One Thousand Hands (OC- Senju SI)

Pre-Chapter A/N: I think we're at the point where it is officially no longer cool to say Happy New Year! Either way, I hope you're all still keeping up with your new year's resolutions. I'm just getting started on mine (still). Here we go with the third chapter of 2025. Lovely to have you all here, and I hope you enjoy this one. If you do, feel free to head over to patreon (www.patreon.com/Oghenevwogaga) and read the next two chapters- I update there on a daily basis so there's always something for you to read. It's also a new year, so this is probably the best time to buy an annual membership on my page, if you're the kind of person that would do well with one. Have fun. 

XXXXXX- KURAMA KIZURU 

He jumped between trees and held his breath as another patrol made their way past him. By his side, Toshiro and Shika were similarly still and once the patrol passed, they exploded into movement once again. Their mission was simple. Simple but insanely difficult, just like most things ended up being. He felt the warm brush of Toshiro's chakra as it cloaked them once more, but now to achieve a different aim. Invisibility had been necessary when out in the forest, but here it would be a detriment. An invisible person would be easily found in the tightly packed can of sardines that was the Suna encampment. Instead, the genjutsu was aimed at making sure they weren't noticed. 

Kizuru began to whistle under his breath as they went deeper into the camp as well, adding his own genjutsu efforts to Toshiro. Neither of their genjutsu were especially strong as that would have been a dead giveaway to the experienced shinobi that surrounded them. Instead, their genjutsu were aimed to be weak but insidious and subtle. Only someone with a med-nin's level of control would be able to notice the disturbance to their chakra network that Toshiro's caused, and then they'd ignore it because that was what Kizuru's own genjutsu whispered for them to do. 

They took a sharp left on reaching the center of the camp. Shika's idea to capture one of the patrols and interrogate them on the camp's layout had proven immensely useful as they had a clear picture of where everything they wanted would be located and wouldn't stick out for looking lost at least. The first thing was the water supply. As expected, they stored their water in fuinjutsu-enhanced barrels. Shori and the others were going to be poisoning the rivers themselves, so these were soon going to be the only safe sources of water available to the Suna nin. 

'Poison or destroy?' He signed at Shika, waiting for her to make a decision. They had yet to decide one way or the other at this point, but instead of replying him with signs, she let her actions do the talking, taking out a steel syringe that she stabbed into one of the barrels from the top. Taking out a scroll, she provided both he and Toshiro with enough syringes to deal with all the other barrels. And then when they arrived at a collection of sealing scrolls, she made a single handseal before tapping the scroll in the middle. It began to be set alight, and then she turned for the to leave. They left the water storage room and moved on to the food room, where multiple rations were stored. For this, they stole what they could and then destroyed what they couldn't. Every shinobi worth their salt probably carried some amount of food with them, so this was unlikely to be the fatal wound that their water sabotage would be. The only reason they'd even be succeeding with the water plan was because this was Suna. Water was scarce enough there that each shinobi could not just be served by carrying their own water- if they did that, they'd fall into scarcity rapidly, so they had to ration things out from the top down. That would turn out to be their undoing, he thought with a smirk as they moved to their next target. 

He never even noticed the woman who narrowed her eyes at them as they passed. It was not until they had entered the next tent that they realised they were being followed. 

"Who the fuck are you?" A voice called out to them as soon as they had made it a few steps into the tent that contained weapon supplies. 

"Uh" He was ashamed to say he froze at her words, shocked to be caught so easily. 

Something about his reply had clearly been found wanting because the woman brought her massive steel fan to bear and waved it. He never got to experience the effects of what he was sure would have been a powerful jutsu as Shika grabbed on to his shoulder and slammed them into the ground, and through it. Transforming into shadows had never been a pleasant experience, he had learned with time and experience from running a few missions with their class's Nara Princess. 

They surfaced at the outskirts of the camp, and he felt his hand move straight to his chest as he gasped for breath. Beside him, he could see Toshiro doing something similar as they struggled to find oxygen- to breathe. His body? He wondered as he tried to convince himself that this was still his body. He moved his fingers in random patterns, using the methods he'd discovered for getting over the effects of shadow melding. Seemingly unaffected, Shika just stood up and stared down at them as they recovered. 

"Hurry. That would have drawn a crowd, and they'll be searching the surroundings once they get a hold of themselves" She said, voice quiet. He nodded, feeling at his chin to make sure his head was moving as he ordered it to. 

XXXXX- SENJU SHORIRAMA 

The land of Rivers was burning. In hindsight, that should have been an outcome he saw coming from taking the water-skin. Perhaps he might have left that behind if he saw this scale of destruction in the near future. Naaa. He'd have taken it either way. He would just have done it with more gravitas, recognizing the moment for the pivotal shift it was. Now, just how did they get here? Right, it all began with Shika, Toshiro, and Kizuru. 

