31: Clash

Dozens of ROOT shinobi dropped from the trees at once.

The sound of it alone was enough to make a lesser person flinch—a rush of displaced air and the crack of boots meeting earth from every direction. Looking up, there was nothing but dark shapes blotting out the sky.

Shisui had already known they were there.

He’d felt them settling into position in the surrounding forest in the moments before—chakra signatures held deliberately still, patient the way trained killers were patient. So when they moved, he moved with them. Body snapping backward before his mind had finished the count, clearing the spot where he’d been standing.

His hand found the kodachi at his back. The Sharingan spun to life in both eyes.

Half his attention stayed on Danzō.

The ROOT shinobi landed in formation—black uniforms, standard-issue kodachi drawn in the same motion—and came at him again without breaking stride.

He knew the math. Too many, nowhere to go, and the man who’d ordered this standing just far enough away to watch. Getting tangled up in a melee with a hundred of them wasn’t a fight. It was a eulogy.

Don’t stay. Break through and run.

He moved away from Danzō—toward open ground, away from the formation—and Body Flickered.

On Danzō’s face, something like contempt appeared briefly, and then didn’t.

Shisui cleared fifty meters. He saw it before he reached it.

A dark line across the ground. The black seal pattern rose before he’d fully registered it—expanding upward, spreading wide, the chakra forming into something vast and net-like that rose into the air and hung there above the path forward.

He stopped hard.

Two chakra signatures in the flanking trees. One on each side. They’d planned for exactly this.

The net isn’t the trap. I’m already in it.

The ROOT closed behind him.

No time. He turned, drew the kodachi, and went in.

Steel rang against steel. Their blades came at him from multiple angles and he was already elsewhere—leaving only a smear of motion in the air, an afterimage where he’d been. They couldn’t track him. A few of them tried; they got cut. The rest adapted quickly, shifting to a defensive formation—blades up, bodies compressing, creating a lattice rather than individual targets, and letting the outer ring adjust.

He was fast. They were many.

More of them fell than he’d expected, though. They’d adapted to his speed, not to what he did with it.

Then he did something different.

Blue chakra bloomed along the kodachi. Not a surface coating—an extension, the energy reaching forward and sharpening the edge until the short sword had the effective reach of something twice its length. He stopped running. Stopped relying on the gap between his speed and their reactions.

He met them head-on instead.

The nearest ROOT shinobi brought his blade up to parry and felt the blue edge make contact—felt it wrap around the steel somehow, curling and clinging like a living thing he couldn’t shake loose.

He didn’t have time to understand it.

The chakra flared red.

Boom.

The explosion was close enough that Shisui felt the pressure against his face. The ROOT shinobi lay on the ground, smoke rising from what had been a person seconds before. He was already moving to the next one.

That one had seen what happened and tried to backpedal. Too slow. The blade went through.

Costs too much. Use it sparingly.

He used it twice more before the black-uniformed fighters broke rank and scattered backward, regrouping at range. Then the shuriken came.

Dozens of them. More than dozens. The air filled with steel.

He read the arcs through the Sharingan—angles, trajectories, the cluster-patterns of mass throws—but reading them and dodging them were different problems when there were this many. He deflected what he could with the kodachi. The rest he gave up on cleanly avoiding.

They found him. Shallow wounds, most of them, the angles turned at the last instant—but many, and the blood running down his arm and side was a resource he couldn’t afford to keep spending.

Range. Fine.

He launched himself skyward.

The ROOT tracked him in formation—shuriken following his arc, perfectly calculated, a field of steel in pursuit. He came down hard, one knee hitting earth, and drove the kodachi into the ground. Both hands moved through seals. Chakra built in his chest.

“Wind Release: Great Breakthrough!“

The gust came out of him like a compressed thunder crack—a rolling wave of pressure that met the incoming shuriken and scattered them sideways, raking them into the trees or spinning them into the dirt.

The ROOT didn’t pause. More came.

They know. They’re waiting for me to run out of chakra.

He reached back and tugged up his sleeve—exposing the bandaged forearm, the fū seal still intact on the cloth. White smoke. Two large pinwheel-bladed shuriken materialized in his hands, wide enough to feel unwieldy, except that they weren’t.

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Blue chakra along the edges. Fire waiting in it.

Wind Shuriken: Flame Pinwheels.

He hurled them both.

They left his hands screaming, and as they spun the blue shifted to orange—fire catching on the rotation, trailing heat, two spiraling blades of flame cutting through the air fast enough to make the surrounding foliage lean away from their passage. He moved sideways immediately, clearing the projectile return.

The pinwheels tore through the next volley in a single pass, burning everything they touched out of the air.

Then, still spinning, still burning, they continued toward the back of the formation.

Toward Danzō.

The man didn’t move.

The white-coated ROOT—the ones who’d been standing in the outer ring this whole time, bird-mask faces tilted slightly, watching—converged in front of him. Their leader’s voice cut through the noise.

“Water Release squad!“

Three of them formed seals simultaneously. Their hands locked into the Snake sign.

“Water Release: Water Encampment Wall!“

The barrier rose from nothing—a flat curtain of water several meters across, hanging in the air between the pinwheels and their target. The first blade hit it and the contact was immediate: a burst of steam, a roar, and then fire and vapor expanding outward in both directions. The explosion swallowed the water wall and most of the visibility with it.

The sound of the second pinwheel hadn’t stopped.

“—there’s another one—”

It came through the steam. Trailing water vapor, still burning, but the angle had changed. It was curving. Moving in an arc that the laws of spinning blades had no business producing.

Because of the wire.

“It’s on a wire! Earth Release squad—”

“Water Style: Wild Water Wave!“