With a thunderous crash, shattered stone burst in every direction.
The small hill that had looked solid a second earlier was punched clean through by Akita's body, leaving a smoking hole from one side to the other.
It was brute force on the level of a rampaging dinosaur. Everyone present swallowed hard.
What Akira was showing now was far beyond an ordinary jonin. This was Kage-class strength, no question.
Samui even felt that, in terms of sheer destructive power, this was already in the same realm as her own Fourth Raikage when he entered Lightning Style Armour.
That kind of unreasonable strength simply should not have existed inside a normal human body.
As for Akita, after being kicked through the hill, he continued skidding through the air for more than a hundred meters before barely managing to stabilize himself.
Hovering high above the ground, the muscles in his back twisted grotesquely. His skin split open, and a pair of deformed wings tore out from behind him.
Blood still hung at the corner of his mouth, and he looked miserable, but the pain seemed to have pushed him even deeper into madness.
His eyes burned red as he clenched his fists, and the wings at his back began vibrating wildly.
Using the momentum of a dive from over a hundred meters up, Akita hurled himself toward Akira like a falling meteor.
He was moving so fast that the friction with the air ignited flames across his body.
From a distance, he looked like a furious fireball crashing down from the heavens.
Samui, Hinata, and the others all felt their hearts rise into their throats, their palms slick with sweat.
"How do you even stop that? Can Akira really handle it?"
Akira, on the other hand, merely tilted his head up slightly, frowned, and let his hands blur through a rapid series of seals.
"Lightning Style: Lightning Bird!"
In an instant, an ominous wave of chakra erupted around him.
Brilliant blue-white light flashed across the darkened sky.
Countless threads of electricity seemed to answer an unseen summons, converging toward Akira's side in a frenzy.
The air for more than a dozen meters around him ionized at once, filling the battlefield with a shrill, sizzling hum.
Arcs of lightning as thick as a man's arm lashed through the air like mad serpents, weaving together into a dense swamp of crackling power.
Then, as the chakra compressed further, all that wild electricity began to take shape.
A giant thunderbird with a wingspan of more than ten meters formed beside him. Its eyes blazed gold, and along its razor-sharp beak danced arcs of annihilating lightning.
"Go."
Akira flicked one hand almost lazily, as if brushing away a fly.
The lightning bird instantly became a streak of thunder that seemed to split earth and sky, flying straight into the fireball descending from above.
The collision came with no suspense at all.
The lightning bird punched straight through the flames without slowing for even a heartbeat.
The violent thunder that followed vaporized Akita's body completely in the blink of an eye, leaving nothing behind.
The thunderbird let out a shrill cry as it tore into the sky, its momentum carrying it thousands of meters upward before it finally faded.
"Crack!"
The previously calm heavens were thrown into chaos by that immense burst of power. Black clouds rolled in all at once, lightning snaked through the sky, and rain came down in a sudden sheet.
Samui stood there dumbstruck, nearly dropping the blade in her hand.
"What... what kind of jutsu was that? A-rank? S-rank? How could human chakra create something like a natural disaster?"
As a jonin of the Kumo, she had seen the Raikage's Lightning Style Armour. She had seen frightening destructive force before.
But she would have staked her forehead protector on it: the intensity and speed of Akira's Lightning Bird would have torn straight through even the Fourth Raikage's steel-like body.
A jutsu that changed the local weather with a single strike had gone beyond normal ninjutsu.
Of course, Samui had never seen the kind of absurdity someone like Madara Uchiha could pull off by dropping meteors from the sky, so her imagination still had limits.
Still, there was no denying it. Akira's Lightning Bird was monstrous, a true super-S-class attack, even more domineering than the Kirin Sasuke would develop in the future.
In theory, it really did have the penetrating force to shatter a meteor.
And yet, this still was not Akira's trump card. He had two jutsus even more outrageous than this one.
The only drawback was how absurdly expensive it was. One use had drained away chakra equal to the full reserves of an ordinary Kage-level ninja.
If Akira's own chakra stores weren't already richer than a complete Nine-Tails, this would have remained nothing more than a fantasy on paper.
When the smoke cleared, Akira blurred and returned to Samui's side.
Before she could even ask what had happened, Akira's face turned grave.
"That was too loud. It woke the Three-Tails. All of you, find somewhere to hide immediately."
Samui froze, then her face changed drastically.
"That's a Tailed Beast. What are we supposed to do?"
She knew her limits. Against something like the Three-Tails, she wasn't delusional enough to think she stood much of a chance. Truthfully, she wasn't even sure Akira did.
Akira pointed toward the cave Akita had been using earlier and spoke in a tone that allowed no argument.
"You take Hinata and the others in there. I'll see whether I can keep that thing occupied."
The truth was, if Akira really wanted to deal with the Three-Tails, all he had to do was open his Mangekyo Sharingan and pin it with a glance.
For him, that would take minutes at most.
The problem was that once a Tailed Beast was controlled with the Sharingan, the tomoe pattern would appear reflected in its eyes.
If Samui saw that and the news got back to the Kumo, it would become a major problem.
In the ninja world, Akira had no intention of letting anyone besides Tsunade know he possessed the Sharingan.
But the moment he finished speaking, Samui stepped directly in front of him, her eyes stubborn.
"No. We came here as teammates. I'm not letting you go out there alone to die."
She framed it as a matter of the mission, but the slight tremor in her fingers gave away the fear she was trying so hard to suppress. She knew very well this fight was likely a death sentence.
And that was exactly why she could not bring herself to run while a comrade stayed behind.
At that, Hinata and Ino also gathered their courage and stepped forward together.
"Akira, we want to fight beside you too!"
Even the usually composed Shino, as well as Karui and Omoi, silently took a step forward to show where they stood.
Looking at this whole group of hot-blooded fools, Akira felt his head start to ache.
"Come on. You people aren't helping. You're just turning this into a harder difficulty setting. Fine. Hinata and the rest of you hide. Samui comes with me. That's the compromise."
He knew there was no talking them out of it completely, so he had to settle for the next best thing. Keeping Samui with him was still manageable.
At least Samui was an elite jonin and had real survival skills. Protecting her would be far easier than babysitting an entire team of genin.
When it looked like Hinata was about to argue further, Akira's expression hardened, and for once he fully invoked the authority of a captain.
"I'm the team leader right now. This is an order. Everyone goes into the cave and stays there. No one sticks their head out until things are quiet outside. At your current level, stepping onto that battlefield would just be suicide. Understood?"
Samui turned and shot Karui and Omoi a sharp look of her own.