Kakashi raised his hand to scatter the iron-sand steel cones that were attacking to kill, then dodged the blade flying in from the blind spot behind him. Both feet stepped on the walls of the Roran ruins, and a few beads of sweat appeared on his forehead.
He really wanted to breathe heavily, but he couldn't.
Just now, Sasori controlled the Third Kazekage puppet to spray a large amount of poisonous mist.
Because it was an open-air environment, the poison mist quickly dispersed with the wind.
But Kakashi was not a rookie fresh out of training.
Masters of poison usually prepare in two ways, part of the poison mist is colored, at a glance you can tell it's deadly; and another part of the poison mist is colorless and odorless, denser than air, and after release, it will "sink" below.
As long as you run quickly, fight, breathe heavily, this part of the poison mist that sank to the ground will be inhaled, and you will unknowingly be poisoned.
Kakashi's Sharingan was slowly spinning, he turned back to glance in the direction of the core battlefield.
The earthquake not long ago was simply too terrifying. Now the ground beneath their feet had opened up with one bottomless fissure after another.
'Ryosuke… should be fine, right?'
The thought flashed by, and Sasori chuckled lightly,
"You still have time to worry about others?"
A whistling sound appeared beside Kakashi's ears.
Only to see the Third Kazekage's arms continuously extending outward, one becoming two, two becoming three, in the blink of an eye endless, as if it were the True Several Thousand Hands of the First Hokage.
And that wasn't all. The most famous technique of the Third Kazekage was Magnet Release: Iron Sand Manipulation.
The iron sand in the sky transformed into countless fine steel needles, falling toward Kakashi from all directions, sealing off all of his escape routes.
"I remember you're called the 'Copy Ninja.' This move, why don't you try copying it?"
Sasori's voice was full of mockery.
If not for Obito being overly arrogant, and if not for some past entanglement between Kakashi and Sasori, then for such a mediocre ninja, Sasori wouldn't even have had the desire to make a move.
What kind of person is called the "Copy Ninja"?
Merely someone without any personal traits.
Copying other people's ninjutsu looks like talent. But true genius is creation.
Even if copying, it should be after copying that you fuse, adjust, and then create joint ninjutsu.
Kakashi wiped the sweat off his forehead.
Puppet jutsu, kekkei genkai, those abilities he truly could not copy. The best way to deal with a puppeteer was close combat, to eliminate the caster.
Before, Kakashi had used Water Clone Jutsu to succeed once, ripping Sasori's Akatsuki robe.
But he hadn't expected, beneath Sasori's robe, his entire body was a puppet, missing the chance to finish him off, turning instead into a stalemate of showing each other's abilities.
Endurance battle was Kakashi's weakness.
The previous water clone, the opened Sharingan, just those two alone had consumed a lot of his chakra.
If not for Grandma Chiyo holding him back, plus the sudden earthquake.
Kakashi would already have lost.
But on the battlefield, there is no "if." He hadn't lost, hadn't died, and that was the reality.
Kakashi kept calm. The desert winds, under the scorching ground fire, became ever hotter. Sweat soaked his clothes, sticking to his body, extremely uncomfortable.
'Really want to take a cold shower, then drink a glass of ice soda.'
The subconscious thought flashed by, Kakashi continued calculating his remaining stamina and chakra, analyzing the enemy's ability details, looking for that fleeting opportunity for a counter-kill.
Sasori lightly leapt up, dodging the rising ground fire beneath his feet, and also avoiding Grandma Chiyo's puppet strike.
He stood atop a high platform, overlooking Kakashi as he spoke, "For a mediocrity like you, it ends here…"
Sasori's ten fingers danced as if playing piano keys, manipulating the Third Kazekage to soar into the air, both hands forming seals.
"Whether your life, or the entanglement between us, it should end now."
"Magnet Release: Iron Sand World Method!"
The summoned iron sand formed countless straight, sharp "lines," like withered trees.
Countless lines crisscrossed, covering the entire battlefield, and in almost an instant sealed off all of Kakashi's movement paths.
Countless iron sand lines pierced into his body, but avoided Kakashi's vitals, because, the Third Kazekage's arm mechanism ejected a steel blade, flying over, about to chop off Kakashi's head.
Sasori's parents had died under the White Fang's blade. He always claimed he didn't care.
Yet, whether out of family bonds or out of the dignity of his slain parents, Sasori wanted to use a "blade" to chop off the head of the White Fang's son, so that cause and effect would be settled.
