"If you guess correctly, there's a reward. I'll give you five minutes to think about it."
Five minutes later, Inuzuka O was the first to blur out an answer: "I bet it's because Sensei ran out of money."
Good grief. Tetsumaru thought. The Inuzuka family's 'dog-like' intuition really was something else; he had almost hit the nail on the head.
Uchiha Hiro frowned and shook his head. He couldn't think of a suitable answer and refused to just take a wild guess.
Nara Yoshito said hesitantly, "Cost efficiency... or perhaps culling the obsolete?"
After speaking, the three of them looked at Aburame Tetsumaru expectantly. Tetsumaru simply raised an eyebrow and smiled. "The enemy is here. I'll announce the answer after the battle is over."
Clack-clack, creak-creak. The rhythmic sound of a puppet's joints was almost hypnotic in its monotony. Suddenly, a young Suna ninja raised his head in confusion, looking toward the mountain ridge on their right.
"Kid, what is it?" a Suna Chunin asked, eyes squinting.
"The insect chirping... it sounds a bit strange."
"Huh? The chirping is loud and clear. What's the problem?"
the squad's Jonin captain heard their exchange. He frowned but didn't speak immediately. Instead, he closed his eyes and listened intently for a while. The chirping was indeed prominent, but... there seemed to be too much of it.
The Jonin looked toward the ridge, his mind racing through all the intelligence he possessed regarding insects.
Nearby, the middle-aged Chunin was busy educating the young Genin. "Listen, kid. A ninja with poor stealth skills will startle the bugs, causing the chirping to stop entirely. A skilled ninja is hard to avoid completely, which results in faint, inconsistent sounds."
"A sound as obvious as this usually means there's a swarm gathering over there. I don't know why, though; I'm no expert on bugs."
"It's spring, maybe they're just mating," another Chunin with a headscarf interjected, adding a lewd wink. "Oh, right, these brats don't even know what mating is yet, do they? Ahahaha!"
Instantly, all the adult ninjas burst into laughter, taking the opportunity to tease the younger Suna ninjas.
Among the eight or nine young Genin, some looked bewildered, while others turned bright red. A few simply looked on with cold indifference, watching the older men like they were idiots. The only Genin who didn't join the mood was the Jonin captain's student. Although only twelve, he already had several kills of Konoha Genin under his belt—a rising star of the Hidden Sand, and understandably arrogant.
"Stop! Alert status!"
The Jonin hadn't found a specific problem, but his cautious nature told him that anything unusual was a danger signal. He decided to deploy a defensive formation to avoid being caught off guard.
"Tch. We ran into a cautious one. How annoying."
Tetsumaru was displeased. There was an art to a surprise ambush. For a transport team with a formation length of less than 300 meters, the hardest part was striking the middle, as the short length essentially meant engaging the entire force head-on.
The second hardest was a frontal interception, as the enemy's attention would be focused forward and their strongest combatants would be near the head of the line.
The ideal strategy was to strike from the rear, where the defense was thinnest and most likely to be overlooked, allowing for a devastating breakthrough.
Unfortunately, the enemy had stopped early. Not only had they avoided the Landmine Insects, but Tetsumaru's squad was now out of range of the rear. They were forced to open the engagement at the middle or the front.
I'll wait for their scout team to come up, take them out to thin their numbers, and then launch the full assault.
"Are you kidding me?" Tetsumaru couldn't help but let out a string of colorful language. The Jonin captain hadn't sent a scout team; he was leading his own squad up the slope himself.
With such a cautious and experienced veteran, the chance of a quick kill was slim. Tetsumaru decided not to take any further risks.
He stood up, leapt onto the ridgeline, and shouted, "Start!"
Immediately, he and his three subordinates unleashed their jutsu simultaneously, targeting the Suna Jonin's squad as they climbed.
Wind Style: Great Breakthrough!Fire Style: Great Fireball!
Followed by a volley of kunai thrown by Nara Yoshito and Inuzuka O—the only long-range options they had during a ninjutsu trade.
"Enemy attack! Counter!"
The Suna Jonin reacted with incredible speed, instantly weaving his own signs.
Wind Style: Wind Counter!
His intention was clearly to reflect Tetsumaru's wind and use Konoha's own jutsu to snuff out Uchiha Hiro's fireball. If he could successfully pull off a one-against-two tactical reversal, the Sand would hold the upper hand.
