The rain in the Land of Sound didn't wash things clean; it just made the grime slicker.
A film of oil floated on the puddles, refracting the meager light into sickly, rainbow-colored bruises on the pavement.
Jiraiya stood perched on the edge of a rusted ventilation tower, the metal cold and vibrating beneath his geta sandals. Below him, the factory town of Saisei sprawled like a fungal infection across the valley floor.
It wasn't a village. It was a machine.
Pipes the size of tree trunks jutted out of the mountainside, throbbing with a rhythmic, mechanical pulse—thud-thud-thud—like IV needles sucking the marrow out of the earth. The vibration rattled Jiraiya's teeth, a subsonic frequency that felt less like machinery and more like a massive, subterranean heartbeat. The steam venting from the pressure valves wasn't white; it was a sickly, bruised yellow that smelled of sulfur and burnt hair.
Jiraiya coughed, tasting iron on his tongue as the acidic air coated the back of his throat.
He isn't hiding, Jiraiya thought, wiping a smear of oily soot from his nose. He's building.
The "rice fields" that surrounded the town were a graveyard. The paddies were filled with black, viscous sludge that rippled under the heavy rain. The stalks were petrified gray wires, dead and sharp.
A crow landed on a petrified stalk and immediately took flight again, cawing in protest as the wire-like plant snagged a feather.
Jiraiya leaped.
He didn't make a sound. He landed on a catwalk, the metal groaning softly under his weight. He moved through the shadows, avoiding the pools of toxic neon-purple light cast by the chakra lamps.
He stopped at a wooden utility pole. It was old, rotting from the inside out.
Stapled to the side, soggy and tearing in the wind, was a poster.
MISSING: Fūma Sasame.
The paper was waterlogged, the ink bleeding down like mascara tears. But what caught Jiraiya's eye wasn't the face. It was the tacks.
There were dozens of them. Rusted. Bent. Someone had tried to keep this poster up, over and over, fighting the wind and the rain and the apathy of a town that recycled people like scrap metal.
The wind howled through the gaps in the corrugated metal siding of a nearby warehouse, sounding like a low, mournful flute.
Jiraiya reached out, touching the wet paper. The texture felt like dead skin.
The smell of the rain changed. For a second, it didn't smell like sulfur. It smelled like woodsmoke.
[Flashback: Post-Second Shinobi World War]
The campfire crackled, spitting embers into the dark, but it did little to warm the ice-cold tension between them.
The surrounding forest was silent, no crickets or night birds daring to make a sound near the two Sannin.
Orochimaru sat across the flames. He was cleaning a kunai with a slow, deliberate precision—shhhk, shhhk—that made Jiraiya's skin crawl. The firelight danced in his golden eyes, making them look like coins dropped in a well. The smell of hot metal and oil from Orochimaru's cleaning kit mixed unpleasantly with the scent of the roasting fish.
"You keep calling me Ogata," Jiraiya muttered, staring into his cup of sake. The liquid trembled with the fire's heat. "I've told you, I don't like it. And I don't like you. You're pale. You reek of old blood. That twisted curiosity of yours—you call it 'passion,' but I know what it is. You just want to pick apart bodies to see what makes them tick."
Orochimaru didn't look up. He tested the edge of the blade against his thumb. A thin line of red appeared.
"The world is rotting, Jiraiya," Orochimaru whispered, his voice smooth as silk over gravel. "Flesh is just the first thing to spoil."
Orochimaru smiled, a flicker of tongue wetting his pale lips, the motion too quick to be entirely human.
"You want to know about Ogata?" Jiraiya slammed his cup down. Sake splashed onto the dirt, sizzling. "Fine. I'll tell you about Ogata. Once a man sees what a human being is actually willing to sacrifice... he can never turn his back on it."
He raised a hand, pointing a single, calloused finger at the Snake Sannin.
"He can never pretend—like you do—that it doesn't matter. That the connections between us aren't real."
The fire popped loudly, sending a shower of sparks drifting toward the canopy, illuminating the stark contrast between Jiraiya's flushed face and Orochimaru's marble stillness.
Orochimaru finally looked up, his head tilting with a reptilian smoothness that ignored the mechanics of vertebrae.
"I do not conduct my research because the village permits it," Orochimaru said softly. "I do it because I must. The fragility of life compels me."
Jiraiya gritted his teeth, the muscles in his jaw working.
"Y'know..."
He aggressively scratched the back of his head, a nervous tic breaking his serious demeanor for a second. The sound of his nails on his scalp was loud in the quiet night.
