"Come at me," the Third said. "Don't hold back. You'll only waste the precious little time I already have."
Rasa attacked.
He pulled the gold from the sand around his feet before he'd finished the thought, the grains leaping to the magnetic field he carried in his blood, and he threw it across the thirty meters between them in a flat bright lance with everything he had behind it. It would have punched through a stone target and buried itself in the canyon wall, and he sent it center-mass at the most powerful man in the history of the village.
The Third didn't move his feet.
A wall of black climbed out of the ground in front of him, iron filings dragged up and packed flat in the half-second the lance needed to cross, and the gold hit it and stopped dead, the two metals grinding against each other with a shriek that could hurt someone's ears. Then the wall came apart into a hundred falling needles and threw itself back at him.
Rasa got his own wall up. Gold surged from the field and stacked in front of his face, and the iron needles hammered into it, through it, the first row stopping in the gold and the second row driving through the holes the first had made. He dove. A needle opened a cut across his shoulder as he rolled, and he came up already moving the gold, splitting his stream in two, sending one half low to take the Third's legs and holding the other back as a defense.
The low strike never reached. Iron rose to meet it, a flat slab that ate the blow and held, and the cost of it landed in Rasa's own chest instead, the price of driving that much gold that fast. His breath came short. The dark rings under his eyes had started to spread. The Third had not yet worked for anything.
"Your guard's too far back," the Third said. "Close it."
The Iron Sand came for him.
It came as a wave first, a black tide that Rasa met with a wall and a turn of his hips, shedding it left, and then as a spear out of the wave that he hadn't seen split off, and that one took him in the chest. The shaft of the spear drove the air out of him and lifted him off his feet and put him on his back in the sand six meters from where he'd stood. The sky went white. His ears rang.
Get up.
He got up. The dark rings around his eyes had spread, deep and bruised-looking, and a thread of blood had started from his left nostril. He didn't wipe it.
He stopped picking at the old man and brought all of it at once. Gold poured out of the canister at his hip and rose off the field around him, a wave taller than he stood, and he put every grain he owned behind it and drove it into the Third's guard. A flat black wall of iron came up to meet it.
The old man gave a step.
One step, set almost before it finished, but he gave it. Gold ran heavier than iron, heavier than any sand, and for half a breath the weight of it pushed the most powerful man in the history of the village back through the dust. Rasa saw it happen. He'd moved him. He had actually moved him.
He chased it, because he was twelve and the door had cracked open and he had to. He folded the wave into a closing fist of gold, top and sides and back, and shut it around the Third like a coffin.
It closed on nothing. The Third had gone up and aside on a low arc of iron in the half-second the fist took to seal, and the gold crushed in on empty air, and Rasa hung there spent and wide open, his whole strength wasted on a grip around a man who wasn't in it.
The Iron Sand took him from the flank. Almost gently this time, a flat wave that swept his legs and laid him down in the spilled gold, because the old man had made the point already and saw no reason to make it twice.
"Enough." the Third said.
Rasa stood in the settling dust with his chest heaving and the blood on his lip and his legs not quite steady under him, and he looked at the Kazekage and waited.
He waited for it the way he always waited for it. For the word. For the Third to look at the gold still glittering in the air, at the wall he'd held, at the step he'd forced out of the most powerful man in the village, and say something. That it was good. That it was more than good. That in all his years the Third had never seen a genin with this much in him, that the Gold Dust set Rasa above every other child in the village, that one day he would stand where the Third stood and the village would say his name the way they said the Kazekage's.
The Third recalled his Iron Sand. The black withdrew from the field and sank back into the earth, and he lowered his hand.
"Acceptable," he said. "I suppose."
Then he turned and looked north, toward the village, his attention already gone from the boy in front of him.
Ryuusa let the field settle and thought about his relative's performance.
The boy had fought well. That was true. He was clearly talented with their clan's kekkei genkai. He was, without much question, among the finest young shinobi in Sunagakure.
