## NNT -- 7:15AM -- Dawn -- Land of Cats
The morning mist crawled across the valley like something sick and dying, thick enough to choke on. It grabbed onto everything—cracked stone walls, the bones of dead rice stalks, rotting fence posts that nobody gave a shit about anymore. The sun tried breaking through but all it managed was weak, yellow light that made everything look half-dead already.
A crane screamed somewhere in that fog. Then... nothing. Just wet silence, like the whole damn world was holding its breath.
The road cut through this wasteland like an open wound, narrow and mean, with flooded fields on both sides reflecting that dead sky back up at you. Stagnant water everywhere, breeding mosquitos and god knows what else, while what crops were left just rotted in the mud. This is what happens when war goes on too long—even the land starts bleeding out.
Fugaku rode at the front of his sorry little group, back straight as a sword blade, jaw clenched so tight his teeth might just crack right in half. That red fan on his back flapped in the wind like some battle flag over a proud lost cause. His horse—black as burned bones—picked its way through the muck real careful-like, knowing death was watching from somewhere.
Behind him, five Uchiha fighters slogged through the slop, hands never wandering far from their weapons. They'd seen too much blood, buried too many friends. Their eyes kept sweeping those hills, looking for the ambush they knew was coming. It always came, didn't it?
This whole mission was beneath him. Fugaku knew it, his men knew it, and whoever sent them here damn well knew it too. Tax collecting in some god-forsaken backwater where peasants ate tree bark and called it dinner. But the Fire Daimyō had insisted—called it some "delicate matter" about ancestral Uchiha farmland that'd been bleeding money for years.
Delicate. He could come up with another lie.
"The Intelligence collected said there might be trouble," one of his men muttered, spitting into the mud.
Fugaku didn't bother turning around. "From what? Scarecrows and dead fish?"
"Bandits, supposedly. Moving through the valleys at night."
"Bandits." He said it like a curse word. "More likely deserters too chickenshit to die proper, or farmers gone mad from eating their own kids."
"There's... other stuff too." The voice was younger, shaky. "Villagers talk about lights in the sky. Say the sky's been bleeding."
That made Fugaku yank on the reins. His horse snorted, breath steaming in the cold. "Bleeding how?"
"Red comet, my lord. Hangs over these hills like a wound that won't heal. The monks who fled the old Ymril temple say it's—"
"I don't give a rat's ass what monks say." But even saying it, Fugaku felt something cold crawl up his spine. He'd heard rumors back at the compound. Strange reports from the borderlands. Shinobi who came back different... if they came back at all.
He kicked his horse harder than he should've. The animal lurched forward, dragging the supply cart through another puddle of filthy water.
The mist got thicker around them, and somewhere in all that gray, the tenacious circle of life continued unborthered.
## NNT -- 19:02 -- Twilight, Edge of Ymril Temple Ridge -- Land of Cats
*12 hours before*
Raghoul knelt in what used to be holy ground.
The temple behind him was nothing but blackened stone and collapsed wood now. Weeds pushed through cracks, and the prayer bells hadn't made a sound in years. This used to be where holy men chanted to their soft gods, begging for peace and all that bullshit.
Now it was his altar.
His breathing came slow and deliberate, each breath sending little trails of heat curling into the freezing air. Where his hands touched the ground, grass died and turned black, leaving perfect handprints in the dirt. The earth around him was covered with marks like that—proof of all the hours, days, weeks he'd spent here, waiting.
Listening.
Above him, that red comet bleed violently like an infected cut, throwing bloody light over everything. Most people looked at it and felt scared, or amazed, or that superstitious dread you get when your brain can't make sense of something.
But for him he felt just hunger.
The comet called to him in unknown language—promises of power, of changing into something more than the broken thing they'd made him into. It called him east, toward the sea, toward something less ancient and more primodial that'd been sleeping way too long.
But tonight, something else caught his attention.
