Hoshi only felt a searing pain across his back, the burning agony making him cry out despite himself.
Hearing Hoshi's scream, Kirū burst into laughter.
"That's right, just like that. Can you feel the pain? I'll make you spend the rest of your life suffering like this every single day.
"If I'm dead, don't think you'll get off easy either. This is my—Lord Jashin's—punishment for you."
"Cursed Technique: Fear Beyond Death Limit."
As Kirū's words fell, his body rapidly withered. All the blood in his body was drawn out by some unknown force, forming a blood sphere the size of a head.
The sphere of condensed blood spun once before shooting straight toward Hoshi's back.
Enduring the pain in his back, Hoshi flung out his Dagger, trying to stop that damned thing. But when the Dagger struck the blood sphere, it passed straight through it. The sphere rippled briefly before returning to normal, completely unchanged.
The blood sphere slammed into Hoshi's back, and in that instant, he felt as though his entire back had been ripped off alive.
The overwhelming pain made him let out a miserable howl before he collapsed unconscious.
Neither Kirū's mummified corpse nor the unconscious Hoshi saw that, after striking Hoshi's back, the blood sphere had actually fused with the ghostly blue Chakra flames burning there.
After the ghostly blue Chakra flames fused with the blood sphere, they left behind a massive ghostly blue skull-shaped mark on Hoshi's back.
The remaining Chakra flames continued to compress, finally gathering in the skull's eye sockets and becoming ghostfire that burned within them.
When Hoshi woke up, he found his head resting on Tsunade's lap. The moment he looked up, he saw Tsunade, her eyes brimming with tears, holding his hand and softly muttering something.
But his ears