Chapter 50.1- One Thousand Hands

The black lightning did not just cover him from head to to toe like his old lightning cloak did. It felt in some ways like he had transformed himself into the lightning. His body became much more amorphous and difficult to place. Sarutobi began the next phases of the duel with wind release so powerful that it scared the ground as it flew towards its intended target. The raikage would have had an easy time of dodging the attack, but almost like he was making a statement, he chose to go through rather than around. Encased in black lightning, he shot through the wind release and went straight for the Hokage.

The good news was that he was not much faster in this state than he used to be. The bad news came when his fist clashed with the Hokage’s adamantium staff and the ground around the both of them exploded from the force he had used. He was stronger. An order of magnitude stronger, she suspected as even the Hokage showed shock at the difference. He moved, his knee moving to cave in the Hokage’s chest, and the staff was there again. Another shockwave. Each attack was delivered with so much strength that she had a hard time believing it was not Shori’s cousin doing the attacking.

Sensei’s clone melded with the shadows for a second and body flickered behind his quarry. The Raikage did not even need to turn to dodge the attack. The arc of chakra flew at the Hokage instead and the monkey summoner was forced to abandon the attack he had been moving to defend against to block the arc of cutting force. The Raikage’s foot slipped out and he dragged the Hokage on to the floor.

As he fell, he formed a one handed handseal and instead of landing bin the ground, he sunk into it. Hiding like a mole jutsu, she recognised. The Raikage stabbed his hand up to his elbow into the ground trying to reach after him but the plan clearly failed as his hand came up empty. Sensei moved in on the attack but the Raikage just stabbed a hand through his chest faster than he could react. He fell apart in water, and her eyes tracked him across the distance, slumped against a tree and trying to heal himself of the wounds he suffered from the strike that had sent him out of the fight.

He formed another set of handseals and two clones of his rose from the blood he was leaking freely and jumped into the fray. She had to figure out how he was doing that. She hadn’t been able to copy the jutsu on seeing it so that meant he hadn’t used all the seals but she could see that he was somehow using blood and water from the air to form clones of himself. Except they weren’t perfect clones. They inherited none of the damage he had sustained in the battle like an ordinary clone would have.