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/-\
District Seven, Lower Vault Boundary
The emergency signal came without context a single word: RUN but it landed like a thunderclap.
Kiera didn't ask questions. She tossed her plasma wrench aside and slammed her hand down on the workshop's emergency lockdown. Steel shutters dropped over the doorways, sealing the interior behind four inches of reinforced composite. Drey flinched at the noise and then turned to Aiden.
"Was that from Luro?"
"Yeah," Kiera said. Her voice was steady, but her eyes weren't. "And if he's saying that, then we've got a problem coming up the tunnel with teeth."
The red light from the sphere bathed the room in pulses brighter now, and less rhythmic. It felt like breathing. Fast, irregular. Unstable.
Aiden moved without speaking, crossing to the nearest storage locker. He pulled out a fiber-sheathed case and popped the locks. Inside: a segmented gauntlet, black with faded kanji etched into the plating. He slid it on wordlessly.
Drey gawked. "Okay. Two things. One: that's not from around here. Two: where the hell did you get it?"
"It came with me," Aiden said, flexing his hand. The chakra channels in the gauntlet flared to life like veins under a blacklight. "Or maybe I came with it."
"Cryptic. I love that," Drey muttered. "Makes me feel very secure."
Kiera ignored him and pulled up a wall schematic. "There's a service hatch beneath the floor grid. It's tight, but it runs parallel to the main power spine. If we move now, we can get out before "
The power went out.
Not gradually. Not like the usual flicker and fade. It died like a breath being held too long.
In the sudden dark, the only light came from the sphere now steadily glowing a deep, low red and Aiden's gauntlet, faintly shimmering with chakra.
A new sound filled the space.
A low, resonant hum. The kind that vibrated bones before ears. The containment field fractured not explosively, but surgically. Like something inside had decided it no longer needed permission to leave.
Kiera took a half-step back.
"Plan B?" she offered.
"Run," Aiden said.
They dropped into the service crawlspace one by one, the passage lit only by Drey's handheld. It smelled of old coolant and nanowire decay, a scent that clung like cold sweat.
"What the hell was that thing?" he whispered as they moved. "It changed. That was a Sharingan, wasn't it?"
"You tell me," Kiera said. "You're the one with seven books on banned bloodlines and post-war suppression tactics."
"Six and a half," Drey muttered. "One's mostly footnotes."
The crawlspace narrowed. Pipes twisted through the corridor like fossilized vines. Somewhere above them, metal groaned not structural, but mechanical. Moving. Opening.
"It's not just reacting to you," Kiera said quietly, glancing at Aiden. "It's activating something else."
Aiden didn't reply.
Because he felt it too the pull.
Like a string threaded behind his heart, dragging him toward something buried. Something old. Not a memory. Not exactly. More like a familiarity. Like walking into a room he'd only seen in dreams.
He didn't know if he was chasing it or being hunted by it.
At the edge of the vault sector, Luro ducked behind a collapsed pylon as a patrol drone swept the tunnel. It hovered, scanned, and moved on. Whatever had triggered the defense net, it hadn't sounded an alert. That was worse.
He pulled out a wire-splitter and tapped into the access panel beneath the old comm relay. Two taps. A breath. Then the screen blinked on.
The map was live.
Red pulses tracked the sphere's signal not just in the vault, but now radiating across four adjacent districts. It was broadcasting. No encryption. No firewalls.
A beacon.
Luro ran a filter. The broadcast wasn't digital. It was chakra-based.
Which meant it was calling to something old enough to hear.
He shut the panel and opened his pad. Typed a single line to Kiera:
It's not just waking up. It's inviting company.
Then he ran.
They surfaced in the old warehouse quarter, near the ruins of a pre-fire observatory dome. The air smelled of burned plastic and rusted steel familiar scents in District Seven, but sharper tonight. As if the city itself were exhaling something long held in.
The warehouse was empty. Or so it looked.
Drey scanned the walls with a handlight. "This place used to house drone rigs. Before the fire."
"Before a lot of things," Kiera said.
Aiden moved to the center of the floor. The sphere's signal was still with him not as a sound, not even a pressure. It was more like a direction. He knelt and pressed his palm to the concrete.
And in a moment, it answered.
A ripple spread beneath his hand. The dust lifted. Thin cracks spidered outward not breaking the floor, but revealing something beneath it. A seal. Faintly glowing. Circles within circles. At its center: the Uchiha fan.
Drey took a slow step forward. "Please tell me that's just a fancy paving stone."
Aiden didn't speak.
Because something moved inside the seal. A shadow. A memory, or maybe a message.
The voice was faint layered, like an echo built from a thousand versions of itself.
"The fire ended the clan. But the seal buried the war. Do not open it unless the world is ready to burn again."
Aiden pulled back. His heart thundered in his chest. He didn't recognize the voice. But his blood did.
"I think," he said slowly, "this isn't just a vault. It's a grave."
"Whose?" Kiera asked.
Aiden looked down at the fan symbol.
"Ours."
