Chapter 271: Trafalgar Hospital
The voice of heaven — vast and distant and untouched by the ordinary world.
What Ritsu felt in that moment was something entirely new. His understanding of Physical Regeneration had broken open in a way it never had before. If someone had destroyed his body completely in the past, death would have come for him eventually — that had always been the outer limit. That limit was gone now. As long as even the faintest thread of his true will persisted, he could draw natural energy from the world around him and reconstitute himself from it entirely. His flesh had been elevated into something that had no name in the vocabulary of the ninja world.
To put it simply — he was no longer human.
He had still been human enough before today, however generously one stretched the definition. Now the concept didn't apply. The shape he wore was human. Nothing else about him fell within those boundaries any longer.
"The voice of heaven." He murmured it and let the faint smile stay on his face. "And Level 6 is only a new starting point."
In the ninja world, truly, he had reached something like absolute supremacy. The only beings that could pose a threat to him were the other Otsutsuki scattered across the universe — and even they held no fear for him now, nor would they be arriving for decades at minimum.
He closed his fist slowly.
He was still suspended in the red-earthed alternate dimension, floating above Madara's fallen body. And now that he had taken the Chakra Fruit from Kaguya, he felt the connection to this dimension — and all the other dimensions governed by the Rinne Sharingan — settle naturally into him. They weren't independent places. They were extensions of the Rinne Sharingan's power, and through the Chakra Fruit, they were now his.
The Rinnegan between his brows had changed as well. The pale violet had bled into crimson, and nine black magatama rotated through it in three separate tiers, soundlessly, carrying a weight of presence that was difficult to look at directly.
Every technique Kaguya had used — and every technique she hadn't had the chance to use — surfaced in his mind and settled there. Eighty Gods Vacuum Attack, Rabbit Hair Needles, Amenotejikara, Yomotsu Hirasaka, all of them known and available.
He didn't waste time. His parents, his wife, his son, his friends — he needed to confirm they were all right.
His son would be fine; the Tenseigan power that had awakened in Ryuchi would have protected him. His parents and the others were more uncertain. But he could sense them even from here, with the connection the Chakra Fruit had granted him, and the distance presented no real obstacle. He'd deal with the Sage God technique first.
He formed a single Ram seal.
Releasing the Sage God: Advent of a World of Flowering Trees wasn't simple as a concept — the seal itself was straightforward, but the prerequisite was Rinnegan power combined with the strength of all nine Tailed Beasts. Normally that meant a Ten-Tails jinchuriki. But Ritsu was effectively that now. When the Tokoyo Insect had extracted the Chakra Fruit, it had brought the Ten-Tails' power along with it. That was precisely why Kaguya and Black Zetsu had ceased to exist rather than merely being defeated.
The seal broke. Across the entire ninja world, the divine trees and their cocoons began to dissolve.
He reached out with his awareness — across the distance, all the way to Konoha — and found what he was looking for. Aika and Ryuchi both registered clearly, their chakra moving normally, untouched by the Sage God technique's effects. His parents and the others had been caught but were unharmed.
Everyone he cared about was alive.
The relief settled through him like something he hadn't realized he'd been holding until it was gone.
He collected Madara's body and stored it.
Then he formed the hand gesture for Yomotsu Hirasaka — still unfamiliar, still not quite natural in his hands — and opened the black gate.
He stepped forward into it.
The moment he crossed the threshold, something happened that he hadn't anticipated.
An enormous force flooded into the technique from some direction he couldn't identify — not destructive, not hostile, but powerful beyond any reasonable scale. It found Yomotsu Hirasaka and poured through it the way fuel finds a flame, driving the technique far past the range it had been designed to cover.
The black portal stretched and warped. The distortion it produced was the kind that didn't bend space so much as blur the concept of it. The point where the gate's other end should have opened — Konoha, a fixed location, a short jump — slipped away.
The universe's boundaries smeared.
The exit point drifted.
What it drifted toward was a planet where blue ocean covered nearly ninety percent of the surface.
Ritsu's will fought back. It wasn't enough to redirect the gate entirely, but it was enough to keep the exit from opening over open water. Some part of him that still functioned found a coastline, found a town — a densely populated place, the scale of it not unlike Konoha — and pulled the opening there instead.
He crossed through.
His body came apart in the turbulence. The transition between universes wasn't something a physical form could survive intact — not because the physical form was weak, but because the rules governing what a physical form was had changed between one side and the other. The blood mist that he scattered into was pulled in every direction by forces that didn't care what he'd been a moment ago.
Most of him was lost in the turbulence.
What remained — a thin trace of blood mist, barely enough to register — pushed through the gate's exit into a world that was not the ninja world and had never been anything like it.
The mist began pulling at natural energy immediately. It was the instinct of Level 6, operating without any conscious direction.
But the natural energy here was wrong. Not corrupted, not absent — simply from a universe that ran on different rules. The Chakra Fruit's immortal power, which had been woven through everything he was, came apart in this new environment. The Divine Tree's force fractured and scattered as pinpoints of fading light.
What remained, holding the last thread of him together, was the superpower itself. Physical Regeneration at Level 6. The voice of heaven, operating on the absolute minimum it could manage.
It kept him alive.
It built him a body — barely functional, incapable of movement, closer to a vegetable than a person — and it dropped that body into a garden that was, by any reasonable standard, beautiful.
His consciousness was in fragments.
He could hear something. A child's voice, high and urgent, calling for her parents. He tried to hold onto awareness and found that the trying didn't accomplish anything. The transit had consumed more than he had to spend. Even the voice of heaven needed recovery time after something like this.
The darkness took him.
In the ninja world, the release of the Sage God technique registered everywhere. The cocoons dissolved. People came back to themselves without understanding what had just happened or why it had stopped. They looked at each other and at the changed sky and the distant echoes of the devastation in the southern Land of Lightning, and the uncertainty was large enough that nobody moved toward it immediately.
The peace that had held for six years stretched a little further, built now on fear rather than equilibrium.
Madara had vanished.
So had the Fifth Hokage.
The two facts sat together in people's minds and assembled into the most available explanation: mutual destruction. The most powerful missing-nin in history and the most powerful ninja in a generation had eliminated each other. It was the kind of ending that made a certain brutal sense.
The theory spread quickly. It found believers in every village, including Konoha.
Uchiha Aika did not recover from it.
She took to her bed. She didn't leave it. Her grief was the kind that doesn't negotiate, and she died of it not long after — quietly, without drama, simply stopping.
She left behind a five-year-old boy.
