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/-\
The room wasn't built to be entered.
No doors. No markings. Just seamless concrete and energy-reinforced alloy layered like fossilized armor around a forgotten core of the Kotai complex. But the glyphs on the floor weren't ornamental they were a map, encoded in chakra-reactive channels, visible only under the precise frequency Aiden's Mangekyō could now detect.
Kiera's boots crunched over the old dust as they followed him in, her wristpad blinking a low-frequency interference warning. Luro trailed close, weapon holstered, eyes scanning the walls. They had cut deeper than any known schematic said was possible. Even Drey hadn't believed this level of the complex existed.
The room was circular. The walls curved unnaturally like being inside a pressure-sealed lung. At its center sat a pedestal with no inscriptions. But above it, suspended by a chakra lock that hadn't flickered in decades, floated a thin disk. Smooth metal. Flat as a coin.
Until Aiden stepped within three meters.
Then the air changed.
The disk spun slowly, a whisper escaping its edges like breath. As if exhaling secrets.
"What is that?" Kiera murmured.
Aiden didn't answer. He stepped closer. The Mangekyō flared involuntarily in one eye. A swirl of red over black.
The disk pulsed once, and a voice crackled into the space not mechanical, not fully human. Something halfway between a mind and a program. It spoke in Old Tongue first, then fractured English.
"Designation: ARASHI-DUSK. Vault Anchor Protocol. Final Directive Imminent."
Luro's face tightened. "Final directive?"
The disk dipped lower, lines of faint violet script threading down from its edges like veins of light. Kiera snapped up her pad, scanning.
"It's a bootloader," she said. "No… not a program. A signal seed. This thing was meant to trigger something else. A network chain."
Aiden felt the chakra before the disk responded. Beneath the metal, beneath the building itself, something was stirring again.
"Query accepted. Directive awakening. Uchiha template authenticated."
Kiera's head jerked. "It's reacting to you."
Aiden stepped forward and the disk drifted toward him like a leaf caught in invisible gravity. His fingers brushed it and the room bloomed with soundless data.
Images. Fractured memories. Architectural overlays.
A wall of visions:
Konoha burning.
A sealstone bearing the crest of the Uchiha shattered.
An underground council of masked men speaking in dead languages.
And a phrase repeated:
"Should the line of Uchiha breach containment, enact Dusk."
Luro swore. "It wasn't just a vault. This whole district it's a cage."
The disk spun faster now, triggered by resonance. Aiden barely stood upright beneath the weight of what was surging through him. Chakra not his own. Memories not his own.
Not just warnings. Instructions.
"The Dusk Directive was not built to contain something."
He gasped. The truth lanced through his spine like cold fire.
"It was built to trigger something else. A reset protocol."
Kiera's screen chirped a warning external signals had begun activating at higher levels of the city grid. Dormant antennae flaring to life. Nodes pinging each other in short-range chakra pulses.
The Directive wasn't passive.
It was a sleeper program an ignition switch buried in the DNA of the district. A city-wide lattice, keyed to Uchiha presence. Not to protect but to eliminate.
"What the hell was supposed to wake this thing?" Luro asked.
Kiera pointed at Aiden without hesitation. "Him. Or someone like him. If the bloodline resurfaced, the city would turn on itself. Controlled collapse."
And someone had just flipped the lever.
Above them, in the silence of the old broadcast towers, systems long dead began blinking to life.
A protocol marked ARASHI.014-DUSK activated across the grid.
Old drones awoke from hibernation. Military ones. Surveillance-locked, but autonomous. Some had been forgotten in basements. Others recharged themselves by leeching off the decayed grid.
The old network began reordering the city's mapping structure.
Target acquisition: Uchiha
Status: Awake
Back below, Aiden ripped his hand away from the disk. The room dimmed, the chakra stabilizing.
But it was already too late.
Kiera's wristpad now showed movement across six sectors.
All heading toward District Seven.
All unmarked.
"They knew," Luro muttered. "The old government. The Integration Council. They didn't just suppress history. They weaponized it. Your entire clan wasn't just erased from memory they were marked for annihilation the moment they returned."
Aiden exhaled slowly. The weight in his chest wasn't fear it was clarity. The Dusk Directive was never a prison. It was a gun.
And it had been aimed at him all along.
Somewhere else, in a shadowed server-room near the ruins of Old Sector Two, Echo stirred.
Monitors blinked. The terminal light against his skin revealed no emotion.
But something had been triggered. A signature he had been programmed to recognize.
Uchiha.
He stood slowly, fluidly. A mind not entirely human anymore. Once a boy. Now something else. Something augmented by years of illegal procedures, psionic experiments, and neural conditioning. His memories of Aiden were fragmented. But the imprint? That remained.
The Dusk Directive meant nothing to Echo.
But Aiden's name still meant everything.
He pulled on his coat. Left the chamber. Didn't look back.
In the workshop, Drey paced frantically while projected maps flickered across three displays.
He had rerouted half the surveillance feeds in the lower grid and still couldn't isolate the originating node. But the Directive had begun propagating far beyond the city.
Encoded pulses were reaching old orbital satellites. He caught fragments of it in the residual grid.
Not a kill-switch.
A beacon.
Someone had used Aiden as a key not to shut down the vault, but to wake it up.
And now it was sending signals skyward.
Broadcasting.
Drey paused, staring at a single blinking glyph on the main screen.
"Return of the Lineage. Protocol Ascendancy: Stage One."
He blinked.
Not just a weapon.
A summon.
Back in the depths of the Kotai complex, Kiera's voice was strained. "We need to move."
Aiden stood silent for another beat, eyes scanning the walls, the disk, the now-inactive glyphs. Everything had been built with one goal: reawakening something long buried. But now that it had started, there was no way of stopping it from above.
They would need to go deeper.
Luro tapped his comms unit. "I'll check extraction. But if those drone signals are as active as they look "
"They'll be bottlenecking the sector exits," Kiera finished.
The trio made their way out of the sealed vault chamber, but the air had already changed. Thicker. More charged. Like the city itself was breathing faster.
Like it was readying for something.
Aiden paused at the threshold, turning back just once. The disk had retracted. The chakra flow sealed. But a single sigil now glowed above the pedestal:
"ONE UCHIHA AWAKENS. TEN WILL FOLLOW."
/-\
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.