"Moon's Push."
Ear pressure inverted, plunging her canals into a sudden, deep-water vacuum. A wave of heat rushed outward, pressing against her skin, before the words finally punctured.
They drove through Anko's skull like a rain of needles, each syllable finding an old groove, an old scar, an old pathway that had never truly healed.
Her cursed mark answered.
It didn't flare. It recognized. Heat detonated under her skin.
Not surface heat, not the suffocating, stagnant burn of Tea's broken season—but something intimate, invasive. A molten thread that traced veins she had spent years pretending were just veins.
Black crawled. Fast. Too fast.
It spread from her shoulder like ink poured into water, filaments racing down her arm, the black markings distorting over the interlocking rings of her chainmail, spidering across her collarbone, licking up the side of her throat. Sweat tracked differently now, pooling inside the raised, burning grooves of the seal rather than sliding off her skin.
Her fingers twitched. Not random. Not panic.
Hand signs.
Old ones. Forgotten ones.
Snake—Ram—something else—
No.
No, no, no—
Her stance shifted without permission, weight dropping lower, hips turning just slightly, spine coiling into a posture she hadn't used since she still answered to that name.
You remember.
The thought wasn't a voice.
It was worse.
It was familiarity.
Her body moved like it had been waiting.
Her chakra surged to meet it—eager, greedy, wrong—
"—wait—"
Her breath hitched.
"—no, not now—"
It felt—
God, it felt—
Good.
That was the worst part.
Not the pain. Not the invasion. Not the loss of control.
The welcome.
Like something inside her had been starving, and this—this crawling, burning corruption—was a long-awaited meal.
Disgust twisted through her gut.
It didn't slow anything.
She threw her left hand forward to cast Striking Shadow Snake, but the muscles spasmed. The chakra misfired, warping into a formless, scorching spark that burned the webbing of her own fingers. Her arm jerked off-target, leaving her chest completely exposed.
The heat in the air bent her perception; Aoi's position smeared half a step to the left, then snapped back, then drifted again.
The pressure in the air dropped.
Her lungs lagged behind her body, breath coming a fraction too late, like she was trying to inhale through memory.
The blurring silhouettes smeared across the shifting wind. She blinked hard, trying to force the double-vision away, but her focus dragged. She tried to track Aoi's center of mass, but her eyes snapped to empty air, leaving her totally blind to his actual approach.
She let go.
Her body went slack.
Her left shoulder hit the ground first with a bone-jarring crack, immediately followed by her cheek slamming into the baked earth. The impact drove the air from her lungs. For three agonizing seconds, her diaphragm refused to expand. When she finally gasped, she inhaled a throatful of dry, granular dust, sparking a violent, choking cough. The soil offered no recoil, collapsing into a soft powder beneath her boots. Dust stuck to the sweat on her skin, turning her into something half-buried.
Aoi's silhouette warped through the heat haze.
His grin stretched too wide, too sharp.
He shifted his weight to strike—
He readied the blade—
"Pay attention to your surroundings, idiot."
Anko's hands snapped up, clamping over her eyes and mouth.
FWWWWWWWWWWWWWWOOOOOSH.
The world tore sideways.
A jet of superheated air, flame, mist, and pulverized dirt screamed over her body, flattening the grass, incinerating the incoming senbon mid-flight with a cascade of sharp, metallic pings as they vaporized or deflected.
The ground shuddered.
Pressure inverted.
For half a second, the world felt hollow.
Then it slammed back into place.
Silence.
Not natural silence.
The horizon tilted at a sickening thirty-degree angle. Anko pressed her palms into the dirt, waiting for the spinning in her inner ear to stop. Up felt like sideways. Gravity pulled at her jaw, confusing her vestibular sense for two heavy beats before her orientation finally snapped back into place.
Anko rolled, pushing herself up.
Aoi was gone.
Of course he was.
"Anko-sensei."
Flat.
Too flat.
Anko spun.
Sylvie stood behind her.
Barely.
The kid looked like someone had taken a functioning human and turned down the brightness. Her posture wavered, center of gravity drifting like she was still standing in the aftershock of that impossible force. Sweat clung to her skin in uneven patches, some already cooling too fast as the first fingers of mist crept back in.
Her eyes didn't settle.
They searched.
"Behind me. Now," Anko snapped, already turning back, scanning for distortion, for movement, for anything that didn't belong.
"Anko-sensei."
Again.
Same tone.
Something in it made Anko's spine itch.
"What the fuck, kid—"
She gestured.
Turned.
Stopped.
The black had reached her forearm.
It pulsed.
Alive.
Her fingers curled slightly, savoring the pressure under her skin.
It felt—
Right.
God.
She hadn't even noticed.
Schink.
Pain.
Sharp.
Immediate.
A needle buried into the side of her neck, just below the jawline.
Not perfect placement.
Too shallow.
Too close to a nerve.
Sylvie's hand trembled violently, a desperate micro-delay stalling the strike before she overcorrected the angle, forcing the precision. Her thick, black-rimmed polarized glasses slipped down her sweating nose, her left hip visibly misaligned from her right shoulder as she compensated for her failing core strength.
Her vision spiked white.
Her body reacted before her brain did.
Her hand snapped up and caught Sylvie's wrist.
Hard.
Too hard.
Bone against bone.
Sylvie didn't pull away.
That was worse.
Anko's grip tightened another fraction.
Her pupils dilated, breath hitching into something halfway between a laugh and a snarl.
"You—"
The word fractured. A buried, rusted instinct screamed to execute the threat, colliding violently with the desperate, exhausted remnant of the jonin trying to shield her student. The conflicting signals paralyzed her throat.
For a split second, Sylvie saw it.
