Yuu had planned this entire sequence in advance. Even the weapon he used had been chosen deliberately.
The reason he used the Sword of the Thunder God instead of the White Fang short blade was because iron sand naturally countered ordinary metal weapons. Only an energy weapon constructed from chakra, like the Sword of the Thunder God, would not be affected.
Across from him,
because of the flames blocking his vision, Sasori did not immediately see Yuu's movements clearly.
But he was still a Kage-level fighter with abundant combat experience. The moment he noticed Yuu vanish from sight, he immediately manipulated iron sand into a flowing defensive barrier around himself. At the same time, he freed one hand, took out a scroll from behind him, and threw it down.
Bang!
White smoke spread.
Five red-clad human puppets of different designs appeared beside Sasori. He controlled them one by one with chakra threads from the five fingers of his left hand, forming a defensive ring centered around himself.
At the same time, the five fingers of Sasori's right hand continued controlling the Third Kazekage puppet, making it rapidly return to defend from Pakura and the three weasel brothers.
Almost at the same moment this series of movements was completed,
a sharp whistling sound suddenly rang out in the air. Then several cold blade-lights, like bolts of lightning appearing out of nowhere, slashed toward Sasori from different angles. Behind the blade-light was a transparent outline, dragging afterimages through midair.
Clang! Clang!
Sasori reacted quickly. The instant he sensed something was wrong, he had already controlled the two red-clad puppets in front of him to cross their poisoned blades and block.
Amid flying sparks, the refined steel short blade in one puppet's hand was actually cut apart by the Sword of the Thunder God, enhanced by Monster Strength.
However, this also bought Sasori a few tenths of a second to breathe, allowing him to close the flowing iron sand barrier in front of himself, forming a defensive layer nearly half a meter thick.
Clang!
Yuu's slash landed hard on the iron sand wall, producing a dull, heavy boom. A deep crack was cut into the surface of the iron sand, and fragments flew everywhere.
Good thing he was using the Sword of the Thunder God right now, not the White Fang short blade. Otherwise, with such a violent impact, even without considering Magnet Release countering metal, the White Fang short blade's edge would probably have snapped on the spot.
When one strike failed to break through, Yuu's figure immediately vanished and appeared behind Sasori in an instant. The blade-light flashed again.
Whoosh! Whoosh!
The other three red-clad puppets swung their iron hammers, drills, and longswords, stabbing toward Yuu.
Strictly speaking, Sasori's reaction speed was slower than Yuu's, but not as much slower as Rasa's or Pakura's.
However, he had investigated Yuu's abilities in advance. From that, he predicted that Yuu might attack again. So when he moved earlier, he had already controlled all five puppets to counterattack at the same time, while his main body shifted aside at the critical moment.
Swish—!
The Sword of the Thunder God almost brushed past Sasori's forehead.
As several strands of bright red hair were cut off and drifted away on the wind, Sasori's pupils contracted violently, and cold sweat suddenly broke out over his body.
At this time,
the Third Kazekage puppet finally rushed back. Before it even arrived, it spread both arms, and countless fine iron sand particles, like black rain, flew with sharp piercing sounds and covered the entire area where Yuu was.
"Magnet Release: Iron Sand Buckshot!"
Puff!
The iron sand buckshot pierced through Yuu's figure, but it only hit an afterimage.
The next moment…
Yuu's figure suddenly split apart in Sasori's vision, transforming into over a dozen high-speed afterimages. They surrounded Sasori and his puppets, launching another storm-like close-range assault. Flashing blade-lights had already woven into a deadly silver net, enveloping Sasori at the center.
Instant Prison Shadow Killing Formation!
After nearly dying just now, Sasori became especially cautious. He gathered all six puppets, including the Third Kazekage, in front of himself. Together with the iron sand, they formed a fortress with interlocking supports, protecting his main body in the middle.
Then, the puppets each showed their skills. Some swung long blades and drills, some released extendable segmented bamboo-like hands, and some opened their mouths to spray blue-purple poison smoke. In various ways, they defended against Yuu's attacks while trying to counterattack.
Clang, clang, clang! Hiss, hiss, hiss!
The sounds of metal striking and blades tearing through the air fell densely like rain.
Yuu's figure shuttled at high speed between blade-light, drills, and poison smoke. The short blade in his hand turned into streaks of silver. Every collision more or less brought the sound of a puppet part cracking.
In barely a minute,
the two had already exchanged over a hundred attacks and blocks, turning this small battlefield into something as fierce as a meat grinder.
Finally…
after one intense collision, the two tacitly retreated several dozen meters at the same time, temporarily opening some distance.
"Hoo…"
Yuu let out a long breath.
