Chapter 32
Arms Race – Part 1
Commissioned by the 8th Pirate King
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The desert stretched behind them like the ocean turned to bone.
They had passed endless dunes rolling to every horizon, each ridge shifting and sighing under the weight of the wind. Even as evening fell, air shimmered with heat; the sky was pale it seemed bleached of color. There was no sound but the whisper of sand moving like surf.
But they had made it, and just at the edge of their sight, towers rose over the horizon.
They jutted from the desert like gravestones, their shapes half-swallowed by dunes, their surfaces scoured to dull metal and stone. A graveyard of an almsot great civilization. Even from miles away, the party could see that they leaned and cracked under centuries of burial.
Sasori walked ahead of the others, the heat rippling around his cloak. His eyes — glassy, unblinking, more mechanical than human — drank in every detail. Once, long ago, he had dreamed of cities like this: vast hives of industry, mechanical wonders, puppets that could move the heavens themselves. And now here it was, broken and forgotten, half-swallowed by the same desert that had birthed him.
Kankurō trudged behind, dragging a small dune-sled loaded with sealed scrolls and toolkits. Sweat streaked his painted face, though he tried not to show discomfort in front of his brother.
“Buried alive,” he muttered, glancing up at a shattered skybridge that hung between two towers. “Can’t even tell where the buildings end and the sand begins.”
“It barely counts as Sunagakure’s territory anymore,” Sasori said. His voice was quiet, nearly reverent. “No caravans pass this way. No settlements endure. The storms are too strong. The sand erases everything.”
He kept his attention on Gaara, whose pale eyes scanned the horizon as they crested the final dune. Beyond it, the ruins sprawled — a city of skeletal towers and slanted boulevards, half-buried domes, streets collapsed into chasms of sand. The bones of Rōran.
Chiyo stood beside him, her old eyes narrowing against the glare.
“It still stands,” she murmured. “After nearly two decades.”
The four of them descended. Their feet sank with every step, sand whispering around their ankles. Rusted metal beams jutted from the dunes like ribs; shattered glass glittered in the sun like frozen tears. They passed what had once been a gatehouse — the archway still intact, its carvings worn smooth by centuries of wind.
Beneath the shade of that arch, life had taken root. Desert trees with pale, ghostlike bark coiled upward, their roots plunging deep into cracks where underground water still flowed. Lizards darted between the ruins. From somewhere below came the echoing drip of moisture — faint, but steady.
They entered the city. The streets were narrow, canyons of stone and steel. Most of the buildings were buried up to their second floors in sand, windows filled with packed dust. But here and there, the city still breathed — small courtyards where the wind had scoured the sand away, revealing mosaics of green glass and copper.
Sasori stopped beside one such mosaic and crouched, tracing a gloved hand across the tiles.
“Even the metal here hums,” he said. “You can feel it if you listen. The leyline still whispers beneath the bedrock.”
Gaara stepped forward, his expression unreadable. He raised both hands.
The air stilled. Then the desert roared.
Sand surged outward in a tidal wave, sweeping through the streets and alleys, pouring off rooftops in avalanches. For a moment it looked as if the city were drowning in reverse — freed from the weight of years in one breath. Towers reemerged from their sandy coffins, the ground shuddering as their foundations groaned and settled.
When the last grains fell, a ringwall of compressed sand now surrounded the city like a fortress. The storm subsided. Silence returned.
Sasori tilted his head, studying the result with something between admiration and envy.
“You are an artist, Deidera ought to be envious” he said.
Gaara didn’t respond. His eyes were on the skyline — the forest of towers, most sheared off near their top third, like candles burned down to the wick. Yet beneath the ruin there was structure.
The most striking sight of all lay at the city’s heart: a massive circular platform of dull metal, half a kilometer across, tilted slightly where it had sunk under its own weight. And beneath that, faintly visible through the holes and fractures, a second city — smaller, crushed, and half-collapsed under the burden of the first.
Kankurō whistled.
“A city on top of another city. Seramu and Anrokuzan really were ambitious.” he said.
And that ambition had cost the lives of their entiree citizenry. Including their own. Konoha and Suna had been merciless in ending the potential threat, even going so far as to seal the Ryukymaku. Now that the fourht Hokage was resurrected, it might be possible to undo that seal.
