Karura spent the next day at the prince's door, checking the range every hour. The clouds kept stacking. That afternoon she told Kaname about the dam. He said he'd seen it, and that if it went, the Five would have the Daimyo on high ground before the water reached the gate. The heir was hers.
The festival peaked the next night, and Hisano won. Karura watched it from the prince's shoulder, where the Daimyo's party sat raised above the square under the best of the lanterns. The whole town celebrated, the food and the music and the dancers and the turquoise on every breast, and through it Hisano moved as the still bright center of it, steering, touching an elbow, bending to the Daimyo's stewards, and the stewards who had written nothing since they arrived, at last, to write. She watched Reizen himself, who had walked over Renge's carpets without looking down, lean a little toward the headwoman and say a thing that made her bow, and her eyes lit up like a star.
Hisano had been right. The town that looked like it needed nothing was going to be given everything. She had played a risky hand and it paid off.
Karura looked up.
The first fat drops came down on the painted gate, one and then another and then a scatter, beading on the fresh lacquer and running, and nobody under the lanterns looked up, because the music was loud and the wine was good and the town had just been told it would be saved.
Karura stood at the prince's shoulder, and readied herself.
Her time had come.
The rain reached the festival.
It came down warm and nicely, and Mizuchi, being a desert town, did what desert towns do when the sky finally rained. It cheered. Dancers turned their faces up into it. Children were held overhead to feel it. The musicians played louder, because rain on the night of the Daimyo's feast was a blessing, an omen, proof that the gods themselves approved of Hisano's lanterns, and the square roared its joy at the black and gathering sky.
Karura stood at the prince's shoulder and watched the town celebrate.
Her Byakugan was two kilometers up the wash and climbing. Beyond the range the rain was a storm and all of it was running downhill just like Genzo said. The catchment behind the Yoke was filling. Grey water climbed the old stone in surges, and every surge leaned its shoulder against a crack that had been held together for years by an old man's hands and a boy with a bucket.
She had looked at that storm twice for chakra, for anyone up there making it. There was nothing. It was only weather.
In that hour, she sent four clones out of the square one at a time, each wearing a stranger's face, and set them along the wadi where Genzo said where the channel bent.
"Hmm, rain wasn't expected but it is quite pleasant." Yuuga said beside her, holding a hand out past the awning. "How long do you think it is going to last?"
"I'm not sure." Karura said.
"Tch, what a boring answer." Yuuga scoffed.
The wall held for one hour, and then Genzo came down the main road screaming. He came out of the dark at the edge of the square soaked to the bone, hatless, his stick gone somewhere behind him, running a lot quicker than a man his age should be running. He was screaming before anyone could hear him and by the time they could hear him he had no voice left, so what arrived in the square was an old man's shredded voice, over and over, the same words.
"The Yoke! The Yoke is going! Get out of the wash, get up, get up, the Yoke is GOING!"
The music stumbled. The nearest dancers stopped. And Mizuchi looked at the old dam-keeper, dripping and wild-eyed and interrupting the finest night in its history in front of the Daimyo of the Land of Wind, and Mizuchi began, in scattered places, to laugh.
Someone shouted at him to go home. The headwoman's men were already moving toward him from two sides with weary faces, and on the raised platform Hisano hadn't moved.
Karura started walking forward.
She vaulted the platform rail and landed in the square and the crowd made way. She reached Genzo ahead of the headwoman's men, took his arm across her shoulders, and turned to the platform, to the lanterns, to the Daimyo of the Land of Wind and all his glittering court, and she filled her lungs and used a volume she very rarely if ever used at all.
"Get off the low ground NOW!" Karura shouted.
For one heartbeat, silence. The rain loud on the lanterns. Then, from the north, the sound arrived. It came with a low grinding roar, and every laugh in the square died in the same instant.
The square panicked.
"UP THE RISE!" Karura's voice cracked across the panic before it could turn to crush. "UP! CARRY THE CHILDREN! GO!"
And to her relief, they scrambled. Hisano's men, useless a moment ago, were suddenly the most useful men alive, hauling people up. Hisano herself was screaming directions from the platform with the lanterns swinging over her. On the high seats, Kaname had Reizen by the arm and Gōki had made himself a wall, and the Five took their Daimyo up toward high ground.
Yuuga stood at the platform rail, alone in the eddy of it, staring at the one bodyguard he had, who was not coming back for him.
"GIRL!" His voice went shrill. "Girl, your post! GET BACK HERE, YOUR POST IS ME!"
Karura heard him.
She set Genzo into the arms of the sweets-seller Otoki, who had her daughter on her hip and her cart already abandoned, and she turned away from the prince of the Land of Wind and ran north up the emptying main road, alone, straight at the sound.
Two kilometers up, the Yoke gave way.
At the first bend, an old woman shadow clone who had been picking through the market's leavings all evening stood alone weaving through seals. The water came around the bend like a shoulder thrown into a door. The old woman's hands turned, and the flood turned with them, a hundred tons of it. The wave leaned east. It gouged the deep bank and it went on by, and the pens and the shallow west stayed dry.
At the second bend a shadow clone caravan hand who had been dozing against a wall all night was no longer dozing. The channel here wanted to jump. The water hit the hump and reared, and the tip of it tried to leave the wadi altogether and go down the caravan track toward the low sheds. The clone wove through hand signs, seized the leaping water and hauled it back down, the flood slamming back into its bed.
Two bends. Two turns. The flood arrived at the mouth of the town and there was nothing left ahead of it now but Karura.
Behind her, far up the rise, a thousand people who had almost outrun it turned at the top and looked back, and what they saw they would tell for the rest of their lives.
