Ten minutes ago that spinning kick might have connected solidly with Ryouma's jaw. Meeting Takeshi and Hakone for drinks on his last night of freedom had clearly been a bad idea, not to be repeated. He and Hakone had both paced themselves, and he hadn't even truly been drunk when he'd gone to bed, just before eleven; he'd woken six hours later without a hangover. He'd have been fine at any ordinary training session, after a few laps and a few hundred pushups to sweat the last of the alcohol out. But ordinary training sessions didn't generally start with Kakashi's most determined attempts at grinding Ryouma's face into the dirt, and it'd taken him a while to catch up.

He was awake now, though. He leaned back, letting Kakashi's heel whistle just under his chin, and saw out of the corner of his eye a blur of motion as Katsuko backflipped. Three kunai embedded themselves in the dirt where she'd stood.

"Cheater!" Katsuko crowed in delight.

They were both insane. Ryouma deflected Kakashi's next blow hard enough to set him back a pace, and Katsuko slid in at his side as smoothly as a blade coming out of a well-oiled sheath, following up before Kakashi could recover.

Or she would have, if Kakashi weren't so damned fast. He caught her kick on his crossed wrists, grabbed her ankle, and twisted, wrenching her off-balance. She threw out a hand; it barely glanced off Ryouma's shoulder, but it gave her the momentum she needed to turn Kakashi's twist into her own spin, locking her other leg around his neck and buckling him toward the ground.

Ryouma had one moment to make the pin, before Kakashi wrapped his hand around Katsuko's knee and forced the joint out of alignment. He didn't manage the takedown quite as cleanly as he'd wanted, because Katsuko was crushed between them and he couldn't get a lock on one of Kakashi's arms. Katsuko was laughing. Kakashi made a thin, snarly sound, and his free hand came up glinting with steel.

Ryouma couldn't disarm him, from this angle. But he could lock his knee over Kakashi's hips and roll, bringing Katsuko on top and within reach of the kunai-hand. She pried the knife out of his hand, and he seized the opportunity, as if he'd been waiting for it all along, to grab her wrists and yank her down. Their tangled center of balance shifted. Kakashi's hips bridged up, and Ryouma surged to block him before he could roll again and top them both—

A hawk cried, overhead.