Thunder was the first thing Akio remembered, but not as sound. It was vibration, something that lived inside the bones and made the wet sand beneath his cheek feel like it was pulsing with the sky. The air tasted of salt and metal, of rain that hadn't fallen yet but was already promised. His mouth was full of grit. His tongue felt thick, his throat raw, and when he tried to swallow he realized he didn't have enough spit to make it easy. The waves rolled in close, cold water sliding over his fingers and then retreating, leaving them trembling and numb. Somewhere beyond the steady undulation of the tide, there was a presence that didn't move like wind or water. It pressed without touching. It watched without eyes. It was the same pressure he'd felt when the hospital corridor had dissolved and the shoreline had replaced it, the same measured inevitability that made his stomach twist because it wasn't threat in the way he understood threat. It was the ocean deciding what the ocean was going to do. It was staring into the abyss and the abyss staring back.
He tried to push himself up and immediately regretted it. Pain flared through his ribs, a hot line that made him hiss and then choke on the sound because it hurt to even breathe. The instinctive part of him wanted to reach for a med-kit that wasn't there, wanted to check his injuries, wanted to take control of the situation the way he always had in the village, in missions, in hospital wards. But the other part of him, the part that had learned the hard way that control was not a given, recognized the truth before his eyes could even focus. Yong was there.
He was seated beside him in the wet sand, legs stretched out, his posture calm in a way that should have been infuriating. Akio could see blood on him, scratches, the evidence that he'd been hurt by Akio's own hands, but that small proof that he wasn't wholly insignificant didn't feel like victory. It felt like a child throwing stones at the sea and being surprised when the sea didn't care. Yong's face was turned slightly toward the surf, cigarette smoke curling up and then tearing apart in the wind. The ember glowed and dimmed as he drew in, then exhaled slowly, as if he was letting time pass through his lungs on purpose.
Akio blinked, and the world shifted again. He felt the heaviness in his limbs, the deep exhaustion that wasn't just physical but spiritual, the kind that made it hard to remember what he had been angry about in the first place. The old woman's face floated up in his mind anyway, uninvited, followed by the flatline tone and then the certainty he'd had when he'd called Yong a monster. That certainty felt less solid now. It still burned, but it had cracks. He hated that it had cracks. He hated that the cracks were there because of what he'd seen in the fight, because of what he'd felt when Yong could have ended him and didn't.
"So be it." Yong said quietly, not looking down at him. Akio wanted to answer. He wanted to say something sharp, something defiant, something that proved he hadn't been broken. But his jaw felt like it weighed too much. His body refused him. His eyelids fluttered as if they were too heavy to lift.
The Senju couldn't tell if it was minutes or hours or days because the shoreline did not change the way the village changed. There was only storm and surf and the patient, endless rhythm of waves crashing against jagged rocks like the world repeating the same lesson until it finally sank in. Akio tried to fight that lesson at first. He tried to hate it. He kept the Will of Fire burning bright in his chest, the way Grandpa Itsuki had spoken about it, warm and shared and protective. He tried to keep his simple morality.
"Good people protect others. Monsters kill the helpless. Shinobi should stand up to evil and do the right thing." The ocean didn't care about simple morality. Yong didn't either. He'd learn that in the months that followed.
Time passed.
And day by day, so did the very world he and Yong now lived within. Akio woke fully, but not on the beach. It was rain on his face, heavy drops that stung his skin and ran down into his eyes. He was standing ankle deep in water between wooden pilings, the smell of fish and wet rope and salt so thick it coated his tongue. Lanterns swung overhead in a small fishing village, their light fractured by the sheets of rain. Children were huddled inside a hut, small silhouettes pressed together like they were trying to become one body so they could be less afraid. Akio's heart clenched at the sight before he even understood why he was there. He looked down at his hands and saw the faint pulse of chakra beneath the skin, steady but controlled, like his body had been dragged from the edge of collapse and set back on its feet whether he agreed or not. He was there to
learn.
Outside the hut, shapes moved in the surf. They looked...
wrong. Scaled and gilled, eyes black as tar, their limbs too long, their movement too smooth. They came in low, lunging between the pilings with a rhythm that didn't match any animal Akio had ever treated or fought. The first one snapped at his shin, and Akio barely moved in time, the motion more instinct than decision. He brought his forearm down hard, wood flaring up from the planks beneath his feet in a sharp twist that caught the creature mid-lunge and flung it back into the water.
