GSiN: Ch. 210

Though the wording was a bit crude, it truly reflected Ryouma's most genuine state of mind at that moment. He'd made it so obvious, just short of writing "something's wrong" across his forehead, yet this Ōtsutsuki still thought he'd won.

He suddenly pulled a handful of explosive tags from his robes. They were already crackling and igniting as he flung them away with force. One by one, the paper tags fluttered down all around, instantly bursting into blinding white flashes. Even more astonishing was that these explosive tags seemed endless, one after another, without limit, continuously summoning the next tag.

It was one of Konoha's most dangerous forbidden techniques, Mutually Multiplying Explosive Tags.

In battles between ordinary ninjas, without the proper method of use, it was practically a last resort that meant mutual destruction with the enemy.

However, in Jigen's eyes, this was nothing more than Ryouma's death throes in a desperate situation.

"It seems you're determined to choose the path of death."

Sukunahikona, simple in ability yet extremely versatile, once again displayed its power, instantly shrinking all the surrounding explosive tags.

Looking at the explosive tags that had turned into tiny firecrackers, Ryouma shook his head slightly and sighed softly.

"Ah... what a shame."

"A shame?"

Jigen frowned deeply, an ominous feeling welling up in his heart. From the very beginning, everything had gone far too smoothly, so smoothly that it made him uneasy.

Yet the heavily injured ninja before him showed no sign of deception at all...

He formed a black rod in his hand and pressed its tip against Ryouma's heart.

"Speak. What did you mean just now?"

"Of course it's a shame I couldn't stack my rage to full before unleashing my ultimate, you idiot."

The corner of Ryouma's mouth curved upward.

After weighing his options, Jigen decided to abandon any thought of extracting information from Ryouma. Having made his decision, he showed no mercy. He forcefully thrust the sharp black rod forward, viciously piercing through Ryouma's heart and sending a spray of blood into the air.

However, when nothing is supposed to go wrong, that's exactly when something does.

At the instant the rod struck its target, he sensed something terribly off from the feedback through the rod. It felt nothing like piercing a living, beating heart.

"Why is your heart not moving? Is this a corpse you're controlling?"

Isshiki, hidden within Jigen's brain, connected this to his own circumstances, and a wild hypothesis suddenly formed in his mind.

"You're not human! You're also from beyond the stars!"

At this moment, their positions reversed. Jigen, who prided himself on being a higher lifeform, instead felt like a moth that had unknowingly wandered into a spider's web. And the Ryouma before him was that long-starving spider lurking in the shadows, baring its sharp venomous fangs, waiting patiently for him to step closer and closer to his doom.

He knew very well that since the other party was, like himself, an extraterrestrial being, the fact that he had endured in the shinobi world until now meant he was undoubtedly plotting something enormous. So he didn't hesitate any longer. He didn't even bother with a finishing blow, directly opening a space-time portal beside himself.

Yet just as he was about to make his escape, another sudden change occurred.

Beneath his feet, without the slightest warning, a whirlwind as solid as matter surged upward, trapping him in place. In an instant, an overwhelming sense of dread crashed over him, completely drowning him.

Instinctively, he raised both hands, trying to rely on the power of the Kāma to block this terrifying energy, an energy whose mere presence made his hair stand on end.

"It can't be absorbed?"

No matter how frantically he drove the power of the Kāma, the golden-red whirlwind streaked with black energy remained utterly unmoved. And there was only one possible reason for this.

This wasn't chakra at all.

His pupils shrank violently. He hurriedly retrieved several cubes.

At once, massive black cubes descended from the sky, howling as they fell, attempting to rely on their terrifying mass to crush and disperse the raging storm.

Reality, however, dealt him a brutal blow.

From within the tornado, an endless burst of energy erupted. In a single instant, the intense high-energy reaction blasted every falling cube in midair into fragments. The shattered debris poured down, crashing into the sea below. Gigantic waves surged and battered everything around them, the spray rising so high it blotted out half the sky.

