Deidara's Miscalculation! A Fierce Air Battle! Art Is Crushed in One Fist

Deidara stood on the back of the huge white clay bird, his golden hair whipped wildly in every direction by the gale at high altitude.

The height of several hundred meters gave him plenty of security. Deidara looked down at Uchiha Yuan in the desert below, who was as tiny as an ant, his eyes filled with fanaticism.

Sasori's death had shocked him, but that shock was quickly buried beneath a frenzied desire to win.

Deidara pressed his hands together, and the explosive clay already chewed in his palms swiftly took shape, turning into a bizarre doll only the size of his hand.

"This was prepared specially to destroy an entire village! You tasteless bastard, turn to ash along with the desert! C3 No. 18!"

Laughing loudly, Deidara threw the doll in his hand down.

The instant the doll left the giant clay bird, its size began to swell crazily. In just a few breaths, the palm-sized doll expanded into a gigantic bomb dozens of meters across, crashing toward the ground like a meteor with a piercing sonic boom. Its huge shadow instantly covered the entire dune where Yuan stood.

Yuan stood where he was without moving. He raised his head and looked at the giant bomb growing larger and larger. The desert gale snapped his black windbreaker loudly around him.

"You call this little firecracker art?" Yuan pulled up the corner of his mouth, revealing an extremely cruel sneer.

The sand beneath his feet let out a muffled explosion. Onoki's ultimate technique, the Ultra-Light-Weight Rock Technique, activated instantly. At that moment, Yuan's body lost all weight, and lightning-nature chakra surged madly through the meridians in his legs.

Bang! A pit more than ten meters deep exploded open where Yuan had been, while Yuan himself had already turned into a black hurricane, soaring into the sky straight toward the C3 bomb powerful enough to wipe an entire village off the map!

Deidara, high in the air, saw this, and his eyes nearly popped out.

"What the hell! He can actually fly?!" Deidara gritted his teeth and formed a hand seal with his right hand. "Blow up!"

Rumble—!

C3 No. 18 was forcibly detonated by Deidara in midair, only dozens of meters above the ground. A blaze of searing white light countless times brighter than the sun instantly swallowed the entire sky. The terrifying shock wave turned into tangible ripples, brutally shaving a layer off the endless dunes below. Hundreds of thousands of tons of yellow sand were swept high into the air, and the entire border of the Land of Wind seemed to be drenched in a murky rain of sand.

In the midst of that world-destroying explosion, Deidara desperately drove the giant bird higher, his arrogant laughter piercing through the roar of the blast. "Hahahaha! Some mad dog of the Uchiha clan—before my art, you still won't even have scraps left..."

Before Deidara's laughter had faded, a figure wreathed in black-red lightning tore straight through the explosive fire cloud hot enough to melt steel!

Most of Yuan's clothes had been burned away, revealing his lean, powerful upper body. A layer of emerald-green light shimmered over his skin as the Strength of a Hundred Technique frantically repaired the burns caused by the great explosion. Charred flesh had barely curled back and fallen away before fresh granulation tissue immediately grew in its place.

Yuan paid no attention to the injuries on his body. His eyes were locked tightly on Deidara above. Not only did his speed not slow, it surged again under the dual boost of the Ultra-Light-Weight Rock Technique and lightning release, stabbing toward the sky like a black spear.

"Not dead? What kind of monster has recovery like that?!" Deidara completely panicked. He immediately thrust both hands into his clay pouch, stuffed the last bit of explosive clay into his mouth, and began chewing madly together with the mouth on his own face.

"If ordinary bombs can't kill you, then I'll let you taste what it feels like to collapse from the inside!" Deidara spat out the chewed clay, a huge lump of white clay.

The clay lump rapidly changed shape in midair, actually transforming into an enormous body exactly like Deidara.

"C4 Garuda!"

The giant Deidara swelled rapidly like an inflated balloon. Immediately afterward, without any violent explosion, the huge body burst open with a pop, turning into a cloud of transparent dust invisible to the naked eye. Following the high-altitude wind, it instantly enveloped the entire airspace within a hundred meters.

Yuan plunged headfirst into that cloud of dust.

His Sage Art Sensing immediately sent out an extremely piercing alarm. In the Sharingan's field of vision, hundreds of millions of microscopic spider-shaped bombs floated in the air. Those bombs were so tiny they could drill directly into the bloodstream through a person's pores and respiratory tract.

