Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

Deidara, Lord of Dragons, Master of Mayhem, and Explosivor Excelsior, was happy.

The sun was shining, the day was surprisingly warm for March, and he had recently upgraded the saddle on his dragon for greater comfort. For three weeks now, he had been trapped in that stupid pile of rocks, sitting next to the rift team while they waggled their seals around and made gobbling noises at each other like all sealmasters. Bunch of crack-brained idiots, if you asked him. Playing around with forces they couldn't possibly hope to control, seeking newer and newer ways to break chakra instead of molding it, collaborating with it. At the higher levels, jutsu were beautiful constru—

A wave of thunderclaps slapped him in the chest as, far below, the Akatsuki rift facility ceased to exist.


A short time ago, a short distance away...

"Check?" Tsunade demanded.

"Ah, you remind me so much of little Zen," Enma said with a grin. "He was also always uptight right before a battle, personally ensuring that each and every person was on the right page instead of—"

"A simple 'check' will suffice, Fuzzface," Tsunade said. "Cannai, check?"

Cannai, currently in his preferred size of 'wow that's a big horse', shifted slightly and allowed his tongue to hang out in a doggy smile. "I do indeed check. Although if you wish to trade further barbs with this one, I have no objection." He tossed his head towards Enma, who sat astride Cannai with his staff held at his hip so that it pointed forward like a sword. "Honestly, it is quite charming."

"Yeah, no," Tsunade said. "That furry idiot has wasted enough of our time. Let's go roll these guys." She turned to HazōShotCaller, who stood atop the nearest of the nine Remote Explosive Runes. "Ready, kid?"

HazōTimeTracker began to sing, his young voice lifting high in the call to arms that was his nation's anthem. "To the glory of the Leaf, we ascend!"

"To the future of the Leaf, we do strive," the multiple Tsunades and Orochimarus sang, carefully matching their tempo to Hazō's.

The Leaf ninja and the handful of summons who knew the song joined in, pride and excitement in their voices.

"The first step is taken!" Tsunade sang, exactly as her foot hit the ground and she began to sprint forward, still singing. The entire assault force was with her, all on the beat so that dozens of feet and paws struck the ground as one. In the lead by twenty meters ran a collection of young monkeys, new warriors who had nothing to contribute to a battle at this level but were being given the honor so that they could experience their first taste of true combat. (Which was a much nicer thing to say than 'can show the rest of us where any potential anti-summon jutsu or seal arrays might be because they will pop first.')

HazōShotCaller waited until the force had disappeared into the gloaming, leaving only a trio of Tsunade shadow clones to act as spotter.

"Ladies Tsunade," HazōShotCaller said, nodding politely.

The nearest Tsunade grimaced. "That always sounds weird. We're on it." She activated her skywalker seals and raced into the sky, compass and sextant in hand. There was just barely enough light left for a telescope-equipped spotter to be useful, which hopefully meant that said spotter would not in turn be spotted by the enemy.

Only when the Tsunades were gone did HazōShotCaller nod to his sibling. HazōTimeToBoom popped, and suddenly every Hazō knew what this Hazō knew: the assault had kicked off and it was time for the Hazōs to do what Hazōs did best. Namely, blow the everliving fuck out of the bad guys.

He took his position atop the Remote Explosive Rune, leaning forward with his hands on the twin protrusions that sprang from the side of the forward needle. The weapons had been pre-aimed with exacting precision and there was nothing more to do. The spotters were only there to report success and accuracy. The Remote Explosive Rune was consistently accurate, but unavoidable and undetectably minor imperfections in the infusion could mean that it hit slightly off from directly forward. Once that error was accounted for it was easy to hit the mark every time, but that error meant that the initial shot might be too far off to destroy the target.

This, of course, was why there were nine Remote Explosive runes, three in each of the three bombardment groups, each with a Tsunade shadow clone as a spotter.

