Sasuke was throwing a lot of those things, but he only had two hands and I had lots of kunai to parry with. I bounced into the trees and around as he tried to get a hit in, and returned fire with a few hundred shuriken clones to keep him from getting too comfortable. Then my clone finished with his, and sent a grand fireball his way. He did a replacement to evade it, and I locked onto his landing spot in the upper branches and met him there.
Close combat was a gamble, but I was betting my superior speed and his shoulder injury would make up for the fact that his sword was electrified. Unfortunately I found that he really was a taijutsu master, and it was a more even fight than I’d hoped. His skill was actually better than mine, his physical conditioning on a par with Gai, and his lighting techniques were a major pain in the ass. But my dancing kunai could attack from every direction at once, and he couldn’t begin to match my physical enhancements.
We traded a flurry of blows, he desperately trying to dodge my fists and parry all of my blades while I struggled to avoid all of his attacks. He knew how to cut chakra strings, but then again all I had to do was wave a hand near a falling kunai to re-attach one. He took several shallow cuts in the space of a few seconds, and only one of my knives was thrown out of reach.
He opened the first three of the Eight Gates, enough to get a decisive physical boost without burning himself out too quickly. I matched him and opened two more with a grin, knowing I could manage the stress on my body easily. Superior skill or not I was so going to kick his ass.
Then he activated his cursed seal, and suddenly I had problems. As a genin that thing had made him a credible threat to jounin. Now, it made him even faster than I was and almost as strong. I tried to disengage, but he managed to graze me with his sword. My muscles spasmed uncontrollably, and he flowed into a fancy spinning cut that separated my head from my shoulders.
Ok, he was one scary bastard. But so am I, and I wasn’t going to die that way again. I spun out a chakra string to touch my dying body, animated it, and used its hands to grab my head and put it back where it belonged. By the time Sasuke realized what was happening I’d healed myself and body flickered a couple of trees away.
“Nice try, Sasuke,” I commented. “But you’ll have to do better.”
His eyes narrowed. “What sort of monster have you become, Sakura?”
“Monster?” I laughed. “Do I look like a monster?”
“We all become monsters in the end. Summoning Technique!”
He bit his thumb and slammed his hand into the branch beneath him, and a summoning array began to spin out. I was tempted to flash in and hit him while it was forming, but he was probably ready for that. So instead I shifted my chakra nature to water, and flickered back to the edge of a nearby pond.
His summoning produced a flock of winged snakes, which he sent soaring towards me as he followed at a more leisurely pace. I danced back onto the surface of the pond as they encircled me, and flicked a few shuriken wrapped in invisibility illusions at them. They dodged, confirming that they weren’t your garden-variety summons. Sasuke took flight, which startled me for a moment until I realized he was using those hand-wing things the cursed seal had given him rather than an air technique. His hands flew through a series of seals as he moved, forming some kind of fancy target-seeking electrical attack. Perfect.
As the lightning bolts formed in his hand I dumped half my chakra into the pond, making the whole mass of water mine. It leaped into motion with a shriek of displaced air as I worked it like a giant Rasengan, forming a ball of furiously whirling water streamers nearly two hundred feet across. The flying snakes were torn to bits in an instant, and Sasuke’s technique grounded out as he hurriedly replaced himself with a rock on the shore.
Floating in the heart of the maelstrom I was immune to both of his elements, but I wasn’t going to give him time to come up with another strategy. I sent the whole mass of my Cutting Water Dance rushing up and into the forest after him, forcing him to dodge and retreat while I shed a mist cloud around us to limit his vision. Of course, to a ninja of his caliber this just made it obvious I was about to pull some kind of tricky ambush tactic while his sight was obscured.
So I didn’t.
Instead I kept my concentration on the Water Dance. It was a little slower than he was, but with dozens of water streamers coming at him from every direction at once it was still tough to dodge them all. Every parry and near-miss showered him with water, making it impossible to use lighting jutsu, and with my chakra filling the air around him he wasn’t going to be getting away with a replacement or body flicker. Meanwhile the shadow clone I’d spun off before took advantage of the mist to suppress her presence and sneak up on Sasuke, since the Sharingan can only penetrate illusions it can see.
Somehow he detected her in time to take her out with a neat little thunderclap jutsu, which blew apart the nearest water streamers as well. But she’d only been a distraction anyway. It was about thirty seconds before the paralytic agent I’d added to some of those first flying water droplets began to take effect. Then he stumbled, and one of my cutting streamers severed the Achilles tendon of his left leg. Another laid open his right arm as he tried to recover, before he realized what had happened.
His wings folded around his body, buying him a few seconds to form seals as I sliced them to ribbons. Then an immense gout of fire washed out in all directions, vaporizing the water streamers around him and threatening to collapse my technique.
Instead of resisting I let it happen, switching my nature back to fire as he spent most of his remaining chakra to blow my watery weapon away. As the blast began to dissipate I cranked up my fire resistance and charged right through the flames, ignoring the pain of flash-fried skin to land a solid punch that broke ribs as his cursed seal began to fade. I spun into a kick that took his legs out from under him and slammed a Rasengan into his belly as he fell.
He went down hard.
I slapped my hand down on his chest and locked up his muscles with a paralysis technique. Then, panting with effort, I paused to heal myself. I was nearly out of chakra, but was quite pleased I hadn’t had to tap my storage seal.
“I suppose this is where the torture begins?” He asked, a lot more calmly than I would have expected. I opened my mouth to reply… and stopped, frowning.
I had no desire to torture Sasuke. I’d been furious when I first saw him, but now… I wanted to stop him. To make sure he didn’t do it to anyone else. To understand why he’d done it, so I could make sure his analogues didn’t go down the same dark road. But killing him wouldn’t accomplish anything, and I felt no desire at all to hurt him in the name of revenge.
Why the hell not?
Oh, of course.
“Well, crap. Apparently universal benevolence is part of the price for this power.” I sank to my knees beside his prone from, and frowned. “My desire for revenge seems to be missing at the moment.”
He chuckled. “There’s always a price. What did you make your deal with?”
“Myself,” I said absently. My chakra was mostly gone, but the golden sparkles were much thicker than before. Was that a different kind of power, something my techniques couldn’t use? I formed a little ball of chakra in my hand, and tried to separate the colors. It wasn’t even hard. The normal human chakra subsided back into my body, leaving behind a tiny bead of gold.
“Not unless you’re a Bright Kami, Sakura,” Sasuke disagreed. “I thought you were smart enough not to believe their lies.”
I shook my head. “You mean those nice, friendly kami who just want to help us when they aren’t condemning people they don’t like to be tortured for all of eternity? Hardly. They tried to recruit me, but I turned them down. My place is here in shadows, with the blood and the fear and the screams of the dying, standing back to back with my loves against the world.”