Circulating around the periphery of Hyuga Yu's body was a Wind Style: Chakra Scalpel, composed entirely of pure, cyan-colored chakra.
Though it bore the name "scalpel," its actual manifestation was colorless and formless—consisting of countless controllable molecular units constructed at a microscopic level.
The essence of "wind" is the disturbance of air by force. Once you strip away the more mystical elements, it is, in substance, a fairly fundamental application of mechanics.
To use an easy-to-understand example:
Danzo's Wind Style: Vacuum Bullets is a high-level ninjutsu where "chakra" within the air is spat from the mouth like bullets while exhaling, thereby forming wind-based light waves. At its core, it doesn't directly "generate" wind; rather, it is a technique that uses chakra to cause the physical deformation of air.
From a more fundamental perspective, the nature transformation of Wind Style is the act of shaping one's chakra into a form better suited to influencing air and altering gaseous structures.
The more powerful a Wind Style ninja is, the more superb their mastery over this ability becomes.
And when a ninja finally sees through the essence of Wind Style—when they can meticulously manipulate the "force" around them to "shape" the air according to their will—only then can they be considered to have truly stepped through the gates of "mechanics."
Tap, tap...
A series of steady footsteps echoed through the quiet, nameless forest.
Hyuga Yu stepped calmly out of the darkness. The white lab coat he wore fluttered high, caught in the disturbance of the airflow surrounding him; even when the sea breeze died down, the hem of his coat continued to snap and rustle incessantly.
He said nothing. He certainly had no intention of revealing information about his "jutsu" to the enemy. Instead, he simply looked up slightly, his gaze silent and cold—as if looking at dead men—and cast a look of utter disdain toward Munashi Jinpachi and Kushimaru Kuriarare.
This brand of "arrogant posturing"—a template seemingly pulled straight from Sasuke Uchiha twenty years ahead of its time—combined with Yu's pair of Byakugan, which seemed to strike the enemy with a "white-eyed glare" at every moment, was effective. With just that one look, Munashi Jinpachi felt his blood pressure spike and his head throb. Squinting his lone eye, the muscles on his face twisted into a snarl. "This brat..."
"Stay calm!" Kushimaru Kuriarare was still observing, offering a cold warning.
However, Munashi Jinpachi took a deep breath, bared his fangs, and said coldly, "Kushimaru-kun, you are being far too cautious."
"It's only been a month since the last time he fought us."
"How much stronger do you think he could have gotten in just one month?"
At that, Jinpachi hoisted the door-like Blastsword: Shibuki. As his thumb shifted slightly on the hilt, the scroll of infinitely generating explosive tags installed on the Shibuki began to spin frantically. "My turn! You just sit back and watch—watch how I blow him into a thousand pieces!"
Jinpachi turned sideways, leaning forward slightly as he gripped the hilt with both hands, swinging the Shibuki behind him. A harsh cry erupted from his throat, naming the technique:
"Explosive Sword Art: Detonation Transition!"
The moment those icy words fell, Jinpachi swung the Shibuki horizontally. One side of the blade suddenly ignited with a brilliant, blinding white light!
BOOM!
The violently moving airflow swirled with fire. Through Flame Acceleration (FA), it transitioned to Deflagration, and finally to a Deflagration-to-Detonation Transition (DDT). The laminar flames stretched into long beams in an instant. By stuffing chakra into the air, he indirectly ignited the non-flammable atmosphere, creating a gaseous explosion to achieve a massive, instantaneous release of energy on a single plane, generating extraordinary thrust! (PS: This is from Hyuga Yu's perspective; the following section is from an ordinary person's perspective.)
In the wake of the violent explosion, Munashi Jinpachi instantly transformed into a blur nearly impossible to track with the naked eye. He was so fast that even Hyuga Yu's dynamic vision—equivalent to a one-tomoe Sharingan—found it difficult to capture his movements!
In the blink of an eye, he crossed fifty meters and appeared directly in front of Hyuga Yu!
Yu had already lost track of his opponent's physical form within his field of vision. However, he didn't show even a hint of panic. In fact, even before this moment, Hyuga Yu had already slowly raised one hand, his five fingers spreading open with casual grace.
"Wind Style: Heavenly Subjugation!"
A voice, calm and devoid of any emotion, rang out in the ears of everyone present.
In the next heartbeat, everyone—Munashi Jinpachi, Kushimaru Kuriarare, the lurking Terai and his Root ninjas, and even a figure hidden even deeper in the shadows—witnessed the same sight.
Jinpachi, who had accelerated to his limit and brought the Blastsword to Yu's neck in a near-instant, suddenly froze mid-air. He could not move an inch!
"What... is... this...!?"
In that lightning-fast moment, Jinpachi couldn't even perceive what had happened. He only suddenly realized that breathing had become extremely difficult.
It was as if he had been teleported from sea level to the summit of Mount Everest in a split second. The intense "altitude sickness" turned his face beet-red and stopped his breath. Even though he could feel the air flowing rapidly in front of his nose, he couldn't inhale a single lungful!
Even so, Jinpachi overcame the suffocating sensation through his sheer will as a powerful shinobi. His head, pinned in mid-air, twisted downward slightly against the immense wind pressure, his muscles twitching violently.
Then, he twisted the hilt of the Blastsword: Shibuki!
"Die for me!"
The Blastsword, held level against Hyuga Yu's neck, began to glow. Tongues of fire and flashes of light licked out from the blade as the hundreds of explosive tags stuck to the surface flickered with a dangerous, rhythmic light!
"Foolish." Hyuga Yu shook his head. With his palm still raised, he spread his five fingers once more.
—OOM!
The indifferent voice sounded like the decree of a god. Following Yu's will, the surrounding "air" suddenly became visible to the naked eye. The transparent substance surrounding Yu—the very thing that was "jamming" Jinpachi and rendering him immobile—began to reveal its shape. It looked somewhat like a transparent "wheel" encased around Yu's body, where air was constantly converging and pressurizing inward under the influence of some "force."
Then, at Yu's command, this compressed air pressure expanded instantaneously!
What followed was a scene of pure terror—as if a tornado had just ripped through a parking lot, or a Category 8 gale had suddenly descended upon the earth!
The once-gentle, controlled winds revealed their hideous true nature the moment the pressure was released. Like an ocean, like a river, like a collapsing dam—a massive volume of wind transformed into incredibly sharp wind blades. Countless blades formed a roaring river of wind that collapsed and howled outward in all directions, with Hyuga Yu at its center!
"Not good!"
Standing fifty meters away and cautiously observing the situation, Kushimaru Kuriarare's pupils shrank behind his mask!
He couldn't afford to worry about Jinpachi, who was taking the hit head-on. He immediately kicked off a nearby tree, sprinting frantically up the trunk until he reached the top of the canopy, before leaping another ten-plus meters into the air!
The next instant—BOOM!!!
The river of wind, composed entirely of countless wind blades, roared and surged forth. With Hyuga Yu as the center, it indiscriminately swallowed the surrounding forest in an eighty-meter radius!
In an instant, trees were uprooted and then ground into countless splinters within the river of wind!
The ground was pummeled into a cratered mess, riddled with a dense array of countless holes!
Stone dust, wood chips, and pulverized sap mixed with the rainwater. They were pushed and piled toward the edges of a massive 160-meter diameter circle, forming a mound of debris over three meters high.
From a bird's-eye view, roughly one-tenth of the greenery on the edge of the nameless forest had been instantly erased, revealing a massive, yellowish-brown, undulating concentric ring!
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