Chapter Six: Questions Without Answers
The fire had burned down to coals by the time the conversation found its real subject.
They had made camp in a defensible position against a rocky outcropping — Kakashi's training on terrain selection had become reflexive enough that none of them discussed it, they simply did it — and the forest around them had settled into the particular quiet of a place that is not actually quiet but has learned to sound that way. Insects. Wind in the canopy. Somewhere distant, something large moving through undergrowth that was far enough away to file as someone else's problem.
Eleryc sat apart from the others, his back against moss-covered stone, and looked at his hands.
He had been looking at his hands for a while. The others had been letting him, with the specific patience of people who understand that some things need to be approached in their own time.
"You've been quiet for over an hour," Sakura said, settling beside him with the careful, unhurried manner of someone who has made a deliberate decision to be present rather than useful. "Do you want to talk about what's actually bothering you?"
Eleryc's laugh arrived without warmth. "Where would you suggest I start?"
"Wherever it's heaviest," she said.
He was quiet for a moment. Then: "A few hours ago, the worst thing I had to worry about was whether I could control some dark energy that made me different from everyone else. Something I could manage, if I was careful." He turned his hands over, studying them with the expression of someone reading a document in a language they only partly understand. "Now I know I'm not human. That what I've been managing is the residue of a life I lived somewhere else, as someone else. Someone who had power that could rearrange reality, and used it for things I can't — " He stopped. "Things I don't want to describe while we're trying to sleep."
Sasuke looked up from his position by the fire. His Sharingan had been activating and deactivating at irregular intervals since their encounter in the forest, drawn by some instinct toward Eleryc's chakra patterns that he hadn't been able to explain. What he saw when it was active was deeply troubling in ways he hadn't yet found the right vocabulary for — multiple layers of energy coexisting within a single body, each coherent, each distinct, each carrying memories the others didn't share.
"Just because you have abilities that come from outside normal human parameters," he said carefully, "doesn't mean you're not human in every way that matters."
"Doesn't it?" The sharp edge in Eleryc's voice was new. "Those entities that attacked me — they knew things about me that I didn't know. They talked about divine essence, about carrying the power of gods. And when the transformation happened—" He paused, and his expression went somewhere internal, retrieving something that was both vivid and unwelcome. "I remembered being someone else. Not fragments. Fully. Someone who had transcended mortality and spent that gift on terrible things."
Naruto, who had been sitting with his knees drawn up and his usual channel of expression noticeably closed off, spoke for the first time in some while.
"I've got a nine-tailed demon fox sealed inside me," he said. The attempted lightness in his voice was there, but it was doing more work than it should have to. "I don't have an identity crisis about it."
"That's different," Eleryc said.
"I know it's different," Naruto said, and dropped the lightness. "I'm not saying it's the same thing. I'm saying it's a data point."
Eleryc looked at him. "The fox is separate from you. It was placed inside you. What I'm dealing with — these aren't foreign memories. They're mine. I remember being that person the way you remember being five years old. The way you remember learning to walk." He looked back at the coals. "And the person I remember being lived for centuries and did things I can't excuse. And the closer I get to that power, the more I can feel his reasoning starting to make sense."
The last sentence landed in the silence with the specific weight of something that had been carried a long time and was now, finally, being set down in front of other people.
Sakura remained perfectly still beside him. She was, her teammates had long since understood, someone who processed through presence rather than motion — she went still when things mattered, and what that stillness communicated was attention without condition.
"His name," Eleryc said, more quietly, "keeps echoing in my head. Goku Black. And with the name comes his perspective. His logic. The architecture of how he saw everything." He paused. "He believed that mortals were a problem. That the potential for change and growth — the thing we think makes us worth something — was itself the corruption that needed to be excised. And every time I access that power, I can feel his argument becoming clearer. More internally consistent. More—"
"Seductive," Sasuke said.
Eleryc looked at him.
"That's the word," Sasuke said. "When logic that leads somewhere terrible starts feeling inevitable rather than chosen. I know what that feels like."
Sasuke had not planned to say what came next. It arrived the way things arrive when they have been waiting behind a door you've been deliberately not opening, and the door has finally been opened by someone else's need.
"The Sharingan awakens through trauma," he said. "Through strong emotion, specifically pain and loss. The stronger the Uchiha becomes, the deeper the capacity for the experiences that drive that strength — and the more thoroughly those experiences can consume them." He was looking at the fire rather than any of them. "My brother achieved the highest evolution of our bloodline. In the process, he became someone who could stand in our family home and end every life in it, and believe he was doing something necessary."
