'They scattered, just like the mice. Gratitude and loyalty escaped them completely as concepts.' Yaten had orders and carried every intention of obeying Uzumaki Shigeru all the way to the grave. He'd deliver the Hyūga boy he saw the other day as compensation for what transpired with the Aburame.

Every time he closed his eyes, all the rogue Sand ninja could think about was the black and ravenous swarm erupting from Aburame Buyo's chest cavity. So many of his comrades were trapped in there: skeletons becoming more visible with each passing second.

None of the other boys ever smiled for Yaten. A skull could only grin or scream. Some would be so slack-jawed in death that an untrained eye would mistake agony for dying laughter.

They were all like him: starving, lost, and wandering Kemurigouken with neither plan nor purpose until Shigeru came along. That was the one thing they all had in common: Shigeru gave them work. He made them stronger but also offered all the security of a job, illegal as it was.

Cautiously, Yaten extended a thin pink tendril into the stairwell and across the hall. If anyone left or entered the eleventh floor, he would feel it. Three came on the neural horizon. Three.

'It could be three against one if we fight.' He made the signs for undoing a summoning seal. Kōmoku and Jikoku, the only two puppets he had left, stood at attention. With his very first paycheck, Yaten restored his dolls. Just as others modified themselves, he chose to modify his artificial partners. They looked real now, at least until the weapons came out.

Both were also clad in the same khaki coats and green armbands as their master. The bottom of Kōmoku's coat flared out because she wore a dress, but both dolls looked like a pair of little kids playing dress-up to mimic their big brother.

Jikoku resembled Yaten in his youth with his cherub-like features: blonde curls, big blue eyes, and chubby rosy cheeks that looked soft enough to pinch. The doll's mouth contained a temporary paralyzing agent. With one bite, even a man the size of the Raikage could go down in minutes: limp and helpless until the drugs wore off. Such a bite took down Aburame Buyo.

Kōmoku underwent a makeover first, being Yaten's favorite doll. Her brown hair was now red and tied into pigtails. Beneath the coat, she wore a type of dress with suspenders that hadn't been popular in ten years. Shigeru insisted on both upgrades and called Kōmoku "little lady" whenever Yaten pulled her out. Beneath that sweet exterior, the doll's chest cavity contained retractable needles laced with a hallucinogenic toxin she could shoot out like a porcupine.

The dolls moved fluidly now, with better ball joints and flexible parts than ever. The secret was the Musubime nerves. Yaten hollowed out corpses in the past by twisting his tendrils into the bodies and forced them to fight alongside him. If any unfortunate dead were in the hall, he'd make use of them. "Kōmoku! Jikoku!" he called out.

Both dolls turned to face him. Yes, he orchestrated their every move, but he still wanted to talk to them as though they were people. Until Shigeru's reinforcements came to bring him out of the lab, his humanoid weapons were all he had. "Let's even the odds, kids. They're coming."

They'd come to the Eleventh Floor, but they'd only leave if Yaten felt merciful. He lost his empathy, his innocence, and any semblance of good so long ago that his colleagues suspected it never existed at all.

And his new enemies would see that.

One flight, two flights–three! Fugaku and the twins stormed up the stairs with such ferocity that their legs seemingly transformed into wings. They'd taken flight, each galvanized by the thought of Buyo-sensei being torn apart by a black market doctor.

'He split up the team. I can blame him all I want, but that doesn't change the fact that I still care about him. No matter what happens, even after the team disbands, he'll always be our sensei. We'll always be Team Buyo! Hold on, Sensei. We're coming for you!'

People were in the halls at this hour, going about their business. Despite the multitude of roaches and mice the boys saw running about freely from location to location, several of the nearby stores made food.

A noodle factory with an archaic, gummed-up machine employed two stick-thin old hags who were hard at work for a grueling 12-hour shift. One coughed, wiped her bare hand on her apron, and kept handling product. Those noodles would be ordered on the cheap by some of the finest restaurants in the trendy Fifth Ward.

