Chapter Eleven: Bonds and Revelations
Consciousness returned to Sakura the way it always returned after complete chakra exhaustion - not as a sudden waking but as a gradual, reluctant reassembly of awareness, each sense arriving separately and requiring time to integrate into a coherent picture of where she was and what she was.
First: the specific softness of medical bay bedding, which communicated safe before anything else did.
Second: the antiseptic smell of a recovery facility, which confirmed the first impression.
Third, and most important: the particular quality of presence beside her that she would have recognized in a much less coherent state than this one.
"Houjin."
"I'm here," he said, immediately, which was how he always answered that specific version of his name - not as acknowledgment but as reassurance, the two words doing a different kind of work than their literal content.
She tried to sit up. Her body conducted a rapid and decisive survey of this plan and returned a clear negative, and Houjin was already there - hands careful, strength held back as it always was, helping her find a position that worked without making her feel that the help was necessary, which was one of the things he was consistently good at.
She accepted water. She took stock.
"How long?"
"Thirty minutes," he said. "Chakra exhaustion and bruising. Nothing that rest won't address."
Thirty minutes. The preliminary matches were still ongoing.
She held the water glass with both hands and thought about the arena floor - the long, complicated exchange with Ino, the hair falling, the mental invasion that had been forcibly expelled by something in her that she hadn't known was there, the final simultaneous strikes, the ground arriving - and she thought about what she was going to say to the person beside her.
She chose the direct approach, because she had spent enough of this examination choosing indirect ones.
"Did I embarrass you?"
The question came out smaller than she intended. She heard the smallness in it and didn't apologize for it, because asking it at all was the thing that mattered.
Houjin's expression did something complicated - she had spent enough of her life reading his expressions to know the ones that were performing their function and the ones that were simply true, and this one was simply true. It moved through several things and arrived at something that was simultaneously amusement and a fierceness she associated with the particular protective warmth he reserved for her specifically.
"Embarrass me," he said. The words arrived with the quality of something being repeated so the speaker can fully examine it.
"I didn't advance," she said. "Neither of us did. We fought until we both couldn't, and then we both - "
"Sakura," he said. "You fought someone who knew every technique you had developed since you were old enough to learn techniques. Someone who trained with you for years before your falling out, who understood your patterns and your reflexes and the specific ways your anxiety manifests in your combat posture." He paused. "And despite all of that intimate knowledge working against you, you refused to end the fight. You expelled a consciousness that had entered your mind through a technique that is designed specifically to be irresistible, through sheer determination. You refused to be someone else's conclusion."
She said nothing.
"I have never been more proud of you," he said, "and I have had reasons to be proud of you before."
The tears arrived then, which she had been managing to prevent, and she let them because there was no one in the room who required her to manage them.
"Winning isn't the only measure," Houjin continued, in the steady, quiet register he used when he meant something completely. "Advancing isn't the only measure. What you demonstrated today is the kind of thing that can't be trained directly - the willingness to find what you have left when you think you have nothing. A great many shinobi reach the end of their physical capabilities and stop there. You didn't."
She pressed the back of her hand against her eyes.
"You're not just saying this because you're my brother," she said, because she needed to confirm it.
"I'm saying it because it's true," he said. "The brother part is why you're hearing it directly rather than overhearing me tell someone else."
She laughed at that, which was the correct response, and the tears and the laughter occupied the same moment in the specific way they do when something has cost a great deal and the cost has been confirmed as worth paying.
The silence that followed was the comfortable kind.
"Does it bother you?" she asked, when the silence had been comfortable long enough.
He looked at her. He knew what she meant without requiring elaboration - she had always been able to deliver context through tone in ways that made explicit statement optional.
"Sometimes," he said, with the honesty he had been giving her since they were children and that she had learned to treat as a resource. "There are moments when I'm aware of the distance between what I am and what everyone around me is. When my instincts operate by a different set of rules and I have to translate in both directions simultaneously - from what my nature wants to do to what the situation requires, and back."
"But?" she prompted, hearing the implied continuation.
"But then there are moments like this," he said, his hand still holding hers, "when being your brother is simply what's true. When the fact that I fell from the sky in a metal pod twelve years ago matters considerably less than the fact that you have never once looked at me and seen anything other than family."
She tightened her grip on his hand.
"Mom and Dad gave me a home," he said. "You gave me a family. Those are different gifts and I don't want you to not know that I know the difference."
