Three puffs of smoke filled the assembly room floor.
Million landed first, a heavy drop. The sound of ironwood and cedar hitting stone echoed through the tiers, and hundreds of puppeteers watched a stocky four-armed puppet wave at them with all four hands. That stupid smiley face stared up at them, carved and cheerful, completely at odds with the thing's build. The bandage wrappings along its arms swayed.
Reaper touched down next. The hooded cloak caught air on the descent and billowed, the blank face disappearing into shadow beneath the cowl. Lean where Million was broad. Tall where Million was squat. It straightened to its full height and the room could see the scythe housings at its wrists, the spinning waist joint, the way the fabric draped to hide every joint angle.
The puppet arms materialized on Karura's back last. The massive wooden fists flexed behind her, knuckle plates settling, forearm segments locking into place. Her puppets were such a contrasting sight from their creator.
Nine threads of chakra hummed from her fingers. The assembly room was silent enough to hear them.
Chiyo let the silence hold. She stood off to the side with her arms crossed, watching her corps like a hawk. Their faces told the story. The front row leaned forward, eyes moving across joints and seams. The middle rows were mixed, some studying, some frowning, some whispering behind cupped hands. The back rows were still comprehending.
"These are her two primary combat puppets," Chiyo said. "Million is a puppet focused on taijutsu. Reaper is a puppet focused on kenjutsu. The arms on her back are for if someone slips past those two somehow. She controls all three simultaneously."
The chunin who had stood up earlier, a big one with calloused hands, leaned forward in his seat. His name was Daigo. He'd been in the Puppet Brigade for eleven years and had fought in border skirmishes with Iwa since he was sixteen. He stared at Million with an expression of awe and shock.
"The layering on the wood," said a woman in the fourth row. She had sharp features and close-cropped grey hair, and she was squinting at Million's frame like she was trying to read fine print. Tsubaki. Jonin. One of the senior combat operators in the Brigade and Chiyo's informal second-in-command. "That's not single-stock. That's composite, bonded under pressure. I can see the grain lines from here."
"Ironwood and cedar," Karura said. "Layered in alternating sheets and bonded with desert resin under compression."
"That technique doesn't exist in any of our scrolls or books."
"Oh. I kind of learned it on my own. The Puppet Master elective class in the academy is all I kind of had to go off of for my puppet knowledge."
Tsubaki's squint deepened. She looked at Chiyo. Chiyo looked back with an expression that said I told you so.
"The four-arm torque problem," Tsubaki continued, her eyes back on Million's lower shoulder mounts. "We shelved dual-arm variants three years ago because we couldn't stabilize the secondary joints. They lost power under load."
"I used an iron strip through the spine as a central anchor. The force distributes evenly through the spine instead of loading the mounts directly."
More silence as people begin thinking of ways of modifying their own puppets.
"Show them the extending arms," Chiyo said.
Karura's fingers moved. Million's four oversized forearm housings cracked open, and the segmented arms poured out from the storage seal. Hundreds of them. Flexible jointed limbs of linked wooden segments, each one tipped with a normal-looking hand that opened and closed as it extended. They spread across the assembly floor in a wave of grasping wooden fingers, some planting themselves in the stone, some reaching upward toward the tiered seating, some wrapping around each other in configurations that demonstrated their range and flexibility.
Someone in the back row stood up without realizing they'd done it.
Million retracted the arms. Karura shifted to Reaper. The scythes extended from the wrist housings, segment by segment, linked steel edges clicking into place. She locked them rigid and swung. The air split. Then she released the lock and the blades went flexible, snaking through the air, whipping around invisible obstacles, the cloak flaring to mask the transition points.
The spinning waist activated. Reaper's upper body rotated a full 360, scythes extended, and the air pressure in the room shifted. Several puppeteers in the front row leaned back involuntarily.
Karura stopped everything. The puppets settled.
Chiyo let the silence stretch until it was uncomfortable, then kept stretching it. She wanted them sitting in it. She wanted them to feel the weight of what they'd just seen before she said what she was about to say.
"Tsubaki," she said finally.
"Chiyo-sama."
"Pick three of your best. One jonin, two chunin."
Tsubaki's head turned. "For what purpose?"
"I want them to fight her."
The room cracked open. Murmuring erupted from every tier. Daigo stood up again. Two chunin near the back exchanged wide-eyed looks. A jonin in the third row uncrossed his arms and leaned forward with the sharp focus of someone who'd just heard something that sounded like a bad idea.