Nearly a hundred people sat expectantly in the laundromat, waiting with frustration to be next in line to wash their clothes. Fugaku saw a dark-skinned, blue-haired man covered in scars waiting in line. He recognized that man from the documentary as one of Tadashī's living dead. He didn't wear a shirt, but his bare back resembled a lotus root with all the empty, expanded pores. Just looking at him made Fugaku feel ill.

A collapsible fence kept dozens of sweaty babies and toddlers caged within a badly-ventilated daycare. The smell of mildew mixed with dirty diapers and spoiled milk. On one side of the day care, the children ate a snack and ran about wildly with only one jaded, hungover attendant among them. On the other side, a group attempted to nap, only to whine and roll over when the more playful tots decided to bother them.

As the trio passed the daycare; one very noisy child grabbed hold of the bars and shook them, screaming as though someone held her hand over a burning stove. Her rosy face wasn't contorted in horror, though. She found this fun and screamed even louder when Hiashi briefly paused to look at her.

A man lay motionless in the hall, covered by newspaper. A rat gnawed on an exposed part of his arm. He didn't move. The passersby did, though none stopped to look at him. One man threw two baht at him and walked faster.

The eleventh floor teemed with life: all of it jaded, all of it desensitized.

Next to a three-man operation making plastic snack bags, Fugaku caught sight of an old man taking a piss. Once the geezer left, walking along as he re-tightened the rope he chose to use as a belt, he turned to the twins. "One of you should go there." Both looked disgusted by Fugaku's suggestion. "I know it's gross, but you don't want anyone to notice you using your–"

Hiashi grumbled something under his breath, but made his way to the corner. The other two stood in front of him, as though they were doing nothing more than giving him some privacy to urinate in peace.

In reality, Hiashi had never used the byakugan to this intensity before. As frightening as some of their missions had been, the situation never called for it as desperately as this did. "I'm only getting echoes of Sensei's chakra farther down the hall. His bugs are on this floor and I know where, but–"

"Hey!" Hizashi snapped, noticing a pair of Academy-aged kids staring at them as though they were the most entertaining thing ever. "Scram! Nobody likes to be stared at while they're–"

Hundreds of needles appeared from the little girl's chest. She grinned, dropping her jaw farther than any human naturally could. More sharp metallic things jutted out just behind her teeth. She launched herself toward the side alley, only for Hizashi to frantically reach for his brother and yank him out of harm's way.

The older twin stumbled on the floor, bumping into the corpse beneath the newspapers…but dead things weren't supposed to move. When Hiashi moved to stand, a pair of stiff arms just coming out of rigor mortis wrapped around him in a pungent embrace.

The little boy was a puppet, too. The entire upper half of his head craned back 270 degrees as his teeth became sharper. Even though the machine couldn't "see," it ran toward the trapped Hyūga, eager to bite.

Fugaku made the hand signs for a condensed fire jutsu, noting how damp and confined a space they had. The hallway was only a meter and a half in width and several people ran for cover in the various apartment modules and stores. They pulled out the iron grates, wishing to keep enemies away.

"Fuck!" he heard one man say. "Dear, turn on the electricity or it's gonna crawl into our home, too!"

'It?'

Fire chakra flickered on the palms of his hands. If he slapped those palms to the ground with a strong surge, he'd create an entire barrier of fire capable of burning anything that came in too close proximity to their squad. Unfortunately, fire could spread and was nigh impossible to control once it did that. The strong chemical scent in the air left him wondering just how flammable the Hidden Smog's air was.

'Oh gods…what if this ends the same way it did in the Hidden Knolls?!'

Fugaku clearly remembered how everything went up in a deathly green glow when Akane Shinsa and Seidou of a Hundred Returns battled to the death. Shinsa's pheromones were so potent that they even killed the people living on the other floors. Everything went up like kindling.

His jutsu killed dozens in Koyamagakure. A similar mistake here could kill 50,000 people: a population greater than some recognized nations. But if he did nothing, nothing at all—

A bright blue glow surrounded Hiashi as he created the ultimate defense for himself. While he couldn't hit any functioning chakra points on the corpse that grabbed him, he could still apply the rotation techniques passed down from his father, grandfather, and every Hyūga head going back to the beginning of shinobi history.

