Hyuga Yu was not naturally gifted at taijutsu.
Although he had trained in the Eight Gates and the Hyūga Clan's Gentle Fist, and had dabbled in Leaf-style close-quarters combat and kenjutsu, none of it could alter the fact that his raw taijutsu fundamentals were relatively weak.
The core of taijutsu lay in the split-second reaction times and tactical counters required for high-speed offense and defense at point-blank range.
Yu had not yet mastered and integrated all the martial arts he had learned to the point of effortless execution, which led to a glaring issue—
In an actual battle, even if his vision, perception, and combat awareness could keep pace, his physical body would always lag a beat behind. Against a powerful taijutsu expert, that split-second delay would become a fatal flaw, easily exploited and infinitely magnified.
However, the power of his dōjutsu, Shifang [Ten Directions], was perfectly suited to compensate for this deficiency!
At the bottom of the canyon, on a wave-shaped platform formed by countless stone pillars...
Five hundred Hidden Stone shinobi stood in tight formation, their expressions grim as they locked their eyes onto the center of the battlefield. There stood a youth with waist-length black hair and the Byakugan, dressed in a black combat uniform.
His Wind Style had been fundamentally countered and suppressed, making it impossible to rapidly open the twelve primary meridians for his Wind Style: Flowing Astral Qi. Leaving aside his Tenseigan-related abilities, which he had to save for Kitsuchi, Yu was left with nothing but an ordinary shinobi blade in his hand.
To any onlooker, the situation looked bleak to the absolute extreme.
Yet, at this very moment, Hyuga Yu calmly raised his head. Under the collective gaze of the five hundred Stone ninja, he took action—he began to stride directly toward the enemy host!
Tap, tap, tap...
His light, precise footsteps beat like a war drum against the hearts of the five hundred encircling Stone ninja. With every step he took, a swirling vortex of air erupted from beneath his feet!
Just like that—one step, two steps, three steps...
A gentle breeze gradually stirred across the sultry, humid battlefield. The invisible wind transformed into translucent ribbons of air, wrapping around Yu's body, his hands, and the blade of his sword.
"Lord Kitsuchi!"
"The wind on the battlefield is gathering around him at an incredible speed! He seems to be... preparing to launch some kind of jutsu!"
A sensor-ninja from the Stone vanguard, holding the Ram hand seal, immediately bellowed the intel to Kitsuchi. Kitsuchi nodded grimly and instantly barked out his orders: "Close-combat containment unit, close the distance and pin him down!"
"Mid-to-close-range combined division, prepare your ninjutsu!"
"Surprise attack unit, continue with the original plan!"
Then, Kitsuchi turned to look at the ten Stone Jonin standing beside him—the absolute elite of this entire force. "Elite Special Ops, advance along with the containment unit. No matter what he's planning..."
"Stop him!"
"Yes, sir!" "Understood!"
With the brief commands issued, the army of five hundred Stone shinobi sprang into action. The various units split into four sections, with nearly two hundred taijutsu specialists forming the vanguard. Under the command of subordinate Jonin, they shifted formations into twelve separate squads to ensure that, at any given second, at least two squads would assault Yu simultaneously from within the encirclement.
Having experienced the war where ten thousand of their ninja besieged the Third Raikage, the Hidden Stone had amassed immense experience in organizing large forces against a single powerful opponent. In an instant, that brutal experience translated into a flurry of lethal blades flashing toward Hyuga Yu!
"Kill him!!!"
A deafening roar shattered the air across the entire battlefield!
Two hundred Stone ninja transformed into a raging torrent, unsheathing their blades with fierce cries as they charged head-on against the advancing Hyuga Yu!
"Haaah!"
"Die!!!"
The two sides clashed in an instant!
