Ryo moved.
He folded into shadow and vanished beneath the eaves.
When he reappeared, he was a phantom at the heavy, grime-stained door of the grand stone house in the village center.
Inside, the Grass leader was still swearing in his greasy voice.
"Kitsuchi-sama! Half a day! Just half a day! I swear on my head we'll bring that brat—"
The words never finished.
Skrrrr, CRACK!
Metal shrieked like torn space.
The thick door, strong enough to shrug off standard jutsu, exploded inward, along with a swath of adjoining stone, as if an invisible ancient claw had seized and crushed it.
Wood shards and stone chips rained through the room like a storm of death.
The oil lamps blew out under the shockwave.
Darkness flowed in like a living thing, swallowing the room whole, leaving only wreckage, and the brief, staccato screams of the two Kusa jōnin who had been posted by the door.
Dust swelled. Light died.
But this sudden dark was Ryo's home ground.
His silver eyes glittered in the grit, colder than any lamp.
Observation Haki had already netted every living presence in the room, positions, motions, even the next heartbeat mapped cleanly into his mind.
"The first."
His voice was emotionless, as if nailing down the first verdict.
At the table where the lamp had just gone out, the Iwa jōnin closest to the door was still locked in shock.
He felt only a chill wind kiss his neck, and then the world spun.
He saw a headless body tipping backward, his own, as a geyser of blood painted his comrade's face.
"The second."
Ryo never paused, never glanced at the flying head.
Kusanagi hummed through the dark like a reaper's scythe.
The blood-spattered Iwa jōnin jerked up a kunai on reflex.
Agony lanced his wrist.
Schlkt.
Steel and forearm parted together under a flash of winter light.
Blood fountained.
He did not even manage a scream before the second cut finished him, clean and final.
"Enemy attack! It's him! The black-market monster!"
Kitsuchi, to his credit, was the first to recover.
His roar, distorted by terror and fury, shattered the silence and lit the chaos.
"Boom! Rumble! Hold him! Protect Kitsuchi-sama!"
The surviving Iwa fought like veterans.
Hands flew, chakra flared.
"Earth Style: Rock Lance!"
Spiked spears jutted from the floor.
"Earth Style: Earth Dragon Bullet!"
A mud dragon's head reared and lunged.
"Earth Style: Eruption Core!"
The floor heaved and bucked to pin and break.
Light slashed through dust and dark.
Death licked every angle.
Ryo's mouth tilted in a thin, icy line.
Vmmm!
A shriek like bladed thunder ripped the air.
Kusanagi carved a vast, silver arc, the light almost swallowing the darkness.
Not mere sword aura, but chakra condensed to the brink of substance, a crescent swelling to tens of meters in a blink.
The silver crescent swept.
Rrrrrrrr.
Hot knife through butter.
Rock lances sheared to dust.
The roaring earth dragon's head tore apart like a sand sculpture in surf.
The bucking floor flattened under invisible weight, and the lingering edge scythed on, vaporizing everything in its fan.
"Ghhhk, aaah!"
Dust and stone screamed again.
Two Iwa chūnin, caught mid-seal for follow-ups, were bisected at the waist, defenses paper-thin before that cut.
The side wall split in a yawning wound, letting in starlight and torch-glow, and lighting the terror contorting Kitsuchi's face.
One stroke, every jutsu undone, men felled.
This was not a battle on the same plane.
Kitsuchi's pupils blew wide.
His heart almost missed a beat.
The intel had not lied.
He had once sneered at his father Ōnoki's order, abort if you encounter Ryo.
He had thought it fussing.
But facing this monster, whose chakra felt like a tailed beast's hide in steel, the comparison felt merciful.
"Stop him!" Kitsuchi howled, staggering back, hands flashing through seals.
"On me! Combined Earth Style!"
The Iwa survivors were elite indeed.
Fear swallowed and formation tightened, chakra braiding for a group defense.
But Ryo's target was never only the Iwa.
Through dust and shadow, his gaze pinned the Grass leader cowering in the farthest corner, close to fainting.
"Your guests, from Iwa?"
His voice was quiet, but every survivor heard it as clearly as a blade at the ear.
The Grass leader shook like a sieve, crotch soaked, stench souring the air.
"S-spare me, my lord, n-not my fault, they forced me, I—"
Kusanagi answered for him with a single, smokeless point.
A cold star flicked through dust and punched his brow.
The heavy body wobbled, face frozen mid-plea, and toppled backward with a thud.
"The first account settled."
Ryo drew back the blade and turned toward the chaos outside.
"Now, the rest."
As if to crown his words, the village alarm finally split the night.
Woooo, woooo, woooo.
The sirens wailed.
Kusagakure yanked awake.
Kusa-nin poured from their ramshackle huts, some half-dressed, some bleary, all faces stamped by fear.
"Intruder!"
"At the chief's stone house!"
"Kill him! Defend the village!"
Panic spread like plague.
Jōnin bellowed orders, trying to shape a line.
Dozens of chūnin and genin converged like a startled swarm, kunai and shuriken flashing a sea of edges in torchlight, enough to trouble even a Kage.
Inside, Kitsuchi and the last jōnin finished their sequence in the breath Ryo had spent speaking.
Dense earth chakra knotted before them.
"Earth Style: Earth Flow Wall, Combined."
"Earth Style: Stone Golem Carapace!"
A wall far thicker than any normal earth rampart, spined and towering, erupted between Ryo and the Iwa.
At the same time, a heavy rock armor plated the defenders.
Their last hope, a tortoise shell to buy a heartbeat.
Ryo eyed the instant wall and the rising noise of the mob outside.
"Fool's wall. Fools behind it."
His heel hammered the broken floor.
Stone spider-webbed and sank.
Riding that savage kick, Ryo became red lightning, faster than a jōnin's shunshin, a body pushed to brutal limits.
Target, the combined earth wall.
"Come on, then," one Iwa jōnin sneered from behind the barricade.
No one could body-check this grade of joint defense.
At the instant of impact, Kusanagi shifted.
Not a chop, but a serpent, a blur of needle points in the same place.
"Kuzuryūsen (Nine-Head Dragon Flash)."
No sweeping aura, only speed to the edge of sight, a kill by puncture.
Shk! Shk! Shk! Shk! Shk! Shk! Shk! Shk! Shk!
Crack.
At the precise point of entry, the wall, fused by multiple jōnin's chakra, spidered with fractures exploding outward.
A heartbeat later—
BOOM, crashhh!
The meter-thick, spike-studded rampart blew open from the center, as if bombed from within.
Stone shrapnel tore backward like cannonshot.
"Guh...!"
"Urk...!"
No one behind it expected such brute contempt for their defense.
Shrapnel and shock chewed through them, the golem armor crazing and sloughing under speed and force.
A jōnin nearest the breach took Ryo's carried momentum full in the chest, sternum caved, eyes bulged, dead before he fell.
Ryo burst through dust and debris without pause, a blood-baptized god of slaughter, and shot out into the street, into the forming ring of Kusa-nin.
(To be continued.)
◇◇◇
◇ One bonus chapter will be released for every 200 Power Stones.
◇ You can read the ahead chapter on Pat if you're interested: p-atreon.c-om/Blownleaves (Just remove the hyphen to access normally.)