The forest did not welcome them. It absorbed them.
Sound died first—Tayuya's footsteps vanished before they finished existing, the silence swallowing the scuff of leather against stone. Even the wind hesitated between branches heavy with late-autumn leaves. Reds bled into golds, golds into a damp, rotting brown beneath her feet. This corner of the Land of Forests remained oppressive, the air heavy with wet mulch and ancient decay.
Tayuya adjusted her grip on the flute at her waist, her palm staying slick with a metallic, cold sweat. She refused to touch her shoulder. The way her right arm hung remained unacknowledged, a defect she intended to bury.
"You've been inefficient for seventeen minutes."
Kabuto didn't look at her. He was reading. A thin stack of cards rested in his hand, his long, pale fingers moving with a terrifying, rhythmic precision as they flicked one upward. His glasses caught the dull light, silver discs obscuring any trace of a human gaze. His respiration remained a metered, barely-there whisper of air—controlled, mechanical, and entirely devoid of the exertion she felt.
Heat crawled up Tayuya's neck. "The hell are you talking about?"
"Your gait." A card slid down, replaced by another without a sound from the paper. "Your right arm. You are adjusting every third step."
She scoffed, though her ear tips bit with sharp, localized heat. "I'm walking fine."
"You are not."
"I said I'm fine."
Kabuto stopped.
Leaves compressed under his boots with a dry, final crunch. A branch creaked somewhere to her left. The forest seemed to lean in, the shadows stretching toward her. Tayuya took one more step before realizing the space beside her had gone empty. Irritation flared—sharp, immediate—as she turned.
"What now—"
He was already there. She lost him for a heartbeat, seeing only a blur of white sleeve.
Instinct drove her body before she could think—shoulder twisting, hand reaching for her flute—but he caught her wrist. His grip didn't feel hard or forceful; it simply existed as an absolute. His fingers landed exactly over the pulse point, dry and devoid of any visible strain in his forearm. He didn't shift his weight. He didn't even seem to be processing the world through lungs or heartbeat.
"You will continue to degrade at this rate," he said. His voice remained conversational, which pushed the blood into her face.
"Let go."
"No."
She yanked. Nothing. His grip didn't tighten; it didn't need to. Her strength broke against his hand like water hitting a cliff.
"I—I'll—!" She choked on the rising bile, the words fracturing as her vision tunneled. "You did that... on purpose! You don't just—"
His other hand moved. Past her elbow, past her bicep, his fingers pressed into the joint of her shoulder. He found the misalignment instantly.
He pushed.
The world snapped white.
Breath tore out of Tayuya's throat, not a scream, but a raw, jagged sound dragged from beneath language. Her knees buckled. The joint slid, ground, and forced back into alignment with a sickening, wet internal thud. She tried to pull away, but her muscles refused to fire.
Chakra flooded the limb—not hers. His. The sensation didn't soothe or numb; it acted as a cold intrusion that overrode the very impulse to move. The connection to the arm snapped. Sensory signals from her limb were hijacked as his signature threaded through the muscle like silver wire, burning through the static she'd built up. Her triceps fired in a series of involuntary twitches, nerves misfiring as his cold energy collided with the feverish heat of her torn tissue.
A sharp twist. A click. Vision smeared at her edges.
He let go.
The forest rushed back in, the wind suddenly a roar in her ears that felt off-center, as if her left ear sat deeper in the trees than her right. Tayuya staggered back, the world refusing to stay level. Her right arm moved with a ghost-like smoothness that seemed artificial, the limb suddenly feeling too light, as if it consisted of nothing but air.
She tried to roll the joint, but her motor control lagged. A step forward became a stumble as her foot snagged on a protruding root. She expected a resistance from her shoulder that no longer existed, and the resulting overcorrection nearly sent her face-first into the mulch. Her right foot stuck in the wet rot while her left slid across a patch of slick moss, the ground feedback returning in conflicting, asynchronous signals. She caught herself, but her hand fumbled against a trunk, misjudging the distance as her depth perception flickered.
Tayuya reached for her flute, but her hand overshot the mark by an inch, fingers grasping at the air where the holster used to be in her skewed perception. When she finally found the strap, her thumb fumbled the buckle, unable to find the correct pressure to engage the leather. Her heartbeat remained a frantic, uneven pulse against her ribs, and her chest felt constricted, her lungs refusing to take in a full inhale.
"You—" She swallowed, her throat dry as ash, her eyes fixed on the dirt to avoid his gaze. She tried to articulate the violation, the anger stuck behind her teeth. "You... I'll kill... you did that... on purpose. You piece of—"
A breath hitch cut her off before she could finish the insult.
