Another Boring Uchiha Power Fantasy.

[Ding!]

[Congratulations to the host for activating the Weekly Sign-in System.]

[Unused Weekly Sign-in Attempt noticed!]

[Signing in!]

[Obtained Shark Skin!]

Name: Mikoto Uchiha

Age: 13

Rank: Genin

Affinity: Lightning Affinity, Fire Affinity, Yin Affinity, Water Affinity

Unique: Strong Chakra, Sharingan (Dormant), Advanced Growth Rate

Skills: Fire Style Mastery, Water Style Mastery, Skilled Shurikenjutsu, Basic Taijutsu, Basic Genjutsu, Skilled Ninjutsu (Body Flicker, Clone Jutsu, Substitution Jutsu, Transformation Jutsu), Advanced Chakra Control, Uchiha Style: Kenjutsu, Stealth, Survival Knowledge, Cooking 

Equipment: Kunai, Shuriken, Smoke Bomb, Explosive Tags, Poison Gas Bomb, Flash Bomb, Gas/Sleep Bomb, Food Pills, Wire Strings, Shark Skin

[Ding!]

[New Famous Location Detected: Land of Rain]

[Location Sign-in Available]

[Signing in…]

[Obtained: Water Style Mastery]

The village had been small enough that no one outside the valley had ever bothered to learn its name.

It sat in a thin valley between two ridges, a cluster of stilted houses crouched over a slow brown river. Rain had been falling on it for nine days straight. The roofs leaked. The floorboards bowed. Every cup left on a table for more than an hour collected a finger of water. The locals had run when the Konoha advance came through, and they had not come back, and the squad had taken the longhouse at the centre of the settlement because it was the driest building left.

Mikoto stirred the pot with a length of carved wood she had whittled herself two days ago. The fire under it was small and stubborn, fed on damp kindling, and the smoke kept curling back into her eyes no matter where she sat. Rice, salted fish, whatever roots she had been able to dig out of the abandoned garden behind the longhouse. It was not a meal her mother would have approved of but it was hot and it was filling and it was going to keep nine people moving for another day, and that was what mattered.

”Smells better than it has any right to,” Kemuri said, sliding down to sit cross-legged next to the fire. His ninken, a half-grown brindle pup named Hoshi, plopped down across his lap and immediately tried to chew on his sandal strap. ”You sure you’re not sneaking spices in when no one’s looking?”

”I’m sure,” Mikoto said. She tasted the broth, considered, added a pinch of something dried from a pouch on her belt. ”And if I am, I’m not telling you.”

Kemuri grinned. Half his face was streaked with dirt and his hair had not been washed in a week and he still managed to look amused by everything. ”She admits it.”

”No I didn’t.”

”Hoshi heard it. Hoshi’s my witness.”

Hoshi rolled onto her back and yawned, all pink tongue and milk teeth, and Mikoto could not help the small smile that touched her mouth before she pushed it back down. She had been raised not to grow attached to dogs that belonged to other people. Her mother had been firm about that. Inuzuka dogs were partners, not pets. She kept her eyes on the pot.

Across the longhouse, two of the others were playing a dice game on an upturned crate. A third was sharpening kunai he had already sharpened twice that morning. Tatsuma Fūma was patching a tear in the lining of his vest taught by his grandmother, his giant four-bladed shuriken propped against the wall behind him. Hisana Hyūga sat in the corner with her knees drawn up, eyes closed. Occasionally opening them and utilizing her Byakugan to check for threats.

It was, all in all, the most peaceful afternoon Mikoto had seen in weeks. She knew she should not be enjoying it. She enjoyed it anyway.

The door at the far end of the longhouse banged open.

”Up,” Inoharu Yamanaka said. He shook rain out of his hair, scowled at the dice players, scowled harder at the kunai sharpener. ”On your feet. All of you.”

The dice players groaned. One of them did not even look up.

”I said up.”

