Heart of Fire ~ prologue 1 ~ 'Ain't no rest for the Wicked...'

[Wee Yong]

The Konoha marketplace never truly slept.

Even as the sun dipped below the rooftops, lanterns flickered along the wooden stalls and the scent of spices and fresh bread lingered in the air. Merchants called out their wares, children darted between legs, and the occasional shinobi moved silently among the crowd. Life carried on in its habitual rhythm, unremarkable and steady.

That was when the procession began.

Foxes, weasels, wolves, and other predatory spirits entered the streets with measured steps. Their fur was dull in the lantern light. Eyes lowered, heads bowed, each one holding a small paper lantern that swayed with every slow movement. A single drum sounded from somewhere unseen, its deep, resonant thump marking each footfall. The procession was deliberate, somber, and utterly silent aside from the drum.

They moved between stalls and through the crowd as though the humans were not there. Not one person could see them, yet the air shifted, heavy and almost sacred.

At the end of the line came the fox mother.

She moved awkwardly on her hind legs, her mourning kimono swaying over frail limbs. A small hand cart trailed behind her, carrying a peaceful-looking young fox wrapped in white cloth. Its eyes were closed as though in deep sleep. She paused briefly, head bowed, her breath soft and ragged.

As the procession passed, the crowd began to change. Confusion crept over faces. Merchants lost track of their wares. Children forgot where their parents stood. Lovers could not find one another. An inexplicable melancholy seeped into hearts like water into dry earth. People slowed, whispered, and glanced around, sensing that something was profoundly wrong but unable to speak it aloud.

The drumbeat continued, steady and unyielding.

When the fox mother reached the center of the marketplace, the ground beneath her shifted. Lines of faintly glowing geometry spiraled outward, forming a vast alchemical circle that encompassed the entire square. The air felt dense, charged with something old and deliberate, wrapping every soul in its invisible embrace.

The humans’ confusion deepened, now softened into quiet sorrow. They dropped to their knees, hugged themselves, and wept in silence. No shouting, no chaos, only a pervasive sadness that hung over the marketplace like a low-hanging fog.

The fox mother lowered her cart gently, placing the young fox in the circle’s center. She knelt beside it, awkward on her hind legs, and began to cry. Her sobs were soft but echoed through the hearts of all around.

The other predatory spirits took positions at the edges of the market, perching on stalls, fences, rooftops, and carts. They watched with solemn attention, unwavering and still. Their heads were bowed, their lanterns held low. No one could see them, yet their presence pressed upon the living with undeniable weight.

The sorrow lingered, thick and heavy. The market had become a place of mourning, a quiet cathedral formed in streets of stone and wood. The fox mother’s tears fell slowly, and the air held them as if the world itself had paused to grieve.

And still, the procession remained, patient and unwavering, leaving the marketplace suspended between the living and the unseen.


[Ooc: This is for a mini event being run by Nao and I, please feel free to join and interact. Do whatever you like in the scene, feel free to discover the animals however you please, jutsu, magic, past trauma opening a third eye to the spirit realm, whatever! (Tip From Nao if you don't know anything like that: NE Jutsu Crystal eye)

The people all feel sad.

Please do not hurt the spirit animals or have them say anything. If you wish to fight them (which you definitely can) end your rp at the moment before conflict.

Most of all... Have Fun!!!

And remember this truth, every action has an equal and opposite reaction...

There is definitely more to come!!!]

 

[Kaguya Mitsuha]

Her own mind had slipped. Her own careful planning to try and remember her own painful past as a way to not turn into an emotionless puppet weapon. She had focused too much on her own work and it had taken her. Mitsuha's eyes went from blue to red, an indication that she is now in an emotionless state. Her now puppet mind looked at the things in front of her to compute what she needs. Materials. She needs materials for a project. Getting up and walking out of her empty home, she would make her way to the Oak district, and more so, the market.

The puppet would go into a shop and grab the necessary components that would get her closer to her goal of.... She cocked her head to the side, trying to remember what it is that she needs these components for. Most of these are for the living, breathing human beings, not machines like her. Nevertheless, the human puppet would go to the store clerk and buy the items. It was when she turned away from him that he seemed to be effected by something, though she hadn't noticed.