Anko smiling.
Not relief.
Not gratitude.
Something feral.
Something that didn't want this to stop.
Then the suppressant hit.
Not clean.
Not smooth.
It slammed into her nervous system, and for a terrifying second, the curse mark fought back. A neural chaos spike erupted through her spine, blinding her with a white-hot flash as conflicting chakras tore at her meridians. Her muscles seized in total rigidity—a partial shutdown that paralyzed her lungs and locked her jaw. Then, with a violent, tearing sensation, the infection broke.
Her chakra pathways spasmed.
The black markings stuttered—spread another inch—then recoiled, dragging heat back with them like barbed wire ripping through flesh.
Anko's knees buckled. The sudden drop in chakra output caused her sweat-soaked chainmail to flash-cool against her torso, sending a violent, shuddering thermal shock through her ribs.
Her grip loosened.
"…hah—"
A broken laugh slipped out.
Her hand dropped from Sylvie's wrist, fingers twitching as sensation came back in jagged bursts.
"…good job…"
The words came slower.
Heavier.
"…kid."
Sylvie didn't relax.
"Side effects?" she asked, already scanning her, already calculating.
Anko rolled her neck, wincing as the nerve she'd clipped screamed in protest.
"My snakes are offline," she muttered, her jaw locking as a delayed muscle tremor racked her forearms. Her skin burned with hypersensitivity, the faint air currents scraping like sandpaper. "Chakra's… misfiring. That shit spreads again, you stab me faster next time."
Sylvie nodded once.
No hesitation now.
She turned, rummaging through her pouch.
For a second, she froze.
Anko saw it.
A flicker.
Her hand brushing something that wasn't there—was there—shouldn't be there.
A pulse of absence.
Then Sylvie ignored it.
She pulled out a Fūma kunai, the heavy, curved steel catching what little stable light remained, and shoved it into Anko's hand.
"I'm going to protect Idate."
Her balance wavered.
She corrected it through sheer stubbornness.
"I'll handle Kagari."
"You'll hold your damn—" Anko's command snagged behind her teeth, a vicious muscle spasm locking her diaphragm and stealing the breath from her lungs.
Sylvie was already moving.
Stumbling.
Not running.
The sound of her exit grated against Anko's ringing ears—a heavy, dragging footfall followed by a lighter, skipping step. The harsh friction of fabric tearing against underbrush clashed with a ragged, uneven breath rhythm that faded into the treeline.
The mist bled back into the battlefield.
Not evenly.
It clung low in some places, pooling like liquid that chilled her bare calves to the bone. In others, it rose in thin sheets, peeling upward and pasting her wet hair to her cheeks. Every inhale dragged heavy, freezing moisture into her throat, suffocating her battered lungs. A few pockets stayed completely clear, forcing her stinging eyes to constantly refocus between the opaque fog and the sharp, empty ground.
"…what did I miss?" Anko muttered.
The answer arrived immediately.
The mist thickened. Condensation collected heavy on Anko's eyelashes, blurring her focus. Uneven cooling mapped across her body—moisture freezing into a slick glaze against her bare arms, while the metal rings of her chainmail trapped a pocket of sweltering, humid heat. The density of her own breath plumed thick, then vanished entirely, the air pressure fluctuating wildly.
Shapes formed within it.
Three.
Five.
Ten.
Aoi.
Oboro.
Mubi.
Standing.
Watching.
Wrong.
Anko's tongue clicked against her teeth. An elongated shadow stretched from one of the Aoi figures, pointing directly into the hidden sun. She tried to pivot her stance to track it, but her left knee buckled, a half-second lag throwing her timing off. A sharp ache in her neck pulled her gaze violently away, snagging on a Mubi silhouette. His chest didn't rise. She stared at his ribs, her eyes burning as she waited for an inhale that never came. A scuff of a sandal aligned perfectly with a shifting shadow. She twitched to strike, but her arm refused to lift, delaying her reaction just long enough for the final mismatch to register—no ozone smell. The scrape of boots echoed only after the silhouettes had already stopped moving. Her conclusion arrived too late to be proactive.
Genjutsu.
She didn't weave a release sign. The nerves in her hands burned with static, refusing to hold the necessary chakra.
Another figure stepped forward.
Aoi.
Or one of him.
His silhouette distorted wildly through the heat haze, his wide stance parting the low-hanging mist like a stone in a river. A sharp glint of yellow light reflected off an unignited blade a fraction of a second before the weapon fully materialized, the ambient lightning briefly defining the hard edges of his outline. Lightning crackled faintly in the air, the scent of ozone threading through the damp heat.
"Let's see how long those trembling knees hold up without your snakes," he said.
Anko rolled her shoulders.
Her chakra sputtered.
Recovered.
Sputtered again.
Ten seconds.
That's all this would take to go completely to hell.
Good.
She preferred it honest.
An Aoi silhouette twitched to her left. She pivoted, calf muscles coiling with a sharp burn to strike—until a sudden lack of displaced mist stalled her momentum.
Instead, one of the Mubi clones moved.
Too close.
Anko didn't wait. Her weight transferred with a painful hesitation before she kicked off the ground—
—and the earth gave way half an inch more than expected, a subtle inward pull shifting the granular dirt toward an unseen center.
Her timing slipped.
Just slightly.
The clone didn't disperse when her kunai sliced toward its throat.
It caught the blade.
Solid.
But the resistance faded instantly, the wrist joint buckling without bone density, behaving like a hollow shell. She had overcommitted on a phantom—until the mass suddenly anchored with bone-crushing density, the trap snapping shut after her strike landed.
Anko's grin snapped into place, sharp and predatory.
"Found you."
Behind her—
Lightning screamed to life.