He hasn't seen this ceiling in a long time.
That was the first thing Ebizo registered. White plaster, cracked in the corner where it met the wall. After the border skirmish near the Land of Salt. After the ambush at the Scorpion Pass.
He tried to sit up. Pain stopped that immediately, answering from everywhere at once, ribs and spine and hand and face that pushed him back into the pillow before he'd risen an inch.
"Don't."
A medical nin appeared at his bedside. Young woman, dark hair pulled back under a cloth wrap, the standard beige uniform beneath her white coat. She pressed a glowing green palm against his chest and the pain dulled to something almost bearable.
"You've been unconscious for nine days, Ebizo-san. Multiple fractures across your right hand, six broken ribs, hairline fracture along your T4 vertebra, severe facial contusions, and blood aspiration in both lungs." She listed his injuries. "You'll make a full recovery, but you're looking at eight weeks minimum before active duty."
"My team," Ebizo said. His voice came out like gravel dragged across sandpaper.
"Your genin? They're fine. Bumps and bruises. The one with the green hair had three cracked ribs but she's already been treated and discharged. The other two walked away with surface damage."
Relief filled Ebizo's chest.
"The mission?"
"Completed. The scroll was delivered to Intel the morning after you were brought in. Your team carried you eighteen miles through the badlands and across the border overnight. The puppet girl's puppets carried you back the entire way, apparently." The medical nin paused. "The mission was reclassified from C-rank to A-rank based on the opposition encountered. Your genin have been compensated accordingly."
Ebizo closed his eyes. A-rank. Three genin, fresh from the academy not even a year, had completed an A-rank mission. They'd fought Iwa chunin and jonin on enemy soil, recovered stolen intelligence, and carried their broken sensei home across the desert in the dark.
He wanted to be furious. He should have been furious. They should have retreated to the village the moment he went down. That was protocol. That was the smart play. Every lesson he'd ever taught them about survival, about prioritizing the mission over comradeship but never prioritizing the mission over living to fight another day, all of it said they should have left him.
But they hadn't.
And he was alive because they hadn't.
Ridiculous girls…
"Has anyone come to visit?" he asked.
"Every day since you were admitted. All three of them, together, every afternoon. The nurses had to turn them away because you were still under." The medical nin straightened his blanket with a practiced tug. "I'll send word that you're awake. I imagine they'll be here within the hour."
It took forty minutes.
Ebizo heard them before he saw them. Footsteps in the hall, two sets quick and one set quicker, and then the door opened and they were there.
"Sensei!" Two of them shouted.
Karura entered first. She looked the same as always, sandy-brown hair framing her face, that long yellow scarf around her neck, her expression worried but joyful. Her eyes moved to his injuries immediately.
Pakura came second. Her eyes glanced at him with softness. She leaned against the doorframe with her arms crossed.
Mai filled the doorway last. She stood with her hands at her sides, looking at Ebizo's face, at the damage written across it. Her facial expressions were the easily to decipher.
The four of them existed in silence for a long moment.
"Sensei," Karura said softly.
"Sit down," Ebizo said. "All three of you."
They sat. Karura on the chair beside the bed. Pakura on the windowsill. Mai on the floor, cross-legged, her back against the wall.
Ebizo looked at each of them in turn. Then he spoke, and his voice carried the weight of a man who had been thinking about this for nine days, even if he'd been unconscious for all of them.
"What you did was wrong."
The words landed in the room like stones dropped into still water.
"You were given no order to pursue. You assessed the situation, saw your jonin sensei fall into an obvious ambush, and instead of doing the intelligent thing, instead of retreating to the village to report and request reinforcement, you ran headfirst into a kill zone occupied by a full enemy squad." He held up his ruined hand, still wrapped in splints and bandages. "This is what that ambush did to me. An experienced jonin. If any of you had taken even half of what I took, you would be dead."
Mai's fists tightened on her knees. Pakura didn't like being lectured despite the mission turning just fine. Karura nodded, knowing what they did wasn't the proper action but she would've done it again without a doubt.
"The shinobi who survives is the shinobi who knows when to fall back. I have drilled this into your heads since the day I took you on. A dead genin recovers nothing. A dead genin saves no one. A dead genin is a waste of every hour spent training them." His voice was level. "If that ambush squad had been larger, or better prepared, if they'd had a sensor type who spotted you coming, your parents and siblings wouldn't be waiting for you to come home. They'd be preparing three funerals." He let that sit. "Do you understand that?"
