Hanayo was not a beast, she was a huntress, who could no longer walk through life on the knife’s edge of her own instincts alone. The only moment those feelings had been forgotten was the kiss she shared with Katsu. She needed to learn control. Control required discipline, discipline required training.
Hanayo hunted beneath the light of a half-moon, her bare feet silent against the loam. Her hunger had sharpened into something quiet and dangerous—not the blind gnawing from days past, but a kind of focus that hissed through her thoughts with every heartbeat.
The ridge became a second home, and the woods her hunting ground.
There was no room for doubt here. No conversation. No society. Only breath, wind, blood, and the steady ache that had taken up residence in the pit of her stomach since the night of her rebirth.
The trees loomed overhead like sentinels, their leaves trembling with the weight of her presence. She moved as smoke might—low, languid, inevitable—through the underbrush, senses stretched thin across the forest.
Hanayo lay flat against a rise in the earth, breath shallow, eyes half-lidded. A single shift of wind, and her ears filled with noise: insect wings grinding, bark peeling, water filtering through stones half a mile away. It was like trying to sip from a waterfall.
Even the silence was deceptive. Beneath stillness, there were layers: the faint hum of chakra in a sleeping bird, the skitter of ants beneath leaves, the hollow thump of a deer’s heart.
She blinked. Blinked again. Focus.
A twig snapped far to the left. A rabbit. Small, frightened, breath quick. She could count the beats of its heart. The scent of its panic licked at her molars.
Not what I’m hunting.
Hanayo closed her eyes and listened deeper.
At first, Hanayo had leapt after her every stray sight and sound like a bloodhound, tracking scent trails and broken branches. But the harder Hanayo chased, the farther she felt.
Now, she hunted not by motion, but absence. The way certain spaces were too quiet. The way birds avoided a stretch of trees. The scent of scorched air that lingered without reason. Negative space.
Still, her senses were too loud. Her thoughts cluttered the line between signal and noise. She needed a new approach.
Hanayo exhaled. Let the hunger rise—not for food, but clarity. Hunger was ‘focus’. Hunger was honest. Her fingertips grazed the ground. Her body went still.
The world peeled open.
Smell came first. The air was a tapestry of rot, sap, fur, sweat, rain. Layers upon layers, like pages in a book soaked through. She could smell them now, all of them. Life. Death. Fear. Salt. But underneath it all—thin as a hair, sharp as steel—was something unnatural.
Hanayo rose to a crouch, movements smooth, and let the scent thread through her. She followed it. Curiously. Then with desperation. Pausing often to recalibrate, backtrack, refine. Each step was a test. Each pause was a correction.
Soon, scent gave way to sound, then to sight just as quickly.
Every twitch of fur, every broken twig, every heartbeat of some sleeping thing nearby sparked against her mind like flint on steel.
Her eyes, which had always served well to guide her, were the most surprising change. It wasn’t about seeing better. It was about seeing right.
In daylight, her pupils dilated to strange shapes—slits that let her catch the twitch of every wing, every falling needle. But that wasn’t the real trick.
The trick was learning which movement mattered.
The forest was full of lies. Wind posed as predators. Shadows disguised themselves as prey. Her eyes had learned not to flinch. They waited, as she did. They scanned without reacting. It was restraint that gave her clarity.
On the branch of an old pine, thirty meters ahead, a piece of bark had been disturbed—too high for an animal, too fresh to be old.
There.
She closed her eyes, and everything rushed back in; sound, scent, taste, pressure. It was almost unbearable.
She let it come.
She let it teach her.
Katsu’s voice lingered in her head like perfume on old silk: “Let instinct guide you. But don’t let it rule you.”
At first, those words had seemed obvious—almost insulting. But now, with days of wakeful hours, sleepless mornings, blood-streaked mouths and trembling hands behind her, Hanayo understood what the titan meant. Instinct was not a map. It was a compass. And even a compass could point you off a cliff if you weren’t careful.
The hunter crouched beside a ravine, eyes flicking downward at a crack of sound in the woods. A fawn. Not long born. The scent of its milk-sweet breath still lingered on the path it had taken east. No, that’s not it, her mouth watered, her nails itched, and her knees tensed in readiness. She smelled man.
