One Thousand Hands (OC- Senju SI)

Pre-Chapter A/N: Happy New Year! It's still groovy to say that right? We're only two weeks into the year. Either way, I hope you're all still keeping up with your new year's resolutions. I'm just getting started on mine. Here we go with the second chapter of 2025. Lovely to have you all here, and I hope you enjoy this one. If you do, feel free to head over to patreon (www.patreon.com/Oghenevwogaga) and read the next three chapters- I update there daily so there's always something for you to read. It's also a new year, so this is probably the best time to buy an annual membership on my page if you're the kind of person that would do well with one. Have fun. 

When you remove the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, is the truth. I can't remember which smartass said that, so I would be taking credit for its from this point onwards. The only issue was that that statement did little to help or even explain the present situation. They'd agreed that it was best if they entered the cave to find what was producing the water. They'd even played devil's advocate and tried to make arguments for not venturing into the cave but not a single argument managed to survive scrutiny from all three of them. So here they were, walking into the cave only to be immediately confronted by what was most definitely impossible. 

It was a water skin. All the water that fed into close to a hundred different rivers and streams was flowing out from a single water skin. Using my byakugan on it only showed me that it had chakra, but not what the chakra did. For the second time, my eyes were being overcome, and even more annoyingly, both had been in the last five minutes and both related to this water-skin that had almost certainly been left here by the sage himself. 

"That's impossible" Uraume said, gazing upon the water-skin in awe and saying the words that were on all our lips. 

"There's no sealing matrix large enough to contain that much water" Shiba commented, looking at the water skin as well, even if his shades made it slightly harder to tell. 

"Whatever is going on here, it goes far beyond the scope of regular ninjutsu" I replied. "Even fuinjutsu can't explain this. This thing has to be somehow creating water from nothing. If it was taking from some ocean, then sea levels would have to be constantly falling because of how much water we're talking about here." I said, blending my knowledge of the myth with my own observations. 

"Creating something from nothing is impossible" Shiba instantly refuted. I turned to him and just lifted up an eyebrow. He met my look but didn't retract the statement. 

"With all the physics-defying shit we get up to, you still argue about the impossible?" I asked sounding doubtful. 

"Nothing we do actually breaks the laws of physics. Nothing breaks the law that matter cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed from one form to another. When you use water style ninjutsu, you transform your chakra into water that lasts for a few minutes at the very most. This is creating water that lasts forever, for all intents and purposes" He said, and I nodded at his words while moving closer to get a better look at the skin. 

It was aged, not in a bad way by any means, but it was clear that it was from a totally different era. The leather was worked in a different way from what present works would have looked like. It was rough, kind of unfinished and raw, unlike the more refined works of the present day. It didn't look bad for its age, and had held up well over the years, but its age still showed in it. Water gushed out from the nozzle without ceasing, flowing down and landing on the pool that flowed out into the waterfall. 

"So how do we poison this now?" Uraume asked, moving to the subject of the matter. 

"Forget that. I say we take the skin and leave" I posited, moving towards the skin. 

"I'm sorry, we can't let you do that" A voice said from the shadows. My vision widened and expanse as I activated my byakugan by instinct. Once again, my vision stopped at the edges of the cave, unable to pick out the people in the shadowy alcove. 

"Come out, whoever you are" I said, stepping in front of my teammates and taking point. 

Out from the shadows came a man and a girl. That was what I could easily describe them as. The man was old, hair greyed out and body hunched over a cane while the girl was more a woman in truth. She looked to be about Tsunade's age. 

"We are the guardians of the Sage's Flask. Begone from here and never return" He said with a grave voice. I tilted my head to stare at him. 

"And if we refuse?" I posed. 

"You die." He replied. 

"You take the younger one. Oldie is mine" I told my teammates before taking off in a body flicker. I moulded the air around me into my chakra cloak in a matter of seconds as I appeared right in front of the old man, intent on delivering a gentle fist strike to end the fight before it even began, but against all odds—he was faster. He moved his head backwards, allowing my grasping fingers that had been aimed at crushing his windpipe with a tap to hit nothing but air. The cane whistled as it came at me too quickly for me to dodge. I focused for a second and pushed out my chakra to form a barrier to push against the cane. The cane cut through the barrier and slammed into my knee. 

I resisted the urge to cry out in pain and lashed out with my fingers again. One more, he was too quick and blocked my fingers with the wooden cane. I flooded the thing with chakra, hoping to shatter it, but it seemed to greedily swallow everything I had to give. He slammed the cane into my midsection this time, still moving too quickly for me to follow and then kicked me, sending me flying over the pond and into the other corner of the cave. 