Hyuga Ryuchi was not treated the way Naruto had been treated in the world Ritsu remembered. The Hyuga clan — Hyuga Takuma, Hyuga Hayato, Hyuga Akiba, Hyuga Arima, and others — refused the narrative of mutual destruction flatly and collectively. A man who had defeated Otsutsuki Kaguya herself did not die falling through a portal. They held to this belief without wavering, organized the clan around it, and with the support of the new Sixth Hokage pushed for the five-year-old Ryuchi to be recognized as the Hyuga clan's acting head.
Hiruko did not wait to be asked.
As the Hokage's official advisor he assumed the acting Hokage role without hesitation and moved to formalize it. The speed with which he did this was noted, though not without sympathy — Hiruko had no interest in power for its own sake and everyone who knew him understood that. What he had was a five-year-old boy who needed someone in that position to be protecting him, and one particular old man — Sarutobi Hiruzen — who would not hesitate to fill a vacuum if one appeared. Hiruko would not allow that. Whatever Ritsu had been to him as a student was also what Ryuchi was to him now. He had not gone through everything he'd gone through to hand the boy's future to someone else.
He became the Sixth Hokage.
Within a month of his taking office, the Fourth Shinobi World War began.
The Cloud Village, Rock Village, and Mist Village moved against Konoha simultaneously, presenting a common stated cause — that Konoha had failed to control its own missing-nin and had brought devastation to all three villages, and the reparations they demanded reflected that damage precisely. The reparations were the kind that could not be accepted by anyone. That was the point.
When Konoha refused, fighting opened on three fronts — the Land of Hot Water, the Land of Grass, and the eastern coast of the Land of Fire — all at once.
The Sand Village stayed out of it. Fifth Kazekage Pakura held her village back under enormous internal pressure, absorbing the accusations of cowardice and weakness from her own people because she judged that joining this war would not end the way its proponents believed. Chiyo and Ebizo backed her openly. Without them, the pressure might have become something the village couldn't contain.
The remaining four great villages fed each other into the meat grinder.
Hiruko fought personally, multiple times, pushing back wave after wave of coordinated attacks using the five bloodline limits he'd built over a lifetime. The war ground forward without resolution.
In a hospital bed in a world he'd never heard of, Ritsu lay completely still.
Weeks passed. Forty days. More.
His body's recovery was the slowest process he had ever experienced. The damage was not ordinary damage — it was the kind that came from crossing the boundary between universes without sufficient preparation or sufficient self to survive the transit. Even Level 6 could only work with what remained of him, and what remained was not much.
But the voice of heaven gave him something, eventually. He could receive information. He couldn't move, couldn't speak, couldn't do anything that required voluntary physical action. But the awareness came back to him — slow and fragmented at first, then more cohesive.
The language surrounding him was completely foreign.
It stopped being foreign.
That was the function of the voice of heaven operating at this level — a kind of universal attunement, not quite translation, more like understanding settling into him directly without requiring the intermediate step of learning. He listened to the small voice that came to his bedside every day, and within it he found context.
He was in Trafalgar Hospital.
A girl named Trafalgar Lami had found him in her family's garden — prone, unmoving, barely registering as alive — and had brought her parents to him. They had admitted him to the private hospital her family operated. He had been here since.
The name alone might not have been sufficient. But one afternoon Lami came with her brother, and her brother was wearing a small hat with a spotted black-and-white pattern, and that was enough.
Trafalgar Law. Young — younger than Ryuchi — but recognizable regardless.
Ritsu lay in his bed and absorbed the confirmation of exactly how far he had come.
Not a different planet. Not even a different corner of his own universe. A completely different set of physical laws, a world governed by Devil Fruits and Haki rather than chakra and jutsu. The Chakra Fruit's power had been essentially destroyed by the transit. The Divine Tree's force had dissipated. He was here on borrowed time and borrowed energy, and the portal back might as well have been a legend.
His feelings about this were not simple.
He was worried about his parents. About Ryuchi. About the wider disruption his absence would cause. If not for Hiruko, if not for Akiba and Hayato and Takuma and Arima holding the Hyuga clan together, his worry would have been considerably worse.
But Aika was the thought he kept returning to.
The Uchiha ran to extremes when their feelings ran deep — it was a pattern, something intrinsic to the bloodline's history, and Aika was as purely Uchiha as a person could be. He knew exactly how much she felt. The parallel to Kushina and Minato was not one he wanted to follow to its conclusion.
He was afraid it had already concluded.
And he could do nothing about it. The recovery was proceeding, but it was proceeding at a rate that made the word feel almost ironic. Forty-something days to recover the ability to passively receive information. To reach the point of opening Yomotsu Hirasaka with sufficient stability and precision to actually return — that was an estimate measured in years. Perhaps ten or more.
He accepted it. There wasn't an alternative to accepting it.
He talked himself toward a kind of calm, eventually. This world had things in it that the ninja world didn't. Devil Fruits, Haki, a completely different category of phenomena. Whatever time he spent here could become something — not wasted time, not punishment, but a window that his particular circumstances had opened. He would use it. When he returned, whatever regrets he carried, there might be ways to address them.
Days passed. He lay still and listened and learned.
Then one evening, the girl leaned against the outside of his window — he could see her profile from the bed — and she was crying, quietly and steadily, in the way that children cry when they've been frightened by something they don't know how to fight.
Her voice came through the glass, broken up by the effort of keeping it quiet, and she told him — the man lying in the hospital bed who still couldn't respond, who she had no way of knowing could understand every word — about her fear of dying. She didn't want to leave her parents. She didn't want to leave her brother. She didn't want to leave this beautiful world.
She was very young, and she was very afraid, and she didn't want to go.
*******************
Chapter 272: Trafalgar Lami Becomes a Jinchuriki
Ritsu lay in his bed and watched the girl with the small movements his eyes still allowed him.
Lami had decided, in her own practical six-year-old way, that the motionless white-eyed stranger in the room down the hall was the ideal confidant. He couldn't repeat anything. He couldn't judge her or offer the kind of advice adults were always trying to give. He was just there, quiet and still, and she could tell him whatever she wanted.
At first it was ordinary things — her brother had stolen her pudding, their father had forgotten for the third time that he'd promised to take her out. Small grievances, quickly shared and just as quickly forgotten. She would sit at his bedside and talk until she ran out of things to say, and then she would leave, and the next day she would come back with more.
Then, quite suddenly, things changed.
The white patches appeared on her face first. Then the life in her — which should have been growing, putting out new shoots the way young things do — began instead to diminish. It happened slowly enough that you could almost tell yourself you weren't seeing it, and then one day you couldn't tell yourself that anymore.
Ritsu already knew what it was.
Amber Lead Disease.
