The Inspection That Wasn't
They arrived just after sunrise.
Twelve shinobi, officially classified as a joint medical and sealing delegation, wearing neutral cloaks and polite expressions. Their documentation was flawless. Their chakra signatures were carefully moderated. Their smiles were practiced to exhaustion.
They were lying.
I stood on the observation balcony overlooking Konoha General Hospital as they entered the grounds, escorted by ANBU who already knew not to interfere unless instructed. Below us, patients moved freely through corridors once known for overcrowding and death. Children ran in places that used to reek of antiseptic desperation.
The delegation noticed that immediately.
Stone noticed efficiency.Cloud noticed security gaps that did not behave like gaps.Mist noticed silence.
That last one worried them the most.
Inside the hospital, Alteran medical lattices thrummed softly beneath the floors, invisible to ordinary detection. Healing seals embedded in walls adjusted chakra flow across entire wards, smoothing fluctuations long before symptoms could form.
To most shinobi, it felt like walking through a place where nothing went wrong.
To predators, it felt like walking into a cage whose bars had not yet appeared.
Kushina walked beside me, her presence calm but heavy. Yin Kurama stirred at her back, attentive, like a judge listening to testimony.
"They're thinking about him," she said quietly.
"Yes," I replied.
Naruto was not in the hospital. That, ironically, was the mistake that convinced them they still had a chance.
The delegation requested access to neonatal records first. Reasonable. Then recovery metrics. Acceptable. Then seal diagrams.
That was the line.
"We do not share seal architecture," I said evenly.
The Stone representative smiled thinly. "We are not asking for trade secrets. Only verification of safety."
"You have verification," I replied. "People who should be dead are alive."
The Cloud shinobi shifted his weight, chakra tightening imperceptibly. "And yet rumors persist that your seals do… more."
I nodded once. "They do exactly enough."
That was when the Mist operative acted.
He never made a move toward me or Kushina. That would have failed instantly. Instead, he triggered a compact, layered phase distortion beneath the floor, one designed not to teleport but to sample space-time. A probing technique meant to copy local sealing rules.
It should have been subtle.
Instead, the hospital stopped breathing.
Not literally. No alarms. No screams.
But the harmonic lattices shifted from passive correction to active enforcement.
Alteran logic does not respond with emotion.
It responds with optimization.
The probing technique was identified as invasive. Inefficient. Destabilizing to system health.
So the system corrected it.
The phase distortion collapsed inward, rewritten into a closed loop. The Mist operative screamed as his technique folded back on itself, tearing his chakra channels apart without explosive force. He dropped to his knees, blood spilling from his mouth and nose as his internal pathways tried to obey two incompatible rule sets.
The other delegates recoiled.
Too late.
The hospital's seals escalated.
Containment fields rose, not as walls but as statements of fact. Space refused unauthorized manipulation. Chakra refused hostile intent. Techniques fizzled, snapped, or unraveled.
One Stone shinobi tried to summon an earth construct.
The chakra dispersed harmlessly, absorbed into the lattice and redistributed to stabilize nearby patients instead.
Cloud lightning sparked between fingers, then dimmed, redirected to ground itself safely away.
The Mist operative collapsed completely.
Dead.
Not killed by force.
Killed by correction.
Silence flooded the ward.
Doctors stared in horror and awe. Patients felt only a faint dizziness before returning to normal. To them, nothing had happened.
To the shinobi world, everything had.
Kushina stepped forward.
Her voice was calm, carrying without effort. "You brought hostile intent into a place of healing."
The remaining delegates backed away slowly, fear cracking their professional masks. They finally understood what they had stepped into.
"This hospital," I said evenly, "is not defended by shinobi. It is defended by rules."
The delegation fled under escort, their mission a public disaster even without witnesses. News traveled faster than they did.
Stone lost diplomatic credibility.Mist lost a senior operative.Cloud lost the illusion of leverage.
And the world learned something critical.
Konoha did not retaliate.
Konoha corrected.