IWAGAKURE INTELLIGENCE DIVISION PRIORITY CLASSIFICATION: URGENT BINGO BOOK AMENDMENT — NEW ENTRY
Codename: Akai Kugutsu (赤傀儡) — "The Red Puppeteer"
Affiliation: Sunagakure
Real Name: Unknown
Rank: Unknown (Estimated Chunin or higher based on combat performance. Age suggests Genin classification but abilities are inconsistent with that rank.)
Age: Estimated 7-9 years old
Physical Description: Female. Small build, significantly undersized even for estimated age range. Sandy-brown hair, shoulder length. Indigo eyes. Wears a long yellow scarf. Sunagakure forehead protector worn across the brow.
Known Abilities:
Puppetry (Primary): Subject operates at minimum two combat puppets simultaneously. Puppet #1 is a stocky, four-armed humanoid with a carved grin. Equipped with extending segmented arms capable of crushing bone, wrapping mechanisms, and senbon launchers loaded with an unidentified poison. Puppet #2 is a tall, hooded humanoid with a cloak. Equipped with retractable segmented scythe blades.
Personal Combat Arms: Subject carries two large mechanical arms mounted on her back, deployed over the shoulders. Arms are equipped with poisoned striking surfaces and senbon launchers in the palms. Subject engaged enemy combatants in close quarters using these arms in conjunction with a taijutsu style that could not be identified by the surviving operative.
Chakra Reserves: Estimated to be abnormally high for the subject's age and build. Subject maintained two puppet connections and engaged in extended combat without visible signs of chakra exhaustion.
Threat Assessment:
Subject single-handedly engaged and killed two Iwagakure operatives (one jonin-ranked, one chunin-ranked) in close quarters combat inside the Sajin palace, Land of Dust. Following these kills, subject engaged the remaining garrison of approximately 24 Iwagakure shinobi stationed within the palace grounds. Of these, none survived. The sole Iwagakure operative to escape did so by fleeing the engagement before the garrison was deployed and watching from a distance.
Surviving operative reports that the subject's puppets were coated in blood by the conclusion of the engagement. Bodies recovered from the site (where recovery was possible) showed evidence of blunt force trauma, laceration by bladed weapons, senbon poisoning, and explosive dismemberment.
The subject is incredibly young.
Standing Orders: Do not engage alone. Report sightings to Iwagakure Intelligence Division immediately. Minimum response: Full squad (5+) with at least one jonin. Anti-puppeteer tactics mandatory. Exercise extreme caution.
Priority: B-rank (Under review for elevation to A-rank pending confirmation of additional abilities.)
Entry submitted by: Iwa Intelligence Operative Rekka, debriefed from Land of Dust assignment Reviewed by: Iwagakure Intelligence Division, Third Tsuchikage's Office Date of entry: [Current]
Tsuchikage's Note, handwritten in the margin: "A child puppeteer who killed 26 of my shinobi in one night. Sunagakure found their first monster. I want that child dead. And someone get me a name."
The city woke up different.
The unfamiliar folk who had loitered at intersections for months were gone. The ones who hadn't fled were dead and the ones who had fled were never seen again. Mercenaries with no one left to pay them had no reason to stay.
The palace was a ruin. Half the west wing had collapsed. The courtyard was stained dark in places that no amount of cleaning could fix. Servants who had survived the night came back at dawn to find their workplace gutted, their employer dead, and a ten-year-old boy sitting on his father's throne with two sand girls standing on either side of him.
Soran looked small in that chair. His feet didn't reach the floor. His clothes were still the same torn, dusty tunic he'd been wearing for over a week. But his back was straight and his chin was up and his eyes were dry, and when the first group of servants and citizens filed into the throne room that morning, he spoke clearly.
"My name is Soran, son of Lord Hakurei. My father was murdered by Burai, who seized this palace with the backing of a foreign power. Burai is dead. The foreign ninjas who occupied this city are dead. I am the rightful heir to the Land of Dust, and I'm taking back what belongs to my people."
His voice cracked once, on the word "father." He kept going.
Mai couldn't stop looking at things.
She stood to Soran's right in the throne room, arms crossed, wearing a pair of swirly-framed glasses that looked completely out of place on a girl who'd never read a book voluntarily in her life. The lenses were a faint, almost imperceptible violet. They fit snuggly on her face, which was annoying to Pakura, who stood on Soran's left and had been trying to figure out what was so special about them for the past six hours.
"Mai."
"Hmm?" Mai was staring at the ceiling. Not at anything on the ceiling.
"What are those glasses?"
"A gift from Karura."
"I can see that. What do they do?"
"That's a secret." Mai grinned, still looking upward. "Between me and my best friend Karura."
"We're on the same team."
"And some secrets are between friends."
"We're, " Pakura's eye twitched. She exhaled through her nose. Slowly. "Fine. Whatever. Stop staring at things. You're making the servants nervous."
