Chapter 49
Chapter 49
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Translator: Ace
Chapter: 49
Chapter Title: A Conversation with "Aunt Snake"
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A dizzying whirl of heaven and earth, and the ninja captain, borrowing the power of the Sharingan, "invaded" Menma's mental space.
"Hmph! This is the Sharingan bestowed by Lord Orochimaru himself! I'll give you a proper taste of its power!"
The ninja captain grinned ferociously, already envisioning in his mind the scene of brutally slaughtering this arrogant brat.
Suddenly!
A thick stench of blood mingled with the pungent smell of gunpowder smoke hit him head-on, surging straight into his brain and choking him into staggering backward.
When he opened his eyes, he discovered he was standing in the center of a horrific battlefield!
It was a massive crater dozens of kilometers in diameter, strewn with all manner of severed limbs and broken arms alongside ninja corpses. Headbands from various villages gleamed coldly amid pools of blood.
The corpses numbered over ten thousand!
This hellscape of corpse mountains and blood seas shocked the ninja captain so badly that the hair on his body stood on end, his entire frame trembling uncontrollably!
He jerked his head up and saw, at the heart of the crater, beneath a blood-red crimson moon, a dark red fox coiled atop a mountain built from countless piled-up ninja corpses.
Nine tails swayed lazily in the moonlight.
The coiled fox resembled a throne, the heaped corpses forming steps leading up to it.
Atop the throne, a spiky-haired boy slowly lifted his gaze, his Three-Tomoe Sharingan swirling with cold indifference that scorned all living beings.
"Scram."
A single softly uttered word exploded like thunder in the ninja captain's mind.
Pfft—
In the real world, that rebuke blasted the ninja captain until blood poured from all seven orifices, his chest convulsing violently as if his lungs were about to burst.
He struggled to raise his head, only to see that his two subordinates were already dead, while the masked mysterious man stood before him, looking down coldly.
"Orochimaru's little gift—I'll take it."
Before the words even finished, two fingers plunged into the ninja captain's right eye, gouging out that two-tomoe Sharingan eye whole and alive.
"Aaaah—"
The scream didn't last long.
Menma examined the bloody eyeball in his hand as a red-haired little girl wearing a black hat tremblingly stepped out from the shadows.
"S-Sir... Lord Orochimaru requests your presence."
The girl looked only four or five years old, cradling a glass container in which pale green liquid swayed gently.
"Orochimaru's quite considerate, isn't he?"
Menma took the glass container and placed the Sharingan eye inside.
"Lead the way."
He then turned to the little girl before him.
Judging by her hair color and age, if he wasn't mistaken, she was Tayuya—one of the future Sound Four.
But right now, she was just a little girl who hadn't even begun refining chakra.
"Yes, sir."
Tayuya bowed respectfully, then walked ahead to guide Menma.
Orochimaru's base entrance lay inside a stone house at the exact center of the village. This place looked like it would become the Hidden Sound Village someday.
For now, though, it was merely one of Orochimaru's outposts. He'd formally establish the Hidden Sound Village after defecting from Akatsuki.
The two proceeded one after the other down the passage within the stone house, soon arriving at a second-floor corridor overlooking a vast underground plaza space.
In the plaza's center, several test subjects were locked in gladiatorial combat. Rooms resembling prison cells around the edges held all sorts of other experimental subjects—some already showing severe deformities in their limbs, while others had lost their sanity and kept slamming against the cage bars.
On the second-floor corridor, a long-haired woman stared intently at the test subjects slaughtering one another in the arena below.
Hearing the footsteps behind her, she slowly turned her head. Her pale face looked especially eerie under the dim indoor lighting.