(In the years before the Second Great Shinobi War...)
The mountain didn't erupt. Mai punched it.
The sound was a dry CRACK, like the spine of the world snapping. A shockwave of displaced air sheared the top off three ancient pine trees and turned the falling snow into instant steam.
Mai stood in the center of the crater, one leg extended in a perfect, high-angle opera kick. She wasn't breathing hard. She was breathing deep, inhaling the thin, sulfurous air of the peaks like it was perfume.
She wore the traditional sleeveless kung-fu tunic of the Iwa martial artists, but dyed a violent, clashing green. Her hair was black, braided into a long queue that whipped around her like a tail. Her eyebrows were thick, dark brushstrokes that gave her face a permanent expression of intense determination.
Steam curled off her skin. Not the red vapor of blood burning—something darker. Her skin looked shiny, hard, and hot. Like cooling lava.
"Again!" she chirped.
"Again?"
The voice came from the avalanche she had just created.
A massive hand, covered in red fur and gold armored plates, punched through the rubble. Son Gokū, the Elder Spirit King of the Monkey Domain, pulled himself out of the debris. He was the size of a castle tower, his face a mask of grumpiness and ancient wisdom.
"You are a pest," the Great Ape rumbled, shaking snow from his beard. "We have been sparring for three days. My joints ache. Do humans not require sleep?"
"Sleep is for people who haven't unlocked the Gate of Wonder!" Mai shouted, dropping into a stance that was low, wide, and immovable. "Come on, Monkey King! You said you'd show me the Lava Release!"
"I said I would teach you the principles of heat," Son Gokū corrected, grabbing a boulder the size of a house and tossing it casually from hand to hand. "You decided that meant setting your own nervous system on fire."
"It works, doesn't it?"
Mai grinned. It was the smile of a shark that really loved being a shark.
"Pyō!" she shouted, flashing the hand seal.
Inside her chest, the chakra gates groaned open. Most shinobi treated the gates like dams to be broken. Mai treated them like a forge. She grabbed the overflowing energy of the 7th Gate and forced it inward, compressing it into her muscles until she felt heavy, dense, and indestructible.
The boulder flew at her.
She didn't dodge.
She had never learned to step aside from fate
She caught I instead.
Her hands slammed into the stone, stopping it dead. The kinetic energy had nowhere to go, so it became heat. The rock glowed bright orange where her fingers touched it, then melted into slag, dripping harmlessly around her sandals.
"Hmph," Son Gokū grunted. "Not bad. For a hairless thing."
An hour later, the violence had stopped.
Mai sat cross-legged on the edge of the Stone Crown precipice, a porcelain bowl of tea balanced on her knee. Son Gokū sat beside her, shrinking his form down to a manageable twelve feet so he didn't block the sun.
Crawling all over the Monkey King's shoulders was a small, white-furred ape with a sour expression and a tiger-skin loincloth.
"He's got a strong grip," Mai noted, watching the little monkey try to pull one of Son Gokū's whiskers out.
"Enma is impatient," Son Gokū sighed, swatting the future Summon of the Third Hokage away. "He wants to be a staff before he knows how to be a stick."
Enma chattered angrily and threw a peach pit at Mai. She caught it between two fingers without looking.
"He'll be strong," Mai said, popping the pit into her mouth and crunching it. "He's got the eyebrows for it."
"You and your eyebrows," the Spirit King grumbled, sipping from a barrel-sized gourd. "Tell me, Mai. Why do you train the Gates this way? The Eight Inner Gates are meant to be a sacrifice. A final bloom. You use them like a hammer."
Mai looked out over the peaks of Iwagakure. Below the clouds, she could see the smoke of the stone quarries, the rigid lines of the village that valued hardness above all else.
"Stones break," she said simply.
She tapped her chest.
"Iwa teaches us to be hard. But if you hit a stone hard enough, it cracks. I don't want to be a stone."
She clenched her fist. The air shimmered with heat.
"I want to be magma. Magma doesn't break. It flows. It burns. And when it cools down, it makes new mountains."
She looked up at the Monkey King, her eyes shining with that terrifying, simple Goku-logic.
"If I burn hot enough, I can reshape the world so my family doesn't have to break."
Son Gokū stared at her. He saw the white residue of unearthly chakra in the moon, and he saw the natural energy in the toads. But in this human girl, he saw something else. Evolution forced through sheer stubbornness, forged out of a will of fire.
"Reshaping the world," Son Gokū mused. "A tall order. There are men coming, Mai. Men with eyes that want to control the Domains. Men who treat beasts like batteries."
He was thinking of Madara. He was thinking of the Gedo Statue that he could feel moving in the dark.
Mai stood up. She dusted off her green tunic.
"Let them come," she said.
She assumed a stance—one fist forward, one fist back, leg raised. A silhouette against the setting sun.
"I'll just kick them really, really hard."
Son Gokū laughed. It was a deep, rumbling sound that shook the snow from the trees.
"I believe you will, Maito Mai. I believe you will."