My body rebelled.
Every cell burned like firecrackers in a metal box, flaring and fizzling with sudden, violent energy. My chakra network screamed in protest, stretched taut, flooding my muscles with everything it had. I didn't know what I'd triggered. I didn't care.
The skin on my hands was cherry red and covered in a map of meandering veins.
"…What?" my opponent said, his voice cracking with genuine confusion. I felt it before I saw it—his chakra stumbled. He hadn't expected that.
Neither had I.
But I wasn't about to waste it.
I surged forward, throwing jutsu like a man possessed. Lightning arced, wind screamed, fire bloomed. But this time, I mixed it up—slipped in silent, near-invisible projectiles between the bursts. Scattershot. Unrefined. Uncoordinated.
Magic missiles.
The first few missed, slamming into the walls and ground with quiet thuds. But the next volley connected. The front of his purple shirt exploded into scraps, shredded by something he couldn't see or sense among the barrage of other jutsu saturating the air with my chakra.
A hit.
Exhilaration bloomed in my chest like sunrise. I'd hurt him. Finally, I'd hurt him.
Then his body hissed—and the wounds closed.
Medical ninjutsu.
His wounds were gone.
Like it never happened.
The taste of victory curdled into ash in my mouth.
Why won't he just die?
Across the village, the Hyuga meeting room fell into tense silence as Hinata stepped through the door.
"Mobilize all resident shinobi," she said, voice firm.
Several clan elders looked up, startled mid-game, the low murmur of leisure dying immediately.
"Who are you to—" one of her great-uncles began, tone brittle with age-old entitlement.
Hinata cut him off with a step forward.
"I said now," she snapped, her Byakugan flaring with a faint blue corona. Her chakra bloomed outward in a pressure wave that cracked stone beneath her feet. It filled the room, heavy and suffocating, soaked with something unyielding. Not anger. Not fear.
Love.
The love she held for Izuku.
Another elder recovered his voice. "Why should we risk Hyuga blood for a clanless nobody?"
Hinata didn't blink. "Because he is a student of the Third."
The room froze. Not a single voice rose in dissent after that.
My opponent's shirt was gone now. Torn apart by a rain of unseen force. He bled—but he didn't fall. My magic missiles left shallow wounds at best. They were too weak. Not enough force. And I was running dry.
I couldn't pump in more chakra—the jutsu would collapse. I was already dancing on the edge of collapse myself.
So maybe I didn't need more power.
Maybe I just needed more focus.
A sure-fire way to make any projectile deadlier came to mind.
Rotation.
Drilling force. Piercing force. More damage than simple blunt impact.
I willed another missile into existence, my chakra network fraying, threads unraveling at the edges of my senses. I brought the jutsu to my lips—and this time, I twisted it. Formed a vortex of chakra around the missile at the moment of release.
It roared out of my mouth with a sound like tearing wind. A visible spiral. A sonic boom.
It was faster than the others—faster than his eyes.
It hit him clean.
Drilled straight through his chest.
The alley wall behind him exploded in red mist.
I collapsed to one knee, my body heaving. My spine felt like it was melting. Whatever I had triggered in my back was still active, still clawing at my nerves.
It felt like dying.
The fuinjutsu barrier remained intact.
Then he twitched.
fuck.
XXXXXXXXX
Hinata stood on a rooftop near where Izuku had last been seen. The minutes had stretched like hours. Every moment without finding him felt like another stone dropped into her lungs. Kuro stood to her left, silent, alert. Naruko paced behind them, her chakra prickly with guilt and fury. Sakura had been sent home.
The three of them had covered much of the village already—with the help of her clan and Dog. The Hyuga were fast and relentless. Yet, they found nothing.
Hinata burned chakra to fuel her Byakugan, her vision stretching to six kilometers in radius. Still nothing. Whoever had taken Izuku was either gone—or hidden behind something powerful enough to bend the sight of her bloodline.
"Hinata-sama, we have found nothing," reported one of her clan's jōnin, kneeling before her, voice respectful.
She barely heard him.
"Hinata," her father said, appearing beside her. "We must consider the possibility that—"
"No." Her voice was calm. Firm.
He looked at her. Not with condescension. With something close to pride and regret. She had changed. Grown. She stood tall now. Clear-eyed. None of her stuttering fear anywhere to be found. His daughter had inherited her mother's grace.
It pained him that it took the loss of a comrade to bring this out of her.
Hinata, on the other hand, had no intention of abandoning Izuku. Not now, not ever.
She stepped to the edge of the roof, closed her eyes, and breathed deep. Her chakra pulsed.
She let herself sink.
Deeper than ever before.
Into memory. Into warmth. Into affection.
Every moment Izuku smiled at her. Every time he stood beside her. His coaching with her bloodline. The time he caught her when she collapsed after training. When he opened up his mind to her and she to him.
She drew all of it into herself.
Everything she had ever loved, ever treasured. Her mother. Hanabi. Her friends. The sun on her face. Naruko's clumsy laugh.
And pushed it outward.
