Three men sat around a table in a windowless chamber somewhere in the western reaches of the Land of Wind. The table was round, carved from dark wood, and the map spread across its surface was detailed enough to show individual buildings in Suishō's capital. Someone had marked the palace in red ink. The gates. The guard rotations. The ceremony hall.
Lord Jinen of the Land of Sand Dunes leaned back in his chair, pipe clenched between his teeth. He was heavyset, broad across the chest and wider across the belly, with a heavily darkened face. His robes were expensive but wrinkled.
"Five years…" He said. The pipe smoke curled toward the ceiling. "Five years I've been sending envoys to Yoshimasa. Trade proposals. Partnership offers. Favorable terms that any sane man would've accepted. Five years, and every single time, polite refusal. Suishō doesn't need the Sand Dunes, he says. We have enough partners, he says. But now..." He jabbed the pipe stem at the map. "Now some boy lord from a pile of dead soil shows up and suddenly Yoshimasa's rolling out the stained glass carpet?"
Lord Doku of the Land of Scorpions sat across from him. Thin with sharp cheekbones and eyes that never quite focused on one place. His fingers, stained faintly yellow from years of handling poisons, drummed against the table's edge.
"It's not about the boy." Doku said. "It's about the trajectory. The Land of Dust was nothing. Worse than nothing. A country bleeding out in the desert. Nobody cared because there was nothing to gain from caring." His fingers stopped drumming. "Then Sunagakure stepped in. Sent their shinobi to clean house. Installed the boy on the throne. And now somehow he's rebuilding trade routes, securing alliances, and knocking on the door of the richest country in the region. The Dust rises, and what do you think happens to the rest of us?"
"We get buried." said the third man.
Lord Gama of the Land of Copper was the youngest of the three. Solidly built, with close-cropped hair and a jaw that looked like it had been cast from the same ore his country was named for. His country sat on mineral deposits that had made it competitive in the regional market for decades. The Land of Dust had similar deposits. Better deposits. Deposits that had been inaccessible during the years of Burai's occupation but were now, under Soran's careful administration, beginning to open up again.
"A Dust-Glass alliance locks us out," Gama said. "Glass money funds Dust's mines. Dust ore flows through Glass's trade routes. They set the prices. They control the supply. My country's exports become worthless overnight."
Jinen pulled the pipe from his mouth. "And mine lose our last foothold in the southern trade lanes."
Doku's thin lips curved. "And mine lose our best customers. Stability is the enemy of my entire economy."
The three of them looked at the map. At the red ink marking the palace. At the ceremony hall where, tomorrow, a boy lord from a country that should have been dead would formalize an alliance that would reshape the political landscape of the entire region.
"The squad is ready?" Jinen asked.
Doku nodded. "Eight shinobi. The best I could assemble on short notice. A jonin leading, the rest are chunin-level. They know the palace layout. They know the guard rotations. They know there are Suna shinobi protecting the boy."
"Suna chunin," Gama said. "Four of them. One's a puppeteer. Team leader."
"A child," Jinen chuckled. "A little girl playing ninja."
"You're awfully relaxed for a man whose country pays tribute to Sunagakure," Gama said. "If this gets traced back to you, the Third Kazekage won't send a letter. He'll send an assassination squad."
Jinen's pipe stopped midway to his mouth. "It won't get traced."
"You can guarantee that?"
"Shinobi from the Hidden Poison Village are reliable. If they can't finish the job, at the very least they know how to escape being captured alive." Jinen put the pipe back.
"They'd better," Gama said. "Because my country doesn't have Suna's leash around its neck. If this unravels, you're the one they come for first."
Doku's fingers resumed their drumming. "That little girl walked into the Land of Dust a year ago and killed every shinobi Iwa had stationed there. I would not underestimate her."
Jinen waved his pipe dismissively. "So she killed some Iwa agents in their sleep. We're not sending her an invitation to a fair fight. We're sending eight trained shinobi from the Hidden Poison Village to hit a ceremony full of unarmed civilians. The Suna girl can't be everywhere at once."
"The point isn't to fight her," Doku said. "The point is to keep her busy while the real work gets done. Hit the gates hard. Draw the shinobi out. And while they're engaged..." He tapped the ceremony hall on the map. "The others slip through."
"To kill who?" Gama asked.
