You are Uzumaki Naori, leader of Amegakure village – something you did not come by easily.

There have been many moments over the years when you’ve come close enough to Death to feel his breath on the back of your neck, and you have the scars to show for it. Some days it’s come to feel as if you’ve become his right-hand woman. But some days… some days you actually face a genuine challenge that reminds you why you’ve fought so hard to get where you are. This day is rapidly shaping up to be one of the latter.

“Well then,” you sigh, rubbing idly at the back of your neck. “I wish that’d left me more time, but here we are.”

“How do you mean?” Fū asks with a little frown. “I mean I get you think he’s gonna make an attack today, I just didn’t follow the reasoning all the way.”

“If I had to guess he’d be after that brat my son ran into,” you reason, “the one Delta went to Konoha chasing after. He’s never shown any urgency, but either this fight’s put some urgency into him or it’s cleared the way depending on how Naruto and Sasuke fared.”

“Cause now Konoha’s weaker,” Fū nods.

“Konan-sensei and Kakashi-sensei are nothing to sneeze at, but they’re short of the raw power to face an enemy who can fight Naruto and Sasuke at the same time.” That’s not an indictment of either of them, to be fair. But they exist at a level of ‘extraordinary’ that doesn’t reap the benefits of close spiritual ties to demigods, which is what Naruto and Sasuke have both inherited after meeting with Ōtsutsuki Hagoromo.

“Correct me if I am mistaken about this, Naori-san,” Matatabi-han interjects, speaking again through Yugito’s voice, “but is conventional wisdom not that you are the ‘weakest’ among the three of you?”

You ponder that for a moment – it’s not exactly untrue. Naruto has Kurama while Sasuke has ‘natural’ rinnegan and fully-matured sharingan, and both of them have been enhanced by old man Hagoromo’s meddling. Not having a tailed beast means you’ll always be weaker than Naruto in terms of raw power, since that raw power magnifies the effects of senjutsu chakra to a point you can’t match even with your enhanced variation of the same basic form. Sasuke’s a bit harder to estimate, since much of his power comes from his dōjutsu rather than raw power, but the end result is about the same in many regards. Both can use massive chakra avatars that can level mountains for example.

You shrug. “So yeah, you know as well as I do, Matatabi-han… sometimes ‘conventional wisdom’ isn’t.”

Matatabi-han blinks Yugito’s eyes slowly, with a distinctly cat-like air of satisfaction. “Quite.”

“Then can I ask you something?”

“Go ahead.”
>1/?

>>6260432 (OP)
“So I know I can count on Yugito-han and Fū to follow along with my plan,” you begin.

“Such as it is.” That was Yugito.

“Such as it is. I’d like to ask the two of you whether the same can be said of you.”

“Yes,” Matatabi-han answers.

“Sure,” Chōmei agrees, before Fū picks up the conversation after him. “So what’s the plan this time?”

“I’m not gonna make the same mistake Naruto and Sasuke did,” you declare. “Stay out of it for now. I’ll make sure that if I lose somehow, you get the benefit of observations from my fight.”

After a moment, Fū replies with a silent nod of understanding.

…

“Hi, Ryūzin,” you greet your wife calmly, via shadow clone, as a gentle rain drums on the roof of your home’s veranda.

She looks up from her work, before gently closing the antiquated-looking book on the low desk in front of her. “Welcome home… you look like you have a lot on your mind.”

“Naruto and Sasuke got got.”

“That would explain it.”

“The guy who got them’s probably an Ōtsutsuki,” you continue, “and I think he’s gonna attack Konoha now. Probably later today.”

“That tracks. What can I do to help?”

“Follow me with your kekkei genkai. If I lose, learn what you can and help the next line of defense do better – that’ll be in Yugito and Fū’s hands.”

After considering your request for a moment, Ryūzetsu quietly agrees.

…

You soon find yourself sitting atop the hokage’s office, eyes shut in quiet contemplation. Shiki-kun and his team are out of the village right now, which somewhat lightens your heart considering how things are likely to go in the next few hours. Of course you’ll try to minimize the damage, but there’s always a limit to what you can do in that regard.

After about fifteen minutes, Konan-sensei joins you. She doesn’t sit.

“It must be bad,” she muses quietly. “How bad?”

“Yeah so it’s been worse,” you sigh. “But not by all that much.”