Unfortunately, Tetsumaru was no ordinary Jonin. Benefiting from his massive chakra reserves and Orochimaru's personal tutelage, his Great Breakthrough was exceptionally powerful, shattering the Suna ninja's counter-jutsu in one blow.
However, the Suna squad included a puppeteer who immediately unfurled a defensive puppet. It stood before the team, shielding them from the wind blades and the fireball while deflecting the kunai.
Without checking the damage to the puppet, the Suna ninjas launched a counter-barrage of their own, only to find the Konoha ninjas had already ducked back behind the ridge. Their wind blades, spheres, and cannons hit nothing but dirt.
A split second later, a sound far different from the clacking of puppets erupted—the sound of countless wings and legs. Thousands of Flight-Locusts swarmed over the ridge, gliding and pouncing toward the Suna ninjas.
The Suna Jonin realized they had been baited into wasting a round of jutsu. With no time to weave new signs, he grabbed his student and signaled his two subordinates to use Body Flicker to retreat.
The moment they vanished, their previous position was riddled by dozens of locusts.
Amidst the buzzing of wings, a crunching sound grew louder as countless oil-black Poison-Needle Beetles surged over the ridge, charging toward the Suna convoy in the valley.
The Suna squad flickered back to the convoy, which had already established a defensive perimeter. The transport puppets were linked together to serve as barricades, their internal mechanisms clicking open to spray a hail of senbon.
"On my command! Prepare Great Breakthrough! Weave the signs!"
The Jonin issued orders, organizing the Suna ninjas to cast the same jutsu in unison for maximum lethality.
"Fire!!"
Wind Style: Great Breakthrough x19!
Perfectly synchronized jutsu created a multiplicative effect. While not as powerful as a formal Combination Jutsu, there was no risk of the jutsu failing. Combined jutsu were prone to failure and were usually reserved for elite, highly trained units; ordinary companies wouldn't attempt them lightly.
Nineteen Great Breakthroughs created a powerful gale accompanied by thousands of wind blades, instantly halting the swarm's momentum. Insect corpses and living bugs were blown backward, the tide of the swarm forced back over forty meters.
The Suna ninjas in the valley let out a collective sigh of relief.
"Haha! Scared me for a second. They're actually this weak?"
"The sheer number of bugs is terrifying, but they're fragile. We must have killed thousands with that one hit."
"Stay alert! Don't let your guard down!" the Jonin barked. "The bugs might be weak, but they could be poisonous. Everyone, be careful!"
"Understood!!"
The Suna morale soared, smiles returning to their faces.
On the ridgeline, the three Konoha Genin took a sharp breath.
"Sensei, something's wrong. Why are these bugs even more fragile than the ones we trained with? Aren't these combat-grade Ninja Insects?" Uchiha Hiro's vision was sharp; he had quickly realized it wasn't that the enemy's wind was too strong, but that Tetsumaru's bugs were glass cannons.
"Hmm..."
"What do you mean 'Hmm'? Can we even win this fight?"
Their previous battle had been a meticulously planned ambush where Tetsumaru hadn't given the Sand a single chance to retaliate. Because the enemy was wiped out instantly, no one had noticed the bugs' defensive shortcomings.
Suddenly discovering this flaw made the three Genin lose their nerve. They lost confidence in their ability to face the main Suna army.
"Haha, don't worry. Just keep watching."
Wind Style: Great Breakthrough!
The swarm was pushed back dozens of meters again. Then came another round. And a third.
By the fifth round, most of the Suna Genin had run out of chakra, and the power of the gale plummeted.
The sixth round only pushed the swarm back thirty meters. The bugs began to surge forward faster, forcing the Suna ninjas to increase the frequency of their jutsu.
By the tenth round, gaps began to appear in the rotation. A few bugs managed to slip through the gaps, only to be picked off by the puppeteers using poison and senbon.
By now, the laughter and chatter among the Sand ninjas had vanished. Every face was grim, though they were still holding their ground.
The fourteenth round of wind had just finished when a massive heap of insects—looking like a landslide of black sand—poured into the clearing. The Suna ninjas panicked, unleashing a chaotic barrage of jutsu and explosive tags.
Once they regained their footing, the Jonin looked up and went pale.
They had been fighting for so long and killed so many bugs, yet more and more beetles and locusts were pouring over the ridge. The beetles were now stacked half a person high, so thick that the ones on top weren't even crawling down; they were simply being pushed off by the mass behind them.
The towering pile of insects was unstable, threatening to collapse into an 'insect avalanche' at any moment. If hundreds of thousands of bugs crashed into the valley at once, thirty ninjas wouldn't stand a chance.
