Hidden Leaf, Hidden Talents 131 (Patreon)

Nine Kiri shinobi raced across the rooftops while smoke drifted up from the streets below.

A few houses burned where the fighting had passed through, flames crawling over broken roofs and shattered windows. Most of the town still stood untouched, dark and silent beyond the scattered patches of fire.

Somewhere up ahead, a jutsu hit with a heavy crack.

Men started yelling after.

Toma ran near the back of the squad.

He had tied his forehead protector three times before they crossed into town. Still felt crooked. Like the thing knew he had no business wearing it.

The new jonin vest was worse. Too stiff in some places, too loose in others. Kept shifting against his shoulders while he ran, and every time it did, his hand wanted to creep up and fix the collar.

He resisted the urge.

Masa dropped onto the roof beside him. “First time inside an enemy town?”

“That obvious?”

"New vest, first real job. That about right?

Toma nodded. “First war too.”

“Yeah. That explains the face.” Masa smirked. “Stay with the squad. Don’t chase anyone alone, don’t stop because you hear crying, and don’t try to impress the captain. Do those three things, and you’ve got a fair chance of seeing home again.”

It wasn’t the fighting that bothered him.

They crossed another roof.

Down below, a man stumbled out of a burning house.

Fire rode the back of his shirt. Half his face was cooked black, and one arm flopped with every step. He lurched into the road, crashed into a water barrel, and pulled the whole thing down with him.

The wood split open.

Water washed around his body, black with ash and pink with blood, then ran off into the gutter.

Toma nearly stopped.

"Not our fault," Masa said. "Orders were plain enough. Uzumaki only, everyone else gets left alone. We don't go out of our way to kill civilians, but we're not stopping for them either." He hopped over a broken ridge beam. "This is just how it goes. People get caught in the middle of this stuff. Nothing to be done about it."

“I know,” Toma said.

The words tasted rotten the second they left him.

Smoke rolled between the buildings, swallowing the burned man from sight.

Casualties.

Could not be helped.

Useful little words.

Would they say the same thing if the orders changed tomorrow?

If someone decided red hair was no longer enough, and every witness had to die?

Would Masa say nothing could be done then too?

They reached a wide road.

A family ran below.

The father carried a little boy against his chest while pulling an older girl by the wrist. The mother followed with a bundle pressed to her stomach, stumbling every few steps as she tried to keep up.

Black hair. Brown hair. Not a red strand among them.

Toma watched the captain, waiting for some sign. A raised hand, a glance downward, anything that meant the order was coming. He knew what it would sound like if it came. ‘No witnesses’. Simple as that. And nobody in the squad would refuse it.

But the captain didn't even look at the family.

Nine Kiri shinobi crossed the road and kept moving, and the family below them was already forgotten.

Only then did Toma let out the breath he had been holding.

The family slipped into an alley behind them and disappeared.

They ran for another few minutes.

The deeper they went, the worse the town became. Houses burned on both sides of the street. Bodies lay crumpled in doorways, under busted carts, half-hidden beneath fallen beams. A few wore Uzushio colors, but most were townsfolk.

Toma counted the red-haired dead until he reached eleven.

Then he stopped counting.

The captain threw up a fist.

All nine Kiri stopped across three rooftops.

Toma dropped beside a chimney with his kunai drawn, his heart pounding against his ribs.

The scout at the front dropped low near the roof’s edge and peered into the lane below.

“Six,” she whispered. “Heading north.”

“Uzumaki?” the captain asked.

“Two. Maybe three.”

The captain pointed toward the next row of buildings. Four shinobi broke off without a word, jumping across the street to block the northern end. Masa went with them.

Toma followed the captain, dropping from the roof into a smoke-filled alley.

They landed ahead of the fleeing group.

Six men stopped in the road.

Two had bright red hair. The other four had black or brown, but every one of them wore an Uzushio forehead protector. One held a wounded man under the arm. Another stood out front with a tanto raised.

Blood soaked their sleeves. Their chests. Their hands.

Far too much of it to belong to the wounded man alone.

The captain looked over the wet blades, then the dark splashes across their clothes. His face hardened. They had already fought someone, and most of that blood clearly wasn’t theirs.

The red-haired man eased the wounded one down against the wall, then stood straight and faced them.

"Filthy Mist scum. You think you can walk into our town and slaughter us like animals?" He showed his teeth. "Come on, then! Let’s see how far you crawl after I spill your guts across the road!”

