Chapter 99: Gate of Life.

They met in the middle of the field.

Chōjūrō came in low with both halves of Hiramekarei, the left blade leading, the right held back along his forearm. Tenten came in high with the two lightning-edged katana. The first exchange was four strikes in less than a heartbeat. His left blade swept at her knees. She stepped over it and brought her right katana down at his collarbone. His right blade came up off his forearm and caught it. Her left katana went for his ribs. His left blade, already recovering from the sweep, turned it.

Steel on steel. The white lines on her edges spat sparks across the flat dark faces of his swords. Neither blade gave. Neither blade broke.

He pressed. Two cuts high, one low, a feint at her eyes that turned into a thrust at her stomach. She gave ground, parrying, and he followed her step for step, and she understood what he was doing about the same time her heel struck the hilt of a planted sword.

He was walking her out of her advantage.

She stopped retreating. She dropped the katana from her left hand, let it fall point first into the sand beside her, and in the same motion pulled the planted quarterstaff at her heel up out of the mud and swung it into his thrust. He knocked it aside. She let it go. It spun away over her shoulder and she already had another weapon in her left hand, plucked from the ground beside her hip.

Chōjūrō stepped back and looked at the field.

Then he started cutting it down. His right blade swept low across the sand and three planted hilts snapped off at the guard. He kicked a fourth out of the mud and sent it skidding twenty meters across the flats into a pool. His left blade flicked out and cut a wakizashi in half where it stood. He moved through the field like a man clearing brush, and every step he took toward her, there were fewer blades standing between them.

“OI! GLASSES-KUN! DON’T YOU KNOW HOW EXPENSIVE WEAPONS ARE? WHAT IN THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?!” Tenten reached for her hip.

There were three scrolls on her belt, smaller than the one she'd unrolled, and she tore the seal on the first with her thumb and threw it straight up.

It burst over their heads. Spears and kama and tonfa, a naginata, two Suna war fans, chains with weights on both ends, a pair of iron clubs, kunai blades by the dozen, Fūma shuriken by the dozen, a tetsubo, three sai, an axe. They went up in a cloud and hung for a breath at the top of their arc.

Then they came down around her.

They fell in a tight ring with Tenten at the center and she was already moving. She caught the first spear out of the air, spun it once around her body, and let it go, and it didn't fall. It flew outward, struck the shaft of the falling naginata, and the naginata turned over in the air and kept moving instead of dropping. She caught a kama with her left hand and threw it into the chain coming down on her right. The chain wrapped the kama's handle and whipped around, and the weighted end smacked a falling club and sent it spinning back up.

Every weapon she touched, she sent into another. Every weapon that got hit kept going. She turned on her heel at the center of it, catching and releasing and striking, her hands never still, and within three seconds the cloud of falling steel had stopped falling.

It was circling her.

A loose, turning wheel of weapons, two body-lengths wide, rotating around her in a dozen overlapping orbits. Blades glinted as they passed. Chains snaked through the gaps. A shuriken caught a passing tonfa, rang off it, and was flung back into the ring at a new angle. Some of it was high, over her head. Some of it was low enough to skim the sand. All of it was moving.

To anyone watching, it looked like the weapons were alive.

They weren't. Every one of them was moving because she'd hit it, or because something she'd hit had hit it, and every few heartbeats something started to drop out of the ring and she struck it back up with whatever was in her hand. Every motion fed the next. Nothing was ever allowed to come to a stop.

Chōjūrō stared at the wheel. Behind his crooked glasses, his eyes moved from weapon to weapon to weapon, trying to count, and kept losing count.

Tenten stepped toward him.

“You owe me some interest, Glasses-kun!”

The wheel came with her.

He attacked anyway. He had to. He came in with both blades and she met his left with her katana and his right blade met a passing axe that she'd sent across her body a half-step earlier. The axe rang off and spun away. He cut through the gap it left. A spear came around from behind her and struck his blade sideways. He turned with it, cut at her again from the other angle, and ran into a chain.

