The clouds overhead grew heavier, two endless slabs of leaden gray that made the strip of torn, molten gold between them look all the more dazzling and strange.
Moton, still holding his blade, had been split cleanly in half along with the chair on the tribunal platform. More than a dozen broad coffins stood in the plaza's center. The people of the Land of Waves crowded together in restless waves, orange and black bodies intermingling as they collided and overlapped, while roars, gasps, and screams tore through the air without end.
Yet on the far side of the plaza, it was unnervingly quiet.
Kurosuki Raiga crossed his twin blades over his chest, shoulders slightly hunched, posture oddly tense. His emerald eyes studied the two figures before him with their unmistakable silhouettes, and the madness on his face had faded. That wind blade from absurd range had been enough to chill his brain to the bone.
He didn't recognize the beautiful girl.
But the tall man beside her, silver hair, face mask, one visible eye, Konoha forehead protector, that signature look was too distinctive.
He was certain he should know him.
"You're Konoha's Copy Ninja, Hatake Kakashi!" Raiga finally remembered, his mind snapping into clarity.
He angled his head slightly, never once taking his gaze off Kakashi and Konome Taketori.
"Ranmaru. Be ready to feed me chakra at any time."
"Yes…" Ranmaru answered from behind him, voice trembling.
The boy was shaking so badly he could barely stand. That nameless fear had hollowed him out until he was almost paralyzed. If Raiga hadn't dragged him off the platform a moment ago, Ranmaru would have been cut down by that lightning-fast Wind Release.
"Kakashi-sensei really is famous." Konome's lips twitched, trying and failing to keep a straight face. "Copy Ninja" was fine, but something about the way Raiga said it made her want to laugh.
She couldn't help imagining some ridiculous "Konoha Technician" working at a massage parlor in the Land of Fire, and Kakashi stepping out in his mask like the world's most deadpan masseur.
It wasn't that masseurs were bad.
It was the mismatch with Kakashi that made it hilarious.
"If you want to laugh, go ahead," Kakashi muttered, catching her barely suppressed smile. "Soon enough you won't be able to."
Annoyed though he was, he never loosened his focus on Raiga.
"The Thunder Demon of the Hidden Mist," Kakashi said, calling out Raiga's own epithet in return.
Elite jōnin across the Five Great Nations often carried nicknames: Zabuza the Demon of the Hidden Mist, Might Guy the Blue Beast, and so on.
Those titles were not meant to boost enemy morale.
It was the opposite.
A title meant intelligence had been gathered. It meant the enemy was no longer a blank page. If a clash happened, you could aim your response.
Take "Thunder Demon." The name wasn't flattering, but anyone who heard it understood immediately: Lightning Release specialist.
So you avoided fighting him with Earth Release if you could help it.
Likewise, when Raiga exposed Kakashi's identity, he was signaling that Kakashi's Sharingan was on his radar. The moment Raiga told Ranmaru to keep chakra flowing, he was clearly guarding against genjutsu.
Konome could still find humor in it now.
But once her own abilities were fully exposed, she had no doubt the world would slap some absurd title on her too. Something like "Heavy Tank," or worse.
Why nicknames at all?
First, on a battlefield, you often didn't know the other person's real name. A title was easier.
Second, the human brain was unreliable, especially under stress. You could know an intelligence report perfectly and still blank out at the worst moment, like forgetting key answers during an exam, only to remember them once you'd already walked out.
But battle wasn't an exam.
Forget one critical detail, and the price was life.
So shinobi used exaggerated, memorable epithets in place of plain names, to brand hard-earned intelligence into the mind.
Kakashi and Raiga trading titles was a warning wrapped in a duel of presence.
I know who you are.
How much each of them truly knew, whether they understood each other's trump cards, whether they had counters prepared, no one could tell.
That uncertainty itself was part of the game.
While Kakashi and Raiga tested each other with psychological pressure, Konome and Ranmaru were already engaged in a real clash of dōjutsu.
Veins swelled at the corners of Konome's eyes like roots crawling across stone, and the pale gaze of her Byakugan spread outward.
But once again, in this tiny Land of Waves, her all-seeing eyes met a wall.
Behind Raiga, two glaring crimson lights burned like headlights cutting through night.
They stabbed into her vision until the world turned red.
A faint crimson chakra reflection wrapped Raiga and Ranmaru completely, airtight as a shell. The meridians and chakra flow that Konome could normally read with ease became blurred, smeared, and indistinct.
All she could catch were faint afterimages. Even bone outlines looked as if they were buried behind thick layers of fat, their contours unclear.
The Red Eyes.
