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Kakuzu rose, face contorted. His stitches tore apart as his real body surged forth.
"You brat…! I'm going to turn your corpse and take your heart into my collection."
Neji stood, one knee shaking. The power in him started to subside.
He didn't reply. The mask whispered something inside him. It wasn't words. It was a pulse. A knowing.
He had one more strike.
One.
He moved again. No wasted motion. A sidestep into an upward palm strike that blasted the Fire mask, cracking its frame. A jump back. Dodging two lightning bolts.
A black thread lanced forward.
Just as it hit, Neji spun.
Eight Trigrams Vacuum Bloom. An experimental idea. But the mask boosted the technique.
His chakra pulsed outward from every tenketsu, not as rotation, but as detonation.
A sphere erupted. The air bent. Kakuzu in an attempt to save the hearts, he produced more threads, which were sliced in ten places mid-air.
The impact knocked them both apart.
Dust. Silence.
--
His knees buckled, but he didn't fall.
Not yet.
The Haze mask cracked. The light in it flickered. The strength, the otherworldly presence that had moved like a second heartbeat inside him - gone.
Neji gasped. The foreign chakra was leaving his system like water draining from cracked stone.
His vision blurred.
But in that moment, he saw Kakuzu's red color hue weaken from his palm strike.
However, the strength that had let him shatter masks, dodge lightning, and rupture the very land was fading fast, and all that remained was pain.
Burning. Deep, marrow-level pain.
His ribs were fractured. His lungs tasted blood. His left arm barely twitched. His skin tingled from chakra feedback. And the Byakugan was the only thing still working.
The True Eyes had shut down the moment the Haze Mask shattered. Its royal-blue brilliance dulled. The silvery gleam in his vision was gone, like the gods had turned off the switch. His vision had gone from multi-layered perception of truth back to chakra flow detection. What had once been a vibrant storm of colors with nature energy particles swirling, hearts glowing - was now back to the pale blues and grays of chakra channels.
Still. He could see.
And that was enough for now.
Ahead, Kakuzu stirred.
The canyon was in shambles. Smoke rose from cracked rock, shattered pillars, collapsed ridges. Earth chakra had been hurled across the battlefield like a tantrum. Lightning had carved ruts through boulders. Neji's blood spattered the dirt near his feet.
Kakuzu had taken real damage. Water mask was shattered again, and another Fire mask cracked beyond function. The threads around his body twitched erratically.
Neji stared at him, exhaling shallow breaths.
He can still kill me. Easily.
But the fury in Kakuzu's eyes had turned cold. That was worse than rage.
"You… little insect." His voice was flat. Controlled. "That chakra. That power wasn't yours."
He took a step forward.
Neji didn't move. Couldn't.
Every part of his body screamed. But that wasn't the worst part.
The backlash from the mask. The sudden chakra injection, the muscle strain, the premature release of whatever power had been sealed away in his mind was eating into his nervous system. His hands trembled, not with fear, but from shorted-out nerves. His tenketsu were misfiring.
He couldn't risk another confrontation like this. Not now. Not when he was already weakened.
I was never going to win this. Not clean. Not even at my best.
That was the brutal honesty of it.
The only reason he had landed those hits was the pulse of alien chakra, the vivid hue markers he saw through with shingan. Each heart had glowed a different shade. Each thread had revealed its type. That was the only reason he had been able to bypass Kakuzu's insane durability and actually damage him.
Now, with the Shingan subsided, it was a guessing game again.
One he couldn't afford to play.
Neji's breath rasped through his teeth as he forced himself upright. Barely.
The plan had to be simple.
Don't die. Escape. Survive.
He thought... leave something behind that'd keep Kakuzu off him long enough to disappear.
His fingers moved sluggishly, but instinct guided them.
He dragged his palm across the ground, etching a half-circle into the earth. Then a line. A symbol. It wasn't a full seal... he wasn't a fuinjutsu specialist. But he could improvise. A chakra marker, laced with compressed chakra points... an unstable signal, like a flare or a fake trail.
