Even hours into the morning, I couldn’t believe it. My face was in a constant state of burning. My ears felt on fire, and my heart sped so much that I was becoming a bit afraid. Not to mention the butterflies, the tingling, and everything else. Somehow, the world looked brighter, more beautiful than it always was.
I still couldn’t meet any of my team’s eyes.
They knew. I knew they knew. They knew I knew they knew.
Amidst it all, I somehow could feel their chakra better than ever. My ability to sense chakra had been steadily improving, but it was the first time, I think, that their emotions were this strong.
Not even finding the destroyed town had caused this reaction.
Karin’s was a mix of flowing and throbbing. From what she’d told me about how chakra behaved, she was content and determined. If I was interpreting this correctly, she was happy for me, and determined… to do something.
Tenten’s chakra was troubling. It was chaotic and unstable. Karin told me it mostly meant confusion or some sort of mental turmoil. Was Ino kissing me that wrong in her eyes? I didn’t know. Maybe it was something else.
Ino’s chakra was another story altogether. It alternated between pulsing, behaving like a stream, and bursting. According to Karin’s chakra indexation chart, that was excitement, satisfaction, and joy.
Chakra sensing wasn’t something I couldn’t always sense, but intense moments made it easier to perceive how their chakra behaved.
And somehow, I still had a hard time believing what had happened. Best Girl Ino kissed me! And not a small peck on the lips like last time. My ears burned even more just remembering it. I might have also done a victory dance, maybe. Don’t blame me. I felt like the luckiest girl in the world.
Every time I looked at Ino, she had a satisfied, smug smile on her face.
Which only made me blush deeper. Gosh, what was I? A teen in love?
That elated state of being didn’t last, however. It started with smoke in the distance. More so because, based on our map, there wasn’t supposed to be anything in that direction. From my place ahead of the pack, I stopped, checking with Karin what she could sense.
“Two of those strange chakras, another one that feels like a normal chakra, but—”
“It’s someone with a lot of chakra.” She looked at me for some reason. “Not as much as Naruto, though.”
That pushed out all the in love girl silliness out of me. “How?” I asked. Did we run into another jinchuriki? Or maybe another Uzumaki ninja?
Karin just shrugged. “It’s a lot.”
I studied my team’s face. Karin’s uncertain eyes, Ino’s determination, Tenten’s still looking confused. If it were up to me, I would like to investigate things, but we couldn’t take that long to help the people trapped in the mobile fortress.
“Should we investigate?” I asked.
“I think so.” “What if they’re attacking another village?” “We have to.”
That decided it. “Arm up,” I ordered.
I considered what to do. I wanted to create more beacons to give the girls, but my chakra was still low from the previous days. I didn’t have enough for three beacons, and even if the selfish part of me wanted to create one and leave with Ino, the practical side of me knew that was a horrible idea.
Nothing killed team coherence than differential treatment between team members. That might be a moot point with how Tenten still looked at me and Ino, but they knew what the wood kunai was. Giving only one to Ino was like slapping them in the face, saying I valued Ino’s life more than theirs.
Which, ugh, it wasn’t true. I was just more afraid now because I didn’t want Ino getting hurt. The most update n0vels are published on NoveI(F)ire.net
“I don’t have enough chakra to create a beacon for everyone,” I admitted, looking at my team. I created one of the kunais, burning through most of the chakra I had recovered through the night. Even though I wanted to give it to Ino, the practical choice was Karin. She was the weaker of us, as well as the one who could heal us from almost any fatal injuries. I tossed her the wooden kunai. Once she caught it, I turned toward the others. “Don’t take unnecessary risks.”
Preparations made, and we ran toward the potential enemy.
We burst into what once had been a caravan. Big, hulking pack animals, creatures that resembled armored rhinos, lay slain near a series of strange carriages. Each one was a wide, low platform mounted on curved runners instead of wheels, like a cross between a sled and a tank. From the design, they were meant to be dragged across grassy plains, sandy roads, or shallow rivers, not normal roads.
There were a fair number of those carriages, but most of them were destroyed.
The clearing was a mess. I saw a few people crumpled on the ground, craters were everywhere, but they didn’t look like explosions; it was more like something heavy had fallen.
But the problem wasn’t the strange caravan, but the massive army of metal-clad golems swarming the place, a few carrying the caravan’s people away.
It was easy to find the two people with the strange chakra. One looked like a young man, blond hair, face hidden beneath a shining silver metal armor that left the mouth exposed, and hid almost everything else but the red eyes.
Panic spiked through me thinking I was looking at a Sharingan, but soon noticed there were no tomoes; the eyes just had a strange shade of red.
The other was… a werewolf woman wearing medieval metal armor. Another one of the shapechangers? Her body still looked like a human’s, but her face was a wolf’s: a maw full of razor-sharp teeth on display. Her fur was almost the same color as her armor, dark blue, aside from her hair. She had a full mane of white hair with white stripes of fur coming down to the tip of her nose. Not to mention the evil-looking red eyes, with dark sclera.
Fighting the two and the army of golems was a single woman.
Not tall, fair-skinned, with blonde hair that parted above her forehead. Even from here, I could see — and feel — the diamond-shaped seal on her forehead. She wasn’t wearing the haori with the “gamble” spelled on it, and even if I had never seen the woman before, there was no way I’d mistake her for anyone else. Even more so when Tsunade punched one of the golems into the ground, splattering the thing in a single punch and creating a crater the others had to maneuver around and through.
Well, we found Tsunade. No way that was anyone else but her.
Now we just needed to defeat the whole golem army. Easy.