The Mission Assignment Desk was louder than Karura remembered.
She'd been here once before, back when she was still an academy student, tagging along on an orientation tour with her class. Back then, the massive hall had seemed almost sacred. The high ceilings, the six tall windows letting in columns of desert light, the kanji for "shinobi" painted across the ceiling like a silent reminder of what everyone in this room had chosen to become. The long table at the far end where senior ninja distributed mission scrolls. The white banner hanging from the front of the desk that read "Mission Assignment This Way," and above it, a second one: "Everybody, Do Your Best for the Village."
Now it just felt busy. Jonin stood in loose clusters near the windows, waiting for their turn. Genin teams filed in and out through the double doors. A chunin near the entrance was arguing with a clerk about false intel. Somewhere in the back, someone laughed too loudly and got shushed.
Ebizo led them through the crowd. The genin followed in a line behind him, Mai craning her neck to look at everything, Pakura with her chin level and her eyes straight ahead, Karura clutching the strap of her scroll pouch and trying not to bump into anyone.
At the long table, the Third Kazekage sat behind a stack of mission scrolls.
He didn't look like a Kage. Not at first glance, anyway. He was a tall man, fair-skinned, with short messy dark-blue hair and narrow yellow eyes. He wore the standard Kazekage attire without the hat, a white cape draped over his shoulders. Just a village leader doing desk work on a Tuesday afternoon.
But the air around him was different. Conversations near him dropped to murmurs. Even Mai, who hadn't stopped talking since they entered the building, went quiet when they reached the front of the line.
"Ebizo." The Third Kazekage acknowledged the old man with a nod. His voice was low and even. "Your team?"
"Team Ebizo, reporting the completion of a C-rank escort mission." Ebizo placed the stamped scroll on the table and unrolled it to the second page where Keisuke's seal marked the confirmation. "Two merchants escorted from Sunagakure to Sābaku-dai. Cargo delivered intact. One bandit ambush encountered and neutralized en route. No casualties among the clients or the team."
The Kazekage looked at the scroll. Then he looked at the three genin standing behind Ebizo.
His gaze lingered on each of them. Mai, who was standing as straight as she could manage. Pakura, arms folded, meeting his eyes without flinching. Karura, who bowed her head slightly when his attention reached her.
"A bandit ambush on a first mission," the Kazekage said. "And all three of them performed?"
"All three." Ebizo's voice carried something that might have been pride, though he wore it lightly. "They held a proper formation around the clients without being instructed. Each one fought well above what I'd expect from fresh graduates."
The Kazekage studied them for a moment longer. Then he gave them a polite smile.
"Congratulations on a successful first mission," he said. His eyes swept across all three of them. "The first step is always the most important one. I hope you'll continue to do good work for our village going forward."
Mai couldn't hold it. "Kazekage-sama, you should keep an eye on me! I'm going to be the strongest kunoichi this village has ever seen!"
A few heads turned. A chunin at the far end of the table raised an eyebrow. Ebizo closed his eyes with a sigh.
The Kazekage looked at Mai. His expression didn't change, but something in those narrow yellow eyes sharpened.
"I'll make sure to keep an ear out of your fame…" he gestured for her to share her name.
"Mai! My name is Mai! I'm going to be the strongest taijutsu specialist of Sunagakure!" She vowed.
"I see. Mai-chan. I believe in you." He told her.
Mai beamed.
Pakura didn't say anything so bold, but her posture spoke for her. Back straight, shoulders squared, the faintest trace of satisfaction at the corner of her lips. Of course her first mission was a success. She was Pakura. The alternative had never been a possibility worth considering.
Karura bowed. "Thank you, Kazekage-sama. We'll do our best."
This response earned an approving nod from the Kazekage and a small "good" before he turned his attention to the next team in line.
But behind the bow, her mind was already elsewhere.
Ebizo collected the mission payment from the clerk at the end of the table. A small envelope, sealed with the village's stamp. He tucked it into his vest and guided his team away from the desk, through the crowd, and out into the corridor beyond the main hall.
He stopped near the entrance, where the foot traffic thinned, and opened the envelope.
"Seventy thousand ryo," he said, thumbing through the bills. "Standard rate for a C-rank of this distance and duration." He began separating the money into portions. A larger stack for himself, three smaller ones for the genin. "My share covers mission expenses, equipment maintenance, and the operational costs of running a team. Your share is yours. Spend it wisely or don't, but don't come running to me when it's gone."
