Chapter Text
5.
In the city of Konoha, one of the surest signs that your day is about to go to shit is when you bump into Itachi Fucking Uchiha in the bread aisle at the supermarket.
The second-surest sign is when, rather than A) Ignoring your very existence or B) Murdering you and every living thing within a square mile radius, he instead smiles and kneels down to help pick up the eleven cans and one loaf of bread that have fallen from your slack fingers.
It’s a curious act of politeness from one of the most wanted mass-murderers in history. This is the man who regularly tears through millions of dollars worth of military hardware every time the government manages to track him down. The man who assassinated Senator Danzo, has broken into at least six heavily-guarded secret facilities, and who inexplicably continues to place among the top ten most eligible bachelors in trashy gossip rags across the city.
That’s the man who’s offering her a basket so she can carry her things a little easier, rather than balancing them all in her arms like some sort of animal.
It’s just going to be one of those days, apparently.
You see, years ago the government put together a special program. Take a few dozen worthy candidates (Uchiha Fugaku had volunteered every last member of his family, from distant cousins to his own two sons) and subject them to every cutting-edge augmentation that existed at the time. Nano-fiber weave to reinforce their muscles, a complete reworking of the entire nervous system, bones strengthened by adaptive polymer injections. By the time they were finished these men and women would be more machine than man.
It was a shameless attempt at one-upping the Hyuga, especially when they unveiled their pride and joy: The Sharingan.
The Sharingan was slated to be an ocular augmentation that would put even the Byakugan to shame. It might not be able to offer the same visual range, but it would be directly linked to the user's nervous system, allowing for reaction times that measured in nanoseconds . And with all the physical augmentations that came with it? It would turn the Uchiha into the epitome of evolution. According to their creator, they would become the perfect human beings.
The perfect killers too. Itachi himself would prove that in one night.
What happened to the vaunted Uchiha program isn't exactly common knowledge, the government had done everything in its power to sweep the entire thing under the rug. But Tenten sits as one tiny piece of a tangled web of lower-city rumormongers and information brokers, she hears things now and then.
Then again, it’s also just really hard to cover it up when a lone man breaks out of his cell, slaughters more than thirty supposedly unstoppable warriors, then murders his way through another sixty guards, scientists, and executives on his way out of the facility he was being kept in.
Near as anyone can tell, not a single other person in the building survived Itachi’s rampage.
Thus it should be excusable that, in response to the last Uchiha’s kind gesture, Tenten’s brain short-circuits rather abruptly. She smiles, she nods, she makes polite, stilted conversation about the weather and which brand of absolutely awful (But cheap!) noodles would work best with her budget. He even pays for her at the checkout, and it’s a blessing that the cashier doesn’t seem to recognize him. If he had he’d have already called the police, and this entire store would be a smoldering crater.
“I’ve been told, Miss Tenten, that if I’m looking for someone who can kill the unkillable, you are the woman to meet.” He smiles as he says it, expression as benign as if he’d merely told her it might rain tomorrow.
Straight to the point, this one. Though even as flattering as that particular rumor is, Tenten can’t help but think it might be a little unfounded. Where would someone even get the idea that she was capable of ‘kill the unkillable’? That was ridiculous-
Oh. Fuck. Hidan .
“I wouldn’t go that far-” Her attempt at correcting Itachi’s unfounded assumption is interrupted when the man presses a note with an address into her hands. A glance can tell her that it’s for one of the thousands of cheap motels scattered around the lower city. The sort of place where a normal person might have to buy their own lock to put on the door.
“This is where I’ll be staying the next three days.” Wait what-? Now that is enough to knock her out of her Itachi-induced haze long enough to give the guy a suspicious look.
She freezes when she meets those neon-red eyes, glowing faintly even in the afternoon light. It’s a kind of gaze she’s all too familiar with, the kind that belongs to a man with no doubts about the limits of his abilities. Orochimaru has similar eyes, no matter what form he might be taking at the time. Tsunade too, on those rare occasions when she can be bothered to drag herself from her near-constant drunken haze.
Itachi Uchiha knows exactly what he is capable of.
“You have three days to prepare yourself, then you will try to kill me.”
He knows, and now he wants to see if he can go even further.