Her Byakugan flared so bright it cast shadows behind her.
And then she saw it.
Everything.
People. Animals. Leaves trembling in the wind. Every detail mattered. Even the corners. Even the hidden corners that whispered they didn't.
That was wrong. That was the trick.
Everything mattered.
She tore through the illusion.
And found him.
Battered, barely breathing, but alive.
"I found him," she said.
XXXXXXXXX
He was still alive.
Whole in his chest and losing massive amounts of blood but he was still breathing.
The vortex missile had slowed my opponent. He hadn't healed yet—but he wasn't down either. His body twitched. He stumbled against the alley wall, dragging breath like it weighed a hundred pounds.
I tried to stand.
Couldn't.
My legs wouldn't listen. My back felt like glass. My chakra was down to flickers, even as my network did everything in its power to wring more energy out of my body.
But I forced my head up. Forced chakra into one last missile.
He saw it coming this time.
He raised a hand—
—but something changed.
The air shifted.
The fuinjutsu cracked.
And then she was there.
Hinata.
She dropped from the sky like an avenging angel with fire behind her. Her chakra struck the ground first, cracking the stone beneath her feet, eyes burning blue-white, veins flared and glowing.
She didn't say a word.
She just moved.
Her hand slammed into our opponent's chest faster than he could blink. No precision, just raw fury.
He reeled backward—and then Naruko was there.
With a flying drop kick.
Right to the sternum.
He flew.
Cratered into the far wall.
Didn't get up.
Kuro dropped beside me, gently pulling me into her arms, whispering something soft I couldn't hear. My ears were ringing. My breath was shallow.
Hinata knelt in front of me. Her hand touched my cheek.
"You held on," she whispered.
I tried to smile. Couldn't.
"It's okay," she said. "We've got you."
Then the world turned black.
XXXXXXXXXX
Kabuto's chest burned.
The pain from lingering injuries flared with every ragged breath he took, and the cold evening air of Konoha's outer woods clawed at his lungs as he pushed himself onward, dodging patrols and skirting chakra signatures like a ghost.
He had escaped. Barely.
A bunshin left in his place, the confusion caused by the sudden arrival of the other children—it had been enough. Just enough. But his wounds were deep, his body sluggish, his healing lagging behind the damage. He had gotten too invested. Allowed himself to be drawn too far in. That was his mistake.
Defeated. By children.
The indignity.
He ground his teeth and pressed on, one hand pressed against his side. He wouldn't make that mistake again. Underestimation was a fool's luxury—and one he would not afford himself twice.
Still, despite the pain and humiliation, his thoughts kept drifting. To Izuku.
He was… magnificent.
The boy's jutsu had been seamless—adaptive, instinctive, like an extension of his body. Techniques born not from memorization, but from creation. Modified mid-cast. Controlled in real time. The way he weaved his own inventions into the flow of battle—it reminded Kabuto of her.
The Mistress.
That spark of uniqueness. Of infinity. Of unapologetic originality. Watching Izuku fight, Kabuto felt something stir deep within him—something awful and beautiful. Hunger. Longing.
He wanted that. Needed it.
It consumed him to see it firsthand, to witness that kind of authenticity when he himself had none.
Nothing about me is real, he thought bitterly. Nothing.
Everything he had was borrowed. Stolen. The skills, the jutsu, the voice, even the name—Kabuto—a mask worn for so long he could no longer remember what lay beneath it. If anything even remained.
That was why he revered his Mistress so deeply. She didn't care for rules. Not for duty or honor or even morality. She pursued what she wanted, what she believed in, with unrelenting ferocity. She was raw and real and herself in a way Kabuto could barely fathom, let alone emulate.
But he wanted to.
God, he wanted to.
And maybe, if he escaped tonight, he'd get another chance.
Or so he told himself.
"Your skill set as a tracker is truly understated, Kakashi-san," he said, without turning.
A pause.
"I know, right?" came the dry reply. "Nobody appreciates a good hunt these days. It's always, 'assassination this, assassination that.' You make one little assassination jutsu and suddenly that's what everybody knows you for."
He was being unusually talkative for a shinobi of his calibre. Which meant he was upset.
Kabuto closed his eyes and sighed. "Will you be accepting my surrender?"
Behind him, the air shifted. The weight of chakra thickened like a storm front rolling in.
"You hospitalized one of the few people I actually give a shit about, Goggles," Kakashi said, his voice flat and cold. "You tell me."
Kabuto chuckled weakly and slumped to the ground, leaning back against a tree, letting exhaustion crash down on him like a wave. He could feel the numbness creeping in, the tremors in his limbs. He was spent.
Tears welled in his eyes, hot against the cold of the night air. He let them fall freely. There was no point in hiding them anymore.
He had failed again. Failed to become more than a shadow. Failed to become real.
The clearing filled with blue light. The sharp, electric scent of ozone flooded the air.
A thousand birds screamed in the silence.
Kabuto's voice came out small, almost childlike.
"…I just wanted to be real…"
Then the light swallowed him whole.