Ryu had just made another small update to his jutsu. It was not a massive upgrade, but it carried enough punch now.
*
Minato watched the changing trajectories.
"He redesigned the jutsu slightly… No… he added new functionality to the existing jutsu to change projectile direction without sacrificing speed by hitting those chakra balls," Minato said. The chakra control required to manipulate those constructs from this distance must be extraordinary. But to make such a modification in the heat of battle…that takes genius. I want to pass [Rasengan] on to that child just to see what he would do with it."
"I wonder if Lord Third or Senei will hand over my jutsu to him..." Minato thought. He did not know the boy had already inherited that jutsu.
Kushina nodded anyway. "He is a genius, yes, but that still does not give him the right to call my boy stupid."
Minato glanced at her. "A minute ago you were siding with him against me."
"That was different," Kushina said at once.
Minato smiled faintly. "Relax. He means well. All elder brothers think their younger ones are stupid." He looked down at the dark water. "Besides, our son is barely five."
Kushina had no argument for that.
*
Back to fighting, Ryu created five more dense chakra spheres.
"Thanks to the borrowed chakra... I don't have to worry about the chakra cost for now," he murmured. "This technique can be improved further," he thought. "If I can automate the jutsu and make them track and attack the target without my active involvement, I could trap multiple enemies in a kill box without expending much effort."
He grabbed more anchors and launched them one by one at high speed.
"[Meteor Shower]," he shouted and after a moment added. "This assault will keep you on edge."
Ryu's hands gestured to change the attack's direction. With one flick, a meteor cannon angled left. A sweep of his arm redirected another from high above. A quick cut with two fingers sent a third curving in behind the fox's ribcage.
Attacks were coming at Fox nonstop; they couldn't hurt him but made him furious.
One hit his right cheek hard. Another one came straight down from the sky. The third hit low on the front leg, and the next one hit hard on the left cheek. And every time, the golden anchors perfectly reflect or redirect the faster and more compressed chakra balls, making the mindscape a three-dimensional killing zone.
The Nine-Tails was forced onto the defensive.
With a growl, the fox curled in on itself, nine tails wrapping around its face and body. The defensive stance had less to do with damage control and more to do with not letting a child hit him in the face again.
"The situation is getting annoying," the fox said to itself as it took hits from all directions.
"Good… It is supposed to be annoying," Ryu said simply, not letting up the barrage for a single second.
One of the tails shifted aside.
Fox's muzzle pushed out through a gap, jaws opening wide.
Dark and light chakra gathered between his teeth. The chakra was dense and rotating, trying to compress itself to become a sphere.
Ryu's eyes narrowed. "Like hell I will allow you to complete that jutsu."
His hand cut through the air.
A [Meteor Cannon] blazed and drove straight into the fox's jaw.
The impact snapped the face sideways and jarred the alignment of teeth and tongue. The unstable [Biju-Dama] fluctuated as the concentration behind it broke for a fraction of a second.
Ryu did not waste it.
A second [Meteor Cannon] went straight for the half-formed sphere and hit the centre.
The explosion bloomed in the fox's face.
Light swallowed its features. The world turned white-gold for a second. Shockwaves blasted outward in every direction.
When the light finally receded, the Nine-Tails was still there, head lowered, getting back up. The incomplete [Biju-Dama] had never been lethal to him, but being forced to choke on it had still knocked something out of him for a second.
The blast and shockwave had passed around Ryu, diverted by the barriers Ryu made just before the explosion.
The fox stared at him without saying anything, and a low growl came from him.
Ryu smirked. "How does it feel to get blasted by your own [Biju-Dama], Mr 9?"
"I will get you one way or another," the fox growled, rage coiling tighter in its chest. "You think you cannot suffer here? I will prove you wrong and put the fear of death back in you."
"Good luck with that," Ryu answered him calmly. "Others have tried and failed."
The fox's eyes narrowed. "Others may have failed, but I will tear you apart," it snarled. "A mental plane does not make you invincible."
"I know," Ryu said. "Being as old as you are, you must have a few tricks. But am I enough of an enemy to make you risk those tricks? If they came without a price, you would have used them on me—or your previous hosts—already. So, am I worth the backlash?"
The fox stared at him, the heat in its eyes steady and unblinking. "I don't care anymore," the beast growled, throwing away its previous caution. "I will just kill you."
"Why are people so obsessed with making others fear death," Ryu continued, "when life can be so much worse? I would not kill my enemies... no. I will keep them alive and make them suffer instead."
His tone never rose—it did not need to. He tilted his head, his eyes turning cold.
"Like that Danzo fellow," he added. "He is plotting against me and Naruto as of this moment. I am going to make his life difficult."
*
Minato and Kushina both went very still.
The name was not new to them. They had once been caught in that old bastard's schemes.
Back then, they had the support of other powerful individuals and the Hokage's backing, and Minato's rising fame served as insulation; even then, it had not been pleasant.
Hearing Danzo's name in their son's mindscape, tied so casually to plotting against their little boy, turned the old distaste into something colder.
*
The fox drew a deep breath and his chest expanded as he prepared something. Compared to the previous [Biju-Dama], this was different.