The corpse's arms separated from the rest of his body, but a set of disturbingly long, noodle-like appendages became visible instead.

"THEY'RE ON THE FLOOR, TOO!" Hizashi shouted, jumping to catch a pipe on the hallway ceiling so he could avoid touching the tendrils. He threw a shuriken at a particularly large knot, watching as blood came out. Both dolls briefly seized up at that, but that was nothing compared to the loud swearing charging from the dark and more dangerous side of the hall.

Running toward them was a dreadful, all-too-familiar face. Just as Hizashi recognized Inago Utaro at the meeting on the surface, he recognized this monstrous youth as the guy who nearly killed Utaro.

Hiashi recognized him, too, as another of Tadashī's supposed dead. 'He interviewed! He's someone who–"

"HOW NICE! I NEVER KNEW THERE WERE TWO OF YOU!" Yaten let out a shrill, high-pitched laugh and only stopped when a tendril tickled his throat. Once he stretched the nerves out like this, it took nearly all his attention to control them. "This is perfect! I can present one of you before Shigeru-sama as a donor and the other can be my–"

"No one's going anywhere, you son of a bitch!" Fugaku snapped. He wouldn't create a pillar of fire, but he'd briefly touched the boy puppet and recognized that just beneath the artificial molding, he was made of some kind of wood. A powerful burst of fire caused the puppet to explode on contact.

The doll's shrapnel flew in all directions. The head bit latched onto the daycare's grate, much to the horror of all the wide-eyed children. "Hizashi! Can you do what Hiashi did?"

"You know I can't!" Hizashi snapped. "That move's for the Main Family only!" He dropped his grip and returned to the floor, moving as quickly as he could so none of the nerves could bore into him. Other innocent passersby trying to run for cover weren't so lucky. Yaten's plague was spreading like wildfire. "Hiashi! Think you and I can take out the dolls? Once they're gone, we go after the source."

"Sounds good to me!" It was the first time he gave Hiashi an order, and it shocked the younger twin greatly when his older brother actually listened. Hiashi surrounded his whole body with chakra, ready to go after the little girl puppet.

"Fugaku!" Hizashi shouted. "You're the one with a fire release. Cauterize whatever you can! The tentacles bleed when you cut them and they don't regenerate. You'll force him to release more!"

'I see. He'll run out or bleed out, whichever comes first.' Fugaku quickly moved to support, more fire at the ready, but he tripped. Tendrils wrapped around his ankle and he felt one drill into his skin. One. Five. Twenty-five

"Hurts, doesn't it?" Yaten jeered, coming closer.

Hurts was an understatement. It was the most pain he'd ever experienced in his life. One of Buyo-sensei's botflies bore into him once and he'd needed to check himself into Konoha General to have it removed. That was a mosquito bite compared to this.

"I know it hurts." And in the background, the broken doll reassembled itself and charged at the twins to join its "sister." More victims were forced into the fight, taking Gentle Fist after Gentle Fist. Hizashi and Hiashi were on the defensive. "Imagine what it must have been like for me: having this procedure done just so I could be a cut above the rest."

Fugaku built what he could inside, waiting for a moment to strike, but the appendages twisted into his muscle. To his horror, his right foot moved without him telling it to do so. The ankle twisted the foot around in a few motions, flexing the toes.

"Your teammates are very valuable. You're probably more like me: no bloodline, nothing that started you off as special. Don't you resent them? Hate them, perhaps?" Yaten moved closer, crouching so he could look the suffering teen in the face. "Was the bug man your sensei?" The recognition in those dark eyes was answer enough. He was. "He died saying only one word: Hizashi. Fugaku, was it?"

Yaten's eyes narrowed. "Your fire techniques could get you far here. It's a rare element in the Land of Smoke. I like to give the nobodies a chance. Your sensei's dead. The likelihood of any of you leaving this place alive is next to impossible. You may as well settle."

A larger ball of tendrils charged at the twins with enough ferocity to rip apart the dirty plywood serving as a floor. Hiashi's entire chest would have taken a hit if he didn't continue the good fight…but his chakra was waning. He didn't have an infinite reservoir.

