Warning: This chapter is extremely graphic. I didn't hold back with the themes, so if you're squeamish, not a fan of body horror, are uncomfortable with the casual disregard for human life, suicide, mentions of multiple miscarriages and abortions, human trafficking, and will be triggered by mentions of cancer, PLEASE skip this chapter.
I'm serious. This is the gnarliest chapter I've ever written.
If you're still here, proceed with caution…
CHAPTER 20.5
"My Little Star"
When Project Star commenced in Hidden Star, Lio was not yet born.
The initiative revolved around the meteorite that had crashed into the village thousands of years ago and how to capitalise on the radiation emitted from the rock. The people of the village, over that period, were only marginally exposed to the pink light and protected from most of the radiation by lead shields and reflective surfaces. Still, a significant number of people absorbed some of the pink light. It assimilated into their chakra, changing the Pink Light into Pink Chakra. Their chakra networks changed and evolved to allow them to use their abilities. And for the longest time, the shinobi of the village harnessed the power of the rock through ninjutsu; forming a unique hand seal and moulding forms with their pink chakra, but continued use of this technique resulted in worsening deterioration of the user, and then death.
Koshi, Second Hoshikage of Hidden Star when Project Star started, wanted a way to harness the energy of the fallen star in such a way that it would give Hidden Star a combative edge over their neighbours.
He wanted to make an army.
From his first day as Leader, he founded the Star Research Facility and built it around the fallen star. Over the years, he fortified the facility. He funded it heavily, compiling data from the fallen rock and perfecting the village's knowledge of their ability to use pink chakra.
For the first time since the meteorite crashed into their small village, the people did something other than shield and hide the space rock; they studied it.
They understood it.
The pink meteorite had been ripped off a collapsing star several light years away and had hurtled through space since before life inhabited Earth. It had reached the planet at just the right time and arrived at just the right angle so as not to cause another extinction event; on getting close to Earth, the meteor was caught in the Earth's orbit and spun around the planet for a short while, falling apart and descending till it crashed into the place that was later Hidden Star. Even at that, the radiation emitted from the rock as it landed was enough to wipe out a large section of the people in the area, and only because of the intervention of a nameless clan was the immediate environment saved from being turned into a radiative wasteland, using their ninjutsu to raise rock walls around the meteorite, unknowingly also using lead particles in the rock wall to insulate the area from the worst of the pink light.
A large portion of the rock had been eroded from its time shooting through space, losing most of its mass and heat until it was just about as big as a boulder. It was amazing that the rock crash landing hadn't split the planet in two.
Some Hidden Star scientists theorised that the same nameless clan that insulated the pink light and meteor from the environment also slowed down the meteor as it entered into Earth's atmosphere. But that was only a theory since the records written that long ago were nearly all too unintelligible to be deciphered.
With the meteorite insulated, the people, many generations down, began to show signs that they were able to use pink chakra in their ninjutsu.
This technique was called the Mysterious Peacock Method.
Pink chakra could be moulded into countless forms, from sprouting pink wings that allowed the user prolonged flight, to changing their body's biology by growing fish gills that allowed the user to safely stay underwater for long periods, to even manifesting pink tentacles similar to that of a hydra, which was able to capturing multiple targets at once. The sky was the limit to what pink chakra could do.
Pink chakra was extremely dangerous and versatile but extremely fatal.
To work around this downside, the Star scientists exposed animal sperm and egg samples to pink light. When that only resulted in the samples being evaporated into fine particles, no matter how minimal the exposure was, the scientists did the same to embryos. This showed promise when the first ten samples didn't immediately disperse into loose molecules, and that success was greatly celebrated.
Then the scientists moved on to phase two, moving from animals to humans.
More embryos were made and showered under a dim radiative pink light. When the cells in the Petri dishes, embryos, absorbed the pink light without dying, the pink light was fractionally brightened. Repeat until the light was at its brightest and the cells weren't crumbling apart.
Phase three was the longest and cruellest phase; women were impregnated with the embryos and confirmed pregnant from the first week and were exposed to pink light.
