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AN
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I'm on break from school, so there will likely be more chapters coming out...
Happy reading.
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The laboratory seemed even worse once Yuuki was standing inside it.
The only steady light came from rows of green glowing tubes arranged with obsessive neatness along the walls and from a few surviving bulbs that buzzed weakly overhead. Their sickly light reflected off broken glass, overturned stools, and old stains on the floor. Some of the cages had been bent open from the inside. Others stood empty with their locks still in place.
Whatever had escaped had not left quietly.
Yuuki walked slowly, keeping one hand near the wall and the other curled into a fist. His short range chakra sense kept tugging at every tiny presence nearby, bugs in cracks, something small nesting behind a cabinet, the faintest flutter of life inside several of the unbroken tubes.
'I came in here thinking I would find clues. I did not think I would find a whole nightmare factory.'
He stopped before one of the tubes. A shockingly blue snake drifted in the green liquid, long and thin, with scales that seemed to catch faint sparks beneath the glass. A clipboard hung from a hook at its side. Yuuki lifted it carefully and read the faded entry.
"Subject 8-V is a failure. Though still living, the lightning chakra derived from the Storm Release bloodline overloaded its senses and forced it into a coma. It may wake eventually. Disposal is authorized."
Yuuki stared at the snake for a long moment.
"Storm Release," he murmured. "That is from Kumo, right? Lightning and water together." He swallowed and glanced toward the dark corners of the room. "So they got samples from the previous war, and Orochimaru got his hands on them somehow. That is... not comforting."
The name brought old memories with it, Darui and his black lightning, the strange logic of bloodlines that belonged to people rather than study manuals. But the snake did not know any jutsu. It had only been used to test whether its body could carry something it had no business carrying.
That made the decision easier.
"Sorry," Yuuki said quietly, laying his palm against the cold glass. "You deserved better than this."
Black smoke spilled from his hand. It covered the tube, the metal brackets, the green fluid, and the motionless snake within. When it faded, the entire apparatus was gone.
For a second, nothing happened.
Then a sharp, clean sensation passed through Yuuki's mind. The laboratory's dim edges became easier to separate. The buzzing bulbs, the small scratches along the floor, the distant drip of water from a broken pipe, each seemed to arrive in the right order instead of all at once.
Yuuki blinked rapidly. "Whoa. I can think faster." He flexed his fingers, then caught himself before the excitement ran away with him. "Not smarter, probably. Just... faster. My reactions too."
He tried to picture lightning running through chakra pathways and immediately stopped. A bloodline did not become a finished technique just because Predator had stolen a piece of its function.
'The snake never used Storm Release. Neither can I. If I start throwing lightning around in an abandoned lab, I will probably electrocute myself and make this day even worse.'
Yuuki continued deeper into the laboratory. He avoided anything marked with an obvious subject number at first, taking only objects that could be useful without turning him into another experiment, sealed rolls of wire, a compact first aid kit, glass vials, a whetstone, several metal scalpels, a small oil lantern, and a sturdy pair of storage boxes. Each disappeared into Predator's smoke before he moved on.
"I can use the wire for traps," he muttered, keeping his voice low despite being alone. "The lantern is obvious. Vials could hold poison, assuming I do not poison myself first. And these..." He held up a scalpel, then immediately put it away. "These are useful in the least pleasant way possible."
The more he collected, the more wrong it felt. The supplies had belonged to people who hurt living things for information. But leaving useful equipment to rot in a place like this felt wasteful too.
'Take what helps me survive. Do not become the kind of person who made this place.'
His eyes fell on another glowing tube.
Inside floated a small monkey. It was unconscious, its limbs loose in the green liquid, but it looked far too healthy for something that had spent who knew how long trapped behind glass. Its brown fur was glossy. Its breathing was slow and steady. A clipboard rested against the tube's base.
Yuuki picked it up.
"Subject 3-M is a failure," he read. "I theorized that combining the cells with a primate would produce a more stable result. The vitality is far too powerful for the host's body to contain. There is no need for disposal. Subject may prove useful for future application with the H-Cells."
