Only the sound of Obito's laughter echoed before he advanced; then he vanished from Minato's sight in a spiral.
Minato was slightly shocked by the speed with which he disappeared. Had Obito's Mangekyō Sharingan ability evolved?
Minato threw a kunai onto the ground a short distance away and did the same with the others he pulled from his tool pouch.
He was fast… he would have been even faster if he still had both arms, but he used what he had. Always keeping his senses at their peak.
Soon, Minato felt Obito's presence. With a yellow flash, Minato vanished; in that same flash, a spiral appeared, disappearing along with him.
When Minato reappeared, he clutched his stomach with an expression of pain. Behind it, several wooden stakes were impaled through his flesh.
Minato was once again surprised by Obito, who had managed to enter through space and strike him in the brief moment he remained in that plane.
The Flying Thunder God technique moved through space almost instantaneously; however, if for a brief moment someone managed to interfere with that space, they would be able to hit Minato.
Minato was not able to think during the short time in the space he entered to teleport, yet Obito had managed to. But how had he hit his stomach?
Minato assumed that Obito also must not have been able to think and had only attacked, counting on luck to hit him.
If things continued at that pace, Minato might end up losing. Creating two clones, he sent them toward Obito, who also attacked.
Minato threw a punch that passed straight through Obito. He countered with another punch, but the clone kicked his arm, its leg passing through Obito's arm without hitting him.
The other clone aimed for the center of his chest. Minato assumed there was no way Obito could keep his entire body intangible while focusing only on the parts being attacked.
Unfortunately, Minato was wrong. The clone's strike passed through Obito's chest as well. The clone then kicked Minato; he had no time to think where to strike, only hitting Minato's stomach.
"Ah!" The pain grew stronger. Minato fell to the ground; the punch that would have hit Obito struck only air. Obito jumped and delivered a spinning kick to the two clones, which exploded into a cloud of white smoke.
Obito's eye widened when he saw, before him, a Rasengan Shuriken, which passed through him and exploded behind him. Quickly, he entered the spiral of his eye, retreating into his inner space.
"I almost died…," Obito muttered in relief, as if he had just seen himself being cut in half by Minato's attack. But there was something about Minato that he found strange.
Entering the spiral again, he returned to the battlefield and saw Minato examining the damage to his stomach.
Blood flowed and dripped onto the ground. Placing his hand over the wound and channeling his chakra, a layer of ice soon covered it. Minato shuddered from the cold and from the sharp pain that rose in his stomach.
"I'm curious… why does it seem like you don't know how to use taijutsu?"
Obito spoke as he appeared behind Minato, who retaliated with a punch that Obito blocked.
Obito hadn't noticed before, but now he had: for some reason, Minato did not seem to know how to fight. He was only throwing punches, which was strange.
Minato spun and delivered a kick that Obito tried to catch—only tried, because this time Minato used chakra. The moment his leg struck Obito's hand, the sound of something breaking was heard.
Obito was sent flying backward, letting out a low grunt, while he looked at his arm, now twisted.
Obito considered that Minato might be pretending not to know how to fight, but for someone who had trained in taijutsu, that kick had only a large amount of chakra; there was no technique at all.
Had Minato always been like this?
"No… he hadn't."
That question left Obito very confused. He was certain that Minato must be a master of taijutsu. Why now did he seem unable to fight? And he did not seem to be pretending.
"In the end, it doesn't matter," Obito murmured. He only needed to cut off Minato's arms and legs and leave him alive. That way, he would have his revenge, precisely when Minato watched his wife being killed.
Despair would take hold of him, just as it had taken hold of Obito on that day.
Minato brought his hands together and began forming seals, sending chakra into the ground through his feet.
Seal markings began to appear on the soil. Obito was not surprised; it would have been strange if, in the short time he had been gone, Minato had done nothing.
Obito activated his eye's ability, but it did not happen as he had imagined. He saw everything turn gray up to a certain distance, where the colors returned.
But where he stood, everything remained gray, and his ability was not working. When he tried to send chakra to his eye, he realized he could not move his chakra.
"What did you do?" Obito asked, turning his gaze to the seal markings on the ground. He understood nothing as he looked at them.
"Was he really pretending he didn't know how to fight?" Obito thought, while trying to mobilize any chakra. His eye deactivated the Mangekyō Sharingan without his permission.
"And it worked," Minato said, relieved. He placed a hand on his knee, enduring the pain in his body from the stakes in his stomach and arm, which had left him extremely exhausted.
He had very little time, but Minato managed to put his plan into practice. The kunai he had thrown earlier served as portals.
Minato had to thank Obito. Because of him, Minato realized that when he used the Flying Thunder God Technique, he did not appear instantaneously. Obito proved that this was not what happened—even if only for a minimal amount of time.
In that tiny interval, Minato passed through another place. It had been nothing more than a theory he formed during the fight, but now it proved correct.
In the little time he had, Minato used thousands of clones to create teleportation seals, then merged them all, distorting the words in the seal.
Honestly, Minato had no way of knowing if it would work. It was more luck than anything else.
He had been inspired by a domain expansion technique from an anime. Maybe it wasn't the same thing, but he took the idea from there.
Small golden glimmers continued to come off Minato as he looked at Obito, who remained paralyzed, only able to think, incapable of moving his body.
The reason Minato was not affected was also because of the seals on his feet, which kept him in a state of teleportation, as if he were constantly using the technique.
This dimension did not affect those who were in that state. As had happened with Obito, since Minato only passed through it, he did not even get to see that dimension.
Minato was truly grateful to Obito, especially because he had not left his intangible space, because if that had happened, the one in trouble would have been Minato himself.
Taking his kunai from his pouch and gripping it tightly, he realized that the time had come to put an end to all of this—and perhaps to the events that might still come.