🎉🎉STIN: Chapter 99/104

Chapter 99: None Shall Be Spared

Ryo moved.

He folded into shadow and vanished beneath the eaves.

When he reappeared, he was a phantom at the heavy, grime-stained door of the grand stone house in the village center.

Inside, the Grass leader was still swearing in his greasy voice.
"Kitsuchi-sama! Half a day! Just half a day! I swear on my head we'll bring that brat—"

The words never finished.

Skrrrr, CRACK!

Metal shrieked like torn space.
The thick door, strong enough to shrug off standard jutsu, exploded inward, along with a swath of adjoining stone, as if an invisible ancient claw had seized and crushed it.

Wood shards and stone chips rained through the room like a storm of death.
The oil lamps blew out under the shockwave.
Darkness flowed in like a living thing, swallowing the room whole, leaving only wreckage, and the brief, staccato screams of the two Kusa jōnin who had been posted by the door.

Dust swelled. Light died.

But this sudden dark was Ryo's home ground.

His silver eyes glittered in the grit, colder than any lamp.
Observation Haki had already netted every living presence in the room, positions, motions, even the next heartbeat mapped cleanly into his mind.

"The first."

His voice was emotionless, as if nailing down the first verdict.

At the table where the lamp had just gone out, the Iwa jōnin closest to the door was still locked in shock.

He felt only a chill wind kiss his neck, and then the world spun.
He saw a headless body tipping backward, his own, as a geyser of blood painted his comrade's face.

"The second."

Ryo never paused, never glanced at the flying head.

Kusanagi hummed through the dark like a reaper's scythe.
The blood-spattered Iwa jōnin jerked up a kunai on reflex.

Agony lanced his wrist.

Schlkt.

Steel and forearm parted together under a flash of winter light.

Blood fountained.

He did not even manage a scream before the second cut finished him, clean and final.

"Enemy attack! It's him! The black-market monster!"

Kitsuchi, to his credit, was the first to recover.
His roar, distorted by terror and fury, shattered the silence and lit the chaos.

"Boom! Rumble! Hold him! Protect Kitsuchi-sama!"

The surviving Iwa fought like veterans.
Hands flew, chakra flared.

"Earth Style: Rock Lance!"
Spiked spears jutted from the floor.

"Earth Style: Earth Dragon Bullet!"
A mud dragon's head reared and lunged.

"Earth Style: Eruption Core!"
The floor heaved and bucked to pin and break.

Light slashed through dust and dark.
Death licked every angle.

Ryo's mouth tilted in a thin, icy line.

Vmmm!

A shriek like bladed thunder ripped the air.
Kusanagi carved a vast, silver arc, the light almost swallowing the darkness.
Not mere sword aura, but chakra condensed to the brink of substance, a crescent swelling to tens of meters in a blink.

The silver crescent swept.

Rrrrrrrr.

Hot knife through butter.

Rock lances sheared to dust.
The roaring earth dragon's head tore apart like a sand sculpture in surf.
The bucking floor flattened under invisible weight, and the lingering edge scythed on, vaporizing everything in its fan.

"Ghhhk, aaah!"

Dust and stone screamed again.
Two Iwa chūnin, caught mid-seal for follow-ups, were bisected at the waist, defenses paper-thin before that cut.

The side wall split in a yawning wound, letting in starlight and torch-glow, and lighting the terror contorting Kitsuchi's face.

One stroke, every jutsu undone, men felled.
This was not a battle on the same plane.

Kitsuchi's pupils blew wide.
His heart almost missed a beat.

The intel had not lied.

He had once sneered at his father Ōnoki's order, abort if you encounter Ryo.
He had thought it fussing.
But facing this monster, whose chakra felt like a tailed beast's hide in steel, the comparison felt merciful.

"Stop him!" Kitsuchi howled, staggering back, hands flashing through seals.
"On me! Combined Earth Style!"

The Iwa survivors were elite indeed.
Fear swallowed and formation tightened, chakra braiding for a group defense.

But Ryo's target was never only the Iwa.

Through dust and shadow, his gaze pinned the Grass leader cowering in the farthest corner, close to fainting.

"Your guests, from Iwa?"

His voice was quiet, but every survivor heard it as clearly as a blade at the ear.

The Grass leader shook like a sieve, crotch soaked, stench souring the air.
"S-spare me, my lord, n-not my fault, they forced me, I—"

Kusanagi answered for him with a single, smokeless point.

A cold star flicked through dust and punched his brow.

The heavy body wobbled, face frozen mid-plea, and toppled backward with a thud.

"The first account settled."

Ryo drew back the blade and turned toward the chaos outside.

"Now, the rest."

As if to crown his words, the village alarm finally split the night.

Woooo, woooo, woooo.

The sirens wailed.
Kusagakure yanked awake.
Kusa-nin poured from their ramshackle huts, some half-dressed, some bleary, all faces stamped by fear.

"Intruder!"
"At the chief's stone house!"
"Kill him! Defend the village!"

Panic spread like plague.
Jōnin bellowed orders, trying to shape a line.
Dozens of chūnin and genin converged like a startled swarm, kunai and shuriken flashing a sea of edges in torchlight, enough to trouble even a Kage.

Inside, Kitsuchi and the last jōnin finished their sequence in the breath Ryo had spent speaking.

Dense earth chakra knotted before them.

"Earth Style: Earth Flow Wall, Combined."
"Earth Style: Stone Golem Carapace!"

A wall far thicker than any normal earth rampart, spined and towering, erupted between Ryo and the Iwa.
At the same time, a heavy rock armor plated the defenders.
Their last hope, a tortoise shell to buy a heartbeat.

Ryo eyed the instant wall and the rising noise of the mob outside.

"Fool's wall. Fools behind it."

His heel hammered the broken floor.
Stone spider-webbed and sank.

Riding that savage kick, Ryo became red lightning, faster than a jōnin's shunshin, a body pushed to brutal limits.

Target, the combined earth wall.

"Come on, then," one Iwa jōnin sneered from behind the barricade.
No one could body-check this grade of joint defense.

At the instant of impact, Kusanagi shifted.

Not a chop, but a serpent, a blur of needle points in the same place.

"Kuzuryūsen (Nine-Head Dragon Flash)."

No sweeping aura, only speed to the edge of sight, a kill by puncture.

