Gravity is a cruel and impartial judge. It does not care about your rank, your clan, or your desperate desire to live. It simply demands that you fall.
Ren Yamanaka tumbled through the void, the wind roaring in his ears like a trapped beast. The darkness of the ravine was absolute, swallowed by the cloud cover and the towering cliffs of the Land of Earth. He flailed, his arms grasping at empty wet air, his mind frozen in a singular, high-pitched scream of panic that refused to leave his throat.
He struck the canopy of a twisted pine tree growing from the ravine wall. Branches whipped him, tearing at his flak jacket, slicing his cheek. Crack. Snap. The impact slowed him, spinning him violently like a ragdoll caught in a thresher, before he was ejected into the open air again.
He hit the ground.
It wasn't the graceful landing of a ninja. It was a wet, bone-jarring collision with deep, semi-liquid mud. The breath was hammered out of his lungs in a sharp, agonizing wheeze.
Ren lay there for a moment, half-buried in the sludge, staring up at the invisible sky. His vision was a kaleidoscope of gray spots and darkness. His ribs burned—a sharp, hot poker of pain on his left side.
Am I dead?
He wiggled his fingers. They were numb, coated in freezing clay, but they moved. He tasted blood—coppery and warm—mixing with the grit of the earth in his mouth.
Not dead. Not yet.
The sounds of battle from above drifted down to him, muffled by the distance and the relentless hiss of the rain. Explosions. The clang of metal on metal. The wet thud of bodies hitting stone.
Ren rolled over, gasping, and retched. Nothing came up but saliva. He crawled, dragging his bruised body through the mire, seeking the shelter of a large boulder. He was trembling so violently that his teeth chattered, creating a staccato rhythm in his skull that synced with the pounding migraine he'd carried all day.
"Unit... 44," he whispered, his voice a broken croak.
He had to move. If he stayed here, he was just a stationary target in a kill box. He needed to find his squad. He needed—
A heavy thud shook the ground five meters away.
Ren froze, pressing himself into the mud, holding his breath until his lungs screamed.
A figure rose from the crater of its own impact. It was Hideo. The squad's heavyset vanguard. Hideo, who complained about the rations and dreamed of opening a bakery.
"Hideo!" Ren hissed, relief flooding his chest. He scrambled forward on his hands and knees. "Hideo, are you alright? We need to—"
Ren stopped.
Hideo was standing, but he wasn't upright. He was impaled. A massive stalagmite of rock, conjured by enemy ninjutsu, had erupted from the ground, catching Hideo as he fell. It pierced his chest, lifting him off the ground like a pinned insect.
Hideo's hands were still twitching, grasping feebly at the stone spear that had ended him. His eyes were wide, staring at Ren, but they were glassing over, the light fading with every beat of his failing heart.
"Ren..." Hideo burled, blood bubbling past his lips. "M-mom?"
Then, he slumped. The weight of his body slid inches down the rock, and he was still.
Ren scrambled backward, his heels slipping in the slime. He covered his mouth to stifle a scream. This was the reality of the disposable. There was no glory here. No heroic last stand. Hideo had died alone, confused, in the dark, killed by the very earth he had tried to master.
I'm next, Ren thought, the icy grip of terror squeezing his heart. I'm the battery. I have no weapon. I have no jutsu.
A flash of fire illuminated the basin.
Ren looked up. About a hundred meters away, near the center of the muddy valley, the battle was raging. Captain Taizen was there, a titan of violence, swinging his massive cleaver with berserk fury. He was fighting three Iwagakure Jonin simultaneously.
Kaito Uchiha and Sora Inuzuka were back-to-back near him, fighting a desperate defensive circle against a swarm of Earth Clones.
"Move!" Ren told his legs. "Move, you coward!"
He forced himself up. He couldn't leave them. Or maybe he just knew that dying alone in the mud was worse than dying with them. He drew a kunai—a pitiful, jagged piece of metal—and began to run toward the flashes of light.
The mud sucked at his boots. Every step was a battle. The air was thick with mist and the smell of ozone.
