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Shimura Danzo moved through the upper branches as a flickering shadow, his bandages fluttering as he cut through the humid air with the sole purpose of evasion. Every subordinate he had brought with him had stayed behind to intercept the Hidden Leaf forces pursuing him. And since he wasn't being hounded by dozens of Leaf shinobi, they had met his expectations.
Instead, there were only two streaks of green and blue-grey in pursuit of him. Hatake Kakashi and Might Gai moved in unspoken synchronisation, shattering bark of trees as they pushed to close the distance. He didn't expect his subordinates to stop two of the Hidden Leaf's most dangerous jōnin. However, he had expected as much from Orochimaru, but seeing that there was not a scratch on the two, the traitor without a loyal bone in his body had definitely let them pass just to spite him.
Danzo pursed his lips, utterly displeased. The only silver lining was that escape would have been far more difficult if he had three instead of the current two jōnin after him. His last encounter with Itachi and his accursed eyes hadn't been an enjoyable one and had forced him to recover for months, unable to use his own powers for extended periods of time.
He didn't look back. He reached into his robes and flicked his wrist. Three shuriken hissed through the air, infused with wind chakra to boost their speed. Kakashi's borrowed Sharingan spun, tracking the silver glint of the rotating blades. He didn't slow and only tilted his head a fraction of an inch, allowing one to whistle past his ear, while his own kunai intercepted the other two in a shower of sparks.
If it had been any other shinobi, the kunai would have been cut through, ending in decapitation.
The tree beneath Gai exploded, the trunk cracking as though it had been chopped by an axe.
"Early Leaf Gale!"
Danzo's old body twisted mid-air, his cane sword unsheathed in a heartbeat. He channelled a razor-thin edge of wind into the blade and met Gai's heel. The collision sent a circular shockwave through the leaves, stripping a dozen trees of their foliage. Gai used the momentum to flip backwards, landing on a lower branch, while Danzo used the force to propel himself further away, deeper into the thicket.
The forest was favouring Danzo's evasive manoeuvres, so Kakashi finished the seals and slammed his hands together. The terrain changed the moment his sandals hit the dirt. The ground roared as the soil rose up in the shape of three massive, lupine heads that lunged upwards, their jaws snapping at Danzo's feet. To avoid the earthen maws, Danzo was forced to dive towards the forest floor.
However, Kakashi had already moved onto his next jutsu, his hand glowing with a jagged, chirping blue light, reminiscent of a thousand birds.
Lightning Release: Chidori
Pure lightning chakra coalesced around his hand to the point of becoming visible. It was Hatake Kakashi's special ninjutsu. The lightning cutter hummed with enough intensity to vibrate the air. His figure cut a blue line through the air towards Danzo's sternum.
He weaved hand seals.
Wind Release: Vacuum Great Sphere
Danzo exhaled a massive, invisible pocket of compressed air. The wind met the lightning head-on. Kakashi's lightning cutter pierced through the vacuum sphere until most of his arm was inside, but could go no further. The two B-rank jutsu energies buckled against each other. The grass down below flattened against the earth, and the ground itself groaned apart under the torment.
In the end, wind triumphed over lightning, but the concentrated lightning chakra of the Chidori and the skill behind the jutsu managed to burn enough oxygen that it caused an explosion inside the sphere. The wind fanned the flames, indiscriminately dousing both parties in their heat.
As the fiery explosion cleared, Gai saw his window. He was stood twenty paces away, muscles straining against his green jumpsuit. The air around him sizzled as he reached into his body and found the eight chakra gates that regulated the flow of chakra and opened the first three gates at once.
First Gate: Gate of Opening—located in the brain's left hemisphere.
Second Gate: Gate of Healing—located in the brain's right hemisphere.
And finally, located at the top of the spinal cord—
"Third Gate: Gate of Life—Open!"
A green glow covered his body while his skin turned red from the accelerated blood flow inside his body as the blood pressure was raised beyond human levels. Whatever sweat happened to drip upon the air evaporated instantly, wreathing Gai in white mist as he stepped forward.
He disappeared.
Danzo's decades of experience screamed at him that he was in grave danger. Unable to move in mid-air, he ripped off the bandages over his eye to reveal the first of his borrowed powers. The Sharingan glowed red with its three tomoe, and suddenly, the world seemed to slow down for him.
