PROLOGUE
The man couldn’t sleep.
He sank his skinny body deeper into the cold sheets. He was indoors, but he could see his breath puff white clouds, and he couldn’t stop shivering, no matter how tightly he wrapped himself in the threadbare blanket.
He’d been sleeping on this thin, sweat- and grime-stained futon for almost two weeks. Each day he woke with more bruises than the day before, which made him feel he’d hardly slept at all. Maybe he could have gotten some rest in a room where the wind didn’t blow and whistle through the cracks in the walls.
The man bitterly lifted his heavy eyelids and peered into the dark room.
There were four grown men sleeping on the floor alongside each other. The room was small, with space for maybe six tatami mats, about nine square meters. Seniority counted for a lot here, so as the newcomer, he’d been given the coldest spot to sleep in. He couldn’t protest.
“Dammit,” he groaned as he rolled over on the hard floor. “How did I end up here?”
Two weeks earlier, he was imprisoned in the capital city of the Land of Redaku. But even as a prisoner, he’d been granted the bare minimum of a life there. That prison was so comfortable he’d even considered committing another crime when his sentence was up just to get himself sent back.
However, one day out of the blue, he got transferred. He was told only that he would be doing construction work in the north. With the work being physical labor, only young and healthy prisoners were being sent.
In the end, he had been brought to a facility made of stone on the peak of a desolate mountain.
The Tatar Observatory.
The historic facility took its name from the legendary astronomer Jean-Marc Tatar, who had lived at the same time as the Sage of Six Paths—supposedly. He was disinterested in any of that lore though. His concern was the location of the facility that he was in, a region so cold that temperatures remained below freezing even as spring approached. The prisoners were kept in an environment and condition worse than what stock animals had to endure, in terms of food, room, and clothing. And they were forced to hack away at the cold earth from morning until night with hardly a break of any kind.
“Why … do I have to …”
He gritted his chattering teeth and clutched the edge of his blanket. His dirty nails dug into the palms of his hands, and his skin had peeled away from the successive days of intense physical labor.
His crime had been robbery and murder. One winter’s day three years earlier, when he hadn’t known where his next meal would come from, he forced his way into a house and stole everything he could sell. When he fled, he left the young couple who owned the house and their two children tied up inside. But no one had come along to free them, and the family froze to death two days later.
Four people dead because of him. He could hardly bear the thought. He had stolen from them only because he didn’t have
anything to eat, so in his mind his theft was an act of self-defense. He hadn’t meant to kill anyone.
Why did this have to happen to me?
Dissatisfaction filled his heart, slowly but surely. He had had enough. Staring at the grain of the wooden ceiling planks, the man made his decision.
Once day breaks, I’m getting out of here.
The prisoners’ lives were controlled by a gong.
When the dull gong gong sounded at the crack of dawn, the exhausted prisoners would rise like zombies. If they overslept, the patrolling guards never hesitated to use their truncheons mercilessly, so the prisoners were always very quick to climb out of their futons. They filed out of their cells, wiping away the sleep in their eyes and scratching incessantly at arms covered in rashes.
Meals were twice a day. Vegetables and barley boiled to within an inch of their lives—slop not even a pig would eat.
Joining the line that snaked out of the dining hall, the man took a deep breath and tried to calm himself and the intense feelings that flooded him.
His body was heavy with exhaustion, but his mind was sharp and excited. He could not be bothered by anything that morning, not the man who cut ahead of him in line and stepped on his foot, nor the man behind him clearing his throat of something so loud it felt like it would land in his ear.
Today he would leave this place. He was breaking out.
The man picked up his breakfast tray and looked out at the room crowded with prisoners. For his escape, there was someone he wanted to invite along.
The shoddy room—a cafeteria in name only—was lined with rickety tables and chairs that were nothing more than chopped logs.
The person he was looking for was sitting in his usual seat near the window.
Prisoner No. 487. Sasuke.
More unusual than his name was his appearance. Unadulterated black hair and eyes. The chiseled fine lines of his face, a proud nose and a profile that drew the eye. His features composed a perfect
picture not just from the front but from any angle whatsoever. When he saw him up close, the man wondered if they were really the same species.
Though born with such looks, Sasuke was silent and unfriendly, always aloof like a cat, which only drew more attention to him.
Even more annoying was his strength—so strong was he that no one could lay a hand on him.
On Sasuke’s first day at the facility, the old hands had been quick to harass the unusual newcomer. But seconds later, they were crawling along the ground with dislocated joints. As the men cried out in extreme pain, Sasuke had looked down on them. The warning that came from his mouth was quite simple: “Leave me alone.”
The majority of prisoners found Sasuke difficult to approach. The man himself should have felt the same way, but on that day when he’d made up his mind to escape, he found the ability to speak to the intimidating stranger.
He sat down across from Sasuke and opened his mouth.
“Er. Um.” The voice that had sounded clear and strong in his mind came out weak and timid. “So, um. You’re … a-a shinobi too, right?”
Sasuke shifted his gaze from the window to the man. “What do you want?”
Caught by those black eyes, his core trembled. “I-I. Uh. I mean, I am too. From the Land of Wind. I didn’t manage to graduate from the academy though, and my parents gave up on me. So I ended up drifting to this country. I can still knead chakra though. See?”
Using his chakra, he drew the tip of a chopstick to him and made it wobble.
He looked at Sasuke boldly, with a meaningfully arched eyebrow, but the black eyes had already lost interest and turned back to the window.
So you’re ignoring me?
He stifled the urge to click his tongue and glared at Sasuke. He couldn’t have been any great shinobi seeing that he’d been taken prisoner in a remote country like this.
As Sasuke stared out the window, he moved his chopsticks neatly from the bamboo shoots to the dish of fiddleheads on the flattened steel tray before him. He was an unfriendly man, but his manners revealed his good upbringing. He was quite obviously different from the human garbage that made up the prison population; anyone could see it.
“W-would you join up with me?” the man said, after waiting for Sasuke to finish eating. He was nervous and stammered the question.
“What do you mean?” Sasuke asked coolly.
“Escape,” the man replied. “W-we get out of here. You can control ch-chakra, right? Um, th-the two of us … could climb the wall and escape.”
The observatory was surrounded by a wall of stone about ten meters high. Looking up at it from the ground, it seemed impossibly huge, but it wasn’t so tall as to be unclimbable, not if they used chakra.
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