Hayashi's seal to liquefy the ground worked. The soil around the "submissive" body turned to runny mud. And when he reached down to pull Max out, a dull, wet pop cracked through the alley, briefly drowning out the rain.
Right in front of a stunned Hayashi, the boy became a roiling cloud of white smoke that immediately began to thin. In Max's place there was only a soaked log and a dark, pulsing lump… his heart.
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the slightest movement by the shed wall a few metres away. A scrap of wet burlap lying on a heap of rubbish twitched in a way cloth shouldn't.
Experience and instinct moved faster than thought.
"Substitution!" stabbed through him like lightning.
He threw himself backwards, chakra surging into his legs to launch him away. Too late.
The world exploded into fire and thunder.
Explosive tags, triggered in the confined pocket of liquefied ground, went off with pinpoint force, monstrous in its violence. Mud, stones, splintered fence wood, everything blasted up into the air. The shockwave slammed into Hayashi. He barely managed to raise his arms and harden his guard with chakra before it flung him like a rag doll into the far wall of the dead end. He hit stone with his back and heard his own ribs crack through the roar and the rising shriek in his ears.
Before darkness swallowed his mind, the mangled jōnin managed one last glimpse through rain haze and swirling dust: a figure materialising on the rubbish heap by the wall. Small. Ruined. Its chest was torn open, something red and pulsing spilling from the gaping wound.
But it didn't freeze.
With a snarl full of pain, and speed that wasn't human, the figure lunged for the bag left by the wall.
⁂
Dirty fingers, shaking with adrenaline and weakness, found the hard little jars inside the bag. Pills. The last ones. Without thinking, without tasting, I dumped a fistful of grey pellets into my mouth. They stuck in my dry throat, slid down in a lump, and my body seized. I choked, tears stung my eyes, but I swallowed, gagged, forced them down. Warmth, pathetic and familiar, spread through me, sanding down the sharp edges of hunger and exhaustion, but it didn't fill the hollow in my chest where something alien was hammering… something I'd cut out with my own hands.
No time. Amegakure. Ninja patrol. They must've heard the blast, they're close. With a hole like this in my chest, in my condition, I can't run. I need a picture. A picture they'll understand.
My gaze snapped to what was left of Hayashi. His body had been thrown against the wall, smeared with mud and soot. No legs below the knees, only bloody stumps. His right arm was twisted the wrong way, a shard of bone jutting out. His face was burned, one eye rolled back, white… and the other… the other, through the grime and blood, was looking at me. Dull, unconscious, but looking. And in that gaze, even without awareness, was everything. He knew. He knew I was immortal. He knew what they'd carved out of my chest… and why.
If they catch him alive… if he wakes up, or they pull thoughts out of him…
A cold wave of fear burned up my spine.
It would be the same for me as in the cult. Only now it would be official. I'd become a numbered specimen, stripped of even the illusion of freedom. Worse than them. The cultists at least had their twisted faith to justify the torture. Amegakure's shinobi would have only cold, clinical curiosity. My immortality would turn into a contract with the village… an endless hell.
Adrenaline, stoked by the pills, boiled in my veins, smothering pain, weakness, terror. I lunged for him, kunai already in my hand. No thought. No feeling. Only the cold, animal maths. His half-lidded eye met my jump. Something flickered there, recognition? a plea? I didn't let it live.
"Hrrr…!"
The blade hissed through the air and punched into his throat. Deep. To the hilt. Warm blood sprayed my hand and mixed with the rain. His body jerked in a final spasm, a bubbling rush pouring from the wound. I yanked the kunai free. Not enough.
For sure.
Without hesitation, with the same dead calm, I struck again. The point sank into his eye with a wet, soft sound. I twisted, turning it into red mush. Only then did I recoil.
Hayashi lay there without breath. Final. Forever. The head of the True Jashin Cult. The Messenger. The tormentor. The reason for six months of underground hell… dead. Killed by me. A seven-year-old kid. In a filthy alley in the Hidden Rain Village.
Emptiness.
It rolled over me, replacing rage. Not joy. Not triumph. Just… nothing. Huge as the sky over Amegakure. I'd settled the score, with one of the main culprits. The one who'd tortured me, cut me, starved me, turned me into an animal on a table.
The one I'd played the holy idiot for, for half a year, just to reach this chance.
And now he lay in the mud with his throat slit and his eyes ruined. Poetic. I tore out my heart, and I tore out his life.
I hope…
Weakness hit again, harder. My head spun, my ears rang. The pills were working, but the wound… the gaping hole in my chest kept seeping blood. Through shredded flesh I could see ribs and empty space. Where my heart should've been, there was only a dark cavity.
I crawled away from Hayashi's body towards the rubbish pile in the deepest corner beneath the overhang of the shed roof. I pressed myself into mud, rotting scraps, rags. Rain fell hard, hiding tracks, washing blood off the ground, but my wound… that had to be hidden now.
I shoved my fingers into the open hole in my chest and clenched my teeth against a fresh surge of nausea and pain. Don't think. Move. I found the torn edges of skin and muscle. Roughly, with brute force, I pulled them together like the sides of a ripped sheet. The skin obeyed, drawing closed as if invisible threads were cinching it.
Muscles twitched, fibres knitting before my eyes, filling the bloody void with new pink tissue. The process was torture, itching and burning at once. I watched broken rib fragments pull inward, vessels fuse, flesh grow, sealing the horror of it. The speed, driven by pills and adrenaline, was monstrous, inhuman. And the pain matched it.
With my back to the cold shed wall, I breathed shallowly so I wouldn't disrupt the knitting, covering the wound with a soaked burlap scrap from the rubbish. My eyes scanned the alley entrance, my ears caught every sound under the rain: footsteps, voices, the clink of weapons. My heart… no, not my heart, something in my ribcage where it should be, was pounding, trying to make up for blood loss, pushing leftover chakra and the meagre heat of the pills through my veins.
"Faster… faster…" I begged my cursed body, staring into the grey curtain of rain at the alley mouth. Any second now, silhouettes in hooded cloaks could appear, the Amegakure patrol drawn by the blast.
Sitting in filth and stinking water, I suddenly caught a strange, almost insane thought punching through the pain:
If I ever master the Eight Gates… does that mean I can open the Gate of Death without consequences?
Hell… just thinking it makes my blood sing. Adrenaline, or whatever circulates in me now, surges like a spring flood.
To hell with genjutsu, ninjutsu, all that crap. Against someone who's opened the Eighth Gate, it's nothing.
Sage of Six Paths? I'll knock him out with one punch. Literally, into oblivion. And if one punch isn't enough, I'll hit again and again until the universe folds in on itself.
It was delirious, sure, blood-loss madness, but it filled me with feral confidence. Right now, in this stinking hole, without a heart, I felt… strong. Potentially.
Still, if my blurry memories were right, Might Duy killed a few of the Mist Swordsmen but clearly wasn't on the level of Guy, who nearly finished Madara. So the Eight Gates' power depends on the base. On taijutsu, stamina, muscle mass. If the body itself is a monster… then the result will match.
I need taijutsu. No other options.
Hands trembling with pain, I kept pulling the wound shut. No time for full recovery, just close the skin, make a protective layer. The heart… let it grow back on its own.
But the wound was closing agonisingly slowly. Too slowly.