Sasori extended his right hand and pointed at the puppet wreckage scattered at his feet. "For every puppet you destroy, my control over the remaining ones becomes more precise."
His smile vanished, his gaze turning cold and mocking. "That's why I said the more puppets you destroy, the closer you come to death. Now, you don't have much time left to live."
The moonlight took on an eerie green hue through the poisonous mist, making the entire forest clearing seem submerged at the bottom of a toxic lake.
Sasori of the Red Sands stood amid his puppets.
"Time's up."
The instant his words fell, two slender poisoned needles shot out of the puppet wreckage at his feet. They came from concealed mechanisms he had planted inside the broken puppets beforehand, triggered in sync with the poison mist reaching its release threshold. Their angles were vicious: one flew toward Uchiha Makoto's throat, while the other cut off his escape to the left.
At the same time, a scorpion-shaped puppet lurking beneath the ground burst through the soil. Its tail stinger, coated in blue-violet poison, traced a gleaming arc straight toward Uchiha Makoto's back, aiming for his heart.
A three-pronged attack sealed off every path to survival.
By Sasori's calculations, even if this strike failed to kill his opponent outright, it would be enough to incapacitate him. All that remained would be to let the poisonous mist fully invade his chakra pathways, and the battle would be over.
Yet in the world of the Sharingan, there was no such thing as an "unexpected outcome."
Within Uchiha Makoto's eyes, three jet-black tomoe underwent a drastic transformation in a thousandth of a second. They joined end to end, spinning and stretching into the sharp pattern of a six-bladed Fūma Shuriken.
Here in this poison-shrouded