Chapter Thirteen: This Power of Mine

Hello...it's me, Kanoko.

Before I am sent into the darkness, I would like you to know about my life. I want to tell you everything that has made me who I am before I am no more.

I was born to an elite family and began learning ninjutsu at a young age. My father, who was my first teacher, taught me how to infuse chakra and make tiny fireballs appear on the tips of my fingers. As great as a teacher as he was, he couldn't always handle me and my unusual power on his own. Sometimes I would get too excited and flames would gather at my feet as I ran across the open field near our home.

At other times, I'd pick up some household item, such as a teacup or a plate and watch in horror as it would explode in my hand.

"Be careful, Kanoko," he would say, "You'll upset your mother if you keep making messes like this."

I'd often watch the blood drip from where the broken item cut my hand. I'd watch it for the few seconds it took for my body to heal itself. My father would remind me of how to hold these items with care, how to never be too excited because that would make my chakra become hard to manage. It would make me difficult.

My mother was not a fan of my power itself, but she did consider our house blessed. My being the host of the Goddess of Fire's chakra was an honor to her, but when she saw me weave hands or heard me talk about jutsu, she always frowned. The power had been passed to me from my grandmother and it had skipped mother entirely. I guess mother just didn't understand what it felt like to hold something like that inside. To house a burning flame at all times.

My siblings also had their own opinions of me. I had one brother and two sisters. My brother was the eldest, I was born four years after him, then Yua, who was two years my junior, and then five years after me came our youngest sister, Aoi was born.

My brother was tough and he wanted me to be tough, too. He would take me to train with him right after he would pick me up from the academy. He made me value my strength and that countered my parents cautiousness. But when he died on a mission, I went back to being afraid to even touch a teacup.

Aoi loved my power, she would always consider me the lucky one. Aoi would often ask me to show her a new jutsu, but then she would become frightened by it. I saw awe and fear in here, a combination I would see often throughout my life. But Aoi held my hand on my worst days, and for that I will be eternally grateful. And then there was Yua.

Yua simply loved me.

And it broke my heart when she no longer did, but I'll say more about her later.

After two years of being a genin, I passed the chunin exams at twelve-years-old. Shortly after, I learned many hard lessons about the shinobi world. One of those lessons was that you can't always save your friends. Like my brother, my teammates died on missions. One was accidentally killed by an ally when delivering a message, although I doubt it was truly an accident. The other died trying to protect a comrade from a trap set by an enemy. The memories of my teammates would remain in my heart forever.

Naturally, I was deeply saddened by the loss of my friends. Then my sensei died and I felt tremendous despair. I became slower than before, and detached from everyone else. I was already misunderstood and feared by others at that point, but my friends had distracted me from the harsh glares and rumors spread about me by others in our village.

My father was concerned about my persistent sadness, and my mother warned me to watch my mood. If I were to lose control of my emotions, I would become susceptible to the attacks of people who had been waiting for the right moment to take my power. She also worried that even if no enemies made a move to attack me, my emotional state would make me volatile.

The Nishi elders also noticed my changed demeanor and they demanded that my parents lock me away until they could find a solution to the problem that was me.

I was restricted to my home for three months and grew more agitated with each passing day. One day, the very thing they feared would happen occurred when my mother called me for dinner. I had sunken into a deep depression and constantly wondered why it was my fate to be so isolated. I stormed into the room where my family gathered, and my mother ordered me to take a seat. She didn't even look at me when she gave her instruction. No one even glanced my way.

"No," I said.

"Kanoko, please, just take a seat," She said, still not even bothering to make eye contact. "Try eating something, it will help you get out of this mood you've been in."

"I said no," my voice trembled, "No. I won't eat, I'm not hungry. I haven't been hungry, who knows if I'll ever be hungry again!"

"Kanoko, listen to your mother," my father said as he ate his rice, "I know you're upset, but until your mood returns to normal you must stay in house and you must obey the rules."

Something shifted in me then. My frustration caused my chest to burn, and I could feel the Goddess energy quickly coursing through my body. It became clear to me that they couldn't truly keep me in the house, that no one could really confine me. I had the power. My chakra became visible then, and it appeared as an orange glow around my body.

My sister, Aoi, got up to calm me down, but instinctively, I pushed her away. What I intended to be a light push, was more than that. I had thrown my poor sister across the room into the wall, knocking her unconscious. All were eyes were on me then.

My father moved to try to stop me, but everyone knew he couldn't. I ran out of the house and passed our neighbors on the way out of our clan's gate. Before I could get there, several elders stopped me.

"Child, why must you behave like this?" One elder said, "This is unacceptable! You are embarrassing your parents and endangering all others in our clan. What is the meaning of this?"

Tears streamed down my face, as I choked on my words. I wanted to say something dignified and to explain myself in a powerful voice.