"Before the war... I had a mission. Standard kidnapping retrieval. You follow?"
Orochimaru gave a single, curt nod.
"I was young. Stupid. I thought the ninja code meant mercy. I thought if I captured them, the system would handle the rest."
Orochimaru's eyes narrowed slightly, a flicker of genuine surprise crossing his pale features. "You... showed mercy?"
Jiraiya held up a hand to silence him. "Let me finish. I thought like you back then—that logic dictated the outcome. That's the point."
He leaned forward. The firelight cast deep, skull-like shadows over his face.
"I tracked the target. I interrogated a subordinate—nearly tore the man's arm off to get the location. I hit the hideout. I knew the girl had to be there. But when I searched the room... nothing."
Jiraiya paused, his throat bobbing as he swallowed hard. The memory tasted like bile.
"And then... I found her."
The silence stretched, heavy and suffocating. A log popped in the fire, sounding like a breaking bone.
"It was pitch black when the kidnapper returned. The kind of dark that swallows you whole. Usually, rogue ninja get dragged back to Interrogation. But rabid dogs..."
Jiraiya's voice dropped to a growl.
"...Rabid dogs get put down."
Orochimaru watched him, unblinking.
"I didn't even weave signs. The tremors of the Rasengan shook my entire arm." Jiraiya held out his fist; it was white-knuckled and trembling, as if reliving the impact. "Warm blood splashed my face," Jiraiya whispered, mimicking the spray with a grim wipe of his hand. "It soaked into my pores. It tasted like copper."
Jiraiya rubbed his hands on his pants unconsciously, as if trying to wipe away a stain that had set decades ago.
He looked Orochimaru dead in the eye.
"Whatever was left of 'Ogata' died in that room with that little girl. When I walked out covered in gore... there was only Jiraiya."
He poured another cup of sake, his hand steady now.
"You see, Orochimaru... the Sage didn't kill that girl. The wars didn't butcher her. Some mad god didn't feed her to the wolves. If there is a god watching what we do, he didn't lift a finger to stop it."
Jiraiya downed the sake in one gulp.
"From then on, I knew: Gods don't make the world this way. We do."
[End Flashback]
Jiraiya blinked. The woodsmoke vanished, replaced instantly by the acrid sting of Saisei's smog.
The transition was jarring, the humidity of the rain instantly plastering his white hair to his forehead.
He hated when memories ambushed him like that. It meant he was getting old. Or sentimental. Both were dangerous in enemy territory.
He looked down at the street.
A patrol was passing below. They weren't ninja. They were "Roadies"—members of the Shiin clan, dressed in drab security uniforms, leaning against the chain-link fences. They were smoking herbal cigarettes, the gray plumes mixing with the fog, trying to filter out the taste of the air.
The glow of their cigarettes was the only warm color in the entire valley, tiny pinpricks of orange against the overwhelming gray.
Behind them trudged a line of workers. Fūma clan members.
They looked exhausted. Their skin was gray, their eyes hollow. They weren't in chains, but they moved with the heavy, dragging gait of the defeated. They walked toward the massive blast furnace that glowed orange in the distance—the heart of the machine.
The furnace emitted a low, continuous roar, drowning out the shuffle of feet and the distant clank of metal on metal.
Jiraiya glanced at the foundation of the building he was perched on. A crumbling brick, covered in slick moss, peeked out from under a layer of concrete retrofit.
He ran a finger over the cold stone, feeling the grit of industrial fallout that had settled into the carving.
Toyosaka Brickworks - Year of the Monkey.
Toyosaka. Bountiful Prosperity.
He looked up at the neon sign buzzing above the factory gate.
SAISEI.
Regeneration. Or Remanufacturing.
"Orochimaru's joke," Jiraiya muttered, his voice lost in the rhythmic thud-thud-thud of the pile drivers. "He took a harvest town and turned it into a recycling plant for human souls."
A siren wailed in the distance, a mechanical scream that signaled a shift change—or something worse.
The rain picked up, cold and relentless.
Jiraiya's feet moved faster than his eyes. He leaped from the smokestack-dotted roof, clearing the sludge-filled moat of the rice paddies in a single bound. He landed silently on the road ahead, his silhouette dissolving into the toxic mist.
He wasn't Ogata. He wasn't a hero.
He was the storm coming to break the machine.
He turned north, toward the deeper darkness where the hum of the underground experiments vibrated in the bedrock. Toward the Hidden Sound.
As he moved, the rain hissed against the hot pipes running along the ground, creating a curtain of steam that swallowed him whole.