He came back to his body like surfacing through blood.
Forest stink hit first—wet earth, sap, metal on the air. Bark dug into his spine. His lungs couldn't decide if they were empty or drowning. The dream clung to him in tatters: the corridor, his parents' room, Itachi's voice saying allowed to spare like it was a favor.
And under all of it, at the side of his neck, something burned.
Not normal burn. Not fire jutsu singe, not a cut. It was a brand under the skin, three curved points sinking their teeth into his nerves and chewing. Heat crawled out from it in black waves. Every pulse of his heart dragged more of it along his veins.
His chakra…was wrong.
It roiled in his coils, thick and hot, like someone had poured oil into clean water and stirred. Parts of him felt heavier, parts translucent, like he could step and not stop. The usual control—measure, shape, direct—was gone. This was flood, not flow.
"—suke. Sasuke. Hey. Come on, open your eyes—"
The voice bobbed at the edge of the roar. High, frayed, familiar.
He forced his eyelids up.
The world came in shards.
First: a face very close to his. Sylvie's. Glasses cracked, hair hacked off into uneven tufts that clung to her cheeks, blood smeared along her temple. Her eyes were wide, hazel blown almost gold with panic.
Then: the clearing behind her, smeared at the edges like a bad painting. Shikamaru with his hands up, shadow stretched thin. Choji, chest heaving. Ino inhabiting Kin's body, posture all wrong for the Sound girl she was wearing. Lee crumpled on the ground like a broken puppet. Naruto slumped against the tree, breathing shallow.
And in front of all of it, like a trio of stains: Dosu, Zaku, Kin. Battered, but upright. Dangerous.
He tried to sit up.
Pain ripped down his neck and shoulder, a fresh flare from the mark. His vision blanked at the edges, then snapped back sharper. Every leaf had an outline. Every breath of wind sketched pressure on his skin.
Sylvie caught his shoulder with both hands.
"Okay, hey, easy," she babbled. Her fingers shook. They were bandaged, blackened along the chakra channels. "You're back, that's good, that's great, don't—don't sit up too fast, your pulse is going insane—"
Her voice scrambled against the inside of his skull.
He could still hear Itachi under it. And another voice, rough and old, saying spare set of eyes while a cane tapped, tap, tap—
For a second he didn't know where he was.
Uchiha compound. Forest. Council room that he'd never actually been in. Orochimaru's mouth at his neck. Sylvie's hands on him now, not letting go.
His fingers moved before the rest of him did.
They closed around her wrist.
Her skin was hot, sticky with dried blood and sweat. The bones felt too small in his grip. He could have crushed them without trying.
She froze. "Sasuke?"
He meant to hold on. Meant to anchor himself on that touch, on the fact that she was real and here and not lying on a floor with her eyes open and empty like—
The mark flared.
Heat slammed through his chest, up his spine, into his skull. Everything inside him lurched sideways. The forest tilted.
For an instant his chakra was a mirror and he saw himself in it.
Small. Kneeling in a doorway. Allowed to live.
Spare.
Something snapped.
"Sasuke," Sylvie said again. Her voice sounded far away. "Hey. Breathe. You're safe, we've got you, just—"
Safe.
Naruto bleeding in the snake's stomach. Sylvie dragging him through the dirt with burnt hands. Lee collapsing under Sound attacks. His clan's bodies cooling under moonlight while men in shadow talked about assets.
Safe.
The word curdled.
He shoved her hand away.
It wasn't rough—he didn't knock her down. It was precise. Deliberate. His palm pushed her wrist aside like removing an obstacle from a target's line.
He got his feet under him and stood.
The ground didn't feel like ground. It felt like an idea he could choose to accept or not. His muscles hummed, full of too much energy and not enough sense. The air against his skin crawled.
Orochimaru. Itachi. The old men behind the door. The Hokage's wrinkles when he lied through his teeth about "for the good of the village." Naruto screaming that he'd never go back on his word. Sylvie in front of him, hair cut, glasses cracked, still trying.
Village. Clan. Friends. Enemies. Tools. Sacrifices. Spare.
Images collided, overlaid.
The Sound-nin blurred at the edges, their shapes trying to resolve into other silhouettes—Itachi's cloak. A bandaged arm and a cane. Orochimaru's smile.
He couldn't separate them. Didn't want to.
The mark on his neck clawed across his skin.
He screamed.
It tore out of him raw. There was pain in it, yes, but there was something else too—relief, ugly and fierce, at the sheer scope of what surged through his coils. For the first time since he'd watched Itachi walk away, he didn't feel small.
