Breathing hard, Yugito turned back toward the distance, her brows drawn tight as she stared at the apocalyptic sight of the volcano erupting.
"An eruption on that scale... that guy should be all right, shouldn't he?"
At that moment, Matatabi's lazy but certain voice echoed inside her mind.
"Relax. With how absurd that boy is, this much lava would barely count as a warm bath to him."
"His strength is even more outrageous than I estimated before, Yugito. Honestly, I'm starting to think even the so-called God of Ninja, Senju Hashirama, might have fallen short of him."
"Take my advice. Don't ever provoke him again. If he genuinely decided to kill you, crushing you would be easier than stepping on an ant."
Yugito's frown deepened.
Her knowledge of Hashirama came mostly from legends, but even she knew he was the mythic figure who had ended the age of war and become an object of reverence across the entire ninja world.
He was the kind of invincible existence who had suppressed an entire era by himself.
More than that, the Two-Tails itself had once been captured by Hashirama as casually as if he were snatching up a stray cat.
But right now, what mattered more to Yugito was Akira's safety.
"That monster looks like it's being forcibly sealed by Akira. Can something that insane really work?"
Matatabi, on the other hand, sounded completely certain.
"I think it can. From what he said earlier, it was obvious Akira had already seen through the trick behind Mōryō's endless chakra."
"The fact that he dared to attack it directly with chakra means he's absolutely certain he can force Mōryō back down with his own power."
"Mōryō's chakra really is on the same level as the Nine-Tails, terrifying and seemingly inexhaustible."
"But don't forget, Akira's chakra is even greater than the Nine-Tails'. And the worst part is that he also commands that high-level sage power."
Beside Yugito, Shion gripped her clothes so tightly her knuckles turned white, her eyes full of worry.
When she had come here, she had done so expecting to die. She had believed from the start that she would have to sacrifice her life to seal Mōryō.
Who could have imagined that no sacrifice would be needed at all, and that Akira seemed intent on overturning fate through sheer force of will?
The outcome still hadn't been decided, yet everything happening before her matched exactly what she had seen in her prophetic dreams.
Akira truly was sealing that world-ending fiend through his own power.
Then, suddenly, a huge crack split open across the crimson sky above the volcano.
In the next instant, countless golden symbols appeared out of nowhere. They moved like living threads, darting back and forth as they stitched the crack shut bit by bit.
Barely half a minute later, that horrifying rift in space vanished completely from the heavens.
The golden symbols streamed together, gathering in midair to form a massive Eight Trigrams seal.
It rotated slowly for several seconds before dissolving into drifting points of gold and disappearing into the air.
At that exact instant, the Ghost Army scattered across the world stopped moving all at once, as though the power animating them had simply been cut off.
Then their once-indestructible stone bodies began to crumble, collapsing into silent earthen mounds.
At that same moment, Tsunade was still leading Konoha's ninja and the Land of Fire's army in a desperate struggle along the border.
The Ghost Army had been a nightmare. No matter how many they shattered, they never truly died.
The moment one was broken, another rose from the ground to take its place.
Just as several border cities had already fallen and despair was beginning to spread, every stone soldier suddenly froze and fell apart into dirt.
The ninja on the battlefield from Konoha all stood stunned, their hands still trembling around their kunai.
Tsunade suddenly lifted her head and looked across the mountains toward the Land of Swamps.
"Akira... you actually did it!"
And on the borders of the other great nations, the ninja still fighting desperately also froze in disbelief.
They stared at the countless mounds of earth now spread across the battlefield, and after a long, stunned silence, cheers finally erupted like thunder.
The Ghost Army had turned into graves.
That could only mean one thing: over in the Land of Swamps, the priestess had succeeded in sealing Mōryō.
Those stone monsters had advanced at terrifying speed, even bypassing the Land of Fire and striking directly at the other great nations. Even the isolated and closed-off Land of Water had not been spared.
Fortunately, at the last possible moment, Akira had brought it all to an end.
Back in the Land of Swamps, Yūgao slowly lowered the sword in her hand, its edge already ruined from fighting the Ghost Army.
Her beautiful eyes remained fixed on the volcano in the distance.
The mountain was still erupting tirelessly.
But no one cared anymore. The surrounding region was empty of settlements anyway.
What mattered was that the Ghost Army had vanished, which meant Akira's plan had worked.
Several minutes later, a figure shot upward from the rolling sea of magma.
Akira arced through the sky and landed in an instant beside Yūgao, more than ten kilometers away.
"Yūgao-onee-san, it's done."
Even though he had just stood in magma hot enough to melt almost anything, not even the corner of his clothes had been singed. He was completely unharmed.
Yūgao's eyes reddened so quickly it seemed she might burst into tears on the spot.
Having fought those undying stone soldiers herself, she understood better than anyone just how hopeless the situation had been.
Now the nightmare was finally over.
Usually so restrained, Yūgao bit her lip, but in the end she could not hold back the surge of emotion. She rushed forward and threw her arms tightly around Akira.
"It worked... it really worked!"
Akira hadn't thought much about it. He simply wrapped his arms around the older woman who had been worrying over him the whole time and felt the slight tremble in her body.
With a smile, he comforted her.
"Yūgao-onee-san, don't worry. After this, the ninja world won't have to deal with Mōryō breaking free ever again. I welded shut the back door that thing was using to reach this world."
Only after a long while did Yūgao finally step back, a little embarrassed, though a relieved smile still lingered on her face.
"This mission can honestly be called a perfect success."
Akira grinned as well, clearly in a good mood.
"Looks like my record's about to get another very impressive S-rank mission added to it."
The two of them stayed there for a moment, caught up in the joy of a mission finally completed.
At the same time, people across the world were celebrating.
When the Ghost Army had appeared at their gates, they had truly believed the end of the world had come.
What they didn't know was that the one who had saved them was not the priestess from the old stories, but a young ninja from Konoha named Akira.
Akira, however, had no intention of announcing that to the world.
Only if people believed the priestess had sealed Mōryō would the Land of Demons continue to hold value and avoid being swallowed by the greater powers.
After all, the Land of Demons had survived between the major nations not because of military strength, but because the priestess alone possessed a sealing power no one else could match.
If that deterrent disappeared, the country would be swallowed up in no time.
This was, perhaps, one small kindness Akira chose to leave behind in such a brutal world.
In the face of the five great powers, a weak nation like the Land of Demons rarely got to choose its own fate.
It would either be annexed or wind up like the tragic Land of Rain, reduced to a muddy battlefield where the ambitions of stronger nations trampled everything.
And it was always the common people who paid for that with shattered homes and broken lives.
The mission had been completed flawlessly.
Akira and Yūgao quickly found Yugito and Shion.
The moment Shion saw Akira, tears began spilling down her face before she could stop them.
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