The air tasted like a penny held under a tongue.
I rubbed my lips, trying to wipe away the metallic film that had coated my skin since we passed the black timber fence. The forest here didn't smell like pine anymore. It smelled stagnant, like water left in a vase for a month until the stems turned to mush.
A low-hanging branch scraped the roof of the carriage—skrrrrrt—sounding like fingernails dragging down a chalkboard.
We were moving slowly now. The carriage wheels crunched over gravel that felt too loud in the unnatural quiet.
I scanned the canopy. My eyes, still adjusting to the gloom, caught a flicker of movement high in the branches of a dead oak.
It was a bird. A thrush, maybe. It was thrashing against a spiderweb strung between two limbs.
I frowned. Usually, webs sway in the breeze. They give. This one looked... rigid. The silk didn't glisten like dew; it shone with a dull, golden luster.
The light didn't pass through it; it pooled on the strands, heavy and viscous, like honey trapped in steel.
Is that... chakra? I wondered, squinting behind my glasses.
I reached down to the floor of the carriage and picked up a small, jagged pebble. I leaned out the window, calculating the arc.
Fwip.
I tossed the pebble. I aimed just above the bird, hoping to tear the web and drop the creature free.
CLINK.
The sound wasn't a soft thwip of stone hitting silk. It was the sharp, high-pitched ring of stone striking metal wire. The web didn't break. It vibrated, humming like a plucked guitar string. The vibration traveled down the tree trunk, shaking a single, dry leaf loose, which spiraled down in complete silence.
I froze.
Hardened chakra silk, my brain analyzed. That's not a bug trap. That's a perimeter alarm.
"Anko-sensei," I started, turning my head toward the driver's seat. "The web up there, it's—"
MMPH.
Anko moved faster than I could track. She spun in her seat, shoving a sticky, syrup-coated dango ball directly into my open mouth.
"Hmph?!" I muffled, tasting sweet rice and terror.
Anko didn't smile. Her eyes were sharp, scanning the tree line. She pressed a single finger to her lips.
"Sound travels," she whispered, her voice barely a breath.
The sweet, glutinous rice paste stuck to the roof of my mouth, making it impossible to swallow the scream caught in my throat.
She looked up at the canopy, her expression grim. Somewhere, miles away, a scope lowered. A bowstring relaxed. We weren't worth the arrow.
But we were being watched.
The forest didn't fade away; it rotted away.
The trees grew sparse, their bark peeling like sunburned skin, until we emerged into the open air of the valley.
"Whoa," Naruto whispered, for once keeping his voice down.
We weren't in the Golden Wheat fields of Fire Country anymore.
The valley floor was a checkerboard of paddies, but there was no water. The basins were filled with a black, viscous sludge that looked like oil mixed with tar. It rippled sluggishly, thick and heavy.
The rice stalks that poked out of the muck weren't green or gold. They were gray. Petrified. They looked like twisted wires jutting out of a chemical spill. A dragonfly landed on the gray stalk, buzzed its wings once, and fell dead into the sludge with a tiny, tragic plip.
The carriage stopped. The road ended. From here, a series of rickety, bleached-wood plank bridges zigzagged across the black paddies.
"Everybody out," Asuma ordered, his voice tight. "Watch your step. Don't touch the... water."
We stepped out. The smell hit me instantly.
It was a physical wall of stench. Rotting vegetation, sulfur, and something that smelled like a compost bin set on fire. My eyes watered instantly, the fumes stinging the sensitive membranes like invisible nettles.
I gagged, pulling my collar up over my nose.
"This is the Land of Rice Fields?" Ino asked, her voice trembling slightly. "It looks like a graveyard."
We walked single-file across the creaking planks. Below us, the black sludge popped—bloop—releasing tiny bubbles of yellow gas.
The bubble popped with a wet, sticky sound, releasing a mini-plume of vapor that swirled lazily in the stagnant air.
Fweeeeeeeee...
I stopped.
"Do you hear that?" I whispered.
