"Beneath cold stars, secrets find their voice.
Under moon's gaze, spirits find their witness."
— Old Iron Country proverb
32 — UNDER THE MOON'S GLARE
THE NIGHT SHIORI carved into herself was a cold one.
A night where the frigid air clung to her like a second skin, sharp with salt and sea-heavy; a night for ancient spirits. She knelt alone, bathed in the pale glow of moonlight and the restless flicker of candles struggling against the wind, sustained only by her chakra's subtle command. Her skin was marked intricately with ink runes. They were careful preparations, precisely drawn, and awaiting their completion in blood.
With deliberate, almost solemn reverence, she unveiled the ritual blade — slender, curved, and etched with runes passed down generations. Her breath trembled as she raised the sharpened metal toward the nape of her neck, fingers searching through silken strands of hair to expose pale flesh beneath.
"Through Sacrifice," she whispered, and her voice strained, if only slightly. "…Meaning."
The blade bit into her skin, as precise as it was unforgiving.
The first cut traced upward, along her occipital lobe, near the brain's visual memory center. Her body seized instinctively, muscles going rigid with the effort of holding still against pain that burned with shocking clarity. Blood trickled forth, warm against the chill of night, mingling with the ink runes already etched into her flesh, setting them alight with what must have been fire.
She bit her lip until it bled, stifling a cry. Her hands, though slick with blood, did not tremble. Each spiral she carved had been obsessively practiced, mirroring the pathways of neurons beneath. Precision was vital. Tonight, Meaning, just like Intent, required exactitude.
Still, the second array shattered her composure.
She pressed deeper anyway, blade scraping perilously close to her temporal lobe, and a strangled cry burst from her throat. Lightning arcs of memory flashed across her consciousness — faces, unfamiliar and not, echoes of voices, phantom touches. Stars exploded behind her eyelids as she fought through waves of nausea and dizziness.
"Onward," she hissed. I'll cut this weakness out of myself if I must.
Blood flowed steadily now, staining the white sheet beneath her. A vivid crimson bloom spread across the fabric marked with the proud Uzumaki crest. Spirals intersected in her flesh, curves and lines that drew strength from the underlying hippocampus, shaping the essence of memory itself into something one step closer to permanence. Fingers slick with her sacrifice clutched desperately at the blade's hilt, and she fought to maintain control.
How she fought, indeed.
With every stroke of the blade, Shiori's determination sharpened, even as darkness began creeping at the edges of her vision. Her chakra surged violently, desperate and raw, betraying the fear she wouldn't acknowledge. She carved onward.
The fourth array penetrated near her frontal cortex; it ignited primal agony.
Her body convulsed as sealing chakra invaded neural pathways never intended for such power. Pain scorched through synapses, her jaw clenching so tightly she felt her teeth might shatter. The seal drank deeply from her, consuming fragments to forge space for something other. It devoured pieces of her essence, rewriting the architecture of her very identity.
Finally came the closing spiral lockkey: the simplest design, yet bearing the greatest power. The open, as it had also been the first, and the close. Her blade etched the spiral above the corpus callosum, binding all previous symbols together into a unified network. As she completed the final, decisive stroke, the symbols surged to life, glowing fiercely in crimson and gold.
"Bind," she managed.
In an instant, the seal awakened fully, embedding itself irrevocably into her neural tissue and chakra system. Someday, that series of cuts would be a living matrix of memory and chakra, capable of capturing, preserving, and sharing experiences beyond her own. Someday, it would become greater than she had ever envisioned, and perhaps that was as much as she could ever have asked for.
For now, however, Shiori collapsed forward, catching herself on trembling arms mere moments before her face met the ground. Blood pooled beneath her, reflecting candlelight that flickered and faded, and extinguished one by one.
"…Seal."
She could feel the seal burrowing deeper, changing her as any Sealed Art would, anchoring itself to her very consciousness.
With shaking fingers, she let her crimson hair fall back into place, concealing what she had done. The vibrant red strands, of course, served as the perfect camouflage for her bloody work. No one would see the seal unless she channeled chakra to it, but she would feel it always.
The candles guttered out one by one, leaving her in darkness save for the moonlight and the faint, spiraling glow beneath her hair.
Exactly one hour later, as arranged, gentle footsteps approached through the darkness, and…
"Wake up," came the hiss. "I think something's here."