Once she walked out of the store, she stopped dead in her tracks as she was registering what was happening here. The human puppet would scan around to see the general population in the market behaving strangely. Crying and hugging one another. It was peculiar to see such a thing and she would guess that it would be the cause of some outside force. But upon looking around,

nothing seemed wrong, at least, nothing physical. Mitsuha would set down her materials and form handseals and a crystal eye would form above the marketplace to look at things. Such a jutsu has a better chance of seeing things better than the naked eye.

She would also summon one of her puppets and fuse into it, "Rika." She would merely say. This puppet would help her with close combat situations. Not that it should be a problem as any close combat situations she can use any and all puppet weaponry at close range with deadly accuracy.

She would look around, with the help of her Crystal eye, and then see it. A procession made up of animals that seem ethereal. When she seen them, she felt a headache, her eyes would shift from red, to blue, then back to red again. Regaining her composure, she would approach the seemingly spirit animals. "You are the ones causing emotional dissonance for the human population here." She said it as if she was stating a fact. "Why?" Depending on what their answer is, the puppet would summon a rapier that was in a hidden compartment within the right sleeve of this puppet. Would these spirits be able to talk? Mitsuha has come to the assumption that they should be able to if she is right about assuming that they are behind what is happening right now.

 

[Senju Akio]

Akio came into the marketplace from the direction of the Sakurako compound. Nao had collapsed, harder than Akio wanted to admit even now, and leaving him behind in Yong's care had been necessary in the same way amputation sometimes was. You hated it. But you did it anyway. Thirty days since they had left to the shoreline. His month away from the village had taken its toll. It changed Konoha, like the five years he experienced had changed him. Akio carried that difference with him in the way he moved.

The square felt... wrong. Not under attack, at least not in the usual sense. But it was quieter than it should have been, and that silence pressed in on itself, folding around the people gathered there like a held breath. Lanterns still swayed, stalls still stood, but the grief spreading through the people there was out in the open, heavy and unhidden. A woman knelt with her child clutched to her chest, rocking without sound. A man stared at the ground like he was waiting for it to open. It wasn't blood and fire and chaos like he'd faced in crater city, but it was equally unnerving. Akio slowed without thinking, his attention sliding into that familiar clinical focus he'd learned under Nao's direction, working in wards and sickrooms, and that was now further tempered by the restraint that he'd been gifted by Yong. If this had been an attack, there would be bodies already. This was something else.

The strange weather didn't help. The wind shifted in short, restless bursts, tugging at cloth and hair with no rhythm to it, the sky holding clouds in odd patterns like it hadn't decided what came next. Akio had felt that all day, the sense that the Leaf itself was out of step, that patterns were fraying in ways that didn't announce themselves unless you were in tune with nature the way that Akio was as a Senju, or until you started paying close attention. Then he heard her voice. "Mitsuha?" He didn't recognize the body at first. The figure near the center of the market moved with a precision that felt just slightly wrong, posture too controlled, weight not quite matching motion. "A puppet," his mind supplied, neutral and immediate. But when he noticed the puppet's chakra signature and that same familiar voice spoke again, the suspicion settled into certainty.

Akio didn't say her name right away. He watched instead. Watched the way her attention stayed fixed on something the civilians couldn't see. Watched the tension coiled in her stance, the readiness that said she was already deciding how to end this. The old version of him would have been right there with her, rushing to aid those people and greet his old friend, blade half drawn, heart already convinced that people needed an immediate reaction to anything causing this much pain. That version of him still existed somewhere. He just didn't let that emotional former self sit in the driver's seat anymore.

