"Me?"
A brief flicker of surprise crossed Haku's voice before it settled back into quiet composure. The naked, undisguised greed in the pale-eyed girl's tone left little room for misunderstanding.
"Is this power—Ice Release—what you're after?"
No anger. No revulsion. Haku's voice carried only a gentle, subdued calm, like snowflakes drifting from a winter sky—no warmth at all, only a quiet lightness and stillness.
"Yes. But not only you. After all, a Kekkei Genkai is inherently a power worth pursuing, wouldn't you agree?"
Rolling her wrists to loosen them, Hinata felt an unexpected prickle of irritation. She'd long since grown accustomed to others showing fear and alarm in her presence. Given how brazenly she'd laid out her intentions just now, mockery or contempt from Haku would have been entirely predictable. Even a coolly elegant silence would have been within expectations.
But this strange, unruffled calm? It set Hinata's teeth on edge.
"Yes... You must be a Kekkei Genkai bearer yourself. And it's probably the very thing that brought you your status and your honor. But I—"
Haku's words paused, as though she were reaching back through memory for something she'd once lived through. In the end, she simply shook her head. "If I'd had the choice, I would have preferred to be born without this power at all. But... there's no undoing it now. I am Zabuza-sama's tool. Whether you mean to hurt Zabuza-sama or steal me away from his side, you'll have to go through my corpse first."
As though issuing a formal declaration of war, Haku's slender form sprang backward, her entire body melting seamlessly into the mirror behind her. In the same instant, every surrounding mirror blazed with her reflected image. Beyond any doubt, this was the true barrier technique that only a genuine Ice Release Kekkei Genkai could produce: Demonic Mirroring Ice Crystals.
Trickier than expected.
Biting down hard on her lip to shake off that nagging, indescribable unease, Hinata's hands erupted in searing orange flame. She didn't think she'd lose to Haku—but the feel of this fight was thoroughly unpleasant.
"Here I come. Brace yourself."
From within the mirrors, Haku calmly raised her hand. Lethal Ice Senbon sprouted between her pale, slender fingers as naturally as snowflakes condensing out of a winter sky. "My attacks have no blind spots. Prepare yourself."
In the next heartbeat, a blizzard of Ice Senbon erupted from every mirror simultaneously—and this was no illusion, no clone technique. Every reflected image had, in that split second, launched a genuine attack in near-perfect synchrony.
The sheer saturation of the barrage generated immense pressure. Precisely because Hinata possessed the Byakugan, she could confirm with absolute certainty that the senbon were converging from all around her, including behind—with virtually zero time differential between volleys.
She swept her arms through the air before her, generating a shield of roiling flame that dissolved the incoming senbon on contact, and simultaneously broke into a sprint toward the edge of the barrier. The senbon chasing from behind couldn't match her speed due to the fractional lag. But she was forced to halt almost immediately: Haku's throws had begun leading her trajectory, and even Hinata couldn't dodge every last needle in this hailstorm. Worse still, judging by the targeting patterns, those Ice Senbon were aimed squarely at her acupoints.
Senbon had negligible individual stopping power—only precision hits on vital points could inflict real damage. And in the original work, Haku had used Ice Senbon to strike the fake-death pressure point on Zabuza's neck with pinpoint accuracy. That alone proved she'd mastered acupoint anatomy, using that knowledge to give her senbon genuine killing potential.
"If you truly hate fighting, then don't you think this is just self-deception? Or is it that so long as I stop resisting, you'll just riddle me half to death with senbon and leave me here for Zabuza to finish off?"
Executing several rapid changes of direction to evade a volley of senbon, Hinata genuinely found herself frowning. There was a reason Haku was one of the few characters in the original work who'd needed a plot kill to be removed from the story. As quite possibly the last living Ice Release Kekkei Genkai wielder in this world, her abilities were formidable enough to be genuinely troublesome—especially given that the terrain advantage belonged entirely to her.
This was the waterfront. For Water Release and Ice Release techniques, it was a natural home field—requiring only a fraction of the normal chakra expenditure. For a fire-affinity fighter like Hinata, this was the worst possible matchup on the worst possible terrain.
"You're right to think of me as a hypocritical, despicable enemy... So please, don't hold back. Come at me with everything you have."
Haku's voice remained placid, serene—as though she'd already made peace with every possible outcome. That fatalistic resignation caused Hinata's brow to twitch sharply, and a surge of ferocity erupted from between her brows like a seal coming undone.
