Boom!
In the distance, someone fell from the sky.
Chairman Quan's soldiers stared, dumbstruck, at the dust rising ahead.
The muddy plain of the Land of Rivers, already churned up by artillery, collapsed into a crater fifty meters across. The shock wave hurled stones and mud outward like buckshot.
The nearest Hammer main battle tank—Konoha First Arsenal's pride and joy, a forty-five-ton steel behemoth—flipped onto its back. Its treads spun uselessly in the air, squealing.
As the dust cleared, Madara Uchiha slowly straightened.
His red lamellar armor was spotless. Not even a fleck of mud clung to his wild hair. He tilted his head slightly, his scarlet Sharingan sweeping the battlefield.
No hand signs. No surge of chakra.
He simply stood there, and an indescribable pressure seemed to thicken the air.
"He looks exactly like the statue in the Valley of the End... Is that really... Madara Uchiha?"
A hundred meters away, a Land of Rivers recruit gripped his Defender rifle in a trench, his teeth chattering uncontrollably.
"Fire! Don't just stand there! Fire!" his squad leader roared, breaking the silence.
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat!
Fear made quick work of trigger fingers.
Dozens of heavy machine guns and over a hundred automatic rifles spat fire at once. Dense chains of orange light tore through the air toward the red figure.
Madara watched the incoming hail of bullets and curled his lip in contempt.
"So these are the ninja tools of the new age? Dead things without chakra."
He moved.
It was no Body Flicker Technique, only raw physical power.
To the recruit, the red figure suddenly vanished. Then sharp metallic impacts rang across the battlefield.
Cling, cling, cling, cling, cling!
Bullets were striking a blade and flying away.
Madara slipped through gaps in the barrage like a ghost. He did not even draw