Chapter 885

Yet his blade carried the swift, distinctive style of a shinobi—wielding that massive executioner's blade as though it were a mere kunai. Truly, one had to wonder how the Mist shinobi had ever trained such a monster into being.

As for Haku, although she and Mei both belonged to the Yuki clan, their approaches to the Kekkei Genkai differed. If Mei was freely displaying herself as a wielder of the Ice Kekkei Genkai, then Haku was doing everything she could to conceal that fact.

She rarely employed large-scale Ice Release ninjutsu; the vast majority of the time she only used the Ice Crystal Mirrors to move about and to forge ice kunai. With Lin Cheng, who had no combat ability at the moment, on her back, this was one factor limiting her use of large-scale ninjutsu—though perhaps it also had something to do with their own life experiences.

As for Young Yuanzi, to be honest, since the age of seventeen he had never been able to see through Young Yuanzi's attacking patterns. A single word could still describe it: fast. Even now, every one of Young Yuanzi's sword strokes was astonishingly swift—so fast that one could not see the blade being drawn or sheathed.

Long ago, the shinobi intelligence Jiraiya had read contained quite a few discrepancies with reality. Now there was also that purple chakra—was it a new mutation of Young Yuanzi's senjutsu chakra? Regardless, Jiraiya felt it best not to touch it directly.

"Muda, muda, muda! Boring, you're all too slow!" Smashing down enemies with the sheathed blade, Young Yuanzi no longer wished to waste time dealing with the grunts, so she simply used brute-force taijutsu to knock these troublesome fellows down, ensuring they would not be getting up for quite a while to threaten the little Zetsu behind them.

"The rest is up to you, Jiraiya! I want to make that salted fish understand one thing." Young Yuanzi turned her gaze toward Kisame Hoshigaki, who had once again engaged Mei in combat.

"And that is, I'm going to thoroughly beat this guy—this creep who keeps sneaking after us and clinging on like sticky toffee—until he never dares show his face again!"

Watching Young Yuanzi join the fight with such ferocious momentum, little Zetsu, who was being guarded behind Haku, had been observing in secret the whole time. She could only silently light a candle for Kisame in sympathy…

At that moment, Lin Cheng, who had been motionless all this while, slightly moved his fingers, and then slowly opened his eyes.

One week before the mission to pursue Jiraiya's team—somewhere in the Land of Water, in the thick morning fog, a village still burning.

"Compared to dealing with our own people, I'm far more interested in having Jiraiya, one of the Legendary Sannin of Konoha, as an opponent." This was what Kisame Hoshigaki had said a few days earlier, when he had just received the Mizukage's transmission. At the time, he was following orders and dealing with a Kekkei Genkai clan that had launched a rebellion.

"These guys really do have hard bones, but unfortunately, under the shark's fangs, all they get is being ground to dust." The Mizukage's messenger, his entire body hidden beneath a raincoat and still wearing a Leaf Anbu mask, surveyed the carnage on the field and spoke thus.

"These people never even awakened their Kekkei Genkai, and they came to die using nothing but the most ordinary taijutsu. Tell me, with just that, could they really have launched a rebellion?" Though phrased as a question, Kisame did not bother to conceal the mockery in his tone. What exactly was going on meant nothing to him; he only needed to carry out the Mizukage's order. And so the Takeuchi clan—a family whose population base had originally been quite large—was almost single-handedly slaughtered by him without the slightest hesitation.

This was absolutely no exaggeration. He simply forced his way in through the village entrance, then cut a path straight to the center of the Takeuchi clan's settlement, stood there, and the Takeuchi clan people were like moths.

Launching themselves at him in a futile death charge. There was no need to worry about any fish slipping through the net, because Kisame had already investigated beforehand: this group ordinarily had no contact with the outside world at all. Perhaps they did not get along well with their neighbors—a Kekkei Genkai clan that was, as the intelligence summarized, single-minded to the bone. Kisame gave them an evaluation that suited them perfectly: reckless, belligerent, short-lived.

The Takeuchi clan's overall performance also greatly disappointed Kisame; it did not give him even a shred of the battle he had been hoping for—only a one-sided slaughter that brought no satisfaction. At this moment, the Mizukage's new order came to Kisame like sweet rain after a long drought. The thought of the Fourth Hokage Minato Namikaze, whom he had faced during the Third Great Ninja War—Jiraiya, as her teacher, must certainly be very strong, worthy of being called one of the Sannin, the "Demi-Gods." A bout with such a master was absolutely something to look forward to.

"Didn't you make it clear to him, Jiraiya's strength?" After Kisame, blade on shoulder, had cheerfully gone off to find the assassination unit that was about to head to the Land of Water with him, after a long silence, a third person's voice suddenly drifted out from behind the Mizukage's messenger.

"I don't think it's necessary. After all, if Kisame Hoshigaki is defeated by Jiraiya, that just proves he has no use value, doesn't it?" Perhaps thinking there was no need to keep concealing his identity, the Mizukage's messenger removed the mask from his face, and his voice returned to its true tone… That's right, this so-called Mizukage's messenger was none other than White Zetsu!