Yuuki frowned at the last line. "H-Cells? What kind of code is that?"
He looked at the monkey again. The creature's health made his skin crawl. It did not look sick. It looked as if someone had poured too much life into a body too small to hold it.
He knew he should walk away. There was no reason to touch an experiment whose note basically said too much vitality. That was the sort of warning label every protagonist ignored immediately before gaining a problem disguised as a power up.
Yuuki's hand rose toward the glass anyway.
'It is unconscious. It has been left here to die or be used again. If Predator can take the useful part without the same failure...'
He shut his eyes. "I hate that this makes sense."
Black smoke consumed the tube.
The reaction was immediate.
Heat erupted beneath Yuuki's skin. Not warmth, heat, violent and alive, surging from his chest into every limb. His knees struck the floor. The green light bent and blurred as chakra flooded through him in wild, uneven waves.
"W-what the hell is happening?" he gasped.
His chakra spiked, fell, then spiked higher then before.
The sensation was not like having too much energy after a good meal. It was as if his body had become too small for the thing inside it. Every heartbeat struck hard enough to hurt. Tears gathered in his eyes before he could stop them. He clawed at the front of his shirt, trying to breathe around the pressure crushing his chest.
'Stop. Stop, stop, stop. Predator, undo it. Throw it back. Do something!'
Predator answered with nothing but the black presence it had always been.
Then, as suddenly as it began, the storm inside him settled.
Yuuki stayed on the floor, shaking. The laboratory was silent except for his breathing. He waited for the pain to return. It did not.
Something had changed.
His chakra felt deeper, denser. It did not simply move through his body anymore, it pressed against his senses like a reservoir filled too close to the brim. Even his muscles felt charged, as if he could run for hours without drawing a full breath.
"What in the world did I just do to myself?"
He looked around at the empty space where the tube had been and felt a stab of fear that cut through the excitement.
'No time, that spike was huge. Surely the ANBU will have felt it. I need to get out before someone finds me next to the evidence.'
Yuuki ran.
He climbed the steep passage beneath the hollow stump, shoved himself into the cold night air, and sprinted toward the grove. The Forest of Death should have been loud with winter creatures and distant movement. Instead, the trees seemed to give him a wide berth.
His chakra sense told him why before his eyes did. Small animals were retreating from him. Not fleeing from footsteps or scent, but fleeing from the pressure rolling off his body.
'They can feel me. Not like a proper sensor can, maybe, but they know something is wrong.'
He leapt for a branch out of habit.
Chakra flooded into his palm with the old, familiar motion, except there was far too much of it. The branch exploded beneath his grip, showering bark and splinters into the darkness.
Yuuki landed hard, stared at his smoking hand, and slowly looked up at the wrecked limb.
"...That should not happen."
He kept running on the ground. Even at full speed, exhaustion did not come. His lungs did not burn. His legs did not shake. The new vitality pushed him forward with terrifying ease.
'H-Cells. Storm Release. More chakra. Worse control. I have absolutely no idea what is happening, and that is the worst possible sentence to be saying while I am running from ANBU.'
The cabin appeared through the trees sooner than it should have. Yuuki slipped inside and pulled the door shut behind him. For several seconds he stood with his back against it, trying to make his breathing quiet.
"All right," he whispered. "No more running from the problem. I need to figure out what changed."
He sat cross legged on the floor and closed his eyes. His chakra sense stretched outward by instinct.
At first, he saw only the usual close map of life around him, insects in the cabin walls, a sleeping mouse beneath the floorboards, roots drinking deep below the soil.
Then he pushed farther.
The sensation expanded like a curtain being ripped open.
Yuuki's eyes snapped wide. "Holy shit. Is that my chakra?"
He could feel it spilling past the cabin, saturating the grove in a pressure that did not belong to a four year old Academy student. The animals had not been afraid of him merely because he was running loudly. They had been afraid because his chakra was screaming into the forest.
