---
"Move like the desert wind — unseen but deadly."
The command passed from lip to lip, each whisper harder and colder than the last.
Inside the underground war chamber, the Council of Sand finalized their plans.
A long, cracked map stretched across the table.
Tattered flags and bloody notes marked supply lines, villages, outposts — veins waiting to be cut open.
The room smelled of ink, old paper, and quiet death.
Jonin, Chunin, and the black-clad assassins of the Dark Corps stood shoulder to shoulder, faces grim.
---
Commander Bekku, a hardened man with scars across his throat, slammed his calloused hand on a point in the eastern border.
"This," he growled, "this will be our first incision."
He pointed to three supply towns — Tani, Hoshin, and Kura — minor settlements feeding the Leaf's frontline forts.
"Burn the crops. Poison the wells. Cripple them quietly."
The Dark Corps leader, a thin woman with snake-like eyes named Asuna, tilted her head.
"If we move too obviously, the Hokage will tighten the leash. We need precision."
Ebizo nodded from the shadows.
"No honor. No warnings. No survivors."
---
Chiyo chuckled darkly, her voice full of sand and scorn.
"We are not here to win cleanly.
We are here to make them bleed... and starve... and fear."
The jonin murmured in grim agreement.
Bekku barked, "Assign squads of four. Scatter them like sand in a storm. Different points of incursion — small teams, independent action."
"And if they are discovered?" one asked.
Chiyo smiled thinly.
"Then die with fangs bared."
---
Squad by squad, the invasion took shape:
Team 9 — led by Asuna — tasked to poison food storage in Tani.
Team 12 — specialists in sabotage — sent to collapse critical bridges.
Team 4 — pure assassins — tasked to decapitate minor town leaders and sew chaos.
Dark Cells — a scattered dozen small two-man teams, hidden and deadly, moving without banners, without names.
All beneath the notice of great armies.
All designed to rot the Leaf from the inside before they even knew the infection had set in.
---
Outside, in the barracks, ordinary soldiers sharpened their kunai with blank faces.
The young ones — boys barely older than Rita, Mishu, Kiswa — joked weakly, hiding their terror.
The veterans said nothing.
They knew there was no glory here.
Just another war in a world that demanded endless blood.
---
As the army moved out under the cover of night, the wind carried strange echoes.
Echoes of memories that would never be made.
Dreams that would be crushed in the dust.
---
Meanwhile — far from the Sand, one solitary figure stumbled through a sea of dunes and broken scrublands.
---
Raghoul had walked for what felt like an eternity.
His black boots were cracked. His long dreads clung to his sweat-slicked skin like a lion's mane soaked in blood.
His eyes, sharp and cat-like, saw nothing but the endless track of survival stretching before him.
The events of the children — Rita, Mishu, Kiswa — clung to him like specters.
He had tried not to think about them.
It didn't work.
He could still see their blood on his hands every time he flexed his fingers.
---
By dusk, he reached the edge of a forgotten village — little more than a clutch of broken homes and dry wells.
Smoke curled lazily from one chimney.
Laughter — thin and forced — floated on the wind.
Something was wrong.
Very wrong.
---
As he approached, his cat-like pupils dilated, his instincts shrieking.
Movement in the shadows.
Figures too tense, too watchful.
Not villagers.
Ninjas.
And not just any — Hidden Sand Shinobi, disguised poorly in civilian clothes.
---
One of them — a sensing ninja — stiffened sharply as soon as Raghoul crossed an unseen boundary.
The sensor's eyes widened.
"His chakra..." he whispered hoarsely to his comrade.
"What about it?" the comrade hissed back, fingers twitching near the handle of a kunai.
"It's... not natural."
The sensor's face had gone pale, sweat beading on his temples.
"It's thick... not human.
It's... fair — like demon from the old stories.
And yet... something darker... something twisted."
The sensor backed away slightly, instinct screaming that they faced something far worse than a mere enemy spy.
---
Without a word, the squad leader gave the silent hand signal: Attack.
Better to kill the unknown than risk it revealing their position.
The first puppet came screaming out of the alley — a grotesque thing of iron and sharpened bone, hunched and spider-like.
It launched serrated chains toward Raghoul's neck.
Snap!
He barely twisted aside in time, the blade brushing a bloody kiss across his shoulder.
Another figure — hidden among the broken homes — unleashed a barrage of poisoned needles with a crack of her wrist.
Dozens of thin black darts shimmered through the air.
