As he dragged one enemy down into the earth, Chiba Shun surfaced at the same time.
The instant his head broke through the ground, both swords flashed from their sheaths. He slashed left and right at the two ninjas who were just about to unleash their jutsu.
Clang. Clang.
The two startled ninjas abandoned their hand seals at once and yanked up kunai to block his blades. For one heartbeat, both of them thought they had survived the ambush.
Then Chiba Shun's leg twisted in a strange, almost unnatural motion.
A third sword flashed out.
At the same time, he snapped his head and hurled the blade clenched in his mouth at the other man like a thrown spear.
Pfft. Pfft.
One ninja cried out as his arm was severed cleanly at the elbow. The other managed to avoid the killing blow only because Chiba Shun still wasn't fully proficient with that fourth strike, but the sword still ripped a deep gash across his chest.
Both men stumbled back in shock, one to each side.
Chiba Shun did not chase them.
Instead, he sheathed one blade, stepped forward, and drove the other straight behind him without even turning around.
Only then did the taijutsu ninja he had dragged underground finally break free of the chakra holding him in place. The man burst upward in a spray of dirt, only to impale himself on Chiba Shun's waiting sword.
The blade punched clean through his body.
Chiba Shun twisted hard.
That one savage motion shredded what life the man had left.
For a brief instant, the chaos on the battlefield froze.
Even the Kumo ninjas stared at him in disbelief. In one sudden exchange, Chiba Shun had killed one enemy outright, crippled another, and wounded a third.
But his streak of good fortune ended there.
A ninja who had been pressing one of the Kumo jonin abruptly abandoned his opponent and turned on Chiba Shun. His hands blurred through seals, and the next second several water bullets came screaming toward him.
At that exact moment, the Kumo side made a mistake.
The jonin who had just been freed should have rushed forward to tie his opponent down again. Instead, he chose to reinforce the others. In his mind, anyone who could wipe out a three-man chunin team in one exchange was obviously no weakling. Even if Chiba Shun was no match for a jonin, he ought to survive for a little while.
Meanwhile, the rest of the battlefield was already collapsing. Several men were dead or dying.
So rather than support Chiba Shun, that jonin left him to face a jonin-level opponent alone.
A curse nearly burst out of Chiba Shun's throat.
But there was no time to spare.
Several water bullets were already racing toward him. He could only retreat at full speed while dodging.
He had just broken away from the melee after his flanking attack. Now he was separated from Yotsuki A and the others. To fight his way back to them, he would have had to cross several enemies, which was impossible.
The jonin didn't expect a simple C-rank water technique to kill Chiba Shun.
He only wanted to stop him from continuing to massacre the weaker fighters.
The moment Chiba Shun escaped the water bullets, he immediately began forming hand seals again.
The jonin's eyes narrowed. He responded at once, his own hands flashing through seals.
"Water Release: Water Dragon Bullet!"
"Earth Release: Earth Flow Wall!"
The enemy finished first.
A roaring water dragon took shape before Chiba Shun had completed his own jutsu. The difference in hand-seal speed was obvious at a glance.
Though Chiba Shun had started first, his opponent was using a B-rank ninjutsu, while Chiba Shun was still relying on a C-rank technique.
When the jonin saw the size of the earthen wall Chiba Shun raised, contempt flickered across his face.
Did this brat really think a wall of dirt like that could stop a Water Dragon Bullet?
But Chiba Shun had never intended to stop it.
His earth wall didn't even last a second.
The water dragon smashed straight through it.
And yet the jonin's expression changed at once, because what happened next made no sense at all.
Ordinary Earth Flow Walls were anchored deep into the ground. If they weren't, they would collapse the moment anything struck them. They would be useless.
Chiba Shun had done the exact opposite.
His wall wasn't rooted to the earth at all. It was a slab—a huge, thick plate of packed soil.
When the water dragon hit, instead of bracing against the force, the slab was carried away with it.
At that point, it wasn't really an Earth Flow Wall anymore. It was more like a flying earthen shield.
The Water Dragon Bullet slammed into the slab and drove it forward through the air. Chiba Shun hid behind it, letting the thing absorb most of the attack as all three were launched away at terrifying speed.
Cracks raced through the dirt shield, but it didn't collapse outright.
The jonin finally understood what the boy was trying to do. A savage grin spread across his face.
The next instant, the water dragon changed direction.
It surged upward, lifting the cracked slab and the hidden Chiba Shun into the air, then whipped downward, planning to smash both shield and target straight into the ground.
But just before impact, Chiba Shun kicked off the slab and hurled himself away.
Boom!
The water dragon exploded against the earth and blasted out a great crater. The earthen slab shattered into fragments that sprayed in all directions. Chunks of hardened dirt peppered Chiba Shun even where he landed, making him bare his teeth in pain.
Still, that was nothing fatal.
He had survived again.
The jonin's expression darkened because Chiba Shun's hands were already moving.
Hand seals.
Again.
Damn it.
He immediately launched into another Water Dragon Bullet. That was clearly his signature technique, the one he trusted most.
But this time he was too late.
