The rain was still falling when night swallowed the sky.
Yami lay on the thin mat, staring at the darkened ceiling of the shack. Every so often, a drop from the leaking roof would land in the corner puddle with a hollow plop. He'd eaten the last of the raw potato hours ago.
Hunger made time stretch. It gnawed at his belly in waves, sharp enough to wake him when he started to drift off. The steady hiss of rain was no longer comforting — it was a wall, trapping him in this rotten shelter with nothing but his thoughts.
"I can't last another day like this".yami thought aloud.
The boy's memories — the real Yami's — surfaced again. For ten days before his collapse, he'd scraped together whatever scraps he could find: a handful of rice from a burnt storehouse, a moldy heel of bread, a cup of water from a cracked barrel. None of it had been enough.
He sat up, rubbing his eyes. "Tomorrow, it's night now and it's no longer safe outside"he murmured to himself, voice hoarse. "I need more food tomorrow."
The sound of his own voice startled him in the silence. He lay back down, listening to the rain, and tried to ignore the way his stomach clenched tighter with each passing hour.
By morning, the rain had thinned to a heavy drizzle. The sky was a uniform grey sheet, the sun a pale blur behind it.
Yami pulled himself to his feet. His shirt clung to his skin, damp from the air alone. Outside, the village was still lifeless and empty eyes in the people — the kind of quiet that made him uneasy.
"This rotten world and its rotten rulers"yami spoke quietly with disgust as he looked through surroundings.
He stuck to side streets, scanning for anything edible. Most of the nearby buildings had already been picked clean or occupied by other scavengers or orphans . A broken crate in an alley yielded only a splintered lid. A tipped cart offered nothing but rusted nails and straw.
His eyes drifted toward the treeline beyond the last row of shacks. The woods weren't far — half a kilometer at most — but the boy's memories warned him it was dangerous. Bandits, stray shinobi, wild animals. Still…
'If i stay here i might die of hunger before even surfing through another day'
yami thought
If I'm careful, I might find something. Just berries. Maybe mushrooms.
The mud sucked at his feet as he approached the edge of the village. The smell of wet earth thickened. By the time he reached the first trees, his clothes were already heavier with water.
Inside the woods, the sound of rain changed — softer under the canopy, punctuated by drips from leaf to leaf. He moved slowly, eyes scanning for color among the green and brown.
It took half an hour before he spotted a small patch of berries, dark red and clustered low to the ground. He crouched, sniffed one, then bit into it cautiously. Tart, but edible. He plucked a handful, tucking them into the deep pocket of his shirt.
Another twenty minutes brought him to a shallow gully. There, lying half on its side in the mud, was a deer. Its eyes were clouded, the body still limp — fresh enough that steam curled faintly from a tear in its flank.
Yami's first reaction was hesitation. Dragging something this big back to the shack would be slow and loud. Cooking it would make smoke. But the second reaction was stronger: meat. Enough to last days if he was careful.
He crouched, gripping the deer's front legs, and began to drag it towards his home.
The wet leaves muffled his steps. He kept glancing over his shoulder, trying to fix landmarks in his mind — a split-trunk tree, a moss-covered stump — to remember the way back.
That was when he heard it.
A sharp clink, followed by another. Not random. Metal striking metal.
He froze, straining to listen. The sound came again, closer this time. Then a dull thump, like something heavy hitting the ground.
'Shinobi'.yami thought and looked around cautiously.
The boy's memories made it clear enough: in Amegakure during the war, any shinobi battle nearby meant death for anyone who stumbled into it. He hauled the deer behind a cluster of thick bushes, crouching low.
The clashing sounds grew sharper, then stopped altogether. The silence that followed was worse.
Minutes passed before movement stirred to his right. Leaves rustled, and through the rain-veiled undergrowth, figures emerged.
Ten of them.
They moved in a loose formation, wet flak jackets dark against the trees. Forehead protectors glinted with the leaf symbol.
