Black static gnawed inward from the edges of my vision.
Kagari's glove crushed my throat; cartilage ground under his grip.
Air wouldn't pass.
My lungs spasmed against a sealed pipe while the cold bit at the back of my tongue.
Then the air detonated.
Pressure hit first.
A boiling mass of red chakra slammed into Kagari's side and the shockwave punched through my chest, wringing out what little oxygen I had left.
Ice shattered. Fragments skittered across my shoulders, sharp and wet.
His weight vanished.
CRACK—SKID—THUD.
Kagari tore free of me, skipping across the frozen ground before slamming into a drowned cedar. The trunk screamed under the impact and split down its core. The canopy gave way and collapsed over him in a rush of snapping branches.
Air tore into my throat in ragged pulls. Each inhale scraped. My right eye pulsed, the grid stuttering, struggling to hold.
Someone stood between me and the broken tree.
Naruto.
No—something wearing Naruto's shape.
Red chakra bled out of his pores in thick, pressurized sheets. It didn't flow cleanly; it leaked, corrosive, eating at the edges of his skin. Fine cracks traced along his arms where the pressure forced heat through tissue that couldn't vent it fast enough. His eyes snapped toward the treeline, but his focus lagged. Pupils uneven. Tracking wrong.
"GET AWAY FROM MY FRIENDS!"
The sound didn't travel clean. It dragged through the ground, a low distortion that rattled through my teeth and sternum.
Movement above. Oboro dropped from the canopy, landing between Naruto and Kagari's crushed position. His chakra flared defensive, tight and controlled.
Naruto moved.
Too fast.
He slipped under Oboro's first strike, boots shearing mud and cracking the ice skin beneath. His knee drove into Oboro's ribs. The impact lifted him. Naruto followed without resetting, a hook snapping Oboro's head back.
But the rhythm broke.
My eye caught it before my body could process it.
Naruto flinched left—hard—dodging a strike that never came. His guard snapped up to block empty air. His leg hitched, weight dropping for a fraction of a second as if something had just smashed into his side.
"I already felt that one—no—wait—don't—pull back—Sasuke—"
His voice fractured mid-breath. Words overlapped, stacked wrong.
His hand clawed at his own ribs, fingers digging into skin like he was trying to pull something out. He twisted away from nothing, guarding angles that didn't exist in this clearing.
Cold slid into my gut.
Not anger.
Overload.
The clones.
He'd burned through hundreds. Every dispel carried impact. Pain. Death. All of it stored, delayed—now hitting at once.
His timing wasn't tied to Oboro anymore. It was tied to ghosts.
Oboro hesitated.
That was enough.
Naruto's hand snapped around his throat and drove him down. Ice shattered under the impact. Mud burst up around them as Naruto mounted him, dragging his fist back.
Impact.
A wet, dense crack. Bone giving.
Oboro's jaw warped under the strike. Blood sprayed hot across the freezing air, turning to steam before it hit the ground. The smell hit a half-second later—iron and rot.
Naruto drew back again.
No pause. No recalibration.
Ten seconds and Oboro would be dead. Less if the angle shifted.
I tried to move.
My chest seized. The command stalled halfway through my diaphragm before tearing loose.
"NARUTO—"
The word ripped my throat raw.
It didn't leave alone.
"STOP."
The second voice rode mine, deeper, heavier. It pressed through my bones more than the air.
Naruto seized.
His whole frame locked mid-motion. The red chakra snapped inward, recoiling toward his core like something yanked on a leash.
He fell back hard, spine arching. His limbs jerked, muscles firing out of sequence. Not a clean collapse—more like a system shorting under load.
Kakashi was there before the mud settled.
He dropped beside Naruto and drove his palm into the boy's abdomen, bracing through his shoulder. Not gentle. Not careful. Anchored.
The red chakra flared against him.
Heat hit first. Then the smell—burning leather, scorched protein. Steam burst up between them, blinding in pulses.
Kakashi didn't pull back.
His forearm tightened, veins standing out as he held contact. His boots ground into the ice, carving shallow trenches as he forced his weight down through Naruto's centerline. A tremor ran through him—constant, controlled—but his posture stayed locked.
Silver chakra threaded down his arm in tight spirals, compressing against the red like a cap sealing a ruptured line.
Naruto spasmed once more.
Then the red vanished.
Not faded. Cut.
He dropped sideways into the slush.
I held my breath without meaning to.
His fingers twitched. A thin, broken wheeze slipped out. Not stable, but alive.
Kakashi stayed where he was, tension coiled through him, ready for a second surge.
I forced my gaze right.
Oboro lay half-sunken in the mud, breath dragging through a ruined jaw. Each inhale rattled wetly. Kagari hadn't moved beneath the cedar. Pine sap and blood mixed in the air.
Behind them, Anko closed in on Aoi. Her gait dragged slightly, favoring one side. Controlled, but not clean.
My eye throbbed.
Pressure built behind it, sharp and rising.
I looked down.
The grid tore across my body, mapping through fabric and skin. My thigh pouch—left side—held a void. Perfect. Dense. Wrong.
The ring.
A thin filament of black energy slipped upward from it. Not static—feeding. It pierced through fabric and air alike, extending up into the storm canopy.
I followed it.
My neck protested, muscles screaming as I forced my head back. The line stretched west, taut, vanishing into distance. Directional. Anchored.
Not local.
My vision warped under the strain. The weight of it pressed inward, like trying to look into something that didn't want to be seen.
Pain spiked.
A hard stab behind my eye. My stomach flipped. I swallowed bile and copper, forcing the grid to keep scanning.
Anko—upright, but off-balance. Breathing rough.
Aoi—bound, chakra suppressed.
Mubi—barely flickering, heat bleeding out into the ground.
Kagari—dim.
Oboro—fading but holding.
Kakashi—still braced over Naruto.
He exhaled.
Just a fraction. Shoulders dropping a centimeter.
That shift broke the tension holding my body together.
The grid shattered.
Color slammed back in. Mud. Green. Grey sky reflected in ice.
Pain followed it.
A spike drove straight through my right eye.
My hands snapped up to my face. My glasses hung crooked, the right lens cracked. The pressure in my skull surged, drowning everything else. My knees gave out and I dropped face-first into the mud.
Too much.
Two activations back-to-back.
Fluid drained. Pressure spiking without release.
The air shifted.
Pressure dropped hard enough to pop deep in my ears and sinuses. My eyes squeezed shut against it.
The storm broke.
Sound cut out.
The wind died so abruptly it left a vacuum in its wake. Heat vanished with it. Cold replaced it in a single sweep—dry, biting, absolute.
Moisture on my skin crystallized instantly. Sweat froze along my lashes. My muscles seized in a violent shiver as the temperature plunged.
No one spoke.
Anko opened her mouth, then stopped. Whatever she meant to say collapsed into a dry rasp. She leaned heavier into her stance, watching Aoi.
Kakashi didn't move from Naruto's side.
I pushed up onto my elbows. Mud clung to my forearms, already stiffening under the cold. My breath fogged in thick bursts.
Naruto lay where he'd fallen. His chest rose unevenly under torn mesh. No red chakra. No immediate flare.
But the pattern lingered in my head. The breaks. The misfires.
I pulled my knees in, arms wrapping tight without thinking. My body shook, the cold biting deeper now that the adrenaline had burned off.
The clearing held.
Barely.
The mission… irrelevant.
What mattered was what had almost come out of him.