Shikamaru raced ever higher as though lured upward by the long, twisting staircase, eyes focused on Gengo’s back ahead of him. His aides were fighting in the hall, while this man, revered like a god, fled by himself. Closed in by stone walls, the spiral staircase felt strangely oppressive. The twisting path was almost dizzying.
“How about you be good and give up already?” Shikamaru called, with no expectation of an answer.
Up ahead, an enormous iron door—an ill-formed and unrefined gate totally without adornment—appeared. Gengo didn’t hesitate; he pushed the heavy door back and disappeared inside.
Shikamaru caught a glimpse of darkness through the crack before the door shut behind the other man. He put a hand on the closed door. He was certain it had to be some kind of trap. He knew he was being lured in somehow.
He opened the door anyway.
It didn’t matter what scheme Gengo had hatched. He could only go forward.
The space on the other side of the door was pitch black. An aura lay hidden in the silent darkness.
One person.
Abruptly, the door behind him slammed shut. The aura was in front of him, so either there was someone else or that had been a little trick of the owner of the aura before him.
“So you’ve come alone, fearing nothing, hm? I can only pray your action does not prove foolhardy.” Gengo’s voice. “You have no hope of finding me in this darkness.”
“For generations, the shinobi of the Nara House have manipulated our own shadows. And what gives birth to shadows is darkness. In a sense, darkness is the mother of the shadow. For me, living with shadows, this darkness is like the inside of my mother’s womb. I’ve been able to see you this whole time.”
This was half bluff.
He was indeed accustomed to the darkness, but that didn’t mean he could actually see in the dark. He was simply a little more sensitive to the strength of auras than other ninja.
“Interesting… You truly are an interesting man. It’s almost a shame to kill you here,” Gengo said, in a tone brimming with self-satisfaction.
Silence…
Shikamaru and Gengo alike held their tongues, narrowing their awareness to focus on their opponent’s aura.
“I was originally a ninja of Kirigakure,” Gengo began speaking as if intentionally breaking the silence. “Do you know of a man named Momochi Zabuza?”
He did.
Naruto kept mentioning that name around the time he had just become a genin. Shikamaru was pretty sure Momochi Zabuza was a masterful rogue ninja who got stuck fighting on a mission he shouldn’t have accepted.
“When Zabuza attempted a coup d’état in Kirigakure, what he was aiming for was my ideal world.”
Gengo’s ideal world—that ninja themselves would rule the world.
“However, the plot was exposed through the reports of collaborators, and Zabuza became a rogue ninja. My youthful self numbered among his followers at that time. But Zabuza needed money to realize his ideal, and thus joined forces with wealthy merchants—basically the mafia—and accepted dirty work. Many of our brethren turned their backs on Zabuza and went their separate ways when he dirtied his own hands in the name of his just cause. I was one of them. It’s been a dozen or so years since then, and I finally obtained a country. It begins now…”
Gengo’s voice was shaking.
“My ambition finally begins now! And yet, because of you lot!”
Bloodlust began to bleed into Gengo’s aura. The quiet sound of kicking at the earth reached Shikamaru’s ears.
He drew his kunai and readied himself. He couldn’t see anything. All he could do was follow the aura.
Gengo was headed straight for him. He was getting far too little information from directly in front of him.
“Zabuza mistook the path! He hurried to realize his ideal and dirtied his hands! But I’m not like him! After a long road of hardship, I came up with this jutsu, swallowed people into a vortex of passion, and now rule this land. And I’ll expand this vortex until it consumes the entire continent!”
Shikamaru heard something unusual in the shouting voice. The sound of the air being sliced.
A blade. And a fairly large one.
A hatchet? No, thinner. Something like a halberd or a longsword.
The aura pressed in on him.
The rush of air was closing in on his own neck. He held his breath and flew to the side. His body was almost at a diagonal when he felt the blade racing above him.
“Nicely dodged. But don’t think that this is the end!” came a shout, following by the side-sweeping wind changing trajectories in the empty space between them.