Shiori — No. Naruto's eyes snapped open in the darkness, his consciousness clawing its way through layers of troubled half-sleep. The remnants of dreams and memories that weren't his clung to him as he did. His fingers unconsciously traced the back of his neck, feeling for marks that weren't there.
His heart hammered against his ribs, a familiar panic that he'd grown accustomed to ignoring over the last days. For a disorienting moment, he couldn't remember where he was, only that he wasn't surrounded by the charred remains of the airship, and that the smell of burning flesh was mercifully absent from the cold cave air.
Otsuru's voice was not frantic, but it was wound tight. This much, he noticed. She hovered above him, the edges of her silhouette blurred in the suffocating darkness. He tasted copper on his tongue — he'd bitten his lip raw without realizing. Still faces flashed behind his eyelids whenever he blinked — small and not; Aiko's face frozen in that final expression; Shiori's eyeless—
The small fire they'd banked before sleep had died to cold ash, of course. The temperature had plummeted while he slept, yet his skin felt feverish, slick with cold sweat that had nothing to do with the current danger.
And then he heard it.
A sound like fingernails dragging across stone, methodical and patient. Something, outside.
Otsuru crouched beside him, her long blade already drawn, reflecting what little light existed in this void. Her breath crystallized in the air between them, tiny clouds of frost.
"How long?" Naruto whispered, his voice scraping out of a parched throat.
"Three minutes. Maybe less." Otsuru's eyes never left the cave entrance, now nothing but a wall of packed snow and ice. "Footsteps first. Then silence. Now this."
The scratching intensified, becoming more deliberate — no longer testing, but searching. Hunting.
Naruto's fingers fumbled for the smoke seal he'd drawn before exhaustion claimed him. He had sealed it in two parts instead of one, hoping it might prove to be useful. The paper felt even flimsier now beneath his calloused fingertips, pathetically inadequate as he slipped it into his pouch and retrieved a kunai instead. Cold steel against his palm — the only certainty he had right now. The scratching stopped. He moved toward the entrance on instinct, muscles groaning in protest. Otsuru's hand shot out, her fingers ice-cold as they circled his wrist with surprising strength.
"Wait," she commanded, barely a breath. "What are you doing?"
"Wait?" His voice threatened to rise above a whisper, indignation warming his blood when nothing else could. "While it finds a way in?"
She held his gaze, her eyes reflecting the faintest light. "You'd rather face it blind? Without knowing who or what waits on the other side? Is that how you do things?"
He scowled, even as she let him go. The truth was, he didn't know what he'd do.
The choice evaporated as he reached the cave entrance, now already sealed by heavy snowfall. The wall of white was thick, betraying no obvious weakness — except the one that would grow soon, where something on the outside was systematically excavating.
Naruto pressed his palm against the packed snow, feeling vibrations telegraph through the barrier. It became even more obvious that it was not the random clawing of an animal seeking shelter but something that knew exactly what it wanted. Something that knew they were there.
His awareness expanded suddenly, horrifically — they were trapped.
The weight of the mountain pressed down on them; the darkness around them was near-absolute, save for the faintest blue glow filtering through ice crystals in the snow wall. And the air felt thin. Used up and tainted with fear, though his seal had taken care of the smoke. His breathing, on the other hand, sounded obscenely loud, echoing wetly in the confined space.
No one knew they were here. No one would come looking until it was far too late.
The scratching had stopped, yes. The silence that followed was somehow worse: it was the sort of void that imagination always rushed to fill with perverse delight. Then, a soft, deliberate thump against the snow wall. Another—
A loud bellow rang, and there was nothing human or scheming about it. The tearing resumed with a violence.
This time, Otsuru seemed to know what they were facing: she cursed. Naruto seized control of his thoughts, knuckles white around the kunai. From her reaction, one thing was clear: they needed a way out. Now.
He turned to face her—
Otsuru was gone.
A faint shimmer caught his eye near the ceiling. When his vision adjusted, he saw her crouched on the rocky shelf above, her fingers working with practiced precision, her face a mask of concentration in the pale orange light.
Wait, light?
"What are you doing?" he hissed.
"What do you think?" she snapped back, not pausing her work. "The same thing as you — going in blind."