A strange kekkei genkai, almost as if it had been born specifically to counter the Byakugan. It carried the Byakugan's strengths, long-range sight and penetration, yet it could also create chakra mirages to deceive and disrupt a Byakugan user's perception.
Konome wasn't especially familiar with Raiga. She didn't recall him having some terrifying signature ninjutsu beyond the sheer ferocity of Kiba.
But she remembered Ranmaru clearly.
The so-called Byakugan killer.
And the scarlet haze filling her sight now proved it wasn't an empty boast.
It made Konome more cautious.
Shinobi battles were not a simple exchange of punches and kicks.
Even a lion hunting a rabbit used full strength, because no one ever knew what secret technique the other side might be holding.
Even Kaguya Ōtsutsuki, who was practically immortal, had been sealed for a thousand years because of one mistake.
The more experience you had, the more careful you became.
Veteran shinobi meeting unfamiliar opponents would rather throw every kunai and shuriken they owned first, testing and probing, only moving into close combat once they'd mapped the danger.
Konome didn't go that far.
But she was only a shadow clone. If she got nicked badly enough and popped back to Konoha, Kakashi and the others would be forced to face Raiga and Ranmaru together, and that could turn into a real fight.
At the same time, Ranmaru, eyes blazing red, trembled behind Raiga.
His frail body was pinned by fear, like something frozen in a glacier. Shivering, he leaned close to Raiga's ear and whispered:
"The silver-haired man's chakra… it's not weaker than yours. His muscle and bone density are high, his taijutsu shouldn't be bad. His hands show repeated traces of minor electric trauma. He uses a Lightning Release technique with extremely advanced nature transformation, often."
He swallowed, forcing himself to continue.
"And the girl… there's a barrier around her body. It blocks my sight. I can't see through it. She should also be a dōjutsu user. Her ocular power is terrifying. Even the Red Eyes can't properly fool her vision. I can only blur her line of sight with chakra mirages."
Ranmaru's voice shook harder.
"Watch that girl. She's truly dangerous."
As if worried Raiga still wouldn't grasp it, he added, trembling:
"She's a hundred times more dangerous than that man."
Raiga's heart sank.
Ranmaru's Red Eyes could see through things, yet her body had a barrier specifically countering it. If it was coincidence, fine.
If it was intelligence leakage, then it was a disaster.
And as for the danger Ranmaru sensed, Raiga didn't need anyone to tell him.
He could feel it himself.
That fear was like ocean waves, battering his mind again and again, forcing his body into rigid tension. He hadn't felt this kind of bone-deep dread in a very long time.
That was not fear Hatake Kakashi could produce.
And mixed with it was something else.
A hungry, violent craving.
With no warning, lightning spilled from Raiga's crossed blades. It flashed for less than half a second, and then instantly filled to bursting.
Lightning Release: Kiba!
Raiga flung his twin swords apart, horns of electricity forming between them as his chakra surged.
Boom!
A terrifying serpent of lightning rose from the blades, branching like a living tree, and slammed toward Konome and Kakashi, swallowing their vision in an instant.
"I'm going to hold a glorious funeral for you!"
His hoarse roar, thick with brutal delight, thundered through the plaza.
Among the Seven Swords of the Mist, Kiba's offensive speed ranked at the top. Because of the sword's nature, Raiga didn't need hand seals to use Lightning Release. Combined with the raw speed of lightning itself, the number of powerful enemies who had died under this strike was beyond counting.
Just as he expected, the lightning poured outward in a flood. The plaza lit up white-hot as Konome and Kakashi were swallowed by the wide-area blast with nowhere to dodge.
They were finished.
The thought of giving these two enemies a funeral made madness creep back into Raiga's eyes.
"D-don't relax," Ranmaru stammered, dumping ice water over Raiga's excitement. "Their chakra hasn't weakened…"
Before he could finish, the Red Eyes caught something.
A warped ripple.
Completely transparent, like vacuum.
Under the blinding lightning, it was so subtle it looked like nothing more than heat-distorted air.
But Ranmaru's hair stood on end.
That vacuum blade had sliced Moton cleanly in half just moments ago.
"Run!" he screamed.
No hesitation.
Raiga's entire body flashed with lightning, wrapping both of them in a heavy layer of crackling chakra like armor. Then he shot sideways to the left at a speed the naked eye couldn't follow.
Bzzz!
At the same moment, the invisible wind blade arrived where he had been standing.
The fog-tide stone paving of the plaza split silently, a deep blue fissure opening like a wound. The cut surface was smooth and gleaming, and a trench more than ten meters long carved itself into the ground.