"Chiyo-sama," Tsubaki said, a little dumbfounded. "She is a genin."
"Did I ask you how old she was?"
"Are you sure she's ready for something like this? I know she completed an A-rank or S-rank mission but still, anyone can get lucky."
"Lucky." Chiyo scoffed.
"You want three of my puppeteers, people who fight on the front lines, to fight an eight-year-old genin in a sparring match."
"I didn't say sparring." Chiyo's voice was increasing in intensity. "I said fight. Puppets, poison, everything they'd bring to a real battle. I want them fighting her the way they'd fight an enemy."
The murmuring stopped. It didn't die down gradually. It stopped, like someone had pulled a plug.
Tsubaki stared at Chiyo for a long moment, wondering if she'd lost her mind. Then she turned to the tiers and swept her gaze across the assembled puppeteers. Fine, if she wanted to act crazy. She'd give her crazy.
"Daigo," she said.
The big chunin straightened. "Yes, Tsubaki-senpai."
"You, Gozu, and Hachi. Gear up."
Daigo's face changed from surprise to irritation to resignation.
He looked at Karura. Small. Sandy hair. Yellow scarf. Pink cheeks. An eight-year-old girl standing between two puppets with wooden arms on her back, looking up at him with an expression that was closer to apologetic than aggressive.
"Tsubaki-senpai," he said. His voice was even, but there was a tightness underneath it. "With respect. This is beneath us."
Tsubaki didn't blink. "It's an order, Daigo."
"I understand it's an order. I'm saying it's a waste of our time and an embarrassment to the girl. She's talented, clearly. Nobody's arguing that. But asking us to go all out against a child is going to end with a child getting hurt and three operators looking like bullies."
A chunin two rows back, Gozu by process of elimination, stood up. He was fit and angular with deep-set eyes and looked annoyed. "He's right. This is a demonstration, not a combat evaluation. We saw the puppets. They're impressive. But impressive puppets and actual battlefield experience are two different things."
The third, Hachi, was already standing. She was the youngest of the three, maybe mid-twenties, with her hair pulled back in a tight knot and a thin scar running from her left ear to her jaw. She didn't say anything, but her expression said enough. She didn't want to beat up a little kid either.
"Your concerns aren't important," Chiyo said. She hadn't moved. Her arms were still crossed. Her voice hadn't changed pitch or volume. "Now gear up."
Daigo's teeth ground against one another. He looked at Tsubaki. Tsubaki's face was stone. He looked at Chiyo. Chiyo's face was worse.
"Yes, Chiyo-sama." The three of them left the assembly room.
The remaining puppeteers sat in their seats and stared at Karura, who stood on the floor with her puppets and wished very badly that she was somewhere else. She didn't want to fight these people. She didn't want to be responsible for the outcome that most likely will occur…
Ebizo appeared beside her. She hadn't heard him move from the back row.
"Sensei," she whispered. "I don't want to fight them."
"I know."
"They don't want to fight me either."
"I know that too."
"Can't you talk to Chiyo-sama? Tell her this isn't necessary?"
"No."
"Why not?"
Ebizo looked at her. His expression was kind, but there was something firm underneath it. "Because it is necessary. My sister doesn't waste people's time, Karura. She's doing this for a reason."
"What reason?"
"You'll understand afterward."
That wasn't comforting. Karura chewed her lip and looked at her puppets. Million stared back at her with its smiley face. Reaper's blank visage offered nothing. The arms on her back flexed, responding to her anxiety through the threads.
The assembly emptied into Training Ground Two, the Brigade's private field. It was larger than Training Ground Four, a wide oval of packed sand enclosed by canyon walls on three sides and the headquarters entrance on the fourth. Practice dummies and weapon targets lined the edges. The ground was scarred and pitted from years of puppet training.
The puppeteers took positions along the canyon walls. Chiyo and Ebizo stood near the headquarters entrance, elevated slightly on a natural stone ledge that gave them a clear view of the entire field. Tsubaki stood beside them, her arms folded.
Karura walked to the center of the field. The afternoon sun was behind the western canyon wall now, throwing the ground into a mix of light and long shadow. Sand crunched under her sandals. She could feel the weight of every pair of eyes on her back, and the Byakugan behind her Transformation wanted to activate so badly it itched.
She let it.
