Earning My Stripes (Mizuki-SI)

[Bakkughan]

I don't know if it was already asked but, is it just me or does his initial power up plan sound like he's trying to become Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez?
It includes regeneration, armor that sounds like it fuses to you (not sure here) and feline traits, so when I put that along his hair colour, it just sounds like Grimmjow.

Click to shrink...

Lol I never made that connection but, yeah kinda?

 

[Bakkughan]

I don't know if it was already asked but, is it just me or does his initial power up plan sound like he's trying to become Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez?
It includes regeneration, armor that sounds like it fuses to you (not sure here) and feline traits, so when I put that along his hair colour, it just sounds like Grimmjow.

Click to shrink...

I never actually thought about it that way, but that is surprisingly accurate lol!

 

[Bakkughan]

Step 3.4​

​

---

Rather than answer the question, Furido drove his foot into Chiriku's chest and sent him skidding backwards. I moved between them before he could follow, slashing at his shoulder and forcing him to bring the staff up across his body. My claws scraped against metal, sending sparks flying. He twisted the shaft against my wrist, trying to lever me sideways, and I let go before he could dislocate anything.

Chiriku was still staring at him.

"How… how are you alive? You died. Asuma killed you himself…"

Kazuma rolled his jaw, blood showing at the corner of his mouth. "You should ask him then. He was the one who left me on that battlefield, so long ago."

Sora had reached the bottom of the steps, having caught the tail-end of the conversation between the two men, his eyes wide and thin frame trembling. "What did you call him?"

Chiriku looked towards the boy, and that was enough to give Kazuma an opening. The metal head flew past me towards Sora. I caught the cable with both hands and hauled it sideways, feeling it cut into my palms as the weight struck the steps beside him.

"Get back!" I shouted.

Kazuma yanked at the staff, then abandoned the attempt when I planted my feet, my enhanced strength trumping his. He made a single-handed seal with his free hand instead ('Damn, I gotta learn how to do that, all the cool missing-nin do!') and the earth behind me split. A corpse heaved itself out of the paving, reaching for my thigh. I kicked its head away, but another caught my other leg while the cable remained stretched taut between us.

Chiriku severed it with a chakra-coated strike. I staggered backwards with the loose length in my hands while Kazuma used our distraction to leap over the dead men rising between us. He landed beside Sora and caught him by the covered arm.

The boy cried out. Red chakra leaked out from between Kazuma's gripping fingers, spreading through the sleeve before he pushed two fingers against Sora's shoulder. The glow receded, leaving the boy staring up at him in startled silence.

"There," Kazuma said. "You see? I know how to help you."

I wrenched my ankle out of a corpse's grip and crushed its elbow underfoot. Chiriku was trying to reach the stairs, but the dead had come up around him as well, forcing him to clear them with broad sweeps of his staff. More were climbing over the courtyard wall, their numbers compensating for their weak frames just so they could fulfill their purpose, to keep us busy until Kazuma could put his hands on the boy.

Sora tried to pull away but the white-haired man held on tight.

"Let go!"

"Sora, listen to me. You heard the monk correctly. My name is Kazuma. I'm your father."

The boy's struggling stopped. He looked towards Chiriku, who had just broken free of the corpses surrounding him.

"You said he was dead." The boy said, his words equal confused plea and pained accusation.

"We believed he was," Chiriku answered, breathing hard. "Sora, step away from him."

Kazuma pulled the boy closer, positioning him between himself and the monk. "You've had years to tell him what you think of me. You can allow me a few minutes with my own son."

Sora was still looking at Chiriku. His face had lost what little colour remained, and for a moment I thought he was going to be sick. Then his gaze dropped towards the hand holding his arm.

"Where were you?" he asked in a small voice.

"I was recovering. By the time I could return, they would never have let me near you." Kazuma answered as he half-turned to answer his son, though he made sure to keep both me and Chiriku in sight.

"You could've sent something." Sora's voice cracked. "A letter. Anything."

"I couldn't risk them finding me before I was ready. My so-called 'murderer' is that despot, the Hokage's son, Sora; nowhere in the Land of Fire was safe for me, even if I could never abandon my homeland completely. Abandon you."

A corpse lurched towards the stairs. I pulled it up by the neck and drove its face into the paving, watching Kazuma over its shoulder. He had loosened his grip slightly, though his other hand was still hovering near Sora's shoulder. Whatever he'd done had quieted the red chakra. I couldn't tell whether it would do the same thing if he touched him again.

