Beneath the Sun

Chapter 16

In the wake of Tenzou's run, for just a brief moment, as he cuts through the thick, jagged bare branched trees spiking into the sky, the wind slackens, as if unwilling to blow without his permission. It's terrifying, how Tenzou focuses on nothing else but the hunt ahead of him. It's frightening, the blood lust that tastes as bitter as poison.

There is no sign of life to be found anywhere in what would have been a welcoming, stretch of lush greenery. No breath, no sound, nothing but the thickening shadows as the darkened winter skies dyes the thick tree trunks an inky black.

There is only this:

A reckoning force cuts through the shadows, making the air and clouds in the sky collide and collapse onto each other, blocking out what is left of the sun in what looks like a storm coming in from the west. There is no fire in Tenzou's chest, no rage that burns hot and dies fast, for there to be such an inferno would mean that there would be cold ashes around him for anyone willing to cross such a distance to reach him. Fire would mean that there still lies hope to listen to reason, for calmness, for the earth to heal and wind to blow the ashy gray away, clear the debris and make green flourish once more should forgiveness manage to creep into what remains of Tenzou's heart.

It's hard to imagine forgiveness, when all Tenzou can see in his mind are possibilities and a dead end that would mean white lilies, another name on the stone, black robes and somber faces, a result of having a massive hole where bone, flesh and heart once lay whole – flail chest, pneumothorax, thoracic trauma, pulmonary trauma, esophageal perforation, aortic injury, heart contusion, laryngeal fracture, the list of possibilities, symptoms that are a result of where he should hit the hardest, data he's memorized from years ago, goes on and on and on – no, there is no fire.

There is only ice, as clear as polished crystal, a frozen fury that burns.

All reason and rationale cannot exist in this barren, cold earth, where nothing can grow and everything remains in stasis under the cold. There is no mission, there is no purpose, there is only carnage.

Carnage that follows when the rest of Tenzou's vision burns white, when his palms come together to form seals and his feet causes tidal waves to rise like a monster in the river when he catches up and slams his blade into the liver of the first shinobi he sees. There is only trees writhing, of pained groans and screams tearing past the throats of two Sound shinobi – young, nubile, with innocence still in their cheeks, even when their eyes bleeds into inky black and their skin hardens into scales the color of a raging fire. Tenzou is deaf to the screams that echo like a banshee's cry, numb as he tears through one of them, hammering rain from Suiton and firing a salvo of mokuton bullets – thousands of them, maybe millions of them, as black as the forest that blankets in the sky, like locusts invading and consuming.

They're monsters, human experiments, nothing different from all the previous attackers and prisoners Konoha had caught during the ongoing skirmishes beyond their gates.

But Tenzou is a monster too, perhaps the biggest one there is, out of all the ones grown out of a laboratory. He is dangerous because he's the most stable, the one that lived when all others had failed to mutate, failed to withstand the changes forced upon their DNA.

The mask on his face cracks and explodes into a spray of porcelain when a large, red, scaly tail catches him on the side of the head – it blinds him for a moment, the sheer force of it, as some calculating part of his mind points out that the force alone had to be at least ten-thousand joules in energy, that there is now way he isn't going to sustain damage from it. It sends Tenzou flying backwards, slamming into trees, blood, teeth, pieces of flesh, pieces of him, falling out and off him in a mess into the crimson stained river, pieces of him like pieces of Iruka in the snow, broken, dying, no chance for survival – it's why Tenzou gave the order that he knows his team will follow but not necessarily to completion.