The moment we stepped through the heavy service doors, my sensory perception went blind.
It wasn't a darkness. It was a whiteout.
The factory floor didn't just have a sound; it had a texture. A constant, grinding roar that vibrated against my ribcage and rattled the lenses of my glasses. Dust motes danced in the strobe-light of the arc welders, looking like microscopic falling stars.
Thud-thud-thud.
Massive pile drivers slammed into the earth somewhere below us, shaking the grated catwalk we stood on. Steam hissed from rusted pressure valves, smelling of wet iron and sulfur. I tasted copper on my tongue, the air so thick with metallic particulates that I could practically chew it. It was a wall of acoustic camouflage.
"Keep close," Anko-sensei mouthed. I couldn't hear her, but I saw the shape of the words.
The metal grating beneath our feet was hot to the touch, vibrating with a frequency that made the soles of my feet buzz.
She signaled for us to crouch. We moved along the upper gantry, hidden by the shadows of massive hanging chains.
Below us, the factory sprawled like a circle of hell devoted to metallurgy. The lighting was sickly—banks of purple chakra lamps buzzed overhead, casting long, bruised shadows, while the blast furnaces down below glowed a toxic, radioactive orange. A blast of heat rolled up from the pit, instantly drying the sweat on my forehead into a tight, salty mask.
There were no birds here. No wind. Just the scream of metal on metal.
"It's huge," Naruto whispered, his face pressed against the railing. He looked pale in the neon light.
He was looking at the workers. They were Fūma clan members, dressed in drab gray uniforms that hung off their gaunt frames. They moved with the sluggish rhythm of the exhausted, hauling carts of ore that spilled black dust onto the concrete. The wheels of the cart squealed—a high-pitched metal scream that cut through the bass rumble of the machinery.
But they weren't the worst part.
We crept further along the catwalk, passing over a section dedicated to power generation.
"Wait," I hissed, grabbing Naruto's jacket. "Look."
I pointed down.
In the center of a cluster of humming generators, a man stood on a raised platform. He wore a dark cowl and a face mask that covered everything but his eyes.
"That's Yoroi," Naruto gasped. "From the exams! The chakra-sucking guy!"
Yoroi Akadō. The man who had fought Sasuke.
But he didn't look like a warrior now. He looked like a component.
Thick black cables were hooked into the back of his vest. He stood in front of a line of prisoners—people bound in heavy iron chairs. Yoroi placed his glowing blue hand onto the chest of a prisoner.
The prisoner screamed—a sound swallowed instantly by the factory roar.
His jaw clamped shut so hard I heard his teeth click together, the tendons in his neck standing out like steel cables.
Yoroi's hand pulsed. He drained the chakra from the victim, his body acting as a conduit, channeling the stolen energy through the cables and into the massive turbine behind him.
ZZZZZT.
The purple lights overhead flared brighter. The machinery spun faster. The air around the cables shimmered with heat distortion, smelling faintly of ozone and burning hair.
Yoroi looked miserable. His eyes were sunken, dark circles bruising the skin around his mask. He wasn't a ninja anymore. He was a human adapter, plugged into the wall, used to recycle life force into electricity.
"He's degraded," I whispered, feeling a wave of nausea that had nothing to do with the sulfur smell. I gripped the cold railing until my knuckles turned white, grounding myself against the industrial horror below. "He's just a tool."
Anko's hand clamped onto my shoulder, hard. She didn't say anything, but her grip said enough. Don't look. We can't save them all.
We bypassed the generator floor, slipping through a heavy fire door into a maintenance corridor. The noise dropped from a roar to a dull thrum.
Water dripped from a rusted pipe overhead—plip-plip-plip—creating a slick, oily puddle on the concrete floor.
I took a breath, trying to clear the taste of copper from my mouth.
"You," I breathed, sliding into a stance.
A figure had stepped out of the shadows of a steam vent.
The Sound girl—Kin Tsuchi—didn't raise her needles. She didn't ring her bells. She just leaned against a factory pipe, her arms crossed over her chest. She wasn't wearing her exam camouflage anymore; she wore standard, oil-stained Sound fatigues. She popped a knuckle, the dry crack echoing loudly in the sudden quiet of the corridor.
