What does it feel like to be shot in the head by a sniper?
Konome Taketori had a rough idea now.
Cold, sharp metal had punched into her brow ridge with a searing heat. Adrenaline flooded her system and blunted the pain for a heartbeat. Memories from two lives whirled past like a carousel, noisy and jumbled, leaving her mind unfocused.
Then the adrenaline ebbed. Pain surged through every inch of her body. A burning, tightening agony pulsed from the center of her brow, like a bar of red-hot iron ramming around inside her skull. The damage to the cranium hurt worst, deep and unrelenting, as if fire were licking bone.
Is that it?
Is this how my thirty-odd years end?
The stab to the brow and the shock to the brain blurred her consciousness. Blood streamed down, dyeing her vision red.
I don't want to die.
I refuse to die.
That raw defiance jolted her will to live awake. A dull light gathered in her ashen pupils. Veins stood out around her eyes like tree roots gripping flesh and drinking deep.
The world snapped into ruthless clarity.
Countless memories and thoughts fused into a single command to survive. The pain lit up her brain. Something inside her body clicked on with a hum like a struck hive. Power flooded out from everywhere at once. Bone and muscle felt as if they had awakened to their own purpose and were switching online.
Creak.
A strange pressure sounded inside her skull, like a boot grinding snow crystals against air, like a beast worrying its kill between iron teeth.
A girl's eerie gray-white eyes filled her attacker's vision. The noises inside her head made the crippled ANBU's gut go cold. He tensed and drove the kunai with all his strength, aiming to ram the blade deeper through the girl's brow.
It would not go in.
Konome's eyes flew wide. A kunai jutted from her forehead, her face a mask of blood. Her lips pulled back.
The smile was feral.
Chakra surged into the frontal bone.
Creak.
The kunai screamed under the strain. Hardened steel buckled, twisted, and then, before the horrified gaze behind the Mist mask, the standard-issue blade snapped between Konome's brows, pinched in two by bone.
Clink.
The broken edge hit the ground with a bright ring.
"Mon… monster…"
The ANBU planted both hands and tried to crab away. With both legs ruined, he could not make distance.
He could only watch the human-shaped monster stand again.
Moonlight washed the ruin.
Konome raised her right hand before her face. Between her fingers, those death-pale pupils grew colder still.
From each fingertip, pure white bone pushed through, narrowing and lengthening, edges honed fine. The thinnest sheath made them look like the keenest surgical knives alive with chill light.
Five blades finished forming, turning a delicate hand into the talons of a predator.
The claws tore the air.
The ANBU flinched back on instinct.
Konome's gray gaze locked and read him clean.
Her strike barely paused as it changed course mid-flow. She swept early, intercepting where his head would be.
The fox-marked mask exploded with a scream. The handsome young face beneath split to quarters. He collapsed bonelessly, red and white soaking the dirt and adding a new layer of mud to this place of blood.
Clouds tore.
Moonlight poured down like milk and laid a silver sheet over the man at her feet.
"Hah… hah…"
Konome drew the claws back and let herself drop, chest heaving. Her heart hammered as if a mad stag were crashing around in her ribs.
She pinched the bent stump from her brow and eased it free. Strangely, no fresh blood flowed.
Chakra rushed to the wound and burned away fast, like fuel in a high-revving engine. Osteoblasts raced to divide and fill the gap in the frontal bone. Skin crawled inward and knit, vessels sealed and steamed faintly.
In the blink of an eye, the vertical "eye" at her brow was gone, as if that nightmare hole had been a mirage.
Her body's change did not surprise her.
Shikotsumyaku.
The Taketori clan's kekkei genkai.
The power to command every bone in the body at will, turning them to shield or spear. Anything tied to bone was hers to rule without limit, from osteoblasts and osteoclasts to calcium flow. She could generate bone, dissolve it, or hold it in hardened states. Because drawing bone through muscle and skin would tear tissue, Shikotsumyaku came paired with a rapid external healing that closed wounds as they were made.
That was the shallow summary you might read in a dossier.
A true Taketori knew more.
In the clan's records, full skeletal control was called a complete awakening, or second stage. Healing the body and doing basic, instinctive corrections to flesh was the first stage, a half-awakening.
The Taketori built their fearsome name on taijutsu alone.
They did not wait decades for the rare second stage. They dominated because most adults reached that half-awakened state.
In half awakening, bone hardens and tendons grow like cable. You can explode with brute strength beyond human limits and ignore pain and damage that would make others fold. Non-lethal wounds seal fast. The body stitches itself to slow blood loss and grind on. Endurance stretches out, and the glands pump adrenaline until battle drunk becomes battle calm. Even unconscious, a half-awakened Taketori can fight on pure muscle memory.
Every such clansman is a berserker, a corpse-soldier without fear of pain or death.
That is why this battlefield looks the way it does.
Under the wide wash of moon, most Taketori bodies were so ruined their faces could not be told apart. No one had defiled them for cruelty's sake. The truth was uglier. The Taketori were too hard to kill and refused to die cleanly. Some of the clan, the maddest of them, even called a comrade's intact corpse a mark of shame and weakness.
No wonder I lived.