She couldn't find words for a moment, so she settled for squeezing his hand, which communicated adequately.
"You're stuck with us," she said eventually, when the moment had resolved into something she could speak through. "Whatever you are cosmically, you're still the older brother who helped me with homework and got territorial about anyone who made me cry on the playground."
"Territorial," he said, with the specific inflection of someone identifying a word that understates its subject.
"Protective," she amended. "In a way that could have been misread as territorial."
"Better," he said.
"Houjin." Her voice shifted register. "What happens now? People saw. The match with Dosu - there were observers from every participating village, and the things you demonstrated aren't things that can be unseen."
He was quiet for a moment - not the quiet of someone without an answer but the quiet of someone deciding how much of the answer to give.
"We handle it," he said finally. "Together. The family way, which means no one handles anything alone and no one makes unilateral decisions about their own safety and no one decides that protecting the others requires leaving the others behind."
She looked at him with the specific attention she directed at him when she was verifying something rather than simply receiving it.
"Promise me," she said, "that last part specifically."
He met her eyes.
"I promise," he said.
Both of them understood the weight of this promise and the conditions that could test it, and both of them chose to make it anyway, which was itself a kind of statement about what they believed family was for.
She allowed herself to be guided back toward the pillow. Her body had been very patient about the sitting up and was now registering clear opinions about horizontal rest.
"Thirty minutes," she murmured. "Wake me up before the finals matchups are posted."
"Yes," he said.
She closed her eyes.
He remained where he was.
In a quiet section of the observation area - not private, because nothing in this room was genuinely private, but occupying the particular semi-privacy that serious conversations can maintain when conducted at the correct register - Hinata and Hanabi stood close enough that their respective Byakugans, if active, would have overlapping perceptual ranges.
Both were deactivated. This was itself a statement about the kind of conversation they were having.
"You've been working alongside him," Hinata said, in the tone she used when she was approaching something carefully. "Throughout the preparation, during the examination. What are your thoughts? Not the tactical assessment-" she paused, "-the actual thoughts."
Hanabi considered this for a moment. She had given the tactical assessment version of her observations considerable thought and had found it increasingly unsatisfying as an account of what she had actually been experiencing.
"Confusion," she admitted. The word arrived with some difficulty, not because it was imprecise but because admitting confusion was something the Hyuga clan's training had never specifically encouraged. "And the desire to understand more than I currently do."
"Confusion about what specifically?" Hinata asked.
"About the relationship between what he is and who he is," Hanabi said. "They're not the same thing. The power he carries, the Saiyan heritage, the alien origin - those are facts about his nature. But the person who sat beside me in the observation area and talked about protecting his family, who fought with complete control today because protecting them required control rather than force-" She paused. "That's something different, and I'm finding that I'm more interested in the second thing than the first."
Hinata was quiet, listening with the quality of attention she brought to things that mattered.
"Father will want a detailed report," Hanabi continued. "Capabilities, weaknesses, potential threat assessment, the usual architecture. And I'll write that report accurately, because accuracy is what I owe the clan and the village." She looked at her hands briefly. "But I've been thinking about what you said - that understanding someone as a person often provides insights that tactical analysis misses. I think that's true. I think the most significant thing I've learned about Houjin isn't what I saw in his energy signature. It's what I saw in how he talked about his family."
"What did you see?" Hinata asked.
"Someone who is afraid of what he is," Hanabi said. "And someone who protects the people he loves anyway, because the fear isn't sufficient reason not to." A brief pause. "I find I respect that considerably."
Hinata looked at her sister with the warmth she had always had for her - not the performed warmth of clan obligation, but the genuine, uncomplicated warmth of someone who loved another person specifically and wanted them to have things that were good.
"There's nothing inappropriate about wanting to understand someone as a person rather than just as a tactical subject," Hinata said. "Especially when that understanding serves both your personal interest and the clan's objectives. Those things don't have to be in conflict."
"I know," Hanabi said. "I'm still learning to feel it rather than just knowing it."
"That's always the harder part," Hinata agreed.
They stood in comfortable silence for a moment.
"He's going to need people who see him clearly," Hanabi said then, in a more private register - the voice she used when she was saying something that was not primarily a tactical observation. "Not as a threat to assess or an asset to protect or a specimen to study. Just - clearly. As what he actually is."