I watched as Shiba and Uraume moved to pincer the girl and weaved two seals to breathe out a swarm of wind bullets. They flew through the air before suddenly slowing down to my vision as the old man just dodged them at a languid pace. What? What was that? I wondered for a second. Tapping my vambrace to unseal two shuriken, I sent them flying—uncaring about my terrible aim as a single handseal turned two into two hundred. Still, the shuriken flew a bit before slowing down as they approached him, and he used his cane to knock the ones that had any chance of hitting him aside. I took a breath at that. What was going on here? 

Some kind of field that slowed everything that gets close to it down? That was the only explanation that made sense. It also explained why I had been unable to keep up with him when it came to taijutsu. If I was getting slowed down, then he had all the time in the world to make his own moves. It was a fucked situation, I realised with a sigh. Looking at the other fight, I could see that both Uraume and Shiba were slowly beginning to become overwhelmed. The woman could make the water in the pool take any shape she wanted it to as she used it to attack them in the form of a menagerie of animal constructs. Uraume had already been forced to use a kaiten to avoid being swallowed by a shark, and Shiba would run out of clones to substitute with sooner or later. 

I had to end this fight quickly if I wanted any chance of helping them. I removed my wind armour and replaced it with fire. This one took slightly more effort to use and would make me struggle to breathe if I kept it on for too long, but that mattered little for now. Forming another seal, another one of me appeared next to me. 

"Pincer two?" My clone asked, and I nodded with a wry smile. We both took off, with me taking point. Now that I paid attention to it, I felt like I could feel the second I crossed into the range, but that might as well have just been placebo. Nothing about my body or mind had changed. I got closer to him, and I noted that he just waited for my approach with an indulgent smile. 

He remained stationary as I approached, and my fingers stretched out at him. Just like earlier, his cane moved in place to block my attack, and then I kept going. "Two palms" I muttered, "Four", "Eight" I kept going until I reached 'Sixty-Four palms, and he kept pace with me all the while, blocking each and every attack as it came. I settled into a scowl and then kept going after that. The next sixty four strikes to complete the one hundred and twenty eight palms jutsu came out with perfect form even as I tried to swallow the disappointment that came with having one of my most dangerous taijutsu combos basically brushed aside. Still, it was not all disappointment. I could see my clone as he went through seals and wrote down various scripts at various points around us. 

Pincer Two was one of my more eccentric strategies. That was because it wasn't a pincer attack as the name suggested. Most shinobi had really good hearing so they'd hear that and fight with the expectation that the clone would jump in at some point, but that was not the case. Pincer Two had me confronting the target with the first stage of my fire armour and taijutsu while my clone prepared a unique barrier that would basically close us off from the surrounding environment. 

"Your jutsu works with some sort of radius. Everything that gets within a certain distance of you gets slower and slower. What I can't tell is if you're messing with time itself or just our shared perception of it. But if it was just a matter of perception, then your old bones would have struggled to block those shuriken from earlier. They would have still been moving as quickly as they had been in reality and perception alone cannot account for the shit you pulled back there" I said while we traded blows. Now that I knew that he was going to be much faster than I was, after one hundred and twenty-eight palms, I'd been content with falling back into defence. 

When I felt the barrier come up, I smiled internally while trying not to give anything away. I slapped his cane away at the very last second and dashed right into the attack, while intensifying the amount of chakra I pumped into my chakra armour. I turned my chakra into fire natured chakra as quickly as I released it from my body and just kept going. His cane blocked each attack I sent. He was keen to allow me to exhaust myself against his defenses I'd noticed. Even when I fell back and allowed him to attack, he barely did so, preferring to bait me with fake openings. All in all, his taijutsu was good, but I was a Hyuga. Good would not be enough. Only this jutsu kept us at anything even resembling equality. But that was what my plan was going to overcome. 

My next attack did not come from stretched fingers as I abandoned the gentle fist in favour of the academy taijutsu style. I punched at his head, forcing his cane up to block, and this time I could hear the wood creak from the force in the attack. My knee rose to smash into his midsection and the same cane was in the way again. I breathed in and out, flaring the flames that cloaked me even more, noting how the floor beneath me was beginning to crack as the heat seeped into the wet stones. 

With my byakugan, I could see the minute beads of sweat as they began to form on his temple. He lifted a hand to wipe and then looked at me. Just like against the Raikage, I'd put in the extra concentration to keep the armour invisible to the naked eye, using fire natured chakra and not fire itself to achieve that goal of heat without warning. 

