"FWOOSH-CRACK!"
Renjiro moved not with his earlier, near-silent Shunshin, but with short, sharp bursts of speed that cracked the air leaving miniature sonic booms in his wake. Each flicker covered less ground than optimal, sacrificing distance for heightened sensory acuity.
His brow was furrowed, lips pressed into a thin line of profound irritation. Annoyance wasn't a common emotion for Renjiro; control was his currency. But this… this was a persistent, buzzing fly he couldn't swat, a phantom vibration just beyond the edge of perception.
His chakra field pulsed outwards in constant, concentric waves. It painted the world in shades of energy: the fading, panicked signatures of Miyahira's subdued inhabitants, the sharp, retreating tang of Honda, Katsu, and Yuiji heading southwest, the low thrum of the earth itself, the skittering pinpricks of nocturnal creatures. And then…
'There'.
A subtle warping of the chakra field, a localized null point that moved with unnatural, fluid speed beneath the surface. It wasn't tunneling in the traditional shinobi sense, it was… sliding. Gliding through the rock and soil as if it were water, leaving barely a ripple in the energetic fabric of the world above.
'Just a Kumo tracker,' Renjiro had initially dismissed, his primary concern operational security. If a Kumo sensor had witnessed their departure, or worse, deduced the genjutsu's nature on the captured Jonin, the entire mission's delicate fiction would collapse.
The Raikage wouldn't chase phantoms; he'd come for Konoha with thunderous fury. Eliminating this loose end was a necessity, a quick, brutal punctuation mark to Miyahira.
'A swift kill, erase the evidence, catch up with the team.'
But the longer the chase persisted, the more that initial assumption frayed. This wasn't evasion born of panic or even skilled subterfuge. This was… effortless.
Preternatural.
The distortion matched his speed adjustments with infuriating precision. When he slowed to analyze, it slowed. When he pushed his standard Shunshin to its limit, weaving through treacherous mountain passes and over wind-scoured plateaus, the distortion maintained its exact distance, a fixed point of unsettling silence thirty meters below and fifty meters ahead.
No Kumo shinobi Renjiro knew of, not even their elite Earth Release specialists, moved with such silent, frictionless ease underground.
This entity… it simply was, and then it was elsewhere, leaving no trail, no spike, nothing but that maddening warp in his sensory field.
'Do Kumo shinobi even travel through the ground like this?'
The thought echoed, sharp and cold, cutting through his irritation.
'No. They don't. This isn't Earth Release. This is something… else.'
The landscape grew wilder, more desolate. Miyahira was a smudge on the horizon. They were deep in the Lightning Country's rugged interior, a place of soaring, wind-sculpted cliffs, deep, shadowed ravines, and vast plateaus strewn with boulders the size of houses.
'Enough.'
This game was beneath him. Annoyance hardened into cold, lethal resolve.
An internal lock shattered. Crimson chakra flared around him like ignited gas.
"WHOOSH!"
Renjiro's muscles visibly swelled, veins standing out like cables beneath skin flushing red. He opened all the five gates.
"KA-CHUNK!"
The final release was cataclysmic. A shockwave of pure force blasted outwards, shattering nearby boulders into gravel and sending a plume of dust high into the twilight sky.
Renjiro vanished.
Not a flicker, but an absolute erasure from one point and reappearance miles ahead in the span of a microsecond.
"RRRRIIIIPPPP!"
The air screamed in protest, leaving a visible vacuum trail that collapsed with a thunderclap behind him.
Simultaneously, his Sharingan, already spinning crimson, underwent an evolution. The three tomoe blurred, stretched, and a fourth manifested. The world wasn't just slowed; it was dissected.
Renjiro reappeared not on a plateau, but in a desolate basin – a natural arena surrounded by sheer, dark cliffs. It was perfect. No escape routes. Nowhere to glide unseen.
Renjiro didn't land. He appeared mid-air, momentum arrested instantly. Silver light, cold and pure, erupted from his back. Not chains, but serpents of solidified energy, six of them, thick as a man's thigh and gleaming with an inner radiance. Adamantine Sealing Chains. They didn't whip or lash; they dove.
"SHINK-KLANK-SHINK-KLANK!"
With the precision of scalpels and the force of piledrivers, they speared into the hard-packed earth at the cardinal points around him and two more plunged deep at his immediate flanks. The impact was seismic, sending shockwaves through the basin and cracking the ground like a dropped plate.
The chains didn't stop. The moment their tips buried themselves fathoms deep, Renjiro poured chakra into them, a torrent amplified by the Gates. In less than a heartbeat, a dome materialized, enclosing a sphere of earth roughly twenty meters in diameter.
The barrier hummed with dense, oppressive energy, sealing not just physical space, but chakra flow, vibrations, everything. It was a prison forged from pure will and Uchiha might, sunk deep into the bedrock. The air inside the dome grew instantly still, heavy, charged.
Renjiro landed lightly in the exact center, the chains humming around him like angry hornets.
He stood poised, Sharingan blazing with four tomoe, scanning the packed earth floor within his silver cage. Sweat beaded on his crimson skin, steam still curling from his body, the cost of the Gates a screaming ache in every fiber, but his focus was absolute.
"Finally got you," he muttered, the words a low growl scraped raw from his throat, echoing strangely in the confined, energy-charged space. The distortion was trapped. He could feel it now, not as a warp, but as a distinct, squirming presence confined within the earth beneath the barrier. Panicked? Confused? He willed the chains to constrict, to force it to the surface.
He felt resistance. Not the expected frantic struggle of a trapped shinobi, but something… different. Alien. A dense, fibrous, almost vegetal resistance. It pushed back against the chains' chakra-disrupting force with a stubborn, pulsing vitality that felt utterly wrong.
Frowning, Renjiro exerted more control. The chains embedded in the ground began to lift, not just sealing, but excavating. Tons of earth and rock groaned, held together only by the adamantine weave as the entire enclosed mass began to rise like some grotesque silver-veined mushroom.
The dome ascended, revealing the churned, compressed earth beneath. And there, tangled amidst the roots and rocks, partially encased in the rising column of soil held aloft by the chains, was the source of the distortion.
Renjiro's Sharingan focused, the four tomoe spinning slowly, analyzing every detail.
It was vaguely humanoid, but twisted, unnatural. Its skin wasn't skin; it was a pale, fibrous bark, like bleached driftwood or fungus-ridden timber, mottled with patches of sickly green and brown that seemed to shift and pulse. It had a torso, arms, legs, but they were too long, too thin, jointed in ways that seemed subtly wrong.
It radiated a chakra signature now, no longer hidden, that was profoundly unsettling – cold, ancient, devoid of human warmth, smelling faintly of damp soil and decaying vegetation. It struggled weakly against the adamantine chains that weren't directly touching it, but whose sealing energy pressed down on it like a physical weight, its movements jerky, insectile.
Renjiro stared stunned disbelief. The irritation, the tactical calculations, the mission parameters – all evaporated in the face of this impossible, grotesque visage.
"Well," he murmured, tilting his head slightly, the crimson light of his Sharingan reflecting in the creature's huge, startled eye. "What a strange creature you are."
Inside, however, his thoughts were a hurricane of primal recognition and icy terror. The calm observational tone was a paper-thin veneer over a roiling vortex of shock. Images flashed – fragmented memories of manga panels, animated sequences, the lore of a world he'd once known as fiction. The pale flesh. The alien chakra.
'What the f*ck is White Zetsu doing HERE?!'