Samehada Bursts the Water Prison! Itachi, How Much Longer Can You Hide?

Faced with Naruto's hysterical, impotent rage, Yuan stood up, too lazy to spare him even one extra glance.

"Do whatever you want. As long as you're not afraid of dying, come throw your life away anytime."

Yuan shook the blood from his hands. Just now, he had used his newly fused [Sage Art Sensing] to expand his search range, and in that brief opening, he had picked up an abnormally massive chakra fluctuation in a forest dozens of miles outside the village, thick with water vapor. That amount of chakra simply did not seem human. It was more like a tailless tailed beast.

Kisame Hoshigaki.

The Akatsuki member who had come with Itachi Uchiha. From the look of it, he planned to sneak in while the Hidden Leaf Village was in chaos and capture the Nine-Tails. Unfortunately for him, he had run into Yuan, whose killing intent had only just been roused.

"Your Pervy Sage is already lining up in the Pure Land. If you want to live, stay in that pit like a good boy." Yuan left him with that mocking remark, chakra exploding beneath his feet as his entire body turned into a streak of black lightning and shot straight toward the forest outside the village.

At the border of the Land of Fire, deep within a dense primeval forest.

Kisame Hoshigaki carried the massive bandage-wrapped blade—Samehada—over his shoulder as he stepped along the branches at an unhurried pace, heading toward the Hidden Leaf Village. A bloodthirsty, savage grin hung on his sharklike face.

"The Hidden Leaf is a total mess right now. Mr. Itachi, this is the perfect chance to capture the Nine-Tails. That Uchiha brat from the rumors, the one who turned the Hidden Leaf upside down..."

Before Kisame could finish speaking, his steps abruptly halted. By instinct, he raised Samehada in his hand to block in front of his chest.

Boom!

A heavy kick descended from the sky with the force to shatter boulders, smashing viciously onto Samehada's broad blade.

The tremendous impact directly crushed the tree trunk beneath Kisame's feet, a trunk so thick it would take three people to wrap their arms around it. Kisame, man and blade together, plummeted to the ground like a meteor and blasted a huge crater into the earth.

"You dead-fish-eyed shark. Where do you think you're going?"

Yuan landed lightly from midair at the edge of the deep pit. His upper body was bare, his muscles looking as if they had been forged from steel and iron, and his pair of scarlet Mangekyo Sharingan looked down from above at Kisame at the bottom of the pit.

Kisame jumped out of the pit, wiped the dust from his chin, and his eyes instantly turned excited.

"So it's you. Uchiha Yuan, the one who came back from the dead. What strength. Perfect. My Samehada loves eating chakra filled with this kind of violent energy!"

Kisame gripped the hilt with both hands and tore the bandages off Samehada, revealing the living greatsword covered in dark-blue barbs like some enormous creature. He kicked off the ground, swung Samehada, and slashed straight at Yuan's waist.

Yuan had no intention of dodging at all. He did not even draw the short blade on his back. He simply extended his right hand, wrapped in chakra, and grabbed Samehada's barb-covered edge as it came chopping toward him!

Splurch! The sharp barbs instantly pierced Yuan's palm, and blood flowed down along the blade.

"Hahaha! Idiot! You dare grab Samehada barehanded?" Kisame laughed wildly. "This blade can drain your chakra in an instant!"

Sure enough, an extremely tyrannical suction force came from Samehada's blade, like a black hole that could never be filled, madly devouring the chakra inside Yuan's body. The barbs on the blade stood up excitedly, making sizzling sounds.

But after only two seconds, Kisame's smile froze.

Because he discovered that Yuan showed no sign of having his chakra drained dry. On the contrary, the corner of Yuan's mouth lifted into an utterly deranged grin.

"You absorb chakra, huh? I've got enough berserk chakra inside me to drown you! I'm only afraid your blade's appetite isn't big enough!"

Yuan actively opened every meridian and chakra point in his body, sending the vast, despair-inducing system chakra inside him, carrying an extremely super-violent nature, pouring madly and without reservation through his palm into Samehada's body like a floodgate being thrown open!

"Wuaaah!"

Samehada, which had been excited a moment ago, suddenly let out an extremely pained, piercing shriek. That berserk chakra was not something it could not digest at all?! How could this be? It could even...

