The choice you made then will be the destruction I bring today!

The black-and-red cloak drifted down onto the lake, a vicious slash running across it.

Its owner, meanwhile, had already slipped free and retreated dozens of meters!

Arata did not press his advantage.

A rat scurrying from hiding place to hiding place might be difficult to find, but how was a turtle trapped in a jar any different from a fish on a chopping board?

He gave the demon blade in his hand a light flick, shaking the beads of blood from its edge, then continued:

"The agreement your brother, Itachi, reached with Shimura Danzō, the chief enemy of our clan, was that he would personally stop the Uchiha Clan's rebellion in exchange for allowing one person to keep living in Konoha."

Yet he had barely begun

when Arata's voice was forcibly cut off.

Black flames filled the sky, plunging down like a black sun. They consumed his vision and engulfed his surroundings, coming within less than a finger's breadth of his body!

But that tiny gap was a chasm these undying black flames could never cross!

Bitterly cold ice sealed the space ahead of them first.

Then, as the black pattern in Arata's right eye began to rotate, immense ocular power poured forth like floodwater bursting through a dam.

In an instant,

the midsummer temperature was dragged below freezing, plunging the world abruptly into the depths of winter.

The lake froze solid, the trees along its banks donned coats of ice, and even those supposedly undying black flames could only writhe inside their eternally sealed prison!

This was the ocular technique that belonged to him alone:

[Cicada Ice: Eternal Winter!!]

Watching the caster sealed in the ice alongside his black flames, Arata still did not seize the opportunity to kill him.

Today, time did not matter to him.

Nor would