The Asura Beneath the Moon, Sosuke Instantly Kills Hidden Cloud Elites

The blade hung suspended in midair, less than half an inch from Kushina's slender ankle.

Thunder Beast's pupils trembled violently in their sockets. He desperately drove the lightning-nature chakra within him, trying to force the short blade down, if only by another inch. But the wildly crackling blue arcs that had once raged through his body now seemed like loaches encountering a higher-dimensional predator, whimpering as they all shrank back into the depths of his meridians.

The night wind came to a complete standstill. Even the night moths flapping their wings in the grass lost the ability to fly and fell stiffly into the dirt.

An incomparably viscous chakra pressure, heavy as a mountain, suddenly pressed in from all directions. It seemed as though the oxygen in the air had been instantly drained away. The chests of several Hidden Cloud elites gave muffled groans under the unbearable strain; even breathing became a luxury.

"Who..." Thunder Beast forced out a word through gritted teeth, cold sweat streaming down his forehead like a waterfall.

There was no answer.

Only the towering ancient tree above them, so thick it would take three men to encircle it, suddenly let out a groan of unbearable strain.

Boom!

The sturdy canopy abruptly exploded into a sky full of splinters. Cold moonlight poured through the violently torn gap in the forest, casting a long, upright shadow across the ground.

Amid the falling wood chips, a figure dressed in pure white slowly descended from the night sky like an exiled immortal.

The newcomer wore an immaculate white haori, his black hair lifting slightly in the night breeze. His face was as warm and refined as jade, every feature so exquisite that not a single flaw could be found. There was even a faint, springlike smile at the corner of his lips.

If not for the visible emerald-green aura surrounding him, warping the space around him, he would have looked like nothing more than a young nobleman taking a midnight stroll.

Sosuke's wooden sandals touched down upon the leaf-strewn ground without making a sound. Between his long fingers, he idly toyed with a lock of vivid red hair.

"Hidden Leaf... reinforcements?" Terror tore at the corners of Thunder Beast's eyes, drawing thin streams of blood. As a battle-hardened jonin of the Hidden Cloud Village, he had witnessed the Raikage's fury, but he had never felt such pure, unreasonable suppression through sheer life force.

Simply standing before this young man in white made every cell in his body scream for him to run.

Sosuke paid no attention to Thunder Beast's fear. His deep eyes passed over the Hidden Cloud ninja and settled directly on Kushina, curled up on the ground.

Seeing the girl's stubborn yet despair-filled gaze, the smile on Sosuke's lips faded slightly.

"Three seconds." Sosuke parted his thin lips and spoke two words.

Before Thunder Beast could understand what those words meant, the white figure vanished from his sight.

The first second.

The two Hidden Cloud elites standing to Thunder Beast's left only saw an emerald flash streak past their eyes. Before they could even draw their swords, their vision began to spin without warning.

Two healthy heads shot into the air.

The explosive power of Sosuke's perfected Sage Body made his hand blade sharper than any chakra-conductive metal. The cuts were smooth as mirrors. Only when the heads struck the ground with dull thuds did two scarlet fountains erupt from the neck stumps of the headless corpses.

The second second.

The third Hidden Cloud ninja standing in the rear finally broke free of the oppressive pressure enough to regain a shred of clarity. He let out a beastlike roar of impending death, rapidly forming hand seals as he hurled every explosive tag on his body, along with his kunai, at the white afterimage.

Sosuke did not even raise an eyelid.

He took a leisurely step forward, and the tangible Yang Release aura around him abruptly swelled outward.

Bang!

The kunai wrapped with explosive tags had no chance to explode the moment they touched the aura. The violent life force directly shattered them into fine iron powder, which fluttered down.

Meanwhile, Sosuke's fair, slender right hand had already pierced straight through the Hidden Cloud ninja's chest without resistance. Emerald-green chakra burst from his fingertips, instantly grinding the man's heart and internal organs into an indistinct mass of flesh.

With a casual flick, Sosuke threw the corpse into the distant bushes as though tossing away a bag of trash.

The third second.

Sosuke was already standing before Thunder Beast.

There was barely any distance between them.

"Monster! Die!" Thunder Beast completely lost his mind. He bit through his tongue, using the sharp pain to regain a moment of clarity, then poured every last bit of Lightning Release chakra in his body into the short blade in his right hand and slashed viciously at Sosuke's neck.

The blade tore through the air with a piercing boom.

Sosuke neither dodged nor formed hand seals. He merely slowly raised his right hand, extending his index and middle fingers, then lightly pinched the blade at the instant it was about to touch his skin.

Clang—

The violent Lightning Release arcs went out the moment they touched Sosuke's fingers, like sparks drained of all energy. The standard Hidden Cloud short blade, said to cut through iron like mud, was firmly caught between two slender fingers and could not advance another fraction.

Thunder Beast's face was filled with incredulous horror.

"Is Hidden Cloud's Lightning Release only capable of this much?" Sosuke's voice was gentle and pleasant, yet it carried an ultimate arrogance that regarded all things as ants.

His fingertips exerted the slightest force.

Crack.

