aFireFist
A Life in the Hidden Leaf
Chapter 16 - Part 3
"Boy. Behind—"
Naruto turned a half-second late.
Human Path was already in range. The Rinnegan in that face did not look at Naruto first. It looked at the toad on his shoulder.
"Fukasaku—!"
The old toad tried to kick off. His legs pushed. It was not fast enough. Human Path's palm hit him square, fingers spreading over the small body like the toad had never been anything but a handle. The pull was ugly and immediate. Fukasaku's body arched. A thin tearing sound sat under the roar of the street, under the fires, under Naruto's shout. Something left the toad that Sage Mode had been using.
Naruto grabbed for him and got empty air. His fingers closed on smoke.
Fukasaku's voice came out thin. "Jiraiya… the boy… do not stop—"
Then he went slack. The small body dropped off Naruto's shoulder and hit rubble. No bounce. No twitch. Just a heap of orange and white against grey stone.
The sharpness in Naruto's senses ripped out with him. Sage Mode cracked off his face in a raw peel. The markings faded. The orange left his eyes. The world went dull and loud and late. Every sound stacked on top of the last — fire, distant screaming, the click of a rod, his own breathing too slow for what was coming. Dust in his mouth. Blood in his teeth. No extra time. No mountain in his veins. Just him.
"No—no, no, get up—" Naruto dropped to one knee beside the toad. His hands hovered and then touched. Fukasaku did not move. The body was still warm. That made it worse.
"Get up. I still need you. I can't—Jiraiya-sensei already—"
Deva Path stepped forward. Red hair dull. Rinnegan empty. "Without the sage, you are only a jinchūriki. Hand yourself over. This ends."
Naruto came up swinging anyway. A Rasengan formed sloppy in his palm, no natural energy under it, just raw chakra and rage packed into a shaking sphere. He threw it straight at the orange-haired one because that was the face that had been standing over everything.
Preta Path stepped in and ate it off his hand. The sphere died in that same hungry pull, collapsing into nothing against those palms. Naruto's fingers closed on empty air a second time.
Asura Path — the ruined one, still not fully restored, one arm gone — fired what it had left from the good side. The blast caught Naruto in the ribs and put him on his back. Air left him in a grunt. A black rod followed, punching through the edge of his vest and pinning cloth and skin to the stone. Pain lit up his side white.
He tore off it with a shout, fabric ripping, blood coming with the rod. He got a boot in the chest for the trouble. Deva Path did not even use gravity. He did not need to. The kick put Naruto down again.
Naruto hit the ground hard and stayed there a second too long, staring at the dull sky. No extra sharpness. No toad on his shoulder. Jiraiya gone. Fukasaku gone. Sage Mode gone. The village still burning around a boy who had just been reduced to what he was before the mountain.
Yasuo felt the Sage Mode signature die from three streets away.
It was not subtle. One moment the east side was a bright, sharp knot of natural energy, the kind that made the air feel cleaner even from a distance. The next it was just Naruto — raw, loud, smaller. The Path signatures did not fade. They closed on the gap the toad had left.
He did not run into the middle of that. Charging the open ground now was the same suicide he had just pulled a squad out of. He started moving people off the radius instead.
A cluster of civilians had frozen in an intersection that was about to become a kill lane if Deva Path pushed again. A kid in the middle. An older woman holding a bundle that might have been clothes or a baby. Two men who had stopped because they could see the red hair in the smoke and could not make their feet work.
Yasuo cut across. Wind snapped a falling sign down before it crushed the kid, the metal screaming as it sheared. He shoved the group toward the nearest slug.
"Go. Don't look east. Keep moving. If you stop in the open, you die in the open."
The woman grabbed the kid and ran. The men followed.
A chunin tried to peel off toward the open ground, kunai already in his hand, face set like he had decided this was the moment he became useful.
Yasuo caught his vest and yanked him back.
"You go in there now, you die in there now. Hold the corridor. That's the job."
The man swore, breath hot. "He's getting buried—"
"And you'll get buried next to him without changing it. Inner line."
The chunin went back to the line, swearing the whole way. Yasuo kept cutting toward the fight anyway, staying on the rim, because the next blast was going to eat whoever was still standing too close and someone had to pull them before it did.
Hinata came out of the wreckage from the south side.
Her jacket was torn at the shoulder. There was dust in her dark hair and a smear of someone else's blood on her sleeve. Byakugan was already live, veins standing out pale at her temples, the world laid out in chakra paths and the ugly wrongness of the three bodies around Naruto. She saw him on the ground. She saw the rod hole in his vest. She saw Fukasaku unmoving on the stone. She did not slow down.
"Naruto-kun!"
Naruto turned his head. The dullness in his eyes made her stomach drop. "Hinata—get out of here. Go. Please. You can't—"
She did not go. She stepped between him and Deva Path with her hands up in the Gentle Fist stance, feet set on broken stone. Her palms were steady. Her voice was not.
"I will not watch you die," she said. It shook. It still came out. "I have watched long enough. I stood in the back of every fight and told myself someone else would reach you in time. I am not doing that today."
