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Chapter 57 - Arc 4 - Brawling in the Streets: The Brawling Starts
🕑 Added 2024-07-14 02:14:37 +0000 UTCThere's a lot of combat in the next few chapters, and I imagine most of them won't end quite as quickly as this fight. Sakura's just, not having mercy after all those zombies. Helps she has dozens of full heals, I wonder what a sacrificial dumbass will do with dozens of full heals.
I'm officially not behind!
We'll see if that's true tomorrow, but you know, maybe I can pull it off. That'd be a chapter Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday. That'd be nuts.
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Excitement is a new commodity as of late, so feeling the wood crunch and dust under her hammer has a flurry of emotions spiking up through her with every swing. One would think the constant crushing of zombie skulls and the putting down of one of the media’s most famous enemies would have her skipping around but the musty smell of the mansion and the constant feeling of squishy rot had her reeling. To put it simply, it was not a pleasant time. It was surprisingly bad.
Over the mansion’s entertainment, what she has out here has her skipping, each bounce of her body is rev’d and ready to go and she revels in the chaotic desire to destroy more infrastructure with every second. She’d smashed a few walls in the mansion, they didn’t even break, but here, well, she made an assumption and it worked! It’s all crumbling, like they’ve switched game genres entirely and now they’re playing Red Faction or Teardown. It’s destructive, it’s senseless, but it’s fun and who hasn’t wanted to tunnel through a wall in real life instead of using the door?
The guilt that would normally come from such an act is entirely off her shoulders here in a dungeon, and the evil smirk that she finds permanently plastered on her lips is as delightful as it is malicious. Her sword is probably jealous of the hammer, as she’s been using it so much more, but in her defense, it’s a giant hammer. She’s jealous too, it’s huge and destructive and knows its purpose in life! She also just… attacking Neji put some things into perspective. Kakashi’s right, she needs to get good with multiple weapons, especially when her main weapon is trying to make her attack teammates. Or, well, it’s not helping her desire to attack teammates.
She just hopes the Hokage is lenient about that… She gets the feeling he’s not going to be lenient at all unless Neji downplays the hell out of it in his report. Issue is, she has to put it in hers, because if she doesn’t and Neji does she’s screwed. So if Neji doesn’t, she’s going to tattle on herself… If only it was her team and she could trust them.
The worry isn’t enough to get her down though, she’ll deal with it later, right now she’s on a conquest and she’s searching around! Nothing, nothing, nothing-
She finds her feet pick up on it before she does. Maybe it’s instinct, maybe it’s one of her traits, maybe she’s just that good, but she jumps out of the way just in time for the area she was standing in to be bathed in flame. The wall she was next to explodes inwards, blocking her vision with dust. Everything around her ignites, beautiful and remarkably sparkly as the very air itself is awash with cleansing heat. A quick look around reveals she’s alone, except for a boy around her age walking towards her from outside the building. The giant hole he made serves well enough to let them see each other, which is odd because he definitely should be running around now if he can see her fully. He must have figured out where she was by approximation from all the noise she was making, which means her fun time is up.
She expected to get through a couple more buildings before being attacked, but if that’s all the leeway she’s been granted for fun, it’ll have to do. “That was rude, you could have hit me!” She shouts at him, waving with one hand and holding the hammer in the other. It’s a bit heavy, and she couldn’t swing it that way, but maybe the appearance will terrify him. She can hope so, a terrified enemy is an easy enemy.
He’s got darker hair, a bit spikey, and his clothing looks to be of very high quality despite the whole missing ninja vibe this dungeon is about. His top is almost robe-like, and his baggy leggings rest at his hip, tied properly with a separate cloth that intertwines both items. He captures the idea of a wannabe samurai, looking less like a ninja and more like a reject from the capital’s forces. She’s not sure how to feel about his visage, but she does know that he thinks he’s the protagonist. He’s got gold trim all over his dirty garments, which implies he’s a merchant's son, or maybe he really is disgraced and from a powerful family.
There’s no reason to allow nice clothes like that to fall to ruin unless you think you’re one turn away from getting new ones. He thinks he’s the leader of this story, those are the rules.
Despite her powers, her clothes are sensible, even if pink probably isn’t a great ninja color. She’s gone out of her way to avoid protagonist syndrome, and yet he walks up to her just like that, it’s enough to cause her pause. This could be a bad thing, people with confidence like that fall into two categories. Dumb, and justified, and that was kind of a big fireball that just tore through the wall.
“My apologies.” He gives her a wicked grin as he gets just close enough for her to see his expression well. He then takes a combat stance and begins on a new set of hand signs. “Leaving you alive to think about this wasn’t my intention, maybe don’t dodge this time?”
Twenty genin, ten Chunin, and one boss enemy. If they have to fight them all here, they’re dead. Even if the chunin are only as strong as normal genin, and the genin are all only as strong as academy students, and Fierro is entirely out of magic and stays out of the fight, they’d die. They would die screaming.
