"I'd rather prove it than say it," Haruichi muttered back, clenching his back teeth against the receeding echo that lastest exchange. It wasn't getting easier to deal with, like a physical pain could become. Haruichi knew why - it was the same principle that made the jyuuken so deadly - you couldn't tense, sheild, or prepare your chakra paths for assault. It happened, and you coped or you didn't.

He forced his fingers out of the clenched fists they'd twitched into, flipped them through the seals, reached out and grasped the Inuzukas' chakra and went back to work. Tease it back to it's true shape on the microscopic and macroscopic levels, fix their systems and then fix their connections, lead their links back to one another and reattach the bonds he'd severed. Then start again until ten, and survive the hurt they couldn't help inflicting, and begin again.

There were no more words exchanged as he fell into the flow of the work, every scrap of concentration dedicated to strategizing and manipulating and perfecting his timing. Haruichi stepped back into his training as a boy, where his sensei forced him to perform katas as well as mathematics and timed exercises all at once. She'd only make him go for longer if he made a mistake, until the days had come when he could calculate down to the instant, the angle and the number of steps what his path would be as he perfected the Hakkesho Kaiten and the Hakke Rokujuyon Sho. It was the same here, save that if he made a mistake with the timing the consequences would be worse than anything she'd ever done to him.

"Well, little one, that's why they call it growing up."

So he didn't make any mistakes, although by the time they reached the sixth round of ten he was starting to appreciate why everybody else who'd ever been able to do this was dead as a doornail. His vision felt like it was collapsing into that luminescent putrescence that wouldn't lift from his sight, and the only thing that was keeping him on course was the glimmering, vivid rightness of Kuromaru and Tsume's chakra paths as they were repaired and reconnected. The light from that outshone the dark from the pain, so he had to be winning.