"Huff—!"
A long breath escaped the white-haired young man standing atop the squat Wood Human, his hands pressed together as though mirroring the construct's gesture, his body wrapped in a blue, flame-like Chakra cloak.
Then came a series of faint, shallow breaths.
At least he had made it in time, right? At that moment, the white-haired young man—Black-robed Chiba—slowly raised his head and looked at the massive sword of black flames hanging barely half a meter above him. He let out a small sigh of relief.
At the very last moment, the Wood Golem Technique had finally made it. It had not only blocked Uchiha Nobuhiko's attack from beneath the earth, but also caught the strike of this massive sword, whose threat was clearly greater than the earlier attack.
"Sizzle, sizzle, sizzle!"
As those thoughts flashed through his mind, wisps of white steam slowly rose from the Wood Human's back and from the palms gripping the giant sword of black flames.
His Kagutsuchi had become even stronger! At almost the exact instant the steam rose, that thought crossed Black-robed Chiba's mind.
There was no doubt that both the earlier underground attack and the great sword made of black flames were Uchiha Nobuhiko's ocular technique, Kagutsuchi.
Back then, Chiba had already completely deciphered Kagutsuchi. Compared to the Kagutsuchi Second Pillar had awakened with his Mangekyō Sharingan in the original story, Uchiha Nobuhiko's Kagutsuchi could not only alter the shape of the Black Flames—that was, Amaterasu—but also enhance their Nature Transformation, in other words, the Black Flames' intensity.
And compared to the battle on the Night of the Nine-Tails and the few clashes that had followed, Uchiha Nobuhiko's Kagutsuchi had become vastly more powerful.
At the very least, the Wood Golem Technique had once been able to withstand the burning of the