As they neared the Suna defensive line, Aburame Tetsumaru and Ueno Hayato swapped positions once more.
Still running, Ueno wove a series of familiar hand seals and slammed his palms together.
Earth Style: Multiple Earth Walls!
Roughly seventy meters from the enemy positions Tetsumaru had marked, four earth walls rumbled out of the ground. They were shoulder-high and incredibly thick.
The four members of Squad Ueno each dove behind a wall, using them as cover to launch a relentless barrage of kunai rigged with explosive tags.
The Suna-nin, caught completely off guard, had relied on camouflage rather than structural fortification for their positions. Their light cover was shredded in seconds. Eight Suna-nin were sent tumbling, covered in soot and dust, utterly bewildered. We were the ones lying in ambush—how the hell did we end up being the ones ambushed?
But the situation didn't allow for contemplation. With their cover gone, the Suna-nin were forced to go on the offensive to avoid being blown apart where they stood.
However, as soon as they left their positions, an unexpected attack hit them. Hundreds of insects leaped from the ground, bursting with sharp pops and shrouding the battlefield in a dense green mist.
It wasn't a lethal toxin, but tear gas—engineered to mimic the color and pungent scent of a deadly poison.
The Suna-nin scrambled to cover their faces and swallow antidotes, but when they saw the Konoha shinobi charging through the cloud wearing full-coverage tactical goggles, they realized they'd been played.
Eyes streaming with tears and vision blurred, the Suna-nin were unable to mount a proper defense. Squad Ueno cut through them in moments, leaving none alive.
The battle ended quickly. Without stopping to scavenge, the four members of the squad immediately split up and fled in four different directions.
Minutes later, three Suna squads arrived at the scene. After a brief analysis of the tracks, they split up to give chase. Two of the squads focused on the trail left by Aburame Tetsumaru.
After crossing through a stretch of dense jungle, the lead Suna Jonin stepped on a blade of grass. He didn't realize it was a disguised insect.
Kilometers away, Tetsumaru felt the contact. As more and more sensory signals trickled in, he began to form a mental map of his pursuers. This was exactly the effect he wanted.
Tetsumaru wanted to field-test his new combat system. He had intentionally left obvious tracks to draw in pursuers, intending to wipe them out using his "Beyond-Visual-Range" tactics.
"Man, life would be so much easier if I had a Byakugan," Tetsumaru grumbled under his breath.
As the distance between him and his targets closed, he reached his prepared ambush point. He tossed out two Combination Bugs, followed by a rapid-fire volley of twenty more within a single second.
The Combination Bug was a multi-stage projectile system designed for ultra-long-range strikes. It was a composite of three specialized insects: an initial flight stage, a mid-course booster, and a terminal explosive burst stage.
The attack was designed for stealth. Upon launch, the first stage would fly in a wide arc around the target. Only then would it enter the second stage—a straight-line jet-boosted acceleration—before finally detonating at a range of one hundred meters to fire lethal shrapnel at the target.
The three-stage acceleration ensured the projectile got faster as it flew, reaching an average supersonic speed over its three-kilometer range. This effectively prevented enemies from hearing the insects coming and dodging beforehand.
The biggest problem? The damn things had zero guidance or terminal homing capabilities. They were incredibly difficult to aim.
The Suna Jonin had been uneasy since they left the forest. He scanned his surroundings constantly, finding nothing, yet his heart rate continued to climb. He felt a sense of mounting dread. As a veteran of the previous Great War, he trusted his instincts implicitly. He barked a warning to his subordinates.
"Stay alert! Something's wrong!"
The Suna-nin stopped immediately, diving for cover and scanning the area with heightened vigilance.
This sudden halt was exactly what Tetsumaru needed. The difficulty gap between hitting a moving target and a stationary one was massive. He launched the rest of his Combination Bugs at full power.
About eight seconds after taking cover, the Jonin felt a lethal threat—a cold shiver that made his heart skip a beat. Obeying his intuition, he leaped from his hiding spot.
At that exact moment, a string of explosions erupted a hundred meters away. Eight invisible strikes tore through the air where he had just been standing, slamming into the ground and rocks, kicking up tall plumes of dust.
Simultaneously, the positions of the other seven Suna-nin were engulfed in fire and smoke. Shrapnel and debris flew through the air, mingled with the horrific spray of blood and shredded meat. The seven shinobi were swallowed by the onslaught.
The terminal stage of the Combination Bug was driven by a reaction between stored chakra and volatile chemicals. The explosion was powerful enough to propel metal shrapnel at twice the speed of sound. At such velocities, a fragment weighing over a hundred grams carried enough kinetic energy to shatter a human body on impact.
The shaken Jonin cycled through a series of Clone and Hiding in Camouflage jutsu, repositioning behind a sturdier rock before checking on his men.
Five of the seven had survived. He let out a ragged breath of relief.
This unknown ninjutsu was terrifying. There was no warning before the strike, and the power was beyond imagination. The two who had died had been hit directly in the torso; they had been torn apart instantly.
One of the casualties was a cautious puppeteer who had swapped places with his puppet, letting the machine carry him. Even the Jonin's keen eyes hadn't spotted the switch, yet the attack had shredded both the man and his puppet.
A third Suna-nin had survived a direct hit to the palm, though he now had nothing left below the elbow.
The Jonin realized with a grim sort of luck that the accuracy of this terrible technique was abysmal. Out of eight people, only three had been hit directly; the others had only suffered minor lacerations from secondary shrapnel.
The surviving Suna-nin were paralyzed with fear. Unlike their leader, these Chunin and Genin hadn't reacted at all—they were alive purely by chance. If a puppet couldn't protect its master, and another wave of these attacks came, they had nothing to rely on but luck and finding thicker cover.
