Sasuke was scared. Zabuza reminded him way too much of That Man for his comfort, and he knew very well how a Sharingan didn’t guarantee Kakashi would win against such a monster. And he wasn’t strong enough to face That Man yet, so naturally he wasn’t strong enough to take down Zabuza himself. The fangirl and the dobe would be no help, so all his hopes lie on Kakashi.
Then the idiot yelled something and a wall of scales blew away the mist.
That…didn’t make sense. Sasuke looked around and up and nearly keeled over in shock. Beside him he noticed Sakura having the same reaction, yelping in fear. Tazuna had fallen on his butt and looked like he needed a drink. Naruto just looked insufferably smug.
A dragon, an honest to Sage dragon had suddenly appeared and wrapped itself around them like a giant snake, trapping them in its shimmering silvery coils. Overhead the dragon leaned out towards..something…its wings open and shielding them from above. There was still a gap they could see the sky through, but that’s where the beast’s foreclaws rested. Clearly, none of them were leaving the dragon’s body-prison without its say-so.
Or get in, Sasuke realized. If he eliminated the fact that he wasn’t looking at a person, he’d call the dragon’s posture defensive. The dragon wasn’t keeping them in, it was keeping Zabuza out.
Naruto didn’t allow himself to sigh in relief, but he honestly wasn’t sure that would work. But now he had a kage bunshin pretending to be him, and he could pretend to be the summons. Now if the clone could just remember his lines…
“Oi!” the Naruto clone yelled. “Dragon guy! The guy with the big sword is a really bad guy!”
Naruto winced. Had he always been that bad at acting?
Outside, the battle between Zabuza and Kakashi had stalled before it even began. The sudden manifestation of tons of armored dragon had blown the mist away, revealing two Kakashi and three Zabuza ready to ambush eachother once Zabuza attacked Tazuna…which clearly wasn’t going to happen anymore. Instead, all three Zabuza were staring at the dragon in shock. “What is that thing!?”
“We have some very promising genin this year,” Kakashi replied calmly. His clone was studying the dragon closely. “Naruto, get Tazuna out of here. Sasuke, Sakura, go with him.”
“But Kakashi-sensei, we can help!” Naruto’s clone called out.
Kakashi didn’t take his eyes off Zabuza, and his own clone came back around to watch Zabuza’s. “This is part of teamwork, Naruto!”
Naruto hesitated. It was true that they hadn’t practiced at all with his dragon form, but he could handle Zabuza all by himself like this!”
“Naruto!” Sakura gasped below him. Naruto looked down at her. She was terrified. Not of Zabuza, but of him. Even if he wasn’t crushing on her anymore (at least not much), he still felt a pang of shame at that.
His clone did, too. They made eyecontact and nodded at eachother. “Okay,” the clone yelled. “Then we’ll finish the mission together, Kakashi-sensei! Dattebayo!”
Naruto moved slowly, uncoiling himself and lying down so that the others could climb on him while he still presented a barrier and a threat to Zabuza.
The clone took charge and grabbed Tazuna’s hand. “Come on, on his back!” he called.
Tazuna took a few weak steps as “Naruto” pulled him along. “Is it safe?” he asked.
“Naruto” grinned. “I’d trust him with my life,” he said, voice lilting with some unspoken joke.
The dragon huffed what could have been a laugh.
Zabuza frowned. This was going horribly off script. It was time to get back on the offensive.
Kakashi was startled out of his stupor when the three Zabuza charged the dragon, veering away from eachother. With his own one clone, and no time to make another at the speed Zabuza was going, he could only intercept two. No time to think beyond that, he picked his two targets and went into motion.
His clone made contact first. Kunai and sword flashed and that Kakashi and Zabuza both disintegrated into harmless water.
Water clone? Zabuza wondered. Konoha favored kage bunshin. Kakashi was showing off his sharingan. How unnerving.
Kakashi allowed his hidden mouth to smile slightly. He knew exactly how to change the odds in his favor now. He swung towards the other Zabuza, the one he didn’t pick originally.
“How did you know!?” Zabuza roared as his very real sword slashed at the equally real Kakashi.
“Simple,” Kakashi said, loud enough for the genin to overhear. “You see, I knew my clone didn’t stand a chance against the real you, so I made sure to intercept you early. I had a 0.33 chance of intercepting the real you.”
Back on Naruto’s back, the genin were trying to find some way to keep Tazuna from falling off. Sakura looked out at the battle. “So since you knew that the one clone wasn’t him, this one had to have a 0.67 chance of being real!”
“Exactly!” Kakashi yelled back, stabbing at Zabuza with his kunai.
“I’m not sure that works in this situation,” Naruto’s clone considered. “That presupposes that the revealed clone was going to be a zero, when in fact there was no active intelligence behind that at all.”
“You think he just got lucky?” Tazuna wondered, forgetting for a moment that he was sitting on a dragon.
“Is this really the time for a debate on unintuitive probability!?” Zabuza raged.
The dragon Naruto snorted and casually ate the final Zabuza clone as it charged into range. “Tastes like water,” he rumbled.
Tazuna stared at the dragon’s head. “You can talk!?”
“Of course I can talk!” Naruto snapped back. His voice was deep and resonate, unquestionably coming from a chest cavity larger than most people. This was good, because otherwise it sounded just like Naruto’s human voice, and Naruto sucked at disguising his voice. “Got a good grip yet?”
The Naruto clone forced Tazuna’s hands to grasp a set of particularly thick scales. Sasuke and Sakura he had no worries for. “Go!” he called.
Naruto nodded and tensed much of his body before jumping into the air like a spring, his wings unfurling to catch the wind.
Tazuna’s eyes rolled up in his head when he felt something hit his back. “Don’t you dare!” Naruto yelled over the roaring wind caused by the sudden speed. “We didn’t get this far just so you could lose consciousness here!”
The bridge builder nodded and closed his eyes, hanging on tight. The battle below suddenly felt very far away indeed.
Zabuza offered a curse as his target flew away, well out of his reach. “I suppose all I have left is to kill you!”
Kakashi leapt backwards and regarded Zabuza calmly. No distractions left, and the missing-nin was in his Sharingan. He adopted a ready stance.
Zabuza started. That stance was…eerily familiar. “Enough. I will”
“finish it in one attack,” Kakashi finished.
Zabuza’s left eye twitched as he realized what was so eerie about Kakashi. He was a perfect mirror.
Kakashi quietly wove a genjutsu into his mimicry.
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(Posted Sat, 30 Apr 2011 05:27)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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