The forest village market churned into a frantic soup of frequencies as the sun dipped behind the volcanic peaks. The sharp, high-pitched whistling of a steam-kettle from a nearby tea house fought against the low-frequency thrum of wooden axles as merchants hauled their carts over the swaying bridges. The air tasted of charcoal smoke and the cloyingly sweet glaze of Anko's dango—a sticky, artificial scent that clung to the back of my throat like a layer of syrup.
I stopped near a moss-etched stone lantern, my fingers twitching at the hem of my gaiter. I had been scanning the festival banners overhead, noticing a strange lack of numerical dates. Everything fell under seasonal labels: "The Year of the Great Harvest" or "The Third Autumn of the Fifth."
"Anko-sensei, Kakashi-sensei," I said, my voice sounding flat and muffled behind the fabric.
They both stopped. Anko sat halfway through a skewer, her teeth tearing into a pink rice ball with a wet squish-snap. Kakashi didn't even lift his gaze from his book, his thumb absentmindedly smoothing the dog-eared corner of a page that smelled of old glue and cheap ink.
"What's up, kid?" Anko mumbled, a bead of dark syrup glistening at the corner of her mouth.
"What year is it?"
The frequency of the group shifted instantly. Anko stopped chewing. Kakashi's eye remained fixed on the text, but his center of gravity drifted a fraction of an inch to the left—a subtle, systemic pause.
"Uhhhmphmm," Anko grunted, her throat working as she forced the sticky paste down.
Kakashi raised a silver eyebrow, finally lifting his gaze. He reached up and scratched the back of his head, his silver hair crackling with a small, dry burst of static electricity in the cool November air. Naruto, who had been trying to balance a kunai on the bridge of his nose, did a violent about-face.
"Oh oh! I KNOW THIS ONE!" he declared, nearly tripping over his own sandals. He puffed out his chest, pointing a gloved thumb at the spiral crest on his jacket with enough force to make the fabric thud. "It's thirteen years since I was born!"
The silence that followed felt absolute. I squinted at him slowly. Kakashi stared. Anko just looked at the empty skewer in her hand as if the bamboo had betrayed her. Kakashi turned back to me, his voice a low, clinical rumble.
"Actually," he drawled, "only farmers and the village intelligence branch keep track of time that way. Farmers need the cycles for the soil. Intel needs it for the archives."
Anko stepped forward, hitting Kakashi's shoulder with a heavy, tactile thwack that rattled the kunai in his pouch.
"For people like us," she said, her grin turning sharp and bone-dry, "keeping track of the year is just a way to remind ourselves we're still alive. It's a biological metric, Sylvie. No real use otherwise."
She tossed the bamboo skewer into a nearby bin. It hit the wood with a hollow clack.
"You're either on the clock, or you're dead weight," she shrugged, the smell of burnt sugar and wood-ash following her as she started walking again. "Don't worry about the numbers. They don't stop the kunai."
The market went silent and my heart hit my throat. One moment, it held the smell of roasting squid and haggling merchants; the next, the humidity dropped, and the shadows seemed to lengthen, pulling toward a raised wooden pavilion near the tea houses. The crowd began to compress, my eyes dropped back to the ground, instinctively searching for exits. Kakashi behind me, Anko to the left, Naruto to my right, and so, so many strangers.
Genjutsu? I considered, my eyes darting back and forth across the crowd of unknown faces.
CLACK-CLACK.
No. The clack rang in my ears like a thousand tinny cans.
I swallowed so hard my chest hurt, "Not again..." I mumbled against my mask.
The sharp hit of hyoshigi clappers cracked my perception open. The sound hit me like a physical shove. For a heartbeat, I wasn't in Hidden Forest. I was back in the rubble of Tanzaku Castle, smelling snake venom and concrete dust, watching the Sannin tear the world apart. I blinked, trying to clear the overlay, but the sensation didn't leave—it swirled.
It took me a second to realize that it wasn't an internal sensation—it was external—it was a chakra signature. It felt like Naruto's—that same dense warmth, like a furnace door opening—but this wasn't chaotic youth. This was refined and mature. Compressed. It felt like high-tension wire wrapped in velvet.
I looked up at the pavilion.
A woman knelt there. Her kimono was a pale sea-foam green, the color of shallow water over sand. Her hair was ink-black, piled high and held in place by tortoise-shell combs. But my eyes—and the weird, borrowed senses of the Toneri-imprint—saw past the dye. Her chakra roared a deep, violent crimson.
She held a folding fan in one hand and a single pink peony in the other. A shamisen player behind her plucked a single, lonely note that vibrated in my teeth. The woman—Mitsuha—lowered her head, and when she sang, her voice held a low, vibrato thrum.
"In the garden where the ocean spins,
We painted the world with brushes of bone.
The ink was red, the paper was stone,
And the tides danced in a circle that never ends."
Mitsuha snapped the fan open.
SHRIP.
The movement was sharp, percussive. She rotated her wrist, and the fan became a shield, then a wave. She didn't look at the audience; she looked at a point a thousand miles away.
"But the Fog came down from the northern peaks,
And the Thunder struck from the clouds above.
They feared the ink, they feared the love,
They feared the silence when the heavy door creaks."
She rose. The movement was fluid, like oil on water. She turned her back to the crowd, the sea-foam kimono displaying a hidden pattern on the back—a single, embroidered crest of a spiral wave, cut in half by the seam of the fabric.
"The glass sky shattered, the island sank,
The crimson water turned to gray.
I washed the red from my hair that day,
And drank the salt from the river bank."
She turned back, closing the fan with a sound like a snapping branch. She brought the pink peony to her lips, kissing the petals, then dropped it to the floor. She stepped on it, gently, burying the vibrant color under her white tabi sock.
"Now I wear the night upon my head,
And paint my face with winter snow.
The spinning sea is all I know,
But I must not say the names of the dead."
She dropped to her knees, curling in on herself.
Twaaaaaaang...
The final note of the shamisen hung in the air, wobbling until it faded into the ambient noise of the forest wind. Most of the crowd sat paralyzed—some shifted uncomfortably, some were cupping their mouths murmuring to neighbors—it wasn't a happy song. It felt like watching a funeral for someone you didn't know you loved.
I glanced to my left.
Naruto stood there, his ramen cup forgotten in his hand, tilting dangerously. He stared at Mitsuha with his mouth slightly open. He blinked, and a fat tear rolled down his cheek, cutting a clean track through the dust on his face. He touched it, looking at his wet finger like he was confused.
"Why is it..." Naruto's voice was thick, cracking. "Why is it so sad? I don't get it. It's just a song, right?"
He wiped his face, sniffing loudly, but his chest stayed hitched. The chakra resonance was going haywire—his own coils were vibrating in sympathy with hers, two instruments tuned to the same lost frequency.
I looked at Kakashi. He wasn't looking at the stage. His lone eye was fixed on Naruto. Kakashi's posture remained rigid, his hands deep in his pockets.
Kakashi closed his eye.
He took a breath, held it, and let out a silent sigh.
He didn't say a word.