Prolonged unprotected exposure to the mineral called Amber Lead, accumulated heavy metal poisoning, presenting as an incurable terminal illness in this world. The World Government and the ruling class of the kingdom called Flevance had covered it up by circulating the lie that it was contagious — that the white-skinned people of this country were themselves a plague.
The country had already boarded the train to its own annihilation. It was moving toward the cliff at full speed, and nobody with the power to pull the brake had any reason to do so.
And Ritsu could do nothing.
His recovery was the kind that couldn't be hurried. Easy in, slow out — the damage was leaving him thread by thread, the same way serious illness always retreated, with the maddening patience of something that operated on its own schedule and not his. His eyes could move. That was the full extent of his functional capacity. Chakra remained entirely inaccessible.
The days went by.
Lami's visits grew less frequent, not because she had tired of him but because her illness had progressed to the point where moving freely was difficult. Her brother came in her place — the boy called Law, who wore the spotted hat and had the kind of eyes that looked at everything a little too steadily for his age. He came to visit. He kept coming.
But gradually, less often.
And each time Ritsu watched him, the anger burning in the boy's eyes had grown. It climbed with every visit, feeding on whatever Law was seeing outside these walls, until it had reached the pitch of something that didn't look like it could be contained much longer — like something that had decided, at a fundamental level, that the world deserved to burn and had begun making its peace with that conclusion.
What a rotten world, Ritsu thought, and meant it entirely.
He had been turning over the problem of what he could possibly do. Lying still and waiting wasn't acceptable — it had never been acceptable to him — but the gap between not acceptable and having a workable alternative was currently very wide.
He was still working through it when the night came that the hospital caught fire.
Smoke pushed through the open door of his room in heavy rolling waves. Through it he could hear sounds from elsewhere in the building that told him what was happening outside even before he understood it.
He had an idea.
It wasn't a good idea. It carried risks he couldn't fully calculate and depended on several things going right that might not go right. But it was the only idea he had.
His ruined body, lying in the bed — still capable of regeneration in theory, still technically a living vessel — began to change. The flesh grew dry, then drier still, the color leaving it, the substance leaving it, until within a few breaths it had crumbled entirely to ash and scattered across the bedsheet.
He had abandoned his body.
What remained was a sphere of chakra, refined down to its absolute essence, floating above the empty bed. His divine will was housed within it. It was precisely because he had reached the level of the voice of heaven that he could do this at all — could separate from his physical form and maintain his self-awareness without it, could trust that some core of him would persist.
The chakra sphere moved through the corridor.
It passed into the single-occupancy room next door and found the girl lying alone in her bed. Her life force was the kind that made Ritsu think of a candle set outside in the wind — not yet out, but the distance between now and out was very small. Even without the fire consuming the building around her, she probably had days at most.
He didn't hesitate long.
His consciousness directed the chakra sphere into her body, entering through her abdomen. Fine lines of seal script spread outward from the point of entry, tracing across her skin in patterns too small and too dense to follow with the eye, covering her entirely and then fading from visibility.
In an instant, their life forces were connected.
The relationship between them now was the same as the relationship between a jinchuriki and a tailed beast.
Lami was his jinchuriki.
The change was visible almost immediately. Her shallow, effortful breathing became steadier and stronger. The grey-white pallor of her skin warmed toward something closer to healthy. The seal lines had vanished, leaving nothing visible that anyone could point to as unusual. If Ritsu had been at full capacity — if this were not a last-ditch measure performed from a severely damaged state — the transformation would have been more dramatic still. As it was, the girl who a moment ago had been measuring her remaining time in days was now simply alive in the ordinary way.
This had been his only option: abandon what was left of his physical form, take the chakra existence that resembled a tailed beast's nature, and let Lami serve as his vessel. The parallel to the Otsutsuki clan's Karma technique was real, though imperfect. The Karma used a host's body as a container for resurrection — the original consciousness eventually fading as the Otsutsuki took over from within.
Ritsu had no interest in taking over a six-year-old girl. He wanted to save her because she had saved him. His current limitations prevented him from doing more, though he would have if he could.
Even this much wasn't guaranteed.
He had pulled Lami back from the edge, and the Amber Lead Disease would no longer kill her — given time, he could work the poison out of her system entirely. But the Amber Lead Disease was only one of the things that was going to try to kill her. The World Government and Flevance's ruling class had decided to eliminate every person in this country. In the history Ritsu remembered, only Law had survived — hidden among the dead and carried out with the bodies. Everyone else had been killed: Law and Lami's parents, the nuns and the children Law had known at the monastery, all of them falling to the systematic efficiency of soldiers following orders and a lie.
Getting Lami past the disease was the first step. Getting her past the massacre was the second, and the second was not guaranteed.
Her cheeks had recovered their color by the time he had finished thinking through this. The Amber Lead spots were still visible on her skin — clearing those would take time — but she was well. She sat up suddenly, called for her parents, and then coughed hard, looking around at a room full of smoke with wide, disoriented eyes.
She was the daughter of doctors. She had absorbed more practical knowledge than most children her age. She found a towel, wet it from the pitcher on the table, pressed it over her nose and mouth, and pushed through the door into the smoke-filled corridor. She found the emergency stairs, and she got out.
She stopped in the garden.
The entire city was burning.
Fires burned in every direction as far as she could see, and the smoke that filled the night air carried with it the smell of blood alongside the smell of burning. The bodies in front of the hospital entrance were in attitudes that left no uncertainty about what had happened to them.
Lami had been born and raised in a hospital, had grown up around illness and death, had spent months being eroded by a terminal disease. Her capacity to absorb difficult realities exceeded most children her age. But there was a distance between capacity and immunity, and seeing what lay in front of her had found that distance.
⌈Lami.⌋
She spun around. Looked in every direction. Found nobody.
"Who said that?"
⌈Don't be afraid. It's me. Your friend — the one you found in the garden. You remember?⌋
Her face went through surprise and then confusion. "The white-eyed uncle? How are you — you're in my head?"
⌈I'm inside your body right now. It was the only way I had to help you.⌋
She blinked. Then she looked down at herself, testing the sensation of breathing deeply, moving her arms.
"You saved me?" The wonder in her voice was genuine. "I don't hurt anywhere. I hurt so much before — Papa and Mama couldn't do anything — white-eyed uncle, you're amazing. Thank you for saving me."
It was said with the complete sincerity of a child who meant every word.
The fragment of Ritsu that still existed let out something that wasn't quite a breath.
⌈Lami, listen to me. You need to stay calm right now. It's very dangerous outside. You need to find somewhere to hide.⌋
"But I need to find my parents."
⌈Lami, the most important thing right now is to keep yourself safe and wait for them to find you. You're a child. If you run into something dangerous out there, you won't be able to see your parents at all. Do you understand?⌋
"But — but—"
She was still resisting, her eyes moving toward the burning streets.
