"Rumble—rumble—rumble!"
Amid the splintered wooden debris filling the sky, a figure wreathed in Black Flames flashed past, trailing a tail of black fire. Like a bolt of black lightning, he plunged into the ground. In an instant, a thunderous roar spread outward alongside the trembling earth.
"Crack, crack, crack!"
"Clang, clang, clang!"
"Creak, creak, creak!"
"Boom, boom, boom!"
What followed was a series of terrifying shattering sounds no less deafening than the thunderous blast. The entire clearing Uchiha Nobuhiko had expanded to span hundreds, even thousands, of meters suddenly caved in around the spot where the black lightning had struck. Massive chunks of earth and stone rose along the web-like cracks that had formed in an instant, then continuously toppled and shattered toward the deepest point of the depression—the direction in which the black figure had fallen—amid chilling crashes.
The entire clearing seemed to keep sinking, fracturing, and collapsing toward that deepest central point. Beneath clouds of dust that blotted out the sky, the cracked and upheaved ground, the sunken and crumbling terrain, extended all the way into the forest a thousand meters away. Only after triggering a chain of falling and buried trees did it finally stop amid the rumbling roar.
When the thunderous rumbling and the earth's tremors finally ceased, a massive circular crater lay beneath Chiba, who had fallen from the air. Dust and debris churned within it. Looking down, it resembled a bottomless funnel, pitch-black within.
"Pfft!"
Just then, as everything came to a halt and the thick dust rolled about, Chiba—his skin covered in Tadpole Script patterns and glowing pale yellow—fell into the black haze. After dropping several meters, perhaps over ten, he landed with a bang, his legs buried almost up to the ankles in the loose slope. He hurriedly braced himself with both