Knitting Fate (Canon Patchworking with Uchiha Ren Part II)

Twenty-Second Thread

"One of the best ways to influence people is to make them feel important."
― Roy T. Bennett

Kurotsuchi has Lava Release. Lava Release is essentially a combination of two other nature transformations: Fire and Earth. Ren has only Fire Release. By all means, she should be at a disadvantage here – but she isn't, not exactly. Because Ren is older and bigger – she has more stamina and therefore more chakra than the eight-year-old twerp and thus, technically, they're about fifty-fifty.

"Stay out of this, she's mine!" Ren snaps at Hana when the Inuzuka steps forward and, reluctantly, her friend withdraws to the back again. Ren is dead set on wiping that smirk off the brat's face herself, after all. So, with a loud 'Katon: Hōsenka', small fireballs with mean shuriken inside charge at Kurotsuchi and Ren charges right behind them, Sharingan glowing eerily in the dark. Akatsuchi and Deidara wisely take a hint and stay back themselves.

Kurotsuchi dodges, and in one instance even deflects, the tiny burning shuriken, just as Ren basically pounces at her. Taijutsu in the dark, slippery, cramped space is difficult and not really advised, but Ren is a shinobi, and shinobi is just another word for dirty fighting. No ninja who wants to stay in the business and live to see their twentieth birthday plays fair – that's a fact. So Ren jumps, runs a few steps on the wall (as much as she can without making it explode), leaps onto the ceiling and promptly throws Awai at Kurotsuchi's face. The girl shrieks, first from shock, then from pain when the spider mercilessly bites into the soft skin of her cheek. Then she almost burns him by literally spitting lava, although Awai manages to jump to safety before darting towards Hana.

Ren uses the momentum that the ceiling gives her upon leaping down and elbows Kurotsuchi square in the face so hard her elbow actually hurts. By the time her feet touch the ground, her left hand is already raised and Ren aims and throws a mean punch right to where she knows her kidneys are. It connects, and Kurotsuchi wheezes in pain. But, somehow, she manages a hand seal and suddenly there's lava bursting from her mouth, right onto Ren's left thigh. It eats through her pants almost instantly and Ren actually howls when the hot magma touches – and burns – her thigh. Her howl, though, is cut in half when she bites her lip, reaches for a kunai, and plunges it down to the hilt in her opponent's thigh in retaliation.

She's nothing if not vindictive, after all.

There's a hard tug on her collar, and Ren gives in almost bonelessly, her back colliding with Hana's chest, and suddenly she's running. In a haze she manages to register Akatsuchi closing them off, dividing the corridor with a wall of solid rock. So, Ren grits her teeth harder and runs, allowing her teammates to lead. It hurts like hell, yes, but if she ignores it, she can run. She has work to do and no time to care about the pain.

(Nobody cares, anyway. Nobody ever does. Just grit your teeth and stop whining-

Shut up, mother. You've never cared, but it doesn't mean others share your lack of sentiment.)

...ooo~(x)~ooo...     

After she realizes that Ren is pretty much out of commission (seriously, how is that girl even running? Doesn't she feel any pain? Her leg is fucking charred!) Hana takes the lead and absolutely no shit from anyone, be it Hibiki or her dogs, and methodically leads them towards the exit through the ever changing tunnels of the maze. They do stop, of course, about fifteen minutes after the encounter. She takes the opportunity to sit Ren down with a stern glare and check her leg. Thank god it's mostly only the skin that's beyond saving and the muscle isn't really that damaged – nothing beyond fixing, at least. And it will scar. It'll make a very ugly and massive scar, actually, but Hana suspects that Ren, half-crazed from pain, hardly cares. So, Hana does what she can right now – she rinses the wound with water from a jutsu (she's not wasting resources, they don't know when they'll make it out) and, after about twenty minutes, when Ren starts to look a bit less like she'd pass out, wraps her leg loosely with gauze and further numbs the spot with chakra. The numbing is shallow, though, and will wear out soon, so they'd better hurry.