V2.C11. Invasion X – Naruto vs Gaara

Chapter 11: The Invasion X -- Naruto vs Gaara

The forest had gone quiet the way forests do right before something breaks. No wind moved through the canopy. No insects called. Even the Sun had pulled itself behind a wall of cloud, like it didn't want to watch what was about to happen down here.

Sakura was on her knees with Sasuke's head in her lap, one hand pressed flat against his chest like she could hold his heartbeat in place by touch alone. Pakkun stood a few feet off, ears low, every muscle in his small body coiled toward the tree line where Naruto had gone.

Naruto didn't wait for Gaara's sand to finish rising.

He was already moving.

There was no seal. No shout. No blue light gathering in his palm. Just a boy, and then not a boy, a blur of black cutting through the dark faster than the eye wanted to admit was possible, and then his fist was buried in Gaara's chest before the sand had even cleared the redhead's shoulders.

Gaara left the ground.

He went backward through the trees like something fired from a bow, and the forest answered him one trunk at a time, wood shrieking and splitting, bark exploding outward in pale shards, until he punched clean through a third tree and the momentum finally let him go. He hit the dirt and skidded, carving a trench through root and stone.

Naruto was already there when he stopped rolling.

His heel came down where Gaara's ribs would've been if Gaara hadn't twisted at the last half-second, sand boiling up beneath him on reflex, and the ground took the blow instead. It caved in like something had dropped a boulder on it, dust and pulverized rock geysering into the air.

The sand rose again, a wall this time, desperate, trying to get between its master and whatever this thing was that hit harder than anything Gaara had faced in his life. Naruto's fist went through it like it was smoke that had forgotten how to be solid. Knuckles found jaw. Gaara's head snapped sideways, spit and blood arcing off into the forest, and before the momentum had even finished turning his head Naruto's foot was already in his ribs.

Something inside Gaara's chest gave with a sound like a green branch breaking.

There was no pause in Naruto's rhythm. No hesitation, no calculation visible on his face, nothing that looked like a boy fighting for his life. Each strike came exactly where the last one had left off, like his body was following a piece of music only he could hear. He wasn't fighting Gaara so much as he was taking him apart, joint by joint, breath by breath.

Around them the forest kept dying. Trees that had stood since before either of them was born folded in half or simply ceased to exist, reduced to splinters and green dust hanging thick in the air. The ground was a moonscape of craters now, each one shaped like the exact place Gaara's body had been thrown into it.

The sand tried three more times.

A barrier, and Naruto's fist punched a hole clean through the middle of it, grains scattering like startled birds.

A shield, curved and thickened, and his foot came down through the center of it and kept going, into Gaara's collarbone.

A spear, thin and fast, aimed for his throat, and Naruto's hand simply closed around it mid-air. He felt it try to writhe, felt the grains grinding against his palm like it was alive and furious, and he snapped it in half without looking at it. Then his fist was in Gaara's face again, and Gaara's head cracked back against the trunk behind him.

Blood ran from Gaara's nose, from a split above his eye, painting one side of his face dark in the sunless gloom. His sand armor, the shell he'd worn like a second skin his whole life, had gone from smooth and unbroken to a spiderweb of fractures, chunks of it sloughing away with every hit it failed to stop.

He had never bled like this.

He had never been hurt like this.

"What," Gaara said, and his voice came out strange, warped, like two throats speaking at once and neither one quite steady, "what are you."

Naruto didn't answer. His fist sank into Gaara's stomach and folded him in half around it. His knee came up into the same place a half-second later, and Gaara's whole body left the ground for a moment before his elbow drove him back down into the dirt hard enough to leave an outline.

Naruto stood over him.

His breathing hadn't changed at all. In, out, even, like he was standing in line somewhere waiting for his turn at a ramen stall instead of standing over a boy he'd nearly killed with his bare hands. His face gave away nothing. His hands, when he wasn't using them, went right back into his pockets, like they had somewhere better to be.

"Is that all you've got?"

For a long moment Gaara didn't move. Then his fingers dug into the dirt, and he pushed himself up, slow, shaking, his whole body trembling with something that wasn't quite pain and wasn't quite rage. Sand crawled up out of the broken earth and began knitting itself back over his skin, patching the cracks the way a wound crusts over. When he lifted his head his eyes had changed. Yellow now, the pupils gone thin and slitted, something old and patient looking out through a child's face.

"You are fast," Gaara said. The two voices in his throat had settled into one, lower than before, and colder. "Faster than anyone I have fought. But speed is not enough. You have nothing to beat me even if you can hurt me. You cannot beat me! I am unstoppable!"

The sand didn't rise this time. It came apart into the air all at once, waves of it, whole dunes' worth surging up out of the broken ground and crashing toward Naruto in walls taller than the trees still standing. It should have buried him. It should have crushed the air out of his lungs and packed his mouth shut and left nothing behind but a boy-shaped hollow in the sand.

Naruto moved through it like it was water and he was something that had never once needed to breathe.

He was never where the sand was. He was always exactly where it wasn't, half a step ahead of a jutsu that had never in Gaara's life failed to land. Claws swung down from above, each one big enough to cut a man in two, and Naruto rolled beneath the first, sidestepped the second, was gone entirely by the time the third arrived. The tail came around low and fast, a scythe of compressed sand aimed at his legs, and Naruto caught it in both hands, dug his heels into the broken earth, and pulled.

Gaara came off his feet.

