Blind Spots of the Mind and the Ruthless Slaughter of Brother Fighting Brother

"Explode."

The word was barely a whisper, muffled by his mud-caked mask, yet it became the last sound Venom Fang would ever hear.

His pride—the intuition of an ANBU operative—had become a complete joke in this moment. Who could have imagined that a piece of cannon fodder, with his chakra nearly exhausted and his left side paralyzed by potent venom, could have silently buried an Explosive Tag deep into the mud the very instant he was sent flying?

Even more terrifying was that he had channeled the chakra for the Tiger Seal using only one hand!

It was a silent, one-handed technique that even elite jonin struggled to master. Venom Fang's gaze had been locked onto Baishi's right hand hanging at his side, wary of him drawing a weapon, yet he had fallen into the fatal psychological blind spot that "seals require two hands."

"Boom!"

A dull explosion erupted beneath the muddy water.

There was no earth-shattering flash of fire, only a highly condensed shockwave mixed with foul-smelling sludge, slamming into Venom Fang's legs like an invisible heavy hammer.

Venom Fang's body tilted forward uncontrollably, the flow of chakra within him violently disrupted by the close-range tremor. His brain frantically issued commands to retreat, but his muscles were locked in a fatal half-second of paralysis.

That half-second was all it took.

Baishi moved.

Instead of retreating to avoid the aftermath of the explosion, he lunged forward into the flying debris and scalding mud like a starving wolf driven to the edge of despair.

His left side remained completely numb, but his right hand—the one that had just finished the seal—violently gripped the hilt of the dark green venomous kunai embedded in his left collarbone.

Only by being ruthless to oneself could one seize the leverage to survive.

"Squish!"

A flash of cold, rational madness crossed Baishi's eyes. His five fingers tightened, and with a sickening sound of grinding bone, he forcibly ripped the kunai out from between his bones!

Viscous black blood sprayed out like a high-pressure hose, the scalding liquid splashing onto Baishi's pure white mask and dripping down his chin.

The excruciating pain caused his facial muscles to twitch violently, yet he didn't let out so much as a muffled groan.

Using the momentum of pulling the kunai and the force of his forward lunge, Baishi slammed into Venom Fang's chest. The kunai, coated in Baishi's own blood and the Iwagakure poison, carved a sharp, mournful arc through the dim canyon.

Venom Fang's pupils dilated behind his mask.

He saw the cold light streaking toward his throat and desperately tried to swing his ninja blade to parry, but the nerve paralysis caused by the Explosive Tag made his movements a fraction of a second too slow.

That fraction of a second was the boundary between life and death.

"Sshhh—"

The sound of a sharp blade slicing through flesh and severing the windpipe was piercingly loud in the wind.

Scalding blood instantly broke free from the carotid artery, spraying out without obstruction and drenching Baishi's head and face. The thick, metallic scent of blood instantly overwhelmed the stench of the swamp.

Venom Fang's body collapsed into the mud like a discarded sack of flour, splashing up a circle of murky water.

He clutched his leaking throat, but blood surged uncontrollably between his fingers, staining a large patch of the mud.

"Gurgle... gurgle..."

Meaningless syllables bubbled from his shattered throat. Venom Fang's bulging eyes stared fixedly at the slight figure kneeling before him, his gaze filled with a terror and disbelief that shattered his understanding of reality.

He couldn't understand it.

How could the perfect plan to borrow a knife to kill, personally devised by Lord Danzo, fall to a piece of cannon fodder whose file labeled him as "cowardly and weak"?

Why did this wretch, who would tremble at the thought of killing a genin, possess such terrifying tactical calculation and such ruthless methods?

Baishi did not give him any chance to find the answer.

Villains died from talking too much, and he never made such a stupid mistake. When facing an enemy, the only safe approach was total physical erasure.

Baishi coldly gripped the kunai in a reverse hold, aimed it at Venom Fang's heart, and drove it down without hesitation, twisting it for good measure.

"Thud."

