The wind and snow seemed to freeze at this moment.
The cold, satisfied curve on Hyuga Xiao's lips had yet to fully fade when a shriek of utter terror and despair exploded beside his ear.
"Watch out—!!!"
It was Kurenai Yuhi's voice.
That voice no longer carried the humility with which she had accepted orders earlier, nor the indifference she had shown while slaughtering enemies. It was a horror born from the depths of her soul, as though she were watching the entire world collapse before her eyes.
Hyuga Xiao's brow twitched almost imperceptibly.
He sensed no killing intent, detected no chakra fluctuations, and not even the slightest abnormality in the movement of the air.
On this snowfield stained red with blood, aside from him and Kurenai Yuhi kneeling amid the corpses, there was not a third living being.
Yet the Tenseigan, already at fifty percent fusion, caught an absolute "anomaly" at the very instant Kurenai Yuhi screamed.
At the edge of his vision, a hundred li away, deep within the gray clouds obscured by wind and snow.
A streak of pure, ultimate "black" silently bloomed.
It was not any known color, but the manifestation of... "nothingness."
It was like a fine needle forged from the void itself, like a spatial rift forcibly torn open, and like a line drawn upon the world's canvas with ink capable of erasing everything—a line leading to ultimate annihilation!
That black line ignored distance, ignored air resistance, ignored the howling wind and snow.
The instant it was born, it had already reached its destination.
Its target—Hyuga Xiao's brow!
[Shadow Sniping].
An ultimate technological weapon developed by the Starsea Alliance specifically to hunt high-energy lifeforms, based on spatial laws and anti-chakra particle theory.
What it fired was neither physical ammunition nor an energy beam.
It