A desperate situation

Facing an opponent of Ran En's caliber, Asami Ri knew they could not afford to fight separately.

"Shin, suppress him from the left! Tekka, look for an opening to attack with Fire Release!" Asami Ri barked, his hands racing through hand seals. "Forget defense. I'll cover you!"

Asami Ri struck first. He formed hand seals, gathering several azure Lightning Balls between his palms.

Under his precise Chakra control, the Lightning Balls did not strike Ran En directly. Instead, they darted and burst around him, their brilliant flashes and chaotic currents disrupting his sight and senses.

"Cheap tricks..." Ran En snorted in disdain and started to raise a hand to disperse them.

"Hah!" Using the lightning's glare as cover, Hyuga Shin shot toward Ran En's rear flank like an arrow loosed from a bow, his palms blurring. "Eight Trigrams Thirty-Two Palms!"

At the same time, Uchiha Tekka's Sharingan locked onto where Ran En's feet would land, and he spat several bursts of flame.

"Fire Release: Phoenix Flower Jutsu!"

Faced with their pincer attack, Ran En did not even move his feet.

A cruel smile crossed his fair face, and he casually swept one hand. "Water Release: Water-Style Wall!"

A thick wall of water rose from the ground out of nowhere. It extinguished the Phoenix Flower Fire and absorbed most of the force behind Hyuga Shin's Gentle Fist strikes with its dense currents.

"Too slow, too weak. You aren't even worth using Storm Release on."

Ran En turned his hand and pressed downward, sending the current in his palm into the ground. "Lightning Release: Earth Flow!"

Violent electricity spread across the earth like a spiderweb, heading straight for Hyuga Shin and Tekka before they could regain their footing.

"Not a chance! Earth Release: Earth-Style Wall!" Asami Ri timed it perfectly and slammed his hands onto the ground.

A low stone wall tore through the ground, cutting off the current heading for the two and stopping it dead.

"Tch. These small fry are such a nuisance." Ran En frowned slightly as his attack was blocked.

He began to move, his figure becoming a white streak through the trees. Even without Storm Release, his taijutsu and basic release techniques as a Kumogakure Jonin were enough to overwhelm all three.

Over the next several minutes, the battle became a desperate stalemate.

With his terrifying Body Flicker Technique and combined Water and Lightning Release Ninjutsu, Ran En drove the three back again and again.

Though Hyuga Shin's Byakugan could follow his movements, his body often could not keep pace. Several times, Ran En's heavy punches nearly shattered his ribs.

Uchiha Tekka attempted to use Genjutsu, but Ran En kept Lightning Release Chakra circulating across his body, forcibly dispelling its effects.

Asami Ri was the busiest of them all.

He constantly used Lightning Balls to disrupt Ran En's vision and Earth-Style Walls to snatch his teammates from death.

Whenever Ran En moved in for a killing blow, Asami Ri managed to interfere with a kunai, throwing his attack off by a few inches.

"Still alive? Still alive?!" Ran En sent Uchiha Tekka skidding more than ten meters with a side kick, only for Asami Ri to block the bolt of lightning he casually fired afterward with an earthen wall.

His delicate features had twisted into something vicious, and a vein throbbed faintly on his forehead.

To him, killing these three brats should have taken mere seconds. Yet now they were like three flies that would not leave him alone.

He had kept them under constant pressure, and every one of them was wounded and gasping for breath, yet their eyes only grew calmer and more resolute.

"Bastards... you damned Konoha ninja!" Ran En felt a humiliation unlike anything he had ever known.

He, a noble inheritor of Storm Release, had been held up by three chunin for this long.

"I'm done playing." Ran En stopped, his killing intent seeming to freeze the air around him.

At last, he stopped toying with them. He brought his hands together before his chest in an intricate seal, and dazzling white light gathered at his fingertips once more, more violent than ever.

"I'll vaporize you along with this entire forest!"

Asami Ri wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth and glanced at Shin and Tekka beside him. "Watch out. He's losing his patience. The real fight starts now."

"Storm Release: Laser Circus!"

In an instant, dozens of brilliant white lasers erupted from Ran En's fingertips like writhing dragons.

Rather than traveling in straight lines, the beams bent and spiraled eerily through the air, shrieking as they targeted the three's blind spots from every direction.

"Damn it! Storm Release!" Asami Ri's pupils contracted. He reacted with incredible speed, completing his hand seals almost instinctively. "Earth Release: Earth-Style Wall!"

