Maple Leaf Village (4)
As everyone knows, most reptiles are water-attribute.
Which means they're weak to fire.
No need to go house-to-house stabbing them one by one. Using the elemental hierarchy to take out a few first was the smart play.
A runaway ninja always fights strategically.
Still in Floating Shadow, I circled the village once and found a warehouse packed with oil drums. No idea what kind of oil it was, but it sure as hell wasn't sesame.
I hoisted the drums, dumped them across the ground, and carefully coated every house near the fence—everything except the entrance.
Oil the Village
Being the sticks, the only fire-starting tools in sight were flints. Yokai could never grasp the civilization humans had built with pure intellect. They just borrowed scraps of knowledge from yakuza and samurai.
Snap! Whoosh—!
The fire caught instantly. Pretty decent rock, maybe?
Once I confirmed the flames had taken, I bolted for the relatively safe center of the village. Time to stay hidden and watch the show.
"What's going on? Why's it so bright?"
"Which bastard's messing around in the middle of the night... huh? Fire! Fire!"
One or two at a time they came pouring out, dumping water on the blaze. An oil fire wasn't going to die from that. It only burned hotter.
Whoosh whoosh whoosh!
"Ack!"
"Ugh!"
A few who'd gotten too close had their clothes catch. They sprinted around in a panic trying to smother the flames, and their bodies began to change. Clothes tore away. Dense scales erupted across their skin. Then, like some hard, oversized turd, a tail burst from each of their asses.
A sight I wouldn't pay money to see.
"Grrrrr—!"
"Sekseksekseksek—!"
The reptile yokai finally showed their true colors. Now they were scrambling around on all fours, looking desperate. Their forms were dead ringers for the Reptilians that once ruled Earth's underworld.
Did they flee to another world to escape ninjas? Whatever. There is no world for yokai.
Before the fire spread any farther, I had to extract that Diana—or Dino, whatever her name was—first. The fully transformed ones were impossible to tell apart, so I left them and scanned the ones still wearing human skins.
"Sister... where are you...?"
Found her.
A little girl who looked like a two-thirds-scale Lamina figure stood alone, clutching a filthy rabbit doll. Lucky break—she'd wandered off looking for her sister and gotten separated from the rest of the village.
"Your yokai sister sent me."
"Eek!"
I clamped a hand over the startled Diana's mouth.
"I'll send you to her soon. Just relax your body."
The fence was already burning, but if I threw her at full power she'd arrive without a single burn. First I yanked the annoying rabbit doll out of her arms and tossed it into the flames.
"Ahh! That was from my dead mom and dad—!"
"Quiet!"
I knocked her out with a solid knuckle-rap. For the record, I'm a VIP customer at every no-kids-zone café on the planet. Nothing pisses me off more than brats whining.
"Hiyah!"
With Diana finally quiet, I hurled her full-force toward the outside. She was a yokai, so even a hard landing shouldn't leave her seriously hurt. If it did, oh well. I did my best. Satisfaction achieved.
Rescue complete.
"Oh my!!"
"Waaaaaah!"
I shifted positions and checked the rest of the village. A solid number of yokai were already on fire. Chaos had hit its peak. With the blaze spreading, surveying the whole place was getting impossible. Time to move.
"You idiots! It's oil! Oil! Why the hell are you pouring water?!"
"Fuck off, I just woke up! How am I supposed to think of that?! You put it out!"
"L-let's just get out of here first."
The ones still in human form bickered as they fled toward the village entrance—the one spot I hadn't oiled—trying to stay alive. Straight toward the place where I was waiting in Floating Shadow.
Slash-slash-slash-slash!
"Ugh...!"
"Oof...!"
Short screams as necks parted. The blade went in easy; untransformed, their durability was no better than a regular human's. Waiting around was a waste. Better to move and start killing fast.
I charged out and cut down the stragglers first.
"Gurgle...."
Murder was a sport to me now.
"Get your heads on straight! This isn't some ordinary fire! It's a planned attack!"
Finally the yokai started clustering. Took them long enough—Lamina's talk about degeneration must have been true. The ones who'd already gone full dino were shielding the ones still mid-transformation while hunting for me.
Numbers left... roughly thirty? A few had slipped out the entrance, but they were on fire and the adventurer party would be waiting. No concern. If those guys couldn't handle one or two of these rejects, they should quit adventuring and take up home security.
"Nin-nin."
I dropped Floating Shadow and revealed myself right in front of the packed yokai.
"W-who the hell are you?!"
"Idiot! It's obviously that bastard! Kill him!"
Kiyaaaah!
Fully transformed into bald reptiles, they roared and charged on all fours. Time to debut the new technique.