“I see. Can you win?”

“Yes.”

“That was a quick answer. Tell me, what inspires such confidence?”
>2/3

>>6260444
That voice is not Konan-sensei’s. It’s male, and much too arrogant.

“So you decided to show up sooner rather than later,” you acknowledge with a sigh, before glancing at Konan-sensei. To her credit she’s still standing, and still looks ready to fight at a moment’s notice. But you can tell by the tension in her face that she knows she’s outclassed. “Konan-sensei, please leave this to me.”

She bows her head slightly before dissolving herself into a thousand sheets of white paper. “Take care.”

“Right.”

Now you turn to face the proverbial ten-ton elephant in the equally proverbial room. “Yeah, so I could ask you the same question. I have a pretty good track record against your kind, you know.”

“I am Ōtsutsuki Isshiki,” the man, who is certainly white enough to back up his claim, “and I am not like the other Ōtsutsuki you may have faced.”

“No, you’re not,” you admit. “I can sense a pressure from you that the others lacked. A sense of urgency. Those of your clan might say you’ve lived here too long.”

“I would tend to agree,” he frowns. “But unlike them, I intend to carry out our clan’s will properly.”

“If I were to give you the boy,” you ask, not truly curious as to the answer, “would you leave this world alone?”

“No.”

“Then to answer your question it isn’t confidence,” you declare, rising to your feet and exploding in an electric blue corona of ranton-senjutsu chakra. “It’s necessity.”

“Right to the punch,” the Ōtsutsuki muses… you swear you can see the faintest traces of a smile tug at the corners of his mouth. “No silly shouting or waving your hands either.”

>Try to launch a surprise first attack. Seize the initiative, and fall back on hiraishin if you have to.
>Use hiraishin to remove Isshiki from Konoha. Trade the initiative for more freedom later.
>See if you can convince Isshiki to leave Konoha with you willingly. Appeal to his arrogance.
>Other?

>>6260445
>>Try to launch a surprise first attack. Seize the initiative, and fall back on hiraishin if you have to.
fi-nah-leeeee!

>>shout extremely loudly to try to distract him and catch him off guard then runaway for a better tactical position.

>>6260445
>Try to launch a surprise first attack. Seize the initiative, and fall back on hiraishin if you have to.

>>6260445
>>Try to launch a surprise first attack. Seize the initiative, and fall back on hiraishin if you have to.

>>6260445
>1d6, taking the first three rolls

Rolled 2 (1d6)

>>6261678

Rolled 5 (1d6)

>>6261678
Luck be a Naori

Rolled 3 (1d6)

>>6261678

>>6260445
He was polite enough to let you stand up without taking any action – leaping to one’s feet from a sitting position is something even professionals have to train to do. Some old schools still maintained by the samurai teach advanced practitioners how to leap to their feet and draw-cut even while wearing armor, understanding that it demands intimate familiarity with the fundamentals. Even sitting in armor in the first place has a technique to it. So while you could certainly duplicate such a movement in your own battle-armor, it’s an annoyance that you’re thankful not to have to deal with this time.

If Isshiki was surprised by your move he doesn’t show it, even as you close the distance in a blurred instant. His response is an abbreviated motion of his arm, almost as if throwing a kunai, and suddenly you perceive a trio of familiar rods like polished black iron in front of you. Much too close, and at speeds too great to catch given that you’ve already positioned your body for a strike. For a fraction of an instant a tiny arc of electric blue connects them to the chakra cloaking your body, and then in the next fraction of an instant the rods are just behind you.

As your hand moves forward Isshiki tries to evade at the last possible instant, only to find the edge of a blade that is not Umekiri drawing a faint line across his right upper arm.

Separating yourself with hiraishin evades his counterattack, and you pivot to face him. He does the same, a little trail of red finally opening where you slashed him to drip down his arm. The three rods collide with a nearby rooftop an instant later, causing damage but probably no casualties if you had to guess. Regrettable, but their apparent passage through you instead of their complete disappearance may buy you a few moments’ latitude.

His fingertips lightly brush at the wound even as it seems to close up on its own initiative. “I see. Fūinjutsu and space-time manipulation. Has anyone ever told you that you fight much like an Ōtsutsuki?”

