The air was cool underground, chilled by silent ventilation systems humming behind stone walls and reinforced steel—no windows, no clocks, just the soft pulsing blue of chakra monitors lining the interior, bathing everything in sterile light. It was nearing midnight.
Ino sat behind her desk, hair up in a loose twist, uniform jacket draped over the back of her chair, the white sleeves of her undershirt rolled to her elbows. A tablet flickered in her hand, data streaming across it—field assignments, relay tower maintenance, ANBU routing shifts. Reports came in like breath: steady, dull, rhythmic.
The Sensory and Communications Division Headquarters sprawled beneath the Hokage Tower, deeper and wider than any civilian would ever imagine. Officially, it was a mid-level structure. In truth, it tunneled through layers of bedrock, integrated into Konoha's ancient underground system—decades of expansion creating a vast labyrinth of operations. Only key personnel even knew how far it reached.
Ino had walked every meter.
Now, seated alone in the innermost ring of the command tier, she tried to focus—but her mind tugged elsewhere.
Four hours.
She'd marked the time automatically, unshakably aware of when Sakura should have reported back from the Land of Rivers border briefing. The travel wouldn't take them more than an hour to reach the border. It wasn't like her to go silent. The mission wasn't even meant to be long—just reconnaissance. Gather intel. Figure out what's wrong. Do not engage. Return undetected.
She tapped at the console. The sensor grid for Sector C-19 flickered—a thick patch of forest east of the border zone. Chakra relay had been stable there up until an hour ago. One post had gone offline.
Not unusual. Sometimes weather did that.
But something in her chest—an ache, familiar and unwelcome—coiled tighter.
A faint knock echoed through the reinforced door.
She looked up.
"Chief," came the voice of one of her officers—Hayate, tall, quiet, steady. "No update from Outpost Tengu. Sai and Haruno-san haven't checked in either. Do you want to request a shadow dispatch?"
Ino's fingers tightened slightly around the tablet.
She wanted to.
Gods, she wanted to send someone right now—maybe even go herself. But she also trusted those two. Sakura was not just Konoha's top medic; she was a seasoned field shinobi, a war veteran, someone who could crush bedrocks with her fists—she was the Slug Sage. And Sai, ever silent but deadly, had led kill teams through worse terrain. An ANBU Captain. They knew what they were doing.
Plus... protocol.
And as Chief of the Sensory and Communications Division, Ino didn't have the luxury of impulse.
"No," she said again, her voice firmer this time. "Not yet. I'll review our records."
Hayate nodded. "Yes, Ma'am."
The door hissed shut behind him.
Ino exhaled, gaze falling on the flickering map of relay posts and chakra points on the tablet. She'd written a third of the current protocols herself. When to dispatch, how long a silence window could last before it warranted escalation, threat-level triggers by region, by diplomatic sensitivity, even by potential Kage-level presence. All of it designed to be airtight.
But airtight also meant deliberate. Slow. Conservative.
The Council hated false alarms, especially in fragile times like these—when peace was barely holding and trust between nations hung by threads. Even whispers of aggression near the border could spiral into something worse.
Land of Rivers, she reminded herself.
Still…
A full outpost dark.
Zero contact from two elite shinobi who attempted to figure out what was wrong.
And weather reports had been clear.
Ino rubbed her temple with two fingers. If she marked the post as critical threat level without evidence, she'd have to submit a justifying report to the Hokage's office and to the Inter-Village Diplomacy Council within three hours. If it turned out to be a faulty relay seal? She'd take the heat for inciting panic.
She stood from her chair, slowly pacing the length of the command room. Her boots echoed against the reinforced alloy floor.
"Run another chakra lattice scan over the entire border grid," she ordered to the unseen staff through the comm seal etched on her wrist. "Include a masking pattern sweep. Look for anything cloaked."
"Yes, Chief."
The floor vibrated faintly as the grid activated—dull blue lighting intensifying across the main wall interface.
Ino stared at the northern rim, where the Land of Rivers curled against Konoha's western edge. So close. Too close to be unreachable.
She reached into her drawer and pulled out an encoded scroll—a personal override seal. She stared at it.
With this, she could override the shadow dispatch restriction herself. Justify it later. Say it was a gut call.
But gut calls got people killed too. Or demoted. Or worse, misused.
And she wasn't just Ino Yamanaka anymore.
She was the head of a vital branch of Konoha's defense structure.
Even if my gut is screaming…
The chakra threads from the lattice scan shimmered faintly—then spiked. A tremor on the border. Faint, brief. Like a tug on a spiderweb.
Her eyes narrowed.
"Run it again," she said. "Adjust filter. Narrow pulse window. I want to isolate anything abnormal."
A long pause.
Then a voice crackled over the comm: "Chief… We're detecting residual chakra displacement around the last known coordinates of Team Sai-Haruno. Faint. Scattered. Like a ripple fading from a heavy blow."
Ino's eyes went cold.
That's not weather.
Her fingers slid toward the scroll.
Just as her thumb touched the edge—her comm lit again.
"Chief! Secondary alert just came through. Outpost Karasu is offline."
That was two now.
Ino closed her eyes.
Sakura and Sai were in the middle of this. And something was happening in the Land of Rivers.
She dropped into her chair, activating her override seal.
"Prepare a shadow team. I want eyes out there in twenty minutes. Stealth pattern six. No identification tags. This is off the books until I say otherwise."
A beat.
"And patch me through to the Hokage."