The chakra pathways of everyone in the training ground bloomed into visibility. The puppeteers along the walls, their chakra networks glowing in her peripheral vision.
And the three walking out of the headquarters entrance, their puppet scrolls on their hips and their chakra already flowing to their fingertips, were ready to fight.
Daigo took the center position. He'd changed into combat gear: sand-colored flak jacket over a dark blue undersuit, shoulder guards, head-wrap with a cloth neck-cover. His puppet scroll was in his left hand. His face was set in a hard line. Whatever reluctance he'd shown in the assembly room was buried now under the professionalism of a shinobi who'd been ordered to do a job.
Gozu flanked him on the left, similarly geared. His scroll was already unrolled and pinched between two fingers. Hachi took the right, her scar catching the light, one hand resting on the scroll at her hip.
Thirty meters of open sand between them and Karura.
"Rules," Chiyo called from the ledge. Her voice carried across the field like a bell. "There are no rules. Give it everything you got. Both sides."
Karura nodded. This would be her first time fighting against another puppeteer.
"The three of us against her?"
"Are you sure about this?"
"I think that might be a bit much, don't you think, Chiyo-sama?"
"Begin when you're ready," Chiyo said.
Nobody moved for three seconds.
Then Daigo, Gozu, and Hachi deployed their puppets simultaneously.
Three scrolls hit the sand. Three plumes of smoke. Three puppets landed on the training ground and the fight changed shape.
Daigo's puppet was a heavy-framed humanoid, thick in the shoulders, reinforced at every joint with iron capping. Its face was a featureless wooden mask with two horizontal slits for eyes. Both forearms were oversized housings, similar in principle to Million's but designed differently, built to store and deploy senbon and kunai from spring-loaded launchers rather than having a storage seal full of extending arms. A row of sealed compartments ran down its torso, each one a poison gas trap or smoke bomb waiting to open. The thing looked like a walking armory wearing a blank face.
Gozu's puppet was leaner. Fast-looking. Two arms, standard configuration, but the fingers were elongated into bladed tips, each one a small knife. A coil of razor wire sat in a spool housing on its back, the wire running through guides along both arms and terminating at the finger-blades, giving the puppet the ability to fling wire traps and cutting lines at range. Its legs were over-articulated, extra joints at the knee and ankle, built for rapid repositioning. Its face had a narrow vertical slit for a mouth, nothing else.
Hachi's was the most unusual. Shorter than the other two, almost squat, with a dome-shaped head and four small apertures arranged in a square on its face. Its body was rounder, barrel-chested, and both arms ended not in hands but in wide nozzle-tipped housings. A poison puppet. The apertures on the face were gas dispensers. The arm nozzles were sprayers. The rounded body was a pressurized reservoir. Hachi had built a puppet whose entire purpose was to fill the air with things you didn't want to breathe.
Paralytic. Sleeping gas. Binding wire. Whatever Chiyo had said about no rules, the three of them had geared for capture, not killing. None of them were going to be the ones who put a child in the ground over a demonstration.
Three puppets. Three operators controlling them with the experience of people who had done this countless times. Their threads fanned out from their fingers, ten each, glowing faintly in the afternoon light.
Karura's Byakugan saw everything. The chakra flow through their threads, the distribution of energy in their puppets, the way their networks spiked at the shoulders and forearms where the most control was concentrated. She could see the poison reservoirs in Hachi's puppet. She could see the spring mechanisms in Daigo's forearm launchers, coiled and loaded. She could see the wire in Gozu's spool housing, thin enough to cut flesh, laced with something that made it glow a sickly yellow.
She put Million and Reaper into motion.
Million moved first, dropping low, four arms spread, rolling forward across the sand in a loping run that covered ground fast. Reaper swung wide to the left, cloak billowing, taking the long angle to flank.
They didn't take the bait.
All three puppets ignored Million and Reaper entirely. Daigo's heavy-frame puppet broke right. Gozu's fast puppet sprinted left. Hachi's poison puppet charged straight up the center. Three different angles, three different approach lines, all converging on the same target.
Karura.
She'd expected it. Any puppeteer worth their headband knew the rule. The puppet was the weapon, not the fighter. Destroying the weapon did nothing but waste time. Take out the puppeteer and every puppet in the field drops like dead weight. These three had fought shinobi who understood that. They'd spent their careers protecting themselves while their puppets did the killing, and they knew exactly how to flip that equation when the enemy was another puppet user.
