To be honest, Inuzuka Tsume's attacks were very difficult to deal with, but she was not the one he was truly focused on. From beginning to end, his real concern was Namikaze Minato.
He had been tracking the movements of the future Fourth Hokage throughout the exchange. That attack aimed at him had been incredibly powerful, and he had been forced to respond to it.
But the attack had come first, and by conventional logic, such a powerful movement should have arrived slightly slower. Instead, Minato had managed to reach his target early, arriving ahead of where the trajectory suggested he should be.
It was not the Flying Thunder God Technique. It was simply a fighting style that utilized the most direct method available, leveraging extreme speed to create a fleeting opportunity and complete the attack. A refined Body Flicker Technique pushed to its absolute limit.
A thought flashed through Yuji's mind as his body tensed.
He could use his own blood to instantly dissolve the marked weapon and end this particular threat immediately. Even though the marked kunai posed no real danger to him and was fundamentally insignificant given his defensive capabilities, instinct had still drawn a fraction of his attention toward it in that brief moment.
After entering the forest, the first thing Minato had done was observe the entire environment.
In an extremely short span of time, his brain had completed a structural analysis of the entire battlefield. His own evasion routes and movement paths had been instantly simulated through his spatial perception, optimized for maximum efficiency, which made his actions appear to arrive at the endpoint a step ahead of what should have been physically possible.
This was a simple, unpretentious fighting style. No reliance on powerful ninjutsu. No complex techniques.
The sole purpose was to find the enemy's weaknesses. And if the enemy had no obvious weakness, to use one's own capabilities to manufacture one.
This was genuinely terrifying.
To achieve this kind of return to fundamental effectiveness, the demands placed on personal ability and every physical and mental attribute were extreme.
Because the slightest mistake or incorrect execution would prevent one from finding the opening that others could not see. And it required something even more than sheer brainpower, which was itself something Namikaze Minato possessed in abundance.
Bang.
A crisp sound rang out as Minato's attack struck the enemy's back, driving toward the heart. But the sensation and sound he received back told him immediately that it had produced no effective damage.
Minato stared intently. The enemy's back was covered in a layer of blood-red crystals, like a shield grown directly from the body, deflecting the attack cleanly.
Minato raised his hand immediately, intending to follow up by grabbing the enemy's body directly.
A barely perceptible thread of wind cut through the air. Minato sensed the danger and jumped clear in the same instant. A razor-thin thread sliced off several strands of his hair.
Bang.
Above his head, Inuzuka Tsume's Gatsuga finally landed, crashing into the ground where the enemy had been standing and sending up a large explosion of mud.
When she jumped out of the crater, breathless, she found her target standing calmly a short distance away, entirely composed.
Her attack had missed completely.
The situation had effectively split into two separate standoffs. Sasori stood to one side while the Minato group stood opposite. The six Konoha ninja faced the two of them, and neither side had achieved a decisive advantage.
Behind Sasori, several dozen puppets clad in red robes were hovering in the air. Some of them, upon closer inspection, had recognizable faces.
They were the former high-ranking officials of the Sand Village. Unlike before when they had been living people, the chakra threads controlling the puppets no longer fired from Sasori's fingers. They came from within his transformed body.
This scene caused Minato, Shikaku, and the others to change expression immediately. They had never encountered this level of puppet control technique before, nor heard of anything approaching this degree of skill.
"It's them."
When Nara Shikaku and Yamanaka Inoichi clearly made out the faces before them, their voices trembled. Shikaku spoke with absolute seriousness to his companions.
"Be careful. These two are none other than the Sand Village's Blood Doctor Yuji and Akasuna no Sasori, the Twin Stars of the Sand Village."
The same individuals who had killed Konoha Jonin years ago during the Land of Grass operations.
Hearing the names, the expressions of everyone in the group shifted drastically.
"It seems the pursuit squad Konoha sent before left some impression," Yuji said, raising the corners of his mouth slightly as he looked directly at Shikaku with the focused gaze of someone sizing up a genuine threat.
"It is you Sand Village people who instigated this war," Shikaku said in a low voice. "And our senior died before. It is time for that debt to be settled."
"Can you do it?" Yuji stared into Shikaku's eyes, his own voice dropping, asking each word slowly and clearly.
Shikaku swallowed.
"These are the cowardly rats who fled before?" Sasori added from the side, his tone flat and contemptuous.
"Exactly," Yuji said.
Then Minato exchanged a look with Yamanaka Inoichi and Shikaku.
Without any warning, they once again coordinated with Inuzuka Tsume and launched a simultaneous attack. At the same moment, the other two Leaf Village Jonin instantly formed hand seals, directing their techniques at Sasori.
