The satisfying thunk of the staff's tip against the distant door echoed in the sudden silence of the basement, a punctuation mark to Renjiro's success.
But the stillness didn't last.
A fierce, almost predatory energy crackled through Renjiro, replacing the focused calm of creation with the urgent itch of testing.
The theoretical success was one thing; feeling the power in motion, understanding its limits, and its responsiveness; that was vital. Especially now.
He surveyed the basement, a landscape of discarded chakra papers and scattered tools.
'No good.'
He needed space. With swift, efficient movements, he gathered the failed seals, tossing them into a disposal bin that hissed briefly as internal incineration seals activated.
Within minutes, the central area was cleared, a rough circle of bare stone floor perhaps ten meters across, illuminated starkly by the single, high window's fading afternoon light.
'Perfect.'
But facing the empty wasn't enough. Renjiro formed a familiar hand seal and with a soft
"Poof!" an identical Renjiro stood before him.
Without a word, Renjiro reached into a storage scroll at his hip, retrieved another scroll and tossed it to his clone. The clone caught it smoothly, its fingers tracing the cool parchment.
"Ceiling. Try to make it… challenging," Renjiro instructed.
The clone smirked, "Define 'challenging'."
"Land a single hit," Renjiro replied, hefting his staff, feeling the reassuring weight, "Anywhere."
The clone's smirk widened.
With a fluid motion, it leapt backwards, its feet adhering to the rough-hewn stone ceiling as if it were solid ground. It crouched upside down unrolling the large scroll revealing a fuinjutsu formula.
Renjiro moved to the exact centre of the cleared circle. He closed his eyes, taking one deep, centring breath.
He pushed the whirlwind of recent events, the anxieties, the calculations, into a tightly locked compartment and then opened his eyes.
The Sharingan flared to life with the twin pools of crimson light spinning slowly.
Simultaneously, the clone slammed its palm onto the centre of the fuinjutsu mark.
"THOOM!"
Then came the rain.
Not water, but steel. A torrential downpour of deadly intent. Thousands of shinobi weapons materialized in a chaotic cloud ten meters above Renjiro's head.
Kunai winked wickedly in the dim light, their sharpened points gleaming. Shuriken spun like malevolent stars. Senbon needles formed glittering, deadly mist. Larger weapons – trench knives, weighted chains, even a few small, vicious axes – tumbled amidst the lethal hail. Gravity claimed them instantly, accelerating them downwards in a whistling, clattering, shrieking maelstrom of death. The sheer volume was staggering, a localized apocalypse of sharpened metal filling the basement from wall to wall.
Time dilated for Renjiro. Trajectories etched themselves across his vision in glowing, predictive lines. Velocities, angles of descent, potential impact points – a thousand data points processed in a microsecond. His body moved before conscious thought could form.
The staff became an extension of his will.
"Fwip-CRACK!"
A downward thrust intercepted three kunai aiming for his head, the staff elongating a precise meter in a blur, snapping them aside with sharp metallic pings, sending them embedding into the stone floor with dull thuds.
"Swish-THWACK!"
A horizontal sweep, the staff extending another two meters laterally, intercepted a cluster of shuriken spinning towards his flank. The ironwood connected with a series of sharp clangs, deflecting them into the wall where they sparked and skittered.
"Thrum-VWIP!" He pivoted, the staff telescoping vertically nearly four meters overhead in an instant, its tip striking the weighted chain mid-descent before it could wrap around his legs.
The chain clattered harmlessly aside.
He was a whirlwind of controlled motion. Leaping, twisting, crouching, never static. The staff was everywhere, a blur of dark wood and sudden, impossible extensions.
It elongated in micro-bursts: a foot to deflect a senbon aimed at his eye; three meters to bat away an axe tumbling towards his shoulder; half a meter for a precise jab that knocked two kunai into a collision mid-air, sending them spiralling off course.
He moved with an impossible economy. A slight shift of his wrist, a fractional pulse of chakra, and the staff would lash out like a striking serpent, covering distances instantly, intercepting threats meters away before they could even enter his immediate defensive sphere.
He deflected not just the weapons directly targeting him, but also those whose ricochets might become threats, using the walls, the floor, even other falling weapons as part of his deflection strategy. The Sharingan mapped it all, a three-dimensional dance of evasion and interception unfolding in perfect, terrifying clarity.
Above, the clone watched, its own Sharingan active, crimson eyes narrowed in concentration. Its hand remained pressed firmly on the scroll, chakra flowing steadily.
'Too easy,' it thought, mirroring Renjiro's own competitive drive.
The clone focused. The silver fuinjutsu mark on the scroll flared brighter. It didn't just release the weapons; it began to manipulate their fall.
Renjiro, mid-pivot to deflect a trio of kunai, saw the predictive trajectories in his Sharingan vision suddenly shift.
It wasn't gravity changing; it was as if unseen strings had yanked them off course. He adjusted instantly, the staff elongating fractionally to compensate, still striking true.
The clone grinned fiercely upside down.
It poured more chakra into the scroll's control matrix. Now, weapons didn't just fall erratically; they actively sought Renjiro. A shuriken veered sharply mid-air, whistling towards his kidney. A kunai, seemingly deflected safely towards the wall, bounced with unnatural force and angle, hurtling back towards his head. Senbon needles, instead of falling straight, corkscrewed downwards like deadly drill bits.
The tempo changed. Renjiro's movements became faster, sharper, less flowing and more reactive. The staff was a constant blur now, elongating, retracting, striking with viper speed.
"Fwip-THUD! Vwip-CLANG! Shhk-PING!"
The impacts were louder, sharper, as he met the increased force and unpredictability. He used the staff's elongation not just for reach, but for leverage, hooking a tumbling trench knife and using its momentum to fling it into the path of a cluster of senbon.
He planted the staff, momentarily elongating it into a fixed pole to vault over a low, sweeping chain manipulated to trip him. Sweat beaded on his forehead, tracing paths through the dust. His breathing, while still controlled, deepened.
The clone saw the sweat, sensed the slight increase in Renjiro's chakra output to maintain the Sharingan's intense calculations and the staff's rapid extensions.
It focused on a particularly dense cluster of kunai and shuriken directly above Renjiro. Instead of letting them fall independently, the clone used the invisible tethering to 'bind' their trajectories together, making them fall as a single, cohesive, weighted net of blades, impossible to deflect individually without being overwhelmed.
The deadly net plummeted, a whistling, gleaming mass blocking escape routes.
Renjiro saw it coalesce in his predictive vision. A microsecond decision. Instead of trying to bat it all away, he dropped into a low crouch, planting the butt of his staff firmly on the stone.
Simultaneously, he triggered elongation upwards*, not with a thrust, but with explosive force.
"THRUM-WHAM!"
The staff shot upwards like a piston, elongating nearly five meters in a blink. It didn't strike the net; it punched through its centre. The concentrated impact point, combined with the staff's sudden, rigid extension, acted like a spearhead.
The bound weapons shattered apart, kunai and shuriken sent violently spinning outwards in all directions, pinging off the walls and ceiling like shrapnel from a grenade. Dust rained down from the impact point on the ceiling where the staff's tip had struck.
"Shhhhk-click!"
The staff retracted as Renjiro rolled smoothly back to his feet, breathing slightly harder now, a fierce grin finally breaking through his concentration.
The clone let out a low, frustrated growl.
"Poof."
The clone vanished in a swirl of smoke, its experience and fleeting frustration merging back with Renjiro. He stood alone amidst the devastation.
"Not bad."
He smirked.