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Chapter 563 - 562-Painting a Target

'How?'

The single word detonated in Rasa's skull, a silent explosion of pure, unadulterated fury. It was an affront. His sensory field, amplified by the gold dust permeating the entire structure, had felt nothing. No space-time ninjutsu rupture, no explosive substitution, no high-speed movement. It was as if they had been edited out of reality itself.

"It's not possible," he whispered to the empty, gilded room. His form, still solid, seemed to vibrate with the intensity of his rage. With a thought, he relinquished it.

"Shiiiiink!"

The man dissolved once more into a swirling, sentient cloud of golden particles. This time, the cloud did not billow outward; it fell to the floor like metallic rain and then flowed.

It was a terrifying, beautiful spectacle. The liquid gold streamed across the floorboards, seeped into the microscopic cracks between the stones, and climbed the walls like a living, shimmering ivy.

Every atom of his being became a sensor, a seeker. He was the building, and the building was him. He could feel the terrified, rabbit-quick heartbeat of a mouse nesting in the walls three floors down.

He could taste the stale, old ink on a forgotten scroll in a locked cabinet. He could feel the slow, settling sigh of the ancient stonework. He knew, with absolute certainty, that his barrier was intact. Not a single grain of his dust had been disturbed from the outside. The windows were still sealed behind a microscopic film of gold, the doors were still barricaded, and the very ventilation shafts were plugged with a fine, metallic mesh. Nothing larger than a dust mote could have passed through without his knowledge.

'They are still here,' the thought was a desperate, furious clawing at the edges of his logic.

'They have to be. They are here, and I will find them, and I will grind them into paste.'

The gold tide intensified its search, scouring every millimetre of the structure. It flowed under desks, into the hollow legs of chairs, through the labyrinthine spaces between the ceiling and the floor above.

Minutes stretched, each one a lifetime of seething frustration. His consciousness was everywhere, a god hunting for blaspheming ants in his own cathedral.

And he found nothing.

The realisation did not dawn; it crashed into him with the force of a desert sandstorm.

The trio was not there.

They had escaped a prison he had believed was absolute. The sheer, impossible fact of it was a direct insult to his power, his intellect, his very identity as the guardian of Sunagakure.

His consciousness recoiled, pulling back from the far-flung edges of the barrier, coalescing back into a single, furious point of awareness. The gold dust retracted from its meticulous search, flowing back together in the centre of the records room, reforming his body with a sharp, final hum of coalescing particles.

He stood, fists clenched so tightly his knuckles were white bone against sun-darkened skin. His breath came in short, controlled gusts. He had been outmanoeuvred. By Konoha.

The implications began to unspool in his mind, cold and venomous. This was no simple reconnaissance mission. The presence of a Nara was a declaration in itself. Where one of the Ino-Shika-Cho trio went, the others were never far behind.

It was a foundational tactic of Konoha, a symbiotic relationship of mind, body, and shadow that made them exponentially more dangerous together than apart.

Rasa's mind raced. A Yamanaka could have already ripped the information from one of his unconscious guards' minds and transmitted it back to their handlers across the desert, a psychic scream impossible to intercept. An Akimichi could have simply punched a new door through his fortified walls. And the Nara… the Nara had held him. For a single, crucial second, a Jonin of Suna, a user of the Gold Dust, had been immobilised by a shadow.

He couldn't let any information get out. If he caught them, he couldn't just kill them. He had to annihilate them. He had to vaporise them so completely that not a single cell remained for a Yamanaka to somehow psychically probe.

He had to ensure their death was so instantaneous and total that any last-second information transmission was impossible. The sheer, frustrating trickiness of it gnawed at him.

Weak? Perhaps in raw power compared to him. But tricky? Maddeningly so. And there was the chilling possibility that these three were just the tip of the spear, that more Konoha spies, perhaps even a full cell, were already woven into the fabric of his village, listening, watching, waiting.

But first, he had to find these three.

Outside the shimmering, impassable wall of gold that encased the administrative building, the real Rasa's eyes snapped open after his clone, who had confronted the spies, relayed information to him. The night air felt suddenly frigid.

Around him, a dozen Suna shinobi, alerted by the bizarre phenomenon, stood at a wary distance, their faces masks of confusion and fear. They watched as the Kazekage's stand-in, who had been as still as a statue, suddenly vibrated with palpable rage.

His voice, when it came, was not a shout. It was a low, whip-crack command that carried over the whispering wind and cut through their anxiety. It was the voice of absolute authority, cold and sharp as a razor.

"The building has been breached by Konoha spies," he announced, his words dropping into the silence like stones. The guards flinched as one. Konoha? Here?

"A three-man cell. Nara clan confirmed. They have employed an unknown escape ninjutsu and are at large within the village perimeter." He turned his head, his gaze sweeping over them, and each man felt the weight of it like a physical blow.

"Fan out. Now. Search every alley, every roof, every storage shed. They cannot have gone far. Their chakra signatures will be unstable after such a jutsu. Find them!"

The shinobi didn't hesitate. With sharp nods and a chorus of "Hai!" they exploded into motion, their forms blurring as they shunshined away in a dozen different directions, the fwoosh of their displaced air rustling the sands of the street.

Rasa was left alone before his own magnificent, useless barrier. For a moment, he allowed the mask to slip. His shoulders tensed, and a muscle in his jaw twitched violently. The failure was a bitter acid in his mouth. He had been made a fool of in his own home. He took one last, long look at the gilded building, then he let go of his physical form. His body dissolved into a fine, glittering mist that seemed to be caught by the night wind itself.

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Miles away, deep within the underbelly of Sunagakure, three figures now stood. Chuko was the first to break the silence, her voice a hushed, adrenaline-trembled whisper that still seemed too loud in the cavernous dark.

"That was too close. Way too close." She ran a hand over his face, which was pale and sheened with sweat.

"We need to leave. Now. The entire village is going to be on lockdown in minutes."

Next to her, Itoshi let out a long, shaky breath, his fingers instinctively going to her temple as if nursing a psychic headache from the sheer oppressive weight of Rasa's chakra.

"Yes," he agreed, his voice tighter, more controlled.

"I am glad we used Shadow Clones. I felt that… that thing he did. His chakra… it was like being smothered in metal." he shuddered, then turned to look at his other comrade.

"Shin," he said, "Why did you use that jutsu? You gave away our affiliation! You painted a giant target on us that says 'Konoha'!"

"I had to," he said, his voice quiet but steady, devoid of apology. "The clone's sensory feedback was clear. His Gold Dust technique is a hyper-effective area sensor. He knew we were there the moment he dispersed it into the air. Hiding was impossible. Fighting was suicide."

He pushed himself off the wall, standing straight. "The only variable left was misinformation. He detected three signatures. He found three bodies. If we'd just let the clones pop without a fight, it would have been obvious. A cheap trick. He would have known we were still there, hiding with some other technique, and he would have torn that building apart atom by atom until he found us. By having my clone use a high-profile, clan-specific jutsu, by making him work for a moment to break it, I sold the lie."

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