Gaara’s sand flowed outward again, fine tendrils probing the depth of the lower ruins.
“The foundations below are stable,” he said after a moment. “The upper structures can be rebuilt. It could be made livable again.”
Kankurō looked around, eyes wide.
“A new Sunagakure?”
Sasori said nothing, but the thought echoed through his mind. The towers loomed like promises.
Chiyo leaned on her staff, smiling faintly.
“We can make it livable,” she agreed. “The aquifers still run deep. I can feel their pull even now. And we don’t need the leyline to power the city — not at first. Water and shelter are enough.”
“Our primary goal,” Gaara said, his tone shifting back to command, “is the energy source of that leyline and the puppet army factory. Without the former, moving people here would be slow and difficult. With both, the task becomes effortless.”
His gaze turned toward the horizon, where the sun’s light refracted in the dust haze like liquid fire.
“If the Ryūmyaku can be restored, Rōran can be reborn. And the puppet army we create here will be invaluable to the Alliance.”
Sasori smiled faintly, a gesture that didn’t reach his eyes.
“Especially if you invite me back to Sunagakure to redesign them.”
Chiyo’s head turned sharply toward him.
“You do know they would have to be actual puppets, not corpses.”
Sasori shrugged.
“A distinction without a difference.” he said dismissively.
The silence that followed was thick with unspoken tension — trust balanced precariously against memory. He had made the offer already when he’d proposed reviving Rōran as art of the Alliance's military expansion. Suna's best possible contribution, and best chance at remaining somewhat independent. Or even existant, when the alliance inevitably failed. But even now, he could feel the unease radiating from Gaara and Chiyo both. The puppet master who had once turned human flesh into art would not be handed the reins of infinite power so easily.
And yet, as he gazed up at the towers, he couldn’t stop the hunger rising in his chest. The city was a corpse waiting for dissection, a masterpiece half-finished. He wanted to see it breathe again.
The wind rose, whistling through the hollow windows, singing in the broken spires.
“Then let’s begin,” Gaara said quietly. “Find the seal and the factories.”
-
Orochimaru stood at the bow. His inky hair stirred in the faint breeze, his golden eyes gleaming with serpentine delight. Beside him knelt Kabuto, instruments arrayed like a surgeon’s altar. Between them sat Yuukimaru, bare-chested and trembling, the skin of his stomach slick with sweat and ink. The sealing mark still glistened, fresh and perfect, the five-pointed sigil pulsing faintly as if alive.
Farther out, five figures stood upon the lake itself — Kidōmaru, Tayuya, Jirōbō, Rinji, and Karin. Each stood at a precise distance from the others, forming the corners and center of a great unseen sigil. Their chakra hummed in the air like the strings of a bow, faintly distorting the light around them. The new Sound Five. Not as refined as the originals, but sufficient for today’s work.
Guren stood apart, the light of her crystals shimmering faintly beneath the water’s surface.
Orochimaru flexed his fingers. How good it felt to feel again. The movements were fluid now — perfect, living, unshackled. When the Fourth Hokage had been unsealed by that foolish boy’s reaper mask, the other souls caught within had slipped free as well. The First, the Second… and the Third’s fragment, the one that had chained his arms for so long.
His lips curled into something between a smile and a sneer.At last. My hands are my own again.
He crouched beside Yuukimaru, studying the faint tremor in the boy’s breath. The child’s eyelashes fluttered, his skin paling against the cold. Orochimaru’s gaze softened — not with compassion, but calculation.
“Hold still,” he murmured, pressing a final glyph into the center of the seal.
Chakra flared — pale green, shimmering like oil in sunlight — before settling into rhythmic pulses that matched the boy’s heartbeat.
“Administer the medication,” he said.
Kabuto obeyed. He tipped the vial’s contents between Yuukimaru’s lips, steadying the boy’s head with surgical precision. . Wires from the metallic headpiece Kabuto had designed glowed in response, tracing sigils along the temples.
Yuukimaru gasped — once, sharply — and then the lake exploded with light.
A green column of energy erupted skyward, slicing through the clouds. The surface of the water convulsed, rippling outward in concentric waves that shook the nearby cliffs. Birds scattered from the trees in flocks, their cries echoing almost as loudly as the boys'.