Shk! Shk! Shk! Shk! Shk! Shk! Shk! Shk! Shk!

Crack.

At the precise point of entry, the wall, fused by multiple jōnin's chakra, spidered with fractures exploding outward.

A heartbeat later—

BOOM, crashhh!

The meter-thick, spike-studded rampart blew open from the center, as if bombed from within.

Stone shrapnel tore backward like cannonshot.

"Guh...!"

"Urk...!"

No one behind it expected such brute contempt for their defense.

Shrapnel and shock chewed through them, the golem armor crazing and sloughing under speed and force.

A jōnin nearest the breach took Ryo's carried momentum full in the chest, sternum caved, eyes bulged, dead before he fell.

Ryo burst through dust and debris without pause, a blood-baptized god of slaughter, and shot out into the street, into the forming ring of Kusa-nin.

(To be continued.)

Special thanks to Jonathan Geesling for sponsoring this extra chapter 🎉🎉🎉

Chapter 100: My Father

"He's out!" "Attack!"

A storm of kunai, shuriken, senbon, even tags, came down like a torrential rain, all of it aimed at the crimson blur bursting into the open.

With blades and paper death scissoring from every direction, leaving almost no room to dodge, a glint like ice flashed in Ryo's eyes.
His body snapped through micro-steps at angles and frequencies naked eyes could not follow, tight pivots, razor slips, each movement threading the gap past the densest kill zones.

Observation Haki, full spread.

In his vision the lethal trajectories slowed to clarity.

Every lift of a wrist, each twitch of an eye, the tell of a shoulder, all of it telegraphed the next point of impact.

He shaved past three kunai guarding his throat, arched back under a tag that scraped his cheek, and slid sideways through a gale of shuriken.
His steps pattered a staccato across the ground, shadow blurring.

Extreme speed footwork flowed into close quarters taijutsu.

The crowd surged.
He threaded it like a ghost, untouched.

Kusanagi, in that instant, became a reaper's invitation.

Cold light flared.

"Splch!"

The elite jōnin leading the rush lifted his blade only halfway before the point punched through his heart.

"Crack!"

Another jōnin's kunai, and his waist, parted in one merciless cut. Gore fanned.

A chūnin flung a chain from the flank to bind him. Ryo did not even look.
A flick of the wrist drew a perfect arc, the chain, and the arm holding it, spun away.

A whisper of air, an ambush from behind.
Ryo's body rotated in place against physics, the sword light wheeled.
The attacker, and two genin beside him, bloomed red at the throat and folded.

Every swing harvested one life, or several.

Each step, each cut, a gear in a precision killing machine.

The swordcraft learned from the Red Haired Emperor shone at full in the crush of melee.

Kusanagi drank and thrummed, humming an eerie red.

"Monster!" "He's too fast! We can't hit him!"
"Don't panic! Bury him in bodies! He'll run out of chakra, out of strength!" a Grass officer screamed from the rear, trying to steady the line.

"Run out?" Ryo's voice cut through screams and iron, edged with frost. "Heh."

He stopped moving.

He lifted Kusanagi high.

Tailed beast scale chakra flooded the blade without restraint.

Silver white fire roared along the edge.
Compress. Condense.
A destroying pressure spiked upward.

The charging Kusa-nin faltered as a tangible killing will pressed their skin to ice.
Despair rose like a cold tide and smothered their legs.

"Stop him!" Kitsuchi's voice shattered into a distant, broken shriek.

Too late.

Kusanagi sang, a clear, long note out of the ninth hell, as if the blade itself strained under the force channeled through it.

A titanic arc of sword energy fell like divine wrath, Ryo's full power cleaving forward in a one hundred eighty degree sweep.

VWAAAM.

This time the slash was not a taut beam of tens of meters, but a howling tsunami, nearly twenty meters wide, more than five meters high, silver white light saturated with the growl of storm and thunder.

Where it passed, space seemed to twist and buckle.

Air imploded, vacuum ripping a dead zone in its wake.

Crushing. Truly crushing.

Kunai, shuriken, senbon, all vaporized on contact like ice flecks in a blast furnace.

The dozens of chūnin and genin in the lead line, bodies, weapons, protectors, cloth, touched the edge of that light and, like cheap foam against a red hot brand, did not even scream, they simply became halves.

The slash did not slow.

The shattered wall of the stone house planed flat in silence.

Shacks and thatch huts met a typhoon's heart, sucked into the storm, torn and rendered to splinters.

Flagstones split into a trench several feet deep and nearly twenty meters across.
Torchlight guttered, crushed by the shock front.

One stroke.

In the fan before Ryo, out to nearly two hundred meters, everything, things living and not, vanished.
The view yawned wide, as if an eraser had gouged a brutal bite out of the village.

Silence.

Absolute silence sealed what remained of Kusagakure.

The survivors, those just outside the arc, those spared only by a low stance and missing an arm or a leg, froze.

Their faces were masks of extremity, fear and blankness.
Comrades who had stood beside them a breath ago, gone.

Around the edge of the scar, limbs littered the ground, the pressurized wake of the slash's wind.
Blood gathered in runnels and spilled into the trench.
The air went thick sweet with dust and iron.

"D demon..." "Judgment, it is judgment..." "Run! He isn't human!"

Collapse broke loose.

Elite jōnin, genin, all will to resist fled.
They screamed, sobbed, trampled each other to flee, to get away from the crimson figure at the brink of annihilation, sword blazing with light.

Ryo watched the inferno without expression, breath a little rough.

Then he moved again, a red bolt, to settle accounts.

This time, the wide slash was not even necessary.

Kusanagi became silver lines threading the crowd.

Every flicker took lives, heads severed, hearts skewered, waists parted.

Too fast. Too strong.
Any who tried to resist, even those one heartbeat slow from fear, fell in an instant.

When rare burly Kusa jōnin tried to block, Ryo pulsed his wrist, raw force shattered arms and ribs, the edge finished the rest.

Kill. Kill. Kill.

Kusagakure had become a crucible of blood and fire.

The once noisy village was now an Avīci wasteland.

Flames licked the collapsing roofs, boiling a nauseating sweet tang out of the blood.

Bodies everywhere, the gaps between broken walls ran dark red like creeks.
Each of Ryo's flashes scored a deeper wound across this man made hell.

