10 Heart

When Ino told him about the Tsuchikage’s intentions, Kakashi was crawling through the ventilation ducts. He was just a little ways away from the opening into the pilothouse.

“They’re starting the executions again. In about two minutes.”

But just as heavy a presence in Kakashi’s heart as the recommencement of the executions was the existence of the stocks of blue fire powder in the ship.

Dammit, where exactly are they hiding blue fire powder?!

“Master Kakashi, please get out of that ship right away. Lady Tsunade is serious. If something happens, she truly intends to shoot down the Tobishachimaru.”

“Thanks, Ino,” Kakashi replied, as he crawled along through the duct. “But I can’t do that.”

“But—”

“The people still on this ship have someone somewhere worrying about them the way you’re worrying about me.”

Ino was silent.

“If I can simply cast aside those people so easily, then I won’t be able to protect the people of the village when I’m Hokage.”

Dropping out through the vent, Kakashi silently struck down the enemy on guard in the pilothouse with some fluid, quick work. The pilots both looked back, stunned.

“Shh!” Kakashi held his index finger up to his mouth. “I’m a shinobi from Konoha.”

The pilots nodded. A sea of gray clouds spread out in the large window in front of them.

“Just stay calm and maintain this altitude as best you can. Even if the enemy tells you to descend, trick them somehow, but please make sure you keep this altitude.”

Kakashi had a reason for this request.

If there really was blue fire powder on this ship, the enemy had probably procured it for the purpose of blowing up Hozuki Castle. The Ryuha Armed Alliance standing by on the ground would take advantage of the confusion the blast generated to rescue Garyo. And the powder would likely be dropped onto the castle from the sky above. So to improve their accuracy, they would have no choice but to lower the ship’s altitude.

He heard a commotion from the direction of the dining lounge.

“Please help me!” a woman screamed. “My child—he’s been asthmatic since birth!”

Killing the sound of his steps, Kakashi approached the lounge and hid in the shadow of a pillar.

“He was just so looking forward to riding on the Tobishachimaru. Please! If you’re going to execute someone, please execute me! In exchange, just please let my boy live!”

A woman—no doubt the boy’s mother—held a gasping child in her arms. Looking closely, he saw that it was the boy Guy had rescued from being crushed by the piano.

When Kahyo made her hole in the ship, the air pressure in the cabin had dropped instantly, and the air had gotten thinner. Kakashi realized this was why the boy was experiencing an asthma attack.

He ran his eyes in every direction. It seemed that in the early confusion, a third of the passengers had been swept out of the ship. The twelve members of the enemy group were now down to seven. Eight, if the one he had knocked out in the pilothouse woke up.

“I lost his medicine in the commotion!” the mother pleaded, desperately. “Without it, he can’t breathe! He’ll die!”

But Rahyo merely looked down on mother and child with cold eyes devoid of any emotion.

“Please! Please! Somehow, please—”

“I can’t land this ship for the sake of a single child. You’re from the Land of Waves, yes?” Rahyo asked. “What do you do for a living?”

“M-my husband is a doctor—”

“A doctor!” His face lit up with a cruel glee. “My nephew, you see, was left to die by the doctors of the Land of Waves. The child of my younger sister standing beside you there.”

Still holding her son as he gasped for air, the mother looked up at Kahyo with eyes spilling over with tears. The other woman turned her face down.

“This is poetic justice,” Rahyo said, and shrugged his shoulders with a laugh. “This time, it’s our turn to leave your child to die.”

Listening to the laughter that made his ears ache, Kakashi narrowed his eyes to focus on Kahyo. She didn’t move. Her long, curly hair cast deeps shadows on her now maskless face.

Before he stepped forward from behind the pillar, Kakashi confirmed that the shadow of the bird was indeed floating outside the window. “Help that child.”

“Hatake Kakashi?!” Murderous bloodlust immediately surged in Rahyo’s veins. “You don’t know when to give up—”

“Kahyo.” Kakashi ignored him. “You said so to me before. That I couldn’t understand the feelings of a parent whose child had been killed. But you do.”

Kahyo’s body stiffened and froze.

“I’m begging you, help that boy.”

“You fool!” Rahyo roared. “This time, I’m definitely going to send you to the afterlife!”

“Shut up.”

Under the pressure of Kakashi’s gaze, Rahyo froze.

“You don’t need to land the ship.” He turned his eyes back to Kahyo. “A comrade of mine is flying along and following this ship. All you have to do is give the child to him. In exchange, you can execute me.”

Kahyo glared at him from beneath her long hair.

“In that case, you die first,” Rahyo interjected again from the side. “There’s no guarantee you won’t have a change of heart the instant we release the kid.”

The attackers laughed vulgar guffaws.

Kakashi didn’t hesitate. Instantly, he gathered his chakra in his right hand and chopped at his own neck with a striking hand crackling with bands of purple electricity.

Rahyo gasped and held his breath.

