"Seven."
Nearly half an hour later, a fine sheen of sweat appeared on Yubi's face. Leaning against a Rain shinobi, he gripped the scalpel's handle and drove the blade straight into the man's heart. Another corpse lay not far from his feet, sprawled in the undergrowth like discarded baggage.
It had been a one-against-two fight, and he had won.
To stop the man from firing a flare and alerting the whole forest, Yubi had forced the battle into close quarters from the very first second. He had ambushed one of them from the shadows and dropped him immediately, but once the other reacted, the fight had turned savage. Even now, thinking back on it, he knew just how close that one had been.
Ordinarily, he never would have chosen a two-man patrol as his target. The risk of exposing himself was simply too high, and once a mission like this failed, the consequences weren't something a rookie could afford. That was why he had been hunting lone stragglers from the start, picking off those who looked weaker and making sure every kill stayed silent.
But then the Rain shinobi in the forest had suddenly begun moving in large groups, all converging toward a single direction. There had been too many of them to mistake the meaning.
Sasori had been exposed.
The moment Yubi realized that, he knew he couldn't stay hidden any longer. Even if he couldn't rescue Sasori directly, the least he could do was cut down as many pursuers as possible and buy him time. For now, the two of them were tied together. There was no such thing as smart self-preservation when the whole mission was collapsing around them.
Yubi shoved the body off the blade and let it sink into the grass. Then he lifted his head and looked toward the part of the forest where Sasori had likely been cornered, his expression darkening at once.
There were roughly twenty to thirty Rain outposts scattered through this sector. If even one of them had gotten the message out, the nearby positions would already be evacuating or reinforcing each other. The longer they remained inside the Land of Rain, the more enemies would close in. This was the front line of Amegakure, not some neglected backwater, and the density of their encampments was far more oppressive than he had hoped.
He couldn't worry about hiding traces anymore. He was just about to move when a figure flickered through the trees and landed in front of him.
It was Arai.
"Mission complete. We're retreating," Arai said, his voice clipped and absolute.
"Understood."
The two of them immediately shot through the forest. Rain shinobi were already rushing in from different directions, but without needing to protect Yubi at arm's length, Arai showed exactly why he was an elite jonin. Every enemy who got in his way died cleanly, swiftly, and without dragging down their momentum.
The Rain side still hadn't formed a proper encirclement. Their forces were scattered, and that made this the best possible moment to break out.
By the time they neared the battlefield where Sasori had revealed himself, the fighting there was already over. Sasori stood in the middle of it, blood all over him. He was injured, but not badly, and the blank calm on his face made the corpses around him seem even more grotesque.
"Move," Arai ordered, not wasting a single extra word.
The three of them fled at full speed.
There was no point trying to conceal their tracks anymore. At this stage, only speed mattered. The faster they ran, the more distance they could force between themselves and the Rain shinobi swarming through the forest behind them.
Along the way, silhouettes flashed on both sides of the trees as Amegakure pursued. Arai let Yubi and Sasori take the lead while he cut down anyone who got close enough to delay them. Even so, Yubi and Sasori each ended up clashing with several pursuers during the retreat. It was brutal, compressed combat, the kind where even a heartbeat of hesitation could nail you to the earth forever.
In the end, because Arai was strong enough and because he chose the escape route well, they managed to burst out of the forest alive and reenter the Land of Wind. Once the damp soil beneath their feet gave way to sand and gravel, the Rain shinobi finally abandoned the chase.
Not long after, reinforcements from Sunagakure arrived to meet them.
Only after confirming that they were truly safe did Yubi collapse onto the ground, limbs spread wide like a starfish. His mouth was dry, his chest heaving as he dragged in breath after breath. That mission had felt like dancing on the edge of a blade. One wrong move, one misread step, and none of the three of them would have come back.
Even an elite jonin like Arai could have died if Amegakure had been given enough time and enough numbers to grind him down. During the escape, Yubi had fought hard simply to keep enemies from pinning him in place. The tension of that kind of battle was completely different from an assassination. There was no silence to hide in, no leisurely calculation - only the constant pressure of death pressing right up against his skin.
Arai was visibly tired now as well. Sasori's face looked a little pale, and several of his puppets had been destroyed, but his expression remained as indifferent as ever. Arai looked at him as though he wanted to say something, then thought better of it.
For shinobi, after all, dangerous missions like this were inevitable. Whatever else might be said, both boys had completed the task magnificently.
Not just well. Brilliantly.
But their methods had been completely different.
Yubi was meticulous. He thought through every step, set up his battlefield, and used his head to make the enemy die exactly the way he wanted. If Sasori hadn't blown open the entire sector, Yubi could have kept hunting for much longer. He was the sort who made a plan, then turned that plan into a clean kill.
Sasori, by contrast, was the opposite. He relied on the overwhelming lethality of his puppets and simply crushed anything in front of him. Whether the scene was concealed, whether the bodies were hidden, whether the target had time to warn others - he didn't care. That was Sasori's style.
And for this mission, that style had not been the better one.
Sasori was more than capable of achieving the same kind of silent result as Yubi, perhaps even surpassing him. But in the end, that wasn't a question of talent. It was personality. Sasori simply had no interest in bending himself to that kind of patience.
Originally, Arai had intended for the mission to last an entire hour. Instead, it had ended much earlier than planned.
"Twenty-one," Sasori said suddenly, staring at Yubi where he lay on the sand.
Arai and the others looked at him.
"And you?"
Yubi grinned up at him. "Ten total, counting the ones I killed while we were escaping."
"I won," Sasori said, putting a slight emphasis on the final word.
He had killed more than twice as many people as Yubi. Judging from that number alone, the Rain forces stationed across that part of the forest had been nearly wiped out by his hand.
"Yubi is a medical ninja. He's not the same as you," Arai said flatly. "And judging from how you both performed, Sasori... I think Yubi did the better job on this mission. If the operation had gone on longer under normal conditions, Yubi would have killed more than you. And if this had been a real village assignment rather than a training mission, he would have been able to contribute more overall."
Sasori's eyes flickered. His face hardly changed, but it was obvious he didn't like hearing that.
Then, to everyone's surprise, Yubi burst out laughing.
It wasn't a small laugh, either. Lying there in the sand, filthy, bloodstained, and exhausted, he laughed so hard that the others around him stared in confusion.
"Interesting," he said. "This is so interesting."
His eyes shone with an excitement that hadn't been there before. "This feeling... it's completely different from anything before."
The Sand shinobi who had come to receive them exchanged baffled glances. Even Arai paused.
"This was only a small-scale skirmish," Yubi said, still breathing hard, the corners of his mouth raised. "I can't even imagine what kind of danger the true monsters of the great villages must face on the battlefield at the height of a Shinobi World War."
At that, the others finally understood what had gotten into him. Several of the Sand shinobi looked at him as though he were insane.
In their eyes, it was already unbelievable that a child like Yubi had entered the front line of the Land of Rain, killed enemy shinobi, and come back alive. Even without witnessing the entire process, they could tell from the state of the three returnees how vicious it had been. Under normal circumstances, a kid who went through something like that should have been left with fear, maybe even trauma.
But Yubi wasn't frightened at all. On the contrary, he almost looked exhilarated, as though he had truly savored the knife-edge tension of it. That was a little twisted, even by shinobi standards.
Arai, however, let out a quiet chuckle. He had been worried that this mission might leave some kind of shadow in Yubi's heart. After all, even many veteran shinobi carried scars from the battlefield that never fully faded.
Then Yubi pushed himself upright, still smiling, and looked at him.
"Arai-sensei," he said, "let's continue."