The captain pulled his sword. “Kill them.”

Toma squeezed his kunai until the wrapping bit into his palm.

His first war.

His first unavoidable death.

The man with the tanto came for him.

Toma went to meet him.

CLANG!

The fight was short, savage, and far more costly than it should have been. Six cornered Uzushio left two Mist shinobi dead and several others bleeding before they were finally put down. Toma nearly joined them. Would have, too, if the captain hadn’t stepped in and knocked the blade aside right before it found his throat.

Toma bent over, heaving through his teeth.

Blood slipped between his fingers.

Too damn close.

The enemy blade had been inches from his throat. If the captain had been any slower, Toma would have been on the ground with the others.

Masa once told him the captain had nearly earned a place with the Seven Swordsmen before some well-fed bastard with the right friends stole it out from under him. Toma had thought he was exaggerating. Not anymore.

The captain flicked the blood from his blade.

“See to him.”

The medic looked from the shinobi dying at her knees to Toma.

The captain didn’t repeat himself.

She pulled her hands away. The green light vanished from the hole in the man’s stomach.

He made a little noise when the warmth left him.

Toma heard the sound and wished he hadn’t.

The medic grabbed his arm and shoved him against the wall. “Move your hand.”

Toma did. Blood had soaked through the torn shoulder of his new vest and turned the cloth almost black.

Her chakra warmed the wound.

“Thank you,” he muttered.

She said nothing. Didn’t even look at him. Her hands kept glowing while the man behind her breathed smaller and smaller.

Masa crouched beside one of the dead and wiped his kunai on the man’s sleeve. “We still moving to the next phase?”

“Yes.” The captain slid his sword back into its sheath. “The barrier is down, but the Uzumaki have pulled tricks like this before. If they survive the night, they may try to raise it again.”

He turned north, where the top of a fuinjutsu pillar rose above the roofs.

Masa frowned. “The western pillar is already gone. Without it, they can’t raise the barrier again. They’re not rebuilding something that size in a few minutes, so what’s the point of destroying the rest?”

“Orders are orders.”

Toma said nothing. The order made sense to him, just not for the same reason. Better to spend their time breaking stone than chasing these poor Uzumaki through the streets. Those who could still run might make it out of town. There was no need for unnecessary violence.

The captain looked down at the dead Uzushio. "Notice where they were running to. Same place as the rest of them." He nodded toward the pillar. "They're protecting what's still standing, so the pillars must still be good for something. That's likely the reason the Mizukage wants them all destroyed."

Toma’s small relief died there.

For one stupid second, he had thought the pillars might pull them away from the worst of the fighting. Instead, they were dragging them straight toward every Uzushio still desperate enough to die protecting one.

Masa came over. “You still good?”

“I’m fine. Shoulder still hurts a little.” Toma let out a breath. “I owe you an apology.”

“For what?”

“That rumor about the captain. I thought you were making it up.”

Masa laughed. “About him almost making the Seven? It’s still just a rumor. People also say he once fought Konoha’s White Fang to a draw, so don’t take every story you hear seriously.”

He clapped Toma on his good shoulder, still chuckling.

A minute later, they left their dead in the street and took to the rooftops.

Toma stuck near the back again, his shoulder throbbing beneath the medic’s rough bandage.

The pillar loomed up ahead, bigger with every rooftop.

Stood dead center of a wide square, thick as an old-growth tree, scrawled top to bottom in sealing script. Cracks split the stone. Some of the ink lines had burned out dark. Others still pulsed a sick red under the soot, like embers refusing to die.

Bodies were scattered everywhere across that square, most in Kiri colors. Toma didn't even get to count them before a Mist went flying across the road and slammed into the pillar's base, painting the stone red.

The captain landed at the roof’s edge.

Down below, three figures stood in the middle of all that death.

A red-haired woman was holding off six Kiri by herself, silver chains whipping out from behind her, ripping chunks out of the road every time they missed. She stuck close to the pillar, angling herself so she was always the wall between the Kiri and the two girls at her back.

One girl, red hair.

One girl, blue.

Young. Both of them. Barely old enough to be handed a genin headband, if that.

Then the blue-haired girl raised a hand.

Nothing happened. Not at first.

A Kiri shinobi charged her.

The rubble beneath his feet burst apart.

