Swoosh!
In the forest, a vortex appeared and Obito dropped to the ground, scanning the surroundings with his Sharingan before picking up a broken branch.
'The front end shows signs of trampling, but the rear was cleanly cut with a blade. It's a false trail deliberately created to confuse pursuers. The true direction of escape is this way.'
Obito raised his eyes toward the four o'clock direction.
Spiral Zetsu remarked inwardly, 'Obito's intelligence analysis ability has gradually matured. Even without the Sharingan and Hashirama cells, he would probably become a remarkable ninja.'
Obito set off in pursuit, heading in the direction Hokusuke had fled.
Along the way, he noticed nearly invisible threads strung between the trees and rocks, connected to explosive tag traps.
'A trap, is it. Fine, I'll turn it to my advantage.'
Obito casually threw a handful of kunai, severing the threads.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Chain explosions thundered through the forest.
Hokusuke, who was fleeing toward the forest exit, heard the explosions behind him and paused on a tree branch to look back.
He wore a Konoha forehead protector with a horizontal scratch carved through its center by a kunai, the standard mark of a missing-nin.
'Did my traps work?'
Hokusuke exhaled in relief and fished out a military ration pill, swallowing it.
Swoosh! At the edge of his vision, a dark figure came racing toward him.
Swoosh! Hokusuke hurled kunai at the approaching figure!
Watching the kunai fly toward him, Obito thought, 'An enemy at this level doesn't require Kamui to dodge. This is a perfect chance to sharpen my basic combat skills.'
Clang!
Obito deflected the kunai with a backhand strike, sending it into a tree trunk.
"Are you from the Root, or from the Anbu?" Hokusuke said, on guard.
"Neither. I'm someone who has his eye on your sixteen-million-ryō head." Obito replied calmly.
Hearing this, Hokusuke's expression relaxed, and he wove hand seals, the corner of his mouth curling upward. "Then you're really out of luck. I've already killed several people just like you along the way."
Swoosh! The seals completed, his figure blurred and vanished.
'Oh, the Camouflage Jutsu. A high-level ninjutsu that transforms one's body to blend with the surrounding environment, achieving the effect of invisibility. He truly is an upper-jōnin. But still.'
This kind of trick held no meaning before the Sharingan.
Swoosh! Obito leaned his body backward, and a blade sliced above him, shearing away falling leaves.
"A sensing-type ninja!!" The attack had missed, so Hokusuke released the camouflage to avoid wasting chakra, and in the same instant flashed behind Obito.
"Shadow of the Dancing Leaf. So you are particularly skilled in kenjutsu." Obito murmured.
Hokusuke swung his blade and unleashed the Leaf-Style Sword Technique: Crescent Moon Dance!
Swoosh swoosh swoosh! Amid the crossing of light and shadow, Obito was slashed into several pieces, but then with a thud his body transformed into a few chunks of wood that tumbled to the ground.
It was nothing more than the ordinary Substitution Jutsu, yet what stunned Hokusuke was, "The speed at which he activated the substitution actually exceeded my swordsmanship!!"
"You did assassinate a daimyō after all, even if you failed. Surely you can't be this limited in ability." Obito appeared on a tree behind him.
"Bastard!" Those words seemed to have struck a raw nerve, and Hokusuke roared in fury, scattering numerous shuriken in all directions that embedded into the surrounding trees, each shuriken wrapped with steel wire. Obito watched as Hokusuke's hands moved at high speed, manipulating the wire that had spread to seal off all four sides, and with a sharp pull backward, the wire wound itself around Obito's body.
'This is the Wind Release: Pinwheel Three-Bladed Sword technique. Young Sasuke, in the Forest of Death during the Chūnin Exams, managed to use it with the help of the Sharingan against Orochimaru. It seems that for an upper-jōnin, the difficulty level is not particularly high.' Obito murmured, seemingly ignoring the fact that he himself was the one now bound.
"It's over!" Hokusuke bit the other end of the wire between his teeth and began weaving seals.