”We’re holding a position, Inoharu-san,” one of the dice players said. ”It’s been held. It’s still held. We can hear if anything moves on the river from in here.”

”You can hear what you happen to be listening for.” Inoharu’s mouth was a tight line. He had a narrow face and a permanent crease between his brows that made him look older than he was. He was twenty-four. He looked thirty-five. ”Asahi is on the north ridge alone because the rest of you decided dice were more interesting than rotation. Get up. Walk the perimeter. Trade off.”

The second chunin, Asahi Sarutobi, walked in behind him a moment later, shaking off his own coat. He was the softer of the two, slower to anger. He looked at the pot Mikoto was stirring and his face softened at the smell of food.

”Inoharu,” he said. ”Let them eat first.”

”They eat after they walk the perimeter.”

”They walk the perimeter better with energy in them.”

”They walk the perimeter at all if I tell them to.”

Asahi sighed. He looked at Mikoto. Mikoto looked at the pot. The dice players grumbled themselves to their feet and started pulling on their sandals. Kemuri scooped Hoshi up under one arm and stood, Hoshi grumbling in confusion at the sudden change of altitude.

”Uchiha-san,” Inoharu said. ”You eat with the rest. Then I want you on the east approach. Through the cypress.”

”Hai,” Mikoto said. She tipped her head with a bow. ”I’ll go now if you want.”

”I want you to eat first,” Asahi said firmly, before Inoharu could answer. ”You cooked. You eat.”

Inoharu’s teeth grinded but he did not argue. Mikoto looked between them, picked up the wooden ladle, and began filling bowls. She passed Inoharu his first. He took it without thanks and turned to watch the rain through the doorway. Asahi accepted his with a small nod and a tired smile.

The others gathered around. Kemuri set Hoshi down and the pup immediately went to work licking up a stray grain of rice that had escaped onto the floorboards.

”To holding a position,” one of the dice players said, raising his bowl.

”To rice that isn’t a ration bar,” said another.

”To Uchiha-chan’s cooking, which is the best thing that has ever happened to this assignment,” Kemuri said, with the kind of grin that demanded to be returned, and Mikoto looked down into her own bowl and did not return it, but she did not stop the corner of her mouth from moving either.

Inoharu did not toast. He was already eating quickly. He finished half the bowl in under a minute and set it down.

”Hyūga,” he said. ”Anything?”

Hisana opened her eyes. The veins around them faded slowly. ”Nothing on the river. Nothing on either ridge inside my range. Two deer in the cypress. A heron.”

”Keep checking. Every ten minutes until I say stop.”

”Yes, sir.”

He nodded once, picked his coat back up, and walked out into the rain. Asahi watched him go, and Mikoto watched Asahi, and Asahi caught her watching and gave her the smallest rueful shrug.

”He worries,” Asahi said quietly. ”He’s not wrong to. He’s just bad at saying it.”

”I know,” Mikoto said.

”You all right, kid?”

”Yes. I’m all right.”

He nodded, and ate the rest of his rice, and went out after Inoharu without another word.

It was Kemuri who broke the small silence that followed. He nudged Mikoto’s knee with his own.

”Your first one, isn’t it?”

”My first what?”

”Posting. War posting.”

”Yes.”

”You’ll get used to it.” He took another spoonful of rice and gave it to Hoshi, who ate it with great seriousness. ”The bored part. That’s most of it. Bored and damp.”

”And the rest?”

He looked at her for a moment. Hoshi licked his fingers clean.

”The rest you don’t get used to,” he said. ”But it doesn’t happen as often as the boredom. So that’s something.”

She finished her bowl. She put the pot back over the fire to keep warm for the rotation. She went outside to walk the east approach through the cypress, the rain falling on her hair the moment she cleared the porch, and the great bandaged shape on her back shivered faintly against her shoulder blades.

She did not let her hand stray to its hilt where anyone could see. She had been very, very careful about that.

She made it three quarters of the way along her loop before everything ended.