Forming the vanguard were two squads totaling sixteen sword-wielding Stone ninja. They launched their first wave of attacks from the front, back, left, and right simultaneously. Behind the primary four attackers stood two ninja on each side, establishing an intricate formation of four on the inside and eight on the outside. The inner four unleashed slashing strikes while the outer eight sought openings to thrust. Hidden directly behind each of the inner four was another comrade, ready to swap places the moment a strike missed or overextended, ensuring a seamless transition into the second wave of the assault.
Yet, Yu merely watched their movements with an unnerving calm. His pale Byakugan eyes flicked left and right, tracing trembling cyan lines of anticipation across his vision. In the next breath, he narrowed his eyes, stepped slightly to the left, and tilted his head. Three blade-flashes grazed the edge of his clothes, while a head-on slash whistled harmlessly past the exact spot his cheek had occupied a millisecond prior!
Immediately following that came eight coordinated thrusts targeting his throat, limbs, abdomen, heart, spine, and the backs of his knees. Yu lightly tilted his head back, tapped the ground with his toes, and leaped into the air. Spinning his entire body in a grand aerial arc, he brushed past the eight cold blades with hairsbreadth precision!
"How is this possible?! He hasn't even activated the Byakugan's full visual expansion, so how is he evading everything?!"
One Stone ninja felt his scalp go numb at the sight. But before he could process it, Yu, spinning upside down mid-air, whipped his legs around and delivered a devastating Leaf Great Whirlwind right across the man's face!
Crack! Bam!
The sickening sound of fracturing bone accompanied the heavy impact as the Stone ninja was sent flying over three meters away. Using the momentum of that kick, Yu flipped backward three times through the air. Mid-rotation, he hurled his shinobi blade with pinpoint accuracy. The sword pierced cleanly through the throat of a nearby Stone ninja, pinning him dead to the ground!
Thud!
Executing a sequence of flawless acrobatic maneuvers, Yu landed steadily. As a dying Stone ninja collapsed beside him, Yu smoothly snatched the blade from the corpse's hand. Dropping his center of gravity, he spun and slid directly into the center of six dazed ninja. With a wide, sweeping slash—a spinning eclipse technique—he cut down all six in a single breath.
This entire sequence of actions took fewer than five seconds. Half of the sixteen-man vanguard was wiped out instantly. The remaining Stone ninja could only swallow hard, staring at Hyuga Yu in sheer horror.
Yu raised the weapon, frowning slightly at the chips on the blade from cutting through six men. Before he could even analyze the precision of his stroke, as if he possessed eyes in the back of his head, he flipped the hilt and thrust the blade blindly backward. Ignoring the agonizing shriek of the Stone ninja attempting a sneak attack behind him, he casually scooped up another dropped blade from the ground. Reversing his grip, he slashed forward.
Clang!
Sparks exploded into the air!
In a flash, he blocked a heavy downward slash coming straight from the front!
His pale cyan Byakugan stared indifferently at the terrified Stone ninja before him. Tilting his head to dodge a stray kunai, Yu delivered a swift front kick directly into the enemy's abdomen. Twisting the hilt of his sword against the collapsing foe, he drove the blade downward.
Splat!
Ripping the blade from the throat, he stepped on the spurting corpse to vault into the air, dodging an underground blade that had impaled its own comrade's body from below. Twisting his body, he kicked outward to send two flanking attackers flying, while forcefully hurling his sword straight down. The weapon pierced the skull of a Stone ninja hidden beneath the earth, pinning him to the spot!
In his cyan-tinted vision, the Stone ninja resembled marionettes controlled by strings, moving along pre-calculated paths to besiege him!
The world before him seemed to fragment, transforming into a massive web woven from countless incoming assaults. Every attack originating from the immediate future was merely a single thread in this chaotic net, aimed brutally at some vital point of a future Hyuga Yu. Some lines showed attacks his future self could dodge; others indicated blind spots where he would be injured, or even lethal blows that pierced his vitals!
But when these lines of assault materialized into reality one, two, or three seconds later, Yu—acting as an absolute [Prophet]—severed them ahead of time!