Sasori of the Red Sand's close-combat ability was a bit stronger than he had expected.
Unlike ordinary puppeteers, who would collapse once an opponent got close, Sasori's taijutsu was not weak. His strength and reaction speed were both respectable. Without activating Overload Pulse, Yuu's normal Instant Prison Shadow Killing Formation posed only limited danger to him.
Mm… strictly speaking, Chiyo was also very strong. According to the settings, her taijutsu and strength were even higher than Sasori's.
In addition, to avoid inhaling Sasori's poison smoke, Yuu had been holding his breath the entire time. Only after using up one breath did he pull back to breathe.
Of course…
that fierce assault had not been completely fruitless.
The five red-clad puppets controlled by Sasori's left hand were basically destroyed now. One had been cut in half at the waist, sparks bursting from its joints. One was missing an arm, and the sword in its hand had become a broken blade. The remaining three could barely stand, but their bodies were covered in slash marks and looked like they might collapse at any moment.
Only the Third Kazekage puppet still hovered intact behind him, radiating powerful pressure.
"Heh…"
Sasori laughed once, licked his slightly dry lips, and locked his eyes firmly on Yuu, looking like he wanted something he could not yet obtain.
"Truly… surprising, Konoha brat. Your body is almost as perfect as the Third Kazekage's. I'm becoming more and more fond of it!"
Before his voice even faded, Sasori loosened the five fingers of his left hand. The five damaged red-clad puppets collapsed to the ground like marionettes whose strings had been cut. Immediately after, he took out new puppets. Another seven red-clad human puppets appeared where the others had fallen, connected to the chakra threads at Sasori's fingertips.
"Do you see?"
Sasori's voice carried a somewhat sickly pride.
"I have no fewer than seventy collectibles like these. No matter how powerful your swordsmanship is, how many can you destroy? You're only delaying the inevitable."
"…Is that so?"
Yuu raised an eyebrow.
He had originally thought that Sasori at this stage would not know Performance of a Hundred Puppets.
In fact, he probably really did not. Normal puppeteers used both hands to control puppets. No matter how skilled Sasori was, it was too absurd for one finger to control ten puppets. That should only be an ability he could use after turning himself into a human puppet.
But…
Not having mastered Performance of a Hundred Puppets did not mean Sasori did not have a hundred human puppets.
According to the setting, he should have made nearly three hundred human puppets. Without disabling his real body's ability to move, trying to wear him down and hoping he would run out of puppets was clearly an extremely foolish strategy.
"Looks like I'll have to find a chance to gamble again…"
[Monster Strength: Huh, are we gambling? Come on, come on! This time I'll definitely roll a 'Full Sweep'! Trust my luck!]
"…"
Yuu's mouth twitched.
The killing move he had just imagined was indeed the same as when he dealt with Rasa: activate Overload Pulse and the Certain Victory of the Desperate buff to the maximum, then gamble with Monster Strength and see whether he could slash out a blow beyond his limits, cutting through both puppets and Sasori in one strike.
However, he probably only had one chance.
He first needed to force Sasori to reveal an opening.
"Yuu!"
Pakura's voice rang out.
Yuu glanced over and saw that Pakura had already moved close to him. A ring of Scorch Release fireballs circled around her, and she had prepared for battle. Jirōmaru and Saburōmaru were crouched on her left and right shoulders, making her look a little like Jiraiya in Sage Mode.
As for Tarōmaru, he turned into a whirl of wind and landed on Yuu's shoulder. His little claws tightly gripped Yuu's collar as he squeaked, "Yuu, I'll help you blow wind! Hurry and beat him!"
"…Alright. Let's do it."
Yuu smiled and nodded, his eyes becoming calm again.
Compared to slowly analyzing and researching, solving the immediate problem was the most important thing.
"We're going in!"
Before his words fell,
Yuu sheathed his blade and thrust his right hand into the ninja pouch at his waist, pulling hard.
Swish! Swish! Swish! Swish!
Dozens of kunai and shuriken shot out.
Then…
Shuriken Shadow Clone Technique!
In an instant, the shuriken and kunai seemed to blur. One became two, two became four… As smoke scattered, the dozens of shuriken multiplied into several hundred in the blink of an eye, covering every area around Sasori. The sight was astonishing.
With the assistance of Tarōmaru's air cannon, these shuriken flew at a speed faintly thirty percent faster than usual.
Thanks to this, Pakura also joined the two weasels and released a Wind Release-enhanced Scorch Release: Corona.
This move was one of her killing techniques. She had used it the first time she fought Yuu, though it had failed to work on him. Now, with the wind support of the two weasel brothers, the edge of this round of Corona showed an extremely faint blue tint.