It wrapped his wrist.

She pulled it. Hard. His right arm went straight and his body came with it, off balance, stumbling a step toward her, and she drove the katana in her left hand down into the top of his right thigh. It went through cloth and into muscle. She let go of it and continued.

Her right hand closed on a wakizashi passing her hip. She sank it into the back of his left shoulder as he twisted away from her. He tore his wrist free of the chain and slashed at her throat. She leaned back from it. A sai came around the ring and she caught it and drove it into his left forearm, between the bones.

He screamed through his teeth and cut the sai's handle off with his right blade. The point stayed in his arm. A short spear, into the meat of his hip from behind, thrown on the far side of the ring and caught on the near side.

He spun on her with both blades, a whirling double cut that would have created a deep, fatal horizontal slash straight across her upper chest and lower throat, and she dropped under it, and the ring went over her head and came around and struck his blades from two directions at once. His arms were flung wide. She came up inside his reach.

The wakizashi was still standing out of the back of his shoulder. She slapped its pommel with the flat of her palm. The blade twisted in the wound. And because her other hand was already on the spear in his hip, and her knee was already on the hilt of the sword in his thigh, the shock went through all three at once.

Chōjūrō's whole body seized. Blood sprayed from three wounds in the same instant.

"Infinite Weapon Style: Rinne!" Tenten shouted.

He staggered back. He ripped the spear out of his hip and threw it away. He tore the wakizashi out of his shoulder with his teeth bared and a stifled scream. The sword in his thigh he left, because he couldn't reach it and keep both blades up.

She didn't let him reset.

Chōjūrō backed across the flats and the wheel followed her, and she followed him, and every time he knocked something out of the wheel there were two more behind it. A kama hooked the back of his knee and cut it open. A thrown kunai went into his side above the hip. He parried a naginata's blade off his face and its butt end came around on the return and cracked against his temple. His glasses flew off and landed in the mud.

He was good. The Hidden Mist Village really made skilled swordsmen. Tenten watched him do things with those two blades that she'd never seen anyone do. He turned three weapons out of the air in a single motion. He cut a chain in half mid-swing so the weighted end flew harmlessly past him. Twice he got through the ring and his blade came within a finger's width of her throat, and both times something she'd thrown a heartbeat earlier was in the way when it arrived.

But he was one swordsman. And she wasn't fighting him as a swordsman. She was fighting him as a shinobi utilizing the pinnacle of her craft.

He cut at her low. She stepped on his blade, pinning the flat of it to the sand under her sandal, and as he wrenched at it she brought her heel down on the fingers wrapped around its handle. Something snapped. He let go. She kicked the half-sword away across the mud.

He lunged for the cord.

She threw a short sword. It went into the sand on top of the cord, pinning it, and the edge opened his palm as his hand came down on it. He jerked back. She was already there. A naginata's blade came around the wheel at ankle height and caught the back of his right heel and he went down to one knee.

His face was white. His left forearm still had the sai's point buried in it. His right hand was broken and bleeding. There was a sword through his thigh and blood running from a dozen cuts she'd stopped counting.

He looked at her through the turning ring of steel.

And then he looked past her. Back toward the water's edge, where the last of his squad were going down under Asuma and the Sand. Back toward the inlet, where the fog still sat low on the water. Toward the spit of land on the other side of it.

I can’t lose here… Everyone is depending on me… I have to do something to change things around! Even if I have to risk everything! Everything that I have! Otherwise, I would be letting everyone down… I’d be letting the Mizukage down… I’d be letting Ao-san down… My friends and family… I can’t die here without giving my all! 

"The more confident you are," he said, mostly to himself, "the stronger the strike."

Tenten saw his face change.

The pain went out of it. So did the fear of death. What was left was something she hadn’t seen from him until now.

