Chapter 1: Subject 402.
The pit stank of copper and piss.
Forced to move through the dark on instinct alone, the torchlight was too weak to show him anything but shapes and shadows. Shapes that wanted him dead.
The clash of kunai sent sparks into the dark, brief flashes that burned afterimages into his vision, a jaw clenched in fury, fingers wrapped tight around a kunai, the whites of eyes belonging to someone who used to be a person.
This is my life now...
He didn't remember agreeing to it. He didn't remember much of anything except the rules. Fight, survive, grow stronger. The System demanded it. Orochimaru demanded it. And the ones who couldn't keep up... They died.
Another body hit the stone somewhere to his left. A wet sound followed, the kind you learn not to think about the more you get used to it.
Kagemaru's opponent came at him fast, a blur of motion and desperation. He slipped the first strike, felt the second graze his ribs, and then his own kunai was buried in soft tissue, somewhere between the neck and collarbone, the warm spray of blood soaking his face.
He pulled the blade free of his victim, his hands no longer shaking as they had done the first time.
There was no going back now. This life... This was the only life he knew. Cruel and bitter.
How did I find myself here, you ask?
Allow me to tell you...
----
I woke up drowning...
Not in water. Something thicker. It pressed against my mouth, my nose, filled my lungs with a weight that shouldn't have been breathable but somehow was. My eyes opened to murk, a greenish blur, shapes moving beyond glass that my brain couldn't make sense of.
Where...
Panic hit before thought did. I thrashed, or tried to. My limbs moved like they were packed in wet sand. My fingers scraped against the smooth walls that curved around me. Close, too close, a coffin standing upright.
A tank. I was in a tank.
The realisation didn't help. My chest heaved against fluid that shouldn't have been letting me breathe. Every instinct screamed to claw my way out, but my body was wrong, sluggish, like someone had filled my veins with something cold and slow.
I need to get out. I need to —
But I couldn't. I was trapped in glass and silence, watching shadows move beyond the murk, and my body wouldn't obey.
Slowly, too slowly, my eyes adjusted.
The room was vast. Stone walls, no windows, the kind of underground architecture that meant there was no sky above you, just tons of earth and rock pressing down. Banks of equipment lined every surface, monitors flickering with data I couldn't read, cables snaking across the floor like dead things.
And the tanks.
Row after row of them, each one lit from within by that same sickly green glow. Bodies floated inside, suspended in fluid identical to what filled my lungs. Dozens of them. Maybe more.
None of them were moving.
They're dead, I thought. They're all dead, and I'm —
I was supposed to be dead, too.
The memory hit like a punch to the chest. I'd been, there'd been something. Headlights. A sound like the world ending. And then nothing. None of it made any sense because this room, this place, the equipment humming around me...
This isn't real. This can't be real.
"How fascinating."
The voice slid through the glass and settled somewhere behind my ribs like a splinter of ice.
I knew that voice.
I'd heard it through speakers, through screens, through the thin barrier of fiction that was supposed to keep monsters on their side of the glass.
Footsteps approached with two figures materialising out of the gloom. One tall, one shorter, both moving with the casual patience of men who had nowhere else to be.
The tall one wore white. His hair hung loose and dark around a face too pale, too angular, too wrong in a way that went beyond appearance. His eyes were gold, slitted like a snake's, and they fixed on my tank with an expression of deep, precise satisfaction.
Orochimaru...
The shorter one stood at his shoulder, adjusting his glasses with a clipboard cradled against his chest. He had the look of a man who'd spent so long cataloguing dead things that finding one alive barely registered as interesting.
Kabuto.
No, no, no, no —
This wasn't possible. These were fictional characters. Drawings. Voice actors pretending to be villains for a cartoon. They couldn't be standing six feet away, separated from me by nothing but glass.
But the glass was cold against my fingertips. The fluid tasted like copper and chemicals. And the way Orochimaru was looking at me, studying me, appraising me, had a weight to it that no screen had ever conveyed.
"Subject 402." His voice was silk draped over something much harder. He tilted his head, examining the tank, examining me, with the focused attention of a collector who'd just confirmed something priceless. "You survived."
"My lord." Kabuto's pen was already moving, small, precise strokes on the clipboard.
"The remaining subjects, all dead." He glanced up through his glasses. "The cellular degradation was... comprehensive. But this one somehow survived. His structure held."
"Truly miraculous." Orochimaru moved closer. His breath fogged the glass. This close, I could see the fine lines around his eyes, the slight curve of his lips that wasn't quite a smile. "Tell me, Kabuto. What was his name again?"
Kabuto consulted the clipboard. "Kagemaru... My lord."
Kagemaru.
That wasn't my name. My name was — my name —
I couldn't remember my name.
Orochimaru smiled, and this close, I could see his teeth were wrong too. Too many. Too sharp.
"Tell me, Kagemaru. How do you feel?" He asked, almost seeming like he cared.
I didn't answer. Couldn't answer. My throat was full of fluid, and my brain was full of static, and Orochimaru was right there, close enough to touch if not for the glass.
I died. I was dead. And now I'm here, and Orochimaru knows my name, a name that isn't mine, and I don't know anything at all.
That was when something shifted.
A pressure built behind my eyes. Not pain exactly, something adjacent to it, the sensation of machinery powering on in a dark room, components initialising in sequence. Light bloomed in the space behind my vision, clean and cold.
Text assembled itself without asking permission.
[CHIMERA SYSTEM — INITIALIZATION COMPLETE]
Host Designation: KAGEMARU // Subject 402...
Status: VIABLE.
Chimera Protocol: ACTIVE.
Kekkei Genkai Absorbed: [Locked — Awaiting Assessment]
One new notification available. Access status to proceed.
I stared at it. The words floated in my vision like subtitles to my own existence, waiting for input I didn't know how to give.
I kept my face completely still. Orochimaru was still watching, those golden eyes missing nothing, and I had no idea what it would cost me to react.
"It would seem he needs time to process, my lord." Kabuto's voice, clinical. Detached. The voice of someone taking notes on a specimen.
Orochimaru nodded, still smiling, before he turned away. He spoke to Kabuto in a low, unhurried tone, the tone of someone discussing furniture arrangements, as far as I knew.
"Drain the tank. Standard assessment protocol. I want a full report on cellular integrity before I examine him personally." A pause. "He is not to be damaged."
"Of course." Kabuto made a notation. "And if he's uncooperative?"
"He won't be." Orochimaru moved toward the door without looking back. "He's frightened, Kabuto. He doesn't yet understand what he is." The smile in his voice was worse than the smile on his face. "We'll let him learn."
Then the door closed.
Kabuto turned back to the tank. We regarded each other through the glass for a long moment, me floating in fluid that shouldn't be keeping me alive, him holding a clipboard that probably contained everything I needed to know about what they'd done to me, something I'm sure I wouldn't get to see any time soon.
Neither of us spoke.
Then Kabuto reached for something outside my line of sight, and the pitch of the machinery shifted, and gas began to hiss into the tank, mixing with the fluid, pressing against my face.
"Try not to panic," he said pleasantly. "It passes quickly."
My vision was already darkening at the edges. The text in my head flickered, destabilising.
Kabuto adjusted his glasses and watched me sink into unconsciousness with the expression of a man watching something mildly interesting on television.
"Welcome to the Hidden Sound, 402."