At this moment, Kurenai and Anko were in genuinely bad shape. Blood had soaked through almost all their clothes. Kurenai was in the worst condition, with a horrifying gash more than six inches long across her abdomen. It looked like the blade had nearly gone straight through her, and if the bleeding was not stopped and the wound sealed immediately, she was absolutely going to die on the spot.
Anko was only slightly better off. She was, after all, a survivalist by nature and a veteran of brutal field combat. When it came to staying alive in real battle, Kurenai simply could not compare with someone as rough-and-ready as Anko.
Before beginning treatment, Akira's hands blurred through a string of seals.
"Concealment Barrier, activate."
In an instant, the air within dozens of feet of him seemed to twist, and an invisible screen sealed the area completely.
From the outside, the mountaintop still looked empty. No one would ever know there were people hidden inside.
Meanwhile, far away at the center of the battlefield, Akira's clone was still locked in a savage clash with Kiei. The two were going at each other with everything they had, neither able to pull away.
Although the clone held the advantage in raw power, it was still only a clone. Instantly erasing the enemy was not so easy. The edge was there, but not enough to finish it outright.
So the fight had stalled. Neither side could kill the other.
But Kiei was becoming more and more shaken. His composure was crumbling.
He had discovered something horrifying. Even after taking a direct hit from his lord of death blade, Akira's clone had suffered no meaningful damage at all. Its soul was untouched, and its body showed no sign of collapse.
A normal shadow clone should have vanished with the slightest serious injury.
But this thing was different. It was like a living mass of energy. When struck, it only dimmed a little, losing some chakra and nothing more.
What made Kiei despair most was that the clone was effectively a perpetual engine. It was actively drawing in natural energy from the environment and refining senjutsu chakra on its own.
That meant unless he could completely empty its entire reserve in a single instant, this thing was an immortal juggernaut.
And if Kiei had that kind of overwhelming burst, he would already have won. He simply could not do it.
As the valley had been blasted to pieces, the barrier that suppressed chakra had long since been destroyed.
Now both of them were fighting without restraint, letting loose with everything they had.
Unfortunately for Kiei, Akira's clone was made from the highest grade of senjutsu chakra, its quality absurdly high. Even now that Kage could freely draw on chakra again and his strength had surged, he still had no real answer for it.
This earth-shaking battle dragged on for more than an hour. Kiei's body, which he had once been so proud of, had been smashed to ruin again and again. Though his regeneration was extraordinary and kept repairing the damage, there was only so much healing could do when he was being pounded without pause.
Akira's clone had taken losses as well, but its condition was clearly better than Kiei's.
After more than an hour of full-output combat, Kiei could feel the end closing in. The weakness of spent power was becoming harder and harder to ignore.
Yet even after burning himself nearly dry, he still could not defeat this damned clone. That powerless frustration drove him nearly insane, and he finally prepared to unleash one last suicidal strike.
"Damn you! How can he be this strong? I sacrificed even my soul, and I still can't destroy a single clone. What kind of sick joke is this?!"
Kiei clenched his fists until blood seeped from every pore. At this point, fully using spirit form was meaningless.
Because Akira's clone was made entirely of senjutsu chakra. Natural energy was the perfect counter to spiritual bodies. Every punch hit him all the way down to the soul.
So Kiei did not dare abandon flesh completely. If he became a pure spirit now, his physical durability would plummet.
Against any normal high-level shinobi who did not understand senjutsu, Kiei would have been slaughtering freely by now.
His tragedy was that he had run into Akira, and not even Akira's real body, but a senjutsu clone made entirely of pure energy.
Every hit from that clone dealt true damage, each blow landing squarely on Kiei's soul.
Spirit form? That would have been a death sentence.
Driven into a corner, Kiei formed seals at breakneck speed. The land for miles around had long since been reduced to rubble by the two of them. Towering peaks had become broken heaps of stone.
The ground was even worse, riddled with over a hundred craters hundreds of feet deep, like the surface of the moon.
The terrain across several miles had been violently reshaped by this battle.
Whether it was Kiei or Akira, the jutsus they had been throwing around were all large-scale battlefield destroyers.
Even their weakest attacks were S-rank jutsus on the level of the Rasenshuriken, moves capable of shaving mountaintops flat.
With that reaper apparition acting as a battery behind him, Kiei's chakra reserves were already on the level of a tailed beast. Every strike he threw could gouge out a massive crater like a meteor impact.
A clash at this level had already surpassed the ordinary Kage class. This was a true super-Kage confrontation.
The scale of destruction now was already approaching the legendary battle at the Valley of the End.
As Kiei began charging his finishing move, Akira's clone calmly formed seals in sync.
"Ghost Release: Soul Devouring Maw!"
"Sage Art: Lightning Titan!"
The instant their hand signs were completed, two apocalyptic surges of power erupted at once.
Behind Kiei, the giant reaper head suspended in the void swelled violently, becoming a monstrous mouth dozens of yards across, radiating a cold and sinister aura.
On Akira's side, the scene was even more outrageous. Countless violet-gold arcs of lightning exploded into existence, writhing like maddened serpents.
All the natural energy in the surrounding world seemed to answer a summons, rushing madly into the clone's body.
"ROAR!"
A pillar of violet-gold lightning descended from the sky like a divine judgment, as though it had torn a savage crack straight through the sky.
Crack!
Accompanied by the shriek of space being ripped apart, a colossal figure made entirely of lightning thrust its arms through that split in the sky and physically tore it wider with both hands.
Boom!
Thunder rolled across space and earth as the titan stood in full form. The titan of violet-gold electricity towered more than two hundred feet high, a frame massive enough to rival the complete Nine-Tails.
Rivers of destructive lightning-plasma coursed over its body. Three enormous thunder-serpents coiled and circled around it, tongues flicking in the air.
The titan clenched its fists. Twin beams of golden light blazed from its eyes. Even its body was wrapped in a prison robe woven from lightning, with a huge glowing character for Prison blazing across its chest.
None of that was decoration. Every last detail was solidified lightning in different forms and densities.
Lightning Style: Lightning Titan.
This was a genuine super-S-rank Lightning style jutsu, or more accurately, a combined jutsu infused with an enormous amount of Yang Release chakra.
Which meant this giant was not some lifeless construct. It had a will of its own. In that sense, it was not so different from a tailed beast.