Sasuke was about to muster a counterattack against the entire group of dragons, to clear them all away in one fell swoop with either Susano’o or Chidori. But when Meno stepped in front of him to try and protect him, he changed his mind.
“Meno,” he said. “I’ll draw off the little ones. You take down the big one.”
In response, Meno raised his tail, full of self-satisfaction.
Sasuke wrapped his arms around the lizard, gave it a sign with his eyes, and then tossed it toward the titan. While he was at it, he hit the pteras soaring past Meno in the sky with a Lightning Style strike.
The pteras were knocked out and plummeted to the earth one after the other, and while one managed to evade the lightning strike, it ultimately collided head-on with an ornith, its eyes still blinded from the lightning. Its sharp beak stabbed deep into the ornith, and the angry bird-dragon kicked out blindly with both legs, striking with little regard to who was friend and who was foe.
Meanwhile, Meno had sunk his teeth into the tip of the titan’s tail. Using his tail like a tightrope walker’s pole, he closed in on Zansul.
“Don’t let Meno near me!” Zansul cried out, but the top of its back was a blind spot for the titan. Neither its head nor its tail could even reach the spot where Zansul stood. “Ptera! Come and save me!”
One of the pteras wheeling in the sky heard this order and hurried to Zansul. It grabbed onto his collar with its beak just as Meno was about to attack and whisked Zansul up into the sky, leaving Meno’s claws to slash at the air and rip into the titan’s back.
The titan howled and twisted around to try and throw Meno off.
Meno didn’t bother to resist. He dropped to the ground and ran in the direction that Sasuke had signaled with his eyes earlier. The titan chased after him with a stride ten times as long as Meno’s.
Panting, Zansul pushed up his glasses. “To think that mere Meno could give me such trouble.”
He was of course alarmed and angry that the creature Meno he thought was under his control had turned on him, no doubt at the suggestion of his new master. Number 487—Sasuke was chipping away at his precious battle power.
Zansul clucked his tongue and shouted thunderously at a nearby ptera. “You! What are you flying around for?! I told you to kill Sasuke.”
That said, the area around the ninja was a free for all. Sasuke himself hadn’t taken so much as a scratch, however. He nimbly dodged attacks as he lured dragons to strike each other.
Even though the dragons knew their frenzy only played to Sasuke’s advantage, they couldn’t disobey Zansul’s orders, and so the pteras swooped down toward Sasuke. But before they could get close to him, they were hit with lightning strikes and dropped to the ground.
“Shouldn’t push these dragons around too much, you know,” Sasuke challenged Zansul as he caught the falling pteras with Wind Style. “You’re not the one using the reanimation jutsu—Jiji is.”
“Nonsense!” A blue vein popped up on Zansul’s forehead.
On Sasuke’s instructions, Meno lured the titan away. Adroitly crossing from one rocky spot to the next, he descended on a diagonal. The titan was not the maneuverable type. Crushing the rocks that were its footholds, it lumbered after the smaller lizard.
Using a tyranno head as a launch pad to leap into the air, Sasuke checked that Meno had reached the edge of the lake and then cried out, “Cut its tendons!”
In response to this call from Sasuke, Meno changed direction. He slid under the belly of the titan and raced to the base of its tail to sink his fangs into its log-like leg. Without giving the monster the chance to even cry out in agony, Meno ripped out the flesh of the ankle together with the bone.
Helplessly, the titan bent heavily at the knee. Losing its balance, it fell over and plunged into the lake headfirst.
An incredible spray of water splashed up to the clouds.
“Useless waste of flesh,” Zansul cursed. “Get out of that lake already!”
Blessed with buoyancy, the titan was quickly able to right itself. But the bottom of the lake was like a bog, and unable to support the weight of the titan, it quickly swallowed up its legs. Without a foothold, the titan couldn’t crawl out, and so it was stuck there, unable to move, its head poking out above the surface of the water.
“Dammit! The huge body backfired,” Zansul spat venomously and issued an order to the ptera carrying him. “Go down to the ground and pull that thing out of the lake!”
He didn’t realize that he had given a fatal order.
The dragons could not take multiple orders from anyone who was not their summoner. And Zansul’s command just now had overwritten his other orders—the dragon was now to go to the ground and rescue the titan. As a result, the ptera opened its beak and dropped its heavy burden to the ground to make itself lighter before gliding off toward the titan.
“Aaaaaah!”
Zansul slammed into the rocks in a burst of bright red like rose balsam. He bounced a few times, kept rolling, until he finally stopped, frozen and twisted.
Sasuke clucked his tongue and climbed down to check on the sand-covered Zansul, but there was no longer anything left of his original shape.
His abrupt end was due to his ignorance of reanimation jutsu.
The ptera in the sky above squawked once and circled around to the observatory. With Zansul’s death, his orders were cancelled. The dragons scattered and began to target the prisoners once again.
“Meno, we have to hurry to the observatory.”
Then, as if it had been watching for the moment when the dragons left, a hawk descended from the sky above. It was the bird they used to communicate with Kakashi. A letter was wrapped around its leg.
“A message at a time like this …”
Sasuke hurried to open it. A familiar hand wrote that the Kakashi-backed coup d’état had been a success, the prime minister had been captured, and he would be heading back to the capital with Queen Marina. Kakashi was apparently feeling a bit loose after this neat resolution; he even included a casual note about Nanara and the maid travelling with him.
So things were resolved in Nagare.
Sasuke stuffed the letter into his pocket and hurried toward the observatory.