"So you left me here," Sora said.

"I left you somewhere safe."

"You don't know what it's been like!"

Kazuma's gaze passed briefly over Chiriku. "I can see enough."

The monk flinched, and I hated that the bastard had managed it. There was plenty wrong with how the people here had treated Sora, but the man saying it had brought an army of corpses to their front door. Hardly proper father-material; I was standing ankle-deep in the evidence after all.

"You can leave with me now," Kazuma continued. "I can finish what I started. You won't have to hide that arm again."

Sora looked up at him. "What you started?"

Chiriku went still.

"The chakra," Kazuma said, apparently deciding he'd already said enough he might as well continue. "It came from the Nine-Tails. I collected it after the attack on Konoha. I sought to bring salvation to the Land of Fire from the Hidden Leaf's ashes; to that end, I had to place its lingering demonic energy… inside you."

For several seconds Sora didn't move. I heard a staff crack behind me and the wet thud of a body falling onto the veranda, but couldn't bring myself to look away from his face.

"You.. put it in me?"

Kazuma's fingers tightened as the boy tried to draw back.

"You survived it. Everything I'd hoped for—"

Sora hit him.

His good fist caught Kazuma across the mouth, snapping his head sideways. The grip on his other arm loosened and Sora tore free, stumbling back against the steps. Red chakra flooded down his sleeve, burning through the cloth as the flesh beneath it swelled.

"All this time," he said, his voice shaking. "You did this?!"

Kazuma wiped his mouth. "Sora, calm down."

The boy screamed at him and swung his demonic arm. Wind chakra stretched beyond the fingers in long, uneven blades, red leaking through the pale edges. Kazuma ducked, losing a section of hair as the strike passed over his head and cut deep into the wall behind him. Sora followed, his second blow catching the remaining length of staff and breaking it across the middle.

I started towards him, but Chiriku caught my shoulder, his expression tight and his worried eyes glued to the boy.

"His arm! Don't touch the chakra."

Kazuma retreated beneath another wild swing, throwing aside the broken shaft. Sora's claws scored his chest, tearing through the robe, and the man's expression hardened. He caught the boy's wrist with one hand, forced it upwards and pressed the other against his shoulder again.

This time the red chakra spread.

"I had hoped to save this for a more opportune moment… unleash these demonic forces where it might strike against that den of traitors and threats to the Daimyo that calls itself Konoha. Poetic justice, if you will, considering how the suffered at the hands of that true demon. But this will serve as a nice prelude if nothing else."

Sora's back arched, his mouth opening in a scream that carried above the noise of the fighting.

"Yes! Show me your true power, Sora! Lay waste to these fools, who think themselves your captors and your tormentors!"

"For a guy that says he wants to save the Land of Fire, you sure are happy burning most of it down, you crazy bastard!" I interrupted as I finally managed to barrel through the last of the shambling corpses, swinging down a claw at the man's head.

Kazuma released Sora at once as he effortlessly dodged away, but the chakra kept pouring out, crawling across the boy's chest and up the side of his face. I grabbed the back of his robes and tried to drag him away from the steps before the corrosive energy reached the wounded inside the hall.

I knew the Tailed Beasts weren't demons in the literal sense; they were chakra constructs, with names and fears and dreams, hunted down and used by humanity ever since their creation by the Safe of the Six Paths.

But standing so close to even a small part of the Kyuubi, feeling that sheer mindless rage burning in the air like napalm, it wasn't hard to see why the monks had thought Sora had been cursed by one.

The cloth disintegrated in my hands and heat seared across my fingers. I let go with a curse as Chiriku swept Sora's legs out from under him and drove a palm towards his back. Golden chakra flashed between them, briefly flattening the red aura against his skin before Sora twisted and struck him in the shoulder.

The monk landed hard beside me. We barely managed to duck before a ragged wave of chakra ripped through the railing and carried part of the veranda into the hall.

"Clear the entrance!" Chiriku shouted.

I got a hand beneath his arm and pulled him up while monks dragged the nearest wounded deeper inside. Sora crouched in the space we'd just left, fingers digging into the stone. His altered arm had grown larger, the skin darkening to burnt-orange scales beneath the red chakra, and when he raised his head I could see his teeth had lengthened.

He was crying. It was difficult to make out beneath the changes spreading across his face, but his good hand kept reaching towards the other arm as if he could somehow pull it off.

"M-make it… s-stop," he gasped.

