Uzumaki

Gust

'Those eyes... she's not the same as she was earlier. I can't take any more risks...'

Haku held the senbon to eye-level, watching Satsuki carefully. The girl smirked.

"With these eyes," she said, "I can see your every movement. It's only a matter of time, now..."

The malice in each word sent a shiver up Haku's spine.

He switched from mirror to mirror, firing quickly, but she dodged faster; no, that wasn't it - she wasn't any faster. She was more efficient; every move Satsuki made was quicker, each route she made ideal, conserving her energy with every duck and jump and dodge.

Each single barrage of senbon Haku sent was evaded, and perfectly so.

'My chakra... I'm too close to running out...'

He stopped, eyeing her carefully through the mask. She smirked, breathing heavily.

"Don't you see?" she said, smirking. "Revenge... revenge has brought me this beautiful, delicious power. And with it, I will erase you!"

Haku's lips thinned.

"So you may believe..."

Haku ran once more, but this time, he observed more than he attacked.

And now he saw: Satsuki was watching him.

She was running, diving, dodging, carefully avoiding her friend's corpse, but more than anything, she was watching him. She was watching his every step, and she was calculating.

This instilled a great sense of fear into him.

'Is she identifying how I fight? What exactly does she plan to do...?'

Haku truly had no idea, until it happened.

There came a single, gross miscalculation; a situation he had noticed due to the subtlety with which she set it up.

He had allowed her to stray too far from him, too far indeed; minutely, with an expertly-executed maneuver, Satsuki had become far too near to one of the mirrors.

Haku had noticed, and dived across-

To which Satsuki sent a horridly forceful foot into his stomach at close range, sending him smashing into the mirror behind him.

Haku winced, sitting up. Blood gathered in his mouth, spilling down his chin.

"Futile," Haku said, and so it was; he melded back into the mirror quickly, with Satsuki within the dome all the same.

Even as everything seemed fine - even though the setback was minor, and he was quickly melding back into his ice mirrors - Haku felt a great, unerring sense of unease as Satsuki smirked. The turn of her lips was not a pleasant one.

She ran.

It took every ounce of Haku's effort to try and catch her, and he did not. Although Zabuza had told Haku, once or twice, of the sheer prestige of an Uchiha eye, it meant very little to him; even as he had observed Kakashi, it had not seemed so superior.

But now, Haku understood; the Sharingan, its precise eyesight and copying - were all efficiency. A wonderful, and fantastically useful efficiency.

She was not faster than Haku, oh no. But she was efficient. There was no mistake in what she did, because there was no mistake in what she expected to come.

After ten minutes of horribly tense evasion and attack, Haku's chakra reached its limit. The mirrors collapsed.

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