Ever since fleeing the Land of Water at age six, this shadow-like pursuit and assassination had continued on and off for six years.
Over the past year, with his focus on treatment and keeping a low profile, they seemed to have lost track of his exact whereabouts.
Now he was openly appearing at the port of the Land of Hot Water, and the top-tier powerhouse Tsunade had temporarily left his side.
The prey was alone.
Naturally, the hunters wouldn’t pass up the opportunity.
Though it remained to be seen who was truly the hunter.
Yamada Souji’s pace faltered for an instant, then resumed as normal.
Watching Shizune and Tonton’s receding figures, he quickly made his judgment.
He couldn’t fight here.
The Land of Hot Water was a small nation, but it had its own ninja village and order.
Making a scene would invite trouble.
More importantly, he couldn’t drag Shizune into this.
So…
His expression unchanged, as if merely taking a casual stroll, he turned into a side alley opposite Shizune’s direction.
The alley ran deep, flanked by tall earthen walls.
At its end, discarded wooden barrels and debris were piled up.
A dead end.
In the Six Eyes’ field of vision, the 6 auras indeed moved, like sharks scenting blood.
They silently spread out and encircled, sealing the alley entrance and the rooftop escape routes on both sides.
A professional pincer formation.
Yamada Souji stopped at the alley’s end and slowly turned to face the empty entrance.
The sea breeze swept through the narrow passage, stirring his silver-white hair and the black cloth over his eyes.
“You’ve been following me all this way.
Aren’t you tired?” His voice carried clearly through the quiet alley.
No response.
But the Six Eyes saw them: 2 figures crouched low on each of the rooftops to either side, beginning to circulate chakra.
From the shadows at the alley entrance, the final 2 emerged, wearing the bird masks of the Hidden Mist ANBU.
One held a ninja sword, while the other rapidly formed hand signs.
The masked ANBU with the ninja sword spoke, his voice hoarse.
“The Mizukage’s orders: the Shikotsumyaku must not be left to wander.
Either you come back with us, or you stay here forever.” “Sigh.
Still the same spiel after all these years.” Souji sighed softly.
A year since his last fight.
He was indeed itching for a proper battle, and his body seemed to catch the scent that it was time to feed, slowly beginning to awaken and flow.
Chakra hummed through his meridians, mingling with cursed energy.
The next moment, he tore off the cloth knot behind his head.
The black cloth slipped free, and he casually stuffed it into his robe.
His tightly shut eyes slowly opened, revealing a pair of extraordinarily peculiar pupils.
A pale blue base, with nebulae of crystallized ice slowly rotating deep within the pupils, cold, calm, utterly devoid of emotion.
Yamada Souji smiled.
He extended his right hand, fingers spread slightly.
“Come on, then.
Let me see what this batch of you is made of.” Before the words faded, the 4 Hidden Mist ANBU on the rooftops moved simultaneously.
“Water Style: Hiding in Mist Technique!” Thick fog gradually rose, filling the alley, as though the world had become a vast expanse of white.
“Water Style: Water Prison Lash!” 4 lashes of condensed high-pressure water materialized soundlessly from within the mist, lashing with deadly precision toward Souji’s limbs and joints.
Standard Hidden Mist capture tactics: prioritize limiting the target’s mobility.
But in the Six Eyes’ vision, the mist was meaningless.
The trajectories of the water lashes, and even the casters’ next shifts in chakra, were all as clear as the lines on his palm.
Souji didn’t even move his feet.
He simply breathed out gently.
The next instant, with him at the center, the surrounding temperature instantly dropped to the freezing point.
The 4 high-pressure water lashes froze inch by inch before they could reach him, then shattered into a spray of ice shards.
Slowly, he raised his right hand, fingers slightly curling.
Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump!
5 muffled impacts exploded through the mist.
Five pale finger bones shot from beneath the skin of his right fingertips.
Wrapped in chakra and cursed energy, they encountered almost no air resistance, their spiral-shaped forms giving them tremendous penetrating power.
Two brief cries of agony rang out from the rooftops, followed by the sound of heavy bodies tumbling down.
Two ANBU had their throats pierced, their chakra flow collapsing the instant they were struck.
The other two barely escaped by using the Body Flicker Technique.
“Ice Style and Shikotsumyaku?
Impossible!” The ninja sword-wielding ANBU at the alley entrance cried out in shock.
Clearly, he hadn’t expected his target to also possess the Ice Style Kekkei Genkai.
And even under the interference of the dense mist, this man’s counterattacks were astonishingly precise and ruthless.