Akio stepped closer, his hands remaining loose, his breathing staying slow. He was ready to react, but this new version of Akio let his senses reach before his emotions did. As a sage, and especially as a Senju, Akio was more in touch with the flow of chakra than the average, even changed as he was. And he let that settle, using his ability to see through the senses of the very trees and grass and leaf give him a larger perspective on the market. And he saw the feminine fox, crying for a cause he didn't yet comprehend. "What is she?" The Senju asked quietly, voice pitched low, meant for Mitsuha and no one else. Only then did he glance toward the puppet, not scrutinizing her shell so much as acknowledging the person inside it. "You look different, Mitsuha..." he said simply, undercutting the fact that the sunny and smiling Senju she'd known just a month prior was now impossibly aged by five years. Akio had changed more than any person should in that short a time, both in the appearance of his physical body and in the way he carried himself. Gone was the brash and overemotional boy she'd known. That boy was replaced with a man who'd learned, after years spent under Yong's tutelage, to survive in the heaviest and darkest of places.

His gaze drifted over the civilians again, lingering on the children without conscious choice. No injuries. No panic. Fear, yes, but the kids were intact, and more importantly, alive. His jaw tightened as memory layered itself over observation. Rain, a fishing village, Yong telling stories to children while Akio fought monsters in the dark. How angry that had made him. How right it had been. "I don't think this spirit is hunting..." Akio murmured, his choice of words revealing the way he saw the world; in nature-bound terms. "And I don't think she's evil. If she was, we'd probably already be too late." After all, Akio had learned that evil is perspective. Most in Leaf would have seen Yong as evil. He was a missing-nin, marked for death on sight. But his mentor had proven himself something else entirely; wise in a way that Akio only hoped had rubbed off on himself. That truth sat heavy in his chest, but it didn't shake him anymore. It grounded him.

Akio reached up and tapped the communicator at his ear, eyes never leaving the square. "Yong," he said softly, keeping his tone even. "I'm at the market. Civilians here are affected. They don't have physical injuries... but..." He realized he didn't know how to describe what was happening to the market-goers, so he continued instead. "There's a fox spirit here. I think it's what's causing this. Something's wrong with her. She's crying." A pause. "Gonna find out more." He lowered his hand, exhaled once, slow, and then he turned to Mitsuha again. "Whatever's here wants something," he said. "Doesn't mean we should give it what it wants. But we should understand it before we decide how to stop this."

The Senju took a step towards the weeping fox mother and extended his hand. This technique required touch, but it had to be willing, and it was one that Mitsuha had seen before. After all, she'd experienced it herself. "Spirit... What's wrong? Let me understand." He said with authenticity. All throughout his life, Akio had loved nature. He made friends with animals, he tended to trees and gardens, he connected with the natural world and nurtured life in a way that most shinobi barely scratch the surface of. In fact, when he was young, alongside Grandpa Itsuki, he'd come upon a kit fox that had just lost its mother to the venom of a spider bite. He'd brought that fox milk, gave it sustenance, watched it grow until it could hunt and live on its own. So when he reached out, he reached out like he would if he did towards that scared little kit, and pleaded, "Connect with me. Please~." If allowed to, he would use the True Empathy that he'd learned to listen to, hoping to understand what this mother needed here.

[NOTE] True Empathy is a CRPJ. A link to my profile is in my signature, and the CRPJ is listed there in its own section.

 

[Wee Yong]

The humans of the market remained still. Their heads hung low, their breaths shallow, eyes distant. A quiet weight pressed down on the square, as if the sorrow around them had seeped into the stones beneath their feet. No one moved. No one spoke.

At the center of the circle, the fox mother stayed seated, tail curled against her side. In response to Mitsuha's question it only stared, head lowering slightly as Mitsuha spoke. She did not raise it again as her gaze shifted to Akio and his bold approach. As he came close she recoiled slightly from him before cautiously leaning forward, slowly lifting her nose and extending it toward his offered hand, as if to sniff it.

The slightly before her nose touched him though, both Akio and Mitsuha's perception's dissolved, spread to a thousand places.

A fox darted through a wheat field chasing rats. Two sharp gunshots rang out. It collapsed fast, fur ruffled and soaked in sweat and spreading blood, its mate froze at the edge of the stalks, ears twitching nervously.

A raccoon scaled a granary wall with its family, looking for spilled grain. A spring-loaded snare snapped shut around its mother’s neck. She struggled once, then went still, pinned against the wooden beams.

A crow swooped above a river, playing in the breeze. A slingstone struck its wing mid-flight. It tumbled into the water, flapping frantically before the current dragged it under.