“If you fail to arrive within the time limit, I will find you.” When he smiles this time it’s the same as before, yet Tenten’s hands shake at the sight of it. “I look forward to seeing what you can do, Tenten.”
He leaves her with that, and thankfully she manages to stumble her way to a rusty old bench before her legs give out from under her. She’s trembling like a leaf, head cradled in her hands. God, she must look like some junkie who’s gone too long without her fix.
Itachi Uchiha has challenged her to a deathmatch.
She’s hyperventilating, too many conflicting thoughts running through her head all at once. She has to hide- She has to run. The police won’t be able to do a thing even if they decide to stick their necks out for some random unregistered gutter-rat. So her only option is to pack her things and get the hell out of town. Maybe she can start a new life in the borderlands. Paint her face and get a taste for human flesh and creepy skull ornamentation, or whatever it is those psychopathic desert-dwellers do.
I look forward to seeing what you can do, Tenten.
…
Or…
(The very thought of it sends a chill through her veins.)
Or she could take him on.
Her odds aren’t great, in fact they’re as close to zero as one can probably get . But Itachi had challenged her . Konoha is a city with a thousand guns for hire, but for some reason he’d tracked her all the way to this tiny little grocer and thrown down the proverbial gauntlet. Why not ol’ One-Eye? Why not the Salamander? Or even one of the dozens of newer mercs making a name for themselves like Aburame, or that crazy Team Seven?
Was it just a passing whim? Or had he seen something in her worth pursuing?
The shaking has stopped by now. A calm descends over her, and with it comes the first tentative roots of something .
Itachi. Tsunade. Sakura. Lee. Shikamaru. Orochimaru. That girl who took her arm.
They’re all driven by that something, a burning desire to see just how far their hard work can take them. Tenten has always just gone with the flow of things, getting swept up in Gai and Lee’s enthusiasm, or the machinations of people like Tsunade and Shikamaru. She can’t even think of a time she did something like this just for the thrill of it, just to test what she’s capable of. It’s an intoxicating thought.
And honestly, there’s no way she could haul all of her things along with her. So running is out.
She’s nowhere close to content with her decision, but three days later a dozen of the angriest thugs Tenten can afford will kick down the door to Itachi’s room.
(When she walks by days later, she’ll find half the building has been all but obliterated. The undamaged rooms are still available for rent though, people down here are adaptable like that.)
She’s not surprised when none of them report in after, she didn’t actually expect them to get far. They’re a declaration of intent more than anything.
‘I accept, now come and get me.’
Not the most elegant gauntlet she could have thrown, but she’s working on a budget here.
Tenten is far from that poorly armed girl she used to be though, and if she intends to face down an Uchiha she’ll need every last piece of ordinance she’s managed to scavenge and steal over the years. Weapons, bombs, traps, even a downright nasty automated scrap gun Sakura managed to throw together in a single night. Her arsenal may not be the prettiest, or the newest, but damn if it isn’t impressive nonetheless.
She holes herself up in an abandoned warehouse near the edge of town, the kind that’s absolutely littered with narrow hallways and dead ends. It’s also secluded enough that there’s little risk of some punk kid wandering by and interrupting things. Tenten is more than happy to spend her three days turning the entire facility into a nightmarish maze of traps, tricks, and general unpleasantness for anyone stupid enough to step one foot inside.
When he arrives, Itachi carves a path right through with an envious ease. His eyes cut a glowing streak through the darkened halls as he avoids her carefully planted explosives, weaving through shrapnel by the thinnest of margins and emerging unscathed. Poison gas turns out to be useless, and fire equally so. Whatever they made these Uchiha out of, it’s incredibly resilient. He cuts his way through tripwires and other mundane traps, even the renovated assassin-drone she was so proud of is completely ineffective, minced into bite-sized pieces before it even hits the ground.
He doesn’t even bother with destroying her cameras, placed such that she always has an unobstructed view of his inevitable progress.
She thinks she has him when he wanders straight into the turret’s sights, a carefully placed explosive collapsing the path behind him and leaving him trapped in its kill-zone. By all rights it should be impossible to avoid it, the thing can throw out enough superheated metal to fill the entire hallway. There’s simply no place to go .