"Yes," Hinata said.
"I think I want to be one of those people," Hanabi said. Simply. As a factual statement about where she had arrived, without additional qualification.
Hinata looked at her sister and felt something that was not quite pride and not quite love but was located where the two of them intersect.
"I think you already are," she said.
Naruto and Kasumi had found a corner of the observation area that was somewhat less populated than the rest of it, which was the closest approximation to privacy the room offered.
"Eleryc told you," Kasumi said. Not a question - she had been watching his energy signature all day and had tracked the change that corresponded with a significant conversation.
"Yeah," Naruto said. He was doing the thing he did when he was managing something complex and didn't want to manage it loudly - all of his usual expressiveness compressed into something quieter, which on his face produced a quality that people who didn't know him well sometimes mistook for calm.
Kasumi knew him well.
"How are you actually doing?" she asked, because the social version of this question would have produced the social version of an answer, and she didn't want that.
"Confused," he said. "The Nine-Tails I've been managing my whole life. That's - I know what that is. I know where it lives and I know what it wants and I know how to hold the line against it." He looked at his hands. "But the idea that there might be something else in there. Something that's not the fox and not exactly me but still mine. That's harder to think about."
"Different doesn't mean wrong," Kasumi said.
"I know," he said. "I know that. But knowing it and feeling it are different things, and right now I'm stuck somewhere in between." He paused. "What if finding out I'm a Saiyan changes who I am? What if the answer to what I am turns out to be something that makes me into someone else?"
Kasumi looked at him with the specific patience of someone who has had years to practice the particular kind of patience that Naruto required - not the patience of waiting for him to be different, but the patience of waiting for him to arrive at what he already knew.
"Your origins don't determine your character," she said. "They never have. You've spent your entire life being told what you were - demon fox, monster, disaster, failure - and you've refused every single time to become what they said you were. That's not a Saiyan thing or an Uzumaki thing. That's a Naruto thing. It belongs specifically to you."
He was quiet, receiving this.
"And whatever you find out about where you come from," she continued, "you're still my brother. You were before the examination, and you are now, and that is not a position that is subject to revision based on genetic information."
He looked at her for a moment. Then the tension that had been holding his shoulders in a position slightly higher than usual released itself.
"I promise not to destroy the village when I figure out the transformation thing," he said.
"I would appreciate that," she said, with the specific gravity of someone who considers this a genuine request rather than a joke.
He laughed. The real one, not the performed one.
"Thanks, sis," he said.
"Always," she said.
Sasuke and Midori occupied their corner of the room in the specific silence that the Uchiha clan had always used as a medium for significant communication. Most things between them were said in the spaces between words.
"Your neck," Midori said.
"Kakashi applied a suppression technique," Sasuke said.
"I can see the residual disruption," she said. The Sharingan flicked on and off in the brief, efficient way she used it for diagnostic purposes rather than combat. "It's less active than during the match. Not dormant."
"Suppressed," he said. "There's a difference."
"I know the difference," she said. "I'm asking about the other difference. The one between now and before the match. Your decision-making patterns-"
"Are fine," he said.
She looked at him with the specific expression that she had been deploying since she was old enough to have expressions that conveyed complex content - the one that said I know what fine means when you say it, and we both know it means the opposite.
"The seal is offering you something you want," she said. "That's its design. It finds the thing you want most and makes itself the path toward it." She paused. "You want strength. You want it specifically because you believe strength is what stands between you and what you've promised yourself."
Sasuke said nothing.
"I want Itachi to answer for what he did too," Midori said. "You know that. I was there. I carry the same night you carry." She let this sit for a moment. "But I'm not willing to become something else in order to reach that answer. Because what I want isn't just an ending - I want to still be myself when the ending comes. I want to be recognizable to the people we lost."
Sasuke's jaw shifted in the specific way that meant something had landed precisely.
"The seal will keep offering," Midori said. "It's going to keep making the dark power feel like the obvious path. What I need you to understand is that I see that path too - I see how direct it looks, how efficient. And I'm asking you, not as a tactical concern but as your sister, to make sure you're choosing rather than drifting."
A silence.
"I'm choosing," Sasuke said. He said it carefully, as someone says something they are simultaneously examining as they say it.
Midori looked at him.
"Then keep choosing," she said. "That's all I'm asking. Choose every time, deliberately. Don't let the seal accumulate enough influence that the choice stops being yours."
