"Watch out!"
"The puppets are coming!"
Countless black dots emerged from the passage in the Artificial Sun, then rapidly expanded into enormous puppet birds!
A puppet sat on each Puppet Bird, its body pitch-black as ink, with only eerie points of light glowing in its eyes.
Come to think of it, the puppets' situation really was somewhat similar to Shikamaru and the others'.
Sai steered his ink bird backward, his pupils contracting slightly as he scanned the enemy's numbers. "Forty... no, at least fifty puppets!"
"They're coming for us." Tenten instinctively pressed a hand against the scroll at her waist.
Shikamaru quickly surveyed the enemy formation.
After pouring out of the Artificial Sun, most of the puppet birds had gathered directly in front of them, while a few circled around to either side, beginning to form an encirclement.
"Toneri has spotted us!"
"But he hasn't acted himself. Looks like our guess was right."
"Can you see the positions of the nodes they use to pass through the barrier?" Shikamaru asked Hōmon.
Hōmon's Byakugan remained fixed on the Artificial Sun's surface. He could clearly see the barrier's chakra flow changing direction at those nodes.
"I can see them clearly! Those nodes are passages. When the puppet birds enter or leave, they need to form hand seals there to synchronize their chakra with the barrier's frequency before they can pass through it."
"What seals?"
"There probably aren't any fixed hand seals. It's more like... the puppets adjust their own chakra to match the barrier's frequency." A trace of sweat seeped from Hōmon's forehead.
"This isn't something an ordinary ninja can do."
Thoughts raced through Shikamaru's mind.
That explained why the puppets could come and go freely, while Sai's earlier reconnaissance had failed to find an entrance at all.
An ordinary person's chakra