"He's out!" "Attack!"
A storm of kunai, shuriken, senbon, even tags, came down like a torrential rain, all of it aimed at the crimson blur bursting into the open.
With blades and paper death scissoring from every direction, leaving almost no room to dodge, a glint like ice flashed in Ryo's eyes.
His body snapped through micro-steps at angles and frequencies naked eyes could not follow, tight pivots, razor slips, each movement threading the gap past the densest kill zones.
Observation Haki, full spread.
In his vision the lethal trajectories slowed to clarity.
Every lift of a wrist, each twitch of an eye, the tell of a shoulder, all of it telegraphed the next point of impact.
He shaved past three kunai guarding his throat, arched back under a tag that scraped his cheek, and slid sideways through a gale of shuriken.
His steps pattered a staccato across the ground, shadow blurring.
Extreme speed footwork flowed into close quarters taijutsu.
The crowd surged.
He threaded it like a ghost, untouched.
Kusanagi, in that instant, became a reaper's invitation.
Cold light flared.
"Splch!"
The elite jōnin leading the rush lifted his blade only halfway before the point punched through his heart.
"Crack!"
Another jōnin's kunai, and his waist, parted in one merciless cut. Gore fanned.
A chūnin flung a chain from the flank to bind him. Ryo did not even look.
A flick of the wrist drew a perfect arc, the chain, and the arm holding it, spun away.
A whisper of air, an ambush from behind.
Ryo's body rotated in place against physics, the sword light wheeled.
The attacker, and two genin beside him, bloomed red at the throat and folded.
Every swing harvested one life, or several.
Each step, each cut, a gear in a precision killing machine.
The swordcraft learned from the Red Haired Emperor shone at full in the crush of melee.
Kusanagi drank and thrummed, humming an eerie red.
"Monster!" "He's too fast! We can't hit him!"
"Don't panic! Bury him in bodies! He'll run out of chakra, out of strength!" a Grass officer screamed from the rear, trying to steady the line.
"Run out?" Ryo's voice cut through screams and iron, edged with frost. "Heh."
He stopped moving.
He lifted Kusanagi high.
Tailed beast scale chakra flooded the blade without restraint.
Silver white fire roared along the edge.
Compress. Condense.
A destroying pressure spiked upward.
The charging Kusa-nin faltered as a tangible killing will pressed their skin to ice.
Despair rose like a cold tide and smothered their legs.
"Stop him!" Kitsuchi's voice shattered into a distant, broken shriek.
Too late.
Kusanagi sang, a clear, long note out of the ninth hell, as if the blade itself strained under the force channeled through it.
A titanic arc of sword energy fell like divine wrath, Ryo's full power cleaving forward in a one hundred eighty degree sweep.
VWAAAM.
This time the slash was not a taut beam of tens of meters, but a howling tsunami, nearly twenty meters wide, more than five meters high, silver white light saturated with the growl of storm and thunder.
Where it passed, space seemed to twist and buckle.
Air imploded, vacuum ripping a dead zone in its wake.
Crushing. Truly crushing.
Kunai, shuriken, senbon, all vaporized on contact like ice flecks in a blast furnace.
The dozens of chūnin and genin in the lead line, bodies, weapons, protectors, cloth, touched the edge of that light and, like cheap foam against a red hot brand, did not even scream, they simply became halves.
The slash did not slow.
The shattered wall of the stone house planed flat in silence.
Shacks and thatch huts met a typhoon's heart, sucked into the storm, torn and rendered to splinters.
Flagstones split into a trench several feet deep and nearly twenty meters across.
Torchlight guttered, crushed by the shock front.
One stroke.
In the fan before Ryo, out to nearly two hundred meters, everything, things living and not, vanished.
The view yawned wide, as if an eraser had gouged a brutal bite out of the village.
Silence.
Absolute silence sealed what remained of Kusagakure.
The survivors, those just outside the arc, those spared only by a low stance and missing an arm or a leg, froze.
Their faces were masks of extremity, fear and blankness.
Comrades who had stood beside them a breath ago, gone.
Around the edge of the scar, limbs littered the ground, the pressurized wake of the slash's wind.
Blood gathered in runnels and spilled into the trench.
The air went thick sweet with dust and iron.
"D demon..." "Judgment, it is judgment..." "Run! He isn't human!"
Collapse broke loose.
Elite jōnin, genin, all will to resist fled.
They screamed, sobbed, trampled each other to flee, to get away from the crimson figure at the brink of annihilation, sword blazing with light.
Ryo watched the inferno without expression, breath a little rough.
Then he moved again, a red bolt, to settle accounts.
This time, the wide slash was not even necessary.
Kusanagi became silver lines threading the crowd.
Every flicker took lives, heads severed, hearts skewered, waists parted.
Too fast. Too strong.
Any who tried to resist, even those one heartbeat slow from fear, fell in an instant.
When rare burly Kusa jōnin tried to block, Ryo pulsed his wrist, raw force shattered arms and ribs, the edge finished the rest.
Kill. Kill. Kill.
Kusagakure had become a crucible of blood and fire.
The once noisy village was now an Avīci wasteland.
Flames licked the collapsing roofs, boiling a nauseating sweet tang out of the blood.
Bodies everywhere, the gaps between broken walls ran dark red like creeks.
Each of Ryo's flashes scored a deeper wound across this man made hell.
At last, his red gaze fixed on a dirt streaked figure tumbling and crawling at the edge of the chaos.
Kitsuchi.
Iwa jōnin.
Ōnoki's own son.
The pride and elite poise were gone.
Mud and blood filmed his protector and face. In his eyes only the pulverized remains of courage.
Their combined wall, a joke in Ryo's first pass.
His subordinates, already mulch in the path of destruction.
A cold premonition strangled his spine.
He threw his weight, flailing, desperate to slither away, but every step felt Death close another finger.
Kusanagi's chill was already breathing on his nape.
He glanced back, straight into Ryo's silver eyes, free of any emotion.
No mockery. No anger.
Only the remote gaze one gives the soon to die.
"No!"
Kitsuchi's pupils split, reason drowned.
A severed arm caught his ankle, he pitched face first into a slick of hot, clotted muck.
He rolled, scrambled, throat tearing a not quite human scream.
Death's crimson was upon him.
Kusanagi's tip trailed tacky threads of blood, wrapped in a cyclone of chakra, falling like a mountain, ripping air, stopping at the fatal point between his brows.
Under the blade, all his luck, all his pride, every hour of shinobi drill ground to grit.
His mind went white, only one reflex remained, branded in bone.
"STOP!"
He gathered the last of his strength and life's instinct into a hysterical, cracking howl that knifed the brief hush of slaughter.
"My father, Ōnoki!"
Time seemed to freeze.
The stink of blood, the crackle of fires, the far off wailing, all blurred to backdrop.
Only the sword hanging over Kitsuchi's skull, beading enemy blood, and the face beneath it, twisted by terror into snot and tears, stood carved in broken moonlight and flame.
That desperate, crazed declaration plopped into the lake of carnage like a stone, rippling a brief, eerie ring, then sank toward stillness.
Kusanagi thrummed, suspended, its tip's blood glob trembling.
(To be continued.)