The moon hung high and cold over the forest road, ten miles outside the walls of Konoha.
A chase was already well underway.
At the front of it ran a young woman, eighteen at most, dressed in close-fitting dark clothes built for speed.
Her face was striking — large, clear eyes like still water catching starlight, the kind of face people remembered.
Right now those eyes burned with a mix of fury and fear as she tore through the underbrush, branches whipping past her in the dark.
Miss.
Miss, my foot.
I’m a man.
If that damned system hadn’t been so vague about the fine print, I never would have chosen the Assassin Pathway.
This is nothing but a trap.
A massive, humiliating trap.
A perfectly normal guy with a perfectly normal orientation — and I physically turned into a woman the moment I advanced to Sequence 7.
And not just any woman.
A beautiful one.
Great figure.
Everything.
If this were my girlfriend instead of me, that would actually be fantastic.
…Damn it.
“Give it up already!” the young woman — Keiko — shouted over her shoulder at the five shinobi closing the gap behind her, cheeks flushed from exertion and rage.
“I’m not going back.
I feel sick just looking at that bastard!”
But to the five shinobi pursuing her, that flushed face and breathless voice only made the sight more arresting.
The moonlight carved her silhouette against the treeline like something out of a painting, and more than one of them felt his pulse climb for reasons that had nothing to do with the sprint.
“Boss, she really is something else.
No wonder Lord Jinka won’t shut up about her.”
“No kidding.
Shame we don’t know if she’s still—” The shinobi grinned.
“Maybe we knock her out first and—”
“Want to be joining her in the dirt?”
“Heheh—”
“Enough.” The lead shinobi, Ryuuji, sucked in a breath and cut them off with a sharp gesture.
His hand moved instinctively toward his mouth before he caught himself.
Focus.
There’s plenty waiting in Tanzaku Town once this is done.
None of them look like this, but that’s fine.
“Pick it up!
She’s fast for a civilian — what is she, training for the Olympic sprint?”
“Has to be.
No chakra at all, confirmed.
She just…
runs.”
“Then she runs really well.”
The five of them surged forward, falling into the standard shinobi loping stride, ground vanishing beneath their feet.
The gap closed fast.
Five miles into the forest, Keiko’s pace finally began to falter.
Sequence 7 had done wonders for her body — strength, endurance, reflexes she hadn’t had before — but it wasn’t chakra.
She couldn’t blur across the ground the way they could, couldn’t ignore the burning in her lungs the way a shinobi could when they pushed nature energy through their limbs.
I should have taken the Secrets Supplicant pathway.
It looked dignified.
It looked like something a person could be proud of.
Assassin.
Even a dog would know better.
She stopped.
Turned.
Bit down on her back teeth hard enough to hurt.
Do I really have to do this?
Here?
In front of five men?
She wasn’t frightened of the fight itself.
Sequence 7 meant she’d already killed — more than once, enough that her hands knew the rhythm of it.
The Witch’s toolkit was formidable.
Wide-ranging.
Powerful in ways these shinobi hadn’t seen yet.
It was just the style of it that made her want to crawl into a hole and disappear.
“Ha—” Ryuuji exhaled with visible relief as she stopped, raising a fist to halt the others.
He spread them wide with a gesture, and the four shinobi fanned out without a word, boxing her in from all sides.
Hands hovered near weapon pouches.
Eyes went flat and professional, the leering gone, replaced with the cold attention of men who knew their trade.
“Alright.
Come quietly.
Lord Jinka’s generous to people who don’t make this difficult.”
Keiko looked at him for a long moment.
Then she put on an expression that made her own stomach turn, softened her eyes, let her lower lip tremble just slightly, and stared up at Ryuuji with the full force of her wide, glistening eyes.
“Please.” Her voice came out soft, a little trembling, almost a whisper.
“He’s cruel.
If you send me back, I’m as good as dead.
Just…
pretend you didn’t see me.
I’m begging you.”
She let the last word carry.
The effect was immediate.
Ryuuji’s next step landed slower than the one before.
Something shifted in his face — the hard professional mask developing a crack, his gaze warming in a way he visibly didn’t intend.
“I…”
“Boss.”
The sharp call from behind Keiko snapped him upright.
He blinked hard.
Refocused.
The warmth in his expression curdled into something angrier, aimed mostly at himself.
“…Damn.
