Lead-gray storm clouds rode the wind and gathered overhead. The lone slit of golden light was swallowed again, and everyone's faces dimmed with it.
"Fog again?"
Naruto craned his neck toward the shore, blond hair whipping wildly. A dense haze, nearly the same color as the gloomy sky, spread over the sea like a blanket. The endless ocean grew even more murky, with dark currents rolling beneath the mist as if something dreadful were hiding inside. It sent a chill crawling up the spine.
"With wind this strong, there's no way this is ordinary fog."
Sasuke's white shirt snapped in the gusts. His two-tomoe Sharingan spun, and he could already see faint chakra glimmers within the fog, thin as breath.
A pale, watery blue halo.
It looked like normal chakra at first glance, but to him it carried a familiar taste.
"It's that bastard Zabuza."
A sharp, thin voice broke the uneasy quiet, furious and spiteful.
Everyone looked over and saw Gatō, tied up like a bundle and squatting inside a coffin, screaming at the fog. His ugly face was smeared with blood. His sunglasses were shattered. His teeth were broken. He looked nothing like the swaggering tycoon from before.
"Shut it," a militia man guarding him barked, planting a boot into his side. Gatō instantly shrank back into sullen silence.
"That's Zabuza's jutsu, isn't it? He didn't run away?" someone said, recognizing the source of the mist.
"What do you mean ran away? He just disappeared," someone else retorted.
"Same difference. But why is he back?"
"He was probably hiding near the Land of Waves. He only dared to return after Kurosuki Raiga died," another voice guessed.
A wave of discussion swept through the crowd. They clearly remembered that shinobi hero hidden in the mist.
In the beginning, the Land of Waves had only been able to break Gatō's blockade and start building the bridge because of Zabuza's help. Without him, many of them would not even have food on the table.
So even though he vanished without a word in the middle of disaster, most of the people still held gratitude in their hearts and refused to speak ill of him.
In their minds, though, they had already settled on an explanation.
Zabuza must have been unable to beat Kurosuki Raiga. That was why he disappeared.
Naruto grew anxious, wanting to argue, but Sasuke stopped him with a look.
Zabuza had been hunted precisely because he stayed in the Land of Waves too long. Now that he had finally slipped away and gone from open to hidden, if Naruto explained out loud, wouldn't the enemy immediately learn Zabuza was still here?
Then not only would Zabuza be in danger, the Land of Waves would be dragged down with him.
A missing-nin might earn the title of "hero," but he could never truly protect that honor.
Maybe that was the price of betraying his village.
On the western side of the plaza, Konome Taketori, who had been watching the coast for a long while, lowered her gaze again and continued extracting the Red Eyes, only moving a little faster now.
"That's the direction we came from, right?" Kakashi asked.
Having accepted the convenient explanation that Konome was simply "gifted," he stepped up beside her and looked at the hazy sea.
The Sharingan could not pierce the vast fog, but it could still catch the faint chakra within. The townspeople were correct.
This was Zabuza Momochi's Hidden Mist Technique.
"About two nautical miles from where we came in," Konome said, calculating Zabuza's position without pausing her work. Her chakra scalpel had already cut fully around Ranmaru's eye socket.
The plaza sat on the western side of the Land of Waves, connected to the Great Naruto Bridge and close to the southwest coast.
Cargo ships from the sea, travelers moving between the Land of Water and the Land of Fire, and merchants crossing the bridge from the Land of Fire all ended up gathering here.
People were inspected before entering the Land of Waves. Goods were stacked here as well.
Because the bridge had been blocked by Raiga and his men, and because they held Dazuna and the others hostage, Team 7 had avoided alerting them. They had taken a wide route by sea, sneaked in, and wiped out the Kurosuki gang in one strike.
Now the core of the fog was close to the same coastline where they had infiltrated.
That should be where Zabuza's real body was hiding.
"His real body has been found, and he's fighting his pursuers," Kakashi said before Konome even answered.
A mist this massive consumed enormous chakra. A clone could not sustain it at this scale. Only the original could.
So what now?
Kakashi's gaze flicked to Konome as she worked.
Anyone capable of hunting Zabuza so aggressively had to be above elite jōnin. Otherwise Zabuza would not have abandoned the Land of Waves so completely. He had not even dared come out to negotiate.
The crisis in the Land of Waves was over. Strictly speaking, Zabuza being hunted was not their problem.
