It was a standoff for a single, ageless momant, the powered-up, scaly rabbit-like Flaw creature fixing Naruto and Hinata with a stare from its menacing, glowing eyes as muscles corded and bunched under its horny flanks. The two Academy students edged further apart slowly, niether used to fighting aside from one-on-one spars against their classmates or instructors, let alone together against some kind of monster. Haruko hung back to watch and assess their skills - the girl yesterday had been pathetic aside from a moderate degree of physical strength, and using it had worn her out far tooo quickly. With the kyuubi's power to draw on for stamina her Naruto-bozu should at least have some staying power, but most of the Hyuuga she'd ever met were below their peers in chakra reserves; even if they didn't waste a jot they just didn't have enough for the really fun techniques.
The moment ended as Naruto switched his kunai from a forward to reverse grip nervously, and he froze in shock as the beast suddenly lunged at him. It moved almost too fast to make out, a shadowy black aferimage trailing it like smoke as it leapt, and if not for Hinata shoving him aside it might well have ripped his face off with its fangs. He tumbled to the ground and she hesitated just long enough for the enemy to recover from the jump, springing away before her thrown blade could reach its position.
Naruto scrambled to his feet, cursing a blue streak and shaking as adrenaline slammed into his system. Hinata shot him a panicked look, thinking he was angry she'd pushed him, before being forced to scramble away herself as the mutant focused its attention on her, the only one to attack so far. The girl didn't even have time to draw another kunai as she frantically dodged furious claw swipes and buck teeth snapping for her throat.
Shaking his head clear, Naruto got back in the game with a roar, tackling the monster to the ground as it charged his classmate again and stabbing his kunai deep into its shoulder at the gap where the scales lay in different directions and so didn't overlap. Pulling the blade free he tossed it to Hinata, who was still unarmed, and drew another himself as he fell back again with a solid kick to the ankle where the beast was trying to get to its feet.
Snapping the blade out of the air and throwing again in the same motion, the Hyuuga heiress buried its razor tip in the creature's left eye before skipping in close, her hands folding into the traditional two-fingered spear of the Gentle Fist. The thing's animal form still only seemed to be an illusion, but the stab wounds it had recieved had made it react with genuine seeming pain, and her special vision showed that they had speared through several of the shredded papers with their illegible writing that made up its real structure. While she'd never managed to make out the tiny pinpoints of an enemy's tenketsu, and it had no inner organs to attack directly with chakra spikes, the Gentle Fist should still disrupt whatever jutsu was on the papers and do real damage. At least, she hoped so, as her fingers struck again and again at the shifting scraps only she could see. To the Uzumakis it looked like she was just tapping her hands against the beast's rough scales, but Haruko knew quite a bit about the Gentle Fist's effectiveness for a non-Hyuuga, and Naruto had seen how she consistently won the Academy spars despite her strikes looking no more effective.
Certainly the monster seemed to feel the blows, rearing back with a howl before scrambling away and shaking itself. The glow of its one remaining eye flared and it snarled before lunging to attack again, much faster than before. Hinata's defense was battered aside by a scaly forlimb before she was blasted backwards into a tree with a kick from the heavily muscled hind leg, long slashes torn across the front of her jacket by its jagged claws and blood welling from scratches torn in undershirt and skin despite the armor mesh. Dazed and winded from the hit, it was all she could do to roll onto her side from where she'd landed face down among the tree roots.
Naruto sprang forward with an outraged shout, but fared little better. He barely managed to stay on his feet as he slid backward, driven by the force of forelimb strikes that cut deep into his hardened leather arm guards as he tried to block. The impact of the heavy hits had shaken his fists loose and both kunai had fallen to the ground; in fact he barely missed cutting himself on them as a body slam knocked him down at last, and the mutant crouched on his chest, slathering at the mouth as it lowered its head.
Just before it could rip the head from his shoulders the other eye exploded with a shot from Haruko's battle guitar, a thin cloud of smoke trailing from a small opening between the tuning knobs on the back of its machine head. He caught just a glimpse of her enraged grimace before she used whatever jutsu it produced again, spurting a blast of fire out of the opening and causing more impacts against the beast that knocked it off of him, despite the flames not reaching more than a foot or two away from the guitar itself. Then, judging the line of fire cleared enough, she let rip with a full burst, freely peppering the thing with holes that oozed brackish black ichor as it staggered back under the barrage. He propped himself up on his elbows at it fell to the ground and began to slowly lose definition, melting into stinking goop like the ones he'd disposed of before. More worrying, the rest of the forest seemed to be blurring and fading as well, and he hurried back to his feet, then to help Hinata up as she gasped and trying to get her breath back.
"Che, that was pathetic," Haruko huffed. "What have they been teaching you kids in the Academy? Hashi-kun and Tobi-kun would have been horrified, and I can't believe Flying Monkey lets them get away with this. Aren't you two supposed to graduate this year?" She paused for a dramatic sigh. "Oh well, I'm here now, and I'll have to make sure you two are fit for ninja life before then. I mean, what if you got seperated from your team and ran into one of the wandering clans on your first mission out of the villiage? There's no way either of you could beat more than a handful of them before they wiped you out, and that just won't do!" The two kids shared an incredulous look - did she really expect them to be able to take on armies right out of the Academy? "Right! Secret Family Training, FULL POWER! You're not getting out of this Item World until it's at one hundred percent!"
As the leaf-diluted afternoon sun faded to twilight and the trees melted into some kind of courtyard, they shifted automatically to stand back to back. The courtyard was filled with heavily built, vaguely pig-like humanoids, whose bottomless black eyes gleamed with malevolence and whose thick, powerful hands clutched crude, knobby clubs.
Apparently, she did.
"Fucking hell!"
Hinata and both Uzumakis blinked in shock, the dark haired girl reddening as she realized she was the one who'd used such foul language, the like of which was never uttered in the Hyuuga compound.
The orcs just raised their weapons and started forward.
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(Posted Wed, 16 Feb 2011 00:13)
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