Chapter 145: And Let Joy Follow

Shirak walked as if treading on the wind, surrounded by a flurry of dancing cherry blossoms as he wove through countless puppet soldiers. Every pass left a deep blade gash on a puppet's neck.

Eeeeeee……

Sweeping Blade, Sweeping Blade, Sweeping Blade…!!!

This fluid, effortless smoothness was like a young maiden's long hair brushing against one's cheek, filling the air with an intoxicating fragrance.

"What on earth is he... doing?" Nonocha stared blankly at Shirak, who was lost in his own ecstasy.

Everyone shook their heads in unison.

"Dad said he has truly only been happy this one time in his entire life, and he wants to leave a memento." Karin pulled out a camera and snapped pictures of Shirak from every angle with rapid clicks.

"Hey, get back here! It's too dangerous!" Baki finally put aside his caution, preparing to fight the enemy together.

"The way of the wanderer, live towards death~" Shirak drifted further and further away, gliding gracefully through the horde of puppets.

"The idiot is going to get himself killed!" Veins bulged on Yura's forehead.

"That would be euthanasia, then~"

"You're being targeted!!!" Nonocha pointed at the patrollers in the sky, where countless rocket-propelled grenades were locking onto Shirak.

"As long as I dash fast enough, the rockets can't catch me." Shirak moved with flowing ease. A barrage of rockets chased relentlessly behind him, failing to catch his pace and detonating a series of shattering rocks in his wake.

"Hasagei!"

A small whirlwind burst forth from Shirak's blade, heading straight toward his own people.

"Ahhhhhhh!!!" Feeling the upward drafting current of air, Nonocha desperately pressed down on her skirt.

"I wear safety shorts to guard against scoundrels, so why are you guarding against a gentleman like me?" Shirak grinned. Damn it, Yasuo is so much fun.

……

"If you've seen enough, it's about time you looked after yourselves." Kakuzu’s entire body was hardened and blackened with Earth Grudge Fear, taking the steel swords thrust by the puppets head-on and smashing them into countless fragments of scrap metal.

"A bunch of puppets without puppeteers... what a pain." Baki pulled out the Wind Blade at his waist, channeled cyan wind-style chakra into it, and slashed four times in an instant, ruthlessly dismembering the puppet soldiers. The recoil made his palms tingle slightly. Yet, as far as the eye could see, heaven knows how many more puppet soldiers remained beneath this Loulan underground.

"If what you're dealing with is a pain, what do I call this?" Yura flipped and leaped onto the head of a puppet, slapped an explosive tag onto its back, and kicked it down with all her might.

Boom!!! The puppet soldiers exploded into pieces.

It was a pity she only had ten explosive tags left in her pouch, while the puppet soldiers before her numbered in the hundreds or thousands.

Scorching Release was completely useless here. Although her taijutsu was decent, she couldn't possibly wrestle a puppet to death with her bare arms, could she?

"Why not try blowing up the conduits releasing the chakra threads from above?" Nonocha pointed to the crisscrossing, vertically and horizontally arranged metal pipes above them. The chakra threads controlling the puppets were hanging down directly from those.

"Whoever dares clear my mobs, I'll never forgive them!!!" Shirak roared, his sword tip dragging a small tornado that batted away a dozen puppet soldiers.

"Forget this!" Yura didn't care what Shirak was shouting. With a kunai clenched between her teeth, she began running upward along the high tower.

Baki opened his mouth, wanting to say something, but stopped. Such an obvious flaw—how could the enemy not have accounted for it? Yet, whether it would succeed or not, shouldn't they at least give it a try?

With chakra adhered to her soles, Yura ran continuously up the tower. A dozen patroller puppets were also floating in the air, pursuing her. Fortunately, the taijutsu foundation Yura had honed through countless battles was extremely solid. She continuously dodged the incoming rockets, and when faced with charging puppets, she even stepped on their heads, using her slender and powerful legs to leap high, approaching the high-altitude chakra transmission pipes at an even faster speed.

Finally...

"Got them!" With a final leap, Yura pulled an explosive tag from her ninja tool pouch, preparing to plant it on the pipe and drop down to the tower on the other side.