Whoosh~
At the instant the blade touched Kakashi, a piercing thunderous roar like thousands of birds chirping resounded.
Kakashi didn't retreat but advanced, grabbing the iron sand barrier, his whole body bursting with countless currents, Chidori's lightning instantly transmitted along the iron sand to the Third Kazekage just a step away.
Sasori's chakra threads snapped under the biting current.
"What?!"
Sasori hadn't expected Kakashi, with such severe injuries, to still be able to unleash such a powerful ninjutsu.
Whether Kakashi was strong or not was debatable, but this endurance…
Truly worthy of being called a ninja.
Kakashi took the chance to swing his Raikiri, cutting the Third Kazekage puppet into pieces.
The iron sand barrier collapsed, countless black iron sand fell, obscuring Sasori's vision, while Kakashi's figure flickered within it.
Ssst!
Kakashi burst out from the ground behind Sasori.
Sasori's expression drastically changed. Looking again at the "Kakashi" running ahead in the falling iron sand, in his hand there was no Raikiri, just a plain kunai.
Sasori immediately realized, "Kakashi, at the instant he shattered the Third Kazekage and the iron sand barrier collapsed obscuring vision, had already used a clone technique, while his real body slipped underground."
Kakashi's Raikiri stabbed fiercely toward the special heart core marked with the word "Scorpion."
His Sharingan clearly saw that Sasori's puppet-controlling threads all ultimately flowed into this heart.
As long as this core heart was destroyed, the Red Sand Scorpion would be defeated.
Bang!
Facing the stabbing Raikiri, the heart embedded in the chest, with a gust of air, shot out like a bullet, precisely dodging the strike.
"It's not over yet!"
Over the rushing iron sand, Kakashi's clone threw the kunai in his hand toward the unprotected heart.
Behind the kunai hung an explosive tag.
Hit means death.
Kakashi stared tightly at that spinning kunai.
"I must admit, even if you're a mediocrity, you're an outstanding mediocrity."
Kakashi suddenly turned back, stunned to see Sasori's heart, just missed, the Scorpion raised his hands, flames spewing from his palms.
One jet of flame destroyed the clone. The heart that had shot out, under the pull of chakra threads, returned to Sasori's chest.
Another jet of flame, like a flaming venomous snake, rushed at Kakashi.
He wanted to dodge, or use ninjutsu, but…
Kakashi's body was erupting with wounds large and small.
To shatter the Third Kazekage's iron sand barrier, he had already forced his body to the limit.
Seeing he was about to be burned to death, chakra threads fell onto Kakashi, dragging him back.
Grandma Chiyo.
She ultimately couldn't bear to watch Sasori kill Kakashi. This wasn't for Kakashi, it was for Sasori.
Shisui was dead, if Kakashi also died, the enraged Ryosuke might kill her grandson.
That was the wisdom of the elderly.
"Old hag, don't get in the way!"
But Sasori didn't care.
The fallen Third Kazekage puppet raised a hand, barely controlling an iron sand blade to cut off Grandma Chiyo's chakra threads, and Kakashi fell again.
This time, no one could save him.
Sasori softly said, "Go peacefully to death, White Fang's son!"
Kakashi heard that name, and closed his eyes.
Yes, White Fang's son.
Not Hatake Kakashi.
Kakashi knew very well that between him and his father there was a big gap. Calling him nicely a Copy Ninja, harshly it was that he had no real signature technique to be called his own.
Even Raikiri, more than ten years had passed, and it was still that same one.
Aside from increased chakra, growing taller, more combat experience, he was no different from his past self.
His dearest friends died in that summer.
So did his soul.
The blazing flames approached, eyes closed Kakashi seemed to return to that summer.
He saw his father hanging from the beam, saw the boy Obito crushed under the boulder, saw Rin with her chest pierced through, and his teacher and teacher's wife who died in the Nine-Tails' attack.
'This summer… really has lasted too long, too long.'
The flames that surged toward him suddenly vanished.
Sasori stared blankly at the disappearing flames and at Kakashi with his left eye shut. He didn't understand what had happened. He opened his mouth,
"You..."
Kakashi climbed up from the ground.
"In my past, there was a summer that could not be forgotten, could not be overcome."
Because it couldn't be forgotten or overcome, from then on Kakashi became careless, his body living and working, but his soul remained in the past.
"But…"
Kakashi looked toward the core battlefield.
In Gorin City, he witnessed tragedy, but also new hope and the birth of history.
