I tugged up the ragged collar of my coat and wiped the sand and dirt off my face.
Turning my head, I grinned at Jiraiya, who was leaning on a crutch.
"All right, old man. You'd better put on a few more layers yourself. Look how weak you are."
"One gust, and I'm afraid you'll blow straight to the Land of Wind."
Jiraiya gave two dry coughs, then tossed an empty medicine bottle at me with a laughing curse.
I tilted my head out of the way. The bottle landed in the muddy water with a gurgling bubble.
Just as I was about to head toward the little villa, a sharp sound suddenly came from the muddy puddle on the ground.
Click.
It was an incredibly faint scrape of metal, but it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
I stopped dead, my hands instinctively clenching inside my pockets.
That Deva Path shell had already shut down completely, reduced to scrap.
Yet the broken Black Rods embedded in his chest suddenly flared with a blinding, blood-red light.
"Sen! Get away! That hunk of metal is going to self-destruct!"
Shikamaru screamed desperately, scrambling backward on his hands and knees.
His mud-caked boots kept slipping on the broken roof tiles.
I turned and saw Deva Path's ruined belly swelling like an enormous bun made of rising dough.
It bulged outward with a bubbling sound, the red chakra glare painfully bright.
"Wonderful. Even stone-dead, you have to let out a fart to disgust everyone. Nice work, Nagato."
I spat out a mouthful of gritty saliva in irritation.
If that self-destruct blast went off, there wouldn't be a single intact brick left within a hundred meters.
Jiraiya, lying on his stretcher, and the exhausted Tsunade would both die here.
"I