Even though she knew she was completely and shamelessly in the wrong, Tsunade maintained her absolute, arrogant confidence.
"Don't worry, brat!" Tsunade barked, crossing her arms tightly beneath her chest. "I'll pay you back every single gold coin sooner or later. I, Tsunade, never break my word!"
Given how historically, universally horrific her gambling luck actually was, Darian honestly didn't know where the hell she drew her endless confidence from. Of course, he knew that as the world's foremost medical ninja, if she ever actually wanted to make money legitimately, there were thousands of wealthy nobles, corrupt daimyo, and merchant lords suffering from rich man's diseases who would happily dump millions of Ryo at her feet just for a single consultation.
Darian didn't care to press the issue of his missing gold right now. He merely closed his eyes again, sinking his weight back into the stone ledge and thoroughly enjoying the explicit, hands-on service of Madame Takayanagi.
Seeing that the wealthy foreigner didn't immediately demand his money back or threaten to invoke the contract, Tsunade let out a soft breath of relief. She stepped into the scalding water and sat down heavily in the far corner, right next to Shizune.
Shizune looked at her master timidly, her voice trembling as she whispered, "Lady Tsunade... the casino... did you really—?"
Knowing exactly what embarrassing question her assistant was about to ask, the guilty Sannin immediately shot her a fierce, terrifying glare before the girl could even finish the sentence. Caught in Tsunade's threatening gaze, Shizune could only obediently shut her mouth, looking profoundly wronged and miserable. As a perpetual doormat, she could only shed silent tears of despair in her heart, deeply wondering if her freedom would ever be redeemed from this handsome monster.
Madame Takayanagi was a fully mature, uninhibited woman who knew exactly how to weaponize her assets. The intense heat of her heavy breasts enveloping the back of Darian's head, combined with her intoxicating, mature fragrance and the slow, deliberate caress of her slick fingers sliding down his chest and firm abs, caused Darian's sexual arousal to flare violently beneath the water.
'If Tsunade and Shizune weren't sitting right across the pool tracking my every move, I'd have already flipped this voluptuous landlady over and buried myself deep inside her right against the marble edge,' Darian thought, his erection hardening instantly.
Even though she was deeply annoyed by Darian's smug attitude, Tsunade's eyes kept involuntarily drifting back to his powerful, heavily muscled physique exposed in the light. Shizune, like a curious child witnessing something forbidden, kept stealing shy, burning glances at Darian's naked chest before instantly snapping her head away, her face burning hotter than the spring water.
Madame Takayanagi became increasingly bold, her wet hands sliding dangerously low past his abdomen beneath the surface. At her mature age, she had long since seen through the illusion of romance; she wanted pure, unadulterated physical pleasure with a hyper-attractive alpha male, and she didn't care who was watching.
But just as their movements were becoming explicitly unruly, Tsunade's eyes suddenly snapped sharp.
"Damn it...!" she muttered, her posture tensing.
Flaring her advanced sensory chakra, Tsunade instantly detected a hostile, concealed aura rapidly closing in on the enclosed bathhouse from the roof.
Just as she opened her mouth to bark a warning, Darian's dark eyes shot open.
Even though he lacked a local chakra network, Darian's mastery of Haki and his hyper-optimized physical cells allowed him to instantly detect the biological life energy—the raw ki—of living beings. He didn't even possess active Observation Haki yet, but his baseline sensory perception was sharp enough to track the rapid, unnatural shifts in air pressure.
The landlady's heavy breasts were still pressed flush against his shoulders. Gripping her slender wrists firmly, Darian instantly yanked her hands away from his torso, stood up fully in the bubbling spring, and violently pulled her voluptuous naked body tight against his chest to shield her from harm.
In the next microsecond—
Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
A rapid, lethal volley of iron shuriken sliced clean through the thick steam, targeting the pool.
Darian didn't flinch. Raising his right hand, he unleashed a sudden, brilliant bolt of blue-white natural lightning from his fingertips.
BOOM!
His precise, innate control over electricity and magnetism instantly generated a violent electromagnetic force field combined with rapidly expanding, superheated air. The incoming shuriken were violently blasted entirely off course, their metal structures warped as they clattered harmlessly against the stone walls.
Everything happened so fast that Shizune was still frozen in shock, her brain failing to process the sudden ambush. But Tsunade was a legendary war veteran. The incoming weapons weren't just aimed at Darian; a secondary volley of poisoned blades was tracking straight toward the two Kunoichi.
Gathering a massive concentration of chakra into her right palm, Tsunade violently slammed her hand down onto the water's surface.
BANG!
Her monstrous physical strength caused the hot spring water to erupt upward like a dense, solid iron curtain, effortlessly absorbing and scattering every single shuriken into the tiled floor.
"What... what is happening?!" Madame Takayanagi whimpered, clutching Darian's broad shoulders in absolute, trembling terror.
"Don't worry, beautiful. You're perfectly safe in my arms," Darian murmured, his cold eyes scanning the shadows of the broken rafters. Looking at the splintered wood, he frowned. 'Looks like these bastards are targeting me exclusively.'
It made perfect sense. Assassinating the Legendary Sannin in Tanzaku Quarters was a suicide mission that would require an army of elite Jonin, not a handful of low-level grunts. And the landlady was just a civilian business owner. The primary assassin dropped down from the ceiling, his dark eyes locked onto Darian through his mesh mask with pure, lethal intent.
"Target confirmed! Cut him down!"
