Enemy border patrols usually moved in pairs or groups of three, following fixed routes through the forest. This was Amegakure territory now. If Yubi wanted to kill without exposing himself, then every strike had to be final. He could not allow even a single target the chance to send a warning, much less alert an entire post.
There was another problem as well.
Yubi hung upside down from a thick branch, chakra fixed to the soles of his feet as securely as if gravity had been reversed for him alone. In front of him, looped around the trunk, was a thread so fine it was almost invisible. It was no thicker than a strand of hair, but it was unmistakably part of a trap network. If someone carelessly brushed against it, some kind of alarm would definitely be triggered.
That would expose the intruder instantly.
It was the same principle as the defense lines Sunagakure liked to build. The people who lived here understood the terrain better than any outsider ever could, so the mechanisms they laid down were naturally harder for foreign enemies to notice. The Land of Rain, the forest, the humidity, the shadows between tree roots and wet stone—taken together, they formed a battlefield built for the hidden village that called this place home.
Fortunately, Yubi was not entirely blind. Thanks to what he knew from another life, he had at least some understanding of the Land of Rain and the style of fighting that flourished in its forests.
The next second, he vanished from the branch.
Concealing tracks. Disguising intent. Observing before moving. These were all part of a ninja's strength. They had all studied the same basic principles at the Ninja Academy, but whether a person could truly apply them in enemy territory was another matter entirely.
No border could be watched by manpower alone. The region was far too large, and by now both Amegakure and Sunagakure were suffering from a shortage of people. The most efficient way to seal the gaps was to fill the land itself with hidden devices—wires, tags, launchers, pitfalls, killing angles. A single patrol squad could never replace that.
And the shinobi of the Rain, naturally, would know where all of those traps were located.
As he moved deeper through the forest, Yubi discovered more than just the nearly invisible threads strung between trunks. He spotted explosive tags pressed flat against dark bark, their placement disguised by moisture and moss. He found concealed projectile racks hidden beneath leaves and shadow, positioned so that a single trigger would unleash a spray of kunai. None of it fell outside his expectations, but that did not make it any less dangerous.
He advanced with extreme caution, gliding through the dense woodland like a faint breath of wind. Then his ears twitched.
A sound.
Yubi instantly slipped beneath the tree and tucked himself into a thick clump of shrubs. Moments later, a Rain shinobi appeared above him, stepping onto the branch with practiced familiarity. The man showed no sign of having noticed Yubi at all. He was simply making a routine inspection of the trap lines in this sector.
That, too, was part of Yubi's own daily work back in Sunagakure. Patrol. Check the route. Inspect the devices. Confirm there had been no interference.
After verifying that nothing was wrong, the man left.
Yubi did not attack.
He still could not confirm whether there were other Rain shinobi nearby. A rushed move in enemy territory was suicide. So he endured the urge, waited, and spent the next stretch of time memorizing this area of the forest instead. Where the shadows fell. Where the branches thickened. Where the ground dipped. Where sound traveled poorly.
Once he was satisfied, he quietly chose this stretch of woodland as his hunting ground. Before hunting prey, he needed to understand the field well enough to make it his own.
Soon afterward, he returned to another trap position that the Rain shinobi had just inspected. He hid himself in darkness and waited.
Sure enough, it was not long before the same Rain ninja reappeared.
Yubi pressed his back to the far side of a tree and watched with the corner of his eye. After confirming once more that the man was alone, he tightened his grip around the scalpel in his hand.
Whoosh.
Explosive tags were notoriously easy to ruin in the damp climate of the Land of Rain. That meant they had to be replaced often. Just as the Rain shinobi attached a fresh tag to the trunk, a sudden chill of murderous intent surged toward him from behind.
Driven by battlefield instinct, the man reacted at once. He raised his weapon while rising, ready to dodge and counter in the same motion. At the same time, he tried to track the enemy's position.
But he had misjudged everything.
He thought the attacker would close in and strike at point-blank range. Instead, Yubi flashed over his head in a single clean movement, landing ahead of him just as he was lifting himself up.
"A child?"
The Rain shinobi's expression shifted the moment he clearly saw Yubi's face. He thought the boy had made a mistake. He did not feel pain. He did not feel injured. For a split second, he almost believed he had escaped unharmed.
Then his gaze dropped to the headband at Yubi's neck.
"Sunagakure..."