Kazuma stepped towards him. "I can—"

Snarling, Chiriku hit him with a palm strike to the chest before he got another word out, driving the man backwards as the enraged monk followed him closely. Kazuma caught the next strike on his forearm and retaliated with a kick, forcing the monk to turn his hip away. I stayed by Sora, uncertain how to approach without losing the skin off my hands. He saw me move and tried to shuffle backwards, leaving bloody marks where his fingers scraped across the stone.

"S-stay… Stay away from me!"

"Sora, look at me."

His eyes found mine for a moment. I crouched, keeping my hands where he could see them, though the right one was already beginning to blister.

"The abbot's coming, he can help you, I promise. But you need to stay strong until he can get here. Can you do that for me Sora?"

I had no idea whether Chūkaku was coming. I hadn't seen the old man since yesterday and he was presumably still occupied with preventing the Temple from being annihilated by the Limelight jutsu. But Sora's frantic attempts to move had stopped at least, and I needed him to keep listening.

"It hurts…" he cried and even a manipulative bastard like me couldn't help but get his heartstrings pulled at the helplessness in the boy's cries.

"I know. I know, kiddo. Try to keep still, Chūkaku is coming, just… stay strong, alright buddy?"

A fresh surge of chakra forced me back before I could say anything else. It spread across the courtyard, lifting grit from the paving and tearing the remaining sleeve off Sora's arm. Something elongated behind his back, the suggestion of a tail forming out of the aura, and the boy's next attempt to speak came out as a strangled growl.

'Fuck. Please be coming.'

Lightning flashed in the south, followed by a second flare from the west. For a moment a bright line held above the roofs, then an explosion broke it apart and a section of the outer barrier flickered out. The ANBU were still fighting. Even if I could have called Tiger, there was nothing he could spare us.

Two monks came down the steps carrying lengths of prayer cord. One threw his around Sora's upper body while the other caught it, and together they pulled him away from the hall. The beads along the cord glowed as the boy struggled, but several cracked almost immediately. I grabbed the loose end and helped them drag him into the open, planting my feet while he tried to pull us towards him.

The heat travelled up the cord. I shifted my grip, smelled burning skin and held on, even as the beads slowly began slipping from my clawed hands, one by one by one by-

Golden hands closed around Sora's shoulders.

Chūkaku stood at the entrance, supported by the monk who'd been directing the wounded. Blood had dried beneath his nose and his robes clung damply to his chest. Behind him a many-armed golden figure made of the purest, thickest chakra I had ever seen rose tall and imposing above the doorway, several of its hands already reaching past us to pin the boy's limbs.

"Move away from him," the abbot said through clenched teeth.

We let go of the cord and I stumbled backwards as one of the golden palms pressed Sora's demonic arm flat against the paving. He howled, red chakra boiling up between its fingers. Chūkaku sank to one knee, keeping his own hands pressed together as if in prayer while the monk beside him tried to stop him falling further.

"Abbot!" Chiriku called, turning briefly from Kazuma, though the distraction almost cost him as the villain struck out with his blade again, almost taking the taller man's head off.

"Keep that man away." The ancient monk said in a strong voice, brooking no argument.

Chiriku did, catching Kazuma's wrist as he tried to form another seal. Their fight moved towards the far wall, the monk pressing hard enough that his former comrade had to give ground. I could see Kazuma trying to look past him towards Sora, but Chiriku caught him across the jaw for his trouble and forced his attention back.

"Mizuki!"

I turned at Tsubaki's voice. She came through the side passage with blood down the front of her clothes and a shallow cut along her cheek. In one hand she carried a severed head, held by the ragged remains of its neck, the long red hair gathered over her forearm to keep it off the ground.

I stared at it for a moment, then looked back at her face.

"Fū?"

"With the monks. The other woman tried to collapse the passage to the kitchens. Fū went after her." She was breathing hard, her eyes moving over the burns on my hands before settling on Sora. "What happened?"

"His father." I jerked my chin towards Kazuma. "He opened something in the boy's seal."

"Put me down, you fucking bitch!"

The monk nearest Tsubaki recoiled so sharply that he tripped over the abandoned cord. Fūka's eyes were open, her face twisted in fury as she tried to turn towards the woman holding her. Her hair tightened around Tsubaki's wrist. Tsubaki grimaced and fed chakra into her hand until the coils loosened again.

"I kept it intact," she told me, though the strain in her voice made it clear what that had cost her. "Can you take it?"

