Chapter 77: One Thousand Blades!
Three kilometers from the walls of Iwagakure, on a ridge that overlooked the village from the northwest, Sparrow crouched behind an outcrop of wind-carved stone and activated his Byakugan.
The coliseum sat near the center of the village, an open-air stadium carved into the rock with tiered seating rising on all sides. Banners hung from the upper walls. Dignitaries filled the reserved sections, the Earth Daimyo's retinue in their silks, village shinobi in their flak jackets, and at the highest tier, in a private box overlooking the field, three figures sat together.
Sparrow's focus increased.
The Third Tsuchikage. Small, old, hovering slightly above his seat. Beside him, broad and dark-skinned and radiating barely contained fury even while seated, was the Fourth Raikage. And beside the Raikage, calm and composed, was the new Fifth Mizukage, her auburn hair catching the light.
Three Kage. Three Great Villages. Sitting together at a Chunin Exam in Stone Country.
That was not normal. Kage attended exams in allied or neutral villages, not in each other's private boxes. The seating arrangement alone was enough to speak for itself, and Sparrow's Byakugan could read more than seating.
He read their lips.
The Raikage spoke first. Sparrow caught the words in fragments, distance and angle making some syllables uncertain, but the shape of it was unmistakable.
Konoha... negotiations... stalling... time to prepare... three sides...
The Tsuchikage responded.
...borders... simultaneous... their strength is spread thin... the boy is one person... cannot defend three...
The Mizukage spoke next
When do we move?
Sparrow held the Byakugan for ten more seconds, watching the Raikage's response, a timeline, a reference to the negotiations over Yugito as a distraction, a mention of how they should use their forces.
Then he deactivated the Byakugan and exhaled.
Three Great Villages were planning a coordinated attack on Konoha. Stone from the west. Cloud from the east. Mist from the south. Three fronts, three armies, the same strategy that had destroyed the Uzumaki clan and wiped Uzushiogakure off the map.
The Raikage was negotiating in bad faith. Every diplomatic message, every formal request for the Two-Tails’ return, every carefully worded scroll was a smokescreen. He wasn't trying to get his jinchuriki back through the talks. He was buying time to assemble something that would make the talks irrelevant.
"Captain." Sai's voice was flat beside him. "What’s going on?"
Sparrow looked at him.
"Three Kage are in the private box together." Sparrow said. "The Raikage, the Tsuchikage, and the Mizukage. They are planning a coordinated invasion of Konoha from three sides. The negotiations over the jinchuriki is a ploy."
"That changes things significantly..." Sai’s eyes widened.
"That changes everything." Sparrow corrected. "This needs to reach Danzo immediately. And it needs to reach the Hokage."
"Lord Danzo will decide what reaches the Hokage."
Sparrow glared at Sai from behind his mask. That was the problem. That had always been the problem. Danzo would use this intelligence as leverage, as currency, as a tool for his own positioning. The question was whether Danzo's interests aligned with Konoha's survival closely enough that the information would get where it needed to go.
Sparrow turned his Byakugan back toward the arena. The first match of the finals was about to begin, and the girl walking onto the field was someone he had not seen in a very long time.
Tenten.
She looked different... The buns were the same, the brown eyes were the same, but the way she carried herself had changed.
Sparrow watched her step onto the arena floor, and behind the bird mask, Neji Hyuga’s face softened.
Let’s see how much you’ve grown since I’ve died…
The arena was loud.
Stone Country loved its fights hard, loud, and brutal. The tiered seating was packed, civilians and shinobi shoulder to shoulder, and the screaming could be felt in one’s chest.
She stood on the arena floor and looked across at her opponent and did not recognize him.
Blond hair in an asymmetrical bowl cut. Sleeveless Cloud uniform. A long white-hilted katana resting against his shoulder. Bandages on his forearms and the kanji for "heat" tattooed on his left shoulder. He was staring at her with an intensity that didn't match the situation.
"Begin!" The proctor's hand dropped.
Neither moved for a beat.
"Do you remember me?" Atsui pointed at her.
"I don't think we've met." Tenten said, honestly.
His face twisted in frustration. "The Land of Frost. You were standing next to him. The Green Devil. You were on his team."
