Pre-Chapter A/N: Here we go with another chapter, coming in right on time. Next three chapters on my patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)— same username as here and link in bio.
XXXXX- MINATO NAMIKAZE
His kunai spread all over the training ground, and Sensei copied the move, except that his multiplied in mid-air to become hundreds that landed all around them. Minato was not yet at the point that he could keep track of so many targets at the same time in combat. He body-flickered forwards, and as Sensei moved to counter him with a punishing strength that Minato was more than familiar with, he was gone. He appeared at one of his markers and then shot for Sensei again.
But Sensei was at his own marker to the left. Minato teleported to the closest one, but when he arrived, Sensei had already moved on to another one, even farther away. Minato searched for his closest one, and then went to it. But the theme continued. Sensei was gone now as well. Minato chased him, moving from marker to marker so quickly that he barely had time to think about the teleports.
But over time, he began to spot a pattern, and instead of teleporting to the marker where Sensei was, he teleported to the one that he figured Sensei would be at next, only for him to appear and then be swept off his feet instantly. He almost pushed back to his feet, but then there was a weight on him and cold steel pressed against his neck.
Sensei eased off, rising and offering a hand to Minato.
"Don't get tunnel vision. Flying Raijin is a neat trick, but not infallible. Expect your enemy to adapt if they see the jutsu more than once," he said.
"So I should kill them the first time around," he said. Sensei nodded.
"I didn't give it to you before now because I feared you would rely on it as a crutch and then die when you faced one of the dozens of countermeasures that the other nations have been preparing for it since the last war. The Otsutsuki will not be ready for it the same way other shinobi on earth might be, so it will be a useful tool. I also won't be using it, so you should expect to keep your advantage for a while, but still be cautious," Sensei warned in a serious tone. Minato nodded.
"How goes the second technique?" Sensei asked.
"Harder to work out. Much harder," he said.
"That is fair enough. The toads?" Sensei asked, only to be interrupted by yelling.
"Enough yapping. It's my turn," Kushina called.
Sensei sighed, shaking his head, but he did begin walking back to the spar starting position as Kushina took the spot Minato had once occupied. He decided he'd tell Sensei about how things were going with the toads and sage mode when he finished. He stepped next to Mikoto. She had bags under her eyes. Whatever Sensei had her working on was taking its toll on her.
Minato couldn't spare much pity either, because he knew the exhaustion on her face only mirrored the one on his. Even Kushina's legendary stamina was being pushed to its breaking point.
Standing opposite each other, Sensei and Kushina were still for a few seconds before the Eight Tails' chakra erupted from Kushina, six tails sprouting from her lower back and then swaying dangerously in the air as the caustic red field appeared around her. And then it began to lighten in colour before seeping back into her body. Her eyes were an even brighter red than usual. Her hair took on a shaggy appearance that differed from her usual soft, silky locks.
She looked almost like a different person with the Eight Tails' chakra brought back within her body and just on the edge of bursting from her. She still looked beautiful, of course. Beauty like hers did not just disappear. But there was a wild harshness to it that had not existed before. When she pushed against the ground, it was all Minato could do to keep track of it.
When she and Sensei—who had turned into a small giant while waiting for her; he'd grown an extra two feet to show just how much nature energy he had allowed to flow into his body—clashed, the ground around them shattered, a shockwave forcing Minato to use chakra adhesion to keep himself planted to the ground. Mikoto did the same by his side. The dust cleared, and there they were. Their fists had met in the middle, and they were straining against each other for dominance, but somehow, against all odds, Kushina was winning.
"What an interesting idea," Sensei said, referring to Kushina's new form. She grunted, not replying. Minato knew maintaining this took a lot of concentration from her. The chakra of the Eight Tails was hard enough to control regularly. Keeping it leashed and contained like this was just asking for trouble. But, as Sensei was forced to pull back and she stepped even deeper into his guard, Minato could admit that it seemed to be well worth it. She lashed out with another punch. This one, Sensei dodged. She followed with a knee to the midsection that Sensei turned and caught with both hands, visibly grunting from the strain. Then she brought her other hand to bear again, almost landing a punch that could have brought an end to the whole thing there and then. But Sensei was wily. And speed was his game. He backpedalled, moving out of the way of the knee that he had just blocked as well as the punch that wanted to ring his head like a bell. And then he came in.
Kushina was fast, but she was stronger than she was fast in this state, and while she had Sensei beat in strength, speed was another matter. He punched her twice, each one forcing her head in a different direction before he slammed his foot into her chest. Those hits would have turned Minato into paste. Kushina bore them well. Sensei was using only his sage mode so far, not the enhanced mass punches he could pull out when he really wanted to send a message. Of course, not even Kushina in this mode could shrug those off. And this was sparring, not a match to the death.
