Her journey through the Land of Fire in search of libraries, secret archives, or bookstores was slow. Mukambe helped her learn more about the world, but offered not a single clue about her mysterious dimensional displacement. She found nothing in the next town either, nor in the small villages she discovered between cities as she flew over massive forests, mountains, and rivers.
The days went by. Then a week passed, and another... time flew, and she didn't feel any closer to returning home. Although she wasn't as desperate about being alone in an unfamiliar place—now that she had the knowledge to blend in—that didn't mean she wanted to stay much longer.
She spent sleepless nights wondering if Luna, Tina, and the others were searching for her through the streets of Tokyo. If they had found anything—a clue, a trace, or anything that could lead them to the damn abandoned temple that held the portal to the unknown. She wondered if Hermione, Ron, and Andromeda already knew she had disappeared, if they had dropped everything in the UK to join the search. She didn't know what was worse—thinking that her friends were suffering because of her disappearance, or imagining that if she didn't return within months, they would assume she was dead and move on with their lives as if nothing had happened.
That thought drove her to stay up late into the night, poring over the copies of documents and books she had secretly made, looking for something she might have missed—something she hadn't written down in her endless-pages diary where she was collecting all the information she thought might be important or useful.
"At least I don't have to worry about having a place to live…" she sighed, speaking aloud to herself as she looked at the greenhouses she had set up weeks ago.
When she bought the tent and suitcase-house, she never imagined how much relief they would bring. She had bought them to live outdoors during the Scamanders' magizoology tour, but now that she was in a place where she didn't even have Muggle money, having her own home felt incredibly comforting.
"I need money," she told herself. "I wonder how much they'll give me for a gold Galleon."
The next day, she left the forest again to head into Shukuba. She had been staying in the outskirts, avoiding the need to convert more Muggle money, but it was time to start blending in with the locals. She was seeing more and more ninjas around, and she couldn't afford for anyone to notice her walking in from the forest every day and wandering through the city—anyone might start asking uncomfortable questions about why she wasn't lodging like a regular tourist.
Shukuba was a city filled with shops—mostly bars and casinos. Because of that, there were also several pawnshops and gold exchange stores, which suited her perfectly. She entered one of them, noticing how more than a few people were browsing gold jewellery or selling earrings for easy money to spend on slot machines.
"Welcome to the South District Gold Exchange. How can we help you?"
"I'd like to exchange this gold medallion."
The Gringotts gold coin had been slightly modified. She knew from her travels and reading books and newspapers that gold coins didn't exist in this world. It was odd, considering this dimension seemed to share similarities with an Edo-era Japan. Apparently, they used bronze, copper, and occasionally silver. So, a Galleon as a coin would stand out immediately. Gringotts gold could be transformed, but no one did it—on the one hand, using gold in Muggle stores was forbidden, and on the other, what was the point of altering a coin just to spend it in a magical shop? Thanks to that legal loophole, Hermione had been able to enchant a Galleon for the Dumbledore's Army, and now she would do something similar to exchange her gold for Muggle money.
The clerk looked at the medallion—with a hole for a chain and everything—and whistled. He turned it over in his fingers with a critical eye before weighing it.
"About 31 grams of 24-karat gold... a fine piece of jewellery," the man said, raising an eyebrow. "Are you sure you want to part with it?"
"Absolutely sure."
"Alright then. Let's see... A gram of gold of this quality is 400 ryo, so for this medallion you'll get... around 124,000 ryo. What do you think?"
"Perfect."
The transaction was quick. She was surprised they didn't ask for ID or anything similar. Not that she had a passport or ID, but she was prepared to confuse him with a spell. She left with several bundles of bills, which she stored in her magical purse. She had eaten a bowl of ramen in Mukambe for 5 ryo, so she knew the money would last her a long time. She would try not to eat her suitcase rations, dine at restaurants instead, and blend in more by staying in cities.
