Capítulo 154: Cleaning the Shadows

When I heard the name, my seventeenth kick to Yahiko's groin came to a halt, and he seized the opportunity to successfully repel me for the first time since I began striking his puppets left and right.

From my observations, it seems that he doesn't feed off the pain his puppets feel, but I simply can't help myself.

Ninjas die constantly in combat, and Shikamaru simply encountered someone who outmatched him by a narrow margin. His father should have known this could happen since he started training him to become a paid assassin in a world where it's considered normal for children to go out and kill some bandits just a few weeks after graduation.

Did he really have the guts to try to do something to my kids to vent his frustration?

Perhaps the Yamanaka clan lost its patriarch due to an imprudent decision, and its heiress due to that same event... but the Nara clan is facing imminent early extinction!

Because if I have to choose between my children and others' children, it won't even be a choice.

You forced my hand, Shikaku. Those deaths... won't weigh on my conscience.

Grabbing the Pains by the collars of their tunics, I threw them with considerable force in the direction of Nagato's hideout. After passing through several walls (and bringing down a building or two along the way), they ended up embedded in the ground and walls around the real Nagato.

While they were on their way, I took the Den Den Mushi and informed Anko.

—Send a warning to Hinata through the scorpions immediately; Pain's plan to attack Konoha will proceed, whether that idiot wants it or not —I paused briefly to calculate— She has two minutes before our arrival.

Another drawback of not having chakra is that I can receive information with the scorpions, but I can't send it unless I respond to the scorpion that brings me the information before it disappears in a mini cloud of smoke.

—Understood!

I hung up and traveled to Nagato in my elemental form, observing how he has been consuming himself in life just to endure and use Madara's eyes. He truly looks wretched, an ideal reflection of what his life has been so far, I suppose.

—You wanted to attack Konoha, didn't you? —I put my hand in my pants and pulled out, as only a cartoon could, a one-meter-tall black octagonal cage containing strange butterflies fluttering inside— Well, I think it's time for you to act.

Nagato looked surprised when he saw that I knew his plan, or maybe that I knew there was a controller behind the scenes, but I won't give him time to react.

There's a reason I merged his puppets with him!

The moment he sees that I'm a few meters away, he squints his eyes and tries to attack me with all the Pains at once in a circular assault.

He even tried to throw some chakra-infused metal rods at me as projectiles.

My response? Open the small door of the butterfly cage.

Third Person POV

The moment Enel opened the cage, several purple butterflies flew out of the device at impossible speeds and landed on the shoulders of everyone present. Without giving them time to react, a torii gate materialized near them, and they disappeared from the place completely as they were absorbed by the portal.

Nagato felt a moment of weightlessness as the surroundings turned dark before the landscape changed.

—This is... Konoha? —he thought, surprised to see the village that houses the Nine-Tails Jinchuriki from a bird's-eye view.

His thoughts resumed their course when he realized that despite his puppets falling from a great height onto the village, he was somehow suspended in the air.

—No! —Nagato's expression changed as he realized that he wasn't defying the laws of gravity, but someone was holding his "throne" from below like lifting a ball.

—Let's see... the Nara clan's territory was over there, right? —he heard the Seimeikage murmuring quietly.

What was he trying to do?

Wait, did he use some kind of space-time ninjutsu to transport them to Konoha?!

Wasn't he just an expert in lightning release?

Before he could try to think of a way to descend, the man below him seemed to have found what he was looking for because the next thing Nagato knew, he was thrown forcefully in a specific direction and hurtling toward what his Rinnegan could identify as a clan complex in Konoha like a meteor.

—No time! —a little panic was setting in because with his body in its current state, a blow like that would surely kill him.

He thought about using the Animal Path to use reverse summoning, but doing so would only start a new fall since his puppets were still too high compared to him.

With no other option, the moment he was a dozen meters from impact, he resorted to the only technique he could think of without holding back.

—Shinra Tensei!

The repulsion force needed to compensate for his kinetic energy was not small, and he barely managed to stabilize for a moment. He summoned the Pains to position themselves beneath him and cushioned the fall.

Two of them ended up crushed, but he summoned the head of the King of Hell to repair them as he pondered what to do next.

The earth around him was completely empty, and what was once the territory of a clan was now just an empty basin.

—Konoha will react at any moment, and repairing the Pains so many times has consumed a decent amount of chakra; should I withdraw? —Nagato thought before inwardly shaking his head— No, the Seimeigake won't let me go that easily. Wait, did he say this was the Nara clan's complex?

Nagato remembered the appearance of the place before using his technique, and indeed, the clan symbol on the door seemed to be that of the Nara clan.

—How did he know that the intelligence came from the Nara clan? —Nagato thought, puzzled— No, the question would be how that strange talking snail managed to unearth that information.

But he had more urgent problems to focus on.

—It's not the ideal plan, but I'll have to start diverting attention while my main body hides —not seeing Enel near him, he took control of the Animal Path and began to summon centipedes, rhinoceroses, multi-headed dogs, birds, pandas, and everything else at his disposal to send them to devastate the surroundings, attracting attention, while he made the chameleon open its mouth and swallow his main body before disappearing.

—He shouldn't be able to find me this way —Nagato thought with some presumption— Let's see if, now that I'm here, I can take the jinchuriki; I just need to drug him and leave him in a cell until it's his turn when I recover the Gedo Mazo.

At the end of the day, he was God, and destiny seemed to be in his favor even in moments of danger.

Meanwhile, in the Hokage's office, just a minute ago...

Shikaku stood frozen, looking in the direction of the explosion, easily recognizing that it should have happened near the territory of his clan. A bad feeling settled in his stomach.

—...Yoshino?