The apprentice's puppet collapsed into a pile of disconnected limbs.
"Let's keep trying everyone." Karura clapped her hands twice, loud enough to carry across the hall.
The young man wiped sweat from his forehead and reached for his chakra threads again. He was eighteen, twice Karura's age, with the calloused hands of someone who'd grown up doing manual work and the frustrated expression of someone who couldn't do something a nine-year-old could with one finger! His name was Ryu. He'd joined the Puppet Brigade two months ago and could barely be considered a puppeteer.
Karura had been assigned to fix that for him and others.
The training hall inside the Brigade headquarters was wide and low-ceilinged, carved from the canyon rock, lined with practice puppets in various states of assembly. Dozens of apprentices worked in pairs across the floor, each one doing the different exercises. Some of them were sparring against one another. Some controlled their puppets into striking hanging sandbags. A small few were still trying to sync their movements with their puppets, Karura insisted on that one. A puppeteer who stood still while the puppet fought was a puppeteer waiting to die.
As for Ryu… His chakra threads reconnected to the puppet. He drew it upright, one limb at a time, his jaw clenched with the effort. Arm. Other arm. Leg. The fourth limb wavered. He bit down harder. The second leg lifted, planted, held.
All four. Stable.
"Good," Karura said. "Hold it. Now walk it forward."
He walked it forward. Three steps. The puppet's gait was stiff and ugly but it didn't fall apart. She gave him a smile as he maintained utter focus.
They didn't know why it worked. They only knew it did. Things that should have taken months were taking weeks, and things that should have taken weeks were taking days. Ryu had failed at four limbs longer than anyone in his intake, and now he was walking a puppet across the floor. He'd decided Karura was just a freakishly good teacher.
He wasn't entirely wrong. She was patient, and she could break puppetry down for even the most lacking student. But every hour under her counted like ten, and every repetition stuck like a dozen. She couldn't grow their chakra or their bodies for them. That was theirs to build.
The veteran puppet masters who came to watch her sessions left more confused than they arrived. All she did was teach. She was kinder about it than most instructors, and more willing to explain the basics nobody else bothered with, but that was all they could see. She told the apprentices the potential had always been inside them. They didn't believe her.
"That's enough for today," Karura said, raising her voice to the room. "Leave the training puppets. Same time tomorrow. Ryu-san, you're on four limbs now. Tomorrow you start learning how to move with your puppet."
[Tenfold has activated!]
[You have gained tenfold teaching results!]
"Move?" Ryu looked at her like she'd suggested he grow wings. "I just started learning how to make the dang thing walk!"
"You'll know how to move by the end of the week." She smiled.
"Why are you more confident in me than I am in m-"
A horn sounded.
It came from the center of the village, a long low blast that rolled down through the canyon and into the stone corridors of the Brigade headquarters. Then a second blast. A third. Karura had heard the drill version of that horn a dozen times. Two blasts for an incoming sandstorm. But this was a pattern she'd only ever heard described in the academy, never heard for real.
Three long blasts, repeating.
Highest alert. Village under threat.
The apprentices froze. Everyone looked toward Karura.
"What is that?" Someone asked.
The ground answered him.
It started as a tremor, a deep shudder that ran up through the stone floor and into the soles of everyone standing on it. Then it grew. The practice puppets rattled. Dust sifted down from the ceiling. A sound rolled through the canyon from somewhere to the north, a roar that bypassed the ears and went straight into the base of the spine.
Karura was already moving toward the exit.
"Everyone out!" She shouted. "Follow me!"
She came out of the headquarters into chaos.
Shinobi sprinting across rooftops toward the village center. Civilians spilling out of homes and shops, looking north, pointing, screaming. The afternoon sky over Sunagakure had gone the wrong color, and something impossible was standing up in it.
Karura's breath caught.
It was enormous. A body of pale sand the size of a small mountain, taking shape against the sky as it rose, two-legged and broad, with a thick tail uncoiling behind it and a head that turned slowly to survey the village it had erupted in the middle of. Dark markings crawled across its sandy hide like cracks in dried clay, pulsing faintly. Its eyes were black with yellow centers, and even from here, even across the entire village, Karura could feel the weight of the chakra rolling off it.