A deer grazed in a forest clearing. Strange arrows whistled through the shadows and into trees. Its fawn bolted before it could be calmed, then it's neck caught a steel snare hidden in its path of escape. The wire tightened, silencing its panic.

A wolf and it's pups stalked near a chicken coop, hungry and focused. Crossbow bolts thudded into the dirt and timber around them. Pups scattered, the wolf ran. A pup screamed once before it fell on its side, the wolf did not look back.

The visions spun faster now, fragmented. Kits trapped in wire cages, raccoons ensnared in spring traps, birds struck mid-flight, foxes felled by rifles, wolves pierced by bolts. Shadows of humans were always present, always just out of focus, always the cause.

Finally, it slowed. A forest edge. The fox mother crouched in the underbrush, her panic obvious as she approached as close as she dared. Ahead, her small white kit struggled inside a chicken coop, trapped after finding a hole. A hole too small for her to follow, a hole too small for her child to escape. Sharp wire bit into its fur. A rifle cracked. The kit fell still. She could not reach it, only watch.

The vision ended abruptly, reality returning like a hammer.

The fox mother’s nose withdrew away from Akio’s hand. The visions would leave a lingering weight in their minds. Her eyes remained on Akio and Mitsuha, dark and steady, filled with sorrow and accusation.

Her voice entered both their minds simultaneously, slow, calm, and heavy with blame. Her mouth did not move, but her head tilted slightly down, adding menace to her stare.

“You watched them die.”
“You did this.”
“You did not know us, yet your hands were the end.”

The humans around the market remained frozen in sorrow. Slowly, one by one, they began to lay down where they stood. Their movements were deliberate but lethargic, as if the weight pressing upon them drained all will and energy. They sank to the ground, lying comfortably, letting sleep claim them.

“Their blood stayed.”
“It followed you down your roads and across your fields.”
"Followed you here."

With each person who settled, the alchemical circle pulsed dimly. Chakra from their bodies flowed into it, weaving into the circle and binding them in the quiet energy around the fox mother.

“As blood followed you, so did we.”

While the fox mother's attention held theirs, an old raccoon crept from the edge of the circle. It moved with slow caution and deliberate control, it's old paw reaching toward the concealed weapon in Mitsuha’s sleeve, testing, curious and unafraid. It knew what a weapon was...

The fox mother remained at the center, watching and patient, her dark eyes never leaving the pair of Shinobi in front of her.

The other animals waited.

Time was on their side, and the night was only young.



[Ooc: Akio and Mitsuha both of you experienced the visions, no special jutsu required.

The other animals are all just watching and waiting, though Mitsuha and Akio have their undivided attention.

Mitsuha, the old racoon WILL steal your stuff if you let it/don't stop it. Not just your weapon, ANY of your stuff!

If you want to do jutsu/attacks (which may or may not be a good idea) just specify anything used in a note after your posts, I will mod everyone but I already have your profiles so don't have to send anything.

If you are going to attack don't describe the outcome, I will rp any mods required to weave it into the story.

And finally... Thanks for joining ]

 

[Kaguya Mitsuha]

The puppet would turn its attention to Akio as he would say that she is different. "This form is merely from the powers of a human puppet. This is not my true form." She would take note of his own appearance. "Speaking of different, you yourself seem to have changed as well." He went on to talk about how that she can't be evil, and if she was, it would already be too late. "One can still be a threat and not be evil, based on their actions toward others."

But even as she said it, she would stay her blade as she let him take point and reach out to the fox spirit and use a technique that he has made himself to empathetically reach the fox spirit. She has experienced it before but never been dragged into it just by being in the vicinity of him using it.

As soon as the vision started, her eyes flickered from red to blue. Mitsuha looked around, almost confused at what was going on. She looked on as each vision would past by. She would understand what was happening. In the eyes of the animals, humans are the enemies.

Finally, the vision ended and she blinked and they were back in the market. There was a spiritual racoon that was near her, inspecting the current puppet body that she was fused in, knowing that there was a weapon in a hidden compartment in the body.