"Either of them. The boy or the girl. Doesn't matter which. One dead child and the alliance dies with them. There is no replacement for the Dust boy. He's the last of his lineage. And if the Glass girl dies, the betrothal has no bride. All Yoshimasa will have left is a four-year-old son meant for the throne. Either way, we win."
The room was quiet. Pipe smoke gathered at the ceiling in a thin grey cloud.
Jinen put the pipe back in his mouth. "Let's do it."
The ceremony hall was the largest room in the palace.
Vaulted ceilings held up by stone pillars, each one inlaid with spiraling ribbons of colored glass that caught the light from the chandeliers and scattered it in every direction. The stained glass wall at the far end of the hall depicted the founding of Suishō in vivid color, artisans shaping the first glass from lightning-struck sand, the desert giving way to beauty under their hands. It was the pride of the palace. The pride of the country.
Today, it was packed.
Yoshimasa had invited everyone. Lords from six neighboring countries occupied the front rows, each one accompanied by retinues of advisors and servants. Master artisans from Suishō's oldest families sat in the middle tiers, men and women who'd spent their lives shaping glass and who represented the economic backbone of the entire region. Wealthy merchants. Trade magnates who ran the export routes that connected the Land of Glass to the rest of the continent. Heads of prominent clans. A who's who that reflected just how many friends Yoshimasa's money had bought over the years.
The air smelled like incense and perfume and the faint chemical sweetness of the glass-bead decorations that hung from every surface.
Soran stood at the front of the hall on a raised platform, dressed in the finest robes the Land of Dust could produce. Deep blue silk with silver trim, a sash across his chest bearing his country's crest. His hair was combed. His posture was straight. Looking every bit of the young ruler he was.
Beside him, separated by three feet of polished stone floor, stood Ruri.
She wore a crimson dress with white embroidery. Long sleeves that hid her scraped hands. A high collar that she kept pulling at with one finger when she thought nobody was looking. Her auburn hair had been pinned up again, more carefully this time, with glass-tipped pins that caught the light. The powder on her face was fresh and she hadn't rubbed it yet.
She looked miserable but she also looked beautiful.
Her eyes were red. She hadn't spoken to anyone since her father's study. She stood on the platform because she'd been told to stand on the platform, and she stared at a point on the far wall because looking at Soran or her parents or any of the hundreds of people watching her was more than she could handle.
Yoshimasa and Tamayo stood behind the two children, flanking them. Yoshimasa's smile was broad and warm. Tamayo's posture was impeccable. The picture of a united family presenting their daughter to the world.
The officiant, an elderly man in white robes who served as the Land of Glass's ceremonial authority, read from a scroll. The words were formal. Ancient. A declaration of intent between two nations, binding the Land of Dust and the Land of Glass in an alliance sealed by the betrothal of their heirs. Not a marriage. Not yet. A promise. The first step on a road that would take years to complete.
Karura stood against the western wall of the hall, ten meters from the platform. Her Byakugan swept the room. Every person in the room was catalogued. Every servant. Every guard. Every lord and merchant and artisan who'd come to witness the ceremony. She checked hands. She checked sleeves. She checked the gaps between robes where a weapon could hide and any signs of the Transformation jutsu.
Nothing. Clean. Everyone was who they appeared to be.
Sayo stood near the eastern entrance. Torune covered the service door behind the platform. May was posted at the main entrance with her fan across her back, watching the hallway that led to the palace's front gates.
The officiant reached the midpoint of the scroll. He asked Soran to state his name and intention.
Soran stepped forward. "I am Soran, Lord of the Land of Dust, son of Lord Hakurei. I come with the intention of uniting our nations in partnership and trust, for the prosperity of both our peoples."
The officiant turned to Ruri. "And you, child. State your name and intention."
Ruri's lips parted. Nothing came out. Her eyes stayed fixed on the far wall. The silence stretched for one second. Two. Three.
Tamayo's hand touched her daughter's back. A gentle pressure that said speak.
"I am Ruri," she said. Her voice was small. Barely audible past the first few rows. "Daughter of Lord Yoshimasa. I..." She swallowed. "I accept this betrothal."
The words sounded like they'd been pulled from her throat with pliers. But she said them. And the officiant nodded and continued reading.
Karura's Byakugan swept outward. Past the walls. Past the palace grounds. Into the streets of Suishō beyond.
