The closest stopping point was the weathered stone wall belonging to an inn. Raidou hit it sideways, putting a heavy dent in the masonry and a slightly smaller one in his ribs. He landed in a welter of fractured stone, blood, and someone else’s bone chips.

The entire world rang loudly, banging like a gong.

Or maybe that was his skull.

He levered himself back upright, step-staggering sideways, and reeled around with base, bedrock wrath. This time, Aoisuke was going to die—

On the ground, Katsuko knelt in a spreading lake of blood, and Raidou’s heart stopped.

That wasn't real. He'd left her behind, alive. He'd done the nesting-doll universe of genjutsu and lost his grip, but she'd broken the world back together. He'd given it up again to kill the last enemy part of it, but he'd left her safe. His death and hers, both fake. The baby's death: real. He couldn’t see Katsuko fall again. He didn’t know what else to fight.

She set one gloved hand against red cobblestones and pushed herself up, listed, steadied, and made it to her feet. Her right arm hung deadweight at her side, but she brought the left up in a ready guard and set her stance. Through the smoke-blackened eyeholes of her mask, she stared him down.

“Come on, taichou,” she rasped. “I can do this all day.”

At her feet, a flayed sack of flesh and bone almost looked like it might, once, have belonged to a person. Except most people had more head. The neck ended in a pulped stump, edged in the shards of a glistening, shattered jawbone and the torn remains of a bandage-mask. Chunks of hair were almost too blood-matted to see the color, but a little green showed through the red. Below the throat, the Kirigakure uniform was still clearly visible. Raidou looked down at his hands. Through a slick sheet of gore, his knuckles were torn open.

Katsuko had a bloody fist-print in the center of her ANBU vest.

Raidou thought, Oh.

She must have seen something in his face, because she paused, straightened out of her guard, and took a careful step forward. Raidou lowered and opened his hands: no threat.

Katsuko’s whole body slumped with obvious relief, though her masked face didn’t show anything. She drew a deep breath, ribs expanding beneath soot-streaked armor—and marched over to punch him in the face.

There was no chakra in the blow, just a glove-wrapped fist and good aim. In terms of ninja aggression, it fell somewhere between you idiot bastard and welcome back. On Katsuko’s radar, it was practically affectionate. It still turned his head gently inside out and stitched agony into the remains. Raidou winced.

“Ow,” he managed, dragging up a rusty croak from the distant place his words had gone. It burned in his throat, like he’d filled up the absence of thought with screaming instead.

“Ow?” Katsuko repeated, dangerously. “Ow?” She shoved into his personal space, in blatant disregard of the fact that he’d just turned a man to mulch with his bare hands. “That’s not ‘ow’. Do you want to know what’s ‘ow’, taichou?”

She jabbed a backwards thumb at the crimson fist-print.