Chapter 280: The Death of Hanzō
Chapter 280: The Death of Hanzō
The ninjas of the Village Hidden in the Rain had suffered heavy losses after the end of the Second Great Ninja War. Although their numbers had been replenished many times since, their quality had never recovered. This was not for any other reason than that as Hanzō aged, the village lost its vitality along with him.
In these years, any Rain ninja with some strength and talent, because they could find no future in Amegakure, chose to leave. Among them, some joined the Akatsuki, some chose to become rogue ninjas, and some established other ninja organizations in other parts of the Land of Rain, wanting to change the country.
These people first went through the conflict between the Akatsuki and the Hanzō-Danzō alliance. Afterward, Hanzō, with the support of Iwagakure, conducted another purge. After that, when Danzō returned to the Land of Rain again, he carried out another purge of these rogue ninjas. Of course, Danzō wasn't doing this for Hanzō's good; it was just part of the obligations of the cooperation he had reached with Hanzō.
In short, although the number of ninjas in Amegakure now was not small, their strength was truly nothing special. Let alone facing the Six Paths of Pain, even if Ishiro's disciples went up, they could easily fight their way to the core of the village.
To better train the younger generation, Nagato even deliberately let some relatively strong Rain ninjas slip through for the youngsters to practice on.
Advancing all the way, they encountered almost no effective resistance. Ishiro and his group had no chance to even make a move. Although the number of ninjas let in by Nagato was not small, they were all cleaned up by the younger generation led by Kawakita.
Until the Six Paths of Pain arrived before the building where Hanzō was.
Looking at Hanzō on the rooftop looking down, and then at the ever-increasing number of Rain ninjas around, the corner of Ishiro's mouth twitched. Hanzō still hadn't given up.
At a time like this, he still couldn't let go of the so-called Village Hidden in the Rain, couldn't let go of that tiny bit of power. If Hanzō had fled a step earlier, he might have really been able to escape the pursuit of Ishiro and the others, because Ishiro's group was dragging along a large group of hindrances.
But Hanzō chose to let a large number of Rain ninjas come to their deaths.
After a while, perhaps feeling that the number of surrounding ninjas was sufficient, Hanzō waved his hand and gave the order to attack.
However, before the Rain ninjas could make a move, the ninjutsu of Ishiro and Nagato was launched.
Among Nagato's Six Paths of Pain, the Deva Path used Shinra Tensei, which required no hand seals, making its speed even faster than Ishiro's.
But Ishiro was only slightly slower than Nagato. With the enhancement of Sage Art, Ishiro's C-rank ninjutsu could reach the power of A-rank. Ishiro used his despair-inducing hand seal speed to rapidly release C-rank Sage Art.
Then, one after another, large-area ninjutsu of the five elements covered the surrounding Rain ninjas.
And Nagato's other five Paths of Pain, seeing Ishiro being so effective, ignored these Rain ninjas and directly targeted Hanzō. The Deva Path, seeing it made little difference whether he was there or not, also flew up to the building in front.
"Boom, boom, boom, boom." After wave after wave of ninjutsu bombardment, the Rain ninjas suffered heavy casualties. Those who remained had either fled or were too injured to flee.
Ishiro signaled for Kawakita to deal with the wounded Rain ninjas, then turned his gaze to the battle between Hanzō and the Six Paths of Pain on the tall building.
Looking at the missile attacks flying everywhere on the building, the giant summoning animals, the continuous sound of explosions, and then at the ruins littered with severed limbs from the waves of ninjutsu bombardment, the children brought by Ishiro and Yahiko were all deeply shocked.
Ishiro glanced at Deidara. With ninjutsu of this power on display, he reckoned Deidara wouldn't go around conducting terrorist attacks just because he learned Explosion Release.
Suddenly, with a "poof," Ishiro saw a giant salamander appear on the roof.
Without another word, Ishiro stretched out his hands and drew a slanted square in front of him.