Boom! Boom! Boom! Three thick stone walls erupted from the ground, attempting to enclose and protect them.

Yet the stone walls, sturdy enough to withstand exploding explosive tags, were as helpless against the Storm Release lasers as butter before a hot knife.

Whoosh—thunk! The lasers instantly pierced the first and second walls, and the third was riddled with holes in the blink of an eye.

"Scatter!" Asami Ri roared.

The three scrambled and rolled in different directions to escape.

Relying on his Byakugan's all-around vision, Hyuga Shin frantically twisted and dodged through the forest of lasers. But the beams seemed to have eyes, tracing graceful arcs through the air as they pursued him relentlessly.

"Aah!" A scream rang out.

Uchiha Tekka's Sharingan could see the beams' trajectories, but his body could only move so fast.

Two lasers pierced his left shoulder and right thigh, spraying blackened blood.

He slammed into a tree trunk, the rapidly spinning tomoe in his eyes losing focus instantly under the excruciating pain.

"Tekka!" In the instant Hyuga Shin's attention wavered, several lasers cut off every escape route.

Gritting his teeth, he forced out more chakra than his body could afford. "Pseudo-Rotation!"

A blue-green hemisphere of chakra had barely formed when Ran En sneered and flicked his fingers.

The lasers shooting toward him merged in midair into a thick pillar of light that slammed brutally into the defensive barrier of Pseudo-Rotation.

Bang! The hemisphere shattered instantly. The immense shock wave hurled Hyuga Shin away, blood gushing from his mouth. The veins around his eyes turned dark and bruised from the chakra backlash, and he collapsed limply into the mud.

As the dust cleared, the once-dense forest had become a field of devastation.

The intense heat had melted through the trees. Countless blackened craters pocked the ground, and the stench of scorched human flesh hung in the air.

Asami Ri knelt on one knee, his left hand clamped over the wound a passing beam had carved into his side. Warm liquid kept seeping between his fingers.

"This is what your desperate persistence earned you." Ran En slowly crossed the scorched earth, his short golden hair looking especially pure beneath the moonlight—and especially cold.

He extended a finger, a tiny point of white light forming at its tip again as he aimed at Asami Ri's forehead.

"Small fry, you've really annoyed me. But as a reward, I'll send you on your way first."

Asami Ri felt the searing heat against his forehead. Blood loss had begun to blur his vision, yet his eyes, hidden in shadow, still showed no sign of surrender.

Hyuga Shin lay facedown in the mud, half his face stained red with blood.

On the verge of losing consciousness, he seemed to return to the year he had turned three.

It had been a gloomy afternoon. A cold cursed seal had taken shape on his forehead, engraving the Caged Bird Seal into his soul.

He remembered the Main Family elder's lofty, merciless gaze, and his parents' muffled sobs behind a screen.

"You belong to the Branch Family. Your life exists to protect the Main Family."

Those words had shackled him throughout his life.

Even though he displayed talent far beyond his peers, even though he could easily see through the Main Family children's techniques, he could never learn their closely guarded secret arts.

He had struggled and twisted beneath that rejection and resentment until this very day.

No... I don't want to die here. I don't want to die a meaningless death here as some expendable pawn!

Hyuga Shin's bloodshot Byakugan snapped wide open.

The countless times he had secretly watched the Main Family practice flashed through his mind: the flow of chakra, the chakra points in the palms, the frequency of chakra compression... Techniques he should never have learned, yet had long since memorized, suddenly fell into place.

Hiss! As his chakra fluctuated violently, visible white vapor erupted from the chakra points all over his body.

Not far away, Uchiha Tekka, slumped against the tree trunk, stared fixedly at Ran En as he prepared to kill Asami Ri.

Agonizing pain battered his mind, but stronger than the pain were his fear of loss and his rage.

As an outsider marginalized by Konoha, he had grown used to whispers behind his back and to being alone.

But during his time teamed up with Asami Ri and Hyuga Shin, he had experienced something called equality for the first time.

He did not have to face people pointing and whispering behind his back, or worry about incompetent teammates. They were all outsiders, and that made them alike.

After all this time... I finally found people I could trust to watch my back...

"You bastard... stop..." Uchiha Tekka growled. A cold surge of Chakra suddenly welled up from deep within his brain, gathering in his eyes like the waters of an icy pool.

The blurred image of the single tomoe, scattered by his severe injuries, spun and collided wildly in his eyes. Then the lone tomoe suddenly split and stretched against the blood-red background, settling into two ink-black shapes.

The Two-Tomoe Sharingan!