Code stood on the outskirts of a ghost town, a nameless place that didn't even appear on the maps of the great villages.
There was no one to watch him.
No one to judge him.
Only him, the silence, and two weeks of questions that needed answers.
He removed his cloak slowly and let it fall onto the cracked earth. Beneath it, his torso was exposed to the cold. His skin was paler than before the process, almost translucent at certain angles, as if the light could pass through it and reveal what lay beneath.
And what lay beneath was power.
He extended his right arm in front of him.
He breathed.
He focused his chakra, just as he had done hundreds of times while training under Jigen's orders, but this time he directed it differently—not toward his limbs, not toward his white marks. He pushed it inward. Toward the tissue. Toward the calcium.
Shikotsumyaku.
The Dead Bone Pulse.
Nothing.
He frowned.
He tried again. This time he imagined the flow as hot water running through every vertebra, every phalanx, every joint. It wasn't ordinary chakra; it was chakra combined with something older, something Kabuto had explained in a cold, technical manner during the days before the process:
"The Shikotsumyaku doesn't work like a conventional jutsu," Amado had said, correcting Kabuto's explanation with his usual clinical tone. "You don't form hand seals and channel energy outward. What you do is control your own osteoblasts and osteoclasts, the cells that produce and remodel bone. Chakra becomes the messenger. You tell your own skeleton how it should grow, at what speed, in which direction."
Code tried again.
This time, something responded.
A strange sensation, almost like a deep tingling beneath the skin of his forearm, as if something were waking from a long sleep. Then pressure. And then…
CRACK.
From his left wrist, a bone spike the size of a finger burst out, white as ivory, sharp as a surgical needle. The skin split around it, but before it could truly bleed, the tissue began to close on its own, sealing itself around the base of the bone as if it had always been there.
Code stared at the protrusion without blinking.
He touched it with the tip of his opposite finger.
Hard. Harder than any metal he had ever held. It didn't give even a millimeter.
"His bones surpass steel in hardness," Kabuto had said. "And any bone that is removed… the body regenerates it almost immediately."
Code clenched his teeth and pulled the spike with his other hand.
A second of pain. A dull crack.
Then he held in his palm a fragment of pure bone, torn from his own body, while watching with fascination as the skin on his wrist sealed within seconds, and beneath it, he could already feel the beginning of regeneration.
He threw the fragment against the wall of an abandoned house.
The bone pierced the rotten wood as if it were paper.
Code processed that in silence.
Then he smiled.
For the next hour, he explored the limits of what his body could do.
He discovered that the growth speed was controllable, like opening or closing a valve. Slow, and the skin adapted without breaking, the bones emerging like patient stalactites. Fast, and the eruption was violent, the skin tearing, but regeneration compensating almost instantly.
He discovered that he could choose the shape.
Not just spikes. He could flatten the bone, extend it, curve it as it grew outside the body. On his left forearm he experimented for twenty minutes until he managed to form a flat, curved blade, the length of a wakizashi, that emerged from the elbow and ran along the outside of his arm to the wrist. He held it at an angle and ran it against a block of stone he found on the ground.
The stone split in two.
Stronger than steel, he repeated mentally.
And it was true.
He discovered that he could fire fragments.
This was accidental. He was channeling chakra with too much intensity toward his fingers when the phalanges of his index and middle fingers expelled two small bone shards that shot forward at considerable speed, leaving marks on the wooden facade of the nearest house. He stopped. Observed them. Then repeated the process intentionally.
Ten shots. Ten perfect holes in the wood.
His body regenerated the material with no apparent effort.
He wondered if Amado was monitoring him somehow. Probably yes. It was Amado. There was always some tracking device, some sensor hidden at points on his skin. But that was a problem for another day.
Today, he had work to do.
At the far end of the village, tied to one of the wooden posts that had once supported a fence, there was a man.
A mercenary. A tracker who worked for one of the minor factions that roamed the lands without a village after the end of the Fourth War. He had captured him two days earlier, simply because he needed a target that could move, breathe, react.
The man raised his head when he heard Code's footsteps approaching.
His left eye was swollen and his shirt torn, but his gaze was not that of a broken man. It was the look of someone constantly calculating his chances of survival. Professional to the end.
"You came back," he said hoarsely.
"I didn't go far," Code replied, stopping about ten meters away.
The mercenary observed Code's exposed torso, the white Karma marks running across his skin, and something in his expression changed. It wasn't fear exactly. It was recognition. The kind of recognition only men who have seen things that shouldn't exist possess.
"What are you?" he asked.
Code didn't answer immediately.
He extended his right hand, palm up, and began.
Chakra flowed into his metacarpals. The skin over his knuckles tightened, split without drama, and from each of the four knuckles emerged a bone spike about eight centimeters long, sharp as giant needles, perfectly parallel. The skin sealed around them within seconds.
The mercenary said nothing.
Code closed his fist. The spikes retracted, absorbed back beneath the skin as if they had never existed. Then he brought them out again. Retracted them. Brought them out.
Like breathing.
"Shikotsumyaku," Code said softly, almost to himself. "The Dead Bone Pulse. The Kekkei Genkai of a clan the world believed extinct."
He moved.
He didn't use his claw marks. He didn't need to. He simply ran, and when the mercenary tensed his arms against his bindings trying to break free instinctively, Code was already in front of him, and from his right forearm the flat bone blade he had perfected earlier had emerged.
He stopped it a centimeter from the man's neck.