"Yes, Sensei," Karura said.
"Yes…" Pakura said through her teeth.
Mai nodded once.
Ebizo held the silence for another breath. Two. Three.
Then his expression changed.
"I am glad you are alive," he said. "I am glad the mission was completed. And I am..." He paused. His good hand gripped the bedsheet. "...proud. Of all three of you. What you accomplished against that opposition, at your age, with the small amount of training you've had so far."
Mai's eyes were bright. She blinked and looked away.
"But," Ebizo said, and his voice hardened again, "if you ever disobey the implicit order to retreat when your commanding officer falls, I will personally send you back to the academy when I recover. Am I understood?"
"Yes, Sensei," they said. Almost in unison. All smiling.
Ebizo leaned back into his pillow and closed his eyes. The pain was coming back.
"Now get out. I need to sleep."
They left. Karura lingered at the door for a moment, looking back at him, and he cracked his good eye open.
"Stop staring and go do something productive with your time instead of worrying about an old man." he muttered.
She smiled. Then the door closed.
______________________________________________
A dedicated workshop was created after receiving an A-rank mission pay.
Tools hung from nails driven into the adobe, chisels and rasps and fine-toothed saws and spools of wire in three different gauges. Wood shavings covered the floor in a fine layer that crunched underfoot. The smell of cedar resin and iron filings had replaced whatever the room used to smell like.
Karura sat on a low stool, her scarf draped over the back of her chair, her sleeves rolled past her elbows. In front of her, spread across the table, was a skeleton.
A puppet skeleton. The frame of what would become Reaper, laid out in pieces like an anatomical diagram. Long limbs, lean torso, narrow hips. Built for reach and speed, the opposite of Million's stocky brawler frame. She'd carved the basic shapes from desert ironwood over the past three days, roughing out the proportions, testing joint articulation, marking where the mechanisms would go.
The hardest part wasn't the body. She'd built Million from scratch, rebuilt it twice, and knew puppet anatomy the way other girls knew how to gossip or play with hair. Joints, sockets, cable runs, compartment housings. She could do that in her sleep.
The hard part was the weapon.
The Blastsword sat on the table beside the frame, wrapped in cloth. She hadn't shown it to anyone. Hadn't told anyone about it. It had simply appeared in a scroll after the mission, along with a flood of other things, ten copies of every piece of loot from the Iwa shinobi she killed, and she'd sorted through it all in the privacy of her workshop with the door locked and the windows shuttered.
The sword was beautiful. Double-sided, one edge for cutting and the other a flat platform ringed with seal arrays that she recognized as dealing with explosive tags. But not normal ones. These regenerated. She'd tested it once, in the desert outside the village walls at midnight, and the detonation had carved a crater the size of her bedroom into the sand. The second swing hit harder. The third even harder than the second.
She needed a cover story. Couldn't just show up to training with a legendary weapon from the Mist and shrug when asked where it came from. "Found it in the desert" might work for a kunai. Not for this.
For now, the sword stayed wrapped and hidden. She'd figure out the explanation later. The puppet came first.
She picked up Reaper's torso piece and held it up to the light, turning it, studying the grain of the wood. The cloak would go over this, a hooded garment that obscured the joints and arm positions, making it harder for an opponent to read what was coming. The waist joint needed to spin freely for the full 360-degree rotation, which meant the cloak had to be loose enough to flare outward during the spin without catching on the mechanism.
She set the torso down and picked up the right arm. Longer than a human arm by nearly a foot. The scythe blade would extend from the wrist, segmented like Million's extending arms but bladed instead of blunt. Wire joints connecting each section so it could lock rigid for cleaving strikes or go flexible for whipping attacks.
She began carving the wrist housing. The rasp bit into the ironwood, stripping away thin curls of pale wood, revealing the darker heartwood beneath. The motion was soothing. Repetitive. Her mind wandered while her hands worked.
Pakura felt the threads.
That had been nagging at her since the mission. When she'd attached her chakra threads to Pakura's body, to Mai's body, the technique had come naturally, instinctively, but the girls had felt it. Pakura had known immediately that something was pulling her. Mai had felt it too. If Karura wanted to use this technique in the future, on enemies rather than allies, they couldn't know it was happening.
She'd need to refine it. Make the threads lighter or more subtle. She'd need to study how chakra moved through a living body's network so she could match the threads to the target's own chakra flow, hiding her interference inside their natural movement.
