Unlimited Blade Works.
The world changed between one blink and the next.
A, the Fourth Raikage, Blue B, and the rest of the Cloud shinobi found themselves standing on a barren plain, the cracked earth bristling with countless swords and blades as far as the eye could see. They spread out on instinct, eyes sweeping the horizon, every muscle wound tight.
Tsunade and Nawaki were simply curious. They'd heard of Unlimited Blade Works, but neither of them had ever set foot inside it.
"Attack!"
A's eyes narrowed, and the lightning sheathing his body flared brighter. He vanished from where he stood, a living thunderbolt tearing through the air straight at Natsuki.
Blue B moved with him. Eight tails erupted from his back like eight mountain ridges tearing free of the earth.
Behind them, the rest of the shinobi—Killer B among them—blazed through hand signs. Lightning Style ninjutsu poured out by the dozen, weaving a crackling net across the sky.
A arrived first.
Lightning Oppression Horizontal Chop!
Every scrap of chakra in his body funneled into his right hand. The knife-hand strike came down with a momentum that felt, quite simply, unstoppable.
And it had been, once. In the original story, that very technique had sheared clean through one of the Eight-Tails' horns.
Natsuki threw a punch.
Raw force detonated between them and rolled outward as a shockwave, and A was hurled backward like a rag doll. Blue B whipped his tails around to catch him—and the moment they touched, all eight of them shuddered violently from the impact still bleeding off the Raikage's body.
By then, the storm of Lightning Style ninjutsu had finally closed over Natsuki's head.
He raised one hand, unhurried.
Hado #99: Five Swirling Dragons of Destruction!
Chakra surged out of him in a torrent. The ground buckled and collapsed wherever it passed, hurling up rubble in every direction.
Five colossal dragons plunged from the sky. The lightning net shattered on contact, breaking apart into stray arcs that whipped and skittered across the wasteland.
A single thought from Natsuki, and the five dragons—still fully intact—turned and dove toward the Cloud shinobi.
"Blue B!"
Ignoring the pain screaming through his ruined right hand, A charged.
Liger Bomb!
He caught one of the dragons by the throat and drove it headfirst into the ground.
Boom!
Lightning erupted, blinding white.
Blue B flickered into place before the remaining four. He roared, blood-red chakra boiling off his skin, and launched himself at them like a cannonball, all eight tails coiled tight around his body. The other Cloud shinobi reacted in the same breath, layering ninjutsu on top of ninjutsu until the four dragons finally burst apart with a thunderous crack.
"Is that what a shinobi is supposed to be capable of?"
Nawaki's mouth twitched. He couldn't help himself.
Natsuki was fighting the Fourth Raikage, a jinchuriki, and thirty-odd Cloud Jonin at once—head-on—and he was winning?
Tsunade opened her mouth and found she had nothing to say. What came to mind instead was Senju Hashirama.
Was the shinobi world about to produce a second God of Shinobi?
"The Hidden Cloud's famous for its Lightning Style," Natsuki said. "Then let's see how you like mine."
He opened his palm. A single spark danced across it.
He tossed it casually into the air.
The atmosphere changed. Something dangerous hung over the battlefield, thick enough to taste, and A and the others went pale in unison, hands flying through seals.
The spark fell.
Just before it touched the earth, it burst.
The roar came first, then the light—a wall of white lightning expanding outward, pulverizing everything it touched. When it finally faded, a crater yawned in the ground, so deep the bottom was lost in shadow.
That was Laxus Dreyar's Lightning Magic: Lightning Explosion. Under normal circumstances, the strongest Lightning Magic there was.
"You bastard—"
A was shaking with rage.
Their counterattack had been fast. It hadn't mattered. The Lightning Explosion had exceeded everything they'd braced for, in raw power and in reach both. The instant it went off, every last one of them had been swallowed by it.
A survived on his Lightning Style Chakra Mode, which gave him solid resistance to lightning of the same nature. Blue B survived behind his Tailed Beast Cloak and its monstrous defense.
The thirty-odd shinobi behind them were not so lucky.
More than half were caught head-on and reduced to blackened corpses. When the lightning finally dispersed, counting A, Blue B, and Killer B, only fourteen Cloud shinobi were still on their feet.
"Forget the Raikage. Natsuki's the number one Lightning Style user in the world now." Nawaki's voice was somewhere between awe and complaint. "When did he even learn something like that? How did we not know?"
"He didn't learn it." Tsunade spoke slowly, eyes fixed on the crater. "Nothing like that has ever existed in the shinobi world. He created it himself."
A sound like splitting sky tore across the battlefield.
A was charging again. The lightning blanketing the world lit up a face twisted with fury, his hair standing on end, his entire body clad in what looked like a second skin of armor.