Fire Release: Great Fireball Jutsu!!
Blazing!! The flames roared along the wire, surging toward Obito.
'In the end, sixteen million ryō buys only this level of skill.' Obito murmured.
Crack! Crack! His arms snapped the wire free, and he raised his hands to form the Horse seal, concentrating chakra at his throat.
Fire Release: Great Fireball Suppression!
Boom boom boom!! What erupted from him was a vast torrent of flame like a tidal wave of seawater, instantly melting the wire, swallowing the Great Fireball, and sweeping across a wide swath of forest.
During the Fourth Shinobi World War, Uchiha Madara had suppressed the combined Water Release: Water Formation Wall launched by twenty Water Release ninja of the Allied Forces using this very Fire Release technique. At this moment, Obito's Great Fireball Suppression, though not reaching Madara's level, already carried three parts of Madara's towering might!
The heat rolled in waves, and Hokusuke stared in despair at the sea of fire roaring toward him. "You, what the hell are you, aaaaah!!"
Boom!! Flames exploded, fire blazing skyward, clearly visible even from a great distance.
Far away, the three Konoha Anbu ninja tracking Hokusuke came to a halt, shielding their faces from the heat as they stared at the blaze.
"What level of Fire Release could produce this!!"
"Could it be that the Root got here first!"
The two male Anbu ninja were shaken.
"Let's go take a look!" The female Anbu at the front took the lead.
When they arrived at the scene, what they witnessed was something they would never forget for the rest of their lives.
That Fire Release had burned a clearing straight through the forest, and in the center of the scorched earth, a masked young man in a black robe was holding up the corpse of someone so thoroughly burned that even the face was unrecognizable, muttering to himself in frustration, "This is a headache. Now I can't even identify the face. Could the sixteen million ryō really just go up in smoke like this?"
"If it's just the face, I can restore it, you know." A second voice, completely different in timbre from the boy's own, came from his body, carrying a hint of idle playfulness.
"Damn it, that's Hokusuke. Did the Root get here first after all!" One of the male Anbu clenched his fist in frustration.
It turned out that Hokusuke had originally been a member of the Konoha Anbu, assigned to protect the Fire Daimyō, yet without any warning had launched an attack on the daimyō.
Afterward, the Anbu's investigation found that before Hokusuke's defection, he had been in contact with the Root, and so they suspected the Root had manipulated Hokusuke to use this incident to frame the Fourth Hokage, who commanded the Anbu.
True to the Root's way of doing things, they would certainly silence Hokusuke at the first opportunity, and so the mission of these three Anbu was to reach Hokusuke before the Root could and bring him back alive.
"No, he's not from the Root. The uniform is different, and besides, he was clearly saying sixteen million ryō." The lead female ninja noticed something was off and stepped forward, calling out sharply toward Obito's back, "Who goes there! We are Konoha Anbu. This is territory under Konoha's jurisdiction. State your identity!"
"Hmm?" At the sound of her voice, Obito slowly turned around, and behind the mask, his Sharingan radiated a bright glow.
"Sharingan! Close your eyes, do not meet its gaze!!" The female ninja's pupils contracted sharply and she squeezed her eyes shut.
Thud! Thud! But it was already too late. The two male Anbu behind her had both been caught and collapsed to the ground.
'That hair color, that voice. Could it be.'
Obito murmured as he dragged Hokusuke's corpse and closed in on the female ninja.
The female ninja retreated rapidly, but her back slammed into a large tree trunk.
Obito was already right in front of her.
"Damn it!!" The female ninja drew her blade and slashed forward.
Swoosh!!
But the blade passed straight through Obito's body, without the resistance that a strike should have produced.
"What?! What is this." At the female ninja's moment of shock, she found her body had already been caught in the Golden Binding Genjutsu, unable to move, and terror swept through her entire body, making her shoulders tremble faintly.
Obito reached out and removed the animal mask from the female ninja's face, revealing a strikingly beautiful yet youthful face, and Obito's eyes lit up.
"Uzuki Yūgao. It really is you."