Sasori extended his right hand, spreading his fingers with his palm facing down toward the ground beneath his feet.
The rock floor of the mine shattered with a thunderous crash. An enormous fissure stretched from beneath Sasori's feet into the depths of the cavern, and within it, hundreds upon thousands of humanoid silhouettes could dimly be seen, densely arranged in layers of Sealing Scrolls.
Sasori's voice echoed through the mine, charged with the irrepressible fervor and pride of an artist about to unveil his masterpiece:
"Since you've brought out so many people, I suppose I should show you the real thing-Performance of a Hundred Puppets."
Layers of leaves and branches broke the moonlight into tiny white flecks that fell across the forest clearing.
The breeze was so faint it could barely stir the hems of the corpses sprawled on the ground. More than a hundred elite ninja from the Land of Fields lay scattered among pools of blood and splintered wood, all lifeless.
Sasori of the Red Sands stood amid the bodies, his red hair a dark crimson that looked almost black in the moonlight.
His gaze swept over the wreckage before settling on the puppets behind him. Around eighty puppets remained from his Performance of a Hundred Puppets; that one-sided slaughter had cost him fewer than twenty of his stock.
For a genius puppet master like him, those losses amounted to no more than half a month's work. He would not even need to replace the core materials. A few patched shells and repaired mechanisms would put them back into service.
Yet Sasori frowned slightly.
He was not grieving over his puppets.
He was watching the two people opposite him, the so-called "top-tier fighters" the Land of Fields had sent to intercept and kill him.
They had quietly watched