In the melancholic dusk of Tierra del Fuego, where the sun bid farewell to the skyline in a torturous display of fiery oranges and deep violets, the moon shyly emerged, reborn from its fleeting daily demise. The once-vivid golden glow splintered into faint echoes that capered across remote peaks, yielding to the encroaching gloom that rose like an unseen, suffocating shroud over the ancient world's foundations. The atmosphere bore the damp scent of rich soil blended with the briny tang of the nearby sea, while breezes murmured age-old mysteries through the foliage of Patagonian trees, which bowed like timeless guardians.
Beneath this thickening mantle of night, muffled footfalls shattered the primeval stillness. The noise was distinctive—a crisp scrape of boots against dewy turf and jagged stones, clashing with recollections of stealthy ninja sandals from far-off realms, as if eras and distances blurred in this isolated expanse. Amid the vibrant green boughs, still dotted with the dying day's light that sparkled like transient gems, a lone figure advanced.
He stood tall, roughly six feet in height, with short, tousled chestnut locks shaped whimsically by the gusts. His slate-gray gaze formed abyssal depths, probing humanity's hidden truths and mirroring an intellect beyond ordinary bounds. Clad in a heavy, somber overcoat that swayed gently in the sporadic Patagonian blasts, beneath it lay a dusky brown shirt that amplified his stern, enigmatic demeanor. His fair complexion starkly opposed a prominent scar snaking from his left cheek down to vanish at his collar—a remnant of a near-fatal slash, an indelible token of bygone conflicts.
Any passerby would instantly sense his otherness: his Western attire, upright stance brimming with assurance, and even his presence exuded an alien quality, as though fate had plucked him from another dimension and planted him here on a whim. Oblivious to any spectral judgments from the wilderness, he kept his focus locked on the freshly darkened heavens, his features stoic and unmoved, akin to a sculpture carved from perpetual frost.
With purposeful intent, he lifted his right palm.
The surrounding obscurity reacted at once, coalescing as if the void itself bent to his command. Tangible shades formed into writhing appendages, razor-edged blades, spectral beings, and shifting silhouettes that materialized and vanished in a mesmerizing loop of genesis and oblivion. This was a demonstration of raw dominion, a bending of darkness that defied natural laws and existence itself. Abruptly, he halted. His icy stare shifted rightward, alerted by a faint disturbance. Something stirred there—feeble and erratic… injured yet enduring.
Intrigue, laced with detached assessment, propelled him forward. He veered his path toward the source, guided not by mere sight but by an acute, near-mystical awareness that sensed a life force teetering on collapse.
The woodland swallowed him anew, its thick canopy obstructing the twilight's final traces, plunging all into utter nocturnal dominion. The air grew thicker, laden with moisture and the metallic odor of fresh crimson. After what felt like endless stretches in temporal suspension, he spotted the form he sought.
She was a female, kneeling on uneven ground riddled with protruding roots, propping herself up with quivering limbs. Her fiery red tresses, lengthy and vivid like living embers, clung messily to her pallid skin, matted by a sticky blend of perspiration and clotted gore. The gash at her collarbone was severe—a profound laceration that oozed sporadically, staining the earth with scarlet droplets that seeped in like echoes of a vanished lineage. She gasped unevenly, ensnared in a whirlwind of excruciating torment, so absorbed in agony that she failed to register the silent intruder's approach.
The man—Engen—halted at a prudent remove, still as the enveloping obscurity, surveying the tableau with emotionless orbs. No urgency. No sentiment. Merely observing, like a researcher examining a captivating trial, the tale of vitality, endurance, and despair unfolding before his ashen gaze.
The surrounding murk seemed to throb with anticipation, as if this chance meeting heralded an intertwined fate, the onset of something vaster and more ominous.
Merely hours prior to his entry into this secluded woodland patch, the woman had been thrust into a merciless pursuit's depths.
She hailed from a minor, shadowy faction—one of countless in the Sengoku period, destined for historical oblivion. Her group mastered the Blazing Blood Art, an ancient method enabling bodily acceleration past mortal thresholds, granting superhuman swiftness and explosive might at the expense of one's essence—a steep toll exacted in shortened lifespans and persistent anguish. This ability inspired dread and covetousness, drawing envy and ruin, with foes eager to eradicate it as a threat or seize it for personal gain.
Her kin had been ambushed at dawn by the Uchiha, a storied lineage that, in that chaotic century, broadened its sway through ruthless expansion, crushing adversaries with consuming infernos and merciless edges, forging a route to total supremacy. The Uchiha's elemental blazes devoured their modest dwellings, reducing huts to smoldering ruins, as invaders' weapons harvested lives indiscriminately, sparing neither youth nor elder.