Luckily though, that’s probably not the case. Neji’s insight is clear, they need to have a force to fight with after this is done which means they’ll try to retreat the moment they start losing people. So all she needs to do is prioritize a few brutal kills, and hopefully, Neji will prioritize a few brutal kills, and Tenten will too, and they’ll quickly do exactly what’s needed to trigger the enemy retreat. It’s more than likely an event trigger and not something they can force by being especially brutal and destroying morale, but it doesn’t hurt to give it her best shot anyway just in case. Her life somewhat depends on her showing here, so, she takes a deep breath to steel her nerves and takes off running-
- She charges at him, actively concentrating her fire chakra to her clothes to create a coating as best she can. It covers her like a layer of oil, or perhaps a protective guardian that only she knows. Her fire affinity isn’t great, but it should be enough.
With both hands on the hammer for the run, she can’t make the seals needed to create a water clone. It’s too bad, it’d be useful for this. “Haaaauuu!” She shouts, making sure to look plenty intimidating, and dumb, and too brutish to think anything through. The enemy must always underestimate you, if she’s learned anything from Kakashi it’s that.
She grimaces a bit in advance when he finishes his final seal, and announces he’s got a nice big fireball coming her way. He didn’t need to say anything though, the huge wall of flame shooting towards her at rapid speed has her just terrified enough to have some doubts. It’s huge, it’s so hot it hurts a little just approaching, and she can hear the roaring of the flame well before she meets it. The air steams, matter smokes, and she meets it running.
She makes it one step into the blistering inferno that bathes her skin, before she jumps, flying right through it. She accelerates herself with all her might, ignoring the painful blisters spawning all over her skin as his fire chakra overwhelms hers and continuing to reinforce herself the best she can knowing damn well that it’d only take a single second’s pause for this to turn very lethal. “Guaaaah!” She pushes herself just that much further, flying out the other side of his wall of flame with a flair filled spin that has her accelerating rapidly. Flames continue to trail after her weapon as it glides through the air, and she allows its path to guide her onward like she and it belong as one. Its weight pushes her further forward as she moves, the upswing in her spin overtaken by the aid of gravity on the downswing and her own forceful movements glide her gleefully towards her opponent's shocked form.
“What the-” It’s all he manages to say, before he’s interrupted by a horrifying crunch, and Sakura’s splattered with bone fragments and other assorted squishy matters she’s become very accustomed to in recent times. She hits him hard enough that the ground craters around them, and the whiplash from her own attack makes her own bones ache, the searing burns make it hurt to breathe but the shockwave flowing through her makes it hard to get any air at all.
That was dumb, maybe assuming his fireball would be weaker than Sasuke’s wasn’t smart. Only the fire chakra in her hands and the water chakra rapidly working to try and cool it stops her from dropping the metal hammer that is currently steaming and trying to fry her. Thinking of her HP as a resource to trade for opportunity hurts far too much, she needs to come up with better plans than this. That being considered, standing on her opponent's freshly cooling corpse and admiring the hole she’s made in the ground where his head used to be, she can’t help but accept that this time in particular was probably a good trade. Especially with all the healing items she has, even if they probably take a bit to use or have a cooldown or something.
She looks around to ensure she’s alone, before taking a moment to check on her status.
“I only lost thirty HP?”
Tough talk or not, that was likely only a genin with a high-fire affinity and a missing-nin genin at that. It’s unlikely the fights with the harder opponents will end in one move.
[2/20 Genin killed]
The notification informs her that someone else has also taken down an opponent. She’s relieved to see that someone else has the same idea, though it bothers her that she didn’t get the third kill. They’re stronger than her, substantially so, so if they’re being attacked now she should be the one falling behind, not in second place.
Being in second place has a lot of implications to it. Their third could be fighting a Chunin and therefore not be on the scoreboard yet - which’d be bad because they’d be alone - or their third could be being merciful, which is almost worse. They need to take the enemy out, and take them out fast.
“Fuck, Tenten,” She bites her lip, already knowing it’s her that’s still fighting for one reason or another. Neji’s decisive, it makes sense he’d take out his opponent before her, but Tenten seems almost benevolent. Shelooks down at the freshly made body. She’ll have to abandon it for now and hope it doesn’t despawn so she can loot it when she gets back. They have to force the enemy to retreat, which means she has to get killing, but most of all she needs to back up the soft-hearted weapon mistress.
Luckily for her, she’s good at exactly one thing in a situation like this, if her teammates have anything to say about it, and that’s scaring the actual hell out of people. “Ow, my shoulder…” She groans, the joint sending her a searing pain as she takes off running towards where Tenten probably is. She probably did more damage to herself with that crap than the fireball did!
The dirt path between them is over quickly, and she gets herself on top of a building to observe with a quick jump onto a wall, and a kick off of it to send herself over to the next.
“Tenten, Tenten, where are you…”
Comments
Christopher Cummins
Yeah... well, even as she grows and changes, some things remain the same. Being willing to jump through a fireball is a nice call back to earlier chapters that I bet a lot of people will miss. It's also a lot less crazy as back then she had like 60 HP and now she has well over 150.
Dopplerdee
Thinking of HP as a resource when your body can lose function from targeted damage seems like a bad idea.