No host survived the third phase.
Scores of women and girls that had been taken in from the streets of Hidden Star or lured in from outside the village, from Bear Country and Earth Country, with promises of food and shelter died from large cancerous tumours in their stomachs. The cancer ate away their vaginas, their ovaries, their bladders, and kidneys, and bloated their stomach horrifically. Their bellies swelled up to four times their normal size while the rest of their bodies dried up of nutrients and became brittle. Their hair fell from their hair in clumps, their eyes sank deep into their skulls, and they were unable to so much as roll onto their sides due to being so weak.
Examining the tumour once it had been cut out of the bodies found that it still contained life, living foetuses inside massive, spherical tumours that resembled rough, red eggs. But the foetuses died quickly. The scientists had tried to keep the foetuses alive once the tumours were removed from the hosts but had been unsuccessful; shining pink light on the tumours had killed them, exposing them to sunlight or moonlight killed them, breaking the surface of the tumour directly fed them nutrients killed them. Everything killed them.
So, the scientists once again put their hope on the hosts but that was also futile. The women only lasted one week, perishing with bloated stomachs and skeletal frames.
The girls didn't last so long.
The bodies were incinerated in the facility and the ashes were compacted into bricks, and stored in a separate warehouse until a means of secretly disposing of the ash bricks was found. It was a gruesome process of carting in dozens of women and girls, and then slipping carts of ash bricks out of the facility.
The scientists were stuck on phase three for years.
The cells, though thriving under the pink light and multiplying as normal, ended up killing their hosts—their mothers—mere moments after being transplanted. Hidden Star ended up wiping out its homeless women population in mere weeks and, so as not to bring any attention to the Star Research Facility, and they came into contact with an organisation from Rain Country.
Akatsuki.
The supply of hosts increased, and in return, Akatsuki was paid.
No secrets left Hidden Star because of its status as a Hermit State, isolating itself from the rest of the continent, similar to Iron Country but significantly more extreme.
The scientists found out late that doing something over and over again without change and hoping for the best was idiotic. It had taken Tatsumaki, Koshi's successor and the Third Hoshikage, threatening their lives and their families for them to finally try another angle. Tatsumaki had gotten impatient with the scientists lining their pockets with their research funds. She demanded results or else she would scrap the project as a failure.
The scientists worked harder. Driven by their leader Koshi's ambition, the scientists of Hidden Star forged ahead. Their progress in Project Star's early phases had filled them with arrogance, believing they could push beyond the boundaries of human limitation. They'd breezed through phases one and two, basking in the glow of their success. Phase three, however, was different. The casualties mounted, and the scientists grew complacent, too focused on repeating the same processes that were no longer yielding results.
Hidden Star was a true hermit state. Its self-imposed isolation went far beyond even Iron Country's neutrality, with no secrets ever leaking beyond its fortified borders. For centuries, the village remained cut off from the rest of the continent, focusing entirely on the study of the pink meteorite and the power it bestowed. The village built itself from the study of science and innovative engineering, becoming self-sufficient by generating its own electricity, and food, and maintaining the population.
The scientists were determined to push through phase three.
They didn't know that Tatsumaki's threats were performative. Empty.
Instead of artificially inseminating any woman or girl they were provided, the scientists began looking for special features; strong genes, strong and healthy bodies, motherly features, and recessive bloodlines that improved their vitality.
Akatsuki found an Uzumaki man hiding in Wave Country and took him to Hidden Star, where the scientists harvested his semen until his body was completely exhausted, disposing of the man like they had disposed of countless women before. Aside from sperm, they also took many pints of blood, harvested his organs, picked out his bones and muscle tendons, sucked out his bone marrow for storage, and recycled many other body parts.
They found another Uzumaki, this time a quarter-Uzumaki woman in her late fifties but with the physiology of a woman in her twenties, and artificially inseminated her; they first harvested her eggs and joined it with the semen from the Uzumaki man, shining the samples under the pink light and placing the result inside the woman.
It took five years of trial and error before the scientists finally made a breakthrough.
