When you regard someone else as prey, you should always remember that they may be regarding you as prey as well.
The eyes of the two eldest Yakushi brothers lit up.
They thought to themselves:
"What are the Sarutobi doing here instead of staying in Konoha and performing their little rituals? Why have they come all the way into Uchiha territory?"
There had to be a conspiracy!
Young men had never been lacking in reckless courage.
When the road ahead was long and difficult, they didn’t turn around.
They wanted grandeur.
They wanted brilliance.
They wanted to make a commotion.
They wanted to take the ship of their ideals and smash it straight into the harbor of reality.
They were the kind of people who would even stop to pet a Northeast China tiger if they encountered one on the road.
A confrontation between Konoha and the Uchiha was inevitable sooner or later.
And a young man’s passion brooked no delay.
Seeing how timid the Five Sarutobi had become, the two Yakushi brothers figured that these five probably weren’t all that capable.
Truly capable people never needed to boast about their family background.
Whatever.
Hit them first and worry about the rest later.
Whether they were actually capable could be decided with their fists.
"Divine Favor Secret Art: Demonic Energy Piercing Cannon!"
Yakushi Inari rapidly activated the first stage of the Cursed Seal of Heaven.
This state enhanced the destructive power of his chakra, and it could be maintained for quite some time.
The chakra energy he had accumulated for a long time surged along the back of his hand, erupting outward as a pillar of light.
Inari showed no mercy with this attack.
He wanted to make the incident as serious as possible.
He wanted to elevate it from a dispute between two families into a confrontation between two factions.
"Go to hell, you dogs who casually run wild on someone else’s territory!"
The energy pierced through the five layers of Earth Release: Earth-Style Wall summoned by the Sarutobi.
Yet it still retained enough power to continue forward.
The energy cannon blasted toward the five men, kicking up a cloud of dust from the ground.
The Five Sarutobi were dumbfounded.
Why did everything go wrong the moment they entered Nanga territory?
Was there no law here?
Wasn’t this supposed to be how things worked?
According to common sense, they should announce their family backgrounds, the other side should announce theirs, and whoever came from the more prestigious family would determine how things proceeded.
Why did these people go berserk the moment they heard the name Sarutobi?
Could it be that everyone in Nanga was united and had already prepared for war with Konoha?
The Yakushi family’s decisiveness made the Five Sarutobi uneasy.
Although the two Yakushi brothers had caught them off guard, the Five Sarutobi were still jōnin, after all.
They had never fought on a battlefield or undertaken particularly dangerous missions.
But they still met the basic standards required of a jōnin.
The Yakushi brothers’ attack shattered the five layers of Earth-Style Wall and kicked up another cloud of dust.
As the saying went, if there’s smoke but no injuries, then there are probably no injuries.
Once the dust settled, the Five Sarutobi emerged from it, covered in dirt.
But the danger was drawing closer.
Before the five could even figure out what was happening, a flash of cold steel swept past them.
"Three-Stage Slash!"
Taking advantage of the smoke and dust kicked up by Yakushi Inari’s attack, Yakushi Tsuchihachiman launched his own technique.
A thin blade.
A fast slash.
Tsuchihachiman, who had trained under Uchiha Hyōma, possessed a viciously unpredictable fast-blade style.
His teacher had been blinded precisely because his techniques were considered too underhanded.
Anyone who could earn the recognition of such a teacher was unlikely to be an innocent man himself.
Tsuchihachiman might appear refined and gentle on the surface, but he was no saint.
The essence of the swordsmanship he had learned from Hyōma was simple:
Whenever you strike, you must gain an advantage.
How much of an advantage didn’t matter.
Even if all you managed to do was cut off a single strand of your opponent’s hair, that was still a profit.
Once the blade was drawn, there were two rules.
First, never allow yourself to suffer a loss.
Second, take whatever advantage you could.
Using the dust to conceal his movements, Tsuchihachiman completely disappeared from the Sarutobi’s field of vision.
His three slashes swept toward three of the five Sarutobi.
Each strike targeted a place that demanded an immediate defense.
The eyes.
The throat.
Between the legs.
Not only were the attacks damaging—they were humiliating.
After delivering the three strikes, Tsuchihachiman immediately withdrew before the five could react.
He refused to become entangled in a prolonged fight.
He gave them absolutely no opportunity to counterattack.
Sarutobi Aoyama and Sarutobi Tanaka managed to evade the worst of it, receiving only shallow cuts.
Sarutobi Yasukuni wasn’t nearly as fortunate.
Tsuchihachiman’s blade left a sizable cut along the inside of his thigh.
Blood flowed freely.
"Bastard!"
During battle, adrenaline and dopamine surged through the body.
A person might recognize that they had been injured without immediately feeling the pain.
But even if the pain could be ignored, humiliation was something else entirely.
