"Thunder Hammer!"
A roar echoed through the mountain valley. Ai's figure rose into the air, and as he raised his right leg, it descended like a blue comet crashing down from the sky.
The ground crumbled like compressed sand beneath the impact, collapsing with a deafening roar. The destructive power of the kick was extraordinary. Even the flying debris and earth launched outward were enough of a threat that Yuji had to block with both hands while rapidly retreating.
On the other side, the Third Raikage drove forward using his Heavy Waterfall Flow elbow strike technique, cutting off the retreat path and landing the blow.
Bang.
Yuji was sent flying again. His ribcage felt shattered. But his expression remained calm, his eyes fixed on the two enemies throughout.
Under this relentless assault, the Third Raikage and Ai showed no intention of pausing. Like two flashing blue stars they charged forward again immediately, determined to maintain a continuous whirlwind of pressure that left no space to breathe.
They would finish this in one sustained push.
Because both of them had assessed the situation clearly. Possessing a miraculous healing technique, Yuji was genuinely difficult to kill through conventional means.
But every technique consumed chakra. Even if he could essentially resurrect himself from fatal injuries, as long as the chakra consumed by the healing process exceeded his total reserves, he would eventually die.
The healing had a ceiling. Therefore they only needed to be aggressive and relentless, continuously forcing him to burn through that ceiling faster than he could recover it.
"This is difficult," Yuji thought as he moved.
The Raikage alone was already extraordinarily difficult to handle. And now there were two of them.
The Lightning Release techniques created a layered problem. It was not only the defense, attack, and speed. The Lightning Release could also be transmitted through the nervous system, directly enhancing reaction speed at the neurological level.
His own physical enhancement through the Red Scale state worked at the cellular level through blood vitality, which provided only limited enhancement to his nervous system response by comparison.
It was simply incomparable to the exaggerated reaction capabilities these two possessed. He could only rely on the powerful vision his eye technique provided to observe and track their movements, thereby shortening the reaction time gap as much as possible.
As for genjutsu, with two opponents present, whenever one was caught in an illusion the other could immediately break it. Under their combined vigilance, the window of effectiveness was extremely limited.
The only reliable application was using the Red Eye to generate small amounts of chakra imagery to deceive and disrupt their perception momentarily.
Beyond that, the Red Eye's danger intuition had proven valuable throughout the fight. These two opponents were simply in a different category from anyone he had faced before. Their combat experience was such that almost no trick or scheme could be fully effective against them.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
Inside the valley, the ground shook violently and continuously. The Third Raikage and Ai combined their offensive into something like a tidal wave, their overwhelming power shattering and destroying the surrounding terrain with every exchange.
Dealing with one was already difficult. Dealing with both simultaneously was something else entirely.
Even so, his fighting spirit remained completely unaffected.
He continued launching full-force counterattacks throughout, continuously using Blood Release to wear down the Lightning Release armor on both opponents, constantly probing and assessing the defensive threshold of each.
His primary target was almost always Ai. He understood that compared to the Third Raikage's astonishing overall output, Ai was meaningfully weaker in every aspect at this stage of his development.
One slip and an opportunity to inflict real damage would open. Targeting Ai also forced the Third Raikage to split his attention.
Pick the softest target. Once you catch one, finish them.
The two had noticed his targeting pattern but disregarded it entirely. Because with Yuji fighting two opponents simultaneously, the pressure on him and the rate of his chakra depletion were unquestionably greater than theirs. This kind of intense continuous combat consumed chakra at a rate measured in seconds.
No matter what methods Yuji deployed to resist and neutralize their attacks, every ability had to be running at maximum simultaneously.
Bang, bang, bang.
Explosions. Dust clouds rising into the sky. Between the three of them, the intensity of the battle showed no sign of declining.
Yuji was determined to avoid any situation where the Reverse Cursed Technique could not reach him in time. Even when his body was struck, his limbs broken or severed, he responded immediately with the reverse technique.
This made him a genuinely formidable opponent for the Raikage and Ai to deal with in a sustained exchange. His battle clothes had been completely shredded, leaving him effectively unclothed. Fragments of clothing mixed with dust and debris fell around him.
His feet dug deep trenches into the ground dozens of meters long before finally neutralizing the force of the Third Raikage's punch. With a crack, his two severed arms healed instantly.
He looked up at the Third Raikage leaping toward him from above and narrowed his eyes.
The Raikage had already noticed that his chakra reserves were running low.
"Blood Release: Bloodstorm!"
He raised his head, looking up at the two flashes of lightning descending from the sky above, and mobilized every remaining piece of chakra he had in that instant. Centered on his own body, within a radius of one hundred meters, blood surged outward and simultaneously condensed into countless spears, each emitting a strange crimson light, all of them aimed directly upward at the sky.
Swoosh, swoosh, swoosh.
A second later, the densely packed spears launched upward toward the direction where the Raikage and Ai were falling.
