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Earth Release: Earth Spear
It was like opening the stopper at the bottom of the pool. A constant stream of chakra was mixed, transformed, and spread to every nook and cranny of the body. Takuma felt his bones grow sturdier, his muscles denser, and even watched his skin turn the colour of the night sky.
Every time he had used the jutsu in training, he felt a sense of power being imbued into his body.
The cautious ROOT agents instantly turned alert. Takuma knew he had breached the barrier.
Almost any jutsu could be used to kill if the conditions were right, but most D-rank jutsu, and to some extent, even C-rank jutsu, weren't considered lethal. That changed with B-rank jutsu; all offensive B-rank ninjutsu were killing weapons. Chūnin who knew B-rank jutsu tried to end fights without using them because using one justified the enemy to use them as well.
It instantly raised the severity of the fight, so avoiding the big guns was a way to keep oneself safe. Of course, exceptions always existed. There were no hard and fast rules in battles of life and death. Some shinobi followed the school of combat that believed in opening with B-rank ninjutsu as a rush and overwhelm tactic. Some used them when they knew their opponent couldn't use them. Some, like Bishop, couldn't handle their egos being bruised and used them in an attempt to uphold their pride.
The ground under Takuma's feet cracked when he moved. The agents moved just as fast and switched their formation. Their swordsman moved laterally and grabbed the sword that had been previously tied to the ground by Takuma's water chain. The moment he grabbed the sword, it buzzed to life, leaving behind a wispy trail on its way to behead Takuma.
He directly blocked the attack with his arm. In any other situation, the action would've been as asking for an amputation, but the impact caused sparks to fly, accompanied by the sharp scrape of blade against stone.
Takuma aimed for the liver with a body shot. The agent blocked by sticking his arm in the way, but the force travelled through his arm and knocked the air out of his lungs. He almost dropped his sword as his arm instantly turned numb.
The agent glared at Takuma as he roared through the pain and kicked him in the stomach, sending him flying into a tree that snapped in half against him. He immediately rolled away as the agent flashed in front of him. The blade passed clean through the trunk, slicing the remaining portion of the tree in half. Their other sword moved just as fast and passed through the trunk like it was nothing.
Takuma brought the agent down with two quick kicks before bringing down a haymaker for his head. The agent, unable to move, let himself fall. The fist smashed through another tree, causing the trunk to explode.
The agent rolled away as Takuma's foot smashed a crater into the ground. Each strike from either of them left destruction in their wake. However, Takuma was the only one doing damage. He knew he couldn't allow the agent any opportunity to charge the kenjutsu running through his swords. The cutters he used to slice through the dome before would be able to cut through Earth Spear's defences to leave shallow damage that could become a problem if it piled up. Of course, the agent knew that as well and was trying to back away to gain the appropriate space to do so.
Takuma wasn't going to let that happen, but the agent wasn't alone. He was forced to back away by a cone of fire lighting up where he was standing. The agent he'd sent flying out of the earthen dome rejoined the battle. The lower half of his face was swollen and bruised, but he seemed to be unaffected.
'Soldier pill,' Takuma thought when he saw veins on the man's forehead and the sheen of his skin.
The agent's arms were wreathed in flames. When Takuma tried to close in on the kenjutsu agent, another jet of fire forced him to back away. He glanced at the third agent, who seemed to be on standby.
Now that he had used Earth Spear, they would retaliate as well.
At least one of the agents had to know a B-rank jutsu. If he were in their position, he would create a scenario where he couldn't avoid whatever they were planning to throw at him. Two of them would confront him while the remaining one would keep an eye out for an opportunity.
But...
'If all of you couldn't handle me before, what makes you think two of you can handle me now?'
Abandoning the swordsman, Takuma confronted the second agent head-on. He slammed his knuckles into the agent's flaming fist. Another collision caused the ground around them to crack. Their knuckles smashed against each other, and on the third impact, the flames around the agent's arm exploded, flooding Takuma with their heat.
The agent immediately rolled out of the way and avoided a kick to the chest. Even though he couldn't see Takuma through the fire, he knew one successful attack wouldn't slow him down. Takuma sprinted out of the fire unharmed and headed straight for the agent, ready to strike him down.
The flames on the agent's arms roared as though gas had been pumped into them before they gathered into his fist. Takuma noticed it but didn't stop because he was confident in being unharmed. However, the agent didn't aim at him but instead at the ground that exploded, causing Takuma to lose balance.
Takuma felt the full force of whatever jutsu the agent was using wash over him. It didn't hurt at all, but he felt the Earth Spear suck more chakra out of him to maintain itself.
"Clear!" yelled someone.
Takuma couldn't track who said it, but he immediately tried to grab the agent as a meat shield, but failed. Four tagged kunai dug into his body, only to bounce off his hardened skin. The tags went off regardless, and the collective force sent him flying. It didn't hurt, but he once again felt the drag of chakra.
He looked up to track the agents, only to see two of them. Where was the third? At that same moment, the swordsman moved to behead him with his augmented sword, while the regular sword in his other hand cut him across his back.
