Chapter 37.3- One Thousand Hands

The snake bit off my head and the rest of my muddy body collapsed around it and kept it frozen still, restricting its movement. Substitution complete, I erupted from the ground beneath her, giving her enough time to bring the glorified cylinder around to face me. The snake was for capture and restriction, the scorpion was a short-range specialist most likely, and so that meant that this one would be…

Right as predicted, the cylinder burst open, sending a massive blast of flames at me. I took a deep breath in to smell the ethanol from the relatively close puppet as I peeked at the internal design before I spat out a massive globe of water that took on the flames with ease before falling upon the puppet and drenching it. I shot around it, deciding that I had seen enough as I rushed at the woman.

To my disappointment, it seemed that was the sum total of her tricks and she was now going to make a suicide play. I avoided using my full speed to make it so that I was just reaching her when she twitched her pinky and the box she had somehow managed to unseal in the first flurry rose to enclose us. I stared at her unimpressed as the seals began to release a poisonous gas into the cage. I allowed my muddy body to begin to dissolve so she realised that she had failed to kill me while I attacked her with the last few seconds of existence I had.

A jounin was supposed to be a well-rounded shinobi, excellent in every field. Maybe by Suna standards, she was worthy of the rank but that meant little as I left her moaning wreck on the floor before my mud clone jutsu had finished deactivating- meaning she had lasted less than a minute against me in close quarters.

I considered setting the wooden box on fire and just killing the jounin, but had to stay my hand. Prisoners were worth something in this campaign- we had a Yamanaka after all. I smashed the box open with a single punch and dispersed the poison with a sealless wind jutsu. Uraume dropped down from the treeline behind me.

“How were they?” I asked.

“None gave me any trouble. A particularly tricky auditory genjutsu was the only thing of note, but nothing can hide from these eyes.” She said with a shrug and I nodded in agreement as we moved to pick up the woman I’d knocked unconscious. Picking her up, I silently made the decision to spend some time designing a seal for transporting captured prisoners. In a war like this one with the potential of acquiring all kinds of valuable targets- both in terms of information they might possess or unique kekkei genkai. Speaking of kekkei genkai, watching my mud clone as it slowly dissolved had given me a unique idea. I knew what earth release looked like, and that hadn’t quite been the right shade.

A/N; He finally starts getting on to the idea. I didn’t mean to make the mud release discovery take this long, but that was just the way things flowed.