Chapter 4
Somewhere beyond the corpse-littered clearing, a branch snapped. Itama's head whipped up, blood-slathered chin dripping onto scorched earth. His ears caught the rhythm of retreating footsteps—lighter, faster. Younger. A survivor too small to fight. The corner of his mouth twitched. Let them run. Let them whisper of the thing that wore dead boys like borrowed coats. He wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist, smearing viscera across skin already knitting itself smooth again. The war had just begun.
Smoke curled from his fingertips as he flexed them, testing the fire-user's chakra coiled in his veins. It burned differently now—less like an ember, more like acid. Devouring the Uchiha's heart had changed something. His stolen sharingan throbbed in its socket, pulsing in time with a phantom heartbeat. A name surfaced in the sludge of devoured memories: *Kagami*. The trembling one had called for him before the flames took his voice. Itama exhaled through nostrils flared wide, tracking the scent of singed cloth and terror into the trees. Someone would come for vengeance. Good.
The rain slowed to a drizzle, revealing the battlefield in macabre fragments—a severed hand curled around a snapped kunai, the glint of an Uchiha crest half-buried in mud. He crouched beside the remains of the fire-user, peeling back charred flesh with clinical curiosity. The explosion tags had been rigged to the man's own chakra network. A suicide play. Itama's borrowed lips split into something too jagged to be a smile. The Uchiha had tried to burn him from the inside out. How *deliciously* ironic. His tongue traced sharpened canines as his body absorbed the last of the man's smoldering chakra, skin blistering then smoothing over in waves
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The distant snap of another twig made his head jerk up—not fear, but hunger guiding the motion. His Hyuga eye caught the flicker of chakra before his ears registered the choked sob: a child, no older than eight, crouched behind a fallen log with hands clamped over their mouth. Their terror smelled like rain-soaked leaves and sour milk. Itama exhaled slowly, watching his own breath curl black with embers in the damp air. The boy's wide, unactivated sharingan reflected the grotesque tableau—charred corpses, steaming organs, the monster licking blood from its claws
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The child's knees gave out as Itama took a single step forward—not a threat, just testing the give of the mud beneath his newly reformed tendons. The boy's breath came in shallow, wet gasps, fingers digging into rotted bark as if it could swallow him whole. Itama tilted his head, tasting the air: no warrior's resolve here, just the brine of panic and the thin, sweet tang of a lineage too young to manifest its power
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The boy's trembling intensified as Itama crouched before him, close enough to count the flecks of ash caught in his eyelashes. Up close, the child smelled of unwashed wool and the iron-rich stench of piss—fear made manifest. A memory flickered through Itama's stolen synapses: a training ground, wooden shuriken embedded in tree bark, an older Uchiha ruffling dark hair. *Kagami's* little brother. His tongue clicked against his teeth, savoring the revelation like a sugar cube dissolving on his tongue.
"Tell me," Itama murmured, running a clawed fingertip down the boy's cheekbone, leaving a hairline trail of blood where the skin split and resealed instantly. "Do they teach you to scream before the sharingan awakens?" His voice was a distorted echo of the Uchiha he'd consumed—their kinsman's timbre warped around his own predator's cadence. The boy's chest hitched, tears carving clean tracks through grime. Itama's stolen eyes traced the boy's chakra pathways—thin, fragile things pulsing like rabbit veins beneath parchment skin. No fire lay dormant here. Not yet.
Behind them, a crow let out a guttural caw, its wings stirring the stench of cooking meat from the battlefield. Itama exhaled through his nose, suddenly bored. The child would make poor sustenance—like chewing on green wood. He stood abruptly, watching with detached amusement as the boy flinched so violently his skull cracked against the log. The scent of fresh blood bloomed copper-bright in the damp air. Itama's fingers twitched of their own accord, his stolen instincts warring with the abyss where his morals used to be
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Then the forest shuddered—not with wind, but with the unmistakable ripple of a space-time technique. Itama's spine straightened, every nerve alight. The trees bled shadows as three figures materialized between the pines, their cloaks damp with evening dew. The lead hunter's hitai-ate gleamed dully in the fading light. Senju. His original clan had finally sent their wolves. Itama's lips peeled back in something between a grin and a snarl. The boy whimpered, a drop of his blood landing in the mud between them like the first note of a war drum.