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"Urrgh—!!"
The Konoha shinobi in front of her dried up in an instant, shriveling into a mummified corpse.
Pakura's Scorch Release had done its job perfectly.
But there wasn't a trace of satisfaction on her face—only an ugly, stormy expression.
The wounds covering her body had been treated by Chiyo's emergency medical techniques. She wasn't back to peak, but at least she could fight again without being a liability. As soon as she could move, she and Chiyo had started sweeping through the Konoha ranks.
With no enemy of equal tier to hold them back, Kage-level shinobi became pure slaughter engines.
Chunin might survive a move or two.
Genin died instantly.
Even jōnin, faced with two Kage-level enemies working together, could barely last a minute or two before being taken apart.
But even after they'd killed over a hundred Konoha shinobi…
Uchiha Feiyu still showed absolutely no intention of engaging them.
Instead, he treated it like some twisted competition—madly mowing down Suna shinobi on the other side of the battlefield.
Even among Kage-level fighters, the speed at which you could kill weaker opponents varied tremendously.
And Feiyu… was very clearly in the fastest category.
Invisible and blindingly fast, he could decapitate any non-sensor Chunin or genin in an instant. Add in the ghostly, unpredictable White Fang Kenjutsu, and even jōnin usually died within three moves—throats quietly slit before they knew what hit them.
His speed and stealth also gave him an extraordinarily high "disengage rate". He rarely got bogged down by enemy jōnin, and almost never found himself surrounded.
Even if Pakura and Chiyo wanted to chase him, he simply never gave them the chance.
And worse—the moment they tried, he would just use the chase window to kill even more ordinary Suna shinobi.
They'd already killed over a hundred Konoha shinobi—
But Feiyu's Suna kill count was approaching three hundred.
If this continued, the first ones to mentally collapse wouldn't be Konoha.
It would be Suna.
"That bastard has a cruel heart," Chiyo thought, jaw clenched. "He doesn't care at all about his own side's casualties…"
Her face twisted with fury—
Then slowly smoothed out, expression draining to something cold and still.
"Damn it… looks like we'll have to use the last resort early."
"Our last resort…?" Pakura hesitated, frowning.
But as she looked out at the battlefield—the dying Konoha, the faster dying Suna, and that invisible butcher she couldn't pin down—she nodded.
"You're right. This is the time."
With a loud bang, Chiyo summoned a strange puppet with an absurdly swollen belly.
Her lips curved in a thin, cold smile.
"Thankfully, that woman didn't join this war for whatever reason," she muttered. "So let Konoha's shinobi enjoy the pinnacle of puppeteer craftsmanship in her place."
She slammed her hands together.
The puppet's swollen abdomen suddenly split open in dozens of tiny vents—
And boiling white vapor blasted out like steam.
The moment they saw the smoke spreading, Chiyo popped a small black pill into her mouth without hesitation. Pakura did the same.
Every Suna shinobi who saw the white haze drifting their way likewise reached into their pouches, pulled out identical pills, and swallowed.
As for the Konoha shinobi who didn't have those pills…
Many of them only barely brushed the edge of the smoke before they doubled over, coughing violently. Eyes, nose, and throat all ignited at once, as if doused in liquid fire; their lungs seized up, their breathing almost completely cut off.
"So this is… chemical gas, huh. Didn't think Suna had something like this up their sleeve."
Feiyu hadn't expected a trick like this.
But he wasn't especially afraid.
The biggest problem was that the "gas" spread rather slowly. For ordinary shinobi, as long as they weren't being held down, it was laughably easy to withdraw outside the affected area.
Strong wind-release users could simply blow it away temporarily, buying themselves a pocket of safety.
From Feiyu's perspective, a weapon like this was best used with terrain advantage—narrow canyons, enclosed valleys—or in a fully encircled situation where the enemy had nowhere to run.
Used like this?
It would certainly drive Konoha off this sector and rack up some casualties… but the actual death toll from the gas itself wouldn't be that high.
As the smoke rolled toward him, Feiyu, still invisible, casually decapitated a Suna shinobi who was just about to swallow his antidote pill.
He plucked the pill from the dead man's slack fingers and swallowed it himself.
Then, without a word, he slipped into the densest part of the white fog.
Inside the haze, Feiyu quickly realized something important:
This so-called "poison gas" wasn't actually a true instant-kill toxin.
Yes, the fog looked ominous and deadly.
But the toxicity itself…
Wasn't.
It wasn't the kind of thing that would fell a shinobi on the spot.
Truthfully, it probably couldn't even kill an ordinary civilian without ten minutes of continuous exposure.
Most of the Konoha shinobi inside the haze were still running around like panicked chickens, hands over their faces, coughing their lungs out and stumbling in random directions. If Suna hadn't been chasing them, most of them probably could've made it out alive with just nasty irritation.
The real threat wasn't the chemical itself.
It was the reaction.
Inhaling the gas triggered:
violent coughing fits,
swollen, burning throat,
intense, stabbing pain in the eyes.
In other words, for a shinobi—
This "poison" was basically a weaponized, supercharged pepper-spray smoke.
And normal gas masks didn't help at all.
Feiyu even saw a Konoha ninja still wearing a mask, hacking his lungs out as a Suna shinobi cut him down.
"Figures," Feiyu thought. "Real nerve gas is hard to make. You want it to kill fast and spread fast and be inhalation-based and be cheap enough to deploy in quantity… that's a tall order."
Stack all those requirements together and even with Suna's deep expertise in toxins, making a true battlefield-killer gas on this scale would be insanely difficult—
And insanely expensive.
Which was exactly why Suna had gone for a powerful irritant-type smoke bomb instead of a true lethal gas.
They were simply too poor to field the real thing.
"Whatever. Whether Konoha wins or loses doesn't really have much to do with me," Feiyu decided. "The important thing is that I keep cutting shinobi and stacking profit."
Inside the thick white haze, he moved like a ghost given form.
One invisible sweep at a time—
And Suna shinobi's throats opened in red smiles.
Because they were inside "friendly" gas and had already taken their antidotes, most of them had relaxed.
The choking smog also limited how far they could see. Between the blurry vision and the general chaos, they couldn't clearly make out their comrades falling in the distance.
Feiyu quickly realized something ironic:
Killing Suna shinobi inside the gas was actually easier.
Before, the "Ghost of Konoha" legend was already well-established.
The moment a Suna shinobi saw a comrade suddenly keel over, throat spraying blood with no visible enemy nearby, they would panic and scatter.
It took time and effort for Feiyu to chase them down.
But now?
Inside this smoke screen, the Suna shinobi were blind and complacent.
They never even saw him.
They never sensed him.
And one by one—
They simply died without ever knowing why.
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