Both failed to do any damage, but he felt his chakra reserves dip once more. He turned around to see the kenjutsu agent, noticing that both of his swords had stopped glowing. Takuma didn't think he had used too much chakra; it had to be because he had taken too much damage.
This was the right opportunity to finish him off. He just needed a few good, non-lethal hits to put him down for good. Takuma zipped towards him. Without his kenjutsu, the agent wasn't much of a threat. Takuma smashed an augmented kick into his calf to disable his footwork, and then threw a chain of normal punches to the liver, kidney, and head to knock him out without immediately threatening his life.
"Huh?"
A cold chill raced down his spine when Takuma suddenly felt the temperature around him spike. He looked back to see a fireball in the shape of a dragon's head straight towards him. He instantly recognised it because it was the most popular B-rank ninjutsu in the Hidden Leaf.
Fire Release: Great Dragon Fire Jutsu
He couldn't believe it. They were sacrificing one of their own to take him out. He had become aware of ROOT's methods since joining Itachi's initiative and gaining access to the department's knowledge about ROOT. Sacrificing agents wasn't unseen, but it was rare because agents weren't in unlimited supply; each one was measurably valuable.
Especially after their excommunication from the village.
Sacrificing agents was for a mission that required success regardless of cost. Killing him, by any means, shouldn't have been something they needed to sacrifice an agent for. If they thought they were going to lose, they would've tried to escape before going for the nuclear option!
"...Fuck."
Takuma faced the incoming dragon's head, taking a stance that pulled his fist in and flooded chakra through his right arm. While he had gained mastery over Earth Spear to make it combat viable, the jutsu required him to stream chakra throughout his body constantly. Disregarding the large amount of chakra it took to do that, the other obstacle was that it made using other jutsu alongside it extremely difficult. Using other jutsu required him to divide the focus needed to keep Earth Spear active.
He had made decent progress, but the failure rate was still too high. In the face of the B-rank ninjutsu, he couldn't risk losing Earth Spear's protection. Especially when he knew that Earth Spear, even while running away at full speed, wouldn't be able to protect him. The jutsu's defences were geared toward enduring anything under a certain threshold, which was substantially higher than any C-rank jutsu, but not as high as tanking a B-rank jutsu that used all of its resources into a "single-charge" attack.
He was going to take damage regardless. However, there was one jutsu he could use with a perfect success rate.
Takuma's arm began to glow blue as an insane amount of chakra began to gather. The colour of the Earth Spear armour in his right arm darkened as he began to compress more chakra into a smaller space.
All that chakra then flooded down to his fist. He was going to punch a B-rank jutsu with the strongest single-charge attack he had. He didn't think of it as a special form like the ranged second-form augmentation, but it incorporated everything he knew when it came to chakra theory and shape transformation.
Chakra Augmentation: All-Out Punch
Normally, it would've blown his arm to a gore of flesh, but because Earth Spear was reinforcing every part of his body, he could handle the amount of chakra flowing through his arm. If Earth Spear's defence threshold was lower than a B-rank jutsu, then all he needed to do to maintain it was lower the attack's damage to that threshold.
The small fist collided with the large dragon's head, causing a thunderous roar. The B-rank jutsu was much more powerful than his augmentation, and drowned it out almost immediately, but not before the concentrated force pierced through the dragon's head and disturbed its core. The excited chakra holding the fire unraveled, and the concentrated fire dispersed. A wave of white-hot fire washed over him. Takuma felt his heart beat faster and faster as the heat ate into his chakra reserves. Earth Spear was fighting to keep up using his chakra as its source.
Fire consumed everything, even his vision, as the blinding light of the jutsu engulfed his sight.
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"He has to be dead."
The agent who had used the B-rank jutsu felt exhausted as the jutsu had sucked most of his chakra out of him. He looked at the trees on fire around him. The forest around them was healthy, lowering the chances of a forest fire, but the rising smoke was sure to attract attention.
Soon, shinobi would arrive at their location, and in their condition, their chances of escape or survival would be low. He looked at his teammate, who didn't look good. They needed to escape before the soldier's pill wore off and his condition plummeted.
"We need to—"
Something shot out of the blaze of fire into the air. He looked in surprise and horror as they saw the ANBU descend from the sky towards his teammates' location. Not only was he alive, but he looked uninjured, thanks to Earth Release: Earth Spear.
"How?" he asked himself. Their sensory-nin had informed them that their target had large chakra reserves, but it was unclear how he was still maintaining a jutsu infamous for draining chakra like no other.
The moment he saw his teammate go down from a single kick to the face, he turned around to escape. They had missed their last chance; there was no value in staying around. He had to escape and report this.
The target's voice rumbled next to his head. "One of yours escaped from me before. Luckily for me, you're not that guy."
The agent's spine stiffened when he heard the voice near his ear. He was hit with an attack so hard that his vision instantly quadrupled his vision and made him want to vomit from the vertigo.
He knew it was over and tried to trigger his seal, but his head was stomped into the ground twice, causing him to lose control of his chakra. That was when he realised he had failed the mission, and the moment he woke up next, he would be actively putting ROOT at risk.
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