Down in the valley, sitting among those dying fields like a coal in wet ash, he felt it. Something familiar. The chakra of someone who shared his cursed physique or at least tiny bit of it, someone who carried fire but never learned to really let it burn.
An Uchiha.
His lips pulled back from his teeth in what might've been a smile, if smiles could hold that much hate.
He stood up, joints popping like breaking bones. His cloak—what was left of it—flapped around him like wings. In the comet's light, the burn scars covering half his face looked like melted metal.
The wind changed, carrying the smell of rice fields and fear.
And Raghoul started his walk down, leaving footprints of ash behind him.
## NNT -- Present -- Noon, Edge of Ymril Temple Ridge -- Land of Cats – The Torii Gate
The torii gate squatted across the path like the ribs of some huge dead thing, red paint peeling off in sick flakes. Once upon a time, it marked where the normal world ended and the sacred began. Now it was just another sign of how far this place had fallen.
Fugaku stopped his group fifty paces away.
Something was wrong. The air felt different—thicker, charged with omninous energy that made his teeth hurt. The birds had shut up, and even the bugs had gone quiet. His horse shifted under him, nostrils wide, smelling gunpowder, sulfur and volcanic ash.
His hand found his sword grip without thinking. Years of war had sharpened his instincts to a knife's edge, and every single one was screaming danger.
Beyond the gate, a shadow moved.
It turned into the shape of a man, but everything about him was wrong. The air around him shimmered with heat, like reality itself was trying to spit him out. Steam rose from where he stepped, and when his cloak brushed the old wooden posts, the ancient wood started to smoke.
He walked like death made flesh—no hurry, no fear, just inevitable. His hair hung in dark locks that seemed to move on their own, and his eyes...
His eyes were the gray of fresh graves, holding the weight of horrors that would make weaker men claw out their own throats rather than remember.
Neither spoke. The silence stretched between them like a blade.
Fugaku's men reached for weapons. He stopped them with one raised hand, never looking away from the approaching figure. Something deep in his blood, some ancestral knowledge bred into his clan's bones, was screaming that drawing steel on this thing would be the last mistake he'd ever make.
They stared at each other across that torii gate—Uchiha pride against something that used to be human but got refined in crucibles of pain until only the cruel parts remained.
Fugaku saw everything in those gray eyes. The wars this thing had fought, not for honor or country, but just to watch the world burn. The villages it turned to ash. The children whose screams were its bedtime stories. And underneath it all, buried deep but not forgotten, the ember of an Uchiha who'd been broken and rebuilt into something the clan would never claim.
Raghoul stopped at the gate's threshold. He tilted his head, studying Fugaku like a cat might look at a mouse it wasn't ready to kill yet.
Then he stepped forward.
Past Fugaku. Through the space between them that should've exploded into violence.
For one heartbeat, they were close enough to touch. The heat coming off Raghoul's skin made sweat pop on Fugaku's face, and he caught a glimpse of scars covering the man's arms like a map of suffering.
Then, a whisper. Dry as dead leaves, soft as a burial shroud:
"Your clan walked in fire once, From Your ancestor, You took supreme destruction." The voice carried accents from deep desert places where water cost more than gold. "But you... you only ever warmed your hands by it. Never learned to let it eat you alive."
Fugaku's blood turned to colder immediately.
His men trembling looked to him for orders, for some sign of how to process what they'd just seen. He said nothing. Couldn't speak even if he wanted to.
Raghoul kept walking down the road, trailing sparks like falling stars. The mist pulled back from him like it was scared to touch something so fundamentally wrong.
## NNT -- 15:02PM -- A Farmstead Beneath the Hill -- Land of Cats
The farmstead hunched in the valley like a hurt animal, all sagging wood and patched roof. The fields around it were a wasteland of mud and broken dreams—rice paddies turned into stagnant pools where mosquitos bred and crops rotted.
The quiet here was different. Not peaceful, but the desperate silence of people trying to disappear.