She pulled four round ceramic spheres from her cloak, barely visible in the faint light coming from her flint. It took him a second to remember what she had told him they were.
Gunpowder bombs.
Her hesitation was brief; a moment of doubt measured in heartbeats. Then, she pressed them into the wall above — one high, one low, two staggered.
Naruto felt his disbelief rise — like his bile did. "We'll bring the whole thing down on us—"
"Do you have a better idea?" Her voice cut through his objection.
The thumping on the wall grew more aggressive. And worse, closer. Naruto thought he saw the snow bulge inward slightly, and what seemed like a sharp claw finally broke through.
He grabbed his cloak, bound his gear quickly, and nodded briskly. No more words needed.
Otsuru pressed her fingers to the wall, carrying a lighter. She signaled for him to block his eardrums and lit the fuse. Then she dropped beside him again, breath misting like smoke.
She lobbed a lit bomb forward with enough strength to bury it into the weakened snow wall.
Naruto hissed, "Another—?"
"Crouch," she said, her voice unnervingly calm. "We run as soon as the ones on top blow."
He did so without thinking.
And then there was a light: an eerie, soundless moment.
The snow wall didn't so much explode as it folded, forced outward by a violent flash of heat and pressure. A geyser of light and ice screamed through the narrow cave mouth as sound resumed, shattering the stillness into a thousand jagged pieces.
The cave groaned. Snow sprayed in sheets, ice and rock pellets slammed into his face with stinging force. For one sickening moment, Naruto thought the entire mountain would collapse upon them, burying their escape plan along with their bodies.
"Go!" Otsuru shouted.
They jumped into the hole above as one, launching themselves into the void.
Outside, the world was a blur of darkness and swirling snow. The blast had torn a wide enough gap in the snowbank for them to dive through. Naruto rolled down a steep incline, blind, his hands scrabbling for purchase on slick ice and shifting snow. Otsuru was just ahead, bounding from foothold to foothold like her bones remembered a rhythm his didn't know, her movements fluid where his were desperate.
Behind them, the cave entrance vanished in a rolling cloud of smoke and shattered rock, erasing their temporary sanctuary from existence.
Then, there was silence.
The snow erupted. No warning. A massive shape burst upward, spraying blood and chunks of ice. Some monstrous beast broke through directly between them, scattering them both. Close to three meters of raw muscle, fat, and bone; light fur matted with blood. One milky eye swiveled wildly. Its jaws unhinged, exposing flesh-ripping teeth stained yellow and red.
What the hell? Naruto thought numbly.
It struck first. Bone claws tore through the space where his head had just been. Naruto dropped and rolled across the snow — only to realize, too late, that it was snow. Without chakra to hold him up, he sank partway through. The creature twisted, its claws carving deep furrows in the ice as it charged.
"Move!" Otsuru screamed, drawing her long blade again.
Naruto's hand flew to his pouch, yanking out the flimsy paper seal. The beast lunged — no hesitation, tearing forward with a savage swipe. Something in its wild, predatory movement triggered a flash of memory: cold green eyes calculating his death with similar indifference, and his breath caught. He slapped the seal down with more force than necessary, channeling chakra with an intensity born of desperation rather than technique.
"Unseal!"
Dense smoke exploded between them. The creature howled in confusion, slashing blindly through the dense cloud that reeked of ash. Its attacks hit nothing but air.
Naruto circled left, kunai in hand. Otsuru right. The beast thrashed in the smoke, snarling. Its one milky eye useless as its nose.
One charge left.
He couldn't help but think how temporary these paper seals were. How fragile. How inadequate when faced with true danger. There had to be a more permanent solution — one that wouldn't dissolve or tear when he needed it most.
Blood spattered across virgin snow. The beast's hide split open in places, revealing muscle and bone underneath. It didn't slow down.
Sensing an opening, Naruto hurled his kunai — aiming for the eye, but only grazing the snout as it jerked.
Otsuru charged, blade held high. The creature sensed her, whirled around. Its jaw stretched impossibly wide, thick saliva dripping between jagged teeth.
"First Fang!" she shouted, bringing her blade down.
The creature turned, using its bulk as a shield. Otsuru adjusted mid-swing — blade arcing wider. It sank deep into the beast's flank. Hide split. Muscle tore. The beast's howl cut the air like breaking metal.
