ACSP: Chapter 216: Does this Kakashi Hatake have an affair with Rin Nohara?
When the Nangong sisters used to grind this Secret Realm with their old teams, they always had to allocate a specific teammate to pull Kakashi Hatake's aggro and just hold him at bay. The rest of the squad would then unleash their full firepower to blitz down the surrounding Konoha mobs first, before finally converging to besiege the white-haired ninja together.
In fact, that wasn't just their personal meta—the vast majority of standard Contractor teams raiding this instance adopted the exact same blueprint.
The reason a single player could comfortably stall Kakashi at the start of the engagement came down to his specific AI logic: his baseline combat programming was intensely, notoriously cautious. The kid favored probing attacks, defensive reads, and calculated repositioning rather than opening with a full-tilt offensive. Because of this, even unoptimized Class-Advancers with garbage configurations could comfortably trade a few neutral blows with him without getting instantly deleted. It was the exact mechanic that earned him the universal "fifty-fifty" meme across the regional strategy forums.
But that caution didn't mean his template was weak. Quite the opposite.
Once you pierced through his defensive posture, this juvenile Kakashi Hatake's actual combat parameters were incredibly terrifying. His meticulous pacing simply meant he almost never exposed a clean counter-hit window for players to exploit. Meanwhile, his raw movement velocity, frame data, and burst damage far outstripped a standard Jonin-tier NPC.
The real run-killer was his signature tracking routine: a high-speed dash combining the kinetic precision of the [Sharingan] with his piercing, single-target [Lightning Release]. The power behind that vector was absolute ruin. The exact millisecond a player slipped up or whiffed a major cooldown, his AI would instantly identify the vulnerability, executing a thunderous, frame-perfect punish that bypassed standard defenses entirely.
Even veteran Kage-level Contractors who got careless could find their entire health pools melted in a single, blink-and-you-miss-it counter-pounce.
Back when this high-level Secret Realm first materialized in the Magic City's instance registry, countless pioneering raid teams were utterly wiped out at this exact choke point. It wasn't until the community collectively figured out the clear-the-adds-first strategy that the survival rate began to creep up.
Yet, even with the optimized meta-routing, most average teams still couldn't dream of walking away from this level unscathed. More often than not, they had to accept trading one or two casualties to the copy ninja's blade—if they didn't end up triggering a full squad wipe anyway.
But watching Jiang Chen casually reverse-bait the boss and end the entire encounter with a single, disrespectful clone swap... the twins realized the "rules" of this dungeon simply didn't apply to him.
Only teams with fully optimized configurations—where every single member was at least a veteran Tokubetsu Jonin Contractor—could reliably execute the standard strategy and clear this leg of the instance.
Yet, Nangong Fei and Nangong Hong never in their wildest dreams expected that this notorious Jonin boss, an entity that had struck absolute fear into the hearts of countless regional raid groups, would be so effortlessly insta-killed by Jiang Chen.
"Wait... why did Kakashi Hatake's attack pattern suddenly completely warp just now?" Nangong Fei stammered, a look of profound disbelief flashing across her face. "I distinctly remember his AI being incredibly cautious. He never commits to a blind, high-altitude dash like that right out of the gate!"
"Could it be... because of what Big Brother Jiang Chen said to him right before he lunged?" Nangong Hong muttered, the puzzle pieces clicking together in her mind.
The twin sisters locked eyes, both of their faces pale with shock. Only at this absolute moment did they finally comprehend the brilliant, unconventional tactical layers behind Jiang Chen's seemingly unhinged comment.
It was a deliberate, hyper-calculated provocation mechanic.
But tracing the logic backwards only made the realization even more mind-boggling. Because based on the extreme psychological breakdown they had just witnessed, it was glaringly obvious that the boss NPC shared a deep, deeply personal bond with the female hostage cradled in Jiang Chen's arm. In fact, given how violently he had lost his sanity over a single vulgar remark, the two might very well be having a secret affair!
But the real, burning question was... how on earth did Jiang Chen read that relationship dynamic within seconds of the encounter?
"Damn, isn't the Boss running this high-level instance for the first time just like the rest of us?" Li Dala scratched his head, completely baffled as his clay bird drifted alongside the giant eagle. "How could he tell at a single glance that this Kakashi guy was fooling around with our hostage? Did he dig up some classified, hidden-lore strategy guide on the deep web?"
He immediately shook his head, dismissing the thought. That made no sense. If a hidden mechanical shortcut like that existed anywhere on the forums, the Nangong sisters—who were established local Contractors from the Magic City—would have been all over it.
