Chapter 196: The Hundred Anchors

 

Tonbo allowed the fusion to finish.

Samehada and Kisame did more than add their chakra together. Their combined body amplified it, producing a total greater than the two separate reserves. Tonbo's nerves moved inside that change like additional limbs.

Off-body information collection had finally worked.

The filaments no longer depended upon continuous physical connection to Tonbo. At close range they mapped cells, chakra pathways, and the transformation joining man to sword. Genetic structures split, recombined, and expressed new functions as Samehada's tissue integrated with Kisame's.

That process explained the sudden growth in power. Kisame had not merely learned to carry a living weapon. He had developed a ninjutsu that made their bodies alter one another.

With more range, Tonbo could place the same nerves upon shuriken and read an enemy from any successful touch. For now he remained close enough to guide them without revealing the connection.

Itachi watched his lack of urgency.

Tonbo had every reason to interrupt a dangerous transformation. Instead he looked pleased.

Itachi remembered the smile after the sword grazed Kisame and the hand Tonbo kept hidden behind the hilt. His Sharingan searched the fused body. Samehada's chakra absorbed every obvious foreign trace, and the physical filaments carried no independent flow for the eye to distinguish.

"Water Release: Great Exploding Water Colliding Wave."

Kisame released an inland sea.

Water drowned the road, climbed above enormous trees, and formed a moving dome around the fused body. Shinobi near the Land of Exchange emerged to see the source. The wiser ones fled as soon as they understood the scale. Others moved closer, trusting secret techniques that had never faced a flood of this size.

The dome did not remain centered upon the place where Kisame cast it. It followed him. Currents curved toward the fused body and gave him the speed of a predator in its own sea, while every opponent had to spend strength merely to breathe and choose a direction. The road, forest floor, and nearby slopes disappeared beneath the same blue pressure.

"This seems excessive," Tonbo called. "I did not kill your family."

The humor concealed a real problem.

Tonbo had prepared to fight Itachi's genjutsu and collect intelligence. He had not prepared an ideal answer to an ocean that moved with Kisame. Earth Release could not displace the entire mass before the enemy reached him.

The nerves inside Kisame confirmed another limit. Samehada consumed chakra from every visual, auditory, and contact genjutsu Tonbo attempted. The illusion dispersed before creating a usable false signal.

Tonbo formed another whale.

The three-story creature drove through the water and struck the fused Kisame head-on. One punch sent it spinning across the artificial sea.

The whale had enough mass to withstand the earlier wave and strike Kisame before the fusion. Now it could not slow him. Its body rolled through the water, trailing broken chakra from the place where the fist had landed, and Tonbo had to dissolve it before Kisame could use the wreckage to conceal his approach.

Tonbo's confidence adjusted.

Knowledge of an opponent did not replace an answer to the technique before him. The shinobi world had spent generations producing methods no remembered account or stolen file could fully describe. Treating its people as predictable pieces had left him without the counter he expected to possess.

Kisame saw the hesitation.

"Without genjutsu, you have nothing."

He still remembered Pain's report of a sealing technique powerful enough to restrain the Demonic Statue and refused to close recklessly.

"Water Release: Thousand Feeding Sharks."

Sharks filled the dome and raced toward Tonbo from every direction.

They did not advance as a loose school. Some drove him upward, where others waited; more cut off the route toward the edge of the dome. Each body was a concentrated Water Release attack, swift enough to tear apart a human target and numerous enough that evasion only narrowed the space available for the next pass.

Tonbo opened his ninja-tool pouch.

One hundred small puppets emerged. Some carried fins, some wings, and some limbs designed for land. Every body held one fragment of the Hundred-Puppet Soul Binding formula Tonbo had carved during the days since taking the technique.

Preparation made the difference. Without the completed formula upon all one hundred carriers, the technique could not begin. Without Tonbo's increased chakra reserves and sealing expertise, he could not have deployed them together inside Kisame's ocean.

The puppets rushed the sharks.

Tonbo divided them into routes suited to their construction. The swimmers met the first jaws directly. The winged figures climbed toward the shrinking air above the water, forcing sharks to turn after them, while the land models used the buried trees and broken ground as brief points of leverage. Their movements looked desperate because survival was never their purpose.

They broke almost instantly.

Jaws tore through swimmers. Water pressure crushed flyers before they reached open air. Land models tumbled uselessly through the current. Kisame watched Tonbo sacrifice one inadequate construct after another and believed the great Konoha specialist had begun improvising in panic.

Itachi saw the count and tried to warn him.

The water swallowed his voice.

He had recognized the regularity too late. Every destroyed puppet released one part of a pattern into the water, and the remaining pieces adjusted their paths to complete it. Kisame saw debris; the Sharingan saw formula fragments settling into a single array around his fused body.

Ninety puppets disappeared. Then ninety-five.

Kisame smiled as the last five entered the sharks.

The hundredth broke.

He began forming the seal for a final Water Shark and discovered that his fingers no longer obeyed.

No command reached his arms, tail, or fused muscles. His awareness remained intact inside a body claimed by the completed binding array.

Tonbo adjusted his glasses.

"Disperse."

Chakra threads extended from his fingers into the seal now closed around Kisame's soul. Through them, Tonbo forced the hand seal to reverse.

Kisame could still think, see, and feel the commands he tried to issue. The binding interrupted the point at which intention became movement and replaced it with Tonbo's control. Raw chakra offered no resistance because the completed formula acted upon the soul directing that chakra, not upon the reserves themselves.

The artificial sea lost cohesion. Water collapsed into foam and ran across the broken ground.

Kisame felt his body move again only to separate Samehada from it. The weapon pulled free, and the monstrous form returned to the man who had entered it.

Itachi studied the threads.

"Puppet technique. No, something different."

The hundred destroyed carriers had never been an attempt to overpower the sharks. Their destruction was the attack.

Their short lives had carried the seal to every part of Kisame's technique. By biting, crushing, and scattering them, the sharks themselves had placed the last fragments where Tonbo needed them. Kisame's overwhelming attack had assembled the cage around its owner.

Tonbo had converted a technique designed to enslave female shinobi into a battlefield trap for an Akatsuki member with the chakra of a tailed beast. He still had the nerves inside Kisame and the new information gathered from the fusion.

Itachi could no longer assume that any visible failure meant Tonbo had lost control of the fight.