7 Frozen Lightning

“Ice Style! Earth Chain Ice!” Kahyo wove her signs and struck the floor with the palm of her hand.

An ice crystal began to stretch out toward Kakashi like a snake. The crystal immediately became an enormous icicle and bared its fangs.

Kakashi reacted without a moment’s delay. “Violet Bolt!” He slammed the palm of his hand onto the floor.

The pale-purple electric current was transmitted across the gallons of alcohol spilled on the floor to meet the ice fang dead on, popping and crackling the whole way.

Booooom!

The ice and lightning, colliding savagely, caused an explosion large enough to shake the entire ship. The passengers screamed.

Caught in the blast, the grand piano flew toward a child who was a little late to run. Sweeping up the boy and dancing away was none other than the man with a broken leg and the power of youth on full display: Guy.

The piano crashed into the wall, and the chandelier on the ceiling shuddered threateningly.

Returning the sobbing boy to his mother, Guy glared hard at Rahyo. “It’s clear you lot don’t understand when we tell you, hm?”

“Ha ha ha!” Rahyo laughed as he charged. “This just got interesting!”

Punch and punch, kick and kick—the battle between Guy and Rahyo was completely even; only the number of moves steadily increased. Ten hits, twenty, thirty, they slammed up against each other violently.

“You,” Kakashi turned toward his own enemy. “Two months ago, you were guarding Garyo, right?”

“We don’t think we can defeat you and Konoha.”

Kakashi was silent.

“But even if we throw away our lives, our message will most definitely reach someone,” Kahyo continued speaking quietly. “And then that someone will move next. Like this, our will is handed down.”

“Garyo’s just an idealist. And the problem with idealists is that they’ll burn down the whole world for the sake of their ideals.”

“A world like this—”

“Should be destroyed.”

She said nothing.

“That’s what you were going to say, wasn’t it?” Kakashi narrowed his eyes. “Madara and a man who was a good friend of mine probably thought the same thing. But I believe the truth is that they loved this world more than anything.” He could feel Kahyo’s icy eyes below her mask. “Naruto told me you lost your child because of the Land of Waves?”

“What!”

“In that case, it’s not hard to see why you’d be happy if the world ended,” Kakashi said. “You do this shinobi thing, and at some point, you’re going to come face to face with the deaths of everyone you love.”

“Hakuhyo—my son did not lose his life in war!” she cried. “Hakuhyo… Hakuhyo… was murdered by those Land of Waves bastards!”

“So you swore revenge against the Land of Waves?”

“Death as a shinobi is something the shinobi chooses!” Kahyo shouted. “The moment you become a shinobi, you are prepared to die. I… My brother and I didn’t want Hakuhyo to live like that. We became rogue ninja and hid ourselves in the Land of Waves. We simply wished for a quiet life without war, a life without hurting anyone.”

“You’re wrong. As long as we’re alive, we have to continue fighting,” Kakashi told her. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re a shinobi or a regular person. Wielding a kunai or wielding banknotes, it’s the same thing. The very fact of living itself means you’re always fighting for your life.”

“Aaaaah!” Kahyo cried out in a strange voice and rushed toward him. “What do you know?”

Kakashi coolly assessed the incoming attack. His enemy’s fist cut through the air and was blocked; the follow-up kick split nothing more than Kakashi’s afterimage.

“The death of a comrade and the death of a child who shares your blood are two entirely different things!”

Kakashi bent down to evade Kahyo’s roundhouse kick.

“Grief over losing a comrade is healed by time at some point!”

He pushed up an elbow strike with a flat hand.

“How could someone like you understand the feelings of a parent whose child has been killed!”

Kakashi grabbed the fist that was launched at him. “Then why are you trying to take the lives of other people’s children?”

The boy Guy had rescued earlier was looking at them with fearful eyes.

“The people that you executed were someone’s children,” Kakashi said. “This grief of yours isn’t going to disappear even if you do destroy the world.”

“Aaaaaaah!” Shoving Kakashi aside, Kahyo slammed the palm of her hand down onto the floor. “Ice Style! Earth Chain Ice!”