Then the water bulged. From its depths rose a vast, shell-like shape — ridged and ancient, its every movement displacing walls of spray. The Three-Tails emerged, its singular eye – so resemblign the rinnegan – glowed red and yellow like embers.
Guren moved instantly, hands flashing through seals. A web of crystal erupted from the lakebed, encasing the beast in a prison of refracted light. For a moment, the monstrous chakra pressed against its cage — then settled.
“Containment holding,” she said, though her voice trembled.
“Not for long,” Orochimaru replied, already turning to the next step. “Prepare the transfer seal.”
The Sound Five took their positions, kneeling at the points of an invisible star etched into the lake’s surface. Their chakra bled into the water, coloring it in shifting hues — crimson, violet, gold.
They began. The five-point barrier snapped into existence, a dome of churning energy that pulsed between the Sound Five like a living heart. At its center, the Three-Tails glowed brighter, the crystal prison resonating until it rang like glass under pressure.
Orochimaru’s own hands flashed through seals, faster than human eyes could follow. The mark on Yuukimaru’s abdomen ignited, spreading veins of red light across his chest, then sinking inward as though absorbed.
The lake screamed.
A column of power surged upward — the barrier shimmered, buckled, and then imploded inward. For a fraction of a heartbeat, the Three-Tails and Yuukimaru overlapped — two souls, one form — before the light consumed them both.
There was a sound like thunder trapped in a jar, and then everything reversed. The air snapped inward. The crystal prison vanished. The barrier dissipated.
And Yuukimaru hovered above the shattered remains of the boat, suspended by sheer force of chakra. His eyes glowed white-hot, his hair whipping around his face in an unseen wind. The lake boiled beneath him.
Orochimaru and Kabuto were flung backward, skidding across the surface of the water. The shockwave tore the air from their lungs.
The boy’s aura rose higher, his chakra surging in waves that painted the sky green. The world itself seemed to bend beneath its weight. The surface of the lake caved inward, pushed down by pressure alone, revealing the muddy bed far below.
And then, as quickly as it had come, the power ebbed. The light dimmed. Yuukimaru’s body sagged, his eyes rolling back, and he fell.
The splash was lost in the ringing silence that followed.
From the lake’s depths, a ripple of water rose and shaped itself into a man. Suigetsu caught the falling child in his arms, reforming from liquid to flesh with a smirk that faltered the moment he saw Yuukimaru’s ashen face.
Kabuto and Karin were already there, sprinting across the water. Their hands glowed with diagnostic chakra, tracing over the boy’s skin.
or a moment the only sound was their breathing and the slow return of lapping waves.
Then Kabuto straightened.
“Pulse stable. Chakra flow erratic, but… self-correcting.”
Karin nodded, pushing her red hair from her face.
“He’ll be fine. But we need to get him back to the hideout before his body crashes.”
Orochimaru approached, hands clasped behind his back, expression calm. The air still trembled faintly around him.
“Congratulations, Lord Orochimaru,” Kabuto said, a thin smile curling his lips. “You successfully created a jinchūriki.”
Orochimaru looked down at Yuukimaru, at the faint rise and fall of the boy’s chest. Then his gaze slid toward the lake — still dark where the beast had been.
His tongue brushed over his lips, thoughtful, serpentine.
"Let us be on our way. That is sure to have attracted attention." he ordered.
-
Danzo walked in silence at the center of his small procession, his cane tapping softly against the ground. Sai followed just behind, expression unreadable beneath his porcelain mask. To either side, Torune and Fū flanked them, silent as ghosts. Four shadows among many.
No villagers came out to greet them. Faces flickered behind shuttered windows, eyes like moths peering from the dark. The Tsuchigumo had learned long ago to fear visitors.
They reached a low house near the village’s center, its paper walls lit from within by amber lamps. One of the guards rapped lightly at the frame. A pause, then a voice from inside:
“Enter.”
The door slid aside.
Five shinobi sat within, cross-legged around a narrow table. Their clothing was simple but well-kept, their eyes sharp. The air carried the faint hum of active chakra — subtle, synchronized. Danzo could feel it: the invisible tension of people who trained to move and breathe as one.
The Magaki Group.
He recognized them from his dossiers: Akaboshi, the quiet one with a scholar’s posture; Benten, doing his best impression of a omwan; Chūshi, thin as a reed, his hands tattooed with strange seals; Nango, who radiated calm competence; and at the center, their leader — Shiranami.