Deva Path looked at her the way he looked at everyone else. Empty. Patient. "Move."
"No."
She moved first. She closed the distance in a short burst, Byakugan locked, and struck at the tenketsu along his forearm, then the shoulder, then the neck. The hits landed. Precise. Harder than they looked. For a normal shinobi they would have mattered — chakra locked, arm dead, balance gone. Deva Path's body rocked half a step. The Rinnegan tracked her without surprise.
Then his hand came up.
Hinata twisted. The first push missed her clean, stone exploding behind where her head had been, shards cutting the air where her hair had just been. She came back in anyway, palm to his ribs, a cry in her throat, Byakugan screaming that the paths in this body were not behaving like a living man's. No tenketsu that stayed locked. No stagger that lasted. She got two more hits. Real ones. Above her weight. The kind that would have dropped a jonin and left him twitching on the dirt.
It was not enough.
Deva Path caught her wrist. His grip was dead and exact. Shinra Tensei went off at short range, too close to dodge, too tight to slip. The force threw her back across the rubble like she weighed nothing. She hit a broken step, rolled through dust and tile, and got up on one knee with blood on her lip and one hand braced on the stone.
"Hinata, stop!" Naruto was dragging himself up, the rod-hole in his vest dark and wet, every breath pulling at the wound. "Please—go back. Don't—he'll kill you—"
She looked at him once. Byakugan still live. Dust in her hair. Blood on her mouth. "I love you. I have for a long time. I stood behind you and told myself that was enough. It is not enough. I am not leaving you on the ground."
"Hinata—"
She ran at Deva Path again.
He did not use a wide push this time. He did not need the street. He stepped in, drove a black rod through her midsection, and let her hang on it for a second so Naruto would see the whole thing — the way her eyes went wide, the way her hands came up too late, the way the rod came out red. Then he pulled it free and she dropped.
The sound Hinata made was small. A punched-out breath. Almost nothing.
The sound Naruto made was not.
"HINATA!"
Her body hit the stone and did not get up. Blood spread under her fast, darkening the dust in a widening pool. Byakugan faded, the veins at her temples going quiet. Her hand twitched once toward Naruto, fingers reaching across broken ground, and then went still.
Deva Path turned back to him as if she had been a lesson and the lesson was over. "This is what resistance buys. Surrender."
Naruto's chakra spiked so hard the air around him crawled. The stone under his palms hairline-cracked. The dullness Sage Mode had left behind filled up with something else, something that had been waiting behind his ribs since the toad hit the ground.
Yasuo hit her side three seconds after she fell.
He did not look at Deva Path. He did not look at Naruto. Looking at either one would have put him in a fight that was not his to take. He dropped to his knees in the blood, hands already green, and found the wound with his palms. Heat. Wet. The rod had gone through muscle and gut. Not the spine. Not the heart. Bad. Not finished if someone moved now.
"Stay with me," he said, low, only for her. "I've got the bleed. Don't try to talk. Don't look for him. Just stay."
Medical chakra sealed the worst vessels first, layering the tear closed enough that the pulse under his hands stopped dumping her onto the street. Then he packed the hole, green light soaking into ruined tissue, buying minutes instead of a grave. She made a broken sound and her fingers closed on his sleeve, weak, still reaching for a boy he could not let her crawl toward.
"I've got you. You're going to the slug. That's the whole plan."
He got an arm under her and lifted. She was light. Too light for how much blood was on him, soaking his vest, running warm down his forearm. Her head tipped against his shoulder. She was breathing. Shallow. There.
"Katsuyu," he told the first medic who saw them coming out of the dust, a chunin with a supply pack and wide eyes. "Now. Tell Shizune it's a through-and-through, abdomen. She's breathing. Don't bounce her. Go."
They took her into the green. Yasuo passed the work off clean — wound location, what he had already sealed, what still needed a real table — then turned back toward the open ground because Naruto's chakra was no longer just spiked.
It was ripping.
Red boiled out of him in a violent sheet. The air pressure changed hard enough that Yasuo felt it in his teeth. Stone cracked under Naruto's feet. A bone-white ribcage started knitting itself over his body, ugly and fast, plates locking over the torn vest. Tails of chakra lashed out and took chunks out of the street, carving gouges through rubble that had already been flattened once today. Deva Path actually stepped back.
Naruto was not talking. His eyes were gone in the red. The thing coming off him was aimed at the man who had put the rod through Hinata and the man who had killed Jiraiya, and it did not care what else was standing in the way. Buildings. Medics. The last people too slow to run.
Tsunade's voice slammed across the seals, raw, stripped of the steadiness the reset had given her.
"Get off that street! All units, pull back from the east open ground now! Do not approach the jinchūriki! Katsuyu, expand cover west and north! If you are in his line, you are already too close!"
Yasuo was already moving people. A pair of genin had frozen staring at the cloak. He grabbed both by the vests and threw them toward the slug line.
"Move. Don't watch. Run."
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