Steel meets tendon.
It isn't a clean slice, not the neat kind of violence you can understand. It's a tearing, sawing kiss that catches on something elastic inside my wrist and drags.
My fingers fling open like a broken fan.
For a heartbeat I don't feel pain. I feel *absence*—a sudden, wrong lightness, like my hand has been disconnected from the idea of "mine" even before my brain admits what happened.
Then the pain arrives.
Bright, delayed, and impossibly intimate. It climbs up my arm like fire trying to find my throat.
I hear Sakura scream again, but it sounds far away, like she's yelling from the other side of water.
The world is fog and blood and the wet smell of mist. My own breath is a thin rasp—half strangled, half stolen—because Naruto is close enough that the air itself has weight. The tether under my wrist pulses as if excited, and the muffling seal Danzo added doesn't stop it from vibrating in my bones.
Warm density clamps my ribs.
Cold depth rises beneath it.
Something behind Naruto's seal leans forward to watch.
**Little… open.**
The intent slides against my mind and my stomach turns.
I pitch backward, slipping in dirt, trying to put distance between my throat and the water clone's blade. My right arm flops uselessly, fingers twitching like they're searching for commands that no longer reach them.
Blood pours down my palm in thick, steady lines.
It doesn't drip.
It *runs.*
My hand spasms once, twice—then settles into a tremor I can't control.
Sasuke crashes into the clone with a furious slash, forcing it back half a step. The blade is faster than a kid should be, the strike sharper than fear. His eyes are hard, furious at the clone, at Zabuza, at himself for not being stronger.
The clone laughs with Zabuza's mouth.
"Protecting the weak?" it taunts, voice wet with amusement.
Sasuke snarls and attacks again.
Sakura tries to pull me farther back by my shirt, hands shaking so badly she keeps losing grip. "Souta—Souta, stay with me!"
I want to answer.
I want to tell her my hand is gone in all the ways that matter, that I can feel tendons sliding wrong under skin, that I can't close my fingers anymore.
My tongue seal coils tight.
A warning bite sparks under my tongue, and the pain makes my eyes water.
All that comes out is a wet, useless sound.
Sakura's face twists. She looks like she's about to cry, and I hate that I did this to her—dragged her into witnessing a kind of suffering that isn't even heroic.
Naruto's shadow clones burst into being around the fog like someone cracked a dam.
The tether punches my ribs again—harder—because Naruto's chakra is moving with intent now. The warm pressure in the air thickens, and my lungs briefly forget how to fill.
I cough blood-spit and mist.
Naruto's voice is rough, too loud, too close. "Sasuke!"
Sasuke barks back without looking away from the clone. "Do it!"
The plan forms in front of me in fragments—canon trying to happen even while my blood paints the ground.
Naruto clones swarm the clone and get cut down like paper. Water bodies splatter and reform, the fog swallowing the sound of each impact.
Sasuke throws shuriken.
Naruto throws too.
Their blades arc through mist toward Zabuza's real body—the one holding Kakashi trapped in the water prison.
Zabuza doesn't even flinch at the first volley.
He deflects with one-handed ease, still maintaining the prison.
But Naruto's last "shuriken" isn't a shuriken.
It's Naruto himself—transformed into a giant demon wind shuriken, spinning with stupid, desperate brilliance.
For a fraction of a heartbeat, the story feels satisfied.
This is the beat it wanted.
Naruto's ingenuity. Sasuke's coordination. The first real proof that teamwork isn't a lecture—it's survival.
The tether surges warm, heavy, almost approving—
—and the cold depth beneath it shifts, amused, like something inside Naruto is enjoying the taste of danger without paying for it.
Zabuza's eye widens.
He turns his head just enough.
And in that motion—the one moment he breaks perfect stillness—Kakashi moves inside the water prison. His hand signs blur through the sphere like a shadow flickering behind glass.
Zabuza jerks instinctively.
His palm slips.
The water prison shudders.
Kakashi explodes out of it with a violent rush, drenched and furious and alive.
The instant Kakashi is free, something in the air relaxes. Not my chest—my ribs are still clamped by Naruto's proximity—but the *shape* of the scene loosens, like a tight knot finally allowed to unwind.
Canon correction completed.
Kakashi appears beside Zabuza with a kunai at his throat in one clean motion.
"Game over," Kakashi says, voice flat as stone.
Zabuza freezes.
The water clone in front of Sasuke hesitates—just a beat—and that beat is enough for Sasuke to slash through its torso.
The clone bursts into water and collapses into the mist.
Sasuke staggers, breathing hard, kunai still raised like he expects the water to bite back.
Naruto dispels his clones and stands there panting, eyes wide and wild. For a second, I see a flicker—something darker behind the blue—then it's gone like it never existed.
The tether still hums.
Warm.
Cold beneath.
Quietly pleased.
Kakashi keeps his kunai at Zabuza's throat, but his visible eye flicks briefly toward us—toward me.
It's the first time anyone has looked at me like I'm more than collateral.
He takes in my wrist in a single glance.
The blood. The torn flesh. The way my fingers won't curl.
