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Neither side wanted the battle to stretch on for long. For Gai and Kakashi, the longer they fought, the greater the chances for Danzo to find an opportunity to give them the slip in the chaos of the battle. For Danzo, a prolonged battle increased the chances of injury or the arrival of reinforcements on the Hidden Leaf's side.
The battle was to end quickly and both sides moved with that in mind.
Danzo felt a lightness he hadn't felt in decades. The grafted cells of the First Hokage filled his body with a renewed, vigorous life. He ran through the forest like the wind. No matter how he pushed, his body seemed to have more to give. His chakra sang. When was the last time he could move so freely?
On top of that, Uchiha Shisui's Sharingan granted him a level of kinetic perception that he had never possessed in his prime. He didn't need to slow down in fear of tunnel vision as he weaved around the trees like a ribbon of silk.
This was undoubtedly the strongest Danzo has ever been.
"Fourth Gate: Gate of Pain—Open!"
And yet, when he turned around, Might Gai was a blur of emerald light. White mist rolled off his body and his every step shattered the earth. Danzo could track him before, but now, even with the Sharingan, the man was a ghost whose mere steps brought about destruction.
"What a ridiculous man!"
Danzo didn't want to be hunted. His chest expanded like a bellows as he inhaled.
Wind Release: Vacuum Blast
He spun around while exhaling the compressed air into a solitary wind blade. The wide crescent screamed across the forest, cutting through dozens of trees in its path and reaching Gai where it seemed to slice through his waist as he was about to push off a tree. But there was no scream or spray of crimson as the afterimage blurred and stretched, melting into a meaningless smear.
Danzo's fingers twitched when he heard wood exploding and only had the time to catch Gai shooting towards him in his peripheral vision. He aggressively swung his cane sword with a burst of wind chakra.
"Strong Fist: The Fist of Vajra!"
Gai's fist was wreathed in swirling green as it crashed into the dense gust of wind. For a moment, he halted it completely before it spasmed under the pressure and erupted in every direction, causing the surrounding leaves to dance violently.
Danzo's defence worked, but Gai didn't slow down. He bent low, slamming his hands into the dirt to pivot into a rapid spin and kicking both legs up.
"Leaf Coiling Wind!"
It created enough wind to clear out the fallen leaves on the ground, shear the grass, and send soil and sediment flying. The first kick was blocked by Danzo's cane sword and sent him backwards, causing the second strike to miss. Danzo managed to convert the momentum of his stumble to keep out of the third kick, but the fourth one landed squarely against his hip.
Gai was spinning so fast that he had already landed three more strikes before Danzo went flying. He coughed involuntarily with tremors spiking through his body, but he managed to to weave hand seals when he saw Gai get to his feet and launch towards him, all with terrifying speed and body control.
Three kunai with explosive tags tied to them whistled towards Danzo while he formed hand seals, thrown at the perfect time. Gai was upon him, and he needed to complete his jutsu if he wanted to defend against the jōnin, but he couldn't just ignore the explosive tags.
Fortunately for Danzo, his chakra was singing, so he abandoned the carefully practised speed at which he usually controlled his chakra. Push it too fast and one risked losing control. His ability to physically wrangle his chakra had declined as it did with age, and so he slowed down. Danzo hadn't tested it, but he knew there was a possibility to regain that speed with the cell grafts, so he pushed his chakra much faster.
It obeyed his control perfectly as it once did when he was young. The ninjutsu was a success as wind chakra gathered in his lungs while he inhaled. Simultaneously, he flicked his cane sword to release a razor-thin edge of wind that cut through the paper tags before they could detonate.
Wind Release: Vacuum Great Sphere
Danzo exhaled a massive, distorted pocket of air that acted as a physical wall the moment his feet touched the ground.
However, the kunai Kakahi had thrown were a feint.
Earth Release: Headhunter Jutsu
The earth beneath Danzo's sandals erupted right as he touched down. Kakashi's hands shot up to grab Danzo's ankle, intending to immobilise him. The intention was to pull him down to at least his waist, but Danzo managed to stop before it reached his knees. He jabbed his sword into the earth and pumped an intense burst of wind into the ground.
Kakashi, who had been unearthed, immediately flickered away at the last moment, but not unscathed, and while the blast inadvertently freed Danzo, it wasn't enough to get him out of harm's way.
"Fifth Gate: Gate of Limit—Open!"
A chill went down Danzo's spine when the B-rank wind sphere exploded like it were a children's balloon. Gai emerged from behind it, unharmed. Danzo blinked. Gai was suddenly in striking distance. There wasn't enough time to weave hand seals, so he clenched his cane sword—constructed from chakra-conductive metal and forged by master weaponsmiths in conjunction with fuinjutsu to facilitate kenjutsu—and pushed chakra through it to send out a small but compressed mass of air instead of parrying the strikes. When Gai's fist came close to connecting with his jaw, a sudden burst of high-pressure wind shoved Gai's arm an inch to the left while Danzo moved his face in the other direction.