She'd never seen it before. But every shinobi in Suna grew up on stories about the thing the village kept locked away, the sand spirit, the monster sealed in a tea kettle, the beast that would end them all if it ever got loose. The horn. The alert. The thing standing in the heart of their village made of living sand.
The One-Tail.
It was real. It was here. And it was laughing.
Karura's mind moved faster than her fear.
The apprentices had followed her out and were standing frozen on the steps behind her, staring north with the same paralysis that gripped half the civilians in the street. That paralysis would get people killed. She turned on them.
"Listen to me!" Her voice cut through the noise. The apprentices flinched and focused. "You are part of the Puppet Brigade. Don't freeze up! Every one of you, take a street. Get the civilians moving toward the shelters, away from that thing. Don't fight it. Don't go near it. Move people and keep moving them. Go!"
They went. Weeks of taking orders from a child had drilled the obedience into them, and now that obedience was the only thing keeping their feet moving. They scattered into the streets, grabbing civilians, pointing south, shouting where to run to.
Karura ran for the nearest rooftop.
She needed height. She made her way to a flat roof of a three-story dye-works, tucked behind a row of drying racks hung with bolts of cloth that screened her from view on three sides. She dropped into a crouch behind them.
Her eyes changed.
The Byakugan flared, the veins around her eyes standing out, the world expanding into the full sphere of sight. The village bloomed in her vision in every direction.
She saw all of it at once. The civilians flooding south, thousands of chakra signatures moving in a panicked tide. The shinobi converging north toward the beast. The collapsed sections of the northern part of the village where the One-Tail had erupted, buildings flattened, people buried under them, faint signatures pulsing weak beneath the rubble. The injured in the streets, dragging themselves or being dragged. The trapped. The dying.
She could see other shinobi already at work throughout the village. Chunin leading teams in the streets closer to the north, pulling survivors from the edges of the destruction by hand, hauling clay and stone off of bodies with earth jutsu or bare fingers. Genin sprinting between shelters and collapse sites, carrying the wounded on stretchers or on their backs. A pair of puppeteers had their own puppets digging through rubble three blocks north of her, slower than Karura's Millions but working. The village was responding. But the damage was vast, and there weren't enough hands.
And above it all, rising into the haze, a figure on a cloud of black iron.
The Third Kazekage.
He hung in the air a hundred meters up, a small dark shape atop a churning mass of iron sand that he'd lifted from somewhere, his Magnet Style giving the metal grains a life of their own. The iron sand spread out beneath and around him in a vast dark sheet, and as Karura watched, it gathered and compressed and lanced forward at the One-Tail in a spear of black metal the size of a building.
The spear slammed straight into the beast's belly and the beast was sent flying outside of the village. The beast cursed the Kazekage as it flew through the air before opening its jagged mouth, and the air in front of it began to compress, sand and wind swirling together into something dense and lethal.
Below the Kazekage, ANBU and jonin poured out across the sand. Dozens of them, the village's heaviest hitters, pouring through the northern gate and out across the open sand, launching jutsu at the beast. Fireballs burst against the beast's body. Water jutsu carved temporary trenches in its sandy hide that filled themselves back in within seconds. They couldn't hurt it. Karura understood that as she watched. Nothing they threw could hurt a thing made of sand.
She didn't have time to watch the whole battle. People were dying under rubble made by its emergence while she was crouched here. Ten scrolls' worth of smoke bloomed from where she was.
Ten Millions landed in front of her.
They came down stocky and broad, the carved smiley faces incongruous against the chaos, four arms each spreading as they stared into the rubble-choked streets. Karura's Byakugan fed her every detail of everyone in trouble simultaneously, and as she connected her chakra string to them, they all moved out at once.
Their forearm housings cracked open.
Hundreds of segmented arms poured out of each Million, a flood of linked wooden limbs spreading across the streets and into the rubble, each one tipped with a normal-looking hand that could grip and lift and dig. They moved like a tide of reaching fingers, flowing into the gaps in collapsed buildings, under chunks of fallen clay and stone, through the dust.