At last, his red gaze fixed on a dirt streaked figure tumbling and crawling at the edge of the chaos.

Kitsuchi.
Iwa jōnin.
Ōnoki's own son.

The pride and elite poise were gone.
Mud and blood filmed his protector and face. In his eyes only the pulverized remains of courage.

Their combined wall, a joke in Ryo's first pass.

His subordinates, already mulch in the path of destruction.

A cold premonition strangled his spine.
He threw his weight, flailing, desperate to slither away, but every step felt Death close another finger.

Kusanagi's chill was already breathing on his nape.

He glanced back, straight into Ryo's silver eyes, free of any emotion.

No mockery. No anger.
Only the remote gaze one gives the soon to die.

"No!"

Kitsuchi's pupils split, reason drowned.
A severed arm caught his ankle, he pitched face first into a slick of hot, clotted muck.

He rolled, scrambled, throat tearing a not quite human scream.

Death's crimson was upon him.
Kusanagi's tip trailed tacky threads of blood, wrapped in a cyclone of chakra, falling like a mountain, ripping air, stopping at the fatal point between his brows.

Under the blade, all his luck, all his pride, every hour of shinobi drill ground to grit.
His mind went white, only one reflex remained, branded in bone.

"STOP!"

He gathered the last of his strength and life's instinct into a hysterical, cracking howl that knifed the brief hush of slaughter.

"My father, Ōnoki!"

Time seemed to freeze.

The stink of blood, the crackle of fires, the far off wailing, all blurred to backdrop.
Only the sword hanging over Kitsuchi's skull, beading enemy blood, and the face beneath it, twisted by terror into snot and tears, stood carved in broken moonlight and flame.

That desperate, crazed declaration plopped into the lake of carnage like a stone, rippling a brief, eerie ring, then sank toward stillness.

Kusanagi thrummed, suspended, its tip's blood glob trembling.

(To be continued.)

Special thanks to Jonathan Geesling for sponsoring this extra chapter 🎉🎉🎉

Chapter 101: To Dust

Kusanagi paused.

The tip hovered half an inch before Kitsuchi's brow.

A single viscous bead of blood, heavy with its master's killing intent and crushing chakra, trembled there, reflecting a face twisted to ruin by terror, filthy with tears and snot.

That hysterical scream, "My father, Ōnoki," split Kusagakure's deathly quiet for a heartbeat, then was eaten by wind, ash, and blood.

Ryo's gaze dropped to the heap of mud called Kitsuchi at his feet.

Kusagakure?

His eyes skimmed the ruin, fire writhing in broken frames, bodies jumbled, blood running like oars through a red canal.

The fall of Kusagakure, no different from the drowned Whirlpools, no different from the Land of Rain flattened into battlefield slag.
Weakness is original sin. No matter how many die, they are footnotes under great nations' games.

And the culprit? Hiruzen will scold for show, perhaps, but with the war gridlocked, Konoha wants his blade.
Grass fell? Then Grass fell.

But this man, Ōnoki's son, what does he mean to Konoha right now?

A cold thought knifed through Ryo's mind.
Kill him?

Kusanagi's hum deepened.

The cost wrote itself. Ōnoki, old and stubborn, had this late born son as the axis of his heart.

Cut Kitsuchi, and you blind the Tsuchikage, you spear his chest.
A raging Ōnoki would hurl Iwa's full might, cost be damned, to repay Konoha.

If the line buckles?
If the rivers run with blood?

Can Hiruzen hold?

Ryo's mouth twitched into a small, cruel curve.

And if he cannot, so what?
Konoha's lofty advisers, the shortsighted townsfolk, they would only pin a scapegoat, Kamiyama Ryo's fault.

"If he hadn't killed Ōnoki's precious boy, the Tsuchikage wouldn't have gone mad.
Ryo dragged disaster to our door, he took our sons, our fathers."

He could see their faces already.
Nuisance.

He did not care for himself, but Kushina? Tsunade, that glorious maniac? And Mikoto?
Caught in the crossfire, they would only suffer.

Even if Hiruzen was still mostly wise, Ryo's rescue of Tsunade and the power he had shown had already planted a thorn in the Hokage's back.

The elders. Danzō.
Even if Hiruzen did not nod, he would look away.

So why should Ryo kill Kitsuchi for Konoha?
Why carry the blame for them?
Why hand them the knife?

Why stand alone before the tidal wrath of Iwa?

His killing urge thinned, and the ice of mockery grew sharper.

Take Iwa's little envoy with him.
Back to the blood swept Land of Rain.
Let Danzō's black heart weigh Kitsuchi's worth.

Let Root gnaw on Iwa's problem.
Ryo brings him in, mission delivered.
Waste recycled. Value extracted.

But, going back empty handed besides the hostage?
Would he see a share of Kitsuchi's value?

Kusanagi trembled. The bead finally fell, pattering across Kitsuchi's terrified face.

"Trash." Ryo's voice was not loud, but it stabbed the frozen eardrum like an icicle.

Kitsuchi's heart seized.
Death had not moved on.

"Your life has a price," Ryo said, stepping forward, the sole of his foot slick with red chakra. "But not enough to buy those brittle bones."

He stamped the shin.

Crack.

Bone snapped with a sound that tore the air.
Kitsuchi's scream went inhuman.

"Want to live? Pay for it."

Ryo raised his foot again, poised over the other leg.

Agony shattered Kitsuchi's last illusions.
He understood, it was not his father's name buying mercy, it was that he himself had become stock on a market stall.

"Ah, ah, stop! What do you want? Money? Intel?"
He howled, tears and snot mixing with the blood, but the colder fear was the word value in Ryo's mouth.

"Ninjutsu."

Kitsuchi's pupils tightened.
Pride as Ōnoki's son flared one last time.
"Dream on. Iwa's secret arts aren't—"

Crack.

The second leg shattered.

"AAAA—!"

His scream broke pitch. He nearly passed out. Survival clenched his jaw.
He looked into those dead silver eyes, not human.

This man did not care.
Their secret arts were interest, not the core of the bargain.

If life could be spared, Ryo wanted Iwa's secrets, over his corpse. He remembered his father's mantra, the Will of Stone, and locked his teeth.

No matter the torment, Kitsuchi would not talk.

The grit irked Ryo. If force could not pry the seal, there were other doors.

