The sky above Ouza Island fractured, a jagged web of white-hot plasma illuminating the drowning cedars. But the ozone stinging Kakashi's throat carried the metallic taint of manipulated chakra, not a natural storm. In the distance, Aoi Rokushō held the Sword of the Thunder God aloft, a beacon dragging the hurricane's fury directly toward the stone steps.
"Move!" Kakashi barked, his voice instantly swallowed by the Niagara-roar of the gale.
He didn't track the genin. He channeled chakra to his bare ankles, his open-toed sandals kicking off the slick, vibrating iron handrail as he flickered straight into the dense treeline.
Behind him, the battlefield detonated into a blinding wash of static, mud, and displaced air.
Kakashi landed on a thick cedar branch. His hand hovered over the slanted metal plate of his forehead protector. Not yet.
Then, the environment fractured.
The horizontal rain simply stopped. The deafening roar of the gale died, replaced by a profound, muddled silence. The eye of the storm slid over the ridge.
The silence pressed against his eardrums, a heavy, barometric vacuum. The world had inhaled and forgotten to exhale.
Shink—thwack.
A sudden, sharp heat blossomed across Kakashi's abdomen. The micro-delay between sensation and sight triggered an adrenaline spike. He looked down. Four kunai buried themselves up to the rings into his olive-green flak jacket and the exposed flesh of his pale forearms. Arterial warmth spread against his dark navy short-sleeved tee.
He reached for the nearest hilt, his muscle fibers locking against the trauma.
Then, the sky wept a single, delayed sheet of freezing rain.
The water hit his bare forearms like liquid nitrogen. November hadn't earned that temperature yet. The phantom blood remained impossibly hot against the freezing downpour, the clash of temperatures misfiring his nerves.
Kakashi didn't pull the blade. He flared his chakra network, surging a disruptive pulse through his meridian lines.
The kunai dissolved into mist. The phantom blood vanished.
A ghost-ache throbbed deep in his forearms. His fingerless shinobi gloves twitched as his grip strength misfired, the muscles struggling to reset. He forced his stuttering lungs to draw a full breath, suppressing the residual panic of the illusion.
High above in the canopy, a figure crouched on a slick branch. A yellow jumpsuit stitched up the middle, the face obscured by a rebreather and a dark sash. He didn't balance lightly; his weight anchored into the wet wood with a heavy, unnatural density.
"Heh... lucky," Oboro's voice filtered through the mask, muffled and arrogant. "Most people don't notice the temperature drop in time."
Kakashi's hand tightened into a fist. Crack-crack-spark-ROAR.
High-voltage chakra surged around his gloves, illuminating the gloom in violent blue flashes.
Too wide. Too loud. He wants me reacting.
Kakashi flickered. He didn't aim for the Amegakure genin. He drove the volatile lightning sphere directly into the trunk of the massive cedar supporting his opponent.
CRRRRR-ACK!
The ancient wood exploded. Timber shrieked as the tree snapped, the kinetic force denying the high ground. Kakashi spun, planting both boots against the splintering trunk to launch himself backward. Clusters of dislodged pine needles stuck to his sweating neck. The sharp, overwhelming stench of ruptured sap filled the clearing as his sandals slipped briefly on a bed of jagged bark debris before finding purchase in the mud. Space created. Hiding spots denied.
Oboro dropped through the rising mist, his sandals hitting the mud several yards away. He tilted his head, watching the destruction level a dozen ancient cedars.
"That was overkill," Oboro grunted.
"Creating space," Kakashi replied, his posture low, weight anchored on his cropped navy trousers.
"Space only matters if you trust your eyes," Oboro retorted, his tone dripping with territorial certainty. "The mud already belongs to me."
Kakashi hooked a finger under his forehead protector, lifting the slanted plate. His left eyelid snapped open, the crimson iris of the Sharingan spinning to life.
The crimson iris spun, vomiting a chaotic overlay across his vision. The Oboro standing ten paces away registered zero chakra. Three massive, distorted signatures flickered in the periphery. The terrain hummed with displaced energy, twisting the slope into an unrecognizable gradient.
Beneath Kakashi's open-toed sandals, the mud flexed. A predatory expansion of the soil.
Two hands erupted from the loam, locking around Kakashi's bare ankles like iron vices.
The Oboro clone directly in front of him lunged, a physical kunai drawn.
"Too slow, old man."