He was already moving before he realized he was moving. He could hear Yong's voice inside the hut, calm and measured, telling a story. Not a mission brief, not a command, a story. The kind that made children stop crying because it gave them something else to hold onto. Akio's first reaction was anger.
"Why is he inside with them while I'm out here fighting? Why am I the the one in the rain taking teeth and claws?" He tried to step toward the door to demand an answer, but the creatures surged again and forced him back. Wood rose from the docks in jagged bursts, barriers forming at angles, roots twisting up through gaps in the planks. He felt the familiar pull of the forest beneath him, not the hospital's sterile tiles but the living network that had always answered him. His breathing steadied as he found his rhythm, strikes efficient, controlled, his body adapting in ways his sixteen year old self had never learned without yelling first.
One creature slipped past his barrier and lunged toward the hut. Akio's stomach dropped. He didn't think, he moved. He shoved chakra into the wood under his feet and felt the structure respond, not like a weapon but like a limb. It stretched, snapped forward, and pinned the creature to a piling hard enough that the wood splintered. The creature screamed, and the sound was so high and shrill and wet that it made his skin crawl. Normally he might have called upon his allies, his contract summons that supported him through thick and thin. Those allies could not be called in this world. Here, his chakra was already changing, even his natural Senju energy slowly gaining weight. Where it was once bright and shining and golden, it was like there was a slick of dark water coating it. So instead, Akio stepped in close and ended it with a clean strike, then turned back to the water just in time to see more shapes gathering in the surf.
He glanced toward the hut again, rain in his eyes, and caught a glimpse of Yong sitting with the children around him. The adults were in the doorway, tense and ready to run or fight, but Yong's posture didn't change. His voice remained even. He spoke about bravery and cunning and the way storms passed eventually, not because storms were merciful, but because storms were storms and storms had limits. Akio hated how much that calm steadied him. Even as he acted, he abhorred the idea of hurting animals, if these creatures could even be called animals. But the lives of those children weighed even heavier on his soul.
"Violence is inevitable." Akio thought, and the thought made his throat tighten because it wasn't resignation... it was recognition. These creatures didn't care about his morals. They didn't care about the village. They came because they came, and if he didn't stop them, the children inside would become bodies. It was that simple.
He fought for hours, or maybe it was days. It was hard to tell in this place. The sun never rose. The rain never let up. His muscles burned, then numbed, then burned again. He learned to move without wasting motion. He learned to stop trying to feel heroic and start trying to be effective. When the creatures finally retreated, it wasn't because he'd proven a point. It was because they'd lost enough that their hunger shifted elsewhere. And finally, when the village fell quiet, Akio staggered toward the hut, dripping water and blood. The door slid open before he could touch it. Yong met him with that same steady gaze and offered him a towel without a word. The children peered around him, eyes wide, and one of them smiled at Akio like he was something safe.
Akio's anger fizzled in the face of that smile. He took the towel and wiped rain from his face, then looked at Yong.
"You didn't help," he said, voice rough. Yong's expression didn't change.
"I did," he replied.
"I helped the children stay children." Akio wanted to argue. He wanted to say that fighting was also helping, that protection was protection. But he could still feel the creature's claws scraping his shin, could still hear the wet scream, could still see the moment it almost got past him. He thought of the children's faces. He thought of how they hadn't seen any of that. How they'd heard stories instead.
"Protect children above everything else," he thought, and for the first time the lesson didn't sound like the harsh darkness he saw when he first met this man.
Time passed.
A fire burned low on a tropical island, the air warm and thick, the smell of smoke and cooked meat mixing with salt. The waves here were gentle, rolling in with a steady rhythm that made Akio feel like the world was breathing instead of roaring. He and Yong sat across from each other near the shoreline, both of them marked with minor cuts and bruises that suggested a fight had happened and then been swallowed by the night. Akio's hands moved automatically as he skewered pieces of meat over the flames, his fingers steady in a way they hadn't been months ago, before day after day of surviving on what he earned. He realized, with a quiet surprise, that he wasn't trembling anymore. Not like those days at the start.
Behind them, half submerged in the surf, lay the carcass of a sea monster. It was immense, its hide glistening where water pooled along it, its jaw open as if it had died mid-breath. Akio remembered the fight in flashes. The way the monster had surged up from the water, the way Yong had stepped aside rather than in front, letting Akio take the first exchange. He had panicked at first, then found his footing, then found the line where fear gave way to focus, where his emotions became calculations. That line was where the student was guided, deliberately, by the teacher he was slowly starting to understand.