He hauled Kitsuchi up, flashed with Flying Thunder God, and rejoined the others.

"Ryo, who's this?"

Seeing him reappear, slick with blood, Mikoto and the rest finally exhaled.
Nawaki eyed the ruin dangling from Ryo's grip, baffled.

"Mikoto. Your Sharingan, can you cast genjutsu?"

Ryo ignored Nawaki and looked to her.

The quiet Uchiha lifted her gaze, already blood red.
Sometime, somewhere in the Land of Rain's carnage, the twin tomoe had ripened, a little uncanny.

No words. The illusion fell.

Vmm.

An unseen lance of will punched into Kitsuchi's ruined mind.

Reality tore.
Through the pain, the world went red.
Ghosts clanked chains out of blood mud, raking his soul.
Halved comrades staggered toward him, screaming.
Worse, in his mind, sealed seals and chakra routes unspooled without his leave, as if iron hooks ripped memory free.

"Ghh, aah."

He convulsed, the body's agony compounded by the brain's violation.

Ryo stood over him, voice a cold burin.

"Added Weight Rock Technique.
Light–Weight Rock Technique.
Seals. Chakra paths. Effects. Core tricks.
From the start. Now."

Kitsuchi's mind pried open like a clam under a knife.

Secrets, rock village core lore, layered with brand seals, peeled like pearls under Ryo's demand and Mikoto's demonic tomoe.

He rasped them out like a broken machine, snatches of hand signs, meridian routes, choking, coughing blood into every syllable.

Ryo listened, memorized.

Added Weight Rock, a mobile gravity field.
Perfect furnace for tempering a monstrous body.

Light–Heavy Rock, a flight art rare in the shinobi world, priceless.

The greatest windfall of this mission lay in the heap of mud at his feet.

When he was sure he had wrung what he wanted, that glimmer sank.
He nudged Kitsuchi with his toe, the jōnin slumped, more sack than man.

"Tie him. Bring him."

Nawaki's stomach flipped at the sight of what had once been a strutting terror, now meat in a bag, but he grit his teeth and nodded.

Kaori, pale, trotted over with rope.
There was no pity in her eyes, only a tautness born of survival.

The four, with their Iwa VIP, left the furnace that had been Kusagakure.
Their road bent back toward the storm bitten front in the Land of Rain.

Mission complete.

Ryo felt no urge to sprint for that meat grinder.

The job was done. Their shoulders eased a fraction.

No need to hurry back to the downpour and iron.

Who knew what death warrant Danzō would throw next?

Better to slow the pace, let their eyes graze a land battered but stubborn, where green still found a way.

They eased their steps.
For once, no rush.
Ryo led, Kusanagi sheathed, the last blood drying black.

Nawaki dragged the fainted Kitsuchi.
Mikoto shadowed him, gaze clear again. The twin tomoe had faded, their strange gleam unlamented.

Kaori clung to Mikoto's sleeve, trying not to look at the red bundle bumping behind.

A rare quiet set in.
The sky was a smear of gray, but rain held.
They took a narrow path through trees rinsed clean, a touch of life returning.

Far from the stink of Grass, the air held a softer scent of soil.

Nawaki's nerves uncoiled a notch.
"If sis learns we not only finished the job, but netted a big fish—"

He broke off, catching Ryo's eye.

Ryo did not turn, but his steps carried an ease that said he held the reins.
This calm was bought by his blade.

"Rest a bit?" Kaori asked softly, tired.
She was frail to begin with. The long march had been hard.

"Mhm," Ryo said, gaze touching a roadside boulder, a decent perch.

And then, a scream sliced the stillness.

Kaori.

Her face blanched whiter than in Grass, whiter than death had made it.
She shook violently, as if a thunderbolt had struck.
Thin fingers clenched her collar. Breath hitched, like a cold hand pressed her throat.

Her eyes flooded with terror, staring past them down the road.

"What is it, Kaori?"
Nawaki snapped alert, dropped Kitsuchi, and stepped in front of her.
Mikoto's hand was already on her kunai, body bent into guard.

Ryo's body strung tight in the same blink.
He spun, silver eyes lancing toward Kaori's line of sight.
A faint, clinging foreboding, a predator's scent of blood, screamed warning in his chest.

Kaori's teeth chattered.
She pointed toward the bend ahead, voice scraping blood from her throat.

"S something, there. A, a chakra, s so, so terrifying."

She shook like a reed.

This was the Uzumaki's birthright, Kagura's Mind Eye, sounding its hopeless alarm.

That gift had let her slip the Grass repeatedly, vanishing into cracks where hunters could not follow, until Ryo's team had found her.

That same day, she had felt the kin echo in Nawaki's blood, a quarter line from Uzumaki Mito, and gambled everything to step into the open.

Silence.

The air congealed.

The insects and birds cut off as if strangled.

Only the wind moved, pushing the meadow smell past the bend and bringing with it a thread of death.

And in that hush, it burst, a sudden, unheralded, bone deep killing intent that froze marrow.

It detonated.
It fixed on them.

Ryo's pupils pinpricked to needles.
Kusanagi sang in its sheath, a sharp, urgent keening it had never voiced before.

Who was coming?

(To be continued.)

Special thanks to Jonathan Geesling for sponsoring this extra chapter 🎉🎉🎉

Chapter 102: The Heart Hunter

The air ahead warped strangely.

Deep in the path, within the thick, crowded shadow of the forest, a swath of darkness swelled, wriggling, pooling.

Like a tide surging up from an abyss.
Like venomous serpents knotting in a viscous bog.
A tangible malice, cold enough to freeze marrow, burst from that growing dark.

Vshlaa.

A dozen blades blacker than night, edges so sharp they seemed to slice sight itself, ripped the air without warning.
Not physical weapons, threads of chakra, compressed to murderous density.
They shredded light, ignored distance, and moved with thunder's speed.

Target, Ryo.

Earth Grudge Fear, tendril blitz.

Ryo's mouth flattened to a cold line.

His left foot hammered back. Force boomed in a ring, spattering hard packed mud.
His body twisted at an impossible angle, spine snapping like a serpent.
Shhk, shhk, shhk.
Air cracked as the threads screamed by. Red strands of hair drifted down.