Drey stepped closer, fingers twitching over the scanner he kept clipped to his belt. "So when you say grave… do you mean metaphoric, like, emotional trauma kind of grave? Or literal "
"Literal," Aiden said.
The seal beneath the floor pulsed once, faint as a dying heartbeat.
Kiera moved beside him, crouching to trace one of the outer glyphs with a gloved finger. "The pattern's layered with suppressive fūinjutsu. Not tech chakra-based. There's no way this was laid down by a city engineer."
Aiden shook his head. "It's older. This wasn't built by the district. It was absorbed into it."
Drey's hand hovered over his scanner, then dropped. "That's not possible. We've mapped this area before."
"No," Aiden said, "you mapped what the city let you see."
He felt it more clearly now a strange resonance running under his skin, like pressure beneath the surface of water. The gauntlet he wore began to shimmer faintly, its chakra pathways brightening in slow, measured pulses.
The seal was responding to him.
And to something else.
Kiera stood, brushing dust from her knees. "If this is really Uchiha work, it should require a key to open. A chakra signature, or "
Her eyes went wide. " a bloodline."
Aiden didn't respond. Not in words. He pulled a single senbon needle from the pouch on his belt and, without hesitation, pricked the inside of his thumb. A drop of blood welled up, darker than it should have been under the warehouse lights.
He pressed it to the center of the seal.
The reaction was immediate not explosive, not dramatic, but precise. The outer ring of glyphs shifted, rearranged, reformed. Then the floor cracked not deeply, but along predetermined fault lines.
A seam opened.
Cold air surged upward, dry and bitter, laced with something ancient. Not rot. Not decay. Just time compressed into stillness.
The seal dimmed.
Aiden stood slowly, staring at the hollowed gap below. There were no stairs, no ladders. Just a smooth shaft descending into darkness. Drey peered over the edge.
"Okay. I'm not a fan of mysterious holes in the ground, but I am a fan of deeply suppressed secrets. So… we going in?"
"No," Kiera said immediately. "We wait. We scout. We think."
Aiden didn't argue, but his gaze remained fixed on the shaft.
He felt it again. That pull.
Stronger now.
Meanwhile, back in the shell of a demolished rail yard at the edge of District Five, Luro set down a signal jammer and checked his bearings.
The Uchiha name hadn't just triggered old surveillance protocols. It had activated something he hadn't seen in years a ghost file buried in the emergency cache of an obsolete satellite node. A dead fallback grid the government had supposedly abandoned after the last data war.
The file was titled: "ARASHI//PROTOCOL//RED."
It contained no data. Only coordinates.
He mapped them.
And they led to the vault Aiden had just opened.
Luro closed his pad and stood. His fingers trembled slightly not from fear, but adrenaline. There was something happening here that predated the fire. Predated the fall of District Seven. Something the higher districts had tried to bury with tech bans and blackout zones.
And it had a name again now: Uchiha.
Back in the warehouse, Drey tapped the side of his scanner.
"Okay, weird question," he said. "Is it possible for chakra to… uh… sing?"
Kiera frowned. "Sing?"
"Yeah. Like, I'm picking up audio resonance from the shaft. But it's not mechanical. It's wait, here."
He amplified the signal. The warehouse filled with a faint hum high-pitched, melodic, almost mournful. It wasn't music in the traditional sense. But it carried rhythm. Structure. Like a lullaby played on broken strings.
"That's chakra," Aiden said. "Pure. Unfiltered."
Drey shook his head. "I thought chakra was invisible."
"It is," Kiera said. "Unless it wants to be seen."
Or heard, apparently.
They stood in silence for a long moment.
Then Aiden said, "I'm going in."
Kiera blocked his path. "No. Not alone. We don't know what's down there."
"I need to find out," he said. His voice was even, but the tension in his jaw betrayed him. "This thing… it's connected to me. It's calling. If I don't answer, I don't think it'll stop."
Kiera stepped back, eyes narrowed. "Then we go together."
Ten minutes later, the trio descended on a repurposed maintenance rig a vertical lifter Kiera had salvaged years ago, now retrofitted with magnetic clamps and shock insulation. It groaned the entire way down.
The shaft was deeper than expected. Lined with stone, not metal. No sign of infrastructure. No lights. No data channels. Just wall carvings symbols and marks that felt half-erased by time.
Drey ran a light across one section and froze.
"These are names," he said quietly. "Uchiha names. Generations of them."
Aiden leaned in, staring at the etchings. Some he recognized. Others rang distant bells, like half-remembered lullabies from a childhood he'd never had.
And then they stopped.
A massive gate stood before them obsidian, scarred, and sealed with a final glyph.
This one was fresh.
Unlike the rest of the vault, this mark glowed not red, but blue. Cold. Cautious. Waiting.
Kiera read the inscription aloud:
"The eye remembers. The fire forgets."
Then the gate opened.
Not by command. Not by touch.
But by recognition.
Aiden stepped forward.
And the seal let him in.
/-\
If you wish to read more or simply support me than check out my Patreon at
"https://www.patreon.com/Its_Zack/"
You can Get Access to 3 More Chapters OR 7 More Chapters if you want.