For a time, Yu moved as if walking through an empty field. He continuously picked up or intercepted dropped swords, carving his way deeper into the swelling ranks of the Hidden Stone army.
Within the dust storms whipped up by his frantic movements, blades flashed and sparks showered the air!
Simultaneously, Yu's advancing speed grew faster and faster.
On the surface of his skin, the surrounding winds absorbed the impacts and transferred the kinetic energy back into his body. The faint glow of the twelve primary meridians gradually illuminated his form, and one by one, his chakra pathway nodes—the tenketsu—began to light up amid the non-stop slaughter.
From one, to ten, and eventually to over fifty nodes.
Yu's movements shifted from a measured stroll to a sweeping jog, and finally, to an all-out, furious charge!
The cyan light in his dōjutsu slowly dimmed, but his blood-spattered, pale eyes shone with an ever-brighter brilliance!
At that moment—
Boom!
Enhanced by the Wind Style: Flowing Astral Qi wrapped around him, Yu unleashed a raw strength akin to a raging dinosaur. A single strike could whip up a massive, five-meter-wide shockwave from his fists or a sweeping blade-beam spanning over ten meters!
In less than five minutes, Yu had torn through three hundred meters, on the verge of completely shattering the two-hundred-man close-combat unit by sheer force!
Witnessing this utterly absurd spectacle, Kitsuchi, who was organizing the final preparations in the rear, felt a chill run down his spine. Two hundred against one, yet they were the ones being pushed back against their own momentum! Their morale was beginning to collapse, and to make matters worse, Yu was clearly growing stronger as the battle raged on!
Seeing this, Kitsuchi steeled his resolve and gritted his teeth. "Damn it! Even with so many elites, the close-combat unit can't hold him down. I can't wait any longer!"
"Now is the time to decide this battle!"
Kitsuchi's expression hardened as he looked at the mid-to-close-range combined division preparing a large-scale ninjutsu. He instantly barked out: "Close-combat unit, retreat!"
"Surprise attack unit, reshape the terrain! Mid-to-close-range division, release your ninjutsu!"
"Utterly destroy his jutsu!"
The moment his voice fell, the Stone ninja swarming Yu immediately fell back, using their subterranean travel techniques to sink into the ground and retreat. At the center of the battlefield, only Hyuga Yu remained.
Further away, at the edges of the battlefield, hundreds of Stone ninja split into two divisions crouched down simultaneously. Slamming their palms against the ground, they roared in unison: "Coordinated Ninjutsu - Fire Style: Hiding in Ash and Dust Jutsu!"
"Coordinated Ninjutsu - Earth Style: Moving Earth Core!"
Yu immediately deactivated Shifang and switched to the omniscient perspective of his Byakugan. He watched as the entire battlefield shook with a deafening rumble, a fine fracture line rapidly tracing along the perimeter of the canyon floor.
In the next instant—Rumble!
Yu suddenly felt the ground give way beneath his feet. He plummeted downward, falling into a massive pit that the Hidden Stone had prepared well in advance. Just as he used the falling boulders to cushion his landing, a massive cloud of coal dust generated by the coordinated Fire Style: Hiding in Ash and Dust Jutsu was spewed out by the Stone ninja, pouring into the pit like a torrential flood.
Yu stared at the massive amount of coal dust suspended in the air. His eyes flickered, and his expression changed slightly. He instantly dissipated the gale enveloping his body, along with the Wind Style chakra scalpels he had prepared for a localized repelling blast. However, at that moment, he saw it—
Above him, standing at the edge of the pit, Kitsuchi clapped his hands together and roared, "Earth Style: Wheel of Fortune!"
Crack! Crack! Crack!
The massive structural pillars previously erected by the Stone ninja snapped simultaneously. The circular, colossal stone ceiling that bridged the top of the canyon plunged downward, heavily sealing the pit Yu had fallen into!
Thud!
