My finger bones were bleeding again, but I dug in harder, hauling myself over another ledge inside the narrow ventilation shaft. The air was stale, thick with dust and something metallic. Half a year of underground hell had honed my senses to a razor edge. I heard every rustle, every distant scrape of iron, felt the slightest shift of air.
The tunnel widened without warning, ending at a dim landing in front of a massive door banded with iron. By the exit, leaning against the wall and visibly bored, stood a kid. Twelve at most. A genin, judging by the simple vest and the headband with the cult symbol on his forehead. His half-asleep eyes snapped wide when I spilled out of the vent's darkness, smeared in grime and blood from my torn hands.
"Y-you?!" he breathed, freezing.
A pause. A fraction of a second of hesitation, shock at the sight of me and the sheer impossibility of my appearance. For someone who'd spent the last months living under constant threat, that was enough.
Survival instinct, sharpened to the edge of a kunai, fired faster than thought. I didn't run back. I didn't scream. I lunged forward like a coiled spring. All my weight, all the strength piled up through months of brutal training in a cell, poured into one short, explosive strike. My fist, small but hard as stone, drove straight into his solar plexus.
"Ughh!" A hoarse, soundless groan tore out of him.
He folded in half as if he'd been cut down, choking on air he couldn't pull in. He dropped to his knees, then onto his side, curled tight, shaking in a silent spasm. I didn't let him recover. I threw myself onto him, jammed a knee into his back, pinned him to the cold stone. No sentiment, no hesitation. With quick, clawing fingers, I started stripping his belt pouch.
Pills. A small jar of greyish pellets, low-grade combat rations, but right now they were food of the gods. I dumped them into the pouch I'd taken from Syuka. A few seals with unfamiliar characters. One was clearly different from the others. I slid it under my shirt, feeling the paper's chill against my skin. A handful of kunai and shuriken followed into my pouch. Nothing else worth taking.
Then I drew a kunai and set it to his throat.
"What are those seals and how do you activate them? Talk, or I'll finish it right here and now since you're useless!"
Drowning in spit and tears, he managed to wheeze out, broken in hiccupping pain:
"S-substitution… s-seal… hand… chakra… explosive… seals… s-stick… i-input chakra…"
He curled again, seized by another spasm.
Enough. I stood. The genin lay helpless, staring up at me with eyes full of fear and pain. There was no cult hatred in them. Just the raw terror of a wounded animal.
'Kill him?' The thought flickered.
Remove the witness. Make myself safer. But why? He was nobody. A grain of sand. His death would buy me nothing but the seconds spent finishing him. And besides… this wasn't my war with him. He wasn't the one who tortured me. In his eyes I saw only a pathetic echo of the horror I'd lived.
"Stay down. Don't move. It'll be easier to breathe," I said flatly, turning away.
Killing a kid felt… like livestock behaviour. Even for me.
With a sharp kick I smashed the rusty bolt on the iron door. Metal shrieked and gave. I slipped outside.
Rain. Cold and soaking, it lashed my face, flooded my eyes, ran down my collar. But it was rain. Freedom rain. I tipped my head back and dragged in a full breath that smelled of wet earth, pine, and distance. Grey sky, low clouds, endless forest blurred by mist. Beautiful. Bitter and damp and infinitely desired.
No time to rest. Behind me, from that dark opening, a chase could burst out any second. I tore into the trees without a path, weaving between slick trunks, leaping roots and gullies. My body, trained on pain and extremes, worked like a tuned machine.
Then the adrenaline began to drain, replaced by leaden fatigue. My muscles burned. My lungs felt as if they were being ripped apart. Anyone else would've dropped dead after a couple of kilometres. But I wasn't 'anyone'. I was cursed. Immortal.
"Concentrate your chakra, idiot. Imagine it flowing through your body!" The shrill voice rose from memory.
In the last few weeks, between sessions of 'studying my nature', the old man in the white coat had tried to hammer the basics of chakra control into me. I was terrible at it. Completely. Feeling that inner energy, those pathetic crumbs, was agony, like trying to grab smoke and getting only cramps.
Now, in a desperate run for my life, I tried again. I clenched my will into a fist and forced that tiny, barely glowing spark in my belly to move down, into my legs. Not through complex channels. I didn't know them. Just down. Like current through a wire. A shove.
And it worked.
For a moment my legs went lighter, stronger. I shot ten metres with inhuman speed, nearly slamming into a pine. The effort ended, the chakra evaporated, leaving a burning emptiness and an even wilder hunger. But it worked. I squeezed out a few more bursts, hopping my distance forward in savage jumps.
Each time, through pain, right on the edge, but it bought me precious metres. I wasn't running on trees. I couldn't. Not on water either, not even close. But on the ground, I ran like a hunted beast, using terrain, brush, and stone to hide my trail. I ran through pain, through aching, through that lung-tearing emptiness, until the forest began to thin and a packed dirt road appeared underfoot.
Even if the old man in the lab coat was secretly celebrating my escape, even if he truly wanted me gone for good, that didn't mean I could relax. Somewhere underground, washed in sacrificial blood, waited a far more dangerous player: the Divine Messenger, Hayashi.
That fanatic with the ruined face was a real leader. His will was law. If he decided to retrieve a 'lost asset'… no one, not the old man, not every shinobi on the base combined, would dare refuse.
So I had to reach a place with people, a crowd, somewhere these second-rate sect rats wouldn't dare search openly or use force.
And there was something else. A scrap of conversation surfaced, something I'd overheard once on an 'operating table' between jolts of electricity.
There were serious bounties on members of the True Jashin cult, especially the upper ranks. They'd said Hayashi himself was worth fifteen million ryo, and other leaders had their own prices, smaller but still tempting. Thinking about it, I couldn't help a grim smirk as I hopped over another fallen tree.
"Someday I'll walk into a bounty office and report your little gathering of fanatics," I promised the underground world I'd left behind.
As I built plans for revenge, the forest ahead started to break. The sky darkened, a fine, nagging drizzle began. Under my feet, soft forest litter gave way to a packed, muddy track.
A road. People. Civilisation.
If I followed it, I'd reach a settlement. There, among ordinary people, I could melt away, vanish, wait, gather strength.