Karura saw the buried through the Byakugan. A woman pinned under a section of collapsed wall, conscious, her leg crushed. A child in the pocket of space beneath a caved-in clay staircase, screaming. An old man unconscious beneath a toppled pillar, his chakra signature dimming. She directed the arms to each of them, the wooden hands closing gently around limbs and torsos, lifting stone, clearing rubble, drawing bodies out of the wreckage and passing them hand to hand down the line toward the open street where other arms waited to carry them south.
She worked the whole district like a field commander. Ten Millions. Thousands of arms. Hundreds of rescues happening at once, each one guided by an eye that could see through stone. All of the citizens of Sunagakure could see above their village were arm segments flying in the sky, twisting, bending, and shooting down toward people in need of help.
The woman with the crushed leg came free. The arms cradled her and bore her south. The child was lifted from beneath the staircase, sobbing, and handed down the line. The old man, the one whose signature was fading, the arms reached him and pulled him into open air and Karura sent two more arms to press against the wound on his head, slowing the bleeding.
She was everywhere within the village. For a few minutes she stopped being a girl on a rooftop and became thousands of wooden hands pulling her people out of the danger.
But the beast was still standing. And one Karura, even spread across ten puppets, couldn't cover the entire village.
The Byakugan showed her everything she wasn't happy to see. The western part of the village, where a row of apartment buildings had buckled when the shockwave rolled through, and small signatures were dimming beneath the stone. The northern part of the village, closest to the emergence, where the damage was worst. The central market district, where a collapsed kiln had set a spice warehouse ablaze and dozens of people were trapped behind the fire with nowhere to go. Streets south of the beast where buildings had come down from stray wind bullets and people lay buried with no one digging.
She could see the other shinobi doing what they could. A chunin team had reached the edge of the northern damage and was pulling people out one at a time, passing them back to genin runners who carried them south. But they were too slow. They didn't have the arms, the reach, the eyes. People were dying in places they couldn't get to fast enough.
People were dying in places she couldn't reach from here either.
But she could reach them. She had the chakra. She had more than enough.
Karura made the cross with her fingers.
"Shadow Clone Jutsu."
Smoke swallowed the rooftop. It poured over the edges of the building and down the walls like fog spilling off a cliff, so thick and sudden that anyone looking up from the street would have taken it for the dust of another wind bullet. Within the smoke, the rooftop was full.
Dozens of Karuras appeared in the smoke, packed shoulder to shoulder, identical down to the yellow scarves and the active Byakugan. Dozens of copies, each with their own chakra, their own scrolls, their own minds. She'd learned the technique from Master Chiyo as a birthday gift. It was a dangerous jutsu for those with average or low chakra reserves, the cost prohibitive, a clone splitting your reserves in half the moment it formed. For Karura, with the reserves she carried, the division wasn't much for her. She'd gone from one to dozens and she was still good on chakra.
This was enough for what the village needed right now despite being able to make more. Every one of them already knew the plan because they were her and they'd seen the same dying signatures through the same Byakugan.
"Transformation Jutsu, please." Karura requested of herself.
Every clone formed three seals at once.
The rooftop changed. Where dozens of identical nine-year-old girls had crouched a moment ago, dozens of strangers now stood. Men and women of different ages, different builds, different faces. A heavyset man in shinobi gear. A thin woman with grey hair tied back. A teenage boy with a scar on his chin. A tall woman in a sand-veil. A broad-shouldered chunin with sunburned arms. Others, all different, only one other stayed as Karura.
Nobody would be able to tie this to her. They'd see shinobi who showed up in the worst of it and started pulling people out of the rubble, and in the chaos of a monster attack nobody was going to stop and ask questions. And none of them would use more than two puppets. That was the other half of the disguise. After Master Chiyo, Karura was the only puppeteer in Sunagakure who could control more than three at once. If reports came back of a dozen strangers each running ten puppets, anyone could trace it to her before the dust settled. But two? Any experienced puppeteer could handle two. Nothing worth a second look.
