Not-So-Great Ultra-Long-Range Attacks

After approaching the Suna Ninja defensive line, Aburame Tetsumaru and Ueno Hayato switched positions again.

While running, Ueno Hayato swiftly formed hand seals and unleashed a ninjutsu.

Earth Release: Multiple Barriers

About seventy meters from the enemy position marked by Aburame Tetsumaru, four massive earthen walls rose with a rumble. They were as tall as a person and extraordinarily thick.

The four ninjas of the Ueno Squad each picked one and rushed over, using the earthen walls as cover before beginning to scatter Explosive Tag Kunai.

The Suna Ninja had lost the initiative. Their prepared cover focused mainly on camouflage and was not sturdy enough, so it was quickly blasted apart. The eight Suna Ninja were left filthy and battered by the explosions, utterly stunned. How had their ambush somehow turned into them being ambushed?

But the situation gave them no choice. Having lost their cover, the Suna Ninja could only launch an attack, or they would surely be bombed to death.

Once they left cover, an unexpected attack appeared. Hundreds of insects sprang up from the ground and exploded with a series of crackles, instantly shrouding the battlefield in green smoke.

It was not deadly poison, but tear gas disguised with the color and smell of poison.

The Suna Ninja hurriedly covered their mouths and noses and swallowed antidotes. Only when they saw that every Konoha Ninja wore fully enclosed protective goggles did they realize they had been tricked.

With tears streaming down their faces and unable to see, the ninjas could not put up a proper fight. The Ueno Squad quickly slaughtered them all.

Once the battle ended, they did not bother cleaning up the battlefield. The four immediately split up and fled in four different directions.

A few minutes later, three squads of Suna Ninja arrived at the battlefield simultaneously. After a brief analysis, they chose two directions to pursue. Two squads went after Aburame Tetsumaru.

After crossing a patch of forest, the leading Suna Jonin stepped on a blade of grass without realizing it was an insect in disguise.

Several kilometers away, Aburame Tetsumaru sensed that contact. As more and more contact signals came in, he gradually sketched out the shape of the pursuers. This was exactly the effect he wanted.

Aburame Tetsumaru wanted to test his combat system, so he deliberately left heavier traces along the way to lure in more pursuers, intending to wipe them out with this brand-new combat system.

"It would be so much easier if I had the Byakugan."

Aburame Tetsumaru muttered a few complaints. As the distance between both sides rapidly closed and the ambush point came into sight, he threw out the two Combination Insects in his hand, then hurled another twenty in rapid succession within a single second.

Combination Insects were an insect combination used for beyond-visual-range attacks. They consisted of three types of insects: those for initial flight, midcourse acceleration, and final-stage explosive launch.

Their attack method prioritized concealment. After being launched, they first flew in arcs around the target, then entered the second stage of straight-line jet acceleration. Finally, they exploded a hundred meters away and launched lethal fragments.

The three stages of acceleration ensured they flew faster and faster, reaching an average supersonic speed over a range of three kilometers. This effectively prevented enemies from hearing them in flight and dodging in advance.

The biggest problem was that they had no targeting or terminal guidance capability, making accurate attacks impossible.

Ever since leaving the forest, the Suna Jonin had felt uneasy. He strained to look around but found nothing, yet his heart pounded faster and faster until he began to panic. The Jonin's expression was grim. As an old ninja who had fought in the previous war, he trusted his instincts deeply. He began loudly warning his subordinates.

"Watch out! Danger!"

All the Suna Ninja stopped and each found cover, warily observing their surroundings.

That very pause prompted Aburame Tetsumaru to fire the Combination Insects at full force. The difference in difficulty between fixed targets and moving targets was enormous.

After taking cover, the Suna Jonin grew increasingly tense. About eight seconds later, he felt a deadly threat, so severe that his heart palpitated.

The Suna Jonin obeyed his instincts and leaped out from cover.

At that instant, a chain of explosions erupted a hundred meters away. Eight invisible attacks passed through the spot he had just occupied, striking the ground and rocks and blasting up eight towering clouds of dust.

