Real? Fake? Obito's Worldview Shattered

The group turned several street corners.

First came a sharp whiff of disinfectant.

Then a nauseatingly foul stench hit them head-on.

The people walking behind Guy all frowned.

"What smells so bad?"

Obito spoke in a low voice, instinctively covering his nose.

Ebisu seemed to recall something, and his expression abruptly changed.

He recognized this smell.

It was extremely similar to the place where corpses had been disposed of at Amachi's human experimentation base in the Land of the Sea.

Disinfectant mixed with the rotten stench of decomposing bodies!

When he had gone into the sea to save Anko, he had stumbled into that place by accident.

He had seen that horrifying sight before.

At the thought of it, Ebisu's face turned exceptionally grim.

"Could this be..."

Before Ebisu could finish—

The sight ahead confirmed his worst fears.

They turned the final corner, and the space before them suddenly opened up.

No, it should have been said that it suddenly grew dark.

This was a dead-end corner shrouded in the shadows of buildings.

It formed a horrifying contrast with the streets outside, which had at least barely maintained a semblance of decency.

People lay sprawled and curled up all over the ground.

Or rather... countless "human shapes."

Most were dressed in rags and emaciated to the bone.

Some had already stopped moving, reduced to corpses.

Maggots crawled over their bodies while flies buzzed around them.

Others still breathed faintly.

Their hollow, numb eyes stared at the sky or the walls.

They showed no reaction whatsoever to Guy's group approaching, as though their souls had long since been taken from them.

It was August now, and the weather was scorching.

The corpses had rotted badly, and the stench was spreading from here.

Yet those who were still "alive" showed no reaction