Facing their pincer attack,
Sasori remained unhurried. On one side, he controlled two human puppets with his left hand to release Water Release, countering Pakura's Scorch Release fireballs. Although those two puppets were not as powerful as the Third Kazekage, they still had jōnin-level strength.
On the other side, the Third Kazekage puppet opened an invisible magnetic field and seized the hundreds of shuriken around it. With a clattering series of metallic sounds, large numbers of shuriken were frantically drawn in and piled onto the pitch-black iron sand. The portion made of shadow clones dispersed with repeated puffs.
At the same time these clones dispersed,
cold currents flowed into Yuu's body, making him shiver.
Shuriken Shadow Clone Technique was a skin of Clone Technique.
So when these ninja tool clones were destroyed by Sasori, Yuu similarly received the enhancement of the Certain Victory of the Desperate buff. Although each buff was not as strong as a normal shadow clone's, there were so many of them that the effect quickly stacked up in a very short time.
But
Yuu did not immediately attack.
Instead, amid spreading sand and steam, he moved closer to Sasori while searching for an opening. At the same time, he continued throwing shuriken and occasionally spat a string of Phoenix Sage Fire toward the puppets near Sasori.
Pakura also tacitly condensed a series of Scorch Release fireballs, forming a crossfire network with Yuu and fiercely bombarding Sasori's position, aiming to destroy his puppets.
Because Sasori was deeply wary of Yuu's miraculous swordsmanship, he did not dare let his puppets move too far away from him. He could only adopt a defensive counterattack posture to deal with their assault. Even the Third Kazekage's iron sand no longer dared spread out recklessly like at the beginning.
Whenever one or two puppets were damaged, Sasori immediately replaced them with new ones, not daring to be careless in the slightest.
For a time, it looked as if Yuu and Pakura had taken the upper hand.
During the fight,
Yuu played two small games with Monster Strength, testing his luck.
Mm… today, Monster Strength's luck seemed very good. For several rounds in a row, she almost always won. This abnormal phenomenon made Yuu a little suspicious. He felt like something was not quite right.
However…
The arrow was already on the string, and he had no choice but to fire. Unless he intended to abandon Pakura and run, under the current situation, there was only one path if he wanted to kill Sasori.
As time passed, Yuu finally waited for a chance when the distance between Sasori and the Third Kazekage puppet widened.
"Now!"
In an instant,
Yuu's figure paused. Chakra exploded under his feet, and his whole body turned into a silver-white streak barely visible to the naked eye. Midway, he used Substitution Technique to cut into the gap of less than two meters.
His target was Sasori's real body.
Swish—!
The Sword of the Thunder God appeared again, slashing horizontally toward Sasori's neck.
However…
on Sasori's ever-calm face, a cold smile of a successful scheme appeared.
"I've been waiting for you, idiot!"
His ten fingers suddenly tightened and crossed. Two puppets that had remained hidden and inactive suddenly turned their bodies and swung their weapons toward Yuu.
That opening earlier had been bait Sasori had deliberately shown Yuu. It was a carefully arranged death trap. Those two puppets had not been positioned to capture Yuu; that was why their reaction was so fast.
Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!
The sounds of blades entering flesh and blunt weapons smashing bone rang out dully.
The chain hammer and longsword in the two puppets' hands struck Yuu solidly. Because the force was so great, the tip of the blade even pierced out through his back and ribs. Yuu's face showed disbelief, and the short sword in his hand silently drooped.
Pakura's shocked cry and the weasels' screams rang out almost simultaneously.
"Yuu—!"
The next moment,
poof!
"!?"
The smile on Sasori's mouth suddenly froze. His pupils shrank sharply to pinpoints as he saw the "Yuu" who had been hit explode into a cloud of white smoke and vanish.
It was a shadow clone!
"This guy… when exactly did he…"
Sasori looked around in disbelief, trying to pull out the real body directly.
But there was no time for him to think any further.
Because of the earlier Shuriken Shadow Clones, Yuu had already stacked Certain Victory of the Desperate to a high level. Now, after sacrificing a shadow clone, his speed and strength rose another level, reaching an unbelievable degree.
Under Sasori's gaze, the Sword of the Thunder God, shining with blue-white arcs of electricity, transformed into a human shape during its fall. It was Yuu's real body transformed by the Transformation Technique. He stepped out of the void and swung his blade with lightning speed.
At this almost face-to-face distance, Yuu did not even need to perform an additional thrust. He only needed the original length of the Sword of the Thunder God to reach Sasori's real body.
Time seemed to stretch infinitely at this moment.
Swish! Swish! Swish! Swish!
