If gods listened, they had done little but count.
Mei pressed her forehead to the snow, the wrapped paper clutched in both hands. The flames behind her ate the house she had been born in. The last, thin strength in her grandmother's body had thrown her clear. It would have to be enough.
The old woman's lips, cracked and purple, had forced a smile for her. Live, it had said. Live even if it hurts.
Mei changed the way she breathed. In. Out. It hurt. She accepted it.
The roof collapsed with a final blow. The heat shuddered through her bones. She pushed herself up on burned palms and looked at them—red, blistered, useful.
"I will live." She bit the words. "I will live. I will live."
She took one step. Then another. Blood slicked the inside of her sleeves. She didn't stop.
She reached the village edge and would have kept going had shadow not fallen across her again.
The ANBU—a different one—dropped from a roofline, blade point carving a wake in the snow. The first man shrieked somewhere behind them as medics grabbed him; this one had a whole mask and a colder voice.
The boot hit her temple. Not as precise. Meaner.
"Down."
He hauled her up by the hair and leaned close, voice a hiss through carved wood. "Answer. The man in black. Glasses. Where is he?"
Something in Mei's chest twisted and settled into a shape it had never owned before. The anger didn't burn out; it sharpened.
The ANBU cocked his fist.
She spat mist.
It seethed through the eye-holes. The mask pitted, then sank. He screamed and dropped her, clawing at his face, kunai tumbling from numbed fingers. Snow smoked where the droplets fell.
Mei ran again. The wind with her. The wrapper in her fist grew warm. Sight-lines did not land on her; the mind behind them refused to fix.
She ducked between two huts, then stopped, heart in her throat, and pressed against the wall. The second ANBU sprinted past at arm's length, chakra probing. He hesitated, turned his head toward her, fury flaying the air—
—and moved on.
The concealment wasn't invisibility. It was misdirection so perfect the brain helped make it true. Sogetsu's craft did not shout I am hidden; it whispered nothing interesting here so convincingly that attention went elsewhere of its own accord.
Mei loosened her grip on the wrapper and the world brightened around her—as if it had remembered she existed. She tightened it again; she became a stain the eye didn't register.
She looked down at the paper. The glyphs weren't just written—they were layered. Where her tears had fallen, lines rearranged microscopically, responding to need.
A gift.
Not a miracle. A promise kept.
From the far side of the square, a brutal laugh rolled—Suikazan Fuguki's—as he ordered the square searched again and again, patience thinning. Samehada rasped along his back, spines flexing, hungry for chakra that no one dared feed it in a place that smelled this much of death.
Mei turned away from the sound and slipped into the trees.
She walked until the smoke was a memory. When she couldn't walk, she crawled. When she couldn't crawl, she slept under a root with the wrapper in both hands and woke with frost on her eyelashes and a killing clarity in her chest.
By noon the storm had eased. She found a creek under its lid of ice and broke a hole to drink. Her reflection, slicked with soot, blinked back. Behind it, a thin trace of vapor bled from her lips and pitted the ice. She felt nothing in her mouth—no chakra molding, no hand signs—only grief becoming change.
Boil Release, she thought without knowing the name. Acid that is mine.
She wrapped her hands, rewrapped the candy paper above her heart, and looked north, toward mists that kept secrets and the city that made them.
"I'll live," she told the trees. "I'll grow strong. And I'll come back."
Somewhere else in that same country, a boy with black-rimmed glasses paused in the snow and turned his head—just once, as if hearing someone speak his name.
Then he kept walking, tracks deliberately visible in the fresh, bright white.
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