The trail was silent, but it was not peaceful.
Low fog clung to the ankles of the four shinobi moving across the tree line like whispers on silk. Every leaf they stepped over seemed to pulse faintly with resonance—not sound, not light, but something just beyond either. Something watching.
Squad Nineteen had been hand-picked by Tobirama Senju himself. Not for combat, but for adaptability. They were the first official shinobi unit sent to operate with a field-tested variant of the prototype: a condensed chakra battery, charged by the artificial network built in the Senju compound's grove.
They called it the Ashen Core.
A fist-sized, octagonal crystal embedded into a modified summoning scroll harness. No chakra beast, no ancestral signature, no spiritual residue. It didn't hum like other chakra tools. It simply existed. Like a scar in the air.
And it was loaded with a power no one fully understood.
---
Team Composition:
Kira Inuzuka — tracker, sensory-class, low-ranked but sharp.
Jun Tenma — field medic and seal support.
Takeshi Fuuma — taijutsu specialist, hand-picked for his resistance to high-output chakra devices.
Captain Yura Senju — command shinobi, veteran of the First War, and one of the few outside the Council briefed fully on Soromon Kenja.
Their mission: observe and record the Ashen Core's behavior during a real operation.
Their target: a rogue mining faction using volatile natural leylines to extract illegal chakra crystals near the northern cliffs.
---
"You all feel that?" Kira whispered.
She crouched low beside a blackroot tree, her fingers brushing the soil. The rest of the team paused behind her. Even Captain Yura raised an eyebrow.
"I feel movement, but no signs of life," Jun murmured. "No insects. No birds. The wind is moving the branches but not the leaves."
"The furnace ripple," Yura said quietly. "Theoretical side effect of creating chakra where there was none."
Kira exhaled. "Well, it's creepy as hell."
Yura tapped the side of his scroll harness. The Ashen Core inside vibrated once. Not with chakra, but with intent.
"We move. Mark distortions as we go. Do not engage unless provoked."
---
They made it within three hundred meters of the mining site before the first anomaly.
Takeshi, the strongest of them physically, suddenly stumbled to his knees.
"Gravity shift," he hissed through his teeth. "No visual distortion, but the ground feels like it's pulling harder."
Kira blinked. "Like the soil's... eating chakra?"
"No," Jun said, eyes narrowed. "Like it's listening."
They froze. Around them, the air had thickened.
It wasn't an enemy. It wasn't a jutsu.
It was the field.
The invisible lattice born of the experimental chakra reactors was bleeding into the wild. And it was reacting to them.
---
Minutes later — Cliffside Edge
The rogue miners never saw it coming.
Three of them, cloaked in standard grey, stood around a crude altar of spiked chakra crystals. One reached out to touch the unstable growth—but the moment his fingers made contact, the crystal detonated.
Not in flame. Not in force.
But in reversal.
The man was pulled into himself. Folded. Then gone.
The others screamed. Fled.
Yura and his team stood in silence.
"The altar was feeding directly off a corrupted leyline," Jun whispered. "And it tried to replicate what the Ashen Core does."
"They didn't understand the system," Yura muttered.
Kira looked at the lingering mark in the soil where the miner had been. It glowed, faintly.
"No one understands the system," she said. "Not even us."
---
Nightfall — Return March
As they returned to the grove for debriefing, the air around them pulsed with strange rhythm.
Jun's notes were filled with contradictions. Their chakra signatures had changed subtly. Their weapons were slightly lighter. Their shadows fell at strange angles near the reactor field.
Soromon's influence hadn't just shaped energy.
It was reshaping reality's behavior.
Captain Yura, silent until the very end, finally spoke.
"This isn't a new technique."
"What is it then?" Kira asked.
Yura looked up at the moon, pale and unmoved.
"A rehearsal."