Chapter 359: A Despairing Truth: A City of Puppets
The air hung heavy, thick with the stale, suffocating stench of mildew and rusted iron. Minato Namikaze's sharp shout still echoed faintly in the enclosed space, though the lethal tension that had gripped the room was slowly bleeding away.
The supposed assassins stood frozen. Their knuckles were white as they gripped their crude, rusted weapons. They exchanged uncertain, exhausted glances.
Finally, the leading woman let out a long, ragged sigh. The fight drained from her posture. Her wrist went slack, and the jagged pipe she held clattered loudly against the stone floor. Raising a trembling hand, she hooked a finger under her dark face mask and pulled it down.
The face revealed beneath the fabric was not that of a hardened killer, but a woman worn down by exhaustion and grief. Seeing their leader yield, the other women followed suit. Masks dropped to the floor one by one. They were not shinobi. They were ordinary citizens of Rōran, their faces smeared with dirt and etched with deep-seated sorrow.
Sara stared, her breath catching in her throat. She had braced herself for ruthless thugs, for cold-blooded murderers sent to claim her life. Yet the people standing before her were her own subjects.
"Why..." Her voice wavered, barely louder than a whisper. "Why are you doing this?"
The leading woman took a heavy step forward. Her eyes, red-rimmed and fierce, locked onto the young queen. "Why are we doing this?" she repeated, her voice cracking with bitter emotion. "Your Majesty, we should be asking you that very question. Give us back our husbands!"
The accusation struck Sara like a physical blow. She stumbled a half-step backward, her hands rising defensively.
"Give them back to you?" she stammered, her mind spinning. "I... I do not understand what you are saying. I have never captured your relatives! I have never issued a single order to arrest the citizens of Rōran!" She pleaded with them, her wide eyes darting from face to face, brimming with desperate innocence and mounting panic.
A heavy, gloved hand suddenly clamped down on Sara's shoulder, halting her retreat. Uchiha Akira stepped smoothly to her side, his presence instantly dominating the cramped space.
"Is it truly that difficult to understand?" His voice was a slow, measured drawl, cutting through the emotional chaos like a blade. "Your ever-loyal minister, Anrokuzan. Or rather, the rat who goes by the name Mukade. He rounded up every able-bodied man in this country. He dragged them deep underground to slave away in a massive, hidden armory, forcing them to build his clumsy little puppets."
The words slammed into Sara. The color drained completely from her face.
"Impossible!" she cried out, shaking her head so violently her long crimson hair whipped around her shoulders. "Anrokuzan is the most loyal minister my mother ever had! He has worked tirelessly for the past six years! Everything he does is for the prosperity of Rōran! What you are saying is impossible!"
Even confronted with the weeping, broken women of her own city, Sara instinctively threw up a shield of denial to protect the man who had guided her. Her mind violently rejected the concept. If Anrokuzan was a fraud, a monster hiding in plain sight, then her entire reign—the last six years of her life—was nothing but a hollow joke.
Akira stared down at her trembling, self-deceiving form. A sharp glint of dark amusement flashed in his eyes.
"Foolish woman," he murmured, his tone dripping with disdain. "You always prefer the comfort of a fragile bubble over the harshness of reality."
Hearing the queen's blind defense of their tormentor, the women across the room bristled. Their grief morphed into sudden, raw fury, and several lunged forward to grab their discarded weapons.
Akira merely raised a single hand. The sheer, oppressive weight of his killing intent froze them in their tracks. He turned his attention back to Sara.
"Do not be so quick to deny it," he commanded, his voice brooking no argument. "You claim to be the queen. Then shoulder a queen's burden. Make them a promise right now. Swear that if the truth aligns with my words, you will tear this city apart to rescue their families."
Sara looked up into Akira's cold, unyielding gaze. She bit her lower lip hard enough to draw a drop of blood, then slowly turned to face the grieving women. Forcing air into her tight lungs, she straightened her spine, trying to summon whatever royal dignity she had left.
"I promise you," she declared, her voice gaining a fraction of strength. "If... if Anrokuzan truly committed such atrocities... I swear I will bring your families back to you!"
The absolute sincerity in her vow caused the hostility in the women's eyes to waver, replaced by a fragile, desperate hope.
Akira's lips curved into a cruel, razor-thin smile. "Since the royal decree has been issued," he said smoothly, "it is time you witnessed the true face of this grand prosperity you are so incredibly proud of."
Before the last syllable even left his mouth, Akira reached out and clamped a strong arm around Sara's waist, pulling her flush against his side.
"Eh? What are you doing now?!" Sara shrieked, her hands flying up to push against his chest.
She never got the chance to struggle. The ground vanished beneath her feet. Wind roared in her ears as Akira launched them into the sky with explosive force. In the span of a few rapid heartbeats, they were soaring high above the towering spires, hovering directly over the sprawling central plaza of Rōran.
"Open your eyes," Akira commanded, his voice cutting cleanly through the howling wind.
Sara forced her eyelids apart, her body trembling in his grip. What greeted her was a stunning sea of crimson and gold. A grand festival was underway. The winding streets far below were draped in vibrant lanterns and flowing silk streamers. Tens of thousands of citizens packed the massive plaza, a dense ocean of humanity waving their arms in perfect unison. They were chanting her name. The cheers rolled upward like tidal waves, crashing against the towering architecture in a deafening roar of adoration.
"Look..." Sara murmured, staring down at the magnificent spectacle. The crushing doubt that had gripped her heart just moments ago began to recede, replaced by a desperate, clinging relief. "They... they are all cheering for me."