Sheets of paper poured from the cracks like something alive, wrapping around his legs and waist, and then the ink lit up.

Blew him clean off his feet.

He came back down in pieces.

Another one tried slipping past the older woman, timing it between two chain-sweeps. Almost made it too, right up until a thin chain snapped up out of the rubble at his ankle. The red-haired girl had threaded it under the broken road while he was busy watching the big chains do their thing.

Yanked his leg out from under him.

Arms flew wide open.

The older woman stepped in and put her whole fist through his chest.

He folded around her arm like paper and went through a wall.

Toma's stomach clenched. These weren't genin, not with how they fought. Young, maybe, but nothing about their movements was genin. High chunin, at least. Maybe worse.

The captain pulled his sword.

“Our people are down there. Help them kill those three. Then destroy the pillar.”

Toma swallowed.

His kunai felt slippery in his hand, wet with sweat and someone else’s blood.

The blue-haired girl looked up.

Her eyes found the squad on the roof.

More paper slithered out from the cracked stone at her feet.

Toma tightened his grip. Whatever hesitation he had left disappeared when another Kiri shinobi vanished inside a burst of fire and white paper.

The captain jumped.

The squad followed.

Toma went down with them.

…

-Shinji’s clone-

On the western side of the square, the clone caught the kick on his forearm. It hurt like hell, but he shoved through it anyway and sent the bastard stumbling back into his friends. That was the thing about pain. You could be right in the middle of a world of it and still have work to do.

A kunai came whistling a moment later, aimed to open his knee like a tin can. He twisted his hips and let it pass, then drove a kick into the thrower’s ribs hard enough to fold him around his own arm. Something cracked in there. Not his problem.

More coming. There was always more coming in this life, right up until there wasn’t. That was usually how you found out you were dead.

He spun as he landed, angled himself so the two loitering by the chimney stack didn't have a clean line on his spine. Those two hadn't thrown a damn thing yet, which in his experience meant one of two comforting possibilities. Either they were useless, or they were about to do something with fire. He had exactly one body to bet with, and he decided he wasn't a gambling man today. Assume the worst. Anything better is a nice surprise.

In the middle of it, he found himself half a second and spent it looking across the rooftops the way a starving man might look at a locked fridge.

Kushina, her mother, Konan, all three still upright, still breathing. One piece of good news in the middle of this whole disaster.

Then his clone-brother, three roofs over, getting knocked around by two of the Seven Swordsmen

That was bad. Genuinely bad.

He ducked a follow-up swing and came up already turning over the thought he’d been trying not to have. Bodies at his feet. Taijutsu alone against these numbers. He didn’t like a single answer he got.

Try Shinra Tensei now and he'd go out like a burst bladder, and that would be that. Which left his fists. Fists he trusted. Fists also weren't going to do a damn thing against a Swordsman and everyone else queuing up behind him.

Boss. Wherever you are, now would be a fine time.

Another kunai clipped past his ear and buried itself in the tile. He closed the distance, drove a heel into the nearest man’s ribs, and used the flinch to take a better angle.

Any time now.

Because if the boss didn't show, that was the end of the story.

That's when his eyes went wide.

He was still trading blows with the man in front, knuckles cocked for the next one, when some clever soul near the back of the Kiri pack decided his own teammate's spine looked like a fine place to plant a wind jutsu. Fired it straight into the man's back without so much as a blink for the fact his friend was standing right there mid-swing. Friendly fire is a phrase men invented for a reason, and apparently the reason hadn't reached this guy yet.

The unlucky sod took it between the shoulder blades and went sailing like a dropped sack of turnips, straight into the clone, and the two of them went off the rooftop together in a tangle of limbs, crashing sideways into a pair of water dragons two other Kiri had already got cooking.

He'd seen plenty of ugly shit in his time. This one climbed the list anyway.

The clone flung his arm up, poured out every last drop of chakra he had, and popped Shinra Tensei right there in the air.

The air went WHUMP.

The water dragons never got their jaws shut. They just weren't there any more, undone along with whatever remained of that first gust of wind. And the unlucky bastard who'd been used as a human missile, still halfway through screaming about his so-called comrade's aim, ate the full repulsion at pointblank range. He went from unlucky to airborne, bending the way a man's body isn't built to bend. His spine went with a wet crack. Ribs came up through the skin like something being born.

The clone spun through his own blast, reaching for the two who'd thrown those dragons in the first place, hand curling for one more smash that was never going to land.

