My first try at sparring with Naruto was a bit different. I went in with my water aspect in control, but my illusions fell apart in that dense chakra field and my water shroud was nearly useless. My strength boost wavered on and off as his chakra scrambled mine, and after our first exchange of blows I was suddenly struck by a desperate desire to have him bend me over the nearest boulder and take me until I couldn’t see straight. I stumbled back, awkwardly parrying blows I couldn’t even feel properly because he was drowning out all my chakra senses, and suddenly I was caught just like Hinata. A calloused hand cupped my breast as I felt his breath on the back of my neck, and my knees went weak.
“Hey, aren’t you supposed to be the one that can resist me?” He asked innocently. “Maybe you’ve got your mind on something besides fighting?”
But I was pretty good at splitting my attention, and he’d given me enough time to trace the effect his aura was having on me. I reached deep into my subconscious, grabbed hold of the part of my subconscious that lit up like a beacon with every flicker and pulse of male chakra, and turned it off with wrenching effort of will.
And then I could think again. Yeah, I still wanted my man to tame me, but I was going to make him work for it. His chakra suppression trick was pretty neat, but no one can match me at chakra control. Hell, he wasn’t a chakra sensor, so I doubt he could even see what he was doing in any detail. He was just putting out a blanket interference pattern, and I could see it clearly now. All I had to do was compensate for the distortion…
I replaced myself with a rock, which got me to the other side of the clearing and out of his aura. But two can play the seduction game. I struck a sultry pose while wrapping myself in a set of allure techniques that would turn most men into drooling idiots in an instant.
“Fight? Why would we fight?” With one finger I toyed with the zipper that held my halter-top closed in front, while I slowly ran the other down my toned belly towards my hip-hugging shorts. “I can think of much nicer things to do with you, big boy.”
“Ooh, I love it when you get all seductive, babe,” he replied with a rakish grin. “Winner gets to be on top?”
“You’re on,” I agreed. I sank into a crouch as I went to full boost and spun up a Rasengan in each hand. “Just don’t think you’re going to get me like you did Hinata. Not that it wouldn’t be fun, but she’s the sub on this team. Now that I know what you’re doing I can beat your chakra interference, and I bet my combat seduction is better than yours.”
“That’s my Sakura,” he said approvingly. “I was hoping you’d give me a real fight.” Then he transformed into a bipedal dragon-thing the size of a dinosaur, and spat a bolt of lightning at me.
Damn, but fighting him was a rush. For the first time in my life I had an opponent I could actually hit, who didn’t go down with one punch. He was unbelievably tough, so much so that even my full strength was barely enough to hurt him, and I quickly discovered his transformation was still running. Injuries vanished as quickly as I inflicted them, his shape mutated constantly to counter my tactics, and he was a lot more used to fighting humans that I was giant monsters.
I led him a merry chase for about five minutes, dancing around him with illusions and clone distractions and invisibility techniques while I rained down increasingly massive levels of destruction on him. After the first couple of Rasengan hits he started throwing out shadow clones in smaller, faster shapes to try to pin me down, but I picked them off steadily and they could barely lay a finger on me. Not that it mattered much if they did, since I could heal myself as easily as he could change shape. Short of massive trauma I wasn’t going to go down until I ran out of chakra, though I was spending it fast enough to be worrisome.
For a few minutes I thought I might actually beat him, until it became apparent that even my biggest attacks couldn’t knock him out and his supply of clone-monsters was growing faster than I could kill them. Then one of the clones managed to bite me, and its venom screwed up my chakra control for several long seconds while I frantically dodged and tried to work out how to neutralize it. I lost my speed boost long enough for another one to tag me, then a leathery tentacle wrapped around my leg and pulled me in. By the time I got both hands around it to rip it apart he had me back inside his aura, with more tentacles around my waist and left arm and a big one with a spike on the end poised right in front of my face.
“Damn, you got me,” I admitted. “I can’t heal myself from a head shot.”
I stopped struggling, and flipped that switch in my subconscious back the other way so I could properly enjoy the feel of his chakra aura saturating every cell of my body. Kami, but it felt good to feel that naughty.
“Is the victor going to claim his spoils?” I asked slyly, as he pinned all four of my limbs with immensely strong tentacles as big around as my thighs. “How are you going to turn back without letting me go?”
“Who says I’m going to change back?” He replied in a throaty rumble. “Pretty girls who fight big, scary monsters with a seduction technique running should know what they’re going to get when they lose.”
I gasped as a smaller, flatter tentacle snaked under my waistband and ripped my shorts and panties right off my body. Then I looked down to see the mass of wet, squirming protuberances that was approaching me from below, and my eyes got very big.
“Oh, fuck yeah!” I gasped.
I have to admit, I don’t think I’ll ever look at tentacle porn the same way again.
It wasn’t all fun and games, of course. I still had a long list of technique ideas to work on, and a vacation loop with Naruto was a unique opportunity to try some of them out. Which is how I ended up spending an entire day in my mindscape setting up a bit of seal-work unlike anything I’d ever tried before.
Seal masters normally work by drawing on paper with ink that contains their own blood and chakra, but it doesn’t have to be done that way. The patterns and chakra are the important parts, and the rest is just a handy set of tools. My variation of Tsunade’s secret seal was done entirely in chakra, drawn in the air with sheer chakra control. It wasn’t easy, but I didn’t see a good alternative.
“Is that really going to work?” Hinata asked skeptically. “I’ve never heard of anyone drawing seals in their mindscape.”
I paused to wipe the sweat from my forehead, and studied the swirling lines of the seal. It was a self-modifying array, which gave it some interesting abilities but made it a real bitch to set up properly. Even a minor error in the initial configuration would tend to grow over time, warping the seal until it failed catastrophically. I wasn’t sure what that would do to me, but I was sure I didn’t want to find out.
“With most seals it would be a waste of time,” I conceded. “But I’ve removed the automated healing function from this version, so what’s left is just a power storage device. That means the only thing it needs to interact with is my chakra, so it should work. Especially considering where we are.”
Hinata raised a questioning eyebrow, and I waved at the pond we stood on. “The water is my chakra,” I explained. “The fish are my techniques, and the little stream that runs over the house and into the pond is my chakra recovery.”
Comprehension dawned in her eyes. “I see. So putting it where the stream runs into the pond means it’s actually a part of your chakra circulatory system? Interesting. Jiraiya and Orochimaru both have seals like that, but I’ve never been able to figure out how they made them. Do you think this is actually the normal way to do it?”