“Lord Danzo,” Shiranami said, inclining his head slightly. His smile was polite, his tone neutral. “We are not missing-nin. Merely shinobi of Tsuchigumo. We are allies.”
“Indeed,” Danzo replied, his voice low and dry.
He eased himself down across from them without waiting for an invitation.
“Hence our meeting under orders of the Hokage instead of in a more... violent confrontation.”
One of the lamps flickered. Shiranami folded his hands.
“And what does Lady Fifth ask of us?”
Danzo studied him before answering. The man’s eyes were too bright — not defiant, exactly, but alive in a way Danzo had learned to mistrust. He had seen that look before, in men who carried dangerous convictions.
“To contact Tonbee,” Danzo said at last, “and alert him to our arrival. Then to escort us safely to their fort. Konoha has decided to incorporate your clan — and its kinjutsu. I am here to negotiate the terms.”
The reaction was not what he expected.
Shiranami’s shoulders eased. Relief — genuine or feigned — softened his face. He exhaled and even smiled faintly.
“That,” he said, “is welcome news. We have guarded the legacy of the Tsuchigumo for too long, and at too great a cost. If the Leaf wishes to shoulder that burden, we would not oppose it.”
Danzo’s single visible eye narrowed. Too easy.
For decades, the Tsuchigumo had sworn to prevent the use of their kinjutsu — a technique capable of annihilating entire regions. Their village’s history was one of martyrdom and paranoia. That such a high raking member of their clan would yield it so freely set Danzo’s instincts on edge.
Either the man is weary… or he is lying.
Still, Danzo inclined his head, letting the silence draw out just long enough to imply mutual respect.
Then we are of one mind,” he said finally. “Peaceful cooperation benefits us both.”
Shiranami poured tea into two cups and slid one across the table. The liquid was the color of rust.
“We have long awaited a moment when our art could serve rather than doom. Tell me, does the Hokage intend to use the kinjutsu?”
Danzo’s gloved hand hovered above the cup but did not touch it.
“Not as such, only studied. The possibility of its use is her, and my, main goal.” Danzo admitted openly. "Essentially the same purpose it has already served, only now instead of a deterrrent whose usefullness is in its mere existence, an emergency failsafe we actually will use if necessary."
Shiranami nodded once to Akaboshi, who rose and left silently. The faintest vibration rippled through the air — the others maintaining their cooperative jutsu to monitor his progress.
Danzo watched them work, studying the efficiency of their shared chakra network. Cooperative ninjutsu — several shinobi acting as one organism. Fascinating. Dangerous. With proper conditioning, Root could make use of such techniques.
He turned his eye back to Shiranami.
“You understand what we offer. Legitimacy. Protection. Access to Konoha’s resources.”
“And in return,” Shiranami said smoothly, “you take our burden.”
Danzo allowed himself the smallest smile.
“You make it sound like a win-win, where you win twice.” said Danzo. "I find that strange."
A gust of wind rattled the shutters. Shadows flickered across the walls.
Shiranami’s expression softened into something almost weary.
“You think me deceitful,” he said, “but the truth is simpler. Every generation, we are told that the kinjutsu must never be used. That it is our curse. Do you know what it means to pass that burden from father to son for so long? To train children only to guard a weapon they must never touch?”
Danzo said nothing.
“So yes,” Shiranami continued, voice quiet, “perhaps I am ready to see that curse lifted. Let Konoha bear it, if it must be borne at all.”
Danzo inclined his head, though his mind raced. Either a broken man, or a clever one. Both can be useful.
“Good,” he said finally. “Then we understand one another.”
The Magaki stood as one, a movement too synchronized to be natural. Danzo’s eye lingered on Shiranami one last time.
He did not trust this man — but then, he trusted no one. That was what made him dangerous.
As they stepped out into the night, the wind rose again, carrying with it the scent of old earth and ink. The chimes rang softly in the distance, the sound like spiders walking across glass.
-
A special thanks to the 8th Pirate King for comissioning this chapter.
Yes, you can commission me to continue my own stories. I charge half my usual rate, so about 50 bucks per chapter. And of course thanks to my patrons and viewers like you leaving feedback.