At Least Bai Ye Got Back

"At least the intelligence made it back."

Hatake Sakumo leaned against a tree, tossed two soldier pills into his mouth, then began tending to his wounds.

For three days and three nights, aside from the first few hours, Sakumo had been fighting almost nonstop. From the initial squads of special jōnin to the increasingly frequent squads of jōnin, even with his strength, he had sustained serious injuries by now. Of course, that was also because he had deliberately exposed some traces. Otherwise, with his combat ability and battlefield experience, if he had fled at full speed from the start, he was seventy percent certain he could have escaped Hidden Rain Village's encirclement. Even if Hanzo, the so-called "Demigod," had personally intervened, he was confident he could have gotten away at little cost.

But then Bai Ye would almost certainly have died.

Hatake Sakumo closed his eyes and went over Bai Ye's route once more in his mind.

"Exactly three days have passed. There are no large forces stationed along that route, and Hanzo's men should all have been drawn here by now. At most, the southern interception force consists of a few scattered patrols. The brat is small, and this mission has already sharpened his ability to hide. As long as nothing unexpected happens, he should be safe in another two or three days."

Should.

Sakumo forced those two words from his mind. There was no should on the battlefield, only doing or not doing. He had done everything he could. What remained depended on the child's own fate.

Hatake Sakumo rested a hand on his sword hilt but did not draw it.

In his senses, the pursuers had arrived on the other side of the ridgeline.

Six.

No, there were more behind them. Another four were climbing up from the ravine, perhaps more. They spread across the ridge in a fan formation, sealing off his paths west and north. Gray combat uniforms, Hidden Rain Village forehead protectors, kunai and ninja swords gleaming dully through the rain.

The leader stood at the highest point of the ridge, looking down at him.

That man did not attack immediately. He watched Sakumo for several seconds, then turned his head and waved to those beside him, signaling his subordinates to confirm whether the man before them was the intruder mentioned in the intelligence, whether there were accomplices nearby, and whether they should send out a call for reinforcements.

Hatake Sakumo did not give him that time.

The sound of a short sword leaving its sheath rang across the ridge. The curtain of rain was split by a straight line. The leader reacted quickly, twisting aside at the instant before the blade reached him. The edge did not cut open his chest, but blood sprayed from his shoulder, scattered by the rain into a pale red mist.

But before he fell, he pulled a signal flare from his waist and fired it into the sky. A burst of red light exploded beneath the gray-white clouds. Sakumo did not try to stop the signal, nor could he have.

This was Hanzo's territory. He had never planned to leave without alerting anyone. Besides, he needed time—enough time for that brat to run far enough away.

The pursuers on the ridge closed in and attacked together.

The first man rushed before him, his kunai stabbing toward Sakumo's chest. Sakumo shifted aside, and the kunai passed beneath his armpit. His short sword tapped lightly against the man's wrist. The kunai flew from his hand, and the man dropped to his knees clutching his severed wrist. Sakumo did not spare him a second glance.

The second man lunged from the left, gripping a ninja sword in both hands, its point aimed straight beneath Sakumo's ribs. As Sakumo blocked with his short sword, he used the force to spring backward a step, narrowly avoiding a kunai striking from behind. His body spun once in midair. The moment he landed, he kicked off from the mud and shot toward the fourth man like an arrow.

The fourth man reacted with startling speed. The instant Sakumo charged, he leaped far back and flung three shuriken. The short sword drew a circle through the air, knocking all three aside with its spine, but that brief delay allowed the fifth and sixth men to attack simultaneously from both sides.

The shorter the blade, the greater the danger.

At the instant before those two ninja swords pierced him, both his knees bent outward, and his entire body dropped low like a sheet of folded paper.

The two ninja swords crossed over his head, their edges grazing his hair.

From that folded posture, Sakumo swept his short sword horizontally. Its edge slashed across the fifth man's calf, then across the sixth man's ankle. Both men fell at once.

When he rose, there was a cut on his face. It was shallow, left by the tip of the sixth man's ninja sword as it missed.

Hatake Sakumo raised a hand and wiped away the blood, his expression unchanged.

Then he began to run.

The enemy needed to coordinate, assemble, assign pursuit zones, and arrange encirclement routes. Every breakout gave him a brief chance to breathe, but the noose was tightening. Every time he broke through, Hanzo's men drew the net tighter the next time. The reinforcements they sent came with ninja hounds, sensory-type ninja, and ninja hawks for communication.

Sakumo's route was no longer entirely westward. Sometimes he detoured northwest, sometimes he veered southwest. Sometimes he deliberately ran slowly across an open stretch, letting the pursuers see his back clearly, then plunged into the dense forest at the moment they were about to catch him, vanishing once more beneath the cover of the canopy and uneven terrain.

But just before dawn, he finally ran into a hard fight.

More than a dozen men. They were an ANBU squad directly under Hanzo. Their combat uniforms bore the distinctive shoulder insignia of Hidden Rain Village's ANBU, and every one of them wore the same black mask, exposing only their eyes.

By the time Sakumo saw them, there were already two wounds on his left shoulder.

The ANBU captain was the first to charge.

His swordsmanship was not the ninja sword style commonly seen in Hidden Rain Village. It was something Sakumo had never encountered before, a style marked by a clear personal flair—fast, vicious, and tricky in angle. Every strike targeted a vital point. His physical abilities also far surpassed those of the earlier rabble. His strength, speed, and reactions were only a shade below Sakumo's.

Sakumo caught his first strike with his short sword. A shower of sparks burst from the collision of the two blades. The second slash swept upward from below. Sakumo leaned back to evade it, opening a step of distance, then switched from a forward grip to a reverse grip. This was the opening stance of Hatake-Style Swordsmanship for close-quarters combat, sacrificing reach and flexibility in exchange for the power and speed of the swing.

When the ANBU captain lunged again, Sakumo's blade was faster. The short sword cut through his combat uniform, then his skin and muscle, carving from his left chest all the way to his right waist.

Before the ANBU captain fell, four of his squad members had already attacked Sakumo from four directions.

When Hatake Sakumo passed between the corpses of the ANBU members, there was another sword wound along his right ribs, long and deep, running from between his ribs to the side of his waist.

Blood seeped from the tear in his combat uniform and ran down his body.

The first ray of morning light slipped through a gap in the clouds, turning the rain curtain gray-gold. Sakumo stopped beneath a rock wall in a ravine, leaned against it, tipped back his head, and gulped down breaths of air.

He lowered his head to check his wounds. Two on his left shoulder, one on his left upper arm, one along his right ribs, and another on his right calf. When had he received that one? He could not remember. There was no time to rest. The pursuers were less than a quarter hour behind him. He used the rainwater to rinse the mud and blood from the surface of his wounds, pulled the torn portions of his combat uniform into place, and pressed the fabric against them as makeshift compression to stop the bleeding.

Then he stood and continued onward.

Before the pursuers' encirclement closed completely, he had to cross this ravine and enter the rolling hills farther west. The vegetation there was denser, the terrain more complex. He could keep the pursuers occupied there for much longer.