Tenten tilted her head. The Land of Frost. That had been a while ago. She barely remembered it.
"Oh." She said. "Were you there?"
She wasn't mocking him. She genuinely did not remember his face.
She doesn't even remember me, Atsui thought, and the heat in his chest turned from fire to something that burned worse. I spent years dreaming about fighting the Devil. I told myself I'd be ready next time. I trained every day thinking about that green blur in the snow. And his teammate doesn't even know I exist.
He drew his katana. Fire chakra crawled the blade's edge, the white steel shimmering with heat, and he settled into the Cloud kenjutsu stance.
"Fine!" he said. "Let me remind you."
He rushed in at a good speed for a genin. The katana cut a line of heat through the air, a diagonal slash aimed at her shoulder, the fire on the blade leaving a bright streak in his wake.
Tenten unsealed a sword.
It was a simple long blade, nothing special, one of hundreds she kept stored. She met his slash with it, steel ringing against steel, and the fire on his blade hissed against hers and found nothing to burn.
Then she dropped the blade, leaped back, and placed both hands on her new main scroll. An oversized scroll on her back.
The scroll unfurled. Hundreds of sealed blades broke free all at once, every size, every shape, katanas and broadswords and tantos and cleavers and heavy two-handers, a fountain of steel that shot skyward and hung for one breathless instant above the arena like a suspended storm.
The crowd gasped.
Then the rain came down.
Every blade fell point-first, driving into the arena floor in a spreading pattern that covered the entire field. They sank into the stone and stood upright, a forest of steel sprouting from the ground in every direction, and Atsui threw himself sideways to avoid being pinned by a broadsword that buried itself where his front foot had been.
When he found his footing, the arena was gone. In its place was a field of standing blades, hundreds of them, some tall, some short, some clustered tight, some spaced wide, every one of them within arm's reach of the girl standing in the center of them like she had planted a garden.
What the hell...
Tenten pulled a blade from the ground beside her, a curved sabre, and came at him.
She closed the distance through the forest of her own making, and every step brought a new blade into her hand. She struck with the sabre, released it, pulled a tanto from the ground on her left, slashed, released, grabbed a straight sword on her right, thrust, released, each weapon used for a single beat before she moved to the next.
Atsui blocked the first. The second. The third came from an angle his guard didn't cover because she had already changed weapons and the new blade was shorter and faster than the one before. The tanto sliced across his forearm and he hissed and countered with a fire-enhanced sweep that should have driven her back.
Tenten pulled two blades from the ground simultaneously and crossed them against his swing. The fire scattered off the crossed steel and she kicked off the block, launching herself backward, grabbing a planted sword as she passed it and throwing it at him in the same motion.
Atsui deflected the thrown blade. A second came from behind the first. Then a third. She was pulling swords out of the ground and throwing them faster than he could track their source, each one coming from a different angle because the planted field gave her weapons in every direction.
This isn't a fight! he realized, blood running down his forearm, his fire blade hissing against the cold air. What the hell kind of shinobi fights like this?!
He poured everything into the fire. His katana blazed, the flames climbing higher, hotter, and he swung in a wide arc that sent a wave of heat across the arena, igniting the air itself, a wall of fire that should have cleared the field and forced her back.
Tenten didn't retreat. She grabbed a heavy two-handed sword from the ground, set her feet, and cut through the wall of fire with a single downward stroke. The blade parted the flames and kept going and Atsui barely got his katana up in time. The impact drove him to one knee. The stone cracked beneath him.
She was stronger than him. She was faster than him. She had more weapons than him. And she was using the arena itself to her advantage while he stood in the middle of it with one sword and a nature that she had already proven she could cut through.
"Dragon’s Fang!"
Three blades standing parallel in the ground in front of him. She drove a swing across their buried tips and all three tore upward in one motion, a rising triple-fang inside his guard where no parry was waiting.
The first blade caught his katana and ripped it from his grip. The second sliced across his chest, cutting his shirt and the skin beneath it. The third he twisted away from, barely, the edge kissing his jaw and drawing a thin line of blood.
His katana clattered across the stone floor, out of reach, the fire on it dying.
"Line of Heaven!"
