The moment my grip tightened, Kakuzu moved.
The fact that he had allowed me to summon out my sword in the first place hadn't been kindness on his part, but merely how the battle between two high-level shinobi flowed.
Short fast bursts, followed by small breaks to observe your opponent, trying to figure them out, to read them, and figure out how to defeat them.
The fact that Naruto would be able to use those breaks to use his talk-no-jutsu in the future was just another reason for the savior being totally broken.
But here, there was little talk, mostly just to try and extract small bits of information or try to put someone off their game. Everything happened for a reason.
Now that Kakuzu had seen through my intention of using kenjutsu, he naturally didn't have to sit around waiting anymore.
He closed the distance in an instant.
No feint. No wasted movement. Just a straight, brutal charge meant to smother me before I could find my rhythm with the blade. The ground cracked beneath his feet as he accelerated, his body already reinforced, already prepared to take the hit if needed.
I stepped into it.
The sword moved.
I cut diagonally, edge angled to intercept rather than cleave, letting the blade do the work my technique could not. Kakuzu met it with his forearm again—and this time, the bone sword bit deep.
The impact rang out like steel struck by a bell.
Earth Spear resisted for a heartbeat.
Then failed.
The blade carved a clean furrow through hardened black threads as if they were mere flesh and blood. Kakuzu twisted with the strike, minimizing the damage, and just barely preventing himself from losing the arm altogether.
Still, he didn't slow down at all.
His knee came up toward my ribs, timed perfectly to catch me mid-cut. I pivoted, letting the blow glance off reinforced bone instead of flesh, and answered with a short thrust aimed for his center mass.
I made sure to aim it at one of the hearts inside his body; it would seem to be totally accidental, the strike appearing non-lethal—certainly to someone that hadn't as much as whinced when nearly losing an arm.
However, innocent as it might appear, it was anything but.
Kakuzu felt it.
Not as pain—but as threat.
The sword point slid past his guard and scraped along his torso, close enough that the air itself seemed to scream. Threads tightened instinctively, hearts shifting just enough to avoid catastrophe.
That was when he disengaged.
He didn't retreat in panic.
He created space.
Kakuzu twisted away, letting the momentum of my thrust carry me forward as he kicked off the ground and vaulted backward in a long, controlled arc. He landed lightly atop the remains of a fallen tree, already moving again before his feet fully settled.
I straightened, blade held low but ready, watching him carefully through the mist.
Kakuzu reached into what remained of his cloak.
The next moment, metal flashed at me.
A volley of kunai screamed through the air, not thrown in a simple spread, but staggered—high, low, left, right—each one aimed to test a different reaction. Several were wrapped in thin wires, nearly invisible against the fog.
I stepped forward instead of back.
The sword traced a clean arc.
Steel met ivory—
—and lost.
Kunai shattered on contact, split cleanly in half as if struck by a guillotine. Wires parted just as easily, falling away in limp coils before they could tighten.
But Kakuzu wasn't aiming to bind me.
He was watching how I cut.
Another volley followed immediately, this time interspersed with explosive tags. The first tag detonated mid-air, the shockwave forcing me to adjust my stance as fragments and shrapnel filled the space around me.
I spun once, blade sweeping wide. Within that single moment, the bone blade gained a faint glow as I covered it in wind-nature chakra, and a lot of it.
The explosion was cut in half.
The shockwave collapsed unnaturally, and the blast redirected into the mud and trees behind me—carefully redirected as the wind chakra exploded at the precise moment it met the explosive shockwave.
Something only possible due to my Byakugan's clarity.
The mist thinned for a heartbeat as the redirected blast tore through the undergrowth behind me, trees snapping and earth churning where the force was discharged. I didn't look back.
My eyes were on Kakuzu.
He had stopped moving.
Not frozen—recalculating.
"So," he said slowly, voice carrying easily across the ruined ground, "you're not just swinging it."
"I never was," I replied evenly.
Another kunai came—not thrown.
Dropped.
It fell straight down from above, spinning end over end, timed precisely to coincide with a second volley fired low and wide. A distraction. A probe.
I stepped forward again.
The sword dipped, then rose in a tight, controlled motion, striking and deflecting the kunai one by one, a large sweep knocking down a wave of shuriken. Kakuzu wasn't sitting still; he was moving around, jumping around to attack from different directions.
All just to test me.
The blade was too sharp for him to meet directly. It stopped him from engaging in taijutsu.
Which meant he ran.
Kakuzu kicked off the tree behind him, vaulting sideways through the mist as another volley of kunai came in from a new angle. I moved after him immediately, chakra surging to my legs as I flashed across the ground, blade trailing behind me in a pale arc.