Hanayo did not strike. She followed. Shadowing the figure through thick brush and up winding paths, until the fool reached a clearing dotted with moss-slick stones and paused to sip from a canteen.
A scout, or a guard perhaps. Moving through the forest with the kind of overconfidence that begged for correction.
The scent of him clogged her nose. Salt, nerves, fabric dye, steel oil.
She crouched behind a fallen tree, invisible.
The hunger surged.
The urge clawed at her ribs. Her stomach roared in protest. Her vision sharpened, flickered, blurred, then returned. She breathed through it. Slow. Measured. In through her nose—catching the whiff of cedar bark, mold, sweat. Out through her teeth.
She gritted her teeth. “You are not starving,” she whispered to herself. “You are strong. Resist.”
The shinobi’s head snapped up, alerted by some unseen ripple.
It would be easy. Too easy. Her mouth twitched into a smile she didn’t quite trust.
She watched it for a long time, crouched in shadow. It was digging for roots. Satisfied. Unaware. She let the temptation wash over her, then let it pass.
She didn’t move until the beast turned and wandered off, deeper into the trees.
“No,” she whispered, the word flat and tasteless on her tongue.
She turned from the trail and climbed instead, hand over hand up a ridgeline strewn with pale stones. They bit into her palms. Her legs ached with effort. It was good. Pain kept her anchored. She welcomed it like an old friend.
There were lessons in hunger. She’d begun to see that. The longer she delayed the kill, the more she saw. How her body adapted. How her chakra fluctuated. She became quieter. Faster. Her nose became more discerning. Her reflexes more terrifyingly sharp. She wasn’t weakening. She was refining. Burning off the need to gorge herself and revealing the true shape underneath.
His hand went to the kunai at his belt. But by the time he turned, she was already gone.
At the ridge’s peak, she rested. Her breath came easier now, less ragged. She rolled her shoulder, testing the bones there, and sighed when they didn’t crack like they used to. The changes were stabilizing. The beast inside her was learning how to live in the cage of her skin without rattling the bars.
Only then did she slip from her perch and continue. The hunger followed.
Jutsu TrainedShow
Aspect of the Beast: Sniff em Out
D - Parasite (sustained)
The host's olfactory receptors are enhanced and multiplied several times over. This augmentation allows the user to recognized even seemingly insignificant scents in the air such as a lavender candle within a large house that hasn't been lit. Following the scent requires training in tracking abilities but recognizing it's presence is almost instant so long as other significantly more potent smells don't overwhelm it. The range that the host can pick up scents largely depends on the situation, but a rule of thumb is the host's endurance in meters as a radius. The downside is this sense can become overwhelmed if a source of odor is suddenly blasted into their senses.
Aspect of the Beast: Sound of Silence
D - Parasite (sustained)
The host's inner ear is modified to be much more sensitive to air born disruptions via vibration. This manifests itself into a uniquely powerful sense of hearing that can detect even the feintest of sounds. Additional training is required to hone this new sense for practical uses. But the host could potentially hear a pin drop within a noisy room across the building assuming the conditions were right. This sense can be overwhelmed with a sudden and powerful sound or drowned out as any hearing can. However, assuming favorable conditions it would be impossible for a sound not to be detected even at some distance.
D - Parasite (sustained)
The host's olfactory receptors are enhanced and multiplied several times over. This augmentation allows the user to recognized even seemingly insignificant scents in the air such as a lavender candle within a large house that hasn't been lit. Following the scent requires training in tracking abilities but recognizing it's presence is almost instant so long as other significantly more potent smells don't overwhelm it. The range that the host can pick up scents largely depends on the situation, but a rule of thumb is the host's endurance in meters as a radius. The downside is this sense can become overwhelmed if a source of odor is suddenly blasted into their senses.
Aspect of the Beast: Sound of Silence
D - Parasite (sustained)
The host's inner ear is modified to be much more sensitive to air born disruptions via vibration. This manifests itself into a uniquely powerful sense of hearing that can detect even the feintest of sounds. Additional training is required to hone this new sense for practical uses. But the host could potentially hear a pin drop within a noisy room across the building assuming the conditions were right. This sense can be overwhelmed with a sudden and powerful sound or drowned out as any hearing can. However, assuming favorable conditions it would be impossible for a sound not to be detected even at some distance.