Dead silence.
The laboratory remained dead silent for a full five seconds.
The thick hydraulic rod in the mech's right arm let out a hiss as air escaped.
A jet of residual white steam sprayed from the valve and dissipated into the air.
The sound was like a spark, setting the entire workshop ablaze.
"Boom!"
A deafening roar blew the roof off.
It wasn't cheering. It was the pure release of months of pent-up emotion.
An engineer covered in black oil slammed the big cast-iron wrench in his hand against the concrete floor.
The wrench bounced up and shattered a floor tile.
His legs gave out, and he crouched down, covering his face with both hands as he sobbed.
His cries were thick and hoarse.
Nearby, two Sealing Squad researchers wearing thick glasses clung to each other.
They jumped up and down, pounding each other on the back.
Tears and snot smeared across each other's greasy white lab coats.
"It broke through... it really fucking broke through!"
They repeated the words like madmen, their voices cracking.
Orochimaru didn't cry. He didn't shout, either.
He stood before the enormous control console and let go of its sheet-metal edge.
His legs suddenly felt as though their bones had been pulled out.
"Thud."
His knees buckled, and he fell straight onto the dusty concrete floor.
His kneecaps struck hard enough to hurt, but he felt nothing.
Orochimaru braced himself on the floor, gasping like a rag doll. His lungs filled with the pungent stench of machine oil and burning.
He raised his head.
His gaze passed through the celebrating crowd and locked onto the five-meter-tall, blue-gray steel behemoth.
He scrambled to his feet on all fours.
His right foot caught on the large sheet-metal megaphone he had dropped earlier.
Orochimaru pitched forward, his chin striking the concrete floor hard.
The skin on his chin split, and a little blood seeped out, mixing with the black dust on the floor and smearing his chin.
Ignoring the pain, he got up and stumbled forward.
He pushed aside the engineers in his way, then the Uchiha city inspectors, whose faces were pale as they questioned everything.
He reached the mech's massive steel foot.
He stopped.
The mech had just endured a round of Fire Style attacks, and its surface was still frighteningly hot.
Orochimaru reached out with both hands, spreading all ten fingers.
He pressed them straight against the thick, heavy blue-gray armor plate.
"Sizzle-"
As flesh met the hot steel, it made a faint sound like meat roasting.
Several white blisters instantly rose on Orochimaru's fingertips. His flesh shrank, and the pain bored into him.
He didn't pull away.
He kept both hands pressed firmly against the steel plate and plastered himself against it like a gecko.
Heavy steel. Rough, oversized rivets. A layer of black ash left by the fire.
The low-frequency vibrations from the reactor inside the mech traveled through the steel plate, passing without restraint into his palms.
They made both his arms shake.
His body began to tremble.
It started in his shoulders, spread to his back, and finally sent his whole body into wild spasms.
His teeth chattered rapidly.
A clack sounded above his head.
The heavy armor plate on the mech's chest sprang upward.
The hatch opened, and an even hotter blast of exhaust rushed out.
The civilian Chunin pilot climbed out.
His face was as white as paper, and his whole body was drenched in sweat. His single layer of gray cloth clung tightly to his skin.
He climbed down the iron ladder on the outside.
Halfway down, his hand slipped, and he fell two meters straight into the sandpit below.
The Chunin lay in the sand, face up, drawing great gulps of air.
He looked at his trembling hands.
A civilian who couldn't even use a C-rank Great Fireball, a man at the bottom who could only spend his life picking up trash on D-rank missions.
Just now, he had pushed a control lever.
With one punch, he had smashed through Triple Rashomon and reduced a bronze gate one and a half meters thick to scrap.
Orochimaru watched the Chunin sprawled in the sand.
The days and nights of the past few months flashed through his mind.
Temporary Laboratory No. 1, that drafty wooden shack.
The sheets of parchment Shu Shiraishi had slapped down on the table.
Thermodynamic conversion. The compression ratio of a Chakra internal combustion engine. The reactor's energy decay threshold.
What had Orochimaru learned before? Hand Seals, the Chakra meridian system, and the interactions between the five elemental styles.
He had once believed those were the truths of the Shinobi World.
Now, compared with the formulas Shu Shiraishi had given him, those things were like children playing with piss-soaked mud in a puddle.
He had endured months of work, enough to make him cough up blood.