The fire moved. No one spoke.
"The power didn't corrupt him," Sasuke continued. "That's what I've had to understand. The Sharingan showed him possibilities, and he chose which ones to walk toward. He isolated himself, refused to trust anyone with what he was carrying, decided that the only rational response to his burden was to carry it absolutely alone." He paused. "And alone, without anyone to reflect back what was happening to him, the logic of terrible choices is much harder to resist."
Eleryc was watching him now with the specific attention of someone receiving information that lands in a precise and painful place.
"So what you're telling me," Eleryc said slowly, "is that the danger isn't the power itself. It's the isolation."
"I'm telling you," Sasuke said, "that if you'd had this conversation with yourself, alone, in the dark, the outcome would be different than this one. And this one isn't finished yet."
Naruto had risen to his feet without any of them quite noticing, the way he sometimes moved when something in him had reached a threshold and needed a larger space to be in.
"You want to know what I think?" he said.
"I think you're going to tell us," Sakura said.
"Yes." He looked at Eleryc directly, and the earnestness in his expression carried none of its usual performance — this was the underneath version, the one that arrived when the exuberance fell away and left the actual person. "You're sitting there afraid that getting stronger will make you think like him. That you'll start seeing people as problems to be solved and stop seeing them as worth protecting. But here's the thing about that fear — the fact that you have it is already the answer."
Eleryc frowned. "How is being afraid the answer?"
"Because the version of you that you're scared of becoming — Goku Black, whoever he was — he wasn't afraid of becoming himself. He was certain. That's what you said: his reasoning became more and more internally consistent. He didn't worry about whether he was wrong. He decided he wasn't, and after that, nothing from the outside could reach him." Naruto sat back down, bringing himself to Eleryc's level. "You're worried. That means you're still reachable. It means there's still something in you that knows what matters."
The silence that followed was different from the ones before it — not the silence of people sitting with weight, but the silence of people sitting with something that has just shifted.
"It's not that simple for me," Eleryc said finally. But his voice was quieter than before, and the quality of his resistance had changed.
"I know it's not simple," Naruto said. "I wake up sometimes and I can still feel where the fox has been inside my head, suggesting things, whispering about what I could do if I just stopped resisting. And every time, I have to choose to be the thing I decided I am rather than the thing the power wants to make me." He looked around at their small camp, at the rocky outcropping and the dying fire and the three people it contained. "But I don't make that choice alone. That's the difference."
Eleryc looked at him, then at Sakura beside him, then at Sasuke across the fire.
"We're your reasons," Naruto said simply. "The same way you'd be ours."
Sakura had been listening with both the emotional intelligence of someone who genuinely cared and the analytical framework of someone who would eventually understand the body and mind better than almost anyone in her generation. While her teammates addressed the philosophical weight of the problem, she had been turning over the practical architecture of it.
"There's something we haven't considered," she said.
They looked at her.
"These memories surface in correspondence with your power levels. The stronger you become, the clearer they get. You said it yourself." She turned to face Eleryc fully. "Which means you have a degree of control over the pace at which they arrive. Not total control — but you're not entirely without agency here."
Eleryc was quiet, following this.
"Most shinobi spend years at each stage of development before advancing," she continued. "Not because they can't move faster, but because rushing toward power without building the foundation for it creates exactly the kind of instability you're describing." She paused, precise as always with her words. "What if you deliberately chose to go more slowly? Not to limit yourself permanently — but to make sure that at every stage of development, your sense of self is more established than the memories trying to overlay it."
"You're suggesting I choose to be weaker than I could be," Eleryc said, and there was something in his voice that was both drawn toward the idea and resistant to it in a way he couldn't immediately account for.
"I'm suggesting," Sakura said, "that prioritizing understanding over power is not the same thing as weakness. It's the thing that makes power sustainable rather than catastrophic."
Sasuke nodded, a small motion that carried more weight than its size suggested. "The Uchiha clan has an extensive record of the alternative approach. It makes for very dramatic history and very few survivors."
"But what if someone needs that power?" Eleryc asked, and now the resistance had found its specific shape. "What if something happens that requires everything I have, and I've deliberately kept myself from accessing it?"
"Then you make that choice in the moment," Naruto said. "You risk the thing you're afraid of becoming because protecting your friends matters more than staying safe inside your own limits. But you do it with people around you who can pull you back." He held Eleryc's gaze. "And you trust us to do that."
