The night deepened. Stars and moon slipped from sight, which only made the flames licking the treetops burn brighter.
Firelight flickered.
Mist Crow's gaze went razor sharp.
He lifted his hand.
Whick. Whick.
Two flashes of steel flew straight for Konome Taketori's face.
At the same instant Blood Hound let out a roar, chakra flooding his legs as he stamped down. Dust blasted backward like arrows.
Riding the recoil, he was already in close. His man-tall blade shot for Konome's abdomen. He was so fast that his thrust reached her at almost the exact moment the shuriken did.
One high, one low. A perfect pincer.
The kunai in Mist Crow's fingers never left his grip. He swept wide to flank, eyes raking Konome for a kill point. The moment she offered even a sliver of an opening, his throw would end her.
Her lanes of escape were sealed. She could only retreat.
If she took even one step back, Blood Hound would hound her heels while he piled on pressure from the side. Experience told him the rest would be inevitable.
Only tonight would refuse to obey his experience.
Because the opponent before him was the first in a thousand years to carry both the Byakugan and Shikotsumyaku.
Two bloodlines that completed one another were about to blaze in Konome's hands.
Byakugan.
Konome called it forth.
Veins bulged around her eyes, running like roots toward her cheeks.
Beneath the blindfold, her gray irises went hawk-keen.
The world slowed.
Mist Crow knifed in from the flank, kunai poised, eyes like a raptor surveying its kill.
Blood Hound charged through the spray of dust his boots had kicked up, long blade leveled.
The spinning shuriken glittered as they sliced the air. Konome could even make out the purple paste staining each beveled edge.
On pure perception and tracking of motion, the Byakugan leaves the Sharingan in the dust. For any Hyuga-trained fighter, tagging vital tenketsu mid-exchange is bread and butter.
She tipped her head left, then right, as calmly as breathing.
Sss sss.
Both shuriken hissed past her ears, close enough to brush a strand of silver hair, yet cutting nothing. Not even a single filament fell.
That kind of precision and poise only comes with a god's-eye view.
Both palms split open.
Shk.
Twin blades of bone, each about 1.2 meters long, slid into her hands.
Clang.
Konome swept one sideways. Blood Hound's thrust veered off, his tip streaking past her flank and stabbing empty air behind her. No blood at all.
Her other blade lashed for his chest.
He kicked back hard and barely slipped under the cut.
Pity, Konome thought, watching him retreat.
She let the bone blade in her hand surreptitiously lengthen to about 1.4 meters at the moment of the swing, then drew it back again.
She stamped.
Every muscle cinched tight at once, chakra sheathing the fibers. Power chained cleanly through her frame and coiled in her feet like a spring.
Boom.
The ground cratered.
Off to the side, Mist Crow's vision blurred for a heartbeat.
The white-armed girl was already on top of Blood Hound.
She is fast.
Whick. Whick.
Two more shuriken streaked from his blind angle toward the back of her head.
Konome never looked. She chased on, idly knocking both shuriken aside with the blade she held behind her.
In her right hand, the other bone blade bulged and flattened into a massive, door-wide cleaver.
Hooom.
She brought the heavy edge straight down at Blood Hound's face.
The wind pressure alone hit like a wall.
Even before steel met steel, Blood Hound felt the ruin in that blow.
There was no time to evade.
He hauled his long blade up to meet the fall of that monstrous white weapon.
Claaang.
Metal screamed.
The broad white edge crushed the narrow steel spine. With a shriek, his blade split down the middle.
The shock rattled his lungs. Even with chakra jammed into his wrist to brace the impact, his tiger's mouth tore and bled. His forearm flushed red to the elbow.
He had paid dearly, but he had stopped the first strike.
Swish.
No chance to breathe.
The blade she had used behind her snapped down again. It should have missed by a clean margin, yet its edge telescoped in mid-fall, stretching to nearly two meters.
The descending cut would quarter him from crown to groin.
Doesn't she need to shed force at all?
That was Blood Hound's last, despairing thought as the edge fell.
Water Release: Water Prison Technique.
Mist Crow flashed into being at Konome's back.
His hands formed the Hare seal and thrust forward.
Water erupted from thin air, surging into twin domes like the jaws of a trapflower snapping shut around Konome.
Konome stood at a fork with no good choice.
If she yielded ground, the kill she had bought would slip away. If she did not, she would split Blood Hound open and then drown alone inside a sphere with no air to breathe.
She did not yield.
Her blade fell and cleaved Blood Hound in two.
Blood sprayed.
Konome's Byakugan dimmed to deeper slate, chakra pouring into her eyes until the pressure sang.
Crack.
Like glass giving way.
The converging prisons collapsed. With them went the figures of Mist Crow and the bisection of Blood Hound, all vanishing together.
"You good?"
A distance away, two shapes shimmered back into existence. Mist Crow had one hand to his brow while propping up Blood Hound with the other. Blood Hound cradled his mangled forearm and shook his head, then both looked toward the girl.
Her blades thinned, the nicked cleaver shrinking neatly back into a slender edge.
Konome straightened, twin swords low at her sides.
Her head turned.
The blindfolded eyes pinned them as if they could see straight through.
Her pale face was unruffled. The brief, brutal exchange might never have happened.
Microtears from her muscle output smoothed under a wash of chakra. Beneath the subcutaneous bone membrane, her fibers knotted denser and more resilient.
Her pores opened.
Hiss.
Heat vented from her skin in visible vapor, like a steamship pulling away from a dock.
With that harmless porcelain face, that blindfold shadowing a mystery, the inhuman presence she radiated pressed on the lungs.
Both men swallowed at once.
"Maybe we shouldn't have taken this one," Blood Hound rasped for the first time, doubt leaking into the voice that never doubted.
"Sometimes the old folks have a point," Mist Crow said, fighting the needle ache behind his eyes, face gone hard as stone.
The sky sank darker still. Beyond the fire, there was no light at all.
The true witching hour had arrived.