The Hokage's Teacup and the Mark of Yin Release

Scalding tea slid down his throat into his stomach, while the bitterness of premium gyokuro melted into a trace of sweetness at the back of his tongue. Baishi leaned against the broad leather chair, his eyelids drooping slightly, his languid expression making him look as though he were taking an afternoon nap.

But on the solid-wood desk before him, the Chakra Water Mirror was boiling violently.

Blinding white light poured through the mirror's surface, bleaching the dim Hokage's Office stark white. Mikoto Uchiha stood behind Baishi to one side, squinting against the glare. The faint cherry-blossom fragrance at her cuffs had mixed with the cold sweat she had begun to exude from tension.

"Hokage-sama! The Barrier... a Barrier is forming overhead!"

Hiashi's shriek, his voice warped out of shape, traveled along the Chakra silver thread and exploded deep inside Baishi's mind. The voice was filled with suffocating despair.

The scene in the Water Mirror had already warped. A translucent geometric cube radiating destructive white light hung above Hiashi and more than a hundred Hyuga elites. Its edges were razor-sharp. Leaves drifting nearby vanished into nothingness the instant they touched it, without even leaving powder behind.

The air reeked of ozone and scorching produced by high-concentration Chakra friction.

"We can't stop it! The Byakugan can't see where the caster is! We can't even lock onto the source of the Chakra!" Hiashi glared at the death flower pressing down overhead. The wound through his right shoulder had split open again, and blood dripped down his arm into the muddy ground. "If we don't retreat, the entire clan will die here!"

The more than one hundred Hyuga ninjas had already lost all sense of order. Some frantically struck at the air with Eight Trigrams Vacuum Palm, but the azure Chakra palm strikes hit