The cshes went on, but with every second it became harder to pretend it was still a fight. It was survival in slow motion—stubborn resistance that existed only because no one there wanted to be the first to truly fall. Ren, Ino, Shikamaru, and Asuma were in a miserable state—not just in body, but in spirit, as if the air itself had grown too heavy to pull into their lungs. Pain had stopped being a warning and turned into a constant backdrop, a tide that rose and fell without asking permission.

  By now, the truth was a stone impossible to ignore: they didn’t stand a chance. It wasn’t a ck of strategy, or courage, or willpower. It was simple. The abyss between them and their enemies was too wide. Every exchange of blows only made it clearer that the distance wasn’t shrinking—if anything, it seemed to grow, as though every attempt to close it only proved how real it was.

  Ren was still standing, but “standing” was almost an insult to reality. His body was marked by shallow cuts spread across his torso and arms—thin, stinging lines that didn’t kill him, but reminded him with every movement that he was being worn down. Blood ran in small trails, mixing with sweat, and his skin could no longer tell what burned from injury and what burned from exertion. His breathing came heavy and uneven, as if he were trying to draw air through water.

  Kimimaro stood in front of him with that cold, almost spotless presence. It was like fighting something that never tires, never hesitates, never gets rattled. When Ren raised his arm to block, the punch came with brutal precision—dry, direct impact that cut through his defense as if his guard were a detail, not a barrier.

  Ren blocked the punch—or tried to—and the force hurled him backward. The ground caught him without kindness. He felt his back protest, his vision wobble for an instant, and a part of him wanted to stay there, motionless, because the idea of getting up felt absurd. It was as if his own body asked, What for?

  And yet he moved. Not because he believed, but because he couldn’t accept the alternative of simply stopping.

  Kimimaro’s voice sliced through the moment with an almost casual tone, like he was talking about something trivial, not the end of four people.

  “You’re running out of energy. Wouldn’t it be better to just surrender?”

  The question slipped into Ren like a bde that didn’t cut flesh, but thought. Surrender. The word carried a quiet humiliation, a yielding that wasn’t only physical, but symbolic. And yet it also carried a dangerous promise: rest. An end to suffering. An end to effort that no longer seemed to lead anywhere.

  Ren kept his eyes on Kimimaro, trying to find any gap, any fw, anything that could turn the fight into something more than a ritual of attrition. But no matter how steady his gaze was, it couldn’t stop the thought from forming. And the thought came, inevitable, like a current:

  What if he surrendered?

  Not as cowardice, not as pure defeat—but as a choice. If he gave in, maybe Kimimaro would stop. Maybe the others would be okay. Maybe Asuma, Ino, and Shikamaru… maybe there would still be an “after” for them.

  Ren’s brain did what it always did when cornered: analyze, calcute, try to turn fear into logic. He built scenarios in pieces, as if every hypothesis could become an exit. His mind went back and forth, rechecked possibilities, weighed probabilities. But no matter how hard he tried, the final result always returned with the same cold crity: there were two paths, and neither favored him.

  In one, they kept fighting and died. In the other, he yielded and hoped it bought time—but hope wasn’t a guarantee, and the word “maybe” didn’t keep anyone on their feet.

  Still, when his breath failed for a second and his chest burned as if it were full of gss, Ren realized he was near his limit. Closer than he wanted to admit.

  He took a deep breath—not an idle sigh, but a deliberate effort to pull air in, to force his head to stay where it belonged. His throat was dry. His tongue felt heavy. And even so, he heard his own voice start, as if it had decided for him.

  “Fine. I—”

  The rest didn’t come out.

  Ino’s scream exploded across the battlefield like an arm that refused to be ignored.

  “SHIKAMARU!”

  Ren felt the sound pass through him. It wasn’t just despair; it was pure urgency—the kind of scream that doesn’t ask for help, it announces tragedy. In the same instant, Ren’s body reacted before thought, snapping his gaze toward her, searching for the source of that terror.

  And he saw.

  Shikamaru was down.

  The image was simple and devastating: his body on the ground, his posture wrong, a stillness that didn’t belong to him. Beneath him, a pool of blood spread—dark and thick, as if the earth were drinking it without hurry. The red wasn’t just color. It was confirmation.

  Ren froze. For a second, the world seemed to lose continuity, as if time itself had glitched and thrown him outside his own body. His mind tried to deny what it saw—tried to fit it into something else, a passing scare, an ordinary fall. But blood didn’t lie.

  And then the images came.

  The moon. The sword. The blood. The bodies.

  Not as organized memories, but as violent fshes—fragments that blew open doors he thought he’d locked. He had believed he’d overcome it. Or at least learned to shove it into a dark corner where it wouldn’t interfere with the present. But pain has a memory of its own. And this scene—wounded comrades, a battlefield, that helpless feeling—was a key turning in an old lock.

