Five thousand Kumogakure ninja charged with a roar.
Their voices joined together like muffled thunder rolling through low clouds.
The vast mass of people covered the hills and plains like a black tsunami.
Leather boots and straw sandals pounded the hard, dry plain.
Withered grass was crushed underfoot in great swathes, rustling softly.
The earth rumbled from the impact, making even the pebbles bounce on the dirt.
Five hundred meters.
Only five hundred meters remained between them and Konoha's trenches.
For ninja skilled in Taijutsu, that distance could be covered in a few breaths.
At the very front charged a vanguard of a thousand.
They held small round shields of refined steel in their left hands and broad-bladed Ninja Blades in reverse grips in their right.
Chakra surged wildly through the pathways in their legs.
Their killing intent soared into the sky.
In Konoha's trenches.
Kagami Uchiha crouched behind the sandbags.
He gripped the small red triangular flag tightly, its pole slippery with sweat from his palm.
A drop of cold sweat ran down his forehead and into his right eye.
It stung painfully.
Kagami clenched his back teeth, not daring to blink.
His Three-Tomoe Sharingan spun rapidly, gauging the distance to the enemy.
Four hundred meters.
The hundreds of Konoha gunners in the trenches began breathing heavily.
The muscles beneath their coarse cloth vests tensed like blocks of cast iron, while the biochemical agent rampaged through their blood vessels.
Their hearts beat so fast they seemed ready to burst through their chests.
They gripped the machine guns' wooden handles tightly with both hands, index fingers curled around the iron triggers, fingernails white.
Three hundred meters.
They could make out the Kumogakure ninjas' faces now.
A Kumogakure Jonin at the very front had a scar running across the bridge of his nose.
He even licked his dry lips in excitement, revealing a vicious grin.
In his eyes, the few shallow ditches ahead could be flattened in a single charge.
"Fire!"
Kagami Uchiha forced a roar from his throat.
His right hand, raised high, swung down sharply.
The red flag cut through the air with a brief flutter.
More than a hundred Konoha gunners.
All squeezed their cast-iron triggers to the limit at once.
"Click."
Brass firing pins struck the miniature Explosive Tags on the Chakra crystals with force.
In an instant.
More than a hundred Chakra Maxim heavy machine guns roared in unison.
"Ratatatatatat!!!"
The deafening roar.
It instantly drowned out the battle cries of five thousand Kumogakure ninja, tearing the air over the plain to shreds.
Eerie blue tongues of flame poured from the dark gun barrels.
They stretched more than half a meter long.
The muzzle flashes joined into a dazzling wall of blue fire.
They cast a ghastly blue light over the Konoha trenches.
The extreme heat warped the air visibly.
Assistant gunners held the long ammunition belts tight.
Compressed Chakra crystals were fed into the chambers like flowing water.
From the ejection ports.
Scorching spent crystal residue and Explosive Tag ashes sprayed out wildly like waterfalls.
"Clatter."
The casings struck the mud in the trenches, scorching the muddy water until it hissed and gave off white smoke.
A potent smell of gunsmoke and burning rushed into their noses.
What spewed from the muzzles was the grim reaper's scythe.
At a rate of thousands of rounds per minute.
Eerie blue Chakra armor-piercing bullets traced hundreds of densely packed lines of blue fire across the plain.
They wove together into a web of fire with no blind spots.
It swept straight toward the charging Kumogakure vanguard.
Three hundred meters.
The bullets arrived in an instant.
The Kumogakure Jonin who had licked his lips.
The vicious grin had yet to fade from his face.
Blue light flashed.
The small round shield of refined steel he held so proudly.
As though pierced by countless red-hot iron nails, it was riddled with dozens of holes in an instant.
The bullets tore through the shield without losing momentum.
They plunged straight into his chest.
Without the slightest resistance.
The Jonin's chest burst like a tomato smashed by an iron hammer, and a great cloud of bloody mist sprayed from his back.
The tremendous impact sent him flying backward, and he was blasted in two before he hit the ground.
Half a length of steaming intestine whipped through the air.
An elite Lightning Release ninja beside him reacted with lightning speed.
He clapped his hands together, and blue lightning instantly enveloped his body.
"Lightning Release Armor!"
The bullets struck the lightning.
This Chakra defense, capable of deflecting ordinary swords and blades, faced with the concentrated fire of heavy machine guns.
It did not last even a tenth of a second.
"Splurt."