It struck back. One massive limb caught Otsuru across the chest, sending her flying. She hit the snow hard, rolled up disheveled.
Naruto attacked from behind, a second kunai slashing uselessly against armored hide. The creature slammed into him without truly looking. Pain exploded through his ribs. He tasted blood.
"Its underbelly!" Otsuru yelled, already positioning for another strike. "Strike it from under!"
"I know!"
The beast charged at her. But Otsuru didn't back down.
Naruto stared in disbelief as he recognized her two-handed stance — it was the same one she had just used. From above, too. "What are you doing? The same attack won't—"
"I know!"
She stood her ground. Waited. Timed it.
"First Fang!"
Her blade came down again. Same pattern as before.
The creature defended high. Otsuru's right hand released the stuck blade's handle and flew down to grab a smaller, already-lit bomb from her cloak. Realization hit Naruto: the attack had been a setup. She had meant to drop it all along.
"Second Fang!" Otsuru's free hand shot forward now, bomb aimed for the beast's underbelly. "Raida—"
The beast jerked. The bomb slipped from her fingers. Fell into the snow.
Claws raked the air where Otsuru had been. Cloth tore. She didn't bleed, only cursed.
Naruto saw the bomb. Saw the creature turning for a lethal blow.
He moved.
Energy surged through his body. Driven by instinct and carried by chakra, he slid forward atop snow, snatched the bomb from where it was lodged, launched upward. The beast sensed him, and its jaws opened in reflex.
"Unseal!"
Driven by a tightly compressed, directed burst of smoke, Naruto's fist — clenched around the bomb — slammed into the creature's open maw. He forced it deep, feeling teeth graze his arm, and yanked back just in time to keep it from being torn clean in half.
Then, he leaped away, taking in Otsuru's gob-smacked expression as she did the same.
A heartbeat of silence. Then — explosion.
The beast's head vanished in red mist. A spray of bone, brain, and blood. What remained of its body convulsed violently, limbs thrashing, carving trenches in the snow. It collapsed, steaming in the cold mountain air. Stillness.
Naruto and Otsuru stood, breathless. Blood from the dead thing sizzled into the snow, carving a slow, red melt. She watched his bruised fist as he winced, pain flickering across his face. His elbow, at least, she couldn't see.
"You're insane," Otsuru said in amazed realization. "You're completely—"
"That," Naruto spit blood, "was your plan?"
Otsuru wiped her face. "Well," she began. Then stopped.
There was silence again.
Not the dead silence from before. Not the one that came right after the beast's crumpling, either. This one was charged — expectant. A held breath.
Otsuru took a small step backward. Her boots crunched on new snow.
Naruto, who didn't yet know the word for it, turned, panting, and saw the avalanche start.
A low, thunderous rumble began to rise from the peaks above them, primordial and unstoppable. Cracks spiderwebbed across the slope like the mountain itself was waking up angry, lines of fracture spreading with terrifying speed.
"Oh," Otsuru muttered, the single syllable somehow conveying comprehension, resignation, and worry all at once.
"What?" Naruto asked. "What is that? Otsuru—! What is that?"
His vision tunneled briefly, reality blurring with the memory of fire consuming everything—
No. Snow shifted in great blankets of what could only be white death.
Otsuru didn't dignify him with an answer. Instead, she lunged forward, seizing his hand and yanking him into motion. "Run! No—! Horizontally — Across it!"
The mountain's groan became a roar. Naruto glanced back once — only once — and his stomach dropped. A true wall of white thundered down the slope, devouring everything in its path, a living thing with terrible hunger.
"Don't look!" Otsuru shouted, her voice barely audible over the avalanche's rage. "Down the ridge! NOW!"
They sprinted through knee-deep snow, and no half-practiced snow step managed to keep him fully out of it. The sound behind them grew impossibly louder, until it all rolled into one approaching doom.
Otsuru veered sharply left toward a rocky outcropping. "There!" she yelled, pointing at a narrow chute between stones where the snow dropped away steeply. "We jump!"
"Are you insane?" Naruto screamed back, but his protest was performative — they had no choice.
Twenty meters. Ten. The avalanche was gaining, its cold breath on their necks.
"Jump sideways!" she commanded, and hurled herself into the void.
Naruto followed with a roar, his body acting before his mind could object. For one weightless moment, he hung suspended between earth and sky, the mountain falling away beneath him.
