Shino did not run because he was afraid.
He ran because speed was a form of respect—respect for patterns, for probability, for the fact that Konoha's streets had just become a math problem full of knives.
Around him, the village did the falling-apart thing at full volume.
A woman screamed his name wrong. Someone else screamed a different name like it was a password that might open safety. Roof tiles clattered down from a house that had just learned it wasn't immortal. A Sand shinobi landed on a corner and cut off a cluster of civilians with the tidy efficiency of someone correcting a diagram.
Shino watched it with the same detached attention he used on a swarm stripping fruit.
Not because he didn't care.
Because if he let himself care too loudly, his body would hesitate—and hesitation got people killed.
His kikaichū were already out.
They spilled from his sleeves and collar in thin, dark threads, riding wind and heat and human panic. They read the world the way his eyes did, only more honest. They didn't look at faces. They tasted air.
Smoke. Blood. Oil from torches. Wet fear.
And—faint, sharp as metal under the tongue—poison.
Shino's stride shortened by half a step.
He adjusted his glasses with two fingers: precise, measured, almost gentle. A ritual in a village that had stopped being neat.
Poison meant one of two things.
Either someone wanted a lot of people dead very quickly…
…or someone wanted one person slowed down just long enough to disappear.
His insects shifted, a subtle ripple like a school of fish turning at once.
Shino turned with them.
A rooftop line ahead: motion, smooth and practiced, moving away from the stadium like a splinter pulled from skin. Not Leaf. Not civilian. Too controlled.
One figure ran light—Temari, fan at her hip, wind tugging her ponytails like a leash she'd trained since childhood.
And behind her—
Mask paint. Hunched shoulders. A puppet pack that knocked softly with each step, not loud enough to be heard from the street, but loud enough to be heard by bugs.
Kankurō.
He was alone.
No sand-cocoon on his arms now. No heavy burden. That meant his job had changed. That meant Temari and Gaara were farther ahead.
Shino inhaled through his nose once, carefully, tasting what his insects tasted.
They were marking the air behind Kankurō like chalk.
He stepped up onto the roofline.
He didn't leap in dramatic arcs like a show-off. He climbed the way insects climbed: direct, efficient, inevitable. One hand, one foot, then he was there—standing in Kankurō's path like a question that demanded an answer.
Kankurō skidded to a stop, sandals scraping tile.
"Aburame," Kankurō said. Not surprised. Annoyed. His voice was muffled behind paint and the kind of calm people wore when they were terrified but had decided terror wasn't allowed. "Move."
Shino did not move.
He stood with his hands in his pockets, high collar up, expression half-lidded like he was bored.
His bugs were not bored.
They swarmed the space between them in a low, living pressure, a patient threat that didn't need theatrics.
"You are attempting to vanish," Shino said. "That is inefficient."
Kankurō's eyes narrowed. "This isn't your fight."
"It is in my village," Shino replied.
Somewhere below, something exploded. The sound punched through the roof beams and up into Shino's ribs. A tremor ran through the tile under his sandals—tiny, persistent, like the village was shivering.
Kankurō's gaze flicked toward the sound and snapped back. His fingers lifted in a small, sharp motion—
—and the puppet pack shifted.
Wooden limbs unfolded with dry click-clicks, like a giant insect waking up offended. Karasu rose over Kankurō's shoulder, head tilting in a parody of curiosity.
Shino's kikaichū answered instantly.
They flowed forward along the seams between tiles, crawling into the puppet's joints and hinges, clustering where wood met wood. They did not try to stop Karasu by brute strength.
They made the movement wrong.
A thousand tiny bodies in the exact places the puppet needed to stay smooth.
Karasu's arm snapped out—bladed forearm whipping down toward Shino's throat.
Shino slid half a step to the side.
The blade cut air where he'd been.
His insects surged upward and wrapped the limb—jammed the hinge—turned a clean strike into a stutter.
Kankurō's fingers twitched again, puppet threads tightening, compensating.
"Cute," Kankurō said, because sarcasm was a shield and he didn't have time for better armor. "You can clog a hinge. Congratulations."
Karasu's chest plate cracked open.
Shino's bugs surged toward it on instinct—
—and Kankurō smiled behind the paint.
The "chest" wasn't a chest.
It was a mouth.
A thick cloud blew out—gray-green and oily—rolling across the roof like someone had dumped death into the wind itself.
It hit Shino's face.
His body tried to inhale reflexively.
Pain knifed straight down his throat.
His lungs seized. His eyes watered so hard his vision went watery around the edges. The world snapped into the ugly clarity of a body realizing it had been chemically convinced to die.
Shino did not panic.
Panic was loud. Panic was inefficient.
He raised one hand to his mouth and nose.
His kikaichū climbed his fingers in a living rush and formed a writhing filter across his breathing. Not airtight—nothing was airtight when poison was the air—but enough to redirect the worst of it.
Enough to buy seconds.
Seconds mattered.
Kankurō backed away immediately, letting the gas do what puppets couldn't: force choice. Force Shino to decide between choking and chasing.
He wasn't trying to win.
He was trying to leave.
Shino's eyes narrowed behind wet lenses.
He chose the third option.
He stayed.
His insects surged into the cloud—not "tanking" it. Solving it, the only way bugs knew how.
