Dogs of the Lightning Capital Dare Bark at Me?

The bone-piercing wind howled through every crevice of the Broken Spine Mountains like countless ice-tempered blades, dyeing everything between heaven and earth a desolate white.

Deep within Ice Rift Valley, the wind twisted into ghostly wails. Three dark figures moved soundlessly like phantoms beneath the cover of the rock walls.

At the front, Baba Tesshin tightly gripped an ancient brass compass. The needle did not point north or south, but trembled violently as it locked onto a cave entrance nearly swallowed by the blizzard.

His voice was pressed low and tight by the wind and snow. "Boss, Hidden Cloud Village's pursuit team is less than ten li behind us. The chakra fluctuations detected by Magnet Release are unusually violent. Darui is leading them personally."

At the rear of the group, the agile Saori lowered her body, her icy gaze piercing through the curtain of snow as she precisely fixed on the darkness ahead.

"Darui..." She licked her slightly chapped lips, her tone carrying a hunter's excitement. "The intelligence was right. He carries the most complete casting trajectory memory for Lightning Release: Swift Wolf Claw. As long as we can force him to go all out for more than three seconds, my system can fully capture and analyze its core model."

Yet Uchiha Xuan, the heart of the team, seemed not to have heard their conversation.

He slowly came to a stop and looked up at the churning lead-gray clouds overhead. Snowflakes landed on his black bangs and melted instantly.

Within his deep eyes, the three tomoe in his right crimson pupil slowly rotated in an eerie rhythm before finally connecting into an intricate, cold six-pointed pinwheel pattern.

"Not force him." Xuan's voice was soft, yet it pierced through the roaring blizzard like a red-hot branding iron. "I'll teach him what... true Lightning Release is."

The instant his words fell, his entire body became an afterimage and vanished into the snowstorm.

Deep inside the mine, compared to the bitter cold outside, there was a trace of deathly tranquility.

Azure Dragon curled beneath a hollow in the rock wall, his body trembling incessantly from blood loss and excessive chakra depletion.

He clutched an ancient scroll tightly against his chest. Fine blue arcs of electricity raced across its surface, radiating a dangerous, powerful aura.

His left arm was already charred black, its muscle tissue necrotic—the painful price of forcibly driving Lightning Release chakra beyond its limits.

Suddenly, an even colder gust than those in the valley rushed in through the cave entrance, nearly extinguishing the campfire.

A slender black figure stepped out of the wind and snow with silent footsteps, as though he himself were part of the night and ice.

Behind him, countless fine black grains of iron sand floated in the air like a living mist, giving off a heart-palpitating metallic aura.

"You're not from Hidden Cloud Village." Azure Dragon abruptly looked up. Hidden Cloud Village's pursuers would not be this quiet, nor would they possess such an eerie bloodline limit.

He struggled to his feet and shielded the scroll behind him. "You came for the Lightning Release Compression Model?"

A cold curve lifted at Uchiha Xuan's lips, as though he were admiring an interesting work of art.

"The scroll is merely a vessel. It's dead." He advanced slowly, the pattern in his Mangekyō Sharingan looking incomparably sinister beneath the dim firelight. "What I want is the living stuff inside your head."

Those words sent Azure Dragon plunging into an ice cellar!

At that moment, a thunderous roar tore through the night outside the cave!

"Azure Dragon! Surrender now!"

Violent lightning instantly vaporized all the snow at the entrance. Darui's tall figure appeared amid the blinding electric light, accompanied by a squad of Hidden Cloud Village elites.

His signature sleepy eyes were now sharp as an eagle's, locked firmly onto Azure Dragon inside the cave.

Yet faced with this sudden development, Uchiha Xuan did not even turn his head, as though Darui and his squad were merely stagehands clearing the set before a performance.

His right eye, that sinister Mangekyō, was fixed on Azure Dragon, whose mind had been thrown into turmoil by Darui's arrival.

Now!

Azure Dragon's instinct to survive overwhelmed everything. Seizing the opening while Uchiha Xuan had his back to Darui, his hands formed seals at astonishing speed—this was the ninjutsu he had created through ten years of painstaking effort!

"Lightning Release: Swift Wolf Claw!"

In an instant, five crescent lightning blades condensed to the utmost burst from his fingertips. They did not strike in straight lines, but carved eerie arcs through the air, sealing every route of Xuan's escape from five different angles like a pack of wolves hunting their prey. They tore through the air with piercing shrieks!

Facing this ultimate technique capable of instantly killing any jonin, Xuan neither dodged nor evaded. He did not even assume a defensive stance.

At the very instant before the lightning blades touched his body, the Mangekyō in his right eye abruptly contracted to its limit!

[Myriad Phenomena Return to the Eye]—fully activated!

In his vision, the entire world was instantly converted into data.

Those five lightning blades were no longer mere bodies of energy, but precise models composed of countless streams of data.

Electrical current frequency: 37.5 hertz.

Chakra density: 1.8 standard units per cubic centimeter.

Trajectory deviation angle: 7.3 degrees... In one ten-thousandth of a second, every underlying principle composing this ninjutsu was completely analyzed, understood, and seized by his ocular power!

He slowly raised his right hand. A blue-white sphere of electricity began spinning rapidly in his palm. Even more unimaginable, a visible ring of rapidly rotating spiral airflow wound around the outside of that violent lightning-nature chakra!

Wind and lightning, two utterly different and even mutually repelling chakra natures, were forcibly kneaded together in his hand!

[Spiral Lightning Sphere]!

"Go."