"I'll try," he said, which was the honest version rather than the confident version, and she accepted it because honesty from him was rarer and therefore more valuable.
"Promise me something else," she said.
He waited.
"When it gets harder - and it will get harder - tell me. Not the version you tell Kakashi-sensei, not the version you tell your teammates. The real version." She held his gaze. "I'm your sister. I'm the person who was there. Let me be useful for something other than tactical support."
He looked at her for a moment. Then something in his face did what Uchiha faces do when they have received something they needed and are choosing not to acknowledge it at conversational volume.
"I promise," he said.
She nodded once.
The match announcements continued, and they both turned back toward the arena floor, and the conversation settled into the archive of things between them that didn't need to be returned to because they had been said properly the first time.
In the medical bay, where Tenten and Kazuna were being attended to for the specific and mutual exhaustion of having pushed each other to simultaneous limits, Kiba arrived with Akamaru.
He sat on the chair beside Kazuna's bed without ceremony, which was the Inuzuka way of communicating that the visit was not formal.
"Explain the no-dog thing," he said.
Kazuna looked at him. Then at Akamaru, who had settled against the chair's leg with the patient attention of a ninken who understands that the humans need to have a conversation.
"I needed to find out what I could do on my own," Kazuna said. "There are things I've been learning about myself. Things that don't fit the framework I was trained within."
"The golden energy," Kiba said. He said it directly because Kiba was, constitutionally, someone who said things directly.
"That's part of it," Kazuna said. "But it's not just a technique or a new capability. It's-" He searched for the right words, which was unusual for him. "It's more like discovering that the framework itself was insufficient. That who I am is larger than what I was told I was."
Kiba was quiet for a moment, which was unusual for him. He was thinking, which was less unusual than the quiet suggested but which he did more thoroughly than most people realized.
"Does it have anything to do with Houjin?" he asked.
Kazuna looked at him. "What makes you ask that?"
"You both have tails," Kiba said. "You both have power that doesn't fit normal parameters. You both got significantly more interesting during this examination in ways that are hard to explain as training improvements." He shrugged with the specific economy of someone who considers obvious observations to be self-evidently worth making. "I'm an Inuzuka. Pattern recognition is part of what I am."
"Yes," Kazuna said. "It has to do with Houjin. We share-" He paused, deciding how much to put in words in the current setting. "We share a heritage. One I'm still learning to understand."
Kiba absorbed this.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay?" Kazuna repeated, with the specific surprise of someone who expected more resistance.
"I mean, I have more questions," Kiba said. "A lot more questions. But those are conversations for after the exams, in private, where we can actually talk properly." He looked at Kazuna with the directness that was his default setting. "What I needed to know right now is whether you're still you. Whether whatever you found out changed the person I grew up with."
"I don't think it did," Kazuna said. "I think it explained some things about why I was always a little different. But I'm not-I haven't become someone else."
"Good," Kiba said. Simple. Final. "Because whatever you are or where your heritage comes from, you're still my cousin. That's the category that governs." He reached down and scratched Akamaru's ears, and the ninken made a sound of contentment that communicated something about acceptance that the words didn't need to carry. "Akamaru agrees."
Kazuna looked at the white dog, and at his cousin, and at the uncomplicated warmth of the statement, and felt something ease in him that had been tense since before the examination began.
"Thank you," he said. "Both of you."
"Just-" Kiba paused. "When we have that conversation. The real one. Don't make me wait too long. I hate not knowing things when people I care about are dealing with them."
"Immediately after the exams," Kazuna said. "I promise."
Kiba nodded. Then settled back in his chair with the air of someone who has concluded the necessary part of a conversation and is now simply present, which was the Inuzuka version of comfort.
The remaining matches moved through their arc with the gathering momentum of a process approaching its natural endpoint.
Eleryc vs. Tatsuo concluded in the specific manner of matches where the disparity is visible from the first exchange and the question is not outcome but duration. Tatsuo was competent in all the ways the word denotes - his ninjutsu diverse, his chakra control precise, his strategic positioning textbook - and against those qualities, Eleryc's dark aura and the awakening divine ki it expressed operated by categorically different rules. The match ended without drama but with the specific quality of information being absorbed by the room - one more data point for the observers who were assembling a picture of what Team Seven's mysterious fourth member actually was.