There was no warning that she could have caught. One moment she was stepping around a fallen cypress root with her hand resting flat against the bark of a wet trunk, and the next moment everything was wrong.

The sound came a half second after the feeling. A high, thin whistling, the noise a kettle would make if a kettle were the size of a house. The trees on her left bent. The trees on her right bent. The wet ferns at her feet flattened in a wave that rolled outward from the village.

Wind.

The shaped, vicious wind of a jutsu cast at a target.

Mikoto turned and ran.

She had been told once, by her father, that the body knew things the mind did not have time to know. She did not remember being told this until she was already moving, already pulling Shark Skin off her back as her feet carried her over roots and through wet undergrowth.

The whistle came again. Closer.

She heard Kemuri scream her name from somewhere ahead. She heard Hoshi yelp.

She came out of the cypress at a dead sprint and the longhouse was gone.

The roof had been peeled away in a clean curve as if someone had taken a sickle to it, and inside the open box of the building the squad was scrambling, dice scattered, the kunai sharpener already dead with a thrown senbon in his throat, one of the others lying half under a beam with his ribs caved in. Inoharu stood in the middle of it with both hands flashing through seals, eyes white-pupilled with the Yamanaka technique already half-cast at something she could not see.

A second gust hit. This one came from the south, scything across the village, and Mikoto threw herself sideways into the shadow of a stilted hut and saw three of the dice players caught full in it. The wind opened them. Ribs first and she had to bite down hard on the inside of her cheek to keep from making a sound.

A fourth gust, smaller, more aimed, came down the alley between the huts at her own position.

She raised Shark Skin. The wind hit it and the wind stopped.

The shaped chakra in the gust sluiced into the wrappings, sank through them, and came roaring up her arms like a river finding a new channel. Her chakra was filled.

She heard Inoharu shout something at her. She did not catch the words.

She caught the next thing, though. She caught the way the second gust came whistling from the south and tore through the cypress where the other two genin had been on rotation and only one of them came stumbling out of it, gushing red from a torn-open shoulder, and the other one did not come out at all.

Mikoto took a breath.

Her hands found the seals her mother had taught her when she was young, and they had been the seals her grandfather had taught her mother when her mother was young, and so on back through every Uchiha who had ever sat cross-legged in front of a clan elder and learned what it meant to be considered an adult.

Snake. Ram. Monkey. Boar. Horse. Tiger.

”Fire Style: Great Fireball Jutsu!”

The fireball was the size of a house. It was the size of a small temple. It hung in the air for a half second as it left her, white-hot at the core and orange at the edges, and then it shot down the alley between the huts and out across the open ground in front of the longhouse and into the rain itself, which boiled into steam in a wave that preceded it.

She heard, somewhere inside the fireball, a man scream. Then two men. Then the screams stopped.

The fireball hit the south slope and detonated against the earth. An explosion of flames spread twelve metres across into the rain and stood there for a long moment before the rain began to win again.

For one strange, suspended second, the field was quiet.

Mikoto stood in the alley with her mouth closed, and across the way, through the steam, she saw Inoharu Yamanaka staring at her with an expression she did not have time to read.

Then a senbon punched through his throat from behind and his eyes went empty and he dropped.

Mikoto screamed.

She did not know she was screaming until she heard it. It came out of her without her permission and it kept coming as she ran, Shark Skin coming up over her shoulder in both hands now, the bandages already darkening with rain.

A shape came around the corner of the longhouse to meet her. A man in tan. Sand-coloured cloak, hitai-ate with the hourglass crest, a length of dark cloth coiled around one wrist that uncoiled toward her like a striking snake.

The cloth caught her left arm.

She felt it tighten. She felt it pull. The Suna kunoichi on the other end of it set her stance and yanked, and Mikoto, all forty kilos of her, came off her feet.

She did not fight the pull. She went with it. She let her body fly, and as it flew she brought Shark Skin down across the cloth in a wide sweep.