Fugaku's boots squelched through mud as he walked up to the main house. His knock echoed like a death bell. No answer. He tried the latch—unlocked, because what's the point of locks when monsters walk free?
Inside, the poverty hit you like a punch. One room doing duty as kitchen, bedroom, and storage all at once. An old man sat hunched by a cold fire pit, hands shaking with more than just age. When he looked up at Fugaku, his eyes had that hollow stare of someone who'd seen too much and understood too little.
"We're here for the tax," Fugaku said, though it felt stupid in this place where just staying alive was a daily miracle. "Rice, by measure. From the Uchiha lands."
The old man's mouth worked without sound, like a fish drowning in air.
One of Fugaku's guards pushed past to search the side room. Sound of rustling grain bags, then a disgusted snort. "Three sacks, my lord. Half-empty, most of it moldy. Barely enough to keep these people breathing through winter."
Fugaku stared at the shaking peasant. "Someone come through here before us?"
A tiny nod, barely there.
"Who?"
"He..." The old man's voice was less than a whisper. "H-he Didn't take nothing, didn't ask for nothing. Just... stood in the middle of the field, listening to something we couldn't hear."
A kid's voice piped up from behind a raggedy curtain: "He made the water catch fire!"
Fugaku spun around. A small face peeked out, eyes bright with the kind of wonder only kids can keep when everything's going to hell.
"What?"
"In the creek," the kid said, pointing toward the window. "When he stepped in it, the water started boiling, but it burned red like blood. The fish didn't die though—they swam in circles, glowing like little lights."
The old man closed his eyes like he was trying to block out the memory. "He didn't talk to us. But I could feel him... listening. Like he was waiting for orders from something we couldn't see."
"Orders from what?"
The man raised a trembling finger toward the window. Outside, the mist was lifting, showing the pale sky beyond. At the edge of the horizon, barely visible in daylight, a faint red glow pulsed like a heartbeat.
"That thing,".
## On the Ridge, Later
Fugaku stood alone on the hillside, watching his men load what little rice they'd managed to collect. Wasn't enough to justify the trip, wasn't enough to satisfy the Daimyō, wasn't enough to do anything but prove what he already suspected.
This wasn't about taxes. This was about something else completely.
He looked down at his hands and didn't like seeing them shake. Not with fear—he'd stared death in the face too many times to be scared of dying.
This was something deeper. The shake of a man who'd spent his whole life thinking he understood how the world worked, only to find out the map he'd been following was drawn by children.
That meeting at the gate kept playing in his head. The heat, the presence, the casual way that... thing... had brushed him off. Like he was nothing. Like his whole clan, with all their history and power and pride, was just a footnote in some bigger, darker story.
"You only ever warmed your hands by it."
The words echoed in his skull like a curse. Because deep down, in places he didn't like looking too close, he knew they were true. The Uchiha had walked in fire once—their ancestors were forces of nature, shapers of destiny, people who bent the world through pure burning will.
But somewhere along the way, they'd gotten comfortable. Tame. They'd learned to bank their fires, to show a respectable face, to play politics instead of embracing the chaos that was their birthright.
They'd become exactly what that scarred monster said they were—people who warmed their hands by flames they didn't have the guts to walk through anymore.
Fugaku turned back toward the horizon. The red comet was visible now, a wound in the sky that seemed to pulse with his heartbeat. It was moving, he realized. Slow, almost too subtle to notice, but definitely heading east.
Following it, like a hungry Hyenna, would be Raghoul.
And for the first time since he was a kid, Uchiha Fugaku felt scared. Not of death, not of failure, but of the growing certainty that everything he'd built his identity around—his clan's superiority, their right to lead, their mastery over fire itself—was about to be tested by something that had already been through every hell imaginable and come out harder, meaner, and infinitely more dangerous.
The wind picked up, carrying the smell of Volcanic ash and the promise of changes coming.
In the valley below, something howled—long, sad, and definitely not human.
The bleeding star pulsed once more, and somewhere in its red light, Fugaku thought he heard a Prophecy.