She would jump onto a nearby rooftop and then speak, "You seek retribution." She would say. A puppet would fall out of her body out into the market below as she would control it from afar. Her eyes darted to and from each body that seems to be used as a catalyst in this circle. Her puppet was far enough away from the spirit racoon as her chakra strings would attached to it. She would hope that Akio would realize what she is doing. The puppet would be used to attempt to move the nearest body out of the alchemical circle.

Her mind is back and she thought about the safety of the citizens as she thought about her next words, "I had once attempted to seek retribution as well." Her voice soft, but carried to those that can hear it. "I was filled with grief. That grief then turned to unbound rage. Through that rage, I was blind to those around me. Lost everything close to me because I chose to hold onto grief turned anger. I even lost my own humanity, my own body, and even at some points.... My own emotions." She would talk to both calm the spirit animals, along with hopefully get the people out of the alchemical circle as discreetly as possible.

"After you seek retribution, all there will be left is an empty void."

Spoiler: actions

channel puppet with Doodle

Puppet/thrown type
suppression
+1 acc, +0% dam, +3% suppression
augments

Spoiler

0: trick weapon-->purchase link
0: homing beacon -->purchase link
0: heavy metal -->purchase link
1: anchor boost--> purchase link
2: self affliction--> purchase link
3: raid--> purchase link

 

[Senju Akio]

The flash of memories hit like cold water to the lungs. It wasn't the kind of illusion he'd felt when he fought and trained with Yong, not a blade of genjutsu sliding between ribs. This was grief, poured straight into his senses, gripping him until it threatened to wring tears from the now far more stoic young man. A wheat field, gunshots, fur soaking dark, a snare snapping shut with the kind of casual violence that made Akio's jaw clench before he even knew he was doing it. A crow flapping its wings before falling like its struck feathers, a deer and its fawn split apart by panic and wire, wolves scattering because hunger doesn't make them bulletproof. It kept coming in fragments, too many, too fast, like the world forcing him to watch the parts of itself people pretended were not their problem.

Akio's shoulders tensed, and he didn't realize his fists had closed until his nails bit into his palms so hard that they'd almost drawn blood. His eyes shut on instinct and he shook his head with sorrow, like that would stop it, like darkness could protect him from what he was seeing. It didn't. The kit in the coop was the worst of it, not because it was the most violent, but because it was helpless in a way that he had seen before, and felt himself. A hole too small for the mother, wire biting into soft fur, the rifle crack, then stillness.

Akio's throat tightened so hard it hurt, and when the vision snapped away and the marketplace returned like a hammerfall, he stayed with his eyes closed for a beat longer just to keep the first thing he did from being something stupid. "There are so many people who never look down." The thought came without permission, flat and bitter inside his own skull, like it belonged to someone older and more world-weary than the boy who used to believe caring hard enough could make the world be good. He let out a slow breath through his nose and opened his eyes again, forcing the air back into his lungs like he was choosing to live on purpose.

The fox mother's nose had pulled away from his hand, and her gaze was still on him like a weight. Sorrow, yes, but sharpened into accusation so clean it could cut. Her voice slid into his mind without sound, and it was not rage the way humans raged. It was the sea deciding something had to be taken back. "You watched them die. You did this. You did not know us, yet your hands were the end."

Akio's eyes flicked across the circle, subtle rather than panicked or frantic, and just trying to get a read on the situation. Humans collapsed into quiet grief, some with heads bowed, forehead to ground, others bodies folded inward like they instinctively sought the comfort of the womb. The other spirits perched and watched them at the center, lanterns low, still as statues. And there, near Mitsuha's flank, the raccoon moving like a shadow, paws light, eyes sharp. Akio saw it, but he didn't react. Not yet. He understood what Mitsuha was doing too, the way her attention shifted, the way she was already thinking about space and angles and getting people out without spooking the spirits into snapping closed a snare of their own, like so many of their own kind fell to in that stream of memory.

