Pain.
Pain everywhere.
His bones felt as though they had been gnawed by ten thousand ants, then run over by a heavy truck.
Kisame Hoshigaki struggled to open his eyes. His vision was a blur, and his ears rang with a relentless buzzing.
He tried to sit up.
"Cough, cough... Pugh!"
The moment he moved, a heart-rending pain tore through his chest. He spat out another mouthful of blood mixed with fragments of his internal organs.
"You're awake?"
A calm voice devoid of emotion came from above him.
Kisame laboriously raised his head.
The Uchiha youth in the black coat was crouching in front of him.
He even held a foxtail grass stem, listlessly drawing lines in the dirt.
"You... you didn't kill me?"
Kisame's voice was as hoarse as a broken gong. His narrow shark-like eyes were filled with the disbelief of someone who had survived a disaster.
"Kill you?"
Yoru curled his lip and looked at him as though he were an idiot.
"What would I gain from killing you? Your head isn't worth much on the black market."
Kisame: "..."
He was the infamous monster of the Hidden Mist Village, an S-rank rogue ninja. No matter what, his bounty should have been worth tens of millions of ryō.
Yet in this kid's eyes, he was not even worth pocket change?
Yoru stood and brushed the dirt from his hands.
Without even glancing at the demon blade Samehada, which was still trembling faintly on the ground, he looked down at Kisame from above.
"I always thought that aside from playing tricks with their eyes, the Uchiha Clan only knew how to hide in the back and throw fire around."
Leaning against the cold rock, Kisame gasped for breath, his eyes full of deep confusion.
"That punch just now...