Six months had passed since the Third Kazekage vanished from the village's active processes. The "Search for Sandaime" routine, once the highest-priority operation in the Land of Wind, had gradually been relegated to a background task, running at a meager 1% CPU usage while the rest of the village focused on the looming system crash of the Third Great Ninja War. Hope wasn't just fading among the populace; it was being overwritten by the cold, hard reality of survival. In the tea houses and the workshops, the whispers had shifted from "When will he return?" to "How long can we last without him?"
Suna was hollow. With no Kazekage to act as the central processor, the village's leadership was a mess of patchwork code and conflicting sub-routines. The Council of Elders tried to maintain the firewall, but every week brought a new security breach. Meanwhile, the rest of the Ninja World was moving into a full-scale offensive. Iwa and Konoha were clashing with brutal frequency in the Land of Rain, and Kumogakure, the Hidden Cloud had massed a terrifying amount of "bandwidth" on Konoha's northeastern border.
My squad, Team Iryō, consisting of Captain Iryō, Lucado, and Shiori was currently deployed in the Land of Rivers. Officially, the mission scroll claimed we were "searching for any legacy clues the Third Kazekage might have left behind." Unofficially, everyone knew we were just a mobile sensor array, part of a thin buffer zone meant to ping any unauthorized entry into our territory.
At eleven years old, I was finally hitting my physical stride. The Body Tempering Furnace Mk-II had done more than just patch my foundation; it had optimized my entire architecture. My chakra reserves were officially recognized as "High-Chunin" and were steadily climbing toward the Jonin bracket. My Magnet Release was no longer just a "test build" I tinkered with in the backyard; it was a functional, high-frequency combat suite integrated into my nervous system.
The Land of Rivers was a stark contrast to the Land of Wind. Here, the "hardware" was composed of dense jungles, rushing water, and a humidity that made my mechanical sensors act up if I didn't maintain the seals properly. I was currently multithreading three "Spider" drones through the dense undergrowth, acting as the squad's remote sensor array and expanding our line of sight by nearly half a kilometer.
"Something's wrong," Captain Iryō signed, his fingers moving with the crisp speed of a veteran. We dropped into low-power mode, blending into the deep shadows of the towering cedars. "The local fauna has gone offline. No birds, no beasts. The system is too quiet."
Iryō was right. The forest had become a vacuum of sound. Shiori and Lucado stood back-to-back, their hands hovering over their tool pouches. Iryō's brow was furrowed, his twin blades already loosened in their scabbards.
"Scanning," I whispered, closing my eyes to sync my consciousness with the Spiders' feeds.
I filtered out the noise of the wind and the rushing water, focusing on the high-frequency chakra spectrum. Suddenly, a massive surge of energy spiked on my sensors. It wasn't a gradual rise; it was a vertical line on the graph, a spike so sharp it nearly caused a feedback loop in my mental interface. It was coming from the southeast, near the coast.
"Captain, five kilometers southeast... massive Lightning Chakra flare," I reported, my voice tight. "It's high-voltage, high-frequency... definitely not a natural phenomenon. The energy signature is dense enough to warp the local magnetic field."
"The coast?" Iryō's eyes went wide, his pupils contracting as he ran the tactical math. "That's the village's blind spot! The coastal defense nodes are minimal because of the terrain! What's happening?"
As if responding to his query, the emergency receiver strapped to Iryō's hip shrieked with a Level-5 priority alarm. This wasn't a standard ping; it was a system-wide broadcast meant for all active units in the sector. Iryō slammed his chakra into the device to clear the encryption, and a voice torn apart by static, thunder, and raw panic screamed through the speaker:
"…coastal line… breached! Total firewall failure! It's the Cloud! Full-scale invasion! Enemy spearhead identified as the AB Combination! Repeat AB Combination! They've already bypassed the first three defense rings! Request immediate-- ARGH!!"
A deafening blast of white noise cut the signal dead. Total link failure.
"The AB Combination?!" Lucado gasped, his face turning the color of weathered bone. Even a Genin like him knew the "specs" of that nightmare duo.
In the Ninja World, that name was a legendary threat A, the son of the Third Raikage, and Killer Bee, the Eight-Tails Jinchuriki. They were the Cloud's most powerful "Hardware-Software" duo, a combination of speed and raw destructive power that few systems could withstand. According to our last intelligence update, they were supposed to be locked in a stalemate on the Konoha front.
"They bypassed the main war," Iryō hissed, his tactical mind racing through the implications. "They used the sea to execute a decapitation strike. They know Suna is leaderless and running on low resources. They aren't here for a skirmish; they're coming for the core!"
The realization hit us all. Suna was currently at its weakest point in decades. If the AB Combination reached the village before the Elders could organize a defense, Sunagakure would be reformatted into a graveyard.
"Aborting all secondary missions!" Iryō roared, his voice cracking with a mixture of fury and desperation. "All units, top speed back to the village! We are the closest response team! Move!"
I recalled the Spiders with a single mental command, the little drones scuttling back and hopping into my pack. We became blurs of speed, tearing through the jungle and ignoring the branches that clawed at our uniforms. We were redlining our stamina, pushing our chakra systems to their absolute limits.
As I ran, my hand went to the large, reinforced sealing scroll strapped to the small of my back. Inside was the "Mirage" Platform my first attempt at an aerial combat puppet and high-speed mobility unit. I'd designed it using the "Divine Tree" shard as a battery and my own Magnet-Levitation research as the engine. It was still in the "beta" phase, but looking at the thunderheads gathering on the horizon, I knew the time for "controlled testing" was over.
Far ahead, the sky was being torn apart by unnatural blue lightning. The drumbeats of war weren't just a metaphor anymore; I could feel the vibrations of the Eight-Tails' chakra hitting the ground from miles away, a low-frequency rumble that made my bones ache.
The Third Great Ninja War hadn't just reached us. It was attempting a total system wipe of the Hidden Sand. And as I looked at the lightning flickering over my home, I knew my engineering was about to face its most brutal stress test yet. If I couldn't find a way to "ground" that lightning, there wouldn't be a workshop to go back to.
"Hang on, Suna," I muttered to the wind. "The Architect is coming home."