He wrapped the cord around his broken right hand, tore it out from under the short sword pinning it, and yanked. The half of Hiramekarei she'd kicked away came skidding back across the mud into his palm. He brought the two halves together. They locked at the handles.

Chakra tore out of the blade, pale blue and blinding, and it wrapped Hiramekarei and kept wrapping it, and the long sword he'd shown her before was nothing next to this. It grew. Five meters. Ten. Fifteen. The edge of it was so bright that the drizzle turned to steam a full arm's length away from the chakra, and the rotting pier post behind him was standing in its light like a black splinter against the sun.

He raised it over his head with both hands, his broken fingers locked around the handle anyway.

Tenten could tell that this was his final slash. Everything he had left, every drop of chakra in his body, poured into one sword. It would go through her ring like it wasn't there. It would go through her. It would probably keep going and carve a trench through the ground and create a ravine.

He'd also stopped defending. Both his arms were over his head. His chest was open. His legs were planted. He'd stopped watching her ring, stopped tracking the weapons, stopped doing anything but pouring himself into that one blade. For the next three heartbeats, there was nothing in the world for him except that sword.

“Alright, Glasses-kun! Let’s finish this!” Tenten wanted to take it on with everything she had. A legendary sword at its peak.

She let the ring fall.

All of it, at once, a clatter of steel and wood and iron hitting the wet sand around her in a crashing circle. The noise of it was still ringing when her hands came together.

Ram. Tiger. Snake. Horse.

She snatched a katana out of the falling ring by the hilt. The plainest one in the pile, a cheap iron blade she’d taken off an enemy.

"Ninja Art: Giant Body Technique!"

Smoke burst around the katana. When it cleared, she was holding the hilt of a sword that went up and up and up. The blade had grown to exceed his. Twenty meters of plain iron, the guard as wide as a cart wheel, the hilt so thick she could barely get both hands around it.

She poured lightning into it. All of it she had. It went screaming up the blade of the giant iron, and the whole sword lit up like a bolt frozen in place, crackling and spitting and roaring in the rain.

Chōjūrō brought his sword down.

Tenten brought hers up.

They met over the middle of the flats.

The sound was the loudest thing she'd ever heard. Louder than the hammer clash. Louder than the giant harpoon falling on Han. It was a crack and a boom and a shriek all at once, blue chakra grinding against white lightning, and the light of the two blades meeting turned the whole grey beach bright as noon. The pools around them blew outward into sheets. The sand under her feet split in a star of cracks. Steam boiled up off both blades in a column that rose into the low clouds.

For a moment, it held.

Her arms shook. His arms shook. The two giant blades were locked together at the edges a dozen meters over their heads, his pressing down, hers pressing up, and the light of them pulsed and flared where they touched.

Then he started to win.

Her knees started to bend. Her elbows started to bend. The blue edge of his sword crept down across the white edge of hers, a hand's width, then two, and her heels slid back through the mud and her shoulders screamed and she could feel her own sword starting to tip back toward her face.

He was going to cut through it. And then he was going to cut through her.

Out on the flats, people from Konoha and Suna were shouting her name.

Tenten smiled.

She couldn't help it. There was blood in her mouth and her arms were coming apart and a fifteen-meter sword was about to fall on her.

"First Gate. Gate of Opening. Open."

Something in her head unlocked.

"Second Gate. Gate of Healing. Open."

Strength came flooding back into her arms like water through a broken dam. Her knees stopped bending.

"Third Gate!"

Chōjūrō's eyes went wide.

"Gate of Life! OPEN!"

Her skin went red.

It came up her arms and across her neck and over her face in a wave of heat, every vein standing out against the skin, and the drizzle that touched her shoulders turned to steam. Her healed muscles tore again. She felt every one of them go. She didn't care.

She pushed.