"I've got it. It's because the moment that white-haired kid breached the canopy, he screamed out the female hostage's name. The Boss analyzed the vocal frequency, panic metrics, and immediate behavioral shift to conclude they were intimately connected."
Ronan, who had been quietly evaluating the combat logs, suddenly spoke up, his voice cutting through the wind.
Hearing Ronan's logical breakdown, Li Dala's eyes lit up as he finally caught on. He vividly remembered the sequence now: the exact second Kakashi materialized, his very first desperate line dialogue was indeed "Let Rin go immediately!"
It made perfect sense. The Boss had instantly isolated that single keyword, deduced the exact emotional vulnerability of the boss template, and engineered a devastating psychological counter-play on the fly.
To possess that level of tactical insight, processing speed, and absolute calmness under pressure... it was truly nothing short of amazing!
...
"Kaka... shi..."
The exact moment Kakashi's head severed from his shoulders, Rin Nohara's eyelids fluttered. It was as if some deep, subconscious bond had snapped, forcibly pulling her from her comatose state. She slowly opened her eyes, only for her gaze to land directly on the horrific spectacle of Kakashi's lifeless, decapitated body plummeting into the trees.
The sight shattered her mind. Propelled by pure, unadulterated trauma and rage, a terrifying, crimson surge of Tailed Beast Chakra erupted violently from her body. The explosive kinetic shockwave blasted outward, knocking the nearby Nangong sisters completely off their feet and sending them flying backward across Garuda's broad back.
"——Ahhhhh!"
Rin clutched her head with both hands, screaming in absolute, agonizing torment. The dense, bubbling chakra radiating from her skin suddenly contracted, instantly snapping back toward her core at a dizzying speed. Within seconds, the ethereal, bone-chilling silhouette of a colossal, spiked sea turtle began to manifest over her flesh.
"Not good! She's triggering an early Tailed Beast transformation!" Nangong Fei shouted in a panic. The moment she stabilized her footing, she spun toward her twin. "Hong'er, quick! Deploy your Sealing Technique before the form locks in!"
"On it!"
Nangong Hong's fingers flew into a blur of hand seals. With a desperate flick of her wrist, she summoned a massive, heavy scroll of reinforced binding cloth from her dimensional storage, aggressively unfurling it into the air. She whipped her arms forward, directing the dense fabric to coil tightly around the screaming, out-of-control Jinchuriki.
"—Ninja Art: Cloth Binding Technique!"
Yet, the exact millisecond the fabric layers began to constrict around Rin's form, a far more malevolent, ocean-like torrent of red chakra surged from her pores. The sheer density of the raw energy acted like an expanding shockwave, instantly shredding the reinforced cloth into millions of harmless white flakes.
"It's completely useless! The instance scaling has pushed her parameters to level 95! My output threshold isn't high enough to suppress it!" Nangong Hong cried out, her face pale as she desperately tried to channel chakra into a secondary binding array, only for the seals to fracture and shatter instantly.
"How can the system parameters be this high?!" Nangong Fei's heart sank into her stomach.
Having researched previous dungeon logs, the twins knew that managing Rin's stability was a core milestone of the escort route. If she lost emotional control mid-transit, a player possessing a specialized sealing toolkit had to immediately step up to manually suppress the Three-Tails. This mechanical requirement was precisely why so many groups in the staging area were aggressively headhunting support Contractors with sealing proficiencies.
According to the strict narrative guidelines of the Secret Realm, the party's objective was to deliver Rin Nohara to the designated perimeter of Konoha so that the Tailed Beast would detonate inside the Leaf's defenses. If Rin died prematurely on the road, or if the transformation completed out in the wilderness, the mission parameters would completely break, resulting in an automatic failure.
When the Nangong twins had run this instance in the past, their party averages hovered around a modest level 70. Back then, if they reacted within the correct frame windows, Nangong Hong's [Cloth Binding Technique] was more than enough to handle the suppression.
Her low-level technique didn't actually overwrite the beast's seal directly; instead, it used external, chakra-infused constriction to completely immobilize the host's physical body. Because the narrative lore dictates that Uchiha Madara had already placed a hidden, 24-hour command seal inside Rin's heart, forcing her body into absolute stasis would cause the turbulent Three-Tails chakra to naturally recede and stabilize.
But right now, the entire mechanical playing field had been drastically warped.
Because Ronan was sitting at a staggering level 95, the instance's global scaling had automatically boosted Rin's transformation resistance to match a Kage-level threat. Against a level 95 localized catastrophe, Nangong Hong's level 68 attributes were simply far too weak. The fabric couldn't even establish a single point of friction before being incinerated by the raw, bubbling heat of the Isobu shroud.
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