The sword came down.
A boot hit the jonin in the spine.
The force of the kick launched him forward, his katana swinging instinctively, the blade cutting nothing but air as his body left the ground and crashed through a supply cart ten meters away. Wood splintered. Crates shattered. The jonin tumbled through the wreckage and slammed into the outpost wall hard enough to crack it.
Shikaku blinked.
Mikoto was standing where the jonin had been. Her back was to him. Her cleaver sword was in her hand without its bandages. Her shoulders were heaving.
"Sen... sei?" Shikaku's voice came out as a whisper.
She didn't answer. She was looking at the compound. At the barracks wall where Inoichi lay crumpled with blood soaking through his shirt. At Chōza, face-down in the dirt beside Shikaku, the wound across his back still pouring.
Her vision blurred.
She wasn’t crying. From something else. Something behind her eyes that burned, a pressure building in her optic nerves that felt like her skull was being squeezed from the inside. Her sight swam, doubled, and for one terrible second she couldn't see anything at all.
Then it cleared.
And everything was different.
The world was sharper. The colors were different, richer, deeper, with an overlay of red. She could see the chakra in Shikaku's body, a dim flickering blue that was guttering like a candle in the wind. She could see Chōza's, fainter, weaker, draining from the wound in his back in thin wisps that dissolved in the air. She could see Inoichi's against the wall, barely there, a smudge of fading light.
She could see the jonin extracting himself from the wrecked cart, his chakra as well, concentrated in his remaining good arm and his legs. She could see every Iwa shinobi in the compound, every Konoha defender, every spark of chakra on the battlefield laid out before her like a map drawn in light.
She didn't know what had happened to her eyes. She didn't care. Her boys were dying.
She dropped to her knees beside Chōza. Her hands glowed green before they touched his back. The wound was catastrophic. Shoulder to hip, through skin and muscle and fascia, the cut so deep she could see the white of his spine through the blood. He was losing more than she could replace.
She poured chakra into him. Sealing vessels, knitting muscle, forcing the tissue to hold together through sheer will. Her reserves were immense but the damage was immense too, and every second she spent here was a second Inoichi bled against the wall and Shikaku lay broken beside her.
She formed hand signs with one hand while the other stayed on Chōza's wound.
Two water clones split from her body and moved without needing to be told. One went to Inoichi. One went to Shikaku. Both knelt. Both glowed green.
The jonin stood up from the wreckage.
His broken arm hung limp. His face was twisted with rage. Blood ran from a cut on his scalp where a splinter had caught him. He looked at Mikoto kneeling over the Akimichi boy with green light pouring from her hands.
"Medical ninjutsu too?" He spat blood. "You Leaf brats are full of talent! How envious!"
He crossed the distance in three steps and his boot caught Mikoto in the side of the face.
The kick snapped her head sideways. Her hands ripped away from Chōza's wound. The healing chakra died. She hit the dirt and rolled twice before catching herself on one hand.
"NO!" she screamed.
The jonin was already turning toward Chōza. His katana rose in his good hand. The boy was on the ground, wound half-sealed, still bleeding, still dying. One swing would finish it. “Worried about this fat fucking brat? He broke my arm, this is the least he deserves.”
Shikaku's hands moved.
He was lying on his back with cracked ribs and barely enough chakra to stay conscious. His arms weighed a thousand kilograms. His shadow was thin and weak and it had nothing left to give.
He gave it anyway.
Shadow Possession Jutsu complete.
The shadow stretched. Thin as a thread. It crossed the blood-soaked ground and caught the jonin's ankle just as the katana reached the top of its arc.
The jonin froze. His arm locked. His teeth bared as he fought the bind, muscles straining against a technique that was held together by nothing but an eleven-year-old's refusal to let his friend die.
Mikoto was on her feet. She Body Flickered across the compound and her foot connected with the jonin's chest with every ounce of strength she had. The kick cratered his sternum. His body left the ground and flew backward through the outpost wall, through the wooden supports, through two trees on the other side. The sound of impact echoed across the compound.
Shikaku's shadow snapped back. His arm fell. His eyes closed.
Mikoto formed another water clone. It went to Chōza and the green glow resumed. She looked at her three boys, all being worked on by clones, all still breathing.
Then she turned toward the hole the jonin had made in the wall and walked through it.
He was getting up.
Both trees he'd hit were shattered at the base, their trunks split and toppled. He was on one knee in the debris, his good hand braced against the ground, his broken arm dangling. His flak jacket was cracked across the chest where her kick had landed. Blood ran from his mouth.
He looked up at her.
And stopped.
"A Uchiha… Lucky. Fucking. Me…" he said.
Mikoto drew the transformed Shark Skin.
"A Sharingan and that sword," he said. He forced himself to stand. His katana came up one-handed. "Mikoto of the Shredding Sword. The bingo book didn't mention you were an Uchiha."
"..." She was boiling with rage, the whites of her knuckles were visible.