As he closed the distance, he saw the Captain roar. Taizen's flak jacket was shredded. His left arm hung uselessly at his side, the shoulder shattered. But he was laughing.
"Is that all?" Taizen bellowed, swinging his blade one-handed, cleaving an Earth Clone in half. "I thought Iwa bred men, not pebbles!"
The leader of the Iwa ambush unit—a tall, gaunt man wearing a porcelain mask with a jagged crack running down the forehead—stepped forward. He wove hand signs with a blur of speed that Ren's eyes couldn't even track.
"Earth Style: Tearing Earth Turning Palm."
The ground beneath Taizen liquidated. The Captain lost his footing, sinking to his waist. Before he could pull himself free, the Iwa Commander clamped his hands together. The liquid earth instantly hardened, crushing Taizen's legs and pelvis with a sickening crunch that echoed across the valley.
Taizen howled—not in fear, but in pure, unadulterated rage. He threw his massive sword like a spear at the Commander.
The Iwa leader sidestepped effortlessly. The sword buried itself harmlessly in the mud.
"You fought well for fodder," the Commander said, his voice smooth and cold. He walked up to the trapped, broken Captain. He drew a kunai. "But you are just a distraction. Your village sent you here to die so their Anbu could slip past. Did you know that?"
Taizen spat blood at the mask. "Doesn't... matter. We're... leaf... shinobi..."
The Commander drove the kunai into Taizen's throat.
Ren skidded to a halt twenty meters away, hidden behind the husk of a dead tree. He watched the light leave his Captain's eyes. The anchor of their squad, the man who called them trash but stood in front of them, was gone.
Now, only the children were left.
"Kill the others," the Commander ordered, wiping his blade on his sleeve. "Leave no witnesses."
The Iwa ninjas turned toward Kaito and Sora.
Kaito was panting, his chakra low. His Sharingan still hadn't awakened. He was just a boy with a sword and too much pride. Sora was on her knees, her claws broken, weeping silently as she slashed at the air, hallucinating her dead dog.
"Kaito! Sora!" Ren screamed.
He didn't mean to. The sound tore from his throat before he could stop it.
The Iwa Commander's head snapped toward Ren's hiding spot. The mask stared at him.
"One more rat," the Commander murmured. He gestured to two of his subordinates. "Finish the squad. I will handle the straggler."
Ren turned and ran.
It wasn't a strategic retreat. It was blind panic. He scrambled over roots and rocks, heading toward a cluster of jagged rock formations near the valley wall. He needed a place to hide. He needed a hole to crawl into.
He heard the heavy, rhythmic footsteps of the Commander pursuing him. The man wasn't rushing. He was hunting.
Ren slid into a narrow fissure between two massive boulders. It was a dead end, a small cave-like depression filled with water and shadows. He pressed his back against the cold stone, clutching his kunai with both hands, the point wavering toward the entrance.
Think, Ren. Think.
He was a Yamanaka. His clan specialized in information gathering, sensory perception, and mind control. But the Mind Body Switch required the target to be still, and if he missed, his consciousness would be trapped in his own body for minutes—a death sentence in combat.
A shadow fell across the entrance of the fissure.
The Iwa Commander stepped in. Up close, he was terrifying. His chakra felt heavy, like a mountain pressing down on Ren's chest. But Ren, with his hypersensitive perception, noticed something else.
The Commander was injured.
There was a seep of blood on his side, beneath the armor plating. Taizen's final desperate sword throw hadn't missed entirely. It had grazed the man's kidney area. The Commander was moving slightly slower, favoring his right leg.
"You have nowhere to go, Leaf rat," the Commander said, raising his hand. Chakra gathered in his palm—Earth Style: Rock Pistol. A simple, lethal projectile.
Ren looked at the man's eyes through the mask slits. He saw confidence. He saw arrogance.
And beneath that, Ren felt the familiar vibration of a mind.
It was the same sensation he felt when he was hooked up to the machine in the tent. The electrical hum of another consciousness. But this time, there were no wires. No Jiro to guide him. Just the raw proximity of hunter and prey.
