The first feather landed on a man's open mouth.
It should've been funny. It looked like something you'd see at a festival—paper snow, some smug little trick to make civilians clap because wow, magic. After everything that had almost happened in the arena an hour ago, the idea that the stadium was trying to be cute made my brain flash a bitter, ugly laugh.
The man yawned so wide I saw the back of his teeth. The feather took its time, drifting down like it owned the air. It brushed his tongue.
He didn't even flinch.
His head just dipped forward, chin to chest. Eyes half-lidded like someone had reached behind them and turned the lantern down.
Around him, people started folding.
No screams. No thrashing. No warning at all—just bodies losing the argument with gravity. A woman sagged into her husband's shoulder. A kid slid down the bench like he'd turned into soup. Two rows down, an old man got halfway to standing, reconsidered existence very politely, and sat again—careful, dignified—
Then slumped.
The stadium didn't go quiet in one clean cut. It drowned in chunks. A thousand mouths that had been yelling and chewing and laughing turned into… open, slack punctuation marks.
My eyelids went hot and heavy at the exact same time, like someone had hung weights off them.
And underneath the heaviness—
A texture.
Not a voice. Not words. A taste in the chakra field: pale and sweet and artificial, the way cheap incense tries to convince you it's a flower.
Lullaby.
"Oh," I breathed, and my own voice sounded obscene inside my skull.
Ino leaned into me so abruptly her shoulder knocked mine. She didn't even swear—she just gave up, her hand sliding off the railing like her bones had gone soft.
"Ino?" I whispered, catching her wrist.
Nothing.
Holding her felt wrong, like I was trying to grab someone through thick cloth. Panic sparked behind my ribs and immediately tried to turn into a wildfire, but my body was already being coaxed downward, gentle and suffocating, like hands pushing your face into a pillow while apologizing.
My head dipped. My neck wanted to quit. My chin drifted toward my chest.
No.
I forced it up like I was lifting a dumbbell with my throat. My heart hammered too fast for how calm my limbs were trying to be. My hands shook—not fear-shakes, not adrenaline. The shakes you get when your body decides it's shutting down whether you agree or not.
This wasn't normal tired.
I'd done tired. Hospital-night tired. "My bones are sandbags" tired. This was outside me. A layer laid over my chakra, thin and persistent, like lacquer brushed across wet paint.
Genjutsu.
I didn't have the words for half the weirdness in this world, but I knew the shape of being manipulated. I knew the feeling of your brain trying to close itself like a book someone else was reading.
My stomach lurched, sharp and sour.
Break it. Now.
Okay. How?
Step one: find me under it.
My chakra was there—small, stubborn, buzzing like a trapped insect. The sleep wasn't coming from inside me. It was being poured on.
Pain helps. It's disgusting, but it's true. You make the body scream louder than the mind can drift.
I bit the inside of my cheek hard enough that blood snapped bright and metallic across my tongue.
For half a second, the world sharpened.
Then the lullaby pressed again, sweet and patient.
Fine.
My fingers fumbled for my pouch. Paper. Ink. Brush.
Too slow. My hands were clumsy, like I'd borrowed them from someone else.
I yanked a blank tag, slapped it against my thigh, and used my thumbnail—wet with my own blood—to drag a jagged little seal onto it. Ugly. Fast. Pure spite.
A pulse-tag. A rhythm slap. A reminder to my nervous system that I wasn't allowed to lie down and disappear.
My vision wavered as I pressed it to the inside of my wrist.
"Go," I hissed at myself.
The tag warmed.
Thump.
A second heartbeat installed under my skin.
My chakra jolted in response—tiny, angry, alive. The edges of the world came back into focus like someone had pulled a cloth off my eyes.
The feathers didn't stop falling, but they stopped landing directly on my thoughts.
I sucked in a breath so hard it hurt. Nausea climbed my throat. My brain immediately tried to throw itself back into the dark like a toddler having a tantrum over a missed nap.
No.
I forced my chakra to move. Not big. Not impressive. Just circulation. Like rubbing feeling back into a hand that fell asleep. Like shaking life into a limb.
The lullaby scraped at me, offended.
A migraine bloomed behind my eyes—white-hot, immediate, radiating into my temples. My glasses felt too heavy on my face. I gripped the railing like it was the only solid thing in the world.
Below, the arena sand was still roiling. Gaara's chakra tasted like a bruise—red-brown and cracked glass. Sasuke's was a blade of blue-white static that made my teeth ache even from up here.
And around me—
People were down.
