Sulfur, charred flesh, and earth had been instantly carbonized by the intense heat, mixing into a peculiar stench.
The lush bushes and concealed rocky bunkers had vanished without a trace. In their place was a massive semicircular crater over a hundred meters in diameter. The earth at the bottom had taken on a strange, glassy texture, still radiating a dark-red afterheat.
"The heat source reaction is subsiding."
An ANBU member wearing a gas mask surveyed the battlefield. His voice sounded somewhat distorted through the filter. "Is this the power of 'Fire Rain'? If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I'd find it hard to believe that destruction on this scale wasn't caused by a Tailed Beast."
Kakashi said nothing.
He stepped across the smoking scorched earth, the soles of his boots making faint sizzling sounds. Even the high-temperature-resistant combat boots specially made by the First Arsenal could not block the scorching heat rising from beneath his feet in this environment.
"If this had been a war in the old days, an ambush battle of this scale would have taken even me, with the Sharingan, at least half an hour to resolve—and cost two or three lives."
Kakashi tugged at the collar of his tactical vest, the exposed dead-fish eye sweeping across the brutal scene around him. "Now, all it takes is moving a finger and entering a few coordinates. If I were a few years older, I'd really have trouble accepting such a world-shaking change."
"Kakashi, I've detected a strange smell!" Pakkun, who was in charge of sensing, suddenly raised his head from the ruins. His wrinkled canine face was filled with disbelief. "In the three o'clock direction, two meters underground... No, the life reaction is extremely weak, but the chakra reaction... is strange."
"Strange?" Kakashi frowned.
Under