Why You Runnin?
Ao leaned against the wall of his guest room, his old apartment long since rented out to a new tenant. He lamented the loss of everything in this village, the overlap of his memories and their current replacements. How his favorite food stands no longer took up space on their corners, or the way his old dive bar was now full of young people looking to get laid like him and his dumbass friends used too. How dare they disrespect their elders by taking their scene?
Mostly he just wanted to know how the hell Zabuza Momochi managed to grow his chakra into something so potent it almost felt like the presence of a Tailed Beast, and how the hell he managed to bring back so many long gone chakra signatures. With his Byakugan, the man's conservative traditional attire concealed nothing from Ao, who saw the transformation of Zabuza's body in all its glory. Every head of muscle worked into perfection, the raw physical energy produced in such a transformation, by such a body, incalculable, especially for a physical phenom like Momochi. It boggles the mind that he managed to achieve such a level of training while on the run, working under the table missions, and balancing it out with mental pursuits to merge the physical and spiritual energies into the colossal pool of chakra like a hidden ocean just under the man's skin.
As for the walking dead stalking the village as women… something about the man's comment about bringing the dead back to life and turning them into women screamed refuge in audacity to the middle aged shinobi. It sounds crazy, but Ao's veteran instincts made him feel that at the end of a long dramatic climactic dangerous investigation in which many might lose their lives, they'd be left with Zabuza laughing about how he told them all so. It sounds crazy, but that's just how it is sometimes.
Doesn't mean he isn't going to do everything in his power to unveil this mystery, he just made peace with the possibility that after great hardship and loss it might still end like a gag. As Ao firmed his resolve, Mei's eye twitched and her fists ached from prolonged white knuckled clenching.
"That was Yagura." she growled the name through grit teeth, "You confirmed the news of his death with that eye, but somehow they pulled a fast one."
"It is possible that they tricked my all seeing eye back then." Ao nodded, "Her signature matched his, minus the Three Tails." Ao sighed, providing corroborating evidence to his leader's intuition, "However, I also recognized the signatures of many long since passed shinobi. Members of the Seven Swordsmen of the Mist. They've all been changed into women, but the chakra still looks the same, but stronger. Their presence makes me believe something else is going on here."
"How many?" Mei inquired in a pained tone.
"Seven, with an eighth signature I don't recognize far more potent than any veteran Jonin's." Ao informed, "They are stationed around the village, but I don't see their iconic swords on them. For some that means they are far more dangerous."
Despite the ingrained reverence for members of the elite group, Ao saw better than anyone else in the village, and even blind men can see that some of the fabled Seven Swords are absolute ass outside of their niche uses.
"So they've boxed us in." Mei muttered, "What's their play? Zabuza won't start a fight with the Daimyo in the village, not with how chummy their relationship looks, but how can we know that with Yagura still around? Are they colluding, is one the puppet of the other?"
"He seems to have bonded tightly with the Daimyo in a remarkably short amount of time." Ao agreed, "As for this mess with Yagura... I just can't imagine the Fourth so servile. I believe Zabuza has found some Forbidden Justu in his travels. This could be a big show of force to cow you into submission. Revealing more stick to make the carrot more enticing."
"Why now? What does Zabuza even want? If he can control people like Yagura and members of the Seven Swordsmen, why is he playing games with us?" Mei's mental wheels spun in the mud.
"Cats often torture captured mice." Ao counseled darkly, "The only thing Zabuza has insisted on since the first meeting was the marriage between you and him. Everything else he has seemed at least flexible on, if not outright agreeable."
"And if he's a cat playing with us, any points earned by us in the negotiations mean nothing." she spat.
Mei scoffed at the idea that her feminine wiles took hold of the heart of the man who became the Demon of the Hidden Mist as a preteen. Zabuza almost seemed asexual before his failed coup drove him into exile from Kirigakure, and there were no rumors of the man engaging in any sort of feminine companionship or comfort in his time abroad. Zabuza lived life like a sword hanging over the heads of everyone around him, just waiting for an excuse to drop.
"We should flee." Ao stated plainly, "Just the two of us, I can guide us out."
"And leave our forces at his mercy?" Mei shook her head.
"We are already at his mercy." Ao countered, "You alone stand a chance against him, but with all the powerful shinobi I've seen, you would need to unleash all you have and damn the consequences just to hope for a chance against them."
"We'll go with Top Slice." Mei commanded.
"The more people we try to leave with, the less likely our success." Ao advised against evacuating with only the elite one percent of their forces.
"And if I abandon my top shinobi then why did we fight at all." Mei denied his position, "Top Slice, Ao. Get moving."
The pair calmly left the room and seeing no change in Zabuza's guard forces quickly located the rebel army's senior officers, who in turn helped them alert the others who made the cut for the tactical retreat termed Top Slice. No one made a ruckus or any show of packing anything, instead, upon the correct time, just over twenty shinobi assembled to escape with Mei and Ao, including the only Seven Swords wielder, Chojuro.