They went over the edges of the rooftop in every direction, scattering across Sunagakure like seeds thrown into the wind.
Most of them headed for the damaged districts. Every collapsed building the Byakugan had shown her with dimming signatures beneath it. Each clone carried copies of every scroll Karura owned. Each clone could summon its own Millions, its own Protectors, its own Moons. The shadow clone jutsu copied everything.
One clone was identical to Karura. It didn't go to the rubble. She went outside the village toward the beast, toward the area where the village's elites were fighting the One-Tail.
In the west, a heavyset man in shinobi gear landed on a rooftop and summoned two puppets into the rubble below. Their forearms cracked open and wooden limbs flooded the collapsed buildings, burrowing through stone and dust and shattered furniture. A family of five came out of a pancaked second floor, the grandmother first, then a man clutching a broken collarbone, then three children passed hand to hand down a chain of wooden arms that set them gently in the clear street and pointed them south. The man said nothing as he moved his puppets to the next people in need. Down the same street, a woman in a dusty flak jacket was already working the other side with two more of the smiling puppets, pulling a couple from beneath a storefront awning that had buried them. Further south, another stranger. Another pair of puppets. The west was crawling with them. Genin and chunin were already in the streets here too, directing civilians toward the shelters and dragging the lightly wounded to safety on their own, but the strangers with the smiling puppets were clearing the deep collapses that no one else could reach.
In the northern part of the village, a thin woman with grey hair summoned a pair of the same smiling puppets into the cratered streets while the ground shook beneath her. The damage here was the worst in the village. Buildings hadn't just collapsed, they'd been swallowed, sucked down into the ruptured earth when the One-Tail tore itself free. Some of the signatures she found were already gone by the time the arms reached them. A woman beneath a collapsed bakery whose chakra faded to nothing between one breath and the next. A pair of signatures so deep under the rubble that the arms couldn't dig fast enough. But others lived. A boy pulled from a drainage channel that had become his only shelter when the street caved in. An infant, somehow unharmed, cradled in a pocket of air beneath a toppled wardrobe, wailing into the dust. The arms carried them south, away from the worst. Three blocks over, a lanky man with one arm was doing the same thing with his own pair of puppets, and beyond him another stranger, and another. A squad of chunin worked the same district on foot, using earth jutsu to shift sections of collapsed wall that even the wooden arms couldn't lift, and a genin runner took the survivors they uncovered and sprinted them toward the southern shelters. The northern quarter had more of them than anywhere, because it needed them the most.
In the central market district, a teenage boy with a scar on his chin stood on a warehouse roof and sent his two puppets' arms punching through the walls behind the fire. The arms made escape routes where there were none, pulling clay bricks and stone out of the far side of the blaze to create gaps that the people trapped in the plaza beyond could squeeze through. Other arms reached through smoke and heat to pull the wounded clear, carrying a shopkeeper bodily over a wall of burning market stalls and setting him down in the open air on the other side, coughing and alive.
In the streets south of the beast, more strangers worked. A broad-shouldered chunin pulling a screaming woman from beneath a wall. A young girl with braided hair carrying a bleeding man on a wooden arm toward the shelters. Others. Dozens of others. Shinobi with puppets appearing in every ruined street, alongside the genin and chunin already working the damage.
Karura's clone reached the open ground beyond the northern wall. She found a position three hundred meters from the One-Tail, behind a rocky shelf jutting out of the sand where the canyon narrowed. Her Byakugan was already mapping the battlefield. She utilized the transformation jutsu and hid her eyes behind her original ones.
It was worse up close.
Shinobi were dying.
The sand spirit's tail swept through a cluster of jonin and three of them went with it, broken and flung across the sand like toys. A jonin halfway through a hand sign never saw the wind bullet that took him at the hips. His legs stayed planted in the sand. The rest of him went end over end for twenty meters and came apart when it landed, an arm still locked in the ram seal.
Its wind bullets, compressed spheres of sand and air, punched through defensive ninjutsu and bodies alike, and every shinobi who didn't dodge one in time simply stopped existing in a spray of red. The beast didn't need to aim. It simply destroyed and killed with relish.
