The Kikyo Pass was not a place where heroes went to die. It was where they went to be forgotten.
It was a jagged scar of a canyon cutting through the mountain range that separated the Land of Fire from the encroachments of the North. The geography was hostile—vertical cliffs of gray shale, narrow bottlenecks where the wind screamed like a dying animal, and a floor of loose scree that made silence impossible.
Ren Yamanaka crouched on a high ridge overlooking the northern approach. The rain had stopped, but the fog remained, a thick, cloying soup that clung to his flak jacket and chilled the metal of his forehead protector.
He was twenty-one now. The last year had stretched him, pulled him taut like a wire over a chasm. He looked different. The boyish softness was gone, replaced by the gaunt, sharp angles of a man who didn't sleep enough. His hair had grown out, tied back in a messy tail, and his eyes… his eyes were the problem. They were teal, but they held a strange, prismatic depth, as if shifting through a spectrum of colors depending on the light.
"Ren-senpai," a whisper came from his left.
Ren didn't turn. "Keep your head down, Daiki. The sound carries."
Daiki Sarutobi, a fifteen-year-old Chunin with the hopeful eyes of a puppy and the lineage of the Third Hokage's clan, ducked lower behind the rock. Daiki was everything Ren used to be—eager, terrified, and desperate to prove that his life had meaning.
"Do you sense them?" Daiki whispered, clutching his bo-staff. "Command said the main Iwagakure force is pushing through tonight."
"I don't just sense them," Ren murmured.
He closed his eyes. He didn't reach out with his own chakra. Instead, he walked down the mental staircase into the basement of his mind—the "Vault" that Inoichi had helped him build.
It was a dungeon of iron and shadow. Behind the bars of the first cell, the spirit of the Mist Sensor he had consumed months ago was pacing.
Lend me your ears, Ren commanded the ghost.
The ghost snarled but obeyed. The contract of the devoured was absolute.
Ren's hearing expanded. The wind howling through the pass separated into distinct frequencies. He heard the rustle of grass three miles away. He heard the heartbeat of a lizard.
And he heard the heavy, rhythmic thud of marching boots. Thousands of them.
"They're here," Ren said, opening his eyes. The world snapped back into focus. "Three battalions. Maybe four hundred men. Heavy infantry supported by long-range Earth users."
Daiki's face went pale. "Four hundred? We only have a reinforced platoon. Fifty men. We're… we're going to be overrun."
Ren looked at the boy. He felt a flicker of pity, but it was distant, muffled by the layers of cynicism he had wrapped around his heart.
"We aren't here to win a fair fight, Daiki," Ren said coldly. "We are the plug in the bottle. Our job is to bleed them until the main army arrives."
"But… we're just pawns?" Daiki asked, his voice trembling with the shattering of his idealism.
Ren looked out at the foggy canyon. "Everyone is a pawn, Daiki. The only difference is some pawns are made of wood, and some are made of iron. The wooden ones burn. The iron ones rust."
Ren stood up. He felt the weight of the souls inside him shifting, restless. Goro the Earth Commander. The Mist assassin. The Cloud tactician. The Puppet Master. They were all awake, sensing the proximity of violence.
"Signal the Commander," Ren ordered. "Tell him to prepare the explosive tags at the choke point. I'm going down."
"Down? By yourself?" Daiki grabbed Ren's sleeve. "Senpai, that's suicide! You're a sensory type, not a vanguard!"
Ren looked at Daiki's hand on his arm. He gently removed it.
"I haven't been just a sensory type for a long time," Ren said softly.
He stepped off the ledge.
The Descent
Ren fell through the fog. The wind rushed past his ears.
Fear, Goro's voice rumbled in his head. You should anchor yourself. Silence, the Mist assassin hissed. Let him fall like rain.
Ren ignored them. He channeled chakra to his feet.
Wind Style: Gale Palm.
He didn't weave signs for this; it was a simple burst of chakra he had learned from a scroll, amplified by the stolen affinity of a Cloud scout. A blast of air shot from his soles, slowing his descent. He landed silently on a pillar of rock in the center of the pass, twenty meters above the valley floor.
Below him, the Iwagakure army was a river of red armor moving through the mist. They were disciplined, silent, a machine of war built to crush the Leaf.
Ren watched them. He analyzed them not as enemies, but as a collection of biological data.
That one favors his left leg—knee injury. That group is clustering too tight—vulnerable to wide-area ninjutsu. Their chakra is synchronized for a massive Earth Style barrage.