The head's eyes shifted towards me. "You. Tell your bitch to let go of me!"

I reached out and caught a loose strand between two claws. It curled away from the contact, responding to my chakra before I'd pushed more than a trickle into it. I looked towards Sora's arm. Beneath the abbot's golden hand, the flesh was still holding together despite enough chakra pouring through it to strip the skin off mine. I had been wondering how his body had adapted to the Kyuubi chakra fused to him on a cellular level. More than that, I'd been wondering how I could separate that potent energy without taking off the whole arm. Now with this living, chakra-absorbing hair I might finally have a way to do so.

"Tsubaki, I think I can draw it out."

Her eyes dropped to the tattoo on my right forearm. We'd spent enough time going through those diagrams together that she didn't need to ask where I meant to store the volatile chakra.

"Can you survive it?" she asked, worried.

I looked back at Sora. A crack opened across one of the golden fingers holding him down, and the abbot coughed behind me.

"This hair will function as a substitute for Jiongu threads, while the Chimera Technique will facilitate absorption and integration."

"That isn't what I asked." She pressed.

"I know." I met her eyes. "I don't have a better answer."

She held my gaze for a moment longer, then nodded stiffly and followed me towards the boy. Fūka began struggling harder as we approached, her hair writhing in Tsubaki's grip.

"Get me away from that!"

I knelt beyond the edge of the golden palm. "Chūkaku-sama. Can you expose his forearm? Just that much."

"What are you doing, Mizuki?" the old monk asked, his voice strained.

"Trying to remove the chakra. I need you to keep suppressing it."

He looked at the head in Tsubaki's hand. Fūka bared her teeth at him, and whatever question he'd been about to ask went unanswered as Sora convulsed beneath the restraints. The abbot pressed his palms tighter together. One golden hand shifted, sliding towards the boy's elbow while another closed around his wrist.

I gathered Fūka's hair near the roots and forced my chakra into it.

She screamed, the strands lashing against my forearms. I held on and worked the crude connection formula I'd managed to reconstruct from Taki's notes and Hiruko's research into the fibres. Resistance caught at it, the woman's chakra fighting mine with an awareness that made my stomach turn. Her consciousness was in there. I was holding her very soul between my hands.

"Wait!" she cried. "I can help you! You don't have to—"

I pulled, bracing my wrist against the back of her skull while Tsubaki tightened her grip on the neck. The scalp tore loose with the hair. Fūka's eyes rolled towards me, her mouth working around a sound that stopped as I forced another surge of chakra through the roots.

The head went slack in Tsubaki's hand. Something kept struggling in the hair for a few seconds longer, a frantic pressure against the pattern I was forcing into it, then that gave way too. I held the fibres until they moved when I wanted them to, then loosened my grip enough to separate a few strands.

Tsubaki lowered the head to the ground. Neither of us looked at it again.

I laid one end of the hair across my tattoo and separated the rest into several narrow bundles. They stiffened as I fed chakra through them, and I guided the tips beneath the edge of the golden hand towards Sora's skin.

All those days in Konoha Jail practising with Chakra Threads were finally good for something.

I tried to keep the sharp-tipped bundles shallow and gentle at first, but the pressure coming off Sora's arm made the strands whip sideways. The abbot's shoulders shook with the effort of forcing it down further.

"Whatever it is you're up to Mizuki, I would suggest you do it. Now." he managed.

No way to make this less invasive then. I roughly drove the strands of hair in, punching through the skin.

Sora jerked against the restraints. The fibres sank through his subdermal tissue and I felt the connection catch as I spread them out like a veiny network, a brief impression of heat and pressure before the other ends burrowed into my own forearm.

I'd expected it to hurt, but what I hadn't counted on was just how wrong the writhing tendrils felt as they dug underneath my skin and burrowed through my flesh. It took all of my willpower to keep myself from tearing the whole fucking thing out when the chakra hit.

My right hand slammed against the ground hard enough to break two claws. Red spread beneath my skin, following the veins up towards my elbow, and for a moment I couldn't remember how to breathe. The hair pulled taut between us as my body tried to recoil. Tsubaki caught my shoulder, keeping me beside Sora while I forced myself to hold the connection open.

Too much was coming through. I'd made the tattoo on my forearm into somewhere for the chakra to go and it was pouring into me far faster than I could work, burning through tissue that had never had to contain it. I felt a split open along my wrist and watched blood run into the black markings.