He handed each of them their cut. Fourteen thousand ryo apiece.
Karura took hers with both hands and a polite nod. The bills felt crisp and light between her fingers.
[Tenfold has activated!]
[You have gained tenfold loot!]
The notification pulsed at the edge of her vision. In her invisible inventory, the number ticked upward. One hundred and forty thousand ryo, neatly stacked in those little boxes that only she could see.
Her expression didn't change. She folded the fourteen thousand in her hands and tucked it into her pouch the same way Mai and Pakura were doing with theirs.
One hundred and fifty-four thousand ryo in her inventory now, counting the bandit loot from the canyon. Plus the fourteen thousand in her physical pouch. She was probably richer than most chunin and she'd been a genin for less than a week.
"Alright." Ebizo tucked the envelope away. "You did well. All three of you. Get some rest tonight, because tomorrow morning I expect you at the training grounds at dawn." He looked at Mai specifically. "Dawn. Not 'roughly around dawn.' Not 'when you feel like waking up.' Dawn."
"I'll be there before you, Sensei!" Mai said, already bouncing toward the exit.
"I sure hope so." Ebizo watched her go, then looked at Pakura.
Pakura gave a respectful nod to both Ebizo and a parting glance back toward the hall where the Kazekage sat, then turned and walked out with her hands at her sides and her back straight. Not a hint of hurry. Not in front of the Kazekage.
Karura lingered.
"Thank you, Ebizo-sensei." She bowed, low enough that her scarf brushed the floor. "For the mission. For trusting us with it."
Ebizo looked at her for a moment. "Just make sure my expectations aren't misplaced, okay?"
She bowed again and left, walking past the banner that told everyone to do their best for the village, through the double doors, and out into the bright afternoon sun.
The sand was warm under her sandals. The village hummed around her, familiar and close, the narrow streets and towering canyon walls that she'd known her entire life.
She had one hundred and sixty-eight thousand ryo and a head full of blueprints.
Time to go shopping.
The Puppet Brigade's public supply depot sat three streets south of the academy, wedged between a tool shop and a tea house. It wasn't much to look at from outside, just a clay storefront with a faded wooden sign that read "Shinobi Craft Supplies" in characters so sun-bleached they were barely legible. But inside, the shelves ran floor to ceiling, and every one of them was packed.
Wood. That was first.
Karura walked the lumber section with her hands behind her back, looking at each material. Desert ironwood was the standard for Suna puppets, dense and impact-resistant, difficult to split. But it was heavy, and for what she had in mind, she needed a puppet that could keep up with a fight, not lumber through it.
She found a bin of composite boards near the back. Desert ironwood layered with lighter cedar in alternating strips, then pressure-bonded with resin. Lighter than pure ironwood, tougher than cedar. More expensive than either.
"How much for the composite?" she asked the clerk, a bored-looking woman with sawdust in her hair.
"Twelve hundred ryo per board foot. Minimum five."
"I'll take ten."
She counted out twelve thousand ryo from her physical pouch and set it on the counter. The clerk raised an eyebrow at a genin carrying that kind of money, but said nothing. This was a ninja village. Kids with cash came with the territory.
[Tenfold has activated!]
[You have gained tenfold loot!]
A hundred board feet of composite lumber appeared in her inventory. Enough to build a small fleet of puppets.
She moved through the store like she'd rehearsed it. Joint assemblies, the good ones with double-bearing hinges and spring-loaded return mechanisms. Spools of high-tension wire. Sheets of thin iron for reinforcing plates. Flexible segmented tubing for the extending arms. Miniature spring-loaded launchers that puppeteer used for shooting senbon. Sealing ink and blank scrolls for the summoning compartments. Binding wire with kunai tips. Smoke canisters small enough to fit inside a forearm housing.
Every purchase multiplied by ten in her invisible inventory.
She stopped at the poison counter last. A locked cabinet behind a secondary counter staffed by an older man with deep lines on his face and the Puppet Brigade's insignia on his vest.
She bought the poisons she needed. The paralytic she had in mind was simple. Desert scorpion venom extract as the active agent, slowing nerve signals to the muscles. Thickened with cactus sap resin so it wouldn't evaporate on contact. Mixed with an iron-oxide powder that would bind to the skin on impact rather than sliding off. Not lethal. Not even debilitating in small doses. But after three or four hits, the target's arms would feel heavy. After six or seven, their legs would start dragging. After ten, they'd be fighting through mud.
