Smoke and flames devoured the outline of Nibelheim.
The instant Sephiroth’s Masamune bloomed with blood in Brian Lockhart’s chest, its cold edge had already turned toward Tifa.
Ripping pain exploded beneath her right collarbone, so deep it reached the bone.
She could even hear the tiny sound of her own bones cracking.
Before her consciousness sank into darkness, all she felt was a pair of rough hands, stained with soot and sweat, Zangan’s hands, suddenly dragging her up from the burning rubble and throwing her over his shoulder.
Every step the old man took slammed against the wound in her chest, and the agony sent her plunging completely into nothingness.
She had no idea how much time had passed before the dim, swaying glow of an oil lamp cast twisted shadows across earthen walls.
In the crude clinic of Corel, bone-deep pain dragged Tifa back to reality.
A barefoot doctor was using a rusty steel saw to cut away the splintered bone jutting out from her wound.
There was no anesthetic, only pure pain that tore through her nerves.
“Bite down, girl!” Zangan’s roar exploded beside her ear, and a leather belt was forced into her mouth.
She bit down on instinct, her canines piercing the tough leather as the salty taste of rust and blood spread through her mouth.
The buzzing scrape of the saw against bone became the only background sound in her mind, lasting for thirty-seven minutes that felt like eternity.
Three weeks later, when Shinra’s medical team appeared with a transfer agreement stamped with a cold official seal, Zangan’s answer was to slam his fist straight down onto the document, sending scraps flying everywhere.
“You burn down her village and still won’t let her get treated?
Damn you!” he growled.
Then he carried the weakened Tifa on his back once again and slipped onto a coal train bound for Midgar.
The smell of disinfectant stung her nose inside a clinic in the Sector 8 slums of Midgar.
A female doctor gently lifted the gauze from Tifa’s chest, revealing a savage gash like a rag doll violently torn open.
The diagnosis was cold and cruel.
The bone structure of her chest cavity had been severely damaged, and a permanent metal support, steel bone, had to be implanted to hold her body together.
Beneath the surgical lights, even through the haze of general anesthesia, the feeling of those icy metal strips sinking into flesh and fitting against bone still felt like a venomous snake slowly burrowing deep into her marrow.
During the long unconsciousness after the operation, she kept falling into the same repeating nightmare: Nibelheim’s flames soaring into the sky, the choking smell of charred ash, and a familiar boy’s voice calling her name again and again from within the sea of fire.
“Tifa… Tifa…” But his face seemed hidden behind layers of thick smoke, always blurred, always impossible to recognize.
After she woke, her body’s collapse was more complete than she had imagined.
In the rehabilitation room, she tried to bend down and touch her ankle, only for all the strength in her body to suddenly drain away when her fingertips were still just an inch from the goal.
She crashed heavily to the floor.
The legs that had once been able to shatter wooden stakes with ease were now as weak as waterlogged cotton.
The doctor’s son helped her up and calmly explained that recovering from muscle atrophy would take time.
But the true suffocation came from the bill placed in her hands.
Printed on it was the staggering figure of 160,000 gil.
To repay a debt equal to decades of income for an ordinary Midgar resident, she had no choice but to work at a steamed bun stand controlled by a Sector 8 gang.
The stall owner, Manson, set her daily wage at 20 gil, but deducted an outrageous 80% “room and board management fee,” leaving only a pitiful 4 gil actually falling into her hands each day.
Behind the steam-filled stall, she mechanically chopped vegetables, kneaded dough, steamed buns, and sold them to customers.
In the pocket of her apron, her fingers clenched around a small scrap of paper with the result she had calculated over and over again written on it: divided by 4, divided by 365, roughly 66 years.
The scorching steam made her eyes turn red.
Her “home” was an abandoned cargo container provided by the doctor’s son, curled away in a corner of the Sector 8 slums.
On rainy days, yellow water with the smell of rust seeped through gaps in the sheet metal.
On cold nights, the wind moved like something alive, finding every crack with precision and gnawing at the not-yet-healed flesh around the steel bone implants, bringing waves of dull, aching numbness.
One silent night, a weak and piercing meow cut through the darkness inside the container.
Tifa pushed open the heavy door.
Beneath the dim yellow streetlight, a skinny orange cat was trembling in the coal ash, its amber eyes staring at her in terror.
The sight struck her instantly.
It looked too much like Maru, the pet cat from Nibelheim who had always gone missing.
Almost without thinking, she broke apart half of the bun she had saved for dinner and carefully placed it on the ground.