Three threads that could pierce stone skimmed his brow, flank, and thigh, drilling smoking pits into the wet earth behind him.
Others he shed with a whip of waist and shoulder, leaving only afterimages.
The deadliest strike, aimed at his throat, met a sudden red arc that split it cleanly aside.

Tching.

Metal shrieked through the dead forest.
Kusanagi's dusky red edge clashed with a black thread, flinging a shower of sparks.

The impact rocked Ryo's arm and dragged a half step gouge underfoot.
In raw power, the match was even.

The writhing threads hesitated only a breath before curling back like sharks scenting blood, spiraling, stabbing again from fresh angles, weaving a death net.
Air shredded to a keening whine. Each strand carried energy enough to bore steel.

"Take them, Nawaki up front, Mikoto rear."

Ryo's voice was quenched ice, flat and absolute.

He spoke, and his sword was already cutting, no more parries, only severance.

Skraaa.

Compressed red light tore the air, Cut Flow.
A high frequency veil of edge shimmered before him.

It smashed headlong into the volley of black threads.

The slicing became a continuous roar, hot knife through hard wax.
Splinters of chakra thread spat away like iron filings in a gale.
Kusanagi's pure sharpness and the trembling blade art meshed perfectly.
Roots of black were sawn apart.

The severed cordage snapped back into shadow with a serpent's hiss.
But more threads crawled from every quarter, lethal feelers from a living abyss.

"Go."

Mikoto's whisper cut quick and low. Her eyes bled red, twin tomoe whirling as she pinned every writhing path.
She shoved a frozen Nawaki and a wilting Kaori.

Nawaki jolted awake, jaw clenched.
He heaved the limp Kitsuchi over one shoulder and yanked Kaori with the other, barreling toward thinner trees.
Kaori's legs buckled. She half ran, half dragged.

A sly thread needled up from the mud for Nawaki's ankle.

Mikoto flashed left. Her kunai met it at an impossible angle, sparks spat.
She danced between the hunters and her charges, Sharingan tracing every filament, her parries rattling like a monsoon on plantain leaves.

From the deeper shadow came a cool exhale of breath, a voice tinged with faint disappointment.

Most of the pressure lifted at once. Nawaki and Mikoto plunged into the side grove, shielding Kaori and hauling Kitsuchi away.

The net that bound Ryo ebbed, flowing back into the pulsing dark.

Silence returned to the grove's heart, heavier than before.
Killing intent condensed, compressing every inch of air until even damp seemed to stall.

That darkness at the path's end began to flow, to thin, to sink.

A tall, broad form condensed out of it and walked forward.

His torn, ash black robe was stained with soil and dew, blending with the green gloom like a statue clawed up from a tomb.
Deep green eyes were set in a face carved by age's ruts, cold and dead.
When they found Ryo, they seemed to drink in even the faintest light, leaving only greed and arithmetic.

A butcher eyeing a gold veined carcass.

Across the chest and shoulders, his shape bulged, something wrong writhing under cloth.
A scent drifted, wet earth, rot, iron.

So Ōnoki's plotting and Danzō's guess were right.

Kakuzu, the bounty hunter.

Ryo straightened, silver eyes lighting from within, the offended chill of a strong man, and a near greedy hunger to test himself, flaring like lava in a waking volcano.
Kusanagi thrummed low and eager. A dim crimson ran his blade, the tip aimed at the foe, edge hissing the damp air to tatters.

"Kage class." Ryo's voice rumbled, a thread of heat in it. "Perfect."

He wanted a worthy whetstone. Kakuzu had walked to his door.

And he had Flying Thunder God. He could leave whenever he wished.

"One hundred million," Kakuzu rasped, sand on steel, each word cold and hard. "Is mine."

No speeches.
The verdict fell even as his hands blurred into seals.

Earth Style, Body Hardening.
Earth Spear.

His skin blackened to a metallic sheen, mass and gravity mounting in him like a mountain.
Almost simultaneously, the ground convulsed. Stone spears erupted in a forest of spikes at vicious angles, each thrust aimed to murder evasion.

Ryo did not back up.

He tore forward, a blood red blur ripping space.

Observation Haki, open.

Time stretched in the mind.
Every spike's birth, angle, and vector sketched itself on a precise map inside him.
Each footfall landed in the slit second gaps, on faces not yet set.

Kusanagi flashed to light.

Pierce the Gale, a plain, perfect thrust.
The tip stabbed at leverage points on the worst of the spikes, power focused to a needle.

Rock burst dull and heavy. Half man spikes collapsed from their tips.

Cut Flow again, blade singing like a dragon.
A vibrating edge became a storm wall. Flanking spears hit the invisible gale and skidded, smashing each other to rubble.

Ryo leapt and slid through the killing grove, precise, efficient, no waste.
Pure instinct, honed to a razor.

He was fast, but Kakuzu's next move was faster.

As Ryo cut past the last spikes, Kakuzu's hardened left fist clamped, crushing the air, over Ryo's line.

A shrill, nerve saw squeal ripped the grove.

Lightning Release: False Darkness.

Blue white lances detonated, a condensed thunder spear, not a straight shot but a sweeping fan, far faster than the threads, the pressure of it warping the air.
It lit Kakuzu's dead face and, for an instant, weight in Ryo's silver eyes.

Not a mere follow up.
It blotted the only foothold Ryo could use to jink away.

Timing. Angle. Perfect.

Ryo's pupils pinholed.
Momentum drove him into the spear's path.
Block?
Steel meant nothing to a natural force sweep that broad.

In the crack between thoughts, he abandoned the twist.
He spun with the last sliver of forward motion, the body a high speed gyroscope.

Both feet stamped the one flat rock face that had not shattered.
It exploded under the recoil.
He yanked a reverse burst out of physics.

Kusanagi wheeled in one arm, no art now, only force, a falling cleave.

Rock Sunder.

Compressed red light lashed up, head-on into the fan of thunder.

KRA THOOM.

The forest howled with ten thousand storms.

White incandescence swallowed the clearing.

Arcs chased like maddened serpents, snapping air. Trees flashed to charcoal and flame.

A pressure ring hurled pebbles and splinters in all directions.

At the detonation's center, the red cut drove into the lightning and held.

A heartbeat of deadlock, then the thunder spear split at the middle, snapped apart by brute red.

The storm shredded sideways in a bellow.

Ryo burst from the tattered light, flipping away.

