Chaos Approaches?
"Hahahaha! Men, hurry up! A bunch of weaklings, how dare you block my way!" The pirate captain, standing in front of the burning warehouse, carried a Sawtooth sword that was still dripping blood on his shoulder, laughing like a child who had just taken apart someone else's toy.
His name is Baldo, with a bounty of 97 million Beli. He's not exactly a big shot in the New World, but in this small town where there aren't even many guns, he's the king of hell.
A burly pirate with a menacing face kicked open the wooden door of the house next to the clinic, and came the sharp cries of a woman and the muffled thuds of furniture being overturned.
Several people nearby, who were stuffing the stolen silverware into a sack, didn't stop when they heard the commotion; instead, they started whistling with great interest.
"Captain Baldo! That bastard Jero jumped the gun again! We still have to wait for him after we finish our work!" Baldo spat, grinning to reveal a row of teeth stained yellow by smoking. "Tell him to hurry up! Damn it, I haven't even had my fun yet, and he's already started picking his own way."
Several pirates around him burst into laughter, their laughter mixed with cries, which sounded particularly jarring in the Kakkō.
The pirate called Jero poked half his face out of the house, giving his companions a smug, lewd gesture. "Get lost! I saw it first, you guys just wait!"
At the street corner, several townspeople who hadn't had time to run away were intercepted by another group of pirates, forced to kneel in a row, and had their pockets searched for money.
An old man with gray hair clutched a waterlogged ledger tightly to his chest. It was all the wealth he had accumulated from running his grocery store his whole life. The pirate impatiently slammed the ledger into the old man's forehead with the hilt of his sword. Blood smeared half of the old man's face, and the ledger slipped from his hand and was kicked into the roadside ditch.
The entire town went from the first scream to the last wailing in less than half an hour.
The Kakkō turned half the harbor a dark red, and even the Whitebeard Pirates ' patrol ship on the distant sea could be vaguely seen with an ominous orange glow.
The cries from the town carried further and further away amidst the Kakkō. The last merchant ship at the dock, which had not yet unloaded its cargo, was also set ablaze. Its mast snapped in half in the intense heat, crashing onto the water and sending up a cloud of steam mixed with sparks.
Baldo leaned against the warehouse door, tapping his shoulder with the back of his Sawtooth broadsword, pondering which island to go to for his next job, when he suddenly heard very light footsteps coming from the street corner.
The footsteps were very orderly, not the random stomping of pirates, but the marching of a well-trained column.
Ten people.
They all wore uniforms of gray and white, with Red-and-White Fan emblems embroidered on the collars.
The leader was a young man in his early twenties, with a Tachi slung across his waist, and his scarlet Sharingan gleamed eerily in the Kakkō.
The nine men behind him were equally expressionless, their gazes sweeping past the burning fishing boats and the mess in the street, coldly locking onto the figure carrying Sawtooth broadsword at the warehouse entrance.
Baldo raised an eyebrow.
Uchiha?
Of course he'd heard of the name; who hadn't heard of the New World these days?
But there were only ten people in front of him. He had at least a hundred men running rampant in the town, not to mention the few still on the boat.
"Hey, Uchiha brats." He took the large sword off his shoulder, the tip leaving a trail of sparks on the stone pavement, grinned to reveal a mouthful of yellow teeth, and said, "I'm taking this crappy island first. If you want to fight over territory, go somewhere else."
The young man in the lead ignored him, but turned his head slightly and said something to the team members behind him.
Baldo didn't hear clearly, but he saw the nine people disperse almost simultaneously, like gray-white petals blown open by the wind, silently blending into the streets and alleys of the town.
A surge of anger welled up inside Baldo, and he was about to curse when he noticed the pirate carrying the woman on the street corner, about to enter the alley, suddenly freeze.
It wasn't blocked by anything; it stopped on its own.
The pirate dropped his sword, slowly raised his hands, and stared blankly ahead, as if he had seen something he was terrified of.
The same scene was playing out simultaneously in every corner of the town.
One by one, the pirates who were ransacking the place stopped. Some collapsed to the ground, some turned and ran, and others raised their swords to fight back, only to find their hands wouldn't obey their commands.
It wasn't that they were poisoned; rather, their bodies betrayed them the moment those scarlet eyes merely flickered in the shadows of the Kakkō.
This wasn't a battle, or even a mopping-up operation. It was ten wolves walking into a sheepfold.
Baldo finally realized, belatedly, that the young leader had never drawn his sword; he had simply stared at him silently with eyes that looked like those of a dead man.
"Hey! Uchiha! What are you doing?! The entire West Blue is so big, do you think you can just take it all for yourselves?! You're nothing but a bunch of ants! Are you going to fight us for their sake?! I'm..."
Baldo's eyes widened, his mouth still agape. Before the words "I'm a pirate with a bounty of 97 million" could even escape his throat, he felt a chill on his neck.
He saw a headless corpse standing there, the Sawtooth broadsword still slung over its shoulder, in the exact same posture as when he had leaned against the warehouse door. The corpse looked so familiar. Then his consciousness faded into darkness.
Uchiha Zhenhe and swiftly sheathed his sword.
He didn't glance at the corpse once, only coldly scanning the still-burning town, his disgust undisguised.
"Lowly trash." His voice wasn't loud, but it carried clearly to the ears of every team member present.
"Leave no one alive. After it's over, hang their heads on the shore."
"Yes, Captain!"
The nine voices spoke in unison.
Nine pairs of Sharingan lit up simultaneously in the shadows of the Kakkō, each at least Two Tomoe, like a group of silent predators approaching in the night.
The Jonin- level strength was deployed to this town to deal with a group of pirates who couldn't even touch the threshold of Haki was not a battle at all—it was just a cleanup.
A flash of light appeared at the alley entrance, and a pirate who was trying to escape by scaling the wall fell straight down from the top.
The Kunai the flank, precisely piercing the wrist of another pirate who was trying to fire his gun. Immediately afterward, a figure flashed past, and a second blade sliced across his throat.
The pirates' screams were extinguished before they even reached the alley entrance, leaving only the muffled thuds of their corpses falling to the ground.
At the back of the group, a slightly younger member paused slightly as he passed the headless corpse.
He glanced at the head that had rolled onto the stone pavement, then at Zhenhe walking ahead, and muttered to his companion beside him, "The captain's sword draw has gotten even faster. It wasn't this fast on the last mission."