How strong!
Shikotsumyaku—it really is Shikotsumyaku! How did he get his hands on this Kekkei Genkai?
His strength has already surpassed that of an ordinary Jonin!
Atop the mountain,
In the crumbling earthen fortress, another person had joined the Konoha Ninja stationed there. He was leaning over the wall, watching the bloody battle on the slope below. It was none other than Yamanaka Kaito.
He had come to provide support as a Medical Ninja. There also happened to be a member of the Yamanaka Clan in the fortress. Though the two weren't close, they knew each other well enough to verify one another's identities, so Yamanaka Kaito had been able to enter without trouble.
But there was no one in the fortress who needed his Medical Ninjutsu, so he joined the others in watching Hyuga Ritsu and Uchiha Shisui battle the Mist Ninja below.
Yamanaka Kaito had started out watching with calm scrutiny, but now he was on high alert. Any thought of taking Hyuga Ritsu out with a sneak attack had been thoroughly extinguished. All that remained was utter shock.
A thought surfaced in his mind:
How can anyone be this strong?
He could see clearly that Uchiha Shisui was fighting Hozuki Mangetsu, the prodigy of the Hozuki Clan, one-on-one. He wasn't offering Hyuga Ritsu any assistance.
Hyuga Ritsu was facing more than forty Mist Ninja all by himself. Nearly ten of them were Jonin, while the rest were battle-hardened, experienced Chunin. Yet he had driven them back, killing twenty and seriously injuring three in just one minute.
Fewer than twenty remained capable of fighting.
And even those were probably no match for Hyuga Ritsu. If Suikazan Fuguki didn't step in soon, Ritsu would likely kill them all in no time.
Just then,
a voice came from beside him.
"Shouldn't we go down and help them?" The speaker was the honest, taciturn Jonin squad leader.
At his question, the others exchanged glances.
"No!"
Yamanaka Kaito answered decisively.
Everyone turned to look at him. He remained calm and said, "What do you think you could do to help if you went down there? Do you even have the ability to help them? To put it bluntly, you'd only get in their way. You'd be a hindrance, not a help."
"The best way to help is to stay here and not make trouble. You have to trust the decision made by the Frontline Camp. If they sent only those two to reinforce us, they must have judged that the two of them could handle the situation!"
Heaven knew, he meant every word. His advice was entirely in the village's interest, with not a hint of selfishness.
After all,
Aburame Ryoma's order had been to observe carefully and gather information.
Beyond that, everything he did had to serve the village's interests. That was the reason people like them had joined Root in the first place. They were the roots buried deep in darkness. They cast aside glory and stopped at nothing, all to secretly eliminate any obstacle that might hinder the village's prosperity!
The battered soldiers defending the Shigushan Mountain line weren't an obstacle to the village's prosperity. Yamanaka Kaito hoped they would survive, rather than throw their lives away because of a bad decision.
The others looked at one another. Yamanaka Kaito had convinced them.
Or rather,
they weren't fools. They knew that with their strength, going down there would be like feeding themselves to the enemy. They had only felt guilty about sitting by and doing nothing, but after Yamanaka Kaito spoke up, they could watch the battle below with a clear conscience. They assumed he had arrived with Hyuga Ritsu and the others.
The next moment,
the situation below changed again.
Suikazan Fuguki finally made his move, and he started with a spectacle: Water Release: Exploding Water Colliding Wave! He spewed out enough water to form a lake. The torrent surged wildly like a flash flood, and the trees on the mountainside took the brunt of it, with a wide swath swept away.
The sight made everyone on the summit secretly grateful they had listened to Yamanaka Kaito. Otherwise, that one technique alone would have sent them fleeing for their lives and turned them into dead weight for Hyuga Ritsu and Uchiha Shisui.
After all,
even Hyuga Ritsu and Uchiha Shisui had to retreat quickly in the face of such a terrifying, wide-area attack. They didn't dare meet it head-on.
"A wide-area attack..."
Hyuga Ritsu moved backward up the slope, dodging the surging waves. He considered how his most obvious weakness was indeed his lack of ways to launch wide-area attacks and defend against them.
And that wasn't just his weakness. More precisely, it was a common weakness of the Hyuga Clan. The Byakugan, as a Kekkei Genkai, had no offensive capabilities of its own, and the Gentle Fist passed down by the Hyuga Clan had no techniques for wide-area attacks.
"Eight Trigrams Vacuum Palm should be a massively degraded version of the Eighty Gods Vacuum Attack, right? I wonder if I can reverse-engineer the Eighty Gods Vacuum Attack..."
An outrageous thought flashed through Hyuga Ritsu's mind.
In an instant,
he pushed the impractical idea to the back of his mind. He stopped retreating up the mountain and glanced at the water level, which had peaked and was now rapidly falling. Then he twisted around and struck the puddle behind him with an Eight Trigrams Vacuum Palm, smashing the water shark that had just begun to emerge.
Some distance away, Suikazan Fuguki stood on the water and raised an eyebrow. His secretly prepared "Four Rain Sharks" hadn't even had a chance to show its power before it was destroyed. The Byakugan's perceptiveness was truly impressive.
"Then we'll settle this with brute force!"
After a brief attempt showed him that trickery wouldn't work, Suikazan Fuguki decisively abandoned the idea. The chances of outsmarting the Byakugan were too slim. The best solution was to overwhelm the Hyuga brat with force and crush him head-on!
His hands began forming Hand Seals so quickly that they blurred.
Then—
Water Release: Water Dragon Bullet Technique!
The rippling water suddenly churned violently. A fearsome water dragon, complete with horns, claws, and fangs, burst from the surface and charged toward Hyuga Ritsu with enough force to smash through the mountain and flatten the forest.
I can't dodge it!
Hyuga Ritsu realized this clearly.
He had seen the massive amount of Chakra gathering and being released within Suikazan Fuguki, but the attack was simply too fast, and its range was too broad.
Unless he had mastered the Body Flicker Technique to Uchiha Shisui's level, or knew a space-time technique that ignored distance, such as the Flying Thunder God Technique, there was no way to avoid Suikazan Fuguki's attack.
Eight Trigrams Palm: Rotation!
Hyuga Ritsu once again used the Hyuga Clan's absolute defense.
The water dragon crashed into the rapidly spinning Chakra barrier and was smashed to pieces. Streams of water sprayed in every direction, as if a sudden downpour had begun over that patch of ground.
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