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Although Sayo's first Ōgumo unit was a rough prototype, its departure from traditional puppetry—shifting from a "tool" to a "manned vehicle"—had not gone unnoticed. Among the few who tracked its clumsy testing was Sasori. From the shadows of the estate, Sasori's violet eyes had followed the eight-legged machine as it navigated the courtyard. He saw Sayo prioritizing weight distribution and kinetic balance over raw firepower—a subtle, calculated approach to engineering that earned a rare, silent flicker of interest from the prodigy.
In the following days, the acoustic signature of Sasori's workshop changed. The delicate tink-tink of watchmaker-precision carving was replaced by the heavy thuds of reinforced plating and the hiss of high-pressure pneumatic testing. The air around the workshop grew jagged, charged with a lethal intent that made the hair on Sayo's neck stand up.
The premonition came to a head when Sayo arrived to discuss—under the guise of theoretical curiosity—the frequency stabilization of Earth Release chakra. Uncharacteristically, Sasori didn't dismiss him with a sharp word. Instead, he gestured with his chin toward the sun-baked clearing outside.
"Bring that pack animal of yours," Sasori commanded, his voice as flat and heavy as a burial slab.
Sayo didn't hesitate. He fetched the Ōgumo, maneuvering it into the clearing with a rhythmic click-clack of metal on stone. But when he arrived, his breath hitched.
Standing in the center of the grounds was a nightmare of iron and wood—a puppet that defied every conventional standard of the Sunagakure arts. It was a massive, streamlined horror resembling a crouching scorpion. A lethal, steel-segmented tail arched overhead, its stinger glistening with a dark, viscous poison. Its back was a reinforced carapace of iron-wood, housing a specialized, semi-enclosed cockpit. The face was a Noh-style mask—expressionless, cold, and grotesque—with hidden firing ports lining the jaw.
This was the fusion of everything Suna had perfected: the speed of the Crow, the internal mechanisms of the Black Ant, and the heavy defense of the Salamander. But it had stolen Sayo's core concept—the pilot—and evolved it into a mobile fortress of slaughter.
"This is... Hiruko," Sasori stated. He ascended with a haunting, weightless grace, sliding into the dorsal cockpit. "Let us see if your 'beast of burden' is worth the materials you wasted on it."
The air fractured as the battle erupted.
Sayo immediately slammed the levers forward, the Ōgumo's eight legs blurring into a sprint. He attempted a flanking maneuver while his hands danced through a sequence: Ram—Snake—Tiger.
"Earth Release: Headhunter!"
Sayo channeled chakra into the ground beneath Hiruko, intending to liquefy the soil into a pit trap. But Sasori was light-years ahead. Without a visible movement, Hiruko's iron tail whipped downward, plunging into the earth like a spear.
CRACK!
The sheer kinetic force of the tail shattered Sayo's jutsu before it could stabilize, the ground hardening instantly under the impact.
"Predictable," Sasori's voice echoed from within the puppet, distorted and metallic.
Fittings on Hiruko's back slid open. A hail of poisoned senbon erupted like a black cloud, covering the clearing in a lethal radius. Evasion was impossible.
Sayo's mind shifted into overdrive. He threw the Ōgumo into a rapid retreat, its legs scrambling in a frantic, coordinated dance, while he released a single-handed sign.
"Wind Release: Fierce Wind Palm!"
A concussive blast of air erupted from the cockpit, acting as a momentary shield that knocked the majority of the senbon off-course. A few needles still found their mark, tearing deep gouges into the Ōgumo's wooden chassis and sending splinters flying. The machine groaned under the vibration.
Sasori didn't give him a second to breathe. Hiruko lunged—a blur of heavy armor and predatory speed. A massive steel pincer swung in a horizontal arc, screaming through the air.
Sayo gritted his teeth, dumping his Chūnin-level reserves into the leg actuators. The Ōgumo performed a desperate, jerky leap, narrowly avoiding the blow as the pincer pulverized the spot where he had been standing.
But the tail was already waiting. The stinger flashed—a silver streak aiming directly for Sayo's throat through the cockpit glass.
No escape.
Sayo abandoned the levers, his fingers weaving a blur of signs.
"Earth Release: Earth Dome!"
A slab of reinforced rock erupted between the pilot and the stinger. The steel needle pierced the stone with terrifying ease, but the momentary resistance was the window Sayo needed. He wrenched the Ōgumo back, creating a desperate gap between himself and the monster.
The disparity was total. Sayo's tactics were creative and his reactions were sharp, but he was fighting a tank with a bicycle. His attacks couldn't even dent Hiruko's carapace, while a single graze from Sasori meant a lethal dose of poison.
"Enough," Sasori muttered, the boredom evident in his tone.
From the Noh mask's mouth, a high-pressure jet of poison spewed forth like a water cannon. Sayo, his chakra flow momentarily stalled by the Earth Dome, could only watch as the purple mist descended.
Then, strangely, the poison plummeted mid-air. It hit the sand in front of the Ōgumo, sizzling and hissing as it corroded the earth into a blackened sludge. An invisible force had dragged it down.
Sasori retracted Hiruko's tail and stood down, casting a cold, appraising look at the sweating boy in the damaged spider. "Your control is precise. Your tactics... mediocre. But the puppet?" He paused, his gaze lingering on the scorched legs of the Ōgumo. "It is trash."
Without another word, Sasori turned the iron scorpion around and crawled back into the darkness of the workshop—a king returning to his throne.
Sayo sat in the cockpit, drenched in cold sweat, his heart hammering against his ribs. He had felt the cold touch of the reaper in that clearing. Yet, as he looked at the damage, there was no despair in his eyes—only a frantic, engineering fire.
He had seen the apex. He had felt the terrifying synergy of a master-class combat puppet. And most importantly, he realized that in that final second, Sasori had adjusted the pressure.
The genius had used a near-death experience to program a lesson into Sayo's mind: If you want to survive the shinobi world, "mobility" is not enough. You must become the weapon.
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