“Will she?” Sasuke glanced my way. “Bad girl.”
I gave him the finger. “Fuck you, Sasuke. All your brainwashing accomplished was to make me learn to be even stronger. You can’t beat the three of us, even with Nagato’s help.”
“Ah, but I don’t have to,” he said triumphantly. “That’s their job.”
Three teenaged copies of Naruto stepped through the rift. Each wore a seal my copy had invented for Sasuke during their last months of preparation, designed to suppress the will of the person it was applied to. There was nothing human looking out of their blood-red eyes, and the crackling auras of red chakra surrounding their bodies already had four visible tails.
The portal closed behind them.
“My Sharingan can control even the Kyuubi,” Sasuke boasted. “Can you defeat the most powerful of the bijuu? Can you do it three times at once? I’d have brought more, but I have to admit this is my limit.”
“Crap,” I muttered. “Naruto, do we need to bug out? Your chakra still isn’t recovered, and…”
“No,” he said harshly. “You wanted to finish this, and that’s what we’re going to do. I’ll handle these boys. You two take care of the others.”
A blinding flare of chakra blazed up around him, refilling his reserves with an ocean of power that made even the massive stores of my own chakra seal seem like nothing in comparison. It took me a moment to realize what I was seeing, and then I had to shake my head. Somehow he’d managed to copy my trick and make a chakra storage seal hidden in his mindscape, despite the fact that his mindscape was just a mental construct instead of a quasi-physical pocket dimension. Only Naruto.
Then he brought his hands together in a seal I didn’t recognize.
“Demonic Sage Mode,” he growled. My jaw dropped as he sucked in the Kyuubi’s chakra and blended it with his own, still augmented by the natural energy of Sage Mode, to make a four-phase chakra. My god. That would be as big a step above normal Sage Mode as that was above an ordinary ninja.
That’s my man.
“We’re on it, Naruto. Kick his ass for me.” I backed away from what was about to be a very bad place to be. Hinata went with me, automatically positioning herself to guard my back as we moved. My mind flashed through everything I knew about our remaining opponents, considering how to beat them.
Sasuke’s Hinata was the hardest of them for me to fight, and the one most likely to take me out without having to deplete my chakra first. My Hinata could keep her busy for awhile, but she probably wouldn’t win that fight. Strong as she was, her older self was even more skilled. I’d have to finish off what was left of Akatsuki in time to help her.
I’d never come close to beating Nagato, and that was when his ‘Six Paths of Pain’ were animated corpses. Now they were alive, much faster and stronger than before, and he had S-rank cannon fodder to throw at me as well. Could I really do this?
I had to.
I set myself, mustered my will, and increased the flow of chakra through my Heaven Seal. I was myself. Centered and strong, every aspect of my body and mind operating in perfect harmony. Aware of the true nature every detail of my surroundings. Ready to spring into action in an instant, bringing irresistible violence to bear on the weakest point of any force foolish enough to oppose me.
It might not be enough, but I’d give them a hell of a fight.
A slight flickering of my chakra in our personal code told Hinata what I needed her to do, and she nodded firmly. I reached back to touch her cheek with a strand of animated hair, and wove the seals for a chakra repulsion array across her skin. It would only stop normal jyuuken, not the elaborate spikes and armor-piercing lances of the higher forms, but it was all the advantage I had time to give her.
“Let’s do this, Sasuke,” Naruto said grimly.
Sasuke nodded, and gestured to his Kyuubi-possessed minions. “Kill him!”
Everything happened very quickly after that.
Hinata and I leaped back as Naruto threw a huge youki-charged Rasenshuriken into their midst and charged. One of them met his attack head-on, and the shockwave from their first exchange of blows cracked the walls and blew away every shadow clone in the building. That was apparently Akatsuki’s cue, because the ceiling above me was blown apart from above an instant later.
I dodged through the rain of multi-ton stone blocks, noting as I did that they were moving a lot faster than terminal velocity. Hundreds of Deidara’s explosive bugs crawled among them, leaping out to attack me when I passed nearby, and I caught a glimpse of puppets appearing in the air above me to swoop down with weapons bared.
I caught a glimpse of the two Hinatas locked in combat some distance away, and angled away from them. The elder Hinata’s divination zone was more than a hundred yards across, an absurdly huge volume of space, but I was already near the edge. A quick body flicker got me the rest of the way out, and I breathed a sigh of relief. As long as I kept my distance and stayed mobile I wouldn’t have to worry too much about her suddenly appearing behind me to launch one of her impossibly fast special attacks, and I’d be able to concentrate on my own opponents.
I ducked under a flailing tail of red chakra so intense it could have killed with a touch, and sent out an indiscriminate detonation command that set off all the constructs Deidara had dropped around me. A body flicker took me above the explosions and into the path of Sasori’s puppets, where I could see the chakra strings that controlled them clearly. A hail of poisoned senbon rattled off my armor as I traced the strings back to their origin, and a cloud of iron particles began to coalesce around me.
I opened six gates, and threw a tight bolt of wind-boosted flame at the puppet master. As I’d hoped he replaced himself with a falling rock to escape, and I met him at his landing point and slammed a fist into the cylindrical artifact that his chakra strings emerged from. It exploded in a spray of blood and grey matter, and his puppets collapsed.
Kisame appeared behind me in the same instant, and I felt Samehada slashing through my armor and into the flesh and bone beneath. The blow sent me flying into the path of a barrage of rockets launched by Pein’s mechanical body, and the explosions sent shrapnel tearing through my limbs. I healed that damage with a thought and flickered back to the floor, before throwing a spread of supersonic shuriken wrapped in invisibility illusions back at the enemies above me.
A massive explosion from Naruto’s battle blew out the side of the palace nearest me, and I body flickered under a falling mass of stone for a moment to heal the wound on my back. One of Deidara’s clay clones appeared in the same space and detonated itself, sending me flying back through the remains of the wall. One of Nagato’s chakra disrupting blades speared through my left thigh as I flew, but I forced my chakra to flow normally around it and tumbled to my feet in time to block another attack from Kisame.
Strength! I sang as I planted my feet, weaving new seals around my right arm. I punched him, and sure enough he reflexively blocked instead of replacing out of the way. My fist met his legendary sword with a thunderous crash, and every bone in my hand shattered despite all the tricks I used to prevent that. But the blow actually bent his sword, slamming it back into his chest hard enough to collapse his rib cage and sending him flying. Sword and wielder sailed far into the air, their trajectories separating as he lost hold of the blade.
Hopefully he wouldn’t get back up.
But I’d been stationary for nearly a second, and it cost me. A beam of light from Nagato’s mechanical body speared through my chest, melting a neat hole through the armor plates that should have protected me and actually setting them on fire. A flurry of paper sheets wrapped around my arms and began to jam my chakra, and a sudden blow from an unseen force knocked me into the flailing tails of one of Naruto’s opponents.