Shrugging, I ordered the kage bunshin to move on, doubling our vigilance, and after a while we began to encounter Onikuni shinobi patrols with their vile chakra, which made it impossible to let even one person slip through.
Of course, maneuvering between them slowed me down considerably, but so far, I hadn't detected a single sensor among the ninja I encountered, which was a plus, and without fully understanding the situation, I wasn't eager to get involved in local fights. Not yet.
Unfortunately, I hadn't been able to find any traces of the surviving Konoha jonin, and the more time passed, the less chance there was that the search would be successful — there were too many hostile shinobi for even an experienced jonin with a client on his hands to remain undetected. Maybe a month ago it was different here, but that was not a fact.
The dark thoughts that were increasingly visiting my head were distracted by the memory of the last kage bunshin, causing me to wince from the sensations I had received.
At the very edge of his senses, he detected a massive source of vile chakra, much denser and more concentrated than anything he had encountered before from ninja. And this could not be ignored.
Having covered the distance to the edge of the chain of clones, fortunately, the anomaly moved relatively slowly compared to my speed, I slowly made my way through the dense undergrowth growing some distance from the road and, noticing a slight tremor in the ground beneath my feet, looked out into the open space, involuntarily staring at the sight that met my eyes.
Huge stone figures of warriors, four meters tall, were marching steadily along the road, causing the very tremor I had felt, and around them was a veritable halo of nauseating purple chakra, sometimes turning black. Along with the giants, leaving behind crushed soil, there were several people wearing the hitai-te I had already seen.
Obviously, they were drivers or something like that. At least now the tracks and piles of gravel were understandable; they must have been these moving stones before. Another question was how they had been reduced to piles.
Each stone colossus radiated the volume of an experienced jonin from a great village, not at the level of Sakumo or mine, of course, but at least a seventh of that, and considering the size of the group, which was about twenty heads, it was very impressive, and whoever had created such a stone army must have possessed a level of chakra equal to that of a tailed beast, starting from the second or third tail and above.
Shit! Everything is becoming much more complicated than just a clash with local ninja who have found a way to significantly strengthen themselves with the help of some external source of chakra!
Now that there is such a large concentration of this filth nearby, an inhuman will akin to that of the tailed beasts can be clearly felt, meaning that its source is, with 100% certainty, alive and intelligent, as much as is possible for an array of chakra, and is pursuing some kind of goal.
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