Fragtastic
patreon
Naruto: Veil of Frozen Bones Chapter 5
🕑 Added 2025-05-07 22:38:46 +0000 UTCThe invisible line had been crossed. The accidental bloom of ice on the floorboards, quickly dissipated but impossible to unsee, hung between Ryuu and Kasumi like a tangible chill.
Kasumi didn't speak of it, didn't acknowledge the Yuki blood simmering beneath her son's pale skin, but her actions screamed the truth louder than any words. The walls of their carefully constructed isolation seemed to press inwards, the fragile peace replaced by a constant, thrumming anxiety.
Kasumi's vigilance became a suffocating blanket. Her dark eyes, already watchful, now seemed to track his every movement with an unnerving intensity. Did he stumble during katas? Was his breathing steady during concealment drills? Was that a flicker of unusual energy when he concentrated?
She seemed poised to react to the slightest deviation, the slightest hint of uncontrolled power. Ryuu felt less like her son and more like a volatile piece of contraband she was desperately trying to keep hidden.
Their training intensified, shedding the last vestiges of playful disguise. Hide-and-seek became exercises in utter sensory deprivation and masking, Kasumi testing his ability to remain hidden not just from sight but from hypothetical sensory techniques, pushing him to hold his breath until his small lungs burned, demanding absolute stillness for excruciatingly long periods.
Lessons on reading the wind or tracking shifted focus – less about finding game, more about detecting pursuit, identifying escape routes, recognizing the subtle signs of shinobi presence. He learned how the mist clung differently around someone moving stealthily, how disturbed water patterns could betray passage, how even the cry of a seabird could be a warning signal.
These weren't things a child should be taught, especially in such a harsh manner. His body was too weak to handle the toll, but he persevered out of sheer necessity. He knew and understood that the situation was dangerous far better than his own mother.
Ryuu saw the toll it took on her. The exhaustion was no longer just a shadow beneath her eyes, it was etched into the tense set of her jaw, the slight tremor that sometimes appeared in her hands when she thought he wasn't looking.
The late-night pacing became more frequent, her silhouette framed against the moonlit paper screens, a solitary figure consumed by unseen fears. She was just a mother, worried for their survival.
He redoubled his own efforts, driven by a different kind of fear. Kasumi feared exposure, Ryuu feared stagnation, weakness, being caught unprepared by the future he knew was coming.
The chakra control exercises became his obsession. He sat for hours, cross-legged, eyes closed, chasing that elusive inner warmth. Progress was infuriatingly slow. His body, not even four years old chronologically despite the adult mind trapped within, simply lacked the developed infrastructure. The chakra pathways felt narrow, resistant. His stamina was pitifully small.
He could feel the potential now, a cool undercurrent distinct from the body's natural warmth, but directing it felt like trying to etch glass with a feather. Fleeting successes – a momentary coolness gathered in his palm, a flicker of energy concentrated behind his eyes – were interspersed with long stretches of frustrating failure.
The drain was significant, even minor successes left him feeling shaky and lightheaded, his small body protesting the unnatural exertion.
"Patience, Ryuu," Kasumi would repeat, her voice tight with suppressed worry as she watched him tremble slightly after a particularly intense session. "Force will only cause backlash. Feel the flow. Gently guide it."
He nodded obediently, but inwardly chafed. Patience was easy to preach when you weren't haunted by visions of war, monsters, and planetary destruction. He needed control now. He needed power yesterday.
He wasn't a genius, that was for sure now. Yes, his body restricted him, but everything was hard from the get-go. He had the mind and thoughts of an adult, but it was not helpful when it came to new things. His body had to learn and adapt and this was only chakra training.
He had never fought anyone.
He needed to use weapons.
And finally but not least, he needed to get accustomed to death.
Get accustomed to killing.
He didn't want that.
————————————————————————————————
Life outside their tense little bubble continued its dreary march. The Kiri patrols became bolder, less rumor, more grim reality. He overheard fishermen complaining bitterly about confiscated catches, about masked shinobi appearing suddenly from the mist like spectres, their demands non-negotiable.
The delayed supply merchant finally arrived, but his stocks were meagre, his prices inflated, citing 'troubles' along the coast. Fear curdled into resentment within the village. Tempers frayed easily.
Ryuu saw his opening and began carefully, subtly, applying pressure to the cracks in Kasumi's resolve. He leveraged the village's growing anxiety, reflecting it back at her through a lens of childish fear.
"Kaa-san," he asked one evening, tracing patterns on the dusty floor while Kasumi sharpened a small utility knife with precise, repetitive strokes. "Old Lady Misaki looked really angry today. When she saw my eyes." He made sure to keep his own red eyes wide, mimicking remembered childhood innocence.
Kasumi's hand stilled on the whetstone. "She is just an old woman full of stories, Ryuu. Pay her no mind."
"But… but what if the Kiri-nin… what if they believe stories like that?" he pressed, letting his voice tremble slightly. "What if they think red eyes are… bad?"
Kasumi resumed sharpening, the scrape of metal on stone overly loud in the small room. "They are shinobi, Ryuu. They deal in facts, not village superstitions." But her knuckles were white where she gripped the knife.