Ishiro aimed the square at the salamander in the air. After a moment, a blue light appeared in his hands, then quickly shot out. In the next moment, the blue light had directly hit the giant salamander on the distant rooftop, which hadn't even had time to display its combat power.
It wasn't that the salamander was careless, but that the scene created by the Six Paths of Pain was too chaotic. The salamander, which had just been summoned and hadn't yet figured out the situation, had its main attention drawn by the several giant summoning animals and didn't notice at all that Ishiro was charging up his power.
By the time it sensed the crisis, it was already too late.
And in the eyes of others, this was the scene: the giant salamander, summoned by Hanzō at the cost of a large amount of chakra, and then, half of its body was gone.
Watching the remaining half of the salamander's corpse crash to the ground, everyone was so scared they didn't even dare to breathe.
"Yahiko, help me look after them," Ishiro shouted to Yahiko, then flew into the air with Kawakita.
Arriving in the air, Ishiro and Kawakita could finally see the battle on the rooftop clearly.
The current Hanzō was in a sorry state. Facing the sudden attack of the Six Paths of Pain, he didn't even have time to summon his salamander. He could only dodge everywhere, constantly using his sword techniques to neutralize various attacks.
Ishiro led Kawakita to Nagato, who had also flown up, and gave him a look. Nagato immediately understood.
Thus, he slightly slowed down the pace of his attacks, both maintaining pressure on Hanzō and preventing him from having a chance to counterattack.
Kawakita's attention was now completely drawn to Hanzō. In Kawakita's impression, a ninja of Hanzō's level should be invincible, yet he was now being forced into a corner by Nagato's puppets.
"Just how strong is Nagato?" Kawakita thought to himself.
But soon, his attention was diverted. He gradually noticed Hanzō's countermeasures. Apart from forming hand seals, Hanzō was mostly fighting with his long blade. With every wave of his hand, Hanzō would defeat one of Nagato's attacks. Whether it was summoning animals, missiles, or taijutsu attacks, for Hanzō, there was no problem that couldn't be solved with a single slash.
After watching for a while and seeing that Nagato's attacks had no new tricks, Ishiro began his performance.
"Water Release: Water Shockwave! Fire Release: Great Fireball Technique! Earth Release: Rising Earth Spears! Water Release: Water Line Technique! Water Release: Water Flow Whip! Lightning Release: Lightning Guide! Wind Release: Breakthrough! Wind Release: Vacuum Sphere..." Ishiro made his move, adding brilliant colors to Nagato's monotonous attacks.
But as expected, these Sage Arts from Ishiro, with power no less than A-rank ninjutsu, were also cut down by Hanzō, one slash after another.
However, each of Hanzō's strikes, though seemingly simple, was actually condensed with a large amount of chakra and was constantly consuming his stamina. Although this consumption was smaller than Ishiro's and Nagato's, it couldn't stand up to them squandering their power like this.
After a while longer, finally, a missile from Nagato hit Hanzō, who was a fraction of a second slow to react.
Looking at the demigod of the ninja world who had fallen to the ground, constantly coughing up blood, Ishiro knew that this journey to broaden his disciples' horizons was about to end.
Hanzō did not look at Nagato or Ishiro, but instead turned his gaze to Kawakita. After struggling to take a few breaths, Hanzō said, "Your name is Kawakita, right? I remember you. I have a sword technique scroll for you."
As he spoke, Hanzō wanted to reach for his ninja tool pouch but ultimately failed due to his severe injuries.
Watching him try several times without success, Ishiro smiled faintly and created a Shadow Clone. The Shadow Clone came to Hanzō's side, carefully opened his ninja tool pouch, took out a large pile of items, and then, following Hanzō's gaze, picked up one of the scrolls.
The Shadow Clone opened the scroll, examined it carefully, and after confirming Hanzō hadn't done anything tricky, put it away. However, even after putting it away, he didn't hand it to his main body but had the Shadow Clone keep it. In short, Ishiro's meaning was clear: as long as Hanzō was not dead, he would not be careless for a moment.
