Compared to Rasa, who had chosen to call for reinforcements, Pakura—who was closer, felt it more clearly, and had been shaken far more directly—made a response that completely defied everyone's expectations.
With a sharp scream, she drew up even more chakra and condensed an even larger orange fireball.
A fireball of that size, once it exploded, would likely evaporate even her own body fluids along with the enemy's.
She had actually launched a suicidal attack.
Who would have thought that Pakura—with her beautiful face, graceful figure, and strikingly sensual appearance—would have such a violent temperament, the kind to throw her life away the moment words failed?
Especially Uchiha Yoru.
He still remembered that woman's appearance during the Fourth Great Ninja War. Even after knowing she had died because Sunagakure had betrayed her, she had still kept her vengeance limited to Kirigakure's ninjas. Later, after being persuaded by her student Maki, she had even changed sides and helped the allied ninjas restrain Gari, the Explosion Release user.
So what exactly had turned this fierce young girl into the gentle older-sister type she would become in the future?
It wasn't as if she had fallen in love, married, and had children.
Still, no matter how sudden the change, if it happened at close enough range, it didn't count as an accident in front of Uchiha Yoru.
He calmly assessed the amount of Scorch Release chakra, then mobilized the appropriate natural energy to dismantle the massive fireball.
In fact, he dealt with it even faster than the smaller ones.
Yoru even had enough spare attention to think:
If this were a true secluded old monster, faced with a reckless girl attacking him like this, would he feel offended?
Of course he would.
The stronger the expert, the worse the temper ought to be.
Then he thought again—
If he really were some old monster, how would he react?
Kill Pakura?
Or…
Actually, either would work.
Old monsters could get away with anything. As long as he acted a bit eccentric and unpredictable, his persona wouldn't collapse.
So the real question was whether he could kill her, and which option would benefit him more—especially which one would buy him the most time.
After giving it proper thought, Yoru concluded that yes, he absolutely could kill her.
Pakura had foolishly stepped into the range covered by his omniscient divine ability, then condensed chakra within that range. That gave him both the opportunity and the time to dismantle her Scorch Release by using the strong compatibility between natural energy and chakra.
She had personally thrown away all of her own advantages.
If she had stayed fifty or sixty meters away and launched those fireballs from a distance, Yoru would not have had time to dismantle them.
He would have had to dodge honestly, or intercept them midway with his own ninjutsu.
Without Scorch Release to support her, Pakura was only a jōnin with excellent taijutsu.
And now she was right next to him.
At this distance, killing her would be as easy as reaching out with one hand.
But killing her would not benefit Uchiha Yoru.
When faced with an overwhelmingly powerful monster, Sunagakure's ninjas would choose the safest, most conservative response. They would not attack rashly.
But if even a beautiful girl like Pakura were casually slaughtered on the spot, then that would prove he was a bloodthirsty monster. And once Sunagakure's ninjas felt they were doomed anyway, they would stop hesitating.
Since death was certain, they would simply throw everything they had at him.
As for fleeing to save themselves?
Sunagakure's ninjas were not yet capable of that kind of behavior.
Their spirit had not been broken.
Only when faced with an enemy so overwhelming that resistance itself was meaningless would they turn around and run.
Like Konoha's White Fang, already dead by now.
Even the Third Kazekage had publicly acknowledged that if Sunagakure's ninjas encountered the White Fang, abandoning the mission and retreating would not be punished.
Only then had they dared to run.
But only the White Fang had possessed that kind of privilege.
No matter how strong anyone else was, all they could do was force Sunagakure's ninjas to fight desperately.
So for his own interests, Yoru could not kill Pakura.
But for the sake of the persona he was playing, he also could not let her off too lightly.
Just as he was wondering how exactly to punish her, a flash of inspiration struck his mind.
He thought of the phrase old child.
Old people, once they got old enough, often became stubborn and capricious—like children, hard to predict.
So if a little boy were provoked by a girl, what would he do?
Lift her skirt…
…No, children could get away with that, but if an old man did it, that would just be disgusting.
Besides, Pakura wasn't even wearing a skirt now. She had on a tight-fitting outfit and shorts, not the much sexier dress-like outfit she would wear later. There was nothing to lift.
Right.
There was another classic way little boys bullied little girls.
Yoru smiled.
Even though the mask hid his face, that malicious little spark of amusement still came through.
Pakura shivered instinctively.
Then she saw Uchiha Yoru moving toward her.
Was he enraged by her attack and finally retaliating?
Fear surged in Pakura's heart, but her proud nature wouldn't allow her to show even a trace of retreat. Instead, she produced a kunai and stabbed toward Yoru's waist.
Her movements were not slow.
But her reaction speed was still that of an ordinary elite jōnin.
Compared to Uchiha Yoru with Omniscient Mind's Eye activated, the gap was far too great.
Yoru casually sidestepped the attack, slipped behind her, and reached out to seize her…
…high ponytail.
Then he yanked hard.