The sword did not cut the cloth. The cloth was enhanced by chakra. Shark Skin did not need to cut. Shark Skin ate. The scales raked across the length of binding and the chakra in it flickered like a candle in wind and the cloth was shredded.

The Suna kunoichi’s eyes went round.

Mikoto landed badly, rolled, came up. The sword came up with her. The binder was already trying to pull a kunai from her thigh sheath and Mikoto did not give her the time to find the grip. She crossed the gap in two strides and brought Shark Skin across the woman’s belly in a wide horizontal sweep.

The scales caught.

They went in and they came across and they took with them everything they touched. The kunoichi made a noise, and the air filled with red, and the air filled with a smell Mikoto had not smelled before in her life, and the woman folded forward over her shredded midsection and went down.

Shark Skin drank her dry on the way down. Mikoto felt the chakra come up through her hands.

She did not have time to be horrified. She turned.

A second Suna was coming up the alley at her with a tantō raised. Behind him, three more. Beyond those, through the steam where her fireball had gone, she could see at least four others picking their way up the slope, one of them with a great folded fan slung across her back. The squad’s second chūnin, Asahi, was fighting two of them on the porch of the longhouse, Sarutobi fire spitting from his mouth in short tight bursts, and as Mikoto watched, one of the Suna got inside his guard with a wakizashi and opened him from collarbone to hip.

He did not go down right away. He killed the one who had cut him. He killed the second one before the first one’s body had finished falling. He took two staggering steps after the third, who was already running, and then his legs gave out and he sat down hard on the porch and looked, for one strange clear moment, surprised.

Then he tipped sideways.

Mikoto turned back to the man with the tantō and did not let herself feel anything yet.

It was Tatsuma Fūma who saved her in the next minute.

She did not see him come. She heard the whistle that meant a fūma shuriken was in the air, and the man with the tantō never finished his swing. The four-bladed weapon took him in the side of the neck and kept going, and one of the men behind him went down with it lodged in his stomach, and the other two had to dive aside to avoid being taken with him.

Tatsuma came down off the longhouse roof in a roll, came up running, snatched the haft of his weapon out of the dying man’s gut with a wet sucking sound, and put himself shoulder to shoulder with Mikoto in the alley.

”Mikoto-chan,” he panted.

”Tatsuma-kun.”

”How many?”

”I counted nine. Maybe ten.”

”Hisana?”

”I don’t know.”

”Inoharu?”

”Dead. Asahi too.”

“Shit! Fuck! Fuck!” He spun the shuriken in his hands. There was a long shallow cut across his forehead and his left sleeve was dark with someone else’s blood. ”Kemuri?”

”I don’t know.”

”Hoshi?”

”I don’t know.”

A laugh came out of him that was not really a laugh. ”Stay close. Try not to die, cousin.”

She did not say anything. She gripped Shark Skin tighter and felt the bandages were straining to hold.

Two more Suna came around the corner of the alley.

Tatsuma threw. His shuriken took the front one’s head clean off. The second one made it three more steps before Mikoto met him with Shark Skin coming down overhead in a two-handed slam, and the great bandaged shape of the sword caught him across the collarbone and drove him into the mud, and the scales underneath the wrappings shredded what was left of him before Mikoto had finished the swing.

She was getting better at this. She did not know how she knew that. She just knew the swing had been better than the first one.

”We need to fall back to Hisana,” Tatsuma said, ripping the haft of his weapon free of its second victim. ”Get the wounded together. We need a chokepoint.”

”Mm.” Mikoto nodded in agreement.

They moved. Through the alley, around the corner of the longhouse where Asahi lay in his own blood with his eyes half open. Past the wreckage of the dice players. Tatsuma slowed for half a second when he saw what the wind had done to them and Mikoto pulled him forward. There was no time. There was no time for any of it.

They found Hisana behind the longhouse, propped against the back wall with her hands shaking and her left leg horribly injured. She was conscious only because Hyūga were stubborn and because she had wrapped a tourniquet of her own headband around the thigh.

