“Aah, come on! Enough already! If you say you don’t want to, I’m not gonna force you to connect with people or whatever, you know.”
“But you and your friends, what you care about is connecting with people, right?” she replied. “I’m just not suited to that kind of thing.”
“Which is why I’m not pressuring you to open up,” he retorted. “Way back when, we had to work together for the sake of everyone in the village, but those days are over now. If you say you don’t want to connect with people, then that’s fine. It’s a peaceful society, you can live like that just fine.”
Chihare fell silent.
When he told her that she was fine the way she was, she felt frustrated. Like her bluff was called and heeded, and her feelings had lost their place to land.
Naruto raced down the steps, his breathing entirely even, and his voice suddenly grew gentler.
“So Hinata, the family she was born into is a pretty famous shinobi family, and the times being what they were, of course she became a shinobi too. But she was never the type for fighting people and taking on those battles. If she had been born now, I feel like she definitely would have picked a different job. And I’m sure a whole bunch of other people really didn’t want to fight, but forced themselves to do it anyway. I always wanted to change it so they had a choice.”
Whenever he talked about his wife, his voice softened.
Chihare sighed as she stared at his broad back. His wife must be amazing. Not all twisted like me.
“So I’m serious, you don’t need to force yourself to connect with people. Do it if you end up feeling like that’s what you want to do.”
Thd!
He leaped down the last twelve stairs from the landing and reached the first floor from the twenty-seventh in the blink of an eye.
“Anyway, why would Furieh get you to develop this device?” he asked. “Wouldn’t demand for Kizahashi gas drop once it’s complete?”
“He probably plans to make the Land of Kizahashi a monopoly. After he uses the ultra particles to eliminate the shinobi of all the nations, the shinobi of his own nation can use their chakra and copy the gas to completely dominate the energy market.”
“. . .”
Furieh’s thinking was the perfect picture of selfishness and, viewed from the position of the Seventh Hokage, utterly unforgiveable.
Naruto didn’t say anything, but his back became a little hotter.
There was an enormous shutter on the front of the hangar for the airships to come and go through. Next to it was a small gate where Orochimaru was waiting for them.
“You done with your hacking?” Naruto asked.
“Of course,” Orochimaru assented calmly, and behind him, the shutter for the gate slowly opened, as if to say, “Welcome, please come in.”
It was pitch black inside the hangar. The slightly metallic scent in the air was no doubt from the Kizahashi gas used as fuel. The twelve airships owned by the Land of Fire were quiet in the darkness, like animals sleeping in their dens.
Furieh was somewhere in one of those twelve ships. If he was in the same place as the pluripotent applicator, then there would be a chakra signal. Naruto was about to put on the goggles and look for it when behind him, he heard a familiar mechanical hum.
“Chihare, get back.”
She didn’t need him to tell her twice. Chihare jumped back and pressed herself against a wall like a gecko.
Their first meeting in a month. The drones with the four propellers.
“You again!” Not sounding particularly surprised, Naruto dropped down into a defensive posture. The fact that the machines were here now meant that it had indeed been Furieh who sent the drones to Chihare’s underground lab. Was his goal to eliminate Naruto?
“Whaaat are they?” Orochimaru said, eyeing them dubiously. “Such sad little things.”
“They probably all have different functions,” Naruto replied. “The ones I know self-destruct and—”
Drones appeared one after the other from the depths of the hangar. It wasn’t a matter of ten or twenty. There were a hundred of them, flocking together like birds as they slowly approached.
“And some of them use laser beams.” Naruto sighed and stepped forward, as if to say they might as well get it over with. He grabbed an arm and pulled the machine in to smash the central spherical body with an uppercut. Inside was precision machinery, after all. Hit it, destroy it.
Three.
The view through the Byakugan caught a digital display blinking immediately behind his head. Two. A bomb drone had started its countdown.
“Not good!” Naruto looked back just as the countdown changed to one and then stopped.
The machine dropped to the floor with clang. One of Orochimaru’s snakes had its fangs in the round body.
The battle had started, slowly but surely.
Drones versus Naruto and Orochimaru. The two shinobi wouldn’t lose in an even fight, but there were so many drones. A hundred machines, and all were equipped with their own individual capabilities, which made it hard to figure out how to handle them. Suicide bombers. Machines that shot laser beams. And—
“Wacha!”
Naruto heard a bizarre sneeze and whirled around to look at the source, stunned.
“Wacha! Wachon! Waaah chooooon!”
Face covered with the sleeve of his kimono, Orochimaru sneezed again and again, his head rocking back and forth like a fan at a heavy metal concert. At least one of the drones was emitting poison gas, and Orochimaru had apparently gotten a blast from it. The sneezing left him wide open, and laser beam muzzles stretched out in his direction.
“Chon! Kacha!”
Even amid his ceaseless sneezing, Orochimaru’s reactions were as quick as ever, and he leaped back to the right. Although he avoided the laser beams with room to spare, a different drone was waiting in the spot where he landed and cut his shoulder with its propellers. It was likely nothing serious, but Orochimaru’s eyes twisted in humiliation.