Ryu's brow furrowed. "What are you doing now...?"
"This was never in the canon," Ryu thought.
Fox snarled, his jaw snapping forward as he violently exhaled.
A small, dense sphere of compressed dark chakra shot out of his mouth like a bullet—a mini version of [Biju-Dama] aimed straight at Ryu's head.
- [Overclocking] Activated
Time slowed for him.
Golden light wrapped around his body again, lightning sparks crawling over his skin and clothes. Every fibre of muscle and every tendon in his legs fired in a synchronised, perfectly timed sequence as Ryu stepped sideways.
He watched the mini [Biju-Dama] pass through the space where his head had been a moment earlier, the surface of the sphere rippling in slow motion as it cut through the air.
As the slow-motion effect broke, the shot slammed into the water. A split second before the sphere detonated, a violent column of water shot up into the air, creating a small explosion that sent shockwaves in all directions.
Ryu's eyes widened as he realised what had just happened.
The Nine-Tails smiled, a pleased curl of lip that showed more fang than humour.
"You think I only make them outside my body," he said. "You guessed wrong."
Ryu replied, "You are right. I never considered it. You form them outside your body when you need them big and powerful. But the trade-off is worth it, I guess. They are now much faster."
"Yes, now prepare to die," said the fox.
Ryu replied, "But they are still not as fast as me at full speed."
"It does not matter," Fox replied. "I know your speed has some risks involved. You also cannot maintain it for very long. Can you?"
Ryu smiled and replied, "True. But I haven't played all the cards in my hand yet. And I have already guessed the risk involved with your new trick."
Fox replied, "You are bluffing."
Fox did not wait to see what those cards were. He took another breath, faster this time.
He spat a second mini [Biju-Dama], then a third, then a fourth, with barely any pause between releases.
Ryu moved. His body blurred, deliberately holding back from his absolute top speed and moving at top speed when dodging lethal attacks, actively conserving his stamina and saving his real-world body from the severe risks of his risky lightning jutsu.
He stepped, flickered, and slid around the incoming blasts, sometimes simply turning his head aside and sometimes letting a shot graze the edge of his golden aura just enough to feel the density, power, and speed of the attacks.
Several of his golden spheres drifted closer, pulled by his will. They came to rest behind him just like the [Truth-Seeking Balls] of those who had mastered the Sage of Six Paths' advance senjutsu.
Ryu grabbed one of them, and it reshaped itself in an instant, flowing out like molten gold into a long staff of compressed chakra.
For a second, the fox froze. In his eye a figure from his past formed, a staff in hand and floating dark spheres behind him. It was an image of his father, the Sage of Six Paths.
Ryu's current posture triggered something in Fox's memory, sending him back through a thousand years.
In the fox's mind, this image was superimposed onto the image of Ryu.
"No… It can't be," Fox forcefully denied the possibility. "The child of the prophecy is supposed to have blue eyes and the mark of the Sage. This is not him. He has far too many eye colours, but not the right one… or the mark of the sage."
On the water, Ryu saw only the half-second of hesitation. He did not know its cause—he merely filed it as an advantage.
Ryu tightened his grip on the staff and launched his final assault. Lightning cracked off his feet with every step. Fox shook himself free of his thoughts and reacted instantly.
His mouth unleashed a relentless onslaught of miniature [Biju-Dama] spheres, shooting out at a breakneck pace. Instead of running away from the explosions, Ryu flickered to nearby anchors and evaded them when in danger and otherwise only deflected them using his staff and feeling and analysing the bijudama and its properties for his calculations.
A few blasts passed close enough to Ryu that the shockwave of their passage slapped his hair and clothes sideways.
Ryu absorbed the battle data from every deflection and near miss, his mind outrunning his body as he calculated from it and built theories in real time.
"Density is higher than a regular elemental blast... Trigger delay upon contact is short, but not zero. Shell integrity is solid—if necessary, I might be able to physically push one away before it breaks. That's enough data."
He felt entirely confident about the gamble.
His golden staff spun once in his grip and he closed the distance.
Ryu deployed a [ReflexGuard - Trampoline] beneath his feet, chaining jumps to launch himself high into the air. As he was dropping out of the sky, he flipped in a downward arc, and the staff extended very rapidly before turning a full cycle.
Ryu brought down the staff, now extended to match the fox's massive scale, and Fox defended himself with a tail, using it as a shield.
At the instant of contact, Ryu drove a [Senju-Style Chakra Impulse] through the staff. The impact did not hurt the fox, but the immense kinetic force and pressure pressed down the massive body and blasted his tail downward.
The black water beneath Fox exploded instantly, creating a massive crater of displaced water.
Minato's eyes were fixed on the point of impact. He could see the subtle difference between a simple strike and one with chakra impulse behind it.
Suddenly the fox felt it. The stomach of the fox expanded, resembling a beer belly and it burped very comically. Apparently the mini-Biju Dama he had formed and stored in his stomach had destabilised and exploded due to Ryu's attack. Ryu was not bluffing earlier and Fox had found this out the hard way.
In a deeper layer of Naruto, Kushina's breath caught.
"Amazing," she whispered.
A/N:
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