She was forced to take a step backwards as Sensei systematically dismantled her with his taijutsu. Wherever she turned, he moved away from. His fingers were folded into punches so as to not end the fight as quickly as it would have if he leveraged the Gentle Fist. With it, these punches could have closed chakra points, ripped muscles to shreds, torn organs apart, and forced the Eight Tails to be too busy keeping her body together to assist her in maintaining this state. He could have won in seconds, but he did not.
Instead, he taught. With every punch that slipped through, he made sure Kushina's guard became more ironclad. With every time he put her body through the motions of a block only for it to turn out to be a feint, he taught her to be more discerning. Kushina's taijutsu was good. One could not be a student of the greatest prodigy that the Hyuga clan had ever produced and have bad taijutsu, but it fell to the background in favour of her true specialty, and when one more punch found its way through her guard and hit the same spot in the middle of her stomach, she jumped backwards, weaving seals already.
She spat out a vortex of water that rushed towards Sensei at pace. He slapped his own hands together and the ground in front of him rose before him, facing off against the Water Release jutsu that could have drilled through stone and holding steady. Minato could see the small glint of seals spreading across the stone. A barrier added to the earth wall? Interesting. Sensei was getting even sharper. To manage something like that so quickly without any visible indication that he was doing it. Sensei had said the Warring Clans era was the last time men truly walked with gods. He'd meant Madara and Hashirama.
Minato strongly believed that he did not give himself enough credit. Kushina heaved, spitting out even more water that rushed forward before coalescing on itself and rising in a wave that dwarfed Sensei and his wall.
Sensei's hands hit the ground this time. The wall, acting more like water than stone, bent around to form a dome to protect him from all sides. The water hit the dome, and it parted. Kushina weaved even more seals, breathing in, and then breathing out lightning.
A ball of sparking electricity formed in front of her mouth, taking more and more chakra to form itself before, in one blast, it nearly seared its image into Minato's eyes. It flashed, and when the flash was gone, there was a hole through Sensei's dome. Straight through. In one part and out the other.
A hand rose from the ground beneath Kushina, grabbing her foot. She looked down, shocked. How had she lost track of him with her senses? She slammed her foot downwards, monstrous strength allowing her to tear through the earth beneath her to reach Sensei. Or rather, his clone. The original was standing behind Kushina now, and he placed a hand on her shoulder, patting it.
"Good one," he said.
She growled, but dropped out of the focused tailed beast state a second later. Sensei had placed a temporary Flying Raijin seal on her with that tap, bringing an end to the fight in one movement. She looked back at him, receiving a nod of approval.
"You're good. Just keep practising so you can maintain that for longer, and so you can access more complicated ninjutsu with it. I know it's going to be a lot of work, but if anyone can do it, it's you." Kushina was nodding as she made her way towards where they were standing. Mikoto began walking towards Sensei then, replacing Kushina for the sparring match.
"Are you ready?" Sensei asked. She nodded, and then weaved the seals for the summoning jutsu before the fight had even started. Two coffins rose from the ground.
"Two?" Sensei asked.
"Trying to control more than that will leave me unable to fight alongside them. Going to three means I have to stay still. Going to four means I can't pay any attention to my body as well," she said.
"Remind me to get you something I wrote after studying Chiyo's work with the puppets. Now let us begin," he said, and then the coffins opened up, the lids dropping to the ground. Mikoto formed the snake seal and two men shuffled out of them. They were wearing the grey scrubs of the Konoha prisons. But that was the only normal thing about them.
For one, Minato could not recognise them. How was Mikoto summoning other humans, and how were they people that they didn't even know? They didn't even look like Konoha shinobi. Minato did not like the direction that his suspicions were taking him in. Their bodies looked strange: those black eyes that lacked any sort of feeling, and those scars on their faces. They were human, but near inhuman. They straightened up once they were out of the wooden coffins and then they shot forward, heading straight for Sensei. Mikoto brought up the rear.
Sensei had dropped out of sage mode now, but he was still dangerous up close. He showed that as he weaved out of the way of the first man's attempt to stab him with a kunai, allowed his body to follow the stab as he pulled the man closer, and punched out. The punch tore through half the man's chest, but instead of blood and flesh, it showed that the man was made of some sort of cloth and sealing paper that began to reassemble as Sensei moved past and towards the next one.
He sent a straight kick that the second was forced to block with crossed hands. And then Mikoto was there. Her movements were silent like the owls she could summon. She sent a knife hand out for Sensei's eyes first, forcing him to lean backwards, parallel to the ground. Her feet lashed out, trying to sweep the only foot on the ground out from under him. He backflipped, pushing off with that foot before Mikoto's could reach it, and then landed on both feet a few paces behind. The first one had fully reconstructed itself, so both it and the second came in a pincer movement while Mikoto jumped backwards, weaving seals.
Her stomach bulged, and then from her mouth came a missile of compressed blue flames that tore through the first of the men even as he kept Sensei occupied and in range, to make its way to Sensei. Sensei bent at the waist and the fire hit the man behind him and tore through him as well before dissipating on hitting the far end of the training ground—the barrier there doing its job and absorbing the attack. While it was gone, Sensei had gone for Mikoto even as her puppets—Minato could not think of a better word for them now—chased his every step.