"Breathe them in, breathe them in good!" Deidara watched from far away, laughing so hard he rocked back and forth. "These are microscopic bombs developed specifically for Itachi's Sharingan! As long as you take one breath, these bombs will flow through your blood into every organ in your body. No matter how tough you are on the outside, once your organs are blown to pieces, you're dead!"

Yuan's movement suddenly halted in midair. He coughed violently, and a trace of black blood flowed from the corner of his mouth.

Those nanoscale bombs had indeed entered his body.

"Detonate!" Deidara gave Yuan no chance to catch his breath. Forming a seal with one hand, he detonated the C4 bombs that had infiltrated Yuan's body without hesitation.

In Deidara's imagination, Yuan's body would burst into a mist of blood from the inside out like a deflating ball in the very next second.

One second passed.

Two seconds passed.

Yuan still hovered there. Apart from the smear of black blood at the corner of his mouth, there was no sign that his body was about to explode.

"How is that possible! The bombs failed?!" Deidara clutched his hair tightly with both hands, unable to understand what was happening before his eyes.

Yuan wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth and raised his head. In those scarlet Mangekyo Sharingan, there was a cold light as if he were looking at an idiot.

"Getting bombs into my body was creative, I'll give you that." Wrapped in chakra, Yuan's voice reached Deidara's ears clearly. "But you idiot don't understand my eyes at all."

One thousandth of a second before the nano-bombs detonated, Yuan had done something utterly insane and deadly.

He directly applied the Mangekyo Sharingan ocular technique "Extinguish" inside his own meridians and blood vessels! Concept-level disintegration force swept through his body by force, erasing those invisible nano explosive clays along with part of his own internal organs!

It was no different from scraping his own bones with a knife. The intense pain made the veins on Yuan's forehead bulge, but the Strength of a Hundred Technique followed immediately after, forcibly repairing the internal wounds he had erased himself.

"Your bombs... can't enter my body." Yuan's voice was filled with bone-deep coldness.

He clenched his right fist, the knuckles on the back of his hand cracking. There was no need to use ninjutsu anymore. Yuan stamped hard in midair, kicking out a sonic boom from nothing, and instantly appeared above the head of Deidara's giant clay bird.

"Don't come over here!" Deidara let out a despairing shriek. He suddenly tore open the clothes over his chest, revealing the mouth sewn shut with thick thread. He was going to flip over his final trump card, turning himself and this monster together into the ultimate explosion within a ten-kilometer radius—C0 Self-Destruct!

The mouth on his chest had just bitten through the seal when a bolt of black lightning had already smashed down like a hammer.

Yuan gave him no time to finish charging. His right fist, carrying monstrous strength to the extreme, punched fiercely through Deidara's chest!

Pchh!

Blood mixed with shards of bone splattered across Yuan's face. Yuan's arm pierced through Deidara's back, his hand clamped tightly around the heart core that was frantically absorbing chakra in preparation for self-destruction.

Deidara's eyes instantly lost focus. He lowered his head and looked at the terrifying bloody hole in his chest, his lips trembling. "My... art..."

"Your art is too low-grade." Yuan leaned close to Deidara's ear and spat out the words coldly.

The fingertips of his right hand suddenly exerted force.

Bang!

That explosive core was crushed by Yuan into a puddle of mush, and all chakra fluctuations came to an abrupt stop.

Deidara's corpse fell from the giant clay bird, plummeting straight toward the yellow sand below. And the giant bird that had lost its chakra support also turned into a lifeless puddle of white mud in midair.

[Ding! Killed S-rank rogue ninja Deidara! Obtained orange shards ×50!]

[Unlocked enemy abilities: Secret Explosive Clay Technique, explosion-nature chakra!]

Yuan hovered in midair, digesting the newly acquired knowledge of clay in his mind. Just as he was about to descend to the ground to recover his chakra, the system's newly upgraded Sage Art Sensing network suddenly caught an extremely massive and completely undisguised chakra fluctuation.

This fluctuation did not come from the Land of Wind, but from the distant east—the outskirts of the ruins of the Hidden Cloud Village.

The number was enormous. Not several thousand, nor several tens of thousands, but a full one hundred thousand identical chakra sources, all radiating a strange plant-like aura!

Yuan turned his head, and a bloodthirsty wild grin appeared on his blood-covered face.

"One hundred thousand pieces of trash."