Torrential rain hammered Konoha's forward camp, hissing in the mud and flinging brown spray. The air was close and heavy, the reek of iron and powder choking every breath.
Whsssh. The sheet of rain split. Three figures cut straight toward the command core, like three steel blades stabbing through the battlefield's clotted air.
Nawaki followed last with a pack on his back, eyes darting at the resting shinobi. But whenever Ryo passed, it was as if an invisible hand seized their throats. Men went rigid in an instant.
Some ducked their heads and growled, "Ryo-sama." More simply froze, scalps prickling, spines locking straight, not respect, but a marrow-deep fear that crept across the soaked ground like a cold serpent.
Nawaki swallowed hard.
Days ago, the figure who single-handedly slaughtered through a thousand Iwa, clashed head-on with Akagan, and, drenched in blood, dragged Tsunade and the others from a heap of corpses, had become the battlefield's deepest imprint.
Fear, of pure, crushing power. Even if that power wore the face of a refined-looking red-haired boy.
Catching every awed, fearful glance, Nawaki's Adam's apple bobbed. Once he had fantasized about renown, praised by thousands, heart stoked by the Will of Fire.
Cold reality had doused that fantasy long ago.
Know yourself. Live. …All thanks to Ryo. The thought tasted bitter. His nails bit crescent moons into his palms.
Inside the command pavilion, currents went dark.
Whsh. The heavy flap rose and dropped, sealing out the storm.
Lamps guttered. Cheap incense bit the nose. Maps papered the walls. A colder, thicker stale hung in the air, ambition and calculation, like fog that would not lift.
On the dais, Shimura Danzō's hawk eyes fixed on Ryo the moment he entered. When his gaze slid to Nawaki and, especially, to the silent Uchiha girl at Ryo's side, a sharp twitch stabbed the edge of his eye.
That damned Uchiha whelp.
The dark fire in his chest whooshed up. When Ryo lay comatose with mortal wounds, what an opportunity. Poison. A medical mishap. Battlefield complications. The perfect stage. A hero who tragically succumbed to his injuries, who would trace it back to Danzō?
Ruined. She kept vigil day and night. Those eyes, undisguised vigilance and silent threat, kept his men from even approaching the bed. Every probe, lightly, flawlessly deflected.
All for nothing. And he could only watch as this unruly monster recovered, stronger. Danzō ground his teeth to chalk, strangled the urge to roar, and forced a waxen, concerned smile. His voice came thin and muffled, ice wrapped in velvet.
"Ryo-kun, how is the recovery?"
Ryo stepped to the center and did not bother raising an eyelid to that counterfeit face. His reply fell like ice on stone.
"Not dead."
The air froze. The temperature dropped.
Danzō's fake smile calcified.
"Hmph." He swallowed the snarl, coughed, and waved his lone Root appointee out.
He lifted a special scroll sealed in wax and intoned with mock gravity.
"The front is tight. We need the sharpest blade to break the game." His voice dropped to a coaxing rasp that pretended to command life and death. "Look at this. Do it, and it is worth more than killing a hundred elites head-on." He slid the scroll toward Ryo, eyes locked on his to catch the slightest ripple.
Ryo's face was a slab of ice. He reached, long fingers teasing. The wax seal crumbled like wet paper. He scanned the inked lines:
[Location: Ame border, Nohara settlement, population about 600]
[Status: Civilian vassals under Hanzō]
[Objective: Stage a massacre using Suna and Iwa style tools and ninjutsu traces. No survivors.]
[Executor: Kamiyama Ryo and squad]
[Strategic Aim: Frame Suna and Iwa, enrage Hanzō into a fight to the death. Konoha profits.]
[Time limit: 72 hours]
Silence imploded. Even the wick's tiny crackle boomed. Smoke hung frozen. The air was thick enough to choke.
Danzō's heart crept up his throat. Submission, or trouble worse than before.
Ryo never paused. Snap. He folded the scroll in one clean motion.
Clack.
The death sentence for six hundred innocents landed back on Danzō's desk like trash, open contempt, rolled twice, and pinned a blurred border on the map.
Ryo raised his head. Silver eyes bored straight through Danzō's shadowed schemer's gaze. His voice was so flat it chilled Danzō's spine.
"Find someone else."
"Kamiyama Ryo." Danzō exploded, palm slamming the table. Bang. Maps jumped. Gear rattled. "This is a wartime order." His voice went high and thin, authority challenged and aflame. "You are a registered Konoha chūnin. Obeying orders is your duty. I will not tolerate this insolence."
The roar crashed in the enclosed space.
Nawaki went paper-white. Cold sweat soaked his back. His right hand jerked to his tool pouch, knuckles bloodless. Mikoto slid half a step forward without a sound, nearly brushing Ryo's arm in a silent guard. Frost flashed in her lowered eyes. A cool kunai fell into her palm. Her killing intent prickled, spearing Danzō.
Ryo stood under the roar and the avalanche of killing intent, eyes lowered.
Then those eyes cut up, twin blades forged at absolute zero, stabbing into Danzō's pupils.
"My blade," he said, not loud, but each word detonated, iron law embodied, "kills only those who should die."
As the words fell, Ryo shifted, barely, but with a natural inevitability, putting the full height of his frame between Mikoto and Danzō, casting her in his shadow. An iron wall rose, unscalable, between malice and its target.
A pressure like an ancient beast awakening erupted, silent, and heavier than a thousand-fathom cliff. Cold as a polar trench. The tent's air seemed ripped from its lungs.