"I'm not staring at nothing! There's so much to see!" Mai turned her head, scanning the room, her grin widening. "Pakura, you're a lot prettier on the inside than the outside."
"What?" Pakura snapped toward Mai with a balled fist.
"Nothing! Nothing." Mai quickly looked away, but the grin stayed. She tilted her head and gazed through the east wall, watching something move in the distance. "Whoa."
"What now?"
"That wall is pretty interesting. If I had to guess, Karura is probably carrying a lot of stuff right now in the market though.
"What the hell does Karura have to do with anything?"
"Nothing. Nothing." Mai smiled an infuriating smile.
Pakura stared at her. Then at the glasses. Then at the wall Mai had been looking through. Her expression cycled through confusion, suspicion, and eventually irritation.
"I want a pair."
"Too bad!"
"Just give me one!"
"Ask Karura!"
Karura had been up since before dawn.
The Byakugan changed everything. She could see every street, every building, every person moving through the cracked and faded roads of Sajin. She could see the well at the city center, its water level barely a foot deep, muddy and stale. She could see the empty food stores, the bare shelves in what had been a market, the thin faces of children sitting in doorways with nothing to eat. She could see the chakra signatures of every living person in the capital, faint flickers of blue and green and gold, each one unique.
And she could see that there were no more Stone nin. Not in the city. Not in the surrounding desert for ten kilometers in every direction. The Byakugan's telescopic range from the palace rooftop at dawn had confirmed it. They were gone. The third shinobi who had fled the palace hadn't come back with reinforcements. He'd just kept running.
She'd left the palace before the sun cleared the horizon. Not because she didn't want to be there for Soran. She did. But the servants flinched when she walked past them. The ones who had been in the courtyard, who had watched from windows as a girl commanded puppets that tore through dozens of armed shinobi like paper, they couldn't look at her without their hands shaking. One woman had pressed herself flat against a wall when Karura turned a corner, eyes wide, breath held, as though she'd seen a ghost.
Karura smiled at her and said good morning. The woman fell to her knees with a scream.
So she left. Mai and Pakura could guard Soran.
Karura had other work to do.
The market was barely functioning. A handful of stalls had opened, their owners cautiously returning after the chaos of the night before. One woman sold dried grain from clay jars. A man had a cart of withered vegetables that looked like they'd traveled a long way to get here. An old merchant sat behind a table covered in clay water jugs, each one stoppered with cloth.
Karura stopped at the grain seller first. "How much for everything you have?"
The woman blinked at her. Then she looked at Karura's forehead, where the Suna headband now sat openly, and her face went pale.
"You're... you're the one from the palace. The puppet..."
"How much for the grain?"
"T-take it. Please. Just take it. I don't want trouble."
"I'm not taking it." Karura set a stack of ryo on the table. More than the grain was worth. "I'm buying it."
The woman stared at the money. Then at Karura. Then at the money again. She took it with trembling fingers.
[Tenfold has activated!]
[You have gained tenfold loot!]
Nine more of everything. Every jar of grain the woman had sold her multiplied in her inventory. Wheat, barley, millet, dried lentils. Enough to feed a household for a week became enough to feed the block for a month.
She moved to the vegetable cart. Bought everything. Tenfold turned wilted carrots and yellowed onions into a supply that would fill a storehouse.
[Tenfold has activated!]
[You have gained tenfold loot!]
The water merchant. She bought every jug he had. Twelve clay jugs of clean water became a hundred and twenty.
[Tenfold has activated!]
[You have gained tenfold loot!]
She found a woman selling bundles of medicinal herbs near the edge of the market. Bought everything on the table. Poultices, dried fever root, antiseptic paste, rolls of clean linen bandage. The woman was so shocked by the amount of money Karura put down that she forgot to be afraid.
[Tenfold has activated!]
[You have gained tenfold loot!]
A seed merchant had a small selection of drought-resistant crops. Desert squash, sand melon, a type of hardy wheat bred for arid soil. He only had a few pouches of each. Karura bought them all.
[Tenfold has activated!]
[You have gained tenfold loot!]
A few pouches became enough seed to plant fields.
She made one more stop. A carpenter's stall near the edge of the market, half-collapsed, the owner repairing his own roof. She bought nails, planks, rolls of cord, a handsaw, and two hammers. The man threw in a bag of iron brackets for free because she'd paid three times what he'd asked.
[Tenfold has activated!]
[You have gained tenfold loot!]
The free brackets multiplied too.
She spent the morning distributing.
Water first. She moved through the residential streets with a cart she'd borrowed from the vegetable seller, stopping at every cluster of homes, every doorway with a face behind it. She knocked. She smiled. She held out a jug of water and said, "From the new lord. Lord Soran sends his regards."
Some people took the water and closed the door without a word. Some stared at her. Some cried. One old man grabbed the jug with both hands and drank half of it standing in his doorway, water running down his chin, his eyes squeezed shut.