HazōShotCaller picked up the song that HazōTimeTracker was still singing. The hair on his arms prickled as the words and notes rolled forth into the world, a promise of victory on their tide. Hazō ShotCaller said a brief and very silent prayer to Lord Jashin, promising to be a very good disciple if only the dread god would not throw this battle in favor of his senior scythe-wielding murderhobo prophet and against the forces of Leaf.

He pushed his chakra into the rune and, exactly on the anthem's specified syllable, fired.


Deidara looked down to find that someone had sneaked in and replaced the rift research facility with a massive cloud of dust and rocky shrapnel. That was impressive, as the facility was—had been—a massive, heavily-reinforced structure explicitly designed, with major input from Deidara himself, to resist aerial bombardment.

In fact, the entire area around the facility had been obliterated in a circle dozens of meters wide.

No, the destruction wasn't a circle, Deidara realized. It was a series of overlapping circles. Three of them, one centered northeast of the facility, one due east, and another southeast. Weirdly, the craters were ridiculously shallow for their breadth. Airburst, perhaps? Or a non-spherical explosion?

Forget that. Why were they here? Had the enemy been attempting to fire a series of warning shots to the east of the facility and they missed, one blast landing too far west? Was it possible that the destruction was an accident, someone trying and failing to demonstrate a new capability for purposes of later extortion? A very, very dumb idea to attempt to extort Akatsuki, but the world was full of idiots.

No, surely the enemy had been firing on the facility but for some reason their shots pulled to the right (or left, whatever). That was valuable capability knowledge; Deidara tucked it away for his report.

All of that took but a moment, thoughts and observations flashing through his trained mind in an instant as he mentally directed his dragon to turn north and run. Below him, he could see that the shield rooms and laboratories had survived the bombardment, which wasn't too surprising given just how paranoid Sasori had been about the defenses and the number of seals the legendary sealmaster had deployed in protection. That meant that a handful of the researchers and possibly a few of the Jashin cultists had survived. (The cultists were ridiculous, bowing before the rift and praying at it while sane people were trying to get work done.) Still, that didn't matter. There was no need to hold the rift; it wasn't going anywhere.

Huh. That was a good point; whoever this was, why were they attacking? Did they simply want to kill Akatsuki members and this was a known target that wasn't as heavily defended as Rain? Were they trying to capture the rift in order to fish someone out? Who did they want to recover and, whomever the attacker was, why did they think they could hold the rift long enough to accomplish that? Hidan had—

With a curse, he yanked the dragon around, making it pump its clay wings furiously in order to reverse course before they pancaked into whatever that was.

He barely made the turn; the dragon's tail flattened against the invisible surface of the utterly ridiculous wall (dome?) that was suddenly in front of him. He kept the now paddle-shaped tail in contact and flew along the surface of the wall, trying to find the edge. No luck; it was curving back on itself into a circle. It was completely transparent, and he might have missed it entirely if a bird hadn't run into it at some point and left a smear of blood slowly dripping down midair.

He hurled a glob of explosive clay at it, shaping the clay in advance so that it would focus the blast and shatter the wall.

The blast went off, the wall (as shown by the bird blood) stayed exactly where it was. It was as if the universe had thumbed its nose at him.

Rapidly, he deployed a variety of additional techniques; nothing worked. That barrier was, as embarrassing as it felt to think the words, invulnerable to his explosives.

Okay, that's fine. If he couldn't go around and he couldn't go through, he'd go over.

He pulled the dragon arou—

Holy fucking shitballs!

Deidara had assumed the bombardment was the point, that whomever had created it had brought it into the world with the elegance and grace of a master painter with the goal of destroying the fortress.

No. No, the bombardment was a footnote, a measly prelude, a wetting of the brush. It was not a portrait being gifted with grace and elegance but merely the illustrated wrapping paper around the actual gift. An ugly, clumsy gift that obviated the beauty of its covering.

And by 'gift', he meant 'assault force'.