Of course the one thing Tenten hadn’t counted on was some kind of ninja bullshit .
It’s understandable. No one could have predicted that, when faced with a literal wall of razor sharp scrap metal flying his way, Itachi Uchiha’s response would be to cut through it .
For a normal person, even for any other augmented person, it would be an impossible feat. Hell, any other Uchiha would probably slip and end up a fine red mist splattered across the walls in this situation. But this is no ordinary Uchiha.
This is Itachi.
His entire body blurs, his blade nothing more than a silver flash as the weave of synthetic fibers making up his muscle mass kicks into overdrive. His eyes begin to spin at a dizzying rate, and every last bullet in his path is catalogued and deflected by the sword in his hands. It’s an absolutely flawless display of precision, and though a few of the projectiles get close enough to brush past the reinforced surface of his skin, not a single one penetrates his defense.
Then there’s an impossible burst of speed her eyes can’t even hope to follow- And in the time it takes her to blink he’s crossed the remaining distance between him and the turret. Behind him the machine goes silent, and Itachi lets out a soft breath as he sheathes his blade.
A second later it falls to pieces with a crash.
It’s all very dramatic. But the sort of thing that might seem cheesy in some low-budget sci-fi flick is absolutely terrifying in real life. That was everything she had. Every last trick up her sleeve and all it amounts to is a few surface wounds and a ruined outfit. He’s not even limping, just walking as serenely as ever towards the room where she’s been watching his progress via datapad.
Well then. She’s already committed this far. If she’s going to die here she might as well make a proper go of it.
The main warehouse is an enormous room filled wall to wall with steel shipping containers. Stacks of them are piled almost to the ceiling in some places, and in others those very stacks have toppled into a mess of steel, leaving the entire room a veritable jungle gym of impossibly narrow paths and potential ambush points.
It’s atop one of the many stacks that Tenten sits, several candy bar wrappers strewn about, a half-empty cup of now cold coffee beside her, and a rifle cradled in her arms.
The instant the doors open she puts a shot through the shadow she sees there, and then she has to roll out of the way before one of her own bombs sails through the space her head had recently occupied. It explodes against the far wall, the echoing boom reverberating through the room as the game begins.
Itachi’s first move is, predictably enough, to kill the lights. The crack of a gun he must have been concealing all this time echoes out, and one by one they explode in showers of glass, steadily enveloping the room in darkness. A clever move considering he can almost certainly see in the dark, where she most definitely cannot. It’s doubly effective since in the sudden blackness the glow of her datapad is now dangerously bright-
It highlights him perfectly when he darts up to it, only to find it propped up by a brick atop one of the highest stacks of containers. It’s a little strange that he hesitates when he sees it, but she’s not about to miss out on an opportunity. She still doesn’t know if her opening shot from earlier hit him or not, but she swears this one takes a chunk out of something before he dives down into the cover of lower ground.
It takes him moments to calculate the trajectory of her shot, his body a blur as he vaults over a rusted heap of metal to land where she’d been set up. She’s already on the move though, pulling the pin on a grenade and tossing it behind her just as she rounds the corner towards her next position.
It’s a cozy little spot hidden away between two fallen containers, one that gives her an excellent view down the very path that Itachi takes to trail after her. Another shot echoes through the room and she’s off once more, she knows there’s no chance in hell he’d let her get away with taking a second.
In an ideal world her plan would go off without a hitch. She could keep up this game of cat and mouse, taking potshots at him from across the warehouse before darting off to safety and her next vantage point.
Itachi Uchiha would not exist in an ideal world though, and nothing makes this fact more evident than just how quickly he turns her plan on its head.
She’s only taken four shots at him when he finally cuts her off, his glowing eyes piercing the gloom are the only warning she gets before his humming sword cuts through the air. She barely ducks her head in time to avoid it, watching with wide eyes as it carves effortlessly through the steel container beside her.
Once upon a time she’d thought that Lee was dangerous up close. That was before Gai had gotten serious one day during the course of their sparring. His student she could handle, (For a few minutes at least) sometimes she could even squeeze in a win on a good day. Gai though, had taken them both down in seconds. Even Sakura, when she’d occasionally agree to join Tenten in her lessons, couldn’t hold a candle to the amount of sheer skill on display. The girl could knock down a concrete wall with a single punch, but Gai had her pinned without breaking a sweat.
