Konan's paper fanned out the moment Naoya's Byakugan locked onto her, thousands of sheets peeling off her body in a single fluid motion, reforming into wings, into blades, into a defensive wall that shifted shape faster than the eye could track.
Naoya rolled his neck, unimpressed. "Huh… Origami. Expected nothing else from a woman."
"You should be careful," Konan said, voice flat. "Careless words tend to get careless men killed."
"Careless." He smirked. "I have known a few strong men in my life, and all of them didn't even know what care looked like."
He closed the distance before she could answer, Byakugan mapping every fold and edge of her technique in real time, chakra points along his palms already crackling faintly with borrowed lightning.
To Konan, he felt like he was teleporting. Having no sensory ability or a Dōjutsu, she didn't have any ability to track Naoya's movements. Her instincts flared up, and not knowing where he could be, she exploded her paper all around to cover all her surroundings.
Konan's paper swarm met Naoya only when he was a few meters apart from her, hundreds of blade-edged sheets converging from every angle at once — the kind of attack meant to overwhelm through sheer number rather than individual precision.
Naoya simply wasn't there when they arrived. He retreated back just as fast as he could arrive; however, he couldn't find a way to attack her again. There was no gap.
At least, normal eyes couldn't find those gaps. His Byakugan, now that was an entirely different thing altogether.
He blurred through the gaps between paper, faster than her swarm could realistically track, Gentle Fist strikes lashing out at what should have been her exposed form — except there was no form to strike, just more paper, endlessly reconstituting the instant contact was made.
Once again, his Byakugan came in handy.
"Cute trick," he said, appearing behind where her core mass had reformed, palm already driving forward. "But I don't need to hit flesh. Just need to hit you."
His strike connected, tearing clean through a dense cluster of sheets — and found nothing beneath but more paper, splitting apart and reforming several meters away, Konan's actual form never quite where the attack landed.
As if she had eaten a Logia Devil Fruit, attacks didn't work when her body had turned into paper. Of course, there are ways to go around that as well, because even in One Piece, no Devil Fruit is perfect.
"You'll need to be faster than that," Konan said, voice carrying from a completely different direction now.
Naoya's jaw tightened. Fine. Speed clearly wasn't the problem — connecting with anything that mattered was.
He shifted tactics, Byakugan tracking not her paper's movement but the subtle chakra thread running through all of it, the singular unbroken current that had to originate from her actual physical form no matter how many decoys and duplicates scattered around the battlefield. There. A faint, denser knot of chakra hidden within the swarm's densest cluster, disguised but not quite disguised enough against eyes built to see through exactly this kind of trick.
"Found you."
He surged forward again, faster this time, aiming true for the knot his Byakugan had isolated — only for the entire swarm to detonate around him in the same instant, paper tags flaring bright with explosive tags stitched invisibly into their fibers.
The blast caught him mid-motion, and though his speed let him minimize the worst of it, twisting clear before the full force landed, it still tore through his shoulder and side hard enough to draw blood, sending him skidding back across the wreckage.
The one part about this world which the people from the Jujutsu Kaisen world don't understand is that Naruto is never about power. Power matters, yes, but at its core, a Ninja fight is all about deception.
There sure are many Jujutsu sorcerers who are good at that, but at its core, they are still very straightforward, working at the outline of the framework of Jujutsu. Many never go to see beyond the application of their own curse technique.
Let alone what is possible outside the mechanisms of Jujutsu itself. Whereas, Shinobi are flexible; everything which gives them an advantage in a fight is a weapon.
"Consider that a warning," Konan said, already reforming several meters away, expression unreadable. "There are more tags where that came from. Considerably more."
Naoya straightened, wiping blood from his mouth, grin sharpening rather than fading. "How many? A thousand? A million? Try it, you bitch, I'll outrun them all."
"Enough that you can't run."
"Then you should've used them already," he said. "Instead of stalling. Almost makes me think you're worried what happens once you run out."
Something flickered behind Konan's composed expression — not fear exactly, but calculation, the same wariness any commander carried when facing an opponent whose full ceiling remained unknown.
There are two major reasons Konan would never think about using her last resort until it's absolutely necessary. First, it was for that man who called himself Madara. While he hasn't used his space-time jutsu since he came back, Konan knew how troublesome that space-time technique of his was. She had painstakingly gathered all the exploding tags she could get her hands on just for this reason. She didn't wish to waste them on someone like this Konoha loudmouth.
Secondly, they were still inside the Hidden Rain Village. The damage those mage exploding tags would bring to the village would be catastrophic, even if she used only a fraction of the tags she had in her possession.
"You talk a great deal for someone who hasn't landed a real hit yet," she said.
"Just a matter of time…" Naoya said. "Unlike you, I don't need a thousand attempts to land one that matters."
He came again, faster than before, Byakugan narrowing focus entirely onto that same dense chakra knot, refusing to be baited into striking decoys twice. Konan met him with another wide detonation, tags flaring across half the swarm simultaneously, forcing him to weave through a storm of small, overlapping blasts rather than one clean strike.
It worked, mostly. He took two more shallow wounds threading the gaps, blood streaking down one arm, but this time he didn't retreat, pressing straight through the explosive haze toward where he'd last marked her chakra signature.
His palm connected with something solid for the first time — a glancing blow, not full contact, but enough that Konan's form staggered visibly for the first time in the exchange, paper scattering loose at the edges from actual impact rather than deliberate deconstruction.
"There you are," he said.
"Don't get ahead of yourself." Konan's voice came tighter now, though still composed. "A graze isn't a victory."
"Keep talking, girl. I'll take you apart one part at a time if I have to." Naoya grinned, though part of it was bravado at best.
Naoya, too, knew that he wasn't the best person to fight her. It wasn't like she was too strong; it's just that his technique and powers didn't match well against her. If he had something like wide-range attacks or something like that, this fight would have been finished long ago.
They traded again, faster, more desperate on both sides now — Naoya's Byakugan burning through chakra reserves trying to isolate her true form amid an endlessly shifting storm, Konan's paper thinning gradually with every detonation she sacrificed to keep him at bay.
At one point, Naoya was really expecting that she would run out of those exploding tags, but they just kept on coming and coming and coming. Even Naoya had to believe in the end that the woman wasn't bluffing when she stated that she had enough of them.
Neither seemed willing to commit to whatever they were actually holding in reserve, though each was testing the other's limits without fully revealing their own.
Konan for obvious reasons, and Naoya because he just couldn't bring himself to admit that he had to open his domain for a woman for the third time. He'd rather die here than admit that.
But he looked at his own condition and then his opponent's. He was breathing harder now, more wounds accumulated across his arms and side than he'd have liked to admit. Even at his speed, the sheer amount of paper Konan was using was overwhelming, no matter how fast he was.
In comparison, Konan was mostly unhurt. She most likely had higher chakra consumption, but in a battle of attrition, he would lose more times than he would realistically win. Curse energy consumption aside, he was constantly getting wounded, even if nothing serious, but for the next few hours, Konan could continue this match like this, and he would be in tatters.
"FUCK…." He shouted, earning an eyebrow raise from the woman.
"Be it your way, then…" He snarled.
"Domain Expansion."
xXx
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