45: Can You Summon a Few More?

A dance of wind, darting through the wind tracks. Each leap formed part of a beautiful dance.

"Death is only a moment away."

The Undead Legion fell in droves. In the blink of an eye, a vast area around him had been cleared.

Yomi's eyes nearly bulged from their sockets. He roared in fury, "Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill him! All of you, attack together! There's no way a million-strong army can't handle one ninja!"

At Yomi's command, countless Stone Puppets gathered and closed in on Baiyu step by step.

Baiyu's figure glided along the wind tracks. Every graceful movement added a little more sharpness to his blade. By the end, he didn't even need to swing his sword. The wind blades surrounding the Kusanagi Sword in his hand could cut through enemies with ease.

Once, twice, three times.

Ten times, a hundred, a thousand.

With each swing of his long blade, Sweeping Blade increased his damage.

Each time he swung, a trace of wind from the wind tracks gathered on the blade. As the number of Sweeping Blade strikes grew, Baiyu found it easier and easier to kill.

Before long, he had fought his way to the middle of the battlefield.

"That was fast. I've already used up the poison."

Baiyu took out another dose of poison and spread it across his sword.

With the wind tracks reinforcing the blade, the poison couldn't seep into the sword itself. It could only cling to the wind traces wrapped around the blade, flowing along with the wind.

Baiyu controlled the wind traces on his sword, enclosing the poison within them.

"Three seconds..."

Baiyu silently counted the time. At first, ten layers of wind-track reinforcement could wrap the blade in a layer of wind traces about a centimeter thick, making it sharper.

The effect lasted three seconds. Now, he didn't know how many layers had accumulated. He only knew that the wind traces had grown to more than fifty centimeters across—nearly half a meter—and the sword itself had stretched to six or seven meters long.

He didn't know the exact effect of the amplification or how to calculate it.

This was Sweeping Blade's amplification, a special effect of one of the sword techniques in Wind Taming Sword Technique.

It used wind as a means of attack, constantly strengthening the sword in his hand through the wind tracks he encountered as he moved.

As the blade grew, its range and power increased.

Yet the sword's weight didn't change at all.

And so, the following scene unfolded.

With each gliding slash, Baiyu's range grew. The more Stone Puppets he cut down as he swept across the battlefield, the less able the ones crawling out of the ground were to keep up with him.

Yomi trembled with rage at the sight. He kept summoning the Ghost Army, shouting louder and more often each time, but the Stone Puppets appeared more and more slowly.

An hour, two hours...

Time passed.

At last, Yomi's voice was hoarse, but he was still calling out. His eyes were vacant, his face filled with despair. A trickle of blood ran from the corner of his mouth and dripped onto the ground, staining it red.

Even so, he kept shouting.

He called to the slumbering spirits in the distance, to the endless abyss.

But the abyss showed him no favor.

Or perhaps it simply said to him, "Get lost. I'm fresh out!"

Whatever the reason, fewer and fewer Stone Puppets appeared. Baiyu gradually came down from his excitement, stopped, and walked over to Yomi.

By then, Yomi had collapsed on the ground and couldn't even stand.

Blood trickled from his mouth. His throat was torn, and tiny tendrils kept repairing it. Yomi's cries could still be faintly heard.

"Can you summon a few more, Archmage Yomi?"

Baiyu crouched down and looked at Yomi's wretched state. His face was pale, and he asked hopefully, his expression utterly sincere.

Yomi's eyes flew open, his whites showing. A hoarse rasp escaped his throat, and his face was written with frustration.

"I still need another hundred thousand..."

He'd earned more than six hundred thousand Draw-Sword Technique counts in total. Baiyu had no idea how many undead had been in the army.

He'd gotten so carried away killing that, as he felt his power growing stronger and stronger, he'd completely forgotten to keep count.

Sweeping Blade was simply too captivating.

Every time he entered a wind track, he didn't need to expend any energy. The wind did all the work—even when he swung his sword, the breeze lent him its strength.

After a battle, Baiyu still had enough energy to talk, while the great mage who had summoned the army had collapsed from exhaustion.

That was the charm of the Wind-Chasing Sword Master. No matter when, he could enjoy himself.

The wind would help him do anything.

In an ordinary state, simply hacking at people would be enough to exhaust him.

With Wind Control, the wind became the executioner.

The killer wasn't human. It was the wind.

"Let's see how many Stone Puppets I cut down this time."

There were still a few wind traces on the Kusanagi Sword in his hand. He casually swung it, cut down a Stone Puppet, and then summoned it back.

"Sixteen more..."

That was so little...

He must've cut down tens of thousands of Stone Puppets.

At first, he'd killed one or two with each strike. Later, he was taking out hundreds at a time, sweeping away huge swathes.

The feeling of mowing down enemies was exhilarating.

That was the joy of being a swordsman.

The sky gradually darkened. He had spent the day cutting down Stone Puppets until nightfall, and time had flown by.

The Stone Puppets hadn't given him as many Draw-Sword Technique counts as he'd expected.

Perhaps their speed and strength simply couldn't keep up with Baiyu.

After mastering Wind Taming Sword Technique, Baiyu's strength had risen another level. He could hold his own in a war of attrition against a near-Kage-level opponent. Against a Kage Level ninja who specialized in ninjutsu, he could use wind walls to hold them off for a while.

If a Kage Level powerhouse let his guard down around him, Baiyu could kill them in a single strike.

But that was unlikely.

"Ghh..."

Yomi was still trying to speak. The remaining Stone Puppets continued advancing on Baiyu, while Moryo raged and cursed inside the seal in the Underground Palace.

What a useless wretch! He hadn't even summoned all those troops, and his body had already given out.

Yomi hadn't learned Dark Medical Ninjutsu yet, and his self-healing ability was weak. It was already impressive that he'd endured Moryo's power for so long.

"Can you still summon them?"

Seeing Yomi pant, Baiyu asked eagerly.

He was still alive! He could still breathe!

He was still a hundred thousand short. It'd be great if he could keep cutting down puppets, like a training session.

He'd prepared more than a hundred bottles of medicine, and now only seven remained. The expense was high, but so were the gains.

A hundred thousand was about what he'd earn for defeating a Kage-level powerhouse.

Yomi still wasn't enough.

At Baiyu's repeated question, Yomi's face flushed red. Blood vessels stood out in his eyes, and his eyeballs looked ready to burst.

"Well? Can you or can't you?"

"Ghh..."

A ragged rasp was his only reply.

"Pfft."

Baiyu stood up and let go of the Kusanagi Sword. The blade dropped and pierced straight through Yomi's head. Countless tendrils tried to pull it out, but they touched the blade and burst into wisps of blue smoke.

Yomi was no use to him anymore.

Yomi finally stopped breathing. His death earned Baiyu nearly twenty thousand additional counts.

He was at the Elite Jonin level, but had already been on the verge of death. If he'd still been in his prime, the reward would have been even higher.

"Next, if I take care of Moryo, I should have enough to reach a million."

Baiyu muttered to himself. He was quite pleased that he'd managed to complete the third stage of the Draw-Sword Technique mission this time.

Just after he executed Yomi, the shrine maiden Miroku suddenly appeared, looking at Baiyu with excitement.

She'd been watching from the shadows ever since Baiyu began fighting the Stone Puppets. Once she saw that he could take on the Undead Legion, she was finally certain.

Uchiha Shiraha was the savior of the Land of Demons!