Movement.
Her focus sharpened. Eight chakra signatures, moving in formation through the streets east of the palace. They were spread across two groups. Five approaching the main gate from the boulevard. Three circling south toward the garden wall.
Armed. Trained. Moving like people who knew exactly where they were going.
Karura's hands moved to her scrolls.
Her Byakugan tracked the five-man group. The southern group was lighter. Three shinobi moving fast along the garden wall, heading for the blind spot behind the ornamental glass spire that Torune had identified two days ago.
Two-pronged attack. The main force hits the gate to draw attention. The infiltrators slip through the gap while everyone's focused on the front.
Karura was already moving.
She found her squad's chakra signatures in the crowd without turning her head. Sayo near the platform. Torune by the service entrance. May along the far wall. A small genjutsu. Sayo had taught her this special trick during their regular lesson exchanges, and the Byakugan made it trivial to cast at range, locking onto their chakra networks across the hall without a single hand sign.
To each of them, Karura appeared right in front of them, close enough to touch. The same message, delivered three times in the same breath.
"Eight enemies incoming. Five at the main gate, three at the southern garden wall. Armed shinobi, not civilians. Protect the people in this hall. Nobody leaves, nobody enters. I'm intercepting the front group."
The genjutsu dropped.
May's response was immediate. Her fan was already sliding off her back.
Sayo shifted toward the platform where Soran and Ruri stood. Her flat eyes had gone sharp.
Torune moved to cover the service entrance. His hand went to his puppet scroll.
Karura walked toward the main entrance of the ceremony hall. To anyone watching, it looked like a girl in a yellow scarf stepping outside for air. The Byakugan tracked all eight signatures as she crossed the threshold into the corridor beyond.
She broke into a run.
The front gate exploded inward.
The two palace guards posted at the entrance didn't have time to draw their weapons. The blast of wind that hit the gate tore the iron-banded wood off its hinges and sent it tumbling across the courtyard in a shower of splinters and twisted metal. One guard was thrown ten meters. The other was pinned under a section of the gate frame, screaming.
Five shinobi walked through the smoke.
The leader was at the center. Average height, lean build, a cloth mask covering the lower half of his face. His hands were still extended from the wind jutsu that had opened the gate. The four shinobi flanked him in a loose diamond, weapons drawn. Two carried swords. One held a pair of curved knives. The fourth had his hands already cycling through seals for another jutsu.
They made it six steps into the courtyard.
Three scrolls hit the ground in front of them.
Smoke erupted. When it cleared, three puppets stood in a line between the attackers and the palace. Short. Squat. Bottom-heavy frames with wide stances and thick legs planted in the stone. Their heads were carved with vertical lines like cage bars, and from the housing mounted in each puppet's torso, a length of heavy segmented tail was already extending, the barbed tips gleaming with poison.
This was Warden or Wardens in this case.
The leader's eyes narrowed. "Puppets. The Suna girl."
She stood at the palace entrance, her fingers raised, chakra threads catching the sunlight for a fraction of a second before they went taut.
The leader's response was a wind jutsu.
His hands blurred through seals. The air in front of him compressed into a blade of cutting wind that screamed across the courtyard toward the three Wardens. The blast hit the center puppet head-on.
The Warden's tail whipped forward. The segmented tail locked rigid and the flat head of the tip turned into the wind blade like a shield face. The cage-bar face stared back at the leader through the fading gust, unmoved.
"Go!" the leader shouted.
The four others split. Two broke left, two went right, trying to run past the Wardens toward the palace entrance. The leader himself charged up the center, drawing a blade from his hip.
A fourth scroll hit the ground between him and Karura.
Smoke burst and cleared. Another Warden, identical to the other three, planted itself in his path. Its tail was already extending, the pointed tip shooting toward his chest before the smoke had fully dispersed.
He twisted sideways. The tip passed close enough to slice through the fabric of his sleeve. Wind chakra coated his blade, extending the cutting edge by half a meter, and he brought it down on the tail in a hard two-handed strike. The transparent edge hit the segments and sparks flew. A scratch in the iron. Nothing more. The tail whipped sideways and he had to throw himself backward to avoid being swept off his feet.
Behind him, his team was already in trouble.
