Leaving the high sandstone walls of Sunagakure behind felt like stepping out of a shielded server room and into the raw, unpartitioned data of the wild. The desert wind was a constant, abrasive stream of noise, but today, I wasn't fighting it. For the first time in two lives, the terrain was no longer a bottleneck.
Underneath me, the Mirage prototype hummed with a deep, subsonic resonance. I sat in the recessed cockpit frame, my fingers light on the control-grips. I wasn't using the traditional, ten-finger "Piano" style of puppetry; instead, I had mapped the primary movement scripts to a simplified, high-bandwidth interface. Two main chakra threads handled the "Vector Nozzles," while a continuous broadcast of Magnet Release chakra sustained the levitation field.
The sensation was unparalleled. In my old life as Logan, I had spent years dreaming of frictionless movement. Now, I was living it. The 400-pound chassis glided exactly ten centimeters above the shifting dunes, its matte-gray hull slicing through the air with a negligible drag coefficient. Whenever a sudden gust threatened to tilt the platform, the Spirit Siphoning Seal inside the core instantly throttled the output to the counter-propulsion nozzles. It was a "Self-Correcting System" that made standard puppets look like glitchy legacy hardware.
My target coordinate was "Ghost-Weep Ravine", the site where Sasori had executed the "Clean-up Script" on the Fangs of Sand.
As I crossed the Great Sand Sea, I pushed the throttle. The Mirage didn't just move; it accelerated with a linear force that pinned me against the seat. My sensory array, recently upgraded with Chiyo's "Spider-Sense" layout, was feeding a 360-degree map directly into my mind. I could see heat signatures of sand-worms three meters below the surface and the micro-vibrations of rock-shales five hundred meters ahead.
Speed: 210 kilometers per hour.
System Stability: 98.4%.
Core Temperature: Optimal.
I arrived at the mouth of the ravine just as the sun began to dip, casting long, skeletal shadows across the jagged sandstone. Ghost-Weep Ravine was a geological error - a deep, winding trench where the wind shrieked through narrow gaps, sounding like the cries of the dead. I slowed the Mirage to a "Low-Power Hover," drifting into the shadows of the towering cliffs.
The scent hit my filters first: old ozone, bitter neurotoxin, and the dry, metallic tang of clotted blood.
I landed the Mirage at the edge of the camp and released three upgraded Spider MK 2 drones. These weren't scouts anymore; they were forensic tools. Each one was equipped with chemical analyzers and chakra-residue scanners.
Toxin analysis... Type-S variant.
Neurotoxin blended with a heavy coagulant. Time to expiration: 1.2 seconds post-injection.
Attack-pattern diagnostic... 53 targets.
All killed with single, high-velocity strikes to the brainstem or heart.
Efficiency rating: 99.8%.
Chakra signature... Frigid. Low-frequency. Unmistakably Sasori.
I walked through the camp, my boots crunching on sand that had been turned to glass by high-intensity friction. The bodies weren't scattered in a panic; they were clustered in tactical "Kill-Zones." It looked like someone had simply deleted the bandit cell from the server. Beside the leader's corpse, one of my Spiders pinged a discovery.
It was an indentation in the sand, a three-pronged mark that didn't belong to any animal. It was the footprint of a heavy, arthropod-like limb.
"Hiruko," I whispered.
The trail pointed northwest, heading deeper into the "Void Zone", a territory so desolate even Suna patrols avoided it. I recalled my drones and initialized the chase.
The hunt lasted for twenty-four hours of continuous uptime. Sasori was a master of "Anti-Forensics." He used sand-sliding techniques and wind-cloaks to overwrite his trail. But the Mirage's high-altitude sensors allowed me to track the thermal displacement he left behind. Every time the trail "glitched," I recalculated his likely trajectory based on the terrain's resistance.
At dusk on the second day, my sensors spiked. Inside a massive, wind-hollowed rock formation ahead, a high-density chakra signature was pulsing. It was frigid, laced with the scent of preservatives and machine oil.
I set the Mirage down three hundred meters away, hiding it behind a dune. I couldn't risk the "Chakra Noise" of the Mag-Lev field alerting him. I sealed the platform into its scroll and moved in on foot, using my Earth Release to minimize my acoustic footprint.
I reached a narrow fissure in the rock and peered inside.
The cavern was vast and artificially leveled, looking more like an industrial hangar than a cave. Piles of mechanical limbs, sorted by alloy type, lay in the corners alongside stacks of forbidden scrolls. In the center, a figure sat at a crude workbench, his back to me.
He wore a black traveler's cloak, his shock of crimson hair the only color in the dim, gray room. His right arm was a gleaming, prosthetic limb of polished mahogany and steel. He was carving a wooden joint, the rasp of the file the only sound in the dead cave.
Sasori of the Red Sand.
My heart rate spiked, threatening to trigger a "Safety Shutdown" in my breathing. After half a year of chasing ghosts, I had found him, the man who had given me the "Salamander" data, the genius who had become an S-rank rogue.
I hesitated, my mind running a thousand "Engagement Scenarios." Should I establish a data-link? Should I observe and retreat?
At that instant, the figure at the bench froze. He didn't turn around, but the air in the cave suddenly dropped ten degrees. His voice rang out, cold, slightly hoarse, and vibrating with a lethal, metallic resonance.
"The little mouse has followed me across three provinces," Sasori said. "You've watched enough, haven't you? Or do you plan to stay hidden until the sand buries you?"
A jolt of adrenaline hit my system. I had used every stealth script in my database, yet he had known I was there the entire time. The "Latency" in my perception of his power was terrifying.
Pointless to hide. I stepped from the crevice, my posture straight, my dark eyes fixed on his back.
"Senior Sasori," I said, my words echoing faintly against the stone walls.
The figure turned slowly. When his face came into the light, my internal "System" suffered a momentary freeze. Prepared as I was by the forensic reports, the reality was a visceral shock to my engineering soul.
Sasori's face was no longer that of a boy. It was an eternal, doll-like mask of impossible beauty. His skin was too smooth, his features too symmetrical, and his eyes, those deep violet eyes regarded me with the detached appraisal of a predator looking at a bug. There was no warmth, no flicker of reunion. Just a trace of cold, clinical curiosity.
"Oh?" Sasori's gaze lingered on my Chunin vest, then moved to the scroll at my hip. "So it's you... the 'Frail One' from the workshop. You've had a major upgrade since we last met."
His gaze narrowed, sensing the Natural Energy humming in my chest.
"That energy... it's not standard chakra," he noted, his voice sounding like two stones grinding together. "You've been debugging the world's original code, haven't you, Sayo?"
Thus, inside that desolate rock, amid the stench of oil and the ghosts of fifty-three dead bandits, the reunion began. I stood before the man I wanted to surpass, realizing that Sasori hadn't just defected from the village, he had defected from humanity itself.
The "Scorpion" was live, and I was standing right in the strike zone.