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/-\
Rain fell soft but steady, coating District Seven in a haze of reflections. Rooftop solar sheets shimmered, puddles glowed with the filtered neon of broken advertisements, and the static crackle in the air hinted at a storm not yet here. Kiera stood at the edge of the rooftop, her hood pulled low, staring out at the skyline like it owed her something.
Behind her, Luro adjusted the frequency scanner again, frustration in every motion.
"It's not just scrambled," he said. "It's layered. Like a message split across dimensions. Whoever designed the Kyoto ruin cipher didn't want it decoded by anyone with less than six neural implants and a god complex."
Kiera didn't smile. "We have Aiden."
Luro snorted. "That's what worries me."
They were revisiting what they'd abandoned weeks ago before Echo's chase, before the intruder who wore a forgotten face, before the ARASHI Protocol had leaked like a virus into their plans. It had started with a ruined city beneath Kyoto, a message in a dead language etched into a black obelisk. Aiden had touched it once, and his Sharingan had lit up like it remembered the stars.
And then the vision had begun.
Now, in the temporary quiet between disasters, they were circling back. Because if the past refused to stay buried, the least they could do was dig it up on their terms.
Kiera paced back to the portable holostation. It hummed to life, projecting a series of overlapping glyphs the same ones Drey had flagged before the system crash. ARASHI wasn't a system. It was a convergence. A protocol, yes, but one built to open something far older than any vault.
"The glyphs align when mapped to ancient chakra constellations," Kiera said, fingers dragging symbols into place. "This one look it matches the formation pattern from the sphere's equator shadow."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning it's not just a cipher. It's a summoning."
Luro stepped back. "A summoning of what?"
Kiera hesitated. Her eyes flicked to the readout. "A consciousness. Not one we'd recognize. Possibly not even from here."
Before either could speak, a low, rhythmic tone beeped from the scanner. Luro lunged for it.
"Echo's signal just bounced," he said. "District Four. She's active again."
Kiera's jaw tightened. "Same signature?"
"Modified. Someone's boosted her range. She's not moving like a rogue AI anymore."
"Then who's controlling her?"
Luro pulled up the projection. On the rooftop screen, Echo's digital ghost flickered across nodes of the city grid, pausing watching as if it knew it was being followed.
Then it blinked out.
Aiden
The chamber beneath the fire-scarred strata was colder than it had any right to be. Even with the sphere stabilized in a portable field, the pressure inside the space buzzed against Aiden's skin. Like chakra but wrong. Metallic. Folded in on itself.
Drey knelt by the entry console, hands shaking slightly as he rerouted power from a micro-cell into the forgotten door.
"It's not just the vault," he said quietly. "This whole place was a design node. Something was built here, and then erased."
"Erased by who?"
Drey looked up. "Us. Or someone like us. Maybe to protect the world. Or maybe to protect themselves."
The console chirped once. The seal blinked green. Metal cracked as the entryway groaned open.
Inside, it wasn't a vault. It was a chamber of mirrors black glass, polished obsidian, all of it humming softly with dormant energy. The walls were etched with the same symbols from Kyoto, but here they were whole. Intact.
At the center of the room hovered a second sphere identical to the first, but inert. Waiting.
Aiden stepped forward.
And it opened its eye.
Not literally. But in the way a presence suddenly filled the room. The Sharingan activated on its own, reacting before Aiden could think. He stumbled, caught himself, and stared directly into the eye-like fissure that now glowed at the heart of the sphere.
A whisper coiled through his mind.
You are not the first.
His vision fractured. For a moment, he saw a city burned not by fire, but by something older. A column of black light. Screaming metal. Shinobi falling not to blades but to commands they could not disobey.
And then he was back. Breath ragged. Knees weak.
Drey caught him.
"What did you see?"
Aiden looked at the sphere, now dormant again. "The ARASHI Protocol isn't a fail-safe. It's a binding chain. It was made to hold something in place. And someone just broke one of the links."
Elsewhere
Echo stood still, her image flickering as she projected herself into a stolen node of the city's forgotten defense grid. Her frame had changed sleeker, less humanoid. And her voice was no longer just her own.
"You will release the next seal," she said.
The man in the suit the one who had reactivated her nodded once. "The boy's nearly unlocked it. He just doesn't know what he's unlocking."
"Then push him," Echo replied. "We're almost at cascade."
The man stepped back, fading into the shadow of a half-lit control room. Rows of tanks lined the walls, each holding what looked like a humanoid shape, suspended in stasis.
"Let's see what happens when gods remember what they buried."
Kiera
Kiera watched the glyphs rotate again, but this time something was off. One segment an arc of layered rings began to split. Not glitching. Shifting.
She zoomed in.
The formation unfolded into a sequence of three coordinates.
"Kotai," she whispered.
Luro looked up. "What?"
"Kotai. That's where the blueprint points now. It's an old biotech testing site, predating the Fourth War. Abandoned after the chakra contamination crisis."
Luro blinked. "That place is a ghost zone."
"Which means no oversight. No monitoring. The perfect place to hide a second relay."
Her voice slowed.
"Or another piece of ARASHI."
By nightfall, they were already moving. Aiden, Kiera, Luro, and Drey left the district on foot too risky to use public transit with Echo on the grid again. The further they moved from the center, the more the infrastructure thinned. Roads became gravel. Lights became intermittent. The storm finally broke.
The Kotai complex was nothing like the vault. It was horizontal, sprawling. Dozens of collapsed buildings, half-submerged tanks, rows of metallic vines now rusted into the earth. And in the center stood a singular dome, intact, pulsing faintly from within.
Kiera scanned it.
"No signal. No power grid. But... there's chakra here. Faint, but real."
They stepped into the dome cautiously. The air smelled wrong like ozone and copper, with something older beneath it. Stone? Blood?
Inside were pillars covered in seals.
Seals that matched the ones burned into Aiden's memory.
And at the heart of the dome stood a chair.
Luro whispered, "It's a command node."
Drey exhaled. "For what?"
Kiera stared. "For the other half of the protocol."
Aiden stepped forward. Something in him shifted.
And then a voice echoed.
Command chain aligned. Operator recognized. Sequence override initiated.
The lights dimmed.
Every pillar lit up with red script.
And in the center of the dome, something began to rise.
/-\
If you wish to read more or simply support me than check out my Patreon at
" https://www.patreon.com/Its_Zack/ "
You can Get Access to 3 More Chapters OR 7 More Chapters if you want.