…
Flash back.
*Question Ten: If a shinobi is ambushed by a superior enemy force, list three possible escape strategies and explain their effectiveness.*
He remembered staring at that question.
*Option one: Smoke bombs and run like hell.*
*Option two: Substitute with a log, then run like hell.*
*Option three: Cry loudly, distract them, then run like hell.*
He'd erased it and written proper answers. Not because the originals were wrong, they were technically valid, but because the exam required the kind of seriousness he could produce on demand even when he didn't feel like it.
The test had dragged on.
He hadn't felt rushed. Others had looked like they were physically fighting their papers.
One girl had chewed her finger so intensely he'd found himself mildly concerned for her dental health.
*Final Question: In your own words, explain what it means to be a shinobi.*
That one had made him pause longer than the rest.
He'd tapped his pencil against his chin and thought about it honestly, which was more than most people in that room had done.
*A shinobi is someone who walks the path of shadows, but never lets the darkness consume them.*
He'd written it and moved on.
At the time it had felt like the best answer available.
Standing here now, surrounded on all sides, Sora's absence a cold weight at the back of his mind, he wondered what the boy who wrote that answer would have thought if he'd known where the path of shadows actually led.
Probably still would have walked it.
That was the problem with knowing yourself too well.
He opened his eyes.
The enemy hadn't moved yet. They were enjoying the moment, the way people did when they believed the outcome was already decided.
Murakami looked at them and felt the two completed threads humming under his skin, his body running hotter and sharper than it had any right to.
The answer he'd written in that academy exam hadn't been wrong.
It had just been incomplete.
He understood the rest of it now.
The path of shadows didn't consume you.
But it asked for everything you had, every single time.
And you paid.
Or you didn't walk it anymore.
His grip tightened on the staff.
The enemy commander's grin hadn't faded. "Whenever you're ready, boy."
Murakami said nothing.
He moved.
…
The moment the reversed flow settled, the world sharpened around him.
Not gradually. All at once.
To the closest enemy it must have looked like he simply ceased to exist in one place and appeared in another.
The man's expression hadn't finished changing when Murakami's fist drove into his gut.
The impact lifted him off his feet.
His body folded around the strike before he was sent backward into the two shinobi behind him, taking all three of them to the ground in a tangled heap.
Murakami was already elsewhere.
A low sweep took the next one at the knee. The crack was immediate. Before the scream could form, his knee met the man's jaw and the scream never arrived.
One shinobi broke from the group on his left, using the chaos of the previous exchange as cover to close the distance quickly, his body lowered and his weight already committed forward.
The man's right arm came in from the side, a horizontal strike aimed at Murakami's temple.
Murakami didn't retreat.
He stepped forward instead, moving into the attacker's range where the strike had no room to generate proper force. The fist passed just behind his head, brushing against his hair as Murakami turned his shoulder through the gap.
At the same time, his left hand caught the man's wrist, preventing him from retracting the arm, while his right elbow drove upward into the exposed throat.
The impact crushed the man's breath before he could make a sound. His eyes widened, his body losing strength instantly as Murakami released him and let him collapse to the ground.
The remaining seven scrambled to reposition.
Their confidence was gone. Something else had replaced it, not quite fear yet, but the thing that preceded fear, the moment when the mind registered that its original assessment had been wrong.
A kunoichi with a scar across her cheek moved through hand seals faster than most chunin managed under pressure.
Fire Release: —
Murakami closed the distance before the technique finished forming. He twisted inside the initial burst of flame, felt the heat against his arm without stopping, and put his fist into her ribs.
He felt them give way as she coughed out a mouthful of blood and went down.
Someone came from behind.
He didn't turn. His foot shot backward in a clean rear kick, connecting with a chest. The shinobi skidded across the dirt, coughing blood, and stayed on his feet.
Jonin.
Murakami noted it without changing his pace and moved on to the next available and easy target.
The remaining shinobi pulled back in reorganization, creating distance to buy seconds to process what they were looking at.
He let them have the seconds as he gripped the staff in his hand tighter.
In the next instant, he was upon another Shinobi, his first swing came before the opponent had finished his read on the situation.
The man brought a kunai up to intercept but the staff knocked it and the arm holding it sideways simultaneously, and the follow-through caught him across the temple.
He dropped without a sound.
Just then, the jonin from before came back in.
He was fast. Faster than the others and, unlike them, he hadn't let the first exchange break his composure.
He adjusted on the fly, came in low with a leg sweep aimed at destabilizing rather than striking, reading that Murakami's balance was his most reliable weapon.
Murakami jumped it, landed light, and brought the staff around in a feint high, the jonin's blade came up, but then he redirected it low into his ribs.
The jonin absorbed the blow and shifted his weight to recover.
'Good instincts.' Murakami thought, but it didn't matter.
Murakami kept the pressure, every strike flowing into the next without pause with no wasted motion or hesitation between commitment and execution.
The staff feinted again, the jonin's blade moved to intercept, and Murakami rotated his grip and wrenched.
The blade left the man's hand.
The jonin's eyes registered what had happened a half-second after his hand did.
That half-second was everything. Murakami's knee drove into his stomach, folding him, and the staff came down across the side of his head.
The man hit the ground and didn't get up.
The remaining shinobi stopped.
Murakami adjusted his grip on the staff and let the silence sit for a moment.
"Who's next?"
…
Kaito had seen prodigies before.
He had fought alongside shinobi who reshaped battlefields without visible effort.
He had watched men and women operate at levels that made the gap between elite and ordinary feel like a physical thing you could reach out and touch.
What he was watching now was different from all of it.
This wasn't the fluid grace of inherited genius.
It wasn't raw power expressing itself through bloodline or natural gift.
It was something that had been built, deliberately, methodically, piece by piece, and was now operating without restraint for the first time.
The first jonin was down before the second had processed the sound of the impact.
Murakami's movement through the clearing carried no wasted motion, no telegraph, no moment where the body announced what it was about to do before it did it.
He didn't fight like someone who had unlocked a hidden strength. He fought like someone who had always been capable of this and had simply stopped choosing not to show it.
The efficiency of it settled cold in Kaito's chest.
Beside him, Hideki had gone completely still. His hands were white at the knuckles. He wasn't breathing in any way that suggested he remembered he was supposed to be.
"That's Murakami?" he said. Barely a whisper.
Kaito said nothing.
He watched another shinobi go down in a clean exchange with no excess, the strike going exactly where it needed to go and nowhere else and thought about every mission report he had quietly filed away.
Every moment where Murakami had performed at a level that didn't quite fit his rank and offered no explanation for it afterward.
He had suspected the boy was holding back.
But he had not suspected this.
There was no anger in his movement. No desperation. No adrenaline-fueled recklessness.
Just certainty, the particular certainty of someone who had already done the math and knew the answer before the problem finished presenting itself.
The jonin with the sword was the last one standing with any real capability.
He was adapting, Kaito could see it, the micro-adjustments, the reads, but it wasn't enough.
Murakami dismantled him the way a patient person dismantled a lock, finding the mechanism rather than forcing it.
When it was over the man was on the ground and the staff was still moving, settling into a ready position that suggested Murakami had already accounted for whoever came next.
Hideki finally exhaled. "How long has he been able to do that?"
Kaito watched Murakami standing in the center of the fallen, green aura still faint around him, breathing measured, unhurried.
"I don't know," he said.
And that, more than anything else he had witnessed in the last two minutes, was what concerned him.
_-_-_-_-_-_-_
Extra chapters on my Patreon page.
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Today, 5th September is my birthday, so I'm going to be posting the remainder this Volume.
Enjoy as I enjoy myself too.