Clang!
The sharp samurai sword collided with the mechanical blade that sprang from the puppet, sending dazzling sparks bursting outward.
Sasori of the Red Sand examined the boy before him, a boy so young he looked as though he had only recently graduated from the Ninja Academy.
The corner of his cold mouth slowly curved into an arc of curiosity.
"You are angry… Why?"
"When comrades from the same village are killed for no reason, is it wrong to feel anger over that?"
Shisui Uchiha did not use his Sharingan right away.
Instead, he only activated the first stage of his Cursed Seal of Heaven.
While cautiously testing Sasori of the Red Sand's strength and combat style, he stared at him with anger in his eyes.
"Kirigakure shinobi… also possess the awareness to care about comrades?"
Sasori of the Red Sand's question did not carry any particularly clear emotion.
But that unpleasant indifference and doubt still reached Shisui Uchiha's ears with perfect clarity.
The black-haired boy's gaze drifted toward the other two puppets beginning to move behind Sasori, and he answered in an icy voice, "Someone who does not care about comrades is nothing but a tool used to execute missions. If you can abandon your comrades, then the village can also abandon you once you are no longer useful as a tool. Humans with emotions can create a new future. Tools that abandon emotion will only ever remain where they are!"
"You have a sharp mouth. A puppet made from you should be very suitable for adding a large number of lethal mechanisms inside that mouth."
As Sasori of the Red Sand's words fell, an enormous number of hidden weapons shot out from the mouths of the two strangely shaped puppets.
Shisui Uchiha's gaze sharpened.
With a leap, he flickered away from the position in front of Sasori.
A black rain of steel chased his figure and spread backward, continuously producing ear-piercing metallic collisions against the ground.
Only after forcing Shisui Uchiha more than twenty meters away did it gradually subside.
The first exchange ended.
Both sides had taken no damage and exchanged some minor intelligence of little importance.
Sasori of the Red Sand became significantly wary of Shisui Uchiha's astonishingly fast Body Flicker Technique.
And Shisui Uchiha roughly estimated how troublesome this opponent would be based on the number of puppets he controlled.
"Three puppets… No, those three puppets are not using all his fingers. He still has a considerable degree of leeway… A puppet master's battle strength depends on the number of puppets they can control. This man is absolutely a top-tier puppet master qualified to become Kazekage."
Against an opponent of this caliber, he had to go all out.
Shisui Uchiha reached toward the ninja tool pouch at his waist.
His eyes also swiftly transformed into the three-tomoe Sharingan.
And when Sasori saw Shisui's movements, he again took out two new puppet scrolls.
After the smoke dispersed, a full five sinister puppets of different forms stood guard around him.
Hiruko, a close-combat puppet equipped with a weapon resembling a scorpion's hooked tail.
Tsuchigumo, a battlefield-control puppet resembling a giant upright spider, with all eight limbs equipped with mechanisms capable of launching steel cables.
Aogi and Akagi, who looked like twin great demons and moved together in perfect coordination, every part of their bodies capable of firing poisoned hidden weapons.
And Gaju, which had blocked Shisui Uchiha's frontal assault, with thick arms from which massive blades had sprung.
These were the puppets Sasori of the Red Sand used under normal circumstances.
"The second round, Kirigakure brat."
Sasori of the Red Sand's fingers trembled slightly.
Aogi and Akagi immediately fired a massive number of hidden weapons toward Shisui Uchiha's position, forcing him to dodge.
At the same time, Tsuchigumo lunged out. All eight of its limbs fired large numbers of nearly transparent, thin steel wires in every direction, preparing to turn the area around Sasori of the Red Sand into an inescapable net.
"Second round?"
Shisui Uchiha, who had leaped high into the air to avoid the first wave of hidden weapons from Aogi and Akagi, coldly snorted while looking down at Sasori of the Red Sand and his five puppets from above.
"The final round!"
The moment his voice fell, Shisui Uchiha gracefully spread his body and threw the shuriken in his hand around him.
Then he used the Shadow Shuriken Clone Technique, a technique he had recently grown increasingly proficient with.
A shower of shuriken scattered outward from Shisui Uchiha's position like flowers cast by a heavenly maiden.
In the air, they performed a staggered metallic symphony.
Amid the crisp clanging of collisions, large numbers of shuriken altered their trajectories and shot toward Sasori of the Red Sand, who was protected in the center by his puppets, from one strange and tricky angle after another.
Shisui Uchiha's extremely distinctive shurikenjutsu made Sasori of the Red Sand pause for an instant.
Because of that, he was half a beat slow in slipping into Hiruko's body.
