Reina's team sat in a tight ring around the campfire, its light painting tired faces in flickering orange.
Raizen had gone through each of them with steady hands and the calm tone he reserved for patients. Reina was in the worst shape—bandaged ribs, shallow cuts lacing her arms, fatigue sunk deep into her bones. Aika was barely better, slumped against her bedroll with dark rings under her eyes and her chakra nearly drained dry. Karui and Raizen were the only ones who could still move without wincing.
Their next assignment was simple on paper and miserable in reality: a guard mission. They were to hold this campsite—the rendezvous where their second scroll was scheduled to arrive—and keep it secure until the end of the exam. The genin guards and Principal Kanzo had already withdrawn, leaving Squad One alone with the fire, the dark, and their exhaustion.
With Reina in no condition to fight and Aika needing real rest, the burden fell on Raizen and Karui.
Together, they worked in silence. Karui dug shallow pits and strung wire, rigging trip-lines and buried tags around the perimeter. Raizen anchored sealing tags and marked trees, then stepped back to weave his own net—threads of lightning-charged chakra unfurling from his fingers and sinking into the terrain.
Web Sense spread out like a second skin over the forest.
To Raizen, it barely counted as a "jutsu." It felt more like breathing with his chakra—a practical application of Lightning Release rather than a technique you'd write down in a scroll. Fine chakra threads stretched outward, each filament coated in a faint current. Anything with a chakra signature that brushed those threads sent a whisper back to him. It cost almost nothing to maintain; the hardest part was the patience.
Hours bled by.
Every so often he felt the skittering pricks of small animals—rabbits, birds, something slithering low through the underbrush. If it wasn't carrying a noticeable chakra reserve, he let it pass and forced himself not to flinch at every twitch in the web.
Karui took the other half of the burden. With help from Aika before she crashed, they'd mapped out a patrol route that covered the blind spots Web Sense couldn't reach: dead ground behind boulders, dips in the terrain that warped Raizen's range. Karui stalked that route over and over, kunai loose in her hand, checking tags, resetting lines, eyes sharp despite the growing drag in her steps.
By midday, the two of them were running on fumes.
They only had to guard the camp for one more day, but knowing that didn't make the hours lighter. The thought of an enemy squad watching from the treeline, waiting for Reina to be at her weakest or for Raizen's focus to slip, kept the pair wired and restless.
Raizen was convinced an attack was inevitable. If he were in their enemies' position, this was exactly when he'd strike.
So they waited.
And waited.
And waited.
The fire burned down to embers. The forest shifted from black to charcoal grey. At last, pale light spilled over the mountain peaks and washed the campsite in cold dawn.
Sunrise.
Raizen exhaled, shoulders loosening just a fraction as the sky brightened.
Twelve more hours, he told himself. Twelve more hours, and we're free of this hellish exam.
—
The sun sat high and merciless by midday, pouring heat straight down onto the clearing. The air over the campsite shimmered, the stone and dirt radiating warmth back in slow waves that seeped into Raizen's bones.
He'd meant to stay sharp. Really.
But his body had its own ideas.
At some point his feet had carried him up into the branches of a thick, shade-dappled tree at the center of camp. Now he lay stretched along a broad limb like a lazy cat, hands folded behind his head, eyes half-lidded as the sun soaked through leaves and into his skin. The heat loosened the last knots of tension in his shoulders. His eyelids grew heavier with each slow blink.
Man, I love this, he thought, muscles melting. Way better than a lumpy bedroll.
Raizen yawned and let one leg dangle.
"Man, I love this heat," he murmured aloud. "Maybe I should take a break. I don't think anyone's coming anytime soon…"
The forest answered with insects and distant birds.
Then—
"DAMMIT, RAIZEN, THIS IS SO DANG BORING!"
Karui's voice tore across the clearing like a thrown kunai.
Raizen jerked upright, chakra flaring on instinct, hand already reaching for a weapon. His Web Sense flexed outward—no hostile signatures, just one very familiar, very irritated chakra presence stomping toward him.
He squinted down through the leaves. "Karui," he sighed, shoulders loosening again. "Aren't you supposed to be patrolling the outskirts of the camp?"
Karui crashed into view, scowling, hands on her hips. Sweat beaded along her brow, and dust streaked her legs from hours of walking.
"Yeah, I am," she snapped. "I've been walking the same route for hours, Raizen. It's driving me insane. I can't keep doing this."
He rolled onto his side on the branch, cheek resting on his forearm. "I hear you. It's not exactly fun up here either. But after the other two phases?" He let out a low whistle. "I think we earned a little downtime."
Karui narrowed her eyes. "You're such a lazy bum. Have you seriously been up on that branch napping the entire time I've been patrolling?"