The Suna Jonin took several deep breaths, forced down his fear, and made a decision.
"Kesshi, Kouichi! Help me! The rest of you, hold the line!"
The Jonin gathered his two closest subordinates and quickly explained the plan. The two Chunin looked at the ridge and turned ashen; they nodded frantically, agreeing with their captain's desperate measure.
Walking to the front of the puppets to face the swarm directly, the Jonin took a final deep breath and began to weave signs. The sequence was incredibly complex, and the Jonin was clearly out of practice, taking a significant amount of time to complete it.
During this interval, the loss of three primary fighters meant the number of insects breaking through increased rapidly. The dozen or so puppets couldn't kill them fast enough, and a wave of bugs lunged toward the Jonin.
Fortunately, his two Chunin stood before him, swatting down every insect that got close, ensuring the Jonin could complete his jutsu.
"Move!"
Wind Style: God's Tempest!
The clouds in the sky instantly twisted into a spiral. Then, a massive hurricane shattered the cloud layer and plummeted from the heavens, striking the heart of the swarm in front of the Sand ninjas and extending far beyond the ridge.
The insects blanketing the slope were sucked into the hurricane layer by layer, ground into dust within the vortex. The white hurricane instantly turned a pale green. As more insects were pulverized, the color deepened to a dark, opaque black.
The hurricane persisted for five full minutes before its energy was spent. As the wind dissipated, a rain of insect limbs and pulverized chitin fell from the sky, coating the valley in a grim drizzle.
This A-rank jutsu left the Suna ninjas paralyzed with awe. Only when they were pelted by falling insect parts did they regain their senses.
Kesshi and Kouichi supported their exhausted captain, their faces flushed with excitement as they cheered at the top of their lungs.
Following their lead, all the Suna ninjas began shouting and waving their hands, celebrating their narrow escape and their hard-won victory.
On the ridgeline, three small heads peeked out, staring down at the celebrating Sand ninjas. They were still stunned by the terrifying jutsu that had just ended.
Then, they looked back at the valley on their own side, and they all sighed in unison. These Sand ninjas are celebrating way too early.
The Suna hurricane had been impressive, even soul-shaking, but it had only wiped out about forty thousand bugs. That was maybe an eighth of the swarm? Perhaps a sixth?
Using that heaven-shaking hurricane as a benchmark, the three Genin finally understood the true horror of this valley-filling swarm.
They're dead.
At Tetsumaru's cold command, the massive tide of insects surged again. They poured over the ridge like a rolling wave, locusts leaping and beetles tumbling down the slope.
Faced with the exact same, unchanging swarm once again, the cheers died in the Suna ninjas' throats. They stood frozen, watching the rolling tide, their minds finally breaking.
Until the Jonin's raspy voice roared, "Fight! Fight! A Suna ninja should fight to the death! Never lose your courage!"
Wind Style: Great Breakthrough!
A single wind jutsu, even from a Jonin, only cleared a thirty-meter radius. Against this swarm, it was a drop in the bucket.
But it jolted the Sand ninjas back to their senses. Facing certain death, they no longer felt fear. The ancient, desert-bred stubbornness in their blood exploded.
Every Suna ninja fought with everything they had. Jutsu, tools, seals, and poison were thrown out without restraint. The puppeteers ignored the wear on their puppets, commanding them to charge into the swarm and self-destruct once they were overrun.
At the rear of the line, the Jonin captain grabbed his student and two other young Genin.
His lips trembled as he suppressed his emotions. "We've lost. Someone has to bring the intel to the Kazekage. Fuyi, I am ordering you to hide. Wait for reinforcements."
"No! Sensei, I want to fight! I won't be a coward!" the cold boy shouted, tears streaming down his face.
"The village must be warned, or more of our people will die!" the Jonin roared back. "Dying in battle is our responsibility. Hiding to survive is yours! That is your burden!"
"Remember, this is an order! This is your duty!"
With that, he shoved the three boys into an empty transport crate, dug a hole in the ground, and buried the crate deep beneath the earth.
In an underground tunnel about thirty centimeters away from the crate, one of Tetsumaru's shadow clones rubbed his nose.
Good grief. Why does this have to be so melodramatic? They're making me feel like the main villain.
We're just two feudal empires fighting for hegemony. Besides, your village was the one that invaded the Land of Fire in the first place. You're losing, and now you're acting like you have the moral high ground. Honestly, the nerve of some people.