The heart was completely shredded.

The light in Venom Fang's eyes faded instantly. His body twitched violently twice, his hands, clawing at the mud, went limp, and he became nothing more than a cold corpse.

Baishi pulled out the kunai and collapsed into the mud, completely spent.

His chest heaved like a bellows as he gasped for air.

"Cough... cough!"

He spat out another mouthful of blackened, toxic blood. The wound in his left collarbone, now lacking the physical pressure of the kunai, was bleeding profusely. The toxin, carried by his accelerated blood circulation, began an irreversible march toward his heart.

The double vision in his sight grew increasingly severe.

Baishi gritted his teeth, his right hand trembling as he formed a one-handed Lightning Release seal.

"Zzzzt!"

Faint blue arcs of electricity struggled to dance at his fingertips. Without hesitation, he pressed his high-voltage fingers against the spurring wound.

The smell of scorched flesh filled the air once more.

He used the high heat of the Lightning Release to forcibly cauterize the ruptured blood vessels and muscle, using a brutal method to stop the massive hemorrhage. The vast vitality of his incomplete Uzumaki Constitution finally caught up to the rate of consumption, shielding his heart and slowly breaking down the toxins in his body.

Only the sound of the wind whistling through the rock crevices remained in the canyon.

Nine corpses lay scattered about: eight Iwagakure elites and one Konoha ANBU captain.

Baishi leaned against a boulder half his height, closing his eyes to steady himself for a dozen seconds.

He had survived.

Yet, he knew clearly in his heart that this death trap had only just begun.

The Konoha higher-ups were no fools. Both the Third Hokage's ANBU and Danzo's Root had sensory-type ninja specifically tasked with crime scene investigation. A mediocre, low-ranking ANBU who not only survived an ambush by Iwagakure elites but also "happened" to witness his captain's death?

That story wouldn't even fool a genin fresh out of the Ninja Academy.

To escape unscathed, he had to provide the Konoha higher-ups with a seamless "truth" that satisfied the interests of all parties involved.

Baishi stood up shakily, muddy water dripping from his tattered ANBU uniform.

He walked over to the corpse of Venom Fang and pulled the standard-issue ANBU blade from the mud. The edge glinted with a chilling, cold light in the dim illumination.

He reversed the blade.

Baishi looked at his right flank, where the bleeding had just stopped. There was no fluctuation in his eyes, as if the body about to be pierced did not belong to him.

The first step in faking the scene was ensuring his own wounds aligned with the logic of being "critically injured by Iwagakure and saved by the captain at the cost of his life." The wounds from Venom Fang's blade and those from Iwagakure kunai were completely different; he had to inflict sufficiently realistic, life-threatening wounds upon himself.

Just as the tip of the blade was about to pierce the skin of his abdomen.

Baishi's gaze swept casually over Venom Fang's pure white mask, half-shattered by an Explosive Tag.

His movements froze abruptly.

The hair on the back of his neck stood on end, and an intense sense of crisis surged straight to his crown.

Baishi threw the ninja blade aside and violently ripped the broken mask from Venom Fang's face.

On the inside of the mask, in an extremely concealed spot near the edge of the jaw.

There, imprinted clearly, was a bizarre mark composed of black jutsu formulas, resembling a bird spreading its wings.

A Flying Thunder God formula!

Namikaze Minato had actually left a Flying Thunder God mark on Venom Fang's mask!

Baishi's breathing stalled, his pupils contracting violently.

He understood Minato's scheme in an instant. That blonde genius had never fully trusted Venom Fang; this mark was Minato's contingency plan. Once the intelligence retrieval mission in the Redwood Forest concluded, or if Minato sensed something amiss, he could traverse space at any moment and descend directly into this canyon!

Looking at the dead Venom Fang on the ground and the traces of destruction left by Lightning Release and Explosive Tags everywhere.

The time remaining for Baishi to erase his own suspicion and complete the perfect disguise had become an unknown and extremely short countdown.