In the year 992 B.W.—Before the War of Worlds—galactic legends whispered on the solar winds of a city steeped in blood and shadow, hidden within the suffocating embrace of the Lakun Jungle. A phantom metropolis, a fever dream on the edge of reality, it was a place spoken of only in hushed tones, a boogeyman to frighten even the most hardened space pirates.

This city, cloaked in an oppressive darkness that seemed to drink the light, was the iron heart of an empire built on the backs of cybernetically-enhanced shinobi. These warriors, masters of forbidden jutsu, possessed powers that mocked the natural order, abilities bought with blood and forged in the fires of a thousand nightmares. Outsiders could only dream of finding Dragonia, for its location was a secret sealed in the souls of the dead, a phantom whispered on the lips of the dying.Within Dragonia's towering, neon-drenched cityscape, a monument to technological depravity, children barely weaned from their mothers' milk were molded into instruments of destruction. At four years old, they entered the Academy, a black pit where innocence was flayed and their nascent talents were honed into weapons of war. Some could summon spectral horrors from the abyss, creatures of nightmare given form. Others could manipulate the very elements—incinerating flesh with a thought, drowning lungs with conjured water, or calling down bolts of lightning that could vaporize bone. Their training was a brutal ballet of agony and attrition, designed to cull the weak and elevate the ruthless. Only the most lethally efficient could serve the Dragonian Empire and its enigmatic ruler, Emperor Konzo V, a sovereign whose face was a mask of polished obsidian, reflecting the darkness of his soul. The training often left many of the children broken, crippled, or even dead, their bodies were often discarded in the lowest depths of the city and used as fuel for the city.Dragonia's skyline was a jagged wound against the sky, a testament to its obscene technological prowess. Skyscrapers, adorned with flickering holographic geishas and pulsating neon kanji, clawed at the heavens like the skeletal fingers of some dead god. Below, the streets throbbed with a predatory energy, a miasma of ambition, fear, and the ever-present threat of violence. Whispers of allegiance to the city and its hidden master were the currency of survival, traded in darkened alleyways and blood-soaked dojos. A powerful sealing jutsu, woven into the very fabric of the city, a masterpiece of forbidden arts, cloaked Dragonia from prying eyes, rendering it invisible to the galaxy, a ghost in the cosmic machine.A humid summer night, thick with the stench of decay and ozone, pressed down on the city like a shroud. An unnatural darkness gathered overhead, a swirling vortex of storm clouds, the color of a week-old bruise, blotting out the lurid neon glow. Inside the austere chambers of the Dragonian Academy, Headmaster Raidon Stormseeker, a man carved from granite and shadow, watched the sky blacken, a knot of unease tightening in his gut. He traced his fingers against a hideous scar that ran across his right eye."What in the hells..." he muttered, his voice a low growl, pushing a stray lock of raven hair from his scarred forehead. "No damn forecast predicted this." Clad in a midnight-black cloak that concealed segmented plates of chrome-alloy armor, Raidon was a weapon given human form. His one good eye, the blue of a dying star, held an ancient weariness that belied his age, a testament to the horrors he had witnessed, and inflicted. A veteran of countless clandestine wars, his strategic brilliance and unmatched lethality in combat had earned him the leadership of the Academy, a position he held with an iron fist. Many cadets often feared him more than death itself.A soft, yet venomous voice, like the whisper of silk over sharpened steel, cut through his brooding. "Headmaster Raidon?""Enter," he commanded, turning to see Jina, a woman as deadly as she was beautiful, enter the chamber. Her cropped, black combat jacket, adorned with unit insignias that spoke of bloody campaigns, barely concealed the riot of vibrant pink hair that crowned her head. Intricate tattoos, a tapestry of biomechanical horrors and ancient symbols, snaked across her exposed arms and legs, visible beneath her black combat shorts, each one a chronicle of a life lived on the edge of a blade, a testament to souls claimed in the service of the Dragonian Empire."Sir, we're picking up some seriously fucked up readings," she said, her voice laced with a predatory unease that mirrored his own. "The sky was crystal clear just a couple of hours ago. This storm… it's unnatural. Do you think the Trigress Clan might be playing with weather-altering jutsu? Maybe a declaration of war?"Raidon offered a tight, humorless smile, though a chill, colder than the void between stars, snaked down his spine. "No, Jina. A storm of this magnitude… it's beyond even their capabilities. This is something else, something… darker." But even as he spoke, he felt it—a tremor in the city's energy, a dissonance in the carefully constructed order, like a predator circling its prey. The air crackled, thick with the anticipation of violence, a promise of the bloodshed to come.As the hours bled