The world narrowed to the space between Tetsu and the woman called Veil.
The roar of the dam faded into a distant hum. Under the constant harassing of ninjutsu, Tetsu saved his strength, building distance, and retreating onto the dam's top walkway.
The mist felt heavier, colder.
Veil's owl summon had been replaced by another, its golden eyes locking onto Tetsu with predatory focus.
Its mistress stood proud, hands already weaving through another set of earth-release seals.
"A Waraiko", Veil stated, her voice muffled but dripping with contempt, "A clan of weepers and laughing fools. Your parlor tricks won't save you. The Tanigakure intel says that you have the most useless of all bloodline release"
"Doton: Earth-Style Fissure (B)!"
The walkway beneath Tetsu's feet split open with a groan of tearing earth.
He leapt sideways, but Veil was already upon him, a kunai flashing for his throat. He parried with his own
*CLANG*
The force behind her strike was immense, knocking him back a step. Surprising for a ninjutsu specialist, but nothing like Ryugo's disciplined slashes.
"You're slow", Veil hissed, pressing the advantage, "Your chakra is thin. The intel said you would be chunins, but I find it hard to believe. Your frame indicates you are young too...You look to have some experience fighting, but it's nothing against a veteran like me"
Her words were arrows, each one finding its mark in the deep, tender places Tetsu had spent the last two months trying to armor.
Weak. Liability. Fool. Useless bloodline release.
They echoed the elder's voice, his classmates' taunts, the silent disapproval of his own clan.
A familiar, hot pressure built behind his eyes. The urge to cry—to unleash the useless, laughing gas of his bloodline—was a physical ache.
But then he heard Ryugo's voice, calm and absolute from their training:
"Your tears are not a weakness, Tetsu. They're a weapon. But you have to aim them."
And Ameruyi's blunt honesty: "Stop flinching. Your genjutsu is the strongest I've ever seen. Act like it"
Veil's owl shrieked, diving, its talons aimed for his eyes. Tetsu didn't look at the bird. He looked at Veil. He let the first tear fall.
It was not a tear of fear or sadness.
It was a tear of focus.
A tear of relinquishing control.
Plink.
It hit the wet concrete.
For Veil, nothing changed at first. Then the world warped.
The sound of the dam didn't just recede; it inverted. It became a deafening silence, a vacuum that pressed on her eardrums.
The mist turned oily, clinging to her skin not with dampness, but with the slick, cold feel of blood. The figure of the boy in the mask before her blurred, then split into three, then five, all moving in erratic, impossible patterns.
"Genjutsu: Hall of Weeping Mirrors (B)"
An evolution of his basic illusions, fueled by his chakra and his bloodline's emotional catalyst. It was his strongest single-target genjutsu technique, one that had recently ranked up after his chunin promotion. He had kept that card hidden, in case he needed it.
Veil snarled, forming the Kai seal with practiced speed. The world snapped back—for a fraction of a second. Then the silence returned, thicker, and the oily mist congealed into shadowy hands that grasped at her ankles.
She dispelled again.
Again the illusion returned, stronger, more visceral each time.
"Persistent", she spat, but a note of strain had entered her voice. She bit her thumb and smeared blood on her summoning tattoo, "Keitaro! Sight Share!"
The owl on her shoulder glowed, its vision superimposing over her own.
The visual illusions shattered, revealing Tetsu's true position—he was standing perfectly still, ten feet away, watching her.
But the auditory and tactile illusions remained. The silence was now a chorus of whispers—voices of people she'd killed, missions she'd failed, her own childhood instructor's dismissive critiques. The oily hands were now cold blades tracing her spine.
"How could you...These are my memories!" Veil screamed, her composure cracking. She abandoned subtlety. Her hands slammed together.
"Doton: Earth-Style Mountain Hammer (B)!"
A massive, ten-foot-wide pillar of solid rock and compacted earth erupted from the walkway beneath Tetsu, not to crush him, but to catapult him into the air, towards the gorge's edge. It was a brute-force solution: remove the caster, break the genjutsu.
Tetsu, in mid-air, did something unexpected.
He stopped trying to land.
He closed his eyes behind his mask.
He didn't think of Veil's insults. He thought of the dark, flooded catacombs where his mother's body was found. Dissected by the Shikabane clan, she had not even earned the right to be buried properly.
He thought of the empty seat at the clan dinners. He thought of the hollow ache that Team 11 had begun to fill, not by erasing the pain, but by giving it a purpose.
He reached into that hollow place and pulled.
The air around him grew cold enough to frost the metal railings. The phantom whispers in Veil's ears coalesced into a single, unbearable sound: the raw, shuddering sob of a child who has finally understood what 'forever' means.
From the shadow cast by the erupting earth pillar, the darkness was born.
It rose.
The Grief-Joy Demon manifested fully.
It was not an unfinished thing, uncontrollable soul-hungry demon like he had summoned in the promotion exam, but a humanoid shadow. Its face showed a screaming mouth of stitches emerging from the dark tide, trailing tears of black water falling on the walkway.
[Grief-Joy Demon – Lv. 41]
It had no claws to swing this time. It simply flowed over Veil's hastily-erected Earth-Style Wall (C), dissolving the chakra structure like sugar in water.
"Doton: Earth Blade (D)!"
It ignored her earthy blades
*BOOM*
The hidden kunai she threw as a last resort "passed" through the Grief-Joy Demon. It was not a physical entity to be fought. It was despair given direction.
It reached her.
Veil's Kai seals turned into frantic, useless slaps against her own body. Desperate, she even plunged three senbons onto her fingernails, hoping that the pain would free her of the horror in front of her. The Grief-Joy Demon washed over her feet, her legs, her torso.
To the outside observer, she simply froze, her eyes widening behind her mask into perfect, silent circles of horror.
Inside her mind, the dam was gone. She was in a place of endless, black, frigid water.
She was sinking. Above her, the shimmering surface receded. The pressure built in her lungs, in her skull.
Shadows with familiar faces—all the people whose deaths she had rationalized, whose pain she had ignored—drifted past her, pointing, their mouths moving in silent accusation. It was hell like she had pictured it.
Her body convulsed on the walkway. She dropped to her knees, then onto her side, curling into a fetal position. Her hands scrabbled at her gas mask, tearing it off. Her face, revealed, was a mask of pure, uncomprehending terror. Her breaths came in short, panicked gasps, though her lungs filled with only air.
Her summon, the owl, gave a final, confused shriek and vanished in a puff of smoke, the contract broken by its master's shattered psyche.
The dark tide receded, flowing back into Tetsu's shadow. The Grief-Joy-Demon's stitched mouth seemed to curve upwards in a final, silent smirk before disappearing.
Tetsu landed lightly on a broken piece of railing, breathing heavily.
The emotional expenditure was immense, a draining ache in his core. He looked at Veil. She wasn't dead. Her heart still beat. But her eyes were empty, staring at nothing, her mouth working soundlessly. Her soul had been eaten.
He finished her off with a simple explosion tag attached to a kunai.
Operative 'Veil' no longer was of this world.