He let the subject drop, planting the seed. A few days later, after Emi had tried unsuccessfully to engage him in conversation near the docks, he returned home looking deliberately distressed.
"Emi's father… he stared at me," Ryuu whispered, hiding his face against Kasumi's leg. "He looked… like Takeda-san did. Before." (He hadn't seen Takeda look particularly scared, but Kasumi didn't know that). "Are people angry at us, Kaa-san?"
"No, little one," Kasumi soothed, stroking his hair, but her eyes scanned the path outside their door. "You imagine things."
He also began orchestrating 'accidents'. During a breathing exercise meant to achieve stillness, he let out a sharp gasp, clutching his hand. When Kasumi rushed over, he'd look terrified.
"It felt… cold, Kaa-san! Like… like the fish!" He wouldn't produce visible ice, just the sensation, the implication of uncontrolled energy leaking out. He'd follow this with wide-eyed fear. "Can people… feel that? If it happens outside?"
Each incident was carefully spaced, designed to seem like genuine slips caused by his youth and volatile potential, feeding Kasumi's deepest fear – that he would be the one to expose them through lack of control. Her instructions on chakra suppression became almost frantic.
He knew it was harsh.
He understood what he did wasn't proper, especially to his own mother.
But he had no other way. For an adult to listen to a child's words, recklessly believing them would be an impossibility, especially for someone like his mother.
The cumulative effect was noticeable. Kasumi grew visibly thinner, her sleep clearly suffering. She started talking, almost muttering to herself sometimes, about alternative routes off the coast, about the schedules of the few merchant boats that still dared to ply these waters, about currents and tides leading away from the Land of Water.
She hadn't mentioned leaving Shiosai directly, but the mental calculations were clearly happening. Ryuu watched, waited, and continued his subtle campaign, gently fanning the flames of her fear, nudging her towards the precipice.
The breaking point, he sensed, was close. The atmosphere in the Land of Water was growing colder, more dangerous. The whispers from the capital intensified. The Kiri patrols grew more brazen. Shiosai, once a remote hiding place, was starting to feel like the center of a tightening net.
All it would take was one more push, one more incident to shatter Kasumi's desperate hope that they could remain invisible here forever.
He continued his chakra exercises with grim determination. The progress was still slow, hampered by his body's limitations, but there was progress. He could hold the warmth in his hands for longer now, direct the flow with slightly more accuracy.
He also began sticking random leafs from outside to him body from time to time. Not on his forehead necessarily, just his hands, holding them in place for a few seconds.
The process drained him considerably, but it was worth it his mind.
He hadn't dared attempt to form ice again, the memory of Kasumi's terror a potent deterrent.
He couldn't risk being seen.
Plus, he was sure to ask his mother to train him in ice release jutsu when he was out of this place. He still wanted to be like those superhuman beings.
The thought of walking on walls alone made excited, but that would take years for him to reach that state.
Producing powerful jutsus, even clones would be a feat he could only imagine at the moment.
He just needed to survive long enough, and get somewhere safe enough, to truly begin forging the key.
—————————————————————————————————————-
One grey morning, as the mist rolled in thick and heavy from the sea, obscuring the docks entirely, Ryuu stood on the porch under his umbrella, watching Kasumi methodically check the simple deadfall traps she'd set near their garden patch.
He felt a shift in the air before he heard it – a low, rhythmic thrumming that vibrated through the damp earth. It was different from the usual fishing boats, heavier, more powerful
The low thrumming vibrated not just through the damp earth beneath Ryuu's feet, but deep within his bones, a primal resonance of approaching danger. Kasumi's hand clamped onto his arm, her usual firm grip now possessing the unyielding tension of forged steel.
She pulled him back from the porch railing, deeper into the shadowed interior of their small house, her eyes fixed on the wall of swirling white mist that concealed the sea and the source of the ominous sound.
Through the thickest part of the fog, the silhouette resolved – larger than any fishing boat native to Shiosai, sleeker, devoid of familiar markings, painted a dull, menacing grey.
It moved with a quiet confidence that spoke of power and purpose, cutting through the waves towards the stony beach. Ryuu's breath hitched. This wasn't a mere patrol demanding tolls.
Then, something impossible happened, something that jolted Ryuu's understanding of this world's capabilities far beyond the theoretical knowledge gleaned from faded manga panels.
One moment, the deck of the grey vessel held several cloaked figures. The next, seemingly instantaneously, one of those figures was simply there, standing silently on the weather-beaten planks of the village's small, rickety dock.
No blur of movement, no sound – just presence. As if space itself had folded and deposited him there. Shunshin no Jutsu, the Body Flicker Technique, Ryuu's mind supplied numbly, the reality far more jarring than the description.
Even partially obscured by the thinning mist, the figure commanded attention. He was tall, broad-shouldered, draped in the standard dark Kiri flak jacket over dark clothing, but there was nothing standard about the aura he projected.
A palpable weight settled over the immediate area, a pressure that made the air feel thick and cold. Strapped horizontally across his back, its sheer size almost comical yet utterly menacing, was an enormous cleaver-like sword, Kubikiribōchō – the Executioner's Blade. Its surface looked dull, almost pockmarked, hinting at countless uses, countless lives ended.
Jūzō Biwa.
One of the legendary Seven Ninja Swordsmen of the Mist.