Civilians. Kids. Shinobi. Slumped with mouths open, curled like they'd been tucked into bed, half-fallen against benches and railings like mannequins someone forgot to stand up. A chūnin in the aisle fought it on his feet—jaw clenched, eyes glassy—made it two steps, then dropped to one knee and stayed there like kneeling was the compromise his body offered.
My pulse-tag thumped again and my stomach flipped with it.
Okay. Awake. Barely.
Now what?
Triage. Always triage.
Who was bleeding? Who was dying?
No blood. Just off. And off meant the enemy got to decide the next beat.
I forced my senses outward even though it felt like someone prying my skull open with a spoon. Ino's chakra had dimmed into soft pink haze—deep sleep, smooth and heavy. Kiba was slumped forward with his arms crossed like he'd fallen asleep in class. Akamaru's little flicker in his jacket tasted confused, twitchy-drowsy, like a dog dreaming with one eye open.
Shino wasn't—
Not here. Right. He'd fought already. My brain tried to yank me into the wrong timeline and I had to blink hard until the present snapped back into place.
Shikamaru.
I found him a row down and to the left, sprawled in the exact posture of I have retired from existence. Head tilted. Mouth slightly open. Arms limp. Perfect.
Relief hit so hard it almost made me stupid.
Shikamaru was smart. Shikamaru would wake up. Shikamaru would—
I started climbing down toward him anyway because smart didn't matter if you were asleep and I had wake-tags and—
I stopped halfway.
Because Shikamaru's chakra didn't look like everyone else's.
Everyone else had dimmed like a lantern turned low.
His was steady.
Not bright. Not flaring. Just… held. Like a candle behind a hand. Like someone choosing to keep their breath inside their lungs.
I stared, senses snagging on the wrongness.
His chakra had that Nara quality—cool smoke, compressed shadow—but instead of melting into fog, it was coiled. Alert.
He was awake.
And pretending he wasn't.
A feather drifted down and landed on his cheek.
He didn't react.
My heart hammered, confused admiration elbowing through my headache. I took one more step, careful.
Shikamaru's right hand twitched. Barely. A finger moved the smallest fraction—so small you could write it off as muscle relaxing.
But I was looking for it.
His finger slid against his sleeve, deliberate.
Don't.
Not in words—just in the way his shadow under the bench shifted half an inch, reaching toward my ankle, then stopping itself like it didn't want to give anything away.
I froze.
The wake-tag was already in my hand. I could slap it on his forehead and drag him into this.
I could also ruin whatever plan his brain was currently building out of boredom and terror.
I swallowed bile and forced myself to breathe through my nose the way Migaki had taught me in wards full of people trying to panic quietly.
Okay.
Shikamaru was doing what Shikamaru did: letting the world think he was harmless while he lined up a knife.
I slid the wake-tag back into my pouch.
"Okay," I whispered, so quiet it was barely air. "I see you."
His eyelid cracked the tiniest sliver.
Then it closed again.
Dead as a rock.
I backed away, climbing back up like I'd never been there. My head throbbed worse for the movement. The lullaby brushed the edges of my consciousness again, annoyed that I was still awake.
Not now.
I scanned for the loudest liability in the stadium.
Naruto.
He was a few rows up near the railing, where he'd been bouncing and yelling at Sasuke like a stressed-out puppy with opinions. Now he was slumped sideways across the bench, cheek pressed to wood, arms dangling like a kid who fell asleep at dinner.
His chakra—normally a sunburst of obnoxious orange—was smothered.
But even smothered, it was still big. Like a bonfire under wet blankets.
And under that, deeper, like something breathing behind a locked door—
A darker orange-red. Thick. Hot. Angry.
It pressed against the lullaby. Not breaking it. Just… pushing.
Naruto's face was calm in a way that looked wrong on him.
I moved fast, stepping over knees, ducking under a man who'd slid halfway into the aisle.
"Naruto," I hissed, grabbing his shoulder.
Nothing.
I slapped his cheek lightly—gentle enough to not startle half the section, sharp enough to make his body notice me.
Still nothing.
"Okay," I muttered. "Cool. Love that for us."
My hands were shaking too hard to draw anything new, so I yanked one of Kanpō's old practice pulse-tags—crude but functional—and stuck it to Naruto's collarbone where I could feel his heartbeat through fabric.
Then I fed it a pulse.
The tag warmed.
Naruto's chakra jolted like someone kicked a beehive.
His eyes snapped open. He inhaled like he'd been drowning.
Then, because he was Naruto—
He shot upright and started to yell.
"WHAT—?!"
I clamped both hands on his jaw and shoved his face down toward me before the whole stadium got a free alarm.