Ren felt the familiar hunger. It wasn't the starving void it used to be. It was a gourmet's appetite now. He saw a Jonin leading the vanguard—a man radiating powerful, dense chakra.
He would taste like granite, Ren thought. Dry, but filling.
He shook his head. Focus. The mission.
The Leaf forces initiated the ambush. Explosive tags lining the canyon walls detonated.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
Massive boulders rained down. The Iwagakure march halted. Screams echoed. But they were elites; panic was brief.
"Earth Style: Earth Dome!" hundreds of voices roared in unison.
A massive canopy of stone rose from the ground, shielding the main force from the falling rocks. The ambush had failed to crush them; it had only annoyed them.
"Leaf scum!" the Iwa Commander roared, stepping out from the dome. "Advance! Crush them into the dirt!"
The Iwa forces surged forward, charging up the scree slopes toward the pitifully small Leaf defensive line.
Ren stood on his pillar, unnoticed in the chaos. He brought his hands together.
He needed to stop four hundred men. A normal Chunin couldn't do it. A normal Jonin would struggle.
But Ren was a chimera.
He closed his eyes and opened the Vault.
"Goro," Ren whispered. "I need your walls." "Mist," he commanded. "I need your water." "Cloud," he beckoned. "I need your wind."
The strain was immediate. His chakra coils burned as three distinct, conflicting nature transformations were forced into the same channel. It felt like his veins were being filled with boiling mercury. His nose began to bleed, a warm trickle running over his lip.
But the power… the power was intoxicating.
Ren wove the signs. He didn't weave them sequentially. He used the puppeteer's dexterity to weave two different sets of signs with his left and right hands simultaneously—a feat that should have been physically impossible for his brain to process.
Right Hand: Earth Style. Left Hand: Water Style.
"Art of the Chimera," Ren gasped, the blood dripping from his chin.
He slammed his hands onto the pillar.
"Composite Ninjutsu: Mudslide Avalanche!"
It wasn't just mud. Ren poured a massive volume of water (created from his chakra conversion) into the loose shale and soil of the canyon floor. Simultaneously, he used Earth chakra to liquify the bedrock.
The entire floor of the canyon, for a stretch of two hundred meters, instantly turned into a raging, churning ocean of deep, viscous mud.
The charging Iwa soldiers lost their footing. They sank. The mud wasn't passive; it churned like a rapids, pulling them under.
"Stabilize!" the Iwa Commander screamed. "Use Surface Walking!"
The soldiers tried to channel chakra to their feet to stand on the mud.
Ren opened his eyes. They were glowing with a feral intensity.
"I'm not done," he whispered.
He inhaled deeply, drawing upon the Wind affinity.
"Wind Style: Great Breakthrough - Freezing Gust."
He exhaled. A gale of supercooled wind, chilled by the moisture in the air, slammed into the churning mud.
The reaction was instantaneous. The water in the mud froze.
CRACK.
The sound was deafening. The ocean of mud solidified in a split second, turning into a jagged, frozen wasteland of concrete-hard earth and ice.
The Iwa soldiers who were waist-deep were instantly locked in place, their legs crushed by the expanding ice, their bodies trapped in the stone. Those who had managed to stand on top were sent skidding, their balance destroyed.
One hundred men immobilized in ten seconds.
Silence fell over the canyon. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath.
On the ridge, the Leaf defenders stared in horror and awe.
"Who… who did that?" Daiki whispered, gripping his staff until his knuckles were white.
Ren stood on his pillar, panting. Steam rose from his body as his chakra system vented the excess heat. The migraine was blinding. Inside the Vault, the spirits were screaming, furious at being used so violently.
Shut up, Ren told them, tightening the mental chains.
Below, the Iwa Commander pulled himself free from the edge of the frozen mud. He stared up at Ren. His face was twisted with rage.
"You…" the Commander pointed a trembling finger. "You are not a Leaf ninja. You are a monster!"
"I am whatever works," Ren rasped.
The battle wasn't over. The remaining three hundred Iwa soldiers, those who hadn't been caught in the trap, began to scale the canyon walls, bypassing the frozen floor. They were swarming like ants, angry and seeking blood.
Ren drew a kunai. He was tired. His chakra was down by half.
"Come on then," he said to the swarm. "Let's see what you taste like."
The Price of Pawns
The melee that followed was a blur of violence.