When Akatsuki had first built this facility, Deidara had spent a few delightful hours with his art in order to clear the trees back for a quarter mile. The purpose was simply to ensure that there would be nice long sightlines that would give the sentries plenty of time to activate Sasori's defensive seal arrays in case of attack. The seal arrays were now somewhat moot since the sentries who would have triggered them, the building they had guarded, and the arrays themselves had all been reduced to a pointillist depiction of anarchy. (Although, yes, now that the dust had settled he could see that the shield room and one of the laboratories had indeed survived and people were digging their way out even now. It was more than a bit aggravating to see Sasori's seal arts trump Deidara's explosive arts, but he comforted himself that the victory of sealing was down to the inadequacy of the explosive painter, not to the failure of explosions as a style. After all, the grace with which the brush was wielded mattered more than the boldness of the color choices.)

Across that quarter-mile killing field came an army of attackers beyond anything even the greatest painters would have attempted to fit into a single work.

Deidara touched the miniaturized telescope strapped over his left eye, the result of Sasori's genius at optimization. He twisted the lens slightly, zooming in on what was below.

Oh good. The enemy force was comprised of half a dozen Orochimarus and Tsunades—shadow clones, presumably—plus far too many summoned creatures to count quickly. Snakes, toads, dogs, monkeys...Sage's name, that was Manda, the Lord of Snake, slithering next to what had to be Katwhatever the ruler of Slug, the summon mist around them rapidly dissipating as they introduced O'Uzu's treeline to their massive momentum. The two tiny little toads hopping alongside them were certain to be Jiraiya's summons, the Toad Sages.

He groaned to himself. Those two and Jiraiya had been a nightmare during the first battle. A true artist should never repeat prior work, and Deidara certainly did not care to reproduce their previous encounter.

Wait, if there were three Clan Bosses on the field, was it possible that the monkey with the iron-shod staff was not simply a powerful monkey combatant but Enma himself? The Lord of the Monkey Clan was known to fight with a staff and was the only one on the field carrying one. Good Sage's hopes, that... Wow.

Heck, might as well go all-in and assume the horse-sized dog that Enma was riding was the Lord of the Dog Clan. Gōketsu was a new summoner and young, too young to have the chakra reserves to summon a Clan Lord from the Seventh Path, but today had already shown Deidara multiple impossible things. Why not assume another?

He was surprised to feel the wind in his throat; he suddenly realized that he was grinning. A dozen Sannin clones and the rulers and strongest warriors of five separate Clans of the Seventh Path? This would be his magnum opus, his greatest creation! He would invent entirely new schools of destructive art this day!

Granted, he would prefer to leave the performance for another time. A time when he wasn't facing an impossible enemy. Just to be sure that retreat wasn't an option, he arced up, the dragon inverting so that Deidara could look down and behind to keep an eye on the enemy even as he climbed, the dragon's tail dragging along the invisible wall to confirm that yup, this was in fact a dome and not a simple wall.

HOW?!

How was it even remotely conceivable that someone could create a jutsu powerful enough to generate this?! Would even Kisame have the chakra to power such a thing?! Were the jinchūriki taking the field against him? Wait, yes, that made perfect sense. If Tsunade was here then surely Naruto couldn't be far behind. Deidara couldn't see the little shit in the attacking force, but it was chaotic enough down there to miss him, at least if he possessed the tiny scrap of intelligence necessary to forego his usual orange jumpsuit. No, wait, Naruto was likely doing what Pain had done at the prior battle: standing immobile, all his efforts devoted to maintaining the dome and none left over to move or fight. That was a relief; last thing Deidara needed to worry about was accidentally releasing a Tailed Beast.

Deidara breathed out, looking for a plan. Step one, make a huge smokescreen to cover whatever it was he decided to do. Second, split off a shadow clone to ride the dragon and distract the enemy, then...right. Sneak to the ground, tunnel down, collapse the tunnel behind him, and wait out the assault. Hopefully he could tunnel out from under the dome, but if not then he could simply go down far enough to be out of sight of any Hyūga and make camp for a day or two. By then the attackers would be gone and the dome would be down.

