Night pressed down like wet ink on the crowns of the towering trees, stingy even with starlight.
Mikoto kept her clear eyes slanted toward the small figure beside her. Her clean outer robe was wrapped tight around Uzumaki Kaori's tiny body.
The little girl curled on the cold ground, sunk in uneasy sleep. Even in her nightmares, her delicate brows were knotted hard, bracing against remembered terror.
Beside her, Nawaki crouched, his muscles bunched, fists clenched so tight his knuckles blanched. Shame and fury still burned from earlier. Now, looking at Kaori's fragile helplessness, a purer blaze surged up, close to consuming reason altogether. The Grass-nin lurking in the dark, this blood debt would be paid with their lives.
Suddenly, a cold aura slid through the night without a sound, the kind that seemed to freeze the soul. A figure coalesced at the edge of the firelight as if condensed from shadow itself.
Ryo stood there.
Mikoto's heart jumped. Nawaki snapped his head around, the flames in his eyes flaring with hard-to-hide anticipation.
"Plan change."
Ryo's voice was low, stripped of waste.
"Target: Kusagakure."
Nawaki's head shot up, battle heat blasting out of him. "Good. Then—"
Ryo's cold glance cut him off. The pressure alone pushed the rest of the words back down his throat.
Mikoto's brows tightened. She heard the undertone beneath Ryo's words, and her heart sank.
"Ryo-kun, what do you need from us?"
Her gaze flicked, unbidden, toward the sleeping Kaori.
"We have to infiltrate. No noise."
Ryo's eyes settled on Kaori. The meaning was obvious. Bringing a defenseless child, one who could cry out at any moment, into an enemy nest? That wasn't a mission. That was walking into a trap.
"I go alone."
"Are you insane?!" Nawaki's worry and pent-up rage burst through. He shot to his feet, voice a scraped whisper. "Alone? That's the Grass-nin's den! And Iwa's dogs are inside! And—"
He remembered the rumors, urgency rasping his throat. "Iwa! Ōnoki, that old monster! Your bounty on the black market is up to a hundred million! If you go in now, the entire village is your gallows! They'll swarm you like hounds on blood!"
"Exactly."
Ryo's voice cracked like ice, sharp enough to cut through Nawaki's doubts.
"We move before they wake from their smug little dream."
His gaze slid over Mikoto and Nawaki, a quenched blade of winter. "One strike to the throat. Root and branch, gone. You two—"
His eyes returned to Kaori.
"Take her far. Farther. Wait for my signal."
Nawaki opened his mouth, and Mikoto's cool palm pressed his shoulder down. Her hand was cold and faintly trembling.
She lifted her eyes and met Ryo's silver gaze head-on. No anger, no recklessness. Only a dead-calm chill.
An absolute will and power that would grind any obstacle to dust.
Mikoto drew a long breath. Her worry settled, transmuted into wordless trust.
She nodded hard. "Ryo-kun, be careful."
Lock. Move.
No signals needed.
Ryo's outline blurred.
"Flying Thunder God."
Light flashed. Space twisted and swallowed all four—the fire's sparks, a few leaves kicked up by the air, and a smear of water on the ground.
Wind swept through. Wet grass shivered helplessly.
By the time the hum of space died in the dark woods, Mikoto and Nawaki stood tens of kilometers away in a cold grove of jagged stones. Nawaki's fists creaked in his grip. Mikoto startled awake from the instant shock, then accepted it.
"Wait for me."
Ryo's voice etched itself directly into their minds, bloodless cold, every word a blade of killing intent scything across the clearing.
"The Grass will pay this debt."
---
Kusagakure's den.
Dozens of kilometers away, in the muddled heart of the village.
Oil lamps glowed like beans, their jaundiced light barely licking the corners, painting two petty, stupid faces.
"Boss?" Scarface licked cracked lips and darted his shifty eyes around. Relief and aftershock smeared across his features. "Those Leaf plague… they really left?"
Under a rickety watchtower, in a shack with a chair bursting its filthy stuffing, the Grass leader slouched like a smug grub in rot. He snorted through his nose, contempt and glee in one.
"Hah! Bunch of nobodies! See? Little push and they ran with their tails tucked! Good riddance, spares me the eyesore." He waggled his greasy head, slitted eyes pinched to threads. "If they'd torn the paper window and seen our guests…"
He hunched his oily neck instinctively, a blotch of fear and greed flushing his cheeks.
"Lucky brats know their place. Heh, heh…"
The laugh wheezed like a punctured bellows.
Scarface tore at a slab of cold, hard pheasant. Grease dripped onto his never-cleaned forehead protector, leaving a dirtier streak.
"Boss, the arrangements for those people, all set?"
The Grass leader wriggled into his wrecked chair like a fat rat on a trash heap. He dug lazily at the grime in his nails, tone full of scorn for Konoha.
A sly, greedy light glittered in his slitted eyes. He could hear the abacus beads snapping. What Iwa promised would pave three broad stone roads, locking the Grass Country's trade in his fist. As long as no one stumbled on the unspeakable little job Iwa was running under the village.