Then gravity reclaimed him.
He landed hard on sliding snow, tumbling, cartwheeling downward and roaring until he managed to get his feet under him. The entire mountainside was moving now, carrying him with it. He fought for balance, arms windmilling desperately.
Ahead, Otsuru had somehow found her footing. She stood in a half-crouch, knees bent, arms extended, riding the snowfall like it was something to be tamed rather than feared. Her cloak whipped behind her, and she made minute adjustments with each shift of the surging snow.
"Like this!" she shouted, though Naruto could barely hear her. "Use chakra! Stay on top! Don't let it pull you under!"
Naruto, this time, didn't quite manage to slide. He struggled to mimic her stance, finding a precarious balance. For three heartbeats, he matched her, exhilaration cutting through terror as they shot down the mountainside on the back of destruction itself.
Then, the snow beneath Otsuru collapsed. A dark fissure opened where solid white had been moments before. Her eyes widened — the first real fear he'd ever seen from her — as she plunged into the white void.
"Otsuru!" Naruto screamed, diving toward where she'd disappeared.
His world became chaos. Snow filled his mouth, his nose, his eyes. He was tumbling, spinning, buried and unburied in the same violent moment. Up became down became sideways. The cold crushed him from all directions, pressing against his chest until he couldn't breathe.
A hand seized his arm — the wrong one, and he nearly screamed in pain. It was Otsuru, who somehow found him in the maelstrom. Her grip was iron, her eyes wide but focused through the swirling white. She pulled him close enough to shout directly into his ear.
"Chakra!" she yelled. "To your hands and feet! Push away!"
He got it. Naruto concentrated, channeling chakra to his extremities forcefully, creating space around them as they rode the heart of the avalanche. The pressure eased slightly. They could breathe, but they were still at nature's mercy, being carried downward at terrifying speed.
Then came the impact.
Something massive and unyielding — a boulder, a tree, a cliff, hard to tell — slammed into them. Snow rushed in, separating them instantly. Naruto felt Otsuru's fingers slip from his arm.
The world went white, then black.
Time lost meaning.
Cold.
Pressure.
Silence.
Naruto couldn't move, couldn't breathe. His lungs screamed for air, and his hand burned. Panic clawed at his mind, and he was back there — trapped beneath debris as flames licked closer, the weight on his chest not snow but burning wreckage. Then, training took over. He forced himself to remain still, to conserve what little oxygen remained.
Which way is up?
He had no idea. The darkness was complete. He tried to move his arm and found it pinned. His leg, too. Only his right hand had a small pocket of mobility.
Spit. That was the rule, Otsuru had said. It had sounded random then — and perhaps something he had thought she had said to disturb him. If you're buried, spit and see which way it goes. Gravity would tell him which way to dig.
He worked up what saliva he could in his bone-dry mouth and let it dribble from his lips. He felt the wetness roll across his cheek, toward his ear.
That way was up.
With his one semi-free hand, Naruto began to dig, scraping at the compacted snow an inch at a time. His movements were pathetically small; his left hand throbbed, though the snow offered some measure of relief. His chest burned. Black spots danced in his vision, though there was nothing to see in this tomb of white.
Dig. Breathe slower. Dig.
His fingers broke through first, into emptiness. Cold air rushed in, the sweetest thing he'd ever felt. He clawed more frantically now, widening the hole.
A thought he had before crystallized with surprising clarity. Tired. He was tired of being at the mercy of elements, of beasts, of enemies. Of fate.
Everything he had could be taken from him — would, if he failed — and he knew that truth far too well. But there were things no one could take from him, weren't there—
Suddenly, the snow above him shifted; not collapsing, but being pulled away. Daylight poured in, blinding after the darkness. A silhouette blocked the harsh glare, hands digging frantically to widen the opening he'd started.
"Damn it," came Otsuru's voice, closer than he'd expected. "There you were."
More snow fell away. Naruto blinked up at her face hovering above him, backlit by the sun. Her hair hung in damp strands around her face. A cut above her eye had left a trail of dried blood along her cheek.
"How did you—" he started, his voice a rasp.
"Find you?" She kept digging, freeing his shoulders now. "I just dug several holes."