This Blood Release technique did not match simply compressed blood in terms of raw penetrating power. But it surpassed it in hardness and in the sheer area it covered.
Most importantly, the Raikage and Ai were in midair with their movement options restricted. With the space above sealed by the spear formation, they could only meet it head-on.
The Raikage's heart stirred with a slight wariness.
Up to this point, even he had to acknowledge Yuji's overwhelming determination and extraordinary reaction capabilities. But with his chakra clearly running low, he still chose to deploy this large-scale technique, accelerating his own depletion even further.
Was this seeking death?
Although this technique was clever in how it seized the counterattack opportunity, at most it could drain a little chakra from him and Ai in the process of breaking through it. It was fundamentally incapable of inflicting meaningful damage on either of them.
Bang, bang, bang.
In midair, the Raikage and Ai simultaneously assumed defensive stances, covering their faces and using their hardened bodies to forcefully shatter the incoming blood-colored star spears. They came down like two meteorites.
They landed safely on the ground. Two craters of varying sizes formed beneath their feet. Their clothes were somewhat disheveled and considerably damaged.
Across from them, Yuji sneered, flicked his finger, and swallowed a Senzu Bean.
A second later, the Raikage's pupils contracted.
A powerful chakra fluctuation erupted from the young man's body. Yuji's entire state instantly surged back to its peak.
He had saved one Senzu Bean for himself. The opponents he was dealing with were the Third Raikage and Ai. He was not arrogant enough to hold nothing back.
The Senzu Bean's chakra recovery effect restored him to full capacity, which meant that before consuming it, burning through every last reserve in aggressive tactical attacks had been the correct approach. Nothing held back had been wasted.
"Continue," Yuji said calmly, watching the two men's expressions shift as he moved his limbs slightly.
"Ai," the Third Raikage said in a low voice.
"I understand," Ai replied.
Both of them grasped the implication immediately. His chakra had been restored. Simply depleting him through attrition would not be enough anymore.
Furthermore, whatever he had consumed appeared to restore not just chakra but his mental state and physical condition as well. Combined with that abnormal healing ninjutsu, the path forward was clear.
Their only viable approach now was to inflict irreversible damage on his body, damage that the healing technique could not reach in time.
Based on the combat experience they had accumulated throughout this fight, they had both noticed something. Yuji had been deliberately protecting his head and large sections of his torso from taking serious direct hits throughout the exchange. This indicated that his healing ninjutsu had limits.
Not every injury could be restored in every situation.
"As expected of seasoned experts at their peak. So perceptive."
Yuji felt a chill move through him as he noticed the change in their eyes.
He observed the Third Raikage's chakra through his doujutsu. What he saw caused his scalp to tighten. The chakra image he was reading had entered something resembling a crushing, explosive pre-ignition state.
A suffocating sense of danger pressed in from every direction simultaneously. All his senses were screaming.
An overwhelming alarm sounded in his mind.
"Now."
Even Yuji's pupils narrowed to their sharpest point in that instant, a single thought cutting through everything else.
Bang.
The Raikage and Ai stomped simultaneously, the force of it cratering the ground beneath them. Physical technique, speed, power absorption, reaction time.
Even with Yuji giving absolutely everything, objectively there was still a slight gap between him and the two of them combined.
He had been pushing his Reverse Cursed Technique to its limit throughout the entire fight, healing himself continuously while fighting. But combat was never purely about surface-level strength. It was also about memory. Calculation.
From the very beginning, Yuji had understood clearly that in terms of raw power, with the two of them working together, his chances of winning through conventional means were extremely slim.
To win, he had to land a decisive surprise attack.
From the opening of the battle until this moment, he had been consistently revealing his fighting style and feeding them combat intelligence.
Simultaneously, he wanted them to believe that what they had seen was the full extent of his arsenal. The longer the battle lasted, the more that belief would solidify.
Because there was only one Senzu Bean. And through careful observation of the Third Raikage's chakra management, he had confirmed something important. In the original story, the Third Raikage had fought solo against ten thousand Hidden Stone Village forces for three days and three nights.
Even with some depletion from the fighting in the Sand Village before this confrontation, his chakra reserves were on a scale that made relying purely on attrition strategies essentially impossible.
Therefore, he had to force the battle to a conclusion at a specific moment, in a way the enemy would not anticipate. No matter how fast an opponent's physical reaction speed, a misjudgment of the battle situation, a blind spot in their assessment, could not be corrected through neural signals alone.
That blind spot was the opportunity he had been engineering from the very beginning.
From his strategic thinking at the outset, he had been setting a trap for both of them without their knowing it. He had constructed this unique opportunity himself.
In the instant the terrifying lightning strike descended toward him, his lips parted slightly and he uttered a single syllable.
"Room."
...
STONESSSS đź’Žđź’Ž
If you're enjoying the story and want to support me, consider joining my P2reon! 30 Advanced chapters are available there, so you can read ahead whenever you like @keepsmiling818 p2reon