The three of them fell off the cliff all together.
Akamaru's last tag went off a beat too close, and the blast that was meant to clear Kiba a path off the chase instead chewed the lip of the ravine out from under everyone standing on it. Kiba felt the ground disappear from beneath him. Then there was air, and a long tumbling fall through it with two enemies falling beside him, and the floor of the trench came up and took the wind out of all of them together.
He came up first. Akamaru landed in a heap of white fur and was on his feet a half second behind, ready to battle.
The twins peeled out of the dust on the far side.
"Two of us, two of you." The one in front smiled with his head tilted down, a red-beaded necklace at his throat. "I like those odds. My brother's been wanting to stretch his legs."
"Don't drag it out, Sakon." The voice came from the back of him, from a second face hanging slack over his shoulder, eyes half-lidded. "We're already late. They die and we go."
"You're no fun." But Sakon rolled his neck, and the cursed seal crawled up out of his collar and across his skin in curling lines and dark blotches, and Kiba felt the air pressure change as the power came up.
"Akamaru." Kiba reached into his pouch. "Pill."
The dog caught the food pill out of the air and his white coat went red, and Kiba dropped to all fours, and the two of them moved as one thing the way they had trained their whole lives to do.
"Fang Over Fang!"
Two spinning drills of claw and tooth tore across the trench. The brothers split apart, Ukon coming clean out of Sakon's body for the first time, two targets now where there had been one, and the drills carved past empty air and gouged the rock wall behind them.
"Heh." Ukon flexed his fingers, standing on his own. "A nose and some claws. That's the whole act?"
"It's not the whole act." Kiba grinned through the blood already running from his lip. "Akamaru!"
The dog leapt onto his back and the transformation took them both, fur and limbs and a swelling of muscle, the henge folding the two of them into one massive shape that filled half the trench. Two heads. One body. Four legs braced against the stone.
"Inuzuka Style: Man Beast Transformation Combo: Two-Headed Wolf." The double-headed wolf's voices came out layered, boy and beast at once. "Wolf Fang Over Fang!"
It came down on the brothers like a landslide given teeth, a churning vortex of the whole transformed body, and where Tunnelling Fang had carved a furrow this one meant to grind them into the trench floor and leave nothing.
The brothers' hands came together at distance from each other.
"Summoning. Rashōmon!"
The gate tore up out of the ground between the wolf and the twins, a slab of black iron three stories tall with a demon's snarling face hammered into its doors, and the Fang Wolf Fang hit it full force. The trench shook. The iron screamed. The transformed wolf bored into the gate and the gate held, and when the technique spent itself and the wolf spun off and crashed down into its two halves again, there was a dent in the iron the depth of a fist where there should have been nothing at all.
Sakon looked at the dent. For a moment, under the seal-twisted face, there was something close to respect.
"That's Lord Orochimaru's strongest wall." He sounded almost pleased. "You put a dent in it. Genuinely, impressive."
Then Ukon was already moving, because Ukon had no patience for being impressed.
What followed was fast and it was bad. Kiba and Akamaru fought separated now, exhausted, the pill burning down to nothing, and the brothers in their second state were simply faster and stronger than two worn-out genin and a ninken. Akamaru lunged at Sakon's blind side and caught a backhand that folded him in the air and put him into the rock wall hard, and he came down and did not get up clean, one leg dragging, a wet red matting his fur that was not the food pill anymore. He got one thing in on the way down, a stream of piss spat into Sakon's eyes that sent the elder twin reeling and clawing at his own face, cursing, blinded.
"AKAMARU!"
But Ukon was on Kiba before the scream finished, and Ukon's body came apart.
Kiba felt it happen, the worst feeling of his life, a hand closing on his arm and then, the enemy dissolving into something that poured into him through the contact, under the skin, into the meat, and a voice that was suddenly next to his head.
"This is the one we don't show people." Ukon's voice came beside Kiba's head. "I'm in your cells now, dog boy . I'll take you apart from the middle out, and you won't be able to lift a finger to stop me, because every finger is mine now too."
Kiba's hand was already moving.
It was the only thing he could think of and it was insane and he did it anyway. He drew a kunai and drove it into his own stomach, into his own gut, all the way, and he felt the blade go through something that was not just him, and inside his chest Ukon screamed.
Blood came up out of both of them, Kiba's mouth and a second wet cough that had no business sharing his lungs, and the thing inside him recoiled from the wound it was suddenly sharing.