Daigo's forearm housings opened. Senbon, dozens of them, laced with paralytic, fired not at Million but at Karura herself. A spread pattern, wide enough that dodging one volley put you in the path of the next.
Gozu's puppet was already flanking, those over-articulated legs eating up ground. Finger-blades flicked outward trailing razor wire, and the wire sang toward Karura from the left in a wide sweeping arc meant to catch her at the waist.
Hachi's puppet opened its face apertures on approach. Paralytic gas, thick and pale, billowed forward in a cone aimed at the girl standing thirty meters away.
All at once. All at her.
Karura's fingers danced.
Million planted all four arms into the sand and launched itself back across the field, crossing the distance to Karura in a single bound. It landed in front of her, between the girl and the rush, and its bandages unspooled from all four arms at once, sixteen strips of linen whipping outward into a swirling wall. The senbon hit the bandages and stuck, dozens of needles caught in layered fabric. The razor wire hit the bandages and tangled. Gozu yanked, trying to pull through, and the linen cinched around the wire and held. Million's four hands gripped four different strips and pulled in opposite directions, and the wire snapped.
The gas kept coming. Bandages couldn't stop gas.
Karura held her breath and vanished. Body Flicker. She vanished from behind Million and reappeared fifteen meters to the right, repositioning out of the gas cloud's path. Her threads stretched, bending with her fingers.
The three puppeteers tracked her. Daigo's puppet adjusted, turning to face her new position, forearm housings reloading. Gozu's puppet was already redirecting, fast legs pivoting, closing the distance to her new location. Hachi's puppet shifted its gas output to follow.
They were coordinated. They'd fought together before, that was obvious. Daigo suppressed with ranged fire. Gozu closed in for the grab. Hachi smothered the space, forcing the target to move where they wanted. A triangle that tightened around the enemy until there was nowhere left to go.
Against most targets, it would have worked.
Karura sent Reaper at Gozu.
Reaper's scythe housings clicked open and both blades extended, not locked rigid but flexible, the segmented steel snaking through the air in twin lines that curved around Gozu's puppet entirely. His puppet was between them, yes. Reaper's blades went around it. Over it. Past it. The flexible scythes bent at angles that solid weapons couldn't reach, and they were heading for Gozu himself, standing forty meters back with his threads out and his eyes widening.
Gozu did the only thing he could. He pulled his puppet back to intercept its own strings, putting the frame between himself and the incoming blades. The puppet caught one scythe on its torso and the impact sent it skidding, but the second scythe snaked underneath and kept going, reaching, reaching.
He jumped. The blade passed under his feet, close enough to nick leather, and he landed running. Pulling his puppet with him, retreating, trying to keep the frame between himself and Reaper's reach.
He couldn't attack Karura and defend himself at the same time. One puppeteer down to pure defense.
Daigo saw it. He adjusted. His puppet's torso compartments opened, not smoke bombs this time, but three kunai with explosive tags. The kunai themselves were aimed at Karura and thrown hard. If they hit near her feet, the blast would disrupt her concentration. Break her threads. Drop her puppets.
Million's extending arms deployed. Not from the forearm housings facing Daigo. From the two housings facing backward, behind Million, the arms Daigo hadn't seen load. Segmented limbs erupted from Million's forearms, dozens of jointed wooden arms that streaked across the sand not toward Daigo's puppet but past it, around it, through the gap between its legs, reaching for Daigo standing behind his own creation.
Daigo's face went white. He abandoned the kunai throw and yanked his puppet back into his own path, using it as a shield the same way Gozu had. Million's extending arms hit the puppet's broad frame and wrapped around it, grasping, pulling, and for a moment the heavy-framed puppet and the reaching arms wrestled in the sand between Daigo and the thing trying to get to him.
His puppet was strong. Reinforced. The iron capping at the joints held. He wasn't losing the grapple.
But he wasn't attacking Karura anymore either. Two puppeteers now locked into defending themselves.
Hachi was the last one free. Her poison puppet kept advancing, gas pouring from its apertures, the cloud expanding across the field in a creeping wall of paralytic haze. She wasn't trying to hit Karura directly anymore. She was trying to fill enough of the training ground that there was nowhere clean left to stand. Area denial. Take away the girl's space. Force her to keep flickering, keep burning chakra, keep splitting her attention between moving and fighting.
It was the smartest play any of the three had made.