into one another, the tempest raged, a raw, untamed beast clawing at the city. Rain fell in torrential sheets, each drop a tiny hammer blow against the armored rooftops. Lightning split the sky with jagged, violent strokes, like the frenzied scribblings of a mad god. Raidon sat at his massive, obsidian desk, a monolith of polished darkness in the heart of his sanctum. His fingers, laced with old scars that spoke of battles fought and lives taken, were intertwined in a complex sealing jutsu, a web of barely contained power. He was casting a net across the city, a mental probe seeking any irregularity in the storm's fury."Jikūkan Ninpō: Psy-Scan," he murmured, his voice a low, guttural thrum that seemed to vibrate in the very bones of the Academy. A mental map, vast and intricate, unfurled in his mind's eye—a living blueprint of Dragonia, overlaid with the pulsing, guttering auras of its inhabitants. Each point of light, a life signature, some bright and fierce, others weak and flickering, all fuel for the city's insatiable hunger. "Nothing out of the ordinary yet," he muttered, his one good eye narrowed, "but this storm… it reeks of something foul."He pulled a sleek, palm-sized communicator from the folds of his cloak, its surface a seamless, black mirror. With a precise tap, he initiated a call. Jina's face, sharp and predatory, materialized in the air before him, rendered in shimmering, ghostly light. "Sir?" she inquired, her voice devoid of inflection, a perfect soldier."Deploy squads to the north, east, west, and south sectors," Raidon instructed, his voice clipped and cold. "Have them sweep the perimeter. I want eyes on everything. This storm is a shroud, and I want to know what it's hiding. Everyone is on high alert. Any hint of trouble, they are to eliminate it. No prisoners, no questions.""Understood," Jina replied, her holographic form dissolving as the connection was severed, leaving Raidon alone in the suffocating silence of his chamber.Four teams of five shinobi, each a vessel of lethal intent, slipped into the storm-ravaged night. They moved like predatory wraiths through the dense jungle surrounding the city, their movements preternaturally fluid and silent, even amidst the torrential downpour. The rain seemed to shy away from their dark, almost liquid-looking cloaks, and the crimson glow of their optical implants, piercing the darkness like the eyes of hunting wolves, illuminated their path through the treacherous, slick terrain.The shinobi squads dispersed, weaving through the jungle's labyrinthine trails, a network of death spreading outwards. Communication was maintained via encrypted cranial implants—tiny, bio-integrated devices that nestled against their brain stems, a direct neural link. "Anything?" a voice, distorted by static and the storm's fury, hissed in their minds."Negative, south sector is a bloodbath but nothing but rain," came a gruff reply."We're balls-deep in mud and getting soaked for nothing. West is clear," a third ninja grumbled, his mental voice a low growl of annoyance. The four groups pressed on through the maelstrom, their vigilance yielding nothing but the ceaseless drumming of rain and the rustling of unseen creatures in the undergrowth."Are we going to be out here all fucking night?" a female voice, sharp with a killer's impatience, sliced through the mental chatter."Doubt it. Orders are to pull back once this shit lets up. East is clear." Each squad eventually reached their designated watchposts—imposing, multi-tiered structures that loomed over the jungle at the city's edge, skeletal sentinels forged from steel and shadow. "North clear," one ninja reported, his mental voice echoing slightly, tinged with the hollow resonance of his helmet. Similar confirmations followed from the other teams, a chorus of negative reports.Suddenly, a thunderclap, a deafening, skull-rattling roar, ripped through the sky, a shockwave rolling out from the bruised, black belly of the storm. "Did you all get that?" a ninja's voice, tight with alarm, pulsed in their minds, just as another, even more violent boom echoed across the ravaged landscape. In the south, the clouds swirled, deepening to a sickening, gangrenous purple, and forked, crimson lightning, like the veins of some cosmic abomination, seared the sky. A deafening roar, the death cry of a fallen god, split the storm's already chaotic symphony. Then, a bolt of lightning, thick as an ancient oak, slammed into the sodden earth near a crumbling, vine-choked temple just beyond the city's perimeter.The ground bucked like a living thing, the rain intensified, turning into a blinding, stinging sheet, and the lightning and thunder erupted into a frenzied, apocalyptic crescendo. "South here! All hell just broke loose! Something massive just hit the old temple! We're moving to investigate!" a tall ninja, his mental signature a blaze of crimson and black, barked into the shared consciousness. His mask, a stylized wolf's head with bared, golden fangs, seemed to snarl in the storm's fury."Riku, are you sure about this? That place is cursed," a shorter, stockier ninja, his own mental signature tinged with a flicker of apprehension, questioned. His mask was adorned with the curved, golden horns of a bull, giving him a deceptively placid look."We got