Reika's breath left her in a slow, visible sigh, the tension in her shoulders softening but not dissolving.
Her bright eyes stayed on him, searching, measuring, as though every word he spoke had to be weighed twice.
"…Fine," she said at last, voice low, steady.
"If you really know something… if you really can show me strength beyond what I have, I'll hear you out. But I won't follow blindly. Especially not someone even a few years younger."
Her chin lifted, proud despite the cracks in her aura.
"I've lost enough already by trusting too easily."
Kimimaro's lips curved faintly, not mocking but deliberate.
"Good. Blind loyalty is for fools anyway."
Inwardly, he almost laughed.
'Perfect. Pride and suspicion. She doesn't even realize those are chains as much as they're shields. All I need is time, and those chains will tighten in my favor.'
He spoke again, tone calm, his words deliberate.
"Then we'll treat this as a pact. Together, we could be stronger for now. That's all it is."
Ashina's voice flickered at the edge of his mind, sharp and dry.
"So you've already decided she'll stay."
Kimimaro ignored him, his gaze locked on Reika.
Reika hesitated a heartbeat longer, then finally gave a small nod. "…A pact, then."
For the first time since she stepped into the ruins, her aura shifted, not all sharp edges now, but something quieter, like a flame sheltered from the wind.
Wariness remained, but beneath it pulsed something else: a thin strand of trust, reluctant but real.
Kimimaro smirked faintly, folding his arms.
"Good. Then you'll stay. These ruins… they're more than just rubble. They still breathe. If you listen long enough, they'll teach you."
Reika's eyes flicked around, as though trying to see the so-called life he spoke of in the cracked stones and half-collapsed towers.
Internally, meanwhile, Kimimaro now knew his tactic had worked perfectly.
Sharing his similar origins and heritage, exposing just enough of his own scars, had done its job. Her vigilance wasn't gone, but it was dulled, softened by the shared weight of tragedy.
After all, Reika was alone now.
The death of her mother was still fresh, days old, the wound raw and bleeding, no matter how firmly she clenched her jaw.
For all her pride, for all her sharp glares and measured tone, she was a twelve-year-old girl whose world had been stripped bare.
Rationally, she wanted to stand unbent, but subconsciously, she must have been desperate for something, anything, to hold onto.
Kimimaro understood it better than she did.
'The mind lies, but grief doesn't. Her body still carries her mother's touch, her scent, her warmth. Losing that leaves a hole. And holes demand to be filled.'
He smirked faintly inwardly, his gaze steady on her. 'I gave her a "chain" of words, and she already started wrapping it around her own wrist.'
The irony wasn't lost on him.
He was younger than her by two years, but in terms of the weight pressing down on the mind, he was leagues ahead.
Where she was only beginning to climb into cruelty and discipline, he had already been beaten, calloused, hammered like steel into form.
She was still becoming.
He was already forged.
And the story he had shared, that vulnerability, tied them closer than blood could.
Though the Yuki and Kaguya clans had never allied, the Kaguya's arrogance left them too primitive for strategy or alliances, but that didn't erase the truth: both clans were corpses now, their names reduced to whispers, their blood hunted and scattered.
'Two survivors of exterminated clans, standing in the ruins of a third. If there's a closer existence to her than me, I can't imagine it.'
Her eyes lingered on him differently now.
Still cautious, still wary, but with the smallest crack of something else, curiosity, maybe even reluctant trust.
And why wouldn't they?
His words had been sharp, but his features were delicate, his tone calm, his demeanor playful enough to disarm rather than threaten.
Combined with the practical insight he'd just handed her, the cruel but liberating truth about envy and strength, it was more than enough to lower her guard.
And there was still the promise.
He could really make her stronger soon.
He wasn't bluffing.
Kimimaro's thoughts curved inward again, quiet and cold.
'She's exactly what I needed. The first subordinate. She doesn't realize it, but her choice is already made. Not because I forced it, but because there's nowhere else for her to go...'
Kimimaro studied her in silence, but his mind was already dissecting everything.
The Yuki clan… in the story he remembered, they were little more than a footnote.
A tragic anecdote spoken through Haku, then discarded, forgotten as if they were never more than a side character's backdrop.
