Kaito's fingers trembled over the edge of the rusted pipe.
It wasn't cold not that night, not under the thick ash-choked sky but his skin shivered anyway.
He crouched alone in the narrow space between two collapsed storage crates, knees hugged to his chest, breath shallow. He'd spent the day scavenging for food, evading fights, slipping through zones with Zetsu clutched like a second skin. He was alive.
But alive wasn't enough.
Ten kept him standing.
Zetsu kept him unseen.
Neither let him win. Neither made him dangerous.
Kaito clenched his jaw, eyes fixed on the ground, on the small pebble between his bare feet.
He needed more.
He had tried other things.
Emission: pushing aura outward in rough blasts but it sputtered, raw, uncontrolled.
Enhancement: strengthening his fist, his skin but his body was too thin, too starved, it nearly snapped him in two.
Manipulation: bending the movement of objects but his aura didn't like obeying straight lines.
Every time, his Nen fought back, like a thread twisting the wrong way through cloth.
But there was something else.
A faint pulse. A strange tug.
A feeling like his aura wanted to flow somewhere… unexpected.
Night deepened.
Kaito sat cross-legged, hands on his knees, head bowed.
Breathe in. Hold. Exhale slow.
He let his aura rise not in a shell, not in a wave, not pulled inward tight but loose, delicate, as if he were weaving it through the air itself.
His eyes half-opened.
Thin filaments stretched from his fingertips barely visible in the dark, shimmering faintly when his breath moved them. They trembled like spider silk strung between his hands, brushing lightly over the ground, the walls, the dead air.
He almost laughed.
This wasn't a shield.
This wasn't a weapon.
This was… almost nothing.
And yet.
He shifted his finger.
The tiny thread swayed, touching the pebble at his feet.
For a moment, nothing. Then just as Kaito let out a shaky exhale the pebble rolled. Not much. Not far. But wrong. It rolled against the slope, twitching left when it should have gone right.
Kaito's heart slammed against his ribs.
He swallowed hard, fingers clenching, almost snapping the aura threads apart.
Again.
He reached forward, touched the edge of a cracked glass shard near the wall. His aura brushed it just a whisper and when he let go, the shard fell.
Instead of shattering, it hit the dirt flat. Unbroken.
Kaito's breath came sharp, thin, eyes wide.
This wasn't manipulation.
This wasn't control.
This was… possibility.
A nudge. A pull. A slip between outcomes.
For the next hour, he worked feverishly, weaving the threads thinner, longer, testing them on whatever he could reach a stone here, a rusted nail there, a loose hinge, a paper scrap fluttering in the breeze.
Sometimes nothing happened. Sometimes everything happened.
He felt his pulse quicken with each near-miss, each lucky turn. His body was shaking now, his skin cold with sweat, his shoulder screaming, but his mind burned sharp and alive.
He was bending the world, even if just a little. And no one else around him could do it.
As dawn's thin light pressed against the city, Kaito crouched low on the factory roof, fingers dangling, eyes fixed on the horizon.
Below, Meteor City stirred gangs crawling from their dens, fires smoldering out, rats scattering through the trash.
His aura flickered weakly at his hands, threads no thicker than breath, barely holding. His body was done. His reserves drained to the bone.
And yet, his mouth curved upward, faint and fierce.
He had touched it.
The edge between possible and impossible.
It wasn't control, not yet. It wasn't a weapon. But it was his. A seed buried deep, aching to grow.
"I'll make this real," Kaito whispered to no one, voice cracked and thin. "I'll make this mine."
His fingers twitched, weaving the last of the fragile threads through his skin.
In the ash-dim light, they shimmered once almost like they were smiling back.