Her life for those terrible five years was filled with unimaginable horrors.
Miscarriage after miscarriage. The samples died on their own inside the woman, draining her close to the point of death and leaving her a hollowed-out, but breathing shell.
Abortion after abortion. The scientists performed countless abortions to save her life when tumours formed in her womb, a gruesome consequence of the pink chakra-infused cells. Those operations also killed the foetuses. With every new insemination, miscarriage or abortion, her body grew weaker, her spirit dimmer, until nothing remained but a broken shell of the woman she had once been.
After each ordeal, the Uzumaki woman was left with less of herself than before. She would often watch listlessly as the scientists observed her, taking note of her swelling stomach and her frail limbs. They started binding her to a bed after one failed attempt at escaping; a lab assistant had felt sorry for her and helped her flee the facility, tasting fresh air and bathing in the sun for ten beautiful minutes, but she was recaptured as quickly as she had fled.
As punishment, the lab assistant, a girl in her late teens, was artificially inseminated.
The Uzumaki woman was forced to watch as the girl was slowly drained of her life and vitality. The corpse and the bloated stomach were left in the room for many hours until the tumour started to fester and emit pink chakra before it was scraped off the floor and disposed of. The scientists and workers in the facility didn't care for the dignity of both the Uzumaki woman and the dead lab assistant.
It killed what little fight she had in her body.
She had stopped counting the number of times she was tortured after fifty-eight. Each time she miscarried or the baby was aborted, she gnashed her teeth and cursed the scientists.
She cursed the facility.
She cursed the village.
She cursed the people.
She cursed life.
She cursed death.
And, when Lio grew in her stomach, she cursed her child. With every fibre of her being and every ounce of strength in her body, she cursed her child, swearing that anything the girl touched would sooner or later implode.
In the eighth month of her pregnancy, her despair finally consumed her. She was physically and mentally unable to endure her suffering, she hung herself in the cold, sterile confines of her room. She had used her gown and looped it around the handle of the door.
For just the briefest of moments, she was free from her suffering, before her heart finally stopped and she died.
The person that freed her from her bindings was never caught.
Despite her mother's fate, Lio survived. The scientists, desperate to salvage something from their grotesque work, placed the infant in an incubator where she remained for the first months of her life. She was the culmination of the village's dark legacy, a living weapon born from the pink meteorite's twisted power.
Her life wasn't that much better than her mother.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
To celebrate the New Year and Akahoshi's swearing-in as the new Hoshikage, the scientists invited the man into the facility to display their progress.
The building was cold, kept at low temperatures for the sake of the computers that worked around the clock. The air smelled sharply of disinfectant, prickling the back of Akahoshi's brain and bringing a distasteful frown onto his terse expression. The smiling looks on the workers' faces were off-putting. Their expressions didn't reach their dim, sunken eyes.
He had been inside the facility before, guarding the Third Hoshikage, Tatsumaki, and he never enjoyed it. Not because of the atrocities that took place inside. He didn't care for that.
He looked at the ceiling of the elevator he was in and noticed, for the first time, that the light flickered with each floor they passed, descending at an even pace deeper and deeper into the bowels of the facility.
Ding!
The doors of the elevator flew open and on the other side of the door was the Doctor. She was an ageless woman with bluish skin, as if the airconditioned building had seeped deep into her skin tone. Her hair was deep brown, framing her lean face, and her eyes were a plain shade of brown.
Her thin lips split her face in two, beaming with a cattish grin, but her smile didn't reach her vacant eyes.
Akahoshi shivered.
He knew her sort; the kind that felt no emotions but only portrayed human feeling for the sake of not raising any eyebrows. Any other person would have fallen for her act. Akahoshi knew better; the Doctor had overseen the entirety of the third phase of the project, as well as the kidnapping of the Uzumaki man and woman, and their subsequent treatment.
The Doctor wasn't human. She hadn't been human for decades.
No one who did what she did could pretend to be human. Not for long.
For the moment, she looked like a discoloured soccer mom, wearing an oversized white shirt with a black turtleneck underneath, tight jeans, and running shoes, draping a lab coat in the crook of her elbow. She looked as if she had just freshened up after a morning jog, gleaming with eagerness to begin the day.
