BOOOOOOM.
That sound, for context, was not a gas leak.
Not a building collapse, not a villain attack, not some freak weather event — though I'd be lying if I said the aftermath looked particularly different from any of those. It was me. Specifically, it was me performing an Almighty Push at what I had thought, was a responsible level of output.
I had taken precautions. Earth walls — dozens of them, layered in concentric rings, each one angled to break and redirect shockwaves outward. Forty minutes of setup. A location with no living person within three kilometres. Open sky, no load-bearing structures in significant range, the nearest actual building already a condemned skeleton that had been structurally apologising for decades.
Reasonable precautions. Thorough, even.
The hill to the east has been levelled.
The forest that used to stand beside it has — and I want to be precise here — stopped existing. Not thinned. Not damaged. Gone. There is a large, conspicuous absence where several hundred trees were standing approximately four seconds ago.
I stand very still.
The dust is still settling.
Something deep in the brain, older than rational thought, sends a message upward. The message is simple: you just seriously messed up.
I turn slowly and look toward the city.
Twelve kilometres out and still standing, nothing collapsing, no smoke.
Good. That's good.
I become aware, distantly, that my hands are shaking slightly. I look at them. I close them. I look back at the absent hill.
The Rinnegan is running a quiet damage assessment — range, radius, structural impact — and the numbers coming back are not numbers I am comfortable with. The shockwave had carried. Further than the walls, further than the perimeter, significantly further than the margin I had optimistically designated as safe.
Then there's the low tremor that had moved through the ground in the push's wake — not violent, more like the earth clearing its throat — and the quiet, horrible certainty settling in my chest that something with seismographs had noticed it.
Several somethings, probably.
---
Six weeks.
The abandoned industrial zone had recommended itself on practical grounds — condemned, isolated, far enough from the city that minor incidents would read as nothing. Nana-san had been the one to suggest it, which made what followed feel slightly less negotiable — she approved it on one condition: someone had to be with me. A guardian. Someone who could intervene if something went wrong.
I had listened carefully, agreed she raised a fair point, and clarified that I wouldn't be doing anything personally — the clones would handle the actual training. They could take the risk, gather the results, and I would receive the memories afterward. Cleaner that way, Safer too"
Then I produced a shadow clone, which I introduced as my training supervisor.
She had looked at it for a long moment, the clone looked back pleasantly.
She hadn't said it didn't satisfy the requirement. I'd decided that was sufficient.
The first two weeks I hadn't touched the Paths. Chakra-enhanced strength — controlled strikes against the old building frames, the slow work of finding where the ceiling actually was. The frames were reinforced concrete. They had not enjoyed the experience. The trees and the ground had also filed complaints.
Nature transformations came next—lightning first, precise and unforgiving, rewarding exactness and punishing approximation. Wind second; that turned into a week and a half of arguing before it finally fully cooperated. Fire, water, earth after that, in order.
I set several things on fire that I hadn't planned to, and found that wind release, once you push it past moderate output, tends to make its own weather—probably explaining a particular Tuesday last month that the city's meteorology service filed under unusual localised phenomena and then chose not to think too hard about.
The Rasengan variants came after that, starting with lightning—the Vanishing Rasengan, nature transformation mid-flight, trading power for invisibility. Wind was harder; the Rasenshuriken's structure doesn't cooperate with already violently rotating chakra the way lightning does, and the first attempts swung between nothing and uncontrolled detonation with very little in between but I got there eventually.
Fire Release Rasengan had come with its own particular exhaustion. The loading bay still bore evidence of our early negotiations. We had reached an understanding. Wind-Fire Rasenshuriken had taken three days beyond that — one test at meaningful output, one building that no longer had opinions. I wrote in my notebook: confirmed functional. Treat as last resort.
Earth release gave me something unexpected: tremor sensing, a quiet map of weight and movement through the soil. Less dramatic than the rest. More immediately useful than most of it.
Water was, I want to be honest, fun. Jet streams, pressurised and directed, cutting through metal and earth with enough sustained output. I spent longer on it than strictly necessary. I have no regrets about this.
The Rinnegan Paths had required a different kind of careful.
