ACSP: Chapter 218: Uchiha Obito is Dead, but this Mission is Clearly Fishy!
"Heavens, this Ronan is really amazing... He can actually duel that masked man head-on and completely suppress him!"
The Nangong twins were entirely star-struck at this point, their minds failing to comprehend the gap in combat performance. They had naturally assumed Jiang Chen's squad would behave like every other standard Secret Realm raid team—grouping up, cycling defensive cooldowns, and throwing everything at the wall to slowly chip down the boss. They never imagined that a single deployment could comfortably lock down and systematically dismantle the most notorious encounter in the instance!
This was completely breaking the established meta. A narrative boss that other elite teams required flawless, multi-man coordination to survive... was being soloed like a common trash mob?
"Tch! Personally, I think this masked freak is just overhyped," Li Dala grumbled, his competitive streak flaring up the moment he heard the girls praise Ronan. "If the Boss had sent me in first, I would've turned him into art by now."
Determined to steal a piece of the spotlight, Li Dala raised his clay-stained hand and aggressively swept his arm forward. Several micro-sized clay hummingbirds shot out from his palms at hyper-velocity, cutting a jagged, whistling line through the air straight toward Uchiha Obito's coordinates.
——BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
A brilliant, white-hot chain of detonations erupted right in the pocket of space between Ronan and the masked boy.
Fortunately, Ronan had already heavily seeded the immediate perimeter with specialized Flying Thunder God formulas. The exact microsecond the clay constructs ignited, his sensory array picked up the chemical spike; without a single frame of hesitation, he executed the [Flying Thunder God Technique], displacing his entire mass a hundred meters away into the safe zone.
Uchiha Obito attempted to mimic the rapid retreat, relying on his Senju-buffed reflexes to leap backward, but he was a fatal step too slow. The expanding concussive shockwave and surging thermal currents instantly swallowed his robed figure whole.
"Damn it, Li Dala! Don't just dump high-yield Explosion Release into my melee pocket without calling it out first! Are you actively trying to team-kill me?!" Ronan snarled, spinning around to glare daggers at the clay artisan.
Li Dala simply shrugged his shoulders nonchalantly, completely unbothered by the Kage-level glare. "Please. You're running a space-time displacement toolkit and an absolute Immortal Body. What is there for you to even be afraid of?"
"Piss off."
Ronan didn't waste any more breath arguing. After a curt, irritated snap, he refocused his gaze, flickering right back to the edge of the billowing, charcoal-thick smoke cloud left by the blast. He kept his stance low, his Sharingan and Byakugan working in tandem to pierce the veil. Although Li Dala's burst damage was undeniably monstrous, his instincts refused to believe that a major narrative milestone boss would be deleted by a single uncoordinated volley.
Seeing that Ronan was maintaining a strict combat posture, Li Dala's smug expression faded slightly. He took a few cautious steps forward, anchoring his own gaze onto the center of the crater.
However, as the dense updraft of soot and ash finally cleared... Both of them froze in genuine surprise.
The masked man had completely vanished.
"What the hell? What kind of mechanical evasion was that?" Li Dala's expression shifted, his confidence dipping into alarm. "My tracking metrics clearly confirmed he was caught dead-center in the blast radius!"
Just then—
Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
The violent, screeching sound of displaced air cut through the clearing from an entirely unmapped vector. Several hyper-dense, razor-sharp tree branches pierced through the curtain of smoke, hurtling through the sky like organic ballistic missiles.
The tracking trajectory was locked dead-center onto Li Dala's torso.
Li Dala's muscle memory immediately triggered, his legs flexing to execute a lateral evasion maneuver. But in the very next frame, his internal radar caught a glaring, chilling anomaly.
Something was deeply wrong with the trajectory.
While the incoming wooden spears were physically screaming toward his current coordinates, the lethal, piercing tips weren't angled to impact his chest at all. The micro-vectors of the projectiles were calculated to pass right beside his flanks—meaning the true, intended kill-zone the opponent was aiming for... was the space directly behind his back!
Standing directly behind him at that exact coordinates on the eagle's back were the twin sisters, Nangong Fei and Nangong Hong.
Is this freak actually prioritizing the backline support?!
Li Dala's eyes flickered with instant realization. As a proud combatant, fleeing a straight engagement while leaving allies exposed was completely out of the question. Moreover, the Nangong sisters were currently physically anchoring Rin Nohara—who had slumped back into a dead coma following Jiang Chen's sealing override—rendering their evasive movement frames severely limited. If he chose to dodge laterally, the two girls would inevitably be impaled clean through by the incoming barrage.
Li Dala's brain cells fired at overclocked speeds. The wooden spikes were screaming through the air far too fast; trying to knead, shape, and deploy a responsive wave of clay bombs within this micro-window was mechanically impossible.
Steeling his resolve, he decisively reached into his pouch, whipped out two heavy Kunai, and aggressively drove his heels into the eagle's crest, leaping directly into the teeth of the projectile storm.
Clack! Clack! Clack!
The sharp, jarring echo of metal colliding with dense wood rang out a millisecond later. Relying on sheer mechanical reflex, Li Dala successfully deflected three of the piercing branches mid-air.
However, just as his arms whipped around to intercept the final, trailing projectile—the wooden shaft violently destabilized, transforming right before his eyes into the full, robed form of the Masked Man!
"What?!"
