The forest became a dark, green nightmare. Daiki, with Hana moaning at his back, stumbled through roots and undergrowth, his breath a ragged gasp of pain and exertion. Kenji ran beside him, his senses stretched like steel nets, listening above the pulse in his ears.
The buzzing was barely audible: the rustle of fabric against a branch, a footstep too light on dry leaves. The tracker. It was good, but Kenji's urgency was a sharper sensor.
We won't get far like this. Hana is bleeding out. Daiki will collapse. Logic, cold and brutal, laid out the only possible path.
"Daiki," Kenji gasped, clutching his good arm. "Listen. Lead her to the stream we saw earlier, follow the current downstream. Look for a cave, a hollow root, anything. Apply pressure to the wound. Don't stop."
Daiki's eyes, clouded with pain, opened in horror. "What about you? I can't leave you!"
"I'm staying. I'll distract him." Kenji's voice left no room for doubt. It was the order of a capo to a soldier, not the suggestion of a comrade. "It's the only way. Now, RUN!"
He pushed Daiki toward a rocky ravine. With a final, stifled cry, the boy shouldered his precious cargo and disappeared into the vegetation.
Kenji stopped, turned around. He took a deep breath, clearing his mind of everything but the here and now. He drew a kunai and threw it at a tree trunk to the left of Daiki's trail. The metallic clang echoed like a gong in the silence.
Instantly, a shadow emerged from the treetops. The Takigakure tracker landed in front of him, his tantō gleaming with a dim light. He was no longer smiling. His face was a mask of cold, professional efficiency.
"A sacrifice. Touching," the man said, his voice a raspy whisper. "But pointless. I'll kill you quickly and then go after them."
Kenji didn't reply. He ran, not toward the enemy, but deeper into the forest, away from Daiki's path. The ninja followed, a ghost at his heels. Kenji led him to an area of mossy rocks and dead trees, a small, open clearing, far from everything.
Here. No one would see him.
He stopped, turning to face his pursuer. The man from Takigakure stopped in turn, assessing him. "Is your career over, kid? A good place to die."
Kenji didn't speak. He just breathed, and deep inside, where the deepest secret resided, he flipped a switch.
A familiar, ravenous heat erupted behind his eyes. The world didn't slow down; it lit up. Every fiber of the enemy's muscle, every slightest change in his posture, the calculated trajectory of his next breath—everything was etched into his mind in vivid detail. His pupils, now a deep blood red, held the slow, lethal rotation of two tomoe.
The change in the Takigakure ninja was instantaneous. His disdain turned to utter surprise, and then to terrified acknowledgment. "Those eyes…! UCHIHA! But that's impossible!"
There was no more time for words. The man charged, his tantō seeking a fatal thrust to the heart, now driven by the panic of facing a member of that cursed clan.
To Kenji, the world was a flowchart. He saw the attack coming as clearly as if it were in slow motion. But seeing it and dodging it were two different things. His body, though trained, was no match for the speed of a seasoned chūnin.
He twisted, but the blade tore a deep gash in his side. The pain was sharp, white. He ricocheted, launching a flurry of shuriken that the Takigakure ninja deflected with his tantō, his movements now nervous, imprecise. The fear of the Sharingan was a weapon in itself.
"Just a kid! A damned lucky brat!" the man yelled, trying to convince himself. He sealed it with one hand. "Water Release: Water Dragon Technique!" A small but swift water dragon burst from his mouth straight toward Kenji.
With his Sharingan, Kenji saw the weak points in the molding, the areas where the chakra was thinnest. Instead of dodging, he charged through the dragon's side, the water hitting him like a sledgehammer but without the force of a frontal impact. He emerged soaked and panting on the other side, just within range of the tantō.
It was a desperate slaughter. Kenji didn't have ninja experience. He had Yakuza experience: street fights, knives in alleyways, the instinct to survive at any cost. He used the environment: throwing dirt in the man's eyes, shoving him against sharp rocks, using the pain of his own wound to keep the adrenaline pumping.
The ninja from Takigakure was better, more technical, stronger. He opened cuts on Kenji's arms, a deep stab wound in his thigh. But fear of the Sharingan made him hesitate. Every time his eyes met that swirling red, he doubted.
The breaking point came when the man, frustrated, launched a direct and powerful attack, a full spin with the tantō meant to decapitate him. Kenji, his Sharingan burning, saw the opening. It wasn't an elegant opening. It was suicidal.
Instead of retreating, he lunged forward, into the arc of the spin. The tantō cut a deep groove into his shoulder, scraping the bone. But the proximity was such that the man's weapon was caught, useless for a second.
The second Kenji needed.
His hand, the one not holding a kunai, closed. Not around a weapon, but with fingers as rigid as a flesh-and-bone dagger. And with all the hatred, fear, and determination of two lifetimes of fighting, he drove it straight into the exposed throat of the Takigakure ninja.
CRACK!
It was a wet, horrible sound. The Takigakure man gurgled, his eyes widening in pure disbelief. He dropped the tantō. His hands clutched Kenji's arm, but his strength was leaving him quickly. He collapsed to his knees, then onto his side, choking on his own blood.
Kenji collapsed beside him, pulling his trembling, blood-stained hand away. The heat wave from the Sharingan subsided, leaving him with a sudden, abysmal fatigue that exacerbated each of his wounds. The pain came then, in a nauseating tide. His shoulder, his side, his thigh, his arms… everything burned.
He gasped, coughing up blood and sweat, watching the man die. There was no victory. Only an icy void and the stark reality of the act. He had killed before, in another life. But this was different. This was personal. This was for pure survival.
He crawled a few meters away from the corpse and slumped against a tree. The silence of the forest, once menacing, was now just emptiness. His mind, clouded by grief, began to connect the dots.
Takigakure… attacking a border village. Not because of a beast. For a "clean-up." A client. His memory, the memory of an anime fan, regurgitated a name: Kakuzu. The immortal miser, former member of Takigakure, who betrayed his village over a failed job. Could this be related? Were they raising funds, testing mercenaries, in an altered timeline?
The "canon" was being torn apart. First, an Akatsuki team with an unknown boy. Now, Takigakure was acting as assassins in the Land of Fire. Their own existence was a grain of sand, but the butterfly effect… their wings were already generating storms.
A weak cough pulled him from his thoughts. It wasn't his own. From the bushes, Daiki emerged, pale as a ghost, but with wild eyes. He had seen. He had seen the end.
"Kaito… your eyes…" Daiki murmured, his voice a thread.
Kenji looked at him, too exhausted to lie, to hide. "Yes," was all he said. A hoarse whisper.
Daiki swallowed, looking at the corpse, then at his mangled and bleeding comrade. Something solidified in his gaze.
Kenji nodded weakly. The first pillar of his makeshift group had just seen the true monster beneath the facade. And he hadn't run away. He'd only come to help him.
The road back would be long, painful, and stained with blood. But for the first time, Kenji wasn't completely alone in the darkness. He had a witness. And a comrade who, despite everything, remained by his side. The price for that loyalty, he'd just realized, would always be paid in blood.