Chapter 116: Bury Them
When an individual's power surpasses a certain threshold, numbers cease to be a deterrent. They become merely a matter of accounting.
Ragnar stood still amidst the carnage. Yama, having feasted on the lives of dozens of Iwa-nin, remained pristine—no blood, no gore. The black metal seemed to have absorbed it all, leaving only the faint, whispering purple miasma that coiled along its edge like sentient smoke. In the silence that followed the slaughter, the miasma seemed to carry faint, mocking echoes from some infernal depth, a psychic chill that seeped into the bones of the living.
He stood, a statue of black and red in a landscape of red and brown, the Rakshasa mask betraying nothing. The carnage he had authored elicited no ripple in his spirit. If anything, the stillness was that of a predator between kills, the hunt not yet sated.
"R-Rakshasa…" Nawaki's voice was a thin thread. He had seen combat. He had faced danger. But this… this was an abattoir. His eyes, wide and horrified, reflected a mosaic of severed limbs, ruptured torsos, and faces frozen in the final, terrible understanding of their own end. The sheer, industrial scale of the death was something his young mind couldn't reconcile with the hero-worship he'd felt moments before.
HURK—BLECH!
His stomach revolted. He doubled over, retching violently onto the churned, bloody earth. The reality of the legend was too visceral, too raw.
Ragnar's head tilted minutely, a predator catching a scent. A cold, inhuman smile touched his lips beneath the mask.
Underground.
Chiyo, in her subterranean escape, had not fled immediately. Driven by a veteran's need to assess the threat, she had paused, using her digging puppet's sensors to observe the massacre above.
What she witnessed was soul-chilling. This wasn't a shinobi. This was a force of nature sculpted into a man's shape, wielded with a cruelty that went beyond wartime necessity. When did Konoha breed this demon? White Fang is a killer, but he has a code, a cold honor. This… this is extermination.
Through her puppet's limited vision, she watched the Rakshasa grow still. Then, impossibly, the blank red mask turned. Not toward the forest, not toward Orochimaru. It turned downward. It seemed to look directly at her hiding spot, through meters of solid earth.
Their gazes met, separated by soil and stone.
A jolt of pure, primal terror shot through Chiyo. He can't. He doesn't have the Byakugan. It's a coincidence. Paranoia.
But the Rakshasa's next move annihilated her denial.
He raised Yama once more, the demon blade pointed not at the sky, but at the ground beneath his feet.
"He can't be…" Orochimaru breathed, his analytical mind arriving at the horrifying conclusion a fraction of a second before the action.
"I gave you a chance to run." The voice from the mask was a soft pronouncement of doom. "You chose to linger. Now, stay."
"CUT."
Yama descended. Not in a mighty overhead chop, but in a series of swift, precise, horizontal flicks. Each motion launched a crescent of condensed black Haki and purple energy that sank into the earth without resistance, vanishing into the soil like stones into water.
"Crescent Moon… Sky Charge."
Ragnar's body seemed to blur. He leapt, not high, but with enough elevation to give his swings a downward angle. From mid-air, Yama became a piston. Swish-swish-swish-swish! Dozens of crescent slashes, black as voids, rained into the ground in a concentrated area. They didn't explode on impact; they penetrated, shearing through soil, stone, and root like a hot knife through butter, their lethal energy propagating deep into the earth.
Chiyo's subterranean sensors screamed warnings. "MOVE!" she shrieked, her voice raw with a grief and fury she hadn't felt since her puppets were destroyed. She poured chakra into her digging puppet, sending it clawing desperately deeper, away from the death raining from above.
The other Sand-nin weren't as fast or as deep. The black crescents found them. In the cramped, dark tunnels, there was no room to dodge. A ninja running just behind Chiyo felt a line of absolute cold bisect him at the waist. Another, to the side, simply ceased to exist as a crescent expanded and consumed the tunnel space. Silent, compressed screams were cut short, replaced by the wet, heavy sounds of earth mixed with freshly spilled viscera.
Ragnar landed, his assault unbroken. Dozens of slashes were launched in seconds. In his Observation Haki's vision, the cluster of fleeing chakra signatures below him began to wink out, one by one.
