Chapter 868

"Ahem, if my eyes weren't playing tricks just now, that was Young Yuanzi, wasn't it?"

Being an Ice Release user after all, Xiaomei quickly calmed down. Since Jiraiya was here, it meant the other party was definitely in the know.

"Hey, why are you running so fast? Don't tell me you want to call off the deal?"

A very arrogant male voice drew closer from the distance.

Following the sounds of pushing aside thick branches and grass, and the swish of a blade cutting through stubborn limbs, what soon appeared in everyone's view was a burly man holding a large sword, his face wrapped in white cloth.

The Executioner's Blade, the Demon of the Hidden Mist, Momochi Zabuza — what a stroke of luck to find him without even searching!

Jiraiya recognized the man at a glance, and the young Young Yuanzi, who had been hiding behind Lin Cheng in almost the same posture as Xiaojue, secretly observing, also understood.

So the person Jiraiya had said he absolutely had to find was the man right before them.

Cut the crap, Momochi Zabuza — in terms of real strength, he's nothing more than a small-time lackey.

The Demon of the Hidden Mist, Momochi Zabuza.

The title sounds pretty terrifying, but it could only really scare a Lin Cheng who at this point probably hadn't even graduated from the Ninja Academy yet.

Because for everyone else present, that title was more of a joke.

Whether it was Jiraiya or Yuki Mei, both had earned merit in several Shinobi World wars — it could well be said they had walked out over mountains of enemy corpses.

Just by standing there, they could hold back the advance of enemy armies numbering in the hundreds or thousands.

And how did Zabuza earn his title?

It was at the tail end of the Third Shinobi World War. On the main battlefield, due to the failure of the Three-Tails deployment operation, the Hidden Mist Village was nearly at a dead end. That was when they encountered the batch of new ninja about to graduate, which included Momochi Zabuza.

Originally, their fate should have been to be thrown in as the cheapest consumables within the next month, or even less, lost on the supply routes used to delay the Konoha army.

But from an overall strategic standpoint, the Land of Water had already lost. A rift had opened between the ninja village and the state apparatus; unilateral warfare had become a luxury. Under internal pressure, the fighting was finally stopped. This batch of graduating students, products of the village's warped educational system, suddenly had no battlefield left to fight on.

All sorts of defeatist, world-weary talk and emotions spread among this group.

The Mizukage, who had temporarily seized great power while the daimyo of the Land of Water fled, was displeased that chaos would inevitably breed. Zabuza saw all this clearly too — only he wasn't strong enough yet, not strong enough to rebel.

Every time he thought of that short but insurmountable figure — the Mizukage — Zabuza would train even harder, all for the day he could surpass the Mizukage and overthrow his rule.

And the Mist ninja graduation exam of that time only strengthened Zabuza's resolve.

Because the Seven Ninja Swordsmen had been all but wiped out fighting Konoha, selecting new wielders of the swords became an urgent priority.