Mikoto's eyes were a burning red as she and Sensei exchanged a furious dance of taijutsu. She dodged every one of his attacks, not having the durability to contend with punches that could dent steel even in his base state. At the same time, she enhanced her own taijutsu with knife hands that had compressed and collected chakra at her fingertips and could tear through flesh with no problems. That one came from the Owls.
She and Sensei kept dancing, and then the puppets managed to make it to them. One jumped, landing right on Sensei, only for Sensei to turn at the last second and then copy Mikoto's technique by lashing out with a sweeping knife hand that cut the man in half. This time, instead of his body reconstructing itself, it came apart even further into exploding tags.
"Mutually Multiplying Explosive Tags," Mikoto intoned as the paper tags then began to explode, summoning their replacements just before they did so, only for that one to form its own replacement as well. The chain reaction continued, but it was only the puppet that had been caught in it. Sensei had used the Flying Raijin at the last second to appear next to the other puppet. It tried to turn to activate its own technique only for Sensei to place a hand on its shoulder. It collapsed to the ground, not able to bear the weight or even to counter Sensei's Superheavyweight Boulder Technique.
Sensei turned to Mikoto then, who lifted her hands in surrender.
"I yield," she said. He nodded, and then he waved his hand to call Kushina and Minato closer.
"When you face the Otsutsuki, you must be prepared to give it your all. Each of you now has the tools you need to become some of humanity's greatest hopes. When the time comes, you might be deployed to the same battlefield. You might also not be. Be ready for either situation. Remember what I told you. And well done. I know how hard this is. I know how much pressure I've been placing on the three of you to become stronger. Better. Watching you handle it makes me so proud. So proud," I said.
"Now just apply the few comments I've given and feel free to stop by the office if you need help with anything. I've got a meeting I'm running late for," I said next, and then was gone.
The next meeting was with Kagame. She and Orochimaru were already waiting in her office by the time I had arrived. I appeared in front of the desk, next to where Orochimaru was sitting almost languidly. Kagame was waiting on her chair, and the fact that she did not even allow me to sit before shoving the papers in my face told me that she was excited about what they had done.
I read through and my eyebrows rose further and further with every line. The initial tests on regular shinobi were going well. Everything was well placed for a full rollout. The side effects were occurring at an even lower frequency than predicted. There had been only one bad reaction so far out of a hundred takers, and it was far tamer than predicted. Some chakra sickness, some purging, then no benefit from what I had begun to mentally call the Superninja serum. Never out loud, though. Kagame would try to stab me if I ever called it that in her hearing.
"So we go ahead then?" I asked, even as I still read.
"We do. Keep reading," Kagame prodded. I lifted my second brow in shock as I arrived at the bit with the continued effects from the initial recipients. It had just been months, so it was not like there had been a long time between them taking it and now, but their cells were showing very little ageing between then and now. None at all that was ordinarily visible, even. Their chakra was getting better at keeping them alive.
"Immortality?" I asked, giving Orochimaru a wary look from the corner of my eyes. It would be just my luck to drop the thing he had left the village searching for into his lap.
"Not quite. Slowed ageing. Significant, don't get me wrong. But no true immortality. And I anticipate that the effects will scale based on the age of those who take it. The younger the better," he said. I sighed.
"Proceed with full rollout. Keep it discreet, but ensure that every shinobi we can afford to dose receives their dose. Inform them that it is a change to the existing supplement dose," I said.
"Something this significant?" Kagame asked.
"People won't feel all that comfortable with the knowledge that we're putting cells from a dead alien inside of them. Speaking of dead alien cells, how many doses are we going to be able to harvest from the subject?" I asked.
"No more than a couple hundred without losing the subject as a viable source for experiments," Kagame said. So not enough for the entire shinobi force.
"And if we give up on using it for experiments?" I asked.
"A thousand. Perhaps more." That was all the jounin and quite a few of the chunin. The benefits would probably scale better if we gave them to the academy students first and foremost, but we needed it in people who would be hitting the frontlines in months, not years. Thankfully, several more sources of genetic material were going to come through portals in a matter of months.
"Progress on the other thing?" I asked. It was Orochimaru that replied.
"The cells fight any sort of disease we can create. Same with poisons. They have an unnatural vitality that makes the proposal for a designed illness spread through their forces unfeasible. Not with the understanding we have of them, at least," he said. I sighed. I was doing that a lot. Biological weapons were, of course, against the rules of war that had been laid down after the First Great War at the Second Five Kage Summit, but aliens weren't party to that. And if we found some way to just get rid of them in one swoop, I'd take it and figure out the consequences later.
"Then use the entire subject. Get as many doses as possible to as many as possible," I said, and rose.
A/N: Shori is taking the Otsutsuki very seriously. Very, very seriously. Next chapter comes on here by Sunday night. Next three chapters up on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga) (same username as here and link in bio), you can support me there and read them early.