Being slashed between the legs might or might not have been a serious injury.
But being humiliated was unmistakable.
Sarutobi Yasukuni exploded in anger.
Before they had introduced themselves, the Yakushi had attacked them.
After they had introduced themselves, the Yakushi had attacked them again.
What exactly was wrong with these people?
"You damned Uchiha! You really haven’t given up on destroying the Sarutobi clan!"
The Five Sarutobi finally began their counterattack.
The reason these five were still regarded as outstanding young members of the Sarutobi clan was that each of them specialized in one of the Sarutobi clan’s Five Elemental Releases.
Working together, they could produce a fairly impressive combination of the Five Elements.
At last, the battle became a genuine back-and-forth exchange.
The five younger Yakushi children immediately withdrew from the battlefield and ran toward the rear to seek reinforcements.
They couldn’t become a burden to their brothers.
Inari and Tsuchihachiman now faced five opponents alone.
"Fire Release: Ash Pile Burning!"
Sarutobi Aoyama and Sarutobi Tanaka worked together.
One exhaled a scorching cloud of ash.
The other ignited it with sparks.
The resulting flames scorched everything in front of them.
What they created was an environment filled with burning ash rather than ordinary flames.
Because of this, the burning cloud could remain suspended in the air and continue igniting for a period of time.
The intense field of fire forced the charging Yakushi brothers to retreat.
But ninjutsu wasn’t supposed to be used like this.
A technique that couldn’t actually inflict damage was nothing more than wasted effort.
The Yakushi brothers rapidly evaded the flames.
Then they prepared to demonstrate their combined technique and let the Sarutobi see what real teamwork looked like.
Their cooperation had to produce an effect greater than one plus one.
Otherwise, there was no point in using a combined technique.
"Water Release: Breaking Wave!"
"Wind Release: Great Breakthrough!"
The two techniques combined.
Countless chunks of ice formed into a swirling vortex.
The ice rotated at tremendous speed, while the bone-chilling cold caused the fiery battlefield created by Fire Release: Ash Pile Burning to gradually die down.
The blizzard-like vortex continued sweeping forward.
The bitter cold caused the limbs of the Five Sarutobi to stiffen.
The actual damage wasn’t particularly severe.
But with their fingers becoming less flexible, the speed at which they formed hand seals dropped dramatically.
Seeing that the technique combination between him and his brother had worked, Yakushi Inari raised both hands.
"Continuous Demonic Energy Piercing Cannons!"
Inari deliberately shouted the name of the technique as loudly as possible.
He wanted his opponents to believe that he was unleashing an ultimate attack.
The teachers at the Iga Academy had taught them about the Sarutobi clan’s specialty in the Five Elemental Releases.
There were five opponents.
And they had already demonstrated one coordinated combination.
That meant there was a good chance the five of them possessed a complete Five Elements combination of their own.
Inari couldn’t allow them the opportunity to coordinate.
If you couldn’t overpower your opponent, then intimidate them.
His Continuous Demonic Energy Piercing Cannons was exactly that kind of technique.
The Demonic Energy Piercing Cannon required charging before firing and possessed considerable power.
The Continuous Demonic Energy Piercing Cannons looked almost identical, giving the impression that it was simply a multi-shot version of the original technique.
In reality, it was nothing more than psychological misdirection.
The Continuous Demonic Energy Piercing Cannons were mostly for show.
After the original Demonic Energy Piercing Cannon had left a powerful impression on the enemy, Inari used only a small amount of chakra to fire imitations of it.
The purpose was tactical deception.
He wanted the enemy to misjudge the power of the technique.
Then the resulting dust clouds would scatter their formation and prevent them from coordinating effectively.
And sure enough—
The Five Sarutobi scattered in different directions.
None of them dared to approach Yakushi Inari’s technique head-on.
The tactic worked.
The two sides widened the distance between them and began casually hurling ninjutsu at one another.
The Sarutobi’s reasoning was simple.
They wouldn’t approach.
That way, they wouldn’t accidentally get caught in a technique and suffer serious injuries.
That Continuous Demonic Energy Piercing Cannon had looked far too intimidating.
Rather than compete with two children in terms of destructive power, they could simply drag the battle out.
They were five adults against two children.
Sooner or later, the Yakushi brothers would exhaust their chakra.
And when that happened, they could capture the two of them.
Little did they know that the two Yakushi brothers had reached exactly the same conclusion.
I’ve got the Cursed Seal.
With just a little chakra, I can amplify it into attacks that look powerful enough.
I’ll drag this out too.
I’ll keep going until reinforcements arrive.
They didn’t need to inflict any more actual damage.
They only needed to keep frightening their opponents.
And so, the battle reached a stalemate.
The two sides continued exchanging attacks.
Neither willing to advance.
Neither willing to retreat.
Meanwhile...
Something had gone completely haywire in the rear.
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