Char streaked him, worst along the outer left arm, sleeve gone, skin blackened and stinking of sear, bone glimpsed white at the edge.

Needle stabs of numbness burrowed to the marrow.

Blood touched his lip. He wiped it away with the back of his hand and slid two meters in furrows before he locked stance.
Kusanagi drooped to the ground, tiny arcs still dancing along it, ringing on.

For the first time, Kakuzu's rock hard face cracked a fraction.
Shock flickered in dead green eyes.

One sword, split my false darkness?

"Warm up's over," Kakuzu rasped, worse than a whetstone's scrape.
Astonishment sank, greed rising darker and higher.
A hundred million prize, worthy indeed.

He slammed his hands together, no complex seals, only brutal motion.

Shhh, shhhh.

Air tore. Behind and beside him, space buckled. Thick halos of chakra twisted like opened sacks.

"Raaah."

Four inhuman shrieks, pain and fury, ripped up from nowhere.

Masks, four of them, wrenched out of Kakuzu's body by an unseen hand.
No flesh, semi phantoms of dense chakra.

Right shoulder, an ocher face, raw and rocky, hollow eyed, mouth split in a low bellow.
Left shoulder, a cyan face where wind seemed to coil visibly, shape blurred, edges screaming.

Right hip, a red face, lava flowing under skin like burning coal, heat chuffing from its slit.
Left hip, a blue white face clenched in lightning, beaked shriek and arcs crackling.

Kakuzu's aura vaulted free of fetters, four differing storms, earth's weight, wind's shred, fire's burn, lightning's lash, colliding and mixing around him.

Pressure turned air to glue. Birds ripped from branches in panic.

The masks hung about him, empty eyes locking Ryo across the distance.

All five natures, this was how he hunted Kage.

"Combine," Kakuzu said, two stones for teeth.

At once the cyan wind mask inhaled, its belly swelling visible to the eye.
The red mask puffed with it.

Wind Pressure.
Fire Blast.

No orders needed, organs of one beast.

The wind core fired first, not a simple ball, but a high speed rotor, a compressed core meant to shred steel.

It swelled the instant it left the mouth, yanking leaves and gravel to mince them to dust.

An instant later, a sheet of molten red flame raved out, like poured magma.

Wind fed the fire. Fire rode the wind.

They braided, and daylight died.

The wind core blew apart, not as a shockwave, but into a cloud of saw blade cyclones, each a high compression cutter.

They plunged into the fire.

Fwooo, KRAK KRAK KRAK.

The mass swelled severalfold.
Flame reddened to whitish terror.
Moisture ripped from the earth. Ground cracked.

Dozens of fire serpents, driven by storm and sliced by blades of air, roared outward, sweeping a fan wider than ninety degrees before Ryo.

Heat warped the world. Everything shivered in the mirage.

Air boiled. The scorching blast rode a pressure keen enough to flense.

The fire wall hit Ryo's front, no room to dodge.

(To be continued.)

Special thanks to Jonathan Geesling for sponsoring this extra chapter 🎉🎉🎉

Chapter 103: The Throw

Kakuzu's mouth twitched into a cold, rigid curve, as if he could already hear the clink of coins hitting his purse.

In the instant the tidal wave of flame crashed toward Ryo, he was cornered.

Ahead, a devouring sea of wind and fire.
Left and right, walls of invisible, knife edged wind.

Behind, dead ground still sparking with Lightning Release.

"Huff, ha!"

At the razor's edge, Ryo sucked air in with a detonation.
His silver eyes pinholed, and under the crushing vise he chose madness.
He did not retreat. He inhaled the burning air, bellows chest swelling.
Every packed muscle groaned under the load, then locked by greater will.

All power, chakra, every last shred of life scraped from the brink, compressed and fused, target, both legs.

Stones not yet fully cracked powdered under a thunderclap of force.
The recoil launched him like a fired shell, straight into the Flame Gale maelstrom.
He chose the rudest, most brutal road, forward.

At the storm's edge his body bent backward from the spine into a drawn bow.
Back and core, bone and muscle, every cell howled.

Kusanagi rose.

"HRAAA!"

Sword followed heart.

The dark red light did not arc, it ignited like a hell furnace.

A compressed pillar of molten crimson, sharp at its point as if to pierce the void, a furnace at its tail, erupted from Kusanagi.

"RRRR, BOOOOM!"

Two planes colliding, an eschaton rolling through the trees.

White blaze swallowed everything.
The Flame Gale's pallid glare and the crimson column smashed and locked, space itself laced with hairline black cracks.

A heartbeat of stalemate, and then, under Kakuzu's disbelieving stare,
schlrrk, the red column knifed into the storm's core like a hot blade into iron.

At the contact point, annihilation thundered.
Pallid fire tore. Wind compressed to blades hit a spinning mill and ground to dust.
Shredded flame and wind spat like stray bullets, lighting distant trees.

Ryo, wreathed in lava red glow, shot from the rupture, an arrow forged in a hell furnace, burning itself out yet carrying killing weight.
Man and blade as one.

Pft. Pft. Pft.

He was on fire.
Half his hair was seared away.
Skin was charred and crazed, left side worst, armor ash, muscle smelling of cooked meat, bone winking pale.
Fresh wounds layered over lightning burns.

But the blaze in his eyes outstripped the blaze on his skin.
His right arm trembled from the force he had wrung from it. The tiger's mouth split, blood slipping down the grip.

He did not stop.

He hit, slid, and lunged, Kusanagi trailing sparks, a blood red blur again.

Target, the lightning mask hovering at Kakuzu's right hip.

Kakuzu's pupils finally flashed with real shock and fury.

The Flame Gale, broken head on?
Not in his math.

"Hmph."

The lightning mask's beak yawned. Blue white glare tightened to a point, Pseudo Darkness, a world ender's spear, locking the charging crimson for a pin to the void.

The wind mask whirled, scalpels of pressure crossing into a death net ahead.
The earth mask flashed ocher into Kakuzu, Earth Spear thickening his hide to stone.

Lightning to the throat, wind to the ribs, a double kill.
Ryo's silver eyes flared.

Observation, open.

Time smeared thin.
The spear's blinding path, the wind net's blind spots, the instant the ocher glow sank in and his skin took a second lamina, all of it laid out like a slowed blueprint.