But Konome's deal with Zabuza was not finished. Haku's whereabouts were still unknown. If Zabuza died, the deal ended with him.
"Is that girl, Haku, important to you?" Kakashi asked.
After weighing it over and over, he decided action was better than hesitation. If Haku mattered, conflict was unavoidable. If she did not, they could pretend they saw nothing.
"Very important," Konome answered calmly, her tone firm enough that Kakashi understood instantly.
"Can you sense anything about the enemy? How strong are they?" Kakashi asked, already shifting into planning mode.
"If I say they're not weaker than my teacher, and they have no obvious weak point, you can forget planning," Konome said.
She looked into the fog at the vague outline of something monstrous, her expression tightening slightly. She had not expected the one chasing Zabuza to be him.
No wonder Zabuza ran the moment he sensed that chakra.
Not weaker than her teacher?
Kakashi's first reaction was immediate.
Konome definitely did not mean him.
That left only the Third Hokage.
Someone on the Hokage's level.
Kakashi exhaled slowly, eyes closing for half a second as he forced down the surge of emotion. Then he moved, turning into a black blur as he sprinted toward Naruto and Sasuke.
If the enemy was comparable to a Kage, planning could wait.
If Konome and that person started fighting, this harbor would not survive.
He needed to evacuate the civilians first.
"Naruto, Sasuke!"
Kakashi shouted instructions as he ran, and the already chaotic plaza erupted into even louder noise.
It would probably become very quiet soon, Konome thought.
Her pale fingers pinched the Red Eye's unique lens structure. With a delicate chakra scalpel, she removed the capillaries cleanly and dropped the whole thing into a bottle of saline.
Do not ask why she carried saline with her.
Chakra, mental energy, and physical energy formed a trinity, circulating through the shinobi's chakra network as the basic loop of power.
So every cell in a shinobi's body held traces of chakra. With enough flesh, you could extract some of it.
The problem was that without a "chakra seed," those traces were rootless. Use a little and there was less left.
Konome's original plan was simple. If Haku insisted on dying, she would take some flesh back to Konoha. Whether for studying Ice Release or for Edo Tensei research, it would be useful.
Now Haku had vanished without a trace. No body. No flesh.
So the saline would have to preserve these Red Eyes instead.
She sealed the last Red Eye into a scroll the same way, then straightened slowly.
The chakra fluctuations in the fog were growing stronger.
Deep in her chest, the false chakra seed began to glow.
She had assumed this trip would be about beating up Zabuza, a weakling. She had not brought much chakra.
But the stronger the jutsu, the more chakra it demanded.
The fight with Kurosuki Raiga had taken less than one "card" of chakra for three instant casts of Floating Water Cannon. Now she still had twenty-four cards left.
That should be enough.
Bzzz. Bzzz.
The crimson curse marks representing Floating Water Cannon flickered in succession, as if countless threads of violet lightning were racing through her entire body.
Violet chakra surged into the inscriptions in a violent flood, dumping massive output all at once. The flesh and meridians conducting that energy began to overheat.
Pshh. Pshh.
Konome's lips curled slightly. Hot air spilled from her mouth.
Superheated steam, beyond the boiling point, evaporated from between her teeth and swirled around her like smoke.
A pale red polyhedral barrier manifested by itself. The high-temperature steam drifted and coiled inside it, like white dragons imprisoned within a crimson diamond.
A low hum vibrated in the air.
It was hard to tell what was making the sound, like machinery waking up and spinning into motion.
Chakra that had undergone countless layers of shape and nature transformation surged out of her body under the curse marks' fully automated control.
In an instant, six slender water spindles formed beside her.
The turbines at their backs accelerated. Terrifying, vicious vertical pupils slowly opened and "looked" toward the fog-shrouded sea.
Two nautical miles away, they would snipe the enemy one by one.
Time rewinds five minutes.
Above the raging sea, a blood-soaked figure fled like a madman through the mist. His footwork was strange and unpredictable. Even though he was running at full speed, the fog around him did not ripple at all, as if he were a mist-ghost no one could truly touch.
Behind him, countless black tentacles writhed.
They looked like iron-thread worms magnified a hundredfold, ripping through the fog in a surging mass that made the scalp crawl just from seeing them.
Whoosh.
Dense white mist poured from the runner's body.
