63 - Return

"Well fuck."

The cave might be crumbling but there just so happened to be no exit. The entrance was firmly sealed with the boulder that crashed down, and there was no light visible in the current tunnel. Fuyuka felt like the world was playing her. Maybe it was, actually.

The blue haired girl searched through the materials she had on her- fish jerky, manga, kunai, shuriken, paper bombs, water, and duct tape (why does she have tape? To be fair, Fuyuka usually carried some really random things. she found banana yellow hair dye in there once, which was promptly burned and thrown into the trash).

She could stick a few explosive tags on the cave walls, but that'll probably just trigger another cave collapse and kill her. Even now, a few bits of debris still fell from the roof.

Did teleporting a guy into the cave wall really do this much damage? It's not like Fuyuka knew a lot about physics, although the whole point of teleporting was defying physics.

Fuyuka walked through the tunnel, careful not to start another collapse. There didn't seem to be anywhere she could get out from without knocking the cave down. Perhaps she could wait for Yozora, Naku and Mitsuka to figure something out, but that's boring.

She turned around a bend, returning to the tunnel which was dotted with doors to the 'rooms' to Sun Star's members. Coincidentally, this was also where they had left Hoka.

The dead fire user wasn't alone.

It didn't make much sense. The cave was absolutely empty apart from Kyomu and Hoka earlier, and there probably wasn't an exit unless the roof completely collapsed in another cavern, which wasn't impossible.

A girl, age unclear, knelt over the now still body of the fire user. Her back faced Fuyuka, so the blue haired girl couldn't tell much about the stranger, except her silver hair, and of course the red wings.

Fuyuka had three realizations. One- holy fuck are those wings? Two- holy fuck is that blood? Three- holy fuck how and why does this girl have blood wings?

On second thought, not many ninja actually obeyed physics.

The girl stood up, glancing at Fuyuka but not saying a word. Her silver hair was brushed over one gray eye, which could either mean she had some secret eye power (unlikely) or she was just being emo (possible). A string of feathers, ranging from red to dark brown, was wrapped around her hair, another layer of red feathers hanging from the back of that string over her back hair. Another act of defiance of physics.

Ignoring Fuyuka altogether, the girl removed her headscarf (was that what it was called?), braiding another red feather onto the end, before flying off into the darkness.

'Well fuck physics, I guess,' Fuyuka thought to herself. The blue haired girl moved to observe Hoka's body, to maybe get a grasp of what the blood-wing girl was doing.

Nothing seemed particularly off. She was dead, clearly, courtesy of Mitsuka and Naku, but nothing else seemed different.

Shrugging, Fuyuka returned to walking through the cave down where the mysterious girl had headed. If blood-girl got in, then that meant there was an exit somewhere.

Following the tunnel, the blue haired chunin walked further into the cave. Soon enough, she arrived back at the cavern she fought Kyomu in.

The roof had indeed almost entirely collapsed, leaving plenty of sky visible over the not-really-high rubble. The red haired man himself had fallen out of the wall and was laying in a puddle of blood and other gory things that Fuyuka didn't know how to describe- he was certainly dead. Blood-girl was nowhere to be seen.

Not bothering to observe further, Fuyuka moved to the edge of the rubble. Using 'that freelance star-thing making Denra trick that she still didn't have a name for' (she really needed to name it soon), the blue haired girl produced a ladder to clamber over the rocks.

With a small thump, she jumped over and landed on the dirt. Yozora, Naku and Mitsuka were nowhere to be seen, so she let her chakra flare out as she walked around.

The area was relatively small, just an outcropping behind the Sun Star cave, perhaps a dozen meters large wrapped around the cave itself. Fuyuka walked around it a few times until she felt a chakra signature approaching.

"Fuyuka-san!" Yozora called, sitting on his Aquila summon. A second star bird appeared in a flash of light, flying over and landing on the outcropping. "Naku and Mitsuka are waiting."

Fuyuka clambered onto the Aquila summon, choosing to wait until they landed back at the entrance of the cave before explaining what happened, including the strange blood-girl.

"That's weird," Mitsuka mused. "We should tell Kakashi-sensei about her, but no point in looking further into her unless she actually becomes a threat."

"I still think I should make the serious decisions," Naku complained. "Obviously I'm the cooler sibling."

"Keep dreaming, bro."

"I missed when you and Terasu actually listened to me."

"Ahem," Yozora interrupted with an awkward cough, patting his Aquila summons. "Should we go back now? It's quite a while away, you know."

"Yeah, yeah, alright," Naku scoffed, hopping onto one of the birds. As the others all mounted their individual Aquila summons, Fuyuka went to follow, but she paused when she saw a glimpse of yellow.

She turned around, her blue eyes narrowing as she faced a bush. However, her gaze quickly softened.

A cat. A yellow cat, but a cat.

Fuyuka's cat senses told her this one was a girl. Its striped tail lashed around and its jade green eyes flickered towards Fuyuka.

The blue haired girl crouched down, letting the cat sniff her hand.

"Fuyuka-san, are you coming?" Yozora called, gesturing to the unoccupied Aquila

"Yeah," she called back, picking up the yellow cat. "Also, I'm adopting a new cat."

"Of course you are."

The four star birds flew back towards Konohagakure.

Fuyuka and Yozora took care of reporting the mission to Kakashi, before the blue haired girl headed back to her own house to introduce the yellow cat to Kuro and Kyuketsu.

'Mezawari,' she decided internally. ''Eyesore,' because she's blinding yellow.'

"Kuro, Kyu," the girl said out loud, closing the door and placing Meza on the ground, where it began to sniff around curiously. "New cat. Come on out."

Once the cats were settled, Fuyuka went out again. This time, she went to find Naruto.

Her blond teammate was walking through a less noisy part of thr village to take a break from his new platoon of fangirls. His Hashirama cell arm was still in the making, so he had only one arm at the moment.

Honestly, you could answer 'Hashirama cells' to any question about why something happened in the history of the world.

"Oh, hey, Fuyuka," Naruto greeted. "I heard you went to fight Kyomu."

"He's dead," the blue haired girl confirmed. "But that's not important right now. I need a favor, for when you become Hokage."

'When,' not 'if.'

"I want you to remove the system of Shadow Star," Fuyuka said. Sure, maybe one of her distant ancestors was an antisocial weirdo, but that doesn't mean her family all had to basically stop existing under the guise of 'protection.' Clearly Tsunade found the system dumb as well, but nobody really bothered to change it.

"Consider it done."