Orochimaru, from his disguised position, added to his notes. Two now confirmed. The orange-haired Saiyan and this one, whose energy operates at a register that suggests divine origins rather than bloodline enhancement. Konoha has accumulated something unprecedented in a single genin cohort. The question of what they'll do with it when they understand it fully is significant.
Kasumi Uzumaki vs. Hideki was the match that most clearly demonstrated what the Uzumaki clan's combination of natural chakra volume and the Nine-Tails' presence actually looked like in application. Hideki was intelligent and his techniques were sophisticated - the layered genjutsu in particular was crafted by someone who understood how to build illusions that compounded rather than simply accumulated. Against most opponents, it would have worked.
The golden chains that emerged from Kasumi's back when she concluded the tactical phase and moved to close the fight drew the specific quality of silence that new things draw in rooms full of people who recognize significance. The Nine-Tails' chakra expressed through Uzumaki sealing heritage produced something that was neither and both simultaneously - the chains' grip irresistible in the particular way of things that operate at the structural level of chakra rather than its surface.
Winner: Kasumi Uzumaki.
Naruto watched from the observation area with the specific warmth of a sibling whose pride has briefly overwhelmed everything else in the available emotional space.
Midori Uchiha vs. Akio was the most technically interesting of the afternoon's later matches, because what it demonstrated was not overwhelming capability but the specific synthesis that the Uchiha clan produced when its bloodline was combined with a different kind of knowledge than the one the clan had traditionally valued. Akio's sonic techniques were genuine tactical tools rather than brute force applications, and his strategy of using the Sharingan's own information against its user showed real intelligence.
But Midori's medical knowledge changed the information the Sharingan was providing. She didn't need to dodge sound waves if she understood the precise conditions under which they were most effective and most avoidable - the tolerances, the margins, the specific physiological mechanisms. Understanding the attack is a different kind of information than simply seeing it coming, and Midori had both.
Winner: Midori Uchiha.
Sasuke watched and filed the assessment of his sister that the match produced, and the assessment was: she will be formidable, and she will be formidable in a way that is distinctly her own rather than a derivative of the clan's established traditions, and he held this assessment with the specific combination of pride and complicated feeling that accompanied recognizing something valuable in someone you love and being aware that the world will also recognize it and will have its own ideas about what to do with it.
Naruto Uzumaki vs. Kiba Inuzuka was, by any conventional metric, the most chaotic match of the day and also, by any metric that accounted for what the chaos was actually expressing, one of the most revealing.
Kiba fought with genuine regard - his competitive energy aimed at Naruto as a worthy opponent rather than a lesser one, which was a form of respect that Naruto received cleanly and returned in kind. The enhanced Inuzuka speed and the coordinated assaults with Akamaru created a genuine problem, not a trivial one, and the soldier pill's additional boost made it a problem that the arithmetic of straightforward engagement couldn't solve.
What solved it was not power but attention. Naruto watched, deployed his clones not as force multipliers but as information, tracked the patterns that enhanced speed produced, and found the specific gap where the enhancement was also a vulnerability - where the increased pace meant less verification before commitment.
The transformation technique was not flashy. Its effectiveness was exact.
The subsequent method of incapacitation was not flashy either, though its nature generated a different quality of response from the observation area.
The Naruto Uzumaki Combo - derived from the Lion Combo by someone who had watched carefully and understood that he could achieve similar results through different architecture - was genuinely impressive in the specific way of things that should not have worked and did.
Winner: Naruto Uzumaki.
Kiba sat up from the arena floor and looked at his opponent with the expression of someone completing a revised assessment.
"You really are something else," he said, which was the direct version of a compliment from Kiba, and therefore more valuable than the embellished version would have been.
Naruto extended his hand.
Kiba took it.
The display board, as the matches concluded, resolved into the final roster with the electronic patience of a system that does not have opinions about its own output.
Fifteen names.
Each of them carrying, in addition to their combat ranking, a specific set of circumstances that made the upcoming month's preparation period more complicated than the examination's formal structure had anticipated.
Sasuke Uchiha - whose cursed seal had now been publicly active in front of international observers, whose Sharingan had been catalogued, whose obsessive drive for a specific revenge made him simultaneously formidable and vulnerable in ways that someone like Orochimaru was already calculating.
