Haku and The Dark One’s blade.
The sight of it caused him instinctive dread. As the blade drew nearer to one of the mirrors Haku immediately felt his strength slipping away. It had to be stopped, but more than anything else his speed was gone. The surface of the mirror seemed to draw him back in until he was pressed against an icy wall. As the blade reached the mirror he felt sick with despair, then - suddenly - as if throwing up, it released. He fell forward, hitting there ground with a roll. He was simultaneously grateful that the evil presence was gone and wary that he'd brought the source that much closer.
Joseph raised the sword and replaced in it’s sheath, “Let’s try that again.”
Made the victim and the martyr in the span of a single stride. The shard of a mirror most cruel is difficult to remove. Rabbit goddess, Ice witch. Perhaps another mentor. Rai~n~bow~
Give our hero a good socking above the navel. Teach him a few tricks. See you in roughly fifteen years.
Departure - Hidden talents
“Now hang on. Before you get too far ahead of yourselves, there’s something you should know.” He revealed a slip of paper from his sleeve. Bordered in red and covered in a word cloud of scripts.
“My more powerful techniques rely on seals. I never keep more than I'd need for a long term mission, and I've only got a few left on my person. I can’t replicate them, and we can’t expect to find a sealmaster who can without drawing attention.”
“Give it to me.”
The boy blinked dumbly, “Uh, what~?” She plucked the paper from his outstretched hand faster than he was able to react. The boy sputtered before composing himself, “It’s not like it'd be a word for just anyone. I had to tailor my training and work closely with a sealmaster just to get them to work.”
“And this guy gave you a hard time.”
He raised his brow and looked at me. I mirror his expression and top it off with a shrug. She was in her own world, and I’d yet to guess what would come out with her.
“Hold this” She handed back the piece of paper. A different piece of bordered paper - I corrected myself when he performed a double take. She was still going over a third piece with a brush and ink, pausing every now and then to glance fleetingly at the original.
I raised my brow and moved closer to the boy, “That stuff again… it is related to your techniques?”
“There aaand~ Done.”
The boy’s eyes widen as the seal in his hand glows, “Woah woah woah!”
On the other side of our little party, blondie reached for his sword.
The boy reached down for the piece of paper - gingerly so as not to smear the ink - and spoke, “This is~”
Powerless - A landscape beyond our stars
It is then, in the face of a monster that I found where my strength comes from. Paws the size of a house swept the forest, and crossed my path with blinding force. I felt a thrill in the face of danger. I stumbled back.
A pillar of white formed before me. Shards of color roared past. Jealousy. Pride. Greed. I felt the sum of my strength flowing around me, but rather than coming to my aid they paved the way for something larger. Shadowed tendrils emerged from the column before me. I knew this demon. It never scared me.
But I knew from the moment I saw it that this was a different beast. The moment it reached me I realized what that meant. That I was out of reach of the one that shielded me from within. This creature raided my body. No amount of effort, thought or presence held it back. It split and rearranged my affinities without pause. The avatars of my closest allies swept around like a die beneath a shell game.
I was nothing and time ceased to be. And then something itched. Over miles and miles of surface area, I saw something crawl. A shard of color. So small and distant that it could hide in the shadow of a human hair. What appeared once multiplied. The horizon became a second skin. Thousands. Millions. Billions of lights appeared and surrounded my body.
I felt myself slipping.
~So I can move.~
Visions of that first encounter. The first malice. The shell that held me like glass, bore down like oceans and crawled beneath my skin.
~Where were you?~
I balled my fists and rotated the shell one cell at a time. Taking advantage of rippling cracks that formed in the iron hold. Capitalizing on warped channels. I reached in for the power that is my own and willed for once forever.
An explosion. A pillar of green the size of the ninetails’ fist erupted from my shadow. Others neighbored it. Some were as wide as I was. Others as small as a finger. Chakra incarnate met an immovable object. The impact was so energy dense that a portion of it imploded. With the rest a Biju roared, and it wasn’t the fox’s.
The latter recoiled at the sight of something older than the rage of mankind. A space opened up, and I drew my arm back protectively. An orb formed. Too many elements to count painted its surface with every imaginable hue. The air between the fox and the clam shell gushed out, leaving the pearl to bore a hole in the natural world.
Kyubi blinked and glanced down. The sharingan had glazed and began to flicker as he struggled.
Enigma - The ice king.
Left behind to grow out of the shadow of root, Enigma’s strength continued to rival the four. His determination and studious attitude drew the best that root had to offer. He apprenticed under several and was dubbed exceptional by each of them. Enigma possessed the knack for absorbing teachings and philosophies, but he was difficult to control. The boy saw through actions above his clearance, and while he moved in their best interest the sheer influence he had as a result was staggering.
Danzo saw this immediately. It was exactly what he wanted root to be. Thorough, responsive, a force of reckoning, loyal to and governed completely by a single individual. Enigma was not Danzo however. Had never received orders from nor credited Danzo. Enigma’s rank and esteem made it impossible for him to know who the leader of root was without compromising the integrity of root.
Danzo saw and knew Enigma’s role with near omnipotence. The danger he posed was unforgivable. Despite every act and interest in alignment with his own… there was too much. The boy had too much freedom. Had an edge that Danzo himself could not employ outside of wartime, and was directly hindered by his connection to the Hokage. By the land of fire as a whole.
A threat to the land of fire, and to the ninja code.
The boy didn’t blink when he was face to face with an assassin. He caught the blade, gripped the hand of the latter between his index and thumb and opened the eight inner gates locally. The chakra throughput drove the man insane, convinced that his arm had either fallen off or was being destroyed and rebuilt again and again. There wasn’t a scratch between them.
Enigma wasn’t a threat. He was an enemy. A Kage. A weapon that - should it ever leave the sanctuary of the root corps - would unmake the shinobi world as they knew it, and forge a new era not unlike Hashirama Senju before him.
Danzo would hide Enigma’s existence with his life, and vet anything- everything that crossed his path with the fury of a Jonin captain. From the specter of infiltrators to the color of the grass.
It was around the same time that Enigma looked to the sky, a voice on the wind alluding, “My time has come.”
Within Danzo’s chakra network, a sliver of life force gave out. A dam broke, releasing a tide of chakra that gripped his heart and turned the clock back on the gate of death. Decades of information fell silent as wisdom and experience were stripped from his flesh and fed into his chakra network.
Danzo took that moment to seal himself within his war room. Rather than scrutinizing maps, he took a seat in one corner of his room and vowed again and again, shaping his will upon the world. He appeared here and there, meeting core contacts within root and sending plans into motion. Despite the upturned use of his time, Root corps did not notice any change.
The third Hokage did however. His comrade had been transformed, aging backward almost twenty years between visits. Under investigation, Danzo had never appeared so animated. His bandages loosened and his skin tightened. There was a fire in his eyes and a glowing vigilance that had never seemed to go out.
At that moment, Hiruzen felt his age like the saddle of a pack mule. The weight of the safety of the village - the strength of his peers. He watched as Minato rose from the grave and placed designs over the Konoha he knew. He saw the age affecting her too.
Of four elements, of eight. Of lighting, of labor. The strength of a thousand made one. A sliver of reflection, of shattered hopes to the dust of ambition ground. Of blue flames and dwelling waters. Tailor of dimensions, lord of time.
