NARUTO: Kakashi’s Story

by Masashi Kishimoto

  This guy! Kakashi was surprised all over again. He’s really mastered the Fists of Seasickness!

  “You…just never stop.” The attacks of the enraged Rahyo gradually grew erratic. Still, one out of every three times, his ice-breaking fist managed to graze Guy.

  “Hey, Kakashi!”

  The small voice called out just as Rahyo’s fist mowed down the bar. Bottles fell to the floor and smashed.

  Kakashi looked down and found that at some point, Pakkun had appeared by his side.

  “We got all the explosive tags,” Pakkun said. “I’m going to chew through your ropes now.”

  Even as Pakkun was struggling with the ropes binding Kakashi’s hands, the battle between Guy and Rahyo continued.

  Foot slipping on the spilled alcohol, Guy fell over rather spectacularly, and Rahyo brought his ice-breaking fist down on him without mercy. Guy rolled away, and Rahyo’s fist, having lost its target, punched a hole in the floor.

  Jumping back up, Guy tossed off a counterattack, but not only was his haphazardly thrown haymaker dodged completely, he accidentally ended up throwing himself into the arms of his enemy.

  “It ends here!” Rahyo’s eyes, sunk into their sockets, glittered sharply. “Ice-Breaking Fist!”

  The iron punch caught Guy in the stomach.

  Whud! The dull sound echoed through the room, and Guy’s body floated up into the air. His eyes bulged and the air in his body shot out all at once.

  Assured of victory, Rahyo grinned.

  But it wasn’t just air that came out of Guy’s body.

  “Urp!”

  Before he knew it, the substance jetting forcefully from Guy’s mouth was making direct contact with Rahyo’s face.

  “Aah! Sorry, sorry,” Guy said, timidly. “I got a bit of that on you…looks like?”

  “I-I’ll kill you!” Rahyo howled, the sour stuff dripping from his face. “Ngaaaaah!”

  A storm of blows in succession assaulted Guy. Kick, thrust, palm strike, elbow, knee, fist—almost as if it would not be enough unless he used every single technique he could to cause his opponent pain, Rahyo struck. And struck and struck.

  “Guy!” Kakashi yanked hard to rip apart the ropes already nearly cut by Pakkun’s teeth.

  “Is our business here done, Kakashi?!”

  “Thanks, Pakkun. Next time, I’ll treat you all to some tasty meat!”

  Grinning, Pakkun—poof!—was enveloped in white smoke and disappeared.

  Kakashi kicked at the floor and flew up, while his chakra poured into his hands to release a crackling stroke of purple lightning. Fierce pain raced along his broken fingers, but that didn’t matter.

  Noticing something amiss, Rahyo turned bloodshot eyes toward Kakashi. “You?! How on earth—”

  Kakashi leapt out from the shadow of the collapsing Guy. “Violet Bolt!”

  His enemy couldn’t react in time.

  But he ended up not being able to strike with the whole might of his purple lightning.

  Shrrf!

  At the sound ripping through the air, he reflexively dodged. A kunai shining with silver light tore open Kakashi’s cheek.

  The moment he landed, he fled with a backward somersault.

  Thk! Thk! Thk! The kunai that came after him pierced the floor. The instant they plunged through the wood, they melted away and disappeared in the blink of an eye.

  Those aren’t kunai. Keeping low, Kakashi glared at the newcomer. These are the same ice fangs that came after us in the air ducts!

  “Kahyo!” Rahyo shouted. “What are you doing?! You’re not supposed to let yourself be seen!”

  “If I hadn’t launched those ice swords, he would have done you in, brother.” The newcomer, in a white ninja costume and a mask with a hook pattern, turned back toward Kakashi. “It’d be a shame to kill you right away. Hatake Kakashi, you fight me now.”

  “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 c
omrade 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.

  Tossed out into the sky, Kakashi found the ship’s passengers scattered around him, all similarly helpless as they fell toward the ground.

  He locked eyes with Guy. Seeing the sharp nod he got in return, Kakashi suddenly understood that Guy too was braced for death again. They could have been the greatest ninja in the world, but there was still only one way things could end if they hit the ground from a height of five thousand meters.