"Ghh." Danzō faltered. He felt like a leaf in a maelstrom. His back took a phantom hammer-blow. Breath punched out.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
He lurched backward, unable even to cry out, and slammed into his chair. One hand crushed the armrest, veins bulging. The other clutched his chest. His face flushed purple from the neck, then blanched blank. Sweat beaded and ran like peas across his brow.
His vision vignetted. Pupils pinholed with terror. Pain screamed. Thought fragmented.
Suffocation. Pain. Boundless fear. Death pressed cold and certain to his throat. No probe, no test, a naked warning, the next heartbeat could cleave him in two.
From the corner of her lowered gaze, Mikoto watched his twisted grimace. Her chin lifted the tiniest fraction. A glacial curve flickered at her lip and died.
Ryo's subtle move to shelter her hit like a tidal wave in her chest. The safest place, beneath the strongest wing, paired with the enemy's humiliation, made for perfect, savage joy. Look, only I stand behind him. Possessiveness surged, fully fed. She dropped her lashes, masking every trace.
That flash of triumph did not escape Danzō, whose senses had sharpened to sickness by pain and shame.
This Uchiha, born wicked, little vixen.
The poison of hate scalded what remained of his reason. The ruined poison plot, the accident that never happened, images stuttered past. Her fault. The snake coiled around Ryo, her, had driven him to riskier games.
His eyes vomited venom, fixing on Mikoto, maddened vivisection in the gaze.
Ryo snorted, cold as hellwind. His pressure did not ease. It surged.
Crack.
An invisible edge kissed Danzō's neck. The chill bit marrow-deep.
An ice tub dropped. Every cell shrieked danger. Sweat drenched his underclothes. The spiked warning nailed into his brain. The leaking malice sluiced back behind his eyes and stilled, dead water.
Damn it. The monster would kill him.
"Hh… ah…" Danzō dragged air, chest flopping like a stranded fish. Colorless now, all threat and fury doused, only a strangled humiliation remained. He shooed weakly, as if waving off a fly.
"…Enough." His voice rasped. "With war so near… since Ryo-kun has… other ideas…" He did not speak the word scroll again.
His glance flicked to a plain roll lying at the desk's edge. In a blink a better, cleaner, deadlier idea sketched itself. If you will not die by my hand, go to hell by theirs.
A thin gleam skated through his eye.
He snatched the plain scroll and snapped into command. "Urgent from the front. Iwa is moving. Root intelligence, northern Grass Country buffer, abnormal Iwa infiltration."
He hurled the scroll hard at Ryo. "Critical. Possible second front to threaten our flank. Ryo Squad, by order, move immediately to recon. Determine enemy scale and intent. If you find a hidden strongpoint, you are authorized either to annihilate at discretion or signal the camp at once."
Risk, take it. Die with it.
The scroll hit Ryo's palm, light and rough.
He did not bother to look at Danzō's face. He ripped the tie and skimmed:
[Location: Northern Grass buffer, around Asu Gorge, high risk]
[Objective: Recon Iwa infiltration, size and purpose. If enemy strongpoint confirmed, destroy at discretion or urgently report, risk borne by unit.]
[Executor: Kamiyama Ryo and Squad, war emergency]
[Time limit: 168 hours, seven days]
Ryo's face was still water. A good place. Iwa, time to balance accounts. He stuffed the scroll into his vest without even a nod. For a dog sending him to the slaughter, why waste breath.
He did not spare Danzō's face, twisted with the thrill of a plan regained and respect in ruins. Ryo spun.
Red hair carved a decisive arc.
Whump. The heavy flap snapped up in his wake. The wet roar of the camp poured in.
Ryo stepped out.
Nawaki and Mikoto shadowed him without hesitation.
The flap dropped like a coffin lid, sealing every venomous scheme and snarled shame inside the dark.
Within, only Danzō's bellows and the wick's weak crackle remained. A tiny flame throbbed at the dead center of the black, limning a demon's face in shadow.
Humiliation, beyond any he had known.
Then that venom pivoted, onto another figure.
"And that damned, innately evil Uchiha vixen. She ruined everything. They should both die."
Rage throbbed his temples. His skull threatened to split. Ryo to Grass Country, to Ashu Gorge.
A cold delight sluiced his shame and anger.
What was that place? A meat grinder. Iwa, who had just lost Akaiwa and a thousand elites to him, were sharpening knives. Ōnoki, sleepless and vengeful, would not miss a revenge platter brought to his table.
And—
His mouth stretched in a soundless, twisted grin. One hundred million ryō. Red hair. Silver eyes. Iwa's nemesis. The bounty news must have flown like plague on wings, raking the shinobi world.
Suna's puppeteers. Kiri's assassins. Kumo's bruisers. And the hounds of the underworld, bounty men and ninja syndicates.
One hundred million. Enough to make anyone feral.
Danzō shivered with a strangled pleasure, his rasp like a snake's tongue tasting poison in the dark. Cruel expectation filled the dead tent. "Let Iwa's massed forces, and the scavenging wolves of the shinobi world, give you a proper welcome, little monster. You will learn soon what it means to refuse me, Shimura Danzō."
"Let Grass Country be your grave."
Outside, the downpour did not tire.
Ryo crossed the command cordon in a single step, without slowing.
Cold rain battered his shoulders, but could not quench the icy, pure fire burning in his silver eyes.
Iwa.
Time to settle the bill.
(To be continued.)