She battled with savage intensity. Confronted four, then five, even six foes in a lethal ballet of plasma and blaze. Her veins surged with searing vitality, hurling her to dizzying velocities that briefly stunned her assailants. Lethal strikes grazed harmlessly, while her ripostes felled opponents with deadly accuracy. Yet each burst exacted a brutal levy, siphoning her core drop by drop. Attempting to shield the clan's final child—a girl with wide-eyed innocence bearing untapped promise—an Uchiha struck her collarbone with a honed dagger, the impact so exact that bone groaned in defiance, nearly fracturing. The youth collapsed lifeless, a mute wail amid the turmoil. She fled without glancing back, her spirit constricted by remorse and resolve.
And now, here she lingered.
Isolated in the forest's immense void.
With her lineage's essence—both literal and symbolic—draining from her open wound, dyeing the terrain in a mournful rite.
Each droplet symbolized a faded chronicle, a heritage whisper lost to the gales. The Uchiha still hunted; she detected their ethereal trails, like ravenous phantoms. She knew discovery loomed, sealing her end.
No tangible motives remained for survival… her group obliterated, customs turned to dust.
…yet surrender to death was forbidden, for her leader's dying plea, breathed amid the pyres, resonated unyieldingly: "Endure… and bear our spark to realms unborn. Become the ember of a blaze that will ignite anew."
She pressed onward, despite her frame's screams of torment, begging for everlasting repose.
Until he appeared.
Or rather: until he found her.
Now, facing this figure with slate eyes and a palpable aura of shadowy might, her awareness ebbed gradually, but primal senses blared in alarm. He wasn't a typical adversary—lacking rival factions' aroma or hunters' spite. Perhaps death incarnate, come to claim her. Maybe an unforeseen deliverance, a chance-formed comrade. Or simply the sole witness to her people's once-vibrant existence, fueled by ardor and tenacity.
Her breaths came ragged and halting, her torso heaving like swells in a gale. Her hazy vision, blurred by blood loss and exhaustion, finally sharpened on the silhouette before her, rigid as an eternal monolith.
She attempted speech, but only a hoarse, broken exhale emerged from her parched throat: "…You… who…"
Engen delayed his reply. He merely scrutinized with that frigid intensity, unhurried, pitiless, devoid of human warmth. As if appraising an artifact, gauging its prospective worth.
When she strove to rise, driven by a final surge of dignity, her form wobbled treacherously, threatening total collapse… but before the soil could embrace her conclusively, a solid umbra enveloped her, supporting her mass with mechanical exactness. Not an act of kindness or sympathy; merely a choice he enacted, an extension of his dominion over substance.
"You're fading," he stated at last, his tone low, resonant, and nearly stripped of inflection, resounding like an inescapable judgment. "Persist in motion like this… and you'll have five minutes left. Perhaps fewer, based on your resilience."
She gasped again, forcing a wry grin mingled with saline trails and crimson trickling from her lips: "Then… let me succumb. Let me reunite with mine."
His gray scrutiny stayed unyielding, steadfast as a crag.
"No." He elevated her slightly, the shade adapting seamlessly, like an auxiliary layer, easing strain on her weary extremities. "That would be pointless squander."
Her eyes widened faintly, bewilderment and frailty clouding her sight: "…Squander…? Of what? My existence is already spent…"
Engen placed his palm on her sternum with unexpected tenderness, yet chill as mortality's caress. The gloom reshaped fluidly and accurately, gliding like animated vapor along the lesion's jagged rims. Shades congealed the flowing vital fluid, halting the bleed with surgical precision, encasing the injury in a throbbing, arcane crust.
"You retain utility," he whispered, gaze locked on the procedure, akin to a craftsman honing his creation.
Transitory vulnerability yielded to profound astonishment, edged with instinctual dread. "Utility… for what? Who are you to decree that?"
He withheld an immediate response. Merely gazed at the waxing lunar orb overhead, as if timing events by its silvery sheen bathing the woods in ghostly hues, computing unseen formulas of fortune and prospect.
"You're tonight's remnant. That opens boundless avenues… pacts, reprisals, abilities ripe for shaping."
She swallowed hard, the iron tang persistent on her tongue, striving to unravel the puzzle before her. "You… intend to preserve me? Why? I offer nothing…"
He met her stare, his ashen irises piercing like daggers. No hubris marred his visage, nor authentic concern—just a stark assertion, as if proclaiming cosmic truth.
"I don't preserve souls. Preservation suggests clemency, and I deal not in such delusions."
"Then why… why intervene?"
"I determine survival. And you… shall persist. For I discern promise in your dwindling spark. Because the cosmos requires instruments like you for reshaping."
An unequivocal declaration. An unassailable edict.