⌈Lami. Don't worry. Your parents are going to be fine. I promise you that.⌋
He said it with conviction.
He knew, with reasonable certainty, that her parents were already dead. He said it anyway, because sending her out into those streets in her current state was the same as sending her to die, and this was the only thing that would keep her in place. He told himself it wasn't entirely a lie. This world had souls. It had something like an afterlife. When he had recovered his full strength — whenever that was — there was a possibility, however uncertain, that the dead could be returned. He wasn't making a promise he was absolutely sure he couldn't keep.
He was mostly sure he couldn't keep it.
He didn't dwell on that.
Lami, by nature obedient and trusting of people she had decided were her friends, chose to believe him. This was the gift and the vulnerability of children — the completeness of the trust they extended to those they accepted, given without the reservations that experience installs.
She went to the hospital's basement level, to the cold room where they kept the bodies awaiting processing.
It was cold. But the life that now moved through her was not the same life she'd had before, and the cold didn't threaten it the way it once might have. The electrical systems had been damaged by the fire, which meant the refrigeration was failing, and the temperature was slowly climbing toward something bearable. She found a drawer that was not-too-cold, climbed in, and fell asleep.
Soldiers came through the hospital at some point during that stretch of time. They swept the cold room — quickly, impatiently, the way people move through a place they don't want to be. They didn't open every drawer.
She survived on bread and water that Ritsu directed her toward in the hospital's ruined cafeteria, rationing carefully under his guidance, until the food was gone. Then she climbed back up to the surface.
The hospital wasn't there anymore.
The building she had grown up in — the clean white walls, the smell of antiseptic and her parents' voices — was gone, replaced by blackened walls and the quiet of a space that had been emptied of everything it had held. The bodies she had seen before were gone too, removed and disposed of under the cover of the contagion lie, carried away in carts like something that needed to be hidden rather than mourned.
It was in one of those carts that Law had escaped.
"Teacher," Lami said, standing in the ruins with the morning light coming through where the roof had been. "Where do I go to find my parents?"
The word came naturally, and it fit something that had shifted between them over the days underground.
Ritsu had made a decision while she slept. He couldn't stay inside her indefinitely, and he had no interest in doing so. He also couldn't remain passive while a century or more of recovery stretched ahead of him. He had thought through his options and arrived at the same answer Kaguya had arrived at before him — though her execution of the idea had left something to be desired.
She had created Black Zetsu and put her will into him, trusting him to work toward her return across a thousand years. The plan had succeeded, in a manner of speaking. The ending hadn't been what she'd intended, but the concept was sound.
Ritsu could do the same thing.
The girl had talent. It was different from her brother's — Law's gifts ran toward something specific and sharp, the kind that cut cleanly. Lami's were broader, less defined, and her fate in the original history had been insufficient to develop them. That fate had changed the moment Ritsu arrived in her garden.
Maybe, through her, the recovery that should take eighty or a hundred years could be shortened considerably. The earlier estimate of ten-plus years had been based on having a physical body to work from. Without that anchor, a hundred years was the honest number. He did not intend to wait a hundred years. Combined across two lifetimes, he hadn't lived that long yet.
He wanted to go home. He wanted to go back. Whatever had happened in Konoha without him — and he had made his peace with not knowing yet, because he had no choice — he intended to return to it.
⌈Lami,⌋ he said, in answer to her question. ⌈What you need to do right now is survive. And grow up as fast as you can. When you're grown, you can go and look for your parents and your brother.⌋
She was quiet for a moment.
She looked at the ruins.
She was young and she was trusting, but she wasn't foolish, and somewhere underneath the trust she had placed in her new teacher's promise was the beginning of an understanding she hadn't let herself fully look at yet. She could sense the shape of it. She chose not to face it directly.
She chose, instead, to believe what she needed to believe — to grow up as fast as she could, and then the rest would follow.
"Teacher," she said. "What do I do to grow up faster?"
⌈Start by looking around for food and water. The fire took a lot, but something should have survived. Let's see what we can find.⌋
And so, in the ash and rubble of a city that had been erased for the sake of a lie, a six-year-old girl and the formless will of a man from another universe began the work of surviving.
*******************
Chapter 273: A Path of Vengeance — Bloody and Unforgiving
Sea Calendar Year 1535, late in the year.
The island sat deep in the North Blue, already buried in winter. The cold that came in off the sea was the cutting kind, the kind that found the gaps in clothing and went through them, and the snow in the fields had piled deep enough to swallow a person's legs to the knee. The main road had been cleared and stayed passable, but only barely.
No one with a choice was outside.
Yet there she was — a girl making her way down the snow-blown road toward the port, walking without hurry into the wind. She was dressed for the cold in thick layers, though the layers did imperfect work of concealing the figure underneath. Her face was the kind of face that stayed in the memory — clean-featured, almost startlingly lovely — and she was talking as she walked, with the focused tone of someone mid-conversation.
There was nobody with her. No Den Den Mushi in her hand. And she wasn't talking to herself.
"Teacher, how many are left?"
"Four more in total. Only one is still in the North Blue. The other three are in the Grand Line — the royal family included."
"So we'll be heading to the Grand Line soon?"
"If I had any say in the matter, I'd have you spend more time building your foundation here first. The Grand Line is a different scale of danger entirely, and the enemy you're pursuing is the World Government. Don't let these North Blue Navy failures make you underestimate the real thing. The finest the Navy has goes to the Grand Line. The Four Blues are where they send people to practice."
The voice came from the left ear — from a teardrop-shaped white crystal earring, quiet and clear above the sound of the wind.
The girl's name was Trafalgar Lami.
The same girl that Hyuga Ritsu had saved in the burning hospital ten years ago. She had been six then. The decade between that night and this one had done its work on her outward shape, turning the frightened child into the young woman now walking calmly through the cold toward a port she had been to before.
The hatred, however, had not been changed by time. If anything it had been concentrated by it — given a decade to settle and take root, it had grown from a wound into something structural, something that had become part of how she was built.
She had sworn to find the people responsible for Flevance's destruction, for her parents' deaths, for her brother's loss. She had sworn it and she meant it. Under Ritsu's guidance she had spent ten years becoming someone capable of making good on that oath, and this year she had finally received his permission to begin.
Behind her, somewhere in the direction she had come from, the sky was bright.
The scattered pedestrians on the road had stopped walking. They were looking back, talking to each other in the urgent, confused way of people trying to understand what they were seeing — a column of fire and smoke rising from a nobleman's estate, the wrong kind of brightness for this hour.
Lami didn't turn around to look.
She walked.
