The Shikkotsu Forest did not rustle. It dripped.
Great calcified trees, white as weathered ribs and porous as bleached bone, spiraled up into a sky that was perpetually, bruised-gray. The air didn't move; it sat heavy and humid, tasting of burning lye and calcium. It was a place of absolute, dissolved silence, where the only rhythm was the occasional hiss-fizz of a stray drop of acid hitting a pool of stagnant, milky water.
Katsuyu liked the silence.
She lay coiled around the base of the central spire—a massive, jagged pylon of white carbonate that looked like a titan's femur. Her body was a vast, pale expanse of viscous, slick muscle, motionless and heavy. She was so immense that she didn't look like an animal; she looked like a collapsing snowdrift that had decided to become sentient and judgmental.
She was meditating. Or perhaps she was just tracking the slow, rhythmic thrum of the earth's deep heat. With her, the difference was minimal.
Pop-shrip.
The silence didn't just break; it was punctured.
A cloud of acrid white smoke exploded near her left flank, followed by the sound of a wet, frantic squeak.
"Big-Me! Big-Me! Did you see?!"
Tsuyuyu didn't land; she bounced. The tiny slug—barely the size of a human's forearm—ricocheted off a shelf of bioluminescent fungus, stuck briefly to a pitted tree trunk, and then launched herself into the air, wiggling her eyestalks with a hyper-vigilant glee.
Katsuyu did not move her main body. She simply swiveled one massive optical tentacle downward, fixing the small creature with a gaze that felt like a barometric drop.
"You are vibrating," Katsuyu said. Her voice was the sound of heavy stones sliding underwater. "Cease."
"Can't cease! Too much spin!" Tsuyuyu chirped, her voice a high-pitched steam-whistle. She landed on Katsuyu's side with a sticky, wet-slap and began sliding in rapid, erratic circles. "Sylvie-chan did the ink-swirl! Woosh! And then the scary blonde lady punched the ground—BOOM—but we were slippery! We were so slippery, Big-Me! The dirt didn't even taste us!"
Katsuyu sighed. It was a long, wet exhale that fogged the immediate area with the smell of damp earth and cold salt.
"The Senju descendant is violent," Katsuyu noted flatly, her skin rippling with the weight of the thought. "This is known. Her blood is hot asphalt and thunder."
"But Sylvie-chan is sticky!" Tsuyuyu trilled, her body shimmering with an iridescent, oily sheen. "She smells like rain and dry parchment! She gave me a snack! It was a chakra pill! It tasted like blue! Not the sky-blue, but the sharp, electric blue that makes your teeth feel like they're made of glass!"
Katsuyu paused. The ripple in her side stopped.
"You ate a soldier pill?"
"I ate two! I feel like I could drink the whole ocean and spit out a mountain!"
Katsuyu closed her eyes.
Usually, when she divided, the smaller parts were just extensions of her will—obedient, quiet, disposable drones in a vast, biological network. But this one... this one had been named. The human girl had looked at a fragment of the hive-mind, applied a distinct label to it, and in doing so, had severed the link just enough to create a biological anomaly.
An individual. With the attention span of a gnat and the frantic, buzzing energy of a swarm.
"It is time to rest," Katsuyu commanded, trying to exert the heavy, gravitational pull of her will over the smaller slug. "Rejoin the whole. We will metabolize the excess energy."
"No rejoin! No sleep!" Tsuyuyu shouted, hopping off Katsuyu's back and beginning to climb a bone-tree at breakneck speed. "Sylvie-chan says we have to practice 'Evasive Wiggles'! Look! Look at my wiggles!"
The small slug began to gyrate wildly on a branch, leaving a trail of sticky, fluorescent slime that sizzled against the white bark.
"Wiggle! Wiggle! Dodge the punch! Eat the ink!"
Katsuyu watched the display with deep, ancient regret.
She remembered the days of the Sage. She remembered the gritty, wood-ash smell of wars that had ended a thousand years ago. She had watched civilizations dissolve into dust while she remained eternal and unchanging. She had never felt tired.
She felt tired now.
"Tsuyuyu," she said, her voice dropping an octave, becoming the menacing, sub-bass drone that terrified entire armies. "Get down here. Now."
"Can't hear you! Too high up! Being a ninja slug! NYOOM!" Tsuyuyu yelled, launching herself toward a higher branch with a squelching jump.
Katsuyu rested her chin on the damp, acidic earth. The little white blur continued to zip through the canopy, chirping about "cool glasses" and "scary lady punches."
For the first time in an epoch, the great slug considered the downsides of being a geological-scale entity.
"I never wanted children," she murmured to the fizzing mist and the white trees. "I simply wanted to be vast."
High above, Tsuyuyu missed a branch, fell fifty feet, bounced off Katsuyu's head with a happy, rubbery splat, and immediately started laughing.
"Again! Again! The gravity is so crunchy here!"
Katsuyu closed her eyes and waited for the tug of the summons to pull them away again. Any war had to be quieter than this.