The strangest thing was that this wasn't the only pile of ashes I came across — a burned-down inn at a crossroads, a tiny village of barely twenty houses had also fallen victim to the Katon's forces, and again, there were no signs of a ninja battle.
It felt like the inhabitants had simply been executed, the population wiped out, which was definitely not something the swamp dwellers would have done — they would have tracked down and destroyed the advance units on their territory, discovered the concentration of enemy forces, attacked, beaten them to a pulp, and rushed back to their own territory, preparing for a protracted war.
They weren't interested in the villages. Besides, I felt uneasy at each of these ruins, my senses detecting something unusual, something that had almost disappeared. I couldn't figure out what it was, so I just put it out of my mind until I could find fresher traces of the butchers.
Combing through the deserted road, I finally found traces of a battle, or rather, it led to a huge field in the middle of the forest, practically plowed over by machinery, impossible to miss.
Searching through it, I found charred pieces of what might once have been a merchant's wagon, several charred human bones, and disfigured body parts. The forest around it was burned, washed away, and plowed, indicating the use of at least three elements, and at the very edge, a real clearing had been made from fallen and chopped trunks.
After examining the traces, I came to the conclusion that these were the consequences of the use of the Akamichi Nikudan Hari Senja (Sharp Shell of Flesh) taijutsu technique, which I had seen used more than once before. So, this was where the team had been attacked and engaged in battle.
Forming a seal, I created two dozen clones and sent them out to search, to turn over every stone — it was necessary to find the bodies of all the fallen, both ours and the enemy's, if the attackers hadn't taken them. After all, I had to know who to avenge and whether any of the trio had managed to retreat with the client.
Half an hour later, memories from one clone, then another, and then another, made me wince — they had dug up body parts dressed in standard Konoha jonin uniforms, and one even had a twisted hitai-te.
Naturally, they could only be identified by these features, as enough time had passed for nature and the weather to leave only scraps of flesh, and even the color of their hair was unrecognizable, as the bodies were charred.
Only the slightly larger size of the bones indicated that they belonged to Akamichi. But I found more than just them — one of the attackers was buried under fallen trees, but the condition of the corpse was much worse than that of our dead, even though there were no traces of wild animals or birds.
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