X- 

"Shika is in trouble" Uraume whispered as they made their way to the chosen rendezvous point. 

"What?" I asked with some urgency in my voice. Losing our chief strategist in the opening exchange of the confrontation would be disastrous. But beyond that, Shika was my friend. 

"She and the others are being chased by close to thirty suna shinobi. They're ahead of them and making good progress". 

"So, what's the problem?" 

"Someone is taking a different route, cutting across to forest to catch up to them. He's moving quickly as well." 

"Only a single shinobi? They should be fine" I said, turning to focus on our travels. 

"While I cannot be one hundred percent certain, I suspect that the shinobi racing towards them is Piandao the weasel" She said, pointing towards the Northeast, and I froze instantly. I'd memorized the bingo book a while ago. Every shinobi worth their salt had learned the names and epithets of the S-ranked threats that called the other villages home. Piandao was one of Suna's most dangerous. 

"Continue towards the others. Inform them about the River situation. Secure our stores and work to make sure that Suna does not get to top theirs up. Hopefully, the fact that Shika and her team are fleeing means they managed to succeed with at least some part of their mission." I ordered Uraume and Shiba. They nodded, and I began to make my way to cut off the approaching Suna threat. 

"Good luck Cousin. Just continue in that direction, and you should come in contact with him in no time. Be careful". 

"When am I not?" I asked rhetorically. 

"Always" Both Shiba and Uraume replied in unison, making me facepalm and return my focus to my target. I jumped into the treeline, moving with vim to make sure I caught up to Suna's famous weasel before he caught up with Shika and the others. 

Piandao the weasel, I thought with a smile beginning to build. Of all Suna's S-ranks he was going to be the one that would present the greatest threat to me and my fighting style. The truth was that being an S-ranked shinobi was often a question of tradeoffs. Every shinobi had their strengths and their weaknesses. A good shinobi would focus their energy on building their strengths and removing their weaknesses. S-ranked shinobi were just so strong that their weaknesses never mattered. To beat one, you had to either get extremely lucky or beat them multiple times in the same fight. One person I regularly used as my standard for this was Uchiha Itachi from canon. He had all the makings of a good shinobi, good chakra control, excellent genjutsu prowess, and flawless taijutsu, but his weaknesses were easily apparent: terrible stamina, progressing blindness and a disease that wreaked havoc through his body. Regardless of these weaknesses, he had still been one of the most dangerous shinobi of his time. It didn't matter that he had shitty stamina when he ended every fight in seconds. 

That was true for most S-rankers, but Piandao took it to an extreme level. He was a swordsman. That was it. He used elemental flow on his blade and could do it with all five elements, but that was the limit when it came to his ninjutsu knowledge. He never used long range jutsu or even genjutsu. Armed with only his blade, he had cut through hundreds of shinobi across a lifetime. What made him dangerous to me was that the gentle fist was shit when it came to combat with bladed opponents as a general rule, and where I would normally bridge that gap with superior skill, I was not stupid enough to think that would avail me against someone who had been killing shinobi for longer than I'd been alive. 

That left me with only one advantage-long range ninjutsu. Even that was suspect, as he had become famous for prevailing against ninjutsu masters, so he definitely knew enough to be able to deal with that when he came. Piandao's weaknesses were obvious — he had no long-range solutions, and would be half the threat he posed if he was robbed of his blade. His strengths, on the other hand, were simply that it didn't matter what one tried — he wanted you dead, you died. 

When I could finally spot him with my byakugan, I began to cycle my chakra through my body in preparation. The bingo book stated his speed and his blade were his biggest advantages. I would have to rob him of both. The second he was in range of ninjutsu, I took a breath in and breathed out a volley of bullets that tore through the trees between us and continued to his position. In a flash, his blade was in his hand and he blocked each of the bullets that were in danger of hitting him so quickly and efficiently that I struggled to describe what I had seen. 

He deflected the bullets, but that was only the first salvo. I twisted my fingers into the Horse seal and took a deep breath. When I breathed out, it was with all the force of a hurricane. The wind uprooted several of the thin trees that called the land of Rivers home. From his position, he saw the effects of the coming wind and dropped to the ground and squatted. I watched as his chakra concentrated itself all along his body and the wind blew against him but failed to even make him budge. One of the uprooted trees slammed into him, but it shattered as it made contact with his stationary form but achieved no damage to his form. I clicked my teeth in irritation as our eyes finally met. My Great breakthrough had torn away all the trees between us, so that meant that the space between us was just made of flatlands and the occasional tree trunk that only had its upper body broken away without being completely uprooted. 

I was finally close enough for his own eyes to see me, and he smiled from ear to ear once he identified me. I had no doubts that he knew exactly who I was. Just like I'd been researching all Suna's threats — there's no chance a shinobi would join an invading force without researching the threats from the village that they were going to be pissing off. 