'The arm. Take the fucking arm first.'

I forced the hair deeper into Sora's flesh, drawing on the Chimera Technique Hiruko had left me. The fibres spread beneath the skin, fine enough to pass between the larger vessels, and began carrying more than chakra back through the connection. Blood darkened the red hair. My own flesh tightened around the roots as the technique reached for what I was bringing into it.

I was by no means a seal master and even after literal days spent pouring over his notes and schematics, I couldn't reproduce Hiruko's work from scratch. But I was a better thief than scribe; I may not have been a seal master, but Orochimaru was and thankfully I didn't have alter much, as Hiruko's foul potion had already made my body capable of accepting foreign tissue. Over the past few days, I'd pulled enough from his notes to work his intricate seal work into the elaborate tattoo Orochimaru had placed on the original Mizuki, (hopefully) supplementing what the technique was missing.

I could feel the process of the combined Chimera Technique and Jiongu integration already beginning as the first of Sora's cells reached my arm. The difficulty was keeping enough of myself intact for it to finish.

The skin along my wrist split further. Tsubaki said my name, sharply this time, and I tried to answer before discovering I'd bitten through the inside of my cheek. I swallowed the blood and concentrated on the tattoo instead as I fed my own chakra into the its entry point, trying to give the arriving tissue somewhere to settle, keep it from spreading where I did not want it to go. It should halt the unceasing tidal flow of foreign chakra and contain it there.

'Should…'

My fingers curled against the stone. Muscle cramped all the way to my shoulder, then began to change. Darkened skin spread beneath the stripes, thickening around the wrist. The split stopped widening. It still hurt enough that I could barely keep my eyes open, but the flesh nearest the connection was holding now, the same adaptation that had let Sora survive beginning to take in my own body.

The chakra kept coming.

Something hot and furious pressed into my chest, and for an instant I wanted to tear Tsubaki's hand off my shoulder. No, not just off my shoulder, tear it off completely and the thought frightened me enough to break my concentration. Red flared up my neck. I heard a low growl and realised it had come out of my own throat.

'No. The arm. Keep it in the fucking arm.'

I dragged the flow back towards the tattoo, following the paths Orochimaru had laid there and that now stood empty since the formula had been extracted and used by Hiruko. The sealing array gave me a route, but it wasn't closed. Chakra escaped through the points that should have carried the transformation into the rest of my body, pushing against my own network wherever it reached.

I caught my wrist with my left hand and pressed two fingers into the blood covering the markings. Drawing the connections was clumsy with claws and a shaking arm, but I knew where those outlets were. I'd spent enough nights tracing them while trying to work out how Hiruko had first changed me. I joined the first connection point back into the outer edge of the formula and forced chakra through the altered path.

The pressure in my shoulder eased.

I did the next, then the next, smearing blood across the black ink while Tsubaki held me upright. Each change trapped more of the chakra in the tattoo's pattern. My forearm swelled beneath my grip, the adopted tissue straining as I forced the remaining flow into the same route.

Chūkaku groaned. One of the golden hands broke apart beside me.

I closed the final connection around the original activation point.

For a moment the whole formula lit red. My arm jerked so violently that Tsubaki nearly lost her hold, and I felt the chakra batter against the altered pattern, looking for a way back out. I kept feeding my own chakra into the trigger, holding it shut until the pressure stopped spreading.

Beside me, Sora went limp.

The red aura had thinned to a faint haze around his arm. I kept the hair in place a little longer, drawing the last of the loose chakra and genetic material through while the abbot lowered the remaining golden palms. Then I withdrew the fibres from the boy's skin and pulled the loose lengths into my own forearm, sealing the connection behind them as the living hair burrowed beneath my tattooed skin, becoming a part of me just as the threads of the real Jiongu would have.

Just… much, much creepier and more disgusting. Which was saying something, considering the original technique.

Sora's chest rose beneath his torn robes. His arm was still misshapen, pinpricks of blood welling from thousands of tiny punctures where the hair had burrowed into his skin, but it had shrunk back towards normal proportions at least. I touched two fingers to his wrist with my good hand and felt a pulse, weak but steady.

Tsubaki let out a shaky breath beside me. She eased him onto his side while one of the monks hurried down from the steps to help her. Behind us Chūkaku's chakra construct faded, leaving the old man leaning heavily against his attendant.

I sat back on my heels and looked down at my arm.