The count whose estate was burning had been a duke before — a duke of Flevance, one of the kingdom's senior nobility. He had not stayed to die with his people. He had taken the wealth he had extracted from those people over the years, crossed to a new country, purchased a new title, and resumed the life of comfortable indulgence that he felt was owed to him. The massacre that had claimed hundreds of thousands of his former subjects had been, for him, a relocation inconvenience.
He had not been the only one. The entire upper tier of Flevance's nobility — the royal family at the top, the great houses below them — had known what was coming and arranged their departures in advance. The people who died that night were the ones who hadn't been told, the ordinary citizens and the minor nobles who were considered expendable to the lie that made it all possible.
Lami had survived. And Ritsu had ensured that her understanding of that night was precise — that she knew exactly who bore responsibility, not the diffuse shape of a world worth hating but specific people with names and addresses.
This was the third name. There were four more.
She didn't have to hear the commentary from the road to know what they were saying. She had watched the first one burn because she had needed to see it. The second time she had glanced once before moving on. This time she hadn't looked at all.
At the port, she found the berth and produced the ticket she had bought three days ago. The Golden Rose was a passenger vessel, medium-sized, well-maintained. It was going exactly where she needed to go next.
She boarded. The ship left port not long after.
Half a day later, a warship flying Navy colors entered the harbor and docked at the berth the Golden Rose had vacated.
The gangway went down. A column of soldiers came off first, dressed in heavy winter gear, boots striking the frozen dock in precise rhythm. Behind them came a single man — middle-aged, with close-cropped dark red hair and dark glasses, dressed in a dark blue pinstripe suit under a white coat worn across the shoulders like a cape. The back of the coat bore the word Justice.
He stopped at the end of the dock and looked around.
The dock was quiet. Cold. Nobody here looked like a problem worth his time.
The collision behind him was soft but unmistakable.
He turned with the resigned expression of a man who had said the same thing several times already. "Commander Grus," he said. "I have mentioned, more than once, that it is useful to watch where you are walking."
The young man who had walked into him was wearing a hat with an unusually long brim, which had probably contributed to the collision. He scratched the back of his head and produced an apologetic grin. "I'm sorry, Rear Admiral Hound. I didn't expect you to stop. I wasn't paying attention."
The Rear Admiral looked at him for a moment. The young man's name was Prins Grus, and he was genuinely talented — talented enough that Naval headquarters had taken notice, talented enough that his Devil Fruit was developed well beyond what most people managed at his age. He was also completely undefensive about being corrected, and apologized with the sincerity of someone who actually meant it.
This made him considerably easier to work with than certain other talented individuals Hound could name.
"Fine. We'll move on. Let's go look at the scene."
He set off toward the distant smoke.
His assignment was this: within the past two months, two noble households had been completely wiped out in the North Blue. Only the slaves and lower servants had been left alive. The countries those nobles belonged to — World Government member states, all of them — had concluded that the problem exceeded their own capacity to address and had forwarded it to the Navy with the quiet efficiency of organizations that have learned how to make other people's problems into someone else's jurisdiction.
Today made three.
Hound was one of the senior officers of the North Blue branch. His particular abilities made him the obvious choice for an investigation that, so far, had produced nothing.
The burned estate looked much like the other two when they arrived. The Count's household — every member of the family accounted for among the dead. The servants and slaves who had survived were being questioned, and producing the same useless results the other survivors had produced: they hadn't seen anything, or what they had seen contradicted every other account, or they had seen so many different people that you would have needed a small army to explain it.
And yet there was no trace of a large group having been present.
Devil Fruit ability, Hound was beginning to think. Had to be.
"Same as before," Grus reported, looking deflated. "Nothing usable."
Hound said nothing. He studied the blackened ruins and the shivering cluster of surviving staff and thought about motive. These nobles had been targeted specifically. Why them specifically, out of all the nobility scattered across the North Blue?
Were they simply convenient? Were they particularly notorious for something?
Or was there a connection he hadn't found yet?
A burst of wind came through the ruins, sharp enough that half the people present flinched and most of them sneezed, Hound included.
Then his expression changed.
He closed his eyes. The dense fur spread across his face in a wave; his nose shifted and darkened and took the shape of a large dog's nose, wet at the tip. His whole head had transformed into that of a hound. He stood completely still in the cold wind, breathing slowly.
Beside him, Grus's disappointment evaporated. He straightened up and kept quiet, recognizing the moment.
Hound had eaten the Dog-Dog Fruit, Model: Hound. Among the gifts it had given him was a sense of smell that made him, for tracking purposes, something close to unmatched in the North Blue.
And right now he was using it.
The silence stretched.
"Grus." Hound's eyes opened. "Go find out which ships left this port today."
"Yes sir."
Grus moved immediately, crossing the yard to find the harbor master's representative that the local authorities had assigned to assist them.
The answer came back quickly. Three vessels had departed that day: the Flower Dolphin, a cargo ship; the Little Bear, a passenger vessel; and the Golden Rose, also a passenger vessel.
"Which ship was in berth two?" Hound asked.
"The Golden Rose, sir."
"Then we follow the Golden Rose." He walked toward the port.
Grus fell into step behind him. "The killer is on the Golden Rose?"
"That's not confirmed." Hound shook his head. "When I came off the warship, I picked up a faint floral scent among all the other smells on the dock. I found the same scent here at the manor. Whoever carries that scent was present at this manor. Whether they're the one responsible is still an open question."
"It has to be them," Grus said, and the certainty in his voice was immediate. "I checked the numbers — the bodies and the surviving staff together account for everyone who was registered here, and no guests were scheduled for today. If they came here but weren't staff or family and there's no record of a guest visit, they had a reason not to leave a record."
Hound looked at the young man with an expression that fell somewhere between approval and mild exasperation.
"You're probably right," he said. "My read is the same as yours. But you said that too absolutely. You've eliminated every other possibility before you've done the verification. What about the bodies, for instance? You're assuming every burned body in there is what it appears to be. Are you certain none of them were placed there to fill out a count?"
Grus stopped walking.
"That's a genuine gap," he said, after a moment. "I should have had someone examine them individually. There could absolutely be substitutions in there."
Hound watched the young man actually process the correction and apply it to his thinking rather than defending himself, and felt the particular satisfaction of working with someone who was useful. He thought briefly, and not for the first time, of how grateful he was not to be stationed in the East Blue, where one of the other young talents had been sent — the one they called the White Hunter — and where his colleague Garp had apparently resumed his habit of abandoning his post to visit his grandson. Two problems of that kind at once would have been intolerable.
North Blue had its dangers. It also had the considerable advantage of not being East Blue.
