Chapter 3: Fog of Revolution
The Mist was stirring.
Not in its streets—not yet—but in its foundation. The quiet killings, the dismantled checkpoints, the vanishing of Yagura's loyalists. Something had shifted. Even the civilians, dulled by years of silence and fear, could feel it in their bones.
Change was coming.
---
Mei stood in the war chamber, her hands pressed against the large map pinned to the wall. Kozan stood beside her, expression unreadable beneath his hood. Ao leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed. Chōjūrō paced quietly in the background, sharpening his blade with short, nervous strokes.
"Three facilities down in one night," Mei said. "No evidence. No retaliation. We've shaken them."
"They'll start hunting us harder now," Ao said. "Yagura doesn't tolerate fear for long."
"He won't find us in time," Kozan replied. "Not before we take the next four targets."
Chōjūrō looked up. "Won't they notice a pattern?"
"They already have," Mei said. "But they think it's multiple cells. That's the trick. They don't know Kozan leads them all."
---
That evening, Kozan led a meeting of his scattered Hunter-nin in a cave behind the waterfall cliffs. No torches. Only ambient chakra lighting the walls with a dull blue hue.
One by one, they reported:
"Barracks 9 dismantled. Three jonin eliminated."
"Scroll cache intercepted and destroyed."
"Civilians evacuated before patrol sweep."
Each detail was logged in Kozan's memory. Every result mattered.
---
After the debrief, one of the Hunter-nin lingered.
A girl, no older than fifteen. Pale eyes, burnt mask.
"Why do we let some of them live?" she asked quietly.
Kozan didn't answer at first. Then:
"Because we're not just ending the old Mist. We're proving something else can exist after it."
She nodded and slipped back into the fog.
---
The next week passed like a storm held in restraint.
Yagura doubled patrols. Summoned assassins. Ordered public executions of "traitors."
But Kozan stayed ahead.
He sabotaged the weapons shipments meant for those loyalists.
He replaced real execution orders with forged ones, letting prisoners slip through cracks no one thought existed.
He made Yagura's network crumble from the inside.
And still, no one knew his face.
---
On the seventh night, Mei sat beside Kozan on the roof of the abandoned observatory tower they used as a secondary hideout.
"You're doing more than I ever expected," she said. "Do you ever stop to breathe?"
Kozan stared at the moon through the fog. "I'll breathe when the screaming stops."
Mei didn't press him further.
Some leaders forged peace through politics. She had found hers in the shadow of a boy who walked like war itself.
---