Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto, or any portion thereof, and make no claims on its copyright. However, all original characters and events are my own property.
Chapter 15 - Black-Red Sky
(the next day)
In the morning the wind blew hard. Sharp gusts raced down behind the rock escarpment sheltering the oasis and brought a surge of cold air. This wind, cold and different from the winds that had blown before, woke Yi from the desperate escape of her dreams, and she could no longer pretend she was not where she was, and that yesterday and the many days before had never happened.
In the cold morning Yi took water from the oasis, and, giving into her body's need, raided the belongings of Owano Dai and gulped down food. She ate with frenzied urgency, trying to block out the visions in her mind of the previous day, but it was useless. She could still feel that ghostly touch on her, feel the burning sensation behind her tongue, and the twin images it brought forth, violation and death. Her shell had been broken, and nothing but fire spilled out, the very substance of life made to burn, the fury of Mizuho.
"Everything I touch dies," Yi sobbed to herself. "This is my power, to take the very stuff of life and turn it to burning death." With her chakra, recovered now from the long sleep, she cast her hand to the top of the oasis pool, and at her silent command it burst into flame on its surface. Staring into the flames, Yi let then it consume all her hope, all her happiness, everything she had once wanted in life. I am lost in the desert now, and I have no destination. There is nothing left here.
The grass ninja still pursued her, Yi was certain of that. They would come for her soon. Perhaps today, yes, I would like that, let them come and meet me here; I'm not running anymore. Yi resolved that in a resigned way, simply lacking the will to travel further. She had no place to go, even her long trek had been brought on by the chase alone, she had not had a path in life since before the grass ninja had begun to chase her. "The chase has brought me this far, but I won't run anymore, I'm tired of it." Looking down at her clothes, a part of her that yet felt whole, Yi saw only a lie. "These are a ninja's clothes, but I am no ninja, I'm just a fool with a demon's powers. I do not belong in them." Though she said those words, Yi felt empty wearing only the clothes, so she ransacked Dai's belongings, reclaiming the weapons he had taken from her, kunai and shuriken. When she was finished she smiled ruefully. "At least when the grass ninja come I can appear as the ninja I might have been if father had not banished me. It will be a good way to die." Yi had no illusions. She would not survive. With no place to flee in the desert she could only get lost and die under the sun, and though here at the pool, with water before her, she might fight well, the grass ninja would still beat her, or if not them, eventually ninja from sand would come to destroy her. I am an outcast, a rogue, and a rogue's fate is always death, inevitably.
Yi sat down to wait, resting and maintaining her strength, with only the wind as company.
It took her some time to mark the wind, a steady chill force from the north, coming down toward the oasis. It was unlike the wind she had felt in the desert before, steady and potent. This is no desert wind, strange. Yi climbed to the top of the rock face, wondering and curious. What she saw there startled her.
To the north the desert sky had vanished beneath a solid bank of blackness. "Clouds…" Yi breathed, dark heavy clouds, come over the mountains, blasted free of the jungles that normally held them by the cold northern air coming south with winter, dark clouds laden with water, bringing to the desert something it only rarely saw. Looking at those clouds Yi realized something, something she had not expected. "It is going to rain." It was a strange thought, and with it she felt less desire to simply let everything go. "It is going to rain," she repeated. "Perhaps it will be nice."
The rain came on soon enough, and Yi watched its approach from the oasis, looking up past the rock face and wondering at the scale of it, this massive stormfront came on with a fury she had not seen even in the mighty storms of the grass plains. This desert storm, it has fury. Yi watched it in wonderment.
Lightning crackled and burst among those black clouds, bolt after bolt, sheer and brilliant, hot white-blue, stinging the eyes and angry. There was rawness to this storm, and as it came Yi could see that though the air heralding it was cold, the storm itself burned with desert heat, lashing air beneath it and burning it in molten rain with all the jungle's fiery embrace behind it. Such a mighty storm indeed…
Yi watched the storm roll over her, the descent of the wall of rain over the rocks protecting the oasis, and then cashing over her, a waterfall of furious energy, breaking unceasingly upon her form.
In moments only Yi was drenched completely, but she was warm, not hot and scorched as the desert had made her, but warm, as under the jungle canopy of her home, a warm rain carrying lush scents and power. It caressed her and made her feel alive again, though as it did so it brought her hopelessness to the fore once more. Still Yi spun about under those clouds, staring up into the yawning flashes of lightning.
"The storm is free, free to do anything it desires, and nothing challenges it, nothing stands in its path!" Yi cried to the heavens above, and she laughed with a manic glee, knowing nothing in that moment but the raw vigor of the storm and reveling in it, forgetting her humanity, her troubles, and her past. "Freedom is here!"