"Purpose is a distraction," he said, already walking again, his back to her. "The joint is seated. That is the only relevant outcome."
The words hit her as a reduction, a theft of her own agency. "I didn't need your help," she forced out, her voice a jagged rasp. She tried to pull herself upright, but her posture remained defensive, her right shoulder pitched forward as if waiting for the next strike. The humiliation felt like a heavy, suffocating weight. It didn't feel as though he'd healed me; it felt as though he had reached inside and rewritten a part of her without permission.
Kabuto flipped another card. "No," he agreed, the words landing without weight. "You needed correction."
The silence that followed stayed packed and airless. Her shoulder felt like a stranger's part attached to her body. She forced herself to move, falling back into step, though the uneven compression of the leaves beneath her feet kept her rhythm broken. A micro-spasm rippled through her deltoid, a lingering echo of the override.
"Your work with Sasuke," Kabuto said. He didn't look back. "...was sufficient."
A pause. Her chest tightened further.
"He did not regress."
No inflection. No approval. A result recorded.
Tayuya's teeth clicked together. "Yeah, well. Obviously. I didn't let him slack off."
Kabuto extended a hand without looking back. Blank cards rested between his fingers, each marked with the kanji for shinobi.
"A reward," he said.
"I don't want your useless paper," she spat, but she took them anyway. They were warm—residual chakra humming beneath the surface. Her fingertips buzzed at the contact.
"Ninja Info Cards," Kabuto said. "Encoded."
"I've seen these before. They don't show anything unless you're the one who encoded them."
Kabuto finally glanced at her. A small, sideways look, but it felt like being pinned under a lens. "Information exists. Whether you can access it or not is a separate matter."
Tayuya studied the cards, trying to push chakra into the surface. She shoved her energy into the paper, but the output came out clumsy and diffuse. The card didn't react; instead, a sharp heat differential stung her skin, making her hiss and jerk her hand back. Her nervous system refused to modulate the fine control needed while her shoulder was still ghosting phantom pain.
"You're... you're blocking them," she growled, her voice catching as she misjudged the force of her own words. "They're broken. Trash."
"The fault lies in the modulator, not the media," Kabuto replied smoothly.
She tried again, forcing a slower pulse. The cards hummed, a pulse of interference that made her eye strain increase. Her focus pulsed, the blank surface doubling and then blurring as she fought for a stable connection.
A shape flickered—not a rendering, but a sensory contradiction. Unstable. Partial signals fighting through a damaged system.
A phoneme surfaced: To... ya...
It cut out, replaced by a silhouette—tall, broad, a presence like looming stone. The impression felt heavy, grounded. A bitterness flooded her mouth that wasn't physical, a taste like iron and old salt.
She pushed harder, her jaw locking with the effort. Fu... m...
The syllables echoed oddly. Fūma. It felt like a shape she'd been circling in the dark, a bitter, sharp sensation that made her tongue feel leaden.
Another flash: Tsu... r—
A spike of heat aborted the name before it could finish. The cards went still, blank and mocking. Her fingers pressed white against the card stock, a micro-tremor visible in her knuckles.
"Why can't I see the rest?" she demanded, her voice cracking.
"The entry is restricted to its creator," he said, not slowing his pace.
She heard the words as a lock she couldn't pick. "That's—stu... unnecessary. If it's about me, I should see it."
"Accessibility is a privilege of the architect," he replied, his tone as clinical as his chakra. "You are merely the occupant."
The cards suddenly flared with a discordant vibration. The hum shifted, becoming jagged and high-pitched.
Tayuya's focus shattered as a new pressure spiked. A subtle spike in atmospheric pressure popped her eardrums, the natural silence of the forest bruising under a directional intrusion from the north. The cards went dead in her hands, the signal drowned out by the incoming interference.
"Konoha," Kabuto said. He stopped. He didn't turn.
Tayuya's fingers moved before she consciously reached. The flute was in her hand, the metal biting into her palm. She raised it to her lips, the cool surface pressing against her teeth. Her embouchure had a slight quiver, her lips feeling thin and weak. Her throat was a desert, making the first intake of air sharp and shallow.
I exhaled slowly, steadying the resonance. Control through sound. Control through me.
The first note hovered, unplayed.
The air grew tight, the airflow resisting her lungs as the temperature dropped. The forest held its breath. The leaves shifted asymmetrically, tilting away from the northern source as the sound deadened in that direction.
She blew.