He didn't know her name and she didn't provide it. Her records had been scrubbed from history by the Second Hoshikage. He had brought her from Kiri to breathe new life into the project, and she hadn't disappointed. Only a brief, five-year snag, before they made their biggest leap in their project.
Lio.
Supposedly, that was the Doctor's real name, but no one was certain. It might as well be her childhood pet's name.
Akahoshi didn't deem the woman with a smile; he wasn't going to stoop to her level and pretend that he was normal.
"Doctor," he greeted with a curt nod.
"My Lord." She curtsied. She studied the man's frosty demeanour and her sunny expression dimmed somewhat. The man suppressed another shiver at the cruelty that skimmed the surface of her eyes, replaced at the last moment by polite impatience as she turned away from him. "Glad you were able to make it. The test just started."
The man didn't reply, striding out of the elevator and walking after her. The man's guards stepped from the elevator but stopped when the Doctor shook her finger from over her shoulder. She didn't stop as she spoke to them.
"Stay there. Only him."
They walked in silence across the room. There was only one table in the room, securely nailed to the ground, and holding a large binder with scribbled notes, and a window on the other side of the room. There was only one door on the left side of the room, close to the table, and it was locked. The Doctor and Akahoshi stepped to the window and Akahoshi realised that it was the same kind of window he observed interrogations through.
He tucked his hands behind his back and peered into the window.
What he saw inside turned his stomach.
A child that couldn't be older than five years old was locked inside a transparent chest, three feet wide and three and a half feet high. She was sitting with her legs drawn to her chest, slumped to her right and looking forward with half-lidded eyes. She was a thin child, so the chest wasn't too small for her, but that wasn't what disgusted the man.
He immediately knew what the chest was.
"Vacuum chamber," the Doctor said, sending the man a proud smirk. "I put it together myself for this display."
The man's throat was dry, flicking a look at her and then back to the girl. The child's lips were parted a little, inhaling and exhaling faintly. He wouldn't have known she was breathing if not for her breath barely misting the wall of the small chamber she was slumped against.
"There is zero oxygen in that chamber," the Doctor continued. In agreement with her words, Akahoshi saw a dial attached to the face of the chest, reading zero oxygen inside the small chamber. There was also a heavy panel on the face of the chamber, next to the oxygen level indicator, and it beeped in tune with the girls waning heart rate; the sound was weak and sluggish. It was state-of-the-art machinery. The Doctor pulled off her oversized shirt, tossed it behind her, onto the table, and wore her lab coat, doing so without an ounce of shame.
"How is she breathing?" the man couldn't help but ask.
The woman hummed, tugging at the sleeves of her lab coat and then crossing her arms. "She's unconsciously converting her pink chakra into oxygen, exhaling carbon dioxide, reabsorbing it, and then converting that into pink chakra." She rolled her wrist. "Rinse and repeat. It's a base instinct that keeps her alive, like fight or flight for regular humans."
The man sputtered. "Pink chakra cannot do that, Doctor."
The woman chuckled. It was the most emotionless laugh Akahoshi had ever heard, but the woman played it off believably, covering her mouth bashfully and looking at the man. "I encourage you to read my latest report, Lord Hoshikage. Lio is such a remarkable child."
The man still found it hard to believe her; he was well aware that pink chakra, utilising the right technique and the right training, would allow the user to breathe in water, but creating oxygen was another thing entirely.
"Lio has the potential to create anything from nothing." A pleasant smile played on her lips. "She's my little star…"
"How long has she been in there?" Akahoshi asked suddenly.
"Twenty minutes, my Lord."
"Is there any way to replicate her ability?"
"Theirs is always a way, my Lord."
"Well?"
"It will take time…"
"How much time?" he asked, trying, and failing, to hide his excitement. The use of the technique was mouthwatering; instead of creating oxygen from pink chakra, he could create poisons and toxins from nothing and use them against their enemies. He could convert pink chakra into gold and diamonds, truly making Hoshi self-dependent without the need for exporting goods.