Naraka Path — summoned the King of Hell to confirm I could. It materialised in the loading bay, vast and entirely indifferent to the setting. I looked at it, confirmed the connection, dismissed it. The restoration function I tested on wildlife. The interrogation function I did not test on anything living.
Human Path I had tested once.
A sparrow had blundered into the loading bay through simple geographical optimism and landed near me on a concrete frame. I had been curious — the specific dangerous kind — and extended the Path, and felt what it was to reach into something living and pull —
The sparrow had died.
I had its memories. Not thoughts, not really — instincts. Hunger. Movement. A constant, low awareness of space and threat. Brief flashes of direction without reasoning behind them. No language, no reflection, just the immediate certainty of what to do next — and then nothing.
I had sat with that for a long time. Not grief, exactly. I hadn't known the sparrow. But with the clean, cold knowledge of what the Path felt like in actual use, and the distance between understanding something intellectually and understanding it in your hands.
I wrote in my notebook: Human Path — confirmed functional. Do not use. Not a question of whether it is useful. Do not use.
I had not opened that door again.
Animal Path had been considerably less morally complicated, if logistically chaotic. Several kaiju sized creatures in the loading bay, reversed before anyone arrived with reasonable questions. Useful. Something to develop further.
Five weeks of careful increments, detailed notes, contained incidents.
And then today, week six, I had looked at my notes, looked at what I knew about the Deva Path, and made the specific error of reasoning that twenty percent output would be conservative.
---
The clone drops from altitude about half a minute later, landing a few metres away. It looks at the crater. Looks at the absent hill. Looks at the skyline.
Then it looks at me.
"I felt that from altitude," it says.
"How high?"
"High enough that I shouldn't have."
I nod. "The city?"
"Still there. Windows rattled on the eastern rail yard buildings." A pause. "People will feel it, boss."
Yes. That's the part making my chest do what it's doing — not just the guilt, though there's some of that, but the cold awareness that somewhere in Hamamatsu right now a seismograph is printing something anomalous, and someone is looking at it with their head tilted.
"We need to leave," I say.
The clone doesn't argue.
---
The garden materialises around me.
Sunday afternoon. Cool air, overcast sky, voices drifting from somewhere above — a television, footsteps on the stairs. Everything exactly where I'd left it, completely indifferent to what had just happened twelve kilometres to the east.
I sit down heavily on the step.
The thing about hoping nobody connects a seismic reading to a seven-year-old orphan in Hamamatsu is that it's a reasonable hope. It is also not a comfortable thing to be relying on.
The bird — Karura, having decided at some point that my knee was its territory and that I had no say in the matter — lands unbidden and shuffles twice; I consider dismissing it, decide against it.
It does not look sympathetic.
---
Aki finds me on the step about fifteen minutes later.
She comes through the back door at speed, cat ears flat, tail rigid — the specific posture she carries when something has unsettled her and she hasn't decided how to feel about it yet. She stops when she sees me. Comes and sits close enough that her shoulder is almost against mine.
"Did you feel it?" I say.
"The earthquake?" No hesitation. "Yeah. I was in study and the window rattled a little." She pulls her knees to her chest. "Mori-sensei didn't even notice. I only did because—" she flicks an ear, like that explains it. "It was tiny. Barely anything. Just — you don't expect it."
She looks at me sideways. She is nine years old and sometimes she looks nine and sometimes she looks considerably older, and right now she's doing the second one. "Was that you?"
"...Yeah."
She pulls at a loose thread on her sleeve. "How much of it is gone?"
"The hill. And the forest next to it."
A longer pause.
"Itsuki," she says.
"I know."
"Is anyone—"
"No one was around. The city only caught the edge. I left as soon as it happened."
"Good." More firmness than I expected from someone who had been sitting in a classroom when most people hadn't noticed anything at all. "Staying to get caught for something you can't explain would've been really dumb. You couldn't fix it, and no one was hurt. So leaving was right." A beat. "Even if it felt bad."
"It felt bad," I confirm.
"Yeah." She leans her chin on her knees. "You should've built bigger walls."
"Yes. That has been added to the list."