Four blade-lights lit up almost simultaneously, with no clear order between them. They were so fast they exceeded the limits of visual afterimages. It looked as if only one slash had been made, yet four clear, solid blue trajectories remained in the air.
The first three slashes aimed at Sasori's right hand.
More precisely, they aimed at the chakra threads connecting his fingers to the Third Kazekage puppet. If the Third Kazekage puppet did not break free from his control, any advantage would only be temporary.
As the blade-light flashed, four of the five chakra threads snapped.
Only the fourth slash was truly a killing move aimed at Sasori himself.
The blade, accompanied by the sound of crackling electricity, tore through the air with the resolve to cut through everything, heading straight for Sasori's chest.
"Aaah—!"
Sasori's eyes widened violently, and a chill rushed from his spine to the top of his head.
In the moment between life and death, he only had time to hook one finger, using the one remaining chakra thread to pull the Third Kazekage puppet. At the critical instant, the puppet was forcefully shifted half a meter to the side in an extremely awkward posture, blocking between him and Yuu.
At the same time, Sasori raised his left arm and made a blocking posture in front of his chest, trying to protect his vital points.
Pfft!
The sound of a blade entering flesh was clear and audible. Blood splashed.
The Sword of the Thunder God in Yuu's hand first cut a gash into the Third Kazekage puppet's shoulder, then landed on Sasori's left arm. Wherever the blade passed, a severed arm immediately flew up.
Not only that, after passing through two layers of obstruction, the slash still cut through Sasori's leather armor with considerable force, leaving a huge, savage, bone-deep wound across his right chest, dragging diagonally down to his abdomen. Blood surged like a fountain.
"…Damn it. If you want to kill me, then die with me!"
The intense pain and threat of death completely awakened Sasori's ferocity.
His eyes turned blood-red. Ignoring his own heavy injuries, he clenched the five fingers of his remaining right hand like claws. The Third Kazekage puppet, whose shoulder Yuu had slashed open, suddenly manipulated the iron sand in midair, turning it into several pitch-black short spears that stabbed straight toward Yuu's abdomen and back.
Whoosh—!
At this moment, Yuu had just completed the four consecutive slashes and was in the moment when old force was spent and new force had yet to form. In a rush, he used Substitution Technique, but in the instant before the ability activated, he was still grazed by an iron sand spear.
After that,
the two figures separated again.
Yuu appeared thirty or forty meters away and glanced at the graze on his waist. There, a purplish-black mark was quietly spreading.
Sasori remained standing in place with his left arm severed. His mouth was open as he panted violently. The huge wound across his chest had nearly split his entire body in two and looked horrifying.
At this time, Pakura seized the opportunity and threw a string of Scorch Release fireballs at him.
Sasori tried to release chakra threads again, using his only remaining hand to restart the Third Kazekage. But how could Pakura give him that chance? Scorch Release fireballs rained down as if they cost nothing, blasting Sasori into a miserable state and forcing him to duck and flee.
Meanwhile, the three weasel brothers took this chance to turn into three gusts of wild wind and snatch the Third Kazekage's corpse away. Although they were not especially smart, they could tell that more than half of Sasori's strength came from that puppet. If they wanted to defeat him, they naturally had to ban that thing first.
"Yuu, are you okay?"
Pakura glanced back at Yuu from a distance in the middle of the fighting.
"…Hmph. He's poisoned. There's no cure."
Before Yuu could answer, Sasori spoke breathlessly while dodging and moving.
"This is a new poison I personally prepared. Even that old woman Chiyo couldn't break it in a short time, let alone such a young Konoha brat.
"Although his strength was somewhat beyond my expectations… I still won this round. You and he will both become part of the art I carefully craft. Eternity is art!"
Originally, that really should have been the case.
Sasori was one of the top poison users in the ninja world. In the original story, the poison he used on Kankurō had left Chiyo helpless, and it was only thanks to Sakura, who inherited Tsunade's teachings, that it was broken. Even Chiyo and Sakura had nearly been killed by that poison in the battle afterward.
Although the current Sasori was twenty years younger than he was during that plot, the fact that he had managed to assassinate—or, by logical inference, most likely poison—the Third Kazekage was enough to prove his level in poison techniques.
At first, Yuu did indeed feel full-body paralysis. His whole body was in terrible pain, and he could barely maintain his composure. Fine cold sweat kept seeping from his forehead.
However…
when this pain rapidly climbed to a certain degree of intensity, another power surfaced within Yuu's body, as if releasing some kind of information.
This was… Healing Technique's Seed of Vitality!
Back when the Seed of Vitality trait had just been unlocked, Yuu had planted one inside himself, allowing it to slowly take root and sprout, recording his physiological state. And now, as Yuu entered a poisoned state, that seed finally began to become active.
~~~
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