The Suna-nin focused entirely on making themselves as small as possible. None of them noticed a large dragonfly gliding high above.
A kilometer away, Tetsumaru shared the dragonfly's vision and surveyed the battlefield. Seeing only three confirmed kills, he sighed. His luck truly was just "average."
The Combination Bugs took eight seconds to reach their target. Putting aside how far a target could move in eight seconds, the three-kilometer non-linear flight path introduced massive margins of error. Hits were largely a matter of probability.
He found it hard to believe that the Suna Jonin had emerged unscathed even after being targeted by eight projectiles. Had they all really missed?
Because the dragonfly was hovering at such a high altitude to avoid detection, it hadn't been in position to see the Jonin's pre-emptive dodge.
Refusing to believe his eyes, Tetsumaru pulled out his remaining fifty sets of Combination Bugs. He didn't believe the man could dodge forever. He launched ten in a single volley.
Ten seconds later, he watched in slack-jawed disbelief as the Suna Jonin perfectly evaded all ten strikes. The man completed his dodge before the projectiles even entered their third-stage detonation.
Tetsumaru nervously rubbed his thumb against the side of his index finger—a nervous tic he couldn't control. He's not seeing them coming. The second-stage jet exhaust was faint, and even the projectile diving from the sun's direction had been evaded. The Jonin hadn't even looked up during the maneuver.
He's not a sensory ninja, either. Suna was notoriously short on sensory types; a Jonin with that rare gift wouldn't be leading a pursuit alone—he'd have two other Jonin guarding him like a national treasure.
Tetsumaru continued his barrage while he thought. The constant booms of the terminal bursts suppressed the Suna-nin, keeping them pinned.
He was frustrated to the point of disbelief, but the Suna-nin were outright losing their minds.
The mysterious attacks weren't entirely trackless. Each strike began with an explosion a hundred meters out, leaving a faint white trail of smoke pointing back toward the origin. But the speed was too high; by the time you saw the burst, the shrapnel was already there. You had to dodge before the explosion.
Worse, the attacks were coming from every direction—even straight down from the sky. How the hell were they supposed to counter-attack?
As his supply of Combination Bugs dwindled, Tetsumaru finally reached a conclusion: the Suna Jonin was dodging based on pure battle instinct.
Meanwhile, the Jonin had also realized the delayed nature of the attacks. He signaled his surviving Chunin to start moving, urging them to spread out and find the source.
The Jonin dodged another overhead strike, his forehead drenched in sweat and his heart pounding against his ribs. His instincts were sharp, but instinct was an unstable resource. As the high-tension situation dragged on, fatigue was setting in. As his mental state wavered, the accuracy of his "gut feeling" dropped. Twice now, he had failed to dodge in time, surviving only because the projectiles hadn't been aimed precisely at him.
He was certain the enemy was attacking from a distance, and their accuracy was improving. Something had to be watching them from nearby.
A Konoha ninja... is it a Water Mirror? A Summoning? The Byakugan?
No, not the Byakugan. He scanned the battlefield he had just leveled with his own jutsu. A Hyuga's range wouldn't exceed the reach of his own Wind Style; if a Byakugan user was nearby, he would have found them.
Exhausted, the Suna Jonin glanced toward the sun, hoping for reinforcements.
He froze. Was that a small black speck in front of the sun?
At that same moment, Tetsumaru saw the Jonin lock onto his dragonfly. He cursed his luck. The scout was a goner.
It was a stroke of bad timing. The dragonfly was hovering at 300 meters. To keep it hidden, Tetsumaru had tried to keep it directly between the Jonin and the sun. At that height, the diffraction of light meant the dragonfly's shadow on the ground was too blurred for the human eye to detect. Furthermore, the blinding glare of the sun should have masked the dragonfly's silhouette.
However, the Jonin was moving rapidly to dodge attacks, and the shared vision between Tetsumaru and the insect had a slight delay. He couldn't keep the "blind spot" perfectly aligned, and a gap had opened. Normally, this wouldn't matter—no one stares directly into the sun—but in a life-or-death hunt for information, the Jonin had looked.
Shinobi combat is an information war. High offense and low defense mean that "to be found is to be destroyed."
In the next instant, the Suna-nin unleashed a massive Wind Style jutsu, shredding the dragonfly to pieces.
Using the last glimpse of shared vision, Tetsumaru launched his final fourteen Combination Bugs.
Field test complete, he noted. Combi-Bugs were great for ambushing stationary targets or large formations, but they were useless against high-level ninjas or high-speed targets.
He decided to play one last trick. In this final volley, he had most of the bugs fan out in different directions, but he bunched three of them together and sent them on a path sixty degrees away from his actual escape route.
Then, he turned and ran for his life.
This time, he didn't hold back. He abandoned all monitoring of the battlefield, leaving only a few alarm-crickets along his path.
Tetsumaru pushed through the Suna blockade, performing several counter-tracking maneuvers and leaving false trails before finally reaching the rendezvous point.
Captain Ueno was already there. Tetsumaru was the second to arrive. After comparing notes, they realized that all the pursuers had chased the two of them. The two rookies hadn't been followed at all.
That meant the new Genin might actually survive. They decided to wait.
Fortunately, the wait wasn't long. Before sunset, the two rookies arrived one after the other. After the squad had rested and the rookies had rehydrated, they resumed their retreat.
By dawn, Squad Ueno approached the outer perimeter of the Konoha headquarters. After making contact with a patrol and handing over their intelligence, they finally allowed themselves to stop and rest.