Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!
A group of Academy instructors flashed through the forest, each with students slung on their backs while crazed beasts howled and gave relentless chase behind them.
"Where did all these animals in Training Ground Zero even come from?"
Mizuki had Yuta on his back and Takaya clutched to his chest. His short blue hair was soaked through and plastered messily to his face, making him look thoroughly bedraggled.
These kids were already the third group they had managed to rescue.
Distress flares kept blooming in the sky.
He had not been able to stop moving for even a moment.
Starting from ten minutes ago,
one student group after another had been attacked by beasts.
At first they thought it was just a string of bad luck with patrol routes colliding. But once they reached the scenes, they realized something was wrong.
The crazed animals were attacking every living thing in sight. Even with kunai buried in their flesh, they would still lunge forward, desperate to tear off a chunk of human meat.
This level of madness was anything but normal.
What made it worse was that Training Ground Zero had never had this many wild animals. Even if you added in everything from Training Ground One next door, the numbers still did not add up.
By the time they realized how serious the situation was, student distress signals were already filling the sky.
Some of the teachers were grumbling that right now, Training Ground Zero was more deserving of the name "Forest of Death" than Training Ground Forty-Four.
"They say it is the work of enemy infiltrators from another village."
Another instructor, also carrying several children, shared the intel he had just heard.
"Someone found several spots in the forest where special medicinal powder had been scattered."
"Powder?"
Iruka's curiosity was hooked. "What does it do?"
"Hallucinations. And rage," the well-informed teacher said grimly.
"The first one who discovered it said that while the drug is in effect, any beast that ingests it becomes unnaturally calm. Even natural predators start acting like best friends and show no desire to attack anything.
"But once the drug wears off, they turn restless, then lose all reason and go berserk, attacking everything around them."
"No wonder."
Mizuki raised an eyebrow. At last he understood why the beasts were so insane.
"Speaking of which, do you guys feel like it has gotten… quieter?"
Iruka suddenly frowned.
The group traded glances, all thinking the same thing.
They turned to look back.
The herd of beasts that had been chasing them moments before had completely vanished, as if the earlier stampede had been some strange hallucination.
At that same moment, in Training Ground Zero,
the sun was gone, leaving only streaks of crimson on the horizon.
Kraa!
Wrapped in a thick winter coat, Sawada Fuka rode atop the Elephant Bird circling high in the sky.
She watched the beasts and the cluster of Narutos battling below and, every so often, glanced toward the eastern part of the woods, as if she had developed some kind of restless tic.
It was impossible not to be on edge.
The drug's effects would not last much longer. She had no idea whether Kumogakure's diversionary tactics had truly worked, when Konoha's reinforcements would arrive, or if they were already on the way.
Everything was an unknown.
Below her, Haori sat cross-legged in the center of the battlefield, her body occasionally flaring with faint halos of light as she worked at something.
Kumogakure's elite strike force had been held up by Kazama Etsu. The commotion in the east had been tremendous. Even just watching the trees constantly collapsing from way up here, she could feel how fierce the battle was.
That elite jonin better not be all talk.
Kazama Etsu was the kind of guy who could be sent to the hospital by one kick from Haori. How was a man like that still holding out this long?
Judging from the scale of destruction, she could already tell that Etsu might not be as simple as she had assumed.
But her nerves kept racing in circles anyway.
The pressure was just too much.
She was a perfectly ordinary spy who could not even beat Academy students, yet here she was, riding a giant bird in circles over Konoha itself.
Who knew when some ninjutsu would suddenly streak up from below, ending her life before she even realized what was happening.
Tick.
Tick.
The hands of her watch swept forward.
Sawada Fuka pushed back her sleeve. The time was 19:28. Only about two minutes remained before night truly fell.
If she had to keep searching after the sun went down, he would probably waste a lot more time trying to locate the target.
They had to hurry.
She clutched the watch face tight and shut her eyes in a silent prayer.
Down below,
the beasts roared as they grappled with a sea of Naruto clones. Haori sat cross-legged at the center of the human ring, palms glowing with condensed chakra.
What she held was almost solid.
Shikamaru tilted his head back, staring at the last light of the setting sun. His brain was a blur of calculations.
In at most three minutes, full night would arrive.
With the sun already beneath the horizon, scattered light had stretched the bird's shadow across the ground to a ridiculous length.
The good news was that a tiny twitch of his own shadow now allowed him to connect with it.
The bad news was that the shadow on the ground was so faint it was barely visible to the naked eye.
Whether Shadow Imitation Jutsu could still function properly under those conditions was a complete unknown.
If Haori could not master the technique within those three minutes, they would have no choice but to stay put and wait for Konoha's reinforcements.
That would put them entirely on the defensive.
