"Who are you?"
Kado didn't feel the weight of danger. Not yet. Instead, he was fixated on Izanami's audacity. He pointed a trembling finger and shouted toward the door, "What the hell are you all doing out there?! Letting some outsider just walk in? Useless idiots!"
Izanami touched the lower edge of his mask and let out a sigh. "So it's not the Mist's fault after all," he mused. "It's that the rogue ninja you've hired have been housebroken—tamed. Lost their edge. That explains why a renegade who could once shake the Five Great Nations is here working for pocket change instead of just killing the rich and taking what's theirs."
Zabuza Momochi's brow twitched. He glanced sideways at Kado. Strangely... the masked man had a point.
"W-What are you even talking about?" Kado stammered, now unnerved.
But Izanami's words had struck something in Kado too—something primal. For the first time, he remembered he was no warrior. Just a man with money, surrounded by killers. And now, another killer had entered the room uninvited.
Panic set in.
"Zabuza! Ten million ryo—kill him!"
Izanami tilted his head slightly, smiling behind the blank mask. "Aren't you curious how I got in?"
He raised one hand toward Kado.
"I used… this."
Kado's body abruptly lifted off the ground, weightless, as if gravity itself had forgotten him. He flailed in mid-air, yelling, "Zabuza! Save me!"
Whoosh—
Zabuza shoved Haku aside, gathered his chakra, and spun. The Executioner's Blade hurled through the air like a massive windmill, slicing toward them—not just toward Izanami, but Kado too.
He aimed to cut them both down.
"I don't know who you are, but that's my money tree you're holding," Zabuza growled. "I can't let you kill him."
Izanami didn't flinch. He lifted his other hand.
With a subtle motion, the spinning Executioner's Blade froze mid-air, suspended as if the world itself had paused around it.
Zabuza and Haku's eyes widened. They'd never seen anything like it.
"There was once a man who called himself a god," Izanami said calmly, "because he wielded a power no one could resist."
With one hand still gripping Kado's neck, he slowly spread the fingers of the other, smiling beneath the mask.
"Would you like to feel what a god's power is like?"
Before they could react, he whispered:
"Shinra Tensei."
—BOOM!
The world seemed to invert. Space warped. Light twisted. Zabuza and Haku were swallowed by blinding white, as if reduced to inked silhouettes before being wiped from the page.
A thunderous shockwave erupted across the island. The sky cracked. Dust mushroomed high above the villa, the explosion sending a gust through the coastal trees.
Villagers nearby screamed and scrambled to their windows. But when they saw the smoke rising from Kado's mansion, their fear turned to awe—and even hope.
Some put their hands together and whispered prayers: Please let that bastard be dead.
The mushroom cloud dispersed as quickly as it rose, blown away by a supernatural gust.
Where the villa had once stood, there was now only scorched rubble.
Izanami hovered calmly above the wreckage, still holding the trembling Kado by the collar. The masked man's gaze shifted, the Rinnegan under his mask scanning the ruins. It stopped.
He raised a hand.
The debris shifted, pulled aside by an unseen force, revealing Zabuza and Haku crushed beneath the rubble, bloodied and broken. Bones jutted from limbs. Blood stained the dirt. Yet both still clung to life—barely.
"Shadow Clone Technique."
With a single-hand seal, a clone of Izanami appeared beside him.
"Keep them alive," he instructed. "Don't let them die... not yet."
The clone knelt and began treatment.
Meanwhile, Izanami turned back to Kado, who was frozen with fear, his mouth trembling, his eyes wide and unfocused.
Izanami lightly patted his cheek. "The money. Basement safe, right?"
"Y-Yes! Yes! Yes…" Kado nodded furiously, drooling as he babbled. "It's all there. Take it all! I've got more—banks, vaults, offshore holdings—just please don't kill me!"
By now, he was sobbing openly.
It wasn't surprising.
To ordinary people, ninja were distant, terrifying forces. But to the rich and powerful, they were just tools—paid muscle.
To men like Kado, even rogue ninja were disposable so long as the money kept flowing.
Until one day, the tools turned and asked: Why work for scraps… when we could take everything?
If they died, it would save him a fortune.
None of the ronin or rogue ninja he'd hired had ever shown the slightest interest in his wealth. To Kado—and to others like him among the nobles and elite—it was simply assumed that ninja, even those who had defected from the great villages, still followed some form of professional code. That they were weapons for hire, not thieves.
Even Kakuzu, a rogue shinobi whose greed was legendary, stuck to the black market, hunting bounties and collecting ryo the "honest" way. Not once had he turned his eyes to looting a mansion.
So when someone like Izanami showed up—a madman with overwhelming power, no sense of decorum, and even less regard for "professional ethics"—Kado was completely unprepared.
No wonder he was scared out of his mind.
"You actually have other treasure troves?" Izanami said, raising an eyebrow behind the mask.
A moment later, he jabbed a pressure point in Kado's neck, knocking him out cold.
"Let's see what kind of stash you've been hiding."
He tossed the limp Kado to his own shadow clone and raised both arms. With a pulse of gravitational energy, chunks of rubble began to rise into the air, swirling around him like debris caught in a storm.
The basement staircase soon revealed itself.
Izanami already knew where the vault was—he wouldn't have wasted Amenotejikara so recklessly otherwise. But without any light source inside, he hadn't been able to tell how much was stored within.
That was why he had spared Kado... for now.
Descending into the basement, he came face-to-face with an enormous, two-meter-high metal safe, complete with a reinforced combination lock.
Izanami didn't bother asking for the code.
He placed his hand against the seam of the door.
Boom.
The entire doorframe buckled inward with a metallic groan.
Another pulse of Amenotejikara.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
On the fourth strike, the massive safe door ripped free from its hinges and crashed to the floor.
The contents within were finally revealed.
Stacks upon stacks of ryo. Gold bars. Precious gems. Official bonds. The air itself glittered as light spilled across the treasure, bathing Izanami in a radiant glow.
He stepped back, hands on his hips, basking in the gleam.
If the mask had been removed in that moment, his Rinnegan would have been gone—replaced by two enormous $ symbols.
"Jackpot."
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