Facing Konan's trembling gaze, Shiba Kiyokawa didn't immediately take the opportunity to shock her with cruelty. Instead, he calmly worked on reinforcing the image he had carefully crafted.
Silently mouthing the words:
"Stay calm, Konan-ne. I'm here."
Turning Konan to his side wasn't something that could happen overnight. So he had plenty of patience—he wasn't in a rush to make any bold moves. For now, he would continue slowly building favor.
Besides, they were still far from being out of danger. Rushing to provoke Konan here could easily endanger them both.
There was, after all, still an entire squad of Iwagakure ninja down below.
And this time, they weren't the fictitious "Iwa spies" he had invented for scapegoating—they were the real deal. Genuine shinobi from a Great Ninja Village.
Sometimes, bad luck really was more reliable than good luck.
As Kiyokawa calculated the threat posed by the Iwa shinobi, the lead ninja suddenly looked up.
"Who's there?! Someone's on the roof!"
Almost simultaneously, an older shinobi in the group flashed through hand signs.
"Earth Style: Stone Column Spears!"
A stone javelin pierced the ceiling in a blink—swift and merciless.
Kiyokawa and Konan were forced to drop down, landing inside the warehouse.
But the next second, white paper exploded into the air—Konan was already retaliating.
"Dance of the Shikigami!"
Her body dispersed into a flutter of paper butterflies, elegant and lethal. As they swirled and gathered, they morphed mid-air into sharp paper spears, whistling toward the Iwa captain.
The smug merchant Ando turned pale, his pipe dropping from his mouth.
"W-What?! How are they already here?! Protect me! Kill them! Kill them all!"
The rest of the Iwagakure squad sprang into action.
Kiyokawa, just having landed, felt immensely relieved that he hadn't launched into a speech trying to shake Konan's ideals.
Thanks to his subtle influence over the past few days, Konan instinctively sent part of her paper swarm to shield him when the fight broke out.
She probably hadn't even realized it herself yet, but Kiyokawa had already climbed to a position in her heart second only to Yahiko and Nagato.
And of course, Kiyokawa wasn't going to waste that kind of favor. Nestled among the paper butterflies, he seized the opportunity—hurling a handful of his own special paper shuriken into the chaos.
The area was already filled with swirling paper. The Iwa captain, still reeling from the paper javelins, couldn't clearly distinguish Kiyokawa's weapons from Konan's.
The other shinobi fell into a mental trap—they assumed the paper shuriken were more deadly tricks from that mysterious blue-haired girl.
In a panic, they dodged rather than blocked, not daring to take the hit.
One of them even shouted in alarm:
"He knows Paper Jutsu too! Be careful!"
Little did they know… Kiyokawa was just throwing plain paper.
Using nothing but scrap paper, he easily disrupted their encirclement, then locked onto a target and charged.
That shinobi—a likely genin—showed visible panic in his eyes. Instead of retaliating, he backed away, forming hand seals in haste.
No fighting spirit in his eyes. His glance shifted to the empty space behind him.
A Substitution Jutsu, Kiyokawa quickly deduced.
So he tossed a shuriken lazily, feigning an attack, just enough to keep the illusion going.
Once he saw the enemy continue hand seals, he abruptly stopped, drew his blade, and lunged to the genin's rear flank.
Poof!
His shuriken struck true—but what landed with a thud on the floor was a wooden log.
Just as he predicted.
The substitution log bounced twice with a hollow thump, and before the sound had even faded, Kiyokawa had already arrived behind the real target, who had just swapped places.
"Wha—?!"
The startled genin barely got a syllable out before Kiyokawa's blade ended his life in a single, clean strike.
The older Iwa shinobi—the same one who had fired the rock spear—was visibly shaken.
"Damn it! He's at least a Chūnin! Don't fight him one-on-one!!"
He urgently signaled to the two remaining genin to regroup and not split up. Meanwhile, he crouched down and started forming hand seals.
This time, he didn't announce the jutsu name aloud, but Kiyokawa didn't need him to.
He immediately jumped upward, tossing another wave of paper shuriken mid-air.
Knowing Iwagakure's shinobi relied heavily on Earth Style, and seeing the older ninja crouch—likely preparing a technique requiring contact with the ground—getting airborne was the smartest move.
The two young shinobi were once again forced to retreat, unable to risk intercepting what they still believed were deadly paper jutsu.
Kiyokawa used the momentum to leap onto a supply cabinet near the rear of the warehouse.
"Earth Style: Headhunter Jutsu!"
The older Iwa ninja finally completed his jutsu.
But Kiyokawa had already moved far out of reach.
The technique—which should have dragged the enemy underground by surprise—ended up only shifting the caster a short distance, repositioning him to where Kiyokawa used to stand.
No damage. No impact.
The older ninja now felt a creeping dread.
Why does he keep predicting our jutsu so precisely? First Yuta's Substitution Jutsu, now my Decapitation Technique… could he have some kind of special eye technique?
While he mentally spiraled, one of the remaining genin suddenly shouted:
"Damn it! These are just normal paper scraps! He tricked us!!"
After using the "paper trick" twice, Kiyokawa's fake-out was finally exposed.
The genin, now feeling triumphant for having figured it out, confidently abandoned all caution. Ignoring his senior's earlier warning, he leapt straight onto the cabinet, kunai in hand, charging straight at Kiyokawa.
Kiyokawa calmly tossed another paper kunai in return.
"Cheap trick!"
The genin didn't flinch. His eyes burned with false confidence.
But Kiyokawa… couldn't hold back a smile anymore.
BOOM!!
A violent explosion rocked the warehouse.
The senior Iwa shinobi watched in horror, eyes wide and bloodshot.
Another comrade… gone.
It was a paper bomb.
Kiyokawa had hidden explosive tags inside his seemingly harmless paper weapons.
He had picked up the technique while questioning Konan about her paper shuriken—learning how she sometimes hid bombs within them.
By mimicking the appearance of sealing lines and chakra formulas, and wrapping the paper to conceal the faint heat signature, he made it impossible to distinguish real from fake at a glance.
Especially after his first two attacks used harmless paper, which completely dulled the enemy's vigilance.
This dirty tactic, of course, earned him an "honorable mention" from the survivors.
"Despicable Rain shinobi!"
But Kiyokawa couldn't care less about such pitiful insults.
Despicable? Underhanded?
He preferred to call it… efficient.
With two genin swiftly eliminated, the final Iwa shinobi had lost the will to fight. He retreated to Ando's side—posing as a bodyguard, but really just trying to stay out of the fray.
Kiyokawa shifted his gaze to the older shinobi—the one who had already cast two Earth Style techniques.
Chūnin, most likely.
Perfect.
Time to test how far his own strength had come.