Prey in the Dead of Night

On the third day after drawing up the hunting list, Shinichi locked onto his first target.

It was not Vanguard—though Vanguard's threat level was high, he partnered with Lamefoot on every mission. The two worked seamlessly together, and the risk of taking on two at once was too great. Nor was it Split Face—Split Face was one of the outpost's core members, with irregular comings and goings, making it difficult to catch him alone. The target Shinichi chose was Last Place. That Root outer member who always lagged behind the group at shift changes, walking carelessly along, wore a cat-faced mask and went by the codename Cat Face.

The reason for choosing Cat Face was simple. According to a week of surveillance records, Cat Face handled supply deliveries around the outpost. Every Wednesday at two in the morning, he would push a handcart alone from the warehouse at the southeast corner, cross the abandoned storage district, take the narrow alley beside the drainage canal, and deliver a batch of crates marked "medical supplies" to a handoff point at the edge of the Death Forest. The entire route took around forty minutes, but one stretch was especially quiet—the drainage canal alley. Abandoned corrugated-iron warehouses stood on both sides, with no residents, no streetlights, and the patrol route turning at the alley entrance, leaving a full fifteen-minute gap. If clashes between shinobi were like chess, Cat Face was the kind of player who followed the same route every move and never looked at the overall board. Such people usually did not survive past the middlegame. The shinobi world was no different.

One forty-five in the morning. Shinichi arrived at the drainage canal alley half an hour early. He was not wearing his usual faded jacket—it stood out too much under moonlight, as the Third Hokage had reminded him the last time he had choked him on the cliff. Instead, he wore an old dark-gray cotton shirt he had dug out of the orphanage storeroom a few days ago. It had originally been Little Fatty's father's work shirt, two sizes too large, but with the sleeves rolled up three times, they reached his elbows perfectly. His pants were dark, and so were his shoes—he had rubbed the old cloth shoes with soot from the bottom of a pot, leaving them completely nonreflective beneath the moonlight. A dark cloth covered his face, exposing only his eyes. Those eyes were black now—the Sharingan was not activated. He did not need that level of ocular power to deal with an outer Chunin.

The environmental survey had been completed in advance. The narrow alley was roughly fifty meters long and one and a half meters wide. A handcart could barely pass through, but there was no room to turn around. The walls on both sides were the side walls of corrugated-iron warehouses, about four meters tall and covered in rust. Midway down the alley was a dent in one wall, made by an abandoned forklift crashing into it. It was just large enough to hide a child. The drainage grate at the alley entrance was loose, and stepping on it would make a sound—he had deliberately tested it two nights ago, confirming the volume and range of the noise. Everything was ready.

Two oh-three in the morning. The sound of handcart wheels rolling over stone slabs came from the alley entrance, creaking steadily. Cat Face pushed the cart into the narrow alley. He walked casually, even chewing on something—the scent that drifted over was from a ration bar. Shinichi held his breath in the recess. The handcart drew closer and closer. Soon, the only sounds left were the rolling wheels and Cat Face's occasional off-key humming. Three meters, two meters, one meter—the instant the handcart passed the recess, Shinichi moved.

He did not pounce. He slid soundlessly out of the recess, with Cat Face's body perfectly blocking the moonlight from the alley entrance. With his left hand, he pulled a shuriken from his waist and flung it toward the loose drainage grate at the entrance. The grate clattered on impact, especially abrupt in the silent night. Cat Face reacted exactly as Shinichi had predicted—he immediately turned sideways toward the source of the sound, shifting his center of gravity forward and exposing his right shoulder. He did not look behind him. That was the difference between an outer member and a Jonin—Tiger Mask had left his original position the instant the white smoke bomb exploded, while Cat Face was still trying to find the target with his eyes.