Thin water-blue chakra glowed within it, spreading with the fog like enormous nets thrown across the sea.
But the violent tentacles behind him did not care. They churned the fog into chaos, twisting together into a long, glossy black spear.
The tentacles snapped.
The spear became a streak of darkness, stabbing viciously at the runner's back.
A shriek of air tearing apart echoed.
The fleeing figure never looked back, as if he had eyes on the back of his head.
With one hand, he swung the massive Executioner's Blade in a half-circle and threw it behind him. The door-slab thickness of the weapon sealed his back completely.
Clang!
Metal screamed across the ocean.
The drill-spear made of tangled threads struck the blade face precisely. The impact nearly sent Zabuza Momochi stumbling mid-run. It felt like a wagon had slammed into his spine, and the already damaged organs inside him flared with pain.
Damn it.
His eyes were bloodshot from pressure. He clenched his jaw and swallowed the metallic sweetness rising in his throat.
Through the chakra-laced mist, he sensed the pursuer behind him.
That chakra was more than ten times his own.
It crushed his will to fight.
So strong.
That man in the black robe patterned with red clouds was horrifying.
Chakra volume ten times his. A body so hard assassination was meaningless. Unpredictable, grotesque tentacles. And multiple high-powered elemental techniques.
When he was young and arrogant, he had once attempted to assassinate the Fourth Mizukage. Years later, he was feeling that same pressure again, the suffocating weight that belonged only to the top of the shinobi world.
Why would someone on a Kage's level hunt me?
Zabuza's chest burned with frustration. He felt like he was cursed with bad luck.
He took Haku on a mission in the Land of Water and ran into a Kirigakure squad. He killed them to erase evidence, only to run into that terrifying blind girl.
He decided to leave the Land of Water.
On the ship, Orochimaru and the "Fierce Fang of the Mist" fought like beasts. If not for Haku saving him, he would have been buried in the endless sea.
Now he hid in the remote Land of Waves, and Kurosuki Raiga and this inexplicable monster still came looking for him.
He only wanted to observe the situation in the Land of Waves.
Yet out on this vast ocean, he still managed to run into that monster shinobi.
The moment he released Hidden Mist, it was blasted apart by a terrifying wind pressure. If he had not used Mist Body Flicker, borrowing the dispersed fog to escape, he would already be dead.
What were the odds?
Zabuza shook his head hard.
He could not calculate the probability of running into an enemy at sea.
He only knew the tentacle-monster behind him was tearing through the fog again.
Heavy footsteps stomped the sea surface, kicking up waves.
He forced himself upright and ran on, jaw clenched.
He did not notice that beneath the sea, more tentacles were sliding through the deep like serpents.
Boom!
Tentacles punched down from above, blasting a hollow out of the seawater. Spray exploded outward like arrows.
Zabuza used Mist Body Flicker again to dodge. His vision swam. His chakra was at the brink.
The sea fog rolled like a dying beast. Sweat fell and shattered into pale fragments.
Behind him came that sticky, wet sound of something writhing closer and closer.
In the fog, the enemy's green eyes lit up, like two floating corpse-lamps.
Then, in that instant, the sea ahead bulged with countless knot-like growths.
Tentacles burst from the water.
On those vein-pulsing black shadows sat eerie masks.
Zabuza tried to change direction, only to find white masks everywhere.
All around him.
A calm, low voice spoke from behind, close enough to raise goosebumps across his skin.
"Kirigakure missing-nin who attempted to assassinate the Mizukage, Momochi Zabuza. Bounty: thirty million. The Executioner's Blade is worth twenty-five million."
When?
How did the Hidden Mist not sense him closing in?
There was no time to think.
A savage glint flashed in Zabuza's eyes. He raised the Executioner's Blade and spun into a heavy slash.
Whoosh.
The blade's rotation carved the mist apart.
The massive edge drew a beautiful arc.
And at last, Zabuza saw his enemy clearly.
A black cloak with red clouds, half undone. Dark shinobi clothing beneath. Gray-green hair. Yellow eyes. Skin pale as a corpse. Stitch-like seams at the corners of his mouth.
At a glance, he looked like a zombie crawling out of a grave.
In sheer horror, he was on the same tier as that blind girl from hell and the immortal snake-man.
"Monster. Die!"
Veins bulged along Zabuza's neck as the Demon of the Mist roared, swinging his blade as if to vent years of fear in one single strike.
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