Chapter 101: The Puppeteer and the Slug Princess
The air in the small valley crackled with unleashed violence and clashing wills. Two battles raged simultaneously, divided yet inextricably linked by the shared stakes of survival and the precious antidote carried by Tsunade.
Ragnar's Harvest
The Suna-nin ranks had been reduced to a charnel ground. Ragnar moved through them like a force of nature, Yama carving black arcs through the air that ended lives with terrifying efficiency. His style was brutally simple—no flourishes, no wasted motion. A step, a slash, a corpse. Armament Haki sheathed his blade and body, turning ninjutsu that came his way into harmless sprays of disrupted chakra. The few Suna ninja who tried to mount a coordinated defense found their formations dissolving as the crimson-masked ANBU appeared among them, his sword already moving.
Uchiha Mikoto provided supporting fire, her Phoenix Sage Fire techniques weaving through the chaos Ragnar created, pinning down survivors and turning the bloody whirlwind into a blazing inferno. She fought with a grim focus, her Sharingan active, copying the movements of the enemy even as she helped eliminate them. It was the easiest combat she'd experienced on a battlefield, not because the enemy was weak, but because the center of the storm was so absolute in its devastation.
Within minutes, the two dozen Suna-nin were reduced to three pale-faced survivors, their weapons trembling in their hands as they stumbled back towards their commander.
The Duel Disturbed
Chiyo's sharp eyes flickered to the side, taking in the slaughter. Her pupils contracted. Twenty Sand-nin… against two Konoha ANBU… and they're being wiped out?
"Old woman, don't get distracted!" Tsunade's voice was a whip-crack of concentration.
A shimmering blue chakra scalpel formed in Tsunade's hand. With a surgeon's precision, she didn't attack Chiyo's body—she slashed at the nearly-invisible chakra threads connecting the puppeteer to her ten dancing weapons. The threads severed with a silent snap.
Then Tsunade moved.
Shave!
The technique Ragnar had taught her wasn't true teleportation, but the explosive leg strength it generated propelled her forward at a speed that felt like it. To Chiyo, whose taijutsu was competent but whose pure movement speed was that of a controller, not a frontline brawler, it was overwhelmingly fast.
Tsunade's fist, coiled with the monstrous force of the Strength of a Hundred, shot toward Chiyo's center mass. It was a fight-ending blow.
But a master of Chiyo's caliber didn't reach her age by being slow to react. At the critical instant, one of the ten puppets—a ghost-faced model from the Chikamatsu Collection—interposed itself between the fist and its master.
BOOM!
The impact sounded like a boulder striking an anvil. Tsunade's fist connected squarely with the puppet's torso. Yet, instead of shattering into splinters, the puppet vibrated violently, emitting a deep, metallic groan. It held. A web of fine cracks appeared on its iron-sand reinforced surface, but it did not break.
"Hah!" Chiyo barked a laugh, a thread of relief and pride in her voice. "These puppets are forged from compressed sand-iron! They boast the strongest physical defense! Your brute strength is formidable, Tsunade, but can it penetrate the earth itself?"
Even as she spoke, her fingers twitched. The robe of the blocking puppet flew open. From its abdomen, two articulated mechanical arms, faster than a serpent's strike, shot out and clamped around Tsunade's punching wrist with a vise-like grip.
Tsunade grunted, trying to wrench her arm free. The puppet's strength was inhuman, fueled by chakra and mechanics. For a split second, she was held fast.
CRACK-CLICK-CLACK!
A series of rapid, grinding gear sounds came from inside the puppet's body. Before Tsunade's eyes, the puppet's head split open like a blooming metal flower, revealing a honeycomb matrix of hundreds of pin-sized holes.
SHOOOOOM!
A cloud of needle-thin projectiles, glistening with a viscous purple toxin, erupted at point-blank range. There was no space to dodge.
"A non-lethal neurotoxin!" Chiyo called out, her voice coldly triumphant. "But you'll be paralyzed long enough to be a guest of Sunagakure!"
Careless! The thought flashed through Tsunade's mind with a spike of frustration. Then, it was replaced by a furnace-blast of defiance.
She was Senju Tsunade. Granddaughter of the God of Shinobi. Grandniece of the Second Hokage. Student of the Third. A Sannin. She would not be caught by a puppet.
"I AM THE GRANDDAUGHTER OF THE SHODAIME!" Her voice roared, not with panic, but with unleashing power. "A PILE OF SCRAP METAL WON'T STOP ME!"
The chakra within her, already vast, surged. The fist that was pressed against the puppet's chest didn't pull back—it pushed forward. The Strength of a Hundred, concentrated to a single, impossible point, met the legendary defense of sand-iron.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then, with a sound like a mountain cracking, the puppet's torso imploded. The sand-iron, famed for its durability, didn't just break—it turned to powder under the focused, world-shattering force. The mechanical arms holding her disintegrated.
BOOM!
Shave!
Tsunade vanished from the cloud of needles. The poisonous projectiles shredded empty air before embedding themselves in the ground where she'd stood. She reappeared several meters away, breathing heavily, her fist smoking slightly from the friction of destroying matter at the molecular level. The parts of the Chikamatsu puppet lay scattered around her like metallic confetti.
The Aftermath of the Storm
On the other side, the last few Suna-nin collapsed, their throats cut or bodies bisected by Yama's unforgiving edge. Ragnar stood amidst the carnage, the black blade held loosely at his side. Not a single drop of blood clung to its demonic metal. It seemed to have absorbed the violence, growing heavier with a silent, predatory aura.
The two dozen Suna-nin were dead. Only Chiyo and her three terrified remaining subordinates stood, surrounded.