Kakashi let his muscles hesitate for a fraction of a heartbeat.
Squelch.
The blade drove into Kakashi's chest plate, biting through the layered Kevlar and piercing skin. Hot copper flooded his tongue. Pain anchored him, the authentic drag of the metal overriding the lingering phantom sensations.
The hands at his ankles yanked.
The earth swallowed his thighs. The mud didn't yield; it clamped down like a dense, freezing fluid, throwing off his spatial orientation. He misjudged the angle of the slope for a frantic half-second, struggling to align his hands in the crushing grip of the soil.
Ram. Dog. Rat. Bird.
"Earth Style: Tunneling Technique."
He slammed his palms against the dirt.
A violent vacuum drop ripped them downward. Kakashi's stomach lurched. Rotational confusion spun his inner ear as they plummeted through the cylindrical shaft. Dense, compacted soil pressed inward, dropping the air pressure and popping his eardrums. Jagged, embedded roots scraped angry red lines across his bare biceps.
Oboro let go of his ankles. He didn't flail or drop with dead weight; his torso aligned perfectly parallel to the rock wall, treating the vertical drop like a horizontal slide. He slammed a hand against the stone, sinking directly into the crust.
A half-second window. Kakashi couldn't track him through solid rock. He needed to force a deflection.
His right fist ignited, the concentrated chirp of a thousand birds echoing in the dark shaft. He angled his descent, thrusting the condensed Raikiri directly at the submerging shadow.
Oboro didn't panic. He just stared up at the descending lightning. "Lucky."
"Rock Shelter!"
A thick, convex dome of hardened earth erupted from the wall, sealing Oboro away. Kakashi's Sharingan flared—no full seal chain. Preloaded chakra.
KA-BOOM!
The Raikiri slammed into the dome, the concussive force shattering the rock and violently launching Kakashi upward. He rode the momentum, flipping out of the sinkhole and landing hard on his boots in the muddy clearing.
Numbness shot up his right arm, a dead weight trailing from his elbow to his shoulder. High-pitched tinnitus screamed in his ears, drowning out the wind. His Sharingan lagged, the crimson vision blurring for a dangerous second before snapping back into focus.
Kakashi anchored his stance. The mud beneath him had flash-frozen. His right sandal skidded on a slick patch, forcing a sharp lateral correction to keep his knees aligned. A thin sheet of ice fractured under his shifting weight with a sharp, crystalline crunch. He swept the crater.
No clean vibration. Just the micro-settling of cracking ice, a delayed echo bouncing off the tunnel walls, and an inconsistent updraft of cold air. The earth offered no reliable metrics.
Kakashi stood alone. Above the treeline, the barometric pressure violently crashed. The eye of the storm fully passed, yielding to the brutal cold front of late November.
A refreshing blast of dry air slammed into the clearing, immediately dropping the temperature toward five degrees. Kakashi's breath plumed into thick, white fog. Low-hanging mist began to pool around his calves, creeping forward with an unnatural directional drift, specifically spiraling toward his boots.
Crunch-slide.
Footsteps sounded directly behind him.
Kakashi pivoted, a kunai snapping into his left grip.
Naruto stumbled out of the treeline. The boy's mesh tank top hung in tatters, the dark netting heavily stained with purple and dark blood. He leaned heavily against a flash-frozen cedar trunk, his chest heaving.
"Kakashi-sensei..." Naruto gasped, his voice a ragged wheeze. "I found him..."
Relief—a fatal, micro-second of misplaced familiarity—eased the tension in Kakashi's shoulders. He lowered the kunai a fraction of an inch.
Then, the anomalies registered.
Naruto's chest heaved, but his face remained a mask of unnatural, frozen stillness. No micro-expressions of pain. His blue eyes tracked Kakashi with a rigid, mechanical precision. The torn mesh exposed bare skin, yet the boy didn't shiver in the freezing air. His pale flesh lacked the mottled flush or blanching typical of severe cold exposure.
Kakashi's lagging Sharingan finally parsed the data. No pupil dilation. No respiratory heat signature. No chaotic, swirling chakra network.
Just a hollow physical silhouette, the mist artificially dense and swirling unnaturally tight around the edges of his form.
Naruto's lips pulled back into a slow, perfectly symmetrical smirk.
"...lucky us." The words overlapped, a slight temporal echo bouncing from the surrounding fog rather than the boy's throat.
His jaw snapped shut a half-second before the sound arrived.