Reborn in the Mist

The room was stuffy. It stunk of instant ramen, fish blood and sex. There were only two windows in the audaciously called apartment— one by the kitchen sink and another next to the parlour couch which sat three of sixteen cloaked and masked shinobi Zabuza stood among.

Bags of kunai, tanto, demon wind shuriken, senbon, paperbombs, bats and an arsenal worth of weaponry and explosives littered the room. In the corners, between the chair cushions and atop the groaning refrigerator.

“We never thought it would ever happen like this.” The owner of these fine staging grounds and de facto leader of the gathering spoke. Zabuza studied him from behind his wrap of bandages. He was a tiger masked mountain of a man and yet, he was only a Genin. He wore a sleeveless vest that exposed the myriad of scars, jagged tattoos of abuse and battle. At his back was a straight, unusually long tanto.

The room hummed together, as if in resonance with his brief, growling words. Zabuza was no exception— no one expected it to happen like this, so soon and so suddenly. There was an electric sensation budding at everyone’s fingertips— Zabuza knew it, he felt it too. It was the nearing taste of freedom, the one generations of caste clansmen had promised their children and children’s children.

What is Lord Fourth thinking?

“But it has happened and we would be fools not to take this opportunity!” Tiger-mask yelled, receiving a chorus of affirming grunts. “Lord Mizukage, Lord Yagura has given us a chance to bleed those who have bled us! He has given permission to set injustice right! And he has promised a new world beyond these…Arrogant Purge days.”

He rose from his place in the centre of the couch, arms spreading out as he looked around. “We know better than to believe in promises, whispers of sweeting futures, do not dream of it, men. Tonight is the only night we have! Seize it, give no mercy! Let it out! Let it out! Let it out!”

The room boomed, the sounds of over a dozen voices chanting Let it OUT like a barbarian war party. Zabuza shook his head, it was here his commonality with these types of groups ended. Chaos for Chaos…truly barbaric.

Word of the Mizukage’s declaration had spread like blood on cotton. The so coined Arrogance Purge was born and given momentum as the many fringe groups, tribalist and other terrorist groups motivated by Main Clan hatred crawled out of their crannies to recruit en masse.

More formed on the spot. The secret plans of massacre and slaughter whispered between friends became Kage sanctioned realities. Zabuza had more than enough time in the afternoon to visit enough to decide that they weren't truly motivated by a want for the equality the Mizukage was hoping to impose in the aftermath of the coming bloodshed.

Hate. It was an emotion Zabuza sympathized with the most in humans, especially when it was the hate of one another. That was why he was here after all, for hate, for the violence of its relief. Zabuza wanted the vaunted Lord Funato’s head separate from his shoulders.

He balled his fists at the thought and searched for the pump of adrenaline as he got excited for the kill…but it wasn’t there. That worried him.

What worried him even more was the fact he was doing this because he needed to feel…something other than hatred for himself. That wasn’t how it went, not how it was supposed to, not how it used to.

He choked the confusion under flashes of explosive rage at the latest man to abandon him. Funato will pay.

“...Hoshigaki and Yuki clans will feel the wrath of decades! They will feel the grief of generations! No one spared! No mercies heard! Come brothers, let us bleed our enemies!”

One by one the group of shinobi vanished, poofed and turned into mist as they shunshin’d away. Zabuza quickly joined them, swifting through the windows and vaulting up onto the rooftops where they congregated. From there they moved as one, fleeting through rooftops and through the tangling vines of anniversary adverts and festivities clung between.

It was only two hours into the evening but Kirigakure was abuzz with a plethora of emotions. The air was tense with emotions and the roar of civilians screaming for answers, for a chance at their own justice nearly drowned out the billow of the mist.

That too was back, the mist. For nearly a week or more combined, Kirigakure dispersed its signature mist and let the sun bathe the expansive central city. Not the best experience in Zabuza’s book but now that it was gone, he couldn’t help looking back at it wistfully.

Utakata’s bubbles always looked better in the sunlight.

Not for the first time, Zabuza squashed the thought of his former team. They invaded his thoughts so regularly they might as well be ghosts.

The murder-hyper group leaped over another clash between shinobi and civilians. There were nearly a hundred by his count, all of them corralled and shepherded by three shinobi who by the look of their vests were likely Chuunin. Zabuza did catch a lurking ANBU-nin perched to the side of a building so perhaps there was some higher rank supervision.

The Chuunin’s yelled at the boiling crowds, two of them stood atop a jutsu-created wall that closed off a particularly slummier part of the neighbourhood. “Get back to your homes! Lord Mizukage orders a curfew, if you are caught you will be imprisoned for ten years!”

Zabuza grimaced at the childish bluff. Even with the third Chuunin and ANBU monitoring the crowds from the back there wasn’t nearly enough shinobi to imprison all of these people, not when they hold back and not when they can’t damage property any more than they already have.

