Kaguya's Legacy

"Left flank!" I shouted, already spinning to deflect a barrage of kunai that came whistling towards me from the mouth of a half-destroyed puppet.

My Byakugan blazed, veins bulging at the sides of my eyes, feeding me a constant stream of information—chakra flows, heat signatures, muscle twitches. The world around me was a thousand moving pieces, but I saw it all.

I would have gone and dealt with the flank myself, but I was currently locked in a brutal dance with three Suna elite—two wielding short-blade chakra sabers, and one firing ranged wind-style bursts that shredded bark and soil alike.

With a twist of my torso, I ducked under a vertical slice aimed for my ribs, used the momentum to sweep the legs of the saber-wielder to my right, then leapt into a sideways roll, avoiding a high-pressure wind bullet that screamed through the air like a train horn. It blew apart a tree trunk behind me in a spray of wet splinters.

I landed low, grounded, Gentle Fist ready.

"Haruto, keep the center!" I barked through clenched teeth. "Arata—scatter their line!"

Even as I was taking the brunt of the heat, the others were still locked in their own fights. Everyone was focusing on their own roles, so I had to make sure they didn't get hit by any of the enemy's tricks.

"On it!" Arata called out as I deflected another barrage of poison needles away from me, and towards the three people he was fighting, making them evade and giving him room to wave together a series of hand signs.

A moment later, the deep thrum of chakra thundered through the battlefield as he slammed his palm into the earth. Pillars of compressed water exploded upward in a scattered arc, disrupting the enemy's rhythm.

The three Suna Jōnin I was fighting weren't thrown off by his attack, and were able to deal with it easily enough. But the same couldn't be said for the rest of their team, which mostly just consisted of Genin and a few Chuunin.

Koji and Kuro had already transformed into the giant two-headed wolf of the Dual Piercing Fang technique. And used the far more advanced Fang Rotating Fang to spin into a storm of teeth and claws and go from target to target, ripping apart puppets and shinobi alike.

Their movements were a blur—fluid, relentless, and impossible to counter once they built momentum. One puppet, a grotesque centipede-thing bristling with blade-arms, tried to intercept. Too slow.

A huge wolf paw with massive, sharp claws tore into it. Wood and metal cracked like eggshells under the impact. They might not be able to target the chakra threats, but once the puppet is reduced to a wreck like that, it's left completely unusable.

And the shinobi hiding behind him, well he only lasted a moment longer thanks to its sacrifice before one of the two heads bit into him, ripping a massive chunk of his shoulder, along with his right arm off.

And due to the rotation, his entire body was lifted up, spun around, and sent flying into a tall tree with a loud, wet crack. He didn't move after that; I confirmed his spine fracturing in three places, and the back of his skull shattering.

He was dead, and so was the next target.

Those two were our main attackers at this point, with me holding the three Jōnin busy and Haruto and Arata busy buying us openings and keeping us safe from deadly puppet attacks.

Another detonation of chakra echoed in the distance—Arata had just tagged a puppet core with a high-precision lightning bolt. The thing convulsed, limbs twitching before exploding in a flash of heat and smoke.

Somewhere behind it, a Suna Genin shrieked, either from the blast or the burning fragments embedded in his leg.

I didn't have time to pay too much attention. One of the saber-wielders surged forward again, feinting high then spinning low with a reverse grip. Clever. But not clever enough.

I let the blade skim past my shoulder—just barely missing thanks to a half-step pivot—then slammed my palm into his ribs.

Gentle Fist: Chakra Scalpel Variant

My chakra covered my hand and extended into the vague shape of a blade, slicing clean through his chakra network just above his kidneys. His body locked mid-strike, muscles misfiring in spasms as he fell to the ground, twitching like a marionette with cut strings.

Two left.

The other saber Jōnin came at me in perfect sync with the wind user, attempting to cross-pattern me—one attacking wide, the other driving a vacuum spear directly at my chest.

I dropped low again, timing the spin.

Eight Trigrams: Palm Rotation.

The chakra exploded from my tenketsu in a brilliant dome, spinning hard enough to deflect both attacks mid-motion. The wind spear shattered against the dome like glass, and the saber bounced off, forcing them both to disengage or be caught in the backlash.

It just so happened that as the saber user bounced back from the rotational force, he happened to enter into the path of the Koji/Kuro combo as their Fang over Fang continued to be a deadly black storm.

He was a Jōnin, so he was quick to react, and his blade was deadly. He twisted in midair, bringing the sharp wind chakra-enhanced edge of his blade into their path, trying to force them to back off.

But I was already ahead of him.

On my palm, there was a thin red line, a tiny wound, and a trace amount of my blood had touched his blade, placing my scent on it.

And since the Koji/Kuro wolf had two heads, they used the scent of my blood to track the blade even while they spun at high speed, one head biting down on it. fangs enhanced by chakra, their entire mouth lighting up as they used Fang Extension.

That allowed them to block the blow without slowing down. Instantly, their spin ripped the blade out of its owner's hand, and claws and teeth ripped in apart, in a shower of gore.

The two didn't even slow down as they continued into their original target, a masked Chuunin.

The masked Chuunin had barely begun to turn before he was gone—reduced to scattered limbs and streaks of blood across the bark of a splintering tree. His puppet, a sleek spider-shaped model armed with hidden senbon launchers, collapsed mid-step.

I turned my focus back to the last wind-style Jōnin, the only one still standing. His chest was heaving, sweat streaking through the dust and ash on his brow. He was good, his ninjutsu deadly.

But now, he was alone, and against me, he had no chance to wave hand signs, and he was no match for me in taijutsu. "Eight Trigrams Vacuum Palm!" I shot out a compressed palm of chakra while fleshing towards him.