"Every sensor in the village can probably feel me right now," he said.
The words reached the air before their meaning fully did.
Yuuki went still.
"...Every sensor in the village can feel me right now."
Panic tried to take over. He forced it down and grabbed at the first memory that might help, Rimuru, frightening an entire goblin village before learning to draw his aura back in.
'Different setting. Different power system. But chakra is still mine. If I can push it out by accident, maybe I can pull it in on purpose.'
"Predator," Yuuki said, holding his hands in front of him. "I need help. Just this once. Please."
Nothing happened.
He swallowed and tried again, this time imagining the black smoke not consuming an object but wrapping around the leaking pressure. His chakra bucked against the effort. Sweat formed at his temples. For a few terrible seconds, it only spread farther.
Then the pressure bent inward.
Yuuki dragged it close in uneven pulls, like hauling a heavy net through water. The wild aura around the cabin shrank. It did not disappear entirely, but it settled into something far smaller, still larger than it had been that morning, but no longer a beacon visible across the village.
Yuuki sagged forward, palms against the floor.
"Okay. Okay, that worked." He swallowed a shaky laugh. "That worked. I have no idea why it worked, but I will take it."
His chakra sense swept the clearing again.
Five presences stood beyond the web alarms.
Yuuki froze.
'People outside?'
He crept to the narrow shutters and peered through a crack. White masks waited between the trees. One carried the long, familiar shape of a dog mask.
Inu.
Another ANBU stood near him, quiet and motionless. Yuuki could not see the operative's face beneath the mask, but something about the tall, muscular build and the way long brown hair had been tied down at the nape tugged at his memory.
'Something about him is familiar. No, I'm imagining things. Half the shinobi in Konoha are built like that.'
"Are you sure it was him?" the dog masked operative asked.
The second ANBU tilted his head, as though listening to something Yuuki could not hear. "One hundred percent. I sensed his chakra this morning. It is different now, but it is still his."
Yuuki's stomach sank.
'He knew my chakra from this morning, so he's a sensor, and he's been near me before today. Great. This is going very well.'
Inu crossed the clearing and knocked once on the cabin door. "Yuuki. We know you are inside. Come out, please."
The word "please" did not make it sound less like an order.
Yuuki opened the door slowly. The cold air brushed his face. He looked up at the masks, then tried to arrange his expression into something worried and small.
"Am I in trouble?"
Inu studied him. "That has not been decided."
The answer was careful enough to be frightening. Inu stepped aside and gestured deeper into the grove. "We need to talk. Have you come across any unusual underground rooms or laboratories in this forest?"
'Wow. No easing into it at all.'
Yuuki rubbed his thumb across the heel of his palm, buying time. He had practiced lies for adults before, small ones, mostly, about why he was tired or why his clothes were dirty. This was not one of those. One wrong detail and he would be explaining Predator to the Hokage.
"Yeah," he admitted, because denying it now would be stupid. "I found a lab. I did not know what it was at first." He looked down. "There was broken glass everywhere. I picked up a notebook, slipped, and cut my hand on something. After that, my chakra went crazy. I got scared and ran."
His lie sat heavily in the silence that followed.
The second ANBU's masked face turned toward his palm. "Show me."
Yuuki held it out. A shallow cut crossed his skin, made earlier with one of the stored scalpels while he was deciding how much of the truth he could survive telling. It stung sharply enough to sell the story.
'I am lying to a whole squad of ANBU at the same time. Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic.'
Inu examined the injury without touching it. "You returned here immediately?"
"Yes, sir."
"Did you see anyone else?"
"No. Just a lot of broken cages." Yuuki hesitated. A child would be afraid, he reminded himself. A child would want answers. "Is it dangerous?"
Inu's dog mask did not move, but his voice lowered. "Yes."
That one word held more truth than anything else Yuuki had heard tonight.
