Chapter 96: Sparrow.

The hoof blotted out the sky.

Tenten's hands moved before her mind caught up. Lightning chakra crackled along the harpoon's shaft, blue-white arcs jumping between the marlin's skeletal fins, and she drove the weapon upward with everything she had left.

She didn’t have time to finish the signs to grow it. It wouldn’t be enough.

She knew it. The hoof above her was the size of a house and the power behind it was too much and one lightning-coated harpoon wasn't going to stop this. She was going to die on this field. Sixteen years old. Never had a boyfriend.

Lee.

His face came to her first. Back then during the chunin exams, standing in front of Shukaku with nothing that looked like fear. He'd done it. He'd proved everything. A shinobi who couldn't use ninjutsu or genjutsu, standing against a tailed beast and winning. He'd become what he always said he would. A splendid shinobi. He'd done that already and he probably didn't even realize it because Lee never stopped climbing.

I'm sorry I won't be there to see what comes next.

Guy-sensei.

She could picture him crying. She'd wanted to surpass Lady Tsunade. That was the goal, had been the goal since she was twelve, the greatest kunoichi who ever lived, and Tenten had been climbing toward her since the first day she picked up a weapon.

I'm sorry, sensei. I didn't quite make it. I was close though…

The hoof was ten meters up and falling fast.

And I'm sorry to me. For being too stupid to know when to run.

She could have run. When Han walked onto the field and started killing people, she should have turned and sprinted for the tree line with everyone else. She wasn't Lee. She wasn't Guy. She was Tenten. Just regular ole Tenten... The normal one on a team of monsters.

But she'd charged anyway.

The harpoon's lightning crackled against her palms. She set her feet. She aimed the point at the center of the descending hoof and braced because if this was the end she was going to make it cost something.

Suddenly air exploded sideways.

A wall of wind so dense it was visible, a whirling sphere of compressed air that erupted between Tenten and the falling hoof with a sound like a hurricane crushed into a single heartbeat. The sphere spun and the wind tore outward from its surface, and the hoof hit the top of the sphere and stopped.

Kokuō's leg buckled. The hoof that should have crushed her into the stone was caught against the spinning dome and the dome was pushing back, not just deflecting but actively driving upward, and the Five-Tails' front end lifted. The beast's massive head tilted skyward. Its horns raked the air. Its other legs scrambled for stability and found none because the dome was expanding, widening, the wind inside it roaring with a fury that swallowed every other sound on the battlefield.

The dome detonated outward.

The Five-Tails left the ground. All four legs, all five tails, the entire building-sized body hurled sideways by the concussive force of the wind, and it crashed into the earth sixty meters away with an impact that shook the ground hard enough to knock Tenten onto her hands.

Someone was standing in front of her.

Lean. Dark hair that fell past his shoulders, whipping in the residual wind. He wore a white mask shaped like a bird, smooth ceramic with narrow eye holes. The rest of his clothes were dark, grey and black, nothing like the green of Leaf forces. No flak jacket. No headband visible. A short blade across his lower back. Wrappings on his forearms.

And his stance.

Tenten's heart stopped beating for one full second because her body recognized something before her brain could name it. Her mouth opened.

"...Neji?"

The mask went still. The figure's body, already coiling to face the recovering Five-Tails, froze. A second of absolute stillness, and the bird mask turned fully toward her. Staring.

It didn't make sense. None of it made sense. They had buried him. She had stood at the memorial stone and traced his name with her fingers and cried into her pillow for weeks and watched Lee and Guy grieve so hard it changed them both. She had seen the body.

But he was standing in front of her.

"How..." Her voice cracked. Her hands were trembling around the harpoon and the lightning had died and she couldn't finish the sentence.

He faced the Five-Tails. The beast was rising, shaking earth from its frame, its eyes already locked back onto them.

"I'll explain later." His voice was deeper than she remembered. Older. But it was his. Unmistakably, impossibly his. "For now, we have to survive."

Tears ran down her cheeks. She ignored them. She gripped the harpoon with both hands and forced her ruined legs to stand, forced her body to straighten, planted herself beside the boy she'd buried.

"Don’t think almost dying gets you out of faking your death, Neji!" Her voice shook. She couldn't stop it from shaking. "You better pray we survive or I'm going to spend the entire afterlife nagging at you."

Behind the mask, Neji's lips slightly curved upward.

"I'm sorry," he said. "But it was necessary."

Kokuō charged.

The ground shook with each stride, the beast's four legs driving forward with a momentum that made the earth buckle, and its horns were lowered, aimed directly at them, gleaming white against the grey sky.

Lightning erupted across Neji’s body. Blue-white arcs crawled over his skin, up his arms, across his shoulders, into his hair, and his hair stood on end and his entire frame crackled with a charge so intense the air around him buzzed. His stance dropped. And then he was gone.