The man's eyes turned cold. He was about to send a signal.
And then his body froze.
His pupils widened violently. Only then did the pain arrive—his throat had already been opened. The blade had been too fine, the cut too silent, too precise. The attack had landed before his nerves even had time to properly understand that he had been struck.
In that instant, he finally understood. The Sand brat had not miscalculated his movement at all. From the start, Yubi had seen through the way he would rise, the distance he would cover, and the line his neck would expose. That jump over his head had not been recklessness. It had been a perfect assassination.
As the Rain shinobi toppled from the tree, Yubi caught the body before it could hit the ground too loudly. He dragged it into the grass, hid the corpse, and quickly erased the most obvious traces of the struggle.
Half an hour later, another Rain shinobi arrived.
He had come to look for his missing comrade.
"Strange... where did he go?"
The man leaped onto a trunk and frowned as he looked around. From where he stood, there were no visible signs of an enemy assault. If his partner had truly run into trouble, there should have been some kind of noise. He had followed the footprints and small traces left behind, and they had led him here. Yet now the trail seemed to end in nothing.
The moment he straightened up in confusion, a chill slid down the back of his neck.
Because an upside-down face dropped soundlessly from above him.
A few leaves drifted down with Yubi's body.
To the Rain shinobi, it was as if the boy had appeared out of nowhere. There had been no warning. No readable presence. No advance flicker of killing intent that his instincts could catch.
Yubi's hand came down in one ruthless motion.
The thin, delicate-looking scalpel punched into the back of the man's skull with terrifying accuracy. In the instant the body went slack, Yubi flipped cleanly down to the ground and supported the corpse before it could crash and expose him. Once again, he hid the remains and erased the signs of death as best he could.
He narrowed his eyes after finishing the cleanup.
The sudden disappearance of two men was enough to make the rest of the stronghold suspicious. The next prey would not be so easy to take. Once the enemy realized people were vanishing, the patrols that followed would be alert. Cautious. Possibly grouped up. Possibly waiting to reverse the trap on him instead.
Besides, Arai had given both him and Sasori a limited time for this mission. If the entire Rain position was thrown into alarm, the situation would become far more dangerous than it already was.
"I'll just do what I can," Yubi murmured with a faint smile.
Then he slipped away again through the forest shadows.
He needed another way to hunt.
***
Elsewhere, two Rain shinobi stared up at the tree in stunned disbelief.
Their companions were hanging from a branch overhead.
Fresh blood dripped steadily from the dangling bodies to the wet ground below. The two men had clearly died only moments earlier. Squatting above them on the branch was a boy with a cold, detached expression, looking down at them as though they were already corpses themselves.
It was Sasori.
The atmosphere around him was completely different from Yubi's. Yubi killed like a surgeon—clean, restrained, careful to erase evidence and preserve silence. Sasori, on the other hand, seemed to treat murder like a display.
"A puppeteer from Sunagakure... send the signal immediately—"
One of the Rain shinobi had only just realized what they were facing when he opened his mouth to warn the others. His partner had already snatched a signaling device from his waist.
But the moment they moved, they heard an unnatural creaking sound.
Two puppets were already flying toward them through the night, pulled by chakra threads so fine they were nearly impossible to detect at a glance. They came from the left and right like twin executioners.
Sasori's fingers twitched lightly.
At once, the puppets transformed. Their bodies split, twisted, and reassembled mid-flight into broad raft-like killing frames lined with rows of sharp spikes.
Crack.
The two puppets slammed together from both sides like closing walls.
The two Rain shinobi were crushed between them in a spray of blood. Their bodies were instantly riddled with punctures. They died on the spot, not even having time to complete the signal they had tried to send.
Sasori's face did not change in the slightest.
With another lazy flick of his finger, he drew the puppets back to his side. Unlike Yubi, he made no effort to hide the bodies. He did not erase footprints, conceal the battlefield, or worry about whether the enemy would find the scene quickly.
He turned and left at once.
Brazen. Cold. Direct.
It was almost as if he was announcing the murders to anyone who cared to look.
If Yubi's way of hunting was like a knife in the dark, then Sasori's was an open display of confidence. One boy relied on restraint, calculation, and concealment. The other relied on overwhelming lethality and disdain for the consequences.
Two boys from the same village. Two killers of the same age. Two completely different styles.
And somewhere in the darkness of the Land of Rain, the hunt had only just begun.