But the person most surprised was Kakashi himself. He had indeed activated Violet Bolt. And yet his strike only slapped up against his neck—no blood came gushing out, his head had not been torn off.

His right hand, which had been white hot, quickly cooled. Plumes of chilly white air rose up from his feet, and a pain like ice needles scraping against the insides of his veins raced over his entire body. Ice began to crawl up from his feet, crackling as it climbed.

Kakashi immediately sent chakra whirling through his body. The ice—which had already climbed as far as his knees—abruptly vanished like mist.

“There’s no need for you to die,” Kahyo said, softly. “I’ll help the child.”

“Oi! Kahyo, you can’t just—”

“Be quiet, brother!”

“What!”

“Indiscriminate slaughter is not our objective.” Brushing aside her brother’s interruption, Kahyo looked into Kakashi’s eyes. “And you can no longer do anything, anyway.”

“When?” Kakashi asked, carefully molding his chakra. “When did you cast your jutsu on me?”

“The first time we met.”

So that time I caught her when she tripped—Kahyo running along to board the Tobishachimaru, lifting the hem of her blue dress—I was already stuck with this jutsu?

Kahyo approached the child, nodded at the mother, and picked the boy up.

In that moment, Kakashi saw the sad face of Kahyo in profile, looking at the gasping boy as though it were her own child in her arms.

With a wave of her arm, a fissure big enough for a single person to slip through opened up smoothly in the ice plugging the hole in the ship. The air pressure within the cabin was already the same as it was outside the ship, so no one was sucked out through the hole this time.

Sai appeared with a cold wind on the back of his Cartoon Mimicry bird. Bracing himself so that he was ready to attack at any moment, he brought the bird up alongside the fissure in the ice.

Holding the boy out, Kahyo said, “The next time I see you, I will kill the hostages.”

Sai met her gaze with a blank face before leaning forward and silently accepting the boy.

Looking back, Kahyo said to the mother, “Come. You too.”

Face wet with tears, the mother thanked her over and over as she took Sai’s hand and became a person outside the ship.

“Th-that’s not fair!” Grumbles of discontent slipped out from amongst the people remaining in the lounge.

“Why does that family get special treatment? If that’s how hostage situations work, I should’ve brought along my own sick son!” said one man.

Closing the fissure in the ice, Kahyo waved her arm again without even looking in the man’s direction. “It seems it’s execution time.”

Ice crackled as it swallowed up the complaining man, starting at his feet. After that, no one made a move to open their mouths.

“I activated the Earth Chain Ice I cast on you,” Kahyo said, turning toward Kakashi. “If you don’t want to be frozen, the only thing you can do is keep molding your chakra and sending that heat around your body.”

“I see. So people who can’t manipulate their chakra end up frozen right away, huh?”

“As long as you are using your chakra to suppress the Earth Chain Ice, you won’t be able to use it for any other jutsu. In other words, Hatake Kakashi,” she paused, “you are just a regular person now.”

“So it was you. The one who froze everyone other than Rahyo, it was you.”

“I’m the only one who can use Earth Chain Ice.”

“Why didn’t you activate it on me until now?”

After a moment’s hesitation, words tumbled one after another from Kahyo’s lips. Her voice was stained with agony and pain and sadness.

“You said it before, Hatake Kakashi. You said, ‘The very fact of living itself means you’re always fighting for your life.’ But there are some who are not allowed to participate in that battle.

“The village of Kirigakure, which we fled, was like that.

“It’s not well known, but there’s been a kind of class system in Kirigakure since olden times. At the top, those people from families whose ancestors, and their ancestors, were born and raised in Kirigakure. Next, those people from families who allied with Kirigakure in the long history of war. And then at the very bottom are families who fell to Kirigakure and had no choice but to be swallowed up by them.

“In Konoha, any mission accepted is given out according to the actual abilities of the shinobi. Not so in Kirigakure, however. The most dangerous and dirty work is always passed along to those of us in the very lowest social class. It has nothing to do with ability.

“From the village’s perspective, we are so-called dangerous elements, liable to betray Kirigakure at any time. So we are assigned dangerous missions.

“We can do nothing but successfully complete our mission. But it’s also fine if our mission ends unsuccessfully and we lose our lives, never to return home.

“With the current Mizukage, the situation seems to have gotten much better, but at the very least, this is how it was in our time. There were rumors among us that the former Mizukage was being controlled by Madara. At any rate, many people find their love for Kirigakure exhausted and abandon the village.

“I’m sure you’ve heard the name Zabuza Momochi. The man they called the demon of Kirigakure. He is one of the people who got out of the village as soon as he could. I heard he was such a gentle boy when he was a child.

“Did you know? In the past, Kirigakure was called the ‘village of bloody mist.’ In order to become ninja, we had to pass a certain test: students at the academy were forced to kill one another.