At the same time, countless golden-red particles converged, forming violent waves that slammed toward Jigen again and again. When they struck his body head-on, an immense tearing force instantly enveloped him, leaving him utterly unable to move.

A distance of only a few centimeters now felt like an unbridgeable chasm, separating Jigen from his space-time portal.

Under the impact of this overwhelming energy, even the gateway began to twist and distort, until it completely dissipated. Knowing there was no way out, he turned toward the source of the attack.

There, the shadow clone he had mistaken for Ryouma's real body was swinging a lively, flopping sailfish.

"Revenge Counter."

This was Ryouma's absolute trump card, an ability he had never once used in the shinobi world.

Its effect was simple. All damage he had taken within a certain period of time would be converted into energy waves and reflected back at a designated target at double the intensity. When combined with Yomi no Tsurugi, this skill gained an almost limitless high-damage ceiling. Add to that its noble, lock-on, guaranteed-hit property, and it could be called the ultimate anti-Ōtsutsuki Noble Phantasm.

He had originally planned to save this move for Momoshiki, who was bound to visit the shinobi world sooner or later, but who could have expected Isshiki to cut in line and show up first?

Over the boundless sea, the revenge tornado continued to rampage wildly through the sky.

Just the airflow at its outer edge carried hundreds of millions of tons of seawater high into the air, violently shredding vast stretches of cloud. Within the core of the tornado, golden-red particles churned like boiling magma, the energy they released battering the surrounding space and warping it into grotesque shapes.

Black mist laced with lightning spread within it, instantly ionizing the air and forming a blazing region of plasma.

He clapped his hands together, controlling sand to form a thick wall in front of him, barely holding back the concentric shockwaves. "Damn... That's really amazing!"

To be honest, even Ryouma himself hadn't expected the destructive power of that Revenge Counter to be so astonishing.

It was fortunate that the wave of Mutually Multiplying Explosive Tags hadn't detonated. Otherwise, he seriously suspected that a single move like that would have evaporated the entire sea area.

"Alright, main body, stop standing there marveling at it. If we don't run now, we're both done for!"

The shadow clone had originally planned to dispel itself proactively, but when it turned its head, it saw that the real body was still lingering nearby, admiring his own handiwork.

It hurriedly used the Flying Thunder God Technique to flash to the main body's side, supporting him as they rode the sand cloud and quickly fled this forbidden zone of life.

And just a few seconds after they left, the energy storm, having been fermented through multiple doublings, finally transformed from gold-red into a black color of pure destruction.

BOOM!

In the sky, the energy storm violently rubbed against the atmosphere, bursting into a blinding flash of light. A gigantic mushroom cloud was lifted upward by scorching air pressure, rising continuously until it pierced through the stratosphere. Endless shockwaves, extreme heat, and energy radiation spread outward like a hydrogen bomb explosion. Wherever it reached, vast stretches of seawater were instantly vaporized, and countless schools of fish on the seabed were scorched to ash.

---

On the eastern coast, wave after wave of increasingly massive surging seas slammed violently against the jagged reefs along the seabed.

Because the combat style of the Super Saiyan Mode 2 was far too wild, and to prevent any accidents, Ryouma had temporarily left Shukaku here.

Sitting bored atop a high platform piled from sand, Shukaku gazed at the empty sea horizon in the distance and, after a long while, let out a sigh.

"Ah... why'd they have to run so far away? I can't see anything even when I squint."

Just as the left-behind tailed beast was sighing and lamenting, a white snake slowly emerged from the sea of sand. After flicking its tongue a few times to sense the surroundings, it opened its mouth wide, and Orochimaru crawled out from inside.

"You don't seem to be in a very good mood. How's the battle going over on Ryouma's side?"

Orochimaru stretched out his long tongue and swept it around once, finding Shukaku's dejected appearance rather strange. He remembered that Ryouma had been completely suppressing that mysterious man the whole time.

Shukaku rolled its eyes and cast Orochimaru a casual glance.