And—too sharp to miss—the faint ring under my skin. The subtle seal ink Danzo placed to contain the tether.
Kakashi's eye narrows a fraction.
It's a tiny movement.
It terrifies me more than Zabuza's blade did.
Because Kakashi doesn't need proof to become suspicious.
He just needs a pattern.
Zabuza laughs softly, even with death pressed to his throat. "Copy Ninja… you're still worrying about your little brats."
Kakashi's voice doesn't change, but the edge in it deepens. "You chose them as leverage."
Zabuza's gaze slides toward Tazuna. "Not just them."
Tazuna flinches.
Kakashi's kunai presses a millimeter closer. "End it."
Zabuza smirks. "Try."
They move at the same time.
Kakashi's hands blur through signs, water and chakra folding into lethal shapes. Zabuza's body shifts, sword lifting, mist twisting around him like it's attached to his bones.
I can't follow it cleanly. My vision is swimming from blood loss and poison and adrenaline. The world keeps dimming at the edges, then snapping back too bright.
Sakura presses a bandage against my wrist, hands shaking. "Hold it—hold it—"
I want to tell her there's nothing to hold. Tendons don't care about pressure the way veins do.
My right fingers twitch uselessly.
I watch my own hand fail to obey and feel something inside me go cold.
This is it, I think. This is the last piece.
First the left arm.
Now the right hand.
The story didn't just punish me.
It's removing my ability to interfere at all.
Naruto's voice cracks. "Souta—!"
He takes a step toward me, instinct dragging him.
My ribs clamp hard.
The air becomes thick enough to choke on.
Blood floods my nose again in a hot wave, and I swallow it, gagging.
Naruto stops, startled, like he hit an invisible wall.
His eyes flick to my face—confused, frightened—and for a second I see him wanting to cross the distance anyway, wanting to do something, because he knows what it is to be left bleeding while everyone else stands back.
But the story doesn't let him focus on me.
It tugs him back toward its spine.
Kakashi and Zabuza clash again—water and steel and killing intent.
Sasuke shifts into guard position in front of Naruto and Sakura, jaw tight, eyes tracking the mist like he's trying to learn by force.
Naruto clenches his fists, torn between rage and fear and guilt.
And all of it—every emotion Naruto leaks into the air—feeds the tether in my wrist like a wire connected to his heartbeat.
I hear my own pulse in my ears.
I hear water.
Then something whistles through the fog.
A thin, sharp sound—like a needle cutting air.
It hits.
Not me.
Zabuza's body jerks.
For a heartbeat, everything stops.
Zabuza's massive frame stiffens, sword halting mid-swing, and then his legs fold as if the strings holding him up have been cut.
He collapses to one knee.
Kakashi freezes with a kunai half-raised, visible eye widening slightly.
A second whistle.
Another senbon.
Zabuza slumps fully, face going slack in a way that looks too final.
Silence crashes down.
Even the fog seems to pause.
Then a figure steps out of the mist like it was born there—slender, masked, wearing the striped uniform of a Hidden Mist hunter-nin.
He moves with smooth, quiet confidence, like this is cleanup.
"Thank you," the hunter-nin says politely, voice soft and oddly gentle. "I have been tracking Zabuza Momochi for some time."
My stomach twists.
Canon.
Haku.
But hearing the words out loud—seeing the mask in real air—makes my skin prickle with dread.
Kakashi's posture shifts subtly, suspicion and caution tightening his stance. "A hunter-nin."
The figure bows. "Yes."
He steps toward Zabuza's body.
And as he moves, the tether in my wrist gives one slow pulse—warm and heavy—then something colder slides beneath it, like deep water stirring.
Not Naruto's cold.
Different.
Sharp.
Interested.
My blood runs colder than the poison ever made it.
Because for the first time, the pressure around my ribs isn't only Naruto's gravity.
It's the story noticing *another* important piece on the board.
And I, bleeding and trembling in the dirt, realize too late what that means:
If fate has been using me as a shield for Naruto…
…then someone else can use me as bait for Naruto.
The hunter-nin kneels beside Zabuza and reaches for the senbon—methodical, practiced.
Kakashi's eye narrows further.
Naruto takes a half-step forward, drawn by curiosity and relief and the naive belief that "hunter-nin" means "problem solved."
My ribs tighten again, warning.
Sakura presses harder on my wrist, her hands slick with my blood. "Don't pass out—please—"
I try to focus on her voice.
On the smell of wet earth.
On anything.
But my vision keeps dragging toward the kneeling figure in the mist.
Because even through the mask, I can feel it:
The hunter-nin's attention isn't on Kakashi.
It isn't on Naruto.
It flicks—briefly, precisely—
to my wrist.
To the sealed ring under my skin.
To the tether.
Just for an instant.
Just long enough to confirm he sees something.
Then his masked face turns back to Zabuza, polite and calm again.
And my blood, already spilling, turns to ice at the thought I can't stop:
If Haku knows I'm connected to Naruto…
…what will he do with that knowledge?
The hunter-nin's hand closes around Zabuza's collar.
He begins to lift the body.
And the tether pulses—warm, heavy—
like Naruto is about to step closer.