Flashback: The Day the Mist Took Everything
Kozan remembered the silence before the screams.
He was only eight. A boy with too much curiosity and a dangerous habit of shaping water with his fingers when no one was looking. His mother always smiled and said it was harmless. His father warned him to be quiet. "The walls have ears," he would say, too often.
Then one night, the mist rolled in thicker than usual. It crept under the doors. The silence felt unnatural.
When Kozan returned from the docks, the village was wrong. Empty. Still.
His house was aflame.
He ran, heart pounding. But before he could reach the front steps, two masked figures stepped from the fog. Hunter-nin.
"You've been identified," one said coldly. "Your family carries a dangerous bloodline."
"I don't understand," Kozan whispered.
The only answer was a hand seal.
He never saw what jutsu they used. He only saw the wall collapse. His father's scream. His mother's silhouette swallowed by flame.
He ran.
They caught him anyway.
---
He woke in a cell.
Concrete walls. No windows. Other children, quiet and shivering. Some had strange eyes, some had markings on their skin. None spoke.
Days passed.
They fed him enough to survive, but never enough to grow. They tested him—genjutsu probes, chakra limiters, interrogation. But he never cried.
One day, a guard pushed him too far. Tried to drown him in a shallow tank to test his water affinity.
Kozan snapped.
The water rose—not by hand seals, but by instinct. It spiraled into the guard's lungs. By the time help came, Kozan had nearly crushed the man's chest with water pressure alone.
He expected to be killed.
Instead, they promoted him.
---
He became a trainee in a quiet facility outside the village. A ghost school. No names, only ranks. No loyalty, only obedience.
Kozan learned to silence his emotions, mask his chakra, kill without sound. He learned how to be invisible.
But he never forgot.
His father's voice. His mother's hands. The smell of their home. The way the Mist betrayed them all.
And so, he made a vow.
"If I am to be their weapon, I will sharpen myself until I cut the hand that holds me."
---
One day, the instructors sent him to observe a bloodline massacre up close. A test.
He followed orders.
But that night, he wrote the name of every victim in the dirt with a wet stick. He memorized their faces.
And when it rained, he stood in the storm and let the water wash it away.
A promise.
One day, he would make the Mist remember them.
---
End of Flashback