"Three left, drop!"

His body moved before thought.
At full sprint, he folded like paper and dove left.

KRA THOOM.

The lightning spear scraped his nape and ploughed a trench meters deep.

Shhh.

Wind scalpels kissed scalp and spine, carving trenches to the bone. Blood seared into scabs at once.

No pause.

At the dive's bottom he pivoted on his left foot, a top's whirl, and with that spin he hauled Kusanagi from low to high in a scything crescent.

Target, the lightning mask in reach.

"Skreek."

Lightning flared as it tried to harden defense.
Too late.

His dive and spin lived in the masks' overlap blind spot, timed like a god's fingertip.

The dark red edge split the lightning mask down the center.

For a breath, the world froze.

The mask halved. Blue white arced madly, a net losing control, snapping and fizzing before going to dust.

One heart, down.

"Ghh, AAAH!"

Kakuzu screamed, inhuman, like a heart ripped live.

His chakra rhythm lurched.

Chance.

No breath to savor.

In the same slice, Ryo's pupils caught the coal red fire mask at Kakuzu's right hip, its mouth flaring to birth.

No second chance.

Cost, meaningless.

A tenth of a blink before the blast, Ryo ignored skin sizzling, blood loss, bone deep hurt.
He packed what remained, right arm only.
Kusanagi shrieked under the load, blade juddering as if to snap.

"Off."

He crushed the charred earth and sprang, shoving the arm with the last of his life.
No art, only a savage thrust.

Pierce Flow, all of Pierce the Gale crushed to a point, body's push stacked on top, a dark red needle faster than lightning, straight for the mask's core.

Sensing death, the fire core collapsed inward to a white hot shield.

PFF, SKSH.

The tip stabbed the collapsing red, a hot knife into cold tallow, resistance heavy, but the edge, born to kill, bit through.

A thunder inside a drum, not explosion, annihilation.

The fire mask imploded like a pricked blister. Light dimmed, warped, then shredded into sparks drifting on a sulfur wail.

Second heart, down.

"Kff, pt."

Ryo spat blood, breath burning.
Every wound tore wider in that thrust.
Kusanagi nearly leapt from his grip. He clamped harder.

He swayed, but his gaze locked the next mark, the wind mask over Kakuzu's left shoulder.

Kakuzu's stone face finally broke, twisted rage and a miser's grief for lost assets.

Not sorrow, loss.

Earth light thickened his hide again. His killing intent peaked.

Finish it, lock with stone spears below, a wind drill to the heart, crush under falling pressure.

Blood hissed out of Ryo's charred skin, steaming hopelessness.
The left arm was gone to numbness, lightning and fire's shared feast leaving bone peeking white.
Every fiber screamed. Strength ebbed like a falling tide.

Kakuzu's greedy focus pinning him.

And then, from the deepest place, the swordsman's soul he had forged under the Red Haired Emperor's shadow roared.

"One, more!"

The cry was cracked and sanded, but it carried a terminal courage.
It jarred even Kakuzu's control, a flicker of disbelief in those wrinkled green eyes.

He still has a last move?

Ryo's silver blaze exploded, bright enough to outshine the fire on him.
Not chakra. Not muscle.
Will, burning the soul.

Observation, beyond the limit.

Every wild arc around him, each micro path of the wind drill's inner streams, every spike's microsecond of birth from the earth below, even the grain shift of Kakuzu's twice hardened skin, all of it etched with icy clarity into his mind.
Time dragged long in thought, warped at the edges.

His body moved before intent.

He abandoned defense wholly.
He poured his last filament of chakra, the dregs wrested from burning life, and the will to pierce the sky and sever fate, into his right hand, into the partner that had sung through a hundred battles, Kusanagi.

No slash.
No stab.
Those demanded paths and space he no longer owned.

Throw.

The instant the earth spears burst from below, stone, iron hard with Earth Release, drilled through his left calf and outer thigh.

Pain flared like torn lightning.

"Ghh."

Blood flooded his mouth. He crushed it between his teeth and swallowed.

No hesitation.
He used the micro hitch of the impalement to finish a perfect, instinct born cast.

"Off."

Kusanagi left his hand like a red meteor.

(To be continued.)

Special thanks to Jonathan Geesling for sponsoring this extra chapter 🎉🎉🎉

Chapter 104: Damn you, Senju Tobirama

Vrmmm.

Kusanagi left his hand.

Not a tossed kunai.

Blood mist wound around the dark red blade until it became a streak wrapped in crimson flame.

Fast, past the limit of Kakuzu's tracking.
Faster than the screaming wind drill itself.

The sword light carved a lethal arc through smoke and scrambled energies, drawing a gorgeous, ghastly line in the air.
Straight for the wind mask hovering over Kakuzu's left shoulder.
For the heart inside.

The angle was wicked, the timing perfect.
It slipped past Kakuzu's bullish neck where fury had tilted him, around the densest Earth hardened glow plating his chest, and went for the control node of the wind.

"Skree?"

The wind mask's cry was thin and not human.

It felt the blood lit edge and the will sharp enough to cut souls, and knew annihilation.

It dumped power from the wind drill at once, yanking everything inward to a core, a densest Wind Release barrier, a screaming cyclone compressed to a bead, keen enough to slice steel.

One throw. One kill.

Only one.

Thunk.

Time froze to a ten thousandth.

The blood wreathed red bolt hit the wind core, no flourish, like a suicide spear.

No sky rending boom.
Just the thick tear of blade through hide and energy ripped apart at the seams.

Crack, whump.

Fractures raced across the mask.
With a twisted, failing shriek, the cyan face burst like a bladder stuffed with hurricanes, shattered to ragged quarters.

Wind chakra, freed of core and command, detonated like a rogue eye of storm.
Compressed razors, shards of gale, shot outward, scoring the earth into deep trenches around Kakuzu and kicking a storm of ash and grit.
Even the air seemed cut to ribbons.

A third mask, wind's heart, down.

The storm born of the wind's failure had not even finished hissing when—

"GRAAAAAAA."

Kakuzu howled, worse than before, pain and disbelief twisted into a beast's gut scream.
His massive, iron body buckled like a spine hit by an invisible hammer.

The ragged cloak of black threads swelled and heaved. Under the skin, a hundred invisible serpents writhed and lost control.
His rock dark hide dulled by the eye. Wrinkles deepened. In an instant he aged ten years.

