Curse These Old Bones - Chapter 58

Chapter 58

Zabuza wouldn’t say it aloud—not to Anko, not to Pakura, and definitely not to that smirking bastard Sura—but he was starting to get cold.

The first days on the boat had been tolerable. A little too sunny for his taste, but the wetness in the air, the shifting spray, the thick slap of water against wood—it reminded him enough of the Mist to feel… not comfortable, but functional. Familiar. Not home. He didn’t get sentimental about Kirigakure. You don’t feel nostalgia for a place that raised you like a rabid dog and fed you corpses. No, he didn’t miss it. He missed nothing.

Still, for half a second, as his breath fogged the air and the wind clawed at the loose cloth near his collar, he thought of Haku. Was the kid eating enough? Training? Sleeping? Had they remembered to tell him to keep his chakra suppressed at night so he didn’t accidentally ice a teammate in his sleep?

He scowled, shook the thought loose like blood from a blade. Not your job anymore. The kid was in good hands. Hands with chains and red hair and a voice loud enough to scare trees into growing faster.

“Big bad boy shivering already?” Anko’s voice slithered in beside him, teasing like a blade pressed to the ribs. She leaned on the railing beside him, wind tousling her mess of violet hair. “Tell me this isn’t too brrr much for you, Zabuza. I’ll knit you a scarf.”

He scoffed, low and guttural, adjusting the grip on Samehada where it rested against his back. “Say that again and I’ll flay you with your own trench coat.”

“Oh,” Anko purred, “don’t threaten me with a good time.”

Before he could snap back, Sura’s voice cut through the wind, smooth and maddeningly unbothered. “Ah, ninjas. So functional. Looks like we’re arriving.” He tilted his head toward the front of the deck, his eyes locked on the horizon. “Zabuza, I’ll let you handle the welcome committee.”

Pakura turned, sharp-eyed. “Welcome committee?” she repeated, suspicion immediately coiling into her stance.

Anko grinned like a fox at a chicken coop. “Ooh, so not a quiet C-rank? What a Surpriiiise.” Her mock-innocent tone dripped sarcasm as she stretched her arms. “And here I thought we were just going to build snowmen.”

Zabuza didn’t say anything. He was already moving, his hand rising to grab Samehada by the hilt and swing the heavy blade down from his back. It hit the deck with a satisfying thud of intent. He didn’t want to disappoint Sura.

Maybe it was blood. Maybe it was something else. His old man had been called the Professor—a butcher of secrets and a lunatic scholar. But Zabuza, somewhere in the back of his murder-shaped mind, had started to think of Sura like a… boss. No. A sensei. A terrifying, ridiculous, snake-charming bastard of a sensei, but one who had taught him more in three months than Zabuza had been allowed to learn in years. In Mist, they didn’t teach you. They threw you in a room with sharp objects and told you to survive. History was for the dead. Theory was for civilians. Genjutsu was something your enemy used to kill you while you blinked.

Sura didn’t just teach them to kill. Did not just teach them new techniques, and new ninjutsu. He taught why. How. The patterns behind the chakra. The flow. The idea that jutsu had architecture. And yet even now, even with all the growth, Zabuza’s mind could still betray him. A flash—his own hands soaked in blood, classmates screaming in a stone ring, the red haze over his eyes. One kid had begged, Please, and Zabuza hadn’t hesitated. Now, he saw Haku’s face superimposed over that kid’s—too close in age, too close in heart—and it made something ugly twist in his gut.

He pushed it down.

He had people to kill.

His chakra began to leak, a soft, malignant pressure rolling off him like the scent of a predator. The air tensed in response, like it knew. He didn’t produce mist yet—they were still too far from the coast, and the wind was too strong.

After a few minutes, the boat docked with a long, groaning creak, its hull scraping against the warped wooden pier as the mooring lines snapped taut. A sharp voice cut through the bustle almost immediately—“Move, move, let’s go, people!”—as the director barked orders from the deck, waving his arms like a man trying to conduct a stampede. Crew members scrambled to unload gear, cameras, crates, and props with all the grace of a panicked circus, their footsteps echoing on the frost-slick planks.

