Karura's eyes found the genjutsu caster first.
He was standing near the ridgeline, thirty yards from the fight, arms folded, watching Mai lunge at Pakura with a smile on his face. He wasn't running. He wasn't fighting. He was enjoying watching the sand genin kill each other.
Karura's hands formed a single seal.
Body Flicker.
The world blurred. Sand and rock and sky smeared into a single streak of color, and then she was behind him. He hadn't seen her move. He was still watching Mai when Karura's foot connected with the base of his skull.
The kick was small. She was eight years old and weighed less than the pack on his back. But her heel hit the sweet spot where the spine met the skull, and she hit it with every ounce of chakra she could push into her leg. His head snapped forward. His body followed, pitching face-first into the sand. He twitched once. His fingers clawed at the dirt. Then they stopped.
Karura didn't look at him. She was already forming the seal again.
Body Flicker.
She reappeared between Mai and Pakura.
Mai had already recovered from Million's hit. She was back on her feet, sand caked across her side, teeth bared. Her eyes were still glazed. She saw Karura appear in front of her and her fists came up.
"More of you?!" Mai snarled. "I'll kill every last one of you Stone losers!"
She swung.
Karura didn't block. She moved.
Her body shifted left, hips turning, shoulders rolling, her feet tracing a half-circle in the sand. Mai's fist cut through the space where her head had been. Karura kept moving, her weight flowing from one foot to the other, arms loose at her sides, scarf trailing behind her like a ribbon.
Mai threw a second punch. A straight right, fast and vicious, backed by strength that made the air hum. Karura swayed back, her spine bending just enough for the fist to pass over her chest. She could feel the power of it. The displaced air tugged at her hair.
A third. A fourth. A combination, left hook into a spinning elbow. Each one fast enough to kill. Each one missing by inches.
Karura danced.
There was no other word for it. Her feet never planted. Her weight never settled. She flowed between Mai's strikes like water around stones, her body turning and dipping and sliding with a rhythm that belonged in a play, not a battlefield. She'd taught herself this in her bedroom, late at night, moving between furniture and imagining attacks. She'd never used it against a real person before.
It worked.
Mai's frustration boiled over. She lunged with both arms, a wild grapple aimed at Karura's torso. Karura spun. Her back pressed against Mai's chest for half a second, just long enough for her arms to snake up under Mai's armpits and lock behind her neck.
Mai thrashed. Her shoulders bunched and her arms strained against the hold. Karura's feet left the ground. She was being lifted, her grip the only thing keeping her attached, and Mai's raw strength was bending the lock wider with every second. Karura's arms burned. Her fingers were slipping.
"Pakura!" Karura screamed. "Now! Break the genjutsu!"
Pakura was on one knee, clutching her cracked ribs, her face twisted in pain. She looked up at Karura riding Mai's back like a wild animal, at Mai's glazed eyes and bared teeth, at the veins standing out on Karura's forearms as the hold failed inch by inch.
Pakura stood. She crossed the distance in three steps. She pulled her hand back.
And she slapped Mai across the face as hard as she could.
The crack echoed off the canyon walls. Mai's head whipped sideways. The force of it, Pakura's palm plus a focused burst of chakra aimed at disrupting the flow in Mai's chakra network. Mai's eyes went wide. The glaze shattered. Her pupils contracted and her body seized, every muscle locking at once.
Then she went limp.
Karura released the hold and dropped to the sand, breathing heavily. Mai crumpled to her knees, hands on the ground, panting. Her eyes were clear. Confused, horrified, but clear.
"What..." Mai's voice came out raw. She looked at her own hands. At the blood on her knuckles. At Pakura standing in front of her, one arm pressed against her ribs, a red handprint blooming across Mai's cheek. "What did I... what happened?"
"Genjutsu," Karura said. She was on her knees too, catching her breath. "One of the Iwa shinobi. He made you see us as enemies."
Mai's face went white. She looked at Pakura. At the way Pakura held her side. At the bruise already darkening along her ribs where Mai's knee had connected.
"I did that?" Mai whispered.