"I'm sad!" Was all I managed to say.

The Goddess power gave me the speed I needed to run away immediately after. As I sprinted through the village, my chakra broke the ground beneath my feet, which made me easy to track. A young boy who was new to the village saw me, and for whatever reason, decided to follow close behind me.

"Wait!" he called after me. I soon attracted the attention of Master Hiruzen and his students. I was heading past them and through my tears, I saw Tsunade. We had been friends earlier in life, but lost that connection for a few years. As I passed, I could feel her energy connect to mine. She knew I was in trouble.

"Kanoko, where are you going?" she said, "What are you running from?"

For a moment, I wanted to stop and answer her, but I kept going. Eventually, I reached the edge of a training ground. I turned to see Tsunade and the blue haired new boy heading my way. Behind them were my clan elders, Master Sarutobi and his other students, and my parents.

"Don't move!" One of the elders said to me, "If you dare to move a muscle, you'll face a punishment harsher than anything you could have ever dream of!"

Tsunade turned to him and the others approaching us.

"No! Back up!" She stomped the ground, shattering it with ease and sent several people flying back, "I'd like to see you try to punish me!"

The elders yelled at Tsunade as Jiraiya cheered and Hiruzen Sarutobi shook his head. I saw my parents crying and pleading with me, but everyone seemed far away. Then the new boy spoke up.

"I don't know what happened, but it couldn't be that bad. She's upset, that's not a crime, is it?" The boy turned and looked at me with a smile on his face.

Everyone grew quiet.

It's not a crime...I'm not a crime.

I stood up and felt more secure. I wiped my face as I walked toward Tsunade and the boy.

"Thank you both," I put my hand out to the area where Tsunade had broken the ground. Channeling my energy, I mended it.

"Perhaps now we can all handle this issue with reason and care," Master Hiruzen said.

After that incident, my clan had discussed the issue with the Hokage. At only thirteen, I was considered a tremendous source of unstable power, but my clan elders treated me with slightly more respect after they saw that I was capable of mending the training ground. I could heal as much as I could hurt and that mattered.

Tsunade began watching over me, Orochimaru would make the occasional comment about my power, and Jiraiya would...well, he would be his usual, perverted self. And the new boy with the blue hair would care for, protect and eventually marry me.

Hiroshi. That was his name. He was from the Hidden Mist so Leaf villagers also did not trust him. Maybe that was why he defended me so often. He was one of the few who truly understood me.

Years later, there was a war. Aoi was assigned to a medical unit so she did not fight and our clan elders instructed Yua to only go to areas where the fighting was not very intense. Because the Nishi were known to have gathered information about our enemies from our constant missions, our clan members were often targeted and held hostage. To prevent kidnapping, the Nishi did not typically battle in areas with many people. I was an exception due to my massive chakra reserve and ability to takedown foes in an instant. Luckily long before the war, I had already taught Aoi and Yua our clan's chakra manipulation jutsu and even gave them a portion of the Goddess chakra in case they were attacked by a powerful foe. Of the fighting Nishi, Yua was one of the most amazing on the battlefield.

Unfortunately, this chakra, the chakra of the Goddess of Fire, eventually burned its way through anyone who used it. After battling many enemies on the front lines, I could feel a strange aching in my bones. I had exhausted my body, and the bitter side of the Goddess energy almost took over me. Soon I stopped using jutsu and stuck to basic shinobi tactics. Doing that didn't win me any medals, but it did allow me to take control of myself again.

Yua was another case. She became so obsessed with controlling the Goddess chakra that she didn't see that it was controlling her. Whenever I had the chance and the battles weren't too heavy, I would visit her on her battleground. She and I would train, but she always tried to rush the process. She had grown impatient and pushy and I was beginning to dislike her. Eventually, we stopped hugging and just departed with a few words before going back into battle.

When the war ended, I thought our strange feud was over. I tried to tell her to rest a while before attempting to infuse chakra, but she ignored me, and would only train with Aoi.

One day, when I was heading to instruct Aoi, Yua confronted me.

"What, you're teaching her on my day now?" Yua said. Her face had changed. I tried to calm her down and explain myself, but she continued to lash out at me. I was also growing agitated due to the overuse of the Goddess chakra. I kept myself together until she shoved me, and the little restraint I had was gone. As she turned to walk away I slammed the back of her head forward which sent her way into the field near our clan's section of the village.

When she got up, I ran over to her. I'm not proud of what I did, and I don't want to be seen as a saint, but my theories about her were true. She was too greedy and too arrogant to properly handle even a small portion of the Goddess of Fire's power I gave her. She hated too easily, and that made her susceptible to experiencing the type of violent rage that came with handling that powerful chakra.

We exchanged blows that bent trees and whipped around the wind. Frankly, she was a great fighter. But I was better. In the middle of our battle Aoi came running across that field to intervene. She stopped me first.