"Let me take your teammates, Fugaku," Yaten offered, "and I'll put a good word in for you. You could find good work out here. We could even–"

"FUGAKU!" Hiashi shouted, coughing. "Now! I can't…I'm…"

It was the first jutsu Fugaku had ever learned: one that he tried day after day until he got it right, wanting to impress his mother. He remembered the blisters on his lips, the hoarse throat he couldn't shake for weeks, and the way Naho-oba told him never to become complacent just because he got it right.

The only difference this time was that a too large fireball would destroy everything. Gōkakyū no Jutsu instead came out as a multitude of tiny fireballs spat out in strategic locations. Every place the Uchiha boy saw one of Yaten's knots, he assaulted with the flames of judgment.

The tendrils blackened and gnarled. "You're lucky we're not cutting your wormy ass," Fugaku snapped, applying a scorching hot hand to his leg. The tendrils shrank away, freeing him. "You'd bleed out if we did that. Wouldn't you, asshole?"

And the next time Yaten met Fugaku's eyes, they weren't dark anymore. The puppeteer's jaw dropped because a two-tomoe sharingan returned his stare. "Wait! Y-you're a–"

"You really didn't know? You knew about my teammates being Hyūga. The fact I'm an Uchiha surprises you?" He took a step closer, expecting Yaten to shrink away.

He didn't. "You think I'm afraid of you!? I have Shigeru-sama on my side! If Musubime knots aren't enough to take you out, then I–"

Yaten's mouth stretched far too widely for that word. The problem was Yaten couldn't shut it again. His hands couldn't close, either. In an attempt to avoid further damage from knives and flames, the tendrils retreated and returned to their host. It was almost as though they had a mind of their own: knowing they were alien to his body. They planned their mutiny by returning to him like vermin to the darkness, all at once.

Yaten shrieked, but it was the last recognizable sound he made. The tendrils ripped from his arms and legs, twisting and rooting themselves into the walls and ceiling. The next time he tried to scream, they left his mouth. He'd never be able to close it again.

Fugaku and the twins stared in disgust and horror as more parts of Yaten's body split. Hizashi instinctively moved to shade Hiashi's eyes from the scene, but the older twin moved the hand away. This, he needed to see, because surely nothing else in this abominable world could be more appalling than this.

Yaten attempted to reach one more time, but the tendrils didn't want to go anywhere near Fugaku. Fugaku burned them, and now the twins stood near him. The former Sand ninja transformed into an undulating and blood-soaked ball of living yarn: something unrecognizable as human. Hizashi took a few steps back, accidentally touched a part of their opponent, and heard the thing that used to be Uwasa Yaten groan.

"Excuse me…" one of the old women from the noodle factory called out. "Is it over?" Although his face had turned green, Hiashi slowly nodded. The woman undid the grate of her store and stepped out, a camera in hand.

"No," Hiashi told her flatly. "There's no point in you doing that. He's–"

"What do you mean there's no point!?" the woman snapped, flashing the camera and snapping as many cheap photos as she could. "Didn't you know some sick bastard on the eighth floor is making a documentary? He'd pay good money for this! Besides…" She stomped on more of the tendrils and spat. "We all hated him. He terrorized this floor and the one below it for years."

Thump-thump. Thump-thump. His heartbeat was not only audible to himself, but to everyone else. Even from the other side of the hallway, the tenants could hear and feel the disturbing, unwelcome reminder that Uwasa Yaten was still very much alive.

He no longer felt his feet. They dangled a meter and a half above the ground. His arms weren't so fortunate. Those, the sense of touch remained because the pink and purple appendages twisted and attached to the hallway's walls like red ivy. A Musubime could have controlled the arteries and nerves, keeping that increasingly lengthy labyrinth within their black bodies. Occasionally, Yaten felt a bloody drip from his lily-white back. Worse than that, what shredded remnants of his clothes remained, he felt them.

He felt everything.

Every last bit of pressure on the exposed nerves felt like being chewed by fire ants. If he tried moving, all those needle-sharp exit wounds wriggled about. Did they have a life of their own? It felt that way: as though every abomination Yaten expelled from his pale skin knew it didn't belong to him and resented him for that. Brains were made of neurons. Weren't nerves the same?