Suffice to say, facing Itachi in melee feels a little like that.
She loses her rifle in seconds, the set of knives stashed in the compartments of her prosthetic arm within the minute, and were it not for an ill-timed cough she might have lost her life soon after that. It’s a sobering thought as she disengages, darting through the twisting maze towards where she’d stashed another gun.
There are dozens of weapons hidden here and there on the off chance that she’d need them, she just wishes she had time to make it to something bigger. A handgun probably won’t cut it against her current opponent, but it’s a comforting weight in her hands regardless.
It’s strange really, the bone-deep terror that had once gripped her is all but gone now. She knows, pressing her back to the metal crate and listening to the tense silence, that somewhere out there in the darkness is one of the most dangerous men alive, hunting for her. But something has been niggling at her all this time though, the question she never could answer about all this.
“So why me?” Tenten can’t stop the words from escaping her mouth, and she winces as the tension in the room instantly skyrockets. She’s on a time-limit now, surely Itachi will be able to zero in the longer she talks. “Why pick me for your fucked up killing game?”
She doesn’t really expect an answer, but after a few tense seconds that congenial voice rings out in reply.
“Mm. A number of things really.” It’s not hard to tell where he is from the sound of his voice, even as it echoes confusingly off the far walls. The problem is that he’s getting pretty close . “You’re relatively new, for one. Which means I’ve no idea what you’re capable of, aside from a few flattering rumors about your abilities.”
Tenten is going to track down every last one of those morons who watched her disembowel Hidan, and she’s going to skin them with a cheese grater-
“But aside from that... I suppose you might call it a hunch.”
…
“I saw you- Callouses from handling a gun regularly. A prosthetic arm clearly crafted by a master, but the way you use it speaks of a traumatic experience. Not one, not two, but three separate weapons on your person. And you knew who I was. From that first moment I saw fear in your eyes.”
….
“There was something else as well though. Maybe everything I heard was a lie, maybe you aren’t the god-slaying warrior a horde of blood drunk cultists make you out to be. But I saw you, and I still couldn’t dismiss the possibility entirely. And that is something worth testing, no?”
….. She’s smiling. She can’t help it. A fierce, toothy grin has spread across her face, fueled by the burning pride welling up inside her chest. It’s nice to be acknowledged is the thing, even more so when it’s coming from a man like this. He may be a murderous psychopath out for her blood, but he knows his stuff.
What feels even better though, is watching his shadowy figure turn the corner just in time to catch nine millimeters through the throat. He falls with a choked gasp, thudding to the floor and twitching until her second shot stops even that. Then a third, just for good measure.
She’s contemplating wasting a fourth bullet when her phone rings.
The phone she made sure to turn off before she got into this mess.
She fumbles her gun into her other hand, reaching into a pocket to pull out the device and squint down at the brightly lit screen. It makes her pause though, when she sees an unfortunately familiar pair of amused yellow eyes there, accompanied by a sly but childish smile. Oh that’s definitely not good.
“Hello Miss Tenten, that was a little rude don’t you think?” His voice rings too-loud from the tiny speakers, especially too loud now that she’s no longer so sure that she’s won this little game of hers.
“Mitsuki what the fuck?” Tenten hisses it between grit teeth, the high of victory now long since gone. She’s never been all that great with kids to be honest, and that goes double for the creepy (Literal) brainchildren of quasi-immortal programmers. Hopefully whatever god is out there will forgive her for failing to watch her language. “Was that you?”
To be fair, he lives on the net. The kid’s probably heard worse. And it’s not like it’s the first time she’s shot him, or rather the body he happened to be inhabiting at the time. But that’s a story for another time.
“I heard that you were fighting someone, but I never imagined it would be Itachi !” He sounds far too excited about that prospect, the image of his face getting even closer to the screen. “Even my parent couldn’t kill him.”
What. Orochimaru and Itachi had fought before? And the city was still standing?