As she watched the kitten cautiously approach, she remembered the awkward neighbor boy who had always silently helped her find Maru.
“Remember,” she whispered to the kitten, though it sounded more like she was speaking to herself, her voice freezing in the cold air, “I can’t reveal the name of my hometown.
Starting today, I’m from Corel.” That was the lie she relied on to survive in Midgar.
Beneath the pale moonlight leaking through a hole in the cargo container’s roof, Tifa slowly threw punches at the rusty iron wall.
With every movement, the steel bone deep in her chest gave off a faint but distinct hum, tugging at her unhealed wounds and sending fresh stabs of pain through her.
Sweat mixed with blood seeping from beneath her bandages and soaked through her thin shirt.
She gritted her teeth and tried a kick.
At last, the wind from her leg knocked an empty medicine bottle from the trembling metal shelf.
The sound of the bottle shattering against the floor was especially sharp in the dead silence of the container.
She gasped for breath, her chest rising and falling violently as the hum of the steel bone intertwined with her heartbeat in her ears.
“Still not fast enough…” she murmured.
Her exhausted voice vanished into the eternal steel gloom that hung over Midgar.
And the true dawn still seemed to be hidden behind sixty-six long years of crushing debt, impossibly far away.
Steam rolled out from the iron cages of the Sector 8 steamed bun stand, roasting the loose strands of hair on Tifa’s forehead.
The 160,000 gil debt was like a cold iron chain, locking her in front of the cutting board.
Day after day, she mechanically chopped cabbage, kneaded dough, and handed steaming buns to hurried customers.
Boss Manson’s abacus clacked behind the counter, and at the end of every day, four cold gil coins were slapped into her palm.
It was one more day in a sixty-six-year sentence.
Nights inside the cargo container were a different kind of torment.
Rainwater snaked down along the rusted seams, forming murky puddles on the concrete floor.
The steel bone ached faintly in the damp cold, like a piece of unmeltable ice lodged inside her chest.
But it was in this iron prison that she began her secret revenge.
When the lights of the slums gradually went out, she would punch and kick at the container wall.
With every spinning kick, the steel bone gave off a faint tremor, pulling at her unhealed scars until the pain turned her vision black.
Beneath her sweat-soaked bandages, the scar stretching from her collarbone to her breastbone remained savage, but the strength in her legs was slowly returning.
She abandoned the hard, forceful moves in Zangan’s martial arts that required powerful upper-body support and shifted her center of gravity completely downward.
Her waist and legs became the axis, her kicks snapped like whips, and her rotations moved like wind.
The prototype of a fighting style tailored for this altered body was quietly born.
One late night, a swift spinning kick precisely swept the empty medicine bottle from the top of the shelf.
The crisp sound of it shattering rang out in the silence.
She panted, her fingertips brushing over the dents in the cold iron wall as she muttered, “Just wait, Master… I’ll use this ‘Tifa style’ to defeat you.” That was one of the obsessions keeping her moving forward through despair.
Burdened with an injured body and a crushing debt, she lived a life of oppression and bullying.
Fortunately, she had her teacher’s lessons, and they kept her alive.
She was not broken.
She endured.
She carried on through the strength of her own unyielding heart, and through the companions she met along the way.
During her days selling steamed buns, Tifa passed her seventeenth and eighteenth birthdays.
On her seventeenth birthday, she met Jessie, Biggs, and Wedge, and attended a Planetology gathering.
Later, after a series of events, she bought the nearly bankrupt Seventh Heaven and joined Avalanche.
Tifa had a kind of magic that affected the people around her.
Without realizing it, those near her began greeting her and wanting to treat her well.
Many people saw the way she struggled to survive.
Through her own efforts, she gained a “home” of her own once again, the “home” that was Seventh Heaven.
The bar’s business gradually got on track.
With her bartending skills, her reputation for being able to fight after handling several drunken troublemakers, and her role as a listener, Tifa became somewhat well known in Sector 7.
Preparing the bar was difficult, but full of hope.
One day, while purchasing ingredients, she wove through the crowded flow of people at the Midgar train station.
The noisy announcements, the shriek of steam locomotives, and the cries of merchants blended into the distinctive background noise of the slums.
Just as she lowered her head and counted the few coins in her hand, a voice so familiar that it made her soul tremble, a voice that had appeared vaguely in her nightmares countless times, cut through all the noise and rang out clearly just a few steps away.
“How… do I get to… Sector 7?”