  Dammit… Closing his eyes, he saw Kahyo in that blue dress.

  “The longer you all hesitate, the more victims there will be.” She had said this with pleading eyes when they were hiding in the kitchen.

  “How could someone like you understand the feelings of a parent whose child has been killed!” she had shouted with her whole body from beneath her mask.

  What could I have done? Could I have done something to her? The ridiculousness of it suddenly hit him. Let it go. It’s over already. Death will finally come. It’s my turn to go there now, to that place where Obito and my father and all my comrades lost in battle have gone.

  Which is why when his body rebelled against gravity and floated upward gently, Kakashi couldn’t understand what was happening.

  “Good thing I made it in time.” He opened his eyes to find Sai looking down at him, grinning. “Did you forget? You called me, didn’t you, Master Kakashi?”

  Kakashi sat up abruptly. He was on the back of a Chinese phoenix Sai had drawn. He looked around to both sides, and then up and down.

  With the Tobishachimaru far above them in the sky, the Cartoon Beast Mimicry bird circled like a dark cloud. Guy, hanging from the bird’s feet, grinned and popped his thumb up. He then lifted up his bad leg. On the back of his cast, the lone word “youth” was scrawled. The passengers who had been thrown out of the ship were clinging to the back of the bird or had been clasped in its beak, or even found themselves clutching its taloned feet for dear life.

  “It’s okay,” Sai said. “I got all of them.”

  “Do you know the altitude right now?”

  “Good question.” Sai followed Kakashi’s eyes up to the Tobishachimaru. “Roughly fifty-five hundred meters, six thousand meters maybe?”

  Tobishachimaru’s probably lighter now after losing all the furnishings from the dining lounge and these people, Kakashi thought. No doubt it’s drifted higher because of that.

  There hadn’t been a cloud in the sky in the morning, but now, countless dark clouds were rolling in from the west. The air began to swell with the faint scent of water.

  “Do you know who the attackers are?”

 
“No, although Lady Tsunade has a fairly good idea.”

  “The ringleader’s a man named Rahyo.” After hesitating a moment, he added, “And his younger sister, Kahyo.”

  Sai nodded.

  Kakashi looked up at the ship drifting in the sky above. Its route was west by northwest. Was there something important in that direction? Kakashi put the gears of his brain into action.

  The Ryuha Armed Alliance were demanding Garyo’s release. They were using the hostages to try to fulfill that objective. However, they couldn’t have thought that Konoha would simply hand over their leader. In which case, perhaps they had a Plan B in case negotiations broke down. And their trump card was Kahyo. There was no doubt about that.

  He quickly reached the answer to his own questions. “They’re heading toward Hozuki Castle. They had another strategy in the event Konoha wouldn’t deal. They’re going to rescue Garyo from above using the ship itself. We need to tighten security at the castle.”

  “What!”

  They were going to pull Garyo up into the sky with Kahyo’s jutsu. If she used the icicles of Earth Chain Ice, it was more than possible. Then all they would have to do was commandeer the Tobishachimaru and fly Garyo to any place he wanted.

  “Ino,” Kakashi called in his mind. “Can you hear me, Ino?”

  “I can hear you.” Her reply came right away. “I’m so glad you’re all right, Master Kakashi.”

  “Tobishachimaru is heading toward Hozuki Castle.”

  “What?”

  “They’re probably planning an aerial assault—to rescue Garyo from the sky.”

  “Understood. I’ll inform Lady Tsunade immediately.”

  “Sai?”

  “Yes?”

  “Take me back to the Tobishachimaru.”

  Sai didn’t respond.

  “I’ve got a bad feeling,” Kakashi said. “And I can’t leave the rest of the hostages to fend for themselves.”

  Riding upward air currents, Sai’s bird broke through the rain clouds and, in the blink of an eye, came out the other side next to the Tobishachimaru. The hole in the ship’s body was already closed over. The ice created with Kahyo’s Earth Chain Ice bulged out from the sealed gap, threatening to overflow.