Chapter 3
Itama exhaled a plume of embers, watching the Uchiha's shriveled corpse collapse into itself like parchment thrown into a furnace. His newly stolen fire chakra danced under his skin—volatile, hungry—making his veins glow like molten cracks in drying clay. The rain evaporated before touching him now, hissing into steam around the halo of his heat. He flexed fingers still steaming with borrowed power, and the forest air trembled.
A whimper cut through the downpour—the wounded Uchiha from the trees, dragging himself backward through the mud with one functional leg. Itama's Hyuga eye traced the erratic flutter of the man's chakra, a moth battering itself against a lantern. His Inuzuka nostrils flared at the stench of urine and burnt fabric. The man's sharingan spun wildly, not in attack, but in desperate, animal denial. Itama tilted his head, listening to the wet click of his own vertebrae realigning.
The Uchiha raised a shaking hand—not to strike, but to plead. "Y-you're—" His voice broke. Itama crouched, letting the man see his reflection in the crimson-and-lilac mosaic of his stolen eyes. The man's breath hitched as Itama's fingernails elongated into blackened claws, the fire-user's DNA still rewriting his flesh. "I'm what?" he murmured, pressing one smoldering palm against the Uchiha's chest. Fabric crisped away. Skin blistered. The scream was cut short when Itama's other hand plunged into the man's ribcage, fingers closing around something that pulsed like a dying star.
When he withdrew his fist, the Uchiha's heart steamed in the rain. Itama brought it to his lips, inhaling the rich iron scent before his jaw unhinged with an audible crack. Devour wasn't gentle. Bones splintered between his teeth; ventricles burst like overripe fruit. The taste of lightning and grief flooded his tongue—memories that weren't his flickering behind his eyelids: a laughing child with sharingan not yet awakened, a woman's hands braiding his hair. He swallowed them all.
Somewhere beyond the corpse-littered clearing, a branch snapped. Itama's head whipped up, blood-slathered chin dripping onto scorched earth. His ears caught the rhythm of retreating footsteps—lighter, faster. Younger. A survivor too small to fight. The corner of his mouth twitched. Let them run. Let them whisper of the thing that wore dead boys like borrowed coats. He wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist, smearing viscera across skin already knitting itself smooth again. The war had just begun.
Smoke curled from his fingertips as he flexed them, testing the fire-user's chakra coiled in his veins. It burned differently now—less like an ember, more like acid. Devouring the Uchiha's heart had changed something. His stolen sharingan throbbed in its socket, pulsing in time with a phantom heartbeat. A name surfaced in the sludge of devoured memories: *Kagami*. The trembling one had called for him before the flames took his voice. Itama exhaled through nostrils flared wide, tracking the scent of singed cloth and terror into the trees. Someone would come for vengeance. Good.
The rain slowed to a drizzle, revealing the battlefield in macabre fragments—a severed hand curled around a snapped kunai, the glint of an Uchiha crest half-buried in mud. He crouched beside the remains of the fire-user, peeling back charred flesh with clinical curiosity. The explosion tags had been rigged to the man's own chakra network. A suicide play. Itama's borrowed lips split into something too jagged to be a smile. The Uchiha had tried to burn him from the inside out. How *deliciously* ironic. His tongue traced sharpened canines as his body absorbed the last of the man's smoldering chakra, skin blistering then smoothing over in waves.