"You. You're insane,"
"Get." Kiba twisted the blade. "Out."
Ukon tore free of him rather than die with him, ripped back out into his own shape gagging and clutching a gut wound that mirrored Kiba's exactly, and in the half second of confusion Kiba did the only thing left to a man who had stabbed himself to survive.
He ran.
He scooped Akamaru up against his chest with one bloody arm, the dog whining, too hurt to walk, and he turned and he fled down the trench with his own kunai wound pouring down his leg and his ninken dying in his arms, fled like prey, because that was what he was now, and he knew it.
Behind him he heard Ukon's voice climb into a shriek, and then go quiet as the brother fused back into Sakon to heal, the two of them becoming one body again so the wounds could close.
He did not have long. He knew he did not have long.
He made it out of the trench and into the trees before his legs started to go.
The wound in his gut had stopped pouring and started seeping, which was worse, and the blood loss had turned the green of the forest grey at the edges. Akamaru had gone quiet against his chest, breathing shallow and fast, and Kiba had nothing left to give him, no pill, no plan, just two arms wrapped around his oldest friend and a stagger that was getting shorter with every step.
He put his back to a tree and slid down it because his knees stopped asking permission.
That was where they found him.
"There he is." Sakon walked out of the trees whole again, the gut wound gone, the necklace back at his throat, Ukon's slack face restored over his shoulder. The second state still rode his skin. "The little dog boy who stabbed himself in the belly to get away from us. That's the saddest thing I've seen all year."
"He's done." Ukon's voice from the shoulder, raspy, satisfied. "Look at him. He can't even stand."
"I know. I want to admire this sight." Sakon crouched down in front of Kiba, head tilted, smiling. "You dented the gate. I meant that. So I'll do you the courtesy of telling you it's over before I open you up. You and the mutt both." He drew a kunai and turned it in the light. "Any last words? Go on. I'll tell your friends if they haven't died already."
Kiba spat blood at his face and said nothing.
"No? Shame." Sakon raised the kunai. "Do-re-mi, then."
The blade came down.
It did not land.
A hand caught Sakon's wrist out of nowhere, stopped the kunai a finger's width from Kiba's throat, and Sakon's head snapped up at the figure that had dropped between them, the figure that had crossed the clearing faster than either brother had heard it come.
Buns in her hair. Scrolls at her hips. A little girl standing over the wounded boy with her hand locked around the killing wrist.
"Tenten…" Kiba breathed.
"Well." Sakon's smile came back, wider, delighted. "Another one. And a girl this time." He wrenched his wrist free and stepped back, looking her over. "You should have stayed hidden, girlie. Now you just die with the dog boy."
"There's no time, Sakon." Ukon was already separating, his body pulling free of his brother's, the two of them spreading to flank her. "Both of them. Now."
"You're always rushing me." But Sakon moved, and Ukon moved, and Kiba tried to shout a warning and only coughed blood.
Ukon reached her first. His arm began to merge into her, the sure kill, the technique that had rarely failed, flowing toward her skin to get inside her and take her apart from the center out.
And it stopped.
Kiba watched Ukon's face change. Watched the confidence on it curdle into confusion and the confusion drop into something close to terror, all in the space of a breath, because the thing his body was trying to pour into was not letting him in. There was no in. His dissolving flesh met the surface of her and found no cells to invade, no proteins to corrupt, no living network to flow along, nothing, only a hard cold smoothness under the disguise, only lacquer and wood and the joints of a thing.
"This isn't…" Ukon's voice came out high and wrong, half-formed, caught between states. "This isn't a person! This is… it's a… it's a doll!"
The doll moved.
Two of its arms, two, there should only have been two, came up and clamped onto Ukon's arms and held them with a grip that did not tremble and did not tire and would not open. Four more arms unfolded from the sides of her ribs.
Ukon had time to make one curse.
Then the four free fists went into his torso, and they did not stop. Weighted metal, blunt and heavy, hammering into his gut and his ribs at a speed no human arm could keep up and no human lungs could outlast, a flurry with no rhythm to it and no end to it, demolishing him from the sternum down while the two gripping arms held him in place to take every blow. The disguise sloughed off the thing as it worked, the false girl peeling away in a shimmer to show what was under it: three heads, six arms, a body of dark wood built in the shape of muscular youthful men, and a face that wore their grin and felt nothing at all as it caved a man's chest in.