Too far.

He knew it the second he tried.

Bastards, he thought. Not much of a last word. Felt about right, all the same.

Then he popped.

…

Across town, near the eastern pillar, the one folks called the Last Pillar or simply the Ninth, Minato swapped his dulled kunai for a fresh one. Below him, Jiraiya-sensei caught a Kiri nin by the wrist and put him down with an elbow to the jaw.

Minato spotted two more Mist shinobi coming in from a distance.

“They’re already inside,” he said. “Why are they still trying so hard to destroy the pillars?”

Jiraiya wiped blood from his knuckles. “Because the barrier going down once doesn’t mean it stays down.”

Minato looked up at the stone pillar next to them. Sealing script running down every side of it, most still glowing faint under the soot.

“They can raise another one?”

“An Uzumaki with Adamantine Sealing Chains can put up a strong barrier alone. Give several of them one of these pillars each and they could cover a good part of the town without much trouble.”

“Like the barrier from before?”

“More or less.” Jiraiya rubbed his chin. “Maybe stronger. Hard to say. Most of what I know came from a half-senile Uzumaki elder who explained the barrier somewhere between a story about his first wife and a long argument with a pigeon.”

Minato frowned. “If they can do that, why haven’t they raised it already? Do they need to take back every pillar first?”

“I doubt it. The whole town, maybe. But they could seal off some of it with fewer pillars. Probably less.”

“Then why haven’t they?”

Jiraiya didn’t answer.

His eyes had drifted to the pack of Uzumaki gathered at the base of the pillar.

Minato listened.

They were far enough away that he missed pieces, but he heard enough to understand what was happening. Several uzu shinobi wanted the seal master to trigger it, the Adamantite Barrier, the last-resort seal nobody raised unless the town was already dying. The seal master responsible for it kept refusing. Others pressed him, argued that more Kiri were entering by the minute, and accused him of wasting the only chance they had left.

The seal master still wouldn’t touch the control seals.

Minato couldn’t make out exactly why, but the fear in his voice was obvious.

Whatever it took to raise that Adamantite Barrier, chakra wasn’t the only price.

Jiraiya had warned him about seals like that during their short fuinjutsu lesson. Power always came from somewhere. When the available chakra wasn’t enough, a seal could take the difference from the user’s body. Their blood. Their lifespan. Sometimes it took everything.

The men around the pillar argued harder. One grabbed the seal master by the robes, and the seal master shoved him back, sending him stumbling.

Jiraiya sighed. “Doesn’t matter. If they don’t make a choice soon, Kiri will make it for them.”

A low hum rolled across the rooftops.

Jiraiya looked north. “Ah. Looks like one of them already made the choice.”

Minato followed his line of sight.

A pale blue wall rose over the northern district.

It started near one of the distant pillars and curved over the surrounding streets, sealing off several blocks beneath a shallow dome. It covered barely a tenth of the town, and it looked nothing like the violet barrier that had surrounded Uzushio before.

Massive red chains wrapped around the blue dome, crossing over one another like bands around a barrel.

Kiri jutsu struck the outer wall seconds later.

The barrier didn’t even ripple.

"They've already started," Minato said. He could feel it even from here, that hum wasn't chakra dissipating into the air, it was being held, contained. "That's the Adamantite Barrier? It feels nothing like the one that went down earlier."

"Looks that way." Jiraiya's eyes stayed fixed on the dome, and for a moment the urgency in his face gave way to something like admiration. "You have to hand it to the Uzumaki, their sealwork never stops being impressive. I wouldn't be surprised if it could hold back a bijuu."

Then his attention dropped back to the streets below. "We should get moving, we need to find Kushina before more of those go up."

Minato looked down at the Uzumaki still gathered around the ninth pillar. “What about them?”

Jiraiya just shrugged. “When things get bad enough, they may change their minds. Or they may keep arguing until Kiri makes the choice for them. Either way, we have our own mission.”

He stepped off the roof.

Minato followed.

Shouts rose behind them before they reached the next building.

“Where are you going? We still need you here!”

“You said Konoha came to help, so help us!”

“Don’t turn your backs on us now!”

Neither Minato nor Jiraiya looked back.

They crossed the next rooftop and disappeared, leaving the pillar and the arguing Uzumaki behind.

Fifteen minutes later, they stopped again.