The left Warden's tail fired. The pointed tip shot from the housing with a sound like a whip crack, extending twenty meters in the span of a heartbeat, the sealed scroll inside feeding segment after segment in an unbroken stream. The tip punched toward the two shinobi breaking left.
The first one dodged. A body flicker that carried him three meters sideways, the tip passing through the space he'd occupied a fraction of a second before. The second wasn't as fast. The point caught his sword arm above the elbow, punching clean through the muscle and out the other side.
He screamed and grabbed the tail with his free hand, trying to wrench it loose.
Karura's fingers twitched. Inside the housing, something clicked. The pointed tip split apart and reformed, segments rotating, barbs folding outward from the shaft like teeth finding their bite. What had gone in easily would not come out so easily.
He saw the change and his face went white.
The leader didn't see it happen. He was too busy trying to get past his own Warden.
He came in fast, wind blade high, aiming for the puppet's neck. The Warden's tail intercepted, the flat tip catching the blade and deflecting it wide. He recovered, spun, came low. The tail was already there, sweeping his legs. He jumped it, body flickered forward three meters, and slashed at the puppet's body.
The tail retracted faster than he could close the distance. It coiled around the Warden's torso like armor, the segments interlocking, and his wind blade hit layered iron instead of wood. The impact jarred his arms to the shoulders. The Warden didn't move.
He disengaged. Circled. The puppet's cage-bar face tracked him, rotating on its neck joint with a faint wooden creak. The tail uncoiled and extended again, the tip following his movements, always between him and Karura.
He tried the body flicker. A burst of chakra that carried him ten meters to the right, past the Warden's shoulder, a clear line to the girl at the palace entrance. For half a second, the path was open.
The tail crossed the gap before he finished the flicker.
Twenty meters of segmented iron, extending from the housing in a blur, the pointed tip arriving at his destination before he did. He appeared with the tail already waiting, the tip hovering a foot from his face. He threw himself sideways and the tip punched through the space where his head had been, cracking the courtyard wall behind him.
He landed rolling. Came up with a kunai in his off hand. Threw it past the Warden's left side and flew through the seals for the substitution jutsu. His body swapped with the kunai in a flicker of chakra, placing him behind the puppet, next to Karura.
Just as he was swinging his sword to decapitate the girl, the tail was already coming.
The tail shot toward the kunai, intending on deflecting it away, only to swing into the leader. He narrowly blocked with his sword. The impact sent him skidding across the stone, his sandals carving grooves in the courtyard floor.
She was watching him. The girl at the entrance. She hadn't moved. Her fingers were raised, threads fanning from all ten, and her eyes were on him like a hawk. Every feint, every flicker, every substitution. She saw it all.
Behind him, the courtyard was a slaughterhouse of his squad's failure. The screaming had stopped from one of the left-side shinobi. The Warden's squat body had pinned him to the ground, three hundred pounds of wood and iron sitting on a man whose body was going numb from the poison in the barbs. The other left-side shinobi was being reeled in by the third Warden, the tail wrapped around his waist, his sword chipping against segments that wouldn't break.
The right side was worse. Both caught. One ankle-hooked and dragged across the stone. The fourth, the one with curved knives, had tried to free his companion and been caught by a sweep that wrapped the tail around both of them, binding them together in a tangle of iron segmented tail.
The leader turned back to his Warden. Sweat ran down his jaw behind the mask. His wind blade flickered. His breathing was ragged. He'd thrown his best at this thing. Speed, substitution, misdirection. None of it mattered. The girl read every move before he made it and the tail was long enough, fast enough, and flexible enough to cover every angle of approach.
A fifth scroll hit the ground beside the first Warden.
Smoke. And when it cleared, a second Warden stood next to the first. Same squat frame. Same cage-bar face. Same heavy tail already extending from its housing, the pointed tip rising to join the first in tracking his movements. Two tails now. Two puppets between him and the girl.
She'd been holding back.
Four Wardens for his team. She'd assigned one puppet per man and still had enough threads left over to dedicate one to him. And now she'd added another...
The leader looked at his team. Four shinobi, caught, pinned, wrapped in segmented iron. He looked at the two Wardens in front of him, their tails swaying like the stingers of scorpions waiting for a reason. He looked at the girl who hadn't taken a single step toward him, who'd beaten his entire squad without moving from the palace entrance.
The mission was over. It had been over from the moment those scrolls hit the ground.
