The poisonous red youki ate deep into my flesh, tainting my chakra pathways and burning my tenketsu before batting me away with enough force to break bones. I struck a mass of rubble headfirst, and died instantly.
“Damn it,” I complained. “I am not going to let my family down. I don’t care how many times you kill me, I’ll keep getting back up until I’ve won.”
I kept my body animated, using it as a puppet as I body flickered away amid a flurry of distracting illusions. I split off an aspect to concentrate on healing myself, flickered away from another Deidara clone before it could explode, and threw myself into the ground as one of Naruto’s opponents lit off an energy blast so big it gouged out a trench all the way to the edge of the plateau.
All across the ruins the ‘shuriken’ I’d thrown moments ago finally fell to the ground. The blood clones dropped their henges as they landed, and wrapped themselves in invisibility instead. Nagato’s Rinnegan was hard to fool at close range, but at a distance the concealment might actually keep him from spotting them. Most of them immediately began a careful search of the plateau, looking for Nagato’s real body.
I had a few seconds to heal myself before someone tried to phase lock me into the ground, and I had to emerge. A glance around revealed that Naruto’s battle had already reduced the palace to a smoking crater, but he and his Kyuubi-possessed copies were still going at it in a barrage of increasingly large attacks. They were up to six tails now, but I saw him punch one of them so hard it went flying into the air right through Sasuke’s intangible form.
Then I was too busy fighting to watch.
Pein’s Preta, Human and Asura paths all engaged me at close range, while the others hung back and watched for good opportunities to snipe me. That meant no ninjutsu unless I wanted to get drained, so I pulled a pair of ninjato from my mindscape and wove my hair into a forest of slender braids tipped with poisoned spikes. Somehow I managed to hold them off for more than a minute, until I finally managed to tag the Asura path with a spinning high kick.
My foot took the mechanical ninja’s head right off, but the risky move gave the Preta path an opening. His fingers brushed along my left arm, ripping out a river of chakra that left the limb momentarily unenhanced and nearly useless. That left me unable to block a kick from the Human path that sent me sailing into the air, only to be blown back into the ground by the invisible impact of the Deva path’s gravity control.
I rolled back to my feet with my arm already recovering, and gutted the Preta path as he tried to pin me. But while my hands were busy the Human path reached right through the snake-like mass of my hair, taking a dozen poisonous hits in the process, to lay his hand on my head.
Then he ripped my soul out of my body.
The pain was agonizing, but it was over in an instant. I found myself hanging from his hand as a ghost, pinned by his technique and unable to slip away. He made a series of signs with his free hand, and the chains of a binding began to wrap around me.
“No!” I shouted. “You won’t take me so easily. Freedom!”
I poured the full force of my stored chakra into my song, and the chains burst. I wrenched myself free, and fell back into my body just as the Deva path pierced my chest with a chakra disruption blade. I pulled my body into my mindscape before he could impale me on enough of the things to freeze me, and took a moment to remove it and heal up.
“Damn, this guy is good,” I muttered. “Ok, he’ll have his other bodies back up before I can catch him, but I can’t just hide in here or he’ll go after Hinata. Time for another new trick.”
I repaired my tattered armor, added seal arrays to generate a chakra shield, and wreathed myself in a whirlwind of air-boosted flame. I discarded one ninjato while growing the other into a proper katana, with seals for sharpness and durability and a nice thick coating of cutting wind chakra. Then I stepped back out into the real world.
The mountain trembled. Great cracks appeared across the surface of the plateau, massive expanses of stone shifting and tilting in response to the forces being unleashed nearby. But my opponents were easy to find.
I spotted the Naraka path not far away, and send a half-dozen flame clones surrounded in distracting illusions after him while I suppressed my presence. He had to take that attack seriously, since that was the body that could rez the others. I saw the Animal path leap in front of him and start a summoning as I turned and sprinted up a sloping expanse of rubble towards the Deva path perched on top.
A flame aura is hard to hide, and he spotted me before I was halfway there. He gestured, and an unseen force blew me off the slope to slam into a boulder hard enough to shatter it. But I just smiled. He had a five-second recharge time on that ability, and that’s practically forever to me. I flickered high into the air, threw a blast of cutting wind that he avoided with a replacement, and used a replacement of my own to meet him at his landing spot.
The Deva path was the strongest of the six, and he actually blocked my sword with some kind of close-range repulsion armor that also kept my flame vortex at bay. But it didn’t do him any good against the four-element Rasengan in my off hand. My attack exploded against his barrier, the backblast straining my chakra shield as it tore through his defense and reduced his body to finely shredded ash. I staggered back, noting that my left hand had been destroyed as well, and started regenerating it as I turned to face some kind of tentacle beast summoned by the Animal path.
A titanic shock wave blew all of us away.
I managed to snag a boulder in mid-flight, dropping my flame shield and anchoring myself to the ground. The whole area was engulfed in flame, and the ground shook so violently we could have been caught in an earthquake. The heat was like a blast furnace, so intense I would have been flash-fried if not for my fire resistance. But between that and my chakra shield I’d be fine.
Then one of my searching clones sent me the location of a dome of fireproof paper on the other side of the ruins.
“Got you,” I crowed triumphantly. I stepped into my mindscape, possessed my clone’s body for a moment, and pulled my body back out at her location.
Sure enough, I could see Konan and Nagato’s chakra inside. The fire resistance jutsu that kept the paper from being burned away by the surrounding flames was as flawless as all of Konan’s work, and for a moment I regretted that we always seemed to be on opposite sides. Maybe I could change that when the loops were done.
But right now she and the man she followed needed to go down hard. The fireball was beginning to thin, and she could probably sense my presence. I’d better work fast. I laid my hand against the paper dome, extending my senses to get a feel for the space within, and filled it with a cloud of nerve gas.
The dome came apart instantly, forming a cloud of flying paper that quickly blew the gas away. I stayed low as I moved in, weaving through a barrage of chakra disruption blades as I called up a storm of cutting wind. A barrage of Konan’s papers exploded around me, but my wind kept them from getting close enough for the blasts to penetrate my chakra shield. Realizing that her ranged attacks weren’t going to stop me she darted between me and my target.
A supremely effective spy she may have been, but Konan was no match for me at taijutsu. We exchanged a brief flurry of blows before I got a hand on her shoulder, and scrambled her paper transformation technique. Half her body mass dissolved into sheets of inanimate paper, and what was left died instantly.