He whispered, barely audible: "Chakra Sogeki… Scatter Trace."
From his tenketsu, thin threads of chakra flared... some visible, some not. They embedded into the nearby rocks behind bushes, and then which would should confuse his senses, but he should be quickly be able to figure out. But before that—
He ran. Staggered was more like it.
The moment his feet moved, Kakuzu charged.
The Wind mask surged with remaining chakra and the Lightning heart howled again.
A fist slammed where Neji had been a second earlier, shattering the earth in a cone.
Rocks exploded.
Dust cloaked the space.
Neji twisted midair, gasping in agony, and flung a kunai tagged with a flash bomb behind him. The flare activated, and the space lit up like a beacon... falsely glowing with an absurd chakra spike.
Kakuzu paused... just for a second losing the footing, he fell from the edge of the canyon. But that second was enough.
Neji bolted behind a jagged rock formation. His chakra was almost gone. His legs were failing. But he dragged himself forward.
Behind him, Kakuzu snarled, "You can't run forever. I don't need to chase. I'll find you when your trail ends. And I'll take your heart. Even if I have to rip it out in pieces."
By the time Neji reached a slope further west, the air had grown colder. The sun was creeping in. The shadows lengthened and the stars above felt impossibly far.
He collapsed under a ridge, half-buried in sand and stone.
His fingers were shaking. His vision was faltering. His body felt alien. And every breath felt like sucking in glass shards.
He touched his face where the Haze Mask had once bloomed.
There was a faint mark.
He didn't know what that being was... what force had touched his mind and pulled something forgotten from his bones. But it had given him one truth:
Power without understanding is a razor in the hands of a blind man.
He had almost died.
Twice now.
Once in that nameless Uchiha's hands. Once today.
He wanted to forget what had happened. But the pain wouldn't let him forget. His arm was torn at the joint. His ribs creaked every time he breathed. His chakra network was in shock.
And still. He lived.
Neji stared up at the sky.
The canyon behind him was silent now. But he knew Kakuzu wasn't done. He wasn't in Akatsuki yet... he hadn't worn the robes, hadn't shown the rings... but he was a now his reaper. And now he'd seen Neji's face.
That's going to be a problem.
But for later.
For now, Neji needed to vanish.
He pulled a sealing scroll from a hidden pouch. Poured chakra into it. A false trail activated... chakra matching his signature, flowing east. This was a one time pony trick.
He'd go west. He'd crawl, limp, bite into roots for water if he had to.
Because he didn't just need to escape.
He needed to heal. And learn.
What was the mask? Why did it react to him? Why was his chakra compatible with something so foreign?
He remembered the voice again, the words before the awakening.
"Not a gift." No, it wasn't.
It was my always my power.
A glimpse. A taste of what lay ahead.
And it had left a cost behind. The nerve damage in his arm. The split chakra coils. The pain in his bones.
But also... It had let him fight a monster. Barely. And not die.
A few miles back, Kakuzu stood at the edge of the ruin, dust swirling around him.
He stared at the blood on his threads. Not enough. He hadn't killed him.
A part of him was furious. He destroyed the whole canyon into rumble in his anger. and fell into the valley.
That boy... Hyuga, clearly... had tapped into something that shouldn't exist.
A chakra burst. And his weird eyes seems to be flowing where my hearts were at. Even for a brief moment, powerful enough to threaten his hearts.
Kakuzu's eyes narrowed. The whole canyon is collapsed with fight. Now, the traces are gone in the rubble.
"That boy… he'll be worth more than just a bounty someday."
He turned, blending into the wind, the black threads twitching around him like the limbs of a centipede.
He wasn't done. Not yet. With Water heart shattered and fire heart not at his peak. He need to find hearts. Hopefully, the Merchant bounty is worthwhile. He should have guards, hopefully there are good Fire and water style users.
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A/N: itachi, my fire boy, what will happen to you.