A door opened and quickly slammed. An intense pain flared up so badly that all Yaten saw was red. The air conditioning in the hall cranked up, the vent dripping onto some of his exposed entrails. It felt cold, but caustic.

He wanted to scream, to shriek at the top of his lungs, but he couldn't. The biggest and thickest of the Musubime parts had expelled from his mouth during the fight. While he only wanted a few in the battle, they just kept coming and coming until they dislocated his jaw. It was now 30 centimeters south of where it needed to be: so badly torn that the skin broke, the bone broke, and only a few overtaxed tendons kept it together.

The tendrils came from his tear ducts, his ears, beneath his nails, and even places he never would have put on display in combat.

Earlier, a little girl squeakily asked her grandmother about the "living silly string." Sometimes children didn't know when to be afraid. They'd instead stare in morbid curiosity. The old woman, however, shrieked and dragged the child away. The noise felt like an ice pick to both his eyes and his ears.

'They're talking about me,' he noted. 'I don't know how I know that, but I do. In their homes, they're doing all they can to keep me out.' But he couldn't stop. His "red ivy" slithered into the other modules: creeping through air vents and boring holes into the walls. Some found the patterns beautiful. Others were too tired to notice. Most, however–

He felt every pocketknife, textbook, shoe, lighter, and hammer the tenants took to the invaders. A muffled whimper was all he could give: high-pitched, weak, and too close to a mewling baby for him to carry any pride left.

'Shigeru-sama…' Yaten thought, realizing that he'd just lost the ability to blink. Too many tendrils had slithered past his eyeballs for his lids to shut. Dust and other debris got in, and there was nothing he could do to wipe them away. 'Help me. Please don't leave me like this.'

Enka music still played through the speakers in Module 1118 so the neighbors would assume nothing was wrong, but thousands of botflies buzzed along to another one of Shigeru's favorite cheesy songs.

"I look up as I walk, so that the tears won't fall.
I'm remembering those spring days, but I am all alone tonight."

As many of his appendages as he could slither down the corridor, Yaten did. He tried with all his might to make them undulate the way he needed. They wriggled across the ground, the walls, the ceiling…and were finally able to crawl beneath the door to Shigeru's lab. 'HELP ME! PLEASE!'

But he was no longer welcome in there. Uwasa Yaten had failed his master one too many times. Shigeru wasn't waiting for him. True to his word, the Uzumaki doctor left the clinic behind: refusing to go back in there until the botfly swarm successfully devoured everything and died off.

"I look up as I walk, counting the stars with tearful eyes.
I'm remembering those summer days, but I am all alone tonight."

Aburame Buyo's corpse remained splayed open on an operating table: ribs broken and split apart until they resembled an open bird cage. Among his organs, the flies found a chance to prolong their own lives.

The man's face remained intact: frozen with more than mere echoes of disappointment etched into it. Although the flies already took out one of Buyo's eyes, the other one remained where it was: staring at the hidden camera. The light blinked, indicating the reel was full and the battery low.

In life, this remarkable jōnin covered his entire body from the neck down. In death, the camera caught why. Buyo's skin was the same pale, bloodless shade as an embalmed corpse, save for the bruised and red skin strained at the infestation sites. His "children" were the color of pus and about the size of human thumbs.

His lips moved, though the rest of him didn't. After all, it wasn't his tongue.

"Happiness lies beyond the clouds.
Happiness lies above the sky."

Nothing but bones remained on the clinic's cadavers and raw organs. A skeletal arm stood up from the sink as fly-infested detritus became nothing but a sticky, gloppy mess. The flies buzzed along in ravenous joy, consuming everything in sight.

Medical scrubs and other tools were strewn all over the floor: scattered because Shigeru had been in a frantic rush to get away from the insects. First, he locked himself in the bathroom and screamed because this was the most frightening, disgusting thing he'd ever seen in his life.

That scream, the camera caught in silence. There would never be any audio to match it.

The instant a squad of khaki-coated boys came to escort him safely back to Fifth Ward so he could sleep quietly in the apartment above his legitimate dental clinic; he covered himself from head to toe in surgical gear, wrapped a towel around the naked part of his neck, and ran faster than he'd ever run in his life.