The tattoo was darker, its markings thickened by the connections I'd worked into it. Beneath them I could still feel the Kyuubi's chakra, contained for the moment and pushing insistently against the closed trigger, an endless circuit looped in on itself. More than the energy, I could feel the weight of its hatred and I had to forcibly remind myself that there was no fox in there. I hadn't acquired a Bijū of my own just by grabbing a handful of somebody else's hair and shoving it into a seal tattoo.

If it were that easy, every minor village and major lord would have dozens of fully empowered jinchūriki running around and the Great Nations would feature a lot more man-made craters than it already did.

But I'd successfully taken the chakra Sora had carried for years, along with the means his father had evolved within his body to survive it, and managed to shut it all inside myself (without blowing myself up, which according to both Hiruko's and Taki's notes, had been a distinct possibility).

As of now, I was no longer just Mizuki, semi-missing nin from Konoha. Now I was something that transcended rank and loyalty entirely. Something dangerous.

A pseudo-jinchūriki.

'Assuming I haven't just given myself a particularly elaborate way to explode.' The sudden thought sobered me and I pumped the breaks on the growing megalomania that had been building as I stared at the sealing array on my arm.

I was more powerful than ever, I knew, yet compared to the real monsters walking this world, it was akin to a lake after a bit of rainfall next to an ocean during a flood. I had a long ways to go yet… but admittedly, this was the first real step I'd made and despite my exhaustion, I couldn't help but feel a bit giddy.

"Mizuki?" Tsubaki's hand settled against my cheek, turning my face towards her. "Look at me."

I did. Her thumb brushed blood away from the corner of my mouth and I became aware that she was checking my eyes.

"I'm here. It's me," I managed, surprised to find my voice haggard and throat raw.

'Have I been screaming? I didn't even notice…'

She searched my face a moment longer before looking down at my arm. "Can you stand?"

A crash from the other side of the courtyard interrupted my attempt to answer. Kazuma had driven Chiriku back against the wall, a blade flashing in his hand as he struck at the monk's stomach. Chiriku turned the wrist aside at the last second and drove his forehead into Kazuma's face, briefly forcing him back before he regained his footing with a spinning back kick that embedded the monk further into the wall.

Kazuma looked towards Sora, knocked out and looking pitiful, but also distinctly un-demonlike. His gaze followed the trail of blood that connected Sora's mangled arm to mine, settling on the altered tattoo and his eyes widened before he snarled.

"NO! You dare!?" He started forwards, only for Chiriku to burst from the rubble and catch his shoulder, throwing him back with a roar.

I pushed myself upright, keeping my left hand on Tsubaki's shoulder until I trusted my legs. My whole body ached, but beneath the pain there was a pressure I could feel through every beat of my heart. I touched the tattoo's trigger with a little chakra, opening it as carefully as I could.

Red spread over my forearm. The muscles swelled, claws lengthening from fingers that had already darkened beneath the stripes, and the broken tips grew back as I watched, grateful for the added confirmation I had incorporated Sora's genetic adaptations. Otherwise, just activating my arm would've crippled me instead. Heat climbed towards my shoulder before I narrowed the opening again, keeping the flow to something I could bear.

Tsubaki withdrew her hand from my arm, watching the chakra gather over it.

"Stay with Sora," I said, a harsh growl in my voice that hadn't been there before.

She looked towards Kazuma, then back at me. I waited until she'd moved away before shifting my weight, balling my enlarged fist until the knuckles stood out, my eyes on the two former Guardian Ninja.

Chiriku struck at Kazuma's head with an open palm. He ducked beneath it, caught the monk's sleeve and tried to drag him off balance, but Chiriku stepped into the pull and drove his knee towards his ribs. Kazuma twisted away, releasing the cloth and jumping clear towards the open side of the courtyard, sealing through the air with the effortless grace only elite ninja possessed.

I pushed off, breaking the paving beneath my foot. I crossed the distance before I'd quite adjusted to how fast I was moving, catching Kazuma just as he was in the middle of his dodge, suspended in the air. His eyes widened as I planted my left foot and turned my hip into the strike, just as Chiriku had been beating into me over the past two days. He tried to bring his arm up between us, but my fist had already struck his chest.

His ribs broke beneath my knuckles, and I kept going, driving my demonic arm straight through him until my fist tore out of his back.

---

AN: Got a bit more written than I had anticipated, so a double update for now. You can read up to five chapters ahead over on my Patreon

 

[Spearow]

The chapter was great, thank you for the work