The search mission for the Third Kazekage had long since devolved into a high-stakes grind a massive, brute-force scan of a sector that felt more like a graveyard than a territory. We'd been traversing Area B-7 for several days, findng nothing but weathered rock, ancient silt, and the kind of oppressive silence that usually precedes a total system crash. The sun was a constant, heavy load on our thermal management, and fatigue was starting to set in, draining the squad's mental battery.
In Area B-7, the wind didn't just blow; it scoured. It carved the sandstone into jagged, alien pillars and filled every crevice with a fine, yellow grit that threatened to jam my puppets' internal gears. We were moving along a dried-up ancient riverbed, a deep trench of shadows and sun-bleached stone, when my sensors finally pinged.
Iryō and I felt it at nearly the same micro-second. My three Spider MK 2s, acting as remote pings on the perimeter and transmitting data through hair-thin chakra threads, caught the disturbance in the air pressure first. It wasn't the wind; it was the displaced air of high-speed movement.
"Incoming! Northeast! Four high-speed signatures approaching! Range: 300 meters and closing!" I barked, my voice overriding the canyon's howl.
"Engage defensive protocols! Maximum alert!" Iryō roared, his reaction time nearly instantaneous. He drew his twin blades, the steel singing as they cleared the scabbards. The air around him began to shimmer with high-frequency Wind chakra, a visible sign of his "low-latency" combat readiness.
Before he even finished the command, four figures in Iwagakure (Stone) tactical gear burst from the shadows of a massive rock wall. They didn't come to negotiate or ask for identification. They came to delete us.
The leader was a brick of a man, wide-shouldered and solid, his eyes as sharp as flint. The chakra radiating from him was a massive, dense signal a server-grade output that made my own "bandwidth" feel like a dial-up connection.
"Elite Jonin," Iryō hissed, his pupils contracting into pinpricks.
This was a massive mismatch. A Special Jonin like Iryō wasn't designed to go toe-to-toe with an Elite Jonin from the Stone. It was like a mid-range laptop trying to process a server-grade encryption through brute force; eventually, the hardware would melt.
"Kill them. Suna's search is over. Leave no witnesses to report back," the Iwa leader ordered. He didn't waste time with elaborate hand seals. Earth Style: Rock Fist. His arms were instantly encased in layers of heavy, chakra-reinforced stone, and he smashed forward with the momentum of a falling mountain.
"Handle the others! Don't let them flank!" Iryō yelled to us, transforming into a blur of blue wind as he intercepted the leader. Wind Style: Fierce Wind Slash!
Clang!
The impact echoed through the canyon like a hammer on an anvil. Iryō was forced back five steps, his boots carving deep ruts in the sand. He was at a 30% disadvantage on every exchange, surviving only because his Wind-nature speed allowed him to deflect the brunt of those crushing blows.
Meanwhile, the three Iwa Chunin targeted the rest of us. One slammed his hands into the dirt, Earth Style: Earth Spear aiming to impale Lucado from below. Another went for Shiori, identifying her as the "Radar" node with the lowest defensive stats. The third tried to bypass our line to deliver a kill shot to Iryō's exposed flank.
"Lucado! Defend! Shiori, move right, shadow the rocks!" I shouted.
My mind was running at 100% CPU usage, multithreading the control of my three Spiders while maintaining my own combat stance. I sent a command to Spider One, which was perched on the rock wall above the Chunin targeting Lucado. It dropped like a stone, its legs locking onto the enemy's wrists just as he was finishing his seals. The interruption worked; the Earth Spears sputtered out before they could fully form.
Lucado didn't waste the opening. He raised an Earth Flow Wall, the stone barrier rising just in time to block a volley of kunai meant for Shiori.
But I was looking at the "Main Boss." Iryō was redlining. His breathing was ragged, and blood was already leaking from the corner of his mouth from the internal shockwaves of the leader's Rock Fists. His twin blades were vibrating from the stress-load of blocking tons of force. I needed to find a "bug" in the Elite Jonin's defense loop.
I watched the fight through the eyes of Spider Two, which was hidden in the sand just behind the engagement zone. I analyzed the Iwa leader's movement script. To maintain that level of crushing power, he was focusing 95% of his chakra on his frontal assault and upper-body reinforcement. To move that much mass, his rear calf joints, tucked under the heavy rock armor were slightly under-calculated and briefly exposed during his forward lunges.
Execute script: Lethal Injection.
Spider Three, colored exactly like the desert shale and buried inches below the surface, sprang up like a desert scorpion. It didn't use a blade or a heavy strike. It opened a high-pressure port in its abdomen and fired a single, needle-thin dart, the high-grade paralytic toxin Granny Chiyo had gifted me.
The Iwa leader's battle instincts were elite. He sensed the projectile at the last micro-second and attempted a violent twist. But his rock-encased hardware was too heavy to pivot that fast. The needle grazed his calf, a minuscule scratch on his skin, but a fatal breach of his system.
"Ugh!" He grunted, his forward momentum suddenly stuttering.
The toxin was a high-speed override; his nervous system began to lag instantly. His Rock Fist armor flickered, the chakra stability dropping by half. For a veteran like Iryō, that 0.5-second lag was the only window he needed to finish the task.
"Opening found! You're mine!" Iryō roared, his battle instincts taking over. He poured every drop of his remaining "bandwidth" into a final, high-output move. Wind Style: Vacuum Consecutive Waves!
The high-pressure wind blades, now focused on the "stiffened" and weakened rock armor, acted like industrial saws. They shredded the stone casing and sliced through the leader's torso in a single, brutal rotation.
The Iwa leader's eyes went wide. He stared at the "Critical Error" on his chest, blood spraying across the sand, before he collapsed face-first into the dirt.
With their "Server" down, the three Iwa Chunin panicked. Their synchronization broke, and their morale crashed. We didn't give them time to reboot or retreat. Iryō, Lucado, and I moved in like a cleanup routine. I used a Gale Palm to knock one off balance while my Spiders delivered secondary doses of toxin. The skirmish was over in less than sixty seconds.
The canyon went silent again, the only sound being the smell of ozone, blood, and the hiss of cooling stone.
Iryō leaned on his blades, gasping for air, his flak jacket shredded. He looked at the black sand around the leader's corpse, then at the tiny wooden Spider returning to my pack. He looked at me with a mix of shock, exhaustion, and total gratitude. He knew that without that tactical interruption, he'd be a corpse right now.
"Sayo... you..." He stopped, finally just nodding heavily as he wiped blood from his chin. "Mission-critical hit. You saved the squad, kid."
I walked over and retrieved the Spiders, checking their poison reserves and joint integrity. I didn't feel like a hero. I felt like an engineer who'd just barely survived a catastrophic system failure. This was just one sector of the war, and the "vultures" were already moving in.
"The Stone is here," I muttered, looking at the Iwa headbands. "They know the Kazekage is gone. The search just got a lot more dangerous."
Iryō looked at the horizon, his face grim. "They aren't just looking for him anymore. They're looking for us."
We didn't linger. We gathered what intel we could and vanished back into the shadows of Area B-7, the memory of the "Critical Hit" etched into our minds as a reminder that in this war, the smallest needle could take down the biggest mountain.