The request was simple and enormous at the same time.
Eleryc looked at his hands once more. Then he looked up.
"All right," he said. Not with the grand conviction of someone resolving everything, but with the quiet acknowledgment of someone who has decided to try a different way of carrying what they're carrying.
It was, for tonight, enough.
The morning in the Forest of Death began without warning and without the courtesy of a transition.
One moment there was camp and firelight and the tentative peace of a conversation that had arrived somewhere useful; the next, Sasuke was on his feet with his Sharingan blazing and the killing intent moving through the trees ahead of them like a physical front — cold, specific, and wearing a shape they all recognized from the afternoon before.
Shiore moved through the forest with the fluid wrongness of someone whose body had not been entirely their own for some time. The giant serpents trailed behind her with the patient coiling grace of creatures that have learned they don't need to hurry.
"Still here," she observed, as though commenting on weather. "I assumed you'd have the sense to move."
She was not looking at the scroll. She was looking at Sasuke.
Sasuke made a calculation in the time it takes to exhale.
"Take it," he said, reaching for their scroll case. "One scroll isn't worth our lives."
The three words that followed were Naruto's fist connecting with his jaw.
The impact was solid enough that Sasuke staggered, caught himself against the rocky face of the outcropping, and tasted copper. He turned slowly. Naruto stood with his chest heaving and his eyes blazing with something that had burned off the last of his usual performed cheerfulness like fog off a morning hillside.
"Give me that," Naruto said, taking the scroll from Sasuke's grip. His voice was the quiet version, which was in several important ways worse than the loud version.
"I'm being rational," Sasuke said, and the strain in his own voice was the tell — the distance between the argument and the person making it.
"No," Naruto said. "You're being afraid, and calling it rational so you don't have to admit it." He turned from Sasuke to face Shiore, and the shift in his posture was complete and immediate. "Nobody touches my team."
What followed demonstrated both the depth of Naruto's courage and the gap that still existed between courage and capability at this particular moment in his development. He launched himself at the nearest serpent with absolute conviction and inadequate technique, and the creature received him with the patient efficiency of something that has been enormous for a very long time.
The jaws closed.
The darkness inside the serpent lasted approximately four seconds before the fox's chakra found something to be furious about, and Naruto's shadow clones began their escape from the inside out. The sound when he punched his way free was the sound of something large losing a disagreement with something small and very determined. The snake went through several trees on its way down, and for a moment, standing in the wreckage with the Nine-Tails' red energy still flickering around his knuckles, Naruto looked like the future Hokage he kept insisting he was going to be.
Then the second serpent caught him with its tail.
The tree he hit did not survive the encounter. He slid down its shattered trunk and stayed down, his chakra connection to the fox severed by something Shiore had applied with the practiced ease of someone who has done this before.
The third serpent turned its attention to Sasuke.
Naruto moved before the thought completed itself — he was already there, already tackling Sasuke out of the creature's arc, both of them rolling across the forest floor in a tangle of orange and dark clothing that fetched up against a root.
"You okay, you big baby?" Naruto managed, his grin appearing through the blood and exhaustion the way it always appeared, as though it was made of something more durable than the face wearing it.
Sasuke stared at him.
He had used those exact words. After the Demon Brothers. When Naruto had been the one on the ground and Sasuke had been the one checking on him.
Naruto, who processed most things through instinct rather than analysis, had not consciously planned this. He was just Naruto, being Naruto, which was in its own way more effective than anything deliberate.
Something cracked open in Sasuke's chest that had been sealed for a very long time.
Sakura had been standing between Naruto's unconscious form and Shiore's next intention, which was what her body had done before her mind caught up with the decision. She held Naruto and felt him breathe and turned to face the enemy and understood, with the cold clarity of someone who has reached the end of available options, that fear was simply no longer useful here.
She turned her eyes to Sasuke.
"Get up," she said.
He was still on one knee. The calculation was running behind his eyes — the Uchiha strategist weighing outcomes, measuring costs, managing the situation.
"Get up," she said again, and her voice had an edge she had not known it possessed. "This is Naruto. This is the person who just threw himself into a snake's mouth rather than let you surrender. Where is the Sasuke who promised he would never be weak again? Where is the shinobi who swore he would protect — "
She stopped herself before the name. But it landed anyway.
The name she had almost said.