No. Wait. Still not the time for this. She shakes her head to clear it, absolutely certain now that Itachi is still out in the darkness somewhere. He must know where she is by now, the glow of her phone and Mitsuki’s irresponsibly cheerful voice are pretty much beacons in the darkness of the warehouse. That he hasn’t already tracked her down and put a sword through her back is either a miracle, or the work of the boy currently peering at her from her phone.
“Mitsuki I’m kind of in the middle of something, can this wait?” She tries to keep her tone as serious as possible in the face of her growing anxiety, hoping the kid will take the hint and go back to whatever it is he does when he’s not bothering her. She’s long-since learned that there’s no point trying to disconnect on an AI-child who wants to bother her.
“Oh I know. I’m here to help you!”
Oh that’s not good. The last time Mitsuki tried to ‘help’ she’d had to spend two weeks lying low until the heat died down. He certainly tries to do the right thing when he can, but it’s never anything but obvious just whose brain-scans make up half of his personality.
“I asked Aunt Karin to let some of the experiments loose, then turned your datapad into a transponder for them to home in on.” He says it like he’s just announced he’s throwing her a surprise party, bless his little heart.
“ You did what?!” The image stutters for a second, and Orochimaru’s face briefly overlays that of his son as his voice cuts into the conversation. He looks absolutely livid too. “Mitsuki you will-”
He cuts off into static, Mitsuki’s face reappearing with a somehow even more smug expression than the one he usually wears.
“Whoops! My parent’s trying to hack in and find you so I think I’ll be going now.” His grin turns wicked and he gives her a wink from behind the safety of the screen, the little shit. “Good luck Miss Tenten! I’m betting a lot on your survival!”
The screen goes blank before she can even think of a retort, leaving her in a suddenly ominous silence.
“You know,” Itachi says from where he’s been waiting politely behind her the last few minutes, “Normally I’d say it’s impolite to take a call during something like this, but I know how these things go. I have a younger brother too somewhere. Probably.”
The concept of there being another Uchiha somewhere in this god-forsaken city is one she’s going to shelve for the time being. Today has already gone to hell in a handbasket, no need to throw another worry entirely on top of the pile.
“Yeah, he’s a treat.” She sighs out the words, turning fully to face Itachi and giving him a chagrined smile. “Do you think we can maybe postpone this? Take a rain check?”
A strange expression flashes over Itachi’s face at that, followed by an uncomfortably long pause as he stares down at her. She’s acutely aware that he’s basically already won, because he’s too close. She probably won’t even have time to raise her gun if he decides to follow through with his promise of killing her, she’ll be just another corpse to add to his long, long list.
But he does look tired, all that running and dodging must have taken some toll on him right? She’s a quick shot, quicker than anyone else she’s ever met. Maybe it’s a shot worth taking.
Her hand twitches, and it’s apparently enough to get the tiniest hint of a smile from the man.
“We’ll call it a draw, hm?” He cocks his head to one side, looking as if he’s hearing something that she can’t. “I’ve tangled with Orochimaru’s little minions once already, it’s not an experience that bears repeating.”
Then he does the strangest thing, he turns his back to her and starts to walk away.
And just like that, she has her shot.
A fast draw is an important skill to learn for anyone hoping to survive in the lowest tiers of the city. You shoot first, you shoot true, and you get to live a little longer than whatever poor sucker you were up against.
Earlier Tenten had marveled at the speed Itachi could muster under the right circumstances.
If someone had been around to see her now, they would have marveled just the same.
In the blink of an eye she lifts her gun, her body giving in to that same bone-deep instinct that has marked her most important kills thus far. It’s as if something else is moving through her, and for an instant she thinks back to Hidan. To the way Death had cradled him.
Like Tsunade’s fist, or Itachi’s sword, her bullet becomes something… Inevitable.
It’s a shame she couldn’t use it on Itachi himself, but alas he is not her bullet’s intended target. Instead it drills through the skull of some sort of twisted metal abomination that had been part way through pouncing on him. It lets out a horrific, pained screech as it falls to the floor mid-leap sliding along for several meters before coming to a stop in front of her.
It twitches for a second, then falls still.
Itachi’s gaze has never been sharper, and to be the focus of the full brunt of his appraisal is an unfortunately familiar terror.
