Defying Orders to Return, Sosuke's Thousand-Mile Dash

"Rumble—"

This was not thunder, but the explosive shockwave produced by a pure physical body breaking the sound barrier.

Dressed in white, Sosuke streaked through the dense primeval forest, leaving behind a hundred-meter-long emerald-green afterimage. The Yang Release chakra of his perfected Sage Body formed a tangible aura around him. The towering ancient trees along the way, which required three people to encircle, did not even need him to strike them. The gale from his passing alone snapped them cleanly in half. Wood chips and fallen leaves whirled wildly through the air as a straight passage was forcibly plowed through the heart of the forest.

Ahead, five figures wearing Hidden Leaf ANBU masks leaped down from the canopy, blocking his path in a wedge formation. They were Hiruzen Sarutobi's agents stationed at the front lines to monitor Sosuke's movements.

"Senju Advisor! Stop immediately!" The ANBU captain in a cat mask held up a red scroll stamped with the Hokage's seal. "An urgent order from the front-line command! You are to report to the central camp at once and must not leave the marching route without authorization!"

Sosuke did not slow down in the slightest. His formerly gentle eyes now radiated an icy chill.

"Get lost."

Just one word, yet it carried the imperial pressure of something that could not be defied.

As that word left his mouth, the abyss-like chakra within Sosuke erupted. He did not form hand seals, nor did he draw a kunai from his ninja pouch. He simply rammed his body straight into the ANBU's vaunted defensive formation.

"Has he gone mad?! Combined defense!" The ANBU captain cried out in terror. All five elites formed hand seals at once, squeezing their chakra to its limit as they unleashed the highest-grade Earth Release: Earth-Flow Wall.

Three thick, sturdy stone walls erupted from the ground, forming a small fortress across his path.

Bang!

The white figure crashed into the Earth-Flow Wall like a meteor from beyond the sky. There was no stalemate, no gradual shattering. The several-meter-thick rock wall turned directly into powder the instant it made contact. The aftermath of that violent momentum became a tangible shockwave, brutally blasting the five ANBU away like rag dolls.

The crisp crack of breaking bones rang especially clearly through the night. The five ANBU slammed heavily into distant tree trunks, vomiting blood as even their masks shattered from the impact. They looked up in terror, but Sosuke's back was already nowhere to be seen.

Only a freezing sentence rode the raging night wind and smashed into their ears.

"Go back and tell Hiruzen Sarutobi that his rules do not apply to the Senju clan."

Ignoring the higher-ups' orders and severely injuring ANBU from his own village—such madness, which would have been tantamount to betraying the village in most people's eyes, came as naturally to Sosuke as breathing. He had long seen through the hypocritical political games of the Hidden Leaf F4. Before absolute force, a Hokage's order was nothing more than a scrap of waste paper.

[System Notice: Distance to target has been reduced to thirty kilometers. The target's vital signs are fluctuating violently, and her emotional state is one of extreme despair.]

The mechanical voice in his mind pulled a cruel curve across Sosuke's lips.

With a light tap of his toes against a thick tree trunk, he shot forward again in a flash of light. The perfected Sage Body had granted him not only inexhaustible chakra, but also a terrifying rise in physical ability. The sensation of wielding his power freely without needing to worry about the limits of his meridians made his blood faintly boil.

Suddenly, Sosuke came to an abrupt halt in midair and landed steadily beside a thorny bush.

His slender fingers reached out and gently plucked a strand of vivid red hair from the sharp thorns.

The strand was stained with dried blood, its edges scorched by Lightning Release. Yet even so, it still retained an extremely faint but incomparably tenacious chakra fluctuation. It was the lingering ember of the Uzumaki clan's immense vitality, as well as the resonance of bloodlines that had shared the same ancient origin as the Senju Clan.

Sosuke slowly rubbed the strand of hair between his fingertips. Before his eyes, he seemed to see that red-haired girl biting through her lip in desperate circumstances, stubbornly doing everything she could to leave behind a signal for help.

"She clearly possesses the potential to overturn the course of this war, yet those old fools used her as bait to lure out the enemy. What a waste." Sosuke tucked the strand of red hair into his sleeve, the possessiveness in his eyes fully exposed beneath the moonlight.

He did not need to guess how utterly despairing Kushina must have been toward the Hidden Leaf right now. The deeper her despair, the better. Only once she had completely given up on that hypocritical village could she throw herself into the Senju clan's embrace without reservation.

"The protection Hidden Leaf cannot give you, I will." Sosuke murmured. The emerald-green chakra around him suddenly contracted before erupting outward with even greater violence. "But the price will be your body and soul. Even that fox inside you will bear the mark of Senju Sosuke!"

Boom!

The enormous tree beneath his feet instantly collapsed. Sosuke's speed broke through its limits once more, and like an unmatched murderous blade tearing through the night, he plunged straight toward Hidden Cloud's retreat route.

At the same time, deep within the forest less than five kilometers from Sosuke.

Thunder Beast, a Hidden Cloud jonin, hurled Kushina from his shoulder heavily onto the ground. The consecutive high-speed dash had left him slightly short of breath, but the fervor in his eyes only grew stronger. Once they crossed the river ahead, they would have completely left the Land of Fire.

"Captain, there's no sign of any pursuers behind us. Those cowards from Hidden Leaf seem to have completely abandoned her," a Hidden Cloud elite reported with a cold sneer.

Thunder Beast drew the short blade at his waist. Its edge reflected a bloodthirsty chill under the pale moonlight. He looked down at Kushina, curled up on the ground, without a trace of pity in his eyes.

"Now that we're safe, cut the tendons in this girl's hands and feet. The Uzumaki clan's recovery ability is too strong. We can't have the monster inside her going berserk halfway there and causing trouble."

Kushina's muscles had become incredibly stiff from the corrosion of Lightning Release, but she still glared fiercely at Thunder Beast. There was not the slightest hint of pleading weakness in those clear eyes. Instead, they held the ferocity of a lone wolf at death's door. She clenched her teeth so hard that a trace of crimson blood seeped from the corner of her mouth.

She knew she was finished. Once the tendons in her hands and feet were severed and she was taken back to the Hidden Cloud Village, what awaited her would be imprisonment and torture even darker than anything in Hidden Leaf. The bustling streets of Hidden Leaf flashed through her mind, followed by the ANBU who spoke of "companions" every day. In the end, it all became a miserable, bitter laugh.

No one was coming to save her. From beginning to end, she had only been a bargaining chip with a clearly marked price.

"Still pretty stubborn." Thunder Beast sneered, swinging his short blade mercilessly down toward Kushina's slender ankle. "Once your hands and feet are useless, let's see what you can use to glare at me!"

Kushina closed her eyes in despair.

The blade tore through the air with a piercing whistle.

Just as that icy edge was about to cut through her skin and sever her tendons—

Whoosh—

An incredibly strange breeze swept past. Several strands of red hair that Kushina had left behind along the way, scattered in the grass, were gently lifted by the wind and began spiraling through the air, about to drift away.

Then, the air throughout the entire forest suddenly froze.

It was not an illusion. A tangible chakra pressure crashed down like mountains and oceans, forcibly suppressing even the wind around them. Thunder Beast's movement froze in midair. His eyes widened in terror as he discovered that his arm seemed to have been filled with tens of millions of tons of molten lead. He could not press down even another millimeter.

A terrifying killing intent that seemed capable of freezing even souls came rushing from the boundless darkness behind them like a violent tsunami, instantly locking onto every Hidden Cloud ninja present.