Li Dala's pupils instantly constricted into pinpricks. He hadn't expected this narrative boss's tactical AI to be so terrifyingly adaptive, seamlessly hiding his physical body inside a basic [Transformation Technique] vector to bypass the front line.
"—Wood Release: Cutting Technique!"
Uchiha Obito fluidly tilted his upper torso, allowing Li Dala's desperate, lunging Kunai to slice through empty air right beside his shoulder. Simultaneously, his right palm shot forward like a piston, aiming directly for the center of Li Dala's exposed chest.
Clang—!
The exact microsecond his palm made contact with the fabric of Li Dala's outfit, a longsword tore through the blind spot with absolute, game-breaking velocity.
Just as Obito was about to execute the lethal point-blank puncture, the razor-sharp tip of the Kusanagi Sword precisely intercepted his vector, piercing clean through the center of his palm!
Blood splattered across the white wood. Not only did the blade completely impale Obito's hand, but the terrifying kinetic force channeled behind the thrust carried his entire mid-air mass backward, hurling him across dozens of meters of open airspace before pinning his palm deep into the trunk of a massive, ancient tree.
"Got you, you slippery brat!"
Ronan seized the operational window instantly. He executed a frame-perfect [Body Flicker Technique], vanishing from his position and materializing onto a thick branch right beside the pinned boss.
Without giving the masked boy a single frame to struggle free from the embedded steel, Ronan gripped the humming hilt of the [Sword of the Thunder God] with both hands and drove it straight through the spiral mask, obliterating the head beneath it.
"Kakashi... Rin..."
Obito's limbs gave a few desperate, erratic twitches before his health bar completely flatlined, his body going entirely limp against the bark.
[Secret Realm Alert: Congratulations on successfully executing the Masked Infiltrator, Uchiha Obito! Mission Progress increased by 20%!]
[Current Global Completion Rate: 55%]
Uchiha Obito... actually just died like that?
Jiang Chen paced over to the base of the massive tree trunk, his eyes narrowing as he stared down at the unmoving corpse. Looking at the completely destroyed head of the narrative's central antagonist, the friction in his instincts didn't recede—it violently spiked. For some unexplainable reason, the sickening feeling that the entire spatial logic of this Secret Realm was playing tricks on them began to grow rapidly stronger in his chest.
Li Dala walked over a few moments later, flanked by the visibly shaken Nangong sisters.
"This Uchiha Obito bastard was way too insidious... actually pulling a dirty transformation stunt like that on me," Li Dala muttered, his face flushing a bright, embarrassed red as he rubbed the back of his neck.
He had genuinely wanted to flex his capabilities and put on a show in front of the twins. He never anticipated that the boss template would completely ignore standard frontline aggro logic and resort to such an underhanded, high-IQ ambush tactic. Instead of executing a flawless highlight reel, he had almost kicked the bucket on the spot. If it hadn't been for Jiang Chen's god-tier interception timing, his torso would have been completely hollowed out by the branching splinters of the [Cutting Technique].
Ronan frowned, tracking the numbers on his floating interface, and murmured, "Strange... isn't this Uchiha Obito guy supposed to be the final boss of this instance? Why did the mission progress only tick up by 20% after his health bar flatlined?"
Jiang Chen harbored the exact same suspicion. The math simply wasn't adding up for a definitive clear. He turned his eyes toward the twin sisters, his voice level: "When you two ran this Secret Realm in your previous raid brackets, did executing Uchiha Obito also yield a flat 20% progress increment?"
Nangong Fei's pretty face flushed a faint, embarrassed crimson. She shifted her weight on the eagle's back, speaking with a sheepish tone: "To be completely honest, Big Brother Jiang Chen... we don't actually know. In all our past runs, even when our five-man squad utilized every single synergy and item cooldown we had, we couldn't ever manage to bring that guy down..."
Li Dala's jaw dropped slightly as he blinked in surprise. "No way? Serious? I mean, looking at his frame data just now, his baseline parameters seemed just so-so. Your entire coordinated frontline engaged him and you still got wiped out?"
Nangong Fei offered a deeply awkward, self-deprecating smile. "We definitely made fools of ourselves compared to your performance..."
Ronan rolled his eyes at the clay artisan in pure annoyance, his tone sharp: "Drop the ego, Li Dala. This isn't a simulated old-era MMORPG; there are no glowing health bars or safety buffers here. In this reality, no matter how optimized a Contractor's build is, if they take a frame-perfect lethal puncture to a vital organ, they die on the spot. You literally just witnessed Obito's micro-positioning, tactical transformation tricks, and raw combat awareness—that kid was anything but weak."
He paused, throwing a deadpan look over his shoulder before delivering the final punchline: "By the way, lest your memory is failing you... if the Boss hadn't executed that god-tier blade interception a second ago, wouldn't you be a pile of organic fertilizer right now?"
Li Dala opened his mouth to fire back a defense, but the words died in his throat as his face turned an even deeper shade of red.
Meanwhile, Jiang Chen completely tuned out their bickering, his mind entirely hyper-focused on the environment. His active [Sage Mode] was still drawing in Nature Energy, and the ambient static in the air hadn't dissipated with Obito's death. If anything, the spiritual pressure wrapping around the valley was starting to warp.
If this wasn't the end of the raid... what exactly did the remaining 45% of the mission progress represent?
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