Sai had undergone extensive training in Root, but he had truly never encountered a battle this intense.
Though he was still young and already quite experienced as a ninja, his raw strength—his overall stats—still needed to grow. After Kakuzu quickly identified water as the weakness of Super Beast Imitating Drawing, Sai temporarily retreated and hid. Yet he had still been discovered by the suddenly appearing enemy in the Spiral Mask, dragging Captain Kakashi down.
Then, Captain Kakashi had seemingly perished together with that orange-masked enemy, only to be jointly blasted into oblivion by that Akatsuki member, the Takigakure rogue ninja—
And then Naruto Uzumaki went berserk. He unleashed some strange, bizarre power, his body transforming into a monster with nine fleshy tails, and fiercely clashed with that Takigakure monster who could hardly be called human either.
Who am I? Where am I? Is this still the ninja world?
Watching all this, Sai's heart—which had been stripped of personal emotion through rigorous training—was thrown into wave after wave of turmoil. He was utterly bewildered.
No, this wasn't right. Battles between ninja were supposed to be about schemes and tricks. You set me up, I deceive you; whoever struck first, whoever hid deepest, won.
How had it turned into two inhuman monsters beating each other up like this?
When Naruto Uzumaki transformed into a humanoid wind god, hundreds upon thousands of whistling Wind Blades surged from his body. With a roar, he became a storm of blades and shredded the humanoid monster stitched together from masses of black threads into countless tiny black fragments—
Watching from the sidelines, Sai saw clearly that just before the Takigakure monster called Kakuzu was shredded by Naruto Uzumaki's blade storm, a shadow flew out from his back. It was the mask capable of using Lightning Release