—Gōzu! —Juro shouted, hurling another wave of lava that melted three earth walls and two shadow clones summoned by Noah—. Stop playing around with that flute of yours and finish this!
—Gladly —Gōzu said.
His flute changed pitch.
This time, he didn't launch a direct attack. The notes spiraled upward, merging with the sound of the rain, multiplying, reflecting off every falling droplet. The entire forest became an echo chamber, and each note of the flute was a hammer striking Noah's brain from all directions at once.
His spirit energy barrier held for a moment, but it couldn't last forever. Noah felt his concentration crumbling with each passing second.
Juro seized the opportunity.
A continuous stream of lava burst from his mouth, sweeping across the ground between them and forcing Noah to retreat. His shadow clones emerged around him, forming a screen of bodies that absorbed the flute's blows and the lava spatters while Noah gained distance.
But it wasn't enough.
Juro unleashed a barrage of lava balls that swept away the clones like chess pieces, and Gōzu focused his notes into a frequency that made the very air vibrate with an intensity Noah could feel in his bones. His eyes, ears, and nose began to bleed as his consciousness started to cloud.
—I have to take one of them out —he thought as he ran among the trees—. If I don't break their coordination, they're going to kill me.
He made a decision.
His hands came together in a sequence of seals that made his chakra roar through his meridians like a caged animal. Wood Style: Wood Dragon Technique!
From the ground at his feet, something enormous began to rise.
It was a dragon made of wood—roots and branches and trunks interweaving into a form nature had never conceived. It measured ten meters from head to tail, and when it opened its mouth—a cavern of black wood with teeth the size of swords—the roar that emerged from it created a sonic boom that nullified Gōzu's attacks.
The dragon lunged at him, jaws wide.
The man tried to retreat, his fingers already on his flute, his lungs filling with air to produce the note that would save him. But Noah wasn't about to give him any chance, using a jutsu to soften the ground beneath his feet and trap him momentarily. Gōzu tried to defend himself, but the dragon was too fast and gave him no time to think of a countermeasure. Its head came down on him like a hammer, its jaws open to close around his body and crush him to dust.
—Not so fast!
Juro appeared near the dragon. His mouth opened, and from it burst a lava ball the size of a wagon—a miniature sun that crossed the battlefield with a hiss of burning air and struck the dragon in the neck.
Half the creature disintegrated.
The dragon's head, now severed from the body that had propelled it, continued its trajectory by inertia, but its jaws closed on empty air, biting nothing. Gōzu had turned to mist in the last instant, his body dissolving into a damp haze that slipped between the wooden teeth and escaped toward the sky.
The mist condensed three meters away, and Gōzu became solid again, his chest heaving with ragged breath, his eyes fixed on the dying dragon crumbling into splinters.
—You fucking brat! —he spat, and for the first time his voice had lost all musicality—. You're going to pay for that!
He blew into his flute again, but this time with a much more aggressive tone.
Noah felt the air around him contract, felt his ears cease to hear because the sound was so intense his eardrums simply burst. The sound was physical, tangible, a mass of vibrations that struck him with the force of a train.
The pain was so overwhelming that for a moment Noah thought he was going to die from sheer agony. His ears bled. His eyes bled. His nose bled. His mouth bled. His brain, protected by his spiritual power but not by enough, convulsed inside his skull like an animal trapped in a cage someone had struck with a hammer. Images fragmented. Sounds distorted. The world became a blur of colors that had no names.
Unable to remain standing, his body fell to the ground by inertia.
His knees hit the mud. His hands sank into the dirty water. The flute continued to play, and each note was a hammer striking his skull from within, staining his vision red, dragging his consciousness toward the abyss of death.
—No —he thought—. Not again.
His chakra moved by pure instinct, wrapping his brain in a layer of energy as dense as lead and as flexible as silk. The flute's notes bounced off that barrier, momentarily losing their ability to inflict further harm beyond what had already been done.
But the damage was already done.
Noah knelt in the mud, bleeding from his nose, mouth, eyes, and ears. Blood dripped from his chin, mingling with the rain, forming red puddles in the mud.
His eardrums were destroyed. His focus shattered. His vision was a blur of grays and blacks that refused to sharpen.
Gōzu approached, his flute lowered, a smile on his lips.
—All done? —he asked, his voice sounding as if it came from the bottom of a well—. All tuckered out, little prodigy?
Noah stood up.
His legs trembled. His hands trembled. His entire body trembled with the violence of someone who had just survived something they shouldn't have.
—They've got me against the ropes —Noah said, his voice barely a thread now, broken by blood, pain, and exhaustion—. So...
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small device. It was barely larger than a coin, with a single red button in the center.
—...I'm going to get serious now.
---
The Dictator's Switch.
A device capable of erasing any target from existence at the user's command. It didn't just erase the body. All traces of their existence. The memories others had of them. Every mark they had left on the universe. Everything was cleanly wiped away.
---
—What is that? —Gōzu asked, and there was a note of alarm in his voice that hadn't been there before.
Noah didn't answer.
He pressed the switch, and the world stopped.
Gōzu opened his mouth.
But the words didn't come out.
Because his lips no longer existed.
His body, his clothes, his flute, his footprints in the mud—everything vanished as if it had never been.
Watching the Dictator's Switch turn to dust in his hand, Noah smiled broadly, and in the next second, his body, which had been holding itself up by sheer force of will, collapsed to the ground.
The mud received him with a dull thud he could barely feel. The rain continued to fall on his face, mingling with the blood seeping from his orifices. His eyes closed before he could order them to stay open.
The last image he saw was the gray sky, the low clouds, the unending rain.
Then, everything went dark.