The clone hadn't come to fight it. Karura wasn't sure if she could stand against it even if she went all out. She didn't have a puppet meant for giant enemies... But that wasn't what she was here to find out. The only thing she cared about was preventing as many people from coming to harm as possible.
Ten scrolls. Smoke. The puppets came down across the sand between the clone and the beast, ten Protectors in a staggered line. Blank-faced and broad, each one the size of a large man, their tower shields raised and braced. Ironwood bodies reinforced with metal plating, built to take hits that would kill the people behind them. Ten walls.
The clone went to work.
A wind bullet screamed toward a cluster of four jonin who were too focused on launching earth jutsu at the beast's legs to see it coming. The clone saw it through the Byakugan a full second before it would have hit. A Protector launched forward and slammed down between the jonin and the incoming blast, tower shield angled into the wind. The compressed sphere struck the shield and split, the force sheeting off to both sides in a spray of sand and shattered air that launched waves of sand on either side but left the jonin standing. The Protector's shields cracked down the center. The Protector held its ground. The four jonin spun around, saw the blank-faced puppet standing between them and where they would have died, and didn't have time to process it before the next attack came.
A second Protector hurled itself in front of a medic who'd frozen at the sight of the beast turning toward her. Both shields came up. The hand-shaped tail swung over its shoulder, fingers spreading, and a thin blue sheet of chakra snapped open above the shields to cover the medic's head. The One-Tail's tail swung where she stood and the Protector took the blow meant for her, its heavy frame skidding back ten meters across the sand, shields dented and splintering but the body still upright, the medic alive behind it with dust in her hair and her heart in her throat.
Below and ahead, two figures Karura recognized fought near the front.
Master Chiyo and Ebizo-sensei.
Chiyo stood on a rise of packed earth with her hands raised, ten chakra threads splayed from her fingers, and ten puppets danced around the beast's legs. None of Chiyo's puppets struck the beast. Each one darted in, pressed a glowing tag into the sand, and darted out again, and the tags spread into a vast circle that the clone slowly understood was the framework of a sealing jutsu. Chiyo was building the cage. The Kazekage was distracting the beast. And when the technique was ready, they would put the thing back in whatever box it had escaped from.
Ebizo fought beside his sister, his ninjutsu covering her, defending her from any attacks by the One-Tail. He moved like the elite jonin he was.
A wind bullet arced toward Chiyo's blind side as she focused on her sealing work, her attention narrowed to the array, Ebizo a beat too far to intercept.
The nearest Protector stood forty meters away, far too heavy to cover that ground in time. The clone didn't try. The puppet's right arm swung back and hurled its tower shield sidearm, the cable paying out behind it in a whining blur. The shield crossed the gap edge-first, turned flat in the last few meters, and slammed into the sand between Chiyo and the wind bullet.
The blast hit it dead center. The ironwood burst apart, iron banding peeling off in curled strips, and the force threw splinters wide in a spray that hit nothing living. The cable snapped taut and reeled back a mangled iron rim, all that was left. Chiyo didn't even look up. She kept working. She kept working.
But Ebizo's head turned, just for an instant, following the cable back to the Protector it came from. His eyes found the others arrayed across the sand behind it, and he saw Karura.
He didn't have time to think about it. He turned back to covering his sister. But the clone saw him nod in her direction.
The sealing jutsu lit up as tag after tag was placed, the circle got brighter around the One-Tail while the Kazekage's iron sand pinned it in place, vast black tendrils wrapping the beast's limbs and dragging against its every movement, slowing it, holding it, keeping it in the one spot long enough for the jutsu to finish.
Karura lost three more Protectors keeping the others alive while they did it. A tail strike crushed one flat. A wind bullet punched through another's shield and through the puppet behind it. The sand beneath its feet crawled up it and pulverized it. But the remaining seven held their positions, battered and cracked, shields splintered, still standing between the beast and the people fighting it. Still doing their job.
...
Back in the village, the original Karura pulled the last of the buried from the rubble.
The district was clear. Every signature she could find beneath the collapsed buildings had been drawn out and carried south. The Millions had emptied a hundred pockets of rubble and not one person in her district had died in the wreckage who could have been saved. Her shoulders came down for the first time since the horn.