With one strong pull, she helped extract him from his icy prison. Naruto collapsed onto the surface, gulping air into his starved lungs. The world around them was blanketed in snow, the landscape almost unrecognizable.
Otsuru knelt beside him, her usual composure momentarily fractured. She gave him a sheepish look, one he'd never seen on her typically confident face.
"I, uh... underestimated the impact radius of the larger bombs," she admitted. "It's the first time I'm allowed to use them on my own." A pause. "Maybe for a reason." Another pause. "…Please don't tell my sister if you ever see her again."
Naruto stared at her in disbelief, a laugh bubbling up from somewhere deep inside him — it was more than a little relief at their survival. At her understatement after the mountain had nearly swallowed them whole.
His laughter seemed to break something loose in her as well. Her sheepish expression melted away, replaced by something genuine and unguarded. Otsuru smiled — not her usual quick smirk or tactical half-grin, but a true smile that transformed her face, reached her eyes, and instantly made him want to trust her fully.
"Next time," she said, the smile still playing on her lips as she offered her hand to pull him fully to his feet, "No — Next time, and if you make me one of these fancy smoke bombs, I'll let you choose our escape route."
"They're not smoke bombs—" He caught himself. "…Deal."
This time, he smacked her hand instead of taking it, and the startled yelp she let out was deeply satisfying.
Eventually, they made their careful way along the snow-covered slope, and took a moment to breathe. Disheveled and limping slightly, Naruto was sure they made for a rather sorry sight.
The wind carried the sharp scent of pine and ice as they trudged through knee-deep snow. Naruto's legs ached with every step, lactic acid burning in his muscles, compounded by his very short sleep (the moon was still bright in the sky, with no sun in sight), but the alternative wasn't an option. He glanced at Otsuru, whose eyes continuously scanned their surroundings, alert and focused.
No, he thought, it didn't seem as though she had any intention of finding another shelter.
When they reached a small clearing sheltered by a cluster of towering pines, however, Otsuru suddenly stopped. She raised her hand.
"Short halt. Just for a moment," she said, her voice low. She crouched down, brushing snow from a fallen log before sitting.
Naruto collapsed beside her, grateful for the reprieve. His breathing was still labored, each inhale like drawing ice into his lungs. "Do you think anyone heard the explosion?"
Otsuru's expression darkened. She pulled a small metal canister from her pack and twisted it open, revealing a steaming liquid inside. She offered it to him first.
"That's what concerns me," she said as he took a careful sip. The lukewarm tea went pleasantly down his throat. "An avalanche of that magnitude won't go unnoticed. Not by the watchers."
"Watchers?"
Otsuru took the canister back, her fingers brushing his. They hurt slightly less, already. "They monitor the risky areas. When something significant happens — yeah, like half a mountain collapsing — they dispatch samurai to investigate."
Naruto stiffened. "Here?"
She nodded and took a sip before continuing. "Yeah. These ones are skilled trackers, trained to move through terrain like this. Even at night, they see better than you or I. The goggles help." She gestured vaguely around them. "And we've left a trail even a child could follow."
Naruto sighed. "We can't exactly explain our reasoning, can we?"
She smiled. "They wouldn't care about explanations, no." She paused. "They're here to maintain order, not to listen to stories." She looked at him intently. "And shinobi are always considered threats. That's without even going into your unfortunate heritage."
"How long do we have?"
"If we're very lucky, until dawn. The watchers would have seen the avalanche, but if it seems like a natural one, maybe they won't bother." She capped the canister and returned it to her pack. "If we're unlucky, they might already be on their way."
A distant sound — barely perceptible — made them both freeze. Otsuru's hand moved to her weapons pouch.
"Was that—" Naruto began. "Another animal? Or?"
"No idea what it was," she said, her voice barely above a whisper. She rose slowly to her feet. "But I think that was enough pausing."
She helped him up, her grip firm on his arm. As they prepared to leave, she leaned close to his ear.
"Stay close to me. Samurai are not like ninja. They're trained to hunt in pairs, using the terrain to their advantage." Her breath was warm against his cold skin. "One to flush out the target, one to strike. Now, if we get separated, head east toward the river. The current is strong enough to mask your scent and trail."
The river, Naruto thought, was likely near freezing. And if they did get separated, he was as good as dead. A seal to warm himself up, he thought he might be able to conceive. But at his level, only one that would work in an enclosed space. Certainly not while moving.