“Yeah no, none of your kind have had the poise,” you shrug. And to be fair, he’s not wrong… his one-time partner in crime, Kaguya-hime, did make something of an impression on you in the short duration of your encounter. One of the things you learned was how difficult it is to handle kenjutsu when even a glancing blow carries lethal potential.

You allow yourself a little smile as you reseal the blade, a black Kotetsu you selected from what was once Hanzō’s private collection, seamlessly swapping it for Umekiri. That experience is why that blade’s edge was coated with enough concentrated giant salamander toxin to kill several bull elephants.
>1/2

>>6263208
There’s another flickering exchange, where you parry a black rod wielded like a short staff more than a sword. Hiraishin allows you to disengage and attack from behind Isshiki’s back with a slash – only for him to almost disappear in front of you. This time, you see the trick – it isn’t a space-time technique similar to summoning or sealing, like most are. It’s not even that he’s shrinking his own body. If it were just that, it wouldn’t be worthy of the Ōtsutsuki.

Instead of trying to adjust your swing to hit the now-tiny Isshiki you take a shuffle-step back and ease into a defensive posture to pre-empt what you suspect would be his counterattack.

He suddenly returns to his regular size, again so quickly that you don’t really see him doing it. “You checked your swing.”

“I’m not sure what would happen to my prized sword if I hit you when you were like that,” you admit with a frown.

“You intuited something the other two didn’t,” Isshiki muses. “Maybe this fight will prove more interesting.”

What you ‘intuited’ is that it’s not Isshiki’s body that’s changing sizes. Reducing a man to that size would come with dangerous drawbacks in physical speed, strength, and durability. Instead, it’s much more advantageous (and in line with the Ōtsutsuki) to compress the space his body occupies.

“Honestly?” you muse, “it’s more interesting for me so far than what Madara’s became.”

There’s a problem though. Just the thrown black rods, which you can’t believe is anything like Isshiki’s most powerful techniques, were enough to cause substantial collateral damage. The thought of having to really let loose around civilians like this bothers you, more so even than in the old days.

>Ask politely if it would be possible to relocate this battle. Argue that it shouldn’t make much difference to Isshiki.
>Using Hiraishin to remove Isshiki from Konohagakure may give him a better understanding of how it works, but it’s necessary.
>You have a barrier technique that typically requires four kages to use that you rarely ever make use of. With some modifications, it could suit your needs.
>Other?

>>6264401
>>Ask politely if it would be possible to relocate this battle. Argue that it shouldn’t make much difference to Isshiki.

>>6264401
>>Ask politely if it would be possible to relocate this battle. Argue that it shouldn’t make much difference to Isshiki.

>>6264401
>Ask politely if it would be possible to relocate this battle. Argue that it shouldn’t make much difference to Isshiki.

>>6264401
“Yeah, so would you consider relocating?” you ask with a frown.

Isshiki stares at you. “And why would I do that?”

“You just said ‘interesting’ in relation to a fight,” you observe. “I wouldn’t completely disagree with the sentiment.”

“A human thing to say,” he admits. “Perhaps evidence of a shortcoming on my part.”

“Either way, it shouldn’t make much difference to you,” you continue.

“Considering the human perspective,” he counters, “would it not benefit me to choose terrain that will serve as a distraction to you? There are many fragile things in this village for you to be concerned with.”

“And threatening them, even implicitly, puts my back up to a wall,” you smirk, crossing your arms for a moment. “Do you really want to see how fierce I can become when pressed so?”

“A cornered rat, is that it?”

“A rat isn’t quite an appropriate comparison,” you insist. “A rat wouldn’t leave you stuck to a tree with a sword through your gut.”

“Probably true,” he concedes.

He opens a large gash in spacetime behind him, through which you can see a grassland on the other side. “Are you coming?”

…

The technique isn’t as disorienting as hiraishin is at first, probably because there’s no jaunt through a ‘third space’. That utter seamlessness is almost more bizarre. It does however come with the benefit of preserving the workings of your own hiraishin for just a little bit longer.

“This place was once a sage clan’s domain,” you muse at the sensation of this place, where waves of grass are broken by clusters of low thorny trees and craggy boulders. And for many shinobi this would have been a devastating selection of battlegrounds – the cover available isn’t especially great, which puts some limits on the more typical shinobi hit and run tactics which work so well against human targets.
>1/2

>>6268782
“I would not know,” Isshiki answers bluntly.

