The clearing was a graveyard of settling dust and cooling blood. Naruto stood paralyzed, his gaze locked on the right side of his jacket. The purple berry juice and Toki's hot, arterial spray had merged into a dark, bruised ink that felt heavy against his ribs, sticky where the fabric clung to his skin. It smelled like oxidizing iron and fermented sugar, a cloying, sweet-metal scent that made his stomach coil.
He tried to open his right hand, but the fingers were locked in a clawed tremor. His vision tunneled, the edges of the clearing blurring into a grey vignette.
"Naruto! Move!" Todoroki's voice was a distant, muffled bark.
Naruto didn't hear him. He was listening to the sound of his own pulse hammering against a sudden, inner silence. It was only when Todoroki's hand slammed into his shoulder—hard enough to bruise—that the world snapped back into focus.
SHRIP—
The sound was the bite of a needle through silk—thin, intimate, final.
Before Naruto could process the motion, silver glints materialized from the fog. Thin, high-frequency wires whipped through the air, cinching around Naruto's waist, Sylvie's arms, and Todoroki's throat.
"Don't move," a sly voice purred from the canopy. Monju dropped from the firs, light-blue hair shifting as he landed with a soft, leather-scuff. He held the tension with his long, painted nails, black lacquer gleaming. His eyes fixed on Gantetsu. "Shura wants his money, old man. Come with me, or I reduce these three to a pile of red cubes."
Todoroki's face turned a violent shade of purple as the wire bit into his neck. He looked at Gantetsu, who was struggling to stand, a wet, crunching sound echoing from his chest as fractured cartilage shifted.
"Let them go," Gantetsu wheezed, pink foam flecking his goatee. "I'll take you... to the cache."
Naruto felt the wire tighten, the metal threads heating up from friction. He looked at the blood on his sleeve, then at the wire cutting into his skin. His body resisted the re-entry into violence; his legs felt like lead, and a wave of delayed nausea threatened to spill over.
"Naruto! Now!" Sylvie's muffled command broke the trance.
Naruto ground his teeth, sweat stinging his eyes. With a collective, desperate heave, the three of them threw their weight forward. The wire sang—a shrill, stinging frequency—until the friction turned into a slip as his own blood lubricated the metal.
CH-CHING.
The sudden slack allowed Todoroki to pivot and slice the primary lead. Monju hissed, retracting his threads and vanishing into the fog with Gantetsu in a smear of motion.
Naruto didn't wait. He sprinted, but his stride misaligned instantly. His left heel clipped the moss-covered root of a fir, a jolt of nausea surging as his stomach heaved. He staggered, the world tilting at a jagged angle as a metallic tang resurged at the back of his tongue. He forced his legs to move, right sleeve flapping heavy and dark, but his coordination flickered with every desperate intake of the freezing mist.
We broke through a thicket of dwarf bamboo, leaves slapping against my school top, and skidded to a halt at a secondary clearing. My heart was a frantic, irregular drum against my eardrums.
The scene was chaos. Kakashi was a blur of silver, blade clashing against Shura's umbrella.
CLANG-SPARK.
Anko was a whirl of mesh, fending off Monju's wires. But it was the center that stopped my breath.
Three kids—(Ishibashi, Jiyo, and Hōtai)—were fighting back with training katanas and bats. And in front of them stood Gantetsu and Kakashi, their bodies positioned as literal shields.
My fingers hitched on the final seal of a prepared diagnostic. I stared, a split-second delay paralyzing my intent. Images of Haku used as a tool by Zabuza and the Sound Genin discarded by Orochimaru flashed across my mind, but they didn't match the man I saw in front of me. Gantetsu was bleeding out to protect non-combatants. Kakashi was taking hits intended for the girl with the ponytail.
I forced the seals to complete, the hesitation leaving a bitter taste in my mouth.
"Naruto! The kids!" I screamed.
POOF-POOF-POOF.
A dozen Narutos swarmed the center. He tackled the kids, dragging them into the mud. He was jittery, hyper-focused on shielding them while keeping his blood-soaked right sleeve tucked away. He twisted mid-fall to keep the gore of his first kill from touching Jiyo's jacket.
Monju snarled, wires whipping in a lethal web. "Get out of the way!"
I lunged forward, fingers stiff. Barely any chakra.
"Water Style: Mist Cover!"
The humidity spiked instantly, the fog collapsing into a heavy, drenching downpour. The moisture coated Monju's wires, making them sag and bead until they were visible silver arcs. As the technique finished, a vasovagal dip hit me. My vision grayed, and I had to claw at my mask to keep from hyperventilating.
"Now, Anko-sensei!"
"Hidden Shadow Snake Hands!"
Snakes erupted from her sleeves with a hiss-snap, coiling around Monju's limbs. She slammed him into a tree—THUD.
"Akio knows where the money is!" Monju screamed.
Todoroki froze. His breath hitched in a jagged, interrupted rhythm, and the tip of his chokutō dropped an inch toward the moss. His grip failed for a heartbeat, the sword nearly sliding from his numb fingers. "Akio?"
"April Flowers—" Shura roared, leaping into the air. "FIRE STARTER!"
A massive column of flame erupted—WHOOSH-ROAR.
The air compressed, sap popping in the trees like gunshots.
Kakashi slammed his hands into the ground. "Water Style: Water Dragon Bullet!"
A serpentine mass of water tore through the earth—GLUG-BOOM. As the attacks collided, I saw Kakashi drop to one knee, blood leaking from his left ear as the overpressure hammered his system.
The thermal detonation followed. Flame devoured water, and a white, scalding wall of steam punched outward.
I was blinded. The world was a white void that tasted of burnt resin and mineral silt. "Naruto! Jiyo!" I swung my arm, nearly striking Anko in the haze. "Jiyo!" someone screamed, but the sound was warped and mislocated by the density of the steam. My boots slid on flash-steamed moss, and I heard the frantic, wet thud of someone falling nearby.
Kakashi tried to rise, but his head snapped back down, his equilibrium shredded by the vascular strain. He stayed on one knee, hand pressed to the vibrating earth.
When the steam finally began to settle in a slow, grey drift, the silence was absolute. Pebbles trickled into the nearby fissure with a dry, sliding hiss. My eyes swung in a half circle across our group: Shura was gone, but the kids—there were three faces among them—two boys and a girl.
There had been four.
"AKIO!" Todoroki's scream was a raw, broken thing that ripped through the trees.