Chapter 134: The Mysterious Cave
It almost felt like someone had deliberately arranged a vacation for Kakashi.
Most of the Chunin Exam trials were now conducted through the Chakra Interconnection Network. Candidates only needed to log in, fight their matches, and they could obtain full scores without ever leaving the village square.
At the same time, although the leaders of the great ninja villages had already returned home, none of them had made any drastic moves.
The crisis of the Infinite Army was a blessing and a curse.
For Konoha and the Land of Fire, with their abundant resources and research systems, it was a solvable problem. They could dig deep, analyze thoroughly, and slowly strip away the threat. For the other lands, however, an Infinite Army that might lurk beneath their feet was nothing short of a nightmare.
In this situation, Kakashi's daily life as the de facto head of Las Noches' liaison office had become deceptively simple.
Eat, sleep, research, and enjoy his childhood.
As Aizen and a former captain of the Eleventh Division had once put it, many of Kakashi's achievements were future possibilities, not yet reality. A happy childhood, however, was the soil from which more valuable technologies might grow. People driven by fond memories often dug deeper into their potential.
The logic was absurd. But coming from Aizen's mouth, it somehow sounded almost convincing. That magnetic voice of his could make madness feel like common sense and leave people doubting their own judgment afterward.
So, still in a faint daze from that call, Kakashi said goodbye to his father, then went to meet up with Rin. The trio, all with questions buzzing in their heads, now squatted together on the first floor of the Uchiha house, staring at the broken flooring in front of Obito's living room.
"...So you did not sleep well, went out to walk it off, stepped on this spot, and the boards broke?"
"Yeah."
"Then you volunteered to pry it open, discovered that there was a hollow space underneath, realized the area was huge and had other structures, got scared, and went to report it to the village gate guards and the security team?"
"Yeah."
"The security team took one look at you, saw you were an Uchiha brat, and told you to handle it internally. And the Uchiha clan, who were never going to bother dealing with you properly anyway, just ignored it and waited obediently for us to show up?"
"Yeah."
"...Is there something fundamentally wrong with Konoha?"
The more Kakashi repeated it, the more his thoughts turned into a tangled mess.
Because under the floor of his childhood friend's house, they had found a massive industrial style sliding door.
It was not the kind of stone slab basement that ordinary families used for storing vegetables or ice. It was not a little storage room dug beneath a detached house.
It was a defensive structure.
In Kakashi's eyes, it was a large underground gate, at least two meters wide, with a chain mechanism and more than twenty steel locking columns, each as thick as his thumb and lined up in a neat row.
If there were no force exerted from the inside, and the plate fell shut, an ordinary person would never be able to open it in their lifetime. They would not even be able to shift it.
This was a hardened underground barrier built to the highest defensive standards. Even many conventional ninjutsu attacks would have trouble damaging it.
"This is... really strange."
Kakashi frowned as he studied the exposed edge of the sliding door.
Aside from the loosened section Obito had broken open by accident, the rust on the sides, the scuff marks, and the dust patterns all told the same story. This thing had been buried under the floor for nearly twenty years before being revealed.
He had never paid much attention to the exact layout of Obito's house before, but now he could guess that the heavy foundation of the building had been laid precisely to hide this underground vault.
Of course, it was possible that it had been constructed on site by some powerful ninjutsu user. But why would anyone go to such lengths in advance, and here of all places?
To hide anything from Konoha's surveillance network, you needed a complete understanding of that network and the ability to evade it.
To slip past the detection of the chakra signal towers, you needed to understand their core protocols and possess administrator level access to the code.
On top of that, any large scale ninjutsu left behind its own traces. Light, sound, chakra distortion. Truly silent ninjutsu was rare, and creating such a large, dense structure without anyone noticing was even rarer.
Eliminating every impossible explanation, Kakashi arrived at the only remaining answer.
Obito's parents were not as simple as they had seemed.
"I think it might be something my parents left for me," Obito said quietly. "They died pretty young. Maybe this is some kind of gift they stored away."
"An underground vault built twenty years ago, with industrial grade construction, as a gift?" Kakashi murmured.
"Then why not just go down and take a look?" Rin propped her chin on her hands and smiled at the two boys.
"Kakashi, you are strong enough anyway. This thing is beneath Konoha's ground, and judging from the age, it was there before Aizen was even born."
