The Night Lantern club pulsed like an infected vein in the icy heart of a forgotten shinobi border town—a den of filth, black-market deals, sex, and suffering. Outside, snow fell in harsh drifts, muting even the distant, hopeless screams that sometimes echoed through the alleys. Inside, the stink of sweat, whiskey, and bloodthirst hung thick. Mercenaries and rogue shinobi lounged in dim corners, eyes sharp and hungry, hands always drifting toward hidden blades.
Above them—silent, almost invisible in the writhing black of the rafters—waited a nightmare most of them didn't believe in. The Red Hood. A legend among corpses. A shadow with a vendetta.
From his vantage, Red Hood watched as two guards ushered a buyer—a greasy brute with a missing-nin headband—toward a locked side door. He noted every detail: the twitch in the buyer's jaw, the calluses on guards' trigger fingers, the desperate girls' broken sobbing almost lost beneath the music. He counted ten men he'd need to kill before they could sound an alarm; another six hovered near the bar, mostly muscle, all scum.
He shifted slightly—armor and weapons making no sound. The club lights cut across the battered, angular lines of his crimson helmet, the glowing white eyes staring down with predator's patience. Wrapped in a ragged gray-blue cloak with wild fur around the collar, he looked nothing like the child who'd been driven out of Konoha all those years ago. His segmented black armor, red bat emblem, bandaged leg, and lethal weapons—all marked a survivor who'd embraced the abyss and come out meaner on the other side.
He saw a girl, maybe thirteen, shoved to her knees by the bar. A trafficker, teeth brown and smile obscene, bent to paw at her face. Red Hood's fist clenched around a baton so tight his knuckles ached. He'd tracked these bastards north through weeks of fucking snow and filth for this moment. Nobody in this room was getting out alive.
He moved. Ghost—no, monster.
Dropping from the rafters behind the first two guards, he snapped a neck with one flick of his wrist; as the second spun, Red Hood's pistol silenced any outcry with a mystic-charged shot that bored a glowing hole straight through his skull. Music stuttered. Screams started as he landed—crouched, red helmet glinting under the flicker of guttering neon.
"Who the fuck—" barked a rogue, reaching for a blade, but Red Hood blurred. One moment on the tiles, the next behind the man—Specter's Passage. Katana unsheathed, a red arc traced across flesh; the man hit the ground twitching, eyes open and sightless.
Gunshots. Shattered glass. The club erupted into chaos as he tore through bodies, a tornado wrapped in shadow and violence, never hesitating. He blocked a wild kunai with his forearm guard and uppercutted the bastard hard enough to send teeth flying into the cheap lights. Every scumbag that rushed him died—shot, stabbed, or left with snapping, wet limbs. Blood spattered the stage, the bar, the terrified girl cowering near the dance floor.
He tracked shots with assassin's precision, making them count. A trafficker tried for the stairs; Red Hood marked the rail, teleported with a whisper, and landed a boot in his chest—sent him through the railing and snapping his spine. More came, more died. Red Hood was everywhere—vaulting, leaping, impossibly fast, impossibly savage.
Within minutes, it was over.
The last man—the head trafficker—dropped his weapon and tried crawling for the door. His pants were soaked, his face broken and desperate. Red Hood strode over, boots crunching glass, blood drying in thick, sticky streaks along his armor.
"I—I can pay. I can—" he whimpered.
Red Hood hauled him up, helmet inches from the trembling face. Through the red steel, those cold, white-lit eyes were merciless. "You sell children," he rasped. "You're not even worth the fucking bullet." He twisted the trafficker's head with a brutal snap.
He wiped the gore from his gloves, moving through the carnage. Survivors—shaking, battered girls—stared at him with terrified hope. He knelt, voice softer but unyielding. "You're safe now. Anyone tries to hurt you again, remember this face."
He dropped his signature: a bloodied red hood calling card pinned to the chest of the last corpse, a warning to every monster who thought the world too dark for justice. Then he turned, cloak fluttering cold in the winter air, and vanished through the shadows—already hunting the next lead in this endless, filthy war.
The blood on the floor would freeze by morning, but the nightmares he left behind would linger, raw and unforgettable.