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/-\
The silence after the quake wasn't really silence just a rearrangement of sounds. Pipes still hissed somewhere behind the wall, loose wiring still crackled faintly overhead. Dust drifted in lazy spirals through shafts of flickering light. But the tension in the air sharp and metallic had everyone frozen.
Kiera lowered her hand from her communicator slowly, jaw set tight. Luro hadn't said anything since the ground shook. He crouched beside the threshold, staring at the scorched outline where a segment of wall had receded into itself.
"What was that?" he asked without looking back.
Kiera stepped up beside him. Her boots scuffed gently against the floor static clung to every movement now. The air felt charged.
"A response," she said. "The vault's listening. Maybe even watching."
"You think Echo triggered it?"
"Not directly," she murmured. "But he's the catalyst. The protocol knew someone was tracking his signature. That might've been enough."
The corridor ahead of them was newly revealed, dark and narrow. Conduits spidered along the walls, some pulsing faintly. At regular intervals, stenciled kanji flickered on and off in blue light: a warning, but incomplete. ARASHI had left its mark here but fragmented.
Luro took a cautious step forward, then stopped. "If it's sealed tech, how are we going to avoid getting fried walking in?"
"We won't," Kiera said. "We'll just try not to piss it off."
Luro turned, eyebrows raised. "That's comforting."
She offered a humorless smile. "Welcome to salvage protocol."
Above ground, Aiden stood on the edge of a forgotten overpass overlooking Sector Nine's burned districts. The wind carried soot and the scent of metal, though the fires had died years ago. District Nine was still listed as a "Controlled Quarantine Zone," but most locals just called it Ghostline. No drones patrolled here. No streetlights. Even the city's AI grids blinked in and out with ghosting patterns, as if the whole system resented being remembered.
Drey had tracked Echo's last signal to a subgrid node beneath this sector an anomaly wrapped in failed code and corrupt timestamp data. That alone would've warranted a check. But it wasn't what made Aiden nervous.
It was the feeling.
He crouched at the edge of the overpass and pressed his fingers to the concrete. The chakra imprint was faint, but not gone. Old. Warped. Like someone had bent space just enough to fit something that wasn't meant to be there.
Aiden closed his eyes. The wind shifted.
And someone whispered.
He didn't hear it in the traditional sense. It wasn't words through air it was pressure against his thoughts. Familiar and foreign.
A chakra echo. Echo's echo.
He opened his eyes slowly and stood. Something deeper than tech was buried here. And for the first time in months, he felt the edge of his old instincts sharpening.
He was going to need them.
Meanwhile, down in the new corridor, Kiera and Luro continued their descent. The walls were tighter now, the air dense with static interference. Kiera's scanner blinked out twice before she shut it off entirely.
Luro broke the silence. "What do you think Echo is?"
Kiera hesitated. "A messenger. A warning. Maybe a test."
"You think he knows?"
"Does it matter?"
They rounded a corner, and the corridor opened into a chamber circular, ringed with blackened terminals, all humming in different frequencies. In the center sat a pedestal. Empty.
Kiera crossed to one of the terminals and dusted off its surface. The screen blinked to life.
"Input recognized," it said. Then it switched languages three times before settling into Japanese script. Kiera read aloud:
"ARASHI protocol node 03: Inert containment. Memory fractal incomplete. Awaiting designation: Uchiha."
She turned to Luro. His face had gone pale.
"Uchiha?" he echoed. "Why does that keep showing up?"
"Because," Kiera said, "this place was never designed to keep things out. It was designed to keep one thing in."
And someone had just triggered the lock.
Back above, Aiden dropped into the under-level node chamber where Drey waited, crouched beside a stack of inert processors.
"It's still here," Drey whispered, nodding toward a rusted central tower. "I think it's listening."
The central core blinked once dimly then again.
Drey stepped back. "I ran a query into the dead sectors, just to see what was cached before the fires. It's not just surveillance data. It's genetic. Bloodline traces."
"ARASHI was tagging shinobi descendants," Aiden said.
"No," Drey corrected. "They were storing them. Memory echoes. Combat data. Sealed jutsu scripts... even parts of personalities, maybe. The ghostlines? I think they're leakage."
Aiden stared at the flickering core.
"And Echo?"
Drey pulled up a half-reconstructed file. "An interface. Genetically coded. The last carrier of an old-world encryption key. ARASHI wasn't just preserving legacy tech. It was building... something."
Aiden didn't speak. The wind overhead whistled through the cracked ceiling, and the hum of the buried machine deepened.
"This is only one vault," he finally said.
"Right," Drey replied. "But something's waking them up."
In the vault chamber, Kiera touched the pedestal's surface.
It pulsed once, then unfolded a section of floor sliding away to reveal a secondary stasis capsule. Inside floated what looked like a shard of obsidian, fractured with veins of white light.
She didn't touch it. Just stared.
Luro exhaled. "Is that what I think it is?"
"A memory core," Kiera said. "Or a weapon. Maybe both."
The chamber's hum rose, and the walls lit up with script frantic, glitching, incomplete.
"Containment breached. External Uchiha signature recognized. Restore ARASHI Prime."
Then:
"Key fragmented. Secondary vessel... active."
Luro turned slowly. "We need to go."
Kiera nodded, and they backed out of the chamber together.
They didn't see the shard pulse again behind them.
At the same moment, across the city, a girl no one remembered stepped off a mag-rail in District Ten. Her eyes flickered faintly violet. Her shadow bent the wrong way.
She smiled when she looked up at the sky. It was time.
The protocol was waking.
And the ghosts were remembering their names.
/-\
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You can Get Access to 3 More Chapters OR 7 More Chapters if you want.