One… two… three… five… eight…
It wasn't enough. The architects of the trap that nearly killed Nawaki, the ones who forced Tsunade's terror, the persistent gnats strangling Konoha's supply—they needed to be erased. Completely. Only then would the cold fury in his chest abate.
He stopped slashing. Instead, he raised his right leg. Armament Haki cascaded over it in an instant, weaving a shell of black, vein-shot armor.
"Heavenly Foot of God."
It was Tsunade's technique, the Strength of a Hundred concentrated into a stomp of earth-shattering force. Augmented by Haki, it transcended the original.
He brought his foot down.
BOOOOOOM!
The impact wasn't a sound; it was a physical event. The ground for ten meters around his foot didn't crack—it compressed, then rebounded in a violent, upward shockwave. The earth acted like a liquid struck by a giant's hammer, rippling outward. But the true force drove downward, a concentrated pillar of concussive annihilation.
He stomped again.
BOOM!
And again.
BOOM!
BOOM!
Ragnar became a force of geologic violence. Each stomp sent a devastating shockwave pulsing through the substrata. The ground shook and buckled for hundreds of meters. Trees swayed and toppled. The very rock layers beneath the soil groaned, fractured, and were pulverized by the relentless, hammering waves of "Strange Power."
The Sand-nin trapped below were subjected to a nightmare. The crushing pressure spiked violently with each impact. Those not killed by the initial sword slashes were now pulverized—organs ruptured, bones powdered—by the sheer, undulating force transmitted through the earth. It was a terramorphic burial.
Chiyo, driving her puppet at its absolute limit, felt each stomp like a physical blow to her own chest. The concussive waves, even attenuated by distance and earth, slammed into her, rattling her ribs, bruising her lungs. She tasted blood—old blood from earlier injuries, and new blood from the internal damage being inflicted with every earth-shaking BOOM from above.
"GACK!" She vomited a stream of dark blood, the metallic taste filling her mouth. Rage, humiliation, and a deep, soul-crushing despair warred within her.
"KONOHA'S RAKSHASA!" she screamed into the dark, choking on her own blood, her voice a broken promise of vengeance. "I SWEAR I WILL KILL YOU!"
But her body, the veteran survivor, was brutally honest. It fled. It ignored the screaming pride and focused on the primal imperative: live.
The earth above her groaned one final, titanic groan. The series of concussive stomps had destabilized a massive section of the underground. With a sound like a mountain sighing, the ceiling of the tunnel network—a square kilometer of earth and stone—collapsed in a catastrophic cave-in.
The last few chakra signatures in Ragnar's Haki sense were snuffed out, buried under millions of tons of rubble. The silence that followed was absolute, deeper than before, now holding the weight of an entire landscape settling into a mass grave.
Only one signature, faint and frantic, continued moving away, diving ever deeper, escaping the zone of annihilation.
Chiyo, alone.
The combined Suna-Iwa sabotage force was no more.
At that moment, Jiraiya, Namikaze Minato, and a squad of Konoha reinforcement ninja burst into the clearing from the treeline. They skidded to a halt, their eyes wide.
The scene before them was apocalyptic. The forest was a shredded, bloody ruin. But what held their attention was the central figure and the transformed earth around him.
Jiraiya's jaw was slack. The ground looked like it had been worked over by tailed beasts. "Orochimaru! Nawaki! You're alive!" he called, relief warring with his shock.
"We are unharmed," Orochimaru replied, his voice oddly flat. His snake-like eyes were fixed on Ragnar. "The Iwa and Suna forces, however, are… indisposed."
"What do you mean?" Jiraiya asked, his gaze sweeping over the obvious corpse field.
"Jiraiya-sensei," Minato said quietly, his voice tight. He pointed to the grisly remains of the Iwa-nin. Then his sharp eyes caught movement in the dirt. "And… there's blood… coming up from the ground."
Nawaki, pale and trembling, just pointed a shaking finger at Ragnar's feet, where dark, rich red liquid was indeed seeping up through the shattered soil, welling from the tomb he had just created.
Ragnar ignored them. He stood amidst the seepage, Yama held loosely, his mask surveying the ravaged land. The hunt was over. The promise to Tsunade was secured.
The harvest was complete.
(End of Chapter)
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