Some of them thickened his living mask, bodies layering until the poison went from a knife to a burn—still awful, still lethal if he stayed too long, but manageable.
Others flooded Karasu's vents and seams, crawling into the puppet's internal channels like black water. They wedged into joints. They clogged valves. They made Kankurō's control threads pull against resistance.
And the most important swarm—thin, fast, almost invisible—didn't go for the puppet at all.
It went for Kankurō.
Up his pant leg. Under his sleeve. Into the folds of his vest. Tiny bites that didn't draw blood, only left a message in pheromone and instinct:
Mark. Follow. Do not lose.
Kankurō's eyes widened as he realized what was happening.
"No," he snapped, fingers flicking harder. Karasu snapped its limbs wide, blades flashing, trying to shred the swarms off—
—but every time it cut through insects, more filled the gap. Not infinite. Not magic. Just relentless in the way a hive could be when it decided you were the enemy.
Kankurō hissed, voice sharper now. "Do you know what that gas does?"
Shino's lungs burned like someone had poured hot sand into them. Numbness crept into his fingertips—slow, insistent, the way poison negotiated with nerves.
He kept his posture perfect anyway.
"I have a general understanding," Shino said.
Kankurō's gaze flicked past Shino—toward the roofline Temari had vanished over, toward the direction Gaara had been taken. His jaw clenched.
He didn't have time for a full puppet performance.
He didn't have time to win.
So he did what a competent soldier did.
He withdrew.
Karasu's chest snapped shut. A second burst of smoke erupted—not as an attack, but as a curtain. Kankurō launched backward into it and vanished over the far edge of the roof with a clean, practiced leap.
Shino moved to follow—
—and his knees almost folded.
The world narrowed into a tunnel for half a second. The poison was in him now no matter what he did. His filter bought time, not immunity.
Shino forced one step.
Then another.
He reached the edge—
—and something landed beside him with no wasted sound.
ANBU.
Full armor, mask blank, blade low. A presence like a closed door.
Shino's bugs reacted before his conscious mind did.
They… recognized something.
Not a scent, exactly. Not a familiar chakra flavor.
A pattern. A wrong familiarity. The way insects paused on the edge of the operative's boots like they were looking at a branch of the same tree.
Shino lifted his gaze.
The ANBU's head turned just slightly.
Too controlled. Too still.
Shino knew.
Torune.
His brother.
The word did not leave his mouth. It didn't need to. Aburame understanding was a language older than speech.
Torune did not speak either.
He stepped into the poison cloud like it was nothing and raised one gloved hand.
A different swarm spilled from beneath his sleeve—smaller, meaner, moving like teeth. Not Shino's calm hunger. Not Shino's slow certainty.
These bugs were weaponized.
They hit the edge of the cloud and thinned it—not cleansing it, not performing miracles, just eating density, reducing the thickest parts into something that didn't immediately drop a person flat.
Torune tilted his head toward Shino.
An order without sound.
Now.
Shino's pride flared—cold and automatic.
He could remain. He could pursue. He could—
His lungs spasmed.
A wet, involuntary cough tore out of him, and the poison scraped his throat with a metallic tang that did not feel human.
That decided it.
Shino took one final step forward—not toward Kankurō, but toward the thin thread of his tracking swarm clinging to the retreat line like a promise.
He pushed chakra through the swarm.
Not a big command.
A simple one.
Stay. Follow. Do not lose.
The kikaichū answered with a faint collective vibration—like a hive agreeing.
Then Shino's legs buckled.
He did not collapse gracefully.
Grace was overrated.
Torune caught him—not with hands, not skin-to-skin, not even through fabric. He braced Shino with the crook of his elbow and the edge of his vest, carrying his weight like he'd done this before.
Like he'd carried broken things in silence for a long time.
Torune hauled him out of the thickest poison and onto cleaner tile.
Shino's boots scraped.
His vision blurred.
Below, Konoha kept screaming like the village had lungs and somebody had stepped on them.
Torune crouched beside him, close enough to block wind, far enough not to touch him wrong. The mask hid everything, but the presence was tight, restrained—Root discipline wrapped around family blood.
Shino tried to inhale.
His lungs rejected the idea violently.
His fingers tingled like they were full of ants made of electricity.
He blinked slowly behind fogged glasses.
Kankurō was gone.
But the trail wasn't.
He could feel it through his insects: a taut line leading east-southeast, leading away from the village.
Good.
That was enough.
Shino's body finally stopped cooperating.
He slumped sideways, shoulder bumping tile. The edge of his vision went gray and thick like someone had smeared ash across his eyes.
He forced his mouth to work anyway—because the important thing had to be real before the dark took it.
"The trail," Shino said, voice thin but calm. "Is marked."
Torune's head dipped once.
Acknowledgement. Promise. The closest thing to comfort either of them were built to give.
Shino's eyelids dragged lower.
Then, because his body was failing and his brain decided now was a perfect time for one last sharp thing, he added—barely audible:
"You're late."
Torune didn't answer.
But the insects around them shifted in a way that felt… almost like flinching.
Shino's consciousness loosened. The screaming dulled into a muffled roar—war heard through a wall.
His last thought wasn't heroic.
It was simple, and it annoyed him for being simple:
I hope Naruto survives this.
Then even that slipped away.