He forcibly sucked the black flames of Amaterasu into his body, where his raging chakra and the fire that could burn everything to ash clashed violently through his meridians. Every inch of his veins felt as if it had been rolled through boiling oil, but he did not even furrow his brow.
Itachi's body swayed. The trace of blood at the corner of his mouth had already dried, but those Mangekyō Sharingan shone with astonishing brightness. He did not retreat. His hands, which had formed seals for years, blurred into a mass of afterimages in midair, and three kunai tied with explosive tags formed a triangle, tearing through the air straight for Yuan's face.
Yuan did not even draw his short blade. The six-pointed star pattern in his left eye suddenly spun. With a muffled "buzz," the ocular technique "Extinguish" activated instantly. Before the three kunai and their explosive tags could touch his skin, they were forcibly erased into nothingness in midair.
At the very instant the kunai vanished.
A black-robed, red-cloud afterimage cut straight into Yuan's defensive circle by sheer force. Too fast! This kind of speed was not the burst of power a terminally ill man at the end of his rope should have possessed. At some point, a matte-black wootz-steel short blade had appeared in Itachi's hand, its edge carrying an extremely cold chakra as it stabbed straight for Yuan's throat.
Yuan snorted coldly and instinctively raised the right arm he could still move. Lightning-flame chakra covered his forearm as he prepared to take the strike head-on.
But Itachi's movement changed midway. Like a precision machine that had calculated this ten million times, his wrist sank downward at a twisted angle that did not conform to human joints at all. The tip of the blade avoided Yuan's