"One more thing," Hound said as they walked. "Contact headquarters. I want the three deceased nobles checked for connections — anything linking them to each other. And I want the Golden Rose's destination investigated. If there's a noble at that port who connects to these three, I want to know before we arrive. Because if there is, that person may already be running out of time."
"Understood, sir."
Grus produced the Den Den Mushi from his coat and began composing the message as they walked.
*******************
Chapter 274: Eyes Like a Pool of Blood
The Navy did not linger.
Less than two hours after arriving on the snow-covered island, Hound's ship was back at sea and pushing hard toward the Kingdom of Lubni'er. Grus had already sent word ahead through official channels — warning Lubni'er that a figure the dispatches were now calling the Noble Killer might be making for their shores, that a specific noble or nobles within the kingdom could be at risk, and that Rear Admiral Hound was in pursuit and would arrive as quickly as conditions allowed.
Neither Hound nor Grus mentioned that their primary suspect was aboard the Golden Rose.
They both knew precisely what would happen if they did. The Lubni'er nobility, operating at the comfortable intersection of power and cowardice, would immediately dispatch the kingdom's naval force to intercept and sink the passenger vessel before it ever reached port. Most of the people aboard the Golden Rose had nothing to do with any of this. They would die for the convenience of people who felt entitled to eliminate problems at a distance.
Beyond the obvious injustice of that outcome, there was the practical problem: if the Noble Killer had the kind of ability that had left three separate households without survivors while leaving the servants alive and unable to describe any consistent attacker, then Lubni'er's fleet might not be able to stop them anyway. The innocent passengers would be dead. The target would escape. And then finding them again would become a considerably larger problem.
Better to let the nobles sweat.
The Golden Rose arrived without incident. Lami stepped off with the other passengers, keeping her pace unhurried, letting the crowds move around her as she walked into the city.
She was stopped almost immediately.
The alley was narrow and badly lit, the kind of place that existed in every port city in every country regardless of the flag flying over it. The men who stepped out to block her path were the alley's regulars — young, underfed, with the look of people who had run out of better options.
She looked at them for a moment.
"It's this cold and you're still working?" she said. "Couldn't you find somewhere to sit by a fire?"
The one in the middle attempted a threatening grin. "How about you lend us a few coins to warm ourselves up at a tavern?"
A moment later, a folded stack of bills landed in the snow at his feet.
"A hundred thousand Berries," Lami said. "Go get warm." She stepped up to the wall, pushed off, and cleared the roofline in a single motion. A few jumps across the frozen tiles and the alley was behind her.
She found a rooftop with a clear view and paused.
Below, the men were already arguing over the money and making their way toward the lights of the nearest drinking establishment.
"The money won't help them," Ritsu's voice said from the earring. "The odds are reasonable that some of them won't survive until spring. You might walk past them tomorrow morning."
Lami watched the snow fall. "Teacher. The nobles in their castles have more grain rotting in their storehouses than they can ever eat. Why do they keep taking more? What is it they're actually trying to hold onto?"
Ritsu went quiet.
The names that came to him were the names of people who had spent entire lifetimes building systematic answers to exactly that question — thinkers who had mapped the mechanics of accumulation and exploitation in more careful detail than he could summarize standing on a rooftop in a snowstorm. He sorted through what he wanted to say.
Before he could say it, Lami shook her head.
"Never mind. I'm not someone who saves people, Teacher. I'm someone who's taking revenge. That's different."
Ritsu closed the thought and let it go.
He was no saint himself. His line was simple: do no evil, harm no innocent. Beyond that line, he had never pretended to be a person whose purpose was the world's improvement. In a world where individual strength could be developed to extraordinary heights, he had always invested his time in himself rather than in the impossible project of solving everyone's problems. He wasn't going to lecture her.
Lami dropped off the roof and left the city behind.
She had done her research before any of this began. Every name on her list had a location pinned to it in her memory, and she had studied the approaches to each one with the same care she brought to everything Ritsu had taught her.
The castle sat on a low hill at the edge of open country, visible from some distance. It was newer than it looked like a castle should be — five years old at most, the stone still clean, the mortar unweathered. The man who lived in it had been Flevance's Finance Minister before the kingdom fell. He had arrived in Lubni'er with enough of Flevance's extracted wealth to purchase a title and enough left over to build this.
"The defenses are unusually tight," Ritsu observed.
He no longer had eyes in the conventional sense, but the voice of heaven gave him something that served the same function — a perception that extended outward from wherever his awareness resided. He could see the castle on the hill clearly: organized patrols, armed soldiers moving in coordinated groups, the whole perimeter on an alert footing that didn't fit a typical winter evening.
"Lami. Our approach may have been compromised."
"I thought the same thing."
She considered this for a moment and reached her conclusion: it didn't change anything. The people who had destroyed her home and killed her family were at the end of this particular road. She had come too far to turn around because the road had obstacles on it.
"Be careful," Ritsu said. "Your abilities are well past what ordinary soldiers can deal with, but this sea has more exceptional people than the soldiers in that castle. Don't let your guard down."
Lami said nothing to this. She looked down at the snow at her feet and brought her hands together.
Fire Style: Fireball Jutsu.
A small fireball struck the ground in front of her, melting through the packed snow layer and heating the frozen earth below until it was warm and workable.
Her hands shifted into the next sequence of seals.
Earth Style: Earth Dragon Concealment Technique.
She sank into the earth.
Twenty minutes later, a stone wall in the castle's underground storage level cracked and gave way, and she stepped through into the dim interior.
A young woman carrying a load of food from the shelves stopped dead when she saw her.
The breath for a scream was already forming.
Lami's eyes shifted.
The crimson that appeared there was deep and absolute, like something that had soaked into the color rather than being painted over it. Black magatama moved through it, drifting with the slow, strange motion of fish moving through still water. The maid's eyes went flat and empty, the scream collapsing before it could form, the tension leaving her body all at once.
"Is Count Gura in the castle?"
"I don't know for certain. I'm a floor servant — I don't go near the Count's quarters. But his carriage hasn't left the stable yard, so I don't think he's gone out."
"And the increased security — was the castle always defended like this?"
"No. It changed last night. In the middle of the night, suddenly. I heard someone say it was because of pirates, but I don't know anything else. None of us were told anything."
The maid knew what floor servants know — which was not much, but not nothing. The carriage detail was a sharp observation, Lami noted. The woman had made a logical deduction from available information rather than simply answering that she didn't know. That was worth more than the answer itself.
She had nothing else useful to offer, and she had done nothing to deserve what had been happening in the floors above her.
Lami eased her out of the genjutsu and into sleep, carried her up through the back stairs to a sitting room on a higher floor, and settled her onto a sofa with something approaching gentleness. Then she went back the other way, following the corridor in the direction the sounds of alarm and the smell of blood were coming from.