"I'll ask this now," Karura said. "Who sent you?"
He let his wind blade dissipate. The transparent edge faded and left an ordinary sword in his hand. He lowered it.
"It doesn't matter." A sad smile appeared on his face. This was an S-rank mission for a good reason…
His right hand moved toward his own collar. His fingers found the seam where the cloth folded double and pulled. A senbon came free, thin as a hair, and he drove it into his own neck.
Karura saw it through the Byakugan. The needle sliding between the tendons, finding the artery. The poison entering his bloodstream the instant the tip broke skin. She lunged forward even as fast as she was the compound was already in his blood.
The jonin's legs gave out. He dropped to his knees, then forward onto his face. His hand was still pressed to his neck, the senbon buried to the hilt. Dead in three seconds.
Behind her, the captured chunin were doing the same thing. Even pinned, even wrapped in segments, their fingers could still reach their own clothing. One tore a needle from the lining of his belt and jabbed it into his wrist. Another twisted his hand up to his collar, found the seam, and stuck himself in the throat. By the time Karura turned the Wardens to try and pin their arms flat, two were already gone, the poison working through them in seconds. The third convulsed, his eyes rolling, and went still. The fourth, tangled in segments with his companion, had to work harder for it. His fingers fumbled along the hem of his sleeve, found what he was looking for, and pressed the needle into the skin behind his ear. His eyes met Karura's through the Warden's cage-bar face. He laughed. Then he died.
Five dead. Five needles. No answers.
[Tenfold has activated!]
[You have gained tenfold loot!]
Their gear flooded her inventory. Weapons, armor, pouches, scrolls, soldier pills, money. Five shinobi's worth of equipment multiplied by ten.
She'd deal with it later.
Karura brow furrowed. She'd wanted them alive. She'd used Wardens specifically to capture them. And they'd still manage to kill themselves. How infuriating… Warden was built for the sole purpose of capturing. The thought of an enemy killing themselves did cross her mind but not through this way… Karura would have to make some modifications to Warden's poison after this mission. Something more fast-acting…
Her Byakugan snapped back to the palace interior. The ceremony hall. She'd tracked the southern three-man team while fighting the front group, keeping them in her peripheral. Two of them had engaged the palace guards at the garden wall, a noisy distraction. The third, the small fast one, had slipped through the blind spot behind the ornamental spire and entered the palace through a service corridor on the ground floor.
He was inside the ceremony hall.
Moving through the panicking crowd toward the platform.
Toward Ruri.
The explosion at the gate shook the ceremony hall.
The chandeliers swayed. Glass beads clinked against each other. A crack ran up one of the pillars and the crowd reacted instantly. Screams. Lords standing from their seats. Servants dropping trays. The officiant's scroll slipped from his hands and unrolled across the platform floor.
"EVERYONE STAY CALM!" Yoshimasa's voice cut through the panic. He was on his feet, his arms spread, trying to hold the room together by force of will. "Guards! Secure the entrances!"
The palace guards moved as fast as they could. By the time they reached the doors, May was already there, her war fan open to full spread, blocking the main entrance with her body and three meters of iron-ribbed canvas.
"Nobody leaves," May said. Her voice carried. "Stay in the hall. We have this under control."
Sayo had moved to the platform. She stood between Soran and the crowd, her flat eyes scanning every face, every hand, every person who moved in a direction that didn't make sense.
Torune sealed the service entrance behind the platform. His puppet emerged from its scroll, four-armed and hooded, its frame filling the doorway.
The crowd pushed and shoved. Lords demanded explanations. Merchants grabbed their valuables. A woman was crying. A child was screaming. The hall was in chaos.
Soran stood on the platform. He hadn't moved. His hands were at his sides, steady. Beside him, Ruri had flinched at the explosion. Her eyes were wide, her face pale, the powder on her cheeks standing out against skin that had gone white.
"What's happening…?" She whispered.
Soran didn't answer. He was watching the crowd. Watching the doors. Watching the shinobi, and understanding that something very bad was happening and the shinobi were the only thing between the people in this room and whatever was coming.
The crowd churned. Bodies pressing against bodies. The guards trying to establish order and failing. In the chaos, one figure moved differently from the rest.
He was small. Average build. Dressed in servant's clothes that were close enough to the palace uniform to pass in a crowd but not quite right if you looked closely. The collar was wrong. The sash was tied on the wrong side. Details that nobody would notice in a panicking crowd, because nobody was looking at servants when the building was shaking.