"They aren't moving." Ao muttered as he guided the group out of the village with his Byakugan Eye.
"Isn't that a good thing?" One of the party quietly asked as they cleared the boundary of the village.
"Maybe." Ao shrugged, but felt his anxiety growing instead of shrinking.
Two hundred meters from the village outskirts, Ao saw them, all of the largest signatures in the village loyal to Zabuza or Yagura, move at once to give chase.
"They're moving!" Ao shouted and the rebel elite abandoned stealth and launched themselves forward at top speed, moving together with a group coordinated Body Flicker.
"Should we scatter?" Mei asked and Ao shook his head.
"The closest of them are moving parallel with us, fast!" Ao answered and the group continued to flee at top speed.
The landscape blurred as the veteran shinobi put their all into the escape, but suddenly Ao screamed, "NO! He can't be that fast!"
The group received an explanation for Ao's scream in the form of Zabuza Momochi appearing ahead of them.
"Why you runnin?" the enormous man mocked with his sheathed sword slung over his shoulders.
Mei refused to let him stall, her hands blurring through signs and she spat an enormous stream of red hot lava at the arrogant disputed kage. 'Burn in hell, you bastard!' Mei thought as she put her hate behind the technique.
Faster still, Zabuza's huge hand burned through a sequence of half seals, launching a Great Waterfall Jutsu, a massive vortex of water that threatened to scar the land with its violent force. The two techniques collided, and the resulting explosion covered the field in scalding steam, not enough to harm shinobi of their caliber, but enough to cook civilians.
As shinobi of the Hidden Mist, they all felt right at home in the obscuring veil of rapidly cooling fog that now hung heavily around them.
"He's laced the mist with chakra!" Ao shouted, and before he could explain what that meant a silent streak came through the Mist and cleaved the man in half.
"I can't see!" Ao continued, the cut so clean he hadn't registered the pain until his legs fell out from under him.
'Shit!' Mei screamed in her mind as she made the signs for the Great Breakthrough Jutsu, her heart hammering in her ears.
Hidden Mist Shinobi may feel at home in low visibility conditions, but there is one man feared far and wide for his unparalleled skill hiding in the mist, the master of silent killing, the man who just killed her closest advisor and now moved freely amongst them.
"Great Breakthrough!" she cried as she blew away the mist covering everything from the light of the moon.
Her head whipped around as her eyes took in the bisected bodies of her team, Top Slice now top sliced. Suddenly hot pain erupted in her chest and her chakra revolted, tilting her head down she saw the highly polished blade gleaming white in the reflected light from the night sky, not a drop of red clinging to the blade despite its bloody work.
"Don't worry about how you led them all to their deaths." Zabuza's rich and raspy voice filled her head as his breath hit her ear, and an arm snaked around her waist to keep her from collapsing despite her sudden lethal injury and rampant chakra refusing her control, "Just think of how lovely the ceremony will be tomorrow. All your friends here cheering as our vows of love and loyalty bring peace to the village, a feast for all fit to bankrupt a criminal organization that held onto an entire country for years!"
"Fu..ck… you." Mei grit out before the blade occupying her heart slid back out.
The absence caused her blood to come pouring out rapidly, but suddenly her chakra control returned. Her hands rose to take the bastard with her, but Zabuza idly slapped them away from each other. Unable to form seals, Mei cursed fate as her tormentor continued to lazily play during her final moments.
Her dreams, her ambitions, her hopes, it all raced through her mind before it faded to black, and then light filled her eyes once more. Feeling some of her strength back, Mei reacted to the sight of Zabuza in front of her with his fingertips blazing with his oily purple chakra.
"Seal." He growled as she failed to defend herself, and what little chakra she had access to become sluggish.
"What? Why?" she managed as the beast of a man flashed through hand signs faster than she'd ever seen anyone before.
As his chakra invaded her mind Mei felt her fear, pain, and anxiety slip away. Eagerness and hope took their place. Tomorrow she'd marry the man she'd fallen in love with at first sight and their union would bring about the peace and stability Kirigakure needed to finally rise above the savage struggles of the Land of Water and become a shining jewel of a city. Mei shook her head, clearing away the fog in her mind and seeing clearly once more.
Her man, a raw hunk of twisted steel and sex appeal, looked down as he operated a handheld device and after a few seemingly back and forth interactions with it he smiled up at her, "That works. C'mon Mei, let's go bring your friends back from the dead."
"Let's!" Mei grinned and took her husband-to-be's arm.
She couldn't help but let out a girlish giggle, tomorrow she'd live out her little girl dream to wed in a big ceremony, the biggest ever in Kirigakure, and she'd finally set out on the path to achieve her social and political ambitions too. All because of her wonderful man, Zabuza!
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Battles aren't a field of narratively driven competing ideals to Zabuza, and Mei found out she had a critical lack of Onoki to carry her through this fight. Girl found out the sharp way the difference between the top of Tier 6 power and the bottom.
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