The Forests - Outskirts of Midori no Mura
The word slipped from Alaric's lips, quiet as a dying breath, yet it carried the absolute, unyielding authority of a god rendering judgment.
"Vulcan..."
The forest instantly succumbed to a metallic symphony. It began as a faint, collective vibration… the shivering of drawn swords, the chattering of kunai in their holsters, the unnatural hum of iron buckles and chainmail weaves. And then, gravity lost its dominion.
A violent, invisible magnetic tide seized the clearing.
Thirty hardened mercenaries, men who had survived wars and slaughtered without remorse, suddenly gasped as an unseen hand hauled them toward the canopy. They didn't float gracefully; they were jerked skyward by the very tools they relied upon to kill. Belt buckles dug painfully into their stomachs, chest plates crushed their ribs upward, and the small, miscellaneous iron trinkets embedded in their clothing dragged them three meters into the frigid night air.
Panic erupted, a chaotic choir of shouts and thrashing limbs. They kicked wildly, suspended like slaughtered swine in an abattoir, but their struggles were entirely futile. The magnetic grip was absolute.
But the horror was only just beginning.
With a series of sharp, metallic screeches, every single weapon… broadswords, daggers, sickles, and senbon… was violently wrenched from their desperate grasps. The blades spun in mid-air, reversing their trajectories, before locking into place mere centimeters from their owners' flesh. Razor-sharp tips hovered steadily before terrified eyes, pressed against throbbing jugulars, and angled precisely at exposed temples.
The thirty men went entirely, deathly still. To twitch was to impale oneself.
Below them, standing untouched in the center of the crater, Alaric Jonathan Kenway reached into the pocket of his olive-green flak jacket. He retrieved the half-smoked cigar he had discarded earlier. Without breaking his glowing, crimson gaze from the suspended men, he raised his index finger to the tip of the tobacco. A tiny spark of golden chakra flared, reigniting the cherry perfectly.
"I won't ask again," Alaric said, taking a slow, savory drag. He exhaled a plume of thick smoke that drifted lazily up toward the terrified mercenaries. "Who is the employer giving you the money to ransack these villages?"
"..."
"..."
Alaric was met with absolute, suffocating silence.
It wasn't a silence born of loyalty or stubborn defiance. It was the paralyzing, animalistic silence of prey caught in the jaws of a predator. Some of the men were weeping quietly, tears tracking through the dirt on their faces. Others had gone completely pale, the distinct, acrid smell of urine hitting the forest floor betraying their broken resolve. A few, unable to process the sheer, terrifying sensory overload of their impending executions, had simply passed out, their heads lolling to the side as white foam bubbled from the corners of their mouths.
Alaric stood there for a moment, observing the display through the geometric pinwheels of his Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan. He let out a long, disappointed sigh, shaking his head.
"Perhaps I'm just wasting my time with you all," Alaric murmured, raising his hand slightly.
The hovering blades retreated an inch, only to angle themselves for a collective, lethal thrust. The magnetic pressure spiked, humming in the air as Alaric prepared to will the metallic storm to pierce every single one of them.
"Wait! Wait!"
A voice shrieked from the periphery of the suspended group. It was raw, tearing through vocal cords shredded by sheer panic.
"GENBEI!" the man screamed, his voice breaking. "It's Amakura Genbei!"
Alaric halted the execution order, his hand freezing in mid-air. He shifted his gaze toward the source of the confession. It was Kenta, the pragmatic rogue ninja who had tried to talk the leader out of this foolish detour.
"Please!" Kenta wept, his hands raised in a desperate, trembling gesture of surrender as a kunai hovered a millimeter from his right eye. "I'm begging you, forgive me! I'm so sick of this life! I've done nothing wrong but follow these sick bastards just so I could afford to eat! Just to live!"
Alaric raised a brow. He took another unhurried drag from his cigar, the ember casting a faint orange glow over his sharp features. He assessed the terrified man for a moment, then gave a slow, deliberate nod.
With a subtle mental command, the kunai threatening Kenta's eye suddenly lost its magnetic charge. It dropped, embedding itself harmlessly into the soil below. Kenta remained suspended by his belt and armor, gasping for breath, but the immediate threat of his own blade was gone.
"Go on," Alaric urged, his voice calm, encouraging the betrayal. "Tell me of this Amakura Genbei."