"Hear what?" Chōji asked, clutching a bag of chips like a safety blanket.
The bag crinkled loudly in his grip, the foil reflecting the dull gray sky, a beacon of processed comfort in a dead world.
"The flute."
It was faint, carried on the wind from far to the north. It wasn't a melody. It cut through the rhythmic thud-thud-thud of the pile drivers like a jagged knife. The factory provided the bass beat, and the flute provided the melody.
It was a song written to make you sick.
A discordant, warbling note that made the fluid in my inner ear tilt. It made the world feel like it was spinning slightly to the left.
Nausea rolled in my stomach, sluggish and heavy, matching the rhythm of the black water below.
I squinted at the horizon. Through the haze, I could see silhouettes moving on the ridges. They didn't look like farmers. They looked like pipers leading a procession.
"Don't listen to it, Sylvie," Asuma warned from the front, his hand resting near his trench knives. "Genjutsu is the regional dialect out here."
I shook my head, trying to clear the wooziness. The sound was a lure. And we were walking right into the throat.
We crossed the final bridge and the mist cleared.
I expected a village. I expected wooden houses, maybe a shrine, maybe some farmers trying to salvage the crops.
I looked up. My jaw dropped.
"What... is that?" Naruto breathed.
It wasn't a village. It was a scar on the mountain.
Rising out of the smog was a town built of brutalist concrete blocks stacked on top of each other like shipping containers. The concrete was stained with streaks of rust that looked like dried blood running down the face of a cliff. It was ugly. It was aggressive.
Massive rusted pipes jutted out of the mountainside like IV needles, throbbing with a rhythmic, mechanical pulse. Thud-thud-thud. They seemed to be sucking the life directly out of the bedrock to power the reactors that glowed with a sickly, toxic orange light. The ground beneath our feet trembled faintly, a constant, subsonic shudder that traveled up my legs and settled in my spine.
Smoke poured from chimneys, not white and fluffy, but yellow and bruised, bruising the sky into a permanent twilight gray. Ash fell like snow, gray and gritty, collecting in the creases of my clothes and coating my tongue with the taste of burnt rubber.
"I don't remember this," Asuma muttered to Anko. He looked disturbed. "The maps said 'Toyosaka'. A harvest town."
"Things change fast when the Snake moves in," Anko replied, her eyes cold as she looked at the neon purple chakra lamps buzzing above the gate.
The noise was overwhelming. It wasn't the rustle of leaves. It was the grinding of gears, the hissing of steam release valves. It was a constant, low-frequency hum that vibrated in my teeth. I pressed a hand to my ear, trying to stop the ringing, but the sound was inside my skull, vibrating against the bone.
To a sensor like me, it was blinding. The background radiation of the machinery was "white noise," masking any individual chakra signatures inside. It was perfect camouflage.
Chōji suddenly stopped walking. He sniffed the air deeply.
His face crumbled.
"Chōji?" Ino asked. "Are you okay?"
"It smells like sulfur and burnt grease," Chōji whispered, his voice thick with emotion. He looked down at his potato chips. "It's... it's disrespectful to my nose, Naruto. It's ruining the lingering aftertaste of the Consommé Punch."
He inhaled sharply, his nose wrinkling in genuine distress, as if the air itself had personally offended his ancestors.
He frantically stuffed a handful of chips into his mouth, crunching loudly as if to drown out the sensory assault. A single tear leaked from his eye.
"Ruined," he mumbled.
I looked past him, at the foundation of a crumbling inn near the entrance. A single, mossy brick peeked out from under the new concrete retrofit.
Toyosaka Brickworks - Year of the Monkey.
And above it, buzzing in neon kanji that flickered ominously:
SAISEI.
Rebirth. Or Remanufacturing.
The town loomed over us, loud and hungry. It didn't look like a place where people lived. It looked like a factory where people were the raw material. A siren wailed in the distance—a long, mournful blast that echoed off the metal canyon walls, signalling the end of a shift, or the start of a nightmare.