They saw the little Suna girl walk toward it. Her hands blurred as dozens of signs were woven, and she planted her back foot on the flooded road and threw both arms forward as if to catch the thing.
And caught it.
The wall of water stopped mid-stand, its top still curling, its thrown stones dropping out of its face to crash into the shallows, and the river behind it kept growing and rising and couldn't go anywhere.
Up on the rise, no one breathed.
Karura stood under it with her arms out and her heels dug in and the entire flood of the range balanced against her two hands, and she began, slowly, to close them. The water obeyed. The water started turning into a spiral, the impossible mass spinning down and down and inward, compressed by chakra. The flood came off the streets. It climbed into the air above her upturned palm, turning, tightening, shedding its silt in a grey rain of its own, and it condensed, at the end, into a single sphere of water the size of a house, dense as a sea, revolving silently above the hand of a nine-year-old girl standing in a painted gate.
The rain fell through the light. The sphere turned. The town, on its hill, made no sound at all.
"You think you could pull that off, Captain?" Jirō grinned.
"..." Kaname stayed silent.
"Silence is an answer too, Captain." Heihachi laughed.
"How is that possible…?" Tsumugi muttered. "Does she have some sort of water kekkei genkai? I thought she was just a puppeteer!"
"Monster." Gōki grumbled.
"The rumors really downplay the girl." Reizen's eyes narrowed.
…
Karura exhaled and then she walked, carrying the flood above her hand, to where it needed to be, and she poured the water in. It took a long time. She stood in the rain and let the sphere unwind, the water running clean now. The cistern that had been dying of thirst for three years took in the flood, and was full for the first time in living memory. The last of the water left her hand.
Karura stood alone at the cistern, and only then heard the noise from the rise. This was a thousand people who had watched death heading for them and then watched a child catch it. There was crying, cheering, and her name being shouted along with people teaching it to the ones who didn't. The cheers rolled down the hill through the rain, and she couldn't do anything about it except stand there and be loved.
Yuuga had not gone up to praise the girl.
He had gotten as far as the platform steps, shoved along by the crowd, and then the crowd had left him, and no Guardian had come for him because the Five were around his father, and his bodyguard, his one bodyguard, the girl whose entire purpose under the sky was his body, had run the other way.
He stood gripping the platform rail through all of it. He watched the water rushing at him and knew he was going to die, and that the last thing he would feel was rage at a tool who had abandoned her post.
Then she stopped the water. He watched her turn death into a ball of water, and carry it away. His hands would not release the rail. His knuckles had gone white around it. And then the sound came down the hill. He turned and looked up, and saw them. All of them, the whole town was weeping and cheering and holding each other, and every face was turned the same direction, shouting the same name over and over.
Rage first. She left me. Then shame. She left me and saved everyone, me included. And then envy… He wanted a thousand people to make that sound for him. His guard hadn't bought this or needed to throw money at a crowd. She risked her life to be a hero and saved everyone. A hero…
He always thought that heroes were nothing but fools and corpses. But maybe there was something to helping people… A way he could benefit from…
He stood in the rain while thinking.
They found each other at the foot of the platform, the drowned festival around them, lanterns guttering, the square ankle-deep in clean rain and nothing else.
"You left me." Yuuga narrowed his eyes at her.
"Yes, my lord."
"Your mission is my safety. You left me. Your mission. Your purpose. Your duty. You're aware of that, correct?"
"The water would have taken this whole square, my lord. You were in the square. I did my job." Karura corrected him.
He frowned at her, rain dripping off the ends of his expensive hair.
"I don't like that answer." He crossed his arms and turned away.
"Sorry." She smiled.
"Whatever." He looked away from her where people were still cheering for her.
People were beginning to come back down toward the ruined beautiful square, hesitant, then faster, and the first of them were already running toward Karura, an old man on ruined knees ahead of them all with a boy under his arm trying to hold him up and getting dragged instead.
"They're coming to thank you." Yuuga said. "All of them. All night, probably. Might even build a statue of you."
"I hope not… I don't need another place building a statue of me."
Another…? Yuuga's eye twitched. "Are you happy?" He questioned.
"I'm happy that everyone is safe and well." Karura said.
What? That wasn't what I was referring to at all. What is this idiot even talking about? Yuuga frowned.
Yuuga stayed for all of it. He stood in the rain a pace behind her like a ghost. Genzo gripped her hands and wept and called her the seventh binder. Mamoru pushed something into her palm without a word, and it was her coin purse. Otoki crushed her against the smell of honey-cakes while little Tomi shrieked at the rain. At the edge of the square, Hisano stood looking at the full cistern, slowly shaking her head, grateful toward the little girl for what she's done. He watched every face. He watched what they gave her. Saw how she acted. Saw how they acted. It was just saving a couple of lives and it seemed like they were ready to give the girl their firstborn if she hinted.
The reward came once she was alone.
[Congratulations on saving an entire town that was doomed for eradication! You are rewarded with the item, Sword of the Thunder God!]
[Sword of the Thunder God - The Sword of the Thunder God is a blade that was once wielded by Tobirama Senju. A blade made entirely of concentrated lightning excluding the hilt.]
She pulled it out of her subconscious.
It was a hilt with no blade. Dark grey metal, a wrapped grip, and a heavy curved guard that hooked up over her knuckles like a crescent moon. She turned it over twice before infusing lightning chakra into it. A long, thin line of black lightning formed.
Karura retracted her lightning chakra.
She sat in the dark after sealing the sword away. That sword would be a better weapon for Reaper. Plus with Black Lightning, she'll be able to disguise it even better.