Konome brushed a finger over the smooth skin at her brow, then looked down at the blood across her chest. It made sense now. After her past life's memories woke, Shikotsumyaku must have half-awakened under the knife at her heart and mended the fatal wound.
Just now, when she fought for her life and opened the Byakugan, the bloodline must have answered that eye and leapt to the second stage, hardening her brow and turning the kill stroke aside so she could reverse it.
She pushed herself up.
You walk close to death and the body remembers. Her limbs trembled. The kunai had not pierced her brain, but the hit's force still left her dizzy and sick with the urge to curl up and sleep among the dead.
Do not sleep.
She slapped herself, sharp enough to sting, and forced her focus back.
The Soldier Pills in her stomach had not fully dissolved. What remained broke down and bled into her chakra coils, topping off the tank just enough to move.
A sweep with the Byakugan had told her the battle was nearly done.
The Mist ANBU ring was tightening toward the center. Squads ghosted through the woods in fluid arcs. Only the east had been ripped open.
She fed chakra to her eyes. The ash-gray deepened.
Trees fell back as if the world slid closer. Everything turned transparent.
At the edge of her far sight, white-masked ANBU in cloaks lay piled like drifted snow. Whole colonies of pythons, thick as barrels, had pocked the ground with pits. Venomous snakes in carnival colors threaded and writhed over the heaps like stitches on a knitted sleeve.
No need to ask whose work that was.
Orochimaru had already taken Kimimaro and torn free to the east. If Konome wanted out of the Mist's cordon, that might be her only path.
Then her vision caught a cluster of chakra signatures.
Her eyes narrowed a fraction. In the clear wood a half-li away, an ANBU squad of a dozen was racing straight toward her.
They closed in so fast they were nearly on her in a few breaths.
Thump.
No time to study or run. Konome toppled face-first into the mud, smearing her blood across the dirt. Shikotsumyaku flowed on instinct. Her arms and legs went slack and twisted into angles a normal body could never manage.
Only a patient eye would catch the faint rise and fall at her back. Otherwise, she was a corpse among corpses.
Silence held for a long beat.
Rustles cut the air.
A score of Mist ANBU dropped from the branches.
Their masks came in many shapes. Their clothes were the same standard issue. The leader wore a Great Tengu mask over dark-brown hair and a cloak over his ANBU garb that hid his body completely.
Konome pressed her face deeper into the earth.
The Byakugan drank the scene.
Masks, fabric, even skin and bone fell away. Chakra lines lit her sight. One jōnin. Three tokubetsu jōnin. The rest chūnin. The gap was a chasm. She could not take them.
She held her breath. Nothing moved but her eyes.
"Crow, Dark Fox, Blood Hound. You three clean the field. If you find a Taketori alive, cut them down on the spot. Everyone else, with me."
"Yes."
Three voices answered low.
The Tengu-masked captain turned and was gone. Most of the ANBU vanished after him.
Three chūnin remained.
The fox-mask wore a hood and had the fullest chakra of the three. The crow-mask was lean, with odd green-gray hair. The hound-mask was huge, nearly two meters, with bristling blood-red stubble like needles.
Konome breathed through her teeth and tasted iron in the damp soil.
A flick.
With no warning, the fox-mask lifted his hand. A shuriken flashed and whirled toward her.
Her eyelids trembled. She did not move.
A wet hiss.
The shuriken buried itself in the chest of the corpse beside her. It was so close she felt the thunk pass through meat.
"What is it, Dark Fox?"
"Nothing. Thought I heard something."
He tipped his chin at the crow-mask in the middle as if to say relax, and walked straight toward Konome.
"The Taketori monsters are stubborn. Keep your guard up," the crow-mask muttered.
"Relax."
The fox-mask spun a kunai by its ring, a toy top whirring on his fingertip. He stopped before a small Taketori body. The child was about Konome's size, seven or eight at most. All four limbs were broken and twisted. The face was so caked in blood the sex was impossible to tell.
The kunai stopped spinning and shot like a falling star.
A wet, ugly sound.
The blade punched in and blood sheeted out. The small body curled around the wound and shook. With the limbs ruined, only the roots near the joints twitched. The hands and feet dragged bonelessly across the ground, and the mouth made an animal whine like a pup with its legs smashed.
Alive.
Konome's heart lurched.
She had just searched that child and taken a kunai. The flesh had been cold. She had thought there was no breath left. She had been wrong.
It would not matter.
The fox-mask flashed through seals and sent two more kunai to be certain. When the body went still, he stepped in and toed the corpse over. He stabbed the heart to finish it and then dug into the clothes to search.
The other two, seeing nothing amiss, drifted apart to other dead and began pushing kunai into hearts, one after another.
Konome watched their hands work with a face like stone and dug her nails into the mud.
She had clawed her way back to life and, with Shikotsumyaku's help, killed one ANBU, only to fall into another snare in the next breath. Damn it. This cleanup should be the medical corps' job. Why send ANBU?
What are they looking for?
She watched the three rummage pockets and pouches and turned the problem over and over, hunting a sliver of escape.
Seconds bled away.
There were not many intact bodies left, and Konome lay close to the last ones. The fox-mask's eyes found her. He came on, kunai sticky with blackened blood.
He was almost on top of her.
Konome's body tightened. After lying still so long, her muscles shook.
What now?