Chapter 166: Haruno Sakura's Trump Card
"Dance of the Seedling Fern!"
Kimimaro's final swan song bloomed upon the earth!
The bones that pierced out from his body grew in a sudden spurt, in just one short second, into a bone flower with a radius of over ten meters. From a distance, it looked like a white dandelion that had floated down to the ground.
Dense bone spikes intertwined and extended. The ghastly white bone sphere completely filled the space of over ten meters, leaving no gap for a ninja to dodge.
"You, who cannot use the Ice Body Flicker, cannot escape this move... Die with me!"
This was Kimimaro's last thought.
And in the instant he used this move, this formidable ninja had already died.
His pale, soft flesh and blood had turned into ghastly white, hard bone—this ninja had burned everything he had, not even leaving a corpse behind.
So Kimimaro did not see that his final move had not hit the enemy.
That bone dandelion, blooming alone on the earth, had not, as he had expected... strangled Haruno Sakura within it.
Swish—
In the instant Kimimaro had used the Dance of the Seedling Fern, Haruno Sakura had found the last ice medium and used the Body Flicker jutsu—
"Ice Style - Demonic Mirroring Ice Crystals!"
The bone blades that shot out from Kimimaro's body only pierced Haruno Sakura's afterimage.
And in the next instant, the figure of the Anbu girl appeared beside Sasuke with a Body Flicker!
"What a formidable opponent..." Sakura, who had dodged Kimimaro's attack in the nick of time, was even unsteady on her feet the moment she landed, almost falling and pressing down on Sasuke.
That was because she had cast the Body Flicker jutsu in too much of a hurry, which had led to a severe sense of imbalance after it had ended.
She had almost fallen in a pathetic state.
She pressed her hand to her chest a few times, feeling a lingering fear in her heart.
His final counterattack had indeed been beyond Sakura's expectations. To ensure that the Dance of the Seedling Fern would hit her, Kimimaro had actually gone to such lengths.
Haruno Sakura lowered her eyelids and let out a soft breath. Kimimaro's decisiveness and ruthlessness had left a deep impression on her. However, in the end, her backup plan was still a move ahead—
"It's a pity your calculations were wrong. There was one more block of ice here that could be used as a medium for the Demonic Mirroring Ice Crystals!"
She was supporting a human-shaped block of ice in her hand.
—An ice clone.
Kimimaro's ruthlessness and tenacity went without saying. His combat intelligence was also quite astonishing.
In the battle, he had quickly discovered that the casting of the Demonic Mirroring Ice Crystals had to be within Sakura's perception range, and there had to be a block of ice with her chakra attached to it as a medium.
And at that time, Sakura's final move, the Ice Prison Explosion, had used up all the ice blocks to create the explosion, shattering the Dance of the Seedling Fern in one fell swoop, and had even almost killed Kimimaro. With the bone forest destroyed, Kimimaro had lost the ability to move instantly on the battlefield.
But correspondingly, the Ice Style girl's Demonic Mirroring Ice Crystals had also lost its medium for casting, and at the same time, Sakura could no longer move instantly on the battlefield.
So in the final taijutsu battle, both of them could only face the opponent's killing move head-on.
Sakura, who used Sakura Rush and the Monstrous Strength Technique, was of course a cut above Kimimaro, who could only simply use the Shikotsumyaku.
Kimimaro also knew this. He knew very well that if not for the battlefield mobility brought by the bone forest of the Dance of the Seedling Fern and the huge amount of chakra obtained by burning his life force, if it were just a taijutsu match, it would be very simple: he could not withstand the opponent's fists and feet, and the opponent could dodge his attacks—so he would have been no match for Haruno Sakura, who had superb reaction speed and unstoppable taijutsu power.
That one blow, both he and Haruno Sakura knew very well that he was doomed.
But he was indeed very formidable... using his own life as bait, he had caught Haruno Sakura at close range with his body.
Indeed, using the Dance of the Seedling Fern at that distance, if Sakura couldn't get away from there, she would most likely have been stabbed into a sieve and died with blood flowing from all seven orifices.
A situation of complete defeat, yet he had been able to seize the opportunity for a mutual kill.
This was Kimimaro's true final blow, an opportunity exchanged for his own life.
But in the end, his calculations were still wrong.
The clone that had been taking care of Sasuke outside the field was an ice clone, not a shadow clone! Its substance was ice with her chakra attached, which is to say...
