Interlude: The Tyrant's Calm
Yagura sat alone on the polished stone of the meditation floor, the air around him humming with chakra.
He had felt the tremor hours before the first detonation.
Fear.
Not his own.
The fear of those who once bowed in silence.
He smiled at the memory.
The village had been too loud in the past—filled with petty bloodlines and whispers of revolution. He had silenced it. He had purged the weakness. What was fear, if not the purest discipline?
---
The Three-Tails stirred inside him. A bubbling pulse of raw power.
"They are coming," it whispered.
Yagura didn't move. "Let them."
He had survived assassination attempts, rebellions, wars.
He had watched fathers kill sons in his name.
He had torn bloodline clans apart with a word.
Let Mei rise. Let her bring her ghosts. Let Kozan—yes, he knew the boy's name now—believe he could win.
Yagura had crushed better men.
---
But beneath that calm, something gnawed.
The silence was different now.
It wasn't obedience.
It was waiting.
---
He remembered a boy once—a child with wide eyes who looked to the elders for protection. Who was gifted a monster sealed inside him before he understood what loneliness meant.
That boy was gone.
The Mist had killed him.
So Yagura killed the Mist in return.
Or so he thought.
Now, it came back to claim him.
---
As footsteps echoed in the corridor, and the mist curled unnaturally beneath the door, Yagura stood.
Chakra flared around him. Tails formed in shadows behind his back.
He smiled.
"If the Mist must fall again," he whispered,
"then I'll drown with it."
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