Zabuza looked around. The docks were poorly managed, sloppy in the way only complacency could rot into infrastructure. Warped planks, frost-chewed ropes, piles of cargo left to freeze in the sunless cold. A few workers hauled crates with the speed of men paid by the hour, not the task. He spotted one with the bearing of a fighter—a little too upright, too balanced for a dockhand. A ronin maybe, but nothing worth a second look. His eyes swept the rest: movement on the rooftops, the wrong kind of stillness near a stack of barrels. Trained chakra signatures, suppressed but not erased. Three of them. They had waited until the ship docked, until the actors stepped off and the crew began their noisy ritual. Smart. They weren’t amateurs. At least chunins, probably jonins.

The kunai came just as Yukie descended the ramp, thrown low and fast, aimed to open her throat without warning. Zabuza moved before it finished its arc. One foot slammed the dock, the other kicked up slush and wood as he blurred forward, intercepting it in motion. He snatched the weapon out of the air, reversed grip, and drove it into the dock post beside him without a word. He unslung the Kubikiribōchō, its enormous blade growling against the wood as he dragged it free. The sound alone made the nearby dockworkers scatter.

Three figures burst from cover. Their armor gleamed—thick, plated harnesses of overlapping panels with faint blue circuitry pulsing along their seams, like veins of frozen chakra. Not standard flak. These weren’t standard soldiers. One of them launched forward on a burst of compressed air, glider-like wings flicking open from her back. Another came in stomping, heavy like a mobile fortress, each step shattering ice. The last skated low over the snow, ice forming beneath his feet, hands already forming seals. “The princess dies now,” one of them barked. “Kill the crew. Leave the bodies in the harbor.”

Zabuza didn’t reply. He never did. He stepped sideways and vanished into the rising mist—his mist. Thin at first, drawn from the snowbanks and the fog off the sea. A few hand signs, precise and familiar, and it thickened like a shroud. Visibility dropped to nothing. The chakra-armored soldiers slowed. One of them cursed. “Where is he?” Too late.

Zabuza reappeared behind the glider kunoichi, blade swinging horizontally in silence. She didn’t even scream as the Kubikiribōchō carved through her wings and into her back, splitting the metal plating of her armor with a screech of rending steel. Blood geysered from the wound, steam rising where it hit the frozen dock. She crumpled, twitching. He didn’t give her time to die. One stomp caved in her skull. The mist swallowed him again.

“Fuck—he’s using the fog. From Mist. Heat sensors are reading his position, he's—” The big one roared and charged blind. The dock cracked under his boots. His fists glowed, encased in reinforced gauntlets tied into the armor’s chakra grid. Zabuza let him come. He slid under the punch and dragged his sword across the man’s calf. Sparks flew. The armor hissed, flickered—and held. It ate the chakra from the blow. Zabuza grunted. Fucking strange. That was new. The man turned and swung a wide, brutal hook. Zabuza blocked with the flat of his blade, skidding back a meter. Then he vanished again.

The skater was smarter. He tried to freeze the mist itself, weaving hand signs that conjured lances of ice from the ground — smart, but Haku was better. They struck shadows, phantoms. “Where are you?!” he shouted, a hint of fear already creeping in. Zabuza answered by whispering behind him. Just a breath: Too slow. The man turned in time to see steel. The Kubikiribōchō sheared through his arm from the shoulder down, carving through flesh and armor alike. Blood painted the snow black. He screamed—high and thin, like a rabbit in a snare—before Zabuza bisected him from the waist.

The last one was panicking now. “Backup! It's…I recognize him from the Bingo Book! It's the Demon of the Mist ! What is he doing here? We need—” His call was cut short as Zabuza dropped from a nearby scaffold, blade first. The sword pierced between the chest plates, the armor cracking like old ceramic under sheer force. But something in the wiring flared and flung Zabuza back with a pulse of chakra—forceful, explosive. He landed in a crouch, skidding across the ice, blood trickling from his lips. He growled. Not invincible. Just inconvenient.

The armored brute stumbled, leaking blood from the mouth. Zabuza gave him no time to recover. He rushed forward, ducked a wild haymaker, and jammed the tip of his blade under the breastplate. Then he pushed. Hard. Bone cracked, then burst. The blade punched through the man’s spine with a sickening pop, and Zabuza twisted, dragging the cleaver free in a spray of viscera and mechanical debris. The armor sparked and died, its power core burning out with a hiss.

Only one left alive. Zabuza didn’t kill him. Not yet. The man writhed on the ground, both arms broken, one leg gone below the knee. The armor was cracked open at the ribs. He breathed in wet, rattling gasps. “Please,” he gurgled. “I… I didn’t know… they said she was just a deserter…”

Zabuza didn’t answer. He stood over the man, blade dripping, mist swirling around him like a living thing. Blood steamed on snow. The docks were painted red. He turned slightly, toward the ship’s shadow—toward where he knew Sura and the others were watching.

