The remaining four ninja finally noticed the figure sitting on the nose of the monstrous head—it was the very bounty target shown in the drawing.
"Y-you're Chishun Setsuna?"
Setsuna nodded. "That's me. Any last words?"
The leader of the bounty hunters felt his vision darken. In that instant, he cursed the task-poster's ancestors back eighteen generations. How were they supposed to defeat a monster this absurd?
"Run!" The leader, showing some professional courtesy, warned his teammates before attempting to form hand signs to sink into the sand.
But he underestimated the Titan's brutality. The Titan opened its massive mouth and swallowed the entire section of the sand dune whole.
Setsuna tapped the Titan's head. The creature snorted, spitting out all the examinees it had "accidentally swallowed."
"I'm alive?" Mizuki touched his body in disbelief, feeling a sense of spiritual redemption.
In the face of imminent death, the true horror of it wiped away all his petty desires.
"Setsuna Bro, is this your Summoning Jutsu?" Gai, breaking free of his fear, asked in astonishment.
"That's right. His name is Titan," Setsuna felt a little boastful now. With the Chief Slime as his ultimate fallback, he didn't mind revealing some of his unique abilities.
Though his current body couldn't handle much of the Chief Slime's power, if he were pushed to the limit—willing to let his body disintegrate to summon the Chief Slime, even for $0.01$ seconds—he could take a member of the Ōtsutsuki clan down with him.
"That's incredible! It's the most powerful Summoning I've ever seen!" Gai waved his arms excitedly, then suddenly thought of his own Ninja Tortoise and quietly wept.
Compared to Setsuna's imposing giant snake, his Ninja Tortoise seemed only useful for letting him temporarily jump off something in mid-air.
"That's his Summoning? Then what's the point of competing?" The Genin from the other four villages looked blankly. Why even take the exam? Just declare him the winner already.
With their attack power, they could stab at that giant snake with a kunai for half a day and probably still not pierce its scales.
A Hidden Stone ninja, choosing discretion over valor, immediately took out his scroll and offered it up. "This is our team's Scroll of Heaven. Please take it."
Shizune said, "Our team also has a Scroll of Heaven."
"You can take ours, too, and give it to another Leaf Village team. I don't want to compete anymore. I just want to stick close to you and safely get out of this desert," the Hidden Stone ninja, Iwate, pleaded.
His words jolted everyone awake, and they all quickly took out their own scrolls.
"We quit, too! We just want to follow you guys!"
"I'm going to retire when I get back. Being a normal person sounds great."
Clearly, the events of this first day had caused a mass psychological breakdown.
Setsuna couldn't help but pity them. Experiencing this kind of shock during the Genin phase was certainly traumatizing.
"Since you all put it that way, you can follow behind us."
---
In a sunken sand pit, three Hidden Sand examinees were surrounded by eleven figures in black cloaks.
Behind a nearby sand dune, Baki and his two subordinates were secretly watching.
"Baki, sir, who are those guys in black? I've never seen them before," one subordinate asked.
"I don't know. It looks like outsiders have infiltrated the Chunin Exams," Baki frowned, assessing the strength of the black-cloaked group.
"Those three are from the Hidden Sand. Should we try to save them?" the other subordinate asked.
At that moment, the leader of the black-cloaked figures praised the Sand team. "You're completely surrounded, yet I don't see a hint of panic on your face. You must be the Hidden Sand's prodigy."
"Too bad, even a prodigy will die here," another black-cloaked figure sneered cruelly. "We have eight Chunin and three Jōnin here. Are you scared?"
"What?" Baki's subordinate yelped, immediately clapping a hand over his mouth in alarm.
But his sound was noticed. The leader of the black-cloaked group said coldly, "Looks like we have little mice eavesdropping. Three, Four, you two go..."
At this moment, one of the surrounded Sand ninja finally spoke. "Do you know what Art is?"
The group of black-cloaked figures froze, then burst into laughter.
"Art? You're talking about art here?" The leader laughed heartily. "Murder is the only art!"
"It seems you don't know," Sasori raised his head, his fingertips dancing like a pianist. "Don't worry, though. You'll soon become art."
In the next moment, his two companions launched into the air, their arms extended like the scythes of the Grim Reaper, instantly decapitating two people.
"Puppets! His two teammates are puppets!" The black-cloaked leader was in disbelief. A Jōnin was instantly killed before he could even react.
"Don't panic! We have the numbers advantage!"
Sasori calmly pulled out a scroll, gently brushing his right hand over it, instantly summoning ten puppets.
Black-Cloaked Leader: "???"
---
"Fire Style: Ash Pile Burning!"
"Fire Style: Great Fireball Jutsu!"
Asuma and Obito coordinated their jutsu, and their teammates fought fiercely, but their hearts sank as they saw the black-cloaked figures watching the show from the sidelines.
Only three of the enemies were fighting, yet they were suppressing the Konoha team to the point of breathlessness. And there were five more of these enemies watching.
"If you struggle this much with a few kids, you should change careers."
"Stop with the trash talk. These Konoha kids aren't weak."
"Don't waste any more time. Capture the boy who claims to be the Hokage's son alive, and kill everyone else," the leader commanded.
"Understood!"
Just as they were about to attack all at once, a massive, reddish-brown hunting dog with three heads suddenly ambushed them.
"What kind of monster is that?" A black-cloaked ninja instinctively threw a kunai.
The Hell Hound, struck by the kunai, instantly split into two. One tore the attacking ninja in half, while the other pounced on the rest of the group.
The remaining black-cloaked figures' expressions changed drastically. They quickly formed hand signs and unleashed their jutsu.
The Hell Hound was engulfed by Fire and Earth Style techniques, but in the next second, over a dozen Hell Hounds burst out of the flames!
"Are these monsters unkillable? They just multiply the more we kill them!"
"What kind of creatures are we even fighting?"
The black-cloaked figures screamed, scattering and fleeing. They didn't even know where the real enemy was.
---
"They're all dead." In the Demon's Desert, Kakuzu looked bewildered.
He had left his Jiongu black tentacles on a few of the bounty hunters to track his targets more easily.
But in less than half a day, every bounty hunter who entered the Demon's Desert, except for himself, was dead.
"Did the Hidden Sand realize what was happening and send out a rescue squad immediately?"
Kakuzu considered this carefully, but quickly ruled it out. "Impossible. Even if the Sand's reaction time was lightning-fast, their reinforcement team would still be en route."
"It seems something terrifying is happening in this demonic desert," Kakuzu stared at the sea of darkness under the night sky. Even with his hardened disposition, a strange dread of the unknown began to grow in his heart.