Raghoul's body moved on instinct, fire blooming around him — a shield of searing red flames — incinerating half the projectiles.
Still, three needles pierced his thigh.
He snarled in pain, the burning in his muscles immediate.
"Paralysis poison," he muttered, recognizing the symptoms from his monastery studies.
Damn them...
They were Sand ninjas — cunning, vicious, precise.
Not sloppy like the academy children.
---
A second puppet — this one tall and skeletal — lunged forward, spewing thick green mist from its chest cavity.
Poison gas.
Raghoul fell back, coughing, his vision blurring.
From the smoke, two of the chunin sprinted forward, chakra blades flashing in their hands.
Their coordination was impeccable — moving like twin wolves, striking from opposite sides.
For a moment, Raghoul almost lost.
The blade slashed across his ribs, blood spraying.
The other would have ended him — a straight thrust toward his heart —
—but he threw up a wall of flame at the last second.
Blood-red fire met cold steel.
The ninja screamed, his blade melting in his hands.
---
Pain blurred everything.
Raghoul staggered backward.
His breath came ragged.
The poisoned needles were starting to numb his right leg.
The puppets scuttled around him, whirring, searching for an opening.
The ninjas kept their distance now, harrying him with kunai and fire bombs, probing, wearing him down.
They were trying to kill him slow.
Efficiently.
Sand tactics.
---
He remembered something the old abbot had once croaked:
"The desert doesn't kill you with a roar. It kills you with a whisper."
---
Raghoul roared.
His blood-red fire exploded outward.
A brutal, raw surge of chakra burned from his core —
—snapping puppet strings, incinerating one entire puppet in a blast of molten death.
One ninja screamed as his control lines snapped, the feedback frying his nervous system.
He collapsed in spasms, twitching until the flames found him.
The others flinched — the momentary hesitation costing them.
Raghoul surged forward.
Fast.
Relentless.
---
He caught the woman with the poisoned needles mid-throw, grabbing her wrist and twisting savagely.
Bones snapped.
She shrieked — only for Raghoul's fire to devour her face.
The smell of burning flesh gagged him — but he didn't stop.
---
The last two chunin tried to retreat, but Raghoul was faster.
His blood-red flames, cold to the soul but hot to the skin, lanced out like spears, punching through one, then the other.
They dropped wordlessly.
Empty.
Gone.
---
Silence.
Smoke.
Death.
The broken puppets twitched feebly in the dirt, their masters cooling nearby.
Raghoul stood in the center of the carnage, panting, bleeding from a dozen cuts.
His thigh throbbed with poison.
But he was alive.
---
He was alive.
They were not.
---
As the adrenaline faded, the weight returned.
The faces of the dead stared at him.
Empty.
Silent.
Gone forever.
---
And each one had a story.
---
Before Death
---
Aya — the puppet master — had once been a child of the slums in Sunagakure.
Born beneath the broken spires, where the wind howled like mourning mothers.
She built her first puppet from broken toys and dead rats.
Her mother used to laugh and call her a genius.
She had dreamed of becoming a healer —
—before her brother was murdered by Leaf shinobi during a border raid.
The dream died.
She traded medicine for poisons.
And her smile vanished forever.
---
Kaiden — the sensor ninja — had been a farmer's son.
He loved the smell of rain on dry earth.
He loved to run barefoot across the dunes with his little sister.
He had hated the academy, hated fighting, hated blood.
But his sister needed medicine.
The Sand needed soldiers.
So he became a weapon.
---
Daiyo — the blade-wielder — had once loved painting.
He painted sunsets on scraps of parchment stolen from the market.
He painted the colors of hope.
Until a Sand jounin found his sketches, scoffed, and smashed them underfoot.
"Art doesn't feed a village," they had said.
"Only death does."
Daiyo traded his brushes for steel.
His sunsets became blood-red.
---
Rin — the poison mistress — had been married once.
A soft-voiced woman named Aika waited for her back home.
Rin had promised her:
"Just one mission. Just one more. Then I'll come home for good."
Now Aika would wait forever.
---
Each corpse was a universe extinguished.
Each dead eye stared upward into a sky that would never care.
---
And Raghoul knew it.
---
He collapsed to his knees in the dirt, his body trembling not from weakness, but from the sheer weight of it all.
The weight of the blood.
The weight of existence.
The weight of survival.
---
Above him, the stars bled across the sky.
Silent.
Indifferent.