Shu Shiraishi extends his right hand.
Fingers clad in black leather gloves gripped the thick kraft paper file folder.
The paper was damp and had a slight smell of heavy machine oil.
Orochimaru loosened his grip.
His palms were sweaty, and he rubbed them vigorously on the hem of his white coat.
The fire in his eyes burned fiercely, making his breathing erratic.
Shu Shiraishi bowed his head.
Press your thumb against the red cotton thread sealing the file folder.
Pull hard.
"Snap."
The red thread snapped. A short, broken piece of thread lay on the Kitsuchi and rolled twice in the wind.
Shu Shiraishi shook the bag open with his hand behind his back.
He reached in with two fingers and pulled out a stack of folded blue-and-white lined drawings.
The blueprints are thick and quite heavy.
He flicked his wrist with one hand. "Whoosh!"
The three-foot-long blueprint was fully unfurled in the wind. The edges of the paper crackled and popped in the breeze.
Right in the center of the drawing.
It depicts a giant cylinder with a complex structure.
The outer shell is layered. The interior is densely packed with spiderweb-like pipes and array runes.
The tip is a cone-shaped projectile.
Shu Shiraishi's gaze shifted to the top of the drawing.
There, in bold black ink, was a line of code.
The handwriting is so strong it seems to penetrate the paper.
" Chakra Nuclear Fission Weapon."
" Lord Shu."
Orochimaru took half a step forward, his shoes landing on the pebbles.
He pointed to the complex spherical structure on the abdomen of the drawing.
" Roshi and Han have been basically squeezed dry."
" The Four-Tails ' Lava Release. The Five-Tails ' Boil Release."
Orochimaru's voice was hoarse, and he spoke extremely fast.
"These two Chakra natures are inherently mutually exclusive."
"We liquefy them separately and store them in these two high-pressure pipes."
He slid his finger down the lines on the drawing and placed it at the center point.
"After launch, the vacuum chamber inside the missile will unlock."
"The two liquid Chakra will collide violently under a million atmospheres of pressure."
Orochimaru slammed both hands down on his chest.
The sound of flesh hitting flesh was muffled.
"Chain reaction."
He grinned, revealing his chapped lips.
"The impact will tear apart the atomic structure of Chakra. The released energy will detonate the outer Four Symbols Seal Array."
"The sealing array has reversed, multiplying the energy exponentially."
"One begets two. Two begets four. And so on, endlessly."
Shu Shiraishi looked at the densely packed calculation formulas on the blueprints.
"How powerful is it?" he asked.
Orochimaru turned his head and glanced at the desolate wilderness in the distance.
"Put this one down."
He swallowed hard.
"A country as powerful Land of Wind can simply be wiped off the map."
"The explosion's epicenter was at a temperature of 1,000 degrees Celsius. The shockwave could instantly vaporize rocks into gas."
Not even a fly's ash was left.
Shu Shiraishi rolled up the drawings.
"Walk."
He stuffed the drawings back into the file folder and tucked them under his arm.
"Take me to see it."
The two walked through the noisy construction site.
We walked to a concrete bunker at the deepest part of the factory area.
There were no windows outside the bunker, only a five-meter-wide steel gate.
Two heavily armed mechs guarded the entrance.
Orochimaru pulled the switch on the wall.
"Laugh--"
The door slowly rose upwards.
Behind the door was a huge elevator shaft, dark and bottomless.
A cold, damp wind blew up from below.
The two entered the metal cage of the elevator.
Orochimaru pressed the red button on the control panel.
The iron fence slammed shut with a clang, locking itself in place.
The winch turned. The thick steel cable was taut and straight.
The elevator began to plummet rapidly.
A feeling of weightlessness instantly enveloped my entire body. The wind whistled past my ears, making my cheeks ache.
The safety light on the shaft wall flashed by. The red light formed a line in my eyes.
"Three hundred meters underground."
Orochimaru shouted loudly. The wind was too strong; if he didn't shout, no one could hear him.
"It's not safe to leave something of this energy level on the ground. If it accidentally goes off, half of Konoha will be gone."
Shu Shiraishi remained silent.
He took a cigarette out of his trench coat pocket and put it in his mouth.
Lighting the cigarette. The cigarette butt glowed intermittently in the dim iron cage.
The temperature is dropping rapidly.
The lower you go, the more humid and cold the air becomes, carrying a heavy, lead-powder smell.
Shu Shiraishi took a drag of his cigarette; his lungs felt a little cold.
It fell for a full two minutes.
"Bang!"