I need a way out, Ren thought frantically. I need to know the terrain. I need to know his weakness.
The Commander fired the rock bullet.
Ren threw himself to the side. The rock shattered against the wall next to his head, sending stone shrapnel into his cheek. Ren lunged forward, not to attack, but to grapple. It was suicide. It was madness.
He slammed into the Commander's injured side.
The Commander grunt in pain, his knee buckling slightly. He grabbed Ren by the throat, lifting him off the ground with one hand. "Pathetic."
Ren's feet kicked uselessly. His windpipe was being crushed. Black spots danced in his vision. He was inches from the mask.
I need to get in, Ren panicked. Mind Body Switch... No, too slow. Mind Reading... No, I need physical contact for the amplifier.
His hands clawed at the Commander's face. He ripped the porcelain mask off.
The Commander's face was revealed—a harsh, angular face with a scar across the nose. He looked surprised, not by Ren's strength, but by his audacity.
Ren stared into the man's eyes.
And then, the Hunger woke up.
It wasn't the headache this time. It was a gaping, voracious void that opened in the center of Ren's mind. It felt like a black hole had spawned in his frontal lobe. It didn't want to read the enemy. It wanted to be filled.
Ren didn't weave signs. He didn't mold chakra in the academy-taught patterns. He simply opened the gate that shouldn't be opened.
He clamped his hands onto the Commander's temples.
"What are you—" The Commander started to say, but his voice cut off into a gurgle.
CONNECT.
The world dissolved.
Ren was no longer in the cave. He was standing in a wheat field in the Land of Earth. The sun was hot on his back. A little girl with pigtails was running toward him, shouting, "Papa! Papa!"
No, Ren thought. This isn't mine.
The scene shifted violently. He was sitting in a stone room, looking at a map. A superior officer was pointing at a bridge. "The weaknesses of the Earth Wall are the tectonic stress points. You must mold the chakra with the density of granite, not sandstone."
Technical data, Ren's mind cataloged. Earth Style theory.
The scene shifted again. Pain. Darkness. The feeling of killing a man with a rock. The satisfaction of a mission complete. The taste of sake. The smell of his wife's hair.
Ren wasn't just seeing these things. He was drinking them.
In the physical world, the Iwa Commander began to scream. But it wasn't a scream of vocal cords. It was a psychic shriek. His eyes rolled back into his head. His body began to convulse, his chakra flared wildly, and then—terrifyingly—it began to flow into Ren.
It felt like Ren was drinking boiling oil.
The foreign chakra rushed into his coils, burning, expanding, stretching his pathways to the breaking point. It was thick, heavy, earth-natured chakra. It clashed with his own Yin-natured spiritual energy, bubbling and frothing.
Ren felt the man's soul—his ego, his identity—being pulled through the connection points in his palms. It was viscous. It tasted like soil, like iron, like regret.
Stop, Ren tried to scream in his own mind. It's too much! I'm going to burst!
But the Hunger wouldn't let go. It was a starved beast, and it had found meat. It chewed through the Commander's mental barriers, sucked the marrow from his memories, and stripped the knowledge from his muscle memory.
Ren felt the sensation of learning a jutsu—something that usually took months of practice—happening in nanoseconds. The hand signs, the chakra molding ratio, the feeling of the earth responding... it was being stamped onto his brain like a branding iron.
With a final, sickening slurp that echoed only in the spiritual plane, the connection severed.
The Iwa Commander dropped Ren.
Ren fell to the wet stone floor, gasping.
The Commander collapsed backward. He didn't move. He wasn't dead, not physically. His heart was beating. But his eyes were wide, empty, and vacuous. He was a husk. A formatted drive.
Ren crawled away, crashing into the opposite wall.
"Hrk—"
He vomited violently.
It was a purge of epic proportions. He threw up his rations, water, and bile, but it felt like he was vomiting up pieces of the man's soul he couldn't digest. The sensation of the little girl's laughter was stuck in his teeth. The memory of the wife's scent was coating his tongue.
Ren sat back, wiping his mouth with a trembling hand. Tears streamed down his face.
