Chapter 98: Infinite Weapons Style!

It was raining when Tenten reached the Mist front.

She came over the last ridge before the coast with her scroll on her back, and the whole shoreline opened up beneath her in shades of grey. Grey beach. Grey water. Grey sky pressing down on both of them. The Leaf and Sand camp sat behind a line of earth walls a few hundred meters back from the tide, a sprawl of mud-spattered tents and cook fires that hissed every time the rain picked up.

No Gates, the medical-nin had said. Not for another month at least. Your body won't survive it.

Tenten nodded along to his words. Whether or not she actually followed those directions depended on what the situation out here looked like.

She walked down toward the camp gate. Two sentries stood under a dripping canvas awning, one Leaf and one Sand. The Leaf sentry squinted at her through the rain. He looked at her headband. He looked at the scroll. He looked at the two buns of hair.

His eyes went wide.

"You're... Tenten! The Hokage's daughter!"

"DAUGHTER?! How do I look anything like that man?! Do you need to get your eyes checked, man?!" Tenten shouted.

"Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. It's just hard to imagine that you're just an ordinary girl… from an ordinary background and the Hokage's student…" He apologized.

"Hmph! We are not related. I am just his student. He was my jonin sensei and I was his genin student." Tenten firmly corrected him.

The Leaf sentry nodded before he turned around and cupped his hands to his mouth. "SHE'S HERE!"

"You don't have to..."

"THE HOKAGE'S DAUGHTER IS HERE!"

"What did I just say!?" Tenten balled her fist.

"Sorry, that's just what they know you as here. I promise I'm not making fun of you…" He explained.

Heads came out of tents. Shinobi stood up from cook fires. Someone dropped a pot. Within thirty seconds there was a crowd forming at the gate, Leaf shinobi elbowing each other for a look, and the whispers ran ahead of her faster than she could walk.

"She’s a lot smaller than I thought."

"She drove off the Five-Tails! "

"That guy's a freaking legend that's been around since the Second Shinobi World War."

"She's a chunin. A chunin. You know how many jonin I've seen die to that guy?"

"I heard she's a Gate user like the Hokage."

"I heard that too! As his daughter, she learned it from him. Not just any ninja can learn that technique. You need the right connections or it's impossible. Trust me, I've been trying."

“Why aren’t her eyebrows like her dad’s?”

A big Leaf jonin with a bandaged arm pushed his way to the front of the crowd and grabbed her hand and shook it hard enough to rattle her teeth. "Welcome to the worst front in the war, kid. We've been stuck in this mud for weeks. Please tell me you're here to get us out of it."

"I'm here to try?" Tenten wasn't given explicit instructions. All she was told was that she was being transferred here because her talents could be utilized better on this front than over on the Stone front.

The ninjas cheered like she'd promised them the moon.

The Sand shinobi were watching too. They stood a little apart from the Leaf crowd, a cluster of tan vests and cloth masks and wary eyes, but they were watching. A Sand kunoichi with a naginata over her shoulder stepped forward, and the Leaf shinobi near her made room without being asked.

"You're Rock Lee's teammate, I heard." The Sand kunoichi said.

"Since we were twelve." Tenten nodded, looking up at her.

The kunoichi looked at her for a moment. Then she nodded. "He came to Suna when he didn't have to. Fought for us when he had no reason to. Saved our tails when he should've left us for dead." She looked back at her people, then at Tenten again. "And now they're saying his teammate chased off the Five-Tails. Seems like the Leaf's strongest are a pretty close-knit group."

A few of the Sand shinobi behind her murmured agreement. Not all of them though. Some of them were still looking at her with suspicion, and Tenten didn't know what to do with that, so she grinned and stuck out her chest and said, "Our sensei believes in hard work and the Power of Youth."

The Leaf crowd roared. Even a couple of the Sand shinobi laughed.

"Maa, maa. Let her through."