Ukon was screaming. Sakon was screaming his brother's name.
"UKON!"
Sakon hit the puppet from the side with everything the second state gave him, a blow that would have shattered a tree, and the puppet rocked and its grip broke and Ukon spilled free, folded around a torso that no longer held its shape, coughing, ruined. Sakon caught him before he hit the ground, dragged him back, put his own body between his brother and the thing.
"You're…" Ukon could barely get it out, blood sheeting from his mouth. "It's not… Sakon, it's not real… it's a puppet."
"I know." Sakon's eyes were moving now, fast, the showboat gone out of him, looking for the strings, looking for the hand on the other end of them, finding nothing, no one, an empty clearing and a wounded dog-boy and a wooden monster wearing a friendly face. "I know. Get inside me. Heal. I'll handle it."
Ukon came apart one more time, and this time he poured into the body he knew, into his brother, fusing back to mend in the only place that could heal him from this, and Sakon straightened alone with his brother safe inside his own chest and the strongest, fastest body the Sound Four had ever produced now fully his to use.
"Alright." Sakon wiped his mouth and faced the puppet, and his grin came back, thinner, meaner. "A puppet. Fine. I can handle a doll. There's always a hand on the strings, and when I find it, I'm going to make the person attached to it die a painful slow death."
The puppet did not answer.
It came at him instead, six arms and no face worth the name, and Sakon met it.
And Sakon was magnificent, for a while. He was everything Orochimaru had bragged about, faster than the wooden thing had any right to lose to, slipping the flurries, landing blows that would have ended a person, driving his clawed fists into the puppet's chest and head and joints again and again.
That was the thing he could not get his mind around, and Kiba watched it dawn on him by degrees. Every blow Sakon landed was a blow against wood. The thing did not bruise. It did not gasp. It did not slow. He caved in a section of its shoulder and the arm kept swinging on a joint that should not have worked. He cracked one of its three heads half off and the other two mouths did not so much as change expression, because there was no expression, because there was nothing in there to express. He was hitting it as hard as a jonin-level shinobi could hit, and he was getting tired, his second state eroding his body to stay powerful and his brother burning more to heal inside him, and the puppet was not breaking like he wanted it to break.
"Just BREAK already!" Sakon snarled, and threw a desperate flurry, and the puppet took it on its forearms and answered with all six of its own, and one of the weighted fists got through and snapped Sakon's head sideways, and his footing went, just for an instant.
That instant was the opening it had been waiting for.
The puppet dropped low and drove a single rising kick up under Sakon's chin, and the heavy wooden leg launched him off his feet and straight up into the air above the clearing.
It went up after him.
It caught him at the height of the rise, all six arms wrapping him at once, and from somewhere on its frame bandages spooled out and lashed around the two of them, around Sakon's arms and his legs and his chest, binding him to the wooden body so tightly he could not move, could not separate, could not pour Ukon out to safety because there was no time and nowhere to pour him, the two brothers wrapped together in one bound bundle against a thing that had them and would not let go.
At the peak, the puppet began to spin.
The puppet was rotating faster and faster as it drove headfirst back toward the earth with the bound brothers fixed against its body, a descending drill of wood and weighted metal and two screaming men.
This was the part where Lee or Guy would let go. This was the part where the bandages came loose and the user pulled away and retreated to safety and left the opponent to meet the ground alone, because no living body could normally survive diving headfirst from such a height at such speeds.
The puppet did not let go.
It rode Sakon and Ukon into the floor of the clearing headfirst at full speed, and at the instant of impact, it detonated.
The blast was enormous, a fist of fire and splinters and pressure that flattened the grass to the treeline and threw a wall of heat across the clearing, the puppet spending itself all at once, every sealed thing in its wooden body going up together with the two brothers bound against it at the center of it.
Kiba felt the heat coming for him and could not move, arms still locked around Akamaru, too wrecked to so much as turn away, and something hooked him.
Yanking them backward off the ground, hauling them clear of the clearing and behind the trunk of a tree as the fire rolled through the space where they had been. He came down in the leaf litter with Akamaru still in his arms and the explosion ringing in his teeth and the world too bright and then too dark and then, slowly, normal again.
When the smoke thinned, there was a crater where the clearing had been. There was nothing in the crater that had been two people. The two beings sharing one body, two members for the price of one, had died exactly that way in the end, together, in a single body, in a single blast.