Raizen exhaled, long and slow, and shut his eyes again. "No," he said, voice calm. "I've been sensing our surroundings and checking on the others."
He let his awareness stretch as he spoke—fine strands of lightning-laced chakra humming out across the ground, brushing trees, stones, and the faint flickers of life hidden in the underbrush.
"Aika's recovering fast," he continued. "Chakra flow's stabilizing; she might be combat-ready before the exam even ends if she doesn't push it. Reina's different. Her reserves are still a mess. She's gonna need extra time after this is all over… and a real medical-nin to look her over."
Karui's shoulders deflated a little at that, some of the sharpness in her expression softening. She glanced up at him, then at the tree, then back up again.
"Wow," she muttered, stepping closer. "You really did find the best spot in camp, huh?"
She jumped, caught a lower branch, then swung herself up until she could flop down beside him. A patch of shade wrapped both of them, the leaves above whispering in the hot breeze.
"You sneaky bastard," she grumbled, leaning back against the trunk. "You were planning to keep this little diamond to yourself."
Raizen's lips twitched. The warmth, the steady hum of his own chakra web, the soft drag of exhaustion—all of it blurred together. His body sank deeper into the bark beneath him.
"Karui," he mumbled, already drifting, "you can hold down the fort while I get some shut-eye."
Karui rolled her eyes. "If we get attacked while you're snoring, I'm—"
Raizen never heard the threat.
He didn't feel himself fall asleep.
One moment he was melting into the warmth on the branch, Karui's grumbling fading into a comfortable blur. The next, something inside his skull tilted.
A soft ping rang through the dark behind his eyelids—high, clear, like a single note struck on glass.
His left eye, the dead one, throbbed.
Heat gathered under the scarred lid, then spiked. For a heartbeat he thought Reina had jammed a lightning scalpel straight into his socket. A pressure, ancient and heavy, pressed down on him from above, like the whole sky was leaning in to look at him.
The world snapped.
It wasn't like being yanked by a summoning. There was no swirling ink, no smoke. It felt like fingers made of light reached down, pinched the thread of chakra in his chest, and pulled it free of his body.
The forest, the camp, Karui's muttering—they tore away like paper in a storm.
—
Black.
Not sleep-black. Not "I closed my eyes" black. This was an endless, depthless void that swallowed every sound before it could be born.
Raizen's eyes shot open.
At first he thought he'd gone blind in his right eye too. There was nothing—no horizon, no trees, no clouds. Just an ocean of cold emptiness and a scatter of hard, distant stars, sharp as senbon pricking the dark.
His breath came out in a startled puff, white mist curling in front of his face.
Cold hit him like a jutsu. It wasn't the sting of winter air; it felt like someone had reached into his chest and pinched the warmth out of his blood. His skin prickled. Every inhale burned.
He staggered and looked down.
Grey dust. Pale as ash, fine as flour, cracked and pressed into hard-packed layers. The ground was gutted by craters of all sizes—some small enough to step across, others yawning wide and shadowed, like the empty eye sockets of a buried giant. Broken stones jutted up at jagged angles, casting long, ragged shadows.
His boots ground against the surface with a dry, gritty whisper.
"…Where the hell am I?" His voice sounded small, swallowed by the void. "Am I… in space?"
He flexed his fingers. He could move. He could breathe. No air, but somehow—chakra?—something was filling his lungs. It felt wrong, but it worked.
Think, Raizen. Check your surroundings. Check your chakra.
He reached inward. His chakra pool was there, coiled and ready.
And then his left eye—his blind eye—burned.
Heat flared under the lid, searing and alien. His hand flew to his face on instinct, fingers clutching at the scarred flesh. For years that eye had been a dead weight, a damaged channel that chakra slid around rather than through.
Now it was a furnace.
A low, resonant hum thrummed through his skull, matching the spike in his heartbeat. Light leaked around the edges of his fingers.
"H-hey—!"
The lid snapped open.
The world changed.
His right eye saw the dead grey plain, the pitted ground, the impossible cold. His left eye saw… layers.
Lines of pale energy ran under the surface like veins—brilliant circuits of chakra etched into the stone, forming patterns too vast to grasp at once. Above him, the sky wasn't empty; a web of faint, translucent threads spanned the void, all converging on a single point he couldn't yet see.
His breath hitched.
"…This is… chakra vision…?" he whispered. "Like a Byakugan…?"
No. It wasn't the pale, expanded world he'd seen in Hyūga scroll diagrams. This felt older, deeper. The patterns carved into the land thrummed with a chakra he instinctively recognized:
The same strange, heavy chakra that had wrapped around him the night his eye went dark as a kid.