The crowd parted for a lazy voice. Kakashi came strolling through the mud with his hands in his pockets and his one visible eye curved into a smile. Behind him came Shikamaru with bags under his eyes, and Temari, who had a similar look on her face.

"Kakashi-sensei!"

"Tenten. You made good time." Kakashi looked her up and down. "And you're walking. That's better than what I heard. I heard you should've been confined for weeks."

"The medical-nin helped me out a lot."

Kakashi's eye curved further. "Come on. You can dry off while we talk."

Temari fell into step beside her as they walked toward the command tent. She was looking at Tenten sideways. Sizing her up.

"So you're Lee's girl." Temari said.

"I'm Lee's teammate. His girlfriend is someone else."

"Mm." Temari's mouth tilted. "The way my people talk about him, they'd follow anybody who stood next to him for more than five minutes. Don't let it go to your head."

"Too late for that." Tenten giggled.

Temari laughed. Shikamaru glanced back at the two of them with the expression of a man realizing that two troublesome women might have become friends.

The command tent was warmer than outside, which wasn't saying much. A brazier glowed in the corner. Kakashi handed her a towel and a cup of something hot, and while she dried her hair, Asuma and Kurenai came in out of the rain and nodded at her. Asuma was chewing on an unlit cigarette because his last pack had gotten soaked. Kurenai looked tired around the eyes, but she smiled when she saw Tenten.

"Guy has to be so proud of you." Kurenai said.

"I don't think he knows yet."

"He'll know." Asuma took the cigarette out of his mouth and looked at it sadly. "Information moves fast during war. By the time this war's over, everyone will know your name."

Kakashi spread a map across the table. "Here's the situation."

He walked her through it. The inlet to the southeast where Mist had pulled back, water on three sides, every approach a battleground. The supply boats that came in at night from the open sea to the east, straight from the Land of Water. The weeks of attrition, squads rotating on and off the line every eight hours, small skirmishes in the rain that killed people on each side and changed nothing. Mist had no jinchuriki at all. Mist's numbers weren't exactly smaller than theirs. But Mist knew the water and the water was everywhere, and every time the Leaf and Sand forces pushed, Mist slid away and came back from another direction.

"And then there's this." Kakashi tapped a mark near the mouth of the inlet. "Mist has one of the Seven Swords on the field. Twin-handled blade, flat and wide like a fish, wrapped in bandages. It turns into a hammer when he wants it to. A long blade when he wants that instead. He cut through several of our men like they were made of paper."

Tenten's towel stopped moving.

"I think I know who you're talking about." She tapped her chin as she thought back.

Kakashi looked at her.

"Square black glasses. Blue hair, kind of spiky. Shark teeth. He looks weak until he swings that thing." Tenten lowered the towel. "Hiramekarei. His name's Chōjūrō."

The tent went quiet.

"You know him?" Asuma's eyebrow rose.

"We met on a mission a long time ago. Back when Lee and I escorted the Water Daimyo home after the Chunin Exams. We were wiping out some pirates that attacked us." Tenten looked at the mark on the map. "His squad showed up halfway through and helped us. He split a whole ship in half with that sword." She was quiet for a moment. "We were temporarily on the same side."

Nobody said anything for a moment. The rain drummed on the canvas.

"Well," Kakashi said finally, "you're not anymore. Will that be a problem?"

"No." Tenten shook her head. She picked the towel back up and scrubbed at her hair. "Hiramekarei, though… One of the Seven Swords. Right here. On this beach."

"You look excited." Temari pointed out.

"I dreamed of holding one of those legendary weapons. Konoha has like no legendary weapons left at all. So, I guess I have to make do by stealing legendary weapons from other villages." Tenten explained.

"I'm not surprised." Temari chuckled.

"A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do." Tenten shrugged.

"Then let's get you your sword." Shikamaru pushed off the tent pole and came to the table. "Here's how he fights. Every time we rotate, there's a gap. Fresh squads coming in, tired squads going out, nobody quite where they're supposed to be. Mist figured that out the first week. Since then, every big raid they've thrown at us has come during a rotation." He tapped three spots along the eastern flats. "And the last three were led by him."