Metal rang against bone.
I cut the first kunai out of the air, twisted, and knocked aside a second with the flat of the blade as my momentum carried me forward. Kakuzu was already gone again, leaping from trunk to trunk, never staying in one place long enough for me to close the distance cleanly.
Good.
I pushed harder.
The ground blurred beneath my feet as I chased him through the wrecked roadside, trees and shattered earth flashing past in my peripheral vision. Kakuzu flung another handful of weapons backward without even looking—kunai, shuriken, weighted spikes—each one thrown to intersect my path rather than strike directly.
I adjusted on instinct.
The sword moved constantly now—short cuts, tight arcs, efficient deflections. Bone met steel again and again, each impact sharp and clean, never slowing the blade, never chipping or cracking no matter how hard the weapons struck.
Sparks flared in the mist.
A wire snapped taut around my calf.
I felt it tighten for half a second before I cut it, the blade slicing through the thin metal line as easily as hair.
I had to admit, I didn't stop that one. The Byakugan had its strengths and its weaknesses. It could see things kilometers away, but it tracked by chakra. Small things like a string hidden in the shadows and mists were the domain of the Sharingan.
Kakuzu clicked his tongue somewhere ahead of me and changed direction again, bounding off a boulder and skidding across mud before launching himself backward in another long jump.
I followed.
We crossed the battlefield in seconds.
His feet barely touched down before he moved again. He also made use of all manner of tools to slow me down, showing a mastery of ninja tools that few could match. Proving that age did matter, that experience mattered.
Still, I was right behind him the entire time.
Kunai ricocheted off bone and shattered against tree trunks. Shuriken spun uselessly to the ground in clean halves. Explosive tags detonated just far enough away to force me to angle my approach, but never close enough to slow me.
He dropped low suddenly, sliding across the ground as he hurled a kunai straight at my face.
I didn't stop.
I leaned into the run and flicked the blade up just enough to shave it aside, then slashed downward as I passed over him. Kakuzu twisted mid-slide, the cut missing his torso by a handspan and instead cleaving a furrow through the earth behind him.
He rolled to his feet and jumped again, gaining height this time, trying to reset the distance.
It would have been easy to stop it, but I didn't.
I let him have a moment to breathe, because I understood that this wasn't getting anywhere. I wasn't good enough with the sword to deal with him, and he couldn't do anything to me.
Both of us had to change tactics.
"Curious," he said as he came to a stop a fair distance away. "That's Konoha-style kenjutsu, and you know the Gentle Fist taijutsu, and Shadow Clone, a Konoha ninjutsu."
I slowed as well, blade lowering slightly but never leaving my line of sight on him.
"You've been paying attention," I replied calmly.
"Of course I have." Kakuzu straightened, rolling one shoulder as if loosening it. His breathing was steady—annoyingly so. "Patterns matter. Origins matter. They tell you what someone expects to work."
He tilted his head, eyes narrowing.
"Yet it is curious that someone from the Kaguya clan knows so many Konoha techniques. It makes one wonder: just who are you really, Kaguya-hime?" he fished for information.
"I am Kaguya," I simply answered as we stood there facing off against one another.
For a moment, neither of us moved.
The mist drifted between us, heavy with the scent of scorched earth and split wood. Around us, the battlefield bore the marks of what had passed—trees cleanly severed, ground carved open, shattered steel half-buried in the mud—but none of it truly reflected the danger standing at its center.
Kakuzu studied me in silence.
Not my sword. Not my stance.
But me.
"You don't fight like a clan relic," he said at last. "Or a runaway experiment."
His eyes narrowed slightly.
"I could say the same," I replied. "You've been very careful not to show me everything."
A thin smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. "Careful keeps you alive."
The air changed.
It was subtle—no explosion of chakra, no dramatic display—but I felt it all the same. Kakuzu's presence sharpened, his chakra compressing inward instead of flaring out, dense and heavy, like a storm being held behind a dam.
He was getting ready, getting ready to get serious. It had seen enough; he had clearly determined that he wouldn't be able to defeat me, he wouldn't be able to get me alive, so he stopped trying.
He would accept the lower bounty on me dead.
No doubt he was raging behind his stoic face, mourning the money he wouldn't be able to earn.
I breathed in deeply, ready to get serious myself. I had to admit, he was strong—the strongest person I had ever fought—well, with the exception of Killer B, but I hadn't fully fought him, merely bought time before faking my death.
This was different.
Through my Byakugan, I saw the extra hearts inside him start to beat faster; clearly, it was time to truly face Kakuzu of the Five Hearts in all his glory.
And I was excited, excited to test my strength further, to see where I stood today.