Sasuke Uchiha suddenly folded his winged appendages in midair and dropped straight down like a chunk of iron hurled from above.
He passed through the edge of the still-spreading dust cloud. A few particles clung to his wing membranes, leaving tiny scorch marks on their surface, but he did not stop. He swiftly cut through the lingering dust layer and closed in on Deidara on the ground again.
As he fell, his dark golden eyes stared directly into Deidara's.
The tomoe in his Sharingan slowly turned within those dark golden pupils as he cast a genjutsu at the same time.
At that instant, Deidara's left pupil contracted slightly. He felt that chakra trying to invade his consciousness.
But he did not fall for it.
Ever since losing to Itachi, he had deliberately trained himself to resist genjutsu—not by relying on his eyes, but on his body's instincts.
Through the muscle memory in his left eye, he turned his gaze away at once.
Sasuke's genjutsu missed.
Before Sasuke landed, Deidara had already moved beyond the range of eye contact. At the same time, he slapped the ground with his left hand—a clay clone split off from where he had been standing and rushed at Sasuke with its arms spread wide.
The clone wrapped its arms around Sasuke and began to swell, ready to explode!
Sasuke was not trapped. Chidori flared to life in his palm again and pierced through the clone's torso, shattering it before it could explode.
But by then, Deidara had used the clone to distract him and circled around to Sasuke's side and rear.
He did not widen the distance or take to the air. Instead, he pressed his left hand against the air behind Sasuke, and a thread of extremely fine white dust drifted from between his