Bab 70: Chapter 85
Tsunade Senju glared at the cheeky, red-haired prepubescent standing on top of a building's worth of rubble and holding the body of a well-known Leaf ninja. It was clear that the person in the black coat was up to no good. She turned her head to her protégé, "Shizune, grab the Copy-Nin. I'll deal with the kid."
Before Haru could stutter out "Wait! I'm not an enemy!" he was interrupted by the ground beneath him exploding from the force of Tsunade's punch. "No, this is all wrong!" he screamed as he flew through the air. The boy landed in a graceful crouch but his frantic explanation was anything but graceful, "I was going to heal him! I know I kinda…did…the stuff to him…"
Fire raged in Tsunade's eyes, glistening darkly and reflecting the remaining city fires that surrounded the new crater. "You cost me five thousand ryo. If it weren't for you, those dice would have landed on odds. I've decided to extract five thousand ryo worth of body parts from your corpse."
Haru wanted to cry. He knew that, on average, his body would only fetch about three thousand total on the black market.
Circling around the boy, Tsunade's assistant had a trio of poisoned senbon in each hand, held between the knuckles of her fingers. Before she could fling her weapons, however, Haru tossed the limp body Kakashi Hatake into her arms. A ninja less skilled than Shizune would have probably skewered the man ironically, but as it was, the medic apprentice dropped her senbon and retreated a safe distance from the ensuing battle with Kakashi's body intact.
As the jinchuriki of the three-tails, Haru should still have had plenty of chakra after his fight with Kakashih. He shouldn't have a shooting pain across his chest or a wet cough welling up in his lungs. He definitely shouldn't have had a darkening of vision that typically accompanied chakra exhaustion.
"Tsunade of the Sannin, I'm here on orders to…"
"Shut it, little girl," Tsunade grunted as she flung an entire brick wall as easily as a wall-sized shuriken. "I'll get the story from Hatake-chan later," she said smugly as the short teen was smothered in wall. "Shizune! How's the patient doing?" she barked, shifting her attention to the girl with the glowing hands.
Shizune's eyes widened as she looked past her mentor. "Tsunade-sama…" she whispered, pointing at what should have been a smear on the ground. A stream of glowing green acid flowed out of the mouth of the creature wearing the ragged remains of a black coat. Demonic chakra flowed over the creature, rippling towards the end of its hair which wagged menacingly like a prehensile tail.
"I want to play too," it spoke. It started with slow, intentional steps and shortly broke into a jog. Its grin was larger than its face.
The sannin uprooted a mostly intact tree trunk and wielded it like a baseball bat. "Come get some then."
"Isobu…no..."
Tsunade sensed a moment of hesitation within the monster and smashed it a kilometer out of the city along with half of her makeshift bat. She dropped her improvised weapon with a seismic thud and chased after it, hopping from roof to roof. A bloody thumb and a few hand seals allowed her to call her enormous slug summon, Katsuyu. An enemy jinchuriki was not to be taken lightly.
Kakashi Hatake awoke with a gasp. Disoriented, he instinctively reached for his weapon pouch only to find he had been disarmed but not restrained.
"Were you looking for this?" Shizune asked the man who suddenly noticed her presence. She tossed the jounin his armaments and explained, "Sorry, standard procedure. One can't be too careful when treating jumpy shinobi who tend to throw shuriken first and ask questions later."
Kakashi asked, "Where is he?" The masked ninja sat up and studied the abandoned tea shop in which he had awakened. It was mostly intact despite a few shards of broken porcelain littering the ground. Trying to slide off the table he had been lain upon, he coughed severely and clutched his chest.
"Are you talking about your opponent? I believe Tsunade-sama is currently dispatching of him." Thunderous rumbles in the distance punctuated her response. "I wouldn't suggest following them. After all, your heart was stopped for several minutes. It's a wonder that there wasn't any permanent damage."
"I don't care," Kakashi said as he affixed his weapon pouch to his leg and replaced the various weaponry he kept hidden on his body. "I have to go out there."
Shizune stepped into Kakashi's path and stood under the doorway with her arms crossed. "What if I were to stop you? You are my patient, after all. Tsunade-sama would be disappointed in me if I let you get hurt."
The absent godfather sighed and rubbed his forehead. "A lot of the time, when I ignore my problems long enough, they go away eventually. I was hoping that this would be one of those times." Kakashi shambled weakly toward the door. "I was hoping for a long, long time that I wasn't making a grave mistake. But it turned out that I was wrong." He stopped in front of her and leaned forward, bracing himself against the door frame with his arm extended over Shizune's shoulder. He whispered into the shorter woman's ear, "It just got bigger and bigger and I thought by coming here I could finally finish things and find closure but we just ended up making a huge mess all over the city. Now I'm sore, exhausted, and can barely walk straight.
Kakashi stood up straight with his hands on his hips and a cheeky smile through his mask. "Now, are you going to let me through, Shizune-chan, or do I have to keep making innuendos?"
The madly blushing woman fell to her knees and covered her face. "Whatever. Just stop. I don't care if you kill yourself. Just never talk to me again."
The white haired man commented sardonically to himself, "Life would have been so very much easier if Seishirou and Nodoka had just made Jiraiya also be Haru's godfather."
There was a moment of clear introspection in Tsunade Senju's mind. "Oh, kami, how did it come down to this? Why am I fighting a biiju? Why is it after me? Shouldn't it be terrorizing a hidden village somewhere instead of leveling a podunk shithole? I didn't even piss anyone off…today…yet…" The thought trailed off as she smashed her foot into the humanoid monster's face, sending it crashing into a thicket of trees like a 140 pound bowling ball.
Katsuyu dropped her entire weight upon the stunned creature like a cruiseliner falling from the sky. Tsunade continued to optimistically imagine the hoard of ryo she would have won if only she hadn't been rudely interrupted early by the brat. The slug summon was enveloping a struggling Haru into an acid filled vestibule in which he would futilely burn out the demonic chakra reserves. The brat had fought like a wild beast, neglecting any ninjutsu or battle strategy. It was frankly a very disappointingly one-sided fight. How the hell did this punk beat the Hatake heir?
Speaking of the devil, a haggard Kakashi arrived along with Shizune in tow.
"What is he doing here?" the sage asked irately. "I need him healthy enough to extract about two thousand ryo from his corpse."
"Actually, Senju-dono, that's my student you're fighting," Kakashi admitted sheepishly while scratching the back of his head.
"EH?" Tsunade raised an eyebrow. "Explain now, whelp."
"He's on a mission from the Sandaime. So I'm asking you, could you please let him go?" Kakashi clapped his hands and glanced up at the woman's eyes from a shallow bow.
"I wasn't aware that Konoha had two jinchuriki," Shizune remarked.
"Haru is just full of surprises. I'm sure you may or may not like him if you get to know him better," he replied. "By the way, does anyone hear…music?"
There was a thumping, pounding rhythm that all of them could feel down to their bones like festival drums. All three shinobi searched for the source of the beat, but it came equally from all directions as if it was being produced inside the ear itself. A drum roll introduced a frantic bass riff and then a guitar crying out as if summoning a demon from hell.
At that moment, Katsuya exploded into hundreds of slug chunks and Haru emerged, wreathed in dark, flaming chakra and with a solid black orb of chakra floating above his hand.
Status Power Mingguan
-- Peringkat
Power 
-- Power
stone