This allowed Numa no Kuni's combat unit to advance completely unhindered, although the commander did not rule out possible clashes with small forces of demon worshippers and prepared for them by actively sending out scouts in a wide semicircle, who found only traces of a battle.
At the end of the first day, it became clear that the idea of putting the priests on horses had failed — lacking the necessary experience, after leaving the saddle, the clergy were not only unable to participate in the battle, but even to move at a normal speed, having bruised and scraped everything that could be bruised and scraped.
Therefore, after receiving help from a couple of iryonins who were among the people of Nisu and me, it was decided that the next day the priests would switch from horses to shinobi. Only a few guys who got young miko as their burden were satisfied, but discipline was high and everything was limited to a little grumbling.
Miroku was taken under the wing of a female bodyguard, much to the chagrin of the men around her, including me.
While the army advanced along the designated route, occasionally stopping to create a normal passage for the horses where it was quicker to do so than to go around — with a sufficient number of ninjutsu specialists of different elements, this was not a problem at all — I did not forget to send kage bunshin ahead, the first of which had already reached the more significant forces of demon worshippers located near the hidden village and crushed more than two hundred stone idols with four times fewer ninja, safely ending their existence with an explosion in the crowd of enemies.
Thanks to this reconnaissance, it became clear that the demon had left some of the creatures created by Yureigun as guards and had already gathered more than a thousand of them, judging by eye.
It was clear that the clone had no way of knowing the exact number. Also, these golems were guarded by much more experienced shinobi than the meat that had been fighting earlier.
Yesterday's bandits were not particularly skilled, but to my surprise, Morieu and his minions adhered to a strategy of conserving hard-to-replace resources rather than mindlessly sending all available forces into battle.
However, this didn't help them much against kage bunshin ninja of my level, so on the third day, when Numa no Kuni's "army" entered the territory adjacent to the hidden village, whose name I never learned, Yureigun had little more than two hundred men left, even though the demon was constantly creating and summoning new ones, and the ninja had been sitting behind thick walls for two days, not risking to engage in battle — the modified Rasengan cleared flesh with no less effectiveness than stone, regardless of the amount of protective chakra.
Only the jonin could oppose them, but there were few of them, and Kage Bunshin dealt with them personally, not sparing his ninjutsu reserves.
The open space around the village resembled a battlefield that had been ravaged for days, and although scouts reported that the army was approaching the target at a distance within sight, everyone was greatly surprised by the pitiful remnants of the demon worshippers' forces.
"What kind of demon happened here?" muttered the chief samurai, glancing at the battlefield and the badly battered stone warriors moving in our direction.
"Before the allied army arrived, I sent several clones here to clean up any small fry," I replied, waving my hand casually forward. "As you can see, it was quite effective.
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