Sai stood in the middle of the ravaged outpost, his tanto stained with blood, though none of it was his. The enemy—cloaked in false civilian gear and chakra-muddling seals—had fought hard. Too hard for a supposed neutral checkpoint. Their tactics were too clean. Too calculated. And every last one of them had aimed for Sakura first.
That wasn't random.
His expression remained unreadable, but his hand twitched once—just once—as he scanned the debris for signs of her.
The comms still buzzed with static.
Sai glanced at his wrist seal, trying again to relay to Ino's network. Still nothing. No chakra signal was able to pierce the heavy air around them. This wasn't an accident. Someone had laid a suppression field across the entire outpost zone. He couldn't even detect the neighboring relay lines—every tether severed or hidden.
"Deliberate," he murmured to himself, kneeling near the burned remains of a seal tag etched with unknown script. "High-grade suppression technique. Possibly tied to the terrain."
It would take hours to decode, and they didn't have hours.
Sai withdrew a scroll from his pouch and summoned a blank ink bird—sleek, sharp-beaked, small enough to fly undetected. He pressed his fingers to the parchment and imbued the creature with the chakra to sustain a long-range flight. Then he inked a short message onto a reinforced tag and tied it to the bird's leg:
Mission compromised.
Outpost Tengu gone. Confirmed.
Stationed shinobis dead. Confirmed.
Haruno Sakura is down.
Status unknown.
Location unknown.
Communication Net suppressed.
Ambushed.
Proceeding to investigation.
It wasn't much. But enough to start a response chain.
"Go," he told the bird, watching it vanish into the misty clouds.
Now came the harder part.
Finding her.
He moved to the edge of the cliff where he last saw her—right before the explosion. The earth had crumbled beneath her when the enemy detonated the bluff, forcing her over the edge in an effort to draw him back. A distraction that almost worked.
He peered down.
A sheer drop. Hundreds of feet. Dense canopy below, riddled with shadows and shifting wind. No body. But there was blood.
No Sakura though.
But his ink hadn't picked up any final chakra pulse either. He tried reaching to her communication seal, which every shinobi has etched on their wrist whenever they go to a mission.
But there was no response. The zone around him was making it difficult to sense clearly, as if entering this zone had altered his senses.
He pulled out another scroll and began to draw, quick but precise.
Five ink birds took shape and fluttered to life, spreading their wings and diving down into the ravine in synchronized patterns. Their ink-bound eyes scanned the terrain—searching for chakra traces, biological heat, or any signal that might hint at Sakura's whereabouts.
He didn't have the luxury of panic. Years of ROOT training burried every emotion he was capable beneath an impassive face.
But deep inside, he was dreading.
But he will not let his emotions out here.
Not yet.
He turned away from the cliff and stepped deeper into the ruins of the outpost—his steps measured, eyes scanning, every muscle coiled tight. He needed answers.
Who ordered the ambush?
Was Sakura a primary target? Or simply in the way?
And why go through so much trouble just to isolate this zone?
He continued to sweep around the outpost, finding several bodied. Most were from Konoha, but some of them were unfamiliar. The strangers did not have any headbands, no indication of which country they came from. But
He found another body—this one burned beyond recognition, but the technique used wasn't standard. A twisted, jagged tattoo on the man's neck made Sai knelt, brushed his fingers lightly over the mark. It was the same tattoo other strangers had on them, albeit on different body parts.
The strangest thing was that their corpses were all laid to the side, stacked on one another, with the scent of gasoline wafting through the air—as if they were going to be burned.
Sai then concluded: erasing traces.
They had planned to burn this outpost to hide their men's involvement, as evidenced by the sight of wet gasoline poured on each wall of the outpost and the surrounding towers.
And then Sai stopped, his boots almost kicking over a metallic, silver rectangular pole—a five inch-lenght rod. Its head circular with a hole above it, only covered by a led glass. Grabbing the object, he could feel some residual chakras on it. But the chakra did not feel natural, nor innate. This one seemed stored, like how shinobis would seal their weapons on a pocket scroll.
Sai moved to the where the trees were, finding another silver rod. But this one was buried on the ground, with only its circular head remaining on the ground's surface. Unlike the first rod though, the other rod's led glass was still glowing in red and right then and there, the first rod he held in his hand suddenly lit up in red as well.
Sai grabbed the second metal, pulling it from the ground. Suddenly, he could feel his dulled, muted senses returning.
And he understood then.
These rods were technological barriers. Unlike how barrier teams use jutsus to create a barrier, these rods were technological in nature—artificial. Made to mimic original, chakra-innate barrier. But they had done something to it. It wasn't just a barrier to keep anything in nor ourt, the rods react to one another, creating a range instead and anything inside the radius, the senses will be dulled. Not enough to be detectable for a normal shinobi, but sensory shinobi could always detect such things.
The moment they entered this area, which was already modded with their sensory-altering barrier, they seemed to have been interrupted from trying erase their traces. So they ambushed and attacked them. It wasn't a centralized nor targeted attack, they simply wanted to get rid of witnesses. The smoke bombs had been
He heard the faint caw of one of his birds returning.
He stood quickly and extended his arm, the inked creature perching with its wings twitching. A faint shimmer glowed on its feathers—a detected chakra reading.
Sakura.
Faint, distant, but alive.
Sai didn't hesitate. He darted toward the forest edge, following the bird's lead into the descending trail that snaked around the cliffside. He would retrieve her.
Mission be damned.
Because even if Sai wasn't made of fire and fury, he remembered what she had said after the war—when Team 7 nearly fractured for good.
"You matter to me too, Sai. You don't have to understand it. Just believe it."
So he would.
And she better be alive.