"Shut your mouth, Kenta!"
The roar came from the center of the formation. The bandit leader, his face contorted in a mask of furious, desperate bravado, struggled against his suspended armor.
"You spineless rat!" the leader spat, ignoring the massive executioner's blade hovering directly over his own neck. "You utter a single word about the employer and I'll carve your heart out myself! I'll—"
The leader never finished his threat.
Alaric didn't even look at him. He simply twitched his pinky finger.
SHLICK.
The massive, heavy executioner's blade slammed downward like a guillotine. It cleaved through the leader's thick neck with zero resistance.
The man's decapitated head tumbled through the air, hitting the forest floor with a wet, heavy thud, while his suspended, headless torso erupted in a geyser of arterial blood, painting the moonlight in a horrific mist of crimson.
The remaining twenty-eight conscious bandits shrieked in fresh, mind-shattering horror.
Kenta stared at the headless body of his commander, his own breath hitching as hot blood splattered across his cheek. The sheer, effortless brutality of the act stripped away whatever reservations he had left. The dam broke entirely.
"Amakura Genbei is from the Amakura family!" Kenta babbled, the words spilling from his mouth in a frantic, desperate rush. "They are a highly prestigious merchant family situated in the inner rings of the Fire Country! Genbei is the current head of the household!"
Alaric listened intently, puffing on his cigar. "The current head? Who was his predecessor?"
"His father, Amakura Genbyo!" Kenta supplied eagerly. "Genbyo was an old friend and one of the biggest financial supporters of the current Fire Daimyo. But he was rumored to have died recently due to a sudden illness, leaving the entire mercantile empire to Genbei!"
'Ah,' Alaric thought, connecting the dots. 'An old friend of the Daimyo dies suspiciously, the son takes over the logistics, and suddenly the relief goods vanish while the budget inflates. A classic coup of the purse strings.'
"There's more!" Kenta shouted, terrified that silence would mean his own head rolling into the brush. "Genbei is secretly colluding with Iwagakure no Sato! It started recently!"
Alaric's eyes narrowed slightly at this revelation. Domestic embezzlement was one thing; funding a hostile foreign military power with stolen royal treasury funds was high treason.
"I know it for a fact!" Kenta cried out, his voice echoing in the quiet forest. "Iwagakure periodically sends a Jonin to the capital to deliver massive payouts to Genbei! In return, Genbei manipulates the trade routes and starves the borders, doing exactly what Iwa wants to weaken the Fire Country's infrastructure from the inside!"
Before Alaric could even ask how a low-level mercenary band had acquired such highly classified, geopolitical intelligence, Kenta was already offering the explanation.
"We were welcomed into the Amakura residence!" Kenta revealed, breathless. "Our meetings with Genbei were top secret, so he hosted us in his private estate to hand over our payment. While the leader was negotiating, a few of us slipped away. We found his private study. We read and stole his encrypted scrolls!"
Kenta swallowed hard, his eyes wide. "We wanted insurance! We stole the scrolls so we would have the upper hand to blackmail Amakura Genbei when we finally got the chance to retire!"
"And where are these scrolls now?" Alaric asked, his voice smooth.
"In his bag!" Kenta screamed, pointing a trembling finger down at the decapitated corpse of his former boss. "The leader always kept them on him! Inside the leather satchel on his hip!"
Alaric remained silent, standing amidst the raining blood. He took a long drag from his cigar, his blue eyes glowing fiercely in the dark. With the Mind's Eye of the Kagura and his Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan operating in tandem, he peered deep into Kenta's soul. He measured the erratic, terrified spiking of the man's chakra, the dilation of his pupils, the sheer panic vibrating in his vocal cords.
There were no lies. Just the raw, pathetic truth of a man trading secrets for his life.
Alaric nodded his head in profound satisfaction.
"Good boy," Alaric smiled.
With that gentle, terrifying smile, Alaric dropped his mental restraint.
SHINK-SHINK-SHINK-SHINK.
The sound of twenty-eight blades moving simultaneously ripped through the clearing. It was swift, clinical, and absolutely merciless. Swords, kunai, and sickles thrust inward, decapitating heads and driving through eye sockets directly into brains.
The twenty-eight bandits died instantly, their screams silenced before they could even register the pain.
Alaric released the magnetic grip of Vulcan.