"So we have found you, rogue!" sharp was the cry, and forceful, carrying over wind and rain, great was its force.
Yi spun at the voice and she saw, standing on the rock face above, the ANBU grass ninja who had pursued her before. His seven companions appeared beside him quickly. They jumped down the face with coordinated movement, coming to stand in a loose line before her, weapons ready. Seeing them, Yi was irritated. I was enjoying the storm, she thought, and felt anger begin to gnaw at her once again.
The ANBU walked up toward Yi, but did not come to close, she stood at the far edge of the oasis pool, watching. They were well within range to attack her, but had not yet done so. "What at you waiting for?" Yi asked. "Strike me!"
"My mission has not changed, rogue girl," the ANBU replied. "I am to take you alive. You know now you are no match for us. Surrender now and come quietly, that way at least you life will be preserved." He spoke as if he clearly considered it a great sacrifice to spare her.
"My life?" Yi laughed. "Fool, my life is meaningless. I don't care if I live." Indeed at that moment Yi could see no reason to go on living, all her cares only piled up on her, and she saw no happiness in the future. "But I won't be captured by you! I have nothing but freedom now, like the storm, and I won't give it up!" Yi shouted the words, her voice as loud as she could make it, all but screaming at them. "Damn you all! There's nothing left for me, but I'm not your slave, not you grass bastards!"
"Then we shall take you by force," the ANBU sneered. "You are a fool."
This morning Yi would have accepted the ANBU's words, but now, with all her raw rage in her, everything she had endured finally brought out, for it was all that was left to her now, her anger, her burning, furious, flames of anger, she knew the truth. "I am a fool?" Her voice held almost nothing human now, as Yi saw the flames dancing before her eyes. The power was within her, a power she had long held, and she knew these grass ninja, who sought to tame her, to tame her blood, understood nothing. "You are the fools! Do you understand nothing of what you face? I am Mizain, wielder of Mizuho! Idiots! It's Raining!"
The eyes of the ANBU were hidden by masks, but the four grass ninja whose faces were exposed rewarded Yi's fury with a look of abject horror as the recognized their terrible, simple, and lethal, error.
The ANBU was the only one who thought to act, his hand flashing down for a shuriken, but it was far too slow. How can the rain be outrun?
Yi brought her hands down before her, far fingers curled, thumbs bent, and one hand in front of the other. Thunder crashed, and her hair flew up behind her, revealing her in the light of a lightning strike as a red and blue silhouette of destruction.
Power surged within Yi, power greater than she thought she had possessed, and she felt her mind merge for a second with the sky, and she cried out with the full exhalation of burning lungs. "Mizuho: Rain of Fire!"
The rain burned.
Droplet after droplet, stretching out before Yi all the way to the rock face and beyond it burned the hard great droplets of the desert storm each sheathed in its own aura of killing flame. When they struck the hard sand it sizzled and steamed, and in some places tiny motes of glass were formed.
When they struck flesh, men died.
There was nothing like it, droplet after droplet of water striking flesh, burning and burning, the flames not ending once they had struck flesh, but seeking deeper, and the bits that splash away coming to rest elsewhere on the flesh, causing their own lurid holes. The pain was unbelievable, and the eight ninja fell to the ground in seconds, for their bodies would not obey, could sense nothing but pain, pain everywhere. They tried futilely to rub the water away with the sand, but the water fell into and through sand, and reached them nonetheless. There was no escape, not should one try to run, or even conjure a shield of brambles, for the ruthless rain of fire ate everything, consuming man, land, ground, and even it seemed the air itself.
Yi held her hands together, locked in screaming rage, shouting as long as air remained in her lungs, and then standing with her mouth open, not inhaling, as the sky burned and the grass ninja were scorched away onto the bone. Only then, as her body cried out for oxygen, did she let it go, collapsing to the ground and feeling all the strength flee her, gone to the raging storm she had created.
Fires winked out then, and though the storm continued, now it was only an ordinary storm, not the fiery madness Yi had created. "What did I do? What did I do?" Yi lay crying, trying to refuse the evidence now lying before her own eyes, the still smoldering corpses before her, wreckage that had once been men. "My freedom, I have my freedom, but is it only the freedom to be a demonic monster, to make the sky burn and men, men who have done no wrong, die. These grass ninja were only trying to fulfill a mission, and yet I killed them to keep myself free. Why? Is my freedom worth so many lives?" Yi looked up into the flashing lightning of the sky, and she remembered who had brought this upon her. "Father!" She shrieked at the sky, daring it to answer her. "Why did you send me away? What is my purpose? Why must I still live?" She could find no answer, and so lay crying beneath the storm, seeking the oblivion of sleep to drive her from herself for as long as possible.