Ren abandoned the large-scale ninjutsu. He didn't have the reserves for another catastrophe. Instead, he moved.
He fought with a style that was jarringly inconsistent.
One moment, he moved low and heavy, using the Iwa Commander's taijutsu to deliver bone-shattering punches. The next, he flowed like water, dodging blades with the fluid grace of the Mist assassin. Then, he would use chakra threads—invisible and deadly—to trip enemies or redirect their own weapons back at them, a gift from the Puppeteer.
He was a one-man army, but he was bleeding. A slash to his shoulder. A senbon needle in his thigh. He was taking damage, but his mind prioritized the data over the pain.
Injury detected: Left deltoid. Mobility reduced by 15%. Compensation: Shift stance to right-side dominance.
It was efficient. It was robotic.
And it was horrifying Daiki Sarutobi.
The young Chunin had descended to join the fray. He was fighting bravely, using his bo-staff to fend off two Iwa soldiers. But he was overwhelmed.
"Senpai!" Daiki screamed as a third enemy dropped from above, sword raised.
Ren was twenty meters away, engaged with three attackers.
Time seemed to slow.
Ren looked at Daiki.
Calculation: Distance: 20 meters. Enemy trajectory: lethal impact in 1.5 seconds. Ren's options: A) Ignore Daiki. Kill current targets. Efficiency: High. Casualties: Daiki (Acceptable). B) Intervene. Expose back to current attackers. Probability of injury: 80%. Efficiency: Low.
The voices in the Vault clamored for Option A. He is weak, the Puppet Master sneered. Let him break. Use his body as a shield later. Focus on the mission, Goro advised. Soldiers die.
Ren watched Daiki's face. The boy was terrified. He was looking at Ren not as a superior officer, but as a savior.
Ren… his mother's voice whispered. Faint. Almost gone. Be kind.
Ren grit his teeth. "Damn it!"
He spun. He ignored the sword swinging at his own back. He threw his hands out.
"Puppet Art: Chakra Thread Manipulation!"
Blue threads shot from his fingers, latching onto Daiki's vest. Ren yanked his hand back.
Daiki was jerked backward through the air, flying twenty feet just as the enemy sword cleaved the space where his head had been.
SHINK.
Ren grunted. The sword he had ignored sliced across his back, cutting through his flak jacket and scoring a deep line into his flesh.
Ren dropped to one knee, the pain white-hot.
"Senpai!" Daiki scrambled up from where he landed, eyes wide.
Ren looked up at the three Iwa soldiers surrounding him. They were grinning. They had the monster on his knees.
"You got distracted," one of them sneered. "Sentimental fool."
Ren laughed. It was a low, dry chuckle that turned into a cough. Blood sprayed onto the stones.
"Sentimental…" Ren muttered. He looked at Daiki, who was alive. Terrified, but alive.
The decision to save the boy felt… heavy. It wasn't efficient. It was messy. It hurt.
But it felt like Ren.
"Yeah," Ren whispered. "Maybe I am."
He looked back at the enemies. The amusement vanished from his face, replaced by the abyss.
"And now, you've made me angry."
Ren didn't use a technique. He didn't use a ghost. He just let go of the dam he had built in Chapter 5. Just a crack.
He reached out and grabbed the nearest soldier's ankle.
Soul Eater: Contact Drain.
It wasn't a full consumption. It was a vampire's sip. Ren ripped the chakra directly out of the man's coil to replenish his own.
The soldier screamed as his legs turned to jelly, his chakra network collapsing instantly.
Ren stood up, fueled by the stolen energy. The wound on his back stopped bleeding as he burned the stolen life force to cauterize it.
"Who's next?" Ren asked.
The other two soldiers stepped back. They looked at their comrade, twitching on the ground, drained and gray.
"Monster," they whispered.
"No," Ren said, dashing forward. "Just hungry."
The Observer
The battle ended not with a cheer, but with a groan.
The Iwagakure forces, demoralized by the terrain trap and the slaughter of their vanguard, broke rank and retreated. The Leaf defenders, battered and exhausted, didn't pursue.
The pass was a graveyard of frozen mud and bodies.
Ren sat on a rock, wiping his kunai with a rag. He was covered in mud and blood—some his, mostly others. He felt hollowed out. The rush of the battle was fading, leaving the familiar, grinding headache of the Vault re-settling its prisoners.
Daiki approached him cautiously. He held a canteen.