Shukuba, of course, had no important documents that could help her. Part of her had already expected that, so she only sighed with a hint of disappointment and went to an onsen to relax. People ignored her, except for a few glances. It was refreshing to be a nobody. The only thing keeping her from treating this like a vacation was knowing she couldn't contact her loved ones to tell them she was looking for a way back. It was like a thorn in her side that sometimes made it hard to breathe.
"Are you alright?"
The voice of an old woman snapped her out of her thoughts. She looked at her, a few meters away, and nodded.
"You don't look like it, dear. Love troubles?"
"No," she chuckled a little. "I can't go home."
"I'm sure it'll work out sooner or later. Everything eventually works out."
"...And if it doesn't?"
"Then what's the point in worrying about something you can't change?"
"Yeah. I suppose that's true," she replied reluctantly. It might be true, but that didn't mean she liked admitting it. "Thanks."
The old woman and that boy meant well, but their words weren't much help. What she needed was beyond the reach of most people. Even her own, and she had supernatural powers.
...
The days passed slowly as she combed through libraries and bookstores in the nearest villages on her way north. She didn't find anything useful, but she did spend a bit of the gold she had turned into Muggle money. Thinking about Hermione's Galleon made her realize she might try to send a message to her friend—and she tried—but it didn't work. It was disheartening to realize Hermione didn't seem to be receiving her message, but she had already suspected it would be difficult or nearly impossible. Somehow, it felt like this dimension was completely sealed off from her original one.
She couldn't use locating spells, couldn't send a message with the Galleon, not even her Patronus message worked. Either way, it seemed the only way to travel between dimensions was physically—through a portal. One that had vanished. It had been almost a month since she disappeared from Tokyo and appeared here, and she was still just as lost when it came to returning. Even so, though she was eager to go back, she hadn't lost an ounce of hope. Somehow, she knew she would return—she just didn't know how yet.
Her path from Shukuba took her farther north, to Naga, another provincial city in the Land of Fire. She had expected it to be like before: walking, occasional chatter with a traveller, city and library exploration, disappointment, and a day of comfort to lift her spirits. In fact, that last part was what had consumed most of her money over the month, since onsens, casinos, and spas weren't free. Still, the cost of living was so low that she hadn't used up the ryo she got from that single Galleon, even though she hadn't been frugal with food or services.
But things didn't go as she expected. As she neared Naga—passing through a small village first—she began to hear crashes and screams in the forest. She looked around, but no one was nearby. It didn't surprise her—she usually wandered into the woods, though staying relatively close to the paths, when she needed solitude. Even so, this was the first time she sensed someone even deeper in the forest. She doubted they were civilians—it had to be ninjas. Especially with those screams of pain.
She hesitated, but once again, her curiosity got the better of her. She found herself flying toward the source of the noise, hearing the screams grow louder through the underbrush, until she came upon what looked like a battle between rival ninjas. After only a few seconds of watching, she realized how serious it was—four ninja corpses lay on the ground, covered in blood and with holes in their torsos. Her stomach turned as she noticed, on second glance, one of them had been stabbed through the eye.
The only ones still alive were two men, though calling them both "men" was generous—one of them looked more like a teenager or young adult than the bearded man who was his opponent. She couldn't see them well, as their high-speed movements meant they barely stood still before vanishing again. But she heard the metallic clash of kunai and what sounded like deep, tired breathing. Then, she saw a tree trunk flying out of nowhere, dragged by what seemed to be a translucent black cloth. It hit one of the ninjas, and the fight ended abruptly.
From her perch on a tree branch, hidden among the leaves, she watched the two ninjas. The older one—a rough, aggressive-looking man with a terrifying scowl—was lying on the ground. The trunk that had struck him was across his legs, as if he couldn't get up under its weight. Judging by what she knew about ninjas, she doubted he really couldn't remove the trunk, and she wondered what was really going on.
