The heat of the Land of Wind was absolute as the sun beat down on the dunes.
Two figures walked steadily through the landscape while heading toward the northern border.
One was Shira, who had discarded his traditional Sand Village attire. Now he wore a bright green, full-body jumpsuit. Reason being was because of the influence Rock Lee and Naruto had left on him during the abbreviated exams.
Trailing a few steps behind him was Yome. Her short pigtails bounced slightly with each step. She had no real strategic reason to be marching through the northern dunes, but her infatuation with Shira anchored her to his side.
Where he went, she followed.
A few moments later, they stopped in their tracks.
Shira stared straight ahead through the distorting heatwaves to see a figure standing still in the distance.
As they cautiously approached, the details of the stranger became clear. The man wore a white coat with a hood obscuring his features. And from the looks of it, he was waiting for them.
"Who's that?" Yome asked.
Shira did not answer.
The figure slowly reached up and pulled the hood back to reveal a man with dark hair and his eyes completely covered by a black blindfold.
Shira's breath caught in his throat upon recognizing the covered face. "H… Hoshikaze-sensei?!"
The man did not speak. Instead, he raised a hand and casually waved away the ambient chakra masking his true form. When the Transformation jutsu dissolved like smoke in the wind, the blindfold vanished, revealing the features of a face burned into every bingo book.
It was Arthur.
Yome gasped as she almost stumbled backward in the sand. Of course she knew who he was. Everyone knew. He was the shinobi who held the power to crush the five great nations.
Arthur looked at the two of them with a blank expression. That green jumpsuit was a glaring symptom of a disease he despised—the sentimental, ideological rot spread by the Leaf Village's protagonists.
"It's been awhile, Shira…"
Yome snapped her head toward her teammate. "You two know each other?!"
"Yes," Shira answered, keeping his eyes locked. "And it has indeed been some time."
Arthur knew Shira would be here because that's how their story ended.
"Shira… I'm here with an offer: side with me and cast away any ties you had with your village."
Shira tightened his fist. "How're you even alive?"
"That's not important… You're to be recruited into my ranks. Or rather, you're to become the ultimate taijutsu fighter I need you to be."
"What are you saying?!"
"Do you not recall what I taught you the last time we met?"
Of course Shira recalled those enlightening lessons. He revered the blindfolded fighter Hoshikaze just as much as he respected Gaara.
"Shira," Arthur offered, "why waste away? Come to my side instead."
Yome quickly reached out and held Shira's arm. She protested in panic. This was not a good idea to her because she had heard the stories, knowing full well that Arthur was akin to a monster.
Her pleas almost went unheard until Shira looked at her with a conflicted expression. Then he turned back to Arthur and admitted, "I greatly respect Hoshikaze, but I don't know if I can stand by your beliefs."
"Hoshikaze and I were one in the same… His skills, his philosophies, they were all from me."
Perhaps Shira didn't believe in Arthur's violent methods, but he at least knew Arthur was fighting for a cause. It was a cause in which only true fighters could understand the sacrifice required.
"But Shira!" Yome tried, pulling on his sleeve.
He stood his ground as he asked, "What will happen if I join you?"
"You'll serve under my army and become a better taijutsu specialist than even those you fought in the exams." The fact Arthur knew who he fought troubled them both. "You'll even be allowed to return to the village to help your precious Kazekage."
"Don't listen to him!" Yome begged, stepping in front of Shira.
But Shira looked at her with reasoning eyes. "Yome… I know that he's bad, but he's being serious. When he was Hoshikaze, he never once tried to hurt me."
Shira was right to think this, as now Arthur was offering something almost no other ninja could gain: servitude under a powerful vanguard, specialized training conditions, and many, many resources to elevate their power far beyond the limits of others.
The shock was evident on Yome's face. She couldn't believe her teammate was actually considering a pact with a rogue warlord.
"I'm glad you see it my way," Arthur said. The wind then howled across the sand as a dramatic pause settled over the dunes. "But… I don't have a need for Yome…"
Both of them froze.
"Yome," Shira said in a serious tone. "Go back to the Sand, and don't tell anyone about this, okay?"
"But Shira!"
Suddenly, Arthur reached into his coat, pulled out a straight sword, and slowly began walking toward them. "She's seen my face, Shira. I can't allow her to leave."
Panic seized the Sand shinobi.
"Wait!" Shira cried. He then quickly dropped to the sand, bowing down on both hands and knees in a desperate plea for mercy. "I'll take full responsibility for—"
Shank!
