The air in the training grounds froze.
The moment Hyuga Xiao removed his mask, those azure eyes swirling with starlight plunged the entire stands into deathly silence. Those were not Byakugan—at least, not the Byakugan they knew.
"Tenseigan..." Mifune murmured, his grip on his sword hilt tightening slightly.
The laziness vanished completely from Darui's face. He stared at Xiao's eyes, his lips curving into an almost crazed smile. "So that's it. No wonder Hidden Cloud was willing to pay such a price to capture you."
Before his words had faded, Darui vanished.
It was not the Body Flicker Technique.
Within Xiao's Tenseigan vision, Darui's trajectory stretched into a warped afterimage—it was not that he was fast, but that the flow of time around him had accelerated. Within 0.3 seconds, Darui had appeared at Xiao's left side, his hand blade wrapped in black lightning slashing straight for his neck.
Xiao twisted aside, gathering a chakra sphere in his right hand to meet the attack.
At the moment they should have collided, Darui's hand blade suddenly slowed.
No, it had not slowed—time around Xiao had been slowed.
"Bang!"
The chakra sphere grazed Darui's arm, while the hand blade struck Xiao's shoulder squarely. Black lightning exploded, blasting Xiao away. He crashed through a stone pillar at the edge of the training grounds, sending shattered rock flying.
A collective gasp rose from the stands.
"What was that?" a samurai asked in a low voice. "Darui's movements... I couldn't see them."
"It wasn't that you couldn't see them." Mifune's voice was grave. "Time was distorted."
From the smoke and dust, Xiao slowly rose to his feet. The clothes over his left shoulder had been scorched by lightning, leaving blackened marks on his skin, but the wound was healing at a visible rate—the self-healing ability of