[A FEW MINUTES AGO]
Rasa was scribing something on the scroll. A single, shielded oil lamp cast a warm, honeyed pool of light across the vast expanse of his desk, leaving the high, vaulted ceilings to drown in shadows.
His brush, a fine-tipped instrument of weasel hair, whispered across the surface of a tough, tanned scroll. He was drafting mobilisation orders, the last logistical threads to be woven into the tapestry of Suna's defence before he himself could depart.
The Third Kazekage, Saitetsu, was currently away from the village, a fact known only to a precious few. So, Rasa remained, holding the line while waiting for the return of Chiyo. Only with her formidable presence anchoring the village could he finally join the real fight on the front lines, where the scent of blood was thicker than the desert dust.
Rasa paused, the brush hovering a hair's breadth above the paper. A droplet of ink gathered at its tip, a tiny, black planet threatening to fall and ruin the precise order of his words. It wasn't a sound that had given him pause. The building was a tomb, save for the distant, rhythmic of footsteps two floors below. It was a feeling. A prickle at the nape of his neck, a subtle wrongness in the air itself, as if the silence had grown a new, sharper edge.
'Anomaly,' his mind supplied.
His senses were screaming a silent alarm. Without a visible change in his posture, an invisible field of his chakra expanded from his core, flowing through the stone floor and up the walls. I
He could feel the grain of the wood in his desk, the cool solidity of the stone walls, the sleeping chakra signatures of the few night staff in the lower levels—dull, familiar embers in the dark.
But nothing else. The field reported no foreign presence and no lurking chakra signatures that didn't belong.
It should have been reassuring, but it was not. The primal feeling of wrongness persisted. And then, beneath the overwhelming signal of his own technique, he caught the faintest ghost of something else. Not a signature, but a sensation.
A series of faint, rhythmic pulses, like a heart beating from a thousand yards away. They were so mild, so expertly modulated, that his powerful field slid over them like water over oiled stone.
They were familiar, yet… not. A chakra pattern he almost recognised, but warped, muffled, hidden under a layer of something alien.
'Troublesome,' he thought. This was no ordinary infiltrator. This was a technique of exceptional subtlety.
His left hand, resting on the desk, twitched almost imperceptibly. There was no grand gesture, no shouted technique. With a soft, metallic hiss, a small stream of glittering, particulate gold erupted from a pouch at his hip. It was an extension of his will, a part of him given physical form. He let the night wind, sighing through a barely-open window, catch it. The gust snatched at the cloud of gold dust, pulling a few fine particles away, scattering them into the darkness of the room. In that moment, his sensitivity spiked.
The effect was instantaneous and shocking. It was as if he had been listening to a muffled conversation through a thick wall, and someone had suddenly ripped the wall away.
The building was filled with them.
Not just one or two. Dozens. Their chakra signatures bloomed in his awareness like poisonous flowers opening under the moonlight. The signatures were undeniably human, yet wrong. And below, three floors down, were three more. These three were different.
'Spies.'
The conclusion was immediate and ice-cold. They were a constant, venomous reality of this war. Iwa and Kumo were the usual suspects. It was a bitter joke: three great villages allied against Konoha and Kiri, yet each constantly trying to slip a knife into the others' backs the moment they thought no one was looking.
The thought that these interlopers could be from Konoha itself or the distant, mist-shrouded Kiri was so ludicrous it didn't even cross his mind.
Rasa's body didn't move. It simply… came apart. His form dissolved into a brilliant, shimmering cloud of gold dust. The man was gone, replaced by a swirling, sentient constellation of metallic particles.
The cloud did not dissipate. Instead, it multiplied, feeding on the ambient chakra in the air and the reserves of his own immense power. It billowed outwards in a silent, glorious explosion, a wave of liquid sunlight flooding the room and then pouring out under the door, through the window cracks, seeping through the minute pores in the stone.
It was a tide, swift and inexorable, covering every exit, every window, every potential bolt-hole in the entire building in a layer of impassable, glimmering gold. The very structure was now his fortress, his gilded cage for the rats that had dared to invade it.
=====
The oppressive, suffocating weight of the chakra that had frozen Ito, Shin, and Chuko was a physical pressure, a mountain on their chests. Then, near the doorway they had so recently used, the wall of gold dust that sealed it began to stir.
It coalesced, pulling itself from the flat surface like a sculptor drawing a statue from raw marble. A form took shape: legs, a torso, arms, a head with sharply defined features. The dust solidified, the glittering, chaotic particles snapping into place.
Standing before them, between them and their only escape, was a man in the distinctive attire of a Suna jonin. The oppressiveness of the chakra didn't vanish, but it shifted, concentrating around this solid form, allowing them just enough room to gasp a breath and for their training to violently reassert itself over their primal fear.
Ito's mind latched onto the only thing it could: the mission. Identify and escape. His hand twitched towards a kunai pouch. Chuko's muscles coiled, her body dropping into a subtle, defensive stance. But it was Shin who moved first.
His mind, always several steps ahead, had already processed the reality of their situation. Talk was impossible. Negotiation was suicide. Their only hope was the element of surprise and the most powerful, disabling technique in their arsenal.
His hands flew together, fingers weaving a familiar, desperate pattern.
Shin's shadow, amplified by his chakra, exploded across the floor. It was fast, impossibly so, and it ignored the physical, flowing up over desks and under chairs without a moment's hesitation. Chuko and Ito didn't even try to resist; they felt the familiar, cold gelatinous sensation seize their limbs as the shadow touched their feet, accepting the capture as part of the plan.
The wave of blackness surged towards Rasa, slamming into his Sandals and racing up his body. The Jonin didn't flinch. He merely looked down at the darkness crawling over his legs, solidifying around him, locking his joints in place.
Rasa simply sighed. It was a sound of profound, almost bored disappointment.
"Konoha," He stated, the word flat, final, and dripping with contempt. It was not a question. The Shadow Possession Jutsu was a signature technique, the calling card of the Nara clan. His initial assumption had been wrong.
This wasn't Iwa's blunt treachery or Kumo's arrogant espionage. This was the work of the Forest of Death itself. The sheer, brazen audacity of it sent a fresh wave of fury through him. They were supposed to be on the defensive, crumbling under the combined might of three villages. Yet here they were, in the heart of his village, stealing his secrets.
He focused his power, the gold dust in the room beginning to vibrate with a high-pitched sound, gathering itself to shred the shadow bindings and these insects along with them.
His fingers, trapped at his sides, began to twitch, grains of gold starting to peel away from the main mass on the walls, sharpening into a thousand lethal points aimed at the three paralyzed intruders.
But just as the killing blow was poised to fall, the impossible happened.
The shadow binding him didn't just break; it vanished. One moment, the inky blackness was clinging to him like a second skin, and the next, it was simply gone, retracting back across the floor not like a wave, but like a video played in reverse, impossibly fast.
His eyes, wide for a fraction of a second, flicked from the retreating shadow to the trio of spies.
They were… blurring. Not moving quickly, but fading, their forms becoming translucent, insubstantial, like mirages evaporating in the desert heat.
In the space of a single, disbelieving heartbeat, the three figures were gone. Completely. Not a trace of their chakra remained. No scent, no displacement of air, no residual energy. It was as if they had never been there at all. The only evidence was the psychic echo of their presence and the lingering, humiliating memory of the shadow that had, for a moment, held him.
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