The other ninja—a boy likely half the age of the older man—panted a couple of times but quickly caught his breath. She couldn't see his face, as he had his back to her, but he was clearly taller than she was. His brown hair was tied into a short ponytail, and she saw a silver earring in one ear. He wore the same Konoha ninja uniform as the one she had seen in the Land of the Sea, so she figured he was from Konoha too. The only parts of him she could see besides his back were the sweat-soaked nape of his neck.
"Konoha ninjas, always sticking your noses where they don't belong," growled the older ninja, still lying on the ground.
Harika blinked, realizing that while she had been watching the younger boy, the older man hadn't moved a muscle. He remained exactly where he had fallen, which only piqued her curiosity further. The younger ninja let out a deep sigh—not from exhaustion, but exasperation. Everything in his posture screamed how bored he was and how little he wanted to be there. He glanced over his shoulder, eyeing the corpses, and sighed again, though this time it seemed tinged with sadness.
"Exiled ninjas like you give us all a bad name," the young man said, walking toward his fallen enemy with confident steps. "Of all the things you could've done, you seriously thought kidnapping civilians for trafficking was a good idea?"
"Ha! As if you care! You're only here because you were ordered to be—and paid for it. Otherwise, I'd like to see if you'd lift a finger to help those civilians."
"There's no point in talking to you anymore. Either way, you're my prisoner now," he replied, his voice growing increasingly monotonous and bored. "You'll pay for my comrades' deaths in prison, that's for sure."
The other ninja, apparently an exile, said nothing. Harika watched everything from her branch in silence, feeling anger that the man lying on the ground had used helpless people for trafficking, and a flicker of gratitude that the other boy had saved them. She realized that, even though she didn't particularly like ninjas due to their... flexible morals, some of them seemed to have principles. A tiny voice in her mind—one that sounded ridiculously like Hermione's—wondered whether he had truly saved them out of compassion or if what had forced his hand had been money. She didn't want to think about it more deeply at that moment, but she wouldn't forget it.
The young boy approached his fallen enemy with what seemed to be a kunai in one hand and large, sturdy handcuffs that bore Japanese kanji she could read from a distance. Ninjas were strong, so she doubted anything as flimsy as metal handcuffs could be of much help. Unless they were enchanted—or whatever people called it here—to restrain the enemy somehow.
The Konoha ninja said nothing as he confidently walked up to his still-prone enemy. The exiled ninja looked at him with disdain, but remained silent, waiting for his fate. Only when the young boy reached out a hand, very close to his body, did he smile with bright eyes and spit something at him that Harika couldn't quite see. In less than five seconds, a series of events unfolded that took her a moment to understand: the young boy gasped as he brought a hand to his neck and pulled out what seemed to be a tiny needle, the black cloth binding the exiled ninja unravelled, and the latter leapt from the ground, brandishing a kunai toward the young man.
Harika could only watch as he stabbed the man in the side before he had time to react. Despite having been attacked twice in under a minute, the young man managed to counterattack, stabbing what looked like a kind of shadow or fabric—she wasn't sure—into his enemy's neck. Both fell to the ground: the older man dead, and the young one on the verge of death. The moment she heard their bodies hit the ground, she blinked, snapped out of her shock, and shifted into human form as she glided the few meters down to the ground.
The exiled one only had a couple of seconds to look at her with clouded eyes before dying, bleeding profusely from the deep wound in his throat. The other man… wasn't even conscious.
Right there on the ground, she covered the wound with her magic and ran to grab a blood-replenishing potion from her potion kit. Within minutes, the bleeding slowed significantly and some colour returned to his previously pale face. Still, she had no idea how to heal the wound in his side.
"It's better if I get out of here as soon as possible," she told herself, seeing the corpses scattered through the undergrowth.
She shrank all the bodies and levitated her half-dead patient. Then she disappeared to a nearby but more remote spot, where she had spent the night outdoors. There, she pulled out her tent—one she no longer used and didn't mind breaking in case the ninja woke up earlier than expected—and entered with the levitating body floating behind her. She laid him down on a stretcher she had transformed from her dining table.