Raiga's forehead broke into cold sweat.
Fog-tide stone was a famous mineral from the Land of Water.
Hard and light, and most importantly, mined in huge quantities, making it cheap. Even the Mizukage's building used it as a primary construction material. The aggregate inside the bridge's concrete came from this stone too.
If her casual strike could cut through that, it could cut bone and flesh just as easily.
And because the slash was Wind Release, even a lightning armor meant to guard offense and defense might not hold.
Raiga's lightning attack faded.
The blaze dimmed, leaving behind the stench of scorching and the spray of shattered stone and dust.
But it couldn't hide the glow.
"That is…" Raiga's pupils shook violently. In his green eyes, a faint red reflection appeared, as if he'd stolen Ranmaru's kekkei genkai for himself.
Through the smoke, countless crimson panes surrounded the girl, forming a precise polyhedral structure like a diamond. Threads of lightning crawled across it, only making the barrier shine brighter, unable to budge it at all.
"That's the barrier blocking my vision," Ranmaru whispered behind him, trembling as he forced himself to keep feeding intelligence. "It was like clothing, pressed tight against her body. It can change shape. It can defend."
"Offense and defense in one. What a pain." Raiga's sharp teeth ground together as he finally acknowledged how strong this opponent was.
"Your shell is pretty tough."
Kakashi's voice came from behind Konome.
At some point, he had moved into her shadow, staring at the layered barrier with envy even in his Sharingan.
Ninjutsu ranks only measured difficulty, not absolute power. But in a world of constant war, any jutsu that was hard to learn and weak in practice simply didn't survive long enough to be passed down.
In that sense, rank was also a sideways proof of strength.
That instant Lightning Release strike earlier was no small thing. Based on the chakra output and level of nature transformation, it was at least B-rank offensive power.
And Konome's barrier had only flickered twice before blocking it all.
Conservatively, it would take an A-rank technique to break through.
"What jutsu is that?" Kakashi asked, baffled.
"ANBU Barrier: Pseudo Concealment Gate Technique." The diamond-like panes twisted and reshaped, compressing until they clung back to Konome's skin.
Beneath her flesh, countless hidden crimson curse marks lit up like a circuit board energizing, faint red pulses running through them.
"No way." Kakashi shook his head so hard he looked like a rattle drum. He didn't believe her for a second.
"I worked in ANBU's barrier division. The Pseudo Concealment Gate requires thousands upon thousands of formulae. If you use hand seals, it would take over a thousand. It can't be used in combat. It's only for protecting secret facilities."
He pointed sharply, continuing without pause.
"And it doesn't have shape-changing abilities. It's not layered like this, either."
"Correct," Konome said calmly. "So I modified it."
She said it like she was talking about changing the seasoning in a meal.
Over the past five years, she had been waiting for her Byakugan and Sage Body to mature.
But she hadn't been lying down and doing nothing.
Back when she was fleeing through the Hidden Mist, desperate for power, she had devised the Perfect Combat Body 1.0 plan.
She would grow dense osteomembranes beneath the subcutaneous fat and around the Byakugan's lens, reinforcing defense. At the same time, she would simplify the sarcoplasm within her muscles, suppressing hypertrophy while adjusting the leverage points of skeletal muscle, pushing raw physical strength to the limit.
That was the modification that allowed her to reverse-kill the Mist ANBU and obtain the body that might have once belonged to a survivor of the Yuki clan.
And over the past five years, supported by flesh-curse inscriptions, her Perfect Combat Body had finally entered Version 2.0.
Squish.
Squish.
The sound of flesh shifting was inaudible to outsiders, but it echoed softly in Konome's ears.
She looked inward.
Curse-mark characters spread throughout her body, glowing like lines of raw program code nourished by chakra.
The principle behind ninja tools and the Seven Swords was simple: forge the blade from chakra-conductive metal, then engrave a jutsu into it as a curse formula. Once the wielder fed chakra into the tool, the function activated.
No hand seals.
Utter convenience.
Using that principle, Konome took the Pseudo Concealment Gate as a reference, rebuilt it, rewrote it, and then engraved it into her own body through flesh curse marks.
A barrier that was always there.
Instant.
Constant.
And this was only one of the more ordinary inscriptions she had carved into herself over the years.
If Perfect Combat Body 1.0 was about turning flesh into a resilient weapon, then Version 2.0 was about carving curse-formula ninjutsu into that weapon, forging herself into a ninja tool a hundred times stronger than any Mist blade.
A leap in quality.
And the first outline of the path she intended to walk.
A Six Paths level taijutsu shinobi.
1
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