One second beside her, the next second thirty meters forward and rising, running up the Five-Tails' foreleg with his feet barely touching the surface.

His hands were glowing.

Twin constructs of pale chakra wreathed both fists, taking the shape of snarling lion heads, their jaws open and their manes flowing back along his forearms. They were three times the size of his hands and they roared.

Neji drove both lion fists into the Five-Tails' shoulder.

Kokuō screamed. Its charge stuttered, the foreleg buckling sideways, and where Neji's fists struck, the fur receded. The skin beneath went grey. Chakra flowed out of the wound and into the lion constructs, pulled, drained, consumed. The same thing her harpoon did, but through his bare hands.

He could drain chakra too.

The Five-Tails swung its head. One horn swept sideways at Neji and he launched himself backward, lightning flaring, clearing the horn by a hand's width. He landed in a crouch forty meters away with sparks trailing from his sandals.

Tenten was already moving.

Ox. Dog. Dragon. Rat. Dog. Boar. Snake. Tiger.

"Shuriken Shadow Clone Jutsu!"

The harpoon multiplied into twelve as they poofed around her, bills pointed at the beast.

It would have to be enough.

"Neji!" She extended her left hand toward him, fingers spread, and pushed. Chakra transfer. The stolen energy she'd been holding, the Five-Tails' own power filtered through the harpoon, flowed out of her palm and across the gap between them in a visible stream of gold-tinged light. It hit Neji and the lightning around his body blazed brighter, the arcs doubling in intensity, and he shot forward without a word.

They fell into a rhythm.

They hadn't fought together in years and the boy beside her had new techniques she'd never seen and a new fighting style she was still processing. But the rhythm was there. The same rhythm they'd had on their genin team, the unspoken understanding of where the other person would be and when.

Neji closed in. Tenten covered range.

Kokuō saw him coming. The beast dropped its head and lunged, horns leveled at the ground, trying to scoop him up on the run.

Neji went under them. He threw himself flat and slid on his back across the stone between the beast’s front legs, and as the white belly passed over him, he punched straight up with his right fist. The lion’s jaws closed on the hide behind Kokuō’s left foreleg, right where the leg met the chest. The whole leg jerked, like it had come down on a nail.

Tenten sent four harpoons after him. They punched into the same leg just above the hoof, one, two, three, four. She felt the beast’s chakra come rushing up the strings into her palms.

Kokuō stamped down at the shape under its belly. Its left foreleg came down weaker and slower. The right one came down hard, an arm’s length from Neji’s head, and stone sprayed across his mask. He rolled out the back between the hind legs and came up running.

The beast’s head swung up. Its jaws opened.

Black and white specks were pulling in from the air around its mouth, swirling together, packing tight into a sphere. She knew what that was.

She ripped the four harpoons out of its leg and sent them up, and sent the other eight with them. Twelve marlins from twelve directions. Two buried themselves in the hinges of its jaw. Three went into its throat below the sphere. The rest went into the sphere itself, and she pulled on all twelve strings at once.

The bomb tore apart like wet paper. Everything it had been made of came down the strings at the same time. Tenten’s knees buckled. Her nose started bleeding and she didn’t wipe it. The chakra flowing through her body burned like it was cooking her from the inside.

Kokuō screamed through a mouth full of harpoons and wheeled away from her, and the turn brought its tails around.

All five of them. They swept across the ground at hip height, faster than anything that big should be able to move, and she couldn’t run on those legs.

Neji landed in front of her. The lightning went out on his body like a snuffed candle, and air started whipping around him instead, wrapping his arms and legs in tight, twisting currents. He planted his left foot and spun.

The dome came up gray with dust, howling. The lead tail hit it a meter off the ground.

The wind took the end off it. Tenten saw white hide split, then the pink meat underneath, and then the tip of the tail was just gone, turned into a red spray that sheeted across the dome and got flung away in a spiral. The other four tails hit the shredded one from behind and bounced off. A chunk of flesh the size of her torso slapped onto the stone beside her and slid, still twitching.

Kokuō shrieked and dragged its tails back. Blood poured from the ragged end and splattered a long curve across the field.

Neji was already gone. Lightning cracked back over his skin before his feet touched the ground, and he went straight up the beast’s right hind leg, onto the haunch, then along its spine at a dead sprint.

She watched where he hit.

The base of the neck. Twice. The bony ridge behind the right shoulder. Then back along the spine to the place where all five tails grew out of the body. He hit that spot three times with both lion fists, and all five tails dropped and dragged on the ground for a moment, like the beast had forgotten they were there.

Every time he hit, the gray patches spread a little wider, and Kokuō was a little slower to turn.