Pakura's jaw was tight. Her eyes were hard. She didn't answer.
"I did that." It wasn't a question this time. Mai's hands curled into fists against the sand. Her shoulders shook. Not from anger. From something worse.
She stood up. Slowly, like every joint in her body ached. She turned to face Pakura fully, and did something none of them had ever seen her do.
She bowed.
Not the shallow nod she gave Ebizo when she was pretending to be respectful. Not the half-hearted dip she used to dodge formality. A real bow. Deep. Her back straight, her head low, her eyes on the ground.
"I'm sorry."
The words came out honestly. Offered to the last person in the world Mai would ever want to say it to.
"I almost killed you. That was my fault. I rushed in without thinking, I got caught in a genjutsu like a loser, and I put you and Karura in danger. I nearly crushed your skull." Her voice cracked on the last word. She swallowed and kept going. "I'm sorry, Pakura. This won't happen again."
The silence that followed was heavy enough to feel.
Pakura stared at the top of Mai's head. Her expression moved through several things. Anger, because her ribs were cracked and the girl who cracked them was standing right in front of her. Surprise, because Mai apologizing to Pakura was something she would have bet her life would never happen. And something else...
She knew what this cost Mai. She knew because she knew herself. If the situation were reversed, if Pakura had been the one caught, the one controlled, the one who'd nearly killed a teammate, she wouldn't have apologized to Mai either. She would have burned it down inside herself before letting those words leave her mouth.
Mai was braver than her. In this one way, in this one moment, Mai was braver.
Pakura nodded.
One nod. Short. Final.
"Don't let it happen again, dork. Or I'll kill you myself."
Mai straightened. Her eyes were red with shame but dry. She didn't wipe them. "If I let something like that happen to me again after this, I won't curse you in the after life." She laughed.
Karura watched the two of them while still controlling her puppet.
[Tenfold has activated!]
[You have gained tenfold fighting experience!]
Her self-taught fighting style expanded with experience. Ten different versions of Mai fighting against her. Ten different version of utilizing Dust Devil on the verge of death. It would've only taken one blow from Mai to severely injure Karura and a second one to finish it.
"We need to move," Karura said softly. "Ebizo-sensei and Million are chasing the scroll carrier."
"Which way?" Mai asked.
Karura pointed northeast. She could still feel Million through the chakra threads, faint at this distance but present. The connection was thinning with every second, the puppet moving further from her range.
"That way. Fast."
They ran.
______________________________________________
Ebizo wasn't expecting a mission like this so soon after getting his genin team.
The wind against his face, the burn in his legs, the sand spraying behind each step. He was running at full speed across the badlands with a puppet somewhat keeping pace behind him and a shinobi fleeing ahead, and despite everything, despite the danger and the fear and the knowledge that his students were behind him fighting for their lives, some small part of him felt alive in a way that regular jonin teacher work doesn't give you.
Million ran beside him, its four arms swinging in rhythm with its stride. The puppet's cracked head had been knocked to an angle during the fight, so the smiley face stared sideways as it ran, which gave it the appearance of a cheerful drunk sprinting through the desert. Under different circumstances, Ebizo might have found it funny.
The ninja was fast. Faster than the other ones had been. The massive scroll on his back didn't seem to slow him at all. He used Body Flicker in short bursts, flickering forward fifty yards at a time, burning chakra to maintain his lead.
Million couldn't match that. The puppet was fast in a straight run, its wooden legs tireless and its joints smooth, but it couldn't flicker without Karura. With every burst the stone nin used, the gap between them and the puppet widened.
Ebizo could match it. He body flickered alongside the ninja's bursts, keeping the distance constant.
The terrain changed. The flat sand gave way to rising ground, rocky slopes and narrow passes where the wind had carved channels between boulders. The border. The disputed badlands where the Land of Wind became the Land of Earth in name, if not in practice.
The ninja flickered again. And again. And again. Three in rapid succession, each one shorter than the last. His chakra was draining. He was burning through his reserves to stay ahead, sacrificing everything for distance.