She looked up at Akira, her eyes shining with renewed conviction. "If Anrokuzan is truly a monster, if my people are suffering in the dark... how could they smile so brightly? How could they throw such a grand, joyous ceremony?"
She searched his stoic face, a raw, pleading vulnerability in her gaze. She wanted him to concede. She needed this terrifying, overwhelming man to admit that he was wrong, and that her beautiful, prosperous kingdom was real.
Akira hovered effortlessly in the sky, his dark eyes locked on the glittering, artificial paradise below. His expression remained carved from ice.
"Is this truly all you see?" he asked, his tone dripping with undisguised mockery.
Without waiting for her answer, Akira shifted his weight. They plummeted.
The wind tore at Sara's clothes as they dropped like a stone, landing with a heavy, echoing thud on a raised ceremonial platform at the very edge of the plaza. They were now less than twenty meters from the front lines of the massive crowd. Down here, the devastating cheers were physically deafening.
"Long live Queen Sara! Long live Queen Sara!"
The citizens screamed with fanatical devotion. Yet, as Sara looked closer, a cold dread began to pool in her stomach. Every single face wore the exact same stretched, manic smile. Their movements were entirely uniform. The angle of their waving arms, the rhythm of their steps, the pitch of their voices—it was all astonishingly, unnaturally identical.
Desperation clawed at her throat. She thrust a trembling finger toward the masses. "You see!" she cried out, her voice cracking. "They love me!"
Akira did not say a word. He merely raised his right arm, slowly extending his open palm toward the thickest cluster of wildly cheering citizens. In the depths of his eyes, a terrifying, ancient ocular power flared to life, warping the very air around him.
"Banshō Tenin."
An absolute, irresistible gravitational vortex erupted from his hand. It seized the closest dozen citizens in an instant. Sara did not even have the time to scream, let alone stop him. She watched in absolute horror as those people were violently yanked from their feet. It was as if an invisible, god-like hand had grabbed them by the throats, dragging them helplessly through the air. They hurtled directly toward Akira's outstretched palm at breakneck speed.
"No! Do not hurt them!" Sara shrieked, lunging forward to grab Akira's arm.
But she was far too late. The moment the screaming citizens crossed within a five-meter radius of Akira, his eyes narrowed. He snapped his five fingers into a tight, brutal fist.
The sound that followed was not the wet, sickening crunch of human bone and flesh. It was the sharp, violent crack of splintering wood. It was the screech of twisting gears and the harsh groan of crushed metal.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The dozen bodies slammed into an invisible wall of gravity, violently compressing into a tight, grotesque sphere before exploding outward in a shower of debris.
Clatter... clack...
Heavy chunks of shattered wood, bent iron joints, and severed springs rained down onto the stone platform. They piled up like discarded trash right at Sara's feet. A perfectly carved wooden hand, painted to look like human skin, rolled slowly across the stone and bumped gently against the tip of her shoe. At the jagged stump of its wrist, a few faint, glowing blue chakra threads twitched and dissolved into the air.
Sara's breath stopped. Her expression froze into a mask of pure, unadulterated horror. Moving with the stiff, jerky motions of a broken doll herself, she lowered her head to stare at the pile of mechanical carnage.
Were those... were those the loyal subjects who had just been screaming her name?
"Pup... puppets?" she choked out, her voice so hollow and faint it barely left her throat.
"Behold your beloved subjects," Akira's cold voice murmured right beside her ear, devoid of any pity. "They have no body temperature. They have no beating hearts. There is nothing inside them but hollow wood and the chakra threads extending from Anrokuzan's fingertips. He simply manipulates their painted faces to show you the exact expressions you wish to see."
The truth was infinitely sharper than any blade. The delicate, painted paper screen of her kingdom's prosperity had been brutally shredded, leaving nothing behind but the cold, mechanical reality of her enslavement.
Sara's knees buckled. She collapsed hard onto the stone platform, her hands gripping her head.
"It is a lie..." she gasped, tears finally spilling over her lashes. "It is all a lie... What have I been doing? For the past six years... what have I been doing? The crowds I watched from the top of my tower every single day... the people who cheered for me... they were just... these things?"
The sheer agony of her entirely fabricated reality collapsing inward was enough to shatter her spirit. In her mind's eye, the gentle, fatherly face of Anrokuzan warped, melting into a twisted, hideous sneer. He had played her for an absolute fool. She was a puppet queen ruling over a city of wooden dolls.
Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
The sharp sound of displaced air broke through her sobbing. Minato Namikaze, flanked by a young Kakashi and the rest of his team, landed smoothly on the far edge of the platform. They had tracked Akira's explosive trajectory and arrived just in time to witness the brutal execution of the wooden crowd.
"This..." Uzumaki Naruto stared wide-eyed at the mountain of splintered wood and gears scattered across the stone. He swallowed hard, his throat dry. "The people on this street... they're all fake?"
Even the usually unflappable Minato Namikaze wore a deeply solemn expression. His blue eyes scanned the sprawling plaza, calculating the sheer magnitude of the deception. A puppet jutsu of this scale was entirely unheard of in the shinobi world. To simultaneously control the complex, daily movements of tens of thousands of civilians across an entire city required a level of chakra and micromanagement that defied human limits. There was only one logical explanation. Mukade had successfully tapped into the limitless, subterranean power of the Dragon Veins.
Akira completely ignored the newly arrived Konoha shinobi. He kept his cold, dark gaze fixed downward, watching the broken queen weep over the wooden hand.
"Have you cried enough?" he asked, his voice devoid of a single ounce of sympathy.
Sara's slender shoulders trembled violently. Slowly, she lifted her head, her tear-soaked eyes meeting the unyielding, crimson depths of Uchiha Akira's gaze.
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