"He picks the weakest area," Temari said. "Hits hard. Cuts through whoever's in front of him and pulls back into the mist before we can bring anyone strong enough to hold him."

"So we give him bait." Shikamaru said. "We pull it down to one squad of chunin, and it looks like we got sloppy." He looked at Tenten. "You're in that squad."

“You’ve known his pattern for weeks,” Tenten said. “Why haven’t you done this already?”

“Because the bait has to be something he’ll bite.” Shikamaru scratched the back of his neck. “Put a chunin squad out there and he cuts through them before Asuma-sensei reaches the flats. We’ve watched it happen. Put Kakashi-sensei, Asuma-sensei, or Kurenai-sensei out there and he never shows up. Mist is always watching.”

“But nobody over there knows I’m here.” Tenten said slowly.

“Nobody over there knows you’re here.” Shikamaru looked like a man who’d finally been handed the last piece of a very annoying puzzle. “A chunin they’ve never seen before.”

"Bait…" Tenten tilted her head. "I'm used to being on the other side of that plan. Usually it's Lee."

Shikamaru moved two more markers onto the map, behind a hump of dunes and the wreck of a beached fishing boat a hundred and fifty meters back from the flats. "Asuma-sensei and Temari will be here, with the Sand squad. The second he commits to you, they move in behind his people and cut them off from the water. He can run back to the inlet alone and leave his squad to die, or he can stay and deal with you." Shikamaru's eyes were half-lidded. "I don't think he's the type to abandon his comrades."

"I don’t know that much about him." Tenten shrugged.

"One more thing." Kakashi spoke up. "The Mizukage's right hand is a man named Ao. Former hunter-nin. Sensor. And he has a Byakugan in his right eye that he took off a Hyuga during the last war. We've seen him watching our lines from the inlet."

Tenten wondered if she should nab that eye back out for Konoha.

Tenten looked down at the map. At the little marker that was supposed to be her, sitting alone on the eastern flats.

…

The tide went out in the night.

By dawn the flats lay bare between the two camps, six hundred meters of wet sand and black mud and shallow pools catching the grey light, broken here and there by the spar of a wrecked boat or a rotting pier post jutting up from the muck. The rain had thinned to a cold drizzle. To the southeast, the mouth of the inlet was a smear of fog sitting low on the water.

Tenten stood at the end of the eastern line with six Leaf chunin she'd met the night before. Her hood was up. Her scroll was across her back under a plain grey cloak. She'd tucked her buns as flat as they'd go.

The chunin beside her, a lanky kid named Hotaru with stars in his eyes, leaned over. "Is it true you..."

"Shh." Tenten said. “Focus.”

"Right. Sorry. Sorry."

The rotating squads were moving behind them. A long muddy shuffle of tired bodies that took longer than it should have. Tenten watched it from the corner of her eye. It looked sloppy. It was supposed to look sloppy.

The fog at the mouth of the inlet rolled forward across the flats against the wind, thickening as it came, eating the shallow pools one by one, and Hotaru's hand went to his kunai pouch and stayed there.

"Hidden Mist jutsu," someone down the line whispered. "Here they come."

The fog reached them. The world went white. Tenten could see Hotaru beside her and nothing past him, and the drizzle and the mist together made a cold wet wall that pressed on her eyes.

Then the water came.

Spheres of it, fist-sized, ripping out of the white from three directions. The chunin at the far end of the line took one in the chest and went down hard. Another caught Hotaru in the shoulder and spun him around. Tenten heard feet slapping across the wet sand, a lot of them, and blades coming out of sheaths.

And under all of it, something else. It sounded like air being shoved aside by something very big.

The chunin two spots down from her raised his kunai. A shape came out of the mist toward him. Something wide and blue and glowing, swinging fast and hard.

Tenten rushed in without hesitating.