A moment later, he swore as a burst of incoming memories hit him. Apparently, one of his shadow clones had just had the same idea, and tried tunneling out. The ground was reinforced somehow, and if those shallow craters from the explosions earlier meant anything, this wasn't a problem Deidara could solve with explosives.

Quickly, Deidara amended. Couldn't solve quickly. All problems could be solved with explosives, but this one wouldn't be solved quickly enough to be relevant.

He sent the dragon up even as he produced explosive clay from his sleeves and hurled it downwards. Placement, of course, was key; long practice allowed him to use some explosives to herd enemies together while others arrived a moment later to destroy them.

On the ground, the assault force was engaging the surviving sealmasters and Jashin cultists. Unsurprisingly, the assault forces was going through their enemies like a hungry man through rice crackers. The Jashin cultists were competent ninja, but they were no Sannin.


Below...

TsunadeFour juked past one of the cultists; he moved like a jōnin and the Lightning Bullet he fired at her had been impressive, but she was of the Sannin.

She brushed her fingers across his throat as she passed, flickering a chakra scalpel in and out of her fingers. The blade cut all the way from front to back, carving through the spine like butter. The guy collapsed, his head still attached only by the flap of skin at the front of his windpipe. Blood went everywhere but she danced around it, turning the motion into a spin kick that broke another enemy and pinwheeled him away like a rag doll.

To her left, Cannai and Enma were having a blast. The Dog was sheathed in crystal armor from the tip of his wet black nose to the end of his adorably fluffy tail. That tail was no longer so adorable; each individual hair was sheathed in crystal, turning the thing into a nightmare of spikes and blades that still moved just as freely as before the armor was applied. Cannai was charging straight through the middle of groups of enemy ninja, tail wagging fiercely. Every time it touched a human being, that human being was converted into so much shredded meat. Enma was busy throwing out jutsu and smashing people with his staff. The staff changed length from two meters to twenty, headshotting people from farther away than they expected possible and forcing some allies to duck in order to avoid being struck. (Granted, the danger was miniscule. Enma had been fighting with that staff for centuries; he didn't hit anyone or anything unless he wanted to.)

Honestly, the biggest problem was that there weren't enough—


Far away, Tsunade Prime jerked as TsunadeFour was popped by a massive explosion that hit exactly when Four was thinking an arrogant thought. Of course. Tsunade knew better than to ever say wow, this is going well or (Sage forbid) we've got this, so what the heck had Four been thinking?


OrochimaruSeven leaped aside, flickering his skywalkers to dodge the ball of explosive clay that hit just to his left. He was too slow.


TsunadeThree cursed and triggered her skywalkers, running up to where the dragonrider circled far above. One of the Orochimarus fell in step next to her.

"Mobility," he said, not bothering to fill in the entire sentence. After all these years, they knew each other too well to need to say anything as verbose as that thing's mobility is going to be a problem.

"Yah. Rest of 'em?"

"No idea. Leave it for the others. This one?"

"Kazu Pass?"

"I'll do Jiraiya's part."

"Check. I'll message."

Orochimaru broke right and climbed. TsunadeThree popped out of existence, spreading her knowledge and intentions to every other existing instance of Tsunade. Tsunades One and Five left the ground battle and ran upwards, pushing hard for altitude. The rest of the team could find whatever other Akatsuki members were sneaking around down there. For now, there was a dragon to kill.


The tiny snake missed by a handspan as Deidara spun his dragon on a wingtip. The dragon was huge, weighing in at literally a ton of explosive clay that had taken him an entire year to manifest. Despite that, it reacted to his thoughts with speed that would have made any jōnin proud.

An Orochimaru was running up from below him, presumably on those fucking skywalker seals that had ruined Deidara's aerial supremacy. Fucking Gōketsu. Deidara should have demanded his death as repayment for Kakuzu. Still, there was a difference. They were now able to enter the skies; he owned the skies.

