A High Fever and Backlash Put Him in Grave Danger, and Haku Used Her Body Heat to Protect His Failing Body

"Click."

With the last of her strength, Haku latched the final rusty bolt into place.

The dull metallic clang seemed to draw a fragile line between this cramped underground space and the world of blood and fire outside.

They were safe.

For now.

As soon as the thought surfaced in Mizuki Han's mind, the nerve he had forced taut to its limit finally snapped under the strain.

His body leaned against the cold iron door, no longer able to hold a sitting position. As if every bone had been pulled from him, he slowly and silently toppled sideways, crashing onto the pile of musty, tattered quilts.

"Han... Han-gege!"

Haku had just finished dealing with the corpse on the stairs. When she turned around and saw the horrifying sight, she cried out and scrambled over to him.

The basement was dark, without a single light. The only illumination came through a few narrow ventilation slits in the iron door: a faint crimson glow cast by the blazing fire outside.

Under that eerie red light, Mizuki Han's face was unnaturally flushed, a terrifying contrast to the deathly pallor of his lips.

Haku reached out with trembling hands to help him up, but the instant her fingertips touched Han's forehead, it felt like touching a red-hot iron. She jerked her hand back.

He was burning up!

Hotter than the midday sun!

But when her gaze dropped to Han's left arm, hidden beneath his gray coat, a chill ran up her spine—the exact opposite of the heat. A thin layer of white frost had formed on the surface of the fabric, visible to the naked eye!

Half fire, half ice.

Two utterly opposing extremes were waging the cruelest of wars inside the body of a boy already covered in wounds.

"Ugh... cough, cough..."

Mizuki Han convulsed in pain, still unconscious. His body shook violently, and the wound that had been forcibly frozen shut in his chest had now split open completely. What poured out was no longer bright red blood, but half-congealed, purplish-black clots with a thick, nauseating stench.

Every breath rasped like the wheeze of an old bellows. With each heartbeat, his crystallized left arm gave a faint crackling sound, as bone ground against ice.

This was the most terrifying kind of Kekkei Genkai backlash.

Forcing Ice Release beyond its limits—even draining one's life force to fuel it—threw the body's physical and spiritual energies into utter disarray. And the self-maiming forbidden technique Han had unleashed at the last moment, Zero-Distance Heart Burial, had only driven the backlash to its extreme.

The purest, most frigid chakra, meant to attack his enemies, had lost the restraint of its master's will. It became a vicious beast, ravenously devouring his own meridians and cells.

In response to this unnatural "freezing," his body instinctively marshaled all its life force, triggering a deadly fever.

Ice and fire were crushing his life away, bit by bit, until nothing remained.

Haku was completely panicked.

She knelt beside Han, helpless and unsure what to do. She was only seven or eight years old. Apart from her meager talent for Ice Release, she knew nothing. She had no medical knowledge, not even the most basic understanding of what to do.

She only knew one thing—Han was dying.

And if Han died, she... wouldn't survive either.

In this man-eating slum, or even in the entire Village of the Bloody Mist, the fate of a little girl with a Kekkei Genkai and no one to protect her would be ten thousand times worse than death.

"Water... I need water..."

Haku remembered the adults in her village saying that people who were sick needed water. Frantically searching the room, she found an old wooden barrel in the corner with half a barrel of rainwater in it. She scooped some up with her hands and carefully brought it to Han's lips.

But the moment her cold fingers touched his lips, the bone-deep chill made her shiver.

No!

There was ice inside him. She couldn't shock him with cold water!

But what could she use to drive away the cold that was devouring his life?

Haku looked around in a daze. The damp, shadowy basement held nothing but moldy quilts and cold walls. There was no fire, no medicine, not even a dry piece of wood.

Despair seeped into her limbs, as cold and damp as the air in the basement.

She watched Han convulse in agony, watched the deathly pallor spreading across his face, and a fear unlike anything she had ever known seized her heart.

She couldn't let him die!

The thought struck her like lightning.

Not out of loyalty, nor because of any bond between them. Simply because he was her only hope of survival.

The boy who had brought her out of hell, fighting his way through. He was cold and cruel, and saw her as a tool, yet in this ruined world, he was the only driftwood she could cling to.

Haku gritted her teeth. For the first time, the eyes that were always brimming with fear and tears blazed with an almost obsessive resolve.

She took off the filthy outer garment she had stripped from a corpse, soaked through with rain, leaving only her thin underclothes. Then she lay down beside Han. Following her memory of how her mother used to comfort her when she was sick, she carefully pressed her thin, trembling body against his.

Cold.

That was all she felt.

Han's body was like a huge block of ice burning from within. His skin was frighteningly hot, but the crystallized chill rising from deep in his bones kept leeching away her body heat.

Haku's teeth chattered, but she didn't pull away.

She wrapped her slender arms around Han and pressed her cheek against his scorching neck. Curling up into a tiny ball, she did everything she could to share the faint warmth of her living body with him.

She would use her body heat to melt the ice inside him.

She would use her heartbeat to rouse his, before it fell silent.

Time lost all meaning in the underground room, cut off from the world.

The rain outside gradually stopped. The clamor and fighting in the distant streets slowly died away, replaced by a deathly silence.

Haku had no idea how much time had passed.

She only knew she was growing colder and colder, and her thoughts were becoming hazier.

Meanwhile, Han's body, held in her arms, was losing its warmth at a terrifying rate. The scorching fever was fading, but what followed was no sign of recovery. It was the icy chill of a life about to go out.

The white frost of crystallization had spread from the stump of his left arm to his shoulder. Fine, snowflake-like patterns of ice were even beginning to appear on his neck.

His breathing grew weaker and weaker, as if it might stop at any moment.

It was over...

Those were the only words left in Haku's mind.

She could no longer feel Han's heartbeat.

She was about to give out, too. Her body had begun to go numb from the prolonged cold, and her eyelids felt heavy as lead.

Just as she was about to sink into the darkness of despair and give up on her futile efforts—

A cold voice, not of this world but composed of pure mechanical logic, rang without warning deep in the mind of Mizuki Han, who had fallen into a profound coma.

[The host has completed the hidden quest chain—"Death Row Survival."]

[Quest Rating: S (Perfect)]

[Rating Criteria: Despite having your chakra sealed and suffering severe injuries, you counterattacked, escaped by the narrowest margin, hunted down the enemy, destroyed their core facility, and successfully killed a jonin-level enemy.]

[Calculating quest rewards...]

[Distributing rewards...]