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<sub>--| He disassembled the rough spherical shaped block of sand. It collapsed around him as he took a deep breath. This was a thought-form, created through sheer willpower. He would be bringing the dragon into physical reality with the precise application of spiritual and physical control. His chakra seemed to cling to him lustfully, but he pushed it away with his own mind, and again formed the core of the creatures body. His gourd emptied. The shell of force vibrated.

Ripples frozen in time could serve as the beginning of its protective armor, the scales. His hands remain clasped together as he continued. He shook his head to clear it, imagined the voice of his 'father' calling him a failure as he sat in the solitude with only the sound of the desert creatures to comfort him. He tried to internalize the feelings of anger and hatred that gave him greater focus. He created three small protrusions of hardened iron. He began the breathing exercise again, this time much faster.

Instead of power and size, he focused simply on control, spinning them, making the protrusions slowly rise in the air. He imagined that the tiny world of conflicting pressure within the shape was also his to command. He let the three shapes sluice into one. He recreated the simplicity of the sphere he'd first fashioned around himself. He allowed a thin layer of the hardened chakra that was its outer surface to soften. It became a cloud, then solidified, then unraveled into dust again.

It ran back into the center of the shape. It did not compromise the integrity of the structure, and he was glad. He felt like an architect or an artist, and mused at how similar the act of ninjutsu was to art. He formed a tight bubble out of the black powder inside the shape. He reestablished his mental connection, momentarily shaking the images of anger and memories of pain, maintained his steady breathing. The bubble seemed to expand and contract with his lungs.

He allowed the bubble to rotate, and before the spinning motion forced it to pop, collected the iron sand along the sides of the form. As the metal settled flat into its pointed lower section, he shifted the swaying motion of his magnetic energies, like the moon affecting the tides of the sea. The diamond of sand was sitting in front of him, gave off the appearance of boiling, and began spinning in a counter-clockwise manner. Something was off. He knew from the ingrained pattern of his hair that his chakra spun with a clockwise rotation, and that anytime the movements didn't sync up, the technique he was attempting to perform would fail.

He steeled his mind, his body. He prepared himself to continue.</sub>

<sub>--| His hands seems to vanish and flicker, breaking apart and reforming into each other as he ran through a string of handseals. He liked to call this his 'warm-up' set. They were movements designed to loosen him up and allow him the flexibility of adding or subtracting seals without losing chakra. Backwards and forwards he moved, as he attempted to break down a new found control into sections. This was practice designed to increase his manipulative pull, not crush an opponent, but it also contained elements of calling up his kekkei genkai's chakra nature, arguably the most powerful in the shinobi world; there was a reason those of the Zantetsuken were once considered royalty in Sunagakure No Sato.


As he studied the internal hollows of his thoughts, he saw that the elements of nature transformation and shape created a direct mental link with both his conscious and subconscious mind. He'd be feeding it instruction, allowing waves of energy to be formed from all areas that would then converge at it's center. He'd have to actually control the iron sand in an uncontrolled manner, transferring the huge elemental collision through the strongest point of each intended iron sand construct. He would first practice simply enveloping himself in his Satetsu Ryuuken Chakra Nature. He could feel it move within and around him. He held in his mind the image of a dragon, its inumerable scales, and shuddered at the glorious undertaking. He was anxious.

He felt as if he were caught in an enormous invisible net as the chakra enveloped him. He was assaulted by intense pressure from all sides but felt strangely anchored in its middle. He realized suddenly that this was the same feeling he would need to introduce to his personal magnetic field. Unfortunately, that could only come once he'd mastered his kekkei genkai, but he would not be deterred. He was comfortable in the iron sand cloud, though parts of his brain wanted to panic caught in the flux of chakra swirling about him. His body was strong however, and even though his Zantetsuken physiology pulled and begged at him to simply create the iron sand from nothingness, he resisted the near impossible temptation, and focused on extracting it from the gourd.

He felt suddenly, perfectly, at home. His muscle fibers and skin gave slightly to the unseen force of the magnetic wave. He inhaled and exhaled slowly, trying to remember the commands his most recent academy instructor had given him. At first, the breathing exercises amused him with their simplicity. He soon reconsidered his take on them once he felt their relevance to his training. Each breath inwards brought with it an intense sensation of control. Each breath outwards pushed reflexively at the wall or iron sand about his form, and told it what to do without words.