orders, Chibli. Raidon's orders. They are absolute. Besides, it might be fun," Riku replied, his mental voice dripping with a predatory excitement. He motioned for Chibli and the other three ninjas to follow him. They plunged into the heart of the tempest, towards the shadowed temple and whatever abomination now lurked within its desecrated walls.As the group neared the towering, ancient structure, they could all feel it—a palpable, suffocating aura radiating from within its weathered stone walls, a pressure that seemed to crush the very air from their lungs. "Denko, Gib, get up top. Provide overwatch. Chibli, Dozer, you're with me on the ground," Riku ordered, his mental voice sharp and authoritative. Denko and Gib, with silent assent, vanished in a blur of motion, scaling the temple's treacherous heights with inhuman speed and agility. "This energy… it's unlike anything I've ever encountered. Stay frosty. We have no intel on what we're walking into," Chibli warned, his mental voice low and tense, a veteran's caution etched into every syllable.They moved like phantoms through the temple's corpse-like interior, their footsteps swallowed by the oppressive silence, the vast, moss-draped chambers seeming to absorb all sound. The air hung heavy, thick with the stench of decay and a strange, metallic tang. "Let's get this over with. I've got better things to do than play hide-and-seek with ghosts," Dozer grumbled, his mask, a cunning fox's face with glowing, neon-green, tear-shaped engravings along the sides, seemed to mock the solemnity of their surroundings.They reached a massive stone door, its surface etched with intricate, disturbing carvings—a tapestry of writhing figures, grotesque faces, and symbols that seemed to pulse with a malevolent energy. As they drew closer, all three suddenly stumbled, their legs buckling beneath them as a wave of nausea washed over them. "This aura… it's crushing. Can barely… move," Chibli gasped, his voice strained, his body trembling under the unseen pressure."Yeah, what the fuck is this…?" Dozer grunted, his face contorted in a grimace of pain and confusion. Riku, gritting his teeth, his muscles screaming in protest, struggled back to his feet, bracing himself against the cold, unyielding stone of the door. With a roar of defiance, he pushed, channeling every ounce of his strength, every iota of his will. The door groaned open, its ancient hinges screaming in protest, and the three of them practically fell into the chamber beyond, their bodies slamming against the unforgiving stone floor.As they scrambled up, their vision blurred, their heads spinning, a warm, golden light, incongruous in the oppressive darkness, bathed the chamber. At its center stood a colossal stone statue of Xenos, the ancient god of war and peace, or so the legends claimed. The statue was draped in a flowing stone cloak, seated upon a massive, carved throne that depicted scenes of long-forgotten battles and sacrifices. The statue dwarfed them, its presence both awe-inspiring and deeply unsettling. Above it, a jagged hole gaped in the ceiling, a raw wound in the temple's structure, a testament to the violent force that had breached it."What in the hells is that… on the statue's lap?" Dozer asked, his voice hushed, his eyes fixed on the source of the golden glow. Riku, his senses on high alert, his every nerve screaming a silent warning, cautiously approached, scaling the statue from its base, his movements catlike, honed by years of training and countless missions. As he reached the lap, he saw it—a tiny baby monkey, swaddled in a blanket of crimson and gold, embroidered with strange, alien symbols that seemed to writhe and shift before his eyes."What is it?" Chibli yelled from below, his voice echoing strangely in the vast chamber, warped by the unseen energies that permeated the air. The baby monkey was fast asleep, its tiny chest rising and falling rhythmically, completely undisturbed by their presence, by the storm, by the ominous power that throbbed in the very stones around them. Riku knelt, examining the creature with a mixture of curiosity and trepidation. A delicate, red-rope necklace encircled its neck, holding a pendant of luminous green jade, carved with a symbol that seemed to pulse with an inner light, a hypnotic rhythm that tugged at his mind—a masterpiece of craftsmanship, or perhaps, something more sinister. "Riku! What is it, man?!" Dozer shouted, his impatience breaking through the tense silence, his voice edged with a hint of fear.Riku gently lifted the baby monkey, and as he did, he felt it again—the overwhelming aura that had brought them to their knees, the crushing weight that had threatened to snuff out their very lives. But now, it was different. It was warm, peaceful, a sensation of pure, untainted energy, a balm to his battle-scarred soul, unlike anything he had ever encountered in his long and bloody career. "Guys," Riku finally said, his voice thick with a mixture of awe and bewilderment, a hint of something akin to hope flickering in his usually cold tone, "I found the source of the aura.""And… what is it?" Dozer and Chibli both demanded, their voices a blend of impatience and apprehension. Riku took a deep breath, his gaze fixed on the sleeping infant in his arms. "A monkey."