"Ren-senpai?"
Ren looked up.
"Thank you," Daiki whispered, bowing low. "You saved my life. You took a hit for me."
Ren stared at the boy. He wanted to say something inspirational. 'That's what comrades do.' Or 'The Will of Fire binds us.'
But the words felt like ash in his mouth.
"Don't thank me," Ren rasped. "Just don't make me do it again. Next time, be stronger."
Daiki nodded, seeing the exhaustion in Ren's eyes. "I will. I promise."
Ren watched him walk away to help the wounded. Be stronger, Ren thought. That's the curse, isn't it? We have to be stronger so the people above us can play their games with heavier pieces.
From the ridge above, shadows lengthened.
A group of Anbu appeared, flanking an older man with a cane and a bandaged right eye.
Danzo Shimura.
Ren felt the arrival before he saw it. Danzo's chakra was cold, dark, and tasted of old parchment and rust. It was the chakra of a man who had buried his emotions so deep they had petrified.
Ren stood up, wincing as his back wound stretched.
The Commander of the sector, a Jonin named Ibiki (the father of the famous Ibiki, perhaps), walked up to Ren, followed by Danzo.
"Yamanaka Ren," the Commander barked.
"Sir." Ren saluted.
"Report," the Commander said, looking around at the devastation. "What happened here?"
"I utilized terrain advantages to neutralize the enemy vanguard," Ren recited robotically. "Casualties on our side are minimal. Enemy retreat confirmed."
The Commander looked at the frozen mud. He looked at the bodies drained of chakra. He looked at Ren's eyes.
"You used Earth, Water, and Wind," the Commander said, his voice low. "That is… highly irregular."
"I improvised," Ren lied.
"Improvisation usually implies desperate flailing," a raspy voice cut in.
Danzo stepped forward. His visible eye scanned Ren like he was appraising a piece of livestock.
"This was not flailing," Danzo said. "This was orchestration. A conductor utilizing every instrument in the pit."
Ren met Danzo's gaze. He felt a mental probe—subtle, insidious—trying to slide past his barriers.
Ren clamped the Vault shut tight. He presented a smooth, mirror-like surface to Danzo.
Danzo's eye narrowed slightly. Impressed.
"The village needs men who can orchestrate," Danzo said. He turned to the Commander. "Field promotion. Jonin. Effective immediately."
The Commander blinked. "Lord Danzo? He is young. And his psychological evaluation is… pending."
"War does not wait for evaluations," Danzo said. "He held the pass. He saved the platoon. He is a Jonin."
Danzo turned back to Ren. He didn't smile.
"Do not think this is a reward, Ren Yamanaka. It is a burden. You are now a high-value asset. Which means you will be sent to the darkest places, because you are the only torch bright enough to see."
"I understand," Ren said.
"Good." Danzo turned to leave. As he walked away, he murmured to his Anbu guard, barely audible. "Keep a file on him. Root potential: Alpha."
The Bloodless Victory
Night fell over Kikyo Pass.
Ren sat alone on the edge of the cliff. In his hand, he held the flak jacket vest of a Jonin, given to him by the Quartermaster an hour ago.
It was heavy.
He had won. He had killed dozens, saved his squad, and earned the rank that most shinobi dreamed of their entire lives.
But he didn't feel like a victor.
He looked at his hands. In the moonlight, they looked pale and clean. But he could feel the phantom sensation of other hands beneath his skin—Goro's rough hands, the Mist assassin's slender fingers.
He was becoming a legion.
"A bloodless victory," Ren whispered to the wind.
He looked at the scene below. The medics were sealing the enemy dead into scrolls. Cleaning up the mess.
Ren realized then that the war was ending. The frantic desperation of the Iwa attack was a death rattle. The treaties were being drafted. The peace was coming.
Peace.
The thought terrified him more than the battle.
In war, he had a target. He had an excuse to use the monsters in his head. He had a place to vent the pressure.
What happens when the fighting stops? Ren thought. What happens to a weapon when there is no enemy?
He looked at the moon. It was full and bright.
Does the hunger go away in peacetime?
The voice in the Vault answered. No. It only gets louder when the world is quiet.
Ren closed his eyes. He put on the Jonin vest. It fit perfectly, like a straightjacket.
"I survived," Ren whispered.
He stood up and walked back toward the camp fires, a rising star in a village that had no idea what it had created. A hero who was terrified of his own reflection.
End of Part 1.