Count Gura was not what she had expected him to look like.
He was thin — genuinely thin, the kind of thin that made the face look predatory, all planes and edges, nothing soft about it. Nothing soft about his history either. He had been the man responsible for managing Flevance's finances, which in practice had meant managing the extraction of Amber Lead wealth while keeping the population unaware that the dust from their industry was slowly killing them. He had known. He had continued anyway. He had left when the extraction was no longer viable and the cover story could no longer hold.
He had left while his people were still dying in the streets.
He was on his knees when she found him, his forehead making repeated contact with the floor, offering her everything — the castle, the accounts, the hidden deposits, every material thing he possessed — in exchange for his life.
She looked at him.
She felt the grief and the rage in equal measure, both so familiar by now they had become simply the texture of the world.
Her parents had been healers. People who dedicated their lives to keeping others alive.
This was what had killed them.
"Die," she said, and drew the short blade, and ended it.
"Lami." Ritsu's voice was sharp. "Company."
The castle wall to her left exploded inward.
Hound came through the stone as though it wasn't there, shaking dust and gravel from his coat, and straightened up in the chamber.
His eyes found the Count's body first. "Too late, then." He said it like a man who expected to be disappointed, and his expression carried the appropriate note of regret. His eyes did not.
They moved on to Lami.
He said nothing for a moment.
"A girl," he said finally. "And younger than I expected."
Lami studied him back with the same directness. The shoulder insignia, the white coat, the unhurried way he had come through a stone wall — she took her time assessing these things.
"Are you a Rear Admiral?"
Hound raised an eyebrow. She wasn't running. That was unusual, and unusual things deserved attention. He had reminded himself on the way here that the world's most celebrated beauty was a member of the Seven Warlords and fully capable of killing anyone she chose to. Appearance said very little about danger. The castle's interior said considerably more.
"That's correct. My name is Hound. And yours?"
"Lami."
He let the pause sit. "Lami. These people — all of this was you?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Revenge."
The word settled in the room with a particular weight.
Hound had been hoping, in the part of himself he preferred not to examine too carefully, that the answer would be something easier to work with — random violence, a thrill-seeking instinct, anything that would let him act without the particular discomfort he was currently feeling. He should, by regulations, not be asking this question at all. An enemy of the World Government's established order had been identified. The next step was straightforward.
He couldn't make himself take it without asking.
"What did they do to you? These nobles."
Lami's lips pressed together for a moment. She had carried this for ten years, and it still felt like lifting something with a raw wound underneath.
"They destroyed Flevance," she said. "They killed my parents. They took my brother from me. And I'm going to kill every last one of them."
Flevance.
He stood very still.
Ten years ago he had been a Captain at Naval Headquarters, not senior enough to be part of what happened to Flevance, not privy to the details of what that operation had actually involved. Since then, his promotions had changed what information he was cleared to hold.
He knew what had actually happened to Flevance.
He looked at this girl standing in the wreckage she had made of a man's guards and household, and the discomfort that had been building since the moment she gave her reason drove into him like something with an edge.
It wasn't his fault. He had nothing to do with Flevance. That was true.
It was also not the kind of truth that made it easy to look at someone carrying this specific wound and tell them their path of healing ended here.
But his duty did not come with an exemption for situations that made him feel bad about enforcing it.
He set his jaw and said: "I'm sorry for your loss, Lami. Genuinely. But your path of vengeance ends here. Whatever the reason, attacking nobles is a crime without exception in the law I enforce. So I'm asking you to surrender. It will go better for you if you do."
Lami didn't move.
Just as Hound began shifting his weight toward action, she spoke.
"So the Navy isn't a messenger of justice at all," she said. "You're guardians of order. Those are different things."
Hound's expression twitched slightly. "You're wrong. The Navy is precisely a messenger of justice. The order we protect is justice."
"Is it." Lami shook her head slowly. "Then the justice you're describing isn't the one I'm looking for. I'll have to find my own." She met his eyes without flinching. "I won't surrender, Rear Admiral Hound."
*******************
Chapter 275: Demonic Illusion — Shackling Stakes
The answer didn't surprise him.
Hound had known what it would be before he asked the question. The Navy's justice was not designed to serve everyone equally — it was built to function for the majority, which meant there were always people at the edges who found themselves outside its reach. This girl was one of those people. The structure that was supposed to protect her had instead been the instrument of her family's destruction, and she knew it. Asking her to surrender to that structure, however gently it was phrased, was asking her to accept that the system's convenience mattered more than her grief.
Of course she refused.
And he had a job to do regardless.
"Then I have no choice but to—"
The words stopped in his throat.
Her eyes caught his.
The crimson hit him like a physical force, the black magatama turning slowly in those depths, and his consciousness was torn loose from its moorings and thrown into an endless space that was the color of blood from horizon to horizon. He felt the metal before he saw it — four enormous stakes driving through his body, pinning him in place, holding his limbs and torso against the blood-red void while the world he had just been standing in ceased to exist.
Demonic Illusion: Shackling Stakes.
Lami released a slow breath.
She had been genuinely uncertain whether her genjutsu would work on someone at this rank. Ritsu had spent years telling her that her abilities were exceptional but not exceptional enough to ignore the world's exceptional people, and the Navy's Rear Admirals were exactly the kind of people he meant. She had prepared herself for the technique to fail.
It hadn't.
For approximately one second, she was satisfied with this outcome.
"LAMI — BACK."
Her body moved before her mind processed the command. Ten years of training had made obedience to Ritsu's voice into something close to reflex; her feet pushed off the floor and she was already five meters back when Hound's right arm swept through the space where she had been standing, the motion swift and hunting, like a dog lunging for something it has seen from the corner of its eye.
He had broken through the genjutsu.
Her technique had lasted perhaps three seconds.
"How—" she started.
"I told you. Multiple times. These people aren't practice targets."
Ritsu didn't soften it.
Lami pressed her lips together and said nothing back. She couldn't argue with it. If his warning hadn't come when it did, she would be in Hound's grip right now. She had better ways to escape from there, probably. But if he had been aiming to kill instead of capture, the probabilities shifted considerably.
Hound stood across the chamber and watched her. He didn't press forward.
The genjutsu was a genuine problem, but it wasn't the thing currently occupying most of his attention. What occupied his attention was the voice. The warning had come from somewhere close to the girl — male, calm, obviously experienced — and yet when he pushed his Observation Haki outward in every direction, he found nothing. No presence. Not within thirty meters, not with any trace of life that would explain a second person in this room.
His Observation Haki was finding nothing because there was nothing physical to find.
He could not detect the divine will housed in a crystal earring.