And he would have died against a squad of Iwa-nin. Ryuusa had set the picture in his head while they sparred and watched it play out the way it would: the boy holding his wall against the first two, spending himself on the third, and the fourth and the fifth taking him from the openings he kept leaving open. Twelve years old, the best blood the Kazekage Clan had produced in a generation, every instructor the village could spare, every hour of training the boy would sit still for, and Ryuusa could not in honesty put him in the same situation as that girl and expect him to come back from that mission alive.
There was a part of him that knew the unfairness of the thought. The boy was twelve. It was no kind of justice to set a child against grown enemy shinobi and find him wanting; there were jonin who'd fall to a coordinated Iwa squad. Few genin anywhere in the elemental nations could be asked to walk into that and walk out. He granted the boy that much, silently, where it would do no harm.
A baker's daughter. No clan. No bloodline anyone could name, as for instructors, the brilliant strategist Ebizo and, lately, Chiyo. But her skill wasn't from those two. It was innate, something she always had. She was top of her class in the academy. Self-taught in puppetry excluding the standard puppet master class in the academy. And as soon as she was let out of school, she's already making her mark on the Land of Wind.
A civilian child who had gone into the Land of Dust and done what she had done, who the Tsuchikage now wanted dead by name, who had handed Sunagakure a self-feeding miracle out of the dirt behind a well house and refused to so much as look surprised at any of it.
It was not the boy's fault that a girl with nothing had so much. It was the boy's fault that he didn't know it.
Rasa walked the village like he was already its strongest. He carried himself like he had no equals. But he was not the strongest genin in Sunagakure, maybe not even the second strongest, and he had no idea. The Gold Dust would carry him a long way on talent alone, and then one day it would set him down in front of something talent didn't answer, and Ryuusa would very much like the boy to have learned to work before that day came rather than after.
Praise would soften him and the truth would break him and the boy had earned neither yet. He gave him the word he felt was fitting.
"I have a meeting with the intelligence division this afternoon," Ryuusa said. "Something useful came in from a genin team. We're done for today."
He walked toward the village. The breeze had come up at last and it pulled at his cape and stirred the iron still threaded through the sand at his feet, the grains drifting after him a few steps before they gave up and lay still.
He didn't look back at the boy standing alone in the gold.
Suna's streets were busy in the late morning.
The market district was the worst of it, merchants shouting prices, camels complaining, children dodging between legs and carts. Rasa avoided the thickest crowds by cutting through the side streets that ran parallel to the main road, narrow passages between clay buildings where the shade was deep and the foot traffic was thin.
He noticed the plants before he noticed anything else.
They grew along the base of the buildings, in the gaps between walls, in the cracks where packed earth met stone. Cacti. Dozens of them, squat and green and bristling with spines that caught the light in a way that didn't look natural. They were everywhere. Lining the streets in rows, clustered around well houses, growing from clay pots set on windowsills and doorsteps. Their spines were rigid, almost metallic, and reddish-orange fruit hung from their bodies in heavy clusters.
Rasa had walked these streets a hundred times. None of this had been here a month ago.
A woman sat on a stool outside her front door, peeling one of the fruits with a small knife. The flesh inside was a vivid pink. She bit into it and closed her eyes, her shoulders dropping with something that looked a lot like relief and tasty joy.
Her neighbor leaned out of an adjacent window. "Cactus girl's plants are getting bigger, have you noticed? The ones behind the well house are taller than my son now."
"She planted more yesterday, I think. Down near the grain storehouse." The woman took another bite. Juice ran down her wrist. "My husband's back pain hasn't bothered him in a week since he started eating these. A week, Miri. He's had that back pain for three years."
"Bless that girl. An angel, that one."
Rasa kept walking. His eyes swept across the cacti as he passed them, these strange intrusions into a landscape he'd memorized, and he hated the look of them.
Cactus girl. He'd heard that name before. In passing. Some genin who grew plants. He hadn't cared enough to listen.
He turned onto the street that led toward the eastern residential quarter, where his family's home sat near the base of the canyon wall. Two chunin walked ahead of him, close enough that their voices carried.
"...puppet girl, yeah. Chiyo-sama brought her to the Brigade headquarters. Had her demonstrate in front of the whole corps."
"I heard she beat Daigo's squad. Three on one."
"Three on one and it lasted under a minute. Tsubaki was there. She said the kid's puppets are unlike anything the Brigade has ever produced."