He scraped explosive clay off his arm, twisted his fingers to mold the clay into a tiny, swift-winged bird, and tossed it towards the foe. The bird snapped its wings out and raced forward, diving impossibly fast.

Orochimaru ducked aside but the bird shifted its flight, homing on the enemy. Deidara grinned in delight; Orochimaru's dead body, or rather the red mist where his body had been, would make such a lovely—

A snake came into existence right in front of the bird, swallowed it, and vanished as the bird detonated early.

Oh, right. Sannin.

Deidara already had another explosive on the way, this one a simple clay kunai. The smoke from the popped snake jutsu would obscure Orochimaru's vision for just long enough to—

A snake appeared from Sagedamned nowhere, swallowing Orochimaru whole for just the instant necessary to block the explosion. It then vanished in another puff of smoke and Orochimaru was still moving forward. Granted, the colors of both the snake and the resulting explosion were quite beautiful.

Fucking Sannin.

From the corner of his eye, Deidara caught two more figures on skywalkers. Oh good, not only had Tsunade joined the party but she had brought a shadow clone. Or maybe they were both clones. Whatever. If only Itachi were here with his stupid eyeballs that could demolish an entire clone network in seconds.

Deidara turned the dragon and dove, trading height for speed to open the distance between himself and Orochimaru. He needed a moment to figure out what was happening.

Long-ranged attacks were coming up from the ground but they fell far short. This annoying, impossible dome was more than half a mile high, yielding plenty of room to stay out of range. Fortunately, summons were chakra-expensive to maintain on the Human Path, Boss summons even more so, and the dragon didn't get tired. Not even Orochimaru could keep half a dozen experienced snake warriors and Lord Manda himself on the field for more than an hour or two. Once the creatures were gone, everyone down there would be low on chakra. Deidara was perfectly content to rain down explosives on them—not enough to pop too many of the summons, since that would reduce the chakra drain their summoners were undergoing. No, just enough to force everyone to tire themselves out dodging, and to prevent them from coordinating to come up with some new trick.

This impossible dome jutsu shouldn't be possible in the first place, but given that it existed it couldn't possibly be maintained for more than a few minutes—call it an hour since the world was already being ridiculous. Surely not even a jinchūriki could keep it going for more than an hour? The moment it popped, Deidara was out of here. He would report back to Rain and then the entire team would go to Leaf and reduce the place to rubble the way they should have long before. Sure, there would be fallout with AMITY, but that was Konan's problem.

Unfortunately, the enemy wasn't as stupid as he would have preferred. The few Akatsuki ground forces who had survived the beautiful artwork from earlier were now dead, the battlefield completely under enemy control. Most of the summons were gone, including Manda and Katwhatever. That massive dog was still down there, as was yes-that-is-definitely-Enma, but the riffraff were all gone. Moreover, three Tsunades and two Orochimarus were sharing the skies with him. The Orochimarus had posted up, one to the north and high, the other to the south and low. The Tsunades were running around, futilely chasing after Deidara, glowing chakra around their fists as they clearly hoped for the finishing blow.

Pfft. As if Deidara was going to let them get close enough. He hurled a trio of explosive bombs towards the nearest Tsunade; she cut her skywalkers and plummeted, dropping just barely clear of the explosion. It didn't matter, since the move had only been a cover for spraying explosive sand behind himself. The stuff was fine enough to fall slowly, almost floating on the breeze, and to be almost invisible. It still packed a punch. It wouldn't trigger on him or his creations, but if anyone else ran through it they were going to become yet another sample in Deidara's gallery of creation.

There was another Tsunade in front of him, so he spun the dragon to the left and clawed for altitude. He had let himself drop too low, and if he went down any further he might conceivably be in range of a Boss summon on the ground.

She was a Sannin; impossibly fast, impossibly dangerous. Still not as fast as his dragon.

The dragon was his masterwork and it easily outpaced any ridiculous human, even one with the ability to chakra boost as much as Tsunade could.

He would—

To his right and far too close, the sky was torn open by an explosion large enough to bring tears of joy to Deidara's eyes.


