Guy did not stop.
The first punch was followed by a second, then a third.
His fists hammered the bottom of the pit like a pile driver, blow after blow. Each punch drove the pit deeper and sent the cracks spreading farther.
His fists were already covered in blood-not the White Zetsu's blood, but his own.
Under the strain of the Eight Gates Formation, his skin had begun to tear. The skin over his knuckles split first, exposing the dark red muscle and white periosteum beneath.
But his fists did not stop. One punch, two, three, four, five.
With every punch, another layer of ground collapsed, and the cracks extended more than ten meters farther underground.
By the eighth punch, the pit was more than thirty meters deep.
Tenten charged out.
She headed for the eastern side of the Bamboo Forest.
She clutched two Exploding Tags in her left hand and her last Kunai in her right.
Her feet darted among the bamboo roots, stepping on raised roots, leaping over cracks in the ground, and dodging two White Zetsu that were still twitching.
She reached the densest part of the eastern Bamboo Forest and stuck the two Exploding Tags onto two bamboo stalks about five meters apart. The instant they touched the stalks, the paper flashed, and the formulas on them began activating automatically. The symbols written in cinnabar crawled across the paper as though alive.
Tenten took three steps back and formed Hand Seals.
"Explode!"
Two walls of fire erupted at once.
They did not blast upward, but outward. Fan-shaped flames sprayed from the two Exploding Tags at thirty-degree angles. They were not the usual orange-red, but the deep blue unique to Tenten's Exploding Tags, carrying an acrid sulfur smell and another, stranger scorched odor, like burning hair.
The