The groan of tortured metal was the only sound in Sakura's world. The steel door, her last bastion, was buckling inward, a concave dent forming in its center with each rhythmic, thunderous impact from the other side. The hinges shrieked, spitting rust and powdered concrete. It wouldn't hold. Another minute, maybe less.
Panic was a cold, constricting serpent around her chest. Her breaths came in ragged, useless gasps. Her kunai felt like a child's toy in her trembling hand. This was it. A pathetic, ignoble end for a Miyamoto, to be devoured by vermin in a dark, forgotten storeroom.
As the fear reached its peak, something else rose to meet it. A strange, simmering heat began to build in her veins, a feeling like a deeply buried ember being fanned into life. Her blood felt hot, almost boiling.
With the heat came a memory, unbidden and sharp. Her grandfather, sitting in the dojo's dusty sunlight, unrolling an ancient, yellowed scroll. His voice, a low rasp, reciting a passage she had dismissed as fanciful poetry.
"Do not fight the shadow," he had said, his finger tracing the elegant, faded kanji. "Become the shadow. The world of substance is an illusion. The true shinobi learns to step through the paper screen between what is seen and what is unseen. Merge with the void, and you will find true silence."
Merge with the void. It was nonsense. A metaphor for stealth, she had always assumed.
CRACK!
A sound like a thunderclap ripped through the room as the deadbolt sheared away from the frame. The door flew inward, torn from its top hinge, and slammed against the interior wall.
Framed in the ruined doorway was the Lord. Its milky-white eyes seemed to stare straight through her, and its chittering was a sound of triumphant hunger. It took a step inside, the smaller roaches swarming around its legs like a living tide.
Time seemed to slow, to stretch into a thick, syrupy stillness. The world narrowed to the space between her and the monster. Death was a breath away.
The old words echoed in her mind. Become the shadow.
Without thought, without reason, her body obeyed a command deeper than conscious will. Her desperate gasps for air ceased. She held her breath, not as a technique, but as a total cessation of being. She closed her eyes and focused every ounce of her remaining energy, not on the monster, but on the image of herself as a wisp of smoke, a patch of darkness, nothing.
A bizarre sensation washed over her. The storeroom, the monster, the deafening noise—it all seemed to recede, as if she were sinking into deep, silent water. She felt... light. Untethered. When she opened her eyes, the world was a muted, grey-scale version of itself. Her hands, held before her face, were translucent, like smoked glass.
The Lord cockroach stormed past where she stood, its heavy claws clicking on the concrete. It stopped in the center of the room, its antennae twitching in frantic confusion. The target was gone. The heartbeat it had locked onto had simply... vanished.
The swarm poured in, a chittering, chaotic mass, crawling over boxes and up walls, searching for the prey that had disappeared from their senses. Sakura stood perfectly still, an invisible spectator to the frenzy. She was there, but she was not. She was a ghost