"I look up as I walk, so that the tears won't fall.
Though the tears well up as I walk, but I am all alone tonight…
I'm remembering those autumn days, but I am all alone tonight."

But in his rush to save his own skin, Shigeru left the other living resident of his laboratory behind. Kenkō remained strapped to a wheelchair, too drugged and weak from having his liver removed to free himself. The IV that had been attached to his arm dripped its contents on the floor, none the wiser that its patient was no longer receiving antibiotics.

Kenkō's dark eyes watched helplessly as Yaten's flayed appendages slithered like snakes on the floor. The flies buzzed around, biting into his skin. Still gagged, he screamed as loud as he could. He thrashed about, hoping his friend had come to his rescue.

The flies were wrathful creatures: driven by their urge to feed and nothing else, now that their master sat dead and exposed on a table. Buyo had been a champion of keeping such a terrifying parasite within himself. Yaten was no such man.

"Ssssshf," Kenkō commanded. Shoo. Shoo!

"Sadness lies in the shadow of the stars.
Sadness lurks in the shadow of the moon."

Kenkō attempted to run over the appendages, but could only scuttle a few inches here and there with his wrists bound to the chair. If he moved his abdomen too much, he felt the pain from the surgery and yelped. And yet Yaten pitifully continued to slither closer: gurgling his own agony in the hallway when his friend's wheelchair ran over his exposed nerves.

Only Kenkō no longer saw Yaten as a friend. He knew who told Shigeru about his liver. Shigeru told him after he stitched him back together. And the medic laughed. Oh, how he laughed! And if Kenkō could make Uwasa Yaten feel even a fraction of the pain and hate he felt for him, then all his suffering would almost feel worthwhile.

'You feel that, you wormy bastard?! I hope you do! I HOPE YOU FEEL IT FOR A LOOOOOONG, LONG TIME!'

"I look up as I walk, so that the tears won't fall.
Though the tears well up as I walk, but I am all alone tonight."

Yaten's eyes rolled back, though his lids couldn't close. People cursed him on this hall, even if they didn't know his name. Then came the worst pain of all: worse than being burned or cut or rolled over by an invalid. And that was the pain of being recognized.

Even hidden beneath the living tangle of undulating tendons, he saw a familiar figure in the hallway: Inago Utaro. "Yaten?" His voice was soft, cautious. "Is that you?"

Another humiliatingly high-pitched whine left Utaro's mouth. He wanted to say fuck you, rent boy or curse Utaro as loudly as his outraged lungs could muster. Yaten squirmed, but he was firmly rooted in place.

"Do you think your doctor will come back and fix you?"

'FUCK YOU, MAN-WHORE! FUCK YOU FOR LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT! You think you're better than me?! You're garbage! You hear me?! GARBAGE!' At least, he wanted to say that. All that came out was "Mmmmmmghnf!"

Utaro approached, no more fear on his face. He'd looked at Yaten with terror in his eyes ever since Yaten got his first khaki coat. It had marked their relationship: Yaten as the hound, Utaro as the hare. But now the hound was in a trap of his own making and would surely die from starvation or his injuries before his master returned.

Even if Uzumaki Shigeru did return, how did this loyal dog know for sure that his master still wanted him? What if he was too much trouble? So the hare smiled. The hare had won.

"I'll never forget you," Utaro confessed. "You're the first person I met out here who kept me on their mind. I know I made you uncomfortable, but…" He smiled. "It made me feel like I mattered: like running away from you gave me some purpose again. I'm gonna leave soon…very soon. I'm getting out of this place and we'll never see each other again."

He was getting away!? The rabbit he'd chased for so long was now out of reach. No matter how much Yaten moved his arms and legs, this hound could run and pursue no further. A bright light hit his eyes and he realized too late that Utaro photographed him.

"Goodbye, Uwasa Yaten."

As Utaro walked away, Yaten noted how the boy tried his best not to step on the mess he left behind. At this, he openly wept. But by three in the morning, when everyone had truly disappeared, one last guest arrived…and it would be the guest who did him in: mice.

"But I am all alone tonight."