Shikamaru tumbled forward and propped himself up on one knee, as the howling pressed in toward the crown of his head.
In the darkness, he dreamed of Gengo.
From the range of the slicing sound, he figured out the length of the blade and got an idea of the hilt attached to it. Beyond that was Gengo.
In this darkness, he couldn’t generate a shadow. He couldn’t use ninjutsu to capture his enemy. He only had his own body to rely on.
Shikamaru had no weapons left besides somewhat unreliable physical techniques. His mind was loose, ready; he even had the mental leeway to note idly that he should’ve gotten Lee to teach him something if this was where he was going to end up.
“Heh heh.” He laughed to himself, satisfaction at the return of his old soft way of thinking.
The howling touched the tip of his tied-back hair.
“Ngh!” Concentrating every nerve in his body, he rolled forward with all his might toward the Gengo he pictured.
Once the longsword had gotten well within reach, he immediately went limp. When driven forward by a blade, it was more effective to get in close than it was to try and run.
You try to live, you die; you go for death, you live…
The foundation of the art of war.
Behind Shikamaru tumbling forward, the longsword cut into the floor. He rolled once more, and then squatted deeply, stretched his legs out, and flew upward. He felt his head hit Gengo’s body.
With a groan, Gengo dropped into a crouch. “Enough!”
Shikamaru set his right foot on top of Gengo’s bent knee and launched his left knee at his opponent’s head. Thanks to his boundless dreaming about the strength of the other man’s aura, his movements, the many sounds, Shikamaru had a very clear image of Gengo in his brain.
“Gaah!” Even after taking that very hearty blow, Gengo did not fall. Through brute strength, he kept his body upright, released the longsword, and wrapped both arms around Shikamaru’s torso.
At first, Shikamaru felt like he was floating, but then an electric current and a sharp pain pierced his spine at the nape of his neck. By the time he realized he had been punched, Gengo’s aura was already standing up. Shikamaru heard the sound of steel scraping along the stone floor. His enemy had probably retrieved the longsword.
His whole body was numb. It took another few moments for his body to do what he wanted it to again.
“In Kirigakure, we have the seven swords, and the jutsu to manipulate these swords is beaten into the village ninja from a young age,” Gengo noted as he swung the longsword.
His target was the prone figure of Shikamaru.
There was only one way.
Absurd.
He’d never even considered trying a stunt like this before. But he had no other techniques for escape.
“Now, then!”
Shikamaru raised his arms to meet the howling. Aiming for the sword in his imagination, he thrust both hands forward.
He felt a chill in his hands.
The sword.
“L-looks like that worked somehow.”
“Ridiculous,” Gengo muttered, dumbfounded.
With good reason. Because somehow, Gengo’s longsword was firmly wedged between the palms of Shikamaru’s hands.
“The ninja art of catching a naked blade… I guess.”
“How long do you intend to continue this foolishness?!” Anger bled into Gengo’s voice.
His opponent poured his strength into the blade suspended in midair. He intended to use physical strength alone to push it down and into Shikamaru. Gengo, standing with perfect posture, pressing the longsword down, and Shikamaru, still lying prone on the ground, trying to push it up. The advantage was with Gengo.
Slowly but steadily, the blade descended.
“I will kill you, you bastard. And I will pull all of those in the hall together into the same mind, and we will proceed toward my ambition.”
“Whoa, whoa, now I’m ‘you bastard’? You don’t even realize your true colors are showing here. No way you’re gonna be able to just do whatever you want with this world.”
“What am I to say of this situation? You are a fool who cannot even grasp the superiority of your opponent.”
“And who was it that was going to make this fool his right-hand man?”
“You and your endless trivialities… There’s no center to your words.”
Gengo put even more power into the sword.
As he pushed back, Shikamaru’s arms trembled. He was already close to his limit. Tepid sweat poured down his forehead. He had been driven into a corner.