She almost smiles. "You have to tell Kenji."
"I know."
"He went all still when it happened and started looking at the walls and ceiling." A pause. "He didn't say anything. Just looked."
Something sits heavier in my chest at that than I expected.
---
I find Kenji in the common room, sitting at the table with a book he isn't reading. It's open in front of him, one hand resting lightly on the page like he forgot to turn it.
He looks up when I come in. Something in his face settles — recognition, confirmation — and then, just as quickly, something else doesn't.
"The earthquake," he says.
"That was me."
The hand on the page goes still.
He looks at me the way you look at something when your brain has received information it isn't sure what to do with yet. Not disbelief, exactly. He knows me well enough for that. More like — recalibration. The specific expression of someone who thought they had a working model and have just been handed a data point that doesn't fit inside it.
"…How bad?" he says, carefully.
"The site took most of it. Hill's gone. Forest's gone. City got the edge — minor tremor, no damage." I pause. "The site gives nothing away except scale."
A beat.
"The hill," he says.
"Yes."
"The whole hill."
"Yes."
He closes the book. Not the way he usually closes it — like the deliberate, conversation concluding motion. He closes it like his hands needed something to do and that was what was available.
"What were you practicing today?"
"The gravity thing."
"And you were at — what output."
"Twenty percent."
Something moves through his face. He looks away from me, to the wall, to the middle distance, the way people look when they need a second to put something somewhere and haven't found the place yet.
"Twenty," he says. Not a question. Just the word, sitting there.
"Yes."
"You're seven years old," he says and this time it comes out differently than it would have ten seconds ago. Not a fact he's reminding himself of. Something closer to genuine bewilderment wearing the clothes of a statement. He points at me, briefly, the gesture quick and almost unconscious, like he's trying to reconcile what he's looking at with what he's just heard.
"Yes."
He looks back at me. Really looks — like he's seeing the gap between what he'd been tracking in his head and what's actually in front of him, and the gap is wider than he thought.
"How did you even—" He stops. Starts again, differently. "Was anyone hurt? Are you hurt?"
"Nope, no one was hurt, and I too am completely fine."
He breathes out. "You won't be caught?"
"Nothing points to anyone specific, at least that's what i think."
A nod. Slow. Like he's putting something down carefully.
"Good." He exhales. Opens the book again. Stares at the page.
A small nod. Then, very quietly, with the particular certainty of someone who means it in more than one direction at once: "Don't do that again."
I take that under advisement.
He turns the page. I'm not sure he reads it. I leave him to it.
---
The news segment airs at seven.
We're all in the common room — full house, Sunday evening, the usual argument over sofa space — because a movie that came out a few months ago is premiering on TV. Someone had insisted this counted as an event. Snacks had been acquired. Territorial disputes over seating had been settled through methods that would not stand up to legal scrutiny.
It had already been a slightly odd afternoon. The earthquake — if you could call it that, most people hadn't felt more than a brief wrongness, a window rattle, the particular instinctive stillness of realising the floor had moved — had made its way through the house the way minor events do: someone mentioned it, someone else confirmed they'd felt it too, a caretaker had checked their phone and said it was probably nothing, and the conversation had dissolved back into the ordinary noise of a Sunday. By dinner it had mostly been set aside. Small quakes happened. This was Japan.
Mostly set aside.
We're about twenty minutes in when the screen cuts to commercials.
A collective groan rolls through the room.
"Already?" Sora complains, halfway upside down off the arm of the sofa. "Nothing even happened yet—"
"Something happened," Mei says quietly. "You just weren't paying attention."
"I was—"
The argument is cut short by the sharp click of a remote.
The channel changes.
Half the room turns immediately.
"Hey—"
"Oi, what are you doing?"
One of the older kids is leaning forward on the arm of the chair, remote in hand, attention fixed on the screen in a way that makes the complaints die down before they really get going.
"Shh," he says, not loudly, but with enough weight behind it that people actually listen. "They're talking about the quake."
That does it. The room had already half-filed it away — small quake, probably nothing — and now here it was again, on the news, at seven o'clock.
The room settles, unevenly, curiosity overriding irritation.