The sound of tearing flesh cut through the wind. And when Shira lifted his head, his world shattered as he saw Yome's wide-eyed head slowly falling toward the ground, separated completely from her neck.
Her lips moved to whisper his name. "Shira…"
The body flopped to the ground as the head rolled away into the sand, leaving a dark trail of blood.
Arthur swiped the blood from his blade with a flick. "Now why would I allow that…?"
He knew Yome well. Her primary skill was a unique dōjutsu; by dilating her pupils, she was able to track down enemies via the reflection on tiny water droplets in the atmosphere, granting her a visual range reaching several dozen kilometers.
While it was an impressive tracking technique for a standard shinobi, it wouldn't serve Arthur in the slightest since he already possessed the Crimson Gaze.
As for training her, it would be a complete waste of his time and resources because her baseline physical stats were far too weak to begin with. She was dead weight.
Shira stared at the blood soaking into the dune. His mind fractured as he was utterly shocked at the casual violence.
"How could you?!" he screamed.
How could he indeed? How could Arthur kill in cold blood? How could he treat a loyal teammate as if she had no life or value beyond a tactical assessment?
"Like I said," Arthur replied, "I have no need for her in my ranks."
Shira was past the point of grief; he was now furious.
His aura quickly began to flare with yellow energy that pushed the sand away. His voice then echoed across the desert as he screamed, "You crazy monster!"
"So… you'd rather defend trash than join me?"
Shira didn't answer as oxygen seeped deep into his bloodstream. His muscles expanded, and the veins in his neck bulged. Suddenly, his energy spiked even further, putting him in his Fifth Activation.
"Oh…" Arthur murmured.
The ground cracked beneath Shira's feet as he flew to punch Arthur in the face. But Arthur swayed his head back at the very last possible microsecond.
The force of the missed punch generated a shockwave that tore a trench through the dunes. Shira skidded to a halt in the sand and whipped around to press the attack, only to find empty space.
Arthur was gone, so the boy scanned the desert frantically.
He knew that challenging a monster of this caliber could mean his death, but the yellow aura burning around him demanded vengeance.
Suddenly, he felt a shift in the air pressure directly behind him. Acting on pure reflex, he executed a high-speed spin kick. Yet his leg sliced through empty air. When he heard the crunch of sand to his left, he threw a backhand. But again, he hit nothing except the wind.
"How is he so fast?!" he argued to himself.
"Shira…" he heard Arthur's voice say from seemingly nowhere. The sound lacked any directional origin, as if existing inside his head. "You're only skilled in taijutsu."
The moment he heard this, the chilling reality of the situation became clear: Arthur had trapped him in a genjutsu.
But when? From the moment Arthur stepped foot in their vicinity, of course.
A tactician of Arthur's quality was never going to take a chance revealing himself so lightly to a pair of Sand shinobi without securing the environment first.
In the real world, the desert was quiet.
There was no yellow aura. There was no crater in the sand. Yet Yome was still decapitated.
Shira himself was exactly where he had been before the violence started: on his hands in a posture of desperate submission, begging for his dead friend's life.
Arthur casually approached the kneeling boy with his sword held. Another chance wouldn't be offered.
Shank!
The steel pierced Shira's back and severed his heart in a single motion. The boy had died instantly.
'What a shame,' Arthur thought, pulling the blade free before wiping it clean.
He was quite annoyed because he had been fully willing to expend massive resources on Shira. The boy's Seven Heavenly Breaths technique could have been refined, and he could have been turned into a superior version of Rock Lee.
Arthur would have gladly used the Evil Illusion Flattery technique to subtly rewrite Shira's will and ensure his absolute loyalty. But reasoning with the boy was an impossibility. Shira's emotional attachments were terminal flaws; his love for his teammates and his Kazekage was clearly stronger than his reverence for Hoshikaze.
Arthur had technically betrayed Shira by hiding his true identity during their first encounter. Though Shira was willing to overlook the deception, what Shira could not overlook was the cold-blooded slayer Arthur was.
The boy was simply a martial artist, not a killer.
If Arthur had ventured to the Sand Village to recruit him years earlier, before the boy had formed deep bonds, Shira might have agreed. Too bad for Arthur that the timeline had worked against him, with Naruto Uzumaki having ruined a perfectly functional asset.
Arthur soon stepped over the bleeding corpse and cleaned up the evidence. The recruitment mission was a failure, but he was not a man who dwelled on sunk costs. Especially when he was not at a loss.
The Land of Wind was vast, and there was still another asset in this territory well worth his attention.