Triple hit. Three core hearts gone in a chain.
Not just a plunge in chakra and force, a wound to life's root.

The soul level rip made him lose control of body and the two remaining hearts.
The mad wind razors cut indiscriminately, raking Earth hard skin that suddenly lagged to respond.

The stone spears and wind drill's death crush evaporated with that loss of control.
What had been a roaring auger for Ryo's back guttered like a snapped kite, light dimming, spin dying, and at the last instant, fell short.

Even so, the vestige of the drill ripped new trenches across his already chewed back, bone showing white as blood fountained.
The spears through his legs burned with layered pain. Blood loss stacked and screamed.

"Kff, pfff."

Ryo could not hold it down.
A gout of hot blood, flecked with charred gut, burst from his mouth.
Darkness lapped at his vision. His mind flickered like a candle in wind.

Do not fall. Not here.

A voice hammered from the soul.

Chance, bought with a paralyzed lower half and a dead left arm, a slit to survive.

Pain beyond limits woke an animal will.
His silver eyes dimmed, but the last sparks leapt and snarled.

He slapped the stone spear skewering his left leg, snapping its tip with raw force, crack.
Both legs wrenched. Agony nearly blacked him out, but his monster's will tore the right leg free of its spike.
The left was gone, no motion there.

He dropped to one knee in blood and char, breath like a bellows, every inhale tasting of hot rust.

The body was at collapse. Even lifting a hand was ordeal.

Far off, Kakuzu hunched and retched up dark green, rotten smelling syrup, the Earth Grudge Fear weeping from wounded cores.
He raised a face wrinkled and wrenched by pain and rage. Dead green eyes burned with hate and an animal's killing.

The last earth mask hovered at his breast, guttering yellow to keep the host upright.
The lightning and fire masks were ash. Stray sparks snapped out in the dark.

"Y, you little, filth."

Kakuzu's voice scraped like a grinder on rusted iron. "I will, crush your bones, make every inch of you, pay."

His huge, hardened right hand lifted, shaky, slower than before, but the killing will was naked and close.

No more masks.
He wanted to pulp the brat who had cost him three gold mines.
A hundred million? He only needed the head.

Ryo lifted his face into that venomous stare.
Soot and blood painted him. Red hair hung scorched and ragged. A bright line of blood tugged his lip.
And in that ruin, his silver eyes twisted into a hideous, icy smile full of contempt.

"Kh, heh, heh."
Weak, but clear. "Old man, your hearts, pricey."

He glanced at the last, ocher mask at Kakuzu's chest. "Three, just to make a dent?"

Veins bulged on Kakuzu's brow.
He roared. The hardened fist fell with a wind that smothered breath.

Death rushed again.

And when the fist was less than a yard away, air ripping the burnt hairs at Ryo's brow—

Ryo's only working hand flicked up.

No weapon, only a kunai.
A plain one, sticky with his blood.

A tiny, jarring motion.

"Flying, Thunder God."

His whisper was a gnat, and a spell.

Space shivered, weak but distinct, rippling from that bloody kunai as its center.
His final out, apart from the last throw, his door from the gallows.

Kakuzu's pupils stabbed to pinpoints.

Flying Thunder God? Senju Tobirama?
No, impossible.

Terror drowned the rage in a blink.
The boy's identity, this lost space art, how—

But the fist was thrown, too close. Old strength gone, new not born. No way to change it in time.

Ryo's cold smile cut deeper at Kakuzu's face, twisted by shock, fear, disbelief.

"One hundred million."

He spent the last of his voice on four clear words, the final verdict.

"Just went up."

The moment the words fell, Ryo, and the bloody kunai, vanished a hairsbreadth before impact.

As if he had never been there.
Left behind, a crater from that iron fist. Scorched earth. A snapped spear through Ryo's left leg. Sprays of hot blood. Smoke and iron thick air.

The missed blow's rebound staggered Kakuzu sideways, injuries howling.

"Uhh, hu, huh?"

He stared at nothing, at the pit his cracked fist had made.

"Disappeared?"

Silence fell.

Only the night wind prowled the wrecked ground, playing the crisped leaves and dust.

Kakuzu stood, hulking and locked, like a ruined statue scoured by a thousand winters.

His anger and killing will, suddenly targetless, drained and flooded back as something larger, colder, and choking.

Three.

Three priceless hearts.

The core's tearing ache kept screaming, the loss was not a dream.

That hundred million mark, not only shredded three hearts and rode out all his assaults, he slipped the surest kill under Kakuzu's very eyes.

"Flying, Thunder God."
The rusted, rotten sour throat forced the words out, chill to the bone.

Senju Tobirama.

A nightmare name leapt across his mind.
A godless, traceless space leap, who else?

A thirteen year old, drove him to near full output, cost him three hearts, and then walked away.

Kakuzu felt bile and blood surge. The world dimmed at the rim.
Not just money.
Decades of savings, hearts, looted in one night, and his hunter's pride, trampled.

"Pfft."

Dark green, viscous fluid frothed with blood from his mouth.

He lifted his face to the black sky.
The night's cold slid through his tattered robe, and into a heart like a broken, empty field.

"Konoha, Ryo."

He ground the names out between teeth, hatred and a deeper fear burning the sound.

"And Flying Thunder God, Senju Tobirama.

Pft.

Pain at the cores and a tempest of rage finally toppled what little he held together.
More green syrup spat from him. The big body sagged, kneeling to catch breath.
Every inhale was a bellows ripping itself to pieces.

—

Meanwhile, on Grass Country's border, in a hidden fold of hills.

Firelight nudged back the dark and the mountain chill, not the cold in three young hearts.

Nawaki leaned on stone, sweat and dust streaking his face, panting.
One hand clamped his ribs, the black threads had carved deep, not mortal, but down to bone.

Beside him, Kitsuchi lay pale and out cold.
Kaori hugged her knees by the fire, small body trembling out of her control, eyes wide and unfocused, only the horror of surviving.

Mikoto stood straight on a high rock at the ravine's mouth, twin tomoe scarlet maxed out, staring toward where Ryo and Kakuzu fought.

Her face was snow pale. She had all but bitten through her lip.

At this range, miles and mountains between, she could see nothing.

(To be continued.)