Hamura's…?
For the first time since he'd lost that eye, Raizen felt something like…belonging radiating from it. Wrong and right at the same time.
A wild thought crept up his spine.
"Am I… on the moon?"
He turned slowly, taking in the cratered landscape. Low ridges rose and fell in the near distance, jagged silhouettes against the star-spattered void. Far beyond them, his left eye picked up a distant, blazing knot of chakra—massive, layered, intricate. It pulsed like a heartbeat.
Something's calling me.
He needed height. A landmark.
His gaze locked on a large rise—a ridge rolling up like the back of a stone leviathan. Without thinking, he moved.
His first step launched him farther than he expected. Instead of a normal stride, his body floated, arcing forward and then settling back down in a slow, weightless glide. Dust bloomed in slow-motion clouds behind him, hanging in the air like smoke.
"The gravity…" he muttered. "It's weaker."
He ran harder.
Each step became a bounding leap, a practiced shinobi sprint distorted into long, floating strides that carried him over crater rims and shattered rock. The cold gnawed at his fingers and lips, but the strange heat in his left eye burned steady, a tiny sun in his skull.
He hit the base of the ridge and drove upward, chakra instinctively reinforcing his legs. The slope was steep and broken, but nothing like scaling a cliff in Kumo's mountain storms. Here, he felt absurdly light, like the world was barely holding him down.
He crested the rise in one last lunging bound—
—and froze.
Hanging in the void ahead, vast and luminous, was a blue-and-white world.
Clouds swirled in slow spirals. Dark continents sprawled across its surface. Bands of ocean glowed a rich, living blue. Tiny flecks of light twinkled on the night-side where cities burned against the dark.
Earth.
His throat went dry.
"Is that…" The words scraped out of him as a whisper. "Is that… Earth?"
His left eye stung. The sight of his home planet filled that eye with reflections of chakra—auras swirling around the globe like a massive, radiant halo. Lines stretched from it into the void, wires of energy reaching—
—to him.
A distant structure flickered into focus in that strange vision. Buried deep within the moon, somewhere far below his feet, an enormous sphere of blinding chakra pulsed. The patterns wrapped around it like petals.
A giant eye of condensed power.
When it beat, his left eye answered, heat flaring in time. The connection was undeniable.
It's calling me, Raizen realized. No. It's… recognizing me.
—
Deep inside the moon, in a chamber of polished stone and ancient seals, the Giant Tenseigan opened.
The massive sphere floated above a circular dais, its surface a lattice of countless pale Byakugan fused into one glowing core. Veins of chakra ran from it into the walls, feeding the artificial sun at the moon's heart, the oceans on the interior shell, the dormant puppet armies.
For centuries its light had pulsed at a steady, measured rhythm—watchful, patient.
Now it shuddered.
Lines of chakra flared, shifting hue. The faint hum of the chamber rose to a clear, ringing tone. Seals carved into the floor blazed to life as the Tenseigan's focus snapped outward—through stone, through void, straight to a familiar signature far above the Earth.
Hamura's chakra.
Echo. Perfect resonance.
Master.
The ancient will nested inside the eye stirred, like something waking from a very long meditation. For the first time in ages, it reached down the lines that tethered moon and planet and tugged.
On Earth, a boy had been sleeping.
—
On the moon's inner surface, beneath the artificial sun, a council chamber thrummed with sudden alarm.
Light from the false star spilled through a circular opening in the ceiling, casting the white walls in a warm glow. Ranks of pale-eyed Ōtsutsuki in layered robes turned toward a hovering projection—a dome of light in the center of the room.
At its heart, an image flickered: Raizen, standing alone on the outer surface, Earth hanging behind him like a jewel.
Murmurs rippled through the chamber.
"An Earth ninja…"
"How did he breach the barrier?"
"Impossible. No transit gates were opened."
On a raised platform at the far end sat a half-circle of elders, their hair long and pale as bone, skin almost luminous under the chamber's light. They watched in silence, their eyes narrowing as Raizen's left eye flared brighter in the projection.
One of them leaned forward.
Her hair fell like silver water down her back, braided with thin, metallic threads. Lines of age and authority cut elegantly across her face, but her gaze was sharp—cold moonlight focused into a single point.
Senator Seira Ōtsutsuki.
"Freeze the image," she said.
The projection halted on a single frame: Raizen on the ridge, Earth behind him, his left eye open and blazing. The pattern in that eye was not a normal Hyūga Byakugan. It was something denser, more intricate—like a single petal of the very Tenseigan that hummed above their shrine.
The other elders hissed.
"That eye—"
"Contaminated. Twisted by Earth chakra."
"He is an intruder. The Tenseigan must have been deceived."