He hit the ground hard enough to crater it a second time, and Naruto was already on top of him, fist to the face, knee to the stomach, elbow to the sternum, three strikes in less time than it took to say them.

Gaara screamed.

It wasn't a sound a person made. It came from somewhere further down, something wounded and old and furious all at once, and the sand around them detonated outward in response, a shockwave of grit and force that caught Naruto mid-strike and threw him backward through the air. He hit a tree hard enough to crack the trunk down its length, slid to the ground, and for one half-second his vision blurred, doubled, came back slow.

He stood up anyway.

His face was still blank. His hands went back into his pockets like nothing had happened at all.

"Good," he said. "That's more like it."

The fight only got worse after that. Worse, and faster, and louder, the two of them tearing through what remained of the forest like they'd been sent to erase it from the map. Naruto stopped moving in straight lines. He was on Gaara's left, and then his right, and then above him, dropping down out of the dark with a heel aimed at his skull, and then he was gone again and reappearing somewhere else entirely, never in the place the sand expected him to be. Gaara's claws swung wide and wild, chasing shapes that had already moved on, and every miss cost him. Naruto ducked under one swing, rolled clear of the next, and came up behind him with his fist already extended, driving it into the small of Gaara's back hard enough to send him crashing face-first into what was left of a tree.

The trunk didn't survive it. Gaara slid down through the wreckage of it, and for a moment he just knelt there, breathing hard, sand hanging in loose curtains off a body that had taken more damage tonight than in every fight of his life combined.

"Get up." Naruto's voice hadn't risen once. "I'm not done with you yet."

Gaara got up.

His sand armor looked less like armor now and more like a cracked shell someone had tried to glue back together in the dark. His eyes were still yellow, still slitted, but there was something else moving behind them now, something that hadn't been there an hour ago.

"You are going to regret this," he said, slower this time, like the words cost him something. "You shouldn’t have pushed me too far! Now you will regret it and your entire village will pay for pushing me too far."

Naruto smiled. It wasn't warm. It was the smile of someone who'd heard that sentence somewhere before, from someone else, and had already watched it turn out to be a lie.

"Then show me! Show me the powers of the lesser monster!"

He didn't wait for an answer. He came in fast, faster than anything before it, each strike landing like a hammer swung by someone who'd stopped caring what it cost to swing it. The sand rose to meet him and he tore through it, again and again, punching holes clean through walls of it before they'd even finished forming, until there was nothing left of Gaara's defenses but scattered grains hanging in the dust-choked air like snow that had forgotten how to fall.

The forest kept dying around them. What trees hadn't already come down in the first exchange went now, snapped clean through or uprooted entirely, and the ground between them had stopped resembling a forest floor at all. It was cratered and torn, gouged in long furrows where bodies had hit and skidded, and the air itself tasted like copper and broken earth.

Gaara went down and didn't get up right away.

He lay there in the dirt, chest rising and falling in shallow, uneven pulls, sand scattered loose around him instead of gathered close the way it had always been, ready, obedient, an extension of his own skin. His eyes were shut.

Naruto stood over him again. Even breathing. Blank face. Hands in his pockets.

"Get up," he said.

Nothing.

"Get up."

Gaara's eyes opened.

Something had shifted behind them, some final door swinging loose on a hinge that had been rusted shut his whole life, and when his body started shaking it wasn't from pain anymore. The sand around him didn't crawl back to him this time. It surged, violent and sudden, whipping up off the ground in a spiral that climbed higher than the tree line, higher than anything left standing in this ruined stretch of forest.

"You are quite interesting," Gaara said, and his voice had gone somewhere Naruto's fists couldn't follow. "Too late for you I simply don’t care anymore."

The sand kept rising.

It didn't stop the way it had before. It kept climbing, faster and faster, spinning into a column that swallowed Gaara whole, lifting him off the ground and wrapping around him layer after layer until there was nothing left of the boy at all, just a sphere of packed sand hanging in the air above the wreckage, humming with a pressure that made the loose dirt on the ground start to tremble.

Naruto watched it happen. He didn't move. His hands stayed exactly where they'd been all night.

The sphere grew.

Cracks split across its surface, thin lines of darkness spreading like something enormous was waking up inside and testing the walls of its cage, and then all at once it wasn't a sphere anymore. It came apart in a single violent burst, sand scattering outward in a ring that flattened what little forest still remained, and out of the wreckage rose something that had not walked this earth in shape or size for longer than either of them had been alive.

A tanuki, but the word barely covered it. A mountain of a thing, sand-formed and furious, taller than the Hokage tower, taller than anything Naruto had ever stood beneath and looked up at besides the chief toad. Its eyes burned yellow in a face built for nothing but hunger. Its teeth were the size of grown men. Its tail alone, when it swept sideways through what forest remained, took down a hundred trees in a single stroke, like a scythe through wheat.

The One Tail had come all the way into the world.

When it spoke, the voice that came out of that vast sand body wasn't Gaara's anymore, not really. It was older. Deeper. Something that had been buried inside a child and had just, for the first time in years, gotten to stretch.

"BUAAAAHAAAA!!!" it laughed, and the ground itself seemed to shudder with the weight of it. "Back in the world at last! After all this time the great Shukaku is free! I AM FREE!!!"

Naruto looked up at it. All that height, all that red-eyed hunger, and his face stayed exactly as still as it had been standing over a beaten twelve-year-old ten minutes earlier.

"Finally," he said. "A real fight."

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Next Time: The One TaiL Rises!