The forest groaned as the bodies dropped. A cacophony of heavy thuds echoed as the lifeless corpses crashed to the ground, a torrential downpour of gore creating massive, steaming pools of blood across the cratered earth.
Kenta, however, was spared the sudden drop.
The rogue ninja felt the agonizing pressure on his ribs ease as the magnetic field around him slowly and gently lowered him to the ground. His boots touched the blood-soaked soil, and his knees immediately buckled. He fell forward, panting heavily, absolutely horrified by the massacre surrounding him, yet profoundly, violently relieved that he was still drawing breath.
"Go get the scrolls from your leader's bag," Alaric instructed casually, turning his back on the carnage to look at the moon.
"Y-Yes! Right away, my Lord!" Kenta scrambled to his feet, slipping slightly in the mud and blood.
He rushed over to the headless corpse of his commander. His hands shook so violently he could barely undo the leather clasps, but sheer desperation drove him. He dug through the satchel, his fingers brushing against stolen coins and rations, until he finally gripped a bundle of heavy, wax-sealed parchments.
He snatched them up and immediately stood from his crouching position, turning back to the blonde monster in the Konoha flak jacket.
Kenta hurried over, his head bowed subserviently, and offered the scrolls with both hands.
Alaric took them without a word. He broke the seals with his thumb and unrolled the parchment. His eyes darted across the encrypted text, his Sharingan instantly deciphering the codes and recognizing the official stamps of the Iwagakure council.
It was exactly as Kenta had described. Hard, irrefutable evidence of high treason and embezzlement.
Alaric nodded his head, a genuine smile of satisfaction crossing his face as he rolled the scrolls back up.
Kenta looked up, seeing the smile. A massive, overwhelming wave of relief washed over his exhausted body. The nightmare was over. He had proven his worth. He was going to live.
His mind instantly began racing toward the future. 'I survived. I'm going to take all the Ryo off these dead fools, cross the border into the Land of Rivers, and start over. A new life. A quiet life. I'll buy a tavern. I'll change my ways...'
Kenta's eyes never left Alaric's smiling face, waiting for the formal dismissal.
But then, Kenta's brow furrowed in deep confusion.
'Huh?' Kenta wondered, a strange, nauseating sensation washing over him. 'Am I having vertigo?'
The world suddenly tilted on a bizarre axis. He saw Alaric's body spin sideways. Then the trees flipped upside down. The blood-soaked crater rushed up to meet his vision in a dizzying, sickening spiral.
He didn't feel the blade. He didn't even realize a blade had moved.
With a soft, wet thump, Kenta's severed head rolled across the grass, his eyes blinking in lingering, detached confusion before the lights went out completely. A full second later, his body collapsed forward into the dirt.
Alaric hadn't even drawn a weapon; a microscopic, hyper-compressed thread of Wind Release had simply swiped horizontally across the man's neck with the speed of thought.
"You really thought you could starve thousands of innocent people and just walk away with a retirement fund?" Alaric murmured softly to the headless corpse, shaking his head.
He tapped the scrolls against his palm, then pushed up the sleeve of his flak jacket. With a brief pulse of chakra, he sealed the vital evidence into the dimensional tattoo inked onto his forearm.
"Well then..." Alaric sighed, adjusting his collar as he surveyed the silent, butchered clearing. "This is a huge amount of progress for one night. Time to head back to the Capital and have a nice, long chat with Genbei."
He took a step forward, preparing to engage Kamui, but paused. He looked down at Kenta's body, then around at the other twenty-nine corpses littering the earth.
A sudden, slightly annoying realization struck him.
"Ah, damn it," Alaric groaned, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "I should've asked Kenta exactly where in the Capital Genbei's estate is located. Or if he's even in the Capital right now. I don't know the address."
He stared at the sea of dead men, briefly contemplating the logistics of his minor blunder.
He gave a lazy, indifferent shrug of his shoulders.
"Eh, whatever. I'll just find his chakra signature when I get there," Alaric reasoned, dismissing the inconvenience entirely. "It's not like I'm going to use Shinsei Tensei to bring one of these bastards back just to ask for directions."
With a final puff of smoke from his cigar, Alaric's right eye flared. The space around him twisted into a spiraling vortex, pulling the anomaly out of the bloody forest and back toward the political heart of the nation.
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