She bought it all. Every ingredient multiplied by ten.
By the time the sun touched the canyon walls, she was sitting cross-legged on the floor of her bedroom at home, the door closed, her purchases unsealed from storage scrolls and arranged around her in neat rows.
A hundred board feet of composite wood. A hundred joint assemblies. Fifty spools of wire. A hundred launcher mechanisms. Enough sealing ink to fill a bathtub. And enough paralytic components to supply a small army.
She picked up a piece of composite board and turned it in her hands. Ran her thumb along the grain. Felt the weight of it, the way it flexed just slightly before resisting.
Then she pulled out a blank sheet of paper, a brush, and began to draw.
…
She called it Million.
The name came to her on the second night, after she'd scrapped three separate designs for the arm compartments and started over from scratch. She was lying on her bedroom floor with wood shavings in her hair, staring at the ceiling, and the name just arrived. A puppet with a million arms. Million.
The design took shape over the next two days between training sessions.
Body: stocky, broad-shouldered, four arms. Two in the standard position, two mounted lower on the ribcage. The torso was wide enough to house the internal framework without sacrificing mobility, reinforced at the spine and shoulder joints with iron strips. Human-sized, the average adult man's height, heavy enough to hit hard but light enough for the composite wood to keep it responsive.
The face was a simple circle carved into the head with two dot eyes and a curved line for a smile. She spent about ten seconds on it. Pakura would have called it dumb. Mai would have had a similar smile on her face. Mai was actually the inspiration. A shinobi that could not use ninjutsu or genjutsu, relying solely on the only thing she had left. Taijutsu.
The forearms were the centerpiece. Each of the four arms ended in oversized forearm housings, hollow chambers reinforced with iron banding. Inside each chamber sat a sealed summoning scroll loaded with dozens of flexible segmented arms. The arms were her proudest work: each one built from linked wooden segments connected by wire-threaded joints that could bend in any direction. When deployed, they'd pour out of the forearm housings like snakes from a basket, flexible enough to curl around corners and follow a dodging target, strong enough to crush bone when they caught one.
Every one of those extending arms had triple-function launchers built into the wrist segment. A rotating mechanism, three positions. First position: a narrow nozzle that sprayed poison gas in a short cone. Second position: a spring-loaded kunai with a spool of binding wire that would wrap around a nimble target if it didn't hit. Third position: a simple kunai launcher for lethal range.
The base arms themselves were built for straight combat. Four arms, each one jointed for wide swings, overhead strikes, and grappling. The fingers were thick and blunt, built for grabbing and crushing rather than fine manipulation.
The whole thing sat in a storage scroll the size of her forearm when sealed. She could carry it on her hip next to the scroll for her puppet arms and deploy either one in seconds.
…
Dawn training with Ebizo started at five and ran until eight every morning. Chakra control exercises, physical conditioning, sparring rotations, teamwork drills. Mai hit the training posts until her knuckles bled through her wraps and then hit them some more. Pakura worked through several jutsus her parents taught her, her fire and wind techniques using less chakra with each jutsu. Karura split her time between chakra thread exercises and taijutsu with her puppet arms.
[Tenfold has activated!]
[You have gained tenfold physical and chakra development!]
She felt it. A sudden surge of power surging through her muscles and chakra racing through her chakra network. Her chakra threads responded faster. Her control over the puppet arms tightened, the lag between her intent and the arms' movement shrinking by a very noticeable amount each morning. Her stamina stretched further. On the first day, she could maintain both arms at full responsiveness for about twenty minutes before the strain started to fray her concentration. By the fourth day, she could hold them for over an hour without an issue.
On day three, Ebizo took them on another C-rank. Escort work again, a merchant hauling dried goods to a mining settlement in the foothills northeast of the village. Two days out, two days back. No ambush this time. The worst they dealt with was a sandstorm that pinned them behind a rock formation for six hours.
[Tenfold has activated!]
[You have gained tenfold loot!]
More money. More supplies.
Karura spent the six hours behind the rock with her back to the wind and Million's torso across her lap, carving the channels that would hold the summoning scrolls in the left forearm housing. Mai watched her work for a while, head tilted.
"Is that a new puppet you're working on?"
"Yes, it's inspired by you."
"By me?! But I don't have four arms!"
"Inspired, not exactly you." Karura giggled.
"And a smiley face. I don't smile that often do I?"
"I think so."