"A genin. Beating three puppet masters."
"She's not a normal genin. You heard about the Land of Dust? That was her team. Except the team part is generous because apparently she handled the hard part alone. An Iwa staging ground, wiped out in one night. The Kazekage gave her S-rank pay."
Rasa's stride slowed.
S-rank pay. For a genin.
The chunin kept talking. Their backs were to him. They didn't know he was there and they wouldn't have cared if they did. This wasn't gossip meant for anyone's ears. It was just two shinobi discussing the most interesting thing happening in their village.
And the most interesting thing happening in their village wasn't Rasa.
He turned down a side street before he could hear more. The alley was empty and shaded and he stood in it for a few seconds with his fists shaking at his sides.
A puppet girl. A cactus girl. A genin, younger than him, just some kid on Ebizo's squad, and the entire village couldn't stop saying her name.
He opened his palm, still shaking. Then it stopped.
He kept walking.
…
The afternoon didn't improve his mood.
He stopped at a food stall near the academy road to buy flatbread and dried meat, and the vendor was talking to the customer ahead of him about the new cacti growing behind the neighboring building. "Cactus girl planted a whole row last week. My daughter ate one of the fruits and her fever broke the same night. The same night!"
He passed a group of genin his age loitering near the training grounds, and one of them was telling the others about a cousin in the Puppet Brigade who'd watched the demonstration. "She built her puppets from scratch. No teacher. No help. Chiyo-sama herself said she's never seen anything like it."
He sat on a bench near the eastern gate to eat his flatbread, and a jonin he recognized from the mission desk walked past with a colleague, and the colleague said, "Did you read Takeshi's full report from the Land of Dust? To think a mere genin squad was capable of completing that. I heard the puppet girl wiped out an entire squad of Iwa nin."
Every conversation. Every street. Every turn. The village was a room full of people talking about someone who wasn't him, and no one noticed he was standing right there.
Rasa ate his flatbread. It tasted like sand.
…
They trained in the late afternoon, the three of them, on the secondary field east of the main grounds.
Rasa arrived first. Shigezane showed up five minutes later, quiet as usual, his water canteen on his hip and his dark hair falling across his face. He nodded to Rasa without speaking and began his own warm-up, pulling moisture from a sealed container and shaping it with hand signs.
Toma arrived last.
He came from the direction of the lower district, walking carefully. Small for his age. Thin. Dark circles under his eyes. He wore a plain sand-colored tunic and his forehead protector was tied around his left arm, partially hidden beneath the sleeve.
He sat down against the wall ten feet from where Rasa and Shigezane were warming up. His hands rested on his knees and his eyes were on the ground.
They ran drills. Rasa calling the exercises because the Third wasn't here and someone had to, and because Rasa liked being the one who did. Formations. Sparring. Combination techniques. It was normal work. The kind of thing they'd done a hundred times because the Third Kazekage was a busy man and rarely had the time to train his own genin. Even if one of them was a relative…
Toma was useful during drills. His sand manipulation was laughable compared to what the Third Kazekage could produce, but it was enough to provide support and assistance to his allies. Neither Rasa or Shigezane knew why the Third put someone like Toma on their team.
They finished the last drill and settled against the canyon wall. Shigezane drank from his canteen. Rasa leaned his head back against the stone and closed his eyes. The dark rings faded from around them as his Magnet Style was dropped.
"Did you guys hear about the puppet girl?"
Rasa's eyes opened.
Toma was sitting in his usual spot, ten feet away, his back against the wall. But his posture was different. He wasn't curled inward the way he usually was, shoulders hunched, chin down, trying to not take up space. He was sitting up. His insomniac eyes were open and bright and looking at Rasa and Shigezane with something that Rasa had never seen on his face before.
"The whole village is talking about her," Toma said. His voice was different too. Not the mumble he usually spoke in. This was louder, faster, alive. "She's a genin on Lord Ebizo's team. She builds her own puppets, and they're supposed to be incredible. Chiyo-sama brought her to the Puppet Brigade and she fought three of their best at the same time and won. Three on one! And it didn't even last a minute!"