But people still died in other parts of the village. People she couldn't save. Her work wasn't done yet. The rescued were still hurt. And the medical corps, what was available, was overwhelmed.
She sealed all the Millions and came down off the rooftop into the area where the evacuees had gathered.
The square had become an infirmary. Hundreds of civilians packed into the open square outside the southern bunkers, and among them the injured, laid out in rows on whatever cloth could be found. A handful of medical-nin moved between them, too few for the numbers, their hands glowing green as they worked from one critical case to the next and didn't have time for the rest. Genin ran back and forth between the square and the collapse sites, carrying fresh casualties on stretchers or guiding the walking wounded in by the arm.
Karura knelt beside the first untreated person she reached.
Her hands glowed green.
The Mystical Palm Jutsu flowed from her palms into a man with a crushed forearm, the bones grinding back toward alignment, the swelling receding, the worst of the damage knitting under her chakra. Chiyo had trained her well enough to handle injuries like these. She moved to the next. A woman with a scalp wound bleeding badly, easy, closed in seconds. The next. A child with a broken leg. The next.
One of the medical-nin noticed her, a young woman with exhaustion carved into her face. She opened her mouth to ask what this little girl thought she was doing, then saw the scarf, and closed it.
Karura worked to the best of her ability alongside the other medical-nin. Moving down the rows, and the rows of the dying grew shorter. Again and again she passed patients being fed cactus fruit, or having the juice squeezed between their unconscious lips.
And eventually the situation changed.
She glanced north over her scarf.
The sand above the village was thinning. The roar had stopped. And through the Byakugan she could see a structure of pale sand was rising and compressing, layer folding over layer, a vast pyramid taking shape around the beast as Chiyo's seal finally closed and the Kazekage's iron sand forced the thing down into it. Even without the Byakugan, the top of the pyramid rose high enough above the walls to be visible against the sky.
The cage finished. The weight that had pressed against the whole village lifted all at once, like a held breath finally released.
It was over.
The beast was contained. Resealed. Forced back into Toma's seal.
So... That monster was inside Toma... He's the container of the One-Tail for the village...
Across the village, dozens of strangers set down the last of their survivors and slipped into alleys and doorways before anyone could think to ask their names. Then memories hit her like a wave breaking over a wall.
Dozens of clones dispelling across the village, their work done, their puppets sealed. All at once. All of them pouring back into her mind in a flood of overlapping images and sounds and sensations that blurred together and separated and blurred again.
Karura swayed where she knelt. Her vision whited out for a moment, then came back, everything too bright and too loud and layered with the ghosts of a dozen places she'd been at the same time. She pressed her green-glowing hands back against the wound in front of her and kept working. The disorientation faded. The memories settled into her.
People still needed her help, she had to focus.
She stayed in the square until the sun went down, hands glowing green, moving from one body to the next, until the medical corps arrived in full force and someone gently told her she'd done enough, that she should rest, that she was a child and she should leave the rest to the adults.
She nodded and didn't argue and didn't rest. She found another row.
The village counted its dead that night.
It could have been so much worse. The shinobi said so to each other in the streets, in the shelters, in the wrecked northern quarter where the cleanup had already begun. A full rampage of the One-Tail in the heart of the village should have killed tens of thousands. The casualty count, when it came, was a fraction of what was expected.
Everybody sang praises of the Puppet Brigade. The Puppet Master Corps. There was no one in the village who hadn't seen puppets flying around saving and helping people in need. Especially the smiling four-armed puppet. The name Million was known throughout the entire village now instead of just the Puppet Brigade.
The Kazekage received reports.
He stood on top of his office that night, looking out at the pale pyramid of compressed sand beyond the village that would take days to disperse and the aftermath of his village. He listened to the reports given by his ANBU.
Reports from other parts of the village mentioned puppet masters pulling survivors from the deepest collapses. None of them could be found after the dust settled. Dozens of puppeteers nobody could name, and every one of them had melted back into the crowd.
