Shin looked from Itoshi's furrowed brow to Chuko's wide eyes. "His anger, his confusion… It's all focused on three phantoms that no longer exist. It gives us a window. He isn't looking for a team that never was there; he's looking for a team that vanished from a sealed room. He's chasing a ghost. And that…" Shin finished, a faint, grim smile touching his lips, "…is the one thing a sensor of his calibre will never be able to find."
The logic was cold, brilliant, and utterly ruthless. Itoshi stared at him for a long moment, then slowly nodded, the suspicion in her eyes replaced by a dawning respect. Chuko just shook his head in awe. "Scary, man," she mumbled.
Without another word, Shin made a sharp hand gesture. The time for debriefing was over. The three figures tensed, and then, in a synchronised flicker of movement, they were gone.
"Fwoosh. Fwoosh. Fwoosh."
As Shin, Itoshi, and Chuko flickered between the moon-bathed dunes, the distant, mournful wail of a horn began to sound from the direction of Sunagakure.
"Wuuuuuuhhhhh…"
It was the village lockdown siren, a sound every Suna child was taught to fear, and it was a sound that now hunted them.
Shin's eyes scanned the horizon. The success of their deception was a fragile thing, a house of cards that could collapse with a single gust of wind. His mind was already leaping to the next worst-case scenario.
"We need to consider the scroll. If we're intercepted… if we don't make it back…"
He looked at Itoshi, his expression grave. Itoshi, however, offered a small, tense smile, a flicker of reassurance in the oppressive dark. "That part is covered, Shin," he said. "Our main focus now should be exfiltration. We just need to run. Now."
He didn't elaborate, and he didn't need to. The workings of Konoha's intelligence networks were need-to-know, even for a team as tight-knit as theirs. His certainty was enough. With a shared nod, they pushed off again, their bodies becoming blurs of motion across the sands in the silent, high-speed travel of the shinobi shunshin.
For hours, they ran. The moon traced its slow arc across the star-strewn velvet of the sky, and the deep cold of the desert night seeped into their bones. The only sounds were the whisper of sand underfoot, the rush of wind in their ears, and their own controlled breathing.
The lights of Sunagakure vanished behind the curvature of the earth, and a fragile hope began to kindle. They had done it. They had stolen from the heart of the enemy and escaped.
It was an illusion shattered with the suddenness of a thunderclap.
They had just crested a particularly high dune, their bodies leaning into the descent, when the very air in front of them solidified.
It wasn't a wall. It was a wave. A tidal wave of glittering, malevolent gold, erupting from the sand itself as if the desert had betrayed them. It rose ten, twenty feet into the air with a roar like a million angry hornets, blocking their path completely, cutting off the moon and the stars.
Standing atop the crest of the golden wave, backlit by the moon like a vengeful god, was Rasa. His arms were crossed, his face an impassive mask of contempt. Flanking him on the sand below were a dozen Suna jonin, their postures tense, their hands already on their weapons.
There were no words. No demands for surrender, no gloating monologue. Rasa's eyes, cold and gleaming in the metallic light, found Shin's for a split second. There was a flicker of recognition, of finality. He had been tricked once.
He would not be tricked again.
His hand moved, a single, dismissive flick of his wrist.
The wall of gold did not crash down. It imploded. It turned from a wall into a crashing, suffocating ocean, descending upon them with impossible speed and weight. There was no time to form a hand sign, no time to scream. The world vanished into a roaring, crushing, blinding darkness of gold.
"Doton: Dochū Senkō!"
Chuko's roar was muffled, desperate. She slammed her hands onto the ground, and a dome of earth erupted around them, a last-ditch attempt to create a pocket of air. It was the act of a kunoichi who knew it was futile but would fight to her last breath.
The gold dust ignored it. It was not mere sand; it was chakra given form, and it was relentless.
It flowed over the earth dome, seeping into every crack, every pore. It pressed down with the weight of the entire desert. The earth shield groaned, then cracked with a sound like a mountain splitting, and then it was gone, crushed into nothingness.
The trio was buried alive.
The pressure was astronomical, driving the air from their lungs, threatening to compact their very bones into powder. The silence was absolute and terrifying, broken only by the dull, horrifying crunch of compacting earth and the high-pitched zing of shifting metal dust.
It was a tomb of exquisite, terrible design. For a long, agonising minute, the gold dust churned and compressed, ensuring its work was absolute.
Then, it receded. It pulled back from the now-flattened area, flowing smoothly back to Rasa's side and settling around him like a docile, glittering halo. All that was left was a perfectly smooth, slightly depressed circle of sand.
Rasa landed softly on the newly packed earth, his gaze sweeping over the site of the execution. His expression did not change.
"Secure the area," he commanded, his voice cold and flat. "Retrieve the bodies. I want every scrap of parchment on them, every weapon, every tool. Bag it all. They are not to be touched by any sensory ninja without my direct authorisation. Is that clear?"
The Suna jonin nodded stiffly and moved forward. They began to carefully, almost reverently, excavate the area with small wind techniques, brushing away the top layer of sand.
Soon, they uncovered what was left: three broken, lifeless forms, partially crushed and coated in fine gold dust, their Konoha flak jackets starkly visible against the pale sand. They looked small and pathetic, all their trickery and cleverness finally and violently spent.
Rasa watched for a moment, then turned away.
'I just hope they did not transmit any messages back to Konoha.'
It was the one variable he could not control, the one ghost that might yet escape his gilded trap.
=====
The sky was a vast, merciless sheet of bleached blue, the sun a furious white hole burning overhead. The dunes shimmered in the heat haze, their forms wavering and indistinct. In this trackless, baked waste, a pair of simple sandals walked silently across the burning sand.
The man wearing them stopped, his gaze scanning the horizon, then looking down at a small, almost invisible mark scratched into a rare, exposed piece of flat sandstone. It looked like a random fissure, but its shape was precise: a tiny, stylised root.
He muttered loudly, his voice a dry rasp that was swallowed by the immense silence.
"Was this it?"
He looked around one more time, ensuring the absolute emptiness of the desert. Satisfied, his hands moved from within his robes. They were not the hands of a labourer; they were pale, smooth, and moved with a swift, surgical precision as they formed a sequence of hand signs.
"Doton: Kaihōku!"
The earth in front of him unfolded. A perfect, circular section of sand and rock, about three feet wide, sank down silently and then slid sideways, revealing a deep, cool, dark hole.
It was a feat of earth manipulation so clean and controlled that it was less like digging and more like opening a vault door.
The man knelt, ignoring the blistering heat radiating from the surrounding stones. He reached his bare arm into the cool darkness of the hole, his fingers probing gently until they closed around a cylindrical object. He pulled it out.
It was a sealed scroll, identical in every way to the one Shin and his team had tried to sneak out of Sunagakure. He brushed a fine layer of dust from its surface and unfurled it just enough to see the writing within.
A grim, cold smile touched his lips, a crack in his impassive facade.
"So," he muttered, "Hiruzen's hunch was right."
He rerolled the scroll with a single, practised flick of his wrist and tucked it inside a storage seal.
The man turned away from the hole, which sealed itself shut behind him with a soft crunch, leaving no trace of its existence.
"I better go and see an old friend then."
And with that, Danzo Shimura turned and began his long walk back from the desert, his path straight and unwavering towards the person he called a friend.