"ROAR!"
The Lightning Titan threw back its head and bellowed, the sound like some primordial beast from the dawn of the world. It clenched those colossal hands, each one powerful enough to crush a mountain peak, and settled into an attacking stance.
Kiei was completely dumbfounded, his eyes nearly bulging out of his skull. "Th... this bastard can actually use a jutsu this absurd? What kind of human being does something like this?!"
His whole worldview was cracking apart. A mythical jutsu like this had no business existing in reality. It was insane.
But there was no retreat now. This final blow had to be all or nothing.
With a savage wave of his hand, the massive Reaper head behind him let out a shrill scream and lunged toward Akira's clone with its jaws wide open.
This Soul Devouring Maw could swallow a soul whole.
Once caught, the victim's spirit would be ripped free and fed directly into the Reaper as nourishment.
That was true annihilation. No reincarnation. No second chance. It was a hundred times crueler than a mutual-destruction seal like the Reaper Death Seal.
Watching that grotesque mouth rush toward him, the Lightning Titan clapped its hands once in contempt, scattering sparks of lightning in every direction.
Its left hand closed around empty air, and a lightning-forged blade nearly three hundred feet long instantly took shape. A circular shield of thunder appeared in its right hand.
"BOOM!"
The titan thundered forward in several strides, making the ground quake beneath it. In an instant it was right in front of the Reaper's head, and with no flourish whatsoever, it brought the blade down in a brutal overhead cleave.
The force of that strike was impossible to describe. As the blade fell, torrents of lightning poured off it like a collapsing waterfall, blasting everything in sight.
The Reaper's head had only ever been a projection to begin with, and after taking that direct hit, its form shuddered violently and became even more translucent.
The aftermath of that single strike pulverized everything within hundreds of yards. Rock that should have been solid as iron crumbled like stale bread beneath the storm of lightning and force.
The ground itself sank more than thirty feet, and what little remained of the surrounding mountainside was instantly reduced to dust.
For miles around, it felt as if the earth had been struck by a major quake.
The Reaper's head fixed its gaze on the Lightning Titan and let out a furious howl.
"ROOOAR!"
"Oh, shut it," the titan roared back without the slightest hesitation, then swung its enormous shield straight into the Reaper's forehead.
And just like that, the two behemoths were locked in close combat, like something torn straight out of a monster movie.
Another earth-shaking brawl erupted, but it was obvious now that Kiei's side was failing. His body was weakening by the second, and the pressure pressing down on him had become unbearable.
"Damn it! Why? Why can a mere clone cast a jutsu like this? What in hell is this guy made of?!"
From the very beginning, Kiei had catastrophically underestimated Akira's strength. Or rather, the entire shinobi world had underestimated him.
Everyone assumed he was just another Kage-level powerhouse.
Other than Tsunade and Jiraiya, the two people closest to him, no one understood that Akira had already broken through the ceiling of what Kage-level meant.
He was now standing on the edge of the legendary Six Paths tier.
Every casual strike from the Lightning Titan carried attack power beyond an S-rank jutsu. It was absurd.
One lazy slash could carve a canyon hundreds of yards long across the ground.
In terms of sheer destructive force, it was no less terrifying than Madara's Perfect Susanoo, perhaps even worse.
For the titan, splitting mountains was basic work. It did it as easily as carving butter.
The only reason Akira's clone had answered with such an extreme jutsu in the first place was because Kiei's Soul Devouring Maw was the real deal.
As time dragged on, Kiei's body finally reached its limit, and the maw itself began fading more and more.
On top of that, it had been smashed into the dirt over and over by the Lightning Titan. Its power had dropped sharply, and those snapping jaws could no longer reach the giant itself. Every attempt was blocked by that massive lightning shield.
Each time the Soul Devouring Maw tried to slip around for a strike, the shield knocked it aside, and a blade came crashing down on it a heartbeat later.
Even while borrowing a portion of the Reaper's divine power, it still could not so much as graze a hair on Akira's clone.
Little by little, Kiei's body began to break apart, piece by piece, under the weight of his fury and hatred.
At the final moment of his life, the giant's shield and blade changed shape once more, instantly becoming a colossal bow of thunder and a blazing arrow of condensed lightning.
Every inch of it was compressed electricity at the highest possible density.
The Lightning Titan drew the bow in one smooth motion, and just before the Soul Devouring Maw could vanish, the lightning arrow shot forward as a streak of gold and violet, punching straight through the monstrous mouth.
"ROOOAAARGH!"
A dreadful scream tore out of Kiei, the sound of a soul being ripped apart.
The Reaper's shadow, torn loose from Kiei's body, turned and let out one last furious cry toward Akira's clone.
But the Reaper of this world was not truly alive, nor did it possess real thought. It was only a manifestation of a certain underworld law.
That last arrow from the Lightning Titan had indeed damaged the portion of the Reaper's power projected into this world.
But as an embodiment of law, the Reaper would not lash out like some wounded beast. It simply was.
The scene shifted.
On the lone peak about half a mile from the battlefield, Akira finally finished what he was doing. Not only had he treated Anko and Kurenai's life-threatening wounds, he had also fed each of them a soldier pill.
They had both lost too much blood. If they did not replenish their strength immediately, waking up would do them little good.
But when the two women slowly opened their eyes, the look they gave Akira was impossibly awkward.
Thankfully, Akira had already set up a concealment barrier. If anyone else had seen this, he would never have been able to explain it away.
Both women had been covered in injuries from head to toe. For treatment to be done properly, their clothes had naturally been... inconvenient.
Once the healing was complete, Akira casually dismissed the barrier.
Seeing the embarrassed flush on both their faces, he pretended not to notice and turned his gaze toward the battlefield half a mile away instead.
His Rinnegan eyesight was absurdly sharp. Even from this distance, he could see everything clearly.
At that very moment, a deafening explosion erupted in the distance, followed by a gigantic mushroom cloud surging into the sky, rising hundreds of yards into the air.
The shockwave that followed spread outward like a tidal wave.
What little rock and dirt remained after the earlier devastation was ripped up by the blast and hurled into the sky, blotting out the light.
Within moments, the entire area for hundreds of yards around was swallowed by a roaring sandstorm of dust and debris.
Through the rolling haze, bursts of fire flashed in and out of view.
And the Lightning Titan itself, standing more than two hundred feet tall, was so enormous that even from this distance, Kurenai and Anko could see it clearly enough to have their jaws drop.
For a moment, they even forgot the embarrassment of having been seen in such a vulnerable state by Akira.
"What... what even is that thing? How could something like that possibly exist?"
Kurenai stared at the colossal figure in disbelief, half convinced the lightning giant had to be some ancient summon or forgotten titan from another age.