"Damn it, again!?" she exclaimed when she saw that he had paled once more and the wound was still bleeding slowly.
Then she noticed the small purplish wound on his neck. That had to be whatever the guy had stabbed him with. Surely it was a needle or something similar. She didn't have time to look for a diagnostic spell, so she made him swallow a bezoar with her magic, just in case it was some kind of poison. Then she gave him another blood-replenishing potion, undressed him down to his underwear, and cleaned him with magic. She didn't want him dying from an infection after using so many valuable potions on him.
Once he was more or less stable, she knew she had to hurry and find those medical books. She had no idea what was wrong with him or what to do to keep him from dying, but considering they were in the west of the Land of Fire, far from any large cities or the ninja village, it was clear that this ninja's best hope for survival was her. She almost laughed out loud at the realization.
"Let's see... Diagnostic spell, diagnostic spell," she murmured over and over while scanning the index of the healing book. It was a large compendium, so she hoped to find something quickly. "Aha! Diagnosio."
The spell summoned a scroll that gradually began to fill. She quickly realized it was a complete medical history since birth—something she wasn't interested in right now. She waited a minute until the scroll finally reached the end and read the technical terms describing a stab wound to the side. What worried her most, after decoding the medical jargon, was that the spleen seemed affected and there was a slight internal haemorrhage. Luckily, the diagnostic spell also indicated that the haemorrhage appeared to be subsiding, or at least stable. That was probably thanks to the two potions she had given him. And, just as she had suspected, he had been poisoned with an anticoagulant toxin.
Had she not been there, the stab wound would have been enough to kill him slowly. Fortunately for the Konoha ninja, fate had placed him in her path.
...
Her improvised rescue underwent a few changes as the hours passed and she realized what she had done.
On one hand, the ninja would wake up sooner or later. Harika had sworn not to get involved with ninjas and to keep her powers hidden from them, so unless she wanted to throw her plans out the window, she couldn't let him see her magical tent. She had no choice but to go to the nearest village—a small one called Zanjo with barely 2,000 inhabitants—and look for a cabin or something similar to rent. Fortunately, money always opens many doors, and it only cost her a few thousand ryo to acquire a wooden cabin on the outskirts—one that had once been used as a ranger shelter and was now rundown.
On the other hand, she left the dead ninjas' bodies where she had found them, though covered with a sheet. She could have kept them shrunk and transformed, but that would raise too many questions. It was better to tell her patient she had found him badly injured and had moved the bodies to prevent animals from eating them or something like that while he was unconscious.
As for the healing itself… the less said about it, the better. It was clear that if she wanted to become a healer in the magical world, she was going to need a lot of practice and study. Fortunately, she had plenty of books and potions—and one wounded person to practice on. It took a long while, but eventually her diagnostic spell confirmed her patient would live.
The bad news was that he still hadn't woken up. She didn't know whether it was because of the poison or simply due to exhaustion, but he had been sleeping for a whole day and still hadn't opened his eyes. If it weren't for her magic keeping him nourished and vanishing his urine... She didn't even want to imagine how she'd catheterize someone without any medical knowledge. She shuddered just thinking about it.
She cleaned his clothes, but didn't repair them. She prepared a bed for herself, a single one placed parallel to her patient's, and lay down. The magical barriers would alert her to anything, so she relaxed on her bed, which she had transfigured from a couple of rotting wooden planks. She wasn't sleepy, nor could she do anything else for the ninja, so she simply stared at the ceiling, her gaze unfocused, while thinking about everything that had happened in less than twenty-four hours. It was at that precise moment that she realized all that time had gone by without her thinking even once about going home, and although now she was thinking about it because she'd remembered it, strangely, she felt less sad. Ironically, feeling less sad for not having thought about her disappearance made her feel guilty. If Armand could read her mind right now, he would schedule another therapy session.