An ice formation so enormous all the others that had come before it paled in comparison encircled Kahyo and spread out, like a ring of ice flowers Kahyo made bloom from her own frozen heart.

Kakashi was not the only one doing a backflip to escape the ice fangs; Rahyo and Guy dodged in the same way, while the passengers stumbled out of the way or slid along the floor.

The steadily growing ice petals pierced the ceiling, lifted the floorboards, and pushed into the walls of the ship with sharpened tips.

“Stop, Kahyo!” The shout came from Rahyo. “We’re still over the ocean! You must endure it!”

Kahyo had completely lost herself, however, and her brother’s voice did not reach her ears. Just the opposite—she radiated even more chakra, adding power to the ice flowers.

Rahyo was forced to leap over the icicles and ram his iron fist into Kahyo’s stomach.

Thud!

Knocked unconscious, she collapsed in Rahyo’s arms.

But he was a just a tenth of a second too late.

Wham!

The jutsu was released at the same time as Kahyo lost consciousness, but before the ice flower could vanish like mist, it opened an enormous hole in the ship’s body.

Air travels from areas of high pressure toward areas of lower pressure—the thin atmosphere five thousand meters above the ground sucked out all of the air in the dining lounge with a roar. Passengers, too, were sucked one after another through the hole in the ship—along with plates and forks, knives, spoons, the wood chips and bottles of alcohol scattered and broken on the floor, and the various equipment brought on board for the sightseeing tour.

Most of its wires now cut, the chandelier was just barely hanging from the ceiling on the one wire it had left.

The screams of the passengers were drowned out by the roar of the wind.

Still holding Kahyo, Rahyo grabbed on to the nearest pillar and just managed to hang on against the wind pressure that threatened to carry him away.

“Ngah!” Guy’s body floated in the air.

“Guy!” Kakashi threw himself forward to grab on to Guy’s hand, but couldn’t get a good grip because of his broken fingers. “Dammit!”

Still, somehow he managed to grab on to one of the power lines jutting out through a rip in the wall. He was about to be pulled outside the ship, still holding on to Guy.

“Aah!”

Kakashi and Guy were thrown about by the wind like a flag ripped in two—up, down, left, right, trading places with incredible speed, slamming into the ship countless times.

“Kakashi, let go!” Guy barked. “If you don’t, you’ll end up falling too!”

“D-don’t fight me, Guy!”

“No! Let go! I’ll be fine! From this trivial altitude, it’s no big deal as long as I have the power of youth!”

“K-keep your sleep talk in your sleep.”

The hand holding on to Guy had a broken finger, and the hand holding on to the power line did too.

No matter how tightly he tried to hold on, Kakashi couldn’t do anything about the power line inching away from the palm of his hand.

“Master Kakashi? Can you hear me, Master Kakashi?”

He didn’t have anything extra to answer Ino’s call with.

In the corner of his eye, passengers plummeted to the ground. And that wasn’t the only thing flitting by in the corner of his eye.

“We’ve secured the passengers our enemies had assaulted and kidnapped near the ceremony grounds.”

Something like a white flower petal, the leaf of a tree blown about by the wind—

“Master Kakashi, can you hear me? The Land of Waves has just now notified Lady Tsunade of the information about the attackers.”

When he saw the hook pattern on that surface, Kakashi realized it was Kahyo’s mask. Even as he was being blown up practically horizontally, Kakashi tried to search out Kahyo somehow. Kahyo, out cold in Rahyo’s arms farther back in the dining lounge. The long curly hair yanked up by the wind—

“Master Kakashi? The breakdown of the twelve people attacking from the Ryuha Armed Alliance is eleven men and one woman. Can you hear me, Master Kakashi? The victims were assaulted by eleven men and—”

“Hngh?!”

In that instant, everything disappeared.

The noise, the wind, even time.

The power line finally slipped from his hand, and the last thing Kakashi saw as he tumbled to the earth with Guy was—

“—one woman.”

The woman in the long blue dress.