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*****
The towering Kisame Hoshigaki and Uchiha Itachi moved swiftly through the forest.
Suddenly, Itachi came to a halt.
"Itachi-san?"
Kisame asked in puzzlement, though his eyes had already turned sharp with caution.
"Someone's coming."
Itachi's voice was calm as his black eyes shifted, turning blood-red. Three tomoe spun slowly within them.
Kisame reached back and gripped Samehada.
The next instant, two figures appeared before them.
The moment they arrived, they launched their attack.
One of them, a woman, unfurled dragonfly-like wings and slowly lifted herself into the air. Beside her, the man raised both hands, conjuring a swirling cyclone between them that stirred the air into gusts.
Pup, pup, pup!
The airborne woman spat globes of liquid at the pair.
The two easily sidestepped them. As the droplets struck the trees, the branches sizzled and corroded away. Their expressions flickered briefly but quickly returned to calm.
If that was all…
Itachi raised his gaze to the woman above. His hands flashed through seals.
"Fire Style: Phoenix Flower Jutsu!"
With his low cry, bursts of flame shot from his mouth like scattering seeds, filling the air and closing in on the target.
The woman twisted and darted nimbly through the firestorm, weaving like a quick and slender caterpillar.
But then Itachi's voice rang out again.
"Fire Style: Great Fireball Jutsu!"
A massive fireball roared upward, engulfing the woman who had just evaded the Phoenix Flowers.
Thud!
A charred corpse plummeted to the ground.
The battle had lasted less than five seconds.
First lure her movements with Phoenix Flowers, then finish her with a Fireball?
Simple and effective tactics.
And yet…
This woman was far too weak.
Kisame glanced at the corpse before turning his attention to the man.
The man snapped his arms forward, and twin whirlwinds surged forth, devouring branches and stones alike like the gaping maws of beasts.
Kisame raised an arm to shield himself, his red-cloud cloak whipping violently in the gale.
In the next moment, he plunged into the earth, gliding through it like a shark in water. He erupted behind the man and swung Samehada in a brutal arc. Just as the man raised his arm and the air stirred around him, Kisame's strike smashed into his waist, sending him flying.
Bang!
The man slammed into a tree, dazed, only to see a shark made of water surge toward him.
A tearing sound rang out. The water-shark turned crimson.
Kisame hefted Samehada onto his shoulder, frowning at the corpse.
The man's ability wasn't bad, but his reactions were sluggish, his combat instincts nonexistent, and his body far too frail.
After this cold assessment, he looked to Itachi.
"They were only here to test us," Itachi said evenly.
Kisame nodded.
He thought the same.
Boom! Boom!
Suddenly, explosions echoed from another direction.
Kisame frowned. "Deidara?"
"If they truly knew we were here, they wouldn't stop at mere probing attacks."
Itachi leapt forward, continuing on.
At the same time, the other pairs—Deidara with Sasori, Nagato with Konan, Hidan with Kakuzu—each encountered their own foes.
The quickest to resolve their fight were Nagato and Konan.
Their victory was absurdly effortless.
As soon as the enemy appeared, Nagato dragged him over with Universal Pull, while Konan casually showered him with paper shuriken, perforating him into a sieve.
The opponent died before he even had a chance to use his ability.
Utterly merciless.
As for Hidan and Kakuzu, their fight was also swiftly settled.
Though their foes possessed fast regeneration and strong ranged power, the pair still dispatched them without difficulty.
But Deidara and Sasori ran into a trickier opponent.
One enemy was nothing special—he could transform into a beast and was promptly dismembered by Sasori. But the other was troublesome.
That man could turn his body into living silver metal, rendering him nearly immune to ordinary attacks.
Neither Sasori's weapons nor poisons, nor even Deidara's clay explosives, had any effect.
Inside his puppet Hiruko, Sasori chuckled toward Deidara. "Need a hand?"
"Help?"
Easily dodging a blow, Deidara landed a sharp kick against the metallic figure, slipped aside, and sneered. "This trash? I'll handle him myself."
In a blur, he closed in, spitting out a wad of explosive clay. It shaped itself into a massive humanoid and engulfed the metal man.
C4 Karura.
If his explosions couldn't shatter this defense from the outside, he would destroy him from within.
The Karura was filled with microscopic bombs invisible to the naked eye, small enough to be inhaled with every breath.
"Hrah!"
As the enemy burst free of the clay giant, Deidara shouted. The man's body, bloated with countless ingested bombs, swelled grotesquely before rupturing into a spray of viscera and blood.
Deidara smirked in triumph, hurling a few more clay bombs to blow apart the remains. "Now this is art!"
Sasori chuckled beside him and pressed forward.
Meanwhile, as the Akatsuki battled Sinister's cloned weapons, Gwen and the others received Mike's signal and began their infiltration.
Still cloaked in invisibility, they slipped quietly into the base.
At the same time, through the island's surveillance feeds, Mr. Sinister watched the battle unfold. As he saw his cloned weapons dispatched with such ease, he did not grow angry—he grew excited.
These eight possessed power beyond his imagination. More importantly, their fighting styles were unlike anything he had ever seen. Some even displayed multiple abilities.
"Mutants? Metahumans? Or perhaps artificially engineered weapons?"
He muttered, eyes gleaming with feverish anticipation.
He could not even conceive that these people came from another world, or that the powers they wielded had nothing to do with mutation at all.
They were shinobi.
(End of Chapter)