The sterile emptiness of the Hyuuga compound clung to Kanzai like a bad smell. Clean. The word tasted like ash.
Where he'd expected the rich, festering rot of generations of suppressed fury and inherited shame – the perfect breeding ground for something like him – he'd found only... absence. A void. Like arriving at a promised feast to find the tables bare, the plates polished and cold.
Unnatural.
His thoughts, sharp and hungry, circled back to the anomaly within those sterile walls: the Uchiha. Not the clan, whose district still radiated the delicious, familiar tang of pride curdled into resentment and grief – a larder he knew intimately.
No, the specific Uchiha. The one with eyes like polished obsidian and hair like spilled ink, who had knelt before the trembling Hyuuga heiress.
Shisui.
Kanzai knew the taste of Uchiha souls. Their cursed energy was a signature dish. Especially the moment of Sharingan awakening – that explosive surge of raw, unfiltered power erupting from the crucible of pain or rage.
Crimson eyes blooming, tomoe spinning, the air crackling with unseen energy they wielded blindly. A beacon. A dinner bell. Kanzai had feasted on the ambient spillage near countless young Uchiha, drawn to the potent negativity they radiated without ever seeing it.
But Shisui... Shisui was different.
Standing now far beyond Konoha's walls, the sterile wind whipping across desolate hills, Kanzai replayed the scene. Shisui had radiated that potent Uchiha energy – refined, humming with latent power. Yet... it hadn't spilled. It hadn't been an unconscious emission born of emotion.
When Kanzai's predatory focus had sharpened on the Hyuuga girl's flicker of despair, Shisui's energy hadn't spiked in alarm like an ordinary Uchiha sensing threat.
Instead, it had... flowed.
A subtle, deliberate current. Shifting. Directing itself between the man and the child like water guided by an unseen hand. A soothing counterpoint woven into the tense air, precisely where Kanzai had been poised to strike.
Not a reaction.
An action.
A manipulation.
Then, the casual lie about the Akai boy. The positioning – a shield formed of casual posture. The deliberate turn, the exposed back radiating an almost insulting lack of awareness... yet Kanzai had felt it.
The faintest, tautest thread of perception stretching back, monitoring the space Kanzai occupied. Not a direct stare, but undeniable awareness. A sentinel's vigilance hidden beneath indifference.
He knew.
Not everything. But enough. He sensed the pressure, the unseen threat. And he reacted not with blind Uchiha fury, but with calculated deflection and veiled control.
He used his cursed energy... like a tool. Not just a symptom of his bloodline.
A low, grinding rasp vibrated in Kanzai's throat, the sound of ancient stones shifting. Confusion warred with a sharp, prickling fascination.
This Uchiha shattered the mold. He wasn't just prey or a passive font of energy. He was an anomaly. A human brushing against the edges of Kanzai's unseen world.
Did he see the curses? Did he understand the dark energy leaking from his own clan's eyes? Was he like Danzo, hoarding stolen power for control? Or like the snake, dissecting it with cold, surgical curiosity?
The emptiness of the hills pressed in, offering no sustenance, only the sterile wind and the unsettling puzzle of Shisui Uchiha.
Kanzai tilted his head, ancient eyes fixed on the distant silhouette of Konoha. The Uchiha compound still pulsed its familiar, tempting aura of bitterness within those walls.
But a new scent lingered now, sharper, more complex, cutting through the stale resentment: the scent of an Uchiha who might see.
Potential threat?
Or... something else entirely?
Click.
The pieces snapped together in his ancient, twisted mind. He was no mere cursed spirit. He was one of the first.
Forged in the cold, blood-slicked darkness of Danzo's discard pile, he had devoured curses and learned human folly for decades.
He understood chakra – their clumsy, visible power. He saw how the Uchiha bled cursed energy blindly, how the Hyuuga suppressed theirs until it festered, how Danzo drowned in stolen rot, how Orochimaru dissected the boundaries.
And Shisui... moved his.
Like a fish trying to act as if he never knew how to swim.
"Sloppy."
The guttural word scraped the air, the realization settling like cold iron in his core.
But it wasn't just Shisui.
The Akai boy. The one he'd encountered before, whose eyes had met his across a space that should have been empty. The fluctuation in the boy's cursed energy... Kanzai had dismissed it as anger. Fear would have screamed awareness. Anger was just... human noise. A convenient misdirection.
"What a show," Kanzai rasped, the wind snatching at his voice. "If you're pulling strings like this... then that kid was faking too."
A presence flickered. Not sound, not sight. A sudden, silent distortion in the fabric of the air itself, sharp as a knife-cut.
Kanzai didn't turn. He didn't need to.
The wind itself seemed to part – a clean, sudden displacement – and then, ten paces away, materializing from the moonlit gloom:
Shisui Uchiha.
Kunai held loosely, yet precisely. Headband catching the pale light. Eyes deliberately dark, Sharingan leashed but the potent energy coiled beneath his skin a palpable thrum in the silent expanse.
"I must say," Kanzai murmured, a slow, unsettling smile stretching his features as he faced the anomaly. "That kid was a better actor than you are, Shisui Uchiha."
Shisui remained still, a statue carved from shadow and moonlight. His gaze, however, swept over Kanzai – not the unfocused stare of a man looking through something unseen, but the slow, deliberate assessment of someone who saw. Who measured.