In Konoha Village, Tsunade was rewriting past mistakes, letting more people stand under the sun.
Everyone around him was moving forward, all working hard to reduce the number of "summer ghosts."
"You're right, compared to my father, my talent falls far short. I don't have his gifts, but I shouldn't have his cowardice either."
"I can't stay in the past forever."
"The summer that trapped me is over, what comes next is..."
Kakashi drew a kunai from his waist, his left eye slowly opened.
Sasori saw it clearly, the tomoe of the Sharingan curved inward, changing shape, finally forming…
Mangekyō Sharingan.
"Autumn has arrived."
———
[Underground Battlefield]
Obito was fleeing for his life.
He turned his head to glance, and with this one glance, his soul was almost scared right out of him.
Ryosuke was sticking right to his back, his face nearly pressed against Obito's face.
Obito shivered in fright, shouting, "Get lost!"
Before he even finished speaking, Obito died once again.
He resurrected in a corner a dozen meters away.
The Sharingan he used to cast Izanagi was now closed forever.
Two minutes and twenty-four seconds.
Obito's condition was worse than he had imagined, but fortunately, by using death, his intangibility time recovered a little.
He ran in the direction of Hiruko.
"Obito, I was struck by a flame attack," Deidara suddenly said.
"Flame attack?"
Obito glanced at the ground fire. He hadn't activated "absorption," so how could flames have entered the Kamui space?
"Could it be your explosives self-ignited?"
Deidara was silent for a few seconds, his voice slightly trembling, carrying a trace of anger as he retorted,
"Are you questioning my art?"
This was clearly a sign Deidara was about to break free from the genjutsu.
Obito's head throbbed.
Having Ryosuke chasing him relentlessly from behind was already irritating enough, and now at this critical moment Deidara was becoming unreliable.
But at last, they had arrived.
Obito saw Hiruko a hundred meters away.
At the same time, Hiruko also saw Obito, and even more clearly saw Ryosuke right behind him, radiating murderous intent.
The two Akatsuki teammates, their expressions changed instantly.
Obito broke into a smile.
Hiruko turned pale in shock.
How could he not see what Obito was trying to do? This was obviously failing to act cool, and instead trying to divert disaster onto others and use the chaos to escape.
"Isn't that my plan?!"
Hiruko turned and was about to run, but he didn't expect Rasa, who had been lukewarm and passive before, to suddenly get spirited when he saw Ryosuke arrive.
A storm of gold dust danced, blocking Hiruko's path.
"Ha..."
Obito laughed loudly, once again activating intangibility, chasing up to Hiruko, ghostlike "merging" into Hiruko's body, while saying, "Help me block once, succeed and you will be rewarded with gratitude."
Hiruko finally couldn't hold back anymore, cursing out loud, "Gratitude your grandma's leg!"
At this moment, Obito and Hiruko were like bugged overlapping models in a video game.
A shadow loomed, Hiruko raised his hand, "Ryosuke, wait a moment..."
Wait?
Ryosuke didn't want to wait even one second.
Doesn't matter if it was Obito or Hiruko.
Since they came, then don't think about leaving.
Ryosuke stepped forward, golden flames entwined with ground fire coiling around his arm, forming strands of chaotic firelight.
He clenched his fist, and smashed it down in a punch.
"Steel Release: Hardening!"
Hiruko could only, at the very last moment, cast ninjutsu, his whole body turning metallic to withstand the power of this punch.
Bang!
The fist was like a falling meteor, heavily landing on Hiruko's chest.
The collision produced a booming sound like morning bell and evening drum, reverberating across the sky, shattering pieces of rosy clouds.
Taking this punch head-on, Hiruko didn't make a sound.
Obito was stunned.
He hadn't expected this newly recruited member, who looked skinny and weak, scholarly and refined, to actually be such a tough, iron-blooded man.
The next second, Hiruko went flying backward, so fast that he left a ring of sonic boom clouds in the air.
Obito, still half a beat slower while in intangibility, stayed in midair, turned his head, and realized, where was the iron-blooded man?
Hiruko's eyes had rolled back white. Clearly, he had been knocked unconscious with a single punch.
He crashed to the ground, smashing out a deep crater, lying there as if asleep, motionless.
"Useless guy!"
Obito cursed under his breath. He had no intention of saving his teammate. Taking advantage of his overlapping with Hiruko's body, Obito once again covered himself in explosive clay.
Maintaining intangibility, carrying a body full of explosive clay, he charged toward Gaara.