But Kimimaro knew better. No true advanced elemental bloodline was ever that shallow. Ice Release wasn't some gimmick after all.
Ice Release wasn't some freak bodily mutation type Kekkei Genkai like Sakon and Ukon's, although both were, for example, classified as such.
It was a fusion bloodline, refined through generations.
Clans like that didn't survive centuries by being weak.
By contrast, the Kaguya, his clan, had degenerated.
Once Otsutsuki-linked, yet reduced to mad marauders who laughed while running into their graves.
The Yuki must have been the opposite: a clan built on refinement and inheritance, their downfall owed to Kirigakure's paranoia, not their own decay.
Yuki were probably the strongest clan in the Land of Water for quite some time, in his opinion.
Reika's earlier attack stayed in his mind.
Those ice shards weren't crude or desperate.
They carried weight, heritage.
They looked more like the mainstay of a clan's arsenal, the kind of first structured offensive techniques an entire lineage would pass down, that looked like more traditional supernatural ice-type powers shown in various shows in his previous life, not some peculiar improvisations of a half-survivor.
And that was all Haku had been.
A boy with half-Yuki blood, raised in scraps, inventing along with Zabuza because he had no legacy to draw on.
His 'Demonic Mirroring Ice Crystals'?
Clever, but probably his own creation, using the clan's blood, not the clan's own crown jewel.
A desperate invention, not the foundation of centuries.
But the girl before him wasn't a half-blood.
She was the patriarch's heir, carrying the true line.
The difference was like shadow to steel.
If this was what she could do instinctively at twelve, then the true arsenal of the Yuki clan must have been even more interesting.
Kimimaro's lips curved faintly.
'Zabuza was satisfied with Haku, a half-blood weapon. But this girl? This is no Haku. This is Haku magnified. Haku on steroids. And she walked straight into these ruins, right to me.'
It was a blessing.
A weapon delivered by fate.
Not to mention, this girl was even more valuable than she first appeared.
The Yuki bloodline alone was formidable, yes, Ice Release, versatile and overwhelming in the right hands, of right, superior essence, able to destroy entire armies theoretically alone.
But Kimimaro also knew its weakness.
'Did they have enough chakra to sustain it on a true Tailed Beast scale, for example, and beyond?'
In his eyes, power without fuel was just theater.
And that was where her Uzumaki blood completed the picture.
Even a fraction of that lineage gave her chakra reserves far beyond a standard Yuki.
A natural amplifier to her clan's elegance.
Proof lay in what she had already told him: her mother had frozen an entire Kirigakure squad, sealing them in a giant block of ice with nothing left but her life.
Kimimaro's smirk wavered, his eyes narrowing as a thought suddenly cut through him.
'No. Wait. Trapped. Not killed. What if—'
He stopped.
His eyes slid closed, lashes lowering as he sank into stillness.
His full sensory field unfurled like a net, chakra spilling out and flooding over the island in every direction, wrapping the forest, the coastline, even the stretch of sea beyond.
Reika stiffened, her breath catching as she felt the pressure of his chakra sweep past her like an invisible tide.
For several long seconds, Kimimaro stood perfectly still, his breathing shallow.
Then his eyes snapped open, sharp and cold, his lips thinning as his pulse ticked faster than usual, uncharacteristic for him.
His voice was low but edged as he turned those eyes on her.
"Reika. You've led quite a bit of trouble to me, it seems."
She blinked, confused. "…What?"
Kimimaro's gaze hardened, scanning the sea beyond.
"Some of those Kirigakure shinobi your mother froze… they didn't die. They were probably at the edges of her technique, enough to survive. And they've been shadowing you since. Close enough that your senses missed them."
Reika's eyes widened, horror flashing across her face as the realization struck.
Her mother's last sacrifice, undone by chance.
Kimimaro's jaw flexed, his hands curling loosely at his sides.
'So that's the truth. They weren't hunting, just tailing her, hovering in her wake like vultures after something bleeding out. Waiting for her to stop moving.'
He exhaled slowly, voice quiet but sharp. "They're here. Landing on this island."
The ruins, silent for years, suddenly felt like they were holding their breath.