Chapter 27: Ma'am, Hold on Tight
"Forgive me, ma'am."
The Grass-nin reinforcements were closing in fast. Neji didn't have much time.
He strode over to Karin's mother, roughly pulled down the collar of her robes to expose her smooth, snow-white shoulder, and bit down, hard.
"Ngh...!"
A tall Grass-nin led the charge, dozens of his comrades close behind, as they rapidly approached the small wooden cabin.
"Spread out and surround it!" Ryurin commanded. The shinobi immediately split into four teams. One would advance from the front, while the other three would circle around to cut off any escape.
Just as they were about to complete their encirclement, a loud boom erupted from the cabin. Neji burst through a wall and shot off into the distance at full speed.
"Teams One, Three, and Four, with me! Team Two, stay here and secure the scene!" Ryurin shouted, leading three of the teams in pursuit of the fleeing shadow.
More Grass-nin, drawn by the commotion, arrived from all directions and joined the chase. The entire village was thrown into chaos.
Meanwhile, the six members of Team Two cautiously approached the cabin. The Tokubetsu Jōnin leading them listened intently for a moment. All was quiet inside, except for the sound of a woman's soft sobbing.
He gave a hand signal. Two of his men leaped onto the roof. Two others circled around to the hole Neji had made in the wall. The Tokubetsu Jōnin and the remaining shinobi gently pushed open the door.
The cabin was bare, containing only a bed and a table. Shōshirō lay unconscious in a pool of his own blood. Karin's mother was a disheveled mess, her robes torn, her shoulder exposed, and tear tracks staining her face.
There was no enemy.
The Tokubetsu Jōnin let out a breath of relief. Then he saw Shōshirō, and his face paled.
"You two, go get a medical-nin!" he ordered. The two on the roof immediately used the Body Flicker Technique and vanished.
The Tokubetsu Jōnin walked over to Karin's mother. "How many enemies were there?" he asked, his brow furrowed.
"Just one," she replied, a subtle hint of resentment in her voice. "He just ran."
He said he would protect us, but after biting me, he ran faster than anyone.
"One?!" The man's brow furrowed even deeper.
Fzzt! Fzzt!
At that moment, a piercing shriek filled the air. Two hands, wreathed in lightning, shot out from the ground and clamped onto his ankles.
The hair on the man's body stood on end. The attack was so sudden and at such close range that he didn't even have time to react before his legs were incapacitated. He gripped his kunai and tried to stab downwards.
Swoosh!
A spear of brilliant blue electricity, several meters long, shot from Neji's palm, piercing through the man's chin and out the top of his skull, stretching all the way to the ceiling.
The Chidori Sharp Spear quickly retracted, coalescing in his palm with a sound like the cry of a thousand raptors.
With a wave of his hand, the violent blue lightning transformed into a shower of slender senbon, which flew toward the three remaining Grass-nin in the room.
Lightning Release: Chidori Senbon!
Combined with the Byakugan to target the enemy's tenketsu points, this technique was devastatingly lethal. The three Grass-nin were struck and fell to the ground, dead on the spot.
The sudden turn of events made Karin's mother's eyes go wide. "You... you didn't leave?"
"No time to explain," Neji said, his voice urgent. "Give me your daughter. I'll carry you on my back. We have to go, now!"
After biting Karin's mother and replenishing his chakra, he had found himself surrounded. Breaking out alone would have been difficult enough, let alone with a mother and child in tow. The Neji that had run out earlier was a Lightning Clone, meant to draw the enemy's fire. His real body had used the Underground Projection Fish Technique to hide beneath the earth. He had waited for the perfect moment to take out the remaining guards and escape with his new charges.
"Ma'am, hold on tight!"
He didn't know how long his clone could last. He had to get Karin and her mother to safety before the Grass-nin realized what was happening.
With a swoosh, Neji shot out of the cabin like an arrow from a bow.
Meanwhile, the Lightning Clone was about to be caught.
Spotting a dango shop up ahead, he broke through a window and dove inside.
"Set up a barrier! Don't let him get away!"
In the blink of an eye, the shop was surrounded by dozens of Grass-nin. The sealing jutsu specialists in the squad immediately began to erect a barrier to prevent him from escaping with an earth-style jutsu.
Ryurin stared at the dango shop, his expression grim, his mind filled with a mixture of shock and doubt. He had tried to overestimate the intruder's strength, but the scene of carnage he had just witnessed back at the "Fruit of the Grass" headquarters was still fresh in his mind. At least thirty of his men were dead. A shinobi with that kind of power was either a top-tier, infamous rogue-nin, or an elite from one of the Five Great Nations. Neither was a possibility he wanted to entertain.
Yugito, still in her cat form, sensed the growing number of chakra signatures ahead and felt a surge of anxiety. A few moments later, she arrived near the dango shop. She didn't approach, instead hiding in the branches of a large tree, watching cautiously.
"Looks like Neji's been surrounded," she muttered to herself, her incessant chattering a poor attempt to mask her own unease. "He's just a kid, after all. Still too green."
She climbed to the very top of the tree, carefully surveyed the scene, and planned an escape route. Then, she transformed back to her human form, formed the hand signs for a fire jutsu, and took aim at the Grass-nin surrounding the shop.
Fire Release: Great Fire Annihilation!
BOOM!
In an instant, a massive wave of fire, far larger than a Great Fireball, surged outwards.
"Teams Three and Four, maintain the perimeter! Team One, with me..." Ryurin was just about to lead his men into the shop to finish Neji off when the sea of fire descended from the sky.
His expression changed. He surged with forty percent of his chakra and faced the onrushing flames. "Water Release: Great Waterfall Technique!"
The giant flames and the raging torrent of water crashed together. With a deafening hiss, a thick cloud of steam instantly billowed outwards, obscuring everything within a hundred-meter radius.
When a powerful fire jutsu and an equally powerful water jutsu collide, they create a massive amount of fog in an instant. In that dense fog, vision is completely obscured, and the advantage of numbers is nullified.
Ryurin, an experienced Jōnin, knew all of this. But he had had no other choice. The attack had been too sudden. If he hadn't met it head-on, his men would have been incinerated.
"Captain, where are you?" a voice called out from within the thick fog.
"Everyone, hold your position and do not move!" Ryurin commanded, his voice calm and steady.
The Grass-nin surrounding the shop were the elite of their village. They knew that moving recklessly in a situation like this was an invitation for an ambush. They all stood their ground, remaining vigilant.
Ryurin, while keeping his guard up, quickly formed another set of hand signs. "Wind Release: Great Breakthrough!"
A powerful gust of wind shot from his mouth, and in a few moments, the surrounding fog was blown away.