Jie glanced at the dumbfounded Hidan, casually lopped off his head with a single stroke, and completely ignored him.
"Two left," he muttered. "Once they're dead, I'm done."
Checking his surroundings, Jie suddenly realized Kisame Hoshigaki was gone.
Did he hide, or just cut his losses and run?
Jie frowned. He had been so focused on harvesting human puppets that he'd let his guard down. Still, Kisame alone couldn't flip the board. Tossing the thought aside, Jie turned a hopeful gaze toward Sasori of the Red Sand.
"Got any more of those human puppets?" Jie asked.
The Hidden Sand might be a barren wasteland, but they were filthy rich. The Fourth Kazekage, Rasa, might have been a mediocre leader, but his Magnet Release was practically a money printer, pulling gold dust straight out of the desert. If Jie could ransom a few high-quality puppets to Rasa for a mountain of gold, funding Konoha's reconstruction would be a breeze.
Across the battlefield, Sasori hadn't expected to lose two teammates in the blink of an eye. Kisame had clearly used the puppet barrage as cover to slip away. Now, Sasori was the only Akatsuki member left standing in Konoha. The odds had turned terrible, but going down without a fight simply wasn't in his vocabulary.
"Scroll: Hellfire Array!"
Two black pipes slid from the palms of Sasori's puppet body. The fire scroll mounted on his back lit up. Fueled by his living core and a massive surge of chakra, roaring flames blasted from the pipes.
"You're really trying to use fire against an Uchiha?" Jie shook his head in amusement. "Don't you know my clan literally wrote the book on pyromania?"
Still, it made sense. Sasori's true strength lay in his puppet army, but Jie had already confiscated most of them, and Kakuzu's dying blast had vaporized the rest. The four scrolls on his back were his absolute last line of defense.
"Fire Release: Dragon Flame Caterwaul!"
Jie didn't care about elemental advantages—he preferred fighting violence with overwhelming violence. If Sasori wanted a firefight, Jie would just burn him out. He exhaled a massive fire dragon, its surging flames slamming into Sasori's blast and stopping it dead in its tracks.
Where the two infernos collided, the overwhelming heat fused the ground into molten slag. With multiple Kage-level fighters clashing, this entire section of the village was already in ruins—adding a little more damage hardly mattered. A clash like this was a contest of raw chakra, and in a battle of attrition, Jie feared no one.
However—
The second scroll on Sasori's back suddenly flared to life.
"Scroll: Severe Corrosive Stream!"
The flames from his palms abruptly died, instantly replaced by high-pressure jets of toxic, corrosive water. Hitting the superheated air of the Dragon Flame Caterwaul, the venomous liquid rapidly flash-boiled into a lethal cloud of steam.
Jie frowned as the noxious gas billowed outward.
I can't let this vapor spread, or the rest of Konoha is dead. He immediately canceled his jutsu, blurring away to dodge the initial stream. Sasori's poisons were famously lethal, and Jie had zero interest in testing his immune system today.
"Earth Release: Dropping Lid!"
Jie's hands blurred through hand seals. A massive earthen dome materialized in mid-air, crashing down over Sasori to trap the toxic steam before it could spread. But the second the lid dropped, a hyper-compressed beam of water sliced cleanly through the solid rock.
Sasori had compressed the water to an extreme degree, drastically increasing its pressure and turning the poisoned stream into something akin to an industrial water jet cutter.
'What a pain', Jie cursed inwardly.
With a single thought, the blade of his Kusanagi Sword shot forward, extending rapidly along the path of the incoming jet. The cutting force was terrifying—
But Kusanagi was a divine artifact.
No matter how intense the pressure, the high-speed water couldn't leave even the faintest mark on its surface.
Clang!
With a crisp metallic snap, the razor-sharp blade cleaved cleanly through the black pipes, severing the puppet's arms in an instant. Stripped of the nozzles compressing the flow, the attack lost all pressure immediately. The once-lethal stream collapsed into a harmless splash of toxic water, no longer posing any threat to Jie.
'The first scroll—Hellfire Array. The second—Corrosive Stream. The third—Performance of a Hundred Puppets…'
Jie's gaze narrowed as he looked toward the suddenly motionless Sasori.
'So… what exactly is the fourth scroll?'
Back on Earth, the contents of Sasori's final scroll had been one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in the Naruto fandom. Countless theories had been proposed, yet it was never revealed in canon.
Was Jie actually about to witness it firsthand?
A brief, heavy silence followed.
Then—
The puppet's wooden jaw clicked open.
"You win."
'…?'
A giant question mark practically popped up over Jie 's head.
'What did he mean, you win?'
Was Sasori seriously surrendering?
He could at least use that fourth scroll just to satisfy his curiosity! What if that final jutsu actually had a chance of killing him? Sure, the odds were basically zero—but an S-rank missing-nin of Sasori's caliber shouldn't just roll over and admit defeat.
"My art is incomplete," Sasori's voice echoed, flat and mechanical—yet carrying a faint trace of bitterness. "I refuse to let a flawed masterpiece be seen by the world."
"Consider yourself lucky, brat. You win this time. But understand this—I didn't lose to you. I lost to time."
Before Jie Uchiha could respond, the human puppet convulsed violently. The flesh-and-blood core embedded in its chest began to glow white-hot—
Crack.
With a sickening snap, it shattered. Crimson fluid seeped from the cavity as Sasori's body went limp, collapsing lifelessly to the ground.
It all happened too quickly—even Jie couldn't stop it.
He stared at the corpse for a moment, then let out a heavy sigh.
"Such premium experimental material… a perfect tool…" he muttered. "And he just rage-quits like that. What a waste."
Clicking his tongue in annoyance, Jie created a shadow clone and sent it over to retrieve the fourth scroll. No matter what Sasori had claimed, his curiosity was already burning.
'Could it really be that legendary hidden puppet the fans always theorized about?'
Jie grabbed the scroll and unrolled the parchment. He stared at the seal for a long moment, descending into a heavy, suffocating silence.
"…To hell with your 'unfinished eternal art.'"
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