But that was a problem for later. Right now, there was a new puppet to build.
She carved. Hours passed. The light through the window shifted from white to gold to amber. Reaper's right arm took shape on the table, the wrist housing hollowed and reinforced, the joint sockets smooth and precise. She tested the articulation, flexing the wooden fingers, bending the elbow, rotating the shoulder. Completely smooth with no stiffness.
She reached for the left arm blank and started again.
______________________________________________
Mai's fist hit the training post hard enough to crack the wood.
She pulled back, shook out her hand, and hit it again. Same spot. The crack widened. A third strike split the post down the middle and the top half toppled into the sand.
"That's the fourth one this week," Pakura said from behind her.
Mai turned. Pakura was standing at the edge of the training ground, arms crossed, her green hair catching the late afternoon light. She'd changed into training clothes, loose pants and a sleeveless top. The bandages around her ribs were gone.
"I'll replace it," Mai said.
"I didn't come here to talk about training posts."
Mai waited. She and Pakura didn't really talk outside of missions and team training. They never had.
Pakura looked at the destroyed training post. At the three other shattered stumps scattered around the clearing. At Mai's bloody knuckles and the sweat soaking through her shirt.
"You're training harder," Pakura said. It wasn't a question.
"So?"
"So am I."
That sat between them for a moment.
"She controlled us," Pakura said. Her voice was flat. Factual. "Like puppets. She attached her threads to our bodies and moved us like we were made of wood and wire."
"I remember," Mai said. Her face frowned at the memory. The helplessness of it. Her body moving without her permission, her legs kicking and her torso twisting at someone else's command. Mai was more upset at the fact that Karura was capable of using her body better than herself! It was humiliating. She would've died without her help.
"She's our age," Pakura continued, "and she controlled three things at once. A combat puppet, me, and you. At the same time. While fighting. Against ninjas who are far more experienced than all three of us."
Mai said nothing. She didn't need to. They were both thinking the same thing.
"I couldn't beat her," Pakura said quietly. "Right now, today, if Karura and I fought seriously, I would lose. Her puppet would keep me at range, her poison would slow me down, and if I got close enough to hit her, those arms on her back would stop me. And now she can just... grab my body and move me wherever she wants."
"She saved your life with that," Mai said.
"I know. That's not the point." Pakura's eyes were hard. "The point is that I'm supposed to be the strongest on this team. I have a kekkei genkai. I have Scorch Release. Nobody else in the village can do what I do. And that girl, who sits in her room playing with dolls, is pulling ahead of me like I'm standing still."
Mai cracked her knuckles. The blood on them had already dried.
"She's pulling ahead of both of us," Mai said.
The admission cost her something. Mai didn't acknowledge weakness. Not in herself, not out loud, not ever. But facts were facts and she'd never been the type to pretend otherwise.
Pakura unfolded her arms. "Spar with me."
Mai blinked. "What?"
"You heard me. You're out here beating up posts. I've been doing training on my own. Neither of us is getting better fast enough on our own. So spar with me."
"You want to train together?" Her eyebrow raised.
"I want to stop falling behind. You're the best taijutsu fighter I know. I need someone who can pressure me at close range so I learn to handle it, because right now, anyone who gets past my orbs can put me down. And you," Pakura pointed at her, "need someone who forces you to fight around ninjutsu so you stop charging face-first into jutsu like an idiot."
Mai stared at her. Pakura stared back.
"Don't tell Karura," Mai said.
Pakura smirked.
"Obviously."
…
They started that evening.
Pakura formed a Scorch orb in her right hand and Mai was already moving, closing the gap between them before the sphere had fully ignited.
Pakura threw it. Mai dodged left, felt the heat sear past her right ear, and kept coming. Two steps, three, and she was inside Pakura's range. She swung. A right hook aimed at Pakura's jaw.
Pakura stepped back and formed another orb. Point-blank. The orange-white sphere hovered between them, close enough that Mai could feel her skin tightening from the heat.
Mai didn't stop. She dropped low, swept Pakura's legs, and rolled clear as the orb sailed over her head and scorched the canyon wall behind them.
Pakura hit the sand on her back. Mai was on top of her in a second, knees pinning her shoulders, fist cocked.
"Dead," Mai said.