Minato stood on the edge of a roof with his arms folded, staring flatly at his sensei’s back.

“This is the third time.”

Jiraiya gave an embarrassed cough. “Look, these things happen. Especially at my age.”

He cleared his throat and changed the subject. “More importantly, you’ve had sensor training. If you could find Kushina, we wouldn’t still be wandering around like this.”

Minato rolled his eyes. Jiraiya was the one wasting time. Three piss breaks in fifteen minutes, and somehow this was his fault.

“That’s why I keep telling you to drink less before missions,” Minato said. “And I barely started learning to sense chakra before someone transferred me to the Kumo front.”

“And you came back better for it,” Jiraiya said, stepping onto the roof ridge. “You know the basics. That should be enough to pick Kushina out once we get close.”

“The town is huge. I already tried twice, but my range doesn’t even reach a kilometer yet.”

Jiraiya slowly shook his head, wearing the grave disappointment of a teacher whose student had failed him terribly. “Sensei is very disappointed.”

Minato gave him another flat look. “You can be disappointed while moving.”

He jumped to the next roof.

After a second, Jiraiya followed.

Minato reached for his senses again as they ran, pushing his chakra outward through the streets below. Walls, fires, fighting, hundreds of signatures scattered through the streets. Everything blurred before he reached the edge of his range.

Nothing.

He pulled back before the strain became a headache.

They would have to keep moving, search again from another part of town, and hope Kushina happened to fall within range before Kiri found her first.

Not much of a plan.

Still better than stopping for a fourth piss.

…

-Kushina-

She loved her mom's chains more than almost anything.

For as long as Kushina could remember, even when she was small enough to sit on her mother’s hip, she had loved watching the silver chains bloom behind her and glow gold from end to end. Her mother would wiggle her fingers, and the chains would wiggle too, making little Kushina laugh and wave both hands as if she were helping.

They never looked heavy. They curled through the air like ribbons, looping around one another and drawing little circles above Kushina’s head. Sometimes her mom made them wiggle like snakes. Sometimes she shaped them into floppy ears and made Kushina guess what animal they were supposed to be.

Kushina would clap and shout, “Again! Again!”

And her mom would laugh and do it one more time, just for her.

She wanted that. She wanted chains of her own more than anything. Sometimes she even checked behind herself in the mirror, just in case they had appeared overnight.

Later, when she was old enough to understand words like bloodline and clan secret, someone finally explained it to her properly. Adamantine Sealing Chains. Not something you could just learn, like the Body Flicker or Bunshin. You needed the aptitude for it, and even then, the clan had to give you permission before anyone would even start teaching you.

Her mom got that permission for her fast and Kushina remembered how happy that had made her, jumping around the house for a full day because she was going to have chains too, just like Mom's.

Then the actual learning started.

And the actual learning was nothing like jumping around a house.

Some kids in the clan got theirs almost right away. Kushina kept telling herself that hers were only shy. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe after one more try.

But tomorrow kept becoming another tomorrow, and after a while, she stopped checking behind herself in the mirror every morning.

Then Kiri came, burned the town, killed people she knew, and hurt people she loved. And after years of waiting, something inside Kushina finally answered her.

She was angry. She hated them for what they had done to her home and her family, to people who had never done anything to them. But beneath all that anger was a small, aching part of her that kept asking the same thing over and over.

Why?

Why would anyone do this?

Why did it have to be them?

And then, right in the middle of all that anger and hurt, her chains came out.

Silver. Every link glowing gold.

Beautiful.

They came out of her like they had always been there, only waiting for Kushina to notice them. She hardly had to think. She wanted them to move, and they did, curling around her as easily as if they already knew what she meant.

One chain swept a Kiri shinobi off his feet.

For one bright little second, Kushina forgot everything else.

My chains. They’re really mine.

She had waited so long for them.

They weren’t only good for knocking people away either. She learned that almost immediately. Whenever a jutsu flew at her or her mom, she threw up her chains, and it burst into pretty light against them.

That was her favorite part.

Something meant to hurt someone she loved would hit her chains and turn into nothing but pretty light, like a beautiful firework made just for her.

She could protect her mom with this.

As long as she had her chains, everything was going to be fine.

Kushina kept them moving through the smoke, swinging and curling wherever she needed them. Her mom stayed close beside her, and every time Kushina left an opening, one of her mother’s chains seemed to be there waiting to cover it. It felt almost like one of those games they used to play when Kushina was little, except now the chains were real, and they were both using them together.