"Fire Release: Great Flame Technique!"
"Fire Release: Fire Dragon Strike!"
Both spewed flames simultaneously, the forms and variations of their techniques different from each other in character and approach.
Yuji looked at them and something clicked.
The identities of these two. Members of the Sarutobi clan within Konoha.
"Earth Release: Earth Wall."
In an instant he formed hand seals, drove his hands into the ground, and a massive stone wall rose from the earth, partially intercepting the incoming flames.
His Earth Release was nowhere near the full power of two Konoha Jonin at peak output, and he knew that clearly. He was simply buying time for himself and Sasori, not committing serious chakra resources to a technique that wasn't his strength.
They dodged again.
The enemy's battle plan was clear. In the Konoha team's assessment, Yuji represented a greater immediate threat than Sasori.
Therefore the two Sarutobi clan Jonin drove directly at Sasori while the remaining four Konoha ninja focused on Yuji. The intention was to divide the battlefield, prevent the two of them from coordinating, and force individual engagements.
Minato pressed forward again. Inuzuka Tsume simultaneously activated a technique similar to Gatsuga, the high-speed rotation making both woman and ninja dog appear as two rolling jagged blades cutting across the ground, the combat effectiveness of the technique considerable at close range.
It was not a simple collision but an effective slashing assault.
Yuji moved through the air, right in front of the two, he activated his Blood Release simultaneously.
Red Scales and Winged King.
Both activated at once, instantly boosting his body's physical attributes, particularly the power and speed that Winged King provided. In an instant, the dynamic of the exchange shifted completely. He was no longer defending or dodging.
He was attacking.
His speed made it impossible for Inuzuka Tsume's technique to keep up. He moved like a streak of blood-red light cutting through the forest and mountain terrain, so fast that the naked eye could not track him.
Even Minato, attempting to restrain him, had to use the Flying Thunder God Technique.
Because without the Flying Thunder God, relying solely on his reflexes and his basic Body Flicker Technique, Minato recognized clearly that even he could not quite keep up with this speed.
Bang, bang, bang.
The scene then transformed into something even more striking than a typical Namikaze Minato engagement.
One figure moved at ghostly speed, shifting and changing positions through the terrain continuously, while Minato repeatedly vanished and reappeared, closing in on the attacker again and again.
Their clashes were extremely brief, a contact followed immediately by separation, then resuming the fierce exchange almost instantly.
A thought stirred in Yuji's mind even as he moved.
He could not react in time to the Flying Thunder God completely. This went beyond speed.
The Flying Thunder God Technique was a spatial ninjutsu, and it had surpassed all conventional expectations. It was impossible to sense or track through normal means.
When the target's direction could not be determined in advance, raw speed became irrelevant, because he could not position himself to respond to movements he could not anticipate.
This rendered many of his Blood Release techniques temporarily ineffective. Techniques that could not land on target wasted chakra with no return.
Therefore, the only viable approach was to maintain his own mobility at maximum output, forcing Minato to actively lock onto his position and close in each time he attacked.
He understood that spatial teleportation techniques like the Flying Thunder God consumed an extraordinary amount of chakra per use.
Each time Minato attacked, Yuji relied on the Blood Armor adhered to his body to absorb the impact, the blood nearly solidifying into a complete shell around him and making it impossible for Minato's strikes to inflict meaningful damage.
But Minato continued his relentless assault without pause, not because he was being foolish, but because he understood that he was not fighting alone.
The constant pressure he was applying to Yuji was continuously creating openings for his companions to exploit from other angles.
On the other side, Minato was also feeling significant pressure from the exchange.
Fighting the Blood-Clothed one made him deeply uncomfortable in a way he had not experienced before with any other opponent. After the exchange continued for some time, Minato arrived at a realization that he found almost absurd, yet could not dismiss.
This opponent understood his techniques and his fighting style extremely well.
Even when facing his attacks, the Blood-Clothed one appeared to be deliberately engineering evasions of the Flying Thunder God Technique with some degree of prior design behind each movement.
This included confirming which weapons he was carrying had marks of unknown destination versus known coordinates, and the moment he attempted to plant a mark on the opponent's Blood Armor, the shell would shatter and reform immediately, destroying the seal before it could take hold.
The constant high-speed movement, combined with the opponent's enhanced spatial awareness and sensory perception, increased the difficulty of landing any decisive technique exponentially.
All of these factors combined made the exchange genuinely painful for Minato to navigate. He even felt at moments as though he were being deliberately toyed with.
…
Bonus @300 PS