She saw it arrive in Sasuke's face — not slowly, not in stages, but all at once, the way something falls when the last support gives out. The carefully managed distance he maintained from his own emotions collapsed in approximately the time it takes to blink, and what it revealed underneath was not the cold calculation of a strategist but something raw and young and furious and afraid that had been there the entire time, underneath every technique and every silence.
He stood up.
The Sharingan blazed.
And Sasuke Uchiha, who had been calculating survival odds, stopped calculating and started fighting.
The dragon of fire was, technically, a technique he had been developing for months. In training, he had managed it three times, each successful execution followed by considerable exhaustion. What emerged from his hands now was the technique expressed without any of the careful management that training conditions produce — pure, fully committed, every available reserve directed toward a single point.
The forest clearing became briefly, overwhelmingly bright.
When the brightness resolved, Shiore lay in the scorched center of it, her pale form unmoving. Sasuke stood with his hands still trailing smoke and his breath coming in the uneven rhythm of someone who has spent everything they had and found the bottom of the account.
He allowed himself two seconds to believe it was over.
Then Shiore laughed.
It was the wrong laugh — too knowing, pitched from somewhere below the voice they had been hearing, carrying harmonics that suggested the voice they had been hearing was itself a costume. The burned skin on her face began to separate, lifting away like the outermost layer of something that had been wearing it for convenience.
The face beneath it was pale and angular and beautiful in the specific way that very old things that have long since moved past caring about human approval can be beautiful.
"Impressive," said Orochimaru. The voice was different from Shiore's — deeper, more precisely modulated, carrying the unhurried warmth of someone who is enjoying themselves completely. "I had heard about your development, but reports have a tendency to understate things."
The name arrived in the clearing and did what names like that do — it changed the air quality, tightened every muscle in the room, produced the specific physiological response of an ancient warning system recognizing a predator of the first order.
Before anyone moved, Orochimaru's neck extended.
This was the thing that training did not prepare you for — not the combat capability or the power level, but the fundamental wrongness of watching a human body demonstrate that it had decided human anatomy was a suggestion rather than a constraint. The movement was too fast to fully track and too fluid to process correctly, and Sasuke's Sharingan, which had been keeping up with everything, stalled for exactly the fraction of a second required.
The fangs found the junction between his neck and shoulder.
The agony was not like pain.
Pain was a signal. Pain said this is damage, stop this, move away. What moved through Sasuke in the moment of the bite was something with different intentions — something that was not warning him but claiming him, reaching down through chakra network and nervous system and the particular lived architecture of who he was, and leaving marks on all of it.
Black flame-like markings spread across his skin in patterns that were disturbingly beautiful in the way that very dangerous things sometimes are. His scream was the involuntary expression of something that had no other outlet.
Naruto and Eleryc moved simultaneously.
Orochimaru's casual gesture sent both of them into the trees.
"Do try to survive the integration process," the Sannin said pleasantly, already withdrawing. "I would hate to lose such a promising specimen to something as mundane as collapse."
He was almost at the forest edge when Anko Mitarashi arrived.
She came through the trees the way people come through trees when they have been running toward something rather than away from it — with the specific damage of someone who has moved too fast through terrain that pushed back, and the specific expression of someone who stopped caring about the terrain several minutes ago.
Her curse mark was already blazing. Hanabi, observing from her own position several hundred meters away in the general direction of Team Six's encounter, felt the energy spike register through a brief Byakugan activation and filed it as: Anko Mitarashi, jonin, active curse mark, controlled but costly.
"I should have known," Anko said, and her voice carried years in it — not bitterness exactly, but the specific weight of a wound that has healed over without ever being properly treated.
Orochimaru turned from the forest edge with the expression of a man encountering something pleasant he had not been expecting. "Anko-chan. You look well."
"I look exactly how you'd expect someone to look after years of carrying your gift."
The battle between them was brief by the standards of the encounter and devastating by every other standard. Anko fought with the desperation of someone who has been waiting years for an opportunity they may not get again, her snake-style combat flowing around its own curse-mark-driven damage with the practiced adaptation of someone who has long since accepted that this particular fight will always cost her. Her techniques were precise and lethal and targeted with the specific intimacy of knowledge that only comes from having once learned from the person you're trying to kill.
It wasn't enough.
Orochimaru moved the way water moves — not in opposition to force but around it, finding the path of least resistance and following it with complete ease. When he finally struck back, it was with the casual efficiency of someone wrapping up an activity they have already finished in their mind.