The giant lightning sword went up through his. The blue edge of Hiramekarei's chakra blade split down the middle where her iron met it, the white lightning tearing through the light like it was paper, and the whole fifteen meters of his sword came apart in two halves that peeled away to either side and dissolved into falling sheets of blue sparks.

Her sword kept going. Straight up into the clouds. It took a hole out of the grey sky the size of a house and the rain stopped falling through it for one long heartbeat.

Chōjūrō was standing under it with Hiramekarei in his broken hands and nothing left on the blade.

Tenten let go of the giant hilt.

She grabbed two katana off the sand at her feet.

She disappeared.

One moment she was standing in front of him with two swords in her hands, and the next her sandals were skidding through the mud ten meters behind him, and her arms were crossed in front of her chest, a sword in each fist, both blades pointed out to either side, white lines still crackling on their edges. Behind her, the giant sword came down out of the sky in a cloud of smoke and shrank back into one cheap iron katana that clattered into a pool.

The drizzle started falling again.

Chōjūrō stood very still.

A line opened across his chest from his left shoulder to his right hip. Then another one, from his right shoulder to his left hip. An X, crossing over his heart. For one second it was just a thin red mark. Then the blood shot out all at once, in a spray that painted the sand in front of him red, and Hiramekarei slid out of his fingers.

He fell forward onto his face in the mud.

He didn't get up.

Tenten stayed where she was for a moment, breathing. Her skin was still red. Steam was still coming off her shoulders. She closed the Gates instantly. Afterwards, her arms were shaking so hard the katana in her hands were rattling.

She dropped them.

Then she turned around and walked back to him.

He was still breathing. She could see his back moving, shallow and fast, under the ruined shirt. Blood was soaking into the sand around him. His glasses were somewhere in the mud a dozen meters away. He looked a lot younger without them.

She looked at him for one second.

He'd killed her people. A lot of them. That was what this was. That was what war was. They'd fought on the same side once, and that had been a different day.

She bent down and picked up Hiramekarei.

It was heavier than she expected. Much heavier. The two handles were warm from his hands, and the flat dark blade was spattered with his blood and hers, and the cord between the handles was scorched black from her lightning. She turned it over. The holes at the tip where the chakra came out. The two curved notches near the base. It looked like a flounder. It looked like a huge flounder.

It was the second most beautiful thing she'd ever held.

She kissed it. On the flat of the blade. Then on the other side. Then on both handles. Then on the blade again, because the first one didn't count, it had blood on it.

"Hi," she whispered to it. "I'm Tenten. You're going to love it with me. We're going to have so much fun together little legendary sword..."

Hiramekarei, being a legendary sword, didn't answer.

That was fine. She'd watched what Chōjūrō did with it. Put chakra in. Decide what shape comes out. She could figure out the rest.

She wrapped some bandages around it before placing it on her back.

She stood up.

Her legs almost didn't let her. She got there anyway.

She didn't look back at Chōjūrō. She stepped around him and started walking north across the flats toward the earth walls, through the wreckage of her own field, past broken hilts and scattered chains and a naginata snapped in half and the cheap iron katana lying in a pool. The Sand kunoichi with the naginata was jogging toward her from the water's edge, blood on her blade and on her face. Behind her, Asuma was crouching by the last of the Mist raiders, slitting his throat. Temari was walking toward a body in the mud with her fan folded and a storage scroll in her hand.

"Are you all right?" the Sand kunoichi asked when she reached her.

"I feel amazing!" Tenten somewhat told the truth.

“A-Are you sure…?” The kunoichi looked at her, her shaking hands, the blood running out of her cuts. Then at the long trench across the flats where the two giant swords had met. Then at the hole that was still closing in the clouds overhead. "I think you heard a different question, Tenten-chan…"

Tenten was completely confused as the kunoichi helped her back to the camp. Up on the earth walls, a hundred Leaf and Sand shinobi were standing in the rain watching her return. Nobody was cheering yet. They were still too busy staring at the sky.