He felt that he could push and manipulate the chakra, move it around. In theory, this was a technique that was easy to perform, and with no specific jutsu to guide his crafting, what he could do with it was far more open to his own desires. But as the chakra moved, he felt different sensations. There was a low heat that obeyed the direction of his mind. He could collect it into his arms or legs, hold it in his chest, exhale it. With awe, he saw the rippling cascade of visible sand ebb and flow around his body, moving precariously towards his hands from within the gourd.</sub>

<sub>--| Energy flowed throughout his body; his hands went over the rudimentary seals representing various astrological bodies as an homage to their power and form, and the chakra moved begrudgingly towards his hands and feet, without being geared towards any specific technique. The magnetism his bloodlimit would create around him would not shift without more concentration, and he attempted to clear his mind of distractions. He allowed himself to become more connected to the gentle pulse and sway of the earth beneath him as he felt its rigidity reject his initial entrance, he allowed the slight chill of the surrounding magnetic field to feed into his ability to control it. Without words and with a heavy sigh, he clasped his hands together and pushed down forcefully, pulling up stray dirt. The ground gave a little. His hands seemed to flicker and vanish as he re-performed their deftly vanishing and reappearing complexity, breaking apart and reforming into a string of solid motions that soon betrayed themselves to the flexibility of expertise.

Another closing of his hands, another hard push of energy into the ground, and the force that had seeped part-ways into the dusted earth seemed to shake from the holds of gravity, and floated a column of iron sand into the air. He called up his natural affinity to create a more intense shell of pressure, and used the warring bonds of positive and negative energy to create a pulse, allowing its slow moving particles to create a rhythm in his head. It was like a heartbeat, and like a skilled surgeon, he used his chakra to divide small razor thin slits between each individual aspect, slowing the movement of the vibrating field down to almost absolute stillness. The temperature seemed to drop. As suddenly as he'd slowed down their motions in the air, he began to push out, spreading each bond further and further apart until the form of the iron sand changed. The suspended black powder separated and broke apart, and soon after, without the need to superheat, became a mass of dark matter. It formed a thick opaque cloud around his body that completely obscured his vision.


Feeling his way along the ground he began to cause reverberations in the structureless vapor before him, his hands still clasped together, pushing the fog out physically as well as with his combined chakra's energies. He inhaled and exhaled deeply, the gourd containing the majority of his initial supply close at hand, and watched his own breath fog in the magnetically charged chill he'd seemed to create. He focused, watched the small emissions of iron seize up unobstructed in their path forced out of his way, and exerted more forceful command over the magnetic field his chakra pressure had expanded. He allowed it to slowly swirl, found that he could push out past its normal boundaries, past the original weight of the wavelengths used. His eyes closed briefly, trying to grow accustomed to the darkness, before opening them suddenly and peering out across the outdoor training area he'd covered in his own essence.

Naitome's visibility was reduced to near zero. He gave a brief smirk, careful not to disrupt the held handseal, and experimented with more and less chakra. He dissolved the field of iron sand in front of him to restore a brief amount of visibility, watched subtle breaths cause his large blue kimono to push aside the black mist that flowed back almost instantaneously to reclaim its position. Letting his hands drop to his side, he pulled as much of his own chakra back into his body as he could, quelled the swirling storm of energy he'd called up, and stood in the placid miasma.</sub>

<sub>He pulled; a curvature in the magnetic spectrum that delayed a few precious seconds. Before commanding the metal sub-stratum of the distorted buildings to right themselves, it sparked with energy. He heard the groaning of their foundations rearrange. Stale air moved 'round brick and iron siding caked with sand. Spider-web thin cracks worked their way across several windows before they shattered, only adding to the debris complicating his task.

He sighed and moved closer, the metal plate below him broke off into a teardrop shaped globule of powder. The tiny iron sand cloud broke apart while Naitome stared with concentration, eyes squinting. It was broken down to its smallest component parts, until it seemed finer than the dust stirred by the sudden movement. This particulate cloud was pushed out. It impacted against each broken shard of window in a thin layer.

