"It should be pretty good for grilling meat."
The moment Sen said that, it was as if the air had been sucked from both riverbanks. The silence was terrifying. Kisame's wild grin cracked little by little like a dried-out face mask, crumbling to pieces. Scarlet veins crawled across his pupil-less, dead-fish eyes as he stared at the huge ball of black fire still blazing on the water as though he had seen a ghost.
"N-no way!" Kisame's voice was as dry as sandpaper scraping stone. "That's Amaterasu! Black fire that can burn even water away!"
But whether he wanted to believe it or not, he had to. The black flames that had been raging so violently, seeking to devour everything, were now visibly shrinking and weakening. Something seemed to be sucking those roaring flames inward, making them collapse further the longer they burned.
Hiss-!
The black flames finally gave out. Like a punctured black balloon, they dispersed with a pop, revealing the boy inside, his hands in his pockets, not even a corner of his clothes singed black.
Hearing the sound, Asuma and Kurenai snapped their eyes open. At the unbelievable sight, their eyes nearly bulged out into the water. "He... he's completely unharmed?!" Kurenai covered her mouth and stumbled half a step backward in horror, her foot splashing through the muddy water.
Sen stood on the water. He stretched, yawned, and rubbed his eyes, which ached slightly from the glare of the flames. His old T-shirt, washed pale with age, was perfectly clean. Beneath its fabric, however, there was the faint outline of an extremely thin, incredibly dense layer of Wood Release armor, gleaming with a dark-brown metallic sheen. The divine tree origin's passive defense.
"Well, this fire's got some staying power." Sen curled his lip and glanced at