“I guess he had a lab closer than we thought, huh?” They’re the last words either of them can speak before they’re set upon by a horde of nightmares.
The creatures are inherently hard to describe, obscured as they are by the darkness of the warehouse and the haze of adrenaline that will blessedly obscure the memories of tonight. They’re an amalgamation of flesh and machine, bits and pieces of organic matter sewn together with the most tenuous threads of metal. Were Orochimaru here, he could explain each and every one to her, and how they each had some specific purpose or query he’d got it into his head to test.
Like that one over there, losing each of its six blade-tipped arms to Itachi’s whirlwind strikes. That one was to see how many limbs a human brain could be forced to manage simultaneously. Or the one dripping sizzling yellow acid from a series of holes in its torso. A test to see just how far the body’s ability to manufacture stomach acid could be pushed.
Oh- And that one that looks like it’s been hollowed out and had all of its major organs replaced with some kind of explosive device- Actually wait no, that one was just for shits and giggles.
But Orochimaru isn’t here right now, so all of this nuance is lost on Tenten. A shame really.
She mostly just thinks these things are freaks. It makes it so much easier to gun them down as they swarm over the piles of crates by the dozen. How Orochimaru got his hands on this many test subjects is not something she wants to think about, nor is just how close she’d come to ending up on his lab table all those years ago.
So instead of thinking, she empties the last of her clip into a weird looking motherfucker with machine guns for legs. She barely has time to process that she’s just used the last of her bullets before a new gun comes soaring through the air, and right into her waiting palm. Because apparently Itachi can fend off three screeching abominations and count her bullets at the same time. At this point she’s not even going to question it.
Mostly because she’s just been handed a very nice gun, and it would be a shame to waste precious time worrying about someone else when she could be firing it.
It doesn’t seem to have a clip, probably running on some sort of advanced power cell tech. Whatever it is though, it works like a charm. Each bullet packs more of a punch than most rifles she’s used, tearing bloody chunks out of anything unlucky enough to get caught in her sights. She’s not too proud to admit that a slightly maniacal laugh may have slipped out once or twice. It’s just hard not to feel giddy watching a handgun punch a hole a foot in diameter through a ten-foot tall horror movie reject with chainsaws for fingers.
But as big as her pile of corpses is getting, Itachi’s is noticeably bigger. Even limited to just the range of his blade he cuts through the ranks of experiments just as easily as he’d cut through her traps earlier. Every blow leads into the next, taking him from monster to monster in swift, brutally efficient motions that leave a trail of dead and dying in his wake.
Tenten sees him cough exactly once, allowing a nasty little beast to dart in and rake its claws along his leg. He tears its arms off a second later in a terrifyingly casual feat of strength, and then he uses them to club it over the head.
Yikes.
Just as quickly as it came, the tide of monsters ebbs soon after. Ferocious and bloodthirsty though they may have been, these things were hardly the perfect killing machines that Orochimaru usually fielded. They were experiments, barely held together and probably mad with pain. Nothing that might pose a threat to a man like Itachi, even in such numbers.
Tenten, on the other hand, immediately finds the nearest surface to lean on the moment the last wailing creature slides off of Itachi’s blade and to the ground. Her heavy panting is the only sound as Itachi calmly surveys the scene of carnage they’d just created. He steps lightly through the bodies, shaking the too-dark blood from the length of his blade and sheathing it once more.
He pauses as he passes by her, and she’s too exhausted to do anything but give him a wry expression as he reaches out to ruffle her hair.
“You did well.” Erk- Damn, is her heart really going to skip a beat every time an absurdly competent person praises her? “I think I’ve seen enough of this city for the time being though, I’ve been thinking about testing the people of the desert next. What do you think?”
“Yeah, they seem crazy and violent. Just your type.” Her retort earns her a soft laugh from the man, genuine amusement appearing in his eyes.
“So I’d heard. Who knows, maybe they’ll be the match I’ve been looking for?” He turns away from her once again, before shooting her a knowing look over his shoulder. “But if not, I’ll be back. I look forward to seeing how much you’ve grown, Tenten.”
And then just like that, he’s gone. Walking out the door and leaving her amidst the sea of bodies like some kind of asshole.
There’s no way in hell he’s getting his gun back now.