At the heart of the storm, Ryo slowly closed his eyes.
Rain drummed against his blood-streaked face and dripped onto the Kusanagi in his hands.
Vmm.
A soundless ripple spread from him.
Observation Haki, on.
Perception surged out like a tide. Inside the sealed killing cage, every wind blade's path, every stone flechette's fall line, each earth dragon's impact core, even the faces of Iwa shinobi crouched along the walls and the killing intent in their eyes, all etched into his mind as a single, crystalline map.
Time seemed to slow against that map.
Data cascaded through his head, lethal trajectories, power nodes, hairline seams, all of it laid bare.
An instant before the airtight barrage could swallow him whole, Ryo's eyes snapped open.
In the dark red depths, a soul-cutting gleam flashed, the edge only a top swordmaster holds.
His wrist turned once.
Kusanagi thrummed, low and eager. Dark red light ran along the black blade like a living thing. A formless, soul-freezing sharpness spiked into the air.
He moved.
Not back. Not aside.
Forward.
Straight into the sky-blotting hail of rock and wind. Straight into the roaring stone dragons and the poisoned hurricane of blades.
The ground burst under his feet, a crater meters wide.
His body became a dark red streak that seemed to rip space.
Sword Art: Cutting Current.
Kusanagi traced a supremely subtle arc. No gaudy light. No bloated shockwave. Only the knife-keen scream of steel shearing air.
Where the edge pointed, high-speed stone shot, hard enough to punch plate steel, met an invisible, slick wall. Ch-ch-ch-ch. An unbroken rattle of fractures. Not smashed by brute force, but deflected like nails striking a spinning grindstone. Some pinged into the cliffs, most shredded to dust in the blade's spiraling wake, bursting into white plumes before him.
His pace did not change.
Sword Art: Piercing Gale.
A slight shift, and the thickest wind blade burst like a pricked bubble, like red-hot steel needling brittle ice. It let out a tearing wail and collapsed. The storm unraveled.
A simple point-thrust, distilled from ten thousand drills, found the seam and turned a wall into air.
Ryo slipped like a butterfly through flowers, flashing onward through the net of strikes. Observation Haki put every impact a beat ahead. Sword instinct picked the cheapest path through. Every cut exact. No waste. Combat honed to the bone.
But the barrage was too dense. Saturation smothers skill.
BOOM.
A stone dragon, massive and close, finally met him in a line he could not dodge. Hard light flickered in Ryo's eyes.
Sword Art: Rockbreaker.
His line changed. No more cutting and guiding, only raw force. Muscle corded. Power climbed the spine and shoulder and poured into the edge.
Kusanagi came down like a siege maul.
A deafening crack. Impact condensed into an unseen hammer that smashed the dragon's reinforced snout. Harder than steel, the stone head sheared away in a slab, like half a hill blasted off. Shrapnel screamed backward. But the beast's momentum was immense.
The shock tore through Ryo's bones and into the ground, exploding more stone beneath his boots. He held, stole recoil, and twisted.
Shhk. Skrrt.
Two poisoned shuriken hissed past. One buried in the wall. The other nicked his left arm, carving a deep line.
Pain. Numbness crept in.
"Hn."
He grunted. No flinch. A scratch. His recovery already tugged muscle toward closure.
His target, the breakpoint, was clear.
He could not stop. In this grinder, stopping is dying.
He drove again, an unbowed red lotus, boring a path through the storm meant to crush all things.
Steel against stone. Steel against wind. Steel against venom. Sparks blew. Rock burst. Needles pinged off. The cloak shredded. Fresh blood striped his skin. His speed only built, momentum piling high.
On the rearmost, highest wall, Commander Akagan fixed on that dark red figure climbing upstream through annihilation, terror rising in his hawk eyes.
That power. That speed. That foresight. To charge through a storm like this, monster.
But he saw the rents in Ryo's cloak. The blood. The poisoned cut.
Hope rekindled.
"Not enough. More. He's hit, press. Wear him down!" Akagan howled, flinging his arm, hysteria glittering in his stare. Drown him with bodies. Pile it on. Even monsters tire. Even monsters bleed.
The Iwa line, cowed for a breath, shrieked back into motion under the whip, more formations, tighter combos, everything thrown to drown that red advance.
And then, as Akagan's roar still rang, as hands began to shape new signs, at the storm's core, the steam-wreathed spear of a man, cut and bloodied, yet upright as a pike, stopped.
He killed his forward rush.
Both hands closed on Kusanagi.
His stance sank.
A pressure like the breath before a volcano bursts spread over the field. Even the downpour seemed to falter.
Up on the wall, Akagan's heart lurched.
Ryo's head snapped up.
Those dark red eyes burned through stone dust and rain, across dozens of meters, past ranks of Iwa, like a scope zeroing in, on Akagan.
Killing intent, cold as a lance of ice, hammered through the commander's soul. A wave of doom froze his blood.
He tried to scream.
Too late.
Ryo moved.
Not a sprint.
A basic, unadorned bow-step cleave.
Every muscle fiber fired. Every cell's charge twisted into a single cable. Waist, spine, shoulder, wrist, perfect transfer.
Hip, leg, arm, blade. One line. Through. Detonate.
