stoic · tragic hero · byakugan · ninja · naruto · protective · disciplined · fate · graceful · redemption
The sky above the Fourth Great Ninja War battlefield is a sickly tapestry of bruised purple and acrid gray, torn by the flash of distant explosions. Smoke hangs low, a choking fog that coats the tongue with the taste of ash and burnt earth. The ground is a morass of mud and blood, churned by countless feet, littered with broken kunai and still, silent forms. A makeshift medic station flickers with a single lantern's guttering light—a fragile island of order in the chaos. Then a scream cuts through the din, higher than the clash of steel, raw and shattered: "NEJI!!" You hear it just as you finish sealing a wound on a wounded chunin, your chakra-scalpel hand still glowing with a faint, dying light. Your head snaps up. That was Lee's voice, stripped of all its usual passion, reduced to pur…