She’s not just a civilian.” His eyes narrowed.
“Lord Jinka undersold her.
Alright, Keiko — you want to do this the hard way.”
“Move.”
He came at her directly, no tools, no hand seals — just closing the distance fast with his hands open, clearly intending to grapple rather than wound.
Keiko exhaled through her nose.
“Why does it have to be like this,” she muttered, and a slender wand appeared in her grip from nowhere in particular.
The giggling started a moment later.
It came from everywhere and nowhere — from the dark between the trees, from just behind each shinobi’s left ear, from inside their own skulls somehow.
Bell-like, light, dancing.
Not quite sound, not quite sensation.
It slipped past the ears and burrowed somewhere deeper, and the cold night air around the shinobi seemed to grow heavier and warmer all at once.
Ryuuji was closest.
He caught the full weight of it.
Something hot and chaotic slammed through him like a wave breaking against stone — his blood surging, his thoughts scattering, an image rising unbidden—
No.
He bit the tip of his tongue.
Hard.
The copper taste of blood flooded his mouth and the image shattered, his focus snapping back into the present, raw and unsteady.
“Witch.” His voice came out rough.
“Don’t hold back — keep her alive, that’s all.”
Shuriken sang out from four directions simultaneously, arcing to avoid her throat and heart, aimed at limbs and torso.
Keiko didn’t dodge.
She tilted her head, drew one finger lightly down her cheek, and let out a soft, put-upon little sound — like someone mildly inconvenienced.
Thwack.
Thwack.
Thwack.
The shuriken buried themselves into her body — abdomen, shoulder, thigh.
One after another.
Ryuuji’s eyes narrowed.
Something’s wrong.
In that half-second of distraction, a hand settled on his shoulder from behind.
Slender fingers.
Warm.
A strand of hair brushed the side of his neck, carrying a scent like something half-remembered, the kind that didn’t have a name.
“That really hurt, you know.” Her voice was just beside his ear, soft and reproachful.
“Look what they did to me.
And you just let them.”
The hand on Ryuuji’s shoulder was real.
The girl in front of him was not — the body full of shuriken rippled like a reflection in disturbed water, collapsing inward, leaving nothing but a cracked mirror catching the moonlight, throwing back a distorted image of Ryuuji’s own slack expression.
Reflection technique.
She was never there.
“Are you even listening?” The voice again, just behind his ear.
Playful now, edged with fake hurt.
“You’re not answering me.
Did you stop caring already?
After all we’ve been through?”
Something strange and embarrassing clawed up through Ryuuji’s chest — a sudden, irrational panic at the idea of her being upset with him — and his hand moved to cover hers before his brain caught up with his body.
“Don’t — I’m here.
I’m right here.
Let me handle them—”
“BOSS.”
“You’ve been played again—”
“Get clear, she’s right behind you—”
“And hey, don’t forget us when you’re done, share the fun—”
The last voice broke something loose in Ryuuji’s chest entirely.
A hot, possessive fury flooded in where the confusion had been.
No one touches her.
No one even looks.
“She’s mine,” he said, to no one in particular, with complete and terrifying certainty.
And Keiko’s voice, light and delighted, breathed warmth against his ear: “Oh, he’s jealous.
I love that.”
Whatever was left of Ryuuji’s professional composure burned away entirely.
He spun toward his own teammates, hands already flying through seals.
Ram.
Snake.
Horse.
Tiger.
“Fire Release: Great Fireball Technique!”
The roar of igniting chakra split the quiet forest.
A massive sphere of fire bloomed from his mouth and hurtled into the cluster of approaching shinobi.
“Scatter—!”
They broke, but not fast enough.
One man — too slow, caught flat-footed — had no time to do anything before the fireball swallowed him.
The explosion rolled outward in a shockwave of heat, scattering burning debris, igniting the lower branches of three nearby trees.
What remained of the shinobi hit the scorched earth in pieces.
Silence for a breath.
Then: “…Tetsu.”
One of the surviving shinobi spoke the name quietly, standing in the dark at the edge of the firelight, staring at the blackened ground.
He had the same jaw, the same brow.
He’d grown up in the same house.
The look he turned on Ryuuji carried something cold and permanent.
But when that look moved to Keiko — still standing calm behind her puppet, wand resting easy in her fingers — it held something else entirely.
“Witch.”
The word came out like a blade leaving a sheath.
“Die.”