A Piercing Scream in the Forest of Death

The Shadow Guard's special training was far more... varied than the ANBU Reserve Unit's tedious torture sessions.

Jiraiya's teaching style was just like the man himself: utterly unstructured and completely whimsical. One second, he would be explaining how to sense senjutsu chakra; the next, he might spot a pretty butterfly passing by and chase it for half a mile, calling it "training to maintain focus in a dynamic environment."

The training location was never fixed. It could be atop Hokage Rock, beneath the waterfall at the Valley of the End, or even in the kitchen of Ichiraku Ramen.

"Yan, watch closely!" Jiraiya stood on a rock in the middle of the waterfall, his hands forming seals. "Senjutsu is basically borrowing money from nature! If you borrow it, you have to pay it back. Borrow too much and can't repay it, and you're done for—you turn into a stone! Got it?"

As he spoke, natural energy began to gather around him, and faint toad-like markings appeared around his eyes.

Yan sat cross-legged on the opposite bank, his mask set aside, his eyes closed. His Observation Haki had long since given him a crystal-clear view of the natural energy flowing within a thousand meters. Jiraiya's explanation was more like... a translation to him. It translated the existing rules of this world into a language he could understand.

"That borrowing-money analogy sucks." Yan opened his eyes, his tone even. "It's more like resonance. When the frequency of your chakra matches nature's frequency, you can draw upon it. If they don't match, you're just an idiot trying to mooch off Wi-Fi with the wrong password, getting kicked out by the router."

Jiraiya stumbled and nearly got swept away by the waterfall. Steadying himself, he pointed at Yan and cursed, "You little brat! Can't you show your elder some respect? This is called an easy-to-understand analogy! What the hell is Wi-Fi? What the hell is a router?"

Yan ignored him. He could sense that the Haki system and the senjutsu system shared something in common at their core. Haki was the ultimate excavation of one's own life force, while senjutsu was the ultimate guidance of external life force. One turned inward; the other outward. If the two could be combined...

"Sensei," Minato said from nearby. He was desperately maintaining a one-handed tree-climbing posture, sweat pouring down his face. "Yan means senjutsu is more like synchronizing frequencies, rather than a simple energy-borrowing relationship, right?"

"See? Minato gets me." Yan delivered the finishing blow without changing expression.

Jiraiya was left speechless by his two students' back-and-forth. In the end, he could only mutter bitterly, "You two will make your teacher turn into a real toad someday."

Ever since the Third Hokage had forcibly stuffed Yan into the Shadow Guard, Jiraiya had become his direct instructor. And Jiraiya never minded taking along an extra "tagalong" during training, so Minato naturally joined this "special tutoring" as well.

Light and shadow once again stood side by side on the same training ground in a strange way.

Only, one person's goal was to become the sun that protected the village, while the other's was to become the incinerator that burned away the dark corners beyond the sun's reach.

Training continued for half a month. Yan's Magma-Magma Fruit evolution progress did not budge in the slightest. Ordinary training could not trigger the system's sweet spot, which was exactly as he had expected. Yet his understanding of senjutsu deepened at a terrifying pace.

Then, one day, a mission arrived.

A routine patrol of the outer perimeter of Konoha, near the edge of the Forest of Death.

This sort of mission was unbearably dull. To Yan as he was now, it was little different from an armed picnic. The team consisted of four Shadow Guard members, led by the familiar Cat Mask.

Four black shadows moved soundlessly through the treetops, like crows blending into the night. The Shadow Guard's operational standards were even higher than those of ordinary ANBU; they could not so much as disturb the wind.

Yan followed at the rear of the group, bored out of his mind as he used Observation Haki to sense everything in the forest.

Within his thousand-meter sensing radius, the entire forest was like a massive, living ecosystem. A squirrel sleeping in a tree hollow three hundred meters away, wild boars mating five hundred meters away, a venomous snake that had just shed its skin seven hundred meters away... the auras and basic emotions of every living creature were like labels pasted across a map in his mind.

Everything was normal.

Until his sensing net swept across an area to the southwest marked as "abandoned."

It had once been an underground research facility from the Second Hokage's era. It was said to have been destroyed during the war and sealed away completely afterward. On Konoha's official maps, it was a blank space.

But in Yan's perception, something lay beneath that blank patch of earth.

An extremely faint chakra fluctuation rose from deep underground—cold and clammy, like snake saliva. That chakra carried a familiar quality that made Yan physically uncomfortable.

Orochimaru.

Besides that chakra, there was another faint life aura. A girl. Her emotional tag was pure, compressed to its very limit—fear.

Then, a soundless scream exploded directly inside his mind.

It was not a sound carried through the air, but the shrill wail of a soul as a life neared collapse. What Observation Haki caught was pure pain, without a trace of impurity.

The team continued onward. Cat Mask made a hand signal indicating that the way ahead was clear and that they were preparing to turn.

Yan's footsteps paused for half a second.

The first rule of the ANBU: absolute obedience to orders.

The first rule of the Shadow Guard: on the basis of absolute obedience to orders, the Hokage's will was the highest will.

Images flashed through his mind: Minato and Kushina fighting over the last slice of chashu at the ramen shop; Minato turning back at their Ninja Academy graduation and shouting, "We'll always be friends."

The Will of Fire, as Yan understood it, was about protecting those moments.

A girl was deep underground, being tortured by a venomous snake, her soul screaming.

This was not one of the moments he wanted to protect.

But it was one of the dark corners he had to burn away.

"Captain," Yan's voice came through the miniature communicator beneath his mask, calm and devoid of emotion. "I need to deal with a personal biological issue. Requesting permission to temporarily leave the team for thirty seconds."

This was the most common excuse for leaving formation during ANBU operations, usually used for... well, exactly what it sounded like.

Cat Mask turned back. There was no ripple in his gaze beneath the mask as he simply gave a gesture of approval. On a routine patrol mission like this, leaving the group for thirty seconds to deal with a "personal matter" was permitted, as long as one remained within sensing range.

"Received."

Yan's figure slipped into a dense patch of bushes.

To the other three team members' senses, Lava's aura merely remained in place before gradually weakening, as though he had used some sort of aura-concealment technique. This was standard procedure when ANBU handled "personal matters," preventing enemies from tracking them by scent.

However, the instant Yan's figure was concealed by the brush, a thin layer of magma silently seeped from beneath his feet into the soil.

His entire body liquefied and sank underground.

Devil Fruit Power: Elementalization.

By flowing through the underground earth as magma, he sped toward the source of that strange chakra in a way no sensory ninjutsu could detect.

Thirty seconds later, Cat Mask stopped.

"Lava, rejoin the team." Silence filled the communicator.

Cat Mask's body stiffened.

"Lava?"

There was still no response.

"Damn it!" Cat Mask cursed under his breath and immediately gave the order. "Eagle, Owl, begin the search! Target: Lava. If he's alive, bring him back; if he's dead, bring back the body! His last known location—"

He did not finish, because he suddenly turned and looked toward the southwest.

A cold, evil, immense chakra, like a dormant volcano, abruptly awakened beneath the earth and then surged skyward.

That chakra was filled with brutality, madness, and a desire for destruction.

It was not Lava's chakra at all!

Cat Mask's pupils contracted.

Something had happened.