They ate in silence for a while, listening to the crackle of fire and the soft hush of waves. Akio kept glancing at the monster behind them, the proof of violence sitting there like an offering. He thought of the hospital again, of how death had been quiet there, clinical, a machine tone and then silence. Here, death was huge and obvious and impossible not to see. It was them or us. It was
unavoidable.
"Was it evil...? The monster." Akio asked suddenly, surprising himself with the question. Yong didn't answer right away. He chewed slowly, swallowed, then looked out at the horizon as if the ocean might respond for him.
"It was hungry," he said. Akio stared at the fire. The monster had attacked them, tried to kill them. It had been terrifying. He wanted it to be evil because evil was simple. Evil meant he didn't have to think. Evil meant he could do what he had to do and still feel clean afterward. But hungry wasn't evil. Hungry was a
fact.
"Evil is based on how you look at it...", Akio thought, and the thought didn't comfort him. It made him feel like the ground under his feet was less solid than he'd believed, like his life and his beliefs were washing away like the sand on the shore of that endless beach. He had called Yong a monster because he'd believed he saw a monster. He had made that judgment with the same certainty he'd wanted to apply to the sea monster. And now, sitting on an island eating meat with the man he'd tried to kill for the sake of "good" and "doing what's right", that certainty looked less like righteousness and more like desperation.
Time passed.
Ancient trees stretched across a forest floor that smelled of damp earth and rot. Akio crouched with three armored shinobi from a village he didn't recognize, their positions spread and deliberate. They communicated with brief gestures and glances that told Akio more than words ever could. He moved with them as if he'd trained alongside them for years, matching their rhythm, anticipating their movements, filling gaps without being asked. There was a strange satisfaction in that, a quiet pride that didn't need to be shouted. Then the undead appeared.
They surged from the darkness, animals and villagers twisted into something wrong, their eyes empty, their bodies moving with the jerky persistence of things that refused to accept death. The first wave hit like a tide. Akio's wood erupted from the ground in controlled bursts, barriers forming to redirect attacks, roots snapping up to pin limbs, splintered beams twisting into blunt weapons. He didn't waste energy on fancy displays. He moved like someone who understood that pretty techniques didn't stop teeth.
One shinobi drew the horde inward. Another cleared flanking paths. Akio reinforced the center, shifting constantly, reading the flow of bodies like he'd read the flow of patients in the hospital, triage not of wounds but of threats. His breathing stayed even. His mind stayed focused. Still, the pressure mounted. The undead did not get tired or hesitate or fear. One ally fell. Then another was dragged under. A cry was lost in the mist, swallowed by the wet sounds of bodies tearing at bodies. Akio's chest tightened, a familiar surge of panic rising as he tried to move to them, tried to help, tried to save. He got there too late. He always got there too late in these moments. The corpses he'd tried to protect became part of the horde, turned against them without remorse. Akio's jaw clenched so hard his teeth ached. This wasn't fair. Every instinct in him wanted to scream that they were good people, that they didn't deserve this, that their lives were supposed to
mean something. But the undead didn't care about meaning. They just kept coming.
A sudden impact shook the canopy above. Akio looked up and saw, through leaves and mist, the silhouette of a massive undead dragon tearing through treetops, its rotting wings scattering branches. For a single terrible moment, he saw Yong in the air, then saw the dragon slam into him, smashing him out of the sky. Akio shouted, lunging forward. The undead surged between him and the sight. Bodies slammed into him, claws and teeth and dead weight, and he had to fight just to keep standing. He couldn't reach Yong. He couldn't see Yong. The canopy swallowed the sky again. Akio's breathing turned ragged. His vision narrowed. Panic clawed at him because this time it wasn't civilians. It wasn't nameless patients. It was Yong, the man who had been dragging him through these lessons for what felt like forever. He realized, with a jolt, that he didn't want Yong to die. He didn't fully understand Yong, but he knew he didn't want him gone.