He shifted his stance. His broken arm was useless. His chest was cracked. He was running on pain and stubbornness. "How old are you, girl?"
“...” This man tried to take her boys from her. Her sweet cute boys…
She closed the distance.
Shark Skin met katana and the jonin's blade met it. They clashed before he disengaged, adjusted his grip, and came again. A one-handed overhead strike aimed at her skull.
She saw it coming a different way from usual. She usually saw attacks coming, through training and instinct and the reading of body language. She saw the muscles in his shoulder tighten a fraction of a second before the swing began. She saw the angle of his wrist shift and knew exactly where the blade would be before it got there. She stepped left and the katana passed through the space her head had occupied.
She brought Shark Skin across his exposed side.
The cleaver bit through his flak jacket, through his shirt, through the skin and muscle beneath. The sword drained. His chakra flooded into Samehada in a single violent pull and the jonin staggered as his reserves cratered. His legs weakened. His remaining jutsu capacity collapsed.
"What…" he wheezed. He looked at the wound on his side, at the cleaved flesh, at his own hands trembling as his chakra was snatched. "It's not poison… It's... you're draining my..."
Mikoto swung again. The second swipe caught his katana arm, the cleaver taking his off arm. What was left of his chakra vanished. The katana flew with his arm.
He scrambled backward. His face was grey. His movements were sluggish, robbed of the chakra enhancement that every shinobi relied on to move at combat speed. He was a jonin without chakra. Still knowledgeable. Still experienced. But stripped of the thing that made him superhuman.
He reached into his pouch with his good hand. A smoke bomb hit the ground between them and the world went grey.
Mikoto didn't need to see him. The Sharingan cut through the smoke like it wasn't there, his chakra signature a guttering flame in the haze, dim but visible. She tracked him as he moved left, circling, trying to create distance.
A flash bomb detonated. White light filled the smoke. She closed her eyes and tracked him with her senses. Two kunai came out of the haze, trailing sparks. She deflected the first with Shark Skin and sidestepped the second. It detonated behind her and the shockwave pushed her forward but she kept her feet.
He was throwing everything. Shuriken, kunai, more explosive tags. Buying seconds with tools because he had nothing else. The missing arm, the drained chakra, the cracked chest. He was a man fighting the end and he knew it.
A hiss from the smoke. Something different. The canister hit the ground near her feet and a cloud of sickly purple gas bloomed upward. Poison gas. Mikoto held her breath and leaped clear of the cloud.
She emerged from the smoke behind him. He was facing the wrong direction, his good hand reaching for another tool from his nearly empty pouch.
"You should have run as soon as I arrived." Mikoto told him.
He spun. His eyes met hers.
The genjutsu wasn't like the ones she'd cast before. Those had been done through hand signs. This one came from her eyes themselves, from whatever was burning behind them, from something that had nothing to do with hand signs and everything to do with how badly she wanted this man to suffer.
The world went red.
The outpost vanished. The smoke, the fire, the compound, all of it bled away and was replaced by a sky the color of arterial blood. A black moon hung overhead, bloated and still. Black clouds drifted across it, slow, like ink dropped in water. The ground beneath his feet was black water, a flat black plane stretching to every horizon, featureless, endless. There was no wind. No sound. Nothing but the color of blood and the girl standing ten meters in front of him.
She was walking toward him. Slowly. Black water rippling with each step
In her hands was a weapon he had never seen before. A massive blade, dark blue and covered in overlapping scales that shifted and bristled as if the thing was alive. A ridged spine ran its length. At the tip, a mouth, wide and lined with rows of teeth. The scales rippled in waves down the blade's surface. It was breathing.
He tried to move. His body wouldn't answer.
"In the world of this genjutsu," Mikoto said, still walking, "space, time, everything is under my control."
She reached him. She raised the living blade.
"From now on, you will endure even worse pain than what you gave to them."
She swung diagonally. The scales caught his collarbone and shredded downward, peeling skin and muscle in a long ribbon. The pain was beyond anything he had a reference for. He opened his mouth to scream and a second slash was already coming, a ghost of her, an afterimage superimposed over her body, swinging from a different angle in the same instant, the copy's blade dragging across his stomach and opening him from his waist. A third copy, layered on the first two, drove the mouth of the sword into his shoulder and the teeth clamped down and shook.
He screamed.
"Nara Shikaku."
Another slash. Another afterimage peeling off her frame, this one rising from below, the scales catching under his ribs and lifting, and his body came apart along the line and he heard himself being taken apart, piece by piece.
"Yamanaka Inoichi."
His legs wanted to buckle. They wouldn't. His body was locked upright, forced to stand, forced to take it. An afterimage drove the blade through his thigh and the scales ground back and forth inside the wound like a saw. His vision went white. His mind tried to leave. It couldn't.
"Akimichi Chōza."
Everything went black.
He woke up standing. Whole. Uncut. The red sky above. The black moon. The girl, ten meters away, walking toward him. The living blade breathing in her hands.