The strongest Lightning Style Armor—the same one the Third Raikage had wielded.
Lightning Release: Lariat!
A drove his elbow forward with everything he had. Power and speed, both pushed to their absolute limit.
Natsuki raised an eyebrow.
Lightning Body.
Lightning crawled over every inch of him, flooding his flesh with strength, hardening it, sharpening his speed.
Armament Haki.
Mana Burst.
Reinforcement Magic.
Monstrous Strength.
Iron Body: Smash!
Natsuki punched.
A slammed into him like a bullet train—and in the instant elbow met fist, the Fourth Raikage felt as though he'd hit a wall of solid, unbreakable iron.
Crack.
Bone gave. His arm folded the wrong way, and pain lanced through him from shoulder to spine.
A stared at Natsuki, disbelief spreading across his face.
A second later his elbow shattered completely, and Natsuki's fist tore straight through the strongest Lightning Style Armor in existence and punched through his heart.
Blood poured out in a torrent. A's body jerked once. His awareness guttered out like a candle, and just like that, the Fourth Raikage was gone.
Silence fell over the wasteland—absolute, ringing silence.
Blue B and the others stood frozen, unable to accept what their eyes were telling them.
A, whose strength had rivaled the Third Raikage's, was dead?
Killed in a single exchange?
It didn't feel real.
Tsunade and Nawaki were no less stunned. They'd known the Fourth Raikage was outmatched. They hadn't imagined the gap was this wide.
A Kage—and a Kage renowned for his taijutsu, no less—couldn't survive one punch.
Which meant any other Kage would fare exactly the same.
Natsuki wasn't surprised in the slightest. That punch was, under normal conditions, the strongest thing he could throw. With that many abilities stacked on top of one another, it would have been stranger if it hadn't worked.
[Congratulations! Host has unlocked Laxus Dreyar's Template Ability 3: Lightning Dragon King Mode.]
Natsuki gave a small nod. The unlock condition had been to defeat the Fourth Raikage. With A dead, the condition was met.
Then Blue B's roar split the air—raw grief and fury tangled together.
A had been too fast; there had been no time to back him up. And with the Raikage's strength, even a failed strike should have let him disengage without a scratch. That was the assumption. That was what reality had just torn apart.
A had died too fast for anyone to so much as move.
Blue B threw his head back and opened his mouth.
Chakra beyond description condensed in front of him. The air warped, and shockwaves rolled outward in visible rings.
Tailed Beast Bomb!
A sphere of pure black hung in the air for half a heartbeat before it shot toward Natsuki.
Neither Nawaki nor Tsunade moved.
A Tailed Beast Bomb's blast radius was enormous. By any sane reckoning, the detonation would swallow them along with everything else.
But Natsuki had rewritten their expectations so many times in the last few minutes that some part of them simply assumed a Tailed Beast Bomb wouldn't accomplish anything either.
Lightning Dragon King Mode!
The lightning around Natsuki surged higher.
Lightning Dragon King: Red Lightning!
He met the Tailed Beast Bomb with a clenched fist and swung.
The lightning compressed until it was almost solid, then peeled away from his knuckles in countless streaks and wrapped the sphere whole.
BOOM.
The Tailed Beast Bomb went off inside the storm. White light burst outward in needles, in every direction at once.
Tsunade and Nawaki felt the pressure hit—suffocating, absolute—and then felt it die, blocked short of them by a curtain of lightning. Natsuki fed more chakra through it, and the dimming arcs blazed back to full brilliance.
The earth heaved. Ridges swayed in the distance. With the blast at its center, the ground pulverized itself and caved steadily inward.
The surviving Cloud shinobi scrambled backward, and as they watched the apocalypse unfold, hope rekindled in their chests.
Nothing survived a Tailed Beast Bomb like that. Nothing.
Then the white light faded, and lightning filled their vision instead.
Natsuki stood exactly where he had been, wreathed in it, without a scratch on him.
"That's impossible—"
Blue B stared for two full seconds, and something inside him quietly broke.
If even the Tailed Beast Bomb was useless, were they all going to die here?
Then a thought struck him, and resolve flashed through his eyes. He closed them.
"Kill him, Eight-Tails."
Blue B severed his own consciousness.
As he collapsed into unconsciousness, his body began to swell, and with a deafening roar—
An enormous creature stood where he had been. The body of an ox, the tails of an octopus. The Eight-Tails. Gyuki.
Blue B was not a perfect jinchuriki; a full Tailed Beast Transformation was beyond him. But Version 2 wouldn't be enough against Natsuki either, so he'd chosen a deliberate rampage instead.
Normally, a rampage happened when a jinchuriki's mind faltered and the beast seized control. Blue B hadn't waited to be taken. He'd handed the body over himself.
