Chapter 25.2- One Thousand Hands

I leaned backwards to avoid the first punch. Kagami pressed around me with a kinda aimed at our opponent's head. He was stopped dead in his tracks. His kunai rested against the lightning armour that surrounded the Raikage, making exactly zero headway. Kagami’s eyes widened just as mine did in the same second. I pushed off with one arm and sent the older Uchiha flying while his kick landed against my unprotected midsection and sent me flying away as well. I chuckled as I realised what had just happened. We’d both reacted to save the other at the cost of our own lives almost by instinct. Fucking will of fire. Where we’d stood was practically torn apart from the impact of the Raikage’s punch.

“Finally. I’ve been trying to figure out how you’ve been doing it. With the Uchiha, it’s easy. He uses those cheating eyes of his to see what I’ll do before I do it and uses that to remain barely ahead of me enough to make it a fight. But you, that’s not it. You copied my technique. But not perfectly, no. Or rather, you use it in a different way by choice. Wind, I suspect. That’s what allows your fingers to lance through my armour with such ease. Once I figured that out, I just had to figure out what made your armour different from mine. Chakra density, was my first guess. But if it was then your armour would be visible to the naked eyes just like mine. It’s not. It’s concentration. Somehow, you are able to concentrate your chakra control down to an almost atomic level and use that to form your armour. It’s invisible to the naked eye so I have no chance of perceiving it, but some hints do give you away. One, the ground around you is disturbed just a few inches beyond where your actual body sits. Two, your teammate can clearly see the armour and he makes sure to skirt your form by a wider margin than would otherwise make sense.” He said, standing mockingly still as he casually tore apart my jutsu with his analysis.

I looked over at Kagami, and found him looking with eyes just as wide as mine. No doujutsu. No prodigal chakra sensing. Just pure intellect. He figured me out just because he’s smarter than I am and also happens to be smarter than every fucking person I know, except maybe Granduncle Tobirama and Hiruzen.

I breathed out, and brought my chakra to bear once more. The wind armour, the one I’d gone to great lengths to hide bloomed around me in a curtain of green chakra that spun around my form. Wind Release: Armour. The new technique I’d formed from studying his lightning armour. With all the ingredients for its formation, it might as well count as a kekkei genkai technique. Firstly, I needed the byakugan to keep track of the output. To control my chakra down to the atomic level to maintain the armour. Secondly, I needed the hyuga kekkei genkai that allowed us to emit chakra from every tenketsu without training.

“I see you like my new technique then. I call it Eight Trigrams: Armour.” I said, and took my stance. Since I wasn’t hiding it anymore, I could move the brainpower that I’d previously spent on making the technique unnoticeable into fighting. This time, we both kicked off against the ground at the same time and met near the middle of the space between us.