”Move me and I bleed out,” she said before either of them could speak. Her voice was thin but steady. ”Don’t move me. I can see. I can call them out for you.”

”Hisana, you need a medic, you need...”

”There isn’t one.” Her eyes had not stopped doing the slow rotation of the Byakugan. ”Three coming around the south side. Two on the roofs. The fan one is by the river. The puppeteer is...”

She paused. Her face changed.

”Above the cypress,” she finished. ”He’s been there the whole time.”

Mikoto looked up. She could not see anything through the rain.

The fan user came first.

She came around the side of the longhouse with her great folded fan held in front of her like a sword, three purple discs along its dark metal body. Even folded it was as tall as she was. She had clearly identified Mikoto as the bigger threat because her eyes did not leave the bandaged greatsword.

”Two stars,” Hisana called from the back wall.

The fan opened. Snap. Two of the three discs flashed.

The wind came in a wide horizontal arc, low across the ground, designed to take Mikoto’s legs out from under her and slam her into whatever stood behind her. It would have worked.

Shark Skin drank it.

Mikoto felt her reserves climb again.

She been taught genjutsu. Every shinobi was. The underlying mechanics of crafting a genjutsu were taught in the Academy. If they had the talent for it.

Her hands weaved through multiple hand signs.

The world inside the woman’s head shifted by half a degree. Just a small wrong thing in the place where her sense of distance lived. The longhouse, in her mind, was a metre closer than it actually was. The mud, in her mind, was firmer than it actually was. The wind, in her mind, was still blowing.

Mikoto body-flickered.

The fan user spun to where she expected Mikoto to be. She was not there. She was a step to the left, because the mud had not been as firm as the woman had thought, and her foot had slid.

Shark Skin came down across her wrist and took her hand off at the joint, fan and all, and the woman had one second to stare at the spurting stump of her arm before Mikoto stepped past her and drove the sword backwards through her ribs from behind.

The scales did the rest.

The chakra came up Mikoto’s hands again, warmer this time, sharper, and the woman went down in the mud with the rain washing pink around her.

Mikoto picked up the fan.

It was heavy. Heavier than it looked. The bloody hand was still gripping it; Mikoto pried the fingers off one by one without looking at them, and then she folded the fan closed with a snap that echoed off the longhouse wall, and she slung it across her back next to the bandaged length of Shark Skin, and she kept moving.

”Three of them coming up the river,” Hisana called. ”The cloth one is dead. The fan one is dead. You have six left. The puppeteer hasn’t moved.”

Mikoto found Tatsuma in the next clearing with two of the three river-comers already on the ground in pieces and the third trying to retreat into the water. Tatsuma’s shuriken took her in the spine before she made it three steps. He turned, blood across his face with a vicious grin on his face.

”Three left,” she said.

”The roof ones,” he said. ”And the puppeteer.”

”I’ll take the puppeteer.”

”Don’t be stupid. Their puppets have poison.”

”Got it.”

She climbed the slope toward the cypress.

The rain had begun to ease. The fire from her great fireball had burnt itself down to a black scar on the south face of the slope and a thin smear of grey-white smoke that rose and bent away toward the river. Bodies lay in it. Some of them were her own.

Halfway up the slope she stopped.

The bandages were about to rip from Shark Skin’s growth. She could feel the sword wanting to grow. It had drunk well and it was hungry for the room to be bigger.

Not yet.

She set Shark Skin’s tip in the mud as she began going through handsigns.

Dog. Boar. Ram.

The wrappings became cleaner wrappings. The shape underneath became different. To any pair of eyes that looked at her now, the great bandaged greatsword was a large cleaver in bandages. Unusual for a Konoha-nin but visibly it was not a legendary sword. The mass and the weight in her hands did not change. The sharpness and the chakra-drink of the scales did not change. Only the image did.

The first puppet came down out of the trees above her like a falling beetle.

