Shengu Xuan simply held out his hand.
There was no earth-shaking eruption of chakra, no dazzling light from a technique, not even a single unnecessary movement. With the five fingers of his right hand spread and his palm facing upward, he casually raised it above his head, as though he meant to catch a leaf drifting down from a treetop.
And that meteor, powerful enough to flatten the entire battlefield and plunge every allied shinobi into the depths of despair, came crashing toward his palm with a sky-rending shriek and flames hot enough to melt steel!
Three hundred meters...
One hundred meters...
Fifty meters...
Ten meters...
At the moment of impact, everyone instinctively closed their eyes, expecting an apocalyptic explosion, expecting that arrogant young man to be ground to dust before absolute power.
But the expected explosion never came.
There was only an extremely dull, extremely brief thud, like a heavy hammer striking thick leather.
"Thud."
Shengu Xuan's palm caught the bottom of the meteor firmly.
His body sank an inch, and the immense pressure sent a visible ring of ripples through the air beneath his feet before everything steadied again. That burning meteor, over three hundred meters in diameter and weighing tens of thousands of tons, simply hovered above his palm, like a somewhat oversized toy held aloft by a mischievous child.
The flames went out.
The white-hot heat on the meteor's surface, produced by intense friction with the atmosphere, rapidly cooled and dimmed the instant it touched Shengu Xuan's palm, as though an invisible giant hand had snuffed out its source, leaving nothing but ordinary, pitted rock.
Even the dense chakra clinging to the meteor, which Madara used to control its trajectory and power, was violently torn apart and dispersed before the Ox Talisman's "boundless strength," an absolute