The Doctor grinned. "I can't say."
"Get it done. Quickly," he snapped and walked away from her, marching back to the elevator. As he left, he heard the girls heart rate spike dangerously.
"Yes, my Lord," the Doctor answered with a slight bow, the grin still plastered on her blue face. She looked into the room where her little star was gasping for dear life; her chakra was depleted. She could no longer create oxygen from it. The woman oversaw her struggle, staring blanky as the girl turned to her as best as she could and weakly banged her fists against the chamber. The Doctor's face didn't change when Lio, not even when the girl suddenly clutched her chest and collapsed. The heart monitor flatlined, and scientists flooded into the room. But the woman didn't panic. She left the room as the vacuum chamber was cracked open and Lio was lifted out of the glass box, desperately resuscitated back to life. "All in due time."
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
The day that Lio's life changed forever came two years later.
She had been returned to her room after a session with the Doctor. It was one of the better days, when they would talk to her about her emotions. It was better than being probed and prodded by those faceless scientists, searching for answers she couldn't possibly provide.
Lio sat on her narrow cot, tracing her finger on a yellow crease on her blanket.
Her head ached. The air was pungent with the stench of antiseptic and something metallic. In her absence, the room had been power washed, her bed had been replaced, and the blanket was replaced for the second time that day. The lightbulb embedded into the ceiling of the room buzzed, sounding like a mosquito just out of her reach, and she squinted at the light.
She remembered her session and her face tightened.
"How are you, Lio?" the doctor had said, smiling sweetly and leaning back in her chair. Her legs were crossed and her hair was bunched into a loose bun.
Lio was lying on a sofa. Her bony wings were folded on her back. She didn't dare lunge at the woman, though she did give the Doctor a simmering stare. "Fine."
The Doctor's expression crinkled, warning the girl, "Lio."
"I…wet the bed again."
The woman's face reverted to normal as if the evil, dangerous glint in her eyes was a mirage. She looked compassionate. Motherly. "Oh, poor baby… I'll have it changed for you. We wouldn't want you to be uncomfortable now, would we?"
Lio didn't reply.
She had learnt to hide her emotions. Tell the scientists and the Doctor what they wanted to hear so that she didn't get hurt. So that they didn't shine pink light on her.
She hated that.
In truth, there was a weight in her chest. Her hatred of the Doctor, the scientists, and the facility physically clogged her throat, making it hard to breathe. She was less of a person and more of an object to those people. An asset, she had read. But she had to keep her thoughts to herself, or else she would regret it. She had learned patience.
She learned to bide her time.
Her hands curled into tight fists at her sides, almost trembling with the effort of keeping her wrath at bay. She stared emptily at the Doctor as she spoke into a two-way radio, ordering for Lio's room to be scrubbed. When she was done, she tucked the radio back into her lab coat, and Lio's eyes followed the device as it was stored away, directing her stare back up to the plain browns of the Doctor's vacant eyes.
"How have your lessons been?"
Lio's lips briefly peeled back, and the Doctor's eyes widened, but the girl smoothed down her expression. The Doctor's pleasant face hid her alarm, but the girl caught it from the momentary twitch for the radio in her shirt. Lio was confident she could erase the Doctor from the face of the earth but not before she was subdued. And punished. The girl was a ticking time bomb, primed to explode at any moment and wipe out all life around her.
Deep down, Lio was happy the Doctor knew that.
Lio weighed this in her mind, fighting to keep her mental battle from making her wings twitch, eventually, the girl tried to answer the Doctor's question, speaking with clipped words, "He annoyed me. I almost lost control."
"But you didn't."
Lio pursed her lips.
"I also see that you're able to suppress your chakra. You're a fast learner." The Doctor beamed and exhaled with a satisfied smile. "I'm proud of you."
Then and even now, the Doctor's pride curdled Lio's blood. It revolted her. It enraged her.