As though her continuance now stemmed solely from his volition, a mandate redirecting fate's trajectory.
She tried to retort, parting lips to challenge or probe further, but a fresh bolt of searing anguish ripped through her like lightning, swirling the surroundings into indistinct smears. Her sight dimmed, and she lapsed into oblivion, her frame limp as a puppet severed from strings.
Before she could slump, Engen's umbra cradled her entirely, suspending her in unseen, intangible limbs, like a safeguarding cocoon wrought from the abyss.
He exhaled softly, a barely audible sound reverberating in the hush, tinged with measured vexation.
"Delicate… yet defiant. That could prove advantageous, if honed properly," he mused aloud, as if evaluating a fresh acquisition in an expansive armory.
Then he raised his countenance once more, his sharpened faculties detecting subtle shifts in distant glooms. Six crimson points, each etched with dual swirling commas, materialized amid sparse trunks, gleaming like infernal optics in the black.
Sharingan. The cursed orbs of the Uchiha.
Tenacious trackers, unrelenting pursuers.
Engen narrowed his lids fractionally, a flicker of annoyance etching his features, like one bothered by persistent pests on a serene evening.
"If you've ventured this far… it's because you covet what is now mine," he breathed, his timbre infused with chill proprietorship.
"Who do you think you are to menace us?" countered one Uchiha, his words laced with the clan's signature conceit. Two sets of Sharingan flared brighter, steeped in evident ire, the commas whirling madly as Engen locked gazes.
At once, the boldest lunged at Engen, dagger gripped, his form blurring with shinobi celerity.
"Wai—" The companion sought to warn, urgency threading his cry, but too late.
A deafening crack of flesh and skeleton fracturing resounded through the grove, akin to an aged bough snapping under storm's burden. Half the assailant's torso was rent asunder by a vast maw of void that manifested abruptly, consuming him in a ravenous flash. The aberration was glaring: Engen hadn't formed hand seals, flouting jutsu's core tenets.
The remaining Uchiha furrowed his brow, Sharingan dissecting the spectacle with keen insight. Anomalous, verging on sacrilegious, to summon such force sans rituals, yet he masked his shock. Swiftly, his digits wove a rapid sequence, peaking in a signature technique: "Fire Style: Great Fireball Technique!" A mammoth sphere of conflagration erupted from his maw, bellowing toward Engen with primal fury.
But——
Before the blaze contacted him, Engen conjured an Executioner's Blade in his grasp, a tenebrous edge keen as emptiness. With a seamless, sparing arc, he cleaved the ether—and the Uchiha—in twain, the weapon slicing through tissue, framework, and energy as if parchment. The bisected remains thudded earthward, the inferno scattering into harmless embers.
"Your ally was overly presumptuous," Engen taunted, addressing the smoldering husk of the initial foe, a malicious grin twisting his mouth for the first time, unveiling the macabre delight he drew from slaughter. The final Uchiha appeared profoundly aggravated by Engen's quip, his Sharingan ablaze with unadulterated rage, yet he refrained from rash assault like his kin. Instead, he stepped back, reassessing the adversary with heightened vigilance.
"You're no ordinary shinobi… What lineage claims you? What bloodline limit is this?" queried the lone survivor, his pitch subdued and strained, as he covertly sealed for a subtle illusion, commas spiraling in entrancing designs.
Engen tilted his skull subtly, the vicious smirk broadening into predatory hunger. "Lineage? Bloodline limit? You Uchiha and your archaic categorizations… I transcend them. I am the gloom that devours blazes."
With nonchalant extension, he proffered his left appendage, and the woodland's shades converged, erecting an impermeable shield that nullified the budding mirage as naught. The hunter blinked, astonished, but countered nimbly: summoning Amaterasu, eternal ebony flames bursting forth at Engen.
Yet Engen's shades surged as a maelstrom, engulfing the indestructible fires in boundless depths, quenching the unquenchable. "Intriguing… But inadequate," he remarked, progressing with measured, intentional strides.
The Uchiha, now in restrained panic, attempted evasion, but shadowy coils ensnared his limbs, hauling him rearward. "Hold! Who are you? Why meddle in Uchiha concerns?"
Engen loomed over the prone form, Executioner's Blade hovering at his throat. "I am Engen. And I meddle because I choose. Because this female is now my implement… and you are mere hindrances."
With a concluding stroke, the edge descended, dooming the final tracker. The grove reclaimed tranquility, disrupted solely by zephyrs and the distant wheezes of the insensate woman.
Engen surveyed the cadavers briefly, plotting subsequent maneuvers. "Opportunities…," he intoned, lifting her in his umbral embrace. He vanished into the obscurity, abandoning only the vestige of a skirmish destined to reshape every facet of existence.