At the command, a hidden ninja wielding a gleaming katana darted forward with blinding speed, his silhouette blurring out of existence through the mist.
"Phantom Dance — Instant Slash!"
CLANG!
The sharp katana left a single streak of silver light in the steam. In the blink of an eye, the assassin stood firmly behind Darian on the stone deck, his sword already snapping back into its sheath. His execution style wasn't just fast; it was completely unpredictable. To a standard Chunin or a wandering civilian ninja, reacting to such high-speed kenjutsu would be mechanically impossible.
From the moment the executioner struck until he finished his sheathing pose, Darian stood perfectly still in the water, holding the voluptuous landlady against his chest as if he were a complete fool who couldn't even process the attack. The heavy katana blade had struck his bare back dead-on.
A smug, victorious grin flashed across the hidden faces of the remaining black-clad assassins in the rafters. They were already celebrating the 100,000 Ryo bounty and thinking about the premium liquor they would buy tonight.
But the swordsman himself suddenly froze, a cold sweat breaking out beneath his clothes. The sensation through his hilt was completely wrong. A faint, milky-white translucent light was enveloping Darian's skin, and the steel blade had merely skated off his flesh.
"Is that seriously the absolute best you've got?" Darian asked, his deep voice echoing through the ruined bathhouse. "I haven't even actively flexed my muscles yet."
The other black-clad ninjas, still oblivious to the deflection, scoffed loudly from the shadows.
"Too weak! He couldn't even mount a basic defensive jutsu!"
"He's just a pathetic wandering rogue! We're drinking like kings tonight, boys!"
Tsunade, seeing Darian get struck directly from behind, flared her chakra in absolute fury. She was only wrapped in a loose bath towel, and it was deeply inconvenient for her to move without exposing herself, preventing her from intercepting.
"Idiots! Get the fuck back!" the lead swordsman suddenly roared in pure terror, finally realizing his blade had entirely slipped off Darian's frictionless skin without leaving a single scratch.
Before their triumphant laughter could even clear the room, the remaining assassins froze, their voices catching in their throats like choking ducks.
Darian slowly turned around in the water, his chest flush against the landlady's back as he stepped closer to the deck. His dark, predatory eyes locked onto the terrified swordsman. With a casual, lightning-fast motion, he delivered a massive backhand slap directly across the ninja's masked face.
SNAP!
A sickening, echoing crack shattered the room. The sheer, superhuman kinetic force instantly twisted the ninja's head in a bizarre, impossible angle, violently spraying a thick mist of blood and shattered teeth into the air. The absolute momentum launched his entire body upward like a rocket.
SPLASH!
The mangled corpse slammed violently back into the deep end of the hot spring, sending a massive wave of red-tinted water splashing across Tsunade and Shizune.
"No... no way! Am I losing my goddamn mind?!"
"What the fuck was that physical strength?!"
"His head... his head spun clean around!"
The remaining assassins stared in absolute, paralyzing horror at the floating corpse. A simple, casual backhand slap had literally spun a grown man's head three times on his neck, instantly snapping his spinal cord.
"I remember reading somewhere that there is one specific biomechanical limit a normal human can never cross," Darian said, his lips curling into a cold, predatory grin as he stepped entirely out of the water, completely naked and dripping with the assassin's blood. "A human can never turn their own head 180 degrees to look at their own spine. I was just being a good guy, helping your friend achieve something completely miraculous before he died. Don't the rest of you scum want to try it out too?"
Hearing his dark, psychotic joke, the assassins' faces paled beneath their masks. They raised their weapons, their eyes wide with homicidal terror. "Fuck this monster! Kill him!"
Darian's smirk widened. "You don't want to? Fine. Have it your way."
In a microsecond, Darian exploded forward, completely vanishing from his spot. A white, frictionless blur tore through the steam.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
A rapid series of heavy, deafening thuds echoed through the bathhouse. Darian's fists struck with the raw weight of a charging sea king. The impact areas on the ninjas' bodies collapsed instantly under the pressure. One man's chest cavity was completely caved in, his shattered ribs piercing clean out his back; another had a literal hole punched right through his lower abdomen. The ones who took a direct blow to the skull had their necks violently twisted as their facial bones exploded into bloody powder.
Without exception, every single assassin struck by Darian's fists became a human cannonball, launched violently backward across the room. Darian precisely calculated his combat angles, slamming his fists upward to launch all their broken, bleeding bodies clean over the high wooden bathhouse railing.
Behind the Takayanagi Inn lay a massive, wild forest teeming with hungry predatory beasts. By the time the sun rose tomorrow morning, their corpses would be completely devoured by wolves, leaving absolutely zero evidence for the local authorities to trace.
Although Darian's physical execution was incredibly bloody and visceral, his raw speed was so immense that the entire slaughter was completed in the blink of an eye.
Standing among the shattered wood and pooling blood, Darian casually shook his hands, his frictionless skin instantly shedding the gore until he was perfectly clean.
'I have no idea what tier of ninja these grunts were supposed to be, but these local fighters are fucking fragile,' Darian scoffed internally, looking back at the shocked faces of Tsunade and Shizune. 'They're literally as soft as blocks of raw tofu. Punching them doesn't even feel like a real fight.'
He chuckled darkly to himself, walking back toward the water. 'No wonder Hashirama Senju used to dramatically threaten to kill himself with a common iron kunai. In a world full of such fragile glass cannons, a basic pocket knife really is a lethal threat.'
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