Steel forged souls, cont.
This is a scene, which poorly illustrates the epic battle in my head. -blows raspberries-
It was a four way stand off at highnoon, the outlaw verses the lawman verses the betrayed brother verses the new sherrif. All four swirling red and black eyes at each other, trying to see the thread of motion that would leave at least one of them a bloody smear. Cloud wished for the ten thousandth time he hadn't let Zack watch the wild western chocobo wrangling series.
"Nii-san, how come the old guy is fighting to? Are they gonna kill their grandpa?" Naruto's innocent question was far too loud and... well Naruto. The silver haired ninja looked like he was valiently hiding a twitch.
Cloud and Naruto were behind Zack, silent and deadly support ready to throw down as soon as it became clear who they were throwing down against. Sephiroth was a menacing figure behind the silver ninja, ANBU Zack had said, but something felt off about that. On the left of Zack was an angry little boy whos fist crackled with enough energy to light up the whole of Midgar and was one step away from carving them all into cold cuts, backed by yet another silver haired ninja. The silver stranger wore thick glasses and had the cold dead feeling of a snake about him. Cloud was pretty sure he wanted that guy dead.
The last corner of the diamond radiated boredom. The Outlaw in this little drama, Itachi, stood in blank silence with his blue fishy friend and stared across the square at his little brother, something dark and cruel and nasty hidden in his smirk. He made Naruto's skin want to crawl right off his bones. Which made Naruto want to punch him right through the planet and out the other side.
Nothing moved, nothing breathed, for a moment that stretched into eternity the last sharingan bearers stood and waited.
The attack that came set everyone in motion, but only blue eyes saw everything. From one heartbeat to the next the stillness was broken by a flash of light followed by a wave of darkness. Unseen till now, one last player entered the game, an oversized shiruken spinning in his left hand, kunai in the right, moving too fast for Zack or the ANBU to stop in time. Plummeting straight down from somewhere above, the figure landed, ripped open glasses ninja from throat to bowel and slit Uchiha Sasuke's throat with his kunai in the time it took to blink. Blood soaked the street and the battle was on.
The figure, dressed in white robes and silver armor with a Leaf Hunter mask, parried the blows from Itachi, twisted under the swing of a bustersword and danced around Masamune before managing to vanish, leaving a free for all in the center of a widening crater, jutsus meeting spells blocked by furious steel. The ANBU was in the thick of it, his team mates holding back the fishy sonofabitch with smiles. Cloud picked up a fallen kunai and prepared to defend himself and his cousin, while Naruto, like the prankster Zack had nurtured, kawarimied to the fallen child across the way.
He met steel, and blood, and the scent of something burning in a rotten way. The body of the older man was dissolving under a white powder, turning to a sickly, bloody ooze. The Hunter, splashed in gore that was almost artistically pretty against the white of his robes, was tending to the child. Sasuke, Naruto had heard him called.
"Hey! You bastard! Leave him alone! Aeris is gonna fix him and I'm gonna kick your ass!"
Either the battle was too loud for the participants to hear this bold exclamation, or there was a notice-me-not jutsu over the area trying very hard to hide the painfully orange menacing thirteen-year-old.
The Hunter remained silent, fingers deftly moving over the slit throat of the Uchiha heir, wiping away blood to reveal a senbon needle skillfully placed in just the spot to cause instant paralysis. Naruto's astounding grasp of the situation led him to say "Huh?".
The next moment a rather large section of the street was pulverized by air preasure and a large sky rise was falling to rubble. Apparently Sephiroth was getting a tad peeved bacause there was also an ominous darkening of the sky and what looked like a six legged horse materializing from the ether. The Hunter and his cargo vanished again, leaving Naruto to curse his slow reflexes and Cloud to curse his fool of a relation.