Grass had bowed and scraped between great nations for generations. The art of being a weathervane was in their bones. Rule one, never be the first head on the chopping block.
Leaf brats go missing? Might spark a war? Hah. They knew the game.
Push the trouble far away, keep your hands clean, your face intact, and when the wind shifts, everything is still negotiable.
Right now, the village was drunk on its own illusion. The preening Grass boss. The self-satisfied Iwa "VIPs." All snug in their dream of safety.
They didn't know a blade, tempered to pure killing, had already slipped through the gap they lived by, and now hovered over their bare throats.
Absolute darkness made the perfect cloak.
The warped palisade outside the village meant nothing to a true master of shadow. Ryo didn't descend from above. He streaked along the ground like a crimson lightning tear through night.
He was too fast.
He flickered through collapsed huts, sagging woodpiles, cobwebbed corners, and alleys, so fast he left only a smear of red, killing intent given shape, there and gone. A lazy Grass patrol passed within five meters. Dust the crimson blur kicked up tickled their captain's nose, and still those fools felt nothing. Their slack faces were a wordless welcome mat for death.
Sensory domain, full spread. Hunter's mind, engaged.
Ryo's will swept out like the finest radar, silent and seamless, the moment he crossed the line. Invisible ripples, a vast taut web, covered every inch of the rotting village.
The strongest signatures flared at once, the gray stone house in the center, out of place among the shacks, the only thing that could be called grand.
Distinct chakra pooled inside, coarse, heavy, reeking of earth and rock. Iwa-nin. Not many, but each one stank of veteran blood and cruelty.
And yet, wrong.
No hint of a disciplined field unit. No fatigue of a long raid.
Instead, a chill like a morgue. The clinical cruelty of a lab. And that gambler's fever, the sick, jittery greed before a final card is turned.
Inside, the light was low. Shadows crawled and twisted on the walls like devils whispering.
Across a low table sat an Iwa jōnin with a severe face, Kitsuchi, son of Ōnoki.
His voice rasped like grit on stone, echoing through the stifling room. His knuckles tapped the tabletop, slow, heavy, each thud hammering the Grass boss's heart.
"Time's up. Where. Are. They."
Kitsuchi lifted his lids. No warmth. Only cold scrutiny and pressure that allowed no refusal.
"Don't waste my time. Are you telling me you can't handle this trivial chore? The Uzumaki rats hiding in their holes, not one you can drag out?"
The Grass boss, so loud with his underlings, stood in the lamp's fringe, a big body trembling. Sweat trickled in streams down his fat, puckered face.
He squeezed out the most servile grin of his life, voice breaking with fear.
"L-Lord Kitsuchi! Please, calm your anger! Those Uzumaki wretches… they're too sly, deeper than the deepest burrow... But! Give me a little more time! A day! No, half a day! Half! I swear on my head! I'll mobilize everyone who can move! We'll turn every inch of Grass Country over if we have to, we'll find them, every last one for you!"
Kitsuchi snorted through his nose, disgust and impatience. He stopped looking at the nauseating coward and dropped his gaze to the table.
In the dim light lay a parchment list.
Names, scrawled but clear. Worse, each had notes, last-seen locations "procured" at great cost by Grass spies, perhaps the lives of innocents.
One stood out, in smaller script.
Girl, around seven… orphaned… hideout: abandoned mine, west of village (to be confirmed)…
So young. Not a child in Iwa's eyes, a part. A "key component."
Prey had been tagged on the map by greedy eyes. All that remained was the grab, and the furnace.
Outside, under the eaves, the shadow was ink-thick.
A figure pressed flat to stone, breath, heartbeat, temperature, everything cooled to near-nothing, like the rock itself.
Ryo.
His sweeping senses bled through the wall as if it weren't there, taking in everything inside. Iwa's mechanical cruelty, the Grass boss's obsequious cowardice barely hiding bottomless greed, the hunting list drenched in the blood and tears of Uzumaki refugees.
Uzumaki orphans. Bloodline power. Jinchūriki vessels. Breeding stock.
Cold fragments clicked together in Ryo's mind, then ignited.
Ōnoki, the hungry old fox of Iwa, never wanted a second front. He had laid traps, risked elite squads, gambled the border, for the Uzumaki bloodline.
To make perfect vessels? To power lost sealing arts? To birth a newer, worse weapon?
Whatever the aim, the means were filth.
To them, every Uzumaki in flight, ancients, toddlers, even the unborn, were consumables. Fuel to be burned. Tools to be reused. Thrown away when empty.
For that ugly desire, this village, and countless Uzumaki in exile, were offerings on the altar.
In the frozen depths of Ryo's eyes, killing intent boiled over, not mere anger, but something deeper, blacker, colder.
While Ōnoki raved over maps in Iwagakure, "Find every Uzumaki! Bring them in! The living are vessels! The breeders breed! The dead, make more!"
He could never imagine that one of the key resource points he clawed for, a pure Uzumaki seed named Uzumaki Kaori, had already, by fate's mockery, been carried out of his reach like a guarded spark in a storm, by the very enemy with a hundred-million bounty on his head.
Reckoning descends, now.
(To be continued.)