"Do what you think you gotta do, damn the rules or consequences," Akio thought, and the thought wasn't heroic. It was ugly. It was the same thought that made med-nin cut into flesh without anesthesia when there was no time, the same thought that made shinobi set traps in places civilians might walk if it meant stopping an enemy force. It wasn't clean, and it wasn't pretty. It was necessity. Akio shoved more chakra into his wood than he knew was safe. Roots exploded from the forest floor with violent force, ripping undead bodies apart, barriers spearing upward, splinters flying. He didn't aim for elegance. He aimed for space. He aimed for survival. He aimed to reach the place where Yong had fallen even if it meant tearing the world open to do it.
When he finally broke through, panting and bleeding, the forest had changed. The mist had thinned. The undead dragon was gone. Yong was standing in the clearing as if he'd never fallen at all, cigarette already lit, eyes calm. Akio froze, fury surging in his chest.
"You let me think you died," he said, voice shaking. Yong watched him without flinching.
"Death is inevitable." Yong replied, flat and simple and straightforward. Akio hated him in that moment. He hated the lesson. He hated that the shinobi world could make him feel this kind of relief and rage and guilt all at once. He hated that he'd been willing to tear the forest apart to reach Yong, because that meant Yong mattered to him in a way he hadn't admitted.
"Death is inevitable..." Akio repeated the words in his mind, and he realized the lesson wasn't about the undead. It was about him, and what he chose when the world forced his hand.
Time passed.
Lantern light spilled across a festival street, glowing reds and golds reflecting off polished stone and laughing, inhuman faces. Akio and Yong ran side by side through the crowd, breathless and grinning, their arms full of absurd prizes. Akio wore a bright kimono patterned with crooked waves and ridiculous frogs, and he hated how much it suited him. He could feel the old version of himself in that laughter, the boy who had believed the world could be made better if he just cared hard enough.
They were being chased by angry oni and snarling yokai, clubs raised, curses shouted. Akio dodged a swinging umbrella that snapped its mouth like teeth and laughed so hard he almost tripped. Yong's laughter was quieter, rarer, but it existed, and somehow, to Akio, that made it more valuable in a way he didn't fully understand. They turned a corner and slid behind a stall, breathing hard, prizes rattling. Akio pressed a hand over his mouth to stop himself from laughing too loudly. The oni thundered past, still shouting.
When it was quiet again, Akio's smile faded a little as he looked at Yong.
"Why are we doing this?" he asked. Yong's eyes flicked toward a group of children in the crowd, laughing as they chased a hopping lantern spirit.
"Because they should get to in the little time they have left to. You should get to be a child. It's not long now." Yong said simply. Akio followed his gaze. The children were small, bright, carefree. They didn't look like shinobi. They didn't look like weapons. They looked like what people were supposed to be before the world sharpened them into something harder. He realized that this moment was him crossing over that bridge.
Time passed.
A sun bleached sky hung over a stone causeway half sunk into a long dry riverbed. Cracked pillars lined the path, etched with symbols worn smooth by age and wind. No enemies came. No allies arrived. Akio walked alone, the heat pressing down despite the sunless sky, his footsteps echoing off stone that felt dead under his sandals. He raised his hand and called wood from the stone at his feet. It crept out slow and imperfect, splitting rock with a quiet strain. Then it collapsed, the structure turning brittle, grey, and wrong. Then it fell apart like ash.
Akio stared at it, breath shallow. He tried again. The same thing happened. The wood that answered him here did not feel alive. It felt like something pretending, something drained. It reminded him of bodies in the hospital ward, of skin pale and unresponsive, of the way a heart monitor could show life while the person behind it was already slipping away. He swallowed hard and kept walking. He didn't say anything. There was nothing to say. The lesson here was not a lecture. It was absence. It was the reminder that power did not always answer the way it had before. That being a Senju did not guarantee the world would cooperate. It also made him realize, quietly, that he'd been taking that cooperation for granted.
"Greed is the worst sin, never take more than you need," he thought, remembering the words that Yong had spoken countless times, and in this moment he hated how the thought fit. The lesson came naturally to him. Akio had never been materialistic. He valued the intangible things in life, and life itself. So it was easy to agree when he thought about the wealthy, hoarding resources or food or money. But the reality is that he'd been greedy himself. He realized that in his certainty, and perceived righteousness, and belief that if he wanted something badly enough, the world owed him the ability to achieve it he'd been feeding his own kind of greed.
Time passed.