I'd learned something during the Instructor Massacre: the only person I can trust in this world is myself. The other candidates hadn't been the slightest help. They were all just like Orphe, deluding themselves that they'd contributed to the win. In reality it had been a solo clear. So in most situations I had to assume the enemies were many and I was alone.
The problem was that no matter how efficiently I killed, if more than ten of them scattered and ran, catching them all got hard. Make it a mission where I also had to rescue civilians while fighting, and it got even worse. Two hands and two legs simply couldn't massacre enemies and protect hostages at the same time. If the enemy just ignored me and dogpiled the things I was supposed to protect, I couldn't stop them. Anyone who could perfectly handle both attack and defense alone wouldn't be called a runaway ninja—they'd be called Buddha.
Anyway, my solution was this:
"Now everything becomes ninja."
I just needed to stop being a "solo unit" and pull their attention. Floating Shadow wasn't an excellent camouflage technique just because it gave you chameleon-like protective coloring. It left faint afterimages in your wake while still projecting an unshakable naturalness. This new move was an application of that.
I circled them once at transcendent speed.
Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh-whoosh!
"He's doing something weird!"
The yokai scrambled up onto two legs, trying to keep their balance. I poured mana into the residual afterimages left by Floating Shadow and gave them solid form. Higher-resolution Shin Nobins materialized all around the pack.
"Huh? He multiplied?"
"Shit!"
The panicking yokai froze. This was my new technique—something the third-rate tails with their pathetic mana pools could never have imagined.
"—VR Ninja... yeah, that name's pure garbage."
Suddenly it sounded ridiculously lame.
Ninja Encirclement
That settled it. Ten clones—afterimages—surrounding them looked downright artistic. The catch was that I had to keep my legs moving in Floating Shadow the entire time or the clones would vanish. Fucking exhausting.
"Wazabyot—!!!"
I bellowed the battle cry so I wouldn't look weak, then charged alongside the Ninja Encirclement. To them it would look like dozens of humans rushing in. Of course, the only one who could actually land a physical hit was me.
An aerial front flip closed the distance in a blink and I dove into their midst. They still couldn't tell which one was real and flailed in confusion.
Slash-slash-slash-slash-slash!
I already knew their regeneration was solid—one of them kept moving even after I severed a burning arm. But they weren't tough enough to keep going after a beheading. So every last one got the decapitation treatment.
"W-what is this?!"
"Got him! Wait, no!"
"Where are you looking? That's an afterimage!"
Being yokai, their animal instincts were sharp. Quite a few of them were frantically darting those huge vertical pupils, trying to track my real movements.
Slash!
Not a chance. Glowering with your eyes and actually moving your body to block are two completely different things.
Slow
No matter how hard some otaku lifts his chin and glares in righteous resistance against unfair violence, one slap from the school bully still drops his head. Eye contact can't beat physical destructive power. Of course every school bully on Earth needs to disappear. Me? I'm only the designated bully for yakuza, samurai, and yokai.
A politically correct ninja.
"Keeeek—!"
The last yokai, distracted by the newest afterimage, lost his head too. A perfect victory for the runaway ninja who had used everything the battle required.
"Indeed."
A sudden male voice made me spin around. A black-scaled dinosaur-man stood upright on two legs. If Baby Dino Dooly ever got ridiculously overpowered, he'd probably look like this.
"Not a knight, not an assassin, not a mage. I've never seen anything like this."
His voice rolled out like a top predator broadcasting infrasound. Completely different class from the lizards I'd been fighting—this one was definitely mountain-lord tier. Where the hell had he been hiding? He'd never moved once, so I'd completely forgotten about him. The fire had chaos everywhere, and the mana drain from Ninja Encirclement had been higher than expected, so my focus had dipped a little.
Anyway, kill this guy and it was truly over.
"Now I can see your movements."
The last dinosaur stretched with theatrical swagger. He'd just stood there watching his comrades die while reading my every move. Not a shred of camaraderie—pure selfishness. Peak yokai behavior.
Crack-crack-crack!
Oh, for fuck's sake?!
His body suddenly ballooned to one-and-a-half times its size. Hard, armor-like plating grew over the existing scales. A two-meter-plus armored giant of a dinosaur pointed at me with his right hand. The nails had grown so long and sharp they'd need industrial clippers, curving like hooks.
"My name is Delamion. Three hundred years ago the kingdom called me the Butcher of Solitron. Warrior—what is your name?"
The ultimate corrupt yokai, Delamion. The only reason this denture-dino had managed to cling to life this long was because this world had no ninjas. Still, he'd observed proper etiquette first, so I had to answer in kind. Manners matter.
"Designated bully of yakuza, samurai, and yokai. Runaway Ninja Shin Nobin."
Delamion's vertical pupils gleamed.
"I swear upon my years—I will swallow you alive."
He bared his fangs and tied the headband he'd been holding in his left hand around his forehead. In that instant, a memory from Earth surfaced.