Open The Reflection of Horror: Silent Halls

[Chikamatsu Shin]

The Toraono Dojo, once a place of learning and comfort for Shin, had always been alive with the sound of students and acolytes practicing their jutsu. Wooden floors creaked beneath their sparring feet, voices barked commands over the crack of training weapons, and the air carried the sweat and resolve of the upcoming generation of Sunagakure's Shinobi Forces. This was where Shin first felt like he belonged. All of those years ago, at the young age of eight years old taking his ninja classes with his sensei, Senju Kazuki.

Tonight, there was nothing.

The great sliding doors groaned as Shin pushed them open, their echoing scream rolled down the empty corridors like a warning. The soft light of photonically charged carmots, that should have kept the dojo softly illuminated, were extinguished which left the soft blue haze of the village's circadian rhythmic carmots which cracked through the paper walls. Tatami mats lay in disarray, ripped and torn with razor like cuts that no ordinary academic sparring match would have left behind.

The silence could be felt in the air. It was quiet, and in the night it was too silent. Even the usual hum of the technological tracks which slowly moved the village could not be heard. The dojo was sickeningly still, as if the very life of this historic landmark was holding its breath as Shin entered. Perhaps it remembered the last time Shin was here, he didn't.

Perhaps out of instinct, perhaps out of fear, as Shin entered the dojo he could feel his hand gravitate towards the sword that rested on his hip. Something was gnawing at the anxiety which grew in his mind. This wave of nausea and lethargy crept over him, and there was an inkling of a feeling that made him sick. That was when he realized what was wrong with this hallway. It wasn't what he saw, it was what he heard.

A soft chuckle, dark and twisted, filled with bloodlust and fury slipped, not from his lips, into the air that cut through the silence. It was his voice but it came from just over his shoulder.

Turning quickly and lifting his blade Shin began to weave his natural spiritual and physical energies with that of nature, entering the early stages of his Sage Mode which caused him to radiate a spiritual pressure of his own.

"Who's there! Show yourself. Your cheap parlor tricks won't work on me."

As he made the decree he didn't hear a response. He didn't hear movement.

A flash of pain shot through his mind as he dropped to his knees. His hands instinctively pulled to his face, but the firmly pressed black sleeves of his button down dripped with the blood that filled his hands.

Then the blood was gone and the hungry sensation to plunge his blade into flesh took over. A searing pain shot through his mind as he began to blend reality with memory. A memory of a time when he wasn't himself and the control over his own body and soul weren't his own.

A time when he didn't deserve to be called Kazekage.

 

[Chikamatsu Shin]

The dojo tilted.

Not physically.

The Overseer knew that much, but his vision skewed, angles sharpening until even the shadows looked like weapons. His breath came too fast for someone who’d mastered the art of controlled fear. The abilities of a Grandeur Phantom, no a Twilight Sage, should have prevented this sort of primordial fear.

The smooth lacquer of the wooden floor beneath his palm felt wrong, too warm, almost pulsing with life or flames, as if the building itself was leaning in to whisper its secrets into his ear with the wisp of fire.

Shin's other hand still gripped the sword. Not with the precision of a skilled swordsman, at least not one trained by Lady Byakko Akujin, but like a drowning man clinging to driftwood.

HIs breath caught, staggering, shallow, fearful.

"Not again,"

Shin muttered, the words fractured with both rage and fear. Then the scent hit him then, ghastly iron burning his nostrils with a lingering memory, the smell of blood burned into his memory more than the air around him. It drug him back to the cage he’d once lived in. Not of iron-and-wood k, but of his own mind, forged by Chikamatsu Wei’s chains of thought and forced will.

His blade twitched.

His own arm unstable and wavering. Quaking like the shifting sands he drenched in the ichor of the innocent.

Something shifted in the shadows ahead, so subtle that anyone else might have dismissed it as a shift of the light. Shin didn’t. His Sage Mode-enhanced senses traced it instantly, not just by sight, but the faint distortion in the air, the weight of another being folding itself into the world like it had always been there. The very air moved and could be felt along the avian grace his natural chakra granted him.

He took one step forward, his heel sliding against the disarrayed tatami with a low rasp.

"You think I’ll obey your strings again and dance when you call?"

His voice was lower now, the facade of confidence layered over terror that a trained leader knew how to put on.

Still, the figure didn’t answer.

Instead, a chuckle returned, this time from everywhere, surrounding the Kazekage from all directions. It rattled inside of Shin's skull, reverberating through bone and memory until it was impossible to tell where it began and where he ended. The line of coherent thought and memories began to blur once again.

Shin’s teeth clenched. His blade rose, not toward the sound, but toward himself. His grasp on the hilt allowed for the pointy reckoning to be aimed at his own flesh. He should. For everything he had done, he knew he should.

His own instincts screamed to stop, but the other voice, the one buried deep, hissed that if he didn’t, someone else would.

He took a deep breath, trying to calm his nerves and anxieties. Trying to cancel out his animalistic instinct for self-preservation. He knew that if he was able to fall under the control of someone like Wei so easily, it wouldn't be long before it happened again.

He knew he would hurt someone again.

He knew he would hurt...

He knew he would...

He knew...