Anko hit the ground at the base of a tree that would remember the impact for some time. She breathed in. She breathed out. She remained conscious through an act of will that was, by any measure, extraordinary.
Orochimaru turned back toward the forest.
He had taken three steps when Eleryc said: "No."
What happened in the next few seconds would be discussed afterward in fragments, because none of the people present had adequate vocabulary for it, and the inadequacy of vocabulary produces fragments rather than narratives.
Eleryc's hair went gold.
But not simply gold — shot through with dark energy, rose-coloured and black together, veins of shadow in a blaze of light, the combination producing something that could not be easily described as beautiful or terrible because it was precisely and equally both. The aura around him did not flicker or build; it simply arrived, as though it had always been there and had only now been given permission to be visible.
The air tasted different. Like altitude. Like the moment before lightning.
Orochimaru, who had been in the process of departing, went still.
He turned.
The expression on his face was the rarest thing any of them would ever see on that particular face, because it was the expression of genuine surprise — the real version, not the performed version he deployed for effect, but the actual response of a consciousness encountering something outside the range of its preparation.
"Impossible," he said, and meant it. "That power signature — it isn't from this world."
"No," Eleryc agreed. "It isn't."
The distance between them closed in the time it takes to exhale. The impact when Eleryc's fist connected with Orochimaru's face was the sound of force finding resistance and winning the negotiation completely. The Sannin went backward through the forest in a series of collisions that redefined the local geography, each impact carrying the dual signature of Saiyan strength and divine ki that had been borrowed from something older than the shinobi world.
When the motion stopped, Orochimaru lay against a boulder with his pale features displaying actual damage — split lip, darkened eye, the precise expression of someone who has just discovered that the categories they use to assess threats had a gap in them.
"You hurt my friends," Eleryc said, and he was walking forward as he said it, his golden aura steady as a carried flame. "You marked my teammate with something that will try to consume him from the inside. And you thought you could leave."
Orochimaru rose from the boulder with the unhurried movement of someone conducting a reassessment. "What are you?" he asked, and for the first time in the conversation, the question was genuine rather than rhetorical.
"Someone who protects the people he cares about," Eleryc said. "I'm still figuring out the rest of it."
The palm strike that followed sent the Sannin skidding across the forest floor, leaving a scar in the earth twenty meters long. The energy in the impact left burns on Orochimaru's clothing — not fire, but something that operated at a different level, touching the spiritual architecture underneath the physical one.
For the first time in years, Orochimaru experienced pain that broke through the layer of detachment he maintained around such things. He looked at it with genuine curiosity from behind the pain, because he had not been curious about his own experience in a very long time.
"Remarkable," he said, and the admiration was completely genuine, which made it significantly more disturbing than if it hadn't been. "Divine ki and shadow ki, unified. You are not just another talented genin. You are something this world has never produced." He began to dissolve — his form separating into serpents that scattered in quiet patterns across the forest floor. "Until next time."
Eleryc lunged. His fist closed on air.
From somewhere in the dissolving dark: "Tell the Hokage his newest generation shows such extraordinary promise. Especially the ones who are not entirely human."
Then the forest, and the quiet that follows the passing of something large.
Eleryc's transformation faded with the gradually decreasing urgency of something returning to its resting state. He stood for a moment in the aftermath, his breathing uneven, cataloguing the interior residue of the power he had used — the memories that had surfaced with it, the specific moments where Goku Black's logic had been there, available, whispering its consistency.
He had not followed it.
He filed that, carefully, as information rather than victory. It was one occurrence. The night around the fire had established that one occurrence was not the shape of a pattern.
Behind him, Sakura was already beside Anko.
Eleryc went to them.
His hands, when he held them over Anko's worst injuries, produced light that was not medical ninjutsu in the technical sense — it did not follow the pathways her training had taught her to expect, and its operation at the cellular level was something that her medical knowledge could observe and not explain. But bone knit. Torn tissue sealed. The color returned to her face in degrees, each degree accompanied by a small sound from her that was not quite pain and not quite relief but something in between.
"That's not standard healing technique," Anko said, when she had enough breath for it.
"No," Eleryc agreed, still working.
"You drove off Orochimaru."
"We drove off Orochimaru," Eleryc said. "I just ended the conversation."
Anko looked at him with the eyes of someone who has spent years in the company of dangerous people and has developed a finely calibrated sense for the difference between dangerous people who are threats and dangerous people who are, against considerable odds, trying not to be. "That power you used," she said. "It'll put a target on you that won't come off."
