Chapter 2
But Itama—no, *he*—had fought Uchiha before. He let his pupils dilate, feigned the gasp, while his other hand dug silently into the mud. The corpse three feet away had been an Inuzuka. Still warm. Still ripe for copying.
The genjutsu's flames licked at his skin with phantom heat just as his fingers brushed dead flesh. A pulse of stolen chakra surged through his fingertips—Copy—and suddenly the battlefield scent doubled: wet dog and blood. The Uchiha's sandal slipped slightly as the body beneath him *shifted*. Not Itama's thin wrists, but an Inuzuka's corded forearms now trapped underfoot.
"You—" The Uchiha's sharingan stuttered. Itama's teeth were sharper when he grinned. The scent of burning fur replaced phantom flames as his new muscles bunched—Devour—and the Uchiha's ankle snapped like green wood in his grip.
Screams blended with the thunder. He licked blood from his lips—part Inuzuka now, part Senju, all predator—as the Uchiha's collapsing form reflected in his suddenly slitted pupils. The rain tasted of copper and possibility.
A kunai whistled past his ear. He didn't flinch. His stolen instincts mapped the battlefield before his conscious mind caught up—three more heartbeats in the tree line, two with the telltale chakra burn of activated sharingan. One trembled.
"Kill it," someone hissed. His new ears twitched at the plural. Interesting. They thought he wasn't human anymore.
Rotating his borrowed shoulders, he exhaled through nostrils that could now track fear-sweat across fifty yards. The bodies around him weren't just corpses. They were menus.
The trembling Uchiha in the trees fired a shuriken that went wide—his shaking hands betraying him. Itama lunged low, not toward the weapon but parallel to its trajectory, letting momentum carry him into a roll that ended with his palm against the cooling throat of a Hyuga scout. Copy. The Byakugan's veins erupted around his eyes before he'd even finished absorbing the corpse's chakra.
Two things happened simultaneously: the remaining Uchiha spat a gout of fire that turned rain to steam, and Itama's new eyes saw straight through it to the panic tightening their throats. He Devoured the Hyuga's rotation technique mid-leap, spinning through the flames with skin that shouldn't have survived.
When he landed, it was atop the trembling one's chest, knees crushing ribs as his now-sharpened fingernails found the soft junction below the jaw. "You're right," he whispered, watching his own distorted reflection in the Uchiha's wide sharingan. The rain sizzled where it touched his overheated skin. "I'm not."
Something warm and vital pulsed under his palms—not just blood, but the raw chakra signature unique to Uchiha lineage. His fingers twitched with the urge to Devour it whole. But the scent of charred meat snapped his focus left; the fire-user had overextended, left arm blackened by backlash. That mistake tasted sweeter than any technique
.
The Uchiha beneath him spasmed—not from pain, but from the realization crawling through his veins like frost. Itama's slit pupils contracted as he inhaled the stench of singed fabric and terror, his borrowed Hyuga vision tracing the erratic flare of chakra beneath the fire-user's scorched skin. Too much, too fast. Amateur
.
The fire-user staggered, his ruined arm dangling like a puppet with cut strings. Itama's lips peeled back—not a grin, but the involuntary snarl of a predator scenting weakness. Behind him, the Uchiha beneath his knees gagged, fingers scrabbling at his wrist where veins had begun *bulging* unnaturally. Devour wasn't just taking; it was rearranging.
A shuriken grazed Itama's shoulder, drawing a line of fire he barely registered. His borrowed Byakugan pinpointed the thrower—an Uchiha crouched in the upper branches, one hand pressed to a bleeding thigh. Prey. The realization came with a rush of saliva as his canines lengthened further. He *leaped* just as the injured fire-user collapsed, abandoning the crushed Uchiha to scramble toward fresher meat.
The trees blurred. Wind roared in ears now half-pinned back against his skull, his new instincts howling for him to *go for the throat*. But the moment his feet touched bark, the wounded Uchiha's sharingan flared—not fear in those spinning tomoe, but *triumph*. The trap snapped shut: explosive tags rustled beneath the rain-slick leaves all around him.
Itama's stolen Hyuga vision caught the chakra threads a heartbeat too late. The world fractured into heat and splintered wood as the forest erupted. His last conscious thought was the taste of his own torn flesh—and the distant, guttural laughter of Uchiha who still believed in mercy kills.
Smoke curled from what remained of his forearms when he hit the ground. The impact rattled shattered ribs against lungs that shouldn't have been breathing. But he was. Because the Inuzuka's regenerative enzymes had already knitted his ruptured organs back together, stitching muscle to bone with wet, clicking sounds that made the approaching footsteps falter.
Through the ringing in his ears, he heard the wet crunch of a kunai being wrenched from flesh—his own, probably. The Uchiha stood over him, sharingan spinning sluggishly now. Exhaustion or pity? No. The hesitation was tactical. They'd seen what happened to the last one who got within reach of his fangs.
He rolled his tongue over molars that kept reshaping themselves—Hyuga precision, Inuzuka savagery, something older and hungrier beneath. The Uchiha's sandal pressed against his throat, but the pressure was careful, calculated. They'd learned. Good.
Rain hissed where it met the burns on his chest. The taste of his own regeneration was thick as old meat at the back of his throat when he laughed. His fingers twitched against a half-buried kunai—no, not a kunai. The fire-user's blackened arm. Still warm. Still ripe. The Uchiha's sandal tensed a second too late as his nails sank into charred flesh. Copy. Devour. The explosion had been part of their trap. The flames would be his.
Smoke billowed from his lips when he exhaled. The Uchiha stumbled back from the sudden heat radiating off his skin—too close now, too late to run. Itama's borrowed Hyuga veins pulsed as his stolen sharingan bloomed crimson in one eye, the fire-user's technique unfurling in his gut like a coiled serpent. He didn't breathe fire. He *became* it.
The Uchiha's scream cut off as flames erupted from Itama's pores—not a jutsu, but his very cells combusting in a wave of stolen fury. Skin blackened and split like overripe fruit, revealing the glowing embers beneath where the fire-user's chakra had merged with his own. The stench of cooked meat filled the clearing, but the Uchiha's horror lasted only seconds before his sandals caught fire, soles melting into the rain-slick earth as he flailed backward into the
mud.
Itama rose on limbs that crackled with every movement—charred flesh sloughing off to reveal new muscle knitting itself together beneath. The Uchiha's dying shrieks faded into wet gurgles as the fire consumed his lungs from within. Somewhere beyond the smoke, branches snapped under retreating footsteps. The survivors were running. He tasted their fear on the wind—sharp as citrus, rich as
marrow.