The Tenjō Temple sat on a spine of rock so high the air tasted of iron and thin silence. Here, the Land of Waterfalls lived up to its name, though the water did not fall; it drifted, a perpetual shroud of mountain mist that turned the world into a series of charcoal sketches.
Arahata sat on the edge of a crumbling torii gate, his legs dangling over a three-thousand-foot drop. He wasn't looking at the view. To him, there was no such thing as a "view." There was only the Grid.
Beneath his eyelids, even closed, the world hummed. Every raindrop held a trajectory. Every gust of wind was a mathematical variable.
"You've been standing there for three minutes, Kaze-kun," Arahata said. He didn't turn around. "Your heart rate suggests you're undecided between a throat strike and an explosive tag. I should warn you—the tag misfires in forty-two percent of the futures I'm currently observing. The dampness, you see."
The man in the shadows, a Takigakure Hunter-nin, froze. He shifted his grip on his tantō. "The Tenjō demon. We were told you stopped looking at the world."
Arahata opened his eyes.
The iris was a pale, icy blue, but as the Jūgan woke, three golden, crystalline rings rippled outward from his pupil. They didn't spin like a Sharingan; they vibrated, refracting the grey light into a thousand prismatic shards.
"I never stopped," Arahata sighed, his voice melodic and drained of all urgency. "I just stopped caring which version of the world actually happens."
The Hunter-nin moved—a blur of Shunjin speed. He was a professional, an S-rank tracker who had spent years perfecting a silent kill. His blade arched toward the back of Arahata's neck.
Arahata didn't move. He didn't reach for a kunai. He didn't even stand up.
The blade passed through the space where Arahata's neck should have been, but Arahata was suddenly sitting six inches to the left, still in the same casual posture. There had been no movement, no puff of smoke, no flicker of chakra.
The Hunter-nin stumbled, his momentum betrayed. He slashed again, a wide horizontal arc. Again, Arahata was simply elsewhere—positioned precisely in the negative space the blade missed.
"Kūkan no Mugen," Arahata whispered, watching the ninja's panicked sweat. "You are trying to hit where I am. You should be trying to hit where I could be. But even then... I'd just choose to be somewhere else."
"Die!" the ninja roared, weaving signs. Suiton: Water Drill!
A spiral of high-pressure water erupted from the mist. It was a certain kill. The probability of survival was near zero.
Arahata's Jūgan pulsed.
The water drill hit the air in front of him and—inexplicably—deflected at a ninety-degree angle, striking a nearby stone pillar. Arahata's hand was outstretched, fingers slightly curled as if plucking a string.
"Sonzai no Kama," Arahata murmured. "In one version of the next three seconds, your technique had a slight cavitation error in the pressure seal. I simply made that version... the only version."
He hopped down from the torii gate. As he moved, the white haori shifted, revealing the edge of a jagged, pitch-black stain creeping up from beneath his collar, branching like lightning across his collarbone. It throbbed with a dull, sickly heat.
The price for rewriting the "Is" with the "Could Be."
The Hunter-nin collapsed, not because he was wounded, but because the psychological weight of fighting someone who existed in four dimensions was paralyzing. "What are you?"
"A mistake of perception," Arahata said. He walked past the man, his footsteps making no sound on the wet stone. "You should leave. In approximately twelve minutes, a rockslide will claim this path. If you stay to finish your mission, you are in it. If you run now, you have a seventy-four percent chance of seeing your daughter again."
The ninja stared at him, eyes wide. "How do you know about my daughter?"
Arahata stopped and looked back, his golden rings glowing with a terrifying, intimate light. "I can see the thread of her in your structure, Kaze-kun. She has your chin. She also has a fever. Go."
The ninja didn't wait. He fled into the mist.
Arahata watched him go, then winced, clutching his chest. The black stain on his skin felt like it was made of broken glass. Every use of the Jūgan shortened the distance between him and the end. He looked at his own hand; he could see the fading probability branches of his own life. They were thinning, merging into a single, dark line.
"Is he gone?"
A new voice drifted through the temple ruins.
Arahata turned. A woman stood near the entrance of the main hall. She wore the dark mesh of a shinobi, but her eyes were covered by a thick, silk blindfold. She carried no visible weapons, but her posture was as steady as the mountain itself.
"Mei-chan," Arahata said, the corner of his mouth twitching into a ghost of a smile. "He left. He chose his daughter over his village. A predictable collapse of duty."
Kurogane Mei stepped forward, her cane tapping rhythmically against the stone. To Arahata's eyes, she was a void. Because she could not see him, the Jūgan struggled to calculate how she perceived him. She was a 'Dark Zone'—a hole in his absolute certainty.
"You're shaking, Arahata," she said, her voice soft.
"I'm observing my own death," he replied casually. "It's very detailed today. It involves a lot of grey light and the smell of ozone. Very poetic."
"You could stop," she said, reaching the edge of the torii where he stood. "You could close your eyes. You could just... be."
Arahata looked at her, his Jūgan drinking in the impossibility of her blindness. "The sky is empty because it holds everything, Mei. I tried to be empty. I tried to refuse to hold anything."
He reached out, his hand hovering inches from her blindfold, feeling the heat of her skin—a variable he hadn't forced, an outcome he hadn't dictated.
"But then I realized," he whispered, "that refusing to hold the world is just another way of clenching your fist against it. I am still holding on. Even now. I'm holding onto the certainty that I will die, because I'm too afraid to see a future where I don't."
Mei reached out, her hand finding his sleeve, then sliding down to his cold fingers. "Come inside. The rain is about to start."
"I know," Arahata said, his eyes tracking the billions of drops suspended in the clouds above, waiting for the one version of reality where they finally fell. "In six seconds. Exactly."
They stood there in the silence, and six seconds later, the world began to weep.