Black flames crawled across his skin. The curse marks writhed out from the bite, racing up his neck, across his jaw, down his shoulder and arm in jagged, hooked lines. They burned and chilled at once, as if someone had injected ice and fire together.
His chakra exploded outward.
Everyone felt it.
Shikamaru's jutsu faltered for half a heartbeat, his shadow stuttering. Ino's borrowed body flinched. Choji's eyes went wide. Sylvie staggered back, hand flying to her wrist where her Pulse Tag linked to him; the ink there glowed painfully. Even unconscious, Naruto's brow furrowed.
The Sound trio stiffened like animals scenting a predator.
Inside, Sasuke rode the wave.
Power flooded his limbs. His fingers curled; the tendons in his forearms stood out like cables. The forest's normal noise—the buzz of distant chakra, the rustle of creatures—went thin and tinny. Above it all, his own energy roared, drowning out thought.
Disgust flickered under it. It felt like Orochimaru's hands pulling him close. Like opening his mouth to drink from a poisoned stream.
He couldn't make himself stop.
Zaku recovered first.
Of course he did.
He shook off the last of Choji's hit and Sylvie's glue, ripping his arm free of the rock with a fresh string of curses. One vent was clogged with hardened ink; the metal there was warped, angry purple bruising already spreading up the skin.
He stared at Sasuke.
Took in the marks, the changed eyes, the way the air around him shimmered.
Grinned anyway.
"Oh, so that's what the snake freak was after," Zaku said. "Nice tattoo." He rolled his shoulders, positioning himself where he could see Sasuke and the unconscious pile behind. "You think just because you leveled up, I'm gonna roll over? Get real."
"Zaku," Dosu said. His voice had lost all boredom. "We should retreat. Now."
"What, from one half-dead Uchiha?" Zaku scoffed. "He's not special. He just woke up mad."
Dosu's gaze didn't leave Sasuke. "His chakra is—"
"Yeah, yeah," Zaku cut him off. "We finish what we started. I'm not going home without something to show for this."
His eyes slid past Sasuke, fixing on the tree.
On Naruto, limp against the trunk. On Lee, sprawled. On Sylvie, standing again despite every reason not to, braced in front of them with her knife back in her hand, mouth a hard line.
"There we go," Zaku said. "Soft targets."
He lifted both arms.
Even with one vent damaged, the air around his hands thrummed, pressure compressing. The sound set Sasuke's teeth on edge. He angled fully toward Sylvie and the others, not even pretending to aim at him.
Extreme Decapitating Airwaves.
He'd used a smaller version earlier. That blast could rip trees out of the ground. Could turn bones to pulp.
He was aiming it at Sasuke's team.
Somewhere under the flood of cursed chakra, something fundamental cracked.
He heard Itachi's voice again—not the one in the dream, but the one from that night, real and clear: You are weak.
He'd believed it.
He'd believed it when he stood frozen in that doorway, when he'd watched the sword come down, when he'd come home to bodies and the village lied about why.
He did not believe it now.
Zaku's palms glowed. The air in front of him wavered, a knife-edge of invisible force building.
Sasuke moved.
The world didn't slow; he just outpaced it.
One step and the ground blurred under his sandals. Two and he was in Zaku's face. The Sound-nin's eyes widened, the forming technique shuddering.
Too late.
Sasuke's foot drove into his ribs.
He felt the impact all the way up his leg, a dull, satisfying crunch. Zaku flew sideways, the half-formed blast tearing a gouge in the ground as it veered off, shredding underbrush instead of people.
Sasuke didn't let him land.
His fingers closed around Zaku's wrist mid-flight.
The cursed chakra sang in his tendons, eager.
He yanked Zaku back toward him, forcing his arm straight. The damaged vent glinted, clog of ink still sealing part of it.
"Sasuke!" someone shouted—Sylvie or Ino, he couldn't tell.
He didn't look.
"Try it again," he heard himself say. His voice sounded wrong in his own ears—too calm over the roaring inside. "Go on. Use that jutsu. Aim at them."
Zaku bared his teeth, pain and rage mixed. "You little— I'll blow your head off!"
He jerked his other arm up, palm aimed point-blank at Sasuke's face.
Fine.
Sasuke shifted his grip, catching both wrists now. His thumbs dug into the tendons as he forced the arms wide, stretching them out to the sides like broken wings.
Zaku struggled. The curse mark fed every twitch of Sasuke's muscles, turning resistance into a game.