"Shut up," I said, very calmly, in the way you speak when you're one sound away from screaming yourself. "Shut. Up."
Naruto blinked hard, offended on principle.
His eyes flicked past my shoulder.
He saw it.
Rows of slumped civilians. Shinobi sprawled like discarded dolls. Feathers turning the air into slow snowfall.
His face drained so pale the orange of his jacket looked obscene.
"What—what is—" He swallowed. "Did we… did we lose? Did I—"
"No." I shook him once. "This isn't you. This is sleep. Someone pushed it into the air."
Naruto stared at the feathers like they had personally betrayed him.
Then his gaze snapped down to the arena.
Sasuke and Gaara were still moving. Gaara's sand had gone thicker, uglier—clumping like wet clay. Sasuke stood poised like a knife mid-strike, but his head tilted toward the stands, attention yanked by the bodies dropping.
Naruto's hands curled into fists.
I felt his panic flare under the smothering layer, felt the instinct in him that wanted to fix everything with sheer force and volume.
"Don't," I warned.
Naruto sucked in a breath anyway, and I saw it—the split-second where his brain grabbed the first tool it trusted.
Noise. Presence. Make the world listen.
I dug my fingers into his sleeve hard enough to hurt.
"Naruto." My voice came out lower than I expected. "Look at me."
He did. His eyes were bright with frantic wetness he'd pretend was sweat later.
"You're awake," I said. "That's good. That matters. But if you start yelling, you're going to make yourself the easiest target in the entire stadium."
Naruto stared, confused for half a beat.
Then the answer arrived.
His eyes widened.
"Oh."
"Yeah," I said. "Oh."
His gaze jerked toward the VIP box. The Hokage sat rigid. The Kazekage sat too still, like a statue that had learned to breathe.
My senses—raw from forcing myself awake—caught the chakra field shifting.
Not the lullaby.
Something underneath it.
Movement.
Intent.
Like blades sliding free of sheaths in the dark.
It hadn't exploded yet. Not in this second. But it was there—the inhale before the punch.
Naruto's chakra flickered, hotter now. Somewhere deep under the wet blankets, that caged thing turned its head like it had scented blood.
I pressed my palm to my pulse-tag and forced another thump through it, steadying my stomach as nausea tried to climb again.
Naruto leaned close, voice finally a whisper. "Okay. What do we do?"
My mouth opened—
And a cold little lurch went through me because I didn't have the whole picture. I was a genin with paper tricks and field medicine. Naruto was a genin with a bonfire inside him and a talent for turning fear into motion. Shikamaru was awake and pretending he wasn't, which meant he either already had a plan or he was building one out of spite.
Somewhere in this stadium full of sleeping mouths, the enemy was moving.
I swallowed hard and forced my brain back into triage.
"First," I said, "we don't fall asleep again."
Naruto nodded like that was perfectly reasonable.
"Second," I said, "we wake the right people."
His eyes flicked instinctively toward the jōnin section.
"Third," I said, because I could feel the world tipping toward violence, "you do not run down there alone like you're the only person who can do anything."
Naruto's jaw tightened. The argument rose in him on reflex.
Then he said, very quietly, "Sasuke's down there."
I looked past him at the arena.
Sasuke's posture had shifted—he wasn't performing anymore. He was listening to the world the way a predator listens right before it bites.
And Gaara—
Gaara was bleeding.
A single drop had become several, and the sand around him moved like it wanted to build a body out of itself.
My skin crawled.
"Yeah," I said, voice tight. "I know."
Another feather drifted down between us, spinning slow and delicate, like the world was still trying to pretend this was peaceful.
Naruto reached out and crushed it between his fingers.
The sound was tiny.
But in the hush of a stadium full of sleeping people, it felt too loud.
Somewhere above us—far enough that it took a beat to register—metal rang against metal.
A sharp, clean clang.
Not crowd noise. Not accident.
A weapon sound.
Naruto and I went still, every hair on my arms rising.
Then Naruto whispered, like he couldn't help it, "It's starting."
Under his skin, the bonfire flared.
Mine didn't.
Mine stayed smaller—just a stubborn match refusing to go out, my pulse-tag thumping like a hand slapping me awake over and over.
I tightened my grip on Naruto's sleeve like fingers and fabric could anchor a hurricane.
"Okay," I murmured, mostly to myself. "Okay. We make the loudest idiot in the village useful."
Naruto's mouth twitched, offended on principle—
And then the stadium roof shuddered, just slightly, like something heavy had landed on it.
The feathers kept falling.
And the thousand mouths stayed asleep.