She shoved the chunin out of the way with her shoulder. Her hand slapped the scroll on her back. Smoke burst from the paper and the thing that came out of the smoke was a hammer. A long-hafted sledge with a head the size of a barrel, the kind of hammer that took multiple men to lift, and Tenten caught the haft in both hands and let its weight pull her into a spin, around once, building speed, and on the way around she brought it up into the blue shape coming out of the fog.

Iron met chakra.

The sound rolled across the flats like thunder. The shockwave blew the mist apart in a ring, ten meters of clear air punched open around them, and flattened the shallow pools into sprays of water. Tenten was driven backward through the mud with her sandals carving furrows. The impact snapped her head back and her hood flew off.

The other figure was driven back too, heels gouging trenches in the wet sand, a huge war hammer of pale blue chakra still raised in both hands. Its head was as wide as a cart. Its haft ran down into a flat, dark blade with two handles bound by a short cord.

Square black glasses. Blue hair. Shark teeth.

Chōjūrō stared at her across the open ring of air.

The hammer in his hands sagged an inch.

"Weapons girl…"

"Hey, Glasses-kun." She grinned. "Looks like we’re enemies now."

“Looks like it…”

Behind him, the mist tore open.

Wind came across the flats from the north in a single enormous gust, hard enough to flatten the drizzle sideways, and the mist was blown apart. It was ripped off the sand in long white rags and blown out to sea, and all at once Tenten could see everything. The Mist attacking squad, ten of them, strung out across the flats behind Chōjūrō in a loose wedge. Hotaru on one knee, clutching his shoulder. Two Leaf chunin down.

And coming over the dunes from behind the wrecked fishing boat, Temari with her fan fully open, all three moons showing. Asuma running beside her, trench knives drawn. And behind them, the Sand squad, the kunoichi with the naginata at their head.

They didn't come for Chōjūrō. They went around him. Straight past the open ring where he and Tenten stood, curving out across the flats toward the water's edge, and they hit the Mist attacking squad from behind. Between the raiders and the inlet.

Chōjūrō looked back over his shoulder. His people were turning to meet them. Steel clashed. And screams echoed.

He looked back at Tenten.

She watched him think about it. Run back. Cut through to his squad and drag as many of them back to the water as he could. And leave her free behind him.

Tenten wouldn’t let him run and he seemed to understand that.

He set his feet in the sand and raised the hammer.

Chōjūrō's face changed. The nervous set of his shoulders vanished. His feet slid apart. His eyes behind the glasses went still.

He let the hammer dissolve. The chakra snapped back into the flat blade. He drove Hiramekarei point first into the sand beside him and his hands flicked through three signs faster than she could follow, and the shallow pool at his feet leaped up into the air and broke apart into a dozen fist-sized spheres of water that hung for half a heartbeat, spinning.

"Water Style: Water Bullets."

Tenten's hand slapped the scroll. Smoke burst from the paper and a kusarigama dropped into her palm, sickle in one hand, weighted chain in the other. She whipped the chain in a horizontal circle in front of her body and the weighted end smashed through the first four water bullets in a spray of droplets. She sidestepped the fifth. The sixth she cut in half with the sickle and the two pieces splashed against her shoulders, cold and hard as slaps.

The seventh and eighth hit the sand at her feet and exploded, throwing wet sand into her eyes.

She was already moving backward. She heard him coming more than saw him, the hiss of his feet across the wet sand, and she threw the chain blind at the sound. It wrapped around something. She yanked.

Hiramekarei came free of the sand where he'd planted it, and the chain dragged it toward her across the flats, and Chōjūrō wasn't holding it.

He was above her.

He'd jumped the moment she threw, and he was coming down with a water blade forming in his right hand, a thin edge of compressed seawater as long as his forearm, aimed at the top of her skull.

Tenten dropped the kusarigama and threw herself backward into the mud. The water blade cut the air where her head had been. She rolled, came up on one knee, and her hand was already on the scroll.