"I know."
"He'll want to study it."
"I know that too."
She held his gaze for a moment, then nodded once — not approval exactly, but acknowledgment. The acknowledgment of one person to another who is carrying something large and doing their best with it.
"Good kid," she said.
Sasuke was unconscious.
The curse mark's integration process had rendered him inaccessible in the way that profound physical trauma renders people inaccessible — present but absent, breathing but somewhere else entirely. The black markings across his skin pulsed with the slow patient rhythm of something establishing itself, and the energy they radiated made the air around him feel thick in a way that had nothing to do with temperature.
Sakura knelt beside him and pressed her healing chakra into his network with everything she had, which she knew as she did it was not the right tool for this particular problem. The seal was not an injury in any sense her training had prepared her for. It was more like a conversation being forced into his system — an argument being made in a language that his body was involuntarily beginning to learn.
"His chakra is in chaos," she reported, her voice carrying the precise steadiness she used when precision was the only form of help available. "Something's been introduced that's trying to rewrite his entire energy network."
"I can feel it from here," Eleryc said quietly, standing nearby. The resonance between the curse mark's energy and his own struggles with inherited darkness was specific and unpleasant. "It's a seed. It's going to grow."
Anko, sitting upright now under her own power, confirmed this with the expression of someone who has personal, extensive, unwanted expertise. "The Cursed Seal of Heaven. I carry the same thing." Her hand moved to her neck. "It will make him stronger. It will also try to change who he is — his goals, his reasoning, his emotional baseline. It feeds on exactly the things he already has in abundance: anger, grief, the desire for power as a solution to loss."
"How do we stop it?" Naruto asked.
"You don't stop it," Anko said. "You help him fight it. Continuously. For the rest of his life, probably." She looked around at Team Seven. "And you keep being reasons for him to stay who he is rather than become what the seal wants him to become."
The echo of what Naruto had said the previous night, around the dying fire, arrived in Hanabi's mind with the particular precision of a thing that has just been confirmed by evidence.
We're your reasons.
She was several hundred meters away and observing through the Byakugan, which she had maintained in brief, careful activations rather than sustained use throughout the events of the afternoon. She had been tracking both teams — her own, in the aftermath of their own encounter and Kage's revelations, and Team Seven, whose situation had developed in directions that her clan's intelligence briefings had not anticipated.
What she had seen in the past several hours was this:
A boy who was afraid of his own power had used that power to protect people he loved, and had come back to himself afterward.
A boy who had been given a spiritual poison designed to isolate him and amplify everything in him that could be turned toward darkness had people around him who had established, clearly and in multiple registers, that they would not let him face that alone.
And somewhere in the forest behind her, her own teammates were sitting with revelations about their own natures that were considerably heavier than anything the academy curriculum had prepared them for.
She deactivated the Byakugan.
The forest resolved back into ordinary sight — tree shapes and shadows and the particular quality of afternoon light that arrived late through dense canopy. She sat with what she had observed and thought about her father's instructions, and the Hokage's instructions, and the conversation with Sakura in the receiving room, and the conversation by the stream with Houjin, and the conversation during the mission about a boar who had given a lonely child a reason to stop being ashamed of himself.
She thought about the specific way Houjin had said: I'm starting to understand that I'm not as alone as I thought.
She thought about what it had cost him to say that, and what it meant that he'd said it to her.
She had a report to write. Her father would want it detailed and precise, covering both the operational developments of the examination phase and the intelligence implications of Orochimaru's confirmed presence and confirmed interest in specific genin. There would be meetings. There would be contingency assessments. There would be, inevitably, the question of what to do with individuals whose existence had now been confirmed as known to one of the most dangerous missing-nin in the world.
She would write the report. She would attend the meetings. She would provide the assessments with the clarity and precision her training had built into her.
And then, when all of that was done, she would find Houjin and tell him what she had seen today — not as intelligence, not as assessment, but as one person telling another person something that seemed important for them to know.
That the things they were afraid of becoming were not inevitable.
That the people around them were real anchors, not just good intentions.
That being afraid was not the same as being lost, and that lost was not the same as alone, and that alone was not, in any case, what either of them were.
She rose from her position, collected her equipment, and moved through the forest toward the sound of her teammates' voices.
There was a great deal of examination left.
There was, it seemed, a great deal of everything left.
End of Chapter Six
To be continued in Chapter 7: The Chuunin Exams Part III