Ragnar turned, his red Rakshasa mask fixed on the puppet master. He began walking toward the central duel, each step deliberate. Yama's tip dragged lightly in the dirt, the soft shhhhk sound incongruously peaceful against the backdrop of slaughter.
"Tsunade," he called, his voice flat. "You finished yet?"
Tsunade shot him a withering look, shaking out her stinging hand. "You think everyone kills Kage-level opponents as easily as you swat flies?!"
Uchiha Mikoto fell into step behind Ragnar, her Sharingan deactivating. The battle had been shockingly one-sided. Her role had been less of a combatant and more of a cleaner, mopping up the stunned survivors of Ragnar's initial, overwhelming assault.
"Chiyo-sama!" one of the three surviving Suna-nin whimpered, pressing close to their commander. Their faces were masks of pure terror. The Rakshasa hadn't fought like a shinobi. He'd moved like a natural disaster—inexorable, impersonal, and utterly lethal.
Chiyo's aged face was a stiff mask, but her eyes were wide, darting between the annihilated ranks of her squadron and the approaching, blood-drenched ANBU. A terrible, ice-cold realization was dawning in her mind.
This speed… this utterly ruthless efficiency with a blade… the black sword that cuts through anything…
The reports from Iwagakure, the whispers of a single Konoha operative wiping out an entire Iwa squad in the Rain Country… they had been vague, dismissed by some as exaggeration.
She wasn't dismissing them anymore.
"Tsunade," Ragnar said, stopping a dozen paces from Chiyo. "I'll handle this."
Tsunade looked from the destroyed puppet at her feet to the nine remaining ones encircling Chiyo. She thought of the antidote in her pouch, of Jiraiya dying back at camp. She thought of the legendary Chiyo in her prime, with her full arsenal deployed. A straight fight would be long, brutal, and risky.
She nodded once, sharply. "Fine. Don't get cocky."
Ragnar's focus didn't waver from Chiyo. He slowly raised Yama, the blade coming to a guard position. The air around it seemed to warp and darken.
"Who are you?" Chiyo demanded, her voice tight. "Konoha has no record of a swordsman of your caliber. No name, no reputation. Just a mask."
"ANBU. Rakshasa," Ragnar replied, the codename dropping like a stone.
"Rakshasa…" Chiyo repeated, committing the name to memory. Her hands, held before her, trembled not from fear, but from the intense concentration of chakra flowing through her ten fingers. "I will remember it."
"You won't live long enough," Ragnar said.
He moved.
Shave.
There was no blur, no afterimage. One moment he was standing still. The next, a line of displaced air and dust marked a path straight for Chiyo, and he was at its end, Yama a horizontal blur of black light cutting for her neck.
Chiyo's eyes blazed. Her face, moments ago showing shock, was now a canvas of cold, calculating focus. Her arms swept out in a wide, dance-like motion.
The chakra threads on her ten fingertips flared a brilliant blue. The scattered parts of the destroyed puppet were yanked off the ground by the threads, flying through the air and reassembling around the damaged core in the blink of an eye. At the same time, the other nine puppets of the Chikamatsu Collection—each a unique, deadly masterpiece—surged into motion. They didn't just attack; they formed a layered, interlocking defensive perimeter around her, their movements perfectly synchronized.
A normal puppet master controlled one puppet per finger, two or three at most for the skilled. Chiyo, with ten fingers, controlled ten elite puppets simultaneously. It was the pinnacle of the art.
WHOOSH!
The puppets moved with a speed and agility that defied their inorganic nature, each one blessed by her chakra. The fastest—a sleek, scorpion-tailed model—intercepted Ragnar's charge. It didn't try to block Yama directly. Instead, its body contorted strangely, and panels on its back slid open.
SHINK! SHINK! SHINK!
A storm of emerald-green poisoned senbon, hundreds of them, filled the space between Ragnar and Chiyo.
Ragnar didn't slow. He didn't dodge.
He simply cut.
Yama swept out in a wide, shallow arc. Armament Haki, black and shimmering, coated the blade and extended beyond it, forming a crescent of pure destructive intent.
The world seemed to split along the line of his swing. On one side was the reality of the senbon storm. On the other was the void left in the wake of his Haki.
The senbon didn't just get knocked aside. They met the Haki-infused slash and stilled. For a fraction of a second, they hung in the air, frozen. Then, microscopic cracks raced across each needle, and they disintegrated into harmless green dust, raining down silently.
Ragnar advanced, a walking tempest. He didn't use complex sword forms. He used force.
SWISH! A vertical slash split a boar-headed puppet armed with twin chain-swords clean in half.
CRACK! A horizontal cut sheared through the legs of a spider-like puppet as it tried to ensnare him with wire.
SHING! A diagonal strike shattered the reinforced pincer-arms of a crab-form puppet.
Each swing of Yama was a declaration. Each step forward was an inevitability. The puppets, each a masterpiece capable of fighting a jonin, were swept aside like driftwood before a tsunami. They were broken, not just disabled. Chiyo's fingers flew, trying to pull shattered components back together, but the destruction was too fast, too complete.
In three breaths, the defensive ring was broken. Ragnar stood before Chiyo, Yama held high for a final, decisive overhead strike. The last puppet between them, a hulking shield-bearing model, lay in pieces at his feet.
"Cut," Ragnar intoned, the word final.
The black blade descended in a perfect, ruthless line.
A flash of steel, a spray of crimson.
Chiyo's head flew from her shoulders, her body slumping to the ground. The remaining chakra threads snapped and vanished.
Silence, heavy and sudden, fell over the valley.
"Did… did she die?" Tsunade murmured, taking a hesitant step forward. It seemed too quick, too simple against a legend like Chiyo.
Ragnar didn't relax. His grip on Yama tightened. His Observation Haki, stretched to its limits, screamed a warning.
Something was wrong.
(End of Chapter)
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