Chōjūrō landed and let the water blade fall apart into the sand. He dove for Hiramekarei, still lying tangled in her chain, caught it by one handle, and ripped it free of the links before she could reel it in.

The two of them looked at each other across ten meters of mud.

"Not cool, Glasses-kun. We’re throwing mud?" Tenten said, wiping sand from her eye.

Chōjūrō flicked his wrist. A spray of pale blue light burst from the flat face of Hiramekarei, a fan of thin chakra needles, dozens of them, thin as fish bones and glittering in the grey morning.

Tenten unsealed a pair of short swords and spun them both in front of her body, a whirling wall of steel, and the needles rang off the blades like hail on a roof. Sparks and blue light. Two of them slipped past her guard and she twisted, and one went through the hem of her shirt and the other grazed her shoulder and drew a thin line of blood. Where it touched her, her arm went cold for a second, the chakra in it stuttering.

Can’t let those hit me, she told herself.

"Hiramekarei Unleashing!" Chōjūrō said.

Chakra poured out of the holes at the tip of the blade, pale blue and boiling, and in the space of two heartbeats the war hammer was back in his hands.

He came forward with it swinging low and flat, a sideways blow aimed at her knees. Tenten dropped her swords, kicked the iron sledge up out of the mud where she'd let it fall, caught the haft, and swung.

The two hammers collided again.

The shockwave tore outward across the flats. It blew the drizzle sideways, ripped the shallow pools around them up into sheets of spray, and punched a crater into the wet sand beneath their feet. Tenten's heels dug trenches through the mud as the force of his blow shoved her backward, one meter, two, the iron shuddering in her hands.

She didn't fight it. She leaned into it.

She let his blow turn her. Her sledge rebounded off his hammer and she went with it, pivoting on her left heel, letting the iron head carry her all the way around behind her back, and when she came around again it was moving faster than when it had left. She brought it in low at his hip.

He got his hammer down in time to block. Barely. The impact jolted up through both his arms, and she watched his teeth clack together.

Then the two blurred.

Chakra flared at the soles of their feet and they tore across the beach, past the rotting pier posts, through pools that burst into spray under their sandals. Wherever they stopped for half a heartbeat, iron met chakra and the sound went off like a thunderclap. Again. Again. Again. The clashes came faster than their echoes could roll back off the dunes, until they ran together into one long rumble across the beach.

Somewhere in the middle of it, Tenten noticed how he was holding it.

He gripped the hammer like a sword. He swung the hammer like a sword. He was fighting his own weapon.

She wasn't fighting hers. A hammer wasn't a sword. You didn't stop a hammer. When she missed, she let the head keep going, carried it around her body, and fed it into the next blow. When he hit her sledge, she let his force turn her and spent it on her own next swing. Her feet did the work and the metal did the rest. Every swing set up the next one, and the circles kept getting faster.

He swung flat at her head. She ducked, and his hammer roared over her. She came up beneath it already turning, and the sledge came around behind her back and over her shoulder and down onto his hammer head from above, smashing it into the sand. He wrenched it free. She was already coming around the other way.

He tried to parry again, a sharp twist of both wrists, angling the hammer head like the flat of a blade to turn her strike aside. A twist like that would have turned a sword. It barely moved the hammer. Her sledge caught the edge of his hammer head, spun it in his grip, and his knuckles cracked against the haft.

There.

She stepped inside his reach, close enough that the glow of his hammer lit the rain on her face. She dropped her right shoulder, sank her hips, and drove the sledge upward from below her knees with her legs, her back, and all her strength behind it. The iron hit the underside of his hammer head dead center.

The sound split the morning in half. His hammer flew straight up, and his arms went with it, wrenched above his head. His back arched. His heels came off the sand. His whole body hung open from chin to belt. Her sledge was still climbing over her head, too heavy to bring back down before he hit the sand.