Konan helped too. Paper wings carried her from roof to roof while she darted in, struck, and slipped away before the Kiri could catch her.

She did pretty well.

But she and her mom still got more of them. Way more.

Not that she was counting.

Maybe Konan had paper wings and got to call him Sensei, but Kushina had chains now. Better chains. Much better.

Shinji could hear all about her new chains later. Right now, she still had people to knock over.

Whack.

One Kiri went skidding across the stones.

Thump.

Her mom sent another into the pillar.

And when the last one finally stayed down, Kushina forgot all about keeping score and threw herself into her mom’s arms.

“We did it! Mom, we actually did it!”

Her mom caught her in a hug, laughing softly into her hair. Then she leaned back and held Kushina by the shoulders, looking from her face to the golden chains still swaying behind her.

“Look at you,” she said, smiling despite how tired she looked. “You finally found them.”

Kushina’s grin grew even wider.

Her mom brushed a thumb across her cheek. “You did so well. I’m very proud of you.”

Kushina felt her whole chest go warm.

She wanted to say something back. Something good. Something that would make her mom smile even wider.

Then Konan shouted from behind them.

Kushina almost frowned. She was having a moment here.

But Konan didn’t sound calm anymore.

She sounded scared.

“Watch out!”

Kushina barely had time to turn her head before her mom shoved her away.

She stumbled across the stones, arms flailing until she caught herself.

“Mom?”

Why had she pushed her?

Kushina turned back, confused, a question already on her lips.

Then she saw it.

Steel jutted from her mom’s chest, slick with blood from base to tip.

She stared.

The man behind her pulled it free, and her mom’s knees gave out, dropping her onto the stones as blood spread beneath her.

“Clean up the rest,” the man said to whoever was standing behind him, already turning away. “Toma, sweep the area. Make sure there's nothing else hiding nearby.”

“Damn, Captain. That was fast.” Masa gave a low whistle. “Maybe those stories about you aren’t all bullshit.”

“Quit talking and help Toma search the area.”

Kushina didn't hear any of that.

She didn't hear anything.

The whole world had shrunk down to one shape on the ground, and everything else, the shouting, the smoke, the Kiri still moving around her, all of it went distant and unimportant and far away, like it was happening to somebody else in some other, less important story.

Mom.

Why was Mom on the ground.

She dropped to her knees beside her, hands hovering, not knowing where it was safe to touch, not knowing anything except that there was a lot of red and it kept spreading no matter how much she stared at it, willing it to stop.

‘Mom.’

‘Mom, please, look at me. Please, please, please look at me.’

Her hands finally landed, one on her mother's shoulder, shaking too hard to do anything but grip.

‘You're okay. You have to be okay. You're the strongest person I know, so you have to be okay, you have to, you have to—‘

Her mom’s lips trembled.

Nothing came out.

She tried again, breath breaking painfully in her chest, until one small word finally slipped free.

“Honey… run.”

Her mom’s eyes stayed on her, soft and worried, as if she still had one more thing to say.

Her lips moved again, but nothing came out.

Then her eyes lost focus. Her eyelids slipped shut and didn’t open again.

“Mom… Mom, wake up. Mom, please, why aren’t you, why is this, why is this happening, why, why, why…”

Her mom had never hurt anyone.

Those same hands had made little animals out of chains just to make Kushina laugh. They had fixed her hair, held her when she cried, and guided her through every day of training even when nothing worked.

Now they lay still against the stones.

It wasn’t fair.

Mom was supposed to open her eyes. She was supposed to smile and tell her she was all right. She was supposed to get up.

But the man who had hurt her was still standing.

Kushina hated him.

She hated the sword in his hand. She hated the Mist symbol on his forehead. She hated everyone who had come here and made her mom close her eyes.

The hate inside her grew hotter and hotter until there was no room left for anything else.

Her chains began to shake.

Red swallowed her vision.

And then the world answered it.

Wind exploded from her, hurling dust, blood, and loose stone across the square. Every Kiri still standing threw up an arm to shield their eyes and stumbled back.

The captain drove his sword into the stones to hold himself. He stared through the gale at the little girl crouched beside her mother.

“What the hell is this...?”

The pressure kept climbing, pressing down on him like a hand at his throat.

Is that… malice?