He didn’t need to speak. His work spoke for him. Still crouched in the blood-stained snow, Zabuza turned his attention to the broken corpse at his feet—not the man, but the armor. His fingers brushed over the cracked plating, the faint glow in its seams already fading. Whatever it was, it had eaten his chakra mid-technique. Suppressed it. Neutralized it. That was new. He wasn’t much of a ninjutsu user compared to others—he preferred the feel of steel carving through ribs, so his opponents had been very unlucky—but even so, armor that could erase jutsu mid-cast? That was more than a nuisance. That was a battlefield equalizer. If this kind of tech could be mass-produced, deployed across an army… no wonder Sura had personally come along for this so-called "C-rank" mission. Zabuza exhaled through his nose, amused. “Fucking bastard,” he muttered, not without respect.

He congratulated his past self, once again, to have accepted Sura's offer.

— — —

The courtyard of the Konoha Police barracks had become a pit. Shouts rang out, limbs blurred, and dust kicked up in thick, choking spirals. Half of it was training. The other half looked like a full-blown brawl. Hoheto Hyūga’s voice thundered above it all, sharp and righteous, though even he wasn’t entirely sure who he was yelling at anymore.

“You call that a parry? A damn Academy brat would’ve broken your jaw! This isn’t a tea party, you weak excuses for shinobi—this is Konoha’s shield! This is the wall between order and collapse!” He spun, finger jabbing through the air at two chunin rolling through the dirt in a tangle of fists and knees. “Get up or get reassigned to latrine duty!”

It wasn’t about discipline. Not really. It was reflex now—screaming about the glory of Konoha felt…safe. Well, safer. More appropriate. Because he was watching.

Commander T stood at the edge of the courtyard, silent as a monolith. Tall, armored in dark flak, his porcelain-white mask emotionless save for the kanji carved into its brow—水. Everyone pretended not to know what it meant. That it didn’t drip with old blood. That the man behind it hadn’t once held the title Hokage before vanishing into legend and corpse-lore.

So yes, he yelled. It kept his hands from shaking. His throat was raw when he finally glanced left—and froze. Hinata.

Sweet, stammering, wide-eyed Hinata—his distant cousin twice removed, the child who used to cling to her father’s sleeve like it was armor. Hoheto remembered her as the one who could barely form a full sentence without flinching, whose voice trembled like a leaf and whose hands folded so delicately in her lap during clan dinners that he sometimes feared speaking to her would cause her to cry. He had once found her alone in the garden at dusk, trying to coax a wounded cicada back to life, tears falling down her cheeks because she was afraid of hurting it more. That memory stayed with him, absurdly vivid. The girl who apologized to flowers when she picked them.

That child did not exist here.

Now she moved like a crack of lightning—precise, emotionless, all ghost-white eyes and seamless angles. She slipped through the sparring circle with a kind of elegance that made the air hum. Her palm slammed into a boy’s diaphragm with a dull, fleshy crack, folding him over as if his spine had vanished. Before he’d even hit the ground, her foot had swept out, hooking behind another’s ankle, dragging him off balance and down with a force that bounced his head off the stone. She pivoted on the ball of her foot, hair sweeping behind her like a lash, and struck the third clean across the jaw with a backhand laced in chakra. Blood misted the air like perfume.

Her expression never changed.

There was blood on her knuckles—splattered across her armguard, already drying beneath her fingernails. Too much. Far too much for sparring.

And yet she stood with such stillness, such poise, that it almost passed as grace. She looked beautiful in that awful, quiet way—like a blade unsheathed under moonlight. All the softness Hoheto remembered had been pressed out of her, ironed flat beneath some hidden forge.

And the worst part—the part that made his breath catch in his throat—was that it didn’t look unnatural on her.

“Enough, Hinata!” he started to shout—but stopped. Bit it down. Swallowed hard.

Because Commander T had moved.

Just a step. Just close enough.

He placed one gloved hand atop her head, not gently, not harshly—just decisively. A gesture that might’ve passed for affection in another world, another era.

“For the glory of Konoha,” she whispered, eyes wide and bright, blood spattered across her cheek like paint.

Hoheto’s spine locked. The air tasted like old paper and damp stone.

