The sun hung low over the outskirts of Konoha, bleeding orange through the trees as Team 11 trudged back toward the village. Their mission—another low-ranked patrol assignment—had left more bruises than glory. The forest air was thick with pollen and the tang of distant smoke, remnants of a lightning strike that had blackened a copse deeper in the woods. Akira kept to the front of their tight formation, his cloak fluttering slightly in the dusk breeze. Silent. Alert. Haunted.
Asenari walked beside him, her fingers still tinged faint blue from a chakra healing technique she'd used on Noboru's arm earlier. She glanced at Akira's profile from time to time but said nothing. She knew that look. He had worn it since their return from the border mission—the one that had revealed too many secrets and left too many wounds.
Noboru broke the silence first, his voice a little too loud against the hush. "I still say we should've gone after those missing-nin instead of reporting back. Coward's move."
Akira's eyes narrowed, but he didn't stop. "We weren't equipped. You're not a jounin yet, remember?"
"Neither are you," Noboru snapped, then immediately regretted it. Asenari shot him a warning look.
Akira paused at the crest of a hill, staring out over the distant rooftops of the village. The wind stirred the trees behind them, and for a moment, there was an eerie silence.
Deep in the shadows of the underbrush, a pair of glimmering mechanical eyes observed them. Hidden beneath a thick net of moss and camouflage panels was a crude but functional monitoring device—Rick's latest iteration of a chakra-synced surveillance drone. He exhaled through his teeth back at the concealed lab nestled underground, muttering to himself.
"Still too young, too green. But the potential's cooking. Real slow-burn stuff, huh?"
He took a swig of his reconstituted sake—awful by interdimensional standards, but drinkable—and turned his attention back to the prototype dimensional resonator glowing faintly in the center of the lab. Most of his tech remained inert, bound by this world's rules. Chakra. Nature energy. Everything here refused to play by multiversal physics.
"The hell kind of sandbox has emotions affecting energy output?"
He kicked a pile of broken seals with a grunt and got back to soldering the next piece of his reconfigurable wormhole anchor.
Back above, the team continued. Konoha's gates rose in the distance, and with them, the subtle shift in atmosphere that came with returning to civilization: chakra scanners humming, Anbu in the trees, civilians crossing paths with shinobi like it was the most normal thing in the world.
Their sensei, Jounin Kaito, met them just before they entered the administrative quarter. A stern man with slate-gray eyes and a constantly wind-ruffled coat, he had been unusually distant these past weeks.
"Report submitted?" he asked.
"Yes, sensei," Asenari said, stepping forward.
He looked each of them over in turn. His eyes lingered on Akira a second longer than necessary.
"Good. Rest up. You'll be called for another mission soon."
And just like that, he was gone, vanishing onto a rooftop with practiced grace.
That night, Akira stood on the rooftop of his apartment, looking out over the dim lights of the village. The wind whispered secrets through the tiles. He could feel it again—that unease. Like something was watching him. Like something in the air was... folding.
He clenched his jaw, eyes glinting with a familiar red hue as the Sharingan briefly flared.
Far below, in a forgotten alley across the village, a small black cube blinked once with blue light before going dark.
Rick grunted from his lab, scribbling equations furiously.
"Okay, kid... so your eyes can ping dimensional residue. That changes the game."
He smirked.
"Still not time. But soon."
[End of Chapter 8]