Ambushed and Pursued

Normally, a mission to escort and protect a convoy couldn't possibly be handled by Touma alone. No matter how strong he was, he couldn't split himself into eight pieces.

But given the situation Sunny City was facing, Jiraiya couldn't send anyone to help him. And even if Jiraiya had dared to, Touma wouldn't have dared to use them.

There was no guarantee a spy wouldn't hear about the mission, disguise themself, and volunteer to join. Touma didn't have the time or energy to carefully investigate their identities.

So he asked Jiraiya to temporarily assign three Genin squads and have them use the Transformation Technique to disguise themselves as the four of them. They would leave Sunny City in three different directions to divert the attention of anyone watching from the shadows.

As for Touma himself, he took the three little ones and left Sunny City under cover of night. By the time their hidden pursuers realized something was wrong, they were already nearing the capital.

At first, Touma thought he had everything covered. He even took the three little ones sightseeing in the capital of the Land of Fire for three days. On the fourth day, they joined a caravan belonging to the Heavenly Fire Cult and headed for Konoha.

But things changed again. Their caravan was ambushed by a group of rogue ninja from Zhe Hidden Village who had infiltrated the Land of Fire from the Land of Woods.

The rogue ninja weren't particularly strong. Most were around the average level of Genin to Chunin, and their leader was, at best, close to the level of a Special Jōnin.

But their abilities, inherited from Zhe Hidden Village, were a real nuisance. Just seven ninja could unleash an attack like an army of thousands, mainly thanks to Zhe Hidden Village's developed Earth Release: Ultimate Creation Technique—Dead Soil.

The technique had originally come from a secret art called the "Dead Soul Technique," used by a ninja from the Land of Woods during the Warring States period to drive the corpses of the fallen back to their hometowns. But after the Land of Woods answered the Five Great Nations' call and established Zhe Hidden Village, the village had lacked a sufficient stock of ninjutsu, so they had been forced to develop the Dead Soul Technique.

That was how Dead Soil came about. It strengthened the original Dead Soul Technique's control and increased the number of corpses it could command, turning it into an extremely offensive Earth Release technique.

Dead Soil no longer required corpses. As long as the user had a dead person's ashes, they could use Earth Release Chakra to manifest that person's physical form, which could wield nearly sixty percent of the person's Taijutsu strength in life.

Of course, this forbidden technique had major flaws. The corpses it created could only attack with Taijutsu and couldn't use ninjutsu. They were also pathetically vulnerable to Lightning Release.

Once he understood what he was up against, Touma, who had been hiding among the caravan, had no choice but to reveal himself.

With Thunder Motion Fist and the Hidden Thunder Sword, he plunged into the army of the dead as if there were no one there. Arcs of electricity accelerated his movements until his figure became a flickering blur, making him impossible for the rogue ninja from Zhe Hidden Village to track.

But as the army of the dead grew, no matter how fast Touma was, he couldn't keep increasing his killing rate. His enemies had the numbers and plenty of ashes to use as material for their technique. In a battle of attrition, Touma simply couldn't win.

So he had no choice but to unleash a powerful technique.

He summoned two Chakra Pills from the seal on his wrist and swallowed them. Then, while a Shadow Clone held off the enemy, his real body quickly retreated, formed Hand Seals, and unleashed the A-rank ninjutsu he had developed from Thunder Motion Fist: Lightning Release: Thunder Shock!

Thunder Shock was the result of Touma's research into quantifying Lightning Release Chakra. Centered on himself, the technique radiated a powerful electrical storm with a voltage of over one million volts and a current of no less than one hundred amperes.

He had tested it once in the Forest of Death. The storm had carbonized every plant and animal within a kilometer, and even the minerals on the ground had turned to glass under the intense heat.

This was its first time being used against an enemy, and it also happened to exploit an elemental weakness. The effect was naturally astonishing.

Beneath Thunder Shock's electrical storm, the entire army of the dead was reduced to ashes in an instant. Even the Dead Soil seals the rogue ninja from Zhe Hidden Village had buried underground could no longer be activated with Earth Release Chakra.

The ground had clearly been saturated with Touma's highly concentrated Lightning Release Chakra. No matter how advanced an Earth Release technique was, it wouldn't work for a while.

As the rogue ninja from Zhe Hidden Village stood frozen in shock at the electrical storm, Touma's Destructo Disc arrived, a little late but right on time. One after another, seven large heads wearing Hannya masks dropped to the ground, only to be snatched up by Ninja Hawks diving from the sky.

Touma wasn't being overly cautious. Zhe Hidden Village really did have a secret technique for reattaching severed heads, called Severed Head Reattachment. It was part of the same series as the Earth Release: Ultimate Creation Technique.

Of course, the reattachment technique couldn't bring someone fully back to life. It only prolonged the body's vitality for a short time—long enough for them to find a medical ninja. That was why Zhe Hidden Village in the Land of Woods was known as the "Immortal Ninja Village."

To keep these ninja from using that technique, Touma had summoned the Ninja Hawks before forming a Destructo Disc in each hand, ready to snatch their heads before they could act.

But after sealing away the seven rogue ninja's heads, Touma realized that he could no longer sense the Shadow Clone he had left behind to protect the three little ones from the Land of Rain in the caravan a kilometer away.

He couldn't even dispel the Shadow Clone. There were only two possible explanations: either a Sealing Jutsu had sealed it away, or it had gone too far from him.

The first explanation was almost impossible. He had created that Shadow Clone after taking a Chakra Pill, so it had nearly eighty percent of his real body's Chakra. Anyone capable of suppressing that level of Chakra with a Sealing Jutsu without making the clone explode would have to be extremely powerful.

Ninja with that kind of strength were all famous throughout the Shinobi World, and most had some connection to the Land of Fire. They wouldn't attack a Land of Fire caravan.

So only the second explanation remained. For his Shadow Clone to have gone beyond his maximum summoning range in just over ten minutes, it meant that it—and everyone in the caravan—had been summoned away.

Sure enough, when Touma went to investigate, all he found on the ground were scattered footprints and wagon ruts. Even the dung left by the horses and oxen after they had been startled by the rogue ninja was gone. This kind of indiscriminate summoning could only have been a large summoning beast's Cooperative Summoning Technique.

Fortunately, Touma always liked to keep a backup plan. From the start, he had left a Twin Xiao-Destroying Bug on each of the three little ones.

A Twin Xiao-Destroying Bug consisted of two Xiao-Destroying Bugs born from a single egg. They could naturally sense the location of their twin through Twin Telepathy. They were unaffected by magnetic fields or pheromones, so the Aburame Clan often used them as a backup means of tracking.

Naturally occurring Twin Xiao-Destroying Bugs were extremely rare. It wasn't until Touma and Shibi discovered, while researching Sage Destruction Bug breeding, a hormone that could stimulate insect eggs to divide and fuse again that they managed to increase their numbers.

Touma quickly released one of the bugs, transformed into a Kestrel, and flew after it.

Fortunately, after advancing his understanding of Yang Release Chakra nature transformation, he could maintain an animal transformation for much longer, and it consumed far less Chakra. He had enough to keep it up all the way to their destination.

But something felt wrong to Touma. The Twin Xiao-Destroying Bug wasn't heading toward the Land of Woods at all. It was heading for the Land of Swamps, a country with almost no presence in the Shinobi World!