He moved through the press of bodies like water through rocks. Sliding between gaps, never pushing, never drawing attention. His right hand was inside his jacket. His eyes were on the platform.
On Ruri.
Sayo didn't see him. She was focused on the crowd nearest the platform, the lords and retinues who might rush the stage in a panic. The infiltrator was coming from the far side of the hall, through the densest part of the crowd, where faces blurred together and individual movement was impossible to track.
Torune didn't see him. His attention was on the sealed service entrance, where the sound of fighting had started, the other two southern attackers engaging the guards in the corridor beyond.
May didn't see him. She was holding the main entrance against a crowd of terrified people who wanted out no matter what.
The infiltrator reached the edge of the platform. He pulled himself up with one hand. The other hand came out of his jacket holding a short blade, curved, single-edged.
He looked at Ruri. Six meters away. Standing on the platform in her crimson dress, frozen, staring at the chaos in the hall. She wasn't looking at him.
He was three steps away when Soran moved.
The boy didn't think. He wasn't thinking about politics or alliances or the future of his country. He saw a man with a blade walking toward a girl who couldn't see him, and his body moved before his mind had finished processing what his eyes were showing him.
He crossed the platform in two strides and threw himself in front of Ruri.
The blade came down and Soran screamed.
It caught Soran's left shoulder. The curved edge bit through the silk of his ceremonial robe and into the flesh beneath, carving a line from the top of his shoulder to the middle of his upper arm. Not deep enough to hit bone. Deep enough to open the skin and the muscle underneath in a gash that sprayed blood across the platform.
Across Ruri's dress.
Across Ruri's face.
Across Ruri's hands.
Soran hit the platform floor on his side. His left arm wouldn't respond. Blood pooled beneath him, spreading across the polished stone in a dark red sheet that reflected the colored light from the stained glass wall.
The infiltrator raised the blade again. One more swing. Finish the boy or the girl. Mission complete.
A tail punched through the ceremony hall's side window.
Glass exploded inward. Colored shards scattered across the platform in a spray of red and blue and gold. The Warden's tail, extending from the courtyard outside, shot through the broken window and across the hall. The barbed tip caught the infiltrator's blade arm at the wrist.
He tried to swing anyway. The tail went taut. His arm jerked to a stop mid-stroke, the blade inches from Soran's head. He pulled against the tail. The barbs dug in. Blood ran down his forearm and dripped onto the platform.
He slashed at the tail with his free hand, pulling a secondary blade from his belt. The short knife bounced off the heavy segments. He slashed again. Again. Each time the tail held and each time the Warden outside the window planted harder, its squat body dropping lower, its thick legs driving into the courtyard stone.
Karura was already inside the hall. She'd come through the main entrance, past May, moving faster than anyone in the room could track. She crossed the hall in seconds. Her hands wove through signs as she moved.
Dog. Tiger. Rat.
Chakra pulsed from her fingertips into the infiltrator's nervous system. A genjutsu. His eyes glazed. His body went rigid. The secondary blade slipped from his fingers and clattered to the platform floor. In his mind, he was somewhere else. Somewhere still and quiet where his body didn't need to move and his hands didn't need to reach for the poisoned needle on his person.
Karura reached him. She pulled a senbon from her pouch and stabbed the needle into the infiltrator's neck. His muscles went slack. His eyes rolled back. He crumpled to the platform floor, alive, unconscious, and still carrying every secret his employers had sent him to die protecting.
Karura turned to her squad. "Sayo, take him. Get everything. Who sent them. How many. What they know. Everything."
Sayo was already moving. She knelt beside the unconscious infiltrator and pressed her fingers to his temples as she wove through hand signs with her other hand. She'd crack his mind like an egg and read what spilled out.
"May, secure the hall. Nobody leaves until we've cleared every exit. Torune, the other two are still in the service corridor."
They moved.
Torune was already at the service door. He'd heard the fighting on the other side die down to two voices and the scrape of boots on stone. The palace guards had bought time but they were losing. He slid the door open and sent his puppet through.
The two southern attackers had cut down three guards and were pushing toward the hall when Torune's puppet came around the corner. Four-armed, hooded, the two extending limbs unfolded from its shoulders, segmented lengths snapping rigid, while the lower pair held its curved wrist blades low and wide.