"What are you doing?" The man asked, but I just smirked and sent a roundhouse kick screaming for his head. He blocked it with his cane again but this time I noticed that the force pushing against me was not as sure. I kept the kick going, channelling even more energy into trying to break his guard. With a heave of strain, he pushed back against me and sent my leg flying back to the ground. I moved with it, replacing one leg with another like a windmill and forcing him into a dog for the first time in this fight. My fingers blurred as I sent four shurinken flying for his position. Poor aim meant only there of them were in any danger of hitting him, but his movements still lagged as he had to bat them away with his cane. 

I flared my chakra even more, upping the heat. The barrier meant that none of the heat I was releasing was being funneled away by the wind or whatever. It was being trapped at the edges of the invisible barrier and bounced right back at us. Basically, I had turned this place into a furnace. With the amount of chakra I had at my disposal these days, there was some possibility that I didn't even need the chakra barrier at all and could have done the same with the cave's walls as a natural barrier, but that ran the risk of incapacitating both Shiba and Uraume as well as our opponents. On the flip side, it would have meant I would have not had to bother with shit like this, I thought as I stomped my foot on the ground and lifted a wall of earth to block the path that the old man had been intending to use to retreat. 

"Nuh-uh not so fast" I said as I came at him again. He took the first punch with the cane, but when my left leg came to slide his out from under him, he only barely managed to lift his in time to prevent loosing his balance, but that did not matter as my other hand came up in a push that sent him to the floor. He was still faster than me in this field of his, but it did not matter. My heat sapped at his energy to prevent him levying the full force of that speed against me while I just fought him with pure taijutsu where I was most assuredly superior. The switch from the Gentle Fist to the academy style also did its job in sending him reeling. It was difficult to fight someone who constantly changed the way they fought, I'd noticed. Uncle Hiroshi considered the entire thing to be pointless, but even he had been forced on the back-foot when I switched styles. Now all I had to do was wait for Might Duy to finish developing the strong fist. I'd seen the genin around the village a few times, but I could tell he was still far off from becoming the man who would kill so many of the Seven Ninja Swordsmen that the organisation as a whole would need two generations to recover from him. 

I stared at him on the floor and waited for him to stand. 

"You have given me a good fight. That is more than I can say for most others. For that, I will honour you with a quick death" I said, picking up the Raijin no ken from my belt and activating the plasma blade. 

He could sense himself beginning to tire, I could tell. When he stood, he stood with the air of a man that knew he was beat. That also meant he was desperate. Desperate men would do stupid things to win. If he was going to make a suicide play, this would be the point. He rushed at me with a war cry on his lips, and he was oh so slow. This time, when I moved, it felt like he was moving through jelly. I dodged underneath the swing of his cane and stabbed the thunder sword right into his chest. 

He looked down at the plasma blade with shock in his eyes, an expression that I shared. What had just happened. 

"I see it now, you're one of them" He said. What? 

"What are you talking about?" I asked, but he was already dead and gone. 

I turned my attention to the other fight, and was not surprised to find the woman moaning on the floor in pain. Shiba and Uraume were a deadly combination. Even one touch from either o them could end the fight. The purple insects making their way across her body told me exactly what had been done to her. I walked towards the water-skin instead. 

"If we take it, the rivers across the country will run dry" Shiba said, not expressing any emotion in favour of taking it or not but just stating it like it was a fact. 

"They will." I agreed. 

"Millions of people depend on those rivers for their livelihood. I wouldn't be surprised if this place became a desert just like Suna if we took it" Uraume put in her two cents. While Shiba didn't seem to care, it was clear that Uraume was just the sort of person who did care. 

"Well, if we weren't going to take it, then we shouldn't have killed the guardians, don't you think? We found this place, so what's stopping anyone else from doing the same. Besides, we had been about to poison these very waters—what's the difference in just taking it." 

"We were planning on using chakra poison that wouldn't have affected civilians, Shorirama-san. It is highly illogical to equate the both of them. But I do agree that killing the guardians does put us in a difficult situation" Shiba said next. 

"We have no choice then" I said, walking forwards and closing the water skin. 

A/N: This will have both long and short term effects. Shori might come to regret this in time, but we will see. As always, the following two chapters are up on pa-treon. If you just want to read complete chapters and not my work in real-time, then feel free to purchase this story as a collection on my Patreon (www.patreon.com/Oghenevwogaga) page so you get to read each chapter after I finish it and not neecessarily the daily updates available with a regular Patreon membership- nice way to support this story and me while you're at it. Enjoy!