"In the world of this genjutsu," Mikoto said, "space, time, everything is under my control."
No. No, no, no.
"From now on, you will endure even worse pain than what you gave to them."
The same words. The same walk. The same blade rising.
"Nara Shikaku."
He screamed before the cut landed.
It landed anyway.
"Yamanaka Inoichi."
He tried to tell himself it was a genjutsu. Illusion. Chakra and light. Not real. The pain disagreed. The pain was in places that genjutsu shouldn't reach, deeper than nerve endings, deeper than the body. It carved into something behind his thoughts, behind his will, behind the wall every shinobi builds between themselves and the things that can break them. It was real to his spirit. His soul. And that was more than enough.
"Akimichi Chōza."
Black.
He woke up standing. Whole. The red sky. The black moon. The girl. Walking.
"In the world of this genjutsu..."
He broke it.
Everything he had left, every scrap of chakra, every drop of will, every survival instinct his body and training had ever given him. He gathered it all and PULLED and the red world cracked like glass and fell away in shards.
"KAI!"
The illusion dissolved.
He opened his eyes.
Mikoto was right in front of him. The real one. The only one. Shark Skin was already moving. Lightning crackled along the blade's surface, sparks jumping between the scales, and the sword drove forward into his gut.
The blunt tip bit through his vest, through his body, through everything. Lightning poured into his body and his body seized, every muscle contracting at once, his mouth open in a loud scream. Shark Skin absorbed what was left, the last scraps of chakra in his system, and the lightning cooked what remained.
He sagged on the blade. His eyes found hers. Red met brown.
"Damn... red-eyed freak…" His voice was a husk. “Konoha… deserves… to be wiped out…”
The light left his eyes before he could finish. His body went limp.
Mikoto pulled Shark Skin free. She flicked the blade once and the blood scattered across the dirt. She slung the happily fed sword on her back and turned and ran.
The compound was quieter when she came back through the wall.
The Iwa assault had broken. With their jonin gone and no signal coming back, the remaining attackers had pulled out. The Konoha defenders were regrouping. Haruna was alive, standing on the remains of the watchtower with blood all over her body and a kunai in each hand, shouting orders to secure the perimeter.
Mikoto didn't see any of it. She ran past the defenders, past the burning buildings, past the bodies of Iwa shinobi scattered across the compound, and she dropped to her knees beside Chōza.
The water clone was still there, still glowing green, still pouring chakra into the wound. The bleeding had stopped. The muscle wall was holding. His breathing was shallow but steady. He was alive.
She looked at Inoichi. The clone beside him had sealed the gash across his side. His color was bad but his chest was rising and falling. Alive.
She looked at Shikaku. The clone had healed his cracked ribs. He was conscious, barely, his eyes half-open and fixed on her.
"Sensei… Your eyes." His voice was barely a whisper.
She didn't understand what he was talking about.
"Your eyes are red. There's two marks in them. Like a comma. Spinning"
She reached up and touched the skin beneath her eye. She couldn't feel anything different. But when she looked at the world around her, she could see everything. Every thread of chakra in the compound. Every heartbeat. Every breath. She could see her water clones' chakra signatures, identical to her own. She could see Shikaku's chakra stabilizing as the healing took hold. She could see Chōza's, fragile but present, clinging to life.
She dismissed the clone and placed her own hands on Chōza's wound. The healing chakra flowed directly now, stronger, more focused. She worked for ten minutes without stopping. The muscle knitted. The skin closed. The wound went from fatal to survivable to stable.
She moved to Inoichi. The gash was sealed but the internal damage needed attention. Bruised organs from the kick to the chest. Minor internal bleeding. She fixed it all. Seven minutes.
She came back to Shikaku. His ribs were healed but his chakra was nearly gone. She shared with him some of her own through the Chakra Transfer Jutsu, more than enough to fill him back to top.
"Is it over?" he asked.
"It's over."
"Are they alive?"
"They're alive."
His eyes closed. His hand was still holding Chōza's.
Mikoto sat back on her heels. She looked at her three genin. Bloody, broken, unconscious or barely conscious, sprawled across the dirt of a burning outpost.
Alive.
Tears rolled down her cheeks. She didn't wipe them. She let them come.
She had a small smile on her face.
"I'm sorry I was late," she whispered. "I'm so sorry."
None of them answered. Chōza was unconscious. Inoichi was unconscious. Shikaku's breathing had evened out into sleep.
She carried them to a makeshift medical tent before making her way to other injured survivors. Mikoto healed them, her Sharingan still active and helping her immensely. Through her new eyes, she could see things no medic should be able to see: the fraying edges of torn muscle, the sluggish pulse of disrupted chakra pathways. Utilizing genjutsu to put patients under. She helped out without anyone’s orders until Haruna found her.
She helped out as relief filled her heart when she looked at her resting genin.
Her boys were safe.