Chapter 85: Bounty Ninjas

Chapter 85: Chapter 85: Bounty Ninjas

Seeing that their attack had succeeded, the attacker on the other side gave a sinister chuckle.

"Big Brother, this twenty-five-million-ryō guy isn’t anything special! Didn’t we take him out in one shot?"

Poof...

Before the words had even finished leaving his mouth, Hyuga Kagami—who had been pierced through both sides by the two blades—burst into a cloud of smoke.

The two attackers froze at the same time.

"A Shadow Clone!?"

At that moment, a figure suddenly descended from above and landed directly on their heads.

One foot for each man.

Before the two stunned attackers could react, they were brutally stomped into the ground.

The figure was none other than Hyuga Kagami.

Still standing on their heads, Kagami slowly crouched down and said helplessly,

"Hey, didn’t the bounty notice have my name written on it? You two were just squatting there in the bushes without a care in the world. Aren’t you looking down on me a little too much?"

"Damn it!"

"How could it have been a Shadow Clone?!"

Even with their heads pinned beneath Kagami’s feet, unable to move, the two bounty ninjas still seemed unable to believe what had happened.

Kagami’s expression, however, turned cold.

"Has the Hyuga Clan’s deterrent power in the shinobi world really fallen this far?"

As far as Kagami was concerned, since his name was clearly written on the bounty notice, any bounty ninja willing to take the job should have known that he was a Byakugan kekkei genkai shinobi.

Yet these two bounty ninjas seemed to have no real understanding of the Byakugan at all.

Their skills weren’t weak, either. Judging from the ambush just now, both of them were at least at the chunin level.

That left Kagami somewhat uncertain.

He couldn’t tell whether these two bounty ninjas were simply hopelessly ignorant, or whether the Hyuga Clan really had so little deterrent power left in the shinobi world.

After tying up the two bounty ninjas, Kagami returned to the village.

It was only at the village’s Mission Center that Kagami learned the two men were rogue ninjas from Kirigakure. After defecting, they had committed all manner of crimes and accumulated quite a blood debt, so there were bounties on their heads as well.

Combined, the two were worth nearly three million ryō.

At the same time, Kagami also learned that Kirigakure had recently fallen into internal turmoil.

According to the rumors, several of Kirigakure’s kekkei genkai clans had directly participated in a rebellion, throwing the entire village into chaos. As a result, large numbers of Kirigakure shinobi had defected. Some became wandering ninjas, while others turned into bounty ninjas.

After dealing with the bounty ninjas, Kagami wasted no time and left the village once again.

As he traveled along the road, despite having just come into a sizable unexpected windfall, there was no trace of happiness on his face.

Quite the opposite.

His expression gradually turned cold and severe.

When he had been attacked earlier, Kagami had kept his real body hidden in the shadows, carefully observing his surroundings in case the enemy had prepared a follow-up attack.

And because of that, he had noticed something.

When he was ambushed, the Root ninja assigned to monitor him from behind had shown absolutely no intention of stepping in to help.

No matter how you looked at it, they were still shinobi from the same village.

Yet when one of his own was attacked, the Root ninja hadn’t cared in the slightest.

That could only mean one thing.

The Root ninja wasn’t merely monitoring Hyuga Kagami.

He was treating Kagami as an enemy.

The moment Kagami realized this, killing intent surged within him.

At first, he had figured that the Root ninja was merely following orders and had little choice in the matter. As long as Kagami shook him off, there was no need to kill him.

But now, he had changed his mind.

That evening, Kagami chose a flat clearing in the forest as his campsite. He lit a campfire and rested beside it while eating roasted rabbit meat.

Not far away, the Root ninja responsible for monitoring Kagami sat on the branch of a large tree, his back against the trunk as he watched the distant campfire.

"Hmph. He actually lit a campfire? His vigilance is pathetic. Someone like this deserves to be in the ANBU?"

The Root ninja chewed on the rations he carried while silently mocking Kagami.

This Root ninja’s codename was Dingyou.

Missions involving surveillance were practically second nature to him, because throughout his entire career, he had only ever carried out two kinds of missions.

One was surveillance.

The other was assassination.

And those two types of missions could often be considered one and the same, because every target he had ever been assigned to monitor eventually became a target he was ordered to assassinate.

Suddenly, Dingyou sensed a wave of killing intent.

Drawing on years of assassination experience, he immediately realized that something had locked onto him.

"Ninja Art: Super Beast Imitating Drawing!"

Almost instinctively, he launched himself into the air. As he flipped down from the tree, he pulled out a brush and paper in midair and rapidly sketched a large ink bird.

Whoosh! Whoosh!

But before he could even land on the ink bird, two iron spears shot forward and pierced straight through it, reducing it to a mass of ink that splattered through the air.

Dingyou landed awkwardly on the ground.

Only then did he see his attacker—a mysterious shinobi whose entire body was wrapped in bandages, leaving not the slightest hint of his appearance visible.

Then he noticed the iron sand floating around the mysterious shinobi.

His heart immediately tightened.

"Magnet Release!?"

As a member of Root, Dingyou had heard of all manner of unusual kekkei genkai and secret techniques throughout the shinobi world, so he recognized at a glance this kekkei genkai unique to Sunagakure!

Dingyou asked tensely,

"Who are you?"

Even within Sunagakure, shinobi capable of using Magnet Release were exceedingly rare.

At present, only two such individuals were widely known throughout the shinobi world—the missing Third Kazekage and the current Fourth Kazekage.

Dingyou didn’t believe for a second that either the Third Kazekage or the Fourth Kazekage would come all the way out to this remote wilderness for no reason just to ambush him.

So in his eyes, there was a very high chance that this mysterious shinobi was a Sunagakure rogue ninja who had somehow mastered Magnet Release.

The reason Dingyou assumed the man was a rogue ninja was simple: he carried neither important intelligence nor any valuable items. There was absolutely no reason for Sunagakure to dispatch an elite shinobi capable of Magnet Release just to assassinate him.

Moreover, Konoha and Sunagakure were currently moving toward an alliance. At a time like this, Sunagakure had no reason to attack a Konoha shinobi.

"His target is Hyuga Kagami!"

Remembering the enormous bounty on Kagami’s head, Dingyou suddenly came to this conclusion.

After all, only a bounty that large would be enough to tempt a Sunagakure rogue ninja of this caliber into making a move.

"He must think I’m in the way, so he wants to get rid of me first before going after Hyuga Kagami!"

With that thought, Dingyou immediately came up with a plan.

If the mysterious shinobi’s true target was Kagami, then all he had to do was lure him toward Kagami. Once they reached the campsite, the enemy would naturally ignore Dingyou and turn his attention to Kagami instead.

When that happened, Dingyou could calmly make his escape.

After all, with his strength as a Special Jonin, he simply wasn’t capable of fighting a powerful shinobi who possessed Magnet Release.

"Ninja Art: Super Beast Imitating Drawing!"

After quickly sketching two ink lions to hold his opponent back, Dingyou immediately used the Body Flicker Technique and fled toward the nearby campfire.

As he raced through the forest, he suddenly discovered that Hyuga Kagami was still sitting beside the fire, leisurely gnawing on a rabbit leg.

Dingyou sneered inwardly.

"What an idiot. There was a battle this close by, and he didn’t even notice it..."