[send some power stones please]
"Four hundred and thirty-second…"
The sword flashed.
A thin line of blood burst from the target's body—
But as Uchiha Feiyu completed the motion, feeling the smoothness of a strike he'd repeated hundreds of times, a faint wrongness prickled at the back of his mind.
His figure blurred backward.
The "bleeding body" in front of him suddenly split open with a mechanical clack—not flesh, but wood and metal.
It was a puppet.
Hidden mechanisms burst to life. A storm of poisoned needles and a cloud of toxic smoke exploded through the space Feiyu had occupied a moment before.
"Damn brat!"
A furious snarl echoed through the mist as more shapes emerged.
One after another, puppets stepped out of the haze—ten of them, draped in white cloth, their silhouettes like shrouded ghosts.
They closed in, surrounding Feiyu in a tightening ring.
"Tch… old hag Chiyo again, huh."
Feiyu smiled lazily.
"Huh. And Pakura's not with you? Aren't you afraid I'll just go finish her off?"
To be blunt, if Chiyo stood her ground and fought to the death, Feiyu was confident he could kill her. And even if she ran, shredding two or three of her puppets would be trivial.
From somewhere among the puppets, a cold voice replied:
"I just need to keep you here. Don't forget—in this fog, the only shinobi around are ours from Sunagakure."
Chiyo herself still hadn't shown her face.
"Oh, so that's your plan…"
Feiyu chuckled.
"Figures. Puppeteers like you were never known for guts—how would you dare face White Fang's blade head-on?"
He tilted his head, voice going casual and cruel.
"Your son, your son-in-law, your grandson… all died under White Fang's sword, right? Tsk, tsk. Old and with no heirs left. When you think about it, you're actually pretty pitiful."
"What did you say?! You little bastard!! What about my grandson?!"
"You mean Sasori of the Red Sand?" Feiyu said, pretending to think. "Red hair, deadpan face? Yeah, him. Of course he got chopped down by Konoha's White Fang."
"After all, when the so-called Kazekage gets killed by White Fang, his personal guard kind of has to die with him, don't they? Poor kid… I hear his last words were something about avenging his parents."
Every word out of his mouth was nonsense.
But the Kazekage's sudden "disappearance" was an undeniable fact. And around that time, Sunagakure had caught wind of Hatake Sakumo's movements, which they'd used as the excuse to light the fuse on the Third Ninja War.
The Suna leadership might have used "White Fang killed the Third Kazekage" as a pretext…
But deep down, they also believed it was possible.
There simply weren't that many top-tier monsters in the shinobi world. In terms of people who could silently assassinate a Kage, Sakumo was definitely on the shortlist.
Which meant that when White Fang's successor suddenly "confirmed" it out loud…
Possibility became certainty.
And when Chiyo imagined that after her son and daughter-in-law, even her only grandson had also been cut down by White Fang—
Her vision went red.
There.
Feiyu, who'd been spouting trash purely to bait her, saw the opening in an instant.
His body flickered.
The Grass Cutter Sword flashed and hacked downward—not at a puppet, but at a small, innocuous tree off to the side.
Steel cleaved wood.
A pained grunt came from behind the trunk.
Chiyo staggered out, clutching one arm, eyes burning with murderous hatred.
Her other hand snapped up.
Five of her puppets surged forward like mad beasts, then in mid-charge, they broke apart and reassembled into a strange, new structure.
"White Secret Technique—Five-Treasure Sky Bind!"
A strange current rippled through the air, creating an enormous suction force—
But that suction didn't pull in Feiyu.
It pulled Chiyo.
With a sharp whoosh, Chiyo vanished from in front of Feiyu's eyes. As she shot upward, she gave him one last venomous glare, then rode the five joined puppets up into the sky and disappeared from sight.
"…That thing comes with a flight mode?"
Feiyu stared for a moment.
"How's she gonna land?"
He honestly hadn't expected that.
From the looks of it, that technique was only good for running away. If puppeteers could fly and still fight effectively, Feiyu wouldn't want to deal with that at all.
"Let her slip away again, huh. That old woman is still using the same trick," Sakumo's voice echoed in his mind.
From the tone, it was obvious.
She'd probably used this exact technique to escape White Fang back in the day as well.
Without some special movement option, a puppeteer—even a legendary one like Chiyo—couldn't possibly outrun Hatake Sakumo.
"Something's off…"
Feiyu scanned the mist.
"Where did Pakura run off to? Whatever. Since Granny escaped, now's the perfect chance to farm."
Decision made, he first collected the remaining five puppets and Chiyo's severed hand as loot.
Then he expanded his perception.
With the number of souls he'd harvested, he'd picked up more than a few sensory techniques. Combined with his own Warden-of-Souls perception, his awareness now stretched for several hundred meters.
Within that range, every shinobi presence lit up clearly.
But very quickly, he realized—
The Suna signatures had thinned out.
A lot.
Even the white "gas" was starting to break apart and drift away.
Before long, Feiyu reached the origin point of the smoke.
The swollen-bellied puppet that had produced the gas was already smashed to pieces, its parts scattered across the ground.
He had no idea which Konoha "hero" had managed that.
He wasn't the only one capable of grabbing Suna antidote pills, after all. And this was Konoha—the village of "a hundred flowers in bloom"—there was no shortage of weird and niche abilities floating around.
It wouldn't be surprising if someone out there had a perfect counter for this kind of thing.
Especially when he noticed the ground around the broken puppet was littered with tiny black insect corpses.
Aburame clan bugs.
Someone had clearly used insect-based techniques to help neutralize the gas.
By the time the last of the smoke dispersed, Feiyu could finally see the bigger picture.
The battlefield was carpeted with bodies from both sides.
Konoha and Suna shinobi lay strewn across the ground, some burned, some sliced, some half-buried in shattered earth.
The once-mighty gold sand tide had collapsed, scattered into dull patches of metallic dust. The roar of battle had dwindled to sporadic, isolated clashes in the distance…and even those were fading.
"So… it's over?"
Feiyu blinked.
"Who the hell won?"
He felt strangely blank.
This "decisive battle" wasn't anything like what he'd imagined.
The battlefield was just too big. Add in the gas and the fact he'd been operating alone in limited visibility, and by the end he'd been completely cut off from the rest of Konoha's line.
To the point that, now that the fighting was done—
He genuinely had no idea who'd come out on top.
One thing was clear, though:
Both sides had paid dearly.
Just from the portion of the battlefield Feiyu could see, there were likely over a thousand dead on each side.
Add in the parts he hadn't seen, and…
Each army had probably lost more than half its shinobi.
Leaving the area that had been choked with gas, Feiyu soon came across several Konoha shinobi huddled together, bandaging one another's wounds.
His figure flickered and appeared in front of them.
They immediately tensed, clutching their kunai—
Then, upon spotting the Konoha forehead protector on his brow, sagged with relief.
"How's the battle?" Feiyu asked.
"We won!" one of them said, eyes bright despite the exhaustion. "Orochimaru-sama defeated the Fourth Kazekage! Sunagakure has retreated!"
The words finally snapped the last unknown into place.
Feiyu now knew how the decisive battle had ended.
◇ I'll drop one bonus chapter for every 10 reviews (leave a review/comment!)
◇ One bonus chapter will be released for every 100 Power Stones.
◇ Read 60 chapters ahead on P@treon: patreon.com/KageNaruto