Behind his glasses, his eyes went wide. Falling backward from the force of her blow, Chōjūrō let the hammer dissolve. He wasn’t as skilled in wielding a hammer as this girl. Not yet.

The chakra drained back into the blade and reshaped itself along the flat steel into a single long edge. A sword. A straight, impossibly long sword of pale blue chakra, two and a half meters from hilt to tip, its edge so fine the drizzle split around it.

Tenten looked at the long sword. Then she grabbed her scroll on her back and unrolled it open in a single violent motion, the paper ripping open along its length, and smoke erupted from every seal on it at once, a rolling grey cloud that spilled out across the flats. And out of the smoke came weapons. Dozens of them. All of them flung up into the air by the force of the unsealing and spinning end over end against the grey sky.

They came down like rain.

They hit the flats all around the two of them. Point first, most of them, driving into the wet sand and mud and standing there quivering, a forest of hilts sprouting from the ground in every direction. Some landed flat. Some hit the shallow pools and stood in the water. Two struck the rotting pier post behind Chōjūrō and stuck there, ringing with a high thin note. In three seconds the whole stretch of beach for thirty meters around them was a field of blades.

Chōjūrō deflected the ones that would land on him.

Tenten pulled the nearest weapon out of the sand, a broad-headed axe, and ran at him.

He met her with the long blade. The chakra edge swept toward her waist in a flat arc and she met it with the axe and the axe's edge shrieked and notched and the force of the blow drove her sideways. She let it. She let go of the notched axe and her other hand was already closing on the next hilt sticking out of the sand beside her, and she pulled it free and turned with it and cut at his wrist.

"We’re just getting started, Glasses-kun!"

He snapped the long blade back to parry. Her katana hit his chakra edge and broke in half.

She let go of the broken hilt. Grabbed a spear. Thrust at his thigh.

"Can you keep up?!"

He stepped back. The thrust missed by a hand’s width and she let the spear go mid-swing and let it fly at his face, spinning, and grabbed the next weapon out of the ground.

"This is the culmination of everything I’ve worked toward so far!"

He knocked the spinning spear away. Her next cut came in under it, a kama hooked low, and opened a line across his left forearm.

"Infinite Weapon Style: Endless Mayhem!"

She didn't stop. Every time a weapon hit something, she let it go. Every time she let one go, there was another one beside her hand. She cut, released, grabbed, cut. Some weapons she swung. Some she threw. Some she kicked up out of the sand with her toes and caught in midair. She circled him and the weapons were always there, always within reach, because she'd thrown them all down herself and she knew where every single one of them was.

Chōjūrō's long blade was faster than any one sword she held. But he could only block one thing at a time. And she was never attacking with just one thing.

A cut across his ribs, shallow. A thrown weapon that clipped his ear and took the earpiece off his glasses. He was giving ground now, backing across the flats toward the rotting pier post, the long chakra blade a blue blur in front of him, and every time he stopped one weapon another was already coming.

He split Hiramekarei.

The long blade flared and broke apart and the chakra snapped back, and the twin-handled sword came apart in his hands at the cord. Two swords. One in each fist, each one flat and wide and dark, each one shorter and faster than the long blade had been.

Her tenth weapon came in at his neck. His left blade caught it. His right blade came across at her belly.

Tenten threw herself backward. The right blade cut through the front of her shirt and she felt the cold bite of it across her stomach, shallow, a line of red. She landed on her back in the sand, and both blades were coming down at her chest.

She grabbed two short swords out of the ground on either side of her, one in each hand, and crossed them over her chest.

Hiramekarei's twin blades hit her crossed swords. The impact drove her down into the mud. Her arms shook. He leaned his weight onto the blades and they pressed down, down, her own swords' spines touching her collarbones now, and his face above her was focused behind his cracked glasses.

Tenten twisted both wrists. Her swords slid down his blades, steel screeching on steel, and the angle changed and his weight tipped forward past her and she rolled out from under him. He fell forward onto one knee. She came up behind him with both swords and cut at his back.

