Breath wouldn’t come. The demon’s venom burned through Genma’s body, convulsing every muscle as it paralyzed him. His chest ached with a desperate, unsatisfiable hunger for air. His heart raced, flooded with useless adrenaline. The demon’s teeth grated against his collarbone. Kakashi’s voice came tinnily over the earpiece: I’m going to find you. Just hold on.

Genma could feel the poison spread with every heartbeat. Feel the spasming in his diaphragm, the twitching of his limbs. For a dilated moment, consciousness ebbed, but as it did, a curious, detached calm took the place of panic. He was dying. The civilians the demons had paralyzed hadn’t died. They’d been breathing, though shallowly and laboriously. Why?

Memories from a chuunin lecture on natural poisons burbled up from nowhere: young vipers were more dangerous than adults when they bit, because they injected all their venom at once. To treat a snake bite without an antidote, force the body to metabolize the poison faster.

Genma shunted chakra to his heart and liver. He pushed his body temperature to climb until sweat was streaming from every pore. His heart pounded as if he’d been sprinting for miles. His chakra felt wildly out of control, surging in his struggling body. But slowly, faintly, he felt himself draw a shallow, ragged breath.

Then another, curling hotly against his mask.

It was working.

Maybe if he could move his hands, could form a seal...

There was still far too much venom in his system to allow it. But as long as he kept up the agonizing chakra burn, kept working to break down the venom, he could breathe.

Don’t die.

The demon dragged him down a narrow, curving tunnel so tight Genma felt the walls catch at his sides. That same, detached part of himself observed the direction they were moving, the demon scent of sulfur and decay, the cold seeping in through his wet clothes, making his artificially fevered body shiver. It wouldn’t be easy for Kakashi to find him here.

They emerged from the tunnel into what felt like a big chamber. The demon dragged Genma across a rough floor and dropped him, backing off. Something scuttled in the dark. Something huge, with a chakra presence that blossomed out of nowhere like a seething flood. The smell of demon was overwhelming—sharper and stronger and much more chemical than it had been before. Genma’s eyes teared reflexively. Animal panic flared at the back of his brain; every instinct screamed for him to run.

The big thing moved nearer, shaking the ground with its weight.

Genma poured chakra to his eyes, forcing the pupils to their widest, opening up channels of sight only a ninja could access. If there was any light at all, he’d be able to see. A few patches of fungus glowed weakly on the chamber ceiling, outlining dripping stalactites. Was this a natural cave connected to the mine?

A massive blackness blotted out the faint fungal lights.

Don’t get pregnant.

Genma wrenched himself into motion, arching his back and throwing himself away from the beast. A clawed leg slammed against his side. He thrashed away from it, barely in control of his movements. The monster lunged at him again, and he flailed away, rolling and heaving himself with shoulders and hips, dragging dead limbs.

Merciful Kannon, intercede for me.

He crashed against a wall, falling into a crumbling seam where the miners had blasted out some vein of precious ore. The monster’s razor-edged claws raked at his shoulders and legs, but it couldn’t reach him. There was a rocky bench here, like the one the dead demon in the first hatching chamber had been wedged under. Genma wriggled further under it, panting and breathless, seeing stars. Hot, sticky warmth slicked his skin under his breached armor. Distantly, he registered something like pain.

The monster clawed at the stone, hissing like a devil from the lowest pit of Hell.

Merciful Kannon, let me die before it digs me out.