She caught the sound of it half a second before it hit. Wood on wood, the small mechanical click of an internal joint adjusting in flight, and then the thing was on her, four arms, two of them tipped in long curving blades that gleamed wet in the dim light and gleamed wetter still where the poison along them had not yet been washed off by the rain. Lacquered black. Faces painted on every surface that did not have a blade attached to it.

It came at her with all four arms moving.

She blocked the first cut on Shark Skin’s length and felt the scales catch the chakra threading the blade. The puppet’s arm spasmed and slowed. She blocked the second on Shark Skin’s flat and ducked under the third and the fourth came around for her ribs and she could not bring the sword back in time.

She nearly caught the blade on her left forearm.

The poison was visible on the blade.

The puppet was already pulling back for another stroke. She did not have a second arm to lose.

She did the only thing she could think of.

She swung Shark Skin wild, low, sideways, no thought to where the blade went, only to survive, and the great bandaged shape of the disguised sword swept through the air a metre in front of her and caught ten threads of chakra strung tight as harp strings between the trees and the puppet.

The threads went out.

All of them. At once. The chakra in them flickered into Shark Skin, and the puppet, which had been about to put a fifth blade through her sternum, went still.

It dropped.

It dropped like a stringless marionette and Mikoto looked up the slope. Through the cypress. Into a low fork in a tree maybe thirty metres up where, for the first time, she saw him.

He was older than she had expected. Forty, maybe forty-five. Sand-coloured robes, sand-coloured hood, two fingers of one hand still curled in the position they had been in when the threads were connected to something. His face had gone the particular pale of someone trying to understand what had just happened to him.

He saw her seeing him.

He started to move.

She body-flickered.

The rain blurred. The trees blurred. He had time to bring his hands up. He did not have time to do anything with them.

Shark Skin came down in a vertical chop from above and the man’s hands came up to catch the blade in front of his face, and the great bandaged shape of the sword split him in two as if he was not there at all.

The chakra came up Mikoto’s hands.

It was a lot. Refueling the transformation jutsu and the body flickers.

She turned and went back down the slope.

The last two came at her on the riverbank.

They had been the roof ones. They had seen the fan user die and the puppeteer die and they had decided, the way professionals sometimes decide, that the mission had gone wrong and they wanted to leave.

They had picked up Hisana’s tied-down body to leave with. A Hyūga main-family girl. A Hyuga Clan for their own village would make their mission a huge success even with everything else lost.

Mikoto met them at the water.

She set the great bandaged sword down in the wet sand and made the seals for a large genjutsu. She had their attention. She was a thirteen-year-old girl on a riverbank in a war, holding a strange sword, with a Suna war fan slung across her back.

The illusion she put in their heads was a big one. The water crawled from beneath their feet, wrapping around their bodies like tentacles. As they struggled to break free from the ‘water jutsu’, it squeezed and water began to enter their pores and holes.

Mikoto picked Shark Skin back up.

The first one went down without even realizing how they truly died. The second one was no different, dropping Hisana, which was the only thing Mikoto cared about, and then the great bandaged shape of the sword took him across the chest and across the throat and across the side of his skull in a single sweep.

Mikoto stood in the rain on the riverbank with two more bodies cooling at her feet and Hisana lying half-conscious between them, and the air around her was so saturated with the dying chakra of strangers that she could taste it on her tongue.

She knelt. She dragged Hisana by her collar as she walked back toward what was left of the village.

She found Tatsuma on the porch of the longhouse, sitting next to Asahi’s body, holding it together. Most of the way together. He had a deep cut across his thigh and another across his shoulder and one of his eyes was already swelling shut, but he was alive, and when he saw her coming up the slope with Hisana across her back, he started laughing.

”Mikoto-chan…” he sang.

”Tatsuma-kun...” She was glad to see him.

”We’re fucking alive!”

”Yeah, I guess we are...” She tried to smile.

