In high summer, fireworks blazed; trees and grass flourished and withered.
A faintly drunken breeze swept up dark crimson leaves, like flames bursting forth in panic, fleeing the vast gray-white battlefield.
Green and red shimmered, trembling beneath the dusky sky, as though bearing endless resentment. Even after drifting to the ground, they refused to go out, only staining the earth red.
Corpses lay heaped together, limbs tangled atop one another, until even the ponds were filled...
The forests of the Land of Grass, littered with bodies, had become nothing but blood-soaked earth.
And it seemed that only in the dead of night were the victims permitted to quietly lick their wounds.
"Damn great nations..."
The young man wearing a Grass Shinobi forehead protector clenched his fist, his eyes reddening. Hidden in the darkness like a sewer rat, he quietly searched the bodies of dead shinobi for something.
The battle between Konoha and the Stone Shinobi had been too brutal. Large-scale Earth Release techniques had seemed like collapsing mountains, with gales and boulders blasting countless Konoha shinobi into the forest.
Even so, the boy, who hid during the day and emerged only at night to search for possible "spoils," had found only three corpses so far. Most had yielded nothing more than a few kunai and Soldier Pills.
"This is..."
"A... scroll?"
The icy touch of the corpse did nothing to cool the heat in his heart. His hands trembled slightly as he used steel wire to hook a scroll out of the bloodied, mangled ninja tool pouch. With practiced ease, he rolled away from the senbon that shot out of the pouch.
Only then did he let out a small sigh of relief and slowly open the scroll.
"A... sealing scroll?"
The bloodstained scroll was difficult to read in the