WAR: WIIGF 24A (Patreon)

Chapter 24

Fingers halfway interlinked, Kenny stood dead center in the narrow concrete canyon behind a long-empty laundromat. Pointers on both hands aimed skyward with his palms flush, he simply breathed slow as best as he could, the filth of the alley almost unnoticed as he closed his eyes and simply focused. 

In, the city.

Out, the noise in his head.

The faint hiss-spit of steam from a busted pipe overhead was the only sound cutting through the distant rumble of the Bludheaven nights. 

His hands dropped from the Tiger sign as a final breath left him, impromptu meditation over as his energies flowed through him; out from his gut and into each and every limb.

Eyelids flicked open and the world snapped into focus.

Grimy brick walls and long-ignored greend dumpsters stared back at him rendered in hyper-saturated color in the dead of night. Every piece of trash, every single water stain and every little bit of rust on the fire escape stood out clear and stark. Irises burned a bright bloody red as he turned his head and blinked. Each one stood out stark against the dark, a single black tomoe spinning a slow, lazy circle around each pupil.

Without warning, his feet slapped the ground, body a coiled spring let loose. 

Thick black combat sandals, fresh from the black suitcase, met the cracked concrete that felt more natural than any of his Nikes or Jordans. His Foams might have been his favorite but they didn’t have shit on the way these helped carry him forward. In seconds, he hit the alley wall at a dead sprint, and… 

He just kept going.

One, two, three steps straight up the brickwork, simple verticality a suggestion he actively decided to ignore. For a little while, at least.Ken kicked off hard, before chakra control could give up on him, muscles in his body burning with blue chakra. Teeth grit, he launched himself across the ten feet that gapped the other end of the alley.

Hands gripped hard, gloved palms clenching tight to the edge of the roof the second he hit the wall. With a grunt, Kenny pulled himself over and onto the roof, landing in a low, tight crouch on the gravel-dusted tar.

He stood up slowly, rising to his feet as he stared up at the weak moonlight of Blüdhaven washing over him. The new gear felt… right. 

It shouldn't have, because new clothes never fit right the first wear, but it did. 

The simple short-sleeve romper fit his wiry frame like a second skin, the black fabric tough but flexible from his neck to where it ended just above his ankles and on his back, sitting dead center between his shoulder blades, was the Uchiha clan crest. The stark white and red fan was emblazoned there like a target, an arrogant declaration to a city that didn't know what the hell it meant. Black fingerless gloves hugged his hands, the metal plates atop his knuckles cold against his skin.

Two utility pouches should have sat heavy on his hips, filled with shuriken and kunai, but Ken had left most of that cold iron at home. He didn’t have the skill to throw them yet and a single day of practicing in the alley behind his house was just not enough to get him anywhere close to good, let alone lethal.

On his hip, though, the solid, undeniable weight of a ninjato sat perfectly straight.

He might not have been trained with the short sword either, but it was just a sharp stick at the end of the day. Just stick ‘em with the pointy end. 

The suitcase his invisible ‘divine passenger’ had dropped on the basketball court had been packed with an entire Uchiha starter pack, complete with the wardrobe. It was almost enough to make him think that his power, this weird, alien system hijacking his life, was purely ninja-related.

But then he remembered the magic, never-ending bag of Cheesy Poofs sitting in his room, and the weird white napkin resting on his desk, and that whole theory fell apart to nothing.

Whatever. He wasn't gonna question it. Not tonight. 

Red eyes flicked over to the alley he’d just jumped up from, hands clenching into tight fists as he stared down at the gap that had him scrambling to make it over. Still not there…

He was stronger than he’d been a week ago and way way way stronger than he was three weeks ago, but that didn’t mean much when he knew how high the scale was. Chakra was cool and all and it had boosted his body to what he could guess was about the level of an academy student — or at least the main character as a student — but that wasn’t enough.

Being as strong as a superpowered eight-year-old just wasn’t cutting it.

Not when he was up against… Dead Apostles.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

Keane stared at him, eyes seeming to shine brighter even as the sky above darkened.

“You said that word the other day…” Kenny looked back at him, eyebrow raised as he waited for the man to answer. “Cause whatever, I’m fine with you kickin’ me out…”Lie. 

Big lie.

He knew it and from Keane’s eyebrow rising to match his, he knew the priest knew that he knew it too.

Still, he was sticking to it.

“You could at least answer my questions, Keane.”

The father’s second eyebrow rose to join the first. “No Father anymore?”

“Unless you count Sunday School from when I was a kid, I ain’t part of the Church,” Ken folded his arms tighter across his chest. “And you ain’t my boss no more either. So, no.”

For some reason, the smile on Keane’s face only grew the more Ken talked. “Of course.”

Ken held back the urge to roll his eyes, no idea of how to read this guy even when his Sharingan was active and spinning. “So what is it?”

Four words were all it took to wipe away the smile clean from the priest’s face. The man lowered his head as his hand rose up to his chest, fingers coming to rest on the silver crucifix hanging from his neck. 

When he finally raised his head again, Ken saw a different man staring out at him with the same green eyes. “A Dead Apostle…”

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

‘A Dead Apostle is not the living sick, nor a beast of the field, but a corpse that has learned to pretend.’ Kenny reached up, fingers meeting the dark fabric around his neck as Keane’s words from last night played back through his head. ‘It is a man put to death who refuses the verdict, a body rewritten by unlawful art into a continuing thing, deserving no mercy but the final one it was denied.’  

He pulled the simple mask upwards, sliding it firmly over his nose and mouth. ‘A self-correcting cadaver, animated not by breath, but by the theft of life from man.’ 

The smell of the city was instantly muted by the scent of clean, sterile cotton as the world narrowed to his eyes, the spinning things in his skull that saw way too much. ‘Death made industrious; spirit, blood, and flesh fused into one construct. And the blood reduced to battery and sacrament inverted. They burn vitae the way a lamp burns oil.’

He kicked off again, body black against night as he began to run and jump. ‘Each an occult engine assembled from what was once human, a parasitic succession in the form of a guild more than a bloodline and borne from the first insult to God.’ 

The ninja darted across the rooftops of the fish-packing district, a ghost flitting through the urban decay as he kept the Sharingan active. ‘A continuity of predation, a recruitment by conversion, a hierarchy of blood.’ The constant drain of chakra behind his eyes was something he could ignore, at least for the most part, the tapestry of detail in front of him making it worth it. ‘And it is for this purpose we do not name the ‘vampire’ a species. They are a category of threat and no more; corpses with doctrine, preaching a single gospel…’

The world spun as he took to the air, body flipping once-twice before he landed into a crouch on both feet.

‘Life exists to be spent.’