He lifted his gaze back to the mother and let his hand lower slowly, palms open at his sides so the message was simple. "I felt it," Akio said, voice low and somber and sincere. "All of it. And I get why you're lookin' at us like that." His mind replayed the scene with the kit, and for a moment the old ache of his life training to be a mednin came up anyway, useless and automatic. There was nothing to treat. There was only the fact of death. He swallowed once, jaw working like he was grinding something down inside his mind. He glanced toward Mitsuha, brief, a small tilt of the head that acknowledged her movement and the way she was pulling people away. "But if we're sharing, then you should know something too. The people who did that to you... most of them aren't here. Does a colony of bees swarm the family of the bear that fells their nest? No... they punish the bear that stole their honey. The people here... The ones on their knees right now, crying and holding their kids... They don't even know why they're cryin'. They can't see your past... They've got no clue that you're carrying all that. They're just... caught in it. Mitsuha's right. Retribution isn't gonna solve anything. Not like this."

While he spoke, he moved as well, following his training so as to not draw attention to it, the way Yong had taught him to. His arms crossed as he continued, his sleeves bunching forward to cover his hands, which began to make signs. No obvious seals flared up in the open, no announcement made like he might have as a brash youth, just subtle chakra movement threaded into the ground beneath the covered stalls at the market's edge, where the geometry's glow and the crowd's bowed bodies made blind spots. Three clones grew up from the shadowed gaps behind stacked crates and hanging cloth, formed quiet and efficient, their faces already set in the same calm Akio was forcing onto his own. They didn't step into the circle right away. He didn't want to provoke the perched spirits. They simply shifted their forms with a soft pulse of chakra, Transformation Jutsu settling over them until they looked like smaller spirit animals, shapes that belonged at the edge of the procession, lantern light making it easy to accept them as part of the mourning if anyone's perception slipped that far. Then his eyes returned to the fox mother, steady.

"There's light and dark in all of us... Human and spirit. Plant and animal." His voice did not rise. It did not perform. It sat where it was meant to sit, calm on the surface, heavy underneath. "The difference is necessity. Hunger. Fear. Protection. The things that make you do what you hate doing." Akio's fingers flexed once, then relaxed again. "And the responsibility that is supposed to come with understanding."He looked past the fox mother for a moment, to the watching spirits on rooftops and stalls, to the way they held their lanterns like this was a funeral and a verdict in the same breath. "I've learned well... Greed is the greatest of crimes. Taking more than you need, hurting just because you can, treating life like it's cheap because you're bored or angry or entitled or can't stop wanting more and more and more. I watched humans do that to nature my whole life, and I hated it... I still do."

His eyes narrowed a fraction, not at the fox, but at the thought that came with it. "But I know better than most what 'evil' looks like from the outside... and how wrong our assumptions of it can be." His lips pursed and his brow furrowed with conviction before he continued, "You're hurting... But you're not evil. And I know damn well as a Senju, that foxes are clever and spirits are wise." Akio inhaled slow, let the air fill him, let the ocean in his soul settle instead of surge. "So tell me," he said, and when he spoke now it was not pleading. It was the kind of question you asked when you were willing to hear an answer you did not like. "Where does the cycle of revenge take us, Lady Fox? 'Cause if it ends with children paying for what adults did, then it's not justice. It's just more greed... And greed isn't less messed up just 'cause it's dressed up in funeral attire."

As he'd been speaking, his simulacrums moved, gently and patiently, starting with the people on the edge and those who were most discrete. They were slow and subtle, hand under an elbow, a guiding nudge that rolled a man just outside the drawn lines, a body eased back behind a stall. He tried to be discreet, to give no sudden motions, attempting a slow evacuation, like pulling a splinter out without making the wound worse. Akio didn't look at his clones at all. He kept his eyes on the fox mother, kept his attention on the spirits, and kept his awareness on the raccoon near Mitsuha. "Because if you want to be heard..." The Senju continued calmly, with genuine empathy, "Then I want to make it clear... I hear you. I feel you... But if you want to punish whoever is closest just because they look like the people who hurt you, then you're gonna teach this village the wrong lesson, and I don't think that's what a wise mother is tryin' to do."

Spoiler: Actions

Akio uses Elemental Clone (NE) [3 Clones]
Elemental Clones use Transformation to take the forms of multiple animal spirits.
[Note: Akio's clones are meant to be out of line of sight when formed]

[MFT] 1540 Words