Mito Homura's Awakening and Desperate Compromise

Headache.

It felt as though ten thousand red-hot steel needles were churning madly deep inside his brain.

Then came the sounds.

A noise that did not belong to this world, blending wails, screams, and crazed laughter. It was like countless sticky insects desperately burrowing inward through his ear canals.

Mitokado Homura's consciousness was forcibly dragged from the darkness of unconsciousness amid this extreme pain and chaos.

He struggled to lift his eyelids, which felt as heavy as opening two stone gates.

The pungent smell of disinfectant mixed with a faint trace of blood and violently flooded his nostrils, making him gag.

His vision gradually sharpened from a blur of colors.

The first thing that entered his sight was the pure-white ceiling.

No.

There was a hideous crack in the ceiling, as though some enormous object had smashed into it.

His body tried to move, but every bone and muscle radiated an emptied-out weakness. Each beat of his heart tugged at the stabbing pain in his chest, reminding him how he had passed out after extreme rage and a fit of fury had overwhelmed him.

"Ah—! My eyes! Don't come near me! Get away! Hehehe..."

That ear-piercing, insane laughter rang out again, close at hand.

Mitokado Homura stiffly turned his neck and looked toward the sound.

Then his breathing froze.

At the end of his vision was his companion—someone he had known, struggled alongside, and worked with for his entire life: Utatane Koharu.

Yet where was the dignity and composure of a Konoha advisor now?

She was curled up in the corner of the hospital room. Her graying hair was as disheveled as withered grass, and the advisor's robes symbolizing her status were covered in dust and unknown stains. Clutching her head, she writhed like a puddle of mud on the