"From what I have heard," the second ANBU said, his voice altered by the mask but carrying a warmth that nagged at Yuuki's memory, "you will not be in serious trouble for reporting, or surviving a dangerous discovery. But your chakra change needs to be examined. You will come with us to the Hokage Tower."
Yuuki nodded quickly. "Okay."
Inu reached for his wrist. "Hold on to me."
The world vanished.
The body flicker was not like running. It was not even like falling. The forest became a rush of broken color and pressure, then the stone streets of Konoha slammed back into place beneath Yuuki's feet.
He blinked once, twice, and found himself outside the Hokage Tower.
Inu looked down at him. "Most people feel sick the first time they experience that."
Yuuki stared up at the broad red doors. His stomach felt strangely steady, but dread had settled there in its place. "Really? I thought it was kind of... weirdly fast."
"That is not usually considered a compliment."
Yuuki almost laughed. It came out as a thin breath instead.
'The Storm Release causing the faster processing. That is probably why I can follow it. Do not say that. Do not say anything interesting.'
Inu knocked. A voice from inside answered at once.
"Come in."
The office beyond was warmer than the winter street and somehow much more intimidating. Hiruzen Sarutobi sat behind a long desk crowded with reports, scrolls, and an ashtray. He still looked younger than the old man Yuuki remembered from the anime, dark hair only beginning to gray at the temples, a trimmed goatee, shoulders straight beneath the Hokage robes. At one side of the room sat Homura Mitokado and Koharu Utatane, both watching him with unreadable patience. At the other stood Danzo Shimura, hands folded into his sleeves, his stare flat and assessing in a way that made Yuuki's skin prickle.
Yuuki's mouth went dry.
'Of course all of them are here. I could not just get caught by one adult. I had to get caught by every politically terrifying adult in Konoha.'
Hiruzen's expression softened when he saw Yuuki. "Yuuki Mori, I remember seeing you during my speech at the Academy." His voice was calm, but his attention missed nothing. "Inu tells me you encountered a laboratory in the Forest of Death. Why dont you begin at the point you entered the forest this evening?"
Yuuki told the story he had prepared, keeping the important parts as close to truth as possible. He admitted to being angry after losing to Kanari. He admitted to returning to the forest to train. He admitted to following an animal into the underground passage. Every true detail made the lie easier to hold.
"After some warm ups, I decided to explore," he said. "I fought a few animals, then one ran away into the place I found. I could not catch it, but I got curious and went after it."
Hiruzen's brows rose. "You use the Forest of Death to train? And fight its animals?"
Yuuki lowered his gaze. "I thought it would make me improve faster."
"There are public training grounds," Hiruzen said, not unkindly. "Any citizen of Konoha can use them, provided they understand the risks. Academy students can also hire approved instructors at a reduced rate. You did not need to risk your life alone among creatures that would happily eat you."
Yuuki looked up, genuinely startled. "Wait. Really? I thought those places were only for actual shinobi."
For a moment, Hiruzen laughed. It was warm, not mocking. "No, child. A village that waits to teach its people until after they are shinobi has failed them."
The softness left Danzo's face before it had ever properly arrived. He struck the desk with his palm. The sharp crack filled the office.
"Enough," he said. "The boy was found inside a laboratory that bears every mark of Orochimaru's work, after releasing a chakra signature strong enough to alert internal security. This is not an Academy guidance session."
Hiruzen's eyes turned toward him, something sharpening behind the calm. "That is a specific name to put to a laboratory nobody has finished examining, Danzo." His voice remained quiet. "It is also not an interrogation room. Yuuki will finish his account, and I will decide for myself whose work that laboratory is."
Danzo's eyes narrowed, but he did not speak.
Yuuki forced himself to continue. "I found a journal and tried to pick it up. I slipped and stabbed my hand on something. Then my chakra... changed. It hurt a lot, and I could not control it. That is all I know."
"You expect us to believe you simply stumbled into a laboratory experimenting with Hashirama's cells, and happened to inject yourself with them?" Danzo asked.
The name hit Yuuki harder than the accusation.
'Hashirama cells.'