She sighed quietly, turning to her side to rest her aching back, and immediately her eyes fell on the man lying barely five feet away. She hadn't paid much attention to him, considering he'd been nearly fatally stabbed, but now that he was out of danger and there was nothing to do, she found herself studying him with growing curiosity. He was the first ninja she'd seen this closely who hadn't wanted to kill her upon meeting her.
She had to admit he was handsome. Not in a runway-model kind of way, but there was something strangely attractive about him. She had never been into men with long hair, and yet here she was, looking at an unconscious, half-naked man covered only by a sheet and a thin blanket. She had to admit that his brown hair, brushing freely against his muscled shoulders clearly shaped by training, his fine yet masculine features, and his lean but well-toned body were a gift to the eyes.
No one could deny that ninjas had impressive physiques—and this one had to be a very young adult. Like her. She couldn't even imagine Draco Malfoy training his body day in and day out to the point of looking like an Olympic athlete, like the boy in front of her.
"What the hell are you doing, Harika?" she asked herself mentally, tearing her eyes away from her patient and returning her gaze to the ceiling.
She was acting like a schoolgirl. Just as she was scolding herself for her strange behaviour, the magical barriers alerted her that he was waking up. Without thinking twice, she turned her head to look at him. She lost her breath when her green eyes met a pair of hazel ones. They stared at each other without saying a word. Even if she had wanted to, she couldn't have looked away. It was as if those almost feline eyes had her trapped. She saw in his expression almost the same surprise she herself was feeling. He didn't even blink as he studied her like—... she didn't know what, or what he had seen in her eyes, but something had happened.
Then, she thought she saw a flicker of pain on his face and realized the potions must've worn off. She jumped up, aware that he was watching her the entire time. She rummaged through her potion kit and offered him the appropriate vial, but he didn't take it.
"I'm not going to poison you. Look," she said, taking a sip of the potion herself. "See?"
For a few seconds, neither of them said anything until he tried to sit up to take the potion. Before he could hurt himself further—considering the stab had been to his side—she was at his side, sitting on the bed and carefully lifting his torso. It was the first time she had touched him while he was awake, and not with the intention of healing him. She wrapped her arm around his shoulders to help him sit up, placing her hand on his left shoulder to support him. The moment she touched him, a tingling sensation spread across her skin, and their eyes met again. This time... just inches apart.
She avoided swallowing nervously. She held out the vial, wondering whether he would accept it or try to inspect it first. To her surprise, he took it gently and drank it without flinching. Clearly, ninjas were built differently; it had taken her nearly eight years to get used to the nauseating taste of potions.
As soon as he drank it, he exhaled. His expression relaxed slightly, and she noticed, realizing he must've been in pain this whole time without her knowing. Maybe she frowned more than usual, or maybe her eyes gave her away, because to her astonishment, he seemed to have figured out what she had just realized, and comforted her with barely two words.
"I'm better."
Harika didn't startle, though she'd be lying if she said her heart hadn't skipped a beat or two at hearing his voice so close. Curiously, he slowly lay back down, facing the ceiling just like before, but with his right arm brushing her knees on the bed. She tucked him in with the sheet and then the blanket, adjusting the covers on each side to keep him warm. When she looked up, she realized he'd been watching her with increasingly heavy, but bright, eyes—as if he was thinking about something. She smiled with amusement when she noticed he was fighting off sleep.
"Sleep," she whispered. "I'll take care of you. I promise."
His eyelids slowly closed over the eyes that had been staring at her until, finally, he drifted off again. Harika realized she was still sitting on his bed, beside him, watching over this stranger like he was a lifelong friend, and once again, it hit her that she had forgotten—again—about her small, big problem. If he hadn't closed his eyes, if he hadn't broken the spell of his gaze on her… would she have remembered again that she was a stranger in this world? She lay back on her bed, staring at the ceiling, wondering what on earth was happening to her...