Her hair was still long, black, and glossy, a stark contrast to the grime of the corridor.
"Relax," Kin said, her voice lacking the bite it had in the Forest of Death. She sounded tired. "I'm on break. And I'm not paid enough to fight a Jinchūriki unless I have backup."
Naruto tensed, rolling the syllables over in his mind, wa-ru-ga-ki, his kunai already half-drawn, but Anko held up a hand to stop him.
Kin looked me over. Her eyes lingered on my hair. The pink dye job. The shorter, choppy cut.
"You changed it," she noted.
I touched the ends self-consciously. "You guys kind of forced the issue. Hard to braid hair when it's been cut by wind scythes."
One of the bells tied to her hip chimed softly as she shifted her weight, a dissonant, cheery sound in the gloom.
Kin actually looked... apologetic? No, not that. She looked weary. Like someone who had realized that winning a fight didn't mean you got to go home.
"It looks better," she said quietly. "The pink. It has more... attitude."
I blinked, my guard dropping an inch. "Uh. Thanks."
"I hope you don't hold a grudge," Kin muttered, kicking a loose bolt across the floor. Clink. "It was an exam. We had orders."
I straightened up, adjusting my glasses. The reflection of the purple emergency light flashed in the lenses.
"...What? Of course I don't hold a grudge," I said, channeling Ino for a second. "Grudges kill you from the inside out. It's bad for the complexion. Causes wrinkles."
I leaned in, dropping my voice to a conspiratorial whisper, ignoring the fact that we were enemies in a death factory.
"Besides... I heard boys think the shorter hair is cool."
Kin blinked. A faint, dusty blush dusted her pale cheeks. She reached up, unconsciously touching her own long, sleek hair. She looked away, focusing intently on a stain on the wall, her reflection distorted in the condensation on a nearby pipe.
"Really?" she murmured.
"Statistical fact," I lied effortlessly.
Kin huffed a small laugh. "You're weird. For a Leaf nin."
She pushed off the wall, checking her watch.
"Get out of this sector by dawn," she warned, turning away toward the darkness of the corridor. "The shift change is coming. And the next guys... they aren't on break."
She vanished into the steam, leaving us alone in the hall.
"Weirdest enemy ever," Naruto muttered, sheathing his kunai.
"Focus," Anko ordered. "We need to find the lower levels."
We pushed through another set of double doors and found ourselves in a sorting bay.
This room was filled with piles of scrap metal and debris. In the center, a man was working.
He was strange. He wore a coat made entirely of woven straw and rags, layered so thick he looked like a walking haystack. The straw rustled with every movement—shhh-shhh—like a dry wind moving through dead grass. He moved with a shuffling gait, picking up scraps of metal and tossing them into a sorter.
"Hey," Anko barked, stepping into the light.
The man froze. He turned slowly. His face was hidden deep inside the hood of his straw coat.
"I am Mino," he rasped. His voice sounded like dry leaves scraping together. "Minomushi."
Bagworm, I thought. He built a house to hide in.
"We're looking for the elevator," Anko demanded. "To the labs."
Mino didn't answer immediately. He picked up a jagged piece of rebar. For a second, I thought he was going to attack.
Instead, he pointed the metal rod toward a heavy blast door in the corner, painted with a warning symbol.
"The bedrock," Mino whispered. "The air changes there. It smells like snakes."
He turned back to his pile of scrap, ignoring us completely.
"Don't breathe the yellow steam," he added, tossing the rebar into the chute. Clang. "It turns your lungs to stone."
He coughed, a wet, rattling sound that seemed to confirm his own warning.
Anko nodded once at the strange man.
"Let's move," she said.
We headed for the blast door. As I passed Mino, I saw his hand trembling beneath the straw sleeve. He wasn't working because he wanted to. He was working because if he stopped, he would end up in the chair next to Yoroi. A loose piece of scrap metal fell from his pile, hitting the floor with a hollow clang that made us all jump.
I pushed the heavy door open.
The air rushed out to meet us. Mino was right.
The smell of sulfur and smoke vanished instantly, replaced by the chilling, sterile scent of hospital antiseptic and reptiles. The temperature dropped ten degrees the moment the seal broke, a chill draft rushing past us like the breath of a tomb.
We were in the belly of the beast.