And Shikamaru's gaze lingered on the giant bird still circling above.
Training Ground Zero was remote, but it was still inside Konoha. Reinforcements could arrive at any time.
The crazed beasts had never been able to break through their defensive line, and yet the person on that bird showed no urgency, drifting lazily overhead. That could only mean the enemy had a bigger card hidden up their sleeve.
Maybe there was an even stronger shinobi involved.
Perhaps some accident had delayed them, or the other instructors from the Academy had managed to keep them occupied for now.
Maybe the person in the sky was just a pawn to keep them from moving.
Shikamaru pressed his ten fingers together in front of his chest in his familiar "pushing hands" pose as his mind raced.
Roar!
A black wolf lunged with a snarl. Naruto twisted aside to avoid its snapping jaws.
He raised his left arm to guard his head and drove his right fist up in a sharp uppercut.
Like a bullet, the punch slammed into the wolf's belly and sent it flying.
He had long since raised his usual training weights to twenty kilograms each. With all four limbs combined, he was lugging around a full eighty kilograms, roughly the weight of a grown man.
On top of that, he ran and practiced strikes every day under that burden. Now, those long hours of training were finally bearing fruit.
Urk!
The wolf he had hit vomited green slime and lay on the ground, too stunned to get up.
Naruto, giddy with excitement, did not notice that another wolf with bloodshot eyes had circled behind him.
Its back arched, muscles coiled, and it sprang into the air, fangs gleaming as they latched onto the back of Naruto's neck.
Poof.
That screaming Naruto burst into smoke and vanished.
"Arghhh!"
Another Naruto roared as he rushed forward to fill the gap and wrestle with the wolf.
"Naruto, are you still okay?"
Choji, doubled in size to nearly two meters tall, was sweating as he pinned a wild boar under his arms. Looking back and seeing how pale Naruto's real body was, his eyes were a mix of worry and shock.
Naruto's strength had always been the weakest in class. The title of dead last clung to him stubbornly, more famous than the word "monster" and a constant source of ridicule.
Yet now, he had grown this far.
Looking at the dozen or so clones still around them, Choji was stunned by the sheer depth of Naruto's chakra. If he was not mistaken, Naruto had already produced more than five hundred clones in total.
"I can still go… ten more rounds, easy!"
Naruto slumped against a tree trunk, panting hard.
The exhaustion gnawing at the back of his mind and the accumulated pain from all those clone deaths were pushing both his body and spirit to the brink.
He still had chakra left.
But every time a clone died, its fatigue and pain fed back into him.
Those sensations stacked and stacked, driving both body and mind toward collapse.
"You cannot push yourself like this. You will die!"
Ino hurried to stop him.
She knew the Shadow Clone Jutsu. Every Konoha shinobi specialized in Yin Release knew it. It was the classic work of the Second Hokage, combining Yin and Yang Release.
It was literally a textbook-level ninjutsu.
During the First Great Ninja War, battlefields had been too complex and full of traps. Konoha's casualties were severe.
In that context,
the Shadow Clone Jutsu had been born.
Originally, it had simply been called Shadow Clone Jutsu. As more and more people used it, everyone slowly discovered its greatest flaw: the feedback of fatigue and injuries.
Some people had even died because of it.
The Third Hokage realized the danger and decided to formally create tiers for the technique.
He added several extra hand seals to limit the number of clones that could be produced, locking the cap at five per use. No more "however many your chakra can handle."
The original version was renamed Multiple Shadow Clone Jutsu and sealed away in the Scroll of Seals.
For an ordinary ninja with normal chakra reserves, the standard Shadow Clone Jutsu was more than enough.
If someone really wanted to break the limit, any Yin Release specialist could go home, remove the extra seals the Third Hokage had added, and return it to Multiple Shadow Clone Jutsu.
What Naruto was using was clearly Konoha's one and only universal forbidden technique: Multiple Shadow Clone Jutsu.
If he kept raging like this, he truly might get himself killed by his own ninjutsu.
"It is okay, Ino."
Naruto forced his trembling arms to push himself up, dragging his body off the ground.
The sky-blue eyes that had always looked so scattered now burned with stubborn resolve.
"I am going to be Hokage.
"If I cannot even protect my friends, what kind of Hokage would I be?"
Ino stared at Naruto's back, lips trembling.
On any other day she would have mocked him for talking big.
But right now, she could not get a single sharp word past her throat.
If someone like him was not fit to be Hokage, then who was?
As they spoke, another batch of clones fell under the beasts' assault, numbers dropping fast.
The tiger that had always lingered at the front, waiting for an opening, finally found its moment and pounced.
Choji threw himself in the way.
Roar!
The tiger clamped onto Choji's thigh, fangs sinking deep into the big tendon.
