atribute Chapter 474: Undying (Patreon)

On the purple-black earth a figure appeared and vanished so fast it might as well have been teleportation. Every time he landed, the ground under his feet blew into a pit several meters deep. There was nothing fancy in the line he took. He went straight at the thing in front of him.

“Arrogant!”

An attack that honest was an insult.

The Specter howled. Two dragon heads came in from left and right to crush him between their jaws. A third spat a breath as thick as tar, purple-black, sealing every angle he had to slip.

Gold flared hard in Taiichi’s eyes. He did not slow. At the last instant before the breath hit him he exhaled.

Sage Art: Wind Release: Great Vacuum Sphere.

A senjutsu wind shot, compressed to a shell, punched into the breath. The impact hissed like acid eating metal and tore a hole down the middle of the stream.

Taiichi went through the gap like a fish through a net. Untouched. He was already under the jaw.

His right fist closed. Senjutsu chakra packed into the knuckles until the air over them warped.

Sage Art: Monstrous Strength: Mountain Breaker.

The punch landed on scale and bone.

The sound was a dull, world-filling thud. A ring of force blew outward, carrying smashed flesh and broken plates. The dragon head snapped up. Both eyes burst from the sockets under the shock.

Pain and rage came out of it in one scream. The other four heads lunged.

Taiichi vanished in midair. The heads swept empty space, hunting him.

He came back at the root of the neck on the far right. The chakra blade formed in his hand again—ten meters this time.

He cut.

It was like putting an edge to steel. The Specter’s body was built to last. The blade was built to cut. The head came off.

The scream that followed was not only pain. There was killing intent in it, and a thin edge of fear.

Four mouths opened. Four thick streams of breath raked the field at random.

Taiichi was gone again. He appeared dozens of meters out in the open sky, pale-blue chakra wings opening at his back, holding him there with small, easy beats.

He watched the Specter tear at the air and took a private inventory.

A few exchanges had been enough. In raw individual strength the Specter sat a shade under a Nine-Tails at full bloom. A thing like that should not have been the world’s problem. Someone should have carved it into pieces years ago and left it dead.

He looked past it at the ghost army still pouring toward this ground, and shook his head. Trash. Numbers without teeth, at least against anyone who could actually fight.

His eyes went back to the Specter. The frown dug in.

Unless it really could not be killed.

He lifted the blade, cleared the thought, and let the only test that mattered stand. Kill it once and see.

The wings twitched. Air gathered. He drove at it again.

Farther out, the strike force was taking pressure from every side and holding like stone. Chakra was still high. The tide was ugly, not yet fatal. Men like Kitsuchi and Dodai even had attention left to watch Taiichi work.

Fists that threw rings of force. Cuts that sheared half a hillside off a neck.

It put a heat in the ranks. Some of them would have sold a year of their lives to take that place and go three hundred rounds with the monster themselves.

That was the ones who liked a fight. Chiyo and Dodai were thinking further.

Could their own villages handle a force like that?

They did not get to finish the thought. The field in front of them demanded the eyes back.

To Taiichi the rock puppets were garbage. To most of the thousand, a crude stone blade still opened skin. Enough ants could drop an elephant. That was not a proverb here. It was a schedule.

A blade skimmed Chiyo’s brow and buried itself in the dirt beside her with a heavy thunk.

“Wake up, old woman. This is not the hour to drift.”

Kitsuchi’s rock fists were still moving. He was the one who had knocked the cut aside.

Sweat ran from Chiyo’s temple. She put her mind back where it belonged. Her mouth did not.

“This old woman knows her work. Don’t fuss.” Her gaze snagged on the stone sheathing Kitsuchi’s arms. Envy, brief and honest. Another good one.

Taiichi stayed in motion around the Specter’s bulk, waiting for a hole. The Specter had learned. It did not want him close.

Four streams of breath ran almost without pause, stitching the air around him. He slipped them by margins that would not survive a mistake.

That was not all. The Specter spun out ten false heads. They could not spit breath. They could hit. Mass and size made each one a falling wall. Taiichi would not meet those head-on if he had a choice, and when he cut one down it simply condensed again. That part he hated.

He still had the Flying Thunder God. When the geometry closed, he left. Then he came back and started the cut again.

A defense held long enough always leaks. The saying worked on a demon as well as it worked on a wall.

Under that pressure the last four heads came off one at a time.

When the final skull hit the dirt, the noise in the Specter’s mind changed. The raw screaming stopped. What was left was almost calm.

“Human. You think this kills me. Wait—”

The voice thinned. It never finished the sentence.

Taiichi hung in the air. The pale-blue wings at his back beat once and moved a little wind.

Below him the Specter’s body lay across the purple-black ground like a mountain that had been pulled down. Five dragon heads were scattered around the trunk. From the stumps ran a thick purple-black fluid, tar-dark. It pooled, then spread into a foul pond. Bubbles broke on the surface. The stink that came off it was rot.

Negative energy lifted from the corpse in mist you could almost take in a hand. At height it thinned and went into the air.

Taiichi was breathing harder than he liked. Sage Mode held through a fight this dense had a cost even for him. Sweat ran to his jaw and dropped.

There was no win on his face. The frown only tightened.

The Specter’s last words sat in him like a nail. This was not finished.

He had cut the thing down himself. No one on the field could read the corpse better.

The body was coming apart at a speed the eye could follow—not rotting. Melting. Solid to energy, energy back into the world. The same shape a tailed beast took when it died.