He had no chance to evade or dodge; everything had happened too fast. I had taken full advantage of my Byakugan's ability to see the entire battlefield all at once to lure them into a trap.

The vacuum palm hit him square in the chest, folding him in half mid-step. He went flying backward, crashing through underbrush and slamming into the dirt with a low grunt, all the air in his lungs torn free. He tried to rise—brave, maybe even desperate—but I was already there.

One step.

He barely lifted his arms before I closed the gap, my fingers glowing faintly with focused chakra.

Gentle Fist: Four Point Disruption.

A lightning-fast combo—left shoulder, right hip, center chest, base of the neck. His limbs locked, chakra sputtered, and his body crumpled with a soft thud, paralyzed but alive.

I instantly jumped back, doing a backflip in the air as a rain of poisoned senbon flew through the space I occupied just moments before.

The battle wasn't over yet, but it would be soon. Without the Jōnin leaders, the rest of the team had little ability to stand up to us in a straight fight. So with me now free, I Body Flickered towards the hiding spot of a puppet user.

I landed in a crouch behind a cluster of dense roots and shattered rock—just in time to evade yet another sneak attack against my old position. Hiding before me was a young woman, she was alert, looking around on the battlefield for me.

Too bad for her, I was right behind her.

She never stood a chance.

I surged forward, tearing through the earth with a burst of chakra-enhanced speed. My palm lashed out as I passed the hiding spot—Gentle Fist: Twin Palm Pulse—a double-strike technique refined for breaching cover. The air shimmered with impact.

The woman exploded into a shower of wood and metal, she was a puppet, but I knew that. I could also see that the real puppet master was hidden inside a small fake rock right in front of the puppet.

And my palms didn't slow down just because the puppet was down.

I twisted in mid-step, redoubling my speed as my chakra flared along my arms. The illusion of the rock dissolved the moment my palm struck it—a half-second too slow to hide the panicked chakra spike within.

Gentle Fist: Whirlwind Break.

A triple-strike sequence. First to rupture the disguise jutsu, second to collapse the support chakra holding the puppet master's hiding shell, and the third—deep, precise—directly into the chest cavity of the man inside.

It was clever, using a realistic human-looking puppet to disguise himself, more so to have that puppet look like a young girl.

While Konoha shinobi were generally too noble to take advantage of captured Kunoichi, the same couldn't be said for other villages.

Every year, many young Genin were captured and raped, some kept as slaves, others killed once the men had their fun. But all in all, it could make people lower their guard, go for a knockout rather than a killing blow.

And this man was clearly someone who wanted to take advantage of that.

Yet now, he gasped in horror as his tenketsu collapsed. His chakra running wild inside his body, his lungs sealing shut, his heart bursting. Blood ran out of his mouth and nose as he stilled.

Not that I wasted time on watching that, no, I was already moving. "Arata! Fourteen north, three down!" I shouted as I jumped towards Haruto to assist him.

"On it!" Arata called back, his voice sharp over the sounds of battle. A crackling snap of chakra and the whistle of lightning followed as he zeroed in on the puppet master I'd just marked—turning a retreat into a kill zone.

Haruto was pinned behind a half-formed wall of earth, sweat streaking down his temples as a barrage of steel-tipped darts hammered into his cover. Poison shimmered on the tips in my Byakugan's vision. A puppet, shaped like a crouched crab, skittered around the outer edge of his defenses, ready to flank.

Not on my watch.

Most people had no good way of dealing with puppets; they would have to break them, but they were made to resist those attempts. Only powerful attacks would do the job. This puppet in particular had a powerful defence.

Yet, as a Hyūga, what was hard for others was easy for me. I could see the normally invisible chakra threats, and with another Gentle Fist: Chakra Scalpel Variant I cut them in two, causing the puppet to collapse on the spot, as my feet smashed into the back, and I used it as a springboard to jump over another barrage of darts coming from the bushes.

I twisted in the air, body tight, chakra coiled. A second puppet—wider, flatter, like a scorpion with its tail arched—fired a rapid salvo of barbed senbon from the brush. I landed on a broken stump, crouched low, then vanished in a burst of speed.

The puppet tracked the motion, but I'd already sidestepped, and with a flick of my wrist, I launched a kunai into the brush—not at the puppet, but at the kneeling figure hidden behind it.

A hiss of pain confirmed the hit.

The puppet stuttered, its tail twitching mid-cycle, and that was all the opening I needed. I was already moving.

The puppet user wasn't stupid; this time, he protected his chakra threats, keeping the puppet between me and them. so I had to disable it the good old way.

Gentle Fist: Arc Palm Barrage.

A high-speed combo I'd been refining for weeks—less precise than my scalpel strikes, but more devastating against immobile targets.

Three blows struck the puppet's side joints, two at its spine-hinge, and the last buried deep into its chest.

My chakra pushed through the joints, pushing back his own chakra, and removing his control over the puppet. It would last long, but I didn't need it.

The small moment was enough that I could pass the puppet and reach its owner.

The Suna shinobi barely had time to register my presence. I saw the panic in his eyes as his hand reached for a backup scroll—too slow, too wide, too desperate.

My open palm, glowing with chakra, slammed into his face, sending him flying backwards, his brain destroyed inside his skull; he was dead. And with my Byakugan, I could see that he was the last one.

Haruto appeared from the dust, coughing. "All clear?"

"Clear," I confirmed. "We're done."

(End of chapter)

Another short fight, will likely do a recap of Yuki's strength soon, explain properly why she can handle three Jōnin on her own, but she is getting strong, though soon enough she will cap out. The Hyūga Clan has few ways to reach higher than elite Jōnin.