Rin Nohara stood frozen, panting heavily as her darkening vision gradually cleared.
What came into focus was a back.
It was Kiyohara's back!
Rin looked at the spot hundreds of meters away where Kiyohara had just been fighting, then turned her head to stare at the boy now standing directly in front of her.
'How did he cross that distance? Am I dreaming? Did he just teleport the moment I blinked?'
However, the enemy would not give Rin time to process her shock.
"He definitely used some kind of high-level Body Flicker jutsu just now! Don't panic, a move like that must have consumed a massive amount of chakra!" Jōkichi barked, the first to weave hand seals, desperately trying to steady his flustered squad.
"Water Release: Water Dragon Bullet Technique!"
A massive water dragon erupted from the coastal moisture, roaring as it swept toward them.
"Water Release: Water Tornado!"
"Water Release—!"
The three Mist ninja beside him followed suit, unleashing their specialized jutsu. A tidal wave of cascading water instantly surged toward Kiyohara and Rin, threatening to swallow them whole.
"Rin, hold onto me."
Kiyohara reversed his grip on his Tachi and scooped the unsteady Rin into a swift princess carry.
A faint scent of medicinal herbs, sweat, and blood wafted from her, but Kiyohara's mind was entirely on survival.
The next moment, Kiyohara's magnetic force erupted.
The repulsive force beneath his feet launched him like a cannonball, propelling them in a sheer, physics-defying arc to the top of a distant, towering tree in an instant.
'The chakra consumption is actually less than using the Konoha Body Flicker,' Kiyohara thought, mildly surprised. Furthermore, the sheer acceleration speed blew standard movement techniques out of the water.
BOOM!
The spot where they had just been standing was annihilated by the combined Water Release jutsu. The earth caved in, instantly forming a muddy crater. If anyone had been caught in that blast, they would have been pulverized.
"So fast..." Rin murmured, slightly dazed. She looked up at Kiyohara's masked profile, her heart hammering against her ribs before reality finally reasserted itself.
'Why is my chakra consumption so low?' Kiyohara asked the Radical Spirit in his mind.
'Essentially, you are only using one part of your own strength to leverage ten parts of the earth's magnetic field,' the Radical Spirit explained, floating behind Kiyohara like a phantom, arms crossed. 'A fraction of those ten parts is then redirected into your momentum. You aren't doing the heavy lifting; the planet is.'
The Spirit scoffed slightly. 'If you had forcefully used this method before your DNA mutated to acquire the Magnet Release Kekkei Genkai, your body would have been crushed by the G-force.'
'I see. So this is the physical strain a Kekkei Genkai puts on the body,' Kiyohara realized.
Genetic mutations always impose a burden on the wielder, which is why "Bloodline Illnesses" exist. It was the tragic fate of prodigies like Itachi Uchiha, Hayate Gekkō, and Yakumo Kurama. Yakumo possessed her clan's most terrifying illusionary Kekkei Genkai, yet her body was so frail she could barely run five hundred meters.
'After fulfilling my second dying wish, the physical burden will shrink even further,' Kiyohara thought, looking down at the enemies scrambling below the tree canopy.
He had achieved this ridiculous speed just by inheriting a portion of the Radical Spirit's power. Once he completed the final wish and fully assimilated the legacy, his strength would skyrocket.
"Be careful, they're coming again," Rin warned, wrapping her arms tighter around Kiyohara's neck to avoid falling as the Mist ninja began scaling the massive tree.
"I know."
Kiyohara nodded. The next moment, his figure vanished like an afterimage, carrying Rin to another vantage point.
As he flickered from branch to branch, his free hand was a blur, pulling shuriken from his pouches.
Soon, a crisscrossing net of near-invisible copper wire dropped from the canopy like a spider's web.
Kiyohara channeled his chakra. He simultaneously infused the wires with Wind Release to sharpen the edges and Lightning Release to add high-voltage lethality.
The surrounding branches and trunks were shredded by the electrified net as if they were made of soft tofu.
Slice. Thud.
Several pursuing Mist ninja were diced to pieces beneath the technique before they even realized they were trapped.
Jōkichi, horrified by the area-of-effect trap, frantically burned through his chakra using the Water Body Flicker to repeatedly warp out of the net's collapsing radius.
'The copper wire is degrading,' Kiyohara noted, sensing the structural integrity of the threads fraying at his fingertips.
These were specialized, highly conductive ninja wires. Unfortunately, channeling two destructive nature transformations through them simultaneously meant they were rendered useless after just a few attacks.
'The true attrition rate of combat,' Kiyohara sighed internally. 'Ninjas don't just burn chakra; we burn money.'
Fortunately, the tactical effect was undeniable. A wide safe zone was instantly cleared. Genma and Kurenai, having finally dispatched the stragglers in their sector, quickly converged on Kiyohara's position.
Not far away, Kakashi watched Kiyohara secure Rin. Though he couldn't fathom the mechanics behind Kiyohara's blinding speed, a massive weight lifted from his chest.
Chidori!
Kakashi lunged, piercing the chests of three Mist shinobi with a blinding arc of lightning.
As the bodies fell, Kakashi swayed, a wave of intense dizziness hitting him.
The Sharingan was taking a brutal toll. The passive chakra drain was suffocating. Kakashi knew his only hope was to survive until adulthood; as a ninja's physical body matures into their prime, their stamina—and therefore their overall chakra capacity—naturally increases.
Meanwhile, Jōkichi had finally escaped the wire net. His attention was hyper-focused on Kiyohara, trying to calculate a counterattack.
He never noticed the pale, scaled shape slithering through the underbrush.
Bite.
A venomous snake sank its fangs directly into Jōkichi's ankle.
Intense, searing pain shot up his leg, and his vision immediately began to darken. The neurotoxin spread with terrifying speed, paralyzing his respiratory system in seconds.
'Such a potent toxin... such a strange snake...' Jōkichi's pupils contracted to pinpricks as a realization hit him.
In the final second before he collapsed into the mud, he saw a tall, pale-skinned man with long black hair approaching through the mist.
Orochimaru.
Unfortunately, Jōkichi had no time to regret his lack of situational awareness. The venom reached his heart, silencing him forever.
"You've done very well, Kiyohara-kun," Orochimaru hissed smoothly, looking up at Kiyohara perched in the canopy.
With the Sannin's arrival on this flank, the remaining dozens of Mist ninja immediately broke their assault and began a frantic retreat. They were vanguard troops waiting for the Seven Swordsmen; a monster like Orochimaru was far beyond their paygrade.
"That speed... and that unique manipulation of your weapons," Orochimaru's golden, slit-pupil eyes locked onto Kiyohara with intense, predatory interest. "What you used just now must be some kind of Kekkei Genkai, correct?"
He had assumed the boy was a pragmatic, talented commoner. He hadn't expected a latent genetic mutation.
With limited data, Orochimaru couldn't precisely identify the nature of the bloodline, but one thing was certain:
His interest in Kiyohara had just multiplied exponentially.
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