What he did know was that if these drones all exploded together, it wouldn’t just be the empty house that went up in flames. He needed to get them away from the crowded city, but in his current chakra-less state, where could he go?
Twenty-eight propellers played their whirring song, interrupting Naruto’s thoughts. He divided his attention among the machines lined up neatly before them, and then he heard a new sound cut through the air—an engine roaring to life.
“Please get on! You drive!” Chihare shouted, straddling the seat of a bike and pulling on the engine lever.
Taking advantage of the moment Naruto was distracted, the seven drones began to move as one. Naruto dodged the machines dive-bombing his face, grabbing a plastic bucket from where it lay on the road and throwing it over the closest drone. And for good measure, he kicked the lid of the bucket up at the remaining drones. This counterattack slowed the machines briefly, but they were soon back in formation.
Thoom! Thoom!
The imprisoned drone pulverized its plastic bucket cage in no time with its propellers and flew out to freedom.
“Gah! Come on!”
Naruto threw the remaining buckets at them with an air of desperation, and then turned his back boldly to run full speed toward the bike. He leaped onto it, grabbed the handlebars, and straddled the seat.
“Grab the lever, and press down on the right foot pedal!” Chihare said.
“Which one’s the lever?!” he yelled.
“This one!” She reached out from behind and slapped the lever below the right handgrip.
Vrrrm!
The engine roared, the bike leaped up, and in the recoil, Naruto’s foot slammed down onto the pedal. He felt a sudden force pushing on the rear of the machine.
“Wha?!” he yelped, and the bike shot forward like a rocket.
The scenery streamed past, and the wind pushed against his face, making it hard to keep his eyes open. When he took a hand off the grips to lower his goggles, the bike swerved dramatically, and the righthand mirror hit the concrete block wall on one side of the road and catapulted up into the air.
“Whoa!”
“Could you please keep your balance here?” Chihare complained, but she herself knew only too well that it was an absurd request. He was already driving impossibly well given that this was his first time even being on the unwieldy machine.
His reflexes were good, and now that he’d experienced losing his balance once, Naruto took one hand off the grip again, but this time, the bike kept moving in a straight line. He lowered his goggles, pulled the lever, and put his hand back on the grip. He checked out the view behind them with his Byakugan. There were no drones around.
“Hey, Chihare!” he shouted. “How do you stop this thing?”
“You can’t stop it,” she replied curtly.
“What?!”
“I told you it’s a prototype, didn’t I?! Incidentally, you also can’t adjust the speed!”
The ends of the grips brushed up against the hedges in front of houses. The road was fairly narrow, and it just barely accommodated the bike.
The machine would stop once it ran out of fuel. But Naruto didn’t want to think about what would happen first—the gas tank emptying out, or the bike crashing through one of the houses on either side of the road.
Well, the road was narrow, but he could probably make it as long as he kept driving straight like this. Wait. Where were they, anyway?
He glanced around and caught sight of blackish blobs flying at the edge of his field of vision through the goggles. “They came after us!”
The seven drones were closing in on them impossibly fast.
A muzzle shaped like a straw stretched out from the spherical body of the drone in the lead.
Hm?
Naruto turned his attention to it and saw the tip flash red.
The photon gun confiscated from Aze Yanaru emits an excimer laser, and the structure is such that the muzzle of the gun flashes red before it fires …
This line from the report on the assassination attempt in the Land of Kizahashi popped up in his mind.
Yikes!
Vvvn!
A bright red beam of light shot out with a low hum, the sound of photons knocking molecules aside.
Naruto didn’t know anything about how to operate this bike, but he reflexively tilted the vehicle body. Their path forward shifted to one side, and the laser beam passed just above his ear and shot into the hedge of a nearby house.
Bompf!
The reed screen in front of the hedges swelled up and exploded at the sudden and dramatic increase in temperature.
“Impossible …” They would die if they took a hit from that. Chihare grabbed tightly onto Naruto’s shoulders. “Please get us out of here! This road is too narrow! Go out onto the main street!”
“Can’t. Too many people on that road. We have to get out of the village—” Before he could finish his sentence, a laser beam shot out from the left this time. It hit the block wall squarely, and a cat startled by the explosion shot out across the road.
“Cat!” Chihare cried.
“I know!” Naruto shouted.
The block wall crumbled, the rubble piling up and spilling out into the middle of the street. When the front wheel of the bike hit the block wall, Naruto threw his arms out and shifted his center of gravity backward.
The front tire floated up. The bike rose up into the air, like it had hit a spring, and easily flew over the cat’s head before hitting the ground again with a thud.
“Aaah!”
The bike stopped for a moment, pitching forward, before restarting its relentless charge forward.
Chihare bit her tongue she screamed so hard, and now she shouted into Naruto’s ear with tears in her eyes. “Lord Seventh! If we’re trying to leave the village, the A-un gate is the other way!”
“Can’t.” Naruto shook his head. “To go out the gate, we have to go down the main road. Too much of a risk of damage to the village.”
“Well then how are we going to get out?”
A way to get outside without going through the gate—train or airship.
“I got it,” he said in a low voice and clenched the grips.
The train station was on the other side of the main street, a long stucco building with three large doors. The doors had been a gift from the Kazekage to celebrate the opening of the railway, and tourists flocked to them to admire the beauty of their construction, with mother-of-pearl inlay craftsmanship and detailed gold lacquer decoration.