Chapter 76: The Clash of Enhanced Strength
Arm wrestling.
A pure test of strength, nothing else.
Asuma watched the two of them settle across from each other at the stone table and felt a bead of sweat form at his temple.
Should that table be reinforced steel? he thought. Stone might not hold up.
"Since you're inviting me, Senior." Sakura had dropped the honorific somewhere in the last thirty seconds. Her voice was pleasant. Her eyes were not. "I'll accept."
She wasn't wrong to be annoyed. Tsunade was — objectively — a good person, someone Sakura had admired before she'd ever met her. But first meetings that open with let me test whether you deserve what you have tended to produce a certain response.
Sakura was not made of mud.
The two of them took their places. Shizune stood to one side with Tonton the pig, watching the pink-haired girl with an expression that was doing its best not to be wistful and mostly failing. Hiruzen had given Shizune the Yin Seal training method years ago. More than a decade of diligent practice, with Tsunade herself as a teacher, and she'd never gotten there.
Four years. This girl had done it in four years.
People are unfair, Shizune thought, with the equanimity of someone who had made peace with this fact.
"Ready, little girl?"
Tsunade laid her hand on the table, red-lacquered nails catching the light, and looked at Sakura with the particular expression of someone who expects to win and hasn't decided yet whether that's going to be interesting.
"I hope you won't lose, Senior."
Sakura placed her right hand in Tsunade's and felt the grip close around hers.
"Hm." Tsunade's eyes sharpened slightly, but her mouth curved. "Plenty of attitude for someone your size. You're about eight hundred years too early to beat me."
"I'll be the judge of that."
Asuma cleared his throat.
"Right then." He placed his hand over their joined ones, looked at both of them — one at a time, each look carrying its own silent assessment of how much structural damage this was about to involve — and began counting.
"Three."
"Two."
"One."
"Go."
The chakra exploded out of both of them simultaneously.
Sakura had used Enhanced Strength in combat. She'd used it against training dummies, against clones, against Orochimaru in the Forest of Death. She thought she had a clear picture of what it felt like to push it to the limit.
She discovered, with immediate and humbling clarity, that she did not.
The force coming back at her through their joined hands was like grabbing a falling building. Not the impact — the weight. The sheer sustained mass of Tsunade's strength pressing back was something she'd never felt before, because there had never been anything alive on the receiving end of her own hits.
This is what I feel like to other people.
The thought lasted about a quarter of a second.
Then she stopped having thoughts and started having the fight.
"The kid knows what she's doing!"
Tsunade was genuinely engaged now — she could feel it in the pressure, in the way the resistance kept adjusting, kept finding new angles. Stronger than the Fourth Raikage, who'd won with speed and timing rather than direct force. This girl wasn't using tricks. She was pressing.
The chakra around both their hands had become visible — gold flames from Tsunade, blue-white from Sakura, both burning hot enough that the air above the table rippled.
The stone cracked.
Not slowly. All at once — a sharp report, a fault line splitting the table from edge to edge — and then the whole thing gave way, exploding into rubble beneath their hands.
Neither of them moved.
Their feet had found new ground and claimed it. The earth under those feet began to crack too, lines spreading outward in all directions from the point of impact as the sheer weight of two people refusing to stop drove into the soil.
Asuma stepped back.
I'm going to have to write a report about this training ground, he thought, watching the ground fracture. I'm going to have to explain what happened to the ground.
Tsunade looked at the girl across from her — this twelve-year-old — and something shifted.
She'd believed Hiruzen's assessment in the abstract. She'd heard the words able to hold off Orochimaru, Yin Seal complete, mastered Enhanced Strength, and processed them as data.
Data and this were different things.
Because right now, if she let up — if she eased off even a fraction — she was going to lose. She could feel it. The math was right there. The girl was below her peak, would probably always be below her peak, but the gap was not large, and the rate at which that gap had closed in twelve years was—
Absurd, Tsunade thought. This is absurd.
She had never in her life lost a strength contest to anyone except through speed and trickery. The Fourth Raikage had done it with footwork. No one had ever just sat down across from her and pushed.
Gold flames and blue-white flames clashed and tangled in the air above their hands, two people who had never in their lives gotten used to anything being stronger than them, neither willing to be the first to admit the other was real.
The nearest tree went over.
It had been standing for thirty years. It lasted about four more seconds after the table went. Then the shockwave from the ground fissures reached its roots and it came down in a long, slow crash that sent birds scattering from every tree in the training ground.
Asuma watched it fall.
He looked at the two women still locked across from each other in the wreckage of what had been a perfectly functional stone table.
He said nothing.
There was nothing to say.
(End of Chapter 76)