent, as a continuous eruption, a geyser of white fog that rose twenty meters, thirty, fifty, blotting out the sky above the battlefield and turning the air into a wall of hot white nothing.
The ground shook.
And through the steam Tenten could see Han's silhouette changing. Expanding. His shoulders broadened beyond any human proportion. His limbs thickened. His back rose, and kept rising, and the shape he was becoming was not a man at all.
A horn pierced through the top of the steam cloud. Then another. Four long, curved horns, white as bone, reaching toward the sky and parting the fog around them.
Oh no.
Tenten threw every harpoon she had.
Sixty-three copies and nine giants and the original, all of them, sent screaming toward the shape in the steam. The tails met them. Muscle and bone under white hide, and the harpoons that bit into it drank and kept drinking and the flesh underneath didn't dissolve. It just kept coming. The swing smashed through the swarm and every clone burst into smoke, and the original spiked into the ground next to Tenten.
The steam cleared.
Kokuō stood on the battlefield.
Five tails, fully formed. A body the size of a building, four legs thick as watchtowers planted in craters of their own making, white fur or something like fur rippling across a frame that belonged to no animal Tenten had ever seen. A horse's body with a dolphin's head, blunt and smooth with blue eyes, and the four horns she'd seen through the steam rising from that head like the masts of a ship, curved and gleaming and taller than the trees at the edge of the field.
The beast exhaled and the breath alone pushed Tenten backward three meters across the ground.
Tenten looked up as she pulled out the original Marlin Harpoon.
She looked at the harpoon. She looked at Kokuō.
The harpoon could eat chakra. It could devour arms and cloaks and tailed beast bombs and strip away chakra tails. But this was a tailed beast. They weren’t made out of chakra, were they? A living mountain so massive that the harpoon in her hand was a needle compared to it. And the beast was looking down at her with those large blue eyes.
Tenten's hand tightened on the harpoon as she locked eyes with the beast.
Maybe instead of believing she could win, she should’ve run when she still had the chance…
Kokuō raised its head as its front hoof lifted from its crater and hung in the air above her like a mountain about to fall.
Tenten raised her harpoon as she wove through hand signs with her other hand.
One weapon. One girl. One tailed beast.
The hoof came down.