At their head was a tall man with close-cropped black hair, wearing a green coloured vest,Tachibana Renjiro. His eyes swept the surroundings in quick, practiced motions.
Beside him padded a man with wild brown hair and the distinctive red fang markings on his cheeks — Inuzuka Riku, his ninken Kiba-maru trotting at his side.
The rest followed in pairs: Chūnin Hayashi abirume and Moriya hyuga , Chūnin medic Shindo Akira, and five younger Genin — Takeda Haru, Sakuma Yori, Ishikawa Daichi, Okabe Nao, and Kuwata Minori.
Renjiro's gaze fixed on Yami almost immediately. His expression hardened.
"There shouldn't be anyone here," he said flatly.
Morito frowned. "Civilians?"
"Doesn't matter," Renjiro replied. His voice was low but decisive. "No witnesses."
Yami's stomach went cold.
Renjiro glanced at Riku and made a quick hand signal. The Inuzuka's lips thinned. "Understood." He drew a kunai. "Easier this way, kid. Mercy, before the war chews you up."
'No. No, no'Yami's mind raced, but there was nowhere to run. His legs wouldn't outrun trained shinobi.
Riku stepped closer, Kiba-maru at his side, both moving in perfect sync. The kunai caught a dull gleam from the overcast light.
"This world," Yami thought bitterly, is rotten to the core. Even the ones who claim to be good ones will cut down a starving kid if it's convenient.
The kunai rose.
Something inside him cracked.
The world dimmed, colors draining until there was nothing but black. His vision tunneled, and in that darkness, his own reflection stared back — but the eyes were wrong. Completely black, even the whites swallowed.
The air grew heavy. A cold, oppressive weight pressed outward from him. The rain slowed, every droplet seeming to hang longer before hitting the ground.
Behind him, a shape rose — not solid, but vast. The suggestion of limbs, the hint of something hunched and coiled, a presence that felt wrong. As the creature made of black smoke appeared everything seemed to be in still and its form flickers between various shapes and a inhuman screech came from the creature.
Riku hesitated mid-step, Kiba-maru's fur bristling and it shivers uncontrollably "What the—"riku exclaimed .
The shadow moved.
One moment Riku and his ninken were whole, the next they were gone — erased into drifting black smoke.
The rest of the squad reacted instantly. Renjiro's voice was sharp. "Full force! Now!"
Hands blurred through seals. Morito's chakra flared, Akira drew a blade, the Genin readied kunai and shuriken.
The shadow turned its gaze toward them.
Every shinobi froze mid-motion. Their pupils shrank, breath catching in their throats. In that gaze, they saw nothing but endless dark — a place where things moved just out of sight, where the air reeked of rot and cold seawater and a numerous horrifying creatures staring back at them and slowly tearing them apart and devouring them again and again .
One by one, they unraveled into black smoke, vanishing without a sound.
The shadow leaned closer to Yami, its form shifting, . It reached for him — with its shadow tentacles , but with something deeper, a hunger that pulled at the center of his being.
From his chest, light erupted. Golden, blinding, spilling from his heart and eyes. Chains of pure light whipped outward, coiling around the shadow's limbs and throat.
The thing convulsed, letting out a sound that made his head feel like being exploded numerous times and — a pressure that made Yami's bones ache. The chains tightened, dragging it inward, until it vanished into him entirely.
The weight lifted. The rain sounded normal again. His eyes returned to black, ordinary black.
Yami stood there, breathing hard, the deer still lying where he'd dropped it. The mud around him was unmarked. No blood, no bodies, nothing to show ten armed shinobi had ever been there.
His hands shook as he bent to grip the deer's legs again. Every muscle screamed at him to leave this place.
He didn't look back as he dragged the carcass toward the village, the berries in his pocket bruising with each step.
By the time the treeline thinned and the shack's roof came into view through the rain, the only thought left in his head was simple, urgent:
Get inside. Lock the door. Don't think about it.