Pakura glared up at her. Then she planted her palm on the ground and a new orb formed beneath the sand, rising under Mai's knee. Mai felt the heat and threw herself sideways, rolling clear just before the sphere erupted from the dirt.
"Not dead yet," Pakura said, standing and dusting herself off.
They went again. And again. And again.
The first session lasted two hours. By the end, Mai had burns on her forearms from near-misses and Pakura had bruises across her shins and shoulders from the hits she hadn't dodged. They sat in the sand afterward, breathing hard, staring at different parts of the sky.
"Same time tomorrow?" Pakura asked.
"Yeah."
…
Pakura's problem was simple. Her Scorch Release was devastating at range, a one-hit kill against anyone the orbs touched, but the moment someone closed the distance, she had nothing. No taijutsu foundation worth the name. She'd relied on her orbs to keep people away, and the mission had proven what happened when someone got through.
Mai fixed that by getting through. Constantly. Every session, she pressured Pakura relentlessly, forcing her to dodge and reposition and form orbs under duress instead of from a comfortable distance. Pakura hated it. She hated being hit, hated being pinned, hated the feeling of Mai's fist connecting with her body and driving her backward.
But she learned.
By the third day, she'd stopped flinching when Mai closed in. By the fifth, she was forming orbs at arm's length without burning herself, tight little spheres that she could hold beside her fist and use as a contact weapon. By the end of the week, she had a better foundation in taijutsu than she ever had in the academy.
Mai watched her improve and felt irritation that Pakura was closing her own gaps so quickly.
…
Mai's problem was different.
She was strong. Stronger than most genin, stronger than some chunin, and her taijutsu was sharp enough to keep up with experienced fighters at close range. But she had nothing for ninjutsu. No counter for it, no answer to it, no way to deal with a jutsu user who kept their distance and pelted her with techniques from safety.
The genjutsu on the mission had proven the worst case. One illusion and she'd nearly killed her own teammate.
She couldn't learn ninjutsu. She couldn't learn genjutsu. Her chakra network didn't work that way and no amount of training would change it. So she had to find another answer.
Speed was part of it. If she could close the distance before a jutsu user finished their hand seals, it didn't matter what they were casting. Pakura's orbs gave her something to practice against, because Scorch Release formed fast and hit instantly. If Mai could dodge those and still close the gap, she could dodge almost anything.
But the genjutsu problem had no physical solution. She couldn't punch her way out of an illusion. She needed to learn to recognize when she was caught, to feel the wrongness of it before she lost herself completely.
"Hit me," she told Pakura one evening.
Pakura raised an eyebrow. "I've been hitting you for an hour."
"Not with your fists. Put me in a genjutsu."
Pakura frowned. "What?"
"Genjutsu works by disrupting chakra flow. If I can learn to feel foreign chakra entering my system, I can recognize when it's happening." Mai held up her fist. "I can't break a genjutsu with technique. But if I know it's there, I can break it by flaring my chakra."
"Why do you think I know how to use genjutsu?"
"What good are you then?!" Mai shouted.
"You cripple! Who are you yelling at?! You can't do genjutsu either!"
"I can't do genjutsu because I'm incapable of it. You can't use it because you're useless!"
"Useless?! Me?! You are calling someone useless! Out of all people!"
"What good are you if you can't even use genjutsu as a ninja that can use genjutsu?"
"At least I know how to break out of a stupid genjutsu!"
"You can't even cast a stupid genjutsu!"
"...!" Pakura balled her fists and stood straight up. "I can't do genjutsu? Just wait damn it! I'm going to go learn one right now! And when I come back, I'm gonna put you in the worse damn genjutsu of your life!" Pakura stormed off.
"I'd break your stupid genjutsu in a heartbeat!" Mai shouted behind her with a mischievous grin.
Having a teammate with jonin parents really has its perks. She thought.
…
They trained every evening for the rest of the week. While Karura carved and assembled and wired her new puppet behind a closed door, Mai and Pakura beat each other bloody in a canyon three miles outside the village walls.
Neither of them told Karura.
They had an understanding that they were losing a race to someone who didn't even know she was running. And it pissed them both off.
Pakura had her kekkei genkai. Mai had her body. And Karura had that look in her eyes sometimes, when she was controlling Million, when her fingers moved and wood and wire obeyed, a look that said she was somewhere else entirely, somewhere they couldn't follow.
They trained harder.
The gap was still there. They could feel it growing. But they'd be damned if they stopped chasing. Their pride wouldn't allow it.