The tea house was small and perfect, tatami mats clean, expensive tables gleaming, sliding doors open to a garden bathed in moonlight. Akio sat across from Yong, older now in ways that did not show only in his face. His shoulders were broader. His posture was steadier. His eyes did not flare with emotion as quickly, but when they did, the emotion was heavier, contained like a storm behind glass. Two cups of green tea sat untouched between them.
"It's beautiful… But tell me, what else do you see?" Yong asked, voice calm, precise.
Akio's gaze moved through the room without hurry. He didn't answer immediately. He let himself feel the space first, the warmth, the faint scent of tea, the softness of the tatami beneath his knees. He let himself notice the garden's details, the way the stones were placed, the way the leaves barely moved. He let himself recognize the faint pressure in the air that had become familiar over the years, the deep ocean presence that never fully left, even in places that looked like land. He thought of the hospital. He thought of the old woman. He thought of his own certainty. He thought of all the times he'd accused without knowing. All the times he'd insisted he was right because he needed to be right to justify his anger. It felt like years ago. It
was years ago.
Akio finally reached for the tea, not to drink, but to feel the warmth of the cup between his fingers. The porcelain was smooth. The heat seeped into his skin. He set it down again carefully.
"I see a place that wants me to relax," he said, voice low.
"I see a room that's too clean to trust." His eyes lifted to Yong.
"I see you watching me to see what I ignore." He paused, then looked toward the garden.
"I see that there's no one here to protect." The words came out without bitterness. Just fact. He remembered the fishing village, the rain, the creatures. He remembered Yong telling stories to children while Akio fought. He remembered how angry it had made him, and how right it had been.
"And..." Akio continued, quieter now,
"...that I still don't know if you lied about her. I still don't know if I was wrong to believe what I saw."
His throat tightened. He found that he the words didn't sound right out loud. And a part of him hated that it still mattered to him. He could feel the Will of Fire in his chest, still there, still warm, but it no longer flared into childish emotion like it used to. It was steadier now, and more controlled. He'd learned that burning too bright too fast just made ash. Yong didn't interrupt, he just waited, steam still slowly rising from his cup.
Akio exhaled slowly, and as he did, he felt his Natural Energy stir beneath his skin. It had changed over the years in ways he hadn't wanted to admit. At sixteen, Natural Energy had felt like something holy, bright in its own way even when it was heavy, like the forest breathing through him. But here, in the realm of the Goddess of Deep Waters, under the pressure of this place, it had become something else. It was still powerful. It was still pure in the sense that it was not chakra. But it no longer felt like sunlight. It felt like darkness, but not the kind that meant evil. Darkness that meant depth... because light simply couldn't reach that far down. It pressed inward, calm and clinical, and there were moments now when he felt it tug at him with a quiet hunger that made him uneasy. He didn't want to call it corruption. That was too simple. The ocean didn't care about simple. And now,
neither did he.
Instead of acknowledging it aloud, Akio continued,
"I see that I've gotten better at fighting. Better at choosing where to put my strength. Better at not wasting my energy yelling." A faint, self-directed single puff of a laugh escaped him.
"I see that you've been trying to teach me to make choices without pretending the world cares about my reasons." He looked down at his hands, callused and scarred. The marks of years that were not his village's years, but years nonetheless.
"And I see that I'm not the same as I came in." The last words sat heavy between them, but Akio didn't look away. Yong's gaze remained steady.
"Then show me," he said.
Then the pressure deepened, and before Akio could even draw a full breath, it was gone.
The warmth vanished. The mist collapsed. The garden, the tea house, the quiet space between questions simply ceased to exist. Fluorescent light stabbed into his eyes as the Konohagakure hospital corridor snapped back around them, sterile air burning his lungs as sound rushed in all at once. Beeping monitors, distant voices, footsteps echoing off tile. Akio stood where he had fallen, upright now without remembering the act of standing, his balance steady in a body that felt heavier than it should have. His hands looked the same at a glance, but they didn’t feel the same. Neither did the energy beneath his skin, no longer warm or bright, but deep and dense and watching, like the ocean waiting beneath calm water. Thirty days had passed here.
Five years had passed in him. Akio lifted his gaze to Yong, jaw set, breath slow, and in that instant the boy who had charged into a hospital room was gone, replaced by a man that was quieter, older, and far less certain that the world owed him simple. After all...
The ocean doesn't care about simple.
[Before|After]
[Word Count] 4696
[Unlearning Archsage]
[Learning Dark Sage]
