Chapter 100-101 — Threads of Flesh and String
They moved as one — a strange procession of past and future, of warriors and a queen — down into the open throat of the city. The entrance to Rōran's underbelly yawned like a wound: wooden scaffolds, rusted gears, and a smell of oil and damp earth. Lanterns swung, throwing sickly light over the gangways. The deeper they went, the more the world changed from festival cheer to a grinding, mechanical heartbeat.
What met them in the hollow below stole the breath out of even seasoned shinobi.
Rows upon rows of people worked like living machines. Their faces were gaunt, skin stretched thin over the bones; their clothes hung like rags. Every few yards, a mechanism clicked, and the slaves jerked in perfect, unnatural rhythm. Atop rigs and platforms, puppeteers — men with pale faces and blank eyes — pulled levers, inspected gauges, and twisted chakra conduits. Every movement the workers made was precise and empty of will.
Sara's hand tightened on Naruto's arm until the leather creaked. Her mouth fell open and then trembled. "No… no, this can't be," she whispered, voice cracking. "How… how did he do this to my people? My city?"
Naruto did not answer at once. The light had left his face; the grin that usually lived at the edge of his mouth was gone. He moved through the rows, looking at them — at the hollowed cheeks, at the eyes that did not glint with hope but only reflect light like a glass has no flame within. Each step seemed to weigh heavier on him.
Minato's expression was stone. He stepped forward and asked the question they all felt. "Sara," he said quietly, "you once told us the queen could influence the Dragon Vein. If so… can you cut off the Vein's chakra flow? If we starve it, maybe the puppet control will stop."
Sara blinked back tears but nodded. "There is a node," she said. "A place tied to the Vein's heart. If I sever the link, the link will weaken. The puppets — their strings are made of chakra threads drawn from the Vein. Break the thread, and the puppetry should end."
They followed her through narrow corridors beneath the city, past vats and pulley systems, until the air grew still and hummed with a low-pitched resonance. In the center of an iron-ringed chamber lay a crystalline fissure — a vein of luminous energy flowing like liquid mercury through stone. Around it were smaller runes inlaid into the floor, stitched with thin lines of chakra that fed out like roots.
Sara placed both hands on the stone as if touching a living heart. Her lips moved; she began an old chant — syllables that were not any living language the shinobi knew, sounds older than the hills above. As she chanted, her body seemed to glow with a faint, steady light.
The thin chakra roots shivered. For a heartbeat, they glowed brighter, drawing into themselves. Then, one by one, the threads snapped like brittle ropes. Those aboveground heard the click and the sudden silence of the puppets. Below, the workers stilled. The puppeteers' fingers clutched nothing. A soft, stunned sob broke out — then a murmur of confused voices struggling into speech.
Relief was brief and raw.
From the darkness beyond the chamber came a voice that slid like oil. "Ah — a family reunion," Mukade said. He stepped into the light with the easy grace of a man accustomed to having power answered with obedience. He wore simple orange robes, and his hair caught the torchlight like it had been gilded. Smiling, he shoved his hands into his sleeves as if bored with their surprise.
"You even brought… two from the future," he observed, eyes glittering. His gaze passed over Naruto and Sasuke, and for the first time it sharpened. "How thoughtful."
Sara's face turned white. Rage flamed in her voice. "You villain. You took my people! You enslaved them and called it mercy for the city!"
Mukade laughed soft and cruel. "Mercy? No. I gave them purpose. I harnessed the Vein to rebuild Rōran. Without control, without order, the old city would have perished. I gave it life — a new order. You and your mother were weak; you did not take the steps the world required."
Akira stepped forward, his jaw tight. "You're a lunatic," he said. "You've been playing with human lives as if they were toys. You frightened them on a whim. You made this your game."
Mukade's smile grew. "And what of it? A leader must be decisive. If being decisive means taking what some call cruelty for the greater state, I will not apologize."
Minato's voice cut like a blade. "Enough. Your logic is hollow. The city doesn't belong to those who make slaves." He glanced at Naruto and Sasuke. "One team defends the queen — another will seal the Vein. This cannot continue."
Sasuke's hands were quiet at his sides. The Rinnegan within his gaze spun with a terrible, ancient patience as he assessed the runes and the vein's architecture. "If that man wishes to test us," he said coldly, "he will lose." Then — with the quiet, absolute command of a soldier who needn't shout — he raised his hand and activated his most fearsome technique.