It could also be used as a medium for the Demonic Mirroring Ice Crystals Body Flicker!
This was Haruno Sakura's trump card. It was small enough, insignificant enough...
But it could turn the tide.
This battle, the ending was not unexpected, but the process had been constantly beyond her expectations.
After the fight was over, she recalled that the Kimimaro in her memory of the manga was not this strong... that Dance of the Seedling Fern, he had actually played it out with the feeling of the Fourth Hokage's Golden Flash!
"It's probably a change caused by the butterfly effect..." Sakura sighed and said to herself, sitting down with difficulty. "After all, the Kimimaro in the original story was ravaged by illness. It's still unknown how much of his full strength he was able to display!"
And the Kimimaro just now also had the air of having used a secret technique similar to the Eight Gates.
That kind of celestial-demon-disintegration great art, which would surely kill you after being opened, would often bring a short-term, massive inflation of strength to the caster. She had recently been studying a lot of materials about tenketsu points with Hinata and Neji, so she had very simply thought of a forbidden jutsu in this area.
"I originally thought I could solve it easily..."
Sakura let out a wry smile.
The chakra stored in her Yin Seal had already been used up in this battle. The two super-large-scale Cold Frost Ice Funeral and Ice Prison Explosion were the biggest consumers of chakra. The super-high-speed battle of Body Flicker versus Body Flicker between the two had also consumed a huge amount of her stamina.
Even her own chakra was almost used up.
If this went on, let alone fighting Orochimaru, if even another Sound Four, whom she could casually abuse, were to come, she wouldn't be able to take it at this point.
"If another slightly stronger one comes, I'll have to fight with my life on the line like Kimimaro..." Haruno Sakura said with a heavy heart, her eyelids drooping.
Fortunately... she hadn't been able to sense Orochimaru's chakra at all. Could it be that that guy really wasn't coming? She felt more and more that this seemingly absurd deduction might just come true!
Not only had she consumed too much chakra, but this battle had also left her body covered in wounds.
When she was fully concentrated on fighting, she hadn't felt anything.
Only after the battle was over, when she was sitting on the ground, did the relaxed Sakura feel a fiery pain all over her body.
In that kind of high-speed combat, to be able to remain uninjured was really too difficult.
What's more, this was the first time she had faced such an evenly matched opponent in a life-or-death battle.
But these wounds that hadn't damaged the bones were still minor pains.
The place that hurt her the most originated from the two intermittent, long-term activations of Sakura Rush - Phase Two. This ninjutsu itself had not yet been fully developed, so once the activation time was extended, it would become quite unstable. When she stopped the Sakura Rush, the girl felt waves of soreness from her nervous system.
Damn it... I used the Sakura Rush secret technique for too long!
But in a battle like that just now, if she hadn't activated Sakura Rush, she was afraid the ending would not have been the current pain, but a real death.
"The nervous system is already damaged..." The risk of an immature jutsu was indeed too great. After she went back this time, she was afraid she would have to recuperate for a few days!
Sakura grit her silver teeth. The force was so great that she could even hear the grinding sound of her molars.
She grabbed a kunai on the ground. When the pain came, she squeezed the kunai hard, and actually managed to deform the steel with her bare palm!
She laboriously endured two waves of intense pain.
The aftershocks had not yet subsided and were still stimulating her nerves. Haruno Sakura endured the discomfort and began to check on Sasuke's injuries.
The ice clone had already bandaged him, but after forcefully getting up to use the Windmill Triple Blade just now, the wound that had just been treated had torn open again.
I have to treat his wound quickly, he's bleeding too much...
She unwrapped the bandage and used the little remaining chakra she had to perform medical ninjutsu on him.
Perhaps the action of unwrapping the bandage was too barbaric, and Sasuke was woken up by the pain.
"Did we win?"
That was the first thing he asked when he woke up.
The pink-haired girl glared at him with her sharp eyes.
"You idiot, just lie down peacefully and don't talk... You were already seriously injured, and you still had to show off and use that move just now. Are you trying to die?!" she said with a flat expression. The pain from deep within her body had gradually subsided.
"I didn't want to. My body just moved on its own..." that guy said weakly, responding to her sharp glare with a faint smile. "Besides, if I hadn't done that, you'd be dead, wouldn't you!"
Sakura's hand tightened, and Sasuke immediately let out a pained grunt.
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