Memories of the anime flashed through him, impossible regeneration, stolen power, failed experiments, bodies overwhelmed by the First Hokage's vitality. He kept his face blank with effort.
Hiruzen's gaze sharpened. "Danzo."
"He should understand the danger," Danzo said. "The cells are not a toy. Most who receive them die or become something else. Yet this child survives and leaves behind a chakra signature unlike anything an Academy student should possess."
Koharu folded her hands. "His survival does not make him guilty of intent."
"It does make him a security concern," Homura added, his tone even. "Those are different matters."
Hiruzen nodded once. "Exactly. We will address both appropriately."
He looked back at Yuuki, and the weight in his eyes made Yuuki feel seen in a way he did not like. "You will be examined by our medical staff. For the next several days, you will not return to the Academy or the Forest of Death. Your teachers will be informed that you are absent for medical observation."
Yuuki swallowed. "Am I going to die?"
The question was not entirely an act.
Hiruzen's expression eased. "I do not know yet. But we will not ignore the possibility, and you will not face it alone."
Danzo made a small sound of displeasure. Hiruzen did not look at him.
"Thank you for your report, Yuuki," the Hokage continued. "You may go with Inu now."
Yuuki bowed too quickly and turned for the door.
Behind him, Danzo said, "Hiruzen, you cannot honestly accept-"
"We will speak once the child is gone," Hiruzen cut in.
Yuuki closed the door behind him before he could hear the rest. The hallway felt cold after the office, even though the windows were shut.
'They do not believe me, atleast not fully. Danzo definitely does not believe me. But Hiruzen did not order anyone to take me apart and see what falls out, so that is a win.'
"Do not relax yet," Inu said from beside him. The other ANBU had already dispersed, leaving the dog masked operative alone in the hall. "You still need to see the medical-nin."
Yuuki groaned. "Right. Of course I do. This day just keeps finding new ways to get worse."
Inu's hand closed around his wrist again. "Hold on."
The Konoha Hospital appeared around them in another flash of motion. Yuuki kept his face carefully neutral this time.
"Still not sick?" Inu asked.
"Still not sick."
"Unfortunate. It builds character."
Yuuki stared at the dog mask. "Was that a joke?"
"No."
It absolutely had been a joke.
Inu stopped at a plain door and knocked twice. "Doctor Inoha? I have the patient Lord Hokage asked you to examine."
"Send him in," a tired voice called.
Inu opened the door, then stepped back. "Good luck, Yuuki."
"That does not sound reassuring."
"It was not intended to be."
The ANBU vanished before Yuuki could answer.
Inside, the examination room smelled sharply of antiseptic and herbs. A woman in a white medical coat looked up from a stack of charts. Her dark hair had been pinned into a practical bun, and the sleeves of her coat were rolled to her elbows. Whatever the official report had said, she clearly already knew enough to be curious.
"Yuuki Mori? I am Doctor Inoha. Come in, please." She pointed to a narrow hospital bed. "Lie down. I need your pulse, your chakra pathways, and several answers. You will remain here overnight for observation. This is for your safety, not research."
Yuuki climbed onto the bed, eyeing the instruments beside it. "You said that very specifically."
Doctor Inoha paused, then smiled despite herself. "That is because someone will eventually accuse me of the second thing."
Yuuki lay back, still tense. The ceiling above him was plain white. For the first time since he had touched the monkey's tube, he was not running, fighting, lying, or trying to force his chakra into behaving.
That was somehow the scariest part.
'Hashirama cells. I swallowed Hashirama cells. I have no idea what I am now, what Predator is doing to me, or what the village will do if they find out.'
Doctor Inoha set two fingers against his wrist. Green chakra gathered around her hand.
"Try to rest," she said.
Yuuki let out a weak laugh. "I will try."
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AN
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Wowie, quite a few things happened this chapter. I wonder how this will affect Yuuki's current standing, hmm hmm...
Anyways, leave any reviews or criticism in the comments so I know what to improve. Thanks for reading!
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