Xuan breathed out a single word, and the blue-white lightning sphere in his hand shot forth with a boom at far beyond the speed of sound!

It did not collide head-on with any lightning blade. Instead, the instant they made contact, the Wind Release airflow around it generated a terrifying suction force, swallowing, shredding, and absorbing all five swift lightning blades!

Then, after absorbing the energy of the lightning blades, the Spiral Lightning Sphere swelled by a full circle, its speed increasing by two-thirds out of nowhere as it crashed into the ground before Azure Dragon's feet with the force to pierce through everything!

Boom—!!!

The earth wailed!

A massive crack several meters wide and bottomless spread madly forward from the impact point for nearly a hundred meters, barely stopping only when it slammed into the rock wall at the end of the mine.

The terrifying shockwave shook the entire mine, sending shattered stones raining down.

At the entrance, Darui's perpetually drowsy eyes widened into circles, his pupils abruptly shrinking to pinpoints!

"Th-this is impossible!" he cried out. "Wind and lightning repel each other! That's common sense in the ninja world! How can they possibly fuse so perfectly?!"

"Your common sense is merely my starting point." Xuan turned around, his cold gaze falling on Darui for the first time. "You use ninjutsu to kill. I use ninjutsu... to evolve."

Before his words had faded, his hands moved so quickly that they became nothing but a blur, forming a series of seals identical to Azure Dragon's.

No, not identical!

They were more than twice as fast as Azure Dragon's. Every seal angle was more precise, and the chakra flow more efficient!

Using only raw hand speed and bodily memory, he had perfectly replicated Lightning Release: Swift Wolf Claw!

Crackle!

Five lightning blades identical in form to the earlier ones, yet darker in color, sharper in aura, and more explosive in power, formed out of thin air. They hovered at Xuan's fingertips like five obedient hunting hounds.

"Y-you saw it only once and..." Azure Dragon completely broke down. The shock in his eyes transformed into fear, leaving behind only endless desolation.

Ten years of cultivation, the work of his entire life, was as fragile as paper before this man.

Xuan advanced step by step, ignoring Azure Dragon's despair and Darui's squad waiting outside in battle formation.

"You spent ten years researching it only to compensate for your innate meridian defect, to heal yourself and prolong your life." His voice was like a demon's whisper. "And I will use it to tear apart this world's rules."

He extended a hand toward the scroll flickering with electric light.

"Don't even think about it!"

A flash of crazed resolve passed through Azure Dragon's eyes. He bit through his fingertip and slammed his blood-covered hand onto the scroll's core rune!

Self-destruct sequence—activated!

The scroll instantly released a destructive radiance. The vast Lightning Release chakra stored within it and countless complex sealing formulas were about to collapse together, becoming an energy storm powerful enough to flatten the entire mine!

At the critical moment, the ocular power in Xuan's right eye erupted once more!

[Soul Devourer]!

An invisible, intangible spiritual force, vast as the sea, instantly spread from his pupil like a giant net cast across heaven and earth.

At the instant the scroll collapsed, the countless runes, data, and streams of information that carried all the knowledge of the Lightning Release Compression Model were forcibly captured, pulled apart, and absorbed by that net of spiritual power, flooding wildly into the depths of his right pupil!

A violent pain stabbed through Xuan's brain. A cold voice, one that did not belong to this world, echoed in his mind:

"Warning! High-dimensional knowledge cluster influx detected! Cognitive reconstruction protocol triggered!"

"Reconstruction complete... Crystalline neural branches in the right cerebral cortex have been generated..."

"New function unlocked: [Ninjutsu Reverse Analysis]!"

Boom—!!!

Amid an ear-splitting explosion, the entire mine completely collapsed. Massive rocks and chunks of ice fell like a torrential rain, swallowing everything.

"Pursue!" Darui roared, just as he was about to charge into the ruins when his vision suddenly went dark.

At some unknown moment, Baba Tesshin's iron sand had become a wall of sand that blotted out the sky, completely sealing their path.

Beyond the sand wall, the figures of Xuan and his two companions calmly vanished deeper into the endless blizzard.

Much later, when the dust settled, only Azure Dragon remained, kneeling amid the ruins in a daze.

He stared into the endless darkness and muttered, "So... so true revolution isn't creating rules and then escaping the system..."

"It is... crushing it outright."

The blizzard still raged along the evacuation route.

Alik, serving as their guide, had flickering eyes. Hidden within his sleeve, his fingers quietly formed a signal seal recognizable only to Hidden Cloud Village's tracking division.

He thought his movements were well concealed, but they did not escape those all-seeing eyes.

Uchiha Xuan's gaze abruptly turned cold.

The next second, a strand of iron sand thinner than a hair silently emerged from Alik's shadow and pierced precisely through his throat at a speed faster than neural reactions.

Alik did not even have time to let out a scream. His eyes widened as he fell stiffly into the snow, life leaving him instantly.

Baba Tesshin glanced at the corpse and asked in a low voice, "No survivors?"

Uchiha Xuan did not answer. He stopped and looked toward the faint lights on the distant horizon, marking Cloud-Thunder Gorge, the capital of the Land of Lightning.

"From this day onward," he said slowly. His voice was not loud, yet it carried an unquestionable authority, as though he were declaring it to the world. "Wherever my footsteps reach shall be forbidden ground."

The wind and snow seemed to grow fiercer.

The repercussions unleashed by the explosion and deaths in the Broken Spine Mountains were spreading wildly toward the Land of Lightning's center of power at a speed far exceeding the blizzard.

A greater storm was already brewing.