"This is—!"
Watching Yukina rush to Hirohiko's corpse, drop heavily to her knees, and examine his body from head to toe as if searching for the faintest trace of life, Nara Shikaku's expression changed slightly, and he blurted out instinctively.
"It... it was released?"
At this moment, Akimichi Choza stared in astonishment at Kushina, who was slumped on the ground with lingering fear on her face.
"No, it wasn't released. It left."
At the same time, Yamanaka Inoichi frowned as he involuntarily looked toward the direction where the largest cloud of dust was billowing up, speaking gravely.
Although his head was still buzzing, as a sensory ninja, he was in some ways far more sensitive than Nara Shikaku and Akimichi Choza.
Even though he possessed Hirohiko's ability to erase ocular power and could not sense the changes in space-time around him, he could still vaguely sense that something had left.
"W-We can move?"
At this moment, Shinoda Ichiro and the other three, whose presence had been weak, also showed stunned expressions.
They only felt the viscous air around them, like flowing water, recede. Then that bizarre sense of wrongness—the wrongness that had prevented them from moving—washed away from their left like a tide. Their limbs could move again.
"What exactly just happened?"
Endo, who could move again and immediately stood up, looked at the largest cloud of dust that had risen amid the heaviest, thunderous impact. The corner of his mouth twitched slightly.
"I don't know! But I do know that battlefield over there isn't somewhere we can go."
Esaki, who stood up a moment later, spoke with bitterness curling at the corners of his mouth.
Even though they had only witnessed the end of that battle, and even though it was not the fiercest clash they had ever seen,