“Three of the most prestigious clans are left as survivors… Who would’ve thought?” He chuckled somberly.

”...” Mikoto did not laugh alongside him.

She set Hisana down on the dry boards of the porch, next to him, carefully. Hisana’s eyes opened for one moment. They tracked Mikoto’s face. They closed again, and her breathing settled.

”They’re all dead,” Tatsuma said.

”Yea, we survived.”

”Ours?”

”Inoharu. Asahi. Kemuri. The dice players. The ones in the cypress. I haven’t checked all of them.”

”Kemuri.”

”Yea...”

”Oh.”

The rain went on doing what rain does. The fire on the south slope had gone out entirely.

She stood after a while and walked through the village, because she needed to know.

She found four of the squad in the wreckage of the longhouse. She found one in the cypress, the way Hisana had said. She found Inoharu in the alley where she had seen him go down, and she closed his eyes with two fingers and the prayer her grandmother used, and she found Asahi on the porch already, and she walked the perimeter slowly through the wet grass.

She found Kemuri behind the smokehouse.

He had taken a senbon through the side of the neck and he had gone down quick. His hand was still half open the way it had been when he was about to scratch Hoshi’s ears.

Hoshi was a metre away. Curled up against the wall of the smokehouse, as if she had crawled there to hide.

She was still.

Mikoto knelt down beside her in the mud. Her knees were already filthy. Adding a little more did not seem to matter.

Hoshi’s eyes were open. Her small tongue was sticking out between her milk teeth. There was a single neat puncture wound through her ribs. Her brindle coat was still soft. The rain had not yet had time to flatten the fur on her belly.

Mikoto picked her up.

She was lighter than she should have been. Her head fell back against Mikoto’s wrist the way a sleeping puppy’s head falls, except it was not sleeping, and it was never going to wake up, and somewhere behind Mikoto’s eyes the last small wall she had been holding together for the past forty minutes gave out at once.

She sat down in the mud behind the smokehouse with the small dead body in her lap and she cried.

She cried with her whole body, with her shoulders shaking and her nose running and her hands flat against the wet ribs of a puppy who had wanted nothing more out of her morning than a grain of rice off the floor. She cried for Kemuri, who had been alive an hour ago and had been smiling at her for the small careful way she stirred a pot. She cried for Inoharu, who had only wanted them to walk the perimeter, and Asahi, who had told her to eat first. She cried for the dice players whose names she had never bothered to learn.

She cried for all of them.

Love is the key to peace, her mother had told her once, with her hand on Mikoto’s cheek. Love is the only key. Hold on to it. Never let go of it.

She did not let go of it. Even now. Even with what she had just done and what her hands still felt like and what she could still taste at the back of her throat, she did not let go of it.

But she sat in the mud behind a smokehouse in a village too small to matter to anyone but the people who had once lived in it, in a country at war, with a dead puppy in her lap and the bandaged shape of a sentient sword propped against her shoulder, and she let herself ask the question her mother had never quite gotten around to answering.

How much blood, she thought.

How much blood did the road to that peace need.

Because this did not feel like peace. This did not feel like the start of peace, or the middle of it, or the end of it. This felt like the opposite of peace.

She did not know the answer.

She wiped her nose on the back of her wrist. She held the puppy a little while longer, until the small body began to go cold in earnest, and then she carried it carefully back through the rain to Kemuri’s side and laid it next to him, in the curl of his open hand, where she thought he would have wanted it.

She rewrapped Shark Skin after it fully digested all the chakra it ate. The bandages were brown with blood and would need replacing, but they would hold for now. She placed the war fan inside Shark Skin for easier carrying. Then she walked back to the porch.

Tatsuma had managed to get himself upright. Hisana was still breathing. The reinforcements would not arrive for another six hours, and in those six hours Mikoto would set a fire to keep her two surviving comrades warm, and she would cook the last of the rice, and she would not eat any of it herself.

The rain kept falling.

It tasted, when it ran past her mouth, like iron.