Million fell behind. The puppet's stride was unchanged, still that same relentless wooden gallop, but the stone ninja had put two hundred yards between them with those last three flickers. Then three hundred. The chakra threads connecting Million to Karura were stretched gossamer-thin. The puppet's movements slowed, its reactions dulling as the chakra strings weakened.
Then Million stopped.
It collapsed in the middle of the badlands, four arms hanging limp, smiley face staring at nothing. The threads had reached their limit. Karura was too far away.
Ebizo was alone.
He kept running. The ninja was slowing now, his flickers spent, his legs carrying him on stamina alone. The scroll bounced on his back. His breathing was audible even from fifty yards behind.
Then the jonin stumbled. His burning legs buckled and he pitched forward, catching himself on his hands. He was gasping. His chakra reserves were empty. He looked back at Ebizo with wide, desperate eyes, then looked ahead at the rocky pass in front of him.
He started crawling.
"Help!" The ninja's voice cracked as he shouted toward the pass. "The Sand bastard followed me! He's right behind me!"
Ebizo's instincts screamed.
He skidded to a stop. The rocks on either side of the pass shifted. Shadows moved where shadows shouldn't have been.
They came from everywhere.
From behind the boulders. From beneath camouflage tarps covered in dust and gravel. From shallow trenches carved into the slope. Iwa shinobi, a full squad, eight of them, rising from concealment with weapons drawn and jutsu already forming on their lips.
A trap. The shinobi escort hadn't just been running. They'd been running toward reinforcements.
Ebizo's hands came up. His feet shifted into a fighting stance.
The first attacker came from the right. Ebizo redirected his thrust and put him down with an elbow to the throat. The second came from behind. Ebizo spun, caught the man's wrist, and used his momentum to throw him into a third who'd been charging from the left.
But there were eight of them. And they weren't tired.
A rock fist caught Ebizo in the shoulder. He heard something crack and the arm went numb. He tucked it against his body and kept fighting with one hand.
An earth spear jutsu grazed his thigh. Blood welled through his pants and the leg stiffened. He shifted his weight to the other side and drove his good fist into the nearest jaw.
They surrounded him. Two in front, two behind, the rest circling. Kunai and jutsu and fists and stone-encased limbs coming from every angle. Ebizo blocked what he could. Redirected what he could. Put two more down with strikes that would have killed men half his age.
It wasn't enough.
A kick caught him behind the knee. His leg folded. He went down to one knee and a stone fist hammered into his back. The impact drove the air from his lungs and something in his spine shifted. Pain raced up his body like lightning.
He tried to stand. A boot connected with his face. His head snapped back and blood filled his mouth, hot and copper-thick. The world tilted. The blue sky above him went blurry at the edges.
Another kick. His ribs this time. He heard them go, not one but several, a rapid sound of cracks like stepping on dry branches. He folded around the impact and hit the ground on his side.
They didn't stop.
A heel came down on his good hand. The bones in his fingers crunched. He couldn't form seals now even if he had the chakra. Another kick rolled him onto his back. He stared up at the sky through one eye, the other swelling shut.
"Annoying sand bastard," The scroll carrier said. A boot pressed down on his throat. Not hard enough to kill. Hard enough to pin. "You should've stayed in your cozy desert, instead of chasing after me."
Ebizo tried to speak. Blood bubbled between his lips.
One of the Iwa shinobi drew a kunai and crouched beside Ebizo. He grabbed the man's hair and pulled his head back, exposing his throat. Ebizo could see the blade. Could see the man's face behind it, young, maybe twenty, the faintest hesitation in his expression before duty hardened it.
"Any last words, sand bastard?"
Ebizo tried to speak. His mouth opened. Blood spilled over his lower lip and down his chin, and whatever words he'd meant to form came out as a wet, rattling exhale.
The young shinobi adjusted his grip on the kunai. The hesitation left his face.
Ebizo's one working eye stared at the sky. The blue was fading. Not because the sun was setting, but because his vision was going dark at the edges, narrowing to a shrinking circle of light above him. He thought about his sister. He thought about his students. He wondered if they'd made it back safely.
The kunai rose.
Everything went quiet.