The screen fills with a news broadcast already in progress.
Aerial footage. A helicopter circling the eastern outskirts, and there it is in sharp, unhelpful clarity: a wide swathe of flattened earth where a hill used to be, surrounded by the blasted remnants of what had been a dense forest, the ground disturbed in a pattern that looks nothing like a natural event.
"—authorities and several Pro Heroes arrived at the scene earlier this afternoon following reports of a localised seismic event. What they found—"
The camera pans across the crater. Across the precise, circular radius of destruction that my earth walls had carved before they too got caught in the blast.
"— investigators have confirmed this was not a naturally occurring event. Pro Hero Ragdoll of the Wild Wild Pussycats, among the first responders, described the scene as—"
Interview footage. A woman in a yellow cat-themed costume — sleeveless, gold trim, cat-ear headgear, pink markings on her cheeks — with an expression I recognise as professional composure sitting atop genuine unease.
"The radius is extremely precise. Whatever caused this — it wasn't random. This was directional force, applied at a scale unlike anything we've ever seen."
The room stays quiet for one more second.
Then Sora turns around with eyes the size of dinner plates. "A VILLAIN DID THAT!!?"
"We don't know that—"
"IT'S A VILLAIN. THERE'S A VILLAIN—"
"Sora!—"
"IN HAMAMATSU—"
The room dissolves into argument. The caretakers step in from the doorway and begin the work of talking everyone down from the collective conclusion that a supervillain has taken up residence twelve kilometres away.
I watch the television.
From the corner of the room, Mei — she's ten, quiet, rarely says anything that isn't worth listening to — sits with her arms around her knees and stares at the footage with an expression that isn't panicked. Just scared. The small, private kind.
Sora's volume doubles. Mei gets a little smaller.
The news panellists use the phrase significant threat to public safety.
About my Sunday training session.
Kenji catches my eye from across the room. Looks at the television. Then back at me.
A brief pause—just long enough to read the thought.
He really did that — or that's what I read in it, anyway.
Then he looks back at his book, with the air of someone who has filed something and is not taking it out again until he is ready.
The segment moves on to commentary. I become aware, very slowly, that someone is standing in the hallway.
Nana-san.
She is not watching the television.
She is watching me.
Her expression is the particular kind of still that has nothing to do with calm — the stillness of someone who has already done the arithmetic, already traced the line from the site I approved to the event on screen, and arrived somewhere she is not yet ready to say out loud. She doesn't look angry. That would be easier.
Our eyes meet for just a moment.
She looks away first. Back to the screen.
She doesn't say anything tonight. But the way she turns back into the hallway — measured, deliberate, the walk of someone setting something aside rather than letting it go — tells me clearly enough.
She will.
---
That night I sit on my bunk long after lights-out, writing by the faint glow of a chakra light cupped in my palm.
Deva Path: twenty percent output removes geography. Shockwave carried to city at twelve kilometres — minor tremor felt, no damage. Site discovered same day. Heroes on scene within hours. Pattern identified as directional force, non-natural.
No evidence pointing to a specific individual.
If there is a next test: ocean. Minimum five kilometres of open water as buffer. Extended perimeter. Start at ten percent and build. Do not assume anything will hold.
Nana-san knows. Or near enough.
I look at the last line for a while. Then I write, below it, the same line I had written three weeks ago after the sparrow, because honesty sometimes requires repetition:
Human Path — confirmed functional. Do not use.
And below that, one more:
On a scale unlike anything she'd ever seen. Remember that.
Karura shuffled once on the pillow. Made the quiet sound — not the chirp. The other one— before I dismissed it.
Outside, Hamamatsu settled into night. Somewhere across the city a news cycle wound down. Somewhere in a Pro Hero agency a report was being filed. Somewhere to the east, a hill was still very much not there.
I closed the notebook.
-----------------------------------------
Author's note:
One thing I want to make clear is that yes I do use AI, not to generate chapter or ideas or any of the content.
I only use it after I have written the entire chapter then to check if better phrasing exist or spelling errors or things like that.
Also as you guys have likely seen by now, i am terrible at writing dialogue 🥲.