**(Yuki's POV – Second Shinobi War Ongoing)**
The rain hasn't stopped for 17 days.
It drums against the rusted tin roof of our hideout like shuriken, a constant reminder that Amegakure is bleeding. Konan sleeps fitfully beside me, her breath fogging in the damp air. Our hands are still interlaced – *have to be* – and in the gloom, I watch the crystalline lattice beneath her skin pulse like a dying star. Every heartbeat sends a tremor through our fused chakra, a grim metronome counting down borrowed time.
*Every warp costs her days.* Tsutako's warning echoes in my skull.
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### **The Salamander's Hunt**
**04:17 AM.**
A paper falcon slams into the windowsill, disintegrating into Konan's palm before I can blink. Her eyes snap open – one still sharp amber, the other clouded with fractal frost.
*"Hanzo's moved."* Her voice is gravel, strained. *"Two klicks south. Steel-Release boy leading a squad. They're… herding refugees toward the Iwa front lines."*
Refugees. Bait. *Again.*
My free hand clenches. The gravity well in my chest *twists*, humming like plucked wire. Konan hisses as the feedback jolts through her.
*"Control it,"* she grits out, paper talismans already peeling from her sleeves. *"Or you'll rip us both apart before they even get here."*
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### **Gravity's Teeth**
We find them at the broken bridge.
Subject #13 – the Steel-Release boy – stands like a statue in the downpour. Rain beads on his liquid-metal skin. Behind him, six terrified families huddle under a crumbling archway. Beyond them, the orange glow of Iwa's flamethrower ninja lights the mist.
*"Asset 7,"* the boy drones. No emotion. Just Hanzo's voice ventriloquized through steel lips. *"Compliance grants the meat one hour's grace."*
Konan steps forward. Her paper shuriken manifest silently, edges shimmering with warped light. *"Run,"* she tells the refugees without looking back. *"North canal. Now."*
The Steel-Release boy moves.
His arm elongates into a spear – aimed not at Konan, but at a child stumbling in the mud.
*No.*
The gravity well in my gut *detonates*.
---
### **Cost of Defiance**
Time fractures.
Konan's shuriken *fold* space, intercepting the spear in a silent implosion of twisted metal. But I feel it – the savage recoil tearing through her chakra pathways. She staggers, black blood welling beneath her frost-clouded eye.
*Weeks. She just burned weeks.*
Rage floods me. Dark. Visceral. The rain *stalls* mid-fall around us, hovering like shattered glass. The Steel-Release boy pauses, sensors whirring behind blank eyes.
*"Yuki!"* Konan's voice is a raw scrape. *"Don't! He wants you to lose control! He's a walking chakra sink—"*
Too late.
I lash out. A wave of crushing gravity slams forward –
– and splinters against the boy's upraised palm. Steel plates ripple like water, *absorbing* the distortion. He doesn't flinch.
*"Gravity Drifter containment protocol… engaged,"* he monotones.
His other hand shoots out. Chains erupt – not metal, but *solidified chakra-vacuum* – snaking toward my chest. To cage the singularity. To rip me from Konan.
---
### **Thunder Without Rain**
Konan slams into me, shoving us sideways. The chains graze her shoulder.
Flesh doesn't tear. It… *unravels*. A spiral of skin, muscle, and paper dissolves into quantum dust. She doesn't scream. Just grits her teeth, sealing the wound with black-origami as we crash into the mud.
Above us, the sky ignites.
Not lightning. **Toad Oil Fireball.**
Jiraiya's signature jutsu engulfs the Iwa flamethrowers. Through the curtain of fire and rain, I see them – the Sannin, carving through Hanzo's flank like vengeful spirits. But Hanzo's fortress still stands, banners snapping in the poisoned wind.
*The war isn't ending. It's escalating.*
The Steel-Release boy turns, calculating. His priority shifts. Containment… or counter the Sannin?
Konan hauls me up. Her breath is ragged, her left arm translucent from shoulder to elbow. *"We need to vanish. *Now*."*
But as we melt into the alleyways, a new shadow falls over us. Not Hanzo's.
Two figures block the path – one fiery-haired and fierce, the other shrouded in a dripping cloak, eyes glinting *violet* beneath the hood.
*Yahiko.*
*Nagato.*
Yahiko's gaze locks on Konan's decaying arm fused to mine. His voice is winter.
*"What the hell did Hanzo do to you, Konan?"*
Nagato's Rinnegan swirls, fixed not on us, but on the *wound in the world* hovering between our hearts.
*"It's not Hanzo,"* he breathes, horror dawning. *"You did this to yourselves."*
Konan meets Yahiko's eyes, her paper swirling like a funeral shroud.
*"We're surviving, Yahiko. Something Hanzo taught us all too well."*
The rain hammers down. The war screams in the distance. And in the silence between Akatsuki's founders and two walking wounds, Amegakure holds its breath.
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