The storm didn't fade; it just stopped.
The wind dropped out like a wire had been cut, and the sudden loss of the gale's shove made me stagger, my center of gravity tilting into a void. My inner ear screamed at the lack of resistance, and a sharp, internal popping stabbed through my head as the pressure shifted. Rain still fell, but softer now—indecisive.
The hurricane's eye sat over me like a lid.
The heat arrived as a heavy, airless load that turned the soaked world into a breathless furnace. Steam uncurled off the stone steps in white ribbons. My black-rimmed glasses fogged instantly, trapping the uneven burning of the air against my eyes. My mesh undershirt became a suffocating, itchy trap, pinning the furnace-air against my ribs until my skin felt tight and ready to split.
Every figure I had approached fell away into the mist.
Illusions.
Fakes.
I couldn't find anyone.
Tears begin to well up in my eyes.
I turned slowly. No Naruto. No Kakashi. No Anko.
Splash.
I froze. My foot had come down in a shallow puddle, but the friction was wrong. A rainbow sheen swirled in the thick muck, the liquid feeling heavy and tacky against my sandal. I watched the ripple move, sluggish and delayed, as if the water had turned to syrup. The acrid, cloying scent of unrefined oil hit my palate a heartbeat later.
I didn't have time to think. The fog in front of me ignited.
It didn't flicker; it tore upward, devouring the mist in a roar of orange. A wall of fire lunged at me, the heat prickling and stinging across my cheeks before I could move. I jumped back, desperate to counter.
"Water Sty—"
I kicked through the puddle, forcing a spray of liquid toward the base of the flame. The spray didn't smother; it spread. The orange simply grew. The liquid I'd sent flying caught the flame and fed it, the fire doubling and rolling forward into a tidal wall that ate the oxygen until my chest tightened in a hollow ache. My throat seized, my breath hitching as the air became unbreathable, searing grit.
Wrong. It's not a nature. It's fuel.
I tried to pivot, to find a patch of clean stone, but my heel skidded in the viscous slurry. I went down to one knee, the thigh pouch containing the Void Ring shifting and dragging at my leg. I reached for a different seal—something for a barrier—but my muscle memory was a mess. My fingers fumbled in the slick heat, the skin of my palms already red and screaming. I was pinned by the oil and the lunge of the heat.
"Lucky..." a voice murmured, distorted by a wet, metallic filter—Kagari. He stood behind the blaze, a silhouette moving with a calm, predatory rhythm.
My brain tried to track him, but the air was thinning, my lungs pulling in nothing but ash. I looked back. Idate. He was behind me, staring at the fire, his face pale. I twisted, reaching back blindly to pull him away, but my footing reported only a slide on the sludge. The fire breathed. And for a fraction of a second, I felt that tiny, fatal hesitation. The snap where you know the next move will be the last.
Allow me.
The voice arrived half a beat early, overlapping my own frantic thought before I could even finish the impulse to move. My temples ignited. It felt like invisible, cold fingers were pressing into the bone on both sides of my head, a pressure that made my own memories feel like thin, rattling paper.
I gasped, my fingers digging into the mesh of my top as something twisted and tore behind my eyes. I couldn't feel my breath. My sense of where my hands were simply vanished.
The world… stretched.
Sound thinned into a reedy, distant hum. The fire stopped. It hung there, a suspended, motionless ocean of orange shards. I blinked, and the world broke open.
Everything turned a blinding, unstable cerulean. I wasn't seeing surfaces; I was seeing a mesh of sharp, intersecting points. The fire was a cluster of blue threads, a shifting lattice of shards I could almost touch. The oil inside it pulsed with a heavier, darker glow.
I looked down, and my inner ear failed completely. There was no ground. Below the surface, beyond the thin skin of the stone, something vast stretched into a void. I saw shards. Fractured planes. I saw impossible angles jutting from a broken world that extended forever beneath my feet.
Curious. The voice again, arriving with a timing that made my pulse stumble.
With me, Sylvie-chan.
My throat was a desert. My hands moved, but the command was an intrusion.
"W-wa… ter…"
The words were a shivering mess. I didn't form a seal; my fingers were lost to the overload. My arms cut through the air, and the space around me thickened into an impossible weight.
Moon's Push.
"…Moon's Push."
The name landed in my mouth like a stone.
I twisted.
I pulled.
The shoulder joints slipped and ground against each other as I fought a weight that wasn't supposed to move. My tendons felt like they were being pulled toward a snapping point. My heart rate slowed to a thudding, heavy crawl, pressure building behind my ribs until my lungs felt like they were being crushed by an ocean.
The fire in front of me trembled. Its blue lines began to unspool.
And I pushed.
Time snapped. The fire didn't explode; it died as the blue lines broke and bled into a heavy, freezing weight. Heat vanished, replaced by a mass of water so dense it felt like lead. It slammed forward—a fist of pressure that made the air itself scream.
Kagari's face appeared for a split second—confusion, shock—before the water hit him. It threw him into the rock face with a concussive thud I felt in my own teeth. He dropped.
The world rushed back.
Sound hit first—a roar. Then the crushing return of gravity. My vision snapped back to a size that felt too small, too suffocating. My head spun violently, my balance telling me I was falling while my eyes said I was standing.
Sylvie— The voice was too close, vibrating through my jaw.
I grabbed my stomach, the world tilting sideways. My depth perception was a lie; the steps looked miles away.
I stumbled forward, my movement lagging behind my intent, and threw up a bitter, watery bile.
Rain hit the ground harder. Colder.
I wiped my mouth, and then I heard it.
Idate. Choking.
I snapped my head up. He was on the ground, half-crawling through mud and oil. I tried to move toward him, but my foot struck the basalt two inches higher than I expected, nearly sending me face-first into the grit.
Kagari moved—a slow, mangled twitch. His fingers dug into the mud, and I felt the vibration through my soles a second before the earth tensed. He was going under.
Idate didn't see it. He was trying to stand, his breath coming in wet gasps.
My brain tried to track the distance, but the blue lines were still ghosts in my vision, making the world overlap. I hesitated.
The ground beneath Idate split. Mud and stone burst upward in a jagged surge. He screamed as it caught his leg, dragging him down into the collapsing stone.
"No—!"
I moved, but I was too far. He slipped, his hand reaching out for a grip I couldn't provide. That snap in my chest made something inside me reject the failure.
My hands moved.
The moisture in the air answered.
Water Release: Hiding in Drizzle.
A fine drizzle formed, pooling first in the low depressions of the steps before thickening into a silver-grey veil.
It wrapped around Idate just as the next surge of earth tore through the space where he'd been. Kagari's head snapped up, his senses thrown by the occlusion. I lunged and grabbed Idate's arm, hauling him out of the mud with a white-knuckled strength that made my joints ache.
"Move!"
He stumbled with me, coughing and slipping, but he was upright. Alive.
Rain intensified. Above us, a distant roar rolled across the mountain. Familiar. Naruto. His mud-water vortex hit the terrain, ripping through the oil patches.
Kagari lost his footing. Just for a second.
I breathed hard, my head throbbing with a pressure that felt like something had settled behind my eyes to watch.
I didn't understand the blue lines.
I didn't understand him.