The next three punches were already on their way. Danzo managed to block one, but the next two hit him: one in the stomach, the second in the upper chest. The latter caused Gai to frown. Danzo was sent skidding backwards, his boots carving deep furrows in the vitrified glass. A triangular rocky wall shot up from behind him and, the moment he slammed into it, earthen arms and hands appeared from the surface and pinned him to the ground.
A few metres away, Kakashi was kneeling with his palms pressed to the ground.
"Now!" he yelled.
Gai disappeared from view as if he'd used the Body Flicker Jutsu, but it was a purely physical movement.
"Leaf Rock-Destroying Rise!"
Gai smashed his elbow into Danzo's chest, using his other arm as support. The earth wall behind them exploded as the sheer force travelled through the body. Danzo's ribs caved under the pressure shortly before he smashed through trees and cratered the ground on impact.
Danzo felt an enormous amount of pain as he forced himself to stand up. His clothes were shredded, revealing his bare upper body, making the Leaf jōnin duo—about to move for their next attack—pause.
White branch-like marks spread outwards throughout his body, originating from his right pectoral. The branches split into smaller sub-branches and extended down to his lower waist and legs. That itself wouldn't make the two jōnin stop.
What made them stop, though, was the bone-white right-side of his chest, where a man's face was sticking out of the skin.
"So, that's what it was," Gai said. "I felt something strange when I hit him there."
"What is that?" Kakashi asked.
He gazed at the face on the deformed pec with his Sharingan, noting a very faint foreign chakra signature that he had missed when he had looked into Danzo's body. It merged with Danzo's own chakra to create a new combined chakra that predominantly circulated throughout the body. The new chakra was the vigorous chakra Kakashi had noticed before.
"He doesn't seem injured. You think that creepy face has something to do with it?" Gai said, frowning.
Kakashi didn't know, but he could guess that was exactly the case. Danzo had been hit by a move that would injure even the most physically durable jōnin, but he looked rather fresh, save for the blood running down the side of his mouth and some redness that was already fading.
Danzo wasn't happy about getting hit, but he was satisfied with how quickly and actively his body was healing itself. The pain in his hip from the previous attack had already vanished, with no lingering stiffness. It was like he hadn't been hit at all. When Orochimaru transplanted the First Hokage's cells into him, the Snake had warned him of the risks and that any benefits would entirely depend on how well his body accepted the cells.
Seeing the invigorated chakra, its effects on his body, and now an innate healing factor—it seemed that his body was compatible with the First Hokage's cells. It was even helpful with the Sharingan, which was a constant chakra sink. He gazed towards Kakashi and wondered how the youngster lived with his implanted Sharingan, given how much chakra the eye ate.
It was worth the cost, though. If it weren't for the eye, Danzo would not have been able to track Gai as well. With the Sharingan, he could track the movement of chakra in the taijutsu specialist's body to roughly predict his moves and react accordingly.
The two young jōnin were playing the 'Hammer and Chisel' tactic. Gai was the hammer, relentless and powerful. Kakashi was the chisel, the calmer and colder mind who made sure that the hammer's force was focused and true to the target. Fighting them any longer was dangerous despite his improved condition. Kakashi was a great mind, a brilliant battle tactician. Given enough time, he would spin up a lethal plan. He knew they wouldn't break, so he had to clear the board if he wanted a chance to escape.
Danzo breathed in, only to feel something hard in the back of his throat. He reached into his mouth and pulled out the strange object. He stared at a small wooden branch with a single green leaf in his hand. For a moment, he wondered if he had swallowed the branch while fighting, but then he saw the pink flesh and red blood on the bottom of the branch, as though it had been attached to the lining of his throat until he pulled it out.
He felt the taste of iron on his tongue and spat out more blood into his palm, only for the red liquid to instantly turn into coarse sawdust that he rubbed between his fingers.
It was undoubtedly wood that came from within him.
The First Hokage's special bloodline limit: Wood Release. It couldn't be anything else. He touched one of the white branches covering his body. Just a few hours ago, it was nothing but white skin, no different from the skin beside it, but now it felt slightly stiffer. It had only been a few days since he had undergone the operation, and he recalled the words Orochimaru had said to him the day after.
"The chances of rejection will remain high until your body gets used to the new cells. It may take a while, so if you don't want things to go wrong, take the medicine and don't exert yourself."
All the previous excitement about being compatible with the grafted cells drained away. He had to finish this fight now.
Danzo breathed in and felt that his chakra pathways were already warm and pliable. With his age, it would have taken much longer, but the grafted cells had greatly quickened his body.
"It has been a while," he said in a gruff voice as he slammed his hands together to weave hand seals, causing gusts of wind to lash out as his chakra was pushed to the limit.
The forest began to vibrate as the winds picked up. He gathered a massive amount of chakra into his lungs, his chest expanding to twice its normal size. It had been a very long time since he had used an A-rank ninjutsu, and he braced for the strain and stress that it always put on his body, only for it not to come—at least not to the levels he remembered.
Instead, casting one of his most demanding ninjutsu seemed to give him that exhilaration most felt when they used B-rank, only much greater. Did the First Hokage feel like this every time he used A-rank ninjutsu?
Wind Release: Demonic Hurricane Massacre
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