The weapons were easier. Just a nice selection of fine steel kunai and shuriken, inscribed with seals for silence and invisibility. I didn’t bother with anything else, since I prefer fists for close combat and ninjutsu at longer ranges.
Nice, Hinata commented.
“Thanks. Oh, can I have permission to reset my loop if I need to? Saskue made me promise not to do that without permission, but I didn’t say he had to be the one to give it.”
Hinata laughed. You have my permission to reset your loop whenever you want, my love. Are there any other promises you need to be released from?
“Nope, that was it.”
The mountain shook again, and there was a blinding flash from the direction of Naruto’s fight. Getting caught in one of those giant attacks would still toast me, so I’d better let him see me coming. I’d left two slits just the right size in the back of my armor, so it was the work of a moment to sprout wings and take flight.
I shot a thousand feet into the air on a rush of hurricane-force wind, before I let the updraft dissipate and banked towards Naruto. Apparently Sasuke had thrown a few more bijuu into the fight while I was busy, and Pein’s summoning abilities had been getting a workout as well. But Naruto’s current opponents were the guardian statues that I’d seen flanking the doors of the palace.
They were fast enough that they could actually hit him if he wasn’t careful, and as I approached I saw one project a tightly-focused beam of light from its forehead that penetrated the near-invulnerable scales of Naruto’s dragon form and burned a deep gouge into his side. He smacked it away with his tail and healed the injury almost instantly, but the thing picked itself up no worse for the wear. I could feel more than a trace of the Kyuubi’s chakra leaking into his aura now, which meant he was starting to get tired.
Well, then I’d just have to give him a break.
I looked the golems over carefully as I approached. They were covered in seals of protection and warding, an impenetrable layer of armor that no normal technique would even scratch. The mechanisms inside were a marvel of sealcraft, far more advanced than anything I’d fought before. But I could read it as easily as anything else. Motive force and senses, control links and repair functions, and a deeply-buried power core like nothing I’d ever seen before. Breaching that looked like a really bad idea, but it wasn’t the only vulnerable point.
Naruto knocked one of his opponents flying with another tail slap, and turned to pounce on the other in a blur of claws and teeth. I picked the one he wasn’t ignoring as my target, and folded my wings to dive at its back as it picked itself up. I wove wind and fire together into a dual-element Rasengan as I dropped towards it, compressing the whirling ball of energy until it was barely the size of a match head.
The amount of energy I’d called up was nothing compared to what Naruto was throwing around, and as I’d hoped it ignored me in favor of lining up another shot on him. But when you build a construct with complicated internal mechanisms, you inevitable have to have some way to service it…
I was barely a hundred feet up when I spotted the access panel, and altered course to alight on the back of the thing’s head. There was a cover plate that flipped up to reveal a cylindrical depression with a crystalline sensor at the bottom, which I presumed was the Celestial equivalent of a lock. I dropped my miniature Rasengan into the hole.
The explosion blew a fist-sized chunk of stone out of the construct’s back, and smoke poured out around the edges of the armored panel. The golem stopped, and both hands began to reach back in my direction. I planted my feet, reached through the hole to grip the side of the panel, and pulled with all of my strength.
The panel came free with a snap and sizzle of breaking stone and failing seals, and went sailing off in the direction of the palace. Under it was a maze of crystal rods and orbs and clockwork bits covered in seals, so complex it would have taken me hours to figure out even in my current enhanced state. I shrugged, and started smashing things at random.
The golem staggered, its arms flailing about as it twitched spastically. Then it ground to a stop, and fell over with a thunderous crash.
I jumped lightly off the falling mass, and spread my wings again to glide towards Naruto. Frantically hugging a dragon wouldn’t have worked very well, and getting too distracted would be a bad idea, so I tried to keep my mind on business. I could crawl into his arms and have a nervous breakdown after we won.
I arrived just as he ripped the other golem’s head off with his teeth, and spat it out with a grimace.
“Those things taste really nasty,” he complained. “Hinata says you’re back, but we can’t leave yet?”
“Oh, do you still have one of her clones in your mindscape?” I asked. “That would explain why you aren’t stuck in Yakumo’s illusions. Yeah, that bastard still has the looping version of Hinata under his control, and she has my contract. I think I’m immune to being trapped like this again, but I’d rather not push my luck. Do you have enough juice left to push through to the palace with us and find her?”
He shook his massive head. “There’s some kind of barrier keeping me away from the palace. I might be able to break it with brute force, but I’d probably blow up the whole building doing it. We can’t help her if she’s dead.”
I turned my gaze on the palace, and saw the ward he was referring to. It was actually the Kyuubi’s alien red chakra it was repelling, but it wasn’t like Naruto could just leave his prisoner out here. The ward was a perfect sphere, emanating from somewhere in the palace. Hmm. The geometric center would be a few feet below the floor in the middle of the throne room, maybe thirty feet from where I’d last seen Sasuke’s spare copy of me.
“Give me a minute, and I’ll see if I can do something about that,” I told Naruto. “I think I just picked up a tricky back door that they don’t know about.”
He looked at the walls of the palace, more than a mile away, and at the pack of unkillable bijuu-sized two-headed dogs that one of Pein’s bodies was summoning between here and there. “Sure,” he said doubtfully. “This I’ve got to see.”
28. Battle
Disclaimer: I don’t own Naruto.
I stepped back into my mindscape, leaving an aspect behind to take care of my body, and examined again the changes my new seal had made. There were doors in my inner recesses that hadn’t existed before, leading to the mindscapes of my other aspects. Those would be of no help, since the Sakura I wanted was a version from another world. But there was still a tenuous sense of connection branching out further than my own aspects, across the space between worlds to other versions of myself. Could I use that somehow?
I dove deeper into the hidden depths of my soul, and found the path that had once led to the space between worlds blocked by a door. It was a massive affair, armored like a bank vault and still growing as I watched, and I realized that my Heaven Seal was directing a steady flow of energy through into it. But the door was only meant to keep out intruders, and it swung open at my touch.
I stepped through it, and found myself in a comfortable-looking study that felt almost entirely real. There was a window overlooking a rather bare lawn, and empty bookshelves covering two walls. A woman who looked exactly like me looked up from a stack of colorful brochures as I entered.
“Well, if it isn’t my first and strongest self,” she said warmly. “Come in. Sit down. I thought you’d be too busy kicking ass to chat anytime soon.”
“I am, actually,” I admitted. “I was trying to trace the connection to that other version of me that Sasuke is keeping enslaved. Um, are you my overself? Because if you are the info I got from my demon side’s briefing makes it sound like I’d just be your puppet or clone or something, and that doesn’t feel right.”