In the soft light of early morning, Uchiha Feiyu slipped silently up to a Cloud-ninja supply depot.
This particular outpost was dedicated to producing explosive tags. The seals were written on a special kind of paper made from the pulp of chakra-infused trees.
The Land of Lightning was mostly high plateaus and sparse grasslands—such chakra trees were very rare there. Konoha, on the other hand, practically had them growing all over the place.
Shipping the wood all the way back to the Land of Lightning was a hassle, so Cloud had simply set up a production base here on Fire Country soil, churning out explosive tags on-site to send to the front lines.
"Gotta say, this really is 'taking from the enemy to use against the enemy'..."
Feiyu circled the compound a few times and sighed in vague admiration.
"For a 'ninja world', they're ridiculously well-developed when it comes to war logistics."
After a few loops around the perimeter, he drew the Kusanagi Sword from his back in a single smooth motion and slashed down.
There was a series of sharp cracking pops as the outer warning barrier shattered—its woven chakra torn apart cleanly by the Break-Evil aura on the blade.
The barrier was gone, and with it any real defensive function, but its alarm effect had already done its job. The ninja who were guarding the depot or working inside on explosive tags came rushing out one after another.
"One jōnin, one special jōnin… and over thirty Chunin? What kind of lineup is this?"
Feiyu eyed the group with a strange look.
The great hidden villages all followed the "three-to-four-man squad" doctrine. What stood in front of him now looked like a mass of people thrown together at random.
Then he noticed: a lot of those Chunin were still holding blank seal papers in their hands.
"Ah. So all these Chunin are just explosive tag scribblers."
"All together! Take this brat down!" someone shouted.
A Cloud shinobi flared his chakra.
"Lightning Release: Chakra Mode—!"
A pale corona of static flickered to life around him—
—and then the air erupted into a fine mist of blood.
Three-tomoe Sharingan spun scarlet in Feiyu's eyes as he stepped forward, white blade cutting arcs of lightning. With the White Fang sword style unleashed, he pounced into the group like a tiger into a flock of sheep.
Within moments, the ground was running red.
"So fast— urgh!"
"Just one guy? Don't underestimate us—!"
To Feiyu, with his reflexes and dynamic vision pushed to the absolute limit, every movement those Cloud-ninja made looked like it had been slowed down tenfold.
In many cases, his blade was already sliding out the back of their throats before their brains finished registering that they'd been attacked.
Even the jōnin among them had no strength to resist. At best, he managed to see Feiyu's strikes coming—but his body simply couldn't keep up. All dying really got him was the privilege of knowing how he was being cut down.
Feiyu tuned out their shouts, raising the Kusanagi Sword lightly.
Lightning crawled over his body, then flashed outward in a white-blue streak that tore into the cluster of Cloud ninja.
"Careful, he's from Konoha—!"
By the time the last flicker of lightning on Feiyu's body faded, all the Cloud shinobi present had already become corpses.
He snapped his fingers and summoned several great serpents from Ryūchidō. They began hauling the bodies away, one by one. Then he walked into the depot itself.
Moments later, the entire Cloud outpost went up in flames.
Feiyu plucked up a stack of explosive tags and weighed it in his hand, his Sharingan sweeping across the storage racks to estimate the volume. He couldn't help curling his lip.
"A bit over fifty thousand tags, huh… and this is after these guys working day and night for a full month."
"Seriously though, how the hell did Konan stockpile six hundred billion explosive tags…?"
Whatever those numbers were, they clearly weren't produced like this—one-by-one handmade. Even if you gathered every ninja from all five great villages, had them working day and night for a hundred years, they'd still never hit that figure.
He sealed the explosive tags into a scroll—no such thing as "too many" when it came to strategic resources—then unrolled a intel scroll and began picking his next target.
Over the next three days, Feiyu systematically tore through Cloud's logistics.
First he wiped out the explosive-tag production base.
Then he hit several Cloud supply convoys in succession.
Finally, he ambushed a unit that was supposed to be rotating off the front lines and heading back to the Land of Lightning.
The Great Ninja Wars were not only brutal, but dragged on for years. Whenever they could, the major villages rotated their shinobi: six months on the front, six months back home. It kept their bodies and minds from snapping under constant strain.
The rotating units also had responsibility for escorting the wounded back to their village.
But once Uchiha Feiyu picked up the trail of this particular rotation convoy, the outcome was… predictable.
Most of the rotating soldiers were slaughtered. As for the wounded—not one escaped.
In an age where medical ninjutsu existed, anyone still labeled "injured" after treatment was basically crippled. Any shinobi with a shred of compassion or pride would hesitate to kill people like that.
Unfortunately for them, in Uchiha Feiyu's eyes, "ninja" were mostly nothing but materials and NPCs. Being badly hurt just meant your materials were easier to collect.
Somewhere on the border between the Land of Fire and the Land of Frost, in a small, ordinary town, Feiyu glanced down at the Kusanagi Sword in his hand, its blade faintly shining with a ghastly white haze.
A smile curved his lips.
"After that many kills, the Break-Evil aura on Kusanagi is finally complete."
"At this point, I don't have to fear even the Third Raikage anymore."
Just then, he felt something.
He reached into his shirt and pulled out a three-pronged kunai.
With a soft pop, a figure appeared beside the kunai—a young man with golden hair and a handsome face: Konoha's Golden Flash, Namikaze Minato.
"Minato-senpai, what brings you here? Something changed on the front?"
Feiyu asked, genuinely puzzled.
Minato nodded, speaking quickly:
"Yes. We don't know what set them off, but the Cloud forces have mobilized their entire army—they're preparing for a decisive battle!"
"Orochimaru-sama sent word. I'm here to bring you back to the front to participate in the final engagement."
Cloud got provoked by something…
Feiyu's mind turned once, and he immediately thought of that rotation unit he'd butchered.
Killing shinobi rotating off the front was bad enough by itself. But on top of that, he'd slaughtered two to three hundred crippled ninja, then had their bodies hauled off to Ryūchidō by giant snakes to be fed into the blood pool.
From Cloud's point of view, that wasn't just killing injured soldiers—that was throwing their wounded to beasts, leaving not even bones behind.
Just killing the disabled was already cruel and contemptible. Taking even their corpses to use as "materials" crossed straight into monstrous.
Feiyu had always known that this approach would absolutely enrage those Cloud brutes.
So when he heard Minato's report, he wasn't the least bit surprised—he'd been expecting this reaction from the start.
◇ 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