"Elder sister," she said through tears, "Please, I know what your power can do, don't do this!"

She grabbed my hands. I didn't know it then, but both of them had been siphoning my power even before the war. Yua revealed this to me recently. They had been working together to manipulate my chakra, and I had taught them the technique they used to do it without thinking about the consequences. I could not have known that Aoi was plotting against me as she held my hands then, but I did begin to distrust her as I distrusted Yua and my whole clan.

I distanced myself from my family and focused only on Hiroshi, who was the shining star of my life. We soon left the village to go on the kind of espionage missions my clan was known for, but I grew bored with them, and later decided to become a writer. During my travels, I researched the mythology of different regions for inspiration. I was shocked to read about the myths about the grand deity whose power I held within my mortal body.

The Goddess is wrath itself, is what stories told me. But there was more to her than that. I didn't interact with her personally, but I could feel that she had moments of peace and I could also feel the effects of the many heartbreaks she had suffered at the hands of mortals. She was demonized and hurt as I was, and I didn't want any other woman to feel rejected and upset about her own power like I did.

That's when I began planning the Leaf kunoichi training program. I wrote a letter proposing my idea for the program to Master Hiruzen who was Hokage at the time, and I hoped that he would understand my vision. He responded saying that he would consider it. If he didn't, there was one other person who I could trust to understand the importance of the program, and that person was Tsunade.

There was a time when she and I were inseparable before the war. The loss of her brother and lover caused her to drift away from the rest of the world, and she had taken to gambling and drinking. Even at her lowest point, I trusted Tsunade more than my own clan, my own family.

My clan knew of my distrust of them and they followed me for years. Whenever I encountered a fellow clan member, we were cordial and friendly on the surface. That changed when I encountered both of my sisters on the way back from visiting a village to promote my most recent novel.

Aoi and Yua stopped me before I reached a small farming village where I was to meet Hiroshi. They urged me to return to the village, saying that there were enemies seeking me out and that I could only be safe in the Leaf. I didn't believe them, of course. There was no truly safe place for me. So we fought.

I tired myself out by battling them both for hours. Their chakra absorption jutsu has greatly improved, much to my surprise. I delivered my last powerful attack on Yua. The final hit exposed my vulnerability. I lost control of myself and tears streamed down my face as I thought of their betrayal and my own isolation. My anger was the strongest it had ever been, and Yua had absorbed much of it when I struck her. My terrible emotions, my loneliness, and another portion of my power. I let her have all of it. She and I fell to our knees and then held one hand on the other's shoulder, trying to catch our breath and preserve our own life.

"Look...look at what you've done!" Yua said, barely holding herself up. We sounded like children then.

"Look at what you made me do," I responded, in an equally childish manner.

Aoi limped toward both of us. Yua reached her free hand back and told Aoi to stop.

"Elder sisters, please, this has gone too far!" I could tell that she was being genuine that time.

"Stay back, you fool!" Yua growled. I could see the gold glow of the untamed power in Yua's eyes. That confirmed that she had certainly absorbed some of the worst of me.

"No, I won't," Aoi said, "I won't leave you both to kill one another. This has to stop!"

"Aoi I said-" Yua had thrusted her hand back to shoo Aoi away and out from her hand shot a beam of energy. I saw it shoot out like a star across the sky. Aoi fell back and clenched the reddened shirt on her bleeding chest. My anger was reborn.

Yua and I staggered over to our dying sister's body.

Oh, Aoi, my dear Aoi! How could she have fallen before my eyes? How could I have failed to save her?

"You did this to her, you...you!" I said. My body ran hot and it began to heal itself in just a few seconds. Yua and I locked eyes. If I had stayed any longer, I would have torn Yua apart. I used the sudden boost of adrenaline to run away.

I sent a coded message to my husband to meet in a different village, one further away from the Leaf. I wrote to Tsunade. I didn't tell her everything in writing, only that my sister had passed away, and that I needed her help. She and I had met in a quiet town near the Land of Lightning a few weeks later. There I revealed the full story. She listened and asked questions.

"Have you had a medical examination since that incident?" Tsunade said.

"No, I don't think I need one," I said, "I have jutsu to heal my body, you know that."

Tsunade sighed.

"Focus your energy on healing your soul," she said. She took me back to the Hidden Leaf to examine me with a team of medical nin. There she learned that I had not only was my body slow to recover, but my chakra network had been damaged severely.

As you can guess, that wasn't the final blow.

When Hiroshi came to visit me, I felt some hope. He told me about the rumors that Tsunade had kept from me after I begged him to. According to a rumor, my sister, Aoi, was supposedly attacked by a rival nation that wanted to strike us before we struck them. The fact was Aoi was dead and Yua was gone. The "why" didn't matter to others, but it did matter to me.

