I passed through the portal and rolled to my feel on the edge of the City of the Gods. Three steps, and I leaped to the top of a marble pillar that rose from the ruins nearby. I suppressed my presence and replaced myself with a rock a hundred yards away, which got me out of immediate danger of being caught. But I knew what was about to happen, so I didn’t stop to look around. Running wasn’t fast enough, so I wove a chain of replacements and body flickers towards the palace as I renewed my anti-summoning seals.
Naruto stepped through the portal looking pissed as hell, and the biggest explosive Deidara had ever built detonated right under his feet. The blast was big enough to level a town, and for a moment I was afraid it had killed him. By then I was half a mile from the portal, but even at that distance the flash warmed my skin and the shock wave blew me right out of the air. I flipped around an especially massive pile of rubble and took cover for a few precious seconds while the dust settled.
I could still feel Naruto’s presence.
I peeked around the rocks to see him walk slowly out of the fading fireball, wreathed in a cloak of pure blue chakra with two tails twisting in the air behind him. I’d seen this before, when Sasuke was teaching a younger Naruto to draw on the Kyuubi’s chakra. But then the aura had been red.
“Naruto has as much chakra as a bijuu?” I stared in wonder. “Wow, I guess Sasuke was right about how dangerous he is.”
“Sasuke!” He roared, his voice much louder than it should have been at this distance. “I’m coming for you, you bastard! Hand over the girls now, and maybe I’ll just beat you to death with my bare hands!”
A swarm of Deidara’s burrowing explosive insects erupted out of the ground around him, while hundreds of flying ones rose from the surrounding ruins to dive at him. It was a perfect target for a big, expensive area attack, and Naruto took the bait. Just three hand seals, and a storm of cutting wind hundreds of yards across rose up to surround him and bat the attackers from the sky. A lot of them detonated, filling the air with smoke and flying debris. They probably couldn’t make out what was happening in there from the palace, but I saw one of Deidara’s clay clones emerge from the earth right behind Naruto and move to attack. Deidara was amazingly stealthy for someone who loves explosions so much, to the point where he could probably walk up behind your typical ANBU and stick an explosive note to his back without being noticed.
But my suspicions were confirmed when Naruto escaped with a replacement, leaving behind… Hinata?
She looked perhaps nineteen, a few years younger than the appearance my partner had settled on for her transformation template, but that wasn’t the only difference. Her taijutsu was filled with a fierce energy completely at odds with the controlled elegance of my partner’s style, but almost as effective. In three swift motions she broke the technique animating Deidara’s clone without detonating it, and it slumped to the ground in a harmless blob of clay.
She turned and danced across the field of animated mines, spinning out a half-dozen shadow clones and disarming everything that came within reach, to rejoin Naruto just as he bit his thumb and slammed down a summoning.
I checked my anti-summoning array nervously when I saw the familiar motion, but this time I wasn’t the target. The girl that appeared looked exactly like my adult form, and the way she took in the situation at a glance told me she’d been waiting for that summon. She turned to her Hinata with an easy smile that made my heart ache, and asked a question as Naruto put a hand on her shoulder.
I recognized that gesture. He was giving her a chakra feed, but not Hinata. I wondered for a moment where they’d gotten a version of me that could do anything useful, as I watched her create a living body for her Hinata. She’d beaten Deidara’s clone while inhabiting a shadow clone body? Well, I could see that, Hinata’s taijutsu is all about not getting hit after all.
“I must have left Naruto a memory bubble,” I realized. “Ok, so that’s really the Sakura from his loop, overlaid with my memories. She doesn’t have any chakra to speak of on her own, so all I have to do is break that link and she’ll be helpless. I can handle that, no problem.”
The other Sakura’s aura suddenly flared into visibility, a column of blue power shot through with gold sparks. Their Hinata turned to face me, and I saw a tracery of seals filled with golden chakra around her eyes. A Tsukuyomi defense? I’d never thought of trying something like that.
Then the other Sakura asked something, and her Hinata pointed right at me. They nodded to each other and vanished, as Naruto called out another swarm of clones to deal with a fresh wave of Deidara’s constructs.
The girls were coming for me, and they were both prepared to go through Sasuke to get me. Naruto was just the decoy. I felt the sinking sensation of knowing the other side just put one over on you, as I realized Sasuke would never consider that possibility. He was still assuming Naruto was the real attack, and if I didn’t let him know otherwise…
I ran.
They were half a mile away, but if they were as fast as I was that was too close for comfort. It was three miles to the palace, and even that was within the range of Hinata’s Byakugan. I wasn’t going to lose them in the rubble no matter what I tried, and even if I could beat them it would take far more chakra than I could afford to spend right now. So I ran, weaving leaps and replacements and a few judicious body flickers into a chain of flickering movement that would get me to my destination in less than a minute. Assuming Naruto didn’t just cover the whole city in clones. Where the hell was the next attack?
A thunderous roar behind me told me the next stage had finally started. I glanced over my shoulder to see four copies of Yugito unleashing their Nekomata on Naruto. Each of them spat a gigantic bolt of pure chakra at him, blowing away his clones and gouging out deep craters in the rubble.
Naruto’s dragon form rose from the smoke as the pack of feline bijuu moved to surround him.
“Is this the best you can do, Sasuke?” He roared. “You think a bunch of little kittens are going to stop me? Dragon Sage Mode!”
I paled, and paused for a moment atop a crumbling pillar to look back again. My chakra senses confirmed that he wasn’t bluffing.
“Oh, holy hell,” I muttered. “He can channel sage chakra in dragon form? Sasuke, there’d better be a lot more ambush you didn’t tell me about.”
I turned, and concentrated on running faster.
27. Jailbreak
Disclaimer: I don’t own Naruto.
Author’s Note: If you’ve asked a question in a review, the answer is probably posted on my blog (see the web site link in my profile for the URL). Also, I’ve begun posting snippets of original fiction there for anyone who’s interested in what my future projects are going to look like.
Four copies of the Nekomata working together were a force that could level a hidden village. With Deidara’s explosive creations darting in to exploit any opening their distractions created even the Sannin would have quickly been overwhelmed.
Against Naruto they might as well have been housecats.
The four bijuu leaped to attack as one. He smacked one out of the air with his tail, sending it flying back through a dozen piles of rubble and right off the edge of the plateau. The creature flailed helplessly as it sailed far out into empty space, and fell out of sight towards the ocean four thousand feet below. The one in front fared even worse, as Naruto opened his mouth and breathed a lance of superheated plasma so intense it momentarily outshone the sun. The beam blew a massive hole clear through the bijuu’s body where it’s heart should have been, and vaporized the jinchuuriki inside.