The beast figured it out.

It stopped opening its mouth. It stopped gathering anything. Instead, it threw itself down on its side and rolled, all that weight going over at once to crush whatever was on its back.

Neji jumped clear at the last second. Two of her harpoon clones didn’t. They burst into smoke under its shoulder.

Kokuō came up out of the roll already kicking. Both hind legs lashed out backward at Neji where he landed. He went over the first hoof and spun away from the second, and the second one smashed a cart-sized boulder instead. Gravel rained across the field.

Then it came for her. The head swung low across the ground, horns sweeping in a wide arc. Tenten pulled three harpoons in front of her and drove them into the side of its face.

The head kept coming. She’d pulled the chakra out of it, but the skull underneath was still there, and the skull was the size of a house.

She threw herself out of the way. The horn passed over her close enough that the wind of it ripped her hair loose, and the side of the head slammed into the ground a few meters behind her and plowed a furrow through the stone.

Neji got between them again. When Kokuō reared back and charged, he met it head-on with the Wind-Style Rotation. The beast’s forehead hit the dome and its head snapped sideways. The force went down its neck and wrenched its whole front end around. Its hooves tore four long furrows through the stone as it slid sideways forty meters and crashed into the rocks at the edge of the field.

It got up. Slower.

So did Tenten, barely. The edges of her vision were going dark again. Her legs shook under her, the muscles still torn from the Sixth Gate. And the stolen chakra was too much.

Kokuō reared up on its hind legs, higher than the trees, and brought both front hooves down together.

The ground split. The crack raced at her across the field, stone breaking open on both sides, the edges dropping away into black. She couldn’t run. She didn’t even try.

One of her harpoons streaked past her shoulder. She grabbed the shaft with both hands, and it tore her off her feet and dragged her sideways across the stone just as the ground she’d been standing on fell into the crack. She hit the ground ten meters away and rolled, and her ribs screamed.

Neji appeared beside her.

"We can't keep this up." Tenten said between breaths. Her voice was raw.

"I know."

The Five-Tails stood a hundred meters away. Battered. Patches of fur missing where the harpoons and lion fists had drained the chakra from its hide, one tail ragged and bleeding. But still standing. Still enormous. Still more powerful than either of them could ever be.

Kokuō watched them with those dark blue-green eyes. Tenten braced for another charge, pulled the remaining harpoons in close around her, and waited.

The Five-Tails turned around.

The beast turned its massive body with slow, ground-shaking weight and faced northwest. Toward Stone territory.

Tenten blinked.

It took a step. Then another. Each hoof left a crater as it walked, and the five tails trailed behind like banners.

The beast's body began to shrink. The frame condensed, fur and horns pulling inward, chakra compressing, and within ten seconds Han stood where Kokuō had been. A man in battered red armor with a cracked furnace on his back and blood leaking from puncture wounds that hadn't healed yet.

He looked over his shoulder. The dark visor found them across a hundred meters of ruined battlefield.

Two shinobi with techniques made to bleed a jinchuriki dry. I can’t finish them cleanly. The longer this drags on, the likelier the Green Savage Devil comes.

Not here. Not on their terms.

He turned and walked into the haze of steam and dust, and the Stone shinobi who'd been watching from the far edges followed him, and in two minutes there was no one left on the field but the dead and the two of them.

Tenten's harpoon clones vanished. And the original Marlin Harpoon slipped from her fingers and clanged against the stone.

She was shaking.

Neji stood three meters away. The lightning was gone. He was just a figure in dark clothes and a bird mask.

Neji turned toward the tree line. Took one step.

Tenten's hand shot out and caught his wrist.

He stopped.

She couldn't see his face. The mask covered everything. But his wrist was warm under her fingers and his pulse was fast against her palm and he was alive. Real and solid and alive. She was holding on because if she let go he might disappear again and she wasn't sure she could survive that twice.

"Tenten." His voice was quiet behind the ceramic.

"You owe me." She wasn't looking at the mask. She was looking at her fingers around his wrist, at the veins beneath his skin. "You owe me answers. You owe Lee answers. You owe Guy-sensei answers. And if you disappear again without giving them, I will find you." Her grip tightened. "I don't care how long it takes or where you go."

The mask didn't move.

“How annoying...” You haven’t changed at all. Behind the mask, Neji smiled. He tapped her forehead, and she dropped. 

He continued walking.

Around the unconscious girl, the battlefield was still. Leaf shinobi were beginning to emerge from the tree line, the ones who'd made it to cover during Han's initial rampage, cautious faces peering out from behind trunks and over ridges. They were looking at the craters. At the massive furrow where Kokuō had walked. At the girl lying unconscious beside her harpoon, alone.