Embedding perhaps one or two tiny grains into each fragment of glass, his iron spread, coating everything in a metallic chakra. Following his silent command, the broken pieces rose in the air. They shakily assembled themselves into whole forms, appearing almost as if they'd traveled back in time. While he could not mend the pieces into their seamless former state, the iron-sand windows held.

He paused to observe his work. Minus their mosaic-like puzzle construction, they were for the most part transparent and functional. A makeshift solution, but one that worked for the time being, and made the process of restoration seem far more possible, if only cosmetic for the time being. The iron plate beneath his feet shifted, and he rose up and away yet again. He headed back towards the tower, dipping from one moment to the next to emit a surge of repelling force that swept away whatever detritus was in his path.

Near the old library, a grouping of incendiary grenades had reduced the third floor to a twisted curl of partially melted rust. In his wake, it straightened, shelves of renewed iron forcing themselves into rows and columns and pillars. The rows of cheap metal chairs and chains barricading the door were pushed away and arranged and Naitome jumped down to land on its cracked tile roof. He sat like this for a while, simply to survey what he'd left behind, to test if he'd made things better, or simply held back the inevitable destruction of Sunagakure. Looking out at a village now more whole from his presence, he was no longer sure if destruction was the Hidden Sands only destiny.

It's destiny could be shaped by its inhabitants.

It already had been.

[exit]</sub>

<sub>He stood atop a rectangular black wedge of iron sand balancing on nothing at all. He floated; high above Sunagakure No Sato but still beneath the heavily overcast night, while a sandstorm batted itself furiously between a few dark clouds. A stirring of magnetic force bloomed out and searched the area, a feed-back loop of pressure that pushed and pulled while keeping his body stationary on a makeshift platform of powder. Down below, where the Hidden Sand Village stretched before him, Naitome's vision flickered from one site of destruction to the next.

He was in the poorest and most dilapidated district of Sunagakure, an area called Nirashi, where once monuments had stood but were now merely broken conflagrations of rock. The area was a wasteland. It had been evacuated months before, but the ruined caverns and abandoned buildings, the dust-filled ruins of homes and offices, the dome shells now disturbed only by rats and roaches were empty and filled with the ghosts of a great tragedy. It was his responsibility to rebuild. The iron sand platform descended in the wake of his own personal magnetic field, and he landed in an outcropping that at one point had been a hospital.

Most of the things broken in this pit were the very metal girders that had held the high structure together, and with the tiniest indication of Naitome's hands, 30 foot iron beams lifted themselves into the air. He directed them with his mind, his eyes taking on an unnatural glow that seemed to spread to encompass his body itself in a vibrant outline that struck a sharp contrast to his dysphotic surroundings. Around him, things settled into purposely organized place, as a cross section of metal stacked and re-stacked, forming rows in the pushed aside sand.

His right hand gestured at the air before him, and one of the iron girders that had been near pulverized in an explosion whose burns still marred its surface with soot, broke apart. It scattered in the wind. Grasped together as if held by an invisible fist; it was prodded and poked by the oldest power on earth channeled through Naitome's small frame as it became simply more powder. He closed his open hand into a tightly balled fist as the re-arranged iron became a sphere. Another movement of the genin's hands, and the sphere flattened to form a 90 foot by 90 foot inch-thick plate of iron.

It moved as if of its own accord, though it was still a slave to Naitome's mental commands, and made a large sweeping motion to clear the field of unwanted debris. Glass bottles, old food, containers and contraband and the skeletons of citizens lost to the war were brushed aside. The iron plate crashed into the ground, crushing everything beneath it, and perhaps serving as the base for some new structure.</sub>

<sub>The assembled group crowded around Naitome, setting up plans and conspiracies, as Fujioka and his main accomplice would from time to time speak to the boy's sister with loving inquiries and obvious affection. Naitome patted Fujioka lightly on the back, a symbol of friendship, and had created a replica of the sand village with iron sand, calling Fujioka's accomplice over to hear their plan to assault the tower. The accomplice bent down low, neck outstretched, struggling to catch a glimpse of the tiny model and their salvation when

Snikt--

The iron sand replica exploded.