Then there were the reports on Karura. She too aided during the breakout of the One-Tail. Her ten puppets saving and helping numerous lives. Healing the wounded until past sundown, until the medical corps arrived in full and someone made her stop.
He'd given up on not being surprised by her. It clearly wasn't going to happen anytime soon. If she was surprising him this much as a child, he believed he was going to have a heart attack by the time she became a young adult.
Ryuusa nearly chuckled and swallowed it. He'd handed her the apprentices as a test, after the reports about the baker's boy and Chiyo's grandson. Teaching would show him whether her talent reached past her own threads. Today, apprentices she'd had for a matter of weeks had cleared the eastern streets before his own chunin got there. Now wasn't the time to be seen laughing.
Konoha was getting more and more unrestrained in their actions and the shinobi world at large was keeping track of their actions. His village had nearly been gutted by its own caged monster, and the thing that had blunted the disaster more than any single jonin, more than anything but his own Iron Sand and Chiyo's fūinjutsu mastery, had been a prodigious child with a bleeding heart.
It turned out that little hero was hiding more than he initially believed even now. He found he didn't mind that as much anymore. This weapon was one that he was grateful to have in his village. A completely loyal weapon with identifiable weaknesses able to be sent and used as he pleases. What more could a Kazekage ask for in a shinobi?
Karura walked home in the dark.
Her hands ached. Her chakra was low for the first time since her reserves were increased. The dozens of clones and the hours of healing had pushed her further than she'd ever been pushed. The streets she passed through were quiet and broken, lamplight spilling from doorways, families counting heads with happy tears in their eyes.
[Congratulations on being a key figure in preventing the deaths of thousands in your village! You are rewarded with Affinity for Fūinjutsu!]
Karura blinked.
She stopped in the middle of the street and read the words again. Then a third time. Affinity for Fūinjutsu. She waited for it, the flood. The way Black Lightning had crashed into her mind like a wave, filling her head with knowledge and experience she hadn't earned. The way her Byakugan had burned itself into her body.
Nothing happened.
She flexed her fingers. Rolled her chakra through her network. Pushed a thread of it out from her fingertip and let it dissolve. She felt the same. Tired, sore, and the same.
An affinity was definitely different from just being granted something. Maybe next time she worked on seals it would take less trial and error. Million, Warden, and Bang all had some fūinjutsu work in their creation.
She dismissed the notification and kept walking.
…
She smelled the bread before she turned the corner.
Her father had kept the bakery open. Of course he had. In a village that had nearly burned, her father had decided the thing people needed was something warm to eat, and he'd baked through the whole crisis and was giving the loaves away to anyone who passed.
Yashamaru came off the bakery step at a dead run when he saw her. He hit her around the waist hard enough to stagger her.
"NEE-CHAN!" His voice cracked. He'd been crying. He was trying not to now. "You're okay. Mama said you were helping. I saw the, the thing, it was so big, and I wanted to go find you but Papa wouldn't let me and I..."
"I'm okay, Yasha." She put her hand on his hair. It was shaking, she realized. Her hand. Just slightly. "I'm okay. I helped. That's all. It's over now."
Her mother was there a moment later, pulling them both in, smelling of flour and fear and relief, doing the inspection with frantic hands, finding no wounds, finding only her daughter, tired and pale.
"You're freezing," her mother said. "Inside. Now. You're eating and then you're sleeping and I don't want to hear one word about it."
"Yes, Mama." Some sleep actually sounded pretty nice right now.
Her father pressed a warm loaf into her hands without a word, his broad face tight with everything he wasn't saying, and the look in his eyes told her he'd spent the whole afternoon imagining the worst and the bread was the only way he had to say he was glad he'd been wrong.
She ate the bread on the walk inside. It was the best thing she'd ever tasted.
That night, lying in her bed with her brother asleep next to her because he'd refused to sleep in his own room, Karura stared at the ceiling and thought.
She'd saved thousands of people today.
And after receiving her clones' memories, it still hadn't felt like enough...
Yashamaru shifted in his sleep and mumbled her name.
Karura listened to her brother breathe, and rubbed his head as she drifted off to sleep herself.