  Ren’s vision blurred. Not from tears, but from an internal colpse: reality trembled, like his mind was trying to shut down so it wouldn’t break. His body failed along with it. His legs lost their firmness. His fingers went numb for a moment. He heard his own blood pounding in his ears, too loud, as if it smothered the rest of the world.

  And that was when he heard another thud.

  A dry sound—someone’s body hitting the ground.

  It yanked Ren back to the surface, not because he wanted it to, but because instinct screamed there was no time to drift. He forced his sight, fought through the blur as if he could tear the fog apart with will alone. His gaze found Ino.

  She was down too.

  Ren’s first impulse was to look for blood—a lot of blood, like Shikamaru’s. But there wasn’t any. Her body had superficial cuts, shallow marks, scratches that looked far too small to justify the fall. And that was exactly why Ren’s panic sharpened—cold, focused.

  If the damage wasn’t outside, it had to be inside.

  The idea slid through him like an invisible bde. Because internal injuries were treacherous. They didn’t scream on the skin. They didn’t warn with color. They just stole strength from within, silently, until the person crumpled. Ren felt his stomach tighten, as if his flesh understood before his thoughts what it meant.

  He tried to reason. Tried to stitch together an answer. Tried to move. But he didn’t even have time.

  The sound came like a cut through the air—a clean, final noise of something being divided with ease. A strike so precise it felt like it split not only flesh, but the world’s continuity itself.

  Then, a smaller thud.

  And after that, a heavier one.

  Ren’s body locked again, but this time it wasn’t shock from an image—it was instinct, a premonition that crawled up his spine like ice. He didn’t know why, but his head turned on its own. Slowly. As if part of him wanted to dey the moment of seeing, as if his neck resisted confirmation but couldn’t stop the inevitable.

  And that was when everything colpsed.

  Ahead y Asuma’s head.

  His wide eyes still held a reflection of surprise, as if the final second had never been understood. Beside it, the extinguished cigarette—a detail so absurdly small it shouldn’t have been there, and yet cruel precisely because it was. A thin thread of smoke still rose, stubborn and steady, like the world insisted on keeping a habit even after the end. Behind, his body y rigid and separated—turned into something that wasn’t Asuma anymore, just what the battlefield had left behind.

  For an instant, Ren couldn’t connect it to an action. It was as if his mind refused to accept it had truly happened. As if it had to be a trick, a mistake, a genjutsu—anything, any expnation that wasn’t raw reality.

  But reality was there, unmoving, staring back.

  Orochimaru stood beside it, holding a blood-stained sword. There was no hurry in his movements. No tension in his body. There was control. And worse than that—there was a smile. Not wide, not theatrical, but a hint of satisfaction that said everything about the difference between them.

  Ren felt his chest sink.

  His eyes moved from Asuma’s body to Shikamaru, and from Shikamaru to Ino. It was like checking off a list of losses, counting what he never wanted to count but couldn’t stop himself from seeing. The field around them felt distant, irrelevant. The fight, once chaos and noise, became background. The whole world shrank until it fit inside that sequence of fallen bodies.

  And when he fixed his eyes on Ino, something inside him snapped.

  Not an explosion. A silent fracture—the feeling that some inner structure, some belief, some pilr, some promise, couldn’t bear the weight anymore and finally gave way. Ren felt as if the air had vanished. As if the space around him had lost color. His throat closed. His tongue found no words.

  Once again, people he cares about get hurt.

  Once again, people he cares about die.

  The repetition was what hurt most. This wasn’t an isoted event. It was a pattern. It was the universe insisting on the same lesson, hammering the same point, as if it wanted to carve it into him with blood.

  And inevitably, the question came—not as doubt, but as accusation:

  Why?

  Ren already knew the answer—or thought he did. It sat there, heavy, simple, impossible to dress up.

  All of this because he was weak.

  He could think as much as he wanted. He could analyze, calcute, try to be smart. He could say the right words, make commitments, promise himself he’d do better. He could even act—throw himself in the way, bleed for it. In the end, none of it changed the central fact: without strength, nothing mattered. Without strength, every decision became a plea. Without strength, every attempt to protect became empty intention.

  And intention didn’t stop a sword.

  Ren lowered his head, slowly, like a lotus wilting. It wasn’t just physical exhaustion—it was the posture of someone who, for a moment, couldn’t even hold up his own gaze. The image of the flower didn’t come as pretty poetry, but as a cruel mirror: something that once had shape, once had beauty, once had purpose—and now simply yielded, crushed by the weight of what it couldn’t control.

  The world insisted that new flowers always bloom.

  That there is always a tomorrow. That there is always a new beginning. That life finds a way to continue, even after death.

  But the despair wasn’t in tomorrow.

  The despair was in now. In what he couldn’t save. In the bodies on the ground, in the blood spreading, in the extinguished cigarette still releasing smoke as if it mocked the idea of continuity. In the empty space where strength should have existed—and didn’t.

  And in that instant, Ren couldn’t feel a future.

  Only the crushing absence of what had already been lost.

  (Early access chapters: see the bio.)