The blast didn't vanish in a blink the way it might in a rushed comic panel.
It roared on for several long minutes, heat boiling the air and smoke swallowing the battlefield before finally beginning to fade.
Out of the scorched crater, a lone figure staggered forward—
the Third Raikage, the very same man Arata had severed an arm from moments earlier.
He looked brutalized.
The Thunder Style Armor that usually wrapped his body had completely vanished.
His skin was burned in over a dozen places, and a deep gash on his left leg exposed bone.
Worst of all was his missing arm. Even after being scorched by the blast, the stump still dripped blood.
Even if the explosion hadn't killed him, being caught in his own allies' Tailed Beast Bombs had nearly finished the job. He could barely stand—much less fight.
Still… if all that damage resulted in Arata's death, the sacrifice would be "worth it."
The Raikage's timing had been perfect—charging in the exact instant his allies fired their Tailed Beast Bombs and forcing a point-blank trade.
With Thunder Style Armor, he could survive the explosions.
Arata, hit by a Hell Stab and two Tailed Beast Bombs, shouldn't have had any chance.
But things hadn't gone as planned.
His Hell Stab—his strongest piercing jutsu—had been brushed aside as if it meant nothing.
How Arata's half-destroyed body restored itself, the Raikage couldn't even guess.
He could only assume it came from some secret bloodline ability.
Hell Stab was lightning-charged—Arata shouldn't have been able to "phase" through it.
But Arata hadn't simply tanked it.
Using his heightened awareness—his "Observation haki"—he'd predicted the strike, shifting his body into a partly elemental state just ahead of the blow, avoiding a mortal wound.
It looked like half his torso was blasted off…
but he had consciously adjusted his body to that configuration to slip the attack.
Even without that trick, Arata still had an ace he hadn't used:
Kamui-phase, his dimensional intangibility—something almost nothing in this world could counter.
High above, untouched by the explosion, Arata drifted back down to the blasted earth.
It had looked effortless, but it wasn't.
Both Hell Stab and the twin Tailed Beast Bombs would have shredded him if not for precise timing.
Hell Stab alone, packed with lightning chakra, would've pierced him even through Armament Haki.
And the Tailed Beast Bombs weren't simple chakra blasts—
they were condensed yin–yang chakra, far above the elemental spectrum. They could hit his real body.
Only Kamui-phase let him slip through that safely…
but using it for several straight minutes pushed him near his limit. His stamina had taken a heavy hit.
At least the bombardment hadn't lasted more than five minutes—
any longer and even he would've run dry.
Just as Arata's boots touched the ground, three figures appeared, surrounding him—two behind, one to the side.
The two behind him were a man and a woman.
The man stood nearly two meters tall—gaunt rather than muscular like most from Kumogakure, but wrapped in a blazing orange Tailed Beast Cloak with four tails manifested.
He had to be the Eight-Tails' previous jinchūriki—the one who'd lost control years before.
The woman was the opposite: blonde, early twenties, tall and athletic, curves sharp and striking—a Western beauty by any measure.
Her features reminded Arata of Yugito Nii, the later Two-Tails jinchūriki—they had to be related.
She wore a single-tailed Tailed Beast Cloak—the Two-Tails' vessel.
Both had flanked him to keep him from moving in on the Raikage again.
No matter how frightened they were, the Raikage's reputation in the village meant they couldn't stand aside.
The third figure was the elite jonin, Doell, who had been watching from afar.
He rushed straight to the Raikage and started patching the stump with crude field medicine.
Outside Konoha, almost no village had real medical-nin—everyone relied on basic first aid.
Anyone else losing an arm would've passed out from shock.
But the Raikage's monstrous body held together—after a quick tourniquet and gauze, he forced himself to his feet again.
Arata didn't attack—he'd burned a lot of stamina himself and needed a moment to recover.
The two jinchūriki couldn't press him either—not after firing a Tailed Beast Bomb.
With their limited control, they couldn't launch another one for a while.
And using large-scale jutsu at this range would risk killing the Raikage.
The Raikage stood swaying, panting hard.
He was nowhere near as confident as before; his stamina was almost gone.
Maybe he had one more Hell Stab left.
Arata, meanwhile, though drained, clearly wasn't at his limit.
The Raikage didn't even ask why Doell had come back.
He just barked:
"We pin him down together. Eight-Tails—charge your strongest shot!"
With that, he limped forward and forced Thunder Style Armor to ignite around him once more, lightning crawling over his battered body.
The Eight-Tails' jinchūriki took the order immediately and leapt away to open distance.
At the same time, Doell and the Two-Tails' jinchūriki entered their own thunder style armor—though nowhere near the Raikage's full Thunder Style Armor.
Their version only stimulated muscles and nerves on the inside; it didn't manifest visually.
If Thunder Style Armor were so easy to master, every village would have knelt to the Kumogakure long ago.
They weren't Raikage-level—but they were still dangerous.
And now, the battle was four against one.