At the same time, dust and smoke burst into the sky from the positions of the other seven Suna Ninja. Broken stones, severed limbs, and shredded flesh flew everywhere as the seven ninjas were instantly swallowed up.

The final-stage attack of the Combination Insects relied on an explosion driven jointly by stored Chakra and chemical substances. Its explosive power was tremendous, and the metal fragments it launched could reach twice the speed of sound.

At such high speeds, fragments weighing over a hundred grams carried enough force to blow a human body apart.

Still shaken, the Jonin repeatedly used the Clone Technique and Invisibility Technique before choosing new concealed cover. Only then did he check on his subordinates.

Five of the seven ninjas had survived, and the Jonin let out a huge sigh of relief.

This unknown ninjutsu was terrifying. There had been no warning before it attacked, and its power was beyond imagination. Both dead men had been struck in the torso and torn apart on the spot.

One of the dead was a cautious Puppet Master. He had swapped appearances with his puppet and let it carry him, a clever disguise that even the Jonin had failed to see through. Yet both he and the puppet had been smashed to pieces.

The third Suna Ninja directly hit had been struck in the hand, leaving nothing below his elbow.

The Jonin secretly rejoiced. Fortunately, this terrifying technique was terribly inaccurate. Of the eight men, only three had been directly hit. The others had only suffered grazing wounds from scattered fragments.

The other surviving Suna Ninja were terrified. Unlike the Jonin, these Genin and Chunin had not reacted at all. They had survived purely by luck.

Even a sturdy puppet could not protect its master. If that attack came again, aside from relying on luck, they could only depend on sufficiently solid cover.

The Suna Ninja did their best to hide themselves. No one noticed a huge Dragonfly sweep past high overhead.

Using the Dragonfly's eyes, Aburame Tetsumaru observed the battlefield from a kilometer away. Seeing that he had only achieved three kills, he could not help sighing that his luck truly was merely average.

The Combination Insects needed eight seconds of flight time to attack their targets. Not only could a target move a great distance in eight seconds, but the three-kilometer non-linear flight path itself created massive error. Their hit rate depended heavily on luck.

Especially that Suna Jonin. He had aimed eight shots at him, yet he had not been hurt in the slightest. Every attack had gone wide? Aburame Tetsumaru found it hard to believe.

The Dragonfly was simply too large. To avoid detection, he had not placed one on the battlefield beforehand, so he had not seen the Jonin dodge in advance.

Aburame Tetsumaru refused to believe it. He took out all fifty remaining sets of Combination Insects and decided to bury him under sheer numbers. He launched ten at once.

Ten seconds later, he stared in disbelief as the Suna Jonin perfectly dodged the attacks of all ten Combination Insects, completing every evasive move before their third-stage explosions.

Aburame Tetsumaru nervously analyzed the reason, fiercely rubbing the side of the first joint of his index finger with his right thumb. It was an unconscious habit he had whenever he was tense.

He had not spotted them in advance. The jet flames from the second stage were faint, and one had even dived in with the sun behind it, yet the Suna Jonin had still dodged. He had not even looked up throughout the entire evasion.

He could not be a sensory ninja. Suna had very few sensory ninjas, and such precious sensory ninjas would not lead a team alone even if they were Jonin. They would instead be assigned two Jonin as protection.

While thinking, Aburame Tetsumaru launched attacks without pause. Explosions boomed continuously, pinning the Suna Ninja in place.

Aburame Tetsumaru was so frustrated he could hardly believe it, while the Suna Ninja were close to going mad.

The mysterious attacks were not entirely traceless. Each attack began with an explosion roughly a hundred meters away, and a faint white smoke trail could be seen at the explosion point, pointing back toward the attack's origin.

But the attack was too fast. By the time they saw the explosion, it had already arrived, leaving them able to dodge only in advance. What drove him even crazier was that the attacks came from every direction, even raining down from above.

How were they supposed to fight back?

Just as the Combination Insects were about to run out, Aburame Tetsumaru finally confirmed that the Suna Ninja dodged their attacks through combat instinct.