A ripple tore through space. The hair on their arms rose. Somewhere in the chamber, the runes screamed as if a great weight were pulling them from the world. Stone groaned. A shape of compressed gravity grew above Sasuke's palm — small at first, then ballooning, a budding planet of darkness and light. Chibaku Tensei.
Mukade's smile slipped. He lunged to disrupt the formation, hands clawing at the void. Naruto's reflexes roared; he rushed, but he could only watch as Sasuke's jutsu finished with an awful, final click. Gravity seared outward and then snapped tight — Mukade's form was pulled toward the center of the sphere like dust to a core. Where Mukade had stood, there was only a void, and then silence.
For a breath, even the Dragon Vein's pulse seemed to hold its breath.
Minato walked forward, eyes sharp. "Now," he said, voice a low iron, "we break the connection to the Dragon Vein. Sara, where is the next bond?"
Sara pointed to a lattice of channels — thin, faintly glowing lines that threaded through the rock like veins through a leaf. Minato surveyed them even as the shudder returned to the chamber; alarms in his head ticked with the sense of some greater presence reacting.
Akira's eyes narrowed. He scanned the lines with Byakugan precision, seeing the subtle flows of chakra current and the tiniest filaments leaching into engines. He pointed. "Here." He touched a faint glyph and whispered a small seal under his breath — not a sealing jutsu in the classical style, but a harmonizing knot that began to dampen the flow.
Kakashi wove hand seals, and together with Chōza and Shibi they started severing channels, using techniques to root out and collapse the small conduits. The ancient runes Sara had cut were amplified with shinobi finesse; they shuddered and died.
Naruto moved among the freed people, calling softly, urging them to stand, to breathe, to remember how to move with their own will. He knelt in front of a young woman who blinked back at him with empty eyes and held out his hand until the light of recognition returned to her face. The people wept when they understood they were no longer bound.
A low, humming presence brushed the edges of their minds then — not Mukade's cruelty now, but something colder, higher, more distant. It was like the wind before a storm; it vibrated in bone and stone.
Sasuke's hand hovered, not yet letting the gravity fold in on itself. He turned his head, Rinnegan glittering like a moon. "There is more," he said. "A presence. Something that has not been awakened… but is responding."
Minato looked up at the fissure in stone, at the Dragon Vein threaded like an artery through the city's bones. His jaw set. He checked his team at a glance — Akira steady, Kakashi alert, Chōza and Shibi ready — and he read Naruto and Sasuke as coordinates of fate. "We do as planned," he said simply. "We extract the citizens. We seal the Vein. Then we prepare for what comes next."
Naruto's eyes were bright with the old fire. "We'll do it," he said. "We'll make sure no one else suffers."
Akira's golden gaze slipped to the dark mouth that yawned at the heart of Rōran, then back to Sasuke. "Whatever it is that answers the vein," he murmured, "it knows we're a threat now. If it was summoned by blood older than our histories, then we must be ready for things that don't think like us."
The freed workers stumbled up toward the light, blinking at the unfamiliar sun above the tunnels. Some clung to Sara, murmuring her name like a talisman. The city's machine-heart was wounded but not dead. For a wondrous, fragile moment, life breathed back into the bones of Rōran.
But as they hauled citizens away and sealed conduits, a shadow shifted in the deepest stones — a hesitation in reality. Somewhere, beyond the reach of their seals, a golden glint opened in the sky like an eye. The Dragon Vein flared, as if calling a name across time and space, and the air tasted suddenly of stars.
Minato felt the old, dreadful chill of an enemy beyond war; Sasuke's Rinnegan sharpened like a blade drawn from the dark. Naruto's grip on his friends tightened.
They had done what they could for now. They had freed their people and imprisoned Mukade. They had struck a first, true blow at the mechanics of cruelty.
But the true response — the one that would test the limits of blood and heart, of past and future — was already stirring in the heights above Rōran. The golden eye in the sky was opening.
And when it descended, it would not come for negotiations.
Prepare, Minato thought, for the world that remembers nothing but devours everything. Prepare, Naruto thought, for a fight that would ask whether the threads of fate can be rewoven. Prepare, Akira thought, to stand and be counted — not as legend or weapon, but as a person who loves.
They had sealed one danger. Another was waking. The battle for time, life, and the heart of the earth itself was only beginning.