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.)
◇◇◇
◇ One bonus chapter will be released for every 200 Power Stones.
◇ You can read the ahead chapter on Pat if you're interested: p-atreon.c-om/Blownleaves (Just remove the hyphen to access normally.)