His vision instantly plunged into pitch blackness, and his nose was assaulted by the pungent smell of dense coal dust. In that moment, Yu realized exactly what Kitsuchi meant when he said he would "utterly destroy his jutsu"—
For a Wind Style user, pure air was the ideal medium. But once combustible dust mixed into the atmosphere, its physical properties altered drastically, introducing an incredibly terrifying chemical hazard.
The suspended dust would significantly increase the air's density and viscosity, causing the chakra required to maintain a high-speed Wind Style jutsu to spike exponentially, draining the user's reserves. Furthermore, if the dust concentration reached its explosive limit, the friction from the rapidly spinning wind would generate electrostatic sparks and heat, which could instantly detonate the Wind Style vortex Yu relied upon!
This would utterly destroy the very Wind Style techniques that had carried Yu this far, tearing them apart from the inside!
Moreover, the Hidden Stone had deliberately engineered a sealed, dungeon-like environment. In such an enclosed space, a dust explosion was far more likely to occur. To make matters worse, high-speed air currents would ricochet off the stone walls to create chaotic turbulence, severely disrupting Yu's control over his jutsu.
This was the Hidden Stone's ultimate killing stroke!
If the wave-shaped baffles and pillars from earlier had merely hindered his Wind Style, this environment was tailor-made to completely eliminate any possibility of him using it!
Thinking up to this point, Yu's expression grew cold as he frowned. In an environment like this, let alone Wind Style—even moving too quickly and violently agitating the air could trigger a massive explosion.
Yet, if it were only this much, Yu could simply choose not to use Wind Style, Eight Trigrams Vacuum Palm, or his repulsive forces. With the terrifying physical capabilities granted by the fifty-three illuminated tenketsu across his twelve primary meridians, he could easily dig a tunnel and climb his way out. Therefore...
Yu instantly deduced that apart from the extreme environment, the Hidden Stone must have prepared another trap for him inside this pitch-black, suffocating cage!
With that thought, Yu immediately closed his eyes to protect them from the abrasive coal dust in the air. Even with his eyelids shut, an activated Byakugan could perfectly perceive his surroundings.
Immediately after—"Byakugan!"
The veins around his temples bulged instantly with rushing blood. At the same time, a monochrome, greyish-white vision enveloped his surroundings, allowing Yu to see the hidden trump card that the Hidden Stone had laid in ambush for this final killing blow—
In the darkness, a heavily bearded man covered from head to toe in black coal dust slowly stood up from the stone wall of the enclosure. He wore what faintly resembled a monk's robe, his entire body pitch-black. Completely ignoring the dense coal dust floating in the air that would shred anyone else's respiratory tract, he took a deep breath. A bizarre, flushed crimson hue spread across his dark face. His lips curled back to reveal a row of white teeth, flashing Yu a sinister smile.
"Konoha's Heavenly Ninja..."
"It seems your shinobi career ends right h—"
Before he could even finish his sentence, a sharp burst of killing intent erupted from behind Yu's closed eyelids. Grinding his toes silently against the ground, his body propelled forward at blinding speed. His right hand whipped out a sharp kunai from the ninja tool pouch at his waist. Gripping it in a reverse hold, he lunged straight for the throat of this Stone monk—Rōshi, the Jinchūriki of the Four-Tails!
With limited visibility in the pitch-black darkness, and a silence so profound that a falling needle could be heard, Rōshi instantly picked up the subtle displacement of air. His eyes narrowed. Stopping mid-sentence, he slammed his hands together!
In the next instant, he roared savagely, "Lava Style: Chakra Mode, activate!"
"Go to hell, Heavenly Ninja!"
At that exact moment, a brilliant, molten crimson glow erupted within an environment completely saturated with highly combustible materials!
The fiery light instantly ignited the massive quantities of coal dust suspended in the air. Within the sealed chamber, the combusting atmosphere and the swirling currents of fire began to rotate violently!
The underground death trap painstakingly prepared for Hyuga Yu detonated immediately!
————
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