The three blades hung in the air for an instant. Tenten struck each one with the sword in her hand, firing them along a flat line, three heavy blades arriving like thrown spears along the same path.
Atsui crossed his arms in front of his face and the first blade stabbed into his arm. The second buried into the stone beside his hip. The third took him in the shoulder and pinned him to the ground.
The arena went quiet.
Atsui lay on the stone floor of the arena with a sword through his shoulder and the girl from the Land of Frost standing over him with another blade already in her hand, and he understood that he had never had a chance.
I couldn't beat her. I couldn't even make her try. I spent years dreaming about fighting the Devil, and I can't even beat the nobody who stood next to him.
And she destroyed me without breaking a sweat.
Konoha is full of freaks. Unfair, impossible freaks. And they deserve to be destroyed…
"Winner: Tenten of Konohagakure!"
The proctor's call echoed off the arena walls. The Stone, Cloud, and Mist shinobi in the crowd did not cheer. However, the civilians who did not have any innate bias cheered for the exciting match. Hundreds of swords flying as one boy does his best to try and survive. A ninja fighting with a hundred swords!!!
Tenten resealed her blades. The forest of steel vanished back into her scroll, leaving the arena floor scarred and pocked with hundreds of narrow holes where the blades had stood.
She walked back to the area where the other genin were.
…
Kurotsuchi walked onto the arena floor with the confidence of a girl fighting in her grandfather's village in front of her grandfather's crowd. She had short black hair and distinctly pink eyes.
The crowd was deafening. This was their girl. Their Tsuchikage's granddaughter. In the finals of their exam, in their arena, against a Leaf kunoichi who had just embarrassed every other village's candidates. The stone was practically vibrating.
"You've caused quite a mess." Kurotsuchi said, casual, hands on her hips. "The proctors are still mad about the second stage. Something about too many casualties?"
"I didn’t tell them to gang up on me." Tenten shrugged.
Kurotsuchi sighed. "You’re going to be a pain in the butt, I can tell. Which is why I have to apologize."
"Begin!"
Kurotsuchi's hands blurred through signs and the arena floor answered. Stone spikes erupted from the ground in a wave, rushing toward Tenten in a line, the earth itself rising to impale her.
Tenten leaped. She cleared the spikes, unsealed a handful of kunai mid-air, and threw them down at Kurotsuchi in a spread pattern. Kurotsuchi raised a wall of earth with a single palm and the kunai thunked into it uselessly.
The wall dropped and Kurotsuchi was already moving, weaving through more hand signs. She exhaled a stream of liquid that hit the ground around Tenten's landing zone and hardened instantly, quicklime that clung to Tenten's sandals the moment she touched down.
"Stuck." Kurotsuchi observed.
Tenten's feet were locked in hardening cement up to the ankles. She looked down. Looked up.
"Not for long."
Lightning crackled across her hands. She drove both palms into the cement and the electrical charge ran through the hardening material and shattered it from the inside, the rapid thermal expansion cracking the quicklime apart like dry clay. She tore free and was moving again before Kurotsuchi's surprise had time to settle.
Lightning, huh… Kurotsuchi observed.
Tenten didn't give her time to think about it. A rain of weapons again, but smaller this time, a targeted burst of thirty weapons aimed not at Kurotsuchi but at the ground around her, planting the field for close combat.
Kurotsuchi answered with Earth Release: Golem Technique. A hulking figure of stone pulled itself out of the arena floor, twice her height, and lumbered forward to smash through the planted blades. It was big and heavy and durable and it swept a granite fist across the field that scattered steel like sticks.
Tenten pulled a blade from the ground and channeled lightning through it. The cutting edge sharpened and when the golem's fist came down at her she cut through the wrist. The lightning-enhanced blade sheared through stone like it was mud, and the granite hand fell to the arena floor in chunks, and the golem staggered backward with a stump.
Kurotsuchi's eyes narrowed.
The golem reformed its hand. Kurotsuchi poured more chakra into it, thickening the stone, reinforcing, and sent it forward again. Tenten cut through the second hand the same way, then ran up the golem's arm before it could regenerate, planted a blade in its shoulder, vaulted off it, and drove a lightning-enhanced sword straight down into the head of the construct. The golem split from crown to chest and collapsed into rubble.