A short distance away...

"High and right!" Tsunade Twelve shouted down. "Left one click, up two, back fifty meters, hold!"

HazōShotCaller cursed and bit his lip in indecision even as he slewed his ponderous device to the new coordinates that his spotter had chosen. Presumably she expected Deidara to be in that location a few seconds from now. Beside him, the other two Hazōs of Battery One turned their own devices to bracket left and right of the point that Tsunade had specified.

Remote Explosive Runes were massive, heavy constructs that were very good at blowing stuff up and very bad at changing their point of aim. They were therefore absolutely the wrong tool for shooting down a fast-moving aerial target.

On the other hand, the nice thing about massive explosions was that you didn't need great aim. They were less 'Dear Ken' and more 'to whom it may concern, which hopefully includes Ken'.

"Fire!" bellowed Tsunade Ten, the spotter for the second battery.

The air around them rippled and shimmered as the runes went off. The Tsunades had been calling strikes for the last three minutes, turning random chunks of sky into destruction in the general area that Deidara was flying through. HazōShotCaller prayed to Jashin that the dragonrider would not figure out where the blasts were coming from, because if he did then he would fly overhead, rain down explosives, and destroy the runes. That would probably cause not one but nine massive runic failures and might possibly end the world.


Nearly two hundred meters underground, roughly under what used to be the Akatsuki staging ground facility for rift exploration...

HazōFreezeBabyFreeze licked his lips nervously after HazōForButAMoment came into existence and instantly vanished. HazōShotCaller was reporting in.

All the remaining summons except Enma and Cannai had been released back to the Seventh Path in order to conserve chakra. Deidara was still alive. He had killed three of the Sannin clones and was proving impossible to hit. It was only a matter of time until he got the rest. Then he would locate the runic explosives, pop all the clones manning them, and have control of the interior of the dome and of the Remote Explosive Runes themselves. True, he couldn't escape until the dome fell but the Leaf forces couldn't get in either. He could wait them out and the moment the dome fell he would be on his dragon and away, uncatchable. He would report to Rain that Leaf had attempted to assassinate Akatsuki, had destroyed the rift facility and captured the rift itself...and he would report the existence of runes. The consequences would be dire.

That wasn't going to happen.

HazōFreezeBabyFreeze studied the rune that sat beside him. It was remarkably delicate, remarkably beautiful, for something that could potentially end civilization.

The Superchiller rune replicated what Akane had done with her Elemental Mastery jutsu: cooled the air until the warmth-loving sky spirits became so infuriated that they tore the world apart for miles around. Except comparing the Superchiller rune to a mere chūnin-cast jutsu was like comparing a mountain to a grain of sand. The rune itself had been activated only once, for testing, deep underground so that it would not perform its actual function of angering the sky spirits. He knew it would work, but he did not know if it would work.

The part that frightened him was that it wasn't an especially difficult rune. In fact, it was ridiculously easy for something so destructive. He wasn't exactly sure how big the area of effect or duration would be, but his best guess was it would be at least hundreds of meters across and last several weeks. The Elemental Mastery jutsu had been perhaps twenty meters and a few hours, and it produced a storm twenty kilometers across and so potent that it scoured the earth.

Hazō Prime had planned for this. If things went wrong, if it looked certain that Deidara would either win or escape, it was HazōFreezeBabyFreeze's job to trigger the Superchiller rune and kill everything and everyone around. Hazō didn't know if the effect would reach outside the Force Dome that was currently over the battlefield; if it did then it might well scour a country. He was sure that the rune itself would survive its own effects. If it didn't...well, add 'runic failure' to the hurricane-force winds and freezing everything.

As of right now, it definitely looked like Deidara would either win or escape.

He took a deep breath and laid his hand on the rune.


Deidara was sweating as more and more bits of the sky erupted around him. Whoever was doing this, there had to be more than one of them because he could see multiple explosions happening simultaneously. Almost always in threes or multiples of three, for whatever that meant.