"Since you insist—then allow me to show a little mercy and relieve you of this life you've already given up on! HYAH!!"
Planting her feet, Hinata let out an explosive kiai. Her right fist, wreathed in searing orange flame, hammered into the ground with a thunderous impact. The frost-hardened earth detonated outward like a firework, showering the interior of the mirror barrier with a choking cloud of ember-laced debris!!
"Ngh!"
Haku flinched within her mirror. The principle behind her Demonic Mirroring Ice Crystals was elegantly simple: it didn't produce phantoms. Instead, the mirrors refracted light in such a way that Haku's real body could achieve mind-boggling speed as she transitioned between them—creating the illusion of a simultaneous, omnidirectional assault.
And that method required one critical component: sight.
Whether she was locking onto a target or precisely entering another mirror, visual confirmation was essential. The mirrors operated on refraction, which made them dependent on the light conditions within the barrier. The wall of dust Hinata had blasted into the air with that brute-force attack had effectively blinded Haku.
After all, Haku possessed Ice Release—not the Byakugan's ability to see through any obstruction. Under normal circumstances, a shinobi could throw a smoke bomb to achieve the same visual disruption, but lacking any form of see-through vision themselves, the smoke would blind them equally. Inside this cramped arena, it would amount to nothing.
But Hinata possessed the Byakugan's full-range, omnidirectional vision. Visual obstructions were meaningless to her—and so she could exploit this blinding tactic one-sidedly.
The moment Haku's attacks ceased due to her compromised field of view, Hinata launched into a dead sprint toward the barrier's edge. Haku fired several blind volleys of senbon based on the sound of footsteps alone, but against the Byakugan's panoramic sight, the shots were trivially easy to dodge. Reaching the barrier's perimeter, Hinata planted herself and raised her right hand high. Searing flame blazed to life in her palm like a torch—South Dipper Flame-Slaying Fist Secret Art: Orochinagi!!
"There you are!"
As the fire of Orochinagi flared, Haku finally pinpointed Hinata's position through the thinning dust and hurtled toward her. "You're not getting out!!"
"Heh!"
But the pale-eyed girl, standing before one of the mirrors, merely flashed a sharp, predatory grin. Instead of slamming the fully charged Orochinagi into the mirror in front of her, she whipped around and hurled the blast behind her. Orange-yellow flame roared outward like a serpent's tongue!!
Completely blindsided by the redirected attack, Haku was engulfed in the torrent of flame. The searing heat dealt thermal burns, while the concentrated chakra packed into the technique hammered her with physical force like a pressure cannon.
Struck head-on by Orochinagi, Haku's body hurtled backward like a kite with its string cut, slamming into the mirror behind her. As her chakra control shattered, the entire barrier of ice mirrors fractured and collapsed in an explosion of crystalline shards.
That was information advantage and Kekkei Genkai advantage, both at once.
Relaxing her stance, Hinata looked down at Haku, who lay crumpled on the ground several meters away. The reason she'd won was straightforward: her knowledge of the original work told her that Haku's mirror barrier relied on refraction to let her real body shuttle between mirrors at extreme speed for hit-and-run attacks. In other words, Haku still needed her physical body to close in for each strike.
And since Hinata had been visibly preparing to launch Orochinagi at one of the mirrors, Haku naturally wouldn't emerge from the mirror directly in front of her—that would be walking into the blast. The logical choice was to flank from behind, from Hinata's supposed blind spot. But the Byakugan's panoramic vision meant Hinata had no blind spot. Even if she couldn't track every detail of Haku's full-speed movement, she could at least trace the flow of chakra along the incoming trajectory—and aim a precision counter along that path.
Of course, none of this would have worked if Haku had known that Hinata understood her attack patterns inside and out. It was precisely that informational asymmetry that had so swiftly made Haku the losing side.
"The outcome is decided. Anything left to say?"
Looking down at Haku, who was struggling and failing to rise, Hinata felt a distinct sense of anticipation. This was the moment she collected her prize, wasn't it?
"It seems... that's how it is. I've lost."
After several failed attempts to stand, Haku could only sit on the ground and speak softly. Hinata walked up without ceremony, reached out, and pulled the mask from Haku's face—exposing that beautiful countenance to the full, unabashed scrutiny of those pale white eyes.
"Then you belong to me now."
Giving Haku no chance to respond, Hinata's hand lashed out in a swift chop to the side of Haku's neck. The girl offered no resistance—her eyes simply fluttered shut, and she collapsed unconscious to the ground.
---