This is just getting started. Tomorrow will be worse, they’ll realize and be emboldened. Zabuza thought as he and the group of sixteen left the caste districts behind for the central district. It was much quieter here, even at the fringes where the wannabe rich lived.

Zabuza was repulsed by their kind, the ones supposedly stuck in the middle of the chaos, the ones between the oppressors and the oppressed. The ones who get to be passerbys, spectators, gossips and enablers.

Of course, there weren’t any crowds formed there, it was too risky to their livelihoods, their standards. If they voiced support for one side or the other it wouldn’t benefit them in any way, the only side to support was themselves.

Rather than crowds of unhappy civilians daring to defy curfew, there were a plethora of shinobi patrolling their neighbourhoods but not straying further in on either side, even though the further in, the noisier it got.

A rising smoke plumed into the sky, and another and three more. It was easy to tell the mist from the smoke, one was darker and wanted to escape and the other? It blanketed all beneath it.

“Men, hover, now!” The tiger-masked leader yelled from the front.

The group dropped down low, relinquishing the breezy rooftops for the cleaned, paved and empty streets. Not a single candle was lit in any of the buildings near where they scattered through, pressing themselves against alleys and underneath left behind kiosk stands. The civilians here were fast asleep, their protection guaranteed by wealth or affiliation, it mattered little as their protectors hunted the group and others like it above— the clang of iron against steel was loud and clear even in the muffling silence of the central districts mist.

They stuck to stealth. Zabuza met the errant eyes of his current comrades in arms and felt confident they could be relied on. He’d done as much vetting as he could in those short hours before the night to find the most competent group to join, regardless of motivation. This was it. Tiger-mask had a fine reputation in Kirigakure, much unlike Zabuza but a good reputation meant little against a finer name and his was caste clan.

Tiger-mask must’ve given a signal from his perch because a chain of whispers trickled through the darkness to meet his ears. “We’re rerouting, hitting the Hozuki first.” the kunoichi beside him said, her mask a diagonal cut of red across a plain porcelain white.

“What? Why?”

She shrugged. “Just tell the next person.”

Zabuza kept his mouth shut and brooded. The Funato was supposed to be first on the docket, damn it!

That was really the only place he wanted to visit. Of course, the Hozuki had their fair share of crimes against him and he hadn’t liked the Princess just for the fact that she was weak despite being the spawn of the Third Mizukage, the man responsible for his becoming a monster.

But they aren’t important, Sandaime is dead now. It’ll be…pointless. He looked up and saw the others dashing down an alley, the kunoichi beside him tapped him and his feet moved, joining the sprint towards the Hozuki clan compound.

He quickly smothered the apathetic thoughts as his calves pumped after the group. This was no time to step out, he might not want to but they clearly did and like the Mizukage had come to see, they had many reasons to.

Zabuza swallowed, the soft thudding scatter of sandals through cobbled streets danced in his ear with other anxieties. “Up ahead.” the kunoichi huffed, sliding her blade out of its scabbard.

The alley they sprinted through narrowed into a golden light, a burst of flames ignited the street, eliciting screams of rage and agony all the same but not long before a spout of water pushed back the blaze.

Grinding blades, gurgling cries of the maimed and punctured. Zabuza ran head first into it, his fingers already twirling his wakizashi, chakra filling his muscles.

“Halt!”

He skidded to a stop with a dozen others at Tiger-masks resounding voice. The man pushed back the way they came before leaping onto rooftops far from the battle. Zabuza hissed, ready to turn away from him and head to the fray right in front of him—

‘You’d just find some other moment to mess us all up.’

Rina’s haughty voice echoing those words might have just been the motivation he needed to do the right thing by a team for once. He braced and wall ran up to meet them, there Tiger-mask was already chattering on about something.

“...bwaha! Not even the main clans like each other. This is our chance men, we remain in stealth and leave the bloodshed out here to the Funato clan.”

Funato?

Zabuza pushed through the group to the edge where Tiger-mask stood. Indeed, from the vantage point Zabuza looked down into the battle outside the western gate of the compound and there were Funato clans men pushing against Hozuki, cursing their fluid bodies with flames and earth all while being drowned.

A significant part of him screamed to pepper the fray from above with senbon and kunai but the watchful eyes pressed on the group was enough to discourage any such action. He searched for where it came from, a gaze backed by Killing Intent so potent even non-verbal communication wasn’t necessary to understand what was allowed and what was forbidden.

ANBU? Who else would referee a bloodbath? The Swordsmen perhaps but…they have stakes in this too so…

“Mizukage…” A chill ran through him, goosebumps rose across his skin as he gulped and stopped looking. Whoever it was, it was clear there were unspoken rules to this, to what was allowed. But how far was really too far when avenging enslaved and will broken ancestors?

“We bypass this ruffian chaos and set the entire compound ablaze.” Tiger-mask answered.