Mai considered this. "I love it! What's its name? Mai Jr?"
Karura couldn't help but laugh some more, "No. I named it Million."
"Million, huh? You definitely gotta let me test it when it's ready!"
"Okay." Karura smiled. What person would be a better opponent than the person who inspired it?
Pakura glanced over from where she sat with her arms folded against the wind. She looked at the half-finished puppet. Looked at the four arm sockets. Looked at the oversized forearms.
"Are you going to make a puppet out of me as well?" she asked.
Karura didn't look up from her carving. "Probably not. Your kekkei genkai is too unique. I wouldn't even know how to replicate it."
Pakura held her gaze for a moment, then turned back to the sandstorm without asking anything more.
…
On the fifth night, Karura modified her puppet arms.
She'd been putting it off because the arms were her only combat tool and she didn't want to risk breaking them mid-modification. But the new joint assemblies she'd bought were better than anything she could have dreamed of a week ago, and the work went smoother than expected.
The poison reservoirs went into the knuckle plates. Small sealed compartments, each one holding a few milliliters of the paralytic compound, with a pressure-release valve that cracked on impact. Every time the puppet fist connected with something, a thin film of poison would coat the striking surface and transfer to whatever it hit. The compound was near-invisible once applied, a faint oily sheen that most people wouldn't notice until their arms started feeling heavy.
The senbon launchers were trickier. She carved out channels in each palm, six per hand, and fitted them with spring-loaded mechanisms that could fire poisoned senbon.
The chakra shields took the longest. The forearm segments of each arm had to be rebuilt as opening panels, hinged plates that could swing apart to expose a flat radiating surface underneath. When she channeled chakra through the threads in a specific way, the plates would open and the surface would project a thin, rectangle-shaped barrier of chakra. It wasn't large, maybe the size of a serving tray, but it was solid enough to stop a kunai or deflect a fireball.
She tested each modification three times. Then three more. Then she sealed the arms back into their scroll and went to bed.
…
Million was finished on the seventh day.
She sat alone in her room with the completed puppet laid out in front of her. Four arms, splayed at its sides with bandages wrapped around them. Broad shoulders. Stocky frame. That stupid, cheerful smiley face staring up at the ceiling. Dressed in layered linen wrappings around its torso, strips wound tight over the chest and midsection. Baggy pants cropped at the knee, tied off with cord to keep sand out of the leg joints.
She connected her chakra threads. Ten of them, one per finger, fanning out to the puppet's major joints. Million's right hand twitched. Then its left. The lower arms flexed at the elbow. The head turned, that carved grin sweeping across the room like it was looking for someone to wave at.
Karura opened the left forearm housing. Chakra flowed through the summoning seal. A dozen flexible arms poured out, unfurling across the floor like vines, their segmented joints clicking softly as they spread. She flexed her fingers and they rose, swaying in the air, each one tracking the movement of her hand.
She rotated the wrist launcher on one of the extending arms. First position. The poison nozzle hissed, a puff of air through the mechanism. Second position. The binding wire spool clicked into place. Third position. The kunai slot locked with a soft snap.
Everything worked.
She disconnected the threads and sat back. Her fingers were trembling, not from strain, but from something else. She leaped into the air with a loud YES! The feeling of holding a thing you built with your own hands and knowing it was good.
[Tenfold has activated!]
[You have gained tenfold crafting experience!]
[You have gained tenfold loot!]
The knowledge hit her first. It came in a wave, not painful but overwhelming, like a dam breaking behind her eyes. She suddenly understood things she hadn't understood five seconds ago. The tensile limits of composite wood under rotational stress. Three different jointing techniques she'd never tried. How to calculate the optimal spring compression for a launcher based on the weight of the projectile and the desired range. A dozen ways to improve the flexible arm design, variations she could feel in her fingers even without picking up a tool. It was as if she'd built this puppet not once, but ten times, each iteration teaching her something the last one hadn't.
Then the inventory updated.
Nine more Millions appeared in those little boxes at the edge of her vision. Identical. Same stocky frame, same four arms, same smiley face, same loaded forearm compartments and triple-function launchers and dozens of flexible crushing arms sealed inside.
Ten Millions. Ten complete, battle-ready puppets.
Karura stared at the notification for a long time.
Then she looked down at the puppet on her floor, the one she'd built with her own hands over seven days of late nights and wood shavings and aching fingers, and she smiled back at its smiling face.
"Nice to meet you, Million." she said.