They were skilled shinobi, however it didn't matter. They were fighting in a narrow corridor against a puppeteer who'd been waiting for them, and a narrow corridor was the worst place in the world to fight a four-armed puppet with nowhere to dodge.
The first attacker lunged. The puppet's upper right limb extended, segments shooting forward, and caught him in the chest before his blade reached striking distance. The impact drove him backward into the wall. He bounced off and tried to roll under the follow-up, but the lower right wrist blade was already sweeping low. It caught his thigh, punching through the muscle and pinning him to the stone floor. He screamed and grabbed the blade with both hands, trying to pull himself free.
The second attacker tried to use the opening. He came over his partner's body, short sword aimed at the gap between the puppet's upper limbs. The puppet's left extending arm whipped sideways and caught his sword arm at the wrist, coiling the segmented length around his forearm. The lower left wrist blade came up and pressed against his throat. He froze.
"Give up." Torune said.
The sword clattered to the floor.
The puppet's upper limbs retracted, pulling both men toward its body. The extending segments wrapped around them, binding their arms to their sides, pinning them against opposite walls of the corridor. Both alive. Both disarmed. Both reaching for their own clothing.
The first one on the floor, the one with the blade through his thigh, had his free hand tearing at the seam of his collar. His fingers found something thin and dark and pulled it loose. A senbon. He drove it into his own neck before Torune understood what he was looking at.
"Hey!" Torune shouted.
Too late. The man's body seized. His eyes rolled back. His legs kicked twice against the stone and then he was still.
The second man was already working at his belt lining. Torune's puppet tightened its grip, the arm-blades pressing harder into the wall, but the man's hand was free and his fingers were fast. He tore a needle from the stitching along his waistband and brought it toward his throat.
Torune's puppet caught his wrist. The segmented upper limb shot down and coiled around his forearm, pinning it to the wall. The needle was an inch from his skin. The man thrashed, pulled, twisted, tried to angle the point toward any vein he could reach. The puppet's grip didn't loosen.
"Let go of me!" the man hissed through his teeth. His eyes were wild. "Let go!"
Torune's puppet pried the senbon from his fingers with its lower hand and snapped it in half. The man sagged against the wall. His jaw was clenched. He glared at Torune with the look of someone who'd been denied the one thing he wanted.
One dead. One alive. One more for Sayo.
Karura turned to the platform.
Soran lay on the polished stone. Blood soaked his left side, the ceremonial robe ruined, the deep blue silk turned black where the wound had bled through. His face was pale but his eyes were open. He was looking up at the ceiling, at the chandeliers still swaying, at the colored light still falling through the windows that hadn't broken.
Karura knelt beside him. Her hands glowed green.
The Mystical Palm Technique. Chakra flowed from her palms into the wound without touching it, the healing energy hovering centimeters above the torn flesh, accelerating the body's natural repair processes. The bleeding slowed. The muscle fibers began to knit. The skin at the edges of the gash started drawing together.
"You're going to be fine, Soran." Karura said. Her voice was steady. Gentle. The voice she used for Yashamaru before he joined the academy and got a boo boo. "The cut was shallow. Hold still."
Soran looked at her. His eyes were bright with pain but behind the pain was something else.
"Is she okay?" he asked.
Karura blinked. "Who?"
"Ruri. Is she hurt?"
Karura looked over her shoulder. Ruri was on the platform three meters away, on her knees, in a crimson dress that was now darker than crimson across the front where Soran's blood had hit her. Her hands were pressed against the stone, trembling. Her face was streaked with blood and tears and cracking powder.
"She's not hurt," Karura said. She turned back to Soran. The green glow of her healing chakra reflected in his eyes. "You protected her."
"She was right there." Soran said. Like it was the simplest thing in the world. Like there hadn't been a choice at all.
"That was very brave." Karura said. She smiled at him. "I'm proud of you."
Something happened to Soran's face that had nothing to do with the blood loss. A warmth that started behind his eyes and spread outward until his entire expression softened into something so open and so naked that it would have been embarrassing if it weren't so sincere.
Karura finished the healing and extracted the poison from his body. The wound closed to a thin pink line, still tender, still raw, but no longer bleeding. She helped him sit up.
