The Reaper's Scythe

In Root's secret chamber, Danzo Shimura's brows drew tight as anger at being toyed with rose inside him.

"So it was all a trick after all! Naraka!"

He had all but decided the sheet was worthless and was about to tear it apart.

Then something changed!

Creak—snap.

From a dark corner high above the chamber came the faint scrape of metal, almost drowned out by the sound of his heartbeat.

It was no attack. The clasp on an old scroll case had finally broken from a change in temperature.

B did not even look up, but his senses had already locked onto the source: an insignificant ninja-tool case falling through the air.

In a microsecond, his mind reached a conclusion: no need to dodge. It would land nowhere near him.

The case tumbled as it fell. Its lid came loose, spilling polished Senbon Poison Needles like a shower of silver rain.

Most of the Senbon scattered across the floor with a clatter, without any discernible pattern.

But one Senbon fell along an extraordinarily unnatural path.

As it spun through the air, its tip just happened to graze a tiny metal protrusion securing a pipe overhead.

Ting!

A crisp sound, seemingly too faint to matter.

That tiny sound made B's pupils contract.

Not because it was loud, but because its timing and position deviated fatally from the physical trajectory his mind had calculated.

The Senbon gained a slight horizontal acceleration from the collision. Its vertical fall changed, and it shot toward the wall.

An ancient metal shield hung there as a decoration.

Age had left its surface oxidized and dull, but a small patch at its center had somehow been polished to a mirror shine.

All of this happened in a flash.

As an elite Root ninja, B had the extraordinary reflexes to sense that something was wrong with the Senbon and register the angle at which it flew toward the wall.

In an instant, he even calculated its likely path after the rebound. It posed no threat to him.

But just before the Senbon struck, a disturbance in the air from the falling scroll case shifted the decorative shield ever so slightly inward.

Perhaps it moved by only one degree.

That was enough.

Clang!

A sharper, clearer ring sounded. The Senbon struck the shield's polished patch at a vicious angle and rebounded in a perfect mirror reflection.

The deadly silver streak changed direction. Instead of flying into empty space, it became a bolt of death too fast for the eye to follow and shot straight out.

At almost the same moment, B's caution as a ninja, coupled with a split second's doubt about his initial calculation, prompted him to make a tiny evasive move.

He turned his head left, trying to confirm the Senbon's final landing point from the corner of his eye, while shifting his weight slightly right.

For an elite Root ninja, it was the perfect response.

Yet that turn placed his right temple directly in the path of the reflected silver streak.

Pfft!

The sound was faint, like ripe fruit dropping to the ground.

B froze midmotion.

His senses, stretched to their limit, registered it with terrible clarity.

A cold Senbon was lodged firmly in his skull, its tail still quivering from the force of the impact.

His powerful Chakra ebbed away in an instant. The Kunai slipped from his suddenly limp fingers and struck the floor with a sharp clatter.

In the deathly stillness of the room, the sound was especially jarring.

To Danzo Shimura, the whole thing had happened almost without a sound, at an unbelievable speed.

The formidable elite Root ninja had offered no effective resistance.

It was as though an invisible misfortune had descended upon him with perfect precision, fulfilling a contract named "death."

Danzo Shimura's lone eye narrowed sharply. For the first time, a flicker of alarm crossed his gaze.

Then a fiercer emotion replaced it: greed and excitement bordering on madness.

He looked sharply down at the still-ordinary sheet in his hand.

The ink spelling out the name "Kurihara Ranmaru" seemed a shade darker, as if it had absorbed some kind of nourishment.

Naraka had not lied to him!

This seemingly ordinary sheet truly possessed a bizarre, indefensible power to kill instantly!

Danzo Shimura's fingers trembled with excitement. Slowly, with the utmost care, he smoothed the sheet as though caressing the world's most precious treasure.

His gaze lifted again, as if it could pierce the layers of rock and reach Hokage Rock.

Minato Namikaze! Soon your name will be printed on this sheet, just like that test subject's.

And then those eyesores of the Uchiha clan.

His lips curved into a cruel smile of absolute certainty.

Naraka gave one of his grating, rustling chuckles.

"Heh, heh, heh... It seems the 'gift' has arrived. How does it feel, Lord Danzo? Are you satisfied with this 'convenience'?"

Danzo Shimura turned slowly, his lone eye sharp as a blade as he tried to read something in Naraka's indistinct face.

He did not say whether he was satisfied. Instead, he asked the question that mattered most to him.

His voice remained calm, though his fingertips unconsciously stroked the sheet.

"What would have happened if I'd intervened just now and done everything I could to save him?"

It was a ruler's instinct: test the boundaries of the rules and learn the limits of the power.

Naraka's laughter grew more delighted, as though the question amused him greatly.

"Save him?" Naraka's voice held an almost mocking amusement. "You can try. But even if you used Medical Ninjutsu to revive him now, you'd only keep him breathing for a little while.

"But once the Curse of Death takes effect, the threads of fate have already wound tight.

"If Senbon Poison Needles don't kill him today, a Shuriken might inexplicably rebound during training tomorrow and pierce his throat;

"the day after, he might take a sip of water, choke, and suffocate when it enters his lungs;

"the day after that, an ordinary roof tile might come loose and land just right to smash his skull..."

Naraka's figure swayed slightly as he spoke, as though acting out countless bizarre ways to die.

A faint chill passed through the depths of Danzo Shimura's lone eye.

An endless succession of fatal accidents? This power went beyond Ninjutsu. It was closer to an inescapable curse, or to Fate Law itself.

That was far more terrifying than the True Person of Nine Nether, whose soul could not die and whose body could not be destroyed!

After a brief silence, he asked the most important question.

"Is there a way to break this curse?"

He had to know, both for his own safety and for whatever he might need in the future.