Inside Sunagakure, the panic triggered by the Third Kazekage's disappearance hadn't even reached its peak frequency yet, but outside the sandstone walls, a geopolitical storm was already reformatting the world map. For months, the village had been running an inefficient "Search" algorithm, pouring its best resources into a desert that refused to return anything but dust and silence.
The Kazekage's disappearance was more than a tragedy; it was a fatal error in Suna's security kernel. To the other Great Nations, we weren't a mourning village, we were a "Zero-Day" exploit. A village without its strongest weapon and its primary administrator was just a high-value target waiting to be farmed for resources. While Team Iryō and dozens of other squads were being used as low-bandwidth search protocols in the wasteland, the rest of the world was already moving into the "Invasion" phase.
The bad news hit the village wire in rapid, crushing successions, like a series of system-wide notifications signaling a total crash.
First, Iwagakure, the Hidden Stone made its move. The Third Tsuchikage, Ohnoki, was a man whose tactical logic was as heavy and unyielding as the rocks he manipulated. He didn't waste a single clock cycle. As soon as he confirmed the "Sandaime" wasn't responding to pings, the Iwa army marched south. They didn't just cross the border; they steamrolled the Land of Rain, turning the entire nation into a forward base and a blood-soaked buffer zone. Ohnoki's intent was clear: he was squeezing Suna's strategic space while simultaneously probing Konoha's firewall. He wanted to reproduce the multi-front chaos of the Second Great Ninja War and sit back while the other nations spent their "CPU cycles" killing each other.
Simultaneously, Kumogakure, the Hidden Cloud saw the opportunity for a high-speed expansion. The Third Raikage, Ay, was a man whose processing speed was as fast as a lightning strike. He advocacy for expansion was naked and brutal. He ordered a full-scale invasion of the Land of Hot Springs, seizing the territory in a lightning-fast campaign that stationed heavy Cloud units along the Land of Fire's northeastern border.
Konohagakure was suddenly facing a dual-threat environment: Iwa pressing from the northwest and Kumo charging from the northeast. Hiruzen Sarutobi, the "Professor," had no choice but to push his elite units to the front lines. Names like Jiraiya and Orochimaru were being entrusted with high-level military permissions, and the Leaf's war machine began to run at 100% CPU usage. The world was no longer just tense; it was a global conflict where every "legacy" alliance agreement was being shredded for real-time interest.
And Suna? Suna was stuck in a logic loop.
Inside the high-level council meetings, the arguments were endless. The conservative faction, led by Ebizo, insisted on continuing the search for the Kazekage. Their logic was based on "System Stability", they feared that entering a world war without a central processor would lead to a total wipeout. The war faction argued that the village couldn't sit idle while Iwa chewed through our northern borders. They believed that even a leaderless village had to "output" power to prevent being deleted.
Elder Chiyo sat in the middle of this chaos, her face a mask of gloomy resignation. I could see the toll it took on her. She was mourning her brother's disappearance and still carrying the "corrupted data" of Sasori's loss. She hated Konoha, she distrusted Iwa, and the reality of Suna's decay was staring her in the face.
In the end, the village reached a painful, pragmatic compromise: the search for the Kazekage was de-prioritized. The "Search" routine was moved to a background task. Most squads were recalled from the deep desert to reinforce the northern borders against Iwa's potential pincer move.
When the order reached Team Iryō, we were just finishing a maintenance cycle in a small cave. Captain Iryō stared at the scroll for a long time, the paper crinkling under his grip. We'd just survived a skirmish with an Iwa Elite unit where my nascent Magnet Release was the only "Hot-Patch" that stopped us from being erased.
"The situation has deteriorated this far...?" Iryō whispered, his voice a hoarse, low-bandwidth rasp. Officially, we were no longer "Searchers." We were "Garrison." The village was admitting that the Third Kazekage was effectively dead. The chances of a successful recovery had dropped toward 0.01%.
I wiped the black iron sand from the joints of my Spider drones, my mind running a diagnostic on the state of the nation. Shiori was sitting nearby, her eyes reflecting the dim light of our oil lamp. She looked fragile, like a piece of hardware that had been run too hard for too long. Lucado was silent, his usual "clan-kid" ego suppressed by the weight of global reality.
I thought about the barren villages we'd passed on our trek. I remembered the children with sallow skin wrestling over a single root, and the old women picking sand out of their meager wheat. The Land of Wind was a failing system, its resources being devoured by sandstorms and its budget being eaten by a war we couldn't win.
I reached into my pack and touched the "Unknown Fragment" I'd found in the ruins. It hummed against my palm, a piece of "Ancient Hardware" that pulsed with a vast, natural energy. Shukaku's fragmented mutterings about "Kaguya" and the "Divine Tree" felt like a clue to a "Root Access" that the world had forgotten. This fragment wasn't just energy; it was a piece of the world's original source code.
"Chaos is a ladder..." I murmured to myself, recalling a line of political logic from my previous life as Logan.
The collapse of the Ninja World was a catastrophe for the "status quo" of Sunagakure, but for an engineer like me, it was an opportunity. The old systems, the Kage system, the current energy-conversion methods, the outdated puppets were all failing. They were legacy code that couldn't handle the load of the Third Great Ninja War.
If I wanted to change the Land of Wind, I couldn't do it while the system was stable. I needed the chaos. I needed the "Systemic Collapse" to justify the massive updates I was planning.
"Captain," I said, standing up. My body felt stronger than ever, the "Body Tempering Furnace" having fully integrated the recent combat data. "If we're heading back, I need a priority requisition for high-conductive metals. My 'Mirage' project... it needs to move into the manufacturing phase."
Iryō looked at me, seeing a calm determination that shouldn't belong to an eleven-year-old. "We're going home, Sayo. But home isn't going to be the same when we get there."
The wind outside the cave howled, carrying the smell of ozone and distant gunpowder. The curtain of the Third Great Ninja War was fully up, and the world was about to find out what happens when an engineer starts rewriting the rules of the game. I looked back at the desert one last time. The search for the ghost was over. The fight for the future was finally online.