"Everything's going smoothly. He just worried that the aftermath of the battle would be too destructive, so he moved the battlefield to the far sea."

"I see."

Orochimaru nodded slightly.

On his way here, he had seen it clearly. Nearly a quarter of the territory to the east had already turned into desert. If someone unaware were to walk through here, they would probably suspect they had somehow crossed into the Land of Wind.

He found it hard to imagine that Magnet Release could one day create such a battlefield.

Although he himself was a civilian ninja without a bloodline limit, he had always been deeply interested in the various bloodline limits of the shinobi world, whether strong or weak. Back when he studied under Hiruzen, he had specifically researched them as well.

Among the bloodline techniques currently known in the shinobi world, the only ones that had truly demonstrated the ability to alter the battlefield itself were the Wood Release and the Ice Release. These two bloodline limits both possessed techniques that could actively create environments suited to their own combat.

As for the other bloodline techniques, to be honest, they fell far short by comparison. But now it seemed that Magnet Release clearly also possessed such formidable potential. It was just that, in the past, Suna had never produced a ninja capable of pushing Magnet Release to such an extreme.

"I recall that Suna should still have ninjas who possess the Magnet Release, right?"

Thinking of the idea that had just formed in his mind, he couldn't help but excitedly run his tongue over his face once more.

Over the past two years, with Ryouma's support, he had greatly refined Yomi no Tsurugi.

After optimizing away some meaningless side effects, it had essentially achieved the form of immortality he desired. But humans were always greedy, especially after the painful experience of being treated like roadside trash and casually one-shot by Jigen.

He decided to pick up again the forbidden technique he had once secretly researched under Danzō, Living Corpse Reincarnation. His original expectation for this jutsu had been to freely seize young bodies from others, thus achieving another kind of immortality.

However, after witnessing the effects of Yomi no Tsurugi, he had immediately tossed this forbidden technique aside, dumping it into a corner of his laboratory. Now it seemed that his younger self had still been too naive, unaware that so-called immortality was merely the first step toward true eternal life.

He had even spoken so arrogantly in front of Jigen about the most important form of power in the shinobi world, only to end up being the one who was "re-educated."

Fortunately, realizing this now was not too late.

Within the conventional ninja system, he believed he had already reached the ceiling. Going any further, only space-time ninjutsu or bloodline limit could bring him additional growth.

He had long since tried space-time ninjutsu and knew he lacked the talent for it.

As for bloodline limit, since he had the capital to choose, then he would choose the very best.

He knew better than anyone how unlikely it was for another example of Wood Release to appear. And the Yuki clan had long since been wiped out. That made the options before him very simple.

He scooped up a handful of fine sand beside him, letting it slowly slip through his fingers.

"Magnet Release... I hope you won't disappoint me."

---

On the other side, in a sea region thousands of kilometers away, crackling arcs of lightning flashed through the air from time to time.

Scorching sunlight pierced the misty gases produced by high-temperature electrolysis, refracting endlessly, as if the entire space were twisting and warping in a bizarre manner.

Standing atop a thick sand cloud, Ryouma gazed at this surreal, dreamlike spectacle.

"Are you even conscious, main body?"

The corner of the shadow clone's mouth twitched as it tossed aside the sailfish it had grabbed at the last moment as a makeshift weapon, just in case Jigen used Sukunahikona to shrink it.

Then it reached out and grabbed the two rods embedded in the main body, yanking them out forcefully.

Pfft! Pfft!

Two jets of blood sprayed out in response.

"Holy shit!"

Ryouma's whole body shuddered as he snapped back to his senses and glared at his mutinous shadow clone.

"Go a little easier, will you? This state doesn't block pain at all. Don't tell me you don't know that?"

"I know. I'll be gentler next time, okay?"

As the shadow clone spoke, its hands didn't slow down in the slightest. It proceeded to pull out the remaining four rods one after another, going all-in on maximum pain, zero anesthesia.