Shigezane glanced at Toma. A flicker of surprise crossed his face at the freak actually starting a conversation.
Toma didn't notice. He was too far gone.
"And before that, her team went to the Land of Dust on a mission and she uncovered this whole plot by Iwagakure to build a base inside our borders. She fought their shinobi by herself. Jonin and everything. And she won." He was leaning forward now, his hands on his knees, his thin frame almost vibrating with the effort of expressing something his body wasn't used to expressing. "But that's not even the best part. After the fighting was over, she spent days helping the people there. Buying food and water with her own money and handing it out door to door. She planted cacti in their city so the people would have food that keeps growing after she left. She just, she gave everything she had to strangers who couldn't help themselves."
His voice cracked slightly on the last part. Not from sadness. From something larger.
"I've been eating the cacti fruit she planted near my place," Toma said quietly, but the shine in his eyes was still as bright as ever. "They're everywhere in the lower district. She just plants them for anyone to take. I don't think she even knows who eats them. She just puts them in the ground and walks away." He looked at his own hands. Thin fingers. Calloused palms. "Nobody's ever done anything like that. Not for the lower district. Not for, for people like..."
He caught himself. Swallowed the rest of the sentence.
"I want to meet her someday," Toma said. And the look on his face when he said it was something Rasa would never forget.
It was pure. That was the only word for it. His dark-circled eyes were wide and warm and full of something that looked like hope, and his mouth was curved into a small, unsteady smile that he was wearing for the first time in front of his teammates, maybe for the first time in months, and he was aiming all of it at the idea of a girl he'd never met.
Admiration. Genuine, absolute, unfiltered admiration.
Rasa glared at him.
He'd known Toma for over a year. Trained beside him five days a week. Trained, eaten meals, sat in the same rooms waiting for the same missions. In all that time, Toma had never once looked at Rasa like that. Never. He'd called Rasa strong once or twice, like someone stating a fact. He'd acknowledged Rasa as the one in charge when the Third wasn't around, because that was what the chain of command demanded, and Toma followed chains of command the way a dog followed its leash. But he'd never looked at Rasa with anything close to what was on his face right now.
Not admiration. Not warmth. Not joy. Not hope.
Never.
And this girl, this puppet girl, this cactus girl, this name that had been crawling through Rasa's ears all day like an insect he couldn't crush, she got it. Without meeting Toma. Without knowing he existed. Without doing a single thing aimed at him specifically. She planted cacti in the dirt and the monster boy who couldn't sleep looked at the idea of her like she'd hung the moon in the sky.
Something in Rasa's chest caught fire.
He stood up.
As Toma was going on and on about her.
Rasa's fist connected with the side of Toma's face.
The sound was stark, knuckle against cheekbone, and the force behind it was everything Rasa had been swallowing since the training field that morning. Every "acceptable." Every conversation he'd overheard. Every mention of her name. Every needle driven into the soft tissue of his pride by a village that should have been talking about him.
Toma left the ground. His small body lifted sideways off the wall and spun once before hitting the sand three meters away. Blood sprayed from his mouth in a thin arc that caught the afternoon light. He landed on his side and skidded, sand scraping the skin off his forearm, and came to rest face down with his arms curled beneath him.
Shigezane flinched. He hadn't seen it coming. Nobody could have seen it coming, because one second Rasa was sitting against the wall and the next second the freak was bleeding in the sand and the air between them tasted like copper.
"Maybe let's cool it, Rasa… We don't want to be the cause of… you know." Shigezane warned.
"Shut up. One punch isn't enough to have this monster lose it. Or what use would he even be?" Rasa knew his limits.
Toma didn't get up.
He lay in the dirt with blood pooling under his cheek, leaking from a split that ran from the corner of his mouth to the ridge of his cheekbone. His eyes were open. They stared at the sand an inch from his face, at the grains darkening as his blood soaked into them. His body was still. Not unconscious. Just curled up in fetal position.
Rasa's fist hung at his side. His knuckles throbbed. Toma's blood was on them, a smear of red across skin that was already bruised from the morning's training.
He looked at Toma on the ground. At the split cheek. At the blood in the sand. At the boy who'd been smiling ten seconds ago and wasn't smiling anymore.