To calculate the reactor's high-pressure critical point, he had gone days and nights without sleep, losing his hair by the handful.
Shu Shiraishi had forced him to fill in the parameters with condemned prisoners.
Living people were stuffed into unstable test machines. Their Chakra overloaded.
People and machines alike exploded into a rain of shredded flesh.
He had cleaned bloodstained gears countless times.
That cruelty, that utter disregard for human life.
Before today's punch, it had all been worth it.
Ninjutsu? Bloodlines? Bonds?
Orochimaru swallowed dryly, his throat aching from thirst.
Before this five-meter-tall steel machine, they were all a pile of stinking dog shit.
There was no need to train hard for decades, no need to desperately refine Chakra.
Still less did one need a good father from whom to inherit a Kekkei Genkai.
As long as one had this machine.
A civilian could climb inside and crush Konoha's high-and-mighty clan elders into meat paste.
What was this called?
It was taking the power of gods, stuffing it into mass-produced iron boxes, and selling it wholesale to mortals.
It was a dimensionality-reduction strike on the level of the rules themselves.
Orochimaru's materialist worldview, his own nihilism toward life-
At this moment, they were crushed beneath treads and gears.
Then, with steel and concrete, they were cast anew into a temple of fanaticism.
He slowly turned his head.
He lifted his face.
He looked toward the steel catwalk more than ten meters above.
A glaring searchlight shone down, and a man stood in its halo.
Shu Shiraishi.
He wore a black short-sleeved shirt, both hands tucked into his trouser pockets.
From high above, he looked down at the laboratory in chaos.
No excitement. No celebration.
His eyes were icy, as though he were looking at an ordinary wrench that had just been polished.
Orochimaru gazed at the figure in black.
His eyes gradually reddened, blood vessels spreading across their whites.
His knees bent once more.
He fell heavily to his knees on the dusty concrete floor at the mech's feet.
Both hands gripped the front of his white lab coat, leaving oily black fingerprints on the fabric.
This is not a human.
That was the only thought left in Orochimaru's mind.
How could a civilian in his teens possibly understand things hundreds of years ahead of his time?
How could he understand using Chakra to fire a boiler, or using Explosive Tags as bullets?
How could he understand stuffing flesh and blood into steel to serve as an engine?
"This is no shinobi..."
Orochimaru's voice was completely hoarse, as though he were speaking to himself, or praying to the figure on the steel framework.
Tears streamed down his sunken cheeks, washing through the black machine-oil stains on his face.
They left clear white streaks behind.
"Lord Shu..."
Orochimaru tilted his head back, his voice filled with the fervor of a man possessed.
He raised both arms over his head and bowed toward the high platform.
"You are the god who will lead us to ascension!"
On the platform above.
Shu Shiraishi couldn't hear Orochimaru's cries; the cheering below was too loud.
He pulled out his right hand and gripped the iron railing in front of him.
The rusty sheet metal pressed uncomfortably against his hand.
His gaze passed over the fanatical Orochimaru and swept across the blue-gray mech.
The reactor in its chest still glowed with a faint blue light.
Bronze fragments of Rashomon lay scattered across the floor, and wind still blew in through the great hole in the wall.
This was only the first generation.
It was still too bulky, its joint transmissions still had delays, and its turning wasn't agile enough.
The thickness of the armor plates was still adding to the machine's own weight.
But it had been built.
Konoha's first heavy industrial production line had finally been brought fully into operation.
As long as steel production could keep up, and as long as Tsunade's biochemical recovery medicine could strengthen civilians' bodies sufficiently.
These five-meter-tall steel monsters.
Konoha could roll dozens of them off the line in a single day.
Shu Shiraishi tightened his grip.
The rusty hollow iron railing gave a thin groan as he crushed a section of it flat.
Rust flaked off and fell into the darkness more than ten meters below.
"Mass-produce it."
Shu Shiraishi spoke quietly, but his voice was clear against his own eardrums.
There was undisguised brutality in his tone.
He looked at the mech standing silently.
The corner of his mouth twitched, revealing a cold smile thick with the scent of blood.
"Next."
Shu Shiraishi released the crushed railing and tucked his hand back into his trouser pocket.
His gaze passed through the great hole in the wall, toward the gloomy sky outside the laboratory.
"We're going to let the other four shinobi villages..."
"Experience what a true dimensionality-reduction strike is."