The finely forged steel blade shattered into more than a dozen fragments, scattering in every direction.

Immediately afterward, Sosuke's hand reached forward and seized Thunder Beast's thick throat.

Thunder Beast stood nearly two meters tall, his muscles knotted and powerful. Yet beneath Sosuke's seemingly slender hand, he was like a chick caught by the nape, forcibly lifted into the air with one hand.

A powerful suffocating sensation rushed into his mind. Thunder Beast's legs kicked frantically as both hands clawed at Sosuke's wrist, trying to pry apart those vise-like fingers. Yet no matter how hard he struggled, Sosuke's arm did not move in the slightest.

Sosuke tilted his head slightly, looking at Thunder Beast's face as it turned purple-red from lack of oxygen. A cold green gleam flashed through his eyes.

"You dared touch something I've set my eyes on. Who gave you the nerve?"

The instant his words fell, his fingers closed.

A scalp-numbing crack of shattering bones exploded through the silent night. Thunder Beast's neck bones were crushed completely into powder by an overwhelmingly violent force. His eyes bulged, his struggles abruptly ceased, and his entire body went limp like a heap of mud.

Thud.

Sosuke released his hand, allowing Thunder Beast's corpse to crash at his feet.

From the moment he landed to the complete annihilation of the four Hidden Cloud elites, the entire process had taken precisely three seconds.

There had been no earth-shattering clash of ninjutsu, no elaborate tactical struggle. There had only been a one-sided slaughter, pure to the extreme and violent to the extreme.

Severed limbs littered the ground as the thick stench of blood rapidly spread through the air.

And Sosuke, standing amid the mountain of corpses and sea of blood, did not have a single drop of blood on his white haori. His brows furrowed slightly as he drew a spotless silk handkerchief from his sleeve and unhurriedly wiped away the small traces of grime on his fingertips.

His movements were elegant and entirely unhurried.

Not far away, Kushina Uzumaki stared blankly at the scene.

The numbing sensation of Lightning Release still ravaged her meridians, but she could no longer feel any pain. Her gaze—her entire world—was completely occupied by the snow-white figure before her.

He was too strong.

So strong that he surpassed everything she knew about ninja.

The indifference with which he took lives in the span of a gesture, combined with his own gentle, jade-like temperament, created a contradiction of immense visual impact. He was like an asura who had emerged from the depths of hell, yet wore the holy garb of a god.

What shocked Kushina even more was the chakra aura emanating from him.

As a member of the Uzumaki clan, she was exceptionally sensitive to life force. She could clearly sense that the power within this man's body resonated with her own bloodline in an ancient, profound way.

That was the Yang Release origin of the Senju Clan!

Not only that, an eerie stirring also came from the seal on her abdomen. The Nine-Tails demon fox, usually arrogant and ferocious as it roared within the sealing space, had now completely restrained its aura. Like a house dog that had encountered its natural predator, it curled up in the corner of its cage and trembled.

The Nine-Tails was afraid.

Afraid of the man before it.

Kushina's breathing quickened. She watched as Sosuke casually threw the cleaned handkerchief onto Thunder Beast's corpse, then turned around and walked steadily toward her, step by step.

His wooden sandals rustled softly against the bloodstained grass.

With every step closer, that tyrannical pressure grew stronger.

Sosuke stopped before Kushina and looked down at the red-haired girl. Her clothes had been torn in many places during the earlier battle, exposing large patches of fair skin. The scorch marks left by Lightning Release were painfully conspicuous upon it.

Yet even so, there was still no surrender in her clear eyes.

Sosuke slowly crouched down.

He held the vivid lock of red hair before Kushina, his gentle voice sounding in the night breeze. "I received your distress signal."

Kushina's nose stung.

Over the years, she had endured countless cold stares and constant surveillance in the Hidden Leaf, treated by the higher-ups as a weapon that could explode at any moment. When the Hidden Cloud had kidnapped her tonight, she had thought the world had completely abandoned her.

Yet in the darkest depths of her despair, this man had appeared like an unreasonable bolt of lightning, shattering all the darkness and forcibly pulling her back.

"Th... thank you..."

Kushina's cracked lips trembled slightly, her voice shaking from weakness and emotion. Instinctively, she wanted to express her gratitude, wanted to ask the name of this powerful member of the Senju Clan.

However, before she could finish speaking—

Sosuke suddenly reached out with his slender fingers and gripped her delicate chin.

The warmth of his fingertips was somewhat cold, but the force behind them was astonishingly strong. With an unyielding firmness that allowed no refusal, he forced Kushina to raise her head and look directly into those bottomless black eyes.

Kushina froze, her words of gratitude caught in her throat.

There was not the slightest hint of compassion or tenderness for saving someone in Sosuke's eyes. There was only naked possessiveness, as though he were looking at the finest prey.

"There's no need to thank me."

Sosuke's thumb lightly caressed Kushina's bloodless lips, while an extremely dangerous yet fatally alluring curve appeared at the corner of his mouth.

He leaned close to the girl's ear and slowly spoke a sentence in a voice only the two of them could hear—words that would completely shatter Kushina's understanding of the world.