The tearing pain in her scalp made Pakura let out a muffled grunt. Before she could recover, that ponytail was dragged again with even greater force, and the girl was swung straight off her feet.
The rapid spinning brought searing pain to her scalp and a violent wave of dizziness. Her vision blurred completely from the rotation.
Before she could adjust to it, she suddenly felt the tension at her scalp vanish.
The next instant, her whole body flew out in a spinning arc.
Vaguely, she saw strands of her own long hair scattering in the air.
And she heard that deep, magnetic voice say,
"An unruly little girl deserves a bit of punishment."
Then Pakura crashed to the ground in a miserable tumble, rolling several times before she barely regained control of herself.
Once she staggered upright, something immediately felt wrong at the top of her head.
She reached up and touched it.
Sure enough.
Most of her ponytail had been cut off.
Only a short stub remained.
She did not react like some Konoha little girl twenty years later and get angry.
Instead, she felt lucky.
Very lucky.
If the other side had truly intended to kill her, then that wind blade that had cut off her ponytail only needed to shift forty centimeters lower—
And her neck would have been severed.
But in the very next instant, Pakura and every Sunagakure ninja present saw it.
A towering wall of fire rushed toward them.
After dismantling Pakura's forming Scorch Release fireballs twice, Uchiha Yoru had gathered an enormous amount of fused sage chakra.
Because the chakra had originated from Pakura, his control over it was poor. He couldn't manipulate it as naturally as his own power.
So while throwing Pakura away, he brought his palms together and unleashed two senjutsu techniques.
Sage Art: Fire Release — Wildfire Across the Plains.
Sage Art: Wind Release — Violent Impact Current.
The fire spread evenly along the ground.
The wind descended from above, then blasted outward in all directions.
The combination formed a circular wall of wind and fire forty meters high.
Then the storm卷起 the yellow sand covering the ground, turning it into a flaming sandstorm that charged at all the surrounding Sunagakure ninjas.
The Sunagakure ninjas were terrified, much like the future Allied Shinobi Forces would be.
But unlike those juniors twenty years later, nobody stood there dumbfounded and helpless.
Instead, each ninja made the best possible response according to his own abilities.
Some were fast enough to turn and run.
Some specialized in ninjutsu and immediately formed hand seals to resist.
But most of them simply dug downward and burrowed into the sand to evade the attack.
Unlike the Allied Shinobi Forces, Sunagakure didn't have a single truly competent Water Release ninja on site.
No one could recreate that kind of dramatic large-scale elemental clash.
Once the flames had surged more than a thousand meters out—
A tornado of violent wind blasted in from the direction of Sunagakure, tearing a huge gap in the ring-shaped fire sandstorm.
This was Wind Release performed by a Kage-level ninja.
A real expert had arrived.
As the wind tornado rose, another rotating tide of chakra appeared nearby, forcibly drawing in, suppressing, and destroying a portion of the flaming sandstorm.
Yoru's Sharingan was sharp.
With the flames casting light across the battlefield, he saw clearly that the technique had not been performed by a ninja at all.
It had been driven by three puppets.
This looked like the prototype of the famous puppet technique Chiyo would use later—Three Treasures Suction Crush.
But the puppeteer controlling the three puppets was a tall, thin man, not the Chiyo from Yoru's memories.
Right after that, one powerful ninjutsu or puppet technique after another erupted in sequence, forcefully tearing open a broad passage through the flaming sandstorm.
Six ninjas and fourteen puppets stepped into the firelight.
Yoru could not help but sigh inwardly.
The quality of Sunagakure's ninjas in the era of the Third Shinobi War was truly impressive.
Their reaction speed was absurdly fast.
These ninjas didn't even need the messenger to explain the situation to them. They made the correct judgment on their own and put it into action immediately.
Yoru turned to look toward distant Sunagakure.
Above the high cliffs, a vast tornado had appeared, covering the entire village.
It had an extremely broad wind column, though its height was rather ordinary, and its speed was only around force seven or eight.
For Sunagakure, which faced sandstorms year-round, that kind of storm had no real destructive power at all.
But it worked like a giant vacuum cleaner, sucking away the foul-smelling ash Yoru had scattered.
When facing sudden changes, Sunagakure's response had been far smarter than Konoha's.
That didn't mean Konoha's ninjas were inferior to Sunagakure's.
It was because Konoha's power structure was more stable, and because the authority shaped by the Third Hokage and Shimura Danzō weighed more heavily over the village. Most ninjas had very little initiative and could only obey orders.
Of course, the aftereffects of Hatake Sakumo's suicide could not be ignored.
A jōnin commander had chosen his comrades' lives over the mission, and for that he had been publicly condemned to death.
If that was the outcome, then who would dare abandon his current assignment without orders in order to save other villagers?
It was only a bad smell.
It wouldn't kill anyone.
Sunagakure's more proactive style allowed it to seize fleeting opportunities and react with maximum speed.
But the same thing could be said in reverse.
A Sunagakure like this could easily end up with multiple voices issuing commands during wartime, or even different factions acting on their own without listening to the Kazekage.