He could feel it—though the mask didn’t shift, though the body remained still as frost—he knew the man was smiling beneath it. Smiling like the dead.

— —

"We know you're here."

Samui said it flatly, without looking up from the edge of her blade as she wiped it clean on the tattered remains of Raiga’s coat. Her voice held no edge, no show of tension—just quiet certainty, the kind that didn’t need volume to carry weight. Her arm ached from the final swing; her ribs throbbed with a slow, pulsing heat where Raiga’s lightning had grazed her earlier, the skin beneath her vest crackling with the sickly burn of chakra overload. But she said nothing of it. Karui was still posturing, Omoi would only overthink it, and Samui had long learned that pain didn’t deserve attention unless it threatened function.

Her chakra brushed the air again—sharp, deliberate. The forest was still too quiet. She felt only ash, blood, the distant pulse of Bee’s mountainous presence humming in the west like a sleeping storm, and—

Yes. There.

Movement. Just slight enough to confirm what instinct had already told her.

The trees parted, and a boy stepped out. No… not a boy, not really. Young, yes—fifteen, maybe?—but not a child, not in the way that mattered. He moved with intent sharpened down to the bone. No wasted motion, no flinch, no false swagger. His clothes were clean but travel-worn, ANBU-cut, stripped of ornament. His face was unreadable, gaze already fixed ahead. He walked like someone who had been told once, long ago, that he was the last of something important—and had taken it as both burden and obligation.

She recognized him immediately.

Uchiha Sasuke.

And that complicated everything.

Samui didn’t react—her breathing stayed steady, her blade lowered—but her thoughts narrowed to a razor’s edge. The last Uchiha, Konoha’s tightly kept heirloom, showing up alone in the aftermath of a high-level target like Raiga… there was no way this was a coincidence. Either someone had sent him as a test, or he’d followed the scent of battle for reasons that wouldn’t be written in any report. There was no version of this encounter that ended cleanly—not with that face, not with that name, not this far from the Leaf’s walls. No way Konoha’s leadership would let him out here without a net of some kind. So where the hell was it?

It didn’t make sense—not really—for him to be alone. Raiga had been more than just a rogue; the man could chew through two lower-level Jonin without breaking rhythm, and even a high-chunin would’ve been shredded in a straight-up fight. And yet, with the next Chūnin Exams rumored to be something twisted—televised, politicized, cross-village pairings and hidden observers, the kind of grotesque spectacle where “promotion” meant proving your village’s superiority in full view of the continent—maybe it did. Hell, her own promotion had been cancelled, hers and Omoi’s, all so they could train under Bee and turn into a public relations sledgehammer. So, of course…Konoha weren’t going to fatten up their candidates in classrooms anymore. They were going to bleed them sharp. Raiga was too volatile to keep, too strong to ignore. But…alone ?

She pulsed again. No team. No Jonin in the shadows. Nothing cloaked behind seals or trees.

Except Bee.

Omoi sucked at his teeth, then tilted his head with that half-annoying, half-thoughtful squint of his. “That’s him? Huh. I thought the Uchiha prince would be taller. Or gloomier. Maybe dragging a cursed katana and sighing into the wind.”

Sasuke didn’t answer. Didn’t even blink. But Samui caught it—the tightening of the jaw, the subtle narrowing of the eyes. Anger. Controlled. Tempered. Not the wild, flaring kind their clan was known for. Whoever was training him had done the most important work first: sanding down the ego. Leaving behind something leaner. Meaner. Someone who wouldn’t snap when provoked—but might snap your neck if you pushed far enough.

She’d seen that kind of edge before. Bee had honed it into her.

Karui snorted and crossed her arms, embers still flickering along her bracers. “This is what Konoha sends after Raiga? What, were all your Jonin too busy reading poetry and crying? Maybe your Hokage figured you’d bore him to death.”

Then, without emotion: “Funny coming from a village where every mouth runs faster than the brain attached to it. What was your plan? Set Raiga on fire and hope your personality would finish him off?”

Omoi let out a low, scandalized "oooh."

“The fuck did you just say, emo twig?!”

He didn’t move. “I said it slowly. Want me to draw it next time?”

There was a beat of stunned silence.

Karui, predictably, exploded.

“You smug little—!”

She launched forward, fire blooming from her arms as her boots cracked against the stone with the speed of her charge.

Samui sighed, already shifting her stance, blade rising.