Ryosuke saw through Obito's plan.
Since he couldn't capture Gaara alive, he might as well kill him outright, at worst just wait for the One-Tail to revive.
This was exactly why Ryosuke wasn't willing to leave the intangible Obito and go kill Hiruko, Sasori, and Hidan first.
Obito's intangibility & explosion tactic, others simply had no way to counter it.
But with Ryosuke here, there was no way he would let Obito succeed in killing.
Time stopped. Ryosuke pulled Gaara, Rasa, and Kohaku behind him, removing them from the explosion range.
Then he released time-stop, flicked his wrist, and his entire forearm exploded.
Flesh and blood turned into flocks of birds, continuously flying through Obito's body, probing his intangibility state.
Even after seeing this countless times, Obito still felt unparalleled dread, his eyeballs bulging from their sockets, teeth grinding so hard they rattled.
The time he had regained for intangibility by dying was about to end, in truth, Obito hadn't had time to rest at all before.
He really had no other trump cards left.
"Let me out."
Deidara's voice appeared at his ear.
His voice was weak, no longer dull, clearly freed from the genjutsu's control.
But in his tone, there wasn't anger toward Obito, on the contrary…
There was incomparable joy.
Inside the Kamui space, Deidara grinned wide, his chest bared, his whole skin turning semi-transparent black. At his heart, a mouth was chomping down mouthfuls of clay.
"Let me out!"
Deidara said again.
His obsession, along with his admiration for Ryosuke's earlier large-scale explosion, had allowed Deidara to a certain extent to break free from the shackles of genjutsu.
Now, Deidara was like someone drunk and dreaming, muddled, half-dream half-awake, thinking Obito was crap, Hiruko too.
Of everyone here, only he and Ryosuke could be considered like-minded artists.
He had already seen Ryosuke's art.
Brilliant, magnificent, explosions and earthquakes stretching hundreds of miles, perhaps a height he could never reach in his whole life.
So…
Deidara, as a "junior," wanted to show Ryosuke his ultimate masterpiece.
C0, the self-detonation bomb.
"Madman!"
Obito glanced at Ryosuke, then at Deidara inside the Kamui space.
"You're all madmen!"
"Including me!"
Obito shouted through clenched teeth, canceling his intangibility right in front of Ryosuke.
He pulled Deidara, almost transparent, out of the Kamui space.
At the same time, the birds crashed into Obito's body.
The seemingly gentle and cute little birds suddenly turned into demons, burrowing into his body, crazily tearing at his flesh.
Obito didn't care, throwing Deidara out, and hurriedly prepared to retreat into the Kamui space.
He shouted at Ryosuke, who had already closed to within five steps, "Quick, save him! Your teammate is about to explode!"
"I'm just a nameless nobody, stop chasing me already! I beg you!"
Obito's hoarse roar resounded across the battlefield.
Ryosuke just looked at Deidara in the sky, and immediately felt an extreme sense of threat.
He didn't hesitate in the slightest, throwing a golden-spiral iron ball at Obito, then turning to grab Gaara, Rasa, and Kohaku, and tossing them into the ghost room.
BOOM!
A massive, starfish-shaped blast appeared, spanning nearly ten kilometers.
This already-ruined Roran ruin was utterly pulverized into fragments.
This was Deidara's strongest artwork.
Ryosuke endured the blast with his body alone, his flesh annihilated again and again in the explosion, again and again regenerating.
This was the most terrifying attack Ryosuke had faced since arriving in the Naruto world.
If not for detonating the Dragon Vein, giving him infinite regeneration, Ryosuke might really have died in this explosion.
He turned his head, looking toward Kakashi and the others' direction.
They were also within the blast's range. Could Kakashi and Grandma Chiyo survive this?
———
On another battlefield, hundreds of puppets formed a defensive circle, blocking the explosion's shockwave.
Luckily, they weren't in the core area, and only had to block the impact from one direction.
Sasori protected Grandma Chiyo within the puppet defense net, while Kakashi was cut off outside the net.
Kakashi had no other option. He could only throw in everything he had, opening Kamui to absorb all the explosion's impact coming from the front.
At the same time, in the Kamui space, Obito collapsed on the ground, panting heavily.
"At least… I survived."
He looked up, showing a survivor's smile.
The next second, the white light of the explosion fell from the sky.
═❀═❀═❀═❀═❀═❀═
patreon.com/XenosX
🥳Joining Patreon keeps me motivated and eager to work diligently, so please consider joining.🥰