Chiba Shun had been forming seals all while he flew behind the earthen slab. By the time the jonin started again, Chiba Shun had already completed his technique and sank into the ground.
Earth Stealth.
It was a ninjutsu Chiba Shun barely knew how to use, and one that required twenty-five hand seals. Under normal circumstances, he could never have deployed it in live combat.
But by getting ahead during that chaotic aerial exchange, he pulled it off.
The second Water Dragon Bullet smashed another crater into the battlefield, but Chiba Shun was gone.
The jonin stared at the ground, face twisting.
"Damn it!"
Then he turned to the rest of the battlefield.
Everywhere around him, the fighting was still fierce. Yet somewhere below their feet, Chiba Shun was moving through the earth like a hidden blade.
After a few seconds, the jonin finally gritted out, "Retreat!"
They still had the upper hand.
But now Chiba Shun had vanished underground. He had already succeeded once. Who could say whether he would strike again? Or a third time?
His performance had made one thing painfully clear: this was a ninja who excelled at tactics.
And ninjas who fought with tactics were always the most hateful kind.
No one could predict his next move.
More importantly, Chiba Shun himself was one of their primary targets. If he escaped, then even slaughtering everyone else would only make this mission half a failure.
Since that was the case, there was no point staying and bleeding any longer.
The attackers withdrew at once in practiced order.
The chunin fell back first. The three jonin covered them while retreating under pressure from Yotsuki A and the remaining Kumo fighters.
Finally, the two ninjutsu-type jonin disengaged first, leaving the taijutsu jonin who had been battling Yotsuki A to cover the rear.
Only after confirming that Yotsuki A could no longer catch the others did that rear guard break away and begin to retreat himself.
Yotsuki A, unwilling to let him go, chased after him.
The taijutsu jonin let out a short laugh, feinted as if to counterattack, then suddenly leaped away toward the darkness.
And right then, a wall of earth erupted from the ground directly in his path.
Both the retreating jonin and Yotsuki A saw it at the same time.
Yotsuki A's eyes lit up.
He had almost given up the pursuit, but the moment he saw that wall, lightning burst across his body and he lunged forward again.
The taijutsu jonin went blank with disbelief.
He reacted quickly, but not quickly enough. The sudden wall forced him to hesitate for the slightest instant in midair.
That was enough.
Boom!
Yotsuki A rammed into him like a thunderbolt.
The two of them smashed together into the earthen wall, and it collapsed beneath the force of the impact.
Not far away, half a head poked up from the ground.
Chiba Shun gulped air, staring at the spot where they had crashed, wondering whether that taijutsu jonin had survived the collision.
The attackers who had already retreated some distance away were equally shaken.
They had never expected their strongest fighter to go down so abruptly.
Several of them stopped instinctively. Some even began shouting for a counterattack.
But the jonin who had been using Water Dragon Bullet shook his head and said grimly, "Retreat. We have no chance now."
By then, the surviving Kumo ninjas who had not originally intended to pursue had also rushed to Yotsuki A's side.
After a few tense breaths of standoff, the attackers finally retreated for good.
Only after the enemy disappeared did two more Kumo ninjas collapse where they stood.
Chiba Shun climbed fully out of the ground.
Yotsuki A looked at him. Chiba Shun looked back.
Then the future Fourth Raikage gave him a short nod.
He was genuinely astonished.
In Yotsuki A's mind, a ninja like Chiba Shun had always been more of a clerk than a real battlefield fighter. Even when he saw Chiba Shun hide the two surviving children inside that earthen dome, he had assumed the boy intended to stay there and wait the battle out.
That was fine, he had thought. Better than becoming dead weight.
He had never imagined Chiba Shun would perform this brilliantly.
In this battle, Chiba Shun's contribution had been no less important than that of the other jonin.
He had tied down a jonin at a critical moment, forced the enemy into retreat, and then worked with Yotsuki A to kill the strongest opponent on the field.
Seeing that nearly everyone was wounded—including Yotsuki A himself—Chiba Shun took the initiative to clean the battlefield.
A short while later, he gathered what spoils he could, including the corpse of the taijutsu jonin who had ultimately died at Yotsuki A's hands.
The rest of the enemy dead had already been carried off during the retreat.
What remained on the field were mostly Kumo corpses.
And among them, the bodies of the twenty-two children were by far the hardest to look at.
Still, the dead jonin had been carrying some very worthwhile items.
There was a large sum of cash on him—several hundred thousand ryo by the look of it—as well as a scroll containing a C-rank Water Release ninjutsu.
More importantly, the long sword he had used was clearly far superior to Chiba Shun's own.
That blade could conduct chakra to a certain degree, much like the precious sword Chiba Shun had once seen in the Kumo ninja tool shop, the one with the outrageous price tag of three hundred thousand ryo.
Chiba Shun gathered everything and carried it over to Yotsuki A.
"It's confirmed," he said. "These people were definitely Kirigakure ninja."
In truth, based on the jutsu they had used during the battle, everyone had already guessed as much.
But ninjutsu could be faked.
Chiba Shun was making a positive identification based on the gear found on the enemy's strongest fighter and the information he could infer from the corpse itself.