He wasn't there. He'd turned on his knee and blocked both her cuts with both his blades, high and low, without looking.

They stared at each other over four crossed swords.

Then they were fighting in earnest.

Two blades against two blades. He was a better pure swordsman than she was. She knew it inside the first ten exchanges. If this had been a duel on a training ground field with one sword each, she'd have lost already.

But this wasn't a training ground. This was her field.

She kicked a sword up out of the sand and caught it with her teeth. She threw one of the two in her hands at his face, and when he blocked it she had the one from her mouth in her hand. She stepped on the hilt of a polearm lying flat in the mud and its blade flipped up into his path and he had to jump it. She took three weapons out of the ground at once and threw them in a spread, a fan of steel aimed at his chest, his hip, his shoulder, and when he cut all three out of the air she was already above him. Tenten came down on him from above with two more blades in her hands.

He went up to meet her. Four swords met in the air and the impact threw them apart.

She hit the sand. Slid. Chōjūrō hit the sand twenty meters away and slid with his blades out to either side, both of them trailing furrows through the wet sand, and they both came to a stop facing each other across the field of swords with their chests heaving.

Neither of them said anything.

Out past him, near the water's edge, the fight between his squad and the Sand had broken into small knots of struggling bodies. Asuma's wind blades flashing. Temari's fan cutting a Mist shinobi into pieces. Nobody was getting back to the inlet.

Chōjūrō was bleeding from several places. His forearm, his ribs, his ear, a cut above his eyebrow he hadn't noticed yet. His glasses hung crooked. Tenten was bleeding from her shoulder and her stomach and a gash on her calf she didn't remember getting.

The drizzle fell. The swords stood in the sand around them, dozens still upright, hilts dripping.

Chōjūrō's left hand came off his blade and started flicking through signs.

She held her sword in front of her in both hands. Fed her chakra into it and lightning crackled along the blade.

Chōjūrō's signs finished. Water rose out of the pool at his feet and climbed up his left blade, wrapping Hiramekarei's flat steel in a skin of churning seawater that stretched past the tip into an edge twice as long as the sword.

He came at her with it.

Tenten met it with the lightning sword.

The water-wrapped blade hit her edge, and the lightning went into the water like it had been waiting for it. It ran up the skin of seawater in a branching white web, up the length of the water blade, onto the steel, into Chōjūrō's hand. His arm locked straight. His fingers spasmed. He tore himself backward and the water fell off his blade all at once, splashing into the sand, and he landed three meters away with his left arm shaking and smoke curling off the cord of his left handle.

He looked at his hand. He flexed it. The fingers didn't close all the way.

"Water Style: Water Bullets!"

He threw them anyway. A dozen spheres of seawater ripped up out of the pools and hurled themselves at her.

Tenten cut the first one. It burst against the white edge with a crack like a snapped branch and blew apart into steam and spray. The second. Crack. Steam. The third. She stood in the middle of the flats and cut every one of them out of the air and every one of them died against her blade in a puff of white vapor.

The last one hit the sand at her feet. She closed her eyes this time. 

Chōjūrō stared at her.

Tenten reached down and pulled a second weapon from the sand. Fed it the same lightning chakra. Then she pointed it out at the field around them, at the dozens of weapons still standing upright in the rain.

"Water isn’t your friend here, Glasses-kun." Tenten was smiling.

Chōjūrō looked at the field of blades. He looked at the steam rising off her swords. He looked at his left hand, the fingers still trembling around the handle.

He understood. She could see it in his face. He shook out his left hand until the fingers closed.

He settled his feet in the sand. Both halves of Hiramekarei came up in front of him. His shoulders loosened. His face became even more determined. Chakra began to bleed out of the holes in both blades, pale blue, wrapping the steel. Not water this time. Only Hiramekarei's own chakra.

Tenten rolled her neck and set her feet and raised both crackling weapons, and around her the field of swords stood waiting in the rain.

Chōjūrō rushed forward.

So did she.