The script was written well, but just as Baki had guessed, Anrokuzan would not allow such an obvious vulnerability to exist. A dozen beams of chakra light shot toward Yura like sharp arrows.

Suspended mid-air, Yura had no leverage to dodge. After twisting her body to evade three beams of light, she was still struck and pierced right through the body. She plummeted like a kite with a broken string. The paralyzing numbness brought by the pain left her with no choice but to watch helplessly as the moon in the sky drifted further and further away, while right below her was a dense forest of puppet blades.

"Is this the end..."

"Yura... in the end, I still couldn't keep our promise..."

"And I never got to wait for a gentle man like the ones in Make-Out Paradise..."

Just as Yura prepared to face death with resignation, an utterly joyous voice rang out right beside her ear.

"Hasagei!"

"Steel Tempest!!"

[Last Breath!]

She felt the upward buoyancy of a fierce hurricane stall her body in the air for a moment. Immediately afterward, a young man with a charming smile at the corner of his lips flashed to her side, catching her falling body.

"It's actually him..." Looking at the man who had suddenly appeared before her, Yura realized for the first time that his profile was so strikingly handsome.

Amidst this colorful falling rain of cherry blossoms, if he were to gently utter, "Are you alright?"

It would be almost identical to the most romantic trope in Make-Out Paradise.

"I told you not to clear my mobs, and you crashed and burned anyway?"

"Hurry up and find a healer, don't ruin my fun."

Shirak tossed Yura toward Nonocha's feet and slid right back out, stepping on the puppet soldiers once again.

???

With a flush that had yet to fade from her cheeks, a string of question marks chased after Shirak's sliding speed.

"Don't call me a healer!" As soon as Nonocha heard that word, and thought of herself decades into the future, she instantly suffered a mental breakdown.

The battle lasted for a full two hours. Shirak dashed for two full hours, and the feeling of joy finally began to fade somewhat.

Kakuzu and the others had been driven into a corner to avoid being attacked from both the front and the rear. Baki's wrist felt so numb it no longer felt like his own; his blade was nearly rolled at the edge.

This bunch of incredibly tough puppets had no vital points. Unless you smashed their critical components into tiny fragments, a few chakra threads would drop down, and they could just piece themselves together again.

Even so, the entire palace square was littered with the severed limbs of puppets, yet a steady stream of puppets continued to provide reinforcements from every corner. Their equipment might not have matched the first batch—many hadn't even been fitted with rocket launchers—but even just a bayonet posed a massive threat.

"We can't keep going like this. Who knows how many more puppets are coming from behind? We need to find a way to deal with this quickly." Baki truly couldn't hold on any longer; he had never felt so exhausted, not even when facing Konoha.

"Eating a grand feast continuously gets a bit tiresome after a while. It's time to wrap this up." Shirak also retreated, thrusting his wind-slashing blade into the ground and shaking his sore arms.

"Your Majesty the Emperor, are you surrendering? Your humble servant thought you were going to keep hacking away forever." Anrokuzan's sycophantic laughter echoed from the air.

"Surrender? Sorry, I'm not French. That word doesn't exist in my dictionary." Shirak smiled.

"Then your humble servant shall assist Your Majesty in surrendering." Another shell of Anrokuzan descended from the sky, his bulky body looking exceptionally bloated beneath his wide red robes.

Anrokuzan's arrival caused the scrap metal across the entire plaza to tremble slightly. Countless oddly shaped iron pieces seemed summoned, assembling around Anrokuzan into a centipede with a hundred feet. Its entire body bristled with blades, resembling an Asura weapon of war.

If one were to be entangled and churned by it, the fate would likely be far more gruesome than falling into a meat grinder.

"Your Majesty the Emperor, does your humble servant's puppet centipede meet with your approval? Hahahahaha." Anrokuzan laughed triumphantly.

"Hahaha... you call this thing a dragon? A centipede is a centipede, a crawler is a crawler. Just because it has two feelers on its head doesn't make it a dragon." Shirak clutched his stomach and burst into laughter.