"Don't talk about that girl around me!" Was the only warning he gave him before he walked away.
His sandals left prints in the sand that led toward the village. He didn't look back. Behind him, Shigezane sat against the wall with his canteen in his lap, staring at Toma, his mouth slightly open, saying nothing. Doing nothing.
Toma lay in the dirt and bled.
The sun moved across the sky. The sand absorbed what it was given. Nobody came.
…
Rasa slept terribly.
He lay on his bedroll in the dark room of his family's house, staring at the ceiling, and Toma's face kept floating up through the black behind his eyelids. The one that had been aimed at a girl's name like it was something holy.
I want to meet her someday.
He turned onto his side. The wall was close. He could see the faint outline of the Gold Dust container sitting on the shelf above his head, the brass catching what little light filtered through the shutters.
Nobody's ever done anything like that.
He turned onto his other side.
Not for people like...
He turned onto his back again. The ceiling stared down at him.
He'd hit Toma before. It was a regular occurance. A smack when he felt like it. A smack on the back of the head when he mumbled instead of speaking up. A smack when he annoyed him. The kind of thing a leader did when his subordinate needed sharpening. The Third corrected Rasa the same way, didn't he? A sharp word. A cold silence. A demand to do better. The tools you used on people who needed to improve.
Ignoring the fact that the Third had never physically disciplined him.
Rasa pressed his forearm across his eyes.
The heat was still there. The anger. It hadn't gone anywhere. If anything, it had spread, filling his chest and throat and the backs of his eyes with a pressure that made it hard to think about anything except the sound of his fist hitting bone and the way the village kept saying a name that wasn't his.
He fell asleep sometime after midnight. His fists balled up.
…
He was on the training field before dawn.
The Third Kazekage wouldn't arrive for another hour. Rasa didn't care. He needed to move. Needed his hands doing something other than thinking.
He pulled gold from the earth and shaped it into targets. Pillars of compressed dust, each one dense enough to take a hit, arranged in a semicircle twenty meters out. Then he tore them apart. Narrow lances, wide surges, crashing waves, everything the Third had been teaching him, driven into the targets with a ferocity that cracked the ground beneath his feet and sent shockwaves rippling through the sand.
The dark rings appeared around his eyes. Blood vessels strained against the skin. He looked feral in the grey pre-dawn light, a twelve-year-old boy with rings like bruises around his eyes and gold swirling around him in streams that screamed when they moved.
He built a wall. Blew it apart with his own lance. Built another. Denser. Blew it apart again. Built a third. The densest he'd ever produced, the particles grinding so tight that the wall rang like a bell when he punched it with a stream of gold. It held. He added more force. More density. More of himself poured into the attack until his nose bled and his hands shook and the wall finally crumbled under a blow that carved a trench six inches deep across the entire width of the field.
He stood in the wreckage, panting, gold dust settling around him like glitter on a corpse.
The Third Kazekage arrived at dawn.
He walked onto the field and stopped. His yellow eyes moved across the destruction. The trenches. The craters. The rubble of compressed gold scattered everywhere. Then they moved to Rasa, standing at the center of it all, blood drying on his lip, hands bruised and trembling, the dark rings pulsing around eyes that burned with something the Third recognized very well.
The Third's gaze lingered for a moment. Then it moved on.
"You started early," he said.
"Yes, sensei."
"You seem motivated today."
Rasa said nothing. He just stood there, gold dust settling in his hair and on his shoulders, breathing through his teeth.
The Third walked to the edge of the field and set down his pack. He removed his white cape, folded it, and placed it on a rock. When he turned back, his hands were behind his back, and his voice carried the same even tone it always carried.
"Speaking of the Puppet Brigade," the Third said, and the words landed in Rasa's chest like a hot coal dropped into a dry field, "they've begun adopting the designs that Ebizo's student provided. Tsubaki tells me the first puppets are already being sold. The girl's innovations may reshape how we deploy puppet squads entirely." He paused, looking at the trenches Rasa had carved. "It's rare to see someone that young change an entire division's approach. Genuinely rare."
The gold dust on the field trembled.