The elevator hit the bottom buffer spring and bounced violently up and down twice.
It's stopped.
The iron fence was pulled open.
Before us was a tunnel ten meters wide. The four walls were all welded shut with lead plates half a meter thick.
Not even a crack was left.
Orochimaru led the way.
At the end of the tunnel is a heavy-duty airtight door.
Orochimaru turned the circular handwheel on the door, making a "click-click" sound as it spun around a dozen times.
The door hinges groaned dully.
He pushed open the heavy lead door with force.
The world inside the door instantly burst into Shu Shiraishi's field of vision.
This extremely deep laboratory is astonishingly large.
It's like an underground plaza that's been hollowed out.
Dozens of high-pressure sodium lamps hung on the surrounding walls, illuminating the entire space in a stark white light.
In the very center of the square.
There stood a colossal creature, entirely black.
It's as tall as a three-story building.
Her waistline was a whole size bigger than the water tower.
It is entirely covered in the highest density manganese steel armor. The surface of the metal is reflective, cold, and piercing.
There are no fancy paint jobs whatsoever.
Only that pure black, which brings absolute destruction.
Shu Shiraishi stopped at the door.
He lost his grip on the cigarette. A piece of ash broke off and fell onto his boot.
A sense of oppression.
A crushing, oppressive feeling, as if it were a massive object, made it hard to breathe, pounded directly on my chest.
Standing before this nuclear bomb, a person appears as insignificant as an ant.
The surface of the projectile is not smooth.
The surface was densely covered with complex Sealing Jutsu, some an inch deep.
These techniques resembled purple veins, crawling all over the bomb's casing.
Dark purple Chakra flowed slowly within the groove.
It's like breathing.
Around the nuclear bomb.
It was erected with three layers of circular steel scaffolding.
Dozens of craftsmen, dressed in heavy radiation protection suits, hung on the racks like worker bees.
They wore full-face masks and carried oxygen tanks on their backs.
Holding a precise Chakra knife, he meticulously polished the edges of the sealing circuit.
No one dared to breathe too loudly. Even a slight tremor of the hand, deviating by a millimeter, would mean certain death.
Dozens of liquid nitrogen tubes, each as thick as an arm, hung down from the ceiling.
It is attached to the base at the bottom of the nuclear bomb.
White, cold air was continuously emitted, physically cooling the reactor.
The white mist covered the ground in a thick layer, reaching above ankle height.
The low-frequency hum of the machine. The hissing sound of refrigerant being injected.
The sounds intertwined, causing the floor to tremble slightly.
Shu Shiraishi stepped inside.
The leather boots clicked off the cold floor, kicking away the white mist that had settled on the ground.
He walked to the bottom of the nuclear bomb.
I looked up at the black cone pointing straight to the dome.
My neck is sore from looking up.
"It's so beautiful."
Orochimaru stood to the side, his face tilted upwards.
His hands were clenched tightly together, his knuckles turning white.
"This is pure science. It's the pinnacle of Chakra technology."
He stared at the purple runes as if he were mesmerized.
Shu Shiraishi withdrew his gaze.
He threw the half-smoked cigarette butt on the ground and stomped it out.
Turn your head.
He stared coldly at Orochimaru.
"Its power is quite good."
Shu Shiraishi's voice was deep, drowning out the roar of the laboratory machines.
However, this violent chain reaction is extremely unstable in terms of energy.
He pointed to the massive projectile overhead.
"At the moment of launch, the propulsion array at the tail will erupt with temperatures of several thousand degrees."
"The backlash radiation and heat waves are enough to instantly melt any living thing within a 500-meter radius into blood."
Shu Shiraishi closed in on Orochimaru by half a step.
"Conventional mechs can't withstand this kind of radiation."
"Remote ignition would forcibly cut off the Chakra signal due to the nuclear bomb's own magnetic field."
He stared into Orochimaru's eyes.
"The launch site would be vaporized by the high temperature."
Who will press that button?
Shu Shiraishi each word slowly and deliberately.
Who will act as this human igniter?
The cool air from the laboratory blew through.
A wisp of cool white mist rose up and swept across their trouser legs.
Orochimaru did not avoid Shu Shiraishi's gaze.
He didn't panic.
Instead, he slowly opened his mouth.
The muscles at the corners of his mouth twitched into an extremely eerie smile.
" Lord Shu."
Orochimaru's voice was hoarse, and he let out two low laughs.
"This problem."
He turned his head and looked at a small lead door in the corner of the laboratory.
Tsunade has taken care of it.