He had been on a straight course for five full seconds. Too long. He flicked the dragon to the side and mentally kicked it in the tail, urging it into a burst of speed.

Whenever more than three explosions came in at the same time, the gap before the next set of blasts was longer. That made no sense; battle jutsu didn't have charge times. It was like someone was...loading a catapult? That would account for the time delay and the fact that they couldn't seem to hit him. It couldn't be; he had been watching and there were no actual proj—

Fuck!

He dodged again and ducked as an Orochimaru and a Tsunade crossed above him, sword and glowing fist missing by less than a meter as he frantically dropped.

Gah, more explosions! Turn, turn fast!

There was barely time to throw more clay. He was too busy keeping the dragon away from the multiple attacks that were filling the battlespace to counterattack more than once every dozen seconds or so. Who the hell could do something like this? The invisible dome (which he had confirmed was still there, Sagedamnit) must have required an impossible amount of chakra, more than he would have expected even of a jinchūriki. These explosion jutsu were coming from no visible source, which meant they were longer range than any jutsu he had ever heard of. They came in bursts of three—okay, fine, there were jutsu that fired more one projectile at a time—but they had that weird lagtime between salvos. And the chakra cost for such a jutsu was impossible! Deidara was a technique hacker, he knew what it took to power a jutsu, and this was literally impossible. No human could do this.

Wait, no human! Boss summon! There must be another Boss summon on the field, but who? Who else did Leaf have...Dog, Monkey, Slug, Snake, um...Porcupine! Could this be a jutsu from the Porcupine Boss? Throwing invisible quills that exploded? It had to be. That was good. If he could find it, he could pop it and the explosions would stop.

Wait, a Tailed Beast could do this, probably. No, the Beasts weren't big on subtlety. If there was one here, he would see it rampaging around. Possibly a jinchūriki could—

Fuck, dodge!

The sun was almost down, barely a trickle of sunlight left. Another dozen each of the shadow-clone Tsunades and Orochimarus had joined the party, making it harder and harder to dodge. He had originally hoped to be able to escape in the darkness, get far enough off and low enough that the enemy lost track of him, then land in the woods and hide until the dome inevitably fell. Nope. Some of the fucking Sannin clones were running around in midair with lanterns of some kind, probably seals based on the pure white color and the intensity. He had caught two Orochimarus and a Tsunade in a blast but he still needed to get the rest. And then he needed to find whichever Boss was throwing those explosions at him and send it back to the Seventh Path.

Fucking Sannin. Fucking Boss summons.


Tsunade winced as yet another of her clones was destroyed by one of those fucking explosions, this one coming out of absolutely nowhere with no warning. All praises to the Sage's mighty ballsack that Deidara had been the only Akatsuki member in the air when they attacked. The Leaf forces were just barely keeping ahead of him and those fucking explosions. If there had been even one other member of Akatsuki riding on that dragon, providing cover and counterattacks, those fucking explosions would have fucking exploded the entire Leaf force and Leaf would be utterly fucked.

Heck, he might still manage it. She and Oro had been spamming basic clones this whole time, creating illusory copies of themselves to serve as decoys. In the semi-darkness, Deidara clearly thought that the useless illusion clones were yet more highly dangerous shadow clones because he was wasting a lot of explosives on them. If he eventually figured out what was going on and managed to target the correct ones, he could likely blow them out of the sky in short order. It was hard to face off against fucking explosions in midair where there was no cover to be had except what you made.

Worse than all that, she had been keeping a lot of shadow clones up for a long damn time. If this kept on for too much longer she was going to have to worry about the clone shock killing her when the remaining clones dispelled or ran out of time.

Fuuuuuck.


Deidara dodged around another snake missile, this one a lovely red/green speckled pattern and probably just loaded with some awful venom that would melt his organs. He closed his eyes for half a second as he created and detonated a flashbomb, light bursting out to blind his opponent, then hurled a kunai made of explosive clay at the Orochimaru who had launched the missile. The asshole pulled a fucking wooden wall out of a storage seal, ducked behind it, and made it through the explosion.