At the same time, the Suna Jonin had also confirmed the delayed nature of the Combination Insect attacks. He called for the Chunin among his subordinates to start running, spread out, search, and launch a counterattack.

The Suna Jonin dodged another attack descending from above. His forehead was drenched in cold sweat, and his heart seemed ready to leap out of his chest. As a seasoned Elite Jonin, his instincts were accurate, but instincts were unstable.

As his intense mental strain continued, he inevitably began to grow exhausted. As his mental state declined, the accuracy of his instincts dropped sharply. He had already failed to dodge two attacks in time, surviving only because they had not been aimed at him.

The Jonin was certain that the enemy was attacking from far away. The enemy's attacks were growing increasingly accurate, so something nearby had to be observing them.

Their target was a Konoha Ninja. Was it the Water Release Water Mirror Technique? A Summoning Animal? The Byakugan?

No, not the Byakugan.

The Suna Ninja looked over the battlefield that his ninjutsu had flattened. A Hyuga clan Byakugan user's visual range would not exceed the range of his own ninjutsu. If it had been the Byakugan, he would have discovered it long ago.

The exhausted Suna Ninja looked up at the sun's position, hoping reinforcements would arrive soon.

He froze. There seemed to be a tiny black dot in the sun?

At the same time, the Dragonfly vision shared by Aburame Tetsumaru noticed that this primary observation target was staring directly at it. He could not help inwardly curse his bad luck. This Dragonfly could not be saved.

It truly was rotten luck. The Dragonfly had originally been flying three hundred meters in the air, and Tetsumaru had deliberately kept its shadow over the Suna Jonin to remain hidden.

The Dragonfly's thin, elongated shadow was diffracted by sunlight and cast onto the ground over a distance of three hundred meters. By then, the shadow had become blurrier than the human eye could distinguish.

Only from far enough away, such as three hundred meters in the air, could it be seen. The target beneath the shadow could not possibly distinguish such a blurred silhouette.

Furthermore, when the Suna Ninja looked up, the Dragonfly was directly between him and the sun. The dazzling sunlight concealed the Dragonfly's form, making it equally difficult to see with the naked eye.

However, in order to evade attacks, the Suna Ninja was running at high speed. The shared vision between the Dragonfly and Tetsumaru always had a slight delay, so it could not remain perfectly on the line between the target and the sun. That created a flaw.

Originally, that tiny flaw would not have mattered. Under normal circumstances, no one stared at the sun. One glance would be enough to make them look away because it was too blinding.

Ninja combat was a war of intelligence. Attack was high and defense was low; in many cases, discovery was practically destruction.

The next instant, the Suna Ninja unleashed a powerful Wind Release that tore the Dragonfly to pieces.

Using the final image he saw, Aburame Tetsumaru launched the remaining fourteen Combination Insects.

The test was complete. Combination Insects were suited for surprise attacks, especially against large forces that were stationed or arrayed in formation, rather than powerful ninjas or high-speed targets.

He played a small trick. In this wave of Combination Insects, most still scattered in all directions, but three were deliberately grouped together, sixty degrees off from the direction in which he fled.

Then he ran for his life.

This time, he truly ran at full speed. He completely gave up monitoring the battlefield and only left a small number of alert insects along his route.

Aburame Tetsumaru kept his head down and ran through the Suna Ninja blockade. After making several counter-tracking maneuvers and misleading feints, he finally reached the agreed rendezvous point.

Captain Ueno had already arrived at the meeting point. Aburame Tetsumaru was second. After the two exchanged information, they discovered that all the pursuers had gone after them, while the two newcomers had not been chased.

In other words, those two newcomers would likely survive, so they decided to wait a little longer.

Fortunately, they did not have to wait long. Before the sun set, the two new Genin arrived one after the other. After the four reunited, they rested briefly so the newcomers could drink water and eat some rations before continuing their escape.

After running through the entire night, the Ueno Squad reached the outskirts of Konoha's main camp around dawn. Only after meeting a patrol squad and handing over their intelligence did they finally relax, stop, and rest.