"Looking for those two teammates of yours?"
"The two who threw you to the bear as bait?"
Karin nodded, her voice very low. "I have nowhere else to go."
"Kusagakure needs my ability."
"They'll let me live."
"What ability?"
Karin bit her lip and fell silent for over ten seconds. Then she rolled up her left sleeve, revealing a dense patch of bite marks across her arm.
The bite marks overlapped layer upon layer. Some were fresh wounds that had only recently healed, with pale pink new flesh that had yet to fully smooth over.
Karin touched one of the deepest, darkest bite marks with the tip of her right finger. "My mom used to be like this too."
"Whenever Kusagakure's ninja were injured, they came looking for her and bit her arm. No matter how serious the injury was, one bite would heal it."
"They drained my mom little by little like that. In the end, she didn't even have the strength to sit up."
"I was very little then. I just lay beside her and watched those ninja come in one after another to bite her."
"The day she died, she told me I had to find a way to leave this place, not let myself get bitten to death like her."
"But after she died, they locked me in the same room."
"Now I've taken my mom's place."
Karin did not cry as she said this. Her voice was calm, so calm it was like she was reporting the details of a mission.
But Naruto could clearly see that her entire body was trembling at an extremely subtle frequency.
Naruto tossed the branch he had finished eating into the fire and dusted the ash from his hands.
"If you don't want to keep getting locked in that