"What... what did I do?" he whispered.
He looked at his hands. They looked different. Stronger. The veins were pulsing with a chakra that felt foreign, heavy, and stable. The migraine was gone. In its place was a feeling of fullness, a grotesque satiety that made him feel heavy.
Ren, the voice in his head said. But it wasn't a voice. It was a memory. Sector 7. The bridge.
He shook his head violently. Get out. Get out of my head!
A scream from outside the fissure snapped him back to reality.
"KAITO!"
It was Sora.
Ren scrambled to his feet. He felt... taller? No, he just stood differently. His posture had shifted. He stood with the weight distribution of an Iwagakure Earth user, grounded and solid. It wasn't conscious. His body just knew how to do it now.
He ran out of the fissure.
The battlefield was a massacre. The surviving Iwagakure ninja—seven of them—had cornered Kaito and Sora against the cliff face. Kaito was on one knee, blood streaming from his forehead, his kunai broken. Sora was shielding him, snarling like a cornered wolf, but she was exhausted.
Three Iwa ninja began to weave hand signs in unison.
"Earth Style: Earth Flow River!"
The ground beneath Kaito and Sora turned into a rapid river of mud, sweeping them off their feet and carrying them toward a jagged pit of spikes the enemy had prepared.
"No!" Ren screamed.
He sprinted. He didn't run like Ren the Battery. He ran with the explosive step of the Iwa Commander. He reached the edge of the mud river.
He needed to stop it. He needed a wall.
Ren's hands flew together. He didn't have to think about the signs. His fingers danced through them with a terrifying familiarity. Tiger. Snake. Rat. Snake. Tiger.
He slammed his palms onto the mud.
"Earth Style: Earth Shore Return!"
He didn't scream the name of the jutsu to announce it. He said it because the memory told him that's how it was done.
RUMBLE.
A massive slab of solid rock, three meters thick and ten meters high, erupted from the ground in front of Kaito and Sora. It wasn't a hastily made wall; it was a fortification. The rock was dense, reinforced with the perfect chakra ratio he had stolen.
The mud river slammed into the wall and diverted, washing harmlessly to the sides. The spikes were buried.
Silence fell over the battlefield.
The Iwa ninjas stopped, staring at the wall. It bore the stylistic markings of Iwagakure masonry—perfectly square, smooth, and imposing.
"That style..." one of the enemy Chunin whispered. "That's... Commander Goro's signature defense."
Kaito and Sora looked up, shivering and muddy, to see who had saved them.
Ren stood atop the wall he had created. He was panting, steam rising from his skin. His eyes were wide, the pupils dilated. He looked down at his hands, then at the enemy.
He felt the remaining chakra in his system—Goro's chakra. He had enough for one more move.
"Retreat!" Ren shouted. His voice cracked, sounding terrified, but the authority of the stolen memories gave it a strange weight. "Go! Now!"
The Iwa ninjas hesitated. They saw the wall. They sensed the chakra signature of their Commander coming from this scrawny Leaf boy. Confusion bought seconds.
"Who are you?" an Iwa Jonin shouted, stepping forward.
Ren didn't answer. He didn't know the answer.
He jumped down behind the wall, grabbing Kaito and Sora by their collars.
"Run," Ren hissed, dragging them toward the narrow ravine path he had seen in Goro's memories—the escape route the Commander had planned to use if things went south.
"Ren?" Kaito stared at him, bewildered. "You... you used Earth Style? Since when do you have Earth nature?"
"Just run!" Ren screamed, the nausea returning in a second wave.
They ran. They scrambled through the dark, guided by Ren's stolen map, leaving the confused enemy behind.
As they put distance between themselves and the slaughter, Ren could still taste it. Not the mud. Not the blood.
He could taste the Iwa Commander's love for his daughter. It was sweet, like peaches. And it was slowly dissolving into the acid of Ren's own mind, fueling his muscles, knitting his bruised ribs, and powering his heart.
He was running, but he wasn't just Ren anymore. He was something else. Something that had tasted human soul and found it... useful.
And God help him, he was still hungry.