In the blink of an eye, they had already lost 2 of their best fighters.
“Rragh!” With a guttural roar, he lunged forward like an arrow released from a bow, his ninja sword carving a pale arc straight toward Souji’s neck.
At the same time, his companion behind him completed his hand signs.
“Water Style: Water Dragon Bullet!” A small water dragon coiled as it surged into the alley from the entrance, combining with the squad leader’s sword strike to effectively seal off all of Yamada Souji’s escape routes.
Faced with this, Yamada Souji merely smiled faintly, as if watching children at play.
He raised his right hand again, pressing his index and middle fingers together before lightly pointing forward.
Ice Formation Cursed Technique · Frost Snare.
Invisible cursed energy flowed from his fingertips, not as a large-scale freeze, but precisely injected into a specific spot.
The ninja sword-wielding ANBU’s foot landed there at that exact moment.
Crack!
The stone beneath his foot instantly became brittle under the extreme cold and shattered apart.
The squad leader suddenly lost his footing, completely throwing off the rhythm of his charge, and his sword strike involuntarily veered off course.
That momentary opening was all Souji needed.
Yamada Souji closed the distance like a phantom.
The skin on his left arm silently split apart, and a 30-centimeter curved bone blade slid out.
A pale crescent flash of cold light streaked by.
There was no fancy technique, only the simplest horizontal slash.
Fast, precise, and ruthless.
The bone blade swept across the squad leader’s throat, spraying a warm mist of blood.
The squad leader froze completely.
His eyes behind the mask widened abruptly, unable to comprehend how he could have died so easily.
Meanwhile, Souji had already passed by him and advanced toward the roaring water dragon.
Facing the attack, he spread both hands, palms forward, as cursed energy surged.
Ice Formation Cursed Technique · Ice Prism.
A semi-transparent barrier instantly unfolded before him, composed of countless tiny hexagonal ice crystals.
The water dragon slammed into the barrier.
Instead of exploding with a deafening impact, it eerily seeped into it.
The ice crystals refracted and redirected the water’s energy and trajectory.
The entire water dragon seemed to plunge into a bizarre labyrinth; its power being dispersed and dissolved layer by layer.
“Impossible!” The ANBU who had unleashed the Water Dragon Bullet stared at the scene in stunned disbelief.
In that instant of shock, Yamada Souji raised his right hand once more.
This time, 5 finger bones fired simultaneously.
The finger bones passed through the not-yet-dissipated Ice Prism.
Their trajectories were distorted by refraction, making them appear as though they had been fired simultaneously from 5 different directions.
The ANBU only barely managed to twist aside.
3 finger bones grazed past him, leaving deep holes in the wall behind him.
But the other 2 found their marks.
One pierced his left chest.
The other embedded itself in his right eye.
The battle had begun quickly and ended even faster.
The mist gradually dissipated, revealing the gruesome scene within the alley.
Of the 6 Hidden Mist ANBU, 2 lay on the ground groaning from severe injuries, 1 had his throat slit, 2 had been critically wounded by finger bones, and the last, with a bone lodged in his chest and another through his eye, slowly slid down the wall as blood spread beneath him.
Yamada Souji stood where he was, his clothes completely spotless, only slightly out of breath.
The bone blade protruding from his arm fell cleanly to the ground.
The skin rapidly healed, leaving behind only a faint white mark.
Used bones couldn’t be reabsorbed.
A smile appeared on Yamada Souji’s face.
He bent down, picked up the bone blade, and then walked step by step toward the 6 Hidden Mist ANBU.
Leave no survivors.
… The black cloth was tied securely behind his head once more.
The Six Eyes switched out of active insight mode and back into a low-power passive mode.
That cold metallic voice in his mind never sounded.
It seemed this level of killing still wasn’t enough to reach a new cursed energy threshold.
Faint voices drifted in from outside the alley.
It seemed the nearby residents had been drawn by the commotion.
Yamada Souji no longer lingered.
His figure flashed, and like a wisp of smoke, he leaped onto the rooftops.
After a few bounds, he disappeared into the tangled shadows of the hot spring town’s buildings.
In the distance, lights gradually flickered to life throughout the hot spring inn district, while laughter and cheerful voices drifted through the rising steam.
This dark alley, however, was left with nothing but the slowly cooling corpses and the lingering scent of blood and icy chill that had yet to fade.
Cursed energy flowed slowly through his body, becoming slightly denser and more solid than before.
Souji stopped atop a rooftop and looked back toward the docks.
The merchant ship remained quietly moored in the twilight bay.