Before I left again, Tsunade encouraged me to seal my powers.

"This Goddess power could complicate things for you emotionally," Tsunade said, "Please consider sealing a portion of it. Let the village help you carry this heavy load."

I listened to her, but I wasn't ready to cut down my power when my body was so vulnerable. During that stay in the village, my parents didn't even visit me. I believe they knew the truth about what happened, somehow their spirits could tell. I only stuck around to begin the kunoichi training program with Lord Third's help, but rumors about the danger of powers resurfaced, and the elder advisors of the Leaf cautioned Lord Hiruzen against allowing the program to continue.

The program had run for a few months and was promising, but the efforts of Danzo and those other two bags of bones ended it. They claimed they were concerned that my power would have a bad influence on the young kunoichi. I argued my case, but it got me nowhere, so I did what I thought was best at the time. I wrote my ideas down and sold them in the form of my guidebook so that some young girl somewhere could hear my words without the threat of me potentially scorching her soul.

Nearly a year had passed before I released the guidebook. Hiroshi and I had left the Leaf village to promote it, and though my body was mostly healed, my chakra didn't flow as it used to. I was fragile, and irritable, but I told myself that I just had to push through it.

And I did until...

I lost Hiroshi.

We were walking together as the sun came through the leaves. I remember laughing with him about a critical review of one of my books. I remember seeing his warm, smiling face.

Then I sensed them, and they came closer, and then we were surrounded. I couldn't believe my body didn't react sooner, that I couldn't stop the barrage of attacks with ease like I had before.

My mind raced, and my heart beat hard against my ribs. I have never felt a fear that could rival the fear I felt that day.

The next thing I saw was Hiroshi laying in his own blood. His smile faded and once it was gone, a piece of me died as well. The power I unleashed on our attackers was ungodly. To this day, a fire burns on that portion of land once a year on the anniversary of his death.

I had no more mercy for the world that had cursed me. When everything around me had turned to blood and ash, I knelt by my lover for the final time and cried. Then came the rain.

It was the first time my medical ninjutsu failed to heal someone. Tsunade was right.

I promptly returned to the Leaf Village to seal my powers.

I traveled back to the Leaf like a walking corpse to meet with her and Lord Third. We made an arrangement, and Lord Third let me know that the procedure was safe and that other Nishi with my power had undergone it successfully. We spoke to my clan elders and the Shiranui clan about the standing agreement. We had the Hyuga medical nin work on identifying my chakra points and ensuring my chakra network would not be completely destroyed during the procedure.

When it was all over, I was considerably weaker, but most of my negative emotions had left my body along with the Goddess's chakra.

I went on with life as usual, and made plans to leave the village once again for the final time. Then I encountered Kushina Uzumaki.

"Lady Kanoko!" she had run after me as I neared the gate, "I'm so glad I caught up to you."

"Kushina! It's been a long time," I turned to face her, "How are you, dear?"

I had known Kushina ever since she had moved to the Leaf and become the Nine Tails' jinchuriki. When I looked into her eyes that day, I saw a light that had faded from my own eyes.

"I'm great!" Kushina said, "It really has been a long time since we've seen each other, huh? Oh, I just wanted to ask you..."

She pulled out a book from a bag on her shoulder. It was my guidebook.

"I don't want to hold you back, but could you please sign this for me? I sort of wish you had written this sooner, so that I could have read it as a little girl. So that I won't feel so weird about being a jin...about being different, you know? You're really an inspiration to me, Lady Kanoko. Thank you. Thank you so much!"

I signed the book and gave her a hug. I could sense the Nine Tailed Fox's presence inside her and I know she must've felt the faint, strange energy in me as well. At that moment, neither of us felt any fear.

Because of that encounter with Kushina, I decided not to leave the village permanently. Instead, I decided to reconnect with the Goddess, but on a deeper level than before. As I traveled, I would meditate at several of the Goddess's shrines and eventually she would appear in her physical form to speak to me on several occasions. I gained more knowledge about her past and she came to trust me. She was the one who told me just months ago that she foresaw a dark force silently drawing closer to me with each day, trying to take me over. I didn't actually sense or communicate with Yua until it was too late.

I'm telling you all of this because you once asked me to be completely honest with you. This is my story. But even if it ends here, I don't want my dream to die.

As for Katsu...there is a family in the Mist who can tell you all about him. I don't want to waste my mental energy on such a lowlife, but the Minazuki clan elder can guide you on how to handle him. Just show them the bracelet I gave you when I taught you that jutsu. Let the girls handle the rest, they are more capable than you know. And they even have allies this world has never seen.

This is all that I have the time to convey to you, but please use this knowledge to save as much as the world as possible. And don't just read "Kichiro's" books, mine have answers as well.

You are now the one I trust most in this world. I'm counting on you...

...Kakashi Hatake.