In less than five seconds, Samehada's body swelled three or four times like an inflating balloon, and every barb on the blade snapped apart.

Bang—splurch!

At last, Samehada could not withstand that energy that threatened to burst everything apart and exploded directly from within, blasting into a mass of minced flesh and fragments! A ninja blade comparable to a divine weapon was forcefully stuffed until it burst by Yuan's utterly unreasonable chakra-infusion method.

Kisame was knocked back more than a dozen steps by the recoil from the broken piece of hilt, his eyes nearly bulging out of their sockets.

"My Samehada... actually burst from being overfilled?!"

Kisame's expression changed drastically. Though he could hardly believe it, his combat experience was extremely rich. He immediately threw away the useless hilt and formed hand seals with both hands at a speed invisible to the naked eye.

"Water Release: Water Prison Technique!"

The moisture in the surrounding air instantly condensed, turning into a huge, high-density sphere of water that wrapped Yuan tightly inside. Kisame's hand was inserted into the water sphere to maintain the chakra, and a cold sneer returned to his face.

"Even without my blade, I can still kill you. Inside my water prison, this high-pressure current can crush even an iron ball. You can't even breathe. Wait for death."

Inside the water prison, Yuan's hair drifted in the current. He did not struggle, and he did not even look as if he intended to hold his breath. Through the curtain of water, he looked at Kisame outside, and the corner of his mouth once again pulled into that devilish curve.

The Mangekyo Sharingan locked firmly onto the water flow surrounding him. The eye technique, "Extinguish," activated!

This was not physical destruction. This was conceptual erasure.

Kisame discovered in terror that the chakra he was using to maintain the water prison was disappearing in a way that completely defied the logic of ninjutsu. That high-density water sphere began evaporating and decomposing from the inside out, out of thin air.

Splash—

The indestructible water prison directly collapsed into a puddle of water with no killing power whatsoever.

"Your water's too little. Don't get cocky!"

Yuan stepped out of the puddle, and his speed instantly rose to the limit. A sonic boom exploded through the forest as he slammed straight into Kisame's chest like a cannonball fired from its barrel.

Kisame was horrified and instinctively formed hand seals, trying to use the Water Clone Substitution Technique.

"Too late!"

Yuan's right fist, carrying piercing thunder, slammed solidly into Kisame's chest. It was a fatal blow that fused monstrous strength with berserk chakra.

Crack! Kisame's ribs shattered, and his heart was smashed to pulp on the spot by the violent force of that punch. His body flew more than thirty meters like a torn sack, snapping five or six great trees before stopping, blood spraying wildly as all signs of life vanished completely.

[Ding! Killed Kage-level · Kisame Hoshigaki! Obtained orange fragments ×50!]

Yuan shook the water droplets from his fist. He ignored Kisame's corpse on the ground and instead picked out the small piece of Samehada's core fragment that could still wriggle from the pile of rotten flesh.

Just then, Yuan used Sage Art Sensing and detected, within the shadow of a treetop several hundred meters away, a trace of chakra fluctuation that was extremely hidden and extremely familiar.

That fluctuation lingered for less than half a second before immediately retreating at extreme speed, attempting to vanish into the night.

That was Itachi Uchiha's chakra.

Everything that had happened just now, Itachi had been secretly observing with his Sharingan. He reached a conclusion that made his heart pound with alarm: Tsukuyomi's genjutsu could not trap that berserk mental power; Amaterasu's black flames might be erased by that strange decomposition technique; even his own Susanoo might not be able to withstand one punch from that madman. Most deadly of all, he absolutely could not let Yuan's hand touch him. Contact meant death.

Itachi chose patience and decisively withdrew.

"Trying to run?"

Yuan crushed the remaining bits of Samehada in his hand and did not give chase. Because he knew that, when dealing with that slippery crow Itachi, chasing him through the forest was the stupidest choice.

Yuan turned around. His pair of scarlet Mangekyo gave off a chilling light in the dark forest. Facing the direction Itachi had fled, he spoke in a voice that was not loud, yet carried clearly into Itachi's ears several hundred meters away.

"Itachi... it's been six years. Those eyes of yours, the ones that bled for the Hidden Leaf, how much longer can they hide in the dark? You'd better wash your neck and wait. Sooner or later, I'll dig them out with my own hands!"