He barely relied on the puppet's heavy frame to block the rain of shuriken that had been enough to force him into a dead end.
Then, just as Sasori of the Red Sand intended to command his puppets to counterattack Shisui Uchiha, he suddenly felt the chakra threads connected between his fingertips and the puppets being severed by something.
"Wh—"
"Fire Release: Blazing Heaven Blade!"
Before Sasori of the Red Sand could realize where the problem had occurred, a samurai sword heated by scorching flames until its entire body glowed red pierced through Hiruko's shell from above.
With incomparable precision, it stabbed through his right shoulder.
Immediately afterward, flames abruptly expanded and exploded inside Hiruko's narrow body, turning into a massive fireball that swallowed Hiruko whole.
"This strike should be enough to heavily injure him."
Shisui Uchiha retreated empty-handed and looked at Hiruko, which was gradually deforming within the flames, slowly letting out a breath.
During his first eye contact with Sasori of the Red Sand, he had already silently used genjutsu on him, imprinting the image of himself without the Sharingan into the other man's mind and laying the groundwork for the second round after he activated his Sharingan.
And when Sasori of the Red Sand summoned five puppets and opened his attack with the words "Kirigakure brat," Shisui Uchiha, whose Sharingan was already active, knew the other party had failed to resist his genjutsu.
Thus, the battle became one-sided.
The Sharingan was an eye with terrifying visual ability, capable of seeing the flow of chakra inside a shinobi and copying ninjutsu based on that.
For puppet masters who needed to connect to their puppets with chakra threads in order to fight, it was a natural counter.
Shisui Uchiha's use of the Shadow Shuriken Clone Technique to attack Sasori of the Red Sand from blind spots was not only to force him into Hiruko's body.
It was also to temporarily deprive the other party of vision and conceal the act of using shurikenjutsu to sever the chakra threads between Sasori and his puppets.
Once the chakra threads were cut, the rampaging Tsuchigumo and the other puppets immediately stopped moving.
Shisui Uchiha himself used the gap before Sasori could react to the blank in his attack and applied powerful Fire Release to the samurai sword in his hand through the new nin-taijutsu he had developed.
With one strike, he cut open Hiruko's defenses and heavily injured Sasori of the Red Sand, who was hiding inside.
If Sasori of the Red Sand were a normal puppet master, the battle could already have been brought to an end here.
Next would be dragging the heavily injured Sasori out from Hiruko's wreckage and using genjutsu to interrogate him for all the information he knew.
That would include the whereabouts of Aoba Mizunotsuki's squad, as well as intelligence regarding the mastermind behind this assassination incident, Root, and the so-called Lord Zetsu.
But Sasori of the Red Sand had long since stopped being a puppet master who fell within the category of normal or ordinary.
The fireball enveloping Hiruko's wreckage suddenly swelled.
The samurai sword embedded in Hiruko's back and the flames were both blown apart by the violently expanding shockwave.
Shisui Uchiha's eyes sharpened.
In the narrowest margin, he flickered aside to avoid a steel cable that shot toward him.
Then, with an unsettled and doubtful gaze, he looked toward Sasori of the Red Sand, who was standing up from Hiruko's wreckage with almost half of his body missing and his entire form charred black.
"I see. The Sharingan. No wonder… The chakra threads connected to my puppets were also seen through by those eyes of yours and severed by those shuriken scattering through the air, weren't they?"
His right arm and shoulder had been destroyed completely, revealing a charred wound without any flesh or organs.
Sasori of the Red Sand looked at Shisui Uchiha.
On his face, burned black by the flames, he slowly revealed a smile that was clearly calm, yet carried incomparable ferocity and killing intent.
"A genjutsu capable of making me fall for it so easily. The Uchiha clan's secret shurikenjutsu. The Sharingan… You are the Uchiha genius captured on the battlefield by the Fourth Mizukage, the one known as Shisui of the Body Flicker. Shisui Uchiha."
"How surprising. A genius of the Uchiha clan has actually become one of Kirigakure's new Seven Ninja Swordsmen… The reason behind that must be quite fascinating."
"That has nothing to do with you, Sasori of the Red Sand!"
Shisui Uchiha looked at Sasori of the Red Sand, whose clothes had burned away completely, revealing a puppet body underneath.
A terrible guess suddenly surfaced in his heart.
"Indeed, it has nothing to do with me. After all, I have no interest in understanding the inner journey behind a puppet."
Sasori of the Red Sand nodded.
With his remaining left hand, he took down two scrolls from his back.
One was marked "Three."
The other was marked "Ice."
He shook his hand and unfurled them.
"Come and look at my finest collections. You will soon become one of them, Shisui Uchiha."
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