He bent at the knee and shot off right towards me. Fucking fast, I silently amended my initial assessment as I pushed my arms out to the left and used wind release to push me in the other direction, avoiding the slash by a hair's breadth. I landed on the floor and rolled to bleed the momentum and avoid the throwing knives that stabbed into the space I'd previously occupied only a second hence. Forming a tiger seal with one hand, I sent a massive great fireball at him. I kept an eye out, waiting for him to dodge so that I could take advantage of his changed position, but he just sliced through the fireball with a glowing blade and kept coming right at me. 

He moved to slice my head off, and I met his blade with the rasengan I'd built in my hand in a second. The collection of chakra threads ground against the blade for what felt like an eternity with neither one managing to make any headway against the other. The older man smiled, his goatee shifting along his face before in a blur of motion, he stabbed a knife into my neck. I grabbed at his foot from beneath the ground as my mud clone fell apart in front of him and dragged him into the ground. At least, I tried to…the blade that sliced along the ground where my hand had been, nary a second ago, dissuaded that thought thoroughly. The remnants of my mud clone failed to stick to him as they usually did, with his chakra allowing him to just shrug it off and take his stance again. 

"Shorirama Senju, Jounin of Konohagakure. It is an honour to meet you. It will be an even bigger honour to kill you" He said. 

"Piandao the Weasel, I wish I could say the same, but we both know that you will be remembered for a month at the most before your village moves on. Killing you will just be another notch on my belt." I said with a shrug, purposely attempting to irritate him as I rose from the ground with a smirk. 

"We'll see about that" he said, and then he was off. His blade sliced a few bangs off my hair as I bent at the waist to avoid the attack. His attempt to shift his footing and send the blade through my chest failed as I switched places with another mud clone. 

"If I have to kill a million of these to get to you, I will. But I would be pleased if you decided to fight like a warrior and abandoned such petty tricks." He said, while flicking his blade to remove what little mud had managed to stick to him. 

I formed the snake seal from behind him, and the ground rumbled as it shifted to form spikes beneath his feet. He shifted his stance, and even as a spike erupted from right beneath his left leg, he somehow managed to remain balanced atop it. 

"That's just bullshit" I muttered as I took a deep breath and covered him in flames. This time, he jumped from one spike to the next and allowed the fire to miss him by some margin. 

"Too slow, Senju-san" He said as he dodged all my attempts to set him on fire even as he jumped through the field of spikes to make his way to me. When he was right in front of me, I allowed him to cleave me in twain, and as my clone fell apart before him, I took aim from a few dozen feet away and sent a beam of pure chakra through his heart. At least, I tried to. 

Just as about the moment my chakra arrow was about to hit, he turned on his heel and sliced through it with his blade. 

"Hiding now?" He asked with a chuckle before jetting off. Guessing that my position had been made, I shoved my hands into the ground and lifted them with rock gauntlets around each fist. My left fist was up in time to catch his blade and stop it short. At least, it was stopped short for a second or two, I amended as I was forced to release the gauntlet as his blade began to eat into it. 

"What even is that thing made of?" I asked as I swung my right fist straight at his exposed midsection. He bent his body out of the way of the blow, and I stomped my foot on the ground, turning the surrounding area into mud in an instant, and forcing him to jump backwards as the mud began to take hold of his feet. 

"That kekkei genkai of yours is annoying" He said with a scoff. 

"Kekkei genkai? This is earth release" I replied with a matching scoff. 

He actually burst into laughter at that. "And you are supposed to be the brightest gem of this failed generation of yours? What has this world come to?" 

Ignoring his attempt to distract me, I formed another hand seal and sent the mud around me reaching out for him. He jumped backwards, avoiding the attack as someone came into my range of vision. 

Not just someone, I noted. It was two people, Izuku and Uzume. I tried to avoid giving it away, but my opponent slashed through some of the mud tendrils and took a single look at my face before jumping backwards. 

"You have reinforcements on the way. We will meet again, Senju-san" He said, and before I could even contemplate following, my eyes caught onto a glowing explosion tag floating in the mud right next to me. Looking around, I noticed that there were at least a dozen more. Fuck. 

"Eight trigrams: Rotation" I began. 

A/N: How was the fight? Don't expect decisive outcomes all the time. Would be a pretty short war if every fight ended with someone important dying, wouldn't it? As always, the following two chapters are up on pa-treon. If you just want to read complete chapters and not my work in real-time, then feel free to purchase this story as a collection on my patreon (www.patreon.com/Oghenevwogaga) page so you get to read each chapter after I finish it and not neecessarily the daily updates available with a regular patreon (www.patreon.com/Oghenevwogaga) membership- nice way to support this story and me while you're at it. Enjoy!