What the Orochimaru in question had not realized was that Deidara had thrown two clay kunai, one of them set to go off six meters after the other. The second explosion caught Orochimaru from behind and blasted him out of existence.

One more down, good. There were eight or nine left, but he was pretty sure that some of those were basic cl—

Gack!

He was splatted in the face by something wet and gross, like translucent snot. The impact rattled him around so much that his vision grayed out. Only for a moment, but that was enough. Even as he clawed the stuff away from his mouth and nose so he could breathe, another strand of the stuff splattered across the dragon's mouth, more across its neck and wings, more across Deidara's chest.

No one had thrown anything! Where was it coming from?!

Wait, Tsunade. She had run through this entire area not two minutes ago; he had thought it odd since he wasn't in that section of the battlespace at the time, but he had been too distracted to think about it. She had left this stuff floating in midair. Floating snot. Probably some Slug technique.

The dragon's wings were getting gunked up, strands of the stuff weighing them down and linking the two wings together so they couldn't make full wingbeats. The dragon itself was slowing down. Frantically, Deidara ordered the outer layers of the dragon's wings to explode, blasting the snot away so that the dragon could once more move at full speed.

Orochimaru was closing in from his left, sword in hand!

Responding to its master's thoughts, the dragon folded its wings, wrapped its tail around itself, and dropped like a stone. Orochimaru's sword extended like a lance, skewering the spot where Deidara's head would have been had he continued straight and level, but the dragon and its master were under that line and falling fast.

Thirty meters from the ground, the dragon snapped its wings open and beat them frantically, struggling to convert its plunging speed into horizontal movement. Enma and that fucking dog were right under him, the Monkey Lord's staff aimed right at Deidara's eyes. The moment he came within range—

Trees erupted from the ground in front of him, blossoming with unearthly speed into a full canopy from which dripped vines that reached towards him like the tentacles of a monster.

The dragon pulled its wings in, just enough, and danced around the boughs and boles with whiskers to spare. Deidara had played this game for years, driving his mount through progressively smaller hoops and tighter-packed forests of poles to prepare for exactly such a situation. Not only did he make it look easy, he took a moment to gift the two Boss summons with an emotionally satisfying example of Deidara's art.

Unfortunately, the artwork was rushed, its creator too hasty, and thus the intended recipients failed to take delivery. Enma swung off the massive dog's back, racing alongside it for a step or two in order to use it as a shield. The dog's armor shed the blast like water off a storm duck and then Enma was back astride, firing jutsu upwards.

The old monkey was good, but the air was Deidara's kingdom and he pulled up and out of range, then turned back to—

A plummeting Orochimaru drove his fully-extended sword through the top of Deidara's head, through his body the long way, and through the dragon so that the tip stuck out through the clay beast's chest. The impact rocked the dragon, flinging Deidara's body sideways against the straps. The straps were tight, ensuring he didn't fly off of his dragon, and thus when he hit the ground he was still firmly attached to his greatest creation.

Deidara, Lord of Dragons, Master of Mayhem, and Explosivor Excelsior, was no longer happy.

He was dead.

---

Results of the battle:

• No allied deaths
• No enemy survivors, no prisoners
• Based on the anticipated number of people at the facility, the vast majority of enemies were vaporized in the initial blast
• Of the bodies that have been discovered, the following have been identified:
  • Around a dozen Jashinist ninja
  • Four Rain ninja
  • Deidara of the Akatsuki
  • No other bodies of Akatsuki members were found, nor were any such members reported during the fighting. It is possible that they were among the 'vaporized in the initial blast' group

XP AWARD: 5 This update covered 1 day.

Brevity XP: 0 The plan was long enough that it technically should be getting a brevity penalty, but I'm feeling so peachy keen happy right now that ima ignore that.

"GM had fun" XP: 3

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Voting ends on Wednesday, Jan 24, 2025 at 7:00 AM .