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/-\
The boy hadn't returned.
Aiden had checked the rooftop again at dawn. The tiles were still warm. He crouched beside the imprint slight pressure in the dust, a half-scuffed pattern like someone had pivoted quickly and leapt. No footprints leading away. No scuff on the railing. The wind carried the scent of damp steel and ionized air. The kind of scent that lingered after lightning or malfunctioning tech.
He stood and looked out across the skyline, watching it yawns into early morning. Above, a weather drone hovered lazily, clicking in a lazy arc, and dipped back into its patrol path. Life below was already stirring. Power stations coughing back to life. Delivery lines humming in the guts of alley walls. Murmured street radio feeds echoing through cracked intercoms.
Another normal day in District Seven.
Except Aiden still had that sphere. And the silence in it felt deliberate.
He didn't trust that kind of quiet.
"Didn't ping on any of the scans?" Kiera asked, brushing sleep-creased hair from her face as she balanced a mug of old synth-coffee in one hand and a barely-functioning wristpad in the other.
"Nothing. Not metal, not ceramic, not tech. Just... nothing," Drey said, pointing to the blank diagnostic logs with his stylus. "Which means either it's wrapped in some kind of anti-signal field we can't detect, or"
"Or it's messing with our equipment," she finished. "Or us."
Drey hesitated. "We've had weird readings before. Leftover residuals. But this is... clean. Too clean. Even null-objects return something. This one's just dead."
"No," Aiden said from the side, his voice so low they nearly missed it. "Not dead."
They both turned. He was leaning against the back wall, arms crossed, gaze fixed on the small table where the sphere sat under a low scanner light. It hadn't moved since last night.
"What do you mean?" Drey asked.
Aiden looked at him without blinking. "I've held dead things before. This isn't one of them."
There was no menace in his voice. But it was a kind of certainty that didn't allow for argument.
Kiera looked away first.
Two floors beneath the lab, nestled between a shut-down cooling system and a disused water filter, was what Drey called "the crawlspace." He hadn't told Kiera about the latest modification.
He clicked on the low LED strips and dropped through the hatch.
Old drives lined the walls stolen, bartered, or fished from burnt out safehouses. He'd been working through them slowly, feeding them through a decoupled loop system and filtering out anything flagged by SHIELD or post-fire municipal authority. Most were junk. Some were encrypted with tech older than he was.
And a few...
Drey plugged in the latest drive.
It whirred, stuttered, then spat out a directory tree that didn't belong to any current OS.
He narrowed his eyes.
A folder labeled Null-Origin/Structure-Dusk blinked at him.
He opened it.
Inside: schematics. Dozens of them. None marked. No builder's stamp. No project ID. But one file was flagged with a timestamp dated six months before the fire.
And the location tag? A coordinate block that matched the warehouse Aiden had found the sphere in.
Drey whispered under his breath. "No way."
He loaded the blueprint.
It wasn't just a vault.
It was a containment shell.
Something built around an inner node, with lining made from layered materials designed to block heat, sound, electromagnetic radiation and chakra. The last part wasn't labeled that way, of course. The schematics called it "PSI Disruptive Latticework."
But he recognized the design pattern. It mimicked anti-chakra fields from old shinobi scrolls Kiera had recovered from the ruins outside Kyoto-City.
Who the hell had built something like this in the middle of a civilian district?
The mysterious boy showed up again the next day.
This time, he was crouched on the opposite building, half-covered in the shadow of an old antenna array. Aiden had returned to the same rooftop, not expecting much just... drawn. A habit, maybe. But when he looked across the gap between buildings, the kid was there.
Staring.
Same wide eyes. Same satchel.
But now, Aiden could see a mark on the kid's collar. A red thread woven into the black fabric, almost too faint to see.
Aiden moved.
He leapt across the gap without a sound, landed with perfect grace, and walked toward the boy. No hand on a weapon. No activation of the Sharingan.
The boy didn't run.
"Who are you?" Aiden asked.
The boy tilted his head. His expression was unreadable like a puppet trying to simulate curiosity. "You're different," he said. "You don't belong."
Aiden didn't respond.
"You remember things," the boy went on. "But you're not from here. Your chakra's wrong."
Now Aiden's eyes narrowed.
"You can see chakra?" he asked.
The boy didn't answer.
A gust of wind pulled at the rooftop flags, fluttering a broken cable near the edge. Aiden took one step closer.
The boy flinched barely perceptible but noticeable.
Aiden stopped. "I won't hurt you."
"You can't," the boy said softly. Then his pupils dilated, and his voice changed tone, like something rewrote the pitch from inside. "They left us behind. Buried us. But we remember."
Aiden's Sharingan ignited.
The boy blinked and vanished.
No chakra signature. No afterimage. No sound.
Just gone.
Aiden stared at the empty space. And then down at his hand.
The sphere was warm again.
Back at the lab, Drey stared at a live 3D rendering of the vault blueprints, rotating the containment shell and highlighting the core node.
"There's a second layer," he muttered. "Beneath the structure. Looks like a dammit, it's encrypted. Of course it is."
Kiera leaned in over his shoulder, eyes scanning the weird lattice symbols. "Could be a trap."
"Could be," Drey agreed.
They both looked up as Aiden entered wordless, as usual. But something in his presence made the hum of the monitors seem quieter.
"What happened?" Kiera asked.
He didn't answer directly.
Instead, he placed the sphere on the scanner tray again. This time, a faint symbol had emerged just visible under the surface. A ripple pattern, circular, etched like a fingerprint of a whirlpool.
Drey leaned in. "That wasn't there before."
"I didn't make it," Aiden said. "It responded to him."
Kiera blinked. "Who?"
"The boy," Aiden said. "He said I don't belong. He said... they remember."
"Who's 'they'?"
Aiden didn't answer.
He stared at the scanner's results. And for a moment, the ripple on the sphere pulsed not in light, but in shadow, as if drawing in the ambient light around it.
Then it was still again.
Elsewhere, beneath an abandoned transport silo two districts over, a device activated.
Its casing peeled back like layers of paper. A screen glowed. Faint glyphs in pre-fire encryption. A flicker of old chakra tech, buried in steel.
And in the darkness, a voice played back.
Broken, static-choked.
But still human.
"Containment compromised... protocol dusk... find the exile... Uchiha..."
The voice clicked off.
A second later, something stirred in the shadows behind the terminal. Not a person.
Not exactly.
But watching.
Always watching.
/-\
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.