“You probably already know all this. But what you don’t know is that the only ones forced to take this test were us, the shinobi in the lowest class. In this graduation exam, Zabuza Momochi, who was still a child, slaughtered over a hundred would-be ninjas.

“And that’s where it comes from, you see? Calling him a demon. After that, he became a rogue ninja. In order to survive, he would cut people down for money. In the end, I heard he was caught off guard by some oaf somewhere and died.

“My husband tried to learn from Zabuza Momochi’s failure. Better to leave the village. We could stay there, but people like us had no future. The homeless ninja tried to make the Land of Waves a place where they wouldn’t have trouble in their lives, a place where they could live.

“As you know, there is no hidden village in the Land of Waves.

“That’s what caught my husband’s eye. The fact that there was no hidden village didn’t mean that they had no need of ninja. He thought that if we could get the work the Land of Waves was asking the five great shinobi nations to do, then rogue ninja could live like ordinary people there.

“Only half of my husband’s guess was right.

“That lot in the Land of Waves did end up requesting work from us. Thanks to that, we were able to make a living. But no one respected a group of rogue ninja carrying out dirty work.

“It gradually ate away at my husband. Yes, just like it did Momochi Zabuza. How he differed from Momochi Zabuza was in the fact that he didn’t direct his anger outward, but rather inward toward himself.

“My husband started to drown himself in alcohol. From here, it’s the usual story. He drank and drank and drank. Until finally, one night, he fell into the sea and drowned.

“With my husband’s death, I left the village of rogue ninja. Carrying my young son, I tried to live somehow as a person of the Land of Waves. I did a number of jobs. All the work was boring, but it was the kind of work where no one got hurt; I was satisfied. We were poor, but I thought I had managed to rebuild my life with my son.

“That’s what I thought…

“My son Hakuhyo inherited my Kekkei Genkai.

“One day, when he was playing with a friend, that friend, likely just fooling around, threw a rock at a giant hornet’s nest. The furious hornets attacked them. Hakuhyo’s only thought was to save his friend, and he unleashed jutsu after jutsu, things he couldn’t have been taught by anyone. He tried desperately to protect his friend.

“Hakuhyo produced the ice swords through the method written into his blood and protected his friend from the hornets. No matter how much he himself was stung, he tried to dispatch the hornets that came after his friend. Thanks to him, the friend managed to get through it with only a few stings. But Hakuhyo was stung all over.

“And what do you think happened after that?

“That friend abandoned Hakuhyo and ran off home by himself.

“When it grew dark and Hakuhyo still hadn’t returned home, I went to this child’s house in search of him. And they looked at me with eyes wide like they were seeing a monster. Now that they knew Hakuhyo was the child of a rogue ninja, they wouldn’t let him play with their child. The mother told me as much to my face.

“Even still, I managed to ask where the children had been playing.

“The sun had set and the moon was high by the time I found Hakuhyo. He… My son had collapsed, alone in the woods. His entire body was swollen. His face so much so that he was almost unrecognizable. And yet he muttered with swollen lips in his delirium. ‘You can’t go throwing stones at giant hornets’ nests… Hurry, run… Hurry, run… I’ll hold off the hornets for you—’ ”

When Kahyo cut herself off, the dining lounge fell into a sudden silence.

Kakashi didn’t know what he should say. Not only have I not had a child, but I’m even thinking twice about becoming the Hokage, the father of Konohagakure. Coming from a guy like me, any words are nothing but hypocrisy.

Kahyo’s eyes were dry. To Kakashi, those dry eyes were much sadder than any amount of tears that might have come from them. Kahyo’s eyes, so empty it wrenched at the heart, were the eyes of someone who had seen unwanted ends play out on more than one occasion.

Then he remembered the last days of Momochi Zabuza.

That had been their first job as Team Seven. Naruto, Sakura, and Sasuke had all been there. It was supposed to have been an easy job—cast a protective jutsu to return the carpenter Tazuna safely to the Land of Waves. There, a man called Gato, the wealthy owner of a transport company, hired Zabuza and Haku as assassins.

Zabuza and Haku had been fearsome enemies, so strong that Sasuke had nearly died. And yet, that that would end up being the last act… Stabbed repeatedly in the pileup with Gato’s little henchmen, Momochi Zabuza’s last request was simply that they lay him to rest next to Haku.

That scene—Momochi Zabuza and Haku lying next to each other on the ground—was overlaid on the image of Kahyo at a complete loss, her dead son in her arms.

“Why didn’t I activate the jutsu on you right away?” Kahyo’s lips moved slightly. “Maybe I wanted you to stop us.”

He said nothing.

“I suppose it’s too late.”

What can I do? Kakashi clenched his hands into fists so tight, his knuckles turned white. What can I do to save this woman’s heart?

“That’s enough talk of the old days,” Rahyo ordered. “Lock this guy up somewhere!”

The shinobi grabbed hold of Kakashi.

Kahyo was no longer even looking in his direction.