En caught up with his squad just as dawn broke.
The five team members huddled inside a rock cave, gripping their kunai nervously. When they heard footsteps, they nearly threw explosive tags.
"Don't throw them. It's me."
Tiger poked his head out of the cave. When he saw En approaching unharmed, he froze for several seconds.
"My lord... y-you're all right?"
"What could be wrong?"
"But there was—an entire battalion—"
En sat down at the cave entrance, pulled out a water flask from his clothes, and took a drink.
"Half a battalion," he corrected. "The other half has already become fertilizer."
The five of them exchanged looks.
Snake—the medical ninja—stared at En as though he had seen a ghost. "You alone... fought an entire battalion?"
"Half of one. I held back. Killing them all wouldn't be good; I had to leave a few alive to report back. Otherwise, Iwagakure might think their Ninth Battalion had vanished as a group and send more people to search for them. That'd be troublesome."
"..."
No one spoke.
It wasn't that they didn't want to. They simply didn't know what to say. They had spent years in the ANBU and seen all manner of storms, but "one man taking on an entire battalion head-on" was something they had only heard of in legends about the First Hokage.
"Let's go." En stood up. "Back to Konoha. I have something to say to those people in the Second Staff Division."
When the battle report reached Konoha, the entire ANBU command center fell silent for at least ten seconds.
The head of the Second Staff Division—a balding middle-aged man in his fifties—held the report in trembling hands.
The report was written concisely. ANBU battle reports required no embellishment or nonsense, only dry statements of fact:
"Intelligence