Kurotsuchi was on her immediately. Earth spikes from below, quicklime from above, the girl was relentless and creative. Use the terrain, use the environment, make the whole arena a weapon.
Tenten matched her technique for technique. Lightning shattered the cement traps. Wind cut through the stone walls. Planted blades gave her weapons everywhere she needed them, and when Kurotsuchi went for close combat, thinking the weapon girl would be weak up close, she found out exactly how wrong that assumption was.
Tenten caught Kurotsuchi's punch with the flat of a hammer, turned it, and struck her across the ribs with the head. Kurotsuchi was sent flying away. Tenten grabbed a planted weapon as she rushed forward and Kurotsuchi barely jumped the slash, landing on an earth pillar she raised under her own feet.
"You're good." Kurotsuchi said from the pillar, breathing harder now, her uniform torn in two places. "Really good. Your sensei must be something."
"Oh you have no idea." Tenten laughed. Then she grabbed two sharp weapons, one in each hand, and ran up the pillar.
“Lava Style: Quicklime Jutsu!” A spray of liquid calcium that would harden on contact and lock her in place permanently.
Tenten crossed her blades in front of her, channeled lightning through both, and cut the quicklime spray in half. The two halves splattered past her on either side and hardened against the arena walls. She reached the top of the pillar and Kurotsuchi met her with a kunai.
They traded blows on top of the stone pillar while the crowd roared. Kurotsuchi was skilled, quick, deceptive, she feinted left and attacked right, she dropped earth walls between them and appeared around them, she used every trick her grandfather and her village had ever taught her.
And it was not enough.
Tenten caught Kurotsuchi's kunai hand, twisted, and disarmed her. Planted a knee in her stomach. And as Kurotsuchi doubled forward, Tenten swung a wind-enhanced blade in a flat arc that stopped one centimeter from the side of her neck.
The wind coming off the edge of the blade cut a thin line of blood without the steel ever touching skin.
The arena went absolutely silent.
Tenten held the blade there. Her breathing was heavy. Her arms ached. Sweat ran down her face and her hair had come loose from both buns, falling across her shoulders in brown waves. She had used more of her arsenal than she wanted to, revealed two nature transformations she had planned to keep hidden, and pushed herself harder than she intended to.
But she was standing. And the Tsuchikage's granddaughter was on her knees with a blade at her throat.
"You give up?" Tenten said.
Kurotsuchi looked at the blade. She looked at the girl holding it. She looked up at her grandfather's box, where the Third Tsuchikage sat watching with an expression she could not read from this distance.
"...Whatever..." Kurotsuchi pouted.
"Winner: Tenten of Konohagakure!"
The crowd was mostly negative. They sat in the heavy, bitter silence of a village that had just watched its princess lose in its own arena to a kunoichi from the village they hated most. There were a lot of boos. A small few cheers. And a lot of dirty looks sent her way.
Tenten sheathed the blade, resealed her remaining weapons, and offered Kurotsuchi a hand. Kurotsuchi looked at it for a long moment. Then she smacked it, stood herself up, and dusted off her outfit.
“Next time, I won’t lose.” She scoffed.
Tenten grinned. “That’s what all sore losers say, you know?” She walked off the arena floor, through the tunnel, and into the daylight on the other side, where Kakashi was waiting with his hands in his pockets and a chunin vest folded over his forearm.
He held it out to her.
"Congratulations, Tenten. You’re a chunin, now." He smiled behind his mask.
She took it. She held it in both hands and looked at it, the green fabric and the scroll pouches and the weight of it, and her eyes got bright, and for a moment she was not the girl who had just won a tournament in enemy territory. She was a gal who had kept a promise.
I told you, Lee. I told you I'd be wearing this vest the next time you saw me.
She put it on. It fit perfectly.
Kakashi hurriedly began escorting her away back to Konoha at their fastest speed.
On the ridge three kilometers away, Sparrow watched through the Byakugan as his old teammate slipped on her chunin vest and smiled in the sunlight, and behind the bird mask, Neji Hyuga had a small smile on his face. However, once he saw the squad of shinobi chasing them, his smile froze before he got to moving. Enemies of Konoha must be eliminated, no matter what. Especially enemies aiming for the lives of his friends…