Chapter 115: The Anatomy of a Ghost
The sound of the explosion was different up close. It wasn't a sharp crack, but a heavy, earth-shaking whoomph that displaced thousands of gallons of stagnant rainwater. The shockwave rippled through the marsh, turning the ground into a slurry of mud and fire.
Nawaki hadn't even had time to scream.
He had stepped directly onto a High-Density Pressure Array—a series of interconnected explosive tags layered with Amegakure's specialized poison gas. In the original history, this was the moment the Senju bloodline's future was hollowed out, leaving behind a crater and a grieving sister.
Rimon moved before the debris even hit the ground.
"Now," Rimon hissed.
He didn't jump into the fire; he slid into it. He activated [PROJECT: GHOST]. From the scroll at his waist, a series of pre-inked translucent barriers expanded, forming a hexagonal prism around the center of the blast. This wasn't a defense against the explosion—the explosion had already happened. This was a Chronos-Dampening Barrier, designed to slow the thermal dissipation for just three seconds.
Rimon stepped into the heart of the smoke. His sensory goggles switched to "Molecular Scan" mode. Through the swirling grey haze, he saw Nawaki's body being tossed like a ragdoll. The boy's internal organs were already rupturing from the concussive force, and the heat was beginning to sear his skin.
"Not today, kid," Rimon muttered.
He reached out, his hand glowing with a concentrated, emerald-green light—the Uzumaki Cellular Anchor. He grabbed Nawaki by the collar of his flak jacket. With his other hand, he slapped a specialized sealing tag onto the boy's chest: the Substitute Heartbeat Seal.
Instantly, Nawaki's actual vitals dropped to near-zero, hidden beneath a "fake" chakra signature that mimicked a dying, failing heart. To any sensor nearby—including the Jōnin commander rushing toward the smoke—it would look like Nawaki was fading into death.
But Rimon wasn't done. He pulled a biological "husk" from a secondary scroll—a flesh-and-bone construct grown in the Uzushio labs using Zetsu's cells and a sample of Senju DNA he'd acquired months prior. It was a masterpiece of bio-sealing.
In one fluid motion, Rimon swapped them. He shoved the husk into the mud, letting the remaining explosive tags finish the job of "hollowing it out" to match the historical description of the death.
He then tucked the real, unconscious Nawaki into a Sub-Space Storage Void—a sealing technique so advanced it effectively removed the boy from the current dimension for a few minutes.
Rimon stood up, his cloak fluttering in the heat of the dying flames. He was barely five feet from the crater. He could hear the desperate shouts of the Leaf team through the rain.
"Nawaki! NAWAKI!"
Rimon looked down at the "body" in the mud. It was a perfect fake. Even Tsunade, with all her medical prowess, would find it hard to distinguish this mass of charred tissue from her brother's remains in the heat of a war zone.
"Patriarch, the Jōnin is thirty meters out," Kushina's voice crackled in his ear, her tone breathless. "You need to ghost, now!"
"Closing the loop," Rimon said.
He didn't run. He activated the Vortex-Cloak's "Null-Reflect" mode. He simply ceased to exist to the naked eye. As the Leaf Jōnin skidded into the clearing, falling to his knees in the mud and screaming in horror at the sight of the crater, Rimon walked right past him.
He moved with the cold, detached grace of a surgeon who had just stolen a soul from the reaper.
The Rain continued to fall, washing away the scent of gunpowder, but the "Will of Fire" had just lost its brightest spark. Or so the world was meant to believe.