The kunai left its sheath. Wind-nature chakra flooded the blade, forming a thin, high-speed layer of cutting wind—an elementary application of Vacuum Blade. It required no hand seals, only compressing wind-nature chakra into the final three inches of the blade. Shinichi did not aim for the throat or the heart, but for the convergence of chakra pathways beneath the right shoulder blade. It was not fatal, but it would instantly sever the chakra circuit in the right arm and prevent the target from forming hand seals. The blade sank in. Cat Face's body stiffened violently, and the kunai in his right hand fell limp when it was only halfway drawn—his right arm's chakra circuit had been cut off. He opened his mouth to shout, but Shinichi's left hand was already pressed against his forehead from behind.

Devour activated.

A stream of warm chakra was drawn from Cat Face's body, flowing along Shinichi's arm meridians into his dantian. It was unlike the searing pain when he had devoured Feng Jian—his body had not yet adapted to foreign chakra then, and his meridians had felt as though they were being flooded with chili water. This time, there was only a faint aching warmth, like muscles heating up slightly after a set of push-ups. A system prompt lit up at the edge of his consciousness, calm and clear.

Devour complete. Attribute: Wind. Bloodline Limit: None. Acquired skills: Assassination Art: Silent Step, Wind Release: Wind Blade, Intelligence: Root Outer Network.

Shinichi withdrew his hand and gently laid Cat Face on the ground. There was no blood and no struggle. The entire process, from activation to completion, took less than five seconds. He pushed the handcart to the intersection at the far end of the narrow alley and left it there, then carried Cat Face's body to the predetermined disposal spot and covered it with miscellaneous debris for camouflage.

Then he leaned against the alley's corrugated-iron wall and let out a breath. It was not physical exhaustion—the fight had lasted only seconds—but the release after intense mental focus. Every use of Devour brought a brief sense of disorientation. It was not the system punishing him, but his mind having to process the muscle memory flooding in from new skills and integrate the old with the new. Assassination Art: Silent Step. He could feel his feet automatically adjusting their angles of force when touching the ground—in the past, when he jumped from a rooftop into an alley, he would make a faint sound. Now, he could precisely control the contact area and force between his soles and the ground, reducing his landing sound to nearly zero. Wind Blade. A more basic Wind Release technique than Vacuum Blade, requiring no kunai as a medium. It directly released wind-nature chakra from the fingertips into curved blades. Its range was short, but it was more discreet to use. Intelligence: Root Outer Network. Cat Face had memorized the codenames, contact signals, and handoff locations of more than a dozen outer members. All that information belonged to Shinichi now.

The gains were better than expected. It was not just two new skills, but more importantly, a complete map of Root's outer communications structure—according to the network's structure, all outer members periodically reported their movements to someone called Snake Face. Snake Face, in turn, answered directly to Danzo's confidant, Elephant Face. That meant that if he followed the communications network to trace the line, he could locate every outer member one by one. There was no need to chase each person all over the village. He only needed to follow the communication lines and clear them out one at a time.

It was just past three in the morning when Shinichi returned to the orphanage. The process had become ingrained in his muscle memory—climb in through the kitchen's back window, skip the third stair that creaked, take off his jacket, hide the kunai, and lie down. His Shadow Clone had been lying in bed for half the night, and the blanket still retained body heat. He slipped into the covers, dispelled the clone, and closed his eyes.

But he did not fall asleep right away. It was not because he was afraid, nor because he felt guilty—Cat Face's hands were not clean. Based on fragments of his memories, he had directly participated in transporting illegal test subjects on multiple occasions. What truly kept Shinichi awake was the efficiency of this hunt. It had taken only three days from locking onto the target to completing the kill. There had been no accidents throughout the process, no alarms triggered, and no traces left behind. To Danzo, this might have meant nothing more than the loss of an insignificant fringe pawn, but to Shinichi, it was a milestone—it showed that he had shifted from passive defense to active elimination.

Under the heading "Root Outer Removal Plan" in his notebook, he drew a line through Cat Face's name. Then he turned to a new page and drew the communications network extracted from Cat Face's memory fragments into a tree diagram, with more than a dozen branches extending beneath "Snake Face." He circled one marked, "Conducts outer transport alone, passes the riverside ferry crossing before dawn every Friday."

The next target—Wind Blade provided better cover for Vacuum Blade, and the synchronization of his assassination technique still needed further combat experience to solidify.