It formed shards of black iron, like the petals of some bizarre flower, its shape was a myriad spiral of jutting spikes that carried a single point through the foreheads of each of the assembled group, save the accomplice, who caught his spike through the left side of his throat, a splatter of blood rippling a red spatter on the train tunnel floor. The three oddly dressed helpers fell with a sick wet thud, while Naitome stood, hand around his nodachi, approaching the fallen accomplice whose hand rose to his throat, spilling blood.

"W..what....what the hell...?"

he questioned, eyes wide with fear and disorientation. Gone from Naitome's face was any sign of kindness or understanding. He was solemn and reserved, Waking Dream seemed to be gaining a black patina of ash as his previous collection of iron sand wrapped around the blade.

"As you said...traitor...deception is a ninja's greatest weapon."

Fujioka turned, began to make handseals...

...and was thrown forward in an ignition of flame born from the exploding tag Naitome's friendly pat had placed on his back.

Naitome removed the head of Fujioka's accomplice quickly and without remorse, before walking slowly to Fujioka's writhing body. His back had been scorched, his body thrown and carrying a criss-crossing pattern of marks that prevented him from moving, except out of pain and fear. He looked up as best he could, back and forth between his sister's partially freed form and Naitome's grim visage. He screamed in torment. He asked, accusing

"You're no better....no better than Sunagakure....one of their shinobi through and through huh...just another dog of war..."

He spat the words viciously.

"What about your sister....what about...the war...what you said...it was all...lies?"

Naitome instructed a block of iron sand to form around Fujioka's body, containing him in a block cube of near impenetrable metal. A prison for the man who hates them. He walked up to the block of iron, as it bobbed lightly before him, and a single spike broke free racing towards and through the throat of Fujioka's sister, before removing her head in the same brutal fashion as he'd done the accomplice.

He placed a single hand against the block of iron.



"Yes."


Naitome answered quietly, before leaving the area with his floating prison, and prisoner, in tow.

[exit]</sub>

After two blocks of deconstructed city, lie Gushoka Way. An X-shaped cross-section of streets that met at what was left of an old train station, four lines of steam driven metal once met here and dislodged busy travelers throughout Sunagakure. Now, the sounds of whistles and grinding wheels was gone, replaced by a heavy thudding step on the old station platform. The two criminals had made their way to the tunnel entrance of the underground Sobek Line, and now conversed with a waiting group of three oddly dressed comrades carrying large bags. Naitome moved to a copse of shadow near the ticket booth, as he heard the young men in frantic discussion.

"--esn't matter. In the end, you didn't bring what I asked for anyway."

Fujioka said, bristling with anger at his accomplice.

"I told you there were ninja everywhere looking for you, and I was right. I wouldn't have been able to take the key ten feet without somebody catching me...which they did. It's your fault for stealing the lock when you could have just asked for it.

His accomplice replied, frustrated briefly, before a smile crossed his face.

"That's why he had US steal it while he created a diversion."

The three strangely garbed newcomers chimed at the same time.

Key? Lock?

"Deception is a ninja's greatest weapon, ha!"

His accomplice said cheerfully, smug. Full of pomp and preening for recognition.

"You've got the key then?! Show it to me."

Fujioka's face spread into a thankful expression of thanks so powerful it almost looked like sorrow as the three men held out a three segments of a some unknown material for the thief to see. Fujioka looked at them and breathed heavily, his hands then performing a grouping of seals Naitome could not recognize. A lull of time filled with chakra radiated out, the train station its epicenter in a flurry of motion beyond the physical as energy careened into reality, and Naitome could almost hear a thunderous resound of defiance as something unnatural began to happen.

The sphere of invisible electro-magnetic forces circulating his body grasped at the shards, fluctuated inward, screeched with a hissing affirmation that told him they were metal, and thus under his blood-based ability to control. As the sky around them all darkened, Naitome still unseen in the shadows, the three shards floated up and out of the men's hands, spinning slightly, and fused in a quiet brightness that made their shape far more recognizable.

A key. The shards formed into a key.


Fujioka slammed his palm suddenly into the earth, into the very sand that was their namesake, as a black pattern spread from what at first had seemed just a tattoo. It now appeared to be some dark writing, moving like a living creature as it settled into a spiral design accompanied only by Fujioka's voice.

"Twelve Lock Seal: Suzaku Flame Cage Dispersal."

What...

...si thaW

What is happening?