Rasa's container hummed at his hip. The magnetic field he generated spiked, responding to the surge of heat that flooded his chakra network, and for one second every loose particle of gold on the training ground lifted an inch off the sand. A shimmering carpet of dust hovering in the dawn light, vibrating, furious.
Then it dropped. All of it. Settling back to the ground in a single exhale.
Rasa formed his stance. Pulled gold from the earth. The dark rings deepened around his eyes until they looked carved there, permanent, the mark of something that had taken root and wasn't leaving.
"Sensei," he said. "I'm ready."
The Third watched him for a long time. This was the outcome he wanted to see.
Rasa didn't need to be pushed today. He was pushing himself. The direction was productive.
"Let's see how long you last today." the Third said. "Get ready."
Rasa attacked first.
The Third responded appropriately as they began their morning training.
…
The academy bell rang.
Rasa was on a rooftop two streets away when he heard it. He hadn't planned to be there. He'd been walking home from training, taking the longer route that skirted the academy district, the route he took when he wanted to avoid the market crowds.
The bell changed his direction. He didn't know why. Some instinct, some pull, the same thing that made him slow down when the chunin were talking that morning instead of walking past. He wanted to see.
He dropped to the edge of the rooftop and crouched behind the low parapet wall, looking down at the academy gate from above and across the street.
Children poured out. The usual flood, bags and scrolls and practice fans, kids shouting and shoving and scattering in every direction. Rasa watched them without much care as he had no reason to care about academy students.
Then he finally saw her.
She was leaning against the wall across from the gate. Small. That was the first thing. Shorter than most of the older academy students filing past her, and thinner, her frame almost lost inside the loose clothes she wore. Sandy-brown hair that framed a round, soft face. A long yellow scarf draped around her neck, the tails of it reaching past her knees with indigo-colored eyes.
She was carrying a clay pot under one arm. A cactus. One of those same barrel cacti that had colonized every street in the lower district, green and bristling with metallic spines and already budding fruit.
She looked like nothing.
She looked like a baker's daughter waiting for her kid brother, which is exactly what she was, because a blur of sandy-blond hair came rocketing down the academy steps three at a time and slammed into her hard enough to make her stumble.
"Nee-chan!"
The boy was tiny. Six, maybe. He would've tackled her off her feet if she didn't brace herself. His face was buried in her scarf. His voice was muffled but loud.
"I've been learning the clone jutsu today! My clone looked way better than my classmates but it still wasn't like a perfect copy of me but it's pretty close and better than anything my friends made."
Rasa watched her hand come up and settle on the boy's head. She ruffled his hair. She laughed.
"I guess we can work on your chakra control during training today."
The boy pulled back and grabbed her free hand, the one that wasn't holding the cactus pot, and started pulling her down the street. He was talking at a speed that should have been impossible for human vocal cords.
She let herself be pulled. The cactus pot sat snug under her other arm. She was smiling happily as he talked all about his day.
They turned a corner and disappeared.
Rasa stayed on the rooftop.
That was her.
That was the puppet girl. The cactus girl. The genin who'd completed an impossible mission, who'd beaten three Puppet Brigade combat operators in under a minute, who'd earned S-rank pay, who'd earned Chiyo's personal attention, who'd earned the Third Kazekage's acknowledgment, the acknowledgement Rasa had been chasing for years and never once received.
That was the name on everyone's lips.
She was small. She was frail. She didn't even look like a shinobi.
Nothing about her matched the stories.
Nothing about her looked like a threat.
If she did, he could have looked at her and seen a rival. Could have measured himself against her. But that?
She was just a girl. A small, soft, smiling girl who planted cacti and picked up her brother from school. And the village loved her for it. The shinobi respected her for it. The Kazekage himself spoke about her in a way that he never spoke about Rasa.
He doubted she even knew his name.
The burn in his chest was the worst it had been all day.
Rasa dropped from the rooftop and landed in the empty street below. His sandals hit the packed sand without a sound.
He walked home. The sun was low. His shadow stretched long and dark across the sand behind him, and the village moved around him naturally.
Puppet girl.
Cactus girl.
I'll bury both of those names under mine.
I don't care how long it takes.