But the absence of a detection was its own information, and it made him more careful rather than less. He stayed where he was, muscles ready, attention distributed across everything in front of him.
Lami studied the Rear Admiral across the distance between them. She had no particular desire to hurt him. Her grudge was specific — seven people whose decisions had killed her family and destroyed her home. It didn't extend to a Navy officer doing his job. She wasn't that kind of revenger. If she were, she would have struck the moment the genjutsu landed.
"Teacher, I want to—"
"You can't retreat. Not the way you were planning."
Ritsu's voice was direct, not trying to soften anything. "Lami. The young officer with the unusual hat — his ability specifically counters Earth Style techniques. Your burrowing route is closed."
He said it without lowering his voice, and Hound heard every word.
The Rear Admiral's eyes moved immediately to the source — the white crystal teardrop hanging from the girl's left ear. The voice was coming from there. His Observation Haki found nothing, but his ears told him the source was exact.
His jaw tightened. Whatever was in that earring was invisible to his most reliable sense. That was the kind of unknown he took seriously.
Footsteps in the corridor. Grus came through the doorway, slightly out of breath, taking in the scene with wide eyes.
"You haven't finished yet, sir?" He looked at Lami, head tilting slightly. "This is the killer? She doesn't look—"
"Don't let her eyes find yours," Hound said. "She's almost certainly a Devil Fruit user. The ability attacks the mind directly. Don't underestimate her."
He had finished his sentence.
Lami had already looked at Grus.
The crimson caught him before Hound's warning had fully settled into his awareness. The genjutsu had no visible startup — no gesture, no sound, nothing to track. The Sharingan simply moved, and the technique was already inside him before he knew it was coming.
Demonic Illusion: Shackling Stakes.
Grus's eyes went flat and empty. His body remained standing with the rigid, useless stillness of something that had lost its operator. Four invisible metal stakes held his consciousness pinned in a space the color of old blood, no amount of effort producing any movement at all.
Fire Style: Fireball Jutsu.
Lami didn't hesitate. The fireball crossed the distance to the immobilized Grus in a fraction of a second, large enough and hot enough to reduce him to carbon if it connected.
Hound was faster.
He crossed the room in an instant — the Soru technique reducing the distance to nothing — scooped Grus up and carried him clear, the fireball punching through the wall behind them and catching the room's furnishings before spreading outward.
Lami's hands were already moving.
Wind Style: Great Breakthrough.
Not an attack. The technique was a tool — Ritsu had taught her its applications early. The wind she exhaled found the existing flames and fed them, turning a contained fire into something that was going to consume the castle's interior level by level.
"Rear Admiral Hound," she called out, loud enough to carry through the smoke. "There are innocent people in this castle. I wonder — will you save them, or stay here with me?"
She ran.
Hound made the decision in less than a second. He turned to the soldiers who had followed Grus in, tossed the genjutsu-frozen Grus to the nearest pair of hands, and barked the evacuation order at the rest before going after her.
Grus would wake up eventually. The castle's surviving staff would not survive a fire on their own.
He caught up to her speed surprisingly fast. Soru erased the distance between them in the time it took her to clear the doorway, and he was in the open snow behind her almost before she had found her footing.
She stopped.
Turned around.
The burning castle was behind her, orange light against the winter dark, smoke going up into the sky in thick columns. Hound's silhouette was between her and it.
She breathed in the cold air and let it out slowly.
"Can I win, Teacher?"
"With me here, you won't lose."
A pause. "...Teacher, isn't that cheating?"
She heard herself and almost laughed. Ritsu did laugh, quietly.
"Cheating how? The Sharingan is yours. Every technique you know is yours. I didn't hand them to you — I planted the seed and you grew everything from it. What you're doing right now is using your own strength." His voice was more serious when he continued. "Use this fight. Find out exactly how far you've come."
He meant it.
Six years ago, when he had entered her body in the burning hospital to save her life, the intention had been purely to sustain her — to keep her alive through the connection of their life forces. He hadn't intended to give her anything permanent.
But the chakra he carried hadn't simply loaned itself to her and withdrawn. It had put down roots. Lami had genuinely developed her own chakra system, and with it — which had surprised Ritsu more than almost anything else in recent memory — a Kekkei Genkai.
The Sharingan.
He had turned this over many times in the years since and still had no definitive explanation. Why the Sharingan and not the Byakugan? Why not some expression of the Senju bloodline? The only theory he had that explained it was one he found slightly absurd: that the Sharingan, above all other bloodline limits, had some deep affinity for the concept of revenge. The grief-and-hatred awakening mechanism that ran through its history.
If so, Lami's circumstances had made her a natural.
She currently carried a two-tomoe Sharingan, had all seven chakra natures available to her, and had built a working library of dozens of techniques across ninjutsu, genjutsu, and taijutsu. Whether that was enough to defeat a Navy Rear Admiral in a fair fight, Ritsu genuinely didn't know.
What he did know was that fair fights were for people who hadn't made adequate preparations.
"Teacher," Lami said, "you're deliberately making me fight this."
"Yes. Deliberately."
She sighed.
"You'll understand why soon," he said.
Rankyaku.
Hound's kick sent a vacuum blade screaming toward her at low altitude, the sound of it arriving a fraction of a second before the force would have. Lami twisted and pulled her body sideways, the cutting edge passing close enough to her side that she felt the air displacement.
Then he was on top of her.
He was fast — not just fast but technically excellent, the kind of speed and precision that came from a thousand repetitions of the same movements until they cost nothing. She had the Sharingan to track him with, and that was the only reason she was still upright. Her eyes could follow him. Her body was doing its best to do the same, but there was a gap between what she could perceive and what she could physically execute, and that gap kept costing her.
She drew the short sword from her hip and threw it across the space between them, angled for his chest.
A single finger struck the blade's spine. The deflection wasn't violent but it was precise — the sword twisted back against her grip and nearly left her hand, and the impact ran up her arm and left her right hand numb to the elbow.
Shigan. Finger Pistol. He hadn't risked his body against an unknown blade, hadn't tried to stop it with Iron Body. He'd redirected it instead. The calculation told her something about how he assessed her — he hadn't dismissed her as a known quantity.
She adjusted her footing and kept the sword in her grip.
Her physical body was a liability. She had known this abstractly before; she knew it concretely now. Six years of training had built her into something genuinely formidable in terms of chakra manipulation and technique. Her raw physical power and speed had improved but hadn't kept pace. Against an opponent who moved like this, that gap was going to be a problem she had to keep finding workarounds for.
She shortened the defensive distance between them, letting him close while she tracked his movements, extending her reaction window by allowing less space for him to accelerate through.
It was working. Barely. Every exchange was narrower than the last.
*******************