These old monsters might have selected a Kazekage candidate for now.
But once chosen, could that Kazekage really restrain them?
After all, the people choosing the Kazekage were only six major figures—not sixty, much less six hundred.
The Kazekage would have no room to maneuver.
All of that belonged to the future.
For Uchiha Yoru, the current Sunagakure was already dangerous enough.
His original plan had never involved fighting.
All he had wanted to do was set off some fireworks and run.
Even if he got unlucky and was intercepted midway, at most he would just brush shoulders with younger Kage-level ninjas like Pakura and Rasa.
Who could have guessed that something would go wrong on Miwa Masayo's side, causing the escape plan to fail?
Then Rasa, who could fly, caught up to him, forcing him to stand and fight.
And before he had even fully suppressed Pakura, before he could determine whether he had intimidated Rasa enough to stop him from chasing—
Sunagakure's old monsters had already surrounded him.
They had moved far too quickly.
Why had it come to this?
He hadn't even beaten down the younger ones yet.
They hadn't even had time to call for help.
So how had the old monsters already taken the initiative and jumped out ahead of the process?
It made no sense.
While Uchiha Yoru was still unsettled by that question, the old monsters of Sunagakure were just as shocked.
In such a short time, Pakura—an elite jōnin qualified to compete for the Kazekage position—had already been defeated.
And the process had looked like an adult bullying a child.
Not everyone among them could do it so casually.
More importantly, Pakura had not been careless.
She had used her kekkei genkai, Scorch Release.
Yet those incredibly dangerous Scorch Release fireballs had been casually swatted apart by the enemy.
That had completely exceeded the old monsters' understanding.
This was a kekkei genkai technique.
Scorch Release fireballs were said to turn anything they touched into a dried corpse.
So how could they simply be scattered with a slap?
And forget Scorch Release—
Since when could even an ordinary Fire Release fireball be dispersed by hand?
If ninjutsu were this easy to deal with, then how had ninjas ever sent samurai into the trash heap of history?
Surely not with half-foot-long kunai.
There was only one conclusion.
The masked man's strength was beyond imagination.
He had to be some terrifying old monster.
These Sunagakure ninjas who had fought through two wars could not help but think of a single question:
Who in the ninja world could ignore ninjutsu?
Their first thought was the Third Raikage of Kumogakure, the so-called strongest shield.
Then, almost at the same instant, they thought of another horrifying title—
The Asura of the Ninja World.
That's right.
According to rumor, Uchiha Madara could ignore ninjutsu entirely, disregard the siege of over a thousand ninjas, and annihilate them all alone.
Why had they all reached that answer at the same time?
Because the thousand ninjas who had once besieged Uchiha Madara…
…had been Sunagakure's own predecessors.
This masked man was strong, certainly.
But he was definitely not comparable to Uchiha Madara of old.
He didn't possess that kind of presence that made people think of death at first glance.
The strange thing was that not a trace of chakra fluctuation came off him.
Even when he used that terrifying fire technique, the chakra signature they felt belonged to Pakura.
Such a bizarre phenomenon made every old monster present act with extreme caution.
But one old man with a wrapped cloth turban had no room for caution at all.
He rushed to the very front and angrily demanded,
"Umino Keisuke—what did you do to my son?!"
[So this is Ebizō?]
[How did he recognize that his son was in there?]
Borrowing that puzzled emotion, Uchiha Yoru asked in return,
"Umino Keisuke? Who is that?"
Ebizō raised one hand and held up an inconspicuous crystal bead.
It was no bigger than a grain of millet, but now it glowed faintly, radiating a rather strong chakra fluctuation.
"This is a puppet bead I gave my son, Umino Keisuke, so he could prove his identity."
"He usually kept it hidden under his fingernail, so it would be convenient when carrying out missions."
"And so I could… identify his corpse on a battlefield where flesh and blood had already been mangled beyond recognition."
"But just now…"
"This bead fell from the sky."
[Puppeteers have things like that too? Learned something new.]
[No wonder. I was wondering why the old bastards jumped out before Pakura and Rasa were even down. So that's what happened.]
"So his name was Umino Keisuke."
"And he was your son."
"Heh."
"What are you laughing at? What did you do to my son?!"
Uchiha Yoru finally found the feeling of being an old monster.
His laughter gradually turned twisted.
"Kehehehehe…"
"Of course I killed him."
"I even arranged a splendid funeral for him just now."
"You should have seen it."
"There's no way you didn't see it, right?"
Ebizō froze for a moment.
Then he understood.
His eyes split wide with fury. Six puppets appeared around him in an instant as he prepared to rush forward and fight Uchiha Yoru to the death.
But a hand that was not large at all caught his shoulder and stopped him.
"Little brother, don't be impulsive!"
"Elder sister, he killed Umino Keisuke! He killed my son!!"
"Even so, you cannot rush in."
"I lost my son, my daughter-in-law, and my grandson. And just now, I also lost my nephew."
"You cannot go throw your life away."
"If we're going to kill him, then we do it together."
"We surround him and attack as one."
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