Chapter 47 – How Could a War Be Fought With Such Shameless Tactics?
Yuki curled into a ball, arms wrapped over his head, every muscle trembling.
At this moment he finally understood—the instinct to survive is the greatest teacher of all.
He had never experienced anything like this before:
a bombardment so overwhelming, so continuous, it felt as though ten thousand cannons were raining fire upon him.
Yet now, without any guidance, he had instinctively learned to keep his mouth wide open—
to avoid the sudden pressure changes from the explosions from rupturing his eardrums or crushing his lungs.
Cowering in a spot that could only be described as blessed by the gods,
Yuki no longer thought of glory or ambition.
Gone was the fantasy of building military merit.
Gone was the desire to make that damned Oda Nobunaga regret ever humiliating him.
Right now, he had only one thought—
"I just want to live."
Only now did he understand the broken old veterans in his village—
the ones missing arms, missing legs, missing hope.
Only now did he realize what they meant when they said war was cruel.
Even as a proud jōnin, he was no better off than the genin beside him.
Because the moment the first wave of exploding kunai landed, Yuki had seen it with his own eyes:
jōnin—shinobi of his own rank—
detonated into mist.
Not bodies. Not limbs. Just… red vapor blown away by the next explosion.
His jaw rattled violently.
"G-g-g-g…"
His teeth clattered uncontrollably.
He had no idea how much longer he could endure this inferno from hell.
Then—
suddenly—
in one fleeting moment, the bombardment paused, like a gasp drawn by heaven itself.
"Thump… thump… thump…"
His own heartbeat roared louder than the detonations.
His ragged breathing wheezed like a broken bellows echoing in craters carved by fire.
"It's… over?"
Tears welled in his eyes.
He thought—he hoped—that the Land of Fields had finally run out of kunai and explosive tags.
It had only been a few minutes, but for Yuki and the entire Cloud vanguard,
those minutes had stretched into an eternity of terror.
How many kunai had the Land of Fields thrown…?
How many explosive tags…?
What monstrous quantity had to be hurled to blanket an entire battlefield for minutes straight?
In all the history of shinobi warfare, when had such a sight ever existed?
Which village had ever been so absurdly wealthy and insane
as to carpet-bomb a battlefield with pure money?
Kunai were cheap.
Explosive tags were not.
And even if each tag were cheap—
such numbers added up to an astronomical, suffocating cost.
"Now it's our turn to counterattack!"
A shout tore through the brief silence.
Despite the carnage, not all Cloud shinobi had lost their fighting spirit.
Warriors who lived for battle—
those who saw the honor of the Hidden Cloud as their own honor—
stood up from the craters, crawled from piles of corpses, dragged themselves out of impossible hiding spots.
Bloodshot eyes filled with rage and humiliation.
Their pride refused to let them die cowering.
They rallied behind the first man to shout—
For Cloud. For pride. For revenge.
And in that moment, they surged forward once more.
The invincible Cloud shinobi would charge again—
only by taking enemy heads could they reclaim their honor.
Should he go too?
Yuki hesitated as he watched his howling comrades surge forward.
And it was precisely in that single moment of hesitation that—
the ringing returned.
His ears flooded with a piercing buzz as the world flipped again and again between red and black.
A burning fragment of someone's arm—bone spike and all—slashed across his cheek.
His nerves were so numbed he didn't even feel pain at first.
Only warm droplets traced down his face, falling onto the scorched earth and splattering into eight-petaled stains.
Instinct drove him to curl even tighter—
but his back was already pressed against the hot ground.
There was nowhere left for him to retreat.
"Despicable!"
The Cloud vanguard trapped in the explosive storm was suffering unimaginably,
but were things any better for the Cloud shinobi watching helplessly from the main formation?
Hardly.
Refusing to let Oda Nobunaga "lead them by the nose" didn't mean they actually believed
a tiny, newborn village like Sound could cause Cloud any real trouble.
Even as commander, Dodai had never expected the probing vanguard to break through the fortress in one go.
But he certainly hadn't imagined the opening battle would devolve into this flaming heap of humiliation.
What did he see?
He saw the mighty Cloud ninja—
those who once made even the great Hidden Leaf tremble—
now lying flat on the ground like whipped dogs, waiting to be slaughtered.
"Despicable!"
He roared again, face dark as iron.
The nearby Cloud shinobi didn't even dare breathe.
Was Nobunaga's method shameless?
Absolutely.
Who could have imagined that simply pausing the bombardment would bait the surviving Cloud shinobi into rushing out—
thinking Sound had run out of ammunition—
only to be blasted a second time?
No one had ever seen a tactic so brutally simple and so brutally effective.
Because no one had ever seen this many explosive tags used like pocket change.
"Dodai-dono…"
After agonizing for a long time—torn between relief and guilt—
one of the senior jōnin finally stepped forward.
"Should we dispatch reinforcements?
At least… at least we should rescue what's left of the vanguard?"
Dodai turned his head sharply, eyes cold.
Of course he knew leaving the vanguard to be obliterated would devastate morale.
But sending support into that?
Did these idiots not see the truth?
Even the earthen walls raised by elite jōnin collapsed instantly under the bombardment.
A combined Earth Release Earth Style
Rampart—still half-formed—
was blown to fragments before it could even take shape.
Those who tried to rely on body-flicker or Lightning Release armor
were vaporized before they made it halfway across the firestorm.
Not even the strongest, fastest shinobi could pass through the death zone.
Nobunaga wasn't stupid.
He had clearly calculated the limits of ninja speed.
Dodai remembered a ridiculous analysis he once read in another world—
claiming a genin-level Naruto moved at Mach 3,
and Kakashi at over 1,600 meters per second.
Back then Nobunaga wondered
how flesh and blood could withstand the drag force of breaking the sound barrier.
And now, having measured this world's reality—
Those "Mach speeds" were nonsense.
Ninja were fast, yes—
but with proper calculations, there was simply no way anyone could outrun a sea of explosive tags.
"Where in hell did they get this many explosive tags!?"
Grinding his teeth, Dodai struggled to comprehend it.
But questions could wait.
What mattered now was deciding—quickly—what to do.
He glanced back at the main force,
a seemingly grand formation now suffocated by silent dread.
For the first time, he found himself longing for Iwagakure's elite earth-release shinobi.
If those stone-fisted maniacs were here, this would be a different battle entirely.
Should he order elites to burrow underground with Earth Release?
But could anyone survive such a long-distance approach?
He weighed the options, teeth clenched.
After several wars, Dodai knew the truth—
Mercy has no place in command.
At last he made his decision.
"Transmit my order:
Send small teams to infiltrate in wide arcs.
Probe and exhaust the enemy's supply of explosive tags—
find the gaps in their fire coverage.
The main force will rest here.
Tonight… we launch a night assault on the fortress itself."
The meaning was clear:
the vanguard was being abandoned.
Every Cloud shinobi knew it—
and yet, seeing the hell that awaited them ahead,
seeing the ceaseless storm of explosions—
not a single one voiced an objection.
With death looming over the battlefield,
they swallowed their anger
and silently accepted Dodai's command.
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