The Lightning Release Armor shattered instantly like paper pasted over a window being punctured.
A dozen bullets bored into his thighs and abdomen.
The elite ninja's legs were severed at the hips, and his upper body slammed into the mud as blood spurted wildly.
Several Earth Release ninja farther back were scared out of their wits.
They dug their soles into the ground to stop and slapped their hands down.
"Earth Release: Multiple Earth-Style Walls!"
Several stone walls half a meter thick rose from the ground.
They blocked the way in front of the crowd.
But it was meaningless.
The machine-gun fire swept across them.
Under the continuous barrage of Chakra armor-piercing bullets, the hard stone walls exploded into clouds of stone dust.
The dozens of Kumogakure ninja hiding behind the walls.
They and the walls alike were riddled with holes.
Shattered stone and mangled flesh flew in every direction.
The five-hundred-meter plain.
It instantly became a slaughterhouse inside a meat grinder.
There was no probing exchange of Ninjutsu.
No back-and-forth between Taijutsu experts.
This was an entirely one-sided, higher-dimensional strike by an industrial production line against bodies of flesh and blood.
The thousand Kumogakure vanguard ninja at the front.
They were like men who had run into an invisible wall of steel.
They fell row after row.
Not one of the bodies that fell was intact.
Under the terrifying kinetic force of the heavy machine guns, arms and thighs flew everywhere.
Half of some people's heads simply evaporated.
Others had holes the size of washbasins blasted through their chests, revealing their fallen comrades behind them.
They could not even scream.
Their voices were completely drowned out by the deafening gunfire.
All that could be seen were gaping mouths and eyeballs bulging with extreme terror.
Above the plain.
A huge, thick cloud of bloody mist burst into the air.
The mist drifted on the wind.
It dyed the withered yellow grass a glaring scarlet.
Entrails and scraps of flesh carpeted the ground, sticky underfoot and giving off a sickeningly sweet, bloody smell.
In the trenches.
The recoil shook the gunners' shoulders until their bones creaked.
If the biochemical agent had not forcibly locked their muscle fibers in place, their shoulder blades would have been shattered by now.
They clenched their teeth and braced themselves hard against the wooden gunstocks.
The barrels burned red-hot, radiating a dazzling white light.
But no one released a trigger.
Blue tongues of flame continued to spew wildly.
Just one second.
One second of covering fire.
The thousand-strong Kumogakure vanguard was wiped out.
Not one person was left standing.
On the open ground at the front of the plain facing the trenches, only a field of steaming severed limbs remained.
Behind them.
The main Kumogakure force charging after them numbered four thousand.
They were all scared out of their minds.
The men charging in the second wave stepped on the scraps of flesh that had splattered over from their comrades ahead.
Their feet slipped.
They desperately tried to stop, their legs plowing hard through the mud ahead of them.
Their soles scraped two deep furrows in the earth.
"Stop! Stop, quickly!"
Someone shouted, his voice cracking and on the verge of tears.
But the people behind had no idea what had happened up front, and the war drums were still driving them forward.
"Bang!"
The people who had stopped at the front were struck squarely in the back by those behind them.
Bones collided.
Thousands of people crashed together in an instant, falling in waves like toppled dominoes.
Some were trampled underfoot, letting out piercing screams.
Others waved their arms, trying to crawl out of the pile.
Trampling. Chaos.
The army formation, once brimming with killing intent, had turned into a churning mess.
The overwhelmingly thick stench of blood.
It rode the autumn wind straight into the Third Raikage's broad nostrils.
The Third Raikage stood behind the army.
A second ago, he had still been laughing wildly.
This second.
His wild laughter caught in his thick throat, as though he had swallowed a hard walnut.
His body went rigid, like a black iron tower.
His neck was stiff.
His ox-like eyes stared fixedly at the battlefield ahead.
His eyeballs nearly bulged out of their sockets, and the muscles around his eyes twitched wildly.
What had he seen?
His most elite vanguard force. The Kumogakure warriors he was so proud of.
They had vanished in a single second.
They had been reduced to a field of red and white scraps of flesh. Not a single intact corpse remained.
In the trenches across from him,
There was no glow of Ninjutsu Chakra.
Only row upon row of iron tubes burning red-hot.
And that relentless "rat-tat-tat," thundering until his heart went numb.
The Third Raikage's jaw trembled slightly.
His fleshy face twitched.
He couldn't understand it at all.
Those lousy iron tubes that couldn't form Hand Seals-what kind of monsters were they?