Eight

Where Skies End

November Creeps Back and It's Been Over a Year

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The tattoo surprised him the first time he saw it.

Her and Bee had come back to the island at the end of two weeks like they always did, only he didn't expect her to greet him with blue horns inked on her face as a clear mark for her guidance under Killer Bee. The first thing he thought was what a bold place for an apprentice tattoo, and the second had been oh, she's actually learning under Bee.

Bee with a student wasn't an unusual sight in Kumo. Nii Yugito had been a student at one point or another and so had Darui, one for bijuu control and one for kenjutsu, respectively. But Sakura was a little different than a student Bee would typically take on. True, she was a natural hand with swords and by some turn of talent she'd achieved the impossible and matched him for blow, for stamina, for perseverance.

But she was also a gift with genjutsu with the talent to spot and dispel them within a minute, and able to put one forth with the one-handed seals she'd gone through too many sleepless weeks to master. Bee didn't have an aptitude for things like that, which is why Motoi supposed he filled in that spot quite well, and they'd both taken on the cold girl with electric pink hair just a few inches shy of six feet tall because there was something in her that was so... curious.

Motoi glanced over at Sakura who took to completing a set of stretches nearby.

"Did you know," he started, and she stood from a side bend stretch to meet his gaze, "that you always look up at the trees when you're trapped in a genjutsu?"

She dipped into a side lunge stretch. He couldn't see her face from where he's standing, but he knew avoidance when he saw one. "Do I?"

"No matter if it's induced by eye contact or otherwise, you head always drifts up," he says. "It's odd, but as long as you can break out of whatever you're trapped in, it shouldn't affect anything." Motoi shook his head. "Anyway, today I'll be testing you with a high level genjutsu and we'll see how well you do with that."

Sakura nodded and moved directly across the field from him and leaves her thicker black jacket on the sidelines, revealing a black muscle shirt and her blue vambrace. It was brisk on the ocean today with the threat of snowfall on the horizon, Genbu swimming along much slower than her usual self.

He frowned. "You don't want to keep your jacket on?"

"It'll be easier like this."

"You might get a cold."

"Motoi-san."

"Ah, alright, alright," he acquiesced. He should know better than to try to pick that stubborn brain of hers. "Ready?"

She sunk into a defensive stance, her right arm held out and her left bicep pressed against her side. She nodded once, and so did he, and then his hands flew through four seals her eyes were quick to track. "Raiton: Raigen Raikochu!"

Blazing white light discharged throughout his body and into the entirety of the training grounds, and from his vantage he saw Sakura's body lock and her eyes go wide and there—her head tilted back ever so slightly and she stared into the treeline with pupils blown so wide there was no way she hadn't been caught.

He launched at her the same moment with a tanto poised to strike her left side. It was her weakest, her most unprotected, and it was the side he'd always go for to make sure she learned it was the place her enemies would tend to strike first.

But before it reached, before it made contact, he saw it.

Her fingers curled in like a dying spider's legs—half a snake seal—and just before metal connected with flesh, she whispered.