“You’ve lived here how many centuries?” you frown. “And you don’t know what’s been going on with the sage regions?”

Isshiki shakes his head. “Why should I care? This is a change in the concentration of natural energy and not in the actual amount, and so is of little importance to the Ōtsutsuki.”

“Yeah,” you scoff. “That sounds like something one of you would say… an exercise in missing the trees for the forest.”

A slight shift in his body positioning telegraphs his intent, and he thrusts his open palm forward. A massive fireball seemingly appears out of nowhere in a fraction of an instant, closing what little distance there is between itself and you in the next fraction of an instant. It’s only thanks to your vastly enhanced reflexes that you’re even able to react in anything like a composed manner, activating both your dōjutsu to observe closely as you meet the attack with Umekiri’s edge.

The storm-release senjutsu chakra flowing through it in a sharp arc opens just enough of a gap for you to slide through before it dissipates, and you can reach out with your left hand to catch three black rods that appear with the same shocking speed… no, perhaps ‘abruptness’ is the right word here. You see them so briefly that it’s hard to even understand how quickly they’re moving before they’re already about to hit you, which makes them seem even faster than they are.

You return the rods to their creator, hurling them with a wide sidearm only to watch them disappear before hitting him. That makes your next move a bit of a non-starter, which you don’t realize until after you’ve committed.

“Shiden!”

Isshiki palms Kakashi-sensei’s most powerful technique and simply absorbs it with no apparent ill effect. But you do note that it doesn’t disappear… which is interesting. There is a terrifyingly short gap between the times he’s used whatever technique he’s using to make things appear and disappear, which you reason may be related to his spatial compression technique. It doesn’t give you a precise figure like what you’re sure Kakashi-sensei would want were he fighting right now, but you’re not him and he’s not here right now. And realistically, only a general idea is necessary.

If you’re fast enough to exploit that gap, then that’s what you’ll do. If not, you’ll find some other way.
>2/3

>>6270405
Just as abruptly, Isshiki himself disappears – he’s compressed space again – and appears behind you holding a black rod. You expertly parry and step in to throw a knee-strike in the same fluid movement, an attack which does not connect. But you do follow through with a high kick that intends to shatter the colossal black cube that he drops on you next. In the moment when your foot meets the cube, Isshiki springs yet another trap – black rods erupt from the ground around your feet, forcing you to use hiraishin to escape.

“At least you seem quite adept at running,” Isshiki muses.

“At least you seem like you’ve picked up the human habit of taunting,” you counter. But you hate to admit that he has a point. With how his attacks have worked so far it’s hard to do anything except evade until you puzzle out a better way to fight back… if all else fails maybe the salamander venom will kick in at some point.

>Try to push an aggressive offense of your own, using hiraishin to evade while putting Isshiki on his back foot.
>Try to exploit the gap between his uses of that spatial compression technique, landing taijutsu attacks if you can.
>Gamble that his techniques are all consciously used, and try to use genjutsu to let you land a few more poisoned cuts on him.
>Other?

>>6270452
>>Gamble that his techniques are all consciously used, and try to use genjutsu to let you land a few more poisoned cuts on him.

>>6270452
>Gamble that his techniques are all consciously used, and try to use genjutsu to let you land a few more poisoned cuts on him.

>>6270452
>>Gamble that his techniques are all consciously used, and try to use genjutsu to let you land a few more poisoned cuts on him.

>>6270452
>1d6, taking the first three

Rolled 4 (1d6)

>>6270971

Rolled 3 (1d6)

>>6270971

Rolled 1 (1d6)

>>6270971

>>6270971
The strategy you have in mind requires you to have both your swords to hand – both the Umekiri Ichimonji you’ve made infamous around the world and the nameless Kotetsu you more recently made into a ‘kokutō’, a black blade steeped in the nastiest poison you could obtain. Isshiki seems to indulge you, answering with two black rods he wields as though they were swords, and as you exchange swift strikes it becomes clear how Naruto and Sasuke probably lost.