An aggregate of energy, then. Worse than a tailed beast. A tailed beast that died took a year, sometimes several, to pull itself together in the right place. The Specter—

He locked on the body. In a few minutes the hundred-meter bulk had lost nearly a third of its height, and the loss was accelerating. At that rate the corpse would be gone inside an hour. After that—what form, and where?

He drew a breath and tried to read the air.

Negative energy was the core. Negative energy was the seed.

The Land of Swamps had no shortage of it. Neither did the Land of Demons. Neither did a shinobi world that had just finished a war.

Out on the line, the strike force broke into a roar.

“He did it! Lord Taiichi killed the Specter!”

“We won!”

“The shinobi world is saved!”

The sound went across the field like weather.

A thousand elites from every village that still had a name had run, cut, and bled to see that shape fall. Fatigue and pain went under the noise.

Kitsuchi put a rock fist through an oncoming puppet and let the relief show. “Finally—”

Chiyo’s ten puppets stopped together. She let out a long breath. Something complicated moved in her eyes. “An ancient monster. In the end it still lost to the shinobi of this age.”

Dodai pulled the Lightning chakra back and wiped his forehead. “Then the ghost army should—”

He did not finish.

The field changed.

“Watch it!”

The scream came off the outer ring.

A Kumogakure jonin who had let his guard drop for the win took a stone blade in the shoulder. The edge bit scapula. Blood went through the cloth at once.

“Damn it—why are they still moving?!”

The shouts stacked.

The ghost army had not paused for anyone’s cheer. Rock puppets kept swinging. Resentment spirits kept screaming. They hit the line where the joy had made holes.

“Hold formation! Do not ease up!” Kitsuchi’s voice carried.

Late.

Seconds of slack were enough. The outer ring opened in more than one place. The ghost army went through those gaps like a snake through a fence. Blades. Cries.

An Iwagakure chunin caught three puppets at once and never finished a seal. A stone spear took him through the belly.

A Kirigakure jonin threw Water Release up in front and ate a resentment spirit in the back. Purple-black energy ate into the skin. The flesh went to rot while he still stood.

In a little more than ten seconds the strike force took the worst losses of the fight. Thirty shinobi down, light to heavy. Seven of those would die without work. Three were already dead.

“Medical ninja! Now!”

Chiyo snapped it. Suna medics moved. Pale-green light hit the worst of the wounded.

Most of the rest had to keep their teeth in it and fight. The ghost army showed no interest in a truce.

Kitsuchi smashed another puppet and stared across the distance at Taiichi, face gone iron.

“Taiichi! What is this? The Specter is dead!”

The shout covered hundreds of meters.

Taiichi did not answer at once. His eyes left the shrinking corpse and ran the field.

The ghost army was still moving. Still attacking. No lag. No drop. The Specter’s death might as well have been weather.

The last thin hope in him went out.

He vanished from the air.

He landed on the forward edge of the strike line. The chakra blade came back—fifteen meters, white-gold senjutsu running the length of it.

“Back!”

A flat order. A horizontal cut. No form. A crescent of force fanned out in front of him.

Everything in the next fifty meters—rock puppets, resentment spirits, all of it—went to powder. The ground opened in a trench meters deep. Purple-black soil tore away and showed gray rock underneath.

The line got its breath.

Taiichi sealed with one hand.

Shadow Clone Technique.

White smoke. A copy stood at his shoulder.

“Stay. Help them hold.” He looked at Kitsuchi, Chiyo, Dodai, and the others coming in fast. “With me.”

They dropped back to the relative quiet at the center of the formation. Leaf and Suna had stacked a double screen there. The noise of the fight thinned.

“How bad?” Chiyo first. Age on the face, no softness in it.

Taiichi pointed at the corpse. “Look.”

They looked.

Nearly ten minutes since the last head had fallen. The hundred-meter body was under forty now, and the fade was still speeding up. Purple-black energy sheeted off it like a fall of water and fed the pond on the ground. The pond boiled. The air over it was hard to take.

“It’s—going?” Dodai’s eyes narrowed.

“Not going. Changing.” Taiichi kept it flat. “The Specter is an aggregate of negative energy, same family as a tailed beast. I killed the body. The energy that made the body is returning to the world—”

“It will come back somewhere,” Kitsuchi said. His face had gone worse. “That’s why the army is still moving. They aren’t tied to the corpse. They’re tied to what it is.”

Taiichi nodded. “That’s it. Plan A failed. We need Plan B.”

“A seal?” Dodai’s brow locked. “How do you seal a target whose corpse is already coming apart?”

Chiyo snorted and tipped her chin at the fight. “More urgent: we need to know where it climbs out. We are not sitting here under this tide and waiting politely.”

No one argued.

A thousand elites was still a thousand. The ghost army did not end and did not tire. Hold this ground long enough and chakra and legs would go first.

“Taiichi.” Kitsuchi looked at the young Leaf shinobi with a mix of things in his face. “You’re running this. What now?”

Every set of eyes went to him.

Kakashi had arrived without anyone marking it. He glanced at the shrinking corpse, then at Taiichi, and waited.

Taiichi said nothing for a stretch.

Command here was a thousand lives. Hold, and the army might bury them before they found the birth-ground. Pull out, and the decapitation they had spent a coalition to buy was finished—and they might not get another throw.

He ran the numbers in his head. Fade rate. How far the negative energy was spreading. How long a rebirth might take. How hard the army was hitting.

He drew a breath and made the call.

“We stay—”