Power. This is power. Not begging in a doorway. Not watching.
The disgust flared again, faint and ineffectual.
He ignored it.
Zaku channeled chakra out of sheer spite.
It hit the block.
The vents screamed.
Pressure needed release; the sealed outlets refused. The half-clogged metal warped, hairline fractures spiderwebbing out. For one second, Sasuke had a perfect, crisp awareness of the forces at play—of all that roiling chakra with nowhere to go, of the brittle line between skin and machinery.
Then the line snapped.
Both arms burst.
Not in a spray; not cartoonish. More like overfilled pipes finally giving. Metal and bone and flesh split along the seams, vents cracking first, shards punching through skin. Blood sprayed in hot arcs. White glimpses of bone flashed where the cannons had sat. Zaku screamed, high and animal.
Sasuke's stomach lurched.
His grip didn't loosen.
He wrenched the ruined arms further, twisting until joints howled. There was a crunching pop as something dislocated. Zaku sagged, legs buckling, shrieking, voice cracking on every breath.
"Sasuke!" That was Sylvie. He was sure of it now. "Stop!"
He heard her. The sound slid past him like water off oiled stone.
His foot came down on Zaku's chest and shoved, pinning him to the dirt. He leaned in, letting the other boy feel the weight, feel how little effort it took now to hold him there compared to the frantic scramble earlier.
One stomp each on the broken arms, deliberate, grinding the damage in.
Zaku's screams went hoarse.
For a moment, rage felt clean. The part of him that had stood in that doorway and thought if I'd been stronger, if I'd been faster, if I'd done something sank its teeth into the satisfaction.
This is what should happen to people who threaten what's his.
His.
The word echoed strangely.
Naruto. Sylvie. Their faces flashed behind his eyes, overlaid with his parents, with the clan. Different, but too easily slotted into the same place. People he'd failed to protect, past and future.
He wanted to tear anyone who tried away from them, limb from limb.
He wanted to never need anyone again.
The curse mark pulsed approval. Black lines crawled farther across his skin, licking up his cheekbone, down toward his chest. His vision tunneled, narrowing to Zaku's ruined arms, his own heel on bone, the wet sound of cartilage grinding.
He hated it.
Hated the boy under his feet for being weak. Hated Orochimaru for putting this in him. Hated Itachi for making him hungry for anything that could close the distance.
Hated himself most of all for liking how easy it felt.
"Sasuke."
Different voice, closer.
Sylvie again. She'd moved up to the edge of the radius even while everyone else froze. He could feel her there, almost at his back, one hand half-extended like she wanted to touch him and thought better of it.
"Let go," she said. Soft. "He's done. You're…you're gonna rip yourself apart if you keep feeding that thing."
That thing.
She meant the mark.
He could feel it eating. Every breath, every spike of emotion, it sank deeper.
He tried to unclench his hands.
They didn't respond.
The curse's chakra had run down into his fingers, into his grip. Releasing felt like trying to lift something with muscles that didn't belong to him.
Zaku whimpered under his foot, sound small and liquid.
The disgust surged, dam finally cracking.
This isn't me.
Not like this. Not with Orochimaru's brand crawling over his skin, Itachi's words in his ears, some old man's cane tapping approval in the background.
He was Uchiha Sasuke. That had to mean something beyond being a convenient container—eyes, vessel, host.
His fingers trembled. The mark blazed.
Move.
He forced his heel back a fraction, shifting weight off Zaku's arms. Bone scraped. Zaku sobbed, incoherent with pain.
Sasuke's grip loosened half an inch.
It felt like tearing Velcro inside his nerves.
His breath came in harsh pulls. Sweat stung his eyes. The marks crawled, confused by the conflict—some lines retracting, others digging in harder.
He could stop.
He could step away. Leave Zaku broken but breathing. Take that tiny, fragile step back from whatever cliff this was.
He could—
"Retreat," Dosu said sharply.
The word cracked through the clearing like its own jutsu.
Dosu didn't take his eye off the boy as he backed up a step, then another, picking a path between the lingering mines of Sylvie's tags. The cursed chakra pulsed with each of Sasuke's ragged breaths. It left an aftertaste in the air, bitter and metallic.
Orochimaru-sama had found his new instrument.
Dosu had no interest in being in the room when that instrument finished tuning.
Live now. Report back. Let the village and the boy fight over what the curse had made of him.
He didn't care which of them won.
He cared that, when the dust settled, he and what was left of his team were still breathing.