"How long," Shisui asked, his voice calm, cutting straight to the core of the threat, "have you been around?"
Age. The true measure of a curse born from human suffering. The key to its power.
Kanzai's unsettling smile widened, a predator amused by the hunter's directness. "Hm. What an interesting question for a first meeting. Do you ask everyone their age the moment you see them?"
"Does it matter?" Shisui countered, his tone flat, unwavering. "I don't expect an answer from you anyway... Cursed Spirit."
Kanzai chuckled, a dry, grating sound. "Rude. But I suppose it is an interesting question." He tilted his head, feigning thought. The jagged tomoe in his eyes seemed to spin slowly in the moonlight.
"When was it again...? Before that Snake-like man defected from Konoha."
Snake.
The only one that came to Shisui's mind was him.
Orochimaru.
If that was the case, then it would be several years ago.
"...So, what are you going to do? If looks could kill, you have a very interesting one there," Kanzai stated.
Shisui's Sharingan shone brightly and spun slowly, much like Kanzai's jagged-pupiled Sharingan.
"Well, you're not wrong about that. After all, you're not even human."
"You'll kill me for that? What was it you called me... 'Cursed spirit'? What an amusing term. That being said... I think I'm more human than you are."
Shisui's expression remained unchanged, unlike the ever-smiling Kanzai, who frequently radiated bloodlust.
"More human? Who? You?" The sarcasm in Shisui's tone was palpable.
"That aside, I am surprised," Kanzai tilted his head. "Why did you follow me this far?"
Shisui didn't flinch. His red eyes stared, unblinking.
"Because people will die if I don't."
Silence fell—thick and heavy.
Kanzai took a step forward. The grass recoiled beneath him. The air didn't grow colder, but it tightened, as if the sky itself was listening.
Another step. The grass beneath his bare feet withered, shrinking away as if the earth refused to hold him.
Then he smiled—not the kind that welcomed peace.
"Hey... do you know about it... The Binding Vows?" he asked lightly, almost conversationally.
Shisui blinked. "...What?"
Kanzai's head tilted. "Ah. So you don't." Delight laced his voice, like a storyteller finding a willing ear. "Let me tell you, then. A Binding Vow... is a promise. A very special promise?"
Shisui narrowed his eyes at Kanzai's questioning inflection. "That's not an answer."
"But it is," Kanzai said, circling silently. "Simply put? A Binding Vow is when you swear something so completely that the world itself listens."
Shisui tracked him with his gaze. "Like a jutsu contract? A summoning pact?"
Kanzai laughed—sharp and short. "No. No ink. No signatures. You offer the world something real—something personal—and it rewards you."
The wind stirred faintly. Kanzai stopped before Shisui, close enough to share breath.
"You could make one too," he whispered.
"Swear never to raise your blade again... and maybe, just once, the world will let you strike with godlike power. Or give up that Sharingan of yours—for something far more interesting."
"What a strange way to say 'equivalent exchange'."
Kanzai's grin widened. "Exactly. Now you understand."
His voice dropped conspiratorially. "But... These days one question comes into my mine: imagine what you'd have to give... to bring someone back."
"To... bring someone back?"
"Yeah," Kanzai said casually.
"That look—you're wondering if I did it." He studied Shisui's impassive face.
"Sorry to disappoint you; I didn't. Trivial things like resurrecting the dead only work when you actually have someone you want to revive."
His grin faltered slightly. "But that was the point of that place: research into eternal life, 'that guy' said."
"...Which place?"
"You wouldn't know it," Kanzai replied, almost wistfully. He exhaled slowly; his breath curled like smoke in the cold.
"I wanted to destroy it. That place."
Shisui stayed silent. Watching. Every word was a stalling tactic.
"At first, I thought it was rage," Kanzai continued.
"But it wasn't. It was curiosity."
His eyes glowed faintly with something hungrier than light. "I wanted to see what would happen when I crushed it—the buildings, the names, the bloodlines. Would anyone remember? Would anyone care?"
He stepped forward, silent over cracked stone. "I've killed more humans than I can count. It's so easy, I started to wonder—were their lives ever worth anything to begin with?"
A flicker of thought crossed his face. "Then I saw humans killing humans like it was natural. Execution. Betrayal. Sacrifice. Wrapped in ceremony and excuses."
He locked eyes with Shisui. "I was born from that. From their fear. Their hatred. Their lies. So I asked myself—what if I'm not the monster?"
His voice lowered, raw.
"What if I'm just the reflection?"
The silence that followed felt like a reckoning.
"I don't pretend like you do," Kanzai declared.
"I don't hide behind smiles and laws like you humans did, without needing some sense of thoughts to justify my actions. I kill when I want. I eat when I want. And when I speak—"
His eyes sharpened.
"—it's as if something inside me won't let me lie."
He raised a hand slowly, fingers spread toward the sky as if demanding witness.
"So I concluded this: those monkeys in their villages, with their customs and rules—they're not human."
His voice dropped to a poisonous whisper.
"I am."
Without warning, his hand snapped down, arm leveled like a blade at Shisui.
"I am the truest human."
His final whisper was laced with venom:
"And it's... nice," he said, grin curving like a hook, "to see one of you evolve."
.
.
.
To be continued.