Kiba lay there breathing and tried to understand what he had just watched.
A girl dropped out of the tree above him.
She landed lightly, the chakra threads winking out from her fingertips one by one. She was a teenage girl with a smile on her face, with pride and confidence radiating from her.
"Tenten," Kiba croaked. "Holy crap…"
"Don't talk." She was already on her knees beside him, already pulling a roll of bandages and a field kit out of a scroll, already pressing the heel of her hand against the wound in his gut.
"Where were you even hiding?" His head was swimming. "You were… You were in the tree. The whole fight. You never had to show yourself once."
"I never needed to." She wound the bandage around his middle, tight, sure, her eyes already moving to Akamaru, observing the dog's wounds without being asked. "The puppet does the fighting. I do the controlling." She pulled the wrap off and started a second pass, packing the gut wound properly. "You're going to live. So is he, I think, if I can stop this bleeding. Wild, dumb, and reckless. Both of you."
Kiba stared at her. At the small girl who had just turned two of Orochimaru's goons into a crater from a hundred feet away without throwing a single punch with her own two hands, and who was now kneeling in the dirt threading a needle to close a dog's wound, and who would, he understood, get exactly no credit for any of it, because nobody had been awake to see it and the only one who had was going to spend the next week in a hospital bed.
"That was amazing. You're amazing."
"Yep, I know. Now I just wish the higher-ups would see that too." She grinned.
She got an arm under his shoulders and gathered Akamaru against his chest with the other, and she stood, lifting a wounded boy and a wounded ninken together. "Come on. Both of you. Let's get you home."
She carried them into the trees, and the crater smoked behind them, and the forest closed up green and quiet over the place where YOUTH had been.
Deep in the trees, where the chase had not reached and the light came down thin and green, the last of the Sound Four was about to make her only mistake.
Tayuya stood over the Nara boy with her flute at her lips and three Doki looming at her back, and the boy was on one knee in the dirt with his arms hanging and his chakra all but gone, and she had every reason to think she had won. He had weathered her melody longer than anyone had a right to, picked apart two of her illusions, kept just enough of himself to crawl this far. But crawling was all he had left in him. She could see it.
She lowered the flute to tell him so. To gloat.
That second was the whole fight.
His shadow had been moving the entire time she was talking. His shadow had through the undergrowth, threading up the base of a Doki's own shadow and using the thing she had summoned as a road, and by the time she dropped the flute to savor him it had come around behind her heel where she was not looking, because nobody looks behind their own win.
Troublesome, he thought.
He had hated the month before the exams. Hated the training, the extra hours, dragging his shadow further and holding it longer until his skull ached, all of it carved out of perfectly good time spent doing nothing. He had only kept at it because the bracket was a coin toss and one face of the coin was a green guy that had killed a tailed beast with his feet, and a person trained a little more urgently when they might have to face that. He had grumbled to his father the entire time.
Turned out he owed the lunatic a thank-you.
The shadow took her.
"Shadow Possession Jutsu Complete…" He exhaled.
Her body locked mid-breath, the flute stalled an inch from her grinning mouth, and the three Doki stopped dead where they stood, because the fingers that played them had stopped. Her face went from confusion to the front edge of a scream, because she could feel it now, the cold climbing her, a shadow with weight to it pouring up her spine and circling her throat the way no shadow was meant to move.
The closer he stood, the stronger it pulled. He stood very close.
He had almost nothing left, so he did not drag it out. The technique had a longer use, a slow one, a strangle, but a strangle cost chakra he did not have and time he would not spend. The shadow at her throat cinched tight, took hold, and snapped her neck.
The sound was small in the big quiet of the trees.
The three Doki came apart into smoke a breath later, summons with no master left to control them. Tayuya fell from the tree branch, lifeless.
Shikamaru sat down hard in the dirt and simply breathed.
He was alone. Nobody had pulled him out of this. No cavalry, no last-second anything, just a boy too lazy to die and too smart to lose, sitting in a quiet forest with a body to deal with and a long walk ahead to learn who else had made it. The rest of his team was scattered across these woods in fights he could do nothing about now.
He tipped his head back against the trunk and looked up through the leaves at a sky going gold.
"...What a drag." he muttered.
Then he made himself stand, because the mission was not finished, and he was the one in charge of it.