The zombie's rotten flesh suddenly burst open, splattering pus mixed with a dark green substance that slithered like a living thing onto the enemy's arm. The Sand ninja was horrified to see his skin rotting away at a speed visible to the naked eye.
"Poison doesn't work on the dead."
Kaede Tsukasa's fingertips still held traces of the chakra used to detonate the zombie.
That corpse, its skull pierced through, had shown its final worth on the battlefield—turning into a human bomb and blasting its attacker at point-blank range.
The instant the Sand ninja heard the sizzling sound, he tried to retreat, but one of his hands was firmly held. He yanked with all his strength, tearing skin and flesh, yet still failed to break free. All he could do was watch the firelight of the explosion engulf him, as his body turned into something between charred coal and a scorched branch.
Morino Isuke's kunai delivered the finishing blow, killing the enemy.
Standing beside Kaede Tsukasa, he kept alert for enemies in other directions. Glancing at the shriveled corpse of the Sand shinobi, his eyes shifted toward the sealing scroll at Kaede Tsukasa's waist. "You injected those corpses with poison?"
"I only stored venom extracted from the Fubuki Tonbo inside their gall bladders. I don't believe every ordinary ninja of the Sand carries an antidote to this kind of poison. They use such toxins against us, so I simply collected some to use back on them. Seems fair to me."
Kaede Tsukasa spoke in a low voice, summoning another zombie to stand before him. In a battlefield like this, besides following the orders of commanders and advisors to attack in certain directions, one also had to handle all kinds of chaos. Any corpse lying on the ground might be an enemy playing dead, waiting for someone to come close.
Lacking the strength to hide one's hand was courting death. Kaede Tsukasa could only summon new zombies to prioritize his own safety—when enemies saw two figures, their attacks would naturally be split, and his chances of survival would improve.
Genin were the ones with the least right to guarantee their survival, but if someone possessed a unique skill, unless they were too unlucky, they usually managed to last a little longer.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
When the Sand's poisonous smoke bombs burst overhead for the third round, Kaede Tsukasa's personal tactics were already overturning many Leaf ninjas' preconceptions.
New zombies appeared, forming a humanoid mobile barricade. Pus and poison gas circulated through the corpse-wall like a walking biochemical fortress—anyone who came near was doomed, the best outcome being forced to take a self-destruct blast, enough to scare them into keeping their distance.
But that reflexive fear and the forced evasive movements always meant openings, and the nearby Leaf shinobi would seize those precious gaps to launch fierce assaults, often reaping unexpected kills.
In a battle that had lasted less than an hour, the same situation had already occurred three times around Kaede Tsukasa. The Leaf ninjas naturally began to notice—amid a battlefield filled with danger, whenever one fought near this medical unit, there always seemed to be surprising opportunities.
With a thunderous crash, one zombie kicked an enemy away with such force that its own leg exploded on impact! That single kick caved in the opponent's chest, blood spraying with bits of organ, while his face froze forever in terror.
"This zombie is basically useless now. Shame I didn't attach an explosive tag to it…" Kaede Tsukasa kept one hand in a sealing stance, always ready to summon new zombies. Occasionally shifting the hand signs was also to prepare for detonating them. He sighed with some regret.
And yet, this was still not the true extent of his Zombie Release—the most terrifying part lay in its infectiousness.
If Kaede Tsukasa truly unleashed it without restraint, ignoring all consequences, then every detonation would scatter flesh and blood that could spark a miniature zombie outbreak. The infected enemies would stagger back to their camp, only to rise again as zombies and spread the contagion further…
Like a snowball rolling downhill, it could expand at a mad pace—before the enemy's higher-ups had time to react and build a containment system, it would already have caused unimaginable devastation.
But Kaede Tsukasa would never go that far. He was only a genin, his limits locked by his frail body. Until he could obtain a vessel that satisfied him, he wouldn't unleash his full power. The true terror of Zombie Release was not something that should be flaunted openly under the sun.
The Second Great War belonged to Konoha's White Fang, the Sannin, and Namikaze Minato. It was never Kaede Tsukasa's stage.
His time to truly shine was not now. If all went according to plan, that moment should come years later, during the Third War.
Kaede Tsukasa needed to make sure he survived—survive until the war ended, so that he could display his talents in a very specific field.
"You're calling this technique the Dead Soul technique? And the Dead Soul technique can actually be used like this?"
The more his fellow medical-nin learned, the more dumbfounded they became.
One medic, who had just healed a wounded comrade with Mystical Palm and watched him charge back into the fight, turned his head at the exact moment Kaede Tsukasa formed seals with one hand and pointed with the other. A zombie chunin sprinted forward so fast that its legs were cracking apart, rushed into an enemy, and fought in a frenzied exchange of wounds, stabbing wildly with a kunai. When its combat ability was completely spent, it self-destructed without hesitation.
This tactic resembled the suicidal style of Shadow Clone combat, except no sane ninja would ever waste clones like that. The agony of such a death would feed back entirely to the caster, causing tremendous trauma to the brain. And no one had enough chakra to recklessly play with clones in this way.
As rumors spread that this was the so-called Dead Soul technique, all the medics who actually knew the technique were stunned. And when other ninjas learned from them what the jutsu was originally supposed to be, they too were stunned.
Taking advantage of a lull after one of his subordinates was killed, Morino Isuke used his chakra scalpel to slash the throat of a Sand shinobi who had launched a sneak attack. Falling back behind his comrades to catch his breath, he muttered: "To twist corpses into something like this… unheard of. Even the creator of the Dead Soul technique probably never imagined it could be used this way."
The medical-nin were shaken the most. They realized the technique wasn't as useless as they had once believed. If it allowed medical-nin to act with more unpredictability, it meant a higher survival rate. And battles between shinobi were always wars of intelligence—any practical skill, especially one that defied expectations, had value.
Well… perhaps it was in the same spirit as when Naruto used the Sexy Jutsu against Ōtsutsuki Kaguya.
Still, this remained little more than a thought experiment. The Dead Soul technique was hardly a respectable ninjutsu. The very act of tampering with corpses was enough to make many turn away in disgust, unfit to be widely taught as a standard jutsu for the Leaf.