The terrifying clash between Susanoo and Super Shinra Tensei shook all of Amegakure to its foundations. Torrential rain mixed with steel plates raining down from the sky and pitch-black motor oil, like a storm of black hail pelting everyone with loud clatters. After the repulsive shockwave passed, the heat blast swept away the mist filling the air, revealing Deva Path Pain gasping heavily in midair. His orange hair was plastered to his face by the rain, and cold sweat faintly seeped from his temples. That strike had consumed an enormous amount of his chakra; even Nagato's true body, far away in the tower, felt a tightness in his chest and had to cough several times in rapid succession.
"Is it... finally over?" Lying amid a gap between steel pipes, Jiraiya used his only remaining right arm to force himself up, trying to see the battle ahead clearly. Dark red blood bubbles kept spilling from his mouth, while the broken bones pressing against his chest sent waves of dull pain through him from the Asura Path's explosion, making his eyelids twitch violently. "Little Jiraiya, don't move around! Your shoulder bone is sticking out, and I'm stitching you up, damn it!" Sage Shima wiped at the tears in the corners of her eyes, tugging at bloodied bandages with mud-caked claws as she muttered nonstop.
In midair, Pain stared fixedly down at the scorched crater below, smooth as a mirror. In his eyes, no matter how powerful that arrogant Uchiha Yoru was, he should have been flattened under that repulsive bombardment. Yet within seconds, the endless white mist and muddy water were forcibly pressed down by an invisible gravitational force. The hundred-meter-tall blue Susanoo giant did indeed dissolve into specks of light like receding seawater. But at the very center of that charred