Isshiki’s ability to reduce and seemingly to store objects, recalling them at a speed similar to your own hiraishin, would be extraordinarily difficult to fight without a technique like hiraishin to answer it. Impressive as his arsenal otherwise is Naruto has no such answer, and while Sasuke does have an option courtesy of his rinnegan that technique is more limited in how it allows its user to react (since it needs to have two ‘targets’). Both of them also tend to rely on techniques which are weak to chakra absorption, especially for protection (as opposed to evasion) which creates a distinct vulnerability. Offensively you have fūinjutsu-based tricks that can unseal fire or other chakra-free hazards, and defensively you can summon the Taiyōmon as a physical barrier and you habitually train in armor as a form of passive protection. Your dōjutsu technique also uses your chakra to create a physical force, which while it would be effective here isn’t something you want to showcase just yet.

So that basically means your best bet right now is to lean on poison delivered by kenjutsu as your ‘sword’ and hirashin as your ‘shield’, settling for incremental advantage until you’re in a better position to start delivering killing-blows instead.

You lean back to avoid an upward strike from one of Isshiki’s black rods, then a step to evade the two sweeps of his other weapon at your waist – just enough distance that the edge on the reversing sweep scratches the enamel coating on your armor. Your own attack with the kokutō strikes nothing but air this time, as Isshiki uses his power on himself, and so when his predictable next attack comes you shift your position with hiraishin to evade it.

This continues.

A theory gradually begins to form in your mind as the two of you fail to land a blow for several seconds – an eternity in this sort of combat. And so you begin to play.
>1/3

>>6274883
The game involves doing something you largely swore off decades ago. Between almost casual slashes and steps you perform flourishes with one or the other blade. When you do it with the Kotetsu kokutō it achieves nothing, but when you do it with Umekiri? That’s a very different story. In theory you could do it as either blade produces tachikaze when you spin it, but after spending so much time inundated with your chakra Umekiri still does it most eagerly and to the greatest effect and so this is where you focus your efforts.

Your swings continue to miss, same as his do. But for about fifteen seconds that’s entirely beside the point. For fifteen seconds, Isshiki is exposed to the vibrations in the air – the sound produced by your blade’s passage – which if your theory is correct should affect him regardless of what size he is, and if your theory is correct should act on his nervous system the same way it would with any other sufficiently developed living thing.

Each time you complete a flourish, Isshiki regards you with a wariness that can only make you think he’s expecting some sort of trap. Each flourish creates the semblance of an opening, albeit one for which the other blade is ready to strike as a counter, which Isshiki must notice. This keeps him from ever trying to take advantage of those supposed openings.

It also gives him a strategy to think that he’s managed to thwart. A seemingly concerted effort that amounts to little more than a throwaway, a strategy that would on its own be beneath any opponent dangerous enough to you that they’d require an underhanded approach.

And yet, Isshiki almost seems disappointed.

You keep it relatively simple. You know that Tobirama-han favored the “Bringer of Darkness”, a technique you can certainly perform, but you’re fairly sure that Isshiki will prove to be one of those opponents who doesn’t need to see you to fight you and using such an obvious genjutsu would immediately give away the trick.

So instead, you attack his perception of time. That ‘casual’ pace you set fifteen seconds ago allows you to vary the speed of your movements a little bit more, giving you somewhere to ‘go’ in terms of abruptly increasing the vigor of your swordplay and footwork. In causing him to delay using his compression technique for just an instant of confusion over the timing and swiftness of a single cut, you finally create the opening you wanted.
>2/3

>>6274894
The hardened edge of the Kotetsu bites into flesh, unusually resistant even if Isshiki weren’t instinctively pulling the limb you targeted away from the source of the offense. But for the second time so far you draw blood on Isshiki’s right arm, and leave a little virulent salamander venom in its place.

“Had you been an Ōtsutsuki,” he grumbles as his wound heals swiftly, “that carelessness may have been fatal.”

… still no obvious effect from the poison, at least not yet.

>You have other ways to deliver poison. Try to set up for a poison cloud attack.
>Switching tactics could throw Isshiki off balance. Try unsealing natural fire.
>Natural lightning could work, but will take setup. May as well start that now.
>Other?

>>6275446
>>Natural lightning could work, but will take setup. May as well start that now.

>>6275446
>>Switching tactics could throw Isshiki off balance. Try unsealing natural fire.

>>6275446
>Switching tactics could throw Isshiki off balance. Try unsealing natural fire.

>>6275446
>>Natural lightning could work, but will take setup. May as well start that now.

>>6275446
>1d6, taking the first three

Rolled 5 (1d6)

>>6278551

Rolled 4 (1d6)

>>6278551

Rolled 5 (1d6)

>>6278551