"Don't move that arm too much for a few days." She told him. "The muscle needs time to fully repair."
Soran nodded. He wasn't really listening. He was watching Karura stand and turn to survey the hall, her scarf catching the colored light, her hands still faintly glowing green. He watched her with admiration and more...
Ruri saw it.
She was still on her knees. Her hands still pressed to the stone. Soran's blood was drying on her skin, going tacky and dark. The tears hadn't stopped. They ran through the blood on her cheeks and left clean tracks in the red.
She'd watched the whole thing. The blade coming down. The boy she'd called a dirty boring loser from a dying country throwing himself between her and death without a second of hesitation. His blood spraying across her.
He'd bled for her. He risked his life for her. Nearly died…
She didn't understand it. She was too young to understand most of it. But she understood enough to know that nobody had ever done anything like that for her. Not her father. Not her mother. Not Haru or Natsuki or Ren. Nobody had ever looked at a blade and decided that their body belonged between it and hers.
"I'm sorry…"
Her voice cracked on both words. Small and broken and raw in a way that had nothing to do with the volume.
Soran looked at her. He was sitting on the platform with his left arm held gingerly against his side, Karura's healing still tingling through the closed wound. He looked at the girl in the bloody crimson dress, on her knees, crying.
He didn't understand why she was apologizing. She was just a girl who'd been in the wrong place, or the right place depending on how you looked at it.
But the version of Ruri kneeling in front of him now was different from every version he'd seen before. The screaming brat on the palace steps. The annoying girl who insulted his home. The ignorant princess who hated him.
This version was different.
"It's okay." Soran simply told her.
"IT'S NOT OKAY!" Ruri's voice broke again. Louder this time, cracking at the seams. "I said horrible things to you! I called your country, I called you, and then you just- you just..." She looked at the blood on her hands. His blood. "Why would you do that?!"
Soran didn't take long to respond.
"Because you were in danger," he said. "And I could do something about it."
A girl was about to be hurt and he was close enough to stop it. That was all. It was what a man should do. A sentiment that lived in his chest and had been growing there since the day a girl in a yellow scarf had freed his country and promised to come back when it was strong again.
He looked at Karura. She was across the hall now, speaking with May at the entrance, her back straight, her scarf catching the light from the broken window. The colored glass on the floor threw fragments of red and gold across her feet.
The look on his face was the same one he'd worn when looking at her. The same one he could never quite keep off his face when she was nearby, no matter how hard the ruler in him tried.
Ruri followed his gaze.
Across the hall. Past the panicking crowd, the guards, the lords being escorted out. Past Torune's puppet blocking a doorway and Sayo kneeling over an unconscious body. To the girl in the yellow scarf standing at the entrance with colored light in her hair.
Ruri looked at Karura.
Then she looked at Soran looking at Karura.
And she understood.
Oh.
He already had someone in his heart.
Something in Ruri's chest twisted. She didn't have a name for it yet. She was too young. But she felt it, a quiet ache that sat behind her ribs and pulsed in time with the tears still running down her face.
She looked at her blood-covered hands. She looked at Soran's closed wound. She looked at the girl in the yellow scarf who'd healed him and called him brave and smiled at him in a way that made his whole stupid face light up.
And for the first time in her life, Ruri felt small. She'd realized, suddenly and painfully, that the world was bigger than her and her anger and her freedom and her friends, and that the boy sitting next to her in a blood-soaked robe understood that in a way she was only just beginning to.
She wiped her face with the back of her hand. It smeared blood across her cheek.
"I'm really sorry…" she said again. Quieter this time.
Soran looked at her. The girl who'd called his country a dying dirt heap. The girl who tried run away from their engagement. The girl who was now covered in his blood and apologizing through tears she couldn't stop.
He didn't feel love. He didn't feel warmth. He didn't feel anything close to what he felt when Karura smiled at him.
But a nicer version of the demon he'd had to interact with so far wasn't bad.
"It's fine." He said. And he gave her a small, tired smile.
Ruri's crying didn't stop. But something in it changed to something that might, with enough time and enough growing, become the beginning of acceptance.
On the platform, in a pool of drying blood and broken glass, two children sat side by side and looked at a world that was bigger and harder and more complicated than either of them had been ready for.
The stained glass wall threw colored light across them both. Red and gold and blue. All of it pretty. All of it fragile.
All of it still standing.