If Karura had a puppet like that, she also would do something similar. But unfortunately, it wouldn't work against her.
Million's bandage wrappings, the sixteen strips that had caught the senbon and tangled the wire, released their hold on the debris and shot forward in a swarm at Hachi. The linen strips streaked across the sand, low and fast, and wrapped around both of Hachi's ankles before the woman could react.
Hachi looked down. The bandages cinched.
Million pulled.
Hachi hit the sand face-first. Her threads went wild, her puppet stuttering mid-stride as her concentration shattered. The gas output sputtered and died. By the time she rolled over and got her hands up to reconnect her threads, Million's bandages had already released and snapped back to the puppet's arms.
Her puppet stood in the middle of the field, still and silent, its gas vented and its operator on her back in the dirt.
Three seconds of stillness.
Gozu was the first to realize. Reaper had stopped chasing him. He looked across the field and saw Hachi on the ground, saw Daigo's puppet locked in a grapple with Million's extending arms, and saw Karura standing fifteen meters from where she'd started, untouched, her hair not even mussed. The puppet arms on her back hadn't moved. She hadn't needed them.
He also saw what nobody else had seen yet, because he was standing at the angle that made it visible.
Reaper was behind him. The puppet had used the time it spent chasing him to reposition, circling wide during the chaos, and now it stood ten meters to his back with both scythes extended and the blank face pointed at the space between his shoulder blades. If this had been real, those blades would have gone through his spine before he knew they were there.
Gozu let his threads drop. His puppet collapsed in a heap of wood and wire.
"I lost," he said.
Daigo heard it. He looked over. Saw Gozu standing with his hands at his sides and his puppet in a pile. Saw Reaper behind him. Saw Hachi sitting up in the sand, brushing dirt off her face, her puppet standing alone and useless twenty meters away.
He looked at his own puppet, still grappling with Million's extending arms. He was holding. The iron capping was strong enough. He could keep this up, keep his puppet between himself and Million's reach, keep fighting.
But he couldn't win. His puppet was designed to fight enemies. Its senbon and kunai and poison traps were built for targets who didn't have a wall of bandages and extending arms standing between them and the launchers. Every weapon in his arsenal was meant to hit people who were standing in front of his puppet, fighting it face to face. Not a girl who stood behind her own puppet and reached around his.
He was a veteran. He'd fought in border engagements for eleven years. He understood when a battle was lost, and he understood that continuing to fight after that point was the difference between a veteran and a corpse.
He let go.
His puppet dropped, freed from the extending arms, and hit the sand with a heavy thud. The iron-capped joints clanged against stone underneath the packed surface.
"I lost as well," he said. His voice was hoarse.
Hachi was on her feet now. Sand in her hair. Dirt on her flak jacket. She looked at her puppet standing inert in the field, looked at the woman-shaped gas machine she'd spent two years building and refining, and then looked at Karura.
"I give up," she said quietly.
Silence.
Karura stood in the training ground with Million on one side and Reaper on the other, the puppet arms on her back still flexed and ready, unused. Her face was calm. She didn't look smug or proud.
No puppets had been destroyed. Nobody was hurt. The fight hadn't even lasted a full minute.
And that was worse than wreckage. Their puppets stood in the field, intact, fully armed, useless. She hadn't broken anything. She'd just walked past everything they'd built.
Daigo stared at the sand. His hands were shaking. He'd told Tsubaki this was beneath him. He'd said it to her face, in front of the entire Brigade, that fighting this girl was a waste of his time.
He looked at Karura.
She looked back at him. Her expression wasn't gloating. It wasn't pity, either. It was the face of someone who understood exactly what had just happened and felt bad about it.
"Your puppet is really well built," she said quietly. "The iron capping at the joints is smart. It held against Million's extending arms and they've crushed through solid stone before. If you reinforced the spine the same way, you could probably mount a second set of launchers on the back. Give yourself coverage in both directions."
Daigo almost lost it but quickly reigned himself back in. She'd just beaten him in front of his friends, rivals, and peers, and her first words were advice on how to make his puppet better. How humiliating… He balled his fist.
Gozu was standing over his collapsed puppet, looking at Reaper. The hooded puppet that had circled behind him without a sound, positioning for a kill shot he never would have felt. He kept replaying it in his head. He'd been so focused on keeping the puppet between himself and the scythes coming from the front that he'd lost track of where Reaper actually was. The flexible blades had been a feint. The real threat had walked calmly around his flank while he was staring the wrong direction.