"Truly... truly cautious... truly worthy of being the Fox of Iwa, cough cough..." Hanzō said halfway, then took several deep breaths again, incidentally spitting out a large mouthful of blood, and then continued to look at Kawakita, saying, "Your talent in sword techniques is good, but you matured too late. Otherwise, if you had a life-and-death battle with me today, you might have been able to break through."
At the last moment, Hanzō finally turned his gaze to the Six Paths of Pain and Nagato, and said with difficulty, "Akatsuki, you win after all. The Land of Rain is yours."
After speaking, Hanzō closed his eyes. The demigod of the ninja world, who had dominated for decades, died just like that.
After confirming Hanzō was thoroughly dead, Ishiro finally handed the scroll to Kawakita and said, "Make a copy and give it to Yahiko tomorrow."
"Yes, Teacher Ishiro," Kawakita replied.
Then Ishiro looked at Nagato and said, "Nagato, let's split up and clean up Hanzō's confidants."
Nagato nodded. As was his habit, he didn't say much, controlling the Six Paths of Pain to search in one direction.
Ishiro, on the other hand, led Kawakita back to the ground and then began to clean up the remnants of the Rain ninjas with his group of disciples.
The process of attacking Amegakure was very smooth. The only one in the entire village who needed attention was Hanzō. After Hanzō died, the Rain ninjas who had been hiding in the dark basically all fled. Those who didn't flee were cleaned up by Ishiro and Nagato. This was something Yahiko and Konan were unwilling to do.
Yahiko and Konan, turning a blind eye, directly took people to take stock of the Rain's assets. By the time Ishiro and Nagato returned from their killing spree, the things that needed to be sorted out had been mostly organized by the two of them with a group of children.
It was getting late, so Ishiro and his group rested in Amegakure for one night.
The next day, the rain in Amegakure still hadn't stopped, but the sky over the village had changed. The civilians of the Land of Rain hid in their homes, not daring to come out. Ishiro and his group, in a relatively intact building, began to divide the spoils.
No, that's not right. Yahiko called it the distribution of the spoils of war.
All documents with written records were easy to handle. Those who needed them just made a copy and took it with them. Those that felt useless were all burned with a Fire Release.
The handling of items was also relatively simple. Although Amegakure was not a great nation, it was still a hidden village, and there were many good things inside. Ishiro's side didn't take much; each person who came just picked one or two items, and the rest was left for Yahiko and his group.
Yahiko and the others needed to re-establish two hidden villages and needed a lot of resources.
Finally, there was the division of territory. Originally, Ishiro had no intention of taking any territory; even Ōnoki had agreed on this point. But Nagato insisted on ceding a part of the Land of Rain's territory to the Land of Earth.
Nagato felt that Ishiro needed to increase his influence in Iwagakure. He felt that although Ishiro was the Tsuchikage, there were still many advisors in the high-level leadership dividing his power. Ishiro needed war merits to increase his authority.
Ishiro considered it and agreed. He said to Nagato, "I'll choose the long, narrow strip of land adjacent to the Land of Earth and the Land of Rain. I plan to give this piece of land to the Land of Grass."
Nagato understood the territory Ishiro chose. Although that area was not prosperous, Ishiro certainly wouldn't choose an exclave. Although the territory was a bit small, which made Nagato a little embarrassed, what Nagato didn't understand the most was why Ishiro would give it to the Land of Grass.
Ishiro smiled and said, "Nagato, do you know why the current five great nations do not border each other? Because being too close easily leads to conflict. I plan to use this land to exchange with the Land of Grass, in exchange for a small piece of territory in the Land of Grass that is sandwiched between the Land of Fire and the Land of Earth."
"I plan to make the Land of Earth and the Land of Fire border each other, so that after we defeat the Land of Fire in the future, we won't be unable to cede their land. At the same time, not letting the Land of Earth and the Land of Rain border each other is to reduce conflicts between the two countries."
Nagato thought about it and then didn't bother anymore. How Ishiro handled his own territory was his own business. For him, the most important thing now was how to rebuild the Village Hidden in the Rain.
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