The fog hanging over the southern trade pass was thick enough to swallow a mountain.
Ren crouched on a slick granite ledge thirty feet above the gorge, his grey Kazeshira cloak blending seamlessly with the stone.
Below him, seven men in mismatched iron armor were huddled around an overturned supply wagon.
They were Hagoromo remnants—heavy-footed, desperate, and armed with heavy iron broadswords and spiked maces.
They weren’t elite Uchiha with spinning eyes or Senju with monstrous chakra pools.
They were scarred, brutal mercenaries who relied on raw muscle and violent surprise.
Ren’s sensory skin picked up their erratic breathing and the rhythmic clinking of their chainmail.
His moderate chakra pool sat cool and full in his chest, stable and disciplined.
“Check the crates again!” the Hagoromo leader barked, kicking a dead draft horse out of the way.
“If there’s no grain in these wagons, we march on the village at the base of the pass.”
Seven targets, Ren calculated, his blue eyes cold and tracking.
Heavy armor, slow recovery times, wide swings.
He didn’t scream a battle cry.
He dropped straight out of the fog.
Ren landed directly on the shoulders of the rearguard mercenary. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
Before the man could register the weight, Ren’s wind-coated trench knife slid cleanly into the gap between his helmet and shoulder guard, severing his spinal cord.
Ren rolled off the collapsing body, using the man’s falling momentum to sweep his leg out, tripping the second mercenary into the mud.
With a quick, surgical flick of his wrist, Ren drove a kunai straight through the fallen man’s throat.
Two down in under three seconds.
Zero chakra wasted.
“INTRUDER!” the Hagoromo leader roared, drawing a massive iron cleaver.
“KILL HIM!”
The remaining five men lunged together, their heavy boots churning the mud into slurry.
Ren didn’t try to block their heavy iron weapons with his light trench knife.
Instead, he relied entirely on his Kazeshira skin.
The atmospheric displacement of five incoming weapons registered in his mind like a detailed, three-dimensional blueprint.
He slipped sideways, the jagged blade of a spiked mace missing his chest by half an inch.
He tilted his head right as a spear whistled past his ear, the wind of the strike rustling his hair.
Ren stepped inside the spearman’s guard, channeled a paper-thin, compressed thread of Wind chakra to his palm, and slammed an open-handed palm strike straight into the man’s breastplate. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
Wind Style: Gale Compression!
The sharp burst of air didn’t blow the heavy armor apart—it violently transferred the kinetic shockwave through the iron plate, shattering the mercenary’s sternum internally.
The man collapsed, choking on his own blood.
“Die, rat!” a mercenary swung a broadsword in a massive, horizontal cleave.
Ren dropped to one knee, letting the heavy steel pass over him, and drove his trench knife upward into the soft leather beneath the man’s armpit.
He yanked the blade free, spun on his heel, and caught the next attack on the flat of his kunai, parrying the heavier blade off-target before delivering a brutal front-kick to the mercenary’s knee, snapping the joint backward with a sickening CRACK.
The Hagoromo leader backed away, his chest heaving as he stared at the bloody nineteen-year-old standing in the fog.
Four of his men were dead, two were screaming in the mud, and the quiet young man in the grey cloak hadn’t even broken a sweat.
“What kind of monster are you…?” the leader gritted his teeth, raising his cleaver in a trembling, two-handed grip.
Ren wiped a small smear of blood from his cheek with the back of his hand, his expression entirely unbothered.
His chakra pool was still over seventy percent—every movement was deliberate, every attack surgical.
“Just a scout clearing the road,” Ren said quietly.
He vanished into the white fog.
A split second later, the whistle of cutting wind echoed through the pass, followed by the heavy, dull thud of an iron cleaver hitting the dirt.