They crested a small ridge, the snow crunching beneath his feet occasionally despite his best efforts to move silently. The valley below stretched out before them, more of that expanse of white broken only by the dark silhouettes of pines. And—
Naruto suddenly dropped to a crouch, pulling Otsuru down beside him.
"There," he whispered, pointing toward the far edge of the valley.
She squinted against the reflected moonlight off the snow. At first, she likely saw nothing but shadows and distance. Then she caught what he had — movement. Two figures Naruto had seen, moving steadily across the landscape.
"I can't see much," Otsuru said.
She reached into her pack and withdrew a pair of compact binoculars. And then she cursed. She handed them to him without a word, her expression grim.
Naruto adjusted the focus, and the distant figures snapped into sharp relief: two shapes in winter armor — furs layered over heavy, segmented plates — their swords catching the moonlight with a dull gleam. Just as she'd said, they moved in perfect sync, one trailing slightly behind the other, scanning the terrain with quiet, practiced precision. Their red eyes were as unsettling as the blades at their sides.
"They're already here," he muttered, lowering the binoculars.
"And they're heading straight toward the avalanche site," Otsuru replied, taking the binoculars back. "Covering the most likely escape routes, too." She studied them for another moment before tucking the binoculars away. "Well, that's pretty bad."
They retreated from the ridge, moving deeper into the shelter of the trees. Naruto watched as Otsuru mapped their route anew in her mind. There was something in her focused determination that made him want to reach out, although he couldn't say why.
The realization came unbidden. And certain, too. He needed to tell her.
"I saw something last night," he said suddenly. "Before sleeping, I mean."
Somehow, he knew she would believe him, too.
Otsuru glanced at him. "What do you mean?"
"Spirits." The word hung between them in the cold air. "Or yōkai. At least, I think that's what they were. They were watching me from the cave opening."
Her eyebrows lifted slightly, but she didn't immediately dismiss his claim. Instead, she studied his face carefully, as if trying to determine if he was joking at the worst possible time. Her gaze was penetrating, searching for deception… or delusion.
"You saw spirits?" There was a hint of skepticism in her voice, and he tried to focus more on the curiosity he also noticed.
Naruto nodded firmly. "Three of them. Watching me — and the seal I drew up." The seal kept them away, he thought. Or did it make them come? He hesitated, suddenly self-conscious. "You believe me, right? I—I'm not losing my mind. It's not the first time, either. My... My clansmen fought one atop the airship."
What he didn't say was how last night, one spirit had pointed to his skin, had traced patterns in the air that, to him, could only mean one thing now.
Otsuru's gaze drifted back toward the ridge, toward the approaching samurai. Her expression was hard to read — it was not disbelief, but something more cautious.
"Most people don't see spirits," she said carefully. "I certainly know I don't. If they truly exist — the same way we do — they don't typically reveal themselves."
She paused. A shadow passed over her face. "What did they look like?"
"Incorporeal," Naruto said slowly, searching for the right words. "They felt... strange. Ancient, but curious, somehow." He didn't mention how one had somehow reminded him of Aiko either, because there was no point in that. And there were too many unpleasant, complicated things that came with it, too.
She didn't answer right away, weighing her response with care. "There are old stories," she said at last. "Some say spirits are drawn to certain people — those with unusual chakra, or certain bloodlines."
Their eyes met. Something unspoken passed between them.
"If you think you saw them—" she began.
"I have."
"If you have seen them, then—"
A twig snapped in the forest below.
Both of them froze, dropping low to the ground, senses sharpening in the silence that followed.
"Yeah, let's move," Otsuru muttered, already sliding downhill. "The samurai are our immediate concern. But... be watchful. If you say there are spirits…"
They started down the slope, away from both the ridge and the approaching hunters. Naruto stayed close, his mind turning over the encounter in quiet, troubled loops.
Several tense minutes passed. Then, Otsuru slowed, glancing back over her shoulder. Her face was half-lost in shadow, but Naruto saw her lips moving — silent words, more prayer than strategy.
"You know," she muttered, "I'm starting to think you've got pretty bad luck."
Naruto didn't answer. His fingers moved without thought, sketching faint shapes across his skin. Luck had never been the problem.
Preparation was.
Next chapter: Hagane