Blood splashed.
"Gyaaaah!"
Choji screamed, hammering his fists down on the tiger's head. After such a long fight, his reactions were nowhere near as sharp as when they had started.
"Choji!"
Ino could not hold back anymore. She drew a kunai and rushed forward, only to have a staff thrust out in front of her to block the way.
Blood streamed down Choji's leg, dyeing the fabric dark red.
Thud, thud.
He gritted his teeth and drove his elbow again and again into the tiger's skull.
The beast refused to let go, no matter how much he hit it. Its jaws were locked tight around Choji's thigh, as if it would not be satisfied until the leg came clean off.
"Shadow Clo…"
Naruto tried to rally what little focus he had left, wanting to send another wave of clones to help.
He suddenly realized that a familiar figure had already passed him, walking calmly toward Choji.
Slender fingers glowed faintly with chakra as they lightly tapped the tiger's head.
In the next instant,
the tiger that Choji could not shake off no matter what he did split neatly in two.
Haori's fingers traced along the "王" character painted on the tiger's forehead. With a tiny twist, the massive head parted right down the vertical stroke.
A spray of red and white stained the ground, leaving only a narrow, perfectly clean line through the center.
Rooooar…
The beasts, still devoid of fear, surged forward again.
But any that drew near Haori were sliced apart by barely visible wind threads, reduced to chunks of meat before they could even understand what had happened.
The stench of blood rolled up to the clouds, driving the already crazed animals to new heights of frenzy.
No matter how violently they thrashed and how fiercely they attacked, they could not shake the gulf in power.
She was like an enormous reef standing firm against the tide, blocking the entire beast horde by herself. Not a single beast could get anywhere near Naruto and the others.
"You finished the secret technique?"
Seeing Haori carving through the beasts in front of them, Naruto yelled with joy, as if his crushing exhaustion had been nothing but an illusion.
With Haori finally stepping in, Choji let out a shuddering breath, as if he had finally found an anchor.
His body shrank back down to normal size, dragging his mangled thigh along with it. By the time he finished, his injury barely looked worse than a housecat bite.
"More or less."
Haori gathered Wind Release chakra into her palm and looked up at the giant bird in the sky.
Combining Eight Trigrams Air Palm with Wind Release had been a spur-of-the-moment idea.
The core principle behind Air Palm was very similar to the preparatory motion for her "High-Pressure Water Cutter."
Before launching an Air Palm, you would briefly charge up, gathering a large amount of chakra into your palm, then compressing it into a highly condensed chakra sphere.
The difference was that the High-Pressure Water Cutter required you to open a tiny vent in the water sphere to release the pressure, creating a continuous cutting jet.
Air Palm simply released the compressed force all at once, shooting out a blast of compressed air like a chakra cannon.
With her experience compressing Water Release,
learning Air Palm itself had not been hard. That was why she had had the confidence to say she could master it quickly after only recalling the basic theory.
Things had gone just as she expected.
She soared through the Air Palm part in mere moments, then spent the remaining time wrestling with how to fuse it with Wind Release.
At first, she had been obsessed with Wind Release's slicing properties and had kept trying to compress the wind into a vacuum blade.
But that form did not mesh at all with the Air Palm's base structure.
There was simply no way to fully reconcile them in the short term.
The sun was about to drop fully below the horizon.
Out of options, Haori had a sudden flash of inspiration.
She used Air Palm's chakra compression trick to compact the gaseous Wind Release into a solid mass, then fired it like an enormous vacuum cannon that could shoot straight up hundreds of meters into the sky.
In theory, there was nothing wrong with it.
Whether it would work in reality, even she could not say for sure.
"There is no time to overthink it. Shikamaru, Ino, get ready!"
As she spoke, Haori raised her hands like claws, one above and one below her right hip, gathering power.
Within moments, the compressed Wind Release chakra was shining with an eerie green light.
Shikamaru and Ino answered together.
Their hands flew into seals with barely restrained urgency. Yin Release chakra that they had been carefully refining and holding back finally surged to life.
Shadow Imitation Jutsu.
Shikamaru's eyes sharpened.
He dropped to one knee and formed the "Ram" seal, channeling invisible Yin Release chakra into his shadow.
Very quickly,
the nearly invisible silhouette at his feet, almost swallowed by the twilight, deepened into a pitch-black pool.
He had already plotted out the giant bird's flight path. Shikamaru stretched his own shadow out to a precise spot, then narrowed and elongated the middle, weaving it into a fine mesh.
Shadow Imitation could be reshaped at will, but it could not increase its total surface area.
The net shape was the best way he could think of to get around that limitation.
He licked his dry lips.
Now all that remained was to wait.
Wait for the giant bird's shadow to drift into the carefully prepared snare.
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