Flying Slash.
Dark red did not flow this time, it erupted. A sword light dozens of meters long, tight as if cast from frozen fire and pure edge, lanced off Kusanagi's tip.
No world-splitting boom. Only a shriek that stabbed the eardrum and seemed to split the soul. Not steel ripping air, space itself crying as it tore.
It punched through everything in front of it.
Ript-ript-ript.
A machine-gun snarl of cuts hit almost at once.
Heavy earth bulwarks, stone spines, met red-hot knife to butter, gone. A thick wall, brittle tofu under a chef's blade, bisected, the cut face smooth as a mirror.
Layered walls, paper. One, two, three, perforated in a blink. Ninja still mid-sign behind them never finished. Sword wind's fringe brushed across them, bodies parted like a butcher's demo, upper halves atomized into rain, lower halves left standing.
In the slash's wake, a vacuum tunnel more than three meters across carved the battlefield. Anything on that line, panicked casters, slow summons, turned to powder. Sight down the channel showed a straight road of ruin, blood and crushed stone, leading to Akagan's perch. Only the thudding growl of air slamming shut in the cut's track remained.
Akagan watched the dark red line of death widen in his pupils, the distance gone as if space bent. Terror broke his paralysis at last. He dropped his last card.
"Earth Release: Rock Shelter!"
The ground writhed. A suffocating mass of bedrock rose and layered over him, compacting into a coffin of stone, the strongest defense his chakra could buy.
The fortress had barely sealed when the blade arrived.
One sound, smaller, keener, more terrible than any before.
No bombast. No quake. The red slash paused, barely, and slid into the heart of the shell. Like a hot brand through tallow, no resistance. Akagan's bastion meant nothing.
The light sheared the final layer, and cut Akagan in two, clean and center, hands frozen mid-sign.
Halved.
"Guh, ah… n-no, way—"
The two pieces snapped backward under brutal force, splatting against the wall with a bone-deep thud. Blood sheeted from the seam, painting rock and his twisted face.
Bulging eyes locked on the figure out in the rain, now swaying on his feet, with a terror that dragged him toward the pit. His mouth worked. No sound came.
One sword.
Split the field. Pierced the bulwark. Halved the commander. Ruthless. Absolute.
Silence fell for a heartbeat.
Every Iwa who saw it stood dumbstruck, eyes bulging. A moment ago Lord Akagan had whipped them back from collapse. The next, he was meat stapled to a cliff. Ice water poured through their chests.
"A-Akagan-sama… is he… dead?" A Genin's kunai fell into the mud with a plup.
"Monster… devil!" a Chūnin stammered, stumbling back.
"Kill him, kill that monster, avenge Akagan-sama!" the adjutant screamed, veins jumping, grief curdling into hysteria. "Don't let him reach the core! Hold him! Kill him!"
"For Akagan-sama!" Shame and horror fused into a warped savagery, one last flare before morale died. Surviving Jōnin, Chūnin, and Genin wheeled as one, threw formation and guard away, and hurled themselves like ants into a brazier, every tool and technique used to stop the stagger in that red-lit stride.
Fwoosh. Fire jetted, scorching the rain. Shhk-shhk-shhk. Wind blades buzzed like locusts. Thud-thud-thud. Stone boulders screamed overhead. Shuriken swarmed in a lattice that covered every escape line. One goal, bar Ryo from the spatial core.
Ryo's step hit heavy. Kusanagi's tip punched into the ground to brace him. The edges of his vision blackened. Each breath rasped like tearing cloth, organs complaining after overdraw.
Numbness from poison crawled down his left arm, a million cold needles stirring bone. Yet through the rain, Observation Haki burned a clear vector. There, a hidden hollow behind the southeastern earth wall.
A subtle, hateful pulse radiated from it, cuffing the cliff's space like invisible manacles. Each wave carried a sticky drag, like thickened air. Target locked.
"The core…" His cracked lips glistened with rain. Two words ground out like steel on steel. Destroy it, or Tsunade, the others, and he were dead.
Dark red fire still burned in his eyes. He wrenched the blade free and—
Duck. A wind shuriken as thick as a barrel screamed past his back. The vortex chewed a yard of wall to rubble. The blast peppered his spine with debris and buckled him to a knee.
From shadow on his rear flank, an eagle-faced Iwa elite Jōnin burst out, palms cupping two high-speed, gray-white chakra spheres whining like hornets.
He slammed his hands together. The spheres fused and ballooned into a two-meter vortex, tearing stone to grit as it dropped toward Ryo. Air twisted under the pull.
A point-blank kill.
Ryo could smell the earth-stink on the man. No room to dodge.
At that same beat, left and front, two more chakra flares. To the left, a pair of seasoned Chūnin leaders stabbed Stone Spear from the ground, razor lances angling for Ryo's legs. In front, another elite Jōnin howled, "Wind Release: Great Wind Cutter!"
Up. Down. Left. Right.
Death box.
(To be continued.)
◇◇◇
◇ One bonus chapter will be released for every 200 Power Stones.
◇ You can read the ahead chapter on Pat if you're interested: p-atreon.c-om/Blownleaves (Just remove the hyphen to access normally.)