She tilted her head, eyes glinting with curiosity.
"Besides, the three of us actually are pretty strong, right? The recon teams the Hokage sends out are usually made up of chunin and genin. We can set up reverse summoning seals, prepare a retreat route, and then go check it out."
"...Yeah."
There it was again. That prickling sensation.
The moment Kakashi nodded, he felt it. A gaze.
No hostility, no warmth either. Just a clinical, measuring look, as if the owner were evaluating a tool on a workbench.
It crawled along his spine.
A gaze like that often appeared on Aizen's face. Calm, sincere, treating everyone the same, whether they were a Raikage or a child offering best wishes.
But this one... where was it coming from?
Kakashi's eyes swept the small room, every corner, every shadow. Nothing. Only his two companions stared back at him, confused by the way he had suddenly tensed and started inspecting the walls.
"Kakashi, is there a problem?" Rin asked.
"...Lately, I keep feeling like I am being watched."
As Obito turned toward him with a puzzled look, the sensation vanished, as if it had never been there. Kakashi let out a slow breath and spoke in a low voice.
"It really feels like someone is staring at me from behind, like needles in my back. I cannot tell who it is, or from where, but the feeling is too strong to ignore."
"Huh? Here?" Obito pointed between the three of them. "It is just us."
He jabbed a thumb at his chest, then at Rin. She nodded, equally lost.
"Could it be someone from Hueco Mundo secretly protecting you?" Obito asked.
"...Maybe," Kakashi said.
"Then... should we go ask the adults first?" Rin suggested.
She dropped back into a crouch beside them, chin resting on her palms again, voice turning cautious.
As a Kido user who had started from the path of a medical ninja, even now, with her power already immense, her instinct was to avoid unnecessary risks. Safety first was etched into her bones.
Kakashi, to be honest, was far more bothered by the unseen gaze than by the vault itself.
If they were in a completely sealed environment, he would not hesitate. He would call for support from Las Noches, comb the area for hostile chakra signatures, and erase whatever was staring at him.
But this was Konoha.
To a ninja, this wooden house, this district, even the village itself were not closed spaces. Unless the walls were solid steel, there were countless ways to hide and move. Only in a truly isolated space did stealth become difficult and detection easy.
Even though he and Rin both had Blut Vene armor and were considered very strong, Kakashi still hesitated to drag his two childhood friends into an unknown risk.
"Let Obito decide," he said at last. "It is his family's basement. And we already tried going through the proper channels once. If we push it again and cause trouble, your situation with Konoha's higher ups could get very unpleasant."
"Huh? What do you mean?" Obito asked.
"If they decide you deliberately wasted Konoha's security forces running around with some Hueco Mundo freak, it could be interpreted as a traitor's scheme," Kakashi replied dryly.
"That sounds horrible," Rin shivered. "If that happened, should I just move over to Kakashi's side?"
"I would rather you did not. Hueco Mundo does not accept people without reason," Kakashi said.
"Eh..."
"..."
Listening to their bickering, Obito hesitated for a long moment. Then he clenched his fists.
"Let us go in together," he said. "This is my family's basement, and it has been under my house all this time. I do not believe my parents would leave anything that would hurt me. And if going down there helps Kakashi, then that is even better.
"Besides, you said it yourself, it is easier to judge things in a closed environment, right?"
"...There might still be danger," Kakashi warned. "Like stepping into traffic the moment you walk outside."
"Then we will test the strength of the Eleventh of Hueco Mundo," Obito grinned.
Kakashi snorted. "Since you put it that way, we go together."
"Yeah."
Their decision came quickly once Obito made up his mind. Under his guidance, the three of them finished checking their seals and equipment, then heaved the heavy underground gate open and stepped into the depths below.
The instant the last of their figures slipped through, the broken floorboards and the gaping steel opening shimmered, then vanished like a popped bubble.
The living room returned to its original, smooth wooden floor.
Far away, in a dim chamber, an old man stared into a mirror that reflected Obito's house. In the image, dozens of thick tubes writhed slowly along his back. Chakra flowed through them, being split, distributed, and sent out to countless unseen coordinates.
"It will be ready soon," the old man murmured.
His voice echoed off the walls for a long time before finally fading away.
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