A tall, severe-looking man rose to his feet, the crescent emblem of Hamura's disciple-line hanging heavy on his chest. "Regardless of the anomaly, an outsider stands on our sacred shell. We should erase him before his presence pollutes our Lord's work."
Several robed figures murmured approval.
Seira did not sit back. Her gaze stayed locked on Raizen's image. Her own Byakugan flared faintly, veins tracing at the corners of her eyes as she peered deeper—not at his clothes or his forehead protector, but at the chakra clinging to his soul.
Beneath the boy's own lightning-scented chakra, another signature pulsed. Heavy. Pure. Unmistakable.
Like recognizing your own handwriting after centuries.
"…No," she said quietly. "The Tenseigan is not deceived."
The tall man frowned. "Senator Seira?"
She stood.
"What you feel is not Earth filth," she said, voice cutting cleanly across the chamber. "Under that boy's chakra lies Lord Hamura's own blessing. His imprint. The Tenseigan responded because it recognized its master."
The room stirred, unease rippling through the ranks.
"Are you suggesting—"
"That this boy is Lord Hamura reincarnated?" another elder scoffed. "Blasphemy."
Seira's gaze sharpened. "I am suggesting that he carries our Lord's chakra in his flesh and eye, and that we do not strike down such a bearer without understanding why."
She turned to the projection again. Raizen's eye burned back at her, stubborn and startled and very, very alive.
"Deploy a retrieval unit," Seira ordered. "Do not kill him. Bind him and bring him to the shrine chamber."
The tall man's jaw tightened. "And if he resists?"
Seira's lips thinned.
"Then," she said, "remind him that this is Lord Hamura's domain," her pale eyes glinting, "and see if his soul remembers to kneel."
—
Back on the ridge, Raizen tore his gaze away from Earth as a prickle ran up the back of his neck.
A vibration rippled through the ground—too regular to be natural, too rhythmic to be shifting stone. His Web Sense unfurled on instinct, lightning-thread chakra racing out along the surface and dropping like anchors into the dust.
The responses that came back made his stomach drop.
Something was moving beneath the surface. Several somethings, each radiating a clean, cold chakra unlike any he'd felt before. Above, the faint web his left eye sensed shuddered, threads tightening.
"Great," he muttered. "Of course it's not just a scenic tour."
Shapes crested the horizon.
At first they looked like statues walking—tall, robed figures of white stone and metal, faces hidden behind smooth masks with a single eye-slot. Their feet did not quite touch the ground; each step sent a quiet thrum through the chakra lines in the dust.
Moon puppets.
They spread into a half-circle around his ridge, silent, identical, each one turning its blank face toward him. Behind them, three human figures alighted on the grey surface in a spray of slow-floating dust—robes heavier, eyes pale and luminous.
Raizen's throat tightened.
Ōtsutsuki…
They floated rather than walked, toes barely kissing the ground, long hair drifting in slow, graceful arcs in the near-absence of gravity. Their gazes were needles.
The one in the center lifted a hand.
"Outsider from Earth," he called, voice echoing too clearly in the thin stillness. "You stand on sacred ground without leave. By decree of Hamura's line, you will be taken and your existence judged."
Raizen shifted into a guarded stance, chakra lacing down his arms, lightning itching to be thrown.
"Yeah, well," he said, eye burning hot in his skull, "I didn't exactly buy a ticket up here."
His left eye flared again.
Every Ōtsutsuki on the field stiffened.
The man in the center's Byakugan snapped active, veins bulging at his temples as he stared at Raizen's face. The two at his side mirrored him—then flinched.
"That chakra—!"
"His eye—!"
Before things could explode, a new presence brushed across the battlefield: refined, controlled, old. A pressure that settled over Raizen's skin like frost.
A fourth figure descended slowly from above, robes fanning out around her. Silver hair, braided, eyes pale and bright. She landed lightly between the puppets and Raizen, the moonlight catching on the sigil at her collar.
Her gaze met Raizen's.
For a heartbeat, everything else—the cold, the puppets, the impossibly distant Earth—fell away.
All he felt was that gaze pressing against his soul, and the wild, ancient pulse of Hamura's chakra answering from inside his left eye.
Senator Seira lifted her chin.
"…That eye," she murmured, almost to herself. "That chakra."
She exhaled, a slow, disbelieving breath that steamed faintly in the air.
"Bind him," she told the others without looking away. "But do not harm him." Her pale eyes narrowed, reading something written deep in his bones.
"If the Tenseigan has called him here," she said, voice soft but carrying, "then this boy is more than an intruder."
Her gaze sharpened, resting squarely on Raizen.
"He may be Lord Hamura's answer."