Lio grabbed her stomach and eased herself down from her cot. She turned to the camera, constantly watching her, and sent a baleful look at it, looking away and stumbling to the glass wall. It was thick and reinforced. She could see through it, watching the scientists as they also watched her. Always writing in their notes. She tapped the glass and it clinked under her short fingernails. This action made the scientists all take one step back, but they never stopped observing her. The glass was breakable if she used her pink chakra but after that, the facility's defences would pin her down.
The Pink Meteorite Research Floor was specially designed to counteract anything she was able to do, all revolving around using pink light to weaken her.
Any idea she had of escape was futile—
The lights flicked off and the next second, the entire floor was bathed in red light, pulsing on and off. An alarm screamed through the entirety of the facility, making Lio's head ring. She recoiled and covered her ears, vaguely aware of the scientists fleeing the floor. There was a mad scramble for the elevator, as the scientists piled inside, shoving aside any other lab assistant and worker, who instead turned and fled up the stairs. None of them cared for the child locked inside the glass cage.
A white gas hissed down from the ceiling and Lio cringed further away from the glass wall, fitting herself into a corner of her cage and pulling her knees to her chest. The entirety of the floor was doused in thick fog. The glass cage was airtight, so nothing seeped in.
She heard a scuffle outside of her cage.
"You mustn't!" the Doctor crowed. Lio was astonished to hear the powerless alarm in her words. "Please—"
Her words were silent abruptly and Lio's eyes bugged wide when the woman's face was slammed into the glass where so many scientists had observed her since she was born. Where her mother was supposedly imprisoned.
A face behind a gasmask leaned forward, next to the Doctor, and the pale eyes behind the visors chilled Lio to the bone, but she couldn't help the exhilarated grin that broke out on her face, surging forward and plastered herself onto the glass wall, getting a better look of the person.
He was lean and not much taller than her, holding the Doctor by the back of her neck. There were bandages around his neck, hands, and feet.
The pale eyes she had seen from afar were byakugan. She recognised them immediately from the books she had read.
The person's gasmask didn't hide the smiling crinkle at the corner of his eyes, giving her a look that didn't try to intimidate her.
The Doctor's mouth rattled and her jaw slipped open. Lio noticed that the place the stranger was holding the Doctor was blackening. Eroding. The cells died and this effect slowly spread, changing her blue skin to something deathly pale, sucking the nutrients from her skin and bones, giving her a ghoulish resemblance. The voice that echoed from the Doctor wasn't her own. It sounded as if it was coming from the end of a tunnel, but deep and guttural.
"Want to be free?"
Despite her shock, Lio nodded.
"I have a condition…"
Lio grinned. Her jagged teeth almost broke her face. "Anything to be free, sir."
"Raise hell."
The girl's elation couldn't be measured. The whites of her eyes became bloodshot. Her pink irises shrank to the size of pinpricks. Her expression was manic. "Please sir, let me out."
The weight she had on her chest for all these years surged up her throat, threatening to spill out. Her spiny, scaly wings flapped, batting and striking the glass. She could blow it up if she expelled her chakra, but she didn't know if the countermeasures had been shut off. She doubted they had been turned off, less so now that the entire facility was on red alert.
Now was her chance.
Her patience was paying off!
"Be free and have fun, my friend."
That about did it for the girl.
She clutched her head, reeling in the pink chakra that leaked from her pores. The wailing of the alarm and the rhythmic pulsing of the red lights weren't helping matters. She soaked in the person's final words, watching him discard the Doctor to the side.
Be free and have fun, my friend.
Be free!
The person taped explosive seals onto the face of the glass wall and sent four kunai into a panel on the right side of the wall, deactivating the machines that watched the girl's vitals. Her heart rate was spiking dangerously. She heard it angrily drum in her ears, thudding noisily in her chest and making it hard for her to think. The stench of antiseptic was gone from her mind. The machine crackled as it powered off. It turned out that the stranger didn't need to blow up the wall.
He fled.
Lio exploded.
Hidden Star was judged that night.
Hell rained down from the heavens. Nobody was spared.
Authors note
Wow…
What do you think of this side story?
Let me know what you think!
See you when I see you ;)
Foy.