Love Through Negotiation «COMPLETED»

Chapter 28

Yugito ducked under an orb of scorch release and swept her tail broadside against the shinobi from sand that sent it her way. The tail of blue fire bisected her, flinging out bits and pieces of ashen paper and putting her out of commission for at least thirty seconds. Not being able to rest on her laurels for even a second, Yugito had to summon a wall of consuming fire in a column around her, which melted the cold ice of a member of the yuki clan. She pounced out of it like a tiger hidden in the grass, shoved her elongated nails into his abdomen, and wrenched away, letting him fall to the ground in pieces so thinly sliced as to look like deli meat.

She didn't have a way to seal them away, but she was strong enough that she could deal with them with relative ease. But there were a lot of them and if she hadn't mastered the use of Matatabi's chakra, then she'd have died dozens of times over by then.

Luckily for her, she had.

Magnet release, blast release, Byakugan, the whole gamut came out to play with her and the only thing she could do was to keep them at bay and hope that Jiraiya was alive enough to help her put them away before they could wander off and do damage on someone who couldn't handle it.

Strangely, despite the fact that she was very truly fighting for survival, her heart wasn't beating with the same flitted up-down, yes-no, do-or-die type of lightning fast deep primal level impulses. For lack of a better word, she felt calm and serene. Like someone who had mastered a particular way of movement. She didn't have to think about the fight, it just happened and she let her body do it for her. A slip up could mean the end of her, but she knew that she wouldn't do that and she also knew that the enemies couldn't force it on her either.

She was ready to take on the world. If the world won, then the world won. But if it won, it wouldn't be because she didn't try.

She stopped, pressed against the floor with her limbs splayed out, baring her fangs at an invisible enemy. All the kekkai genkai users were motes of paper in the wind. She had a few seconds respite before the next one fully reformed and came with the intent to kill again.

Yugito closed her eyes and focused on breathing. It was in those scant few moments that images of her loved ones came to mind.

Kurotsuchi, a brave girl with a mouth that would make a sailor blush. Fu, the one who laughed at everything, even when the world threw the worst it had at her. Temari, who stood tall when everything around her fell to pieces. Mei, a bastion of wise council, never changing, never having to change. Naruto, the one she decided to stand next to.

And also Ai and Bee and Omoi and Karui and, hell, even Samui or Atsui. She thought of Sakura and Kakashi and she thought of Jiraiya and Tsunade. She thought of them all.

She thought back to when they weren't with her. Or, more accurately, when she wasn't with them. And she smiled. Even in the epicenter of the end of the world, Yugito smiled in remembrance of all those who helped her become more than a monster.

And when she opened her eyes, Fu flew into the room, her back a mass of strange purple extensions that scooped down and entrapped the reforming kekkai genkai users in an instant and dropped off, leaving an inescapable coffin with a struggling zombie inside in its wake. She moved methodically and without having to stop, taking the zombies in her contraption one by one until over the course of half a minute, only she and Yugito were left in the room with functioning movement.

Her back morphed back into itself and she reabsorbed the exoskeletal material from the outside, leaving Fu in an almost completely exhausted state behind. She was leaning against the wall, her hands on a convenient railing as sweat poured from every area on her body. Her breathing was ragged and her eyes bloodshot.