| [May. 28th, 2009|07:51 pm] |
Striking metal hammered the air out of his chest; he didn't have the breath to scream Natsumi's name. There was nothing to mark her fall but an avalanche of stone, a double-dozen ripples in low-lying mist, and a gut-punch of bright white rage.
He didn't have breath, but he damn sure had enough chakra to slap his palm over the blade scoring his ribs and wrench it free, tearing it from the redhead's hands. Blood splattered over twisted wooden slats; his still-new chestplate was a crunching mess, porcelain shards stitched together in gashed cloth.
And none of it mattered, because he'd just let another pretty girl die.
Asuma snarled, stripped his henge away, and smashed the centuries' old hilt straight into the redhead's teeth.
Or where her teeth would have been, if she hadn't bent like a reed and vanished in a glimmer of chakra. Genjutsu. He snapped the fake money-bag around, letting the mouth fall open, and cast a cascade of rocks at the suddenly empty air. A throttled grunt--twenty feet away--was enough of a target to fling a kunai at, but there was no second sound.
Natsumi was in the river.
And the target still had the damn scabbard. Asuma swore, threw himself forward, and barely dodged the vicious black shuriken that nearly embedded in his voicebox. Fingers--and the kid was winding up for another throw.
Asuma answered him with a pillar of flame. It engulfed the torii gate, lashed into the bridge's gang-ropes, and drained away enough chakra to make his head swim. But the teenager skidded from a slick baby assassin to a screaming, blackening, falling chunk of panic, and that made for two (three) corpses and one vanishing bitch, and there was nothing else to care about.
Natsumi had to be dead. The redhead still had the scabbard. Still counted as a mission--
"Fuck you," Asuma bellowed, and slammed chakra through his stolen, re-stolen sword. One scything strike was enough to part rope and wood like breaking ice; two was enough to destroy them entirely. The bridge shuddered and snapped apart, dropping him with the last vestiges of falling stone and a bloodied weapon held tight against his side. A high scream tore the air; it wasn't his.
The translocation halfway down damn sure was. |
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