Eleryc - whose divine ki signature had been observed by enough perceptive shinobi that the fact of it was established, whose connection to something called Goku Black was known to his teammates and to no one else, whose sealed memories were becoming less sealed with each significant engagement.
Kasumi Uzumaki - whose golden chains had announced themselves to the room in a way that raised questions about the relationship between Uzumaki heritage and the Nine-Tails that the village's official account of her situation had not previously needed to address.
Midori Uchiha - whose combination of bloodline and medical knowledge created a synthesis that the Uchiha clan's internal records had no precedent for, and whose presence as a tournament finalist would draw the attention of people whose interest in the Uchiha clan was not benign.
Naruto Uzumaki - who had won his match through ingenuity and the specific stubborn refusal to concede a narrative that others had written about his limitations, and who was managing a private question about his own origins that he had not yet finished processing.
Houjin Haruno - who had defeated a Sound ninja in the specific manner of someone who is holding back considerably more than they are deploying, and whose otherworldly energy signature had been in the room all day like a lit lamp that certain observers had been spending the day measuring.
Hanabi Hyuga - who had won her match with the precise adaptation of someone who had been learning to recalibrate in real time from proximity to things she had no prior framework for, and whose decision about what kind of person she wanted to be in relation to her teammate was, by now, made.
Kazuna Inuzuka - whose golden transformation had earned him a draw through the specific courage of using capabilities he didn't fully understand rather than retreating to the ones he did, and who had made a promise to his cousin that he intended to keep.
And the others, with their own histories and their own private complications, filling out the roster.
One month.
Hayate concluded the preliminary phase with the economy of a man whose commitment to efficiency was reinforced by a persistent cough. The matchups would be posted. The month was for preparation. The finals would take place in a public venue before an audience that would include heads of state and dignitaries and intelligence operatives from every participating nation.
He did not say the last part, because it was not formally part of his address. Everyone present who needed to understood it anyway.
The room began its dispersal.
Teams reconstituted. Conversations that had been waiting for appropriate moments began. Various people moved toward the medical bay, the exit, the consultation with their jonin instructors.
Houjin remained in the medical bay.
He had been there since Sakura fell back asleep, and he remained there now - the chair beside her bed occupied by someone who had decided that this was where he was going to be, and who was applying to the question of where to be the same quality of decision-making he applied to everything.
The fur pelt lay against his waist. The tail moved in its slow, unselfconscious rhythm. His dark eyes were on his sister's face - the cuts healing, the hair short around her face, the expression of someone whose body has appropriated the unconsciousness it was owed and is now conducting its own recovery in the competent, uncompromising way that bodies conduct recoveries when they've been given the opportunity.
Yugao appeared in the doorway.
Houjin looked up.
"We need to have a conversation," she said, in the tone that was not immediately but was soon. "About the attention that was generated today. About certain observers and their specific interests." She paused. "And about what we do with the month we have before this becomes a great deal more public."
"Yes," he said.
"Not tonight," she said. "Tomorrow. Bring Hanabi."
She left.
Houjin looked back at his sister.
I promise. He had said it an hour ago. He was holding it now, examining it in the light of what the afternoon had confirmed - the disguised Sannin whose interest had been felt if not fully understood, the room full of foreign observers who had been there to learn things, the specific quality of attention that certain kinds of power attract when it is displayed in front of people who measure power for a living.
The promise had conditions that circumstances might test. He knew this.
But promises weren't made because conditions didn't exist. They were made because some things were worth committing to even with the knowledge that commitment would be tested.
He would do his best with the month. He would train toward better control and broader understanding. He would have the conversation with Yugao and whatever conversations the results of that conversation necessitated. He would be present in the ways that the people he cared about needed him to be present.
And when the final tournament came - with its international audience, its foreign observers, its disguised Sannins and whatever else had been accumulating interest in the quiet - he would face it as what he was.
Which was: a Saiyan, yes. The last of a kind, probably. A being with power that most of the people around him had no framework for.
But also: Kizashi's son. Mebuki's son. The older brother of the pink-haired kunoichi asleep in this bed who had expelled a foreign consciousness from her mind through pure, unreasonable stubbornness and refused to be embarrassed about drawing even the match.
The latter things were the governing ones.
He settled deeper into the chair.
The medical bay was quiet.
In the observation hall, the final roster was being posted.
One month.
End of Chapter Eleven
To be continued in Chapter 12: A Failure Stands Tall!; Fate and Determination