Danzo took in a deep breath; he had never experienced anything like it, even in his prime as a jōnin. It was only a moment and only one ability of the eyes, but he truly understood why villages around the lands instructed their men to flee if they ran into a Sharingan-bearing Uchiha.
His eyes snapped towards Gai flying through the air towards him. The Sharingan's vision, which slowed everything, could only make the Leaf's Noble Green Beast seem like he was moving at a normal pace, which was still blazingly fast for everyone else.
So, Danzo asked himself on question: was his body capable of reacting to his improved vision? He was far too old to be on the battlefield, and unlike Hiruzen, the passage of time hadn't been charitable to him. It had already been over a decade since he had been able to move at the speeds he could reach in his prime.
That would have been a problem a few days ago, but now?
Gai struck with a barrage of a dozen strikes delivered in the span of a second, each one thrown with the specific intent to kill. Danzo raised his cane sword and parried each strike that came as though his age had no bearing on his physique.
Despite the pressure, Danzo remained clinical. He allowed Gai's final kick to connect with his forearm, using the impact to slide backwards while retrieving a pair of shuriken and breathing wind chakra through them to create fuma shuriken composed entirely of wind chakra.
Wind Release: Vacuum Blade
The wind-infused shuriken sliced through the air as they headed for Gai. He reached for a pair of nunchaku, but before he could whip them out in his defence, Kakashi appeared in front of him, precisely jamming a kunai in the centre hole of the first shuriken and then using it to stop the second shuriken.
Kakashi closed his left eye, his breathing steady. He gazed at Danzo's right eye, which now bore a Sharingan like the one in his left eye.
"That's…"
Kakashi nodded at Gai's trailing statement. That eye was Uchiha Shisui's stolen eye. For the first time, the Hidden Leaf had concrete proof that Danzo had stolen a Sharingan and, thus, conclusive proof that he was the one behind Shisui's death. However, the question was: why only one eye? Both of Shisui's eyes were missing, so why had he only transplanted one?
Was it because of the chakra burden? Those outside of the Uchiha bloodline with a transplanted eye couldn't turn off the Sharingan, making maintaining one eye a burden in itself; two eyes would be twice as much of a drain. Kakashi also thought back to Orochimaru's sudden appearance, which raised a question. Had Danzo sold the eyes to him or someone else? There could be a number of possibilities about what had happened to that singular eye.
"Something else is wrong as well," Kakashi said, reopening his left eye.
The flow of chakra inside Danzo was unlike that of a man of his age. Even though Danzo was a jōnin, Kakashi had a chance to observe other jōnin of advanced age.
Chakra was a product of equal parts physical and spiritual energy. The decline of the physique was a normal part of ageing, and with it came a reduction of physical energy; when one of the two energies declined, a shinobi couldn't make as much chakra as they could in their prime.
Moreover, the imbalance between the two energies caused the quality of the chakra to decline. So, on top of lacking its previous quantity, the reduced amount of chakra wasn't even of the same quality as it would have been in a shinobi's prime. Shinobi or chakra users couldn't escape the ravaging effects of age. They could defer those effects through diligent training and self-evaluation, but they couldn't be entirely avoided.
Some people's peak was so absurdly high that they remained powerful well into old age.
What Kakashi saw inside Danzo was a flow and vitality of chakra that would be present in a jōnin fifteen years younger than him. However, Kakashi clearly recalled looking at Danzo several years back during a certain incident, and the man from the Third Hokage's generation did not have anything close to the flow of chakra he was showing now.
Something had changed in the man since he had fled the village.
"I did feel that he blocked my previous attack a little too easily," Gai said. "It would have seemed arrogant from anyone else, but it was a genuine statement coming from him. "I guess we just have to work harder! This is a challenge, and we must overcome it so that we can be better than ourselves of yesterday!"
Kakashi sighed. Just hearing those words made him tired. He watched Danzo turn tail and resume his escape instead of continuing to fight and followed with Gai hot on his heels.
"I don't know what he's done to himself, but with his chakra and that stolen eye, we have to treat him as a much stronger opponent," Kakashi said.
"Want me to probe him?" Gai asked as more mist rose around his body.
Kakashi nodded, his natural eye affixed on his target.
"Go at him. I'll look for openings to strike or create openings for you. We can't allow him to escape here alive."
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