"How long was it behind me?" he asked.
"About four seconds," Karura said. "I repositioned it when Daigo threw the kunai. Everyone was watching Million."
Four seconds. Reaper had been behind him for four seconds with both scythes out, and he hadn't felt a thing. If this was a battlefield, he'd be dead. He'd have died staring at empty air where he thought the threat was.
He looked at Karura with an expression that was impossible to read.
Then he bowed.
A full, deep bow from the waist.
"How did you even make those extending arms?" he questioned. "I know I'm not talented in sealing but still. Some kid who was in the academy not too long ago can create something like that?" He sighed, still bowing.
Hachi bowed next. Sand was still in her hair. "The bandages. I didn't even see them come for me. I was watching the gas, watching your puppets, and the bandages just... appeared around my legs." She swallowed. "You built that into your puppet from the start, didn't you? The extending arms, the bandages, the flexible scythes. They're not just weapons. They're designed to reach past the puppet to the person behind it."
Karura didn't answer at first. She just looked at Hachi with a small, slightly embarrassed smile.
"No. I never thought about fighting puppeteers when designing my puppets. This was my first time."
Daigo was the last. He stood with his puppet behind him. He wanted to be better. And better had just walked into his life wearing a yellow scarf and telling him how to improve his shoulder mounts.
He bowed.
"I was wrong," he said. "I apologize, Karura-san. You aren't beneath us." He swallowed. "We're the ones who still have catching up to do."
Karura's face had gone red again. From her hairline to her collar. She waved her hands in front of her.
"Please stand up. All of you. Please. You don't have to bow. I'm the one who should be bowing. You're all senior to me and you've been doing this for years and I, I just, please stop bowing."
Nobody stopped bowing.
"Seriously, please."
Still bowing.
"Sensei, help."
Ebizo, from the ledge, laughed. Beside him, Chiyo had a proud smile on her face.
The rest of the Puppet Brigade was quiet. They lined the canyon walls, watching three of their own bow to an eight-year-old girl in a training ground with three intact puppets lying useless in the sand. Some faces were stunned. Some were thinking. A few, the younger recruits who hadn't been in the Brigade long enough to have their pride calcified, were looking at Karura with open, undisguised awe.
One by one, the murmuring started.
"The extending arms. How many can each forearm hold?"
"Is the spinning waist a universal joint or a ball-and-socket?"
"What adhesive do you use for the composite bonding? Standard resin cracks under desert temperature cycling."
"Can the scythes be retrofitted to existing frames or do they need the waist joint to function?"
"How many threads are you using? I counted nine but that can't be right for two full puppets plus the arms."
Karura looked at the faces along the canyon walls. Puppeteers. Real ones. People who'd dedicated their careers to the same art she practiced in her courtyard. They weren't looking at her with hostility anymore. They weren't looking at her with confusion. They were looking at her like she was something they wanted to understand.
She took a breath. Straightened her back. The red in her cheeks faded to a warm pink.
"The extending arms use a sealed storage scroll in each forearm housing," she said, and her voice carried. Steady now. "Each scroll holds hundreds of arms. The arms are linked wooden segments connected by wire-threaded joints, so they bend in any direction. The adhesive is desert resin mixed with ironwood sap, and it doesn't crack because the layering technique distributes thermal stress across the grain boundaries instead of concentrating it at a single bonding plane."
She paused. Looked at the faces. They were listening. All of them.
"The spinning waist is a reinforced ball-and-socket with a locking pin system that lets me fix the rotation angle mid-spin. The scythes need the waist joint to reach their full potential, but the segmented blade design could work on any puppet with enough wrist clearance. And I'm using nine threads. Seven for the two puppets, two for the arms."
"Nine threads for all of that," someone said from the back row. There was something hollow in their voice. "I use eight for one puppet."
Karura didn't know what to say to that, so she didn't say anything. She just stood in the center of the training ground with her puppets beside her and her puppet arms on her back, surrounded by intact puppets and a field of veterans looking at her like she'd just changed something fundamental about the world they lived in.
Chiyo stepped forward from the ledge.
"Now you understand," she said to the Brigade, "why I called this assembly."
She looked at Karura. That look again. The one from the hospital. The one that had too many things in it to name.
"Everyone back inside. I have one more thing to discuss."