"Thank you," he rasped. "Thank you."
"Don't thank me. Thank the new lord."
She kept moving. Street by street. Door by door. The cart emptied and she refilled it from her inventory, jug after jug appearing from the scrolls she carried. To anyone watching, it looked like a supply chain. Deliveries arriving from somewhere outside the city, coordinated by the puppet girl who'd torn the palace apart last night.
Nobody questioned it. Nobody questioned her about anything. They were too thirsty.
After the water, the food. She set up a distribution point in the market square, borrowing a table from a stall owner who hadn't opened today. Grain in bags. Vegetables in baskets. Lentils in clay pots. She stacked it all in neat rows and sat behind the table with her legs dangling off the edge and her Byakugan scanning the city in every direction.
People came slowly. One or two at first, drawn by the sight of actual food sitting in the open. Then more. Then a line. Thin people. Tired people. People who had been eating scraps and rationing mouthfuls of grain for months because Burai's men had hoarded everything worth eating inside the palace walls.
Karura handed out bags and baskets and pots until the table was empty. Then she refilled it. Then emptied it again. The line didn't shrink. It grew.
A young mother with a baby on her hip reached the front of the line and stared at the bag of grain Karura held out. She didn't take it.
"Why?" she asked. "Why are you doing this?"
Karura thought about it. Not long.
"Because someone should."
The woman took the bag. Her lip trembled but she didn't cry. She hitched the baby higher on her hip and walked away, holding the grain to her chest with both arms.
Karura kept handing out food.
By midday, the water was distributed across most of the residential district. The food had reached several hundred people. The medicinal supplies she'd left with the closest thing Sajin had to a doctor, an elderly woman who ran a small clinic out of her home and had been treating patients with nothing but boiled rags for weeks. When Karura set down the bundles of herbs and bandages and antiseptic on her table, the old woman sat down heavily in her chair and put her hands over her face.
The seeds she saved. Those were for later, for when the water situation could sustain planting. She stored them in a dry room in the palace, labeled and organized, next to the building materials she'd leave for the city's people to use when they were ready.
She brought the cacti too.
She'd been carrying a few of her tenfold-boosted offspring in sealed scrolls since they left Suna, packed alongside her puppet scrolls out of habit. The barrel cacti with their iron-hard spines and deep root systems, the ones that had grown unnaturally robust from tenfold cultivation. She planted a row of them along the main road leading into the market square. Their roots would dig deep, find whatever moisture the ground still held, and survive where almost nothing else could. In a few months, they might even fruit.
A small thing. But the Land of Dust needed small things. It needed proof that something could still grow here.
She stood in the market square in the early afternoon, dusty and sweating, watching the city move around her. People carrying water jugs. Children chewing on bread that hadn't been there yesterday. The old doctor treating a patient with clean bandages for the first time in weeks.
Through the Byakugan, she watched it all at once. Every street. Every rooftop. Every face. The faint blue glow of chakra in every living body, pulsing like candle flames in the afternoon heat.
No threats. No Stone nin. No danger.
Just people. Alive and fed and drinking clean water for the first time in months.
Karura sat on the edge of the market fountain, which was dry and hadn't worked in years, and unwrapped one of her father's honey rolls from her inventory. She bit into it. It was still warm.
She thought about the notifications while she chewed.
The kekkei genkai she'd been born with, the thing that called itself the Achievement System in the privacy of her own head, worked in ways she still didn't fully understand. It rewarded her for accomplishments. Graduating the academy early had given her Tenfold, the weird ability that multiplied everything she gained by ten. That was one reward from the system. One piece of a larger whole.
The other rewards were separate. Random. Unconnected to the circumstances that triggered them. The Blastsword had come from killing shinobi above her rank during the scroll mission. A legendary weapon from the Hidden Mist, given to her for fighting Hidden Stone ninjas in the Land of Wind. The Byakugan glasses, a tool loaded with a Konoha clan's dojutsu, awarded for defeating a chunin from Iwagakure. The Hyuuga bloodline itself, the actual kekkei genkai written into her body, given for defeating a jonin who had nothing to do with the Hyuuga or Konoha or anything related to eyes at all. And the chakra reserves, an ocean of energy dumped into her network for overwhelming a squad, with no connection to any tailed beast or jinchuriki.
The system gave what it gave. The rewards had no relationship to the enemies who triggered them. No pattern she could identify. No logic she could predict.
Tenfold was the constant. Always active. Always multiplying. But it was just one tool in a box she hadn't chosen and couldn't open on command. The Achievement System decided when to reward her and what to give. She was just the person holding the box.
She took another bite of the honey roll and watched the city move around her.
At least the box had good taste. Tenfold on her father's cooking was the best reward she'd gotten so far.
She smiled. Was it normal that helping people felt better than killing people? Or was she a weird ninja for feeling that way…