It was a desperate, ugly option, because a rampaging beast didn't distinguish friend from foe.
Then again, inside a separate dimension, that hardly mattered anymore.
Gyuki turned its head and fixed Natsuki with a long look.
Sealed away as it had been, it still understood the situation perfectly well. To win its freedom, it had to get out of this dimension—and the only thing standing in its way was the shinobi in front of it.
That strength stirred old memories. Senju Hashirama. Uchiha Madara.
Gyuki bellowed, wrapped its eight tails tight around itself, and began to spin, kicking up a howling gale and splitting the ground open as it barreled toward Natsuki.
Lightning Giant!
Natsuki waved a hand almost lazily.
A giant of pure lightning rose, no smaller than Gyuki itself. It planted its feet, spread its arms wide, and caught the Eight-Tails head-on.
The impact drove it skidding backward. Gyuki pressed the advantage, chasing it like a runaway top.
Roaring Thunder: Red Lightning!
Natsuki lifted his hand. Red-black lightning lanced out in a straight line and slammed into Gyuki mid-spin, grinding it to a shuddering halt. Its tails scorched black under the assault, and the faint, sickening smell of cooked meat drifted across the battlefield.
The Lightning Giant seized the opening and swung.
Gyuki was sent tumbling hundreds of meters across the wasteland. The Cloud shinobi watching from the sidelines couldn't get clear in time; half of them died where they stood.
Gyuki didn't spare them so much as a glance.
It hauled itself upright, and its fury boiled over.
It had been insulted.
Tailed Beast Bomb!
Gyuki spat the sphere point-blank at the Lightning Giant.
A thought from Natsuki, and the giant detonated. Every ounce of electricity stored in its frame flooded outward at once.
Boom!
The Tailed Beast Bomb went off in the same instant, hammered into detonation. White light shot skyward in countless pillars, and the ground was blown apart all over again.
Gyuki turned back to Natsuki.
It opened its mouth and spat out five Tailed Beast Bombs.
That was what set the Eight-Tails and the Nine-Tails apart. For every other beast, one Tailed Beast Bomb was the limit. These two could fire them one after another.
Five spheres hung in the air, and the expressions on the battlefield changed all at once.
Tsunade and Nawaki went tense with worry.
Killer B and the surviving Cloud shinobi lit up. There it was—hope, one more time.
Because a shinobi was still a shinobi. A human being had limits. Stopping one Tailed Beast Bomb was already the stuff of legend. Stopping five was flatly impossible.
Five Tailed Beast Bombs stacked together didn't mean five times the power. It meant something far worse.
Natsuki drew Minazuki.
At its core, a Tailed Beast Bomb was nothing but numbers piled on numbers. That was exactly why most Tailed Beasts never bothered learning ninjutsu—why bother, when one Bomb reduced every enemy in sight to ash?
By rights, that should have made them invincible. But the world had a way of balancing its scales, and every so often it produced a monster who could shrug a Tailed Beast Bomb off entirely.
Senju Hashirama, for one.
And the best way to answer numbers was with bigger numbers.
Excalibur!
Natsuki gripped Minazuki in both hands as chakra from the Black Holy Grail poured into the blade.
He swung.
A golden beam of light stretched from one end of heaven to the other.
All five Tailed Beast Bombs went off at once.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
Explosion piled onto explosion, throwing up blinding white light and a gale that scooped up everything not nailed down and flung it outward in every direction.
The Cloud shinobi took casualties again. They'd put distance between themselves and the fight, but five Tailed Beast Bombs had a reach that made distance meaningless—and Gyuki, in its rage, had never spared them a single thought.
Tsunade and Nawaki, by contrast, stood exactly where they were and didn't feel so much as a breeze.
"What are you?"
Gyuki's eyes went wide, the question torn out of it before it could stop itself.
It never got an answer. The golden light had already reached it.
The beast slumped into unconsciousness, and Blue B reappeared in its place.
The sword beam swept on. Killer B and the last of the Cloud shinobi had just enough time for despair to surface on their faces before the hope they'd clutched at moments earlier—and they themselves—were gone completely.
"Is that... it?" Nawaki said, mostly to himself. "That's not an ending anyone could have imagined."
Tsunade stood frozen, her expression blank, feeling as though she had just watched a new God of Shinobi be born.
Natsuki walked over to Blue B.
The Black Holy Grail floated out and dragged the Eight-Tails free of him.
Blue B died moments later.
And with that, the Hidden Cloud's entire leadership had been wiped out by Natsuki in a single stroke.
After all, any shinobi capable of staying conscious under the weight of Conqueror's Haki qualified as a monster in their own right.