Chapter 17, Part 3: The Final, Fleeting Art
Silence.
A heavy, absolute silence settled over the ruined landscape, broken only by the gentle whisper of the wind. The two halves of the Third Kazekage puppet lay inert on the ground, a monument to a master's final failure. Sasori of the Red Sand, the genius who sought eternity in his art, was gone.
High above, Deidara stared down from his clay dragon, his single visible eye wide with a mixture of shock, disbelief, and a profound, hollow emptiness.
"Danna..." he whispered, the name catching in his throat. His partner. His rival in art. The one person whose quiet, eternal philosophy had always been the perfect foil to his own fleeting, explosive passion. Defeated. Erased. Treated like... trash.
A tremor ran through his body. It started in his hands, a faint shake that grew until his entire form was vibrating with suppressed emotion.
"You..." he growled, his voice low and trembling. His gaze fixed on Naruto, who stood calmly below, Nozarashi resting on his shoulder as if he hadn't just obliterated an S-rank legend. "You... what did you do?!"
Naruto merely tilted his head, his expression unreadable. "I took out the trash. Weren't you watching?"
The casual, dismissive tone was the final spark on a mountain of gunpowder.
"DON'T YOU DARE MOCK HIM!" Deidara shrieked, his voice cracking with a raw, unadulterated fury. "His art was eternal! It had true beauty! YOU WOULDN'T UNDERSTAND! YOU DESTROYER! YOU UNREFINED, BRUTISH... BEAST!"
Tears streamed down his face, not of sadness, but of pure, artistic rage. He had argued with Sasori, insulted his philosophy, but there had always been a grudging respect. A partnership. Now, that was gone. And this... this monster below was the cause.
"My art... is the only true art," Deidara whispered, a terrifying calmness suddenly descending upon him. His fury coalesced into a single, focused point of resolve. "Art is an explosion! A fleeting moment of sublime beauty that burns brighter than anything else! Sasori-danna never understood that. But now... now I will create my ultimate masterpiece. An explosion that will honor his memory by proving my philosophy is supreme!"
He began to form hand seals, his movements sharp and deliberate. Down below, Naruto watched with a flicker of interest, his grip tightening on Nozarashi.
"This chakra..." Naruto murmured, a bloodthirsty grin beginning to form. "Now this feels like a real fight."
Deidara's clay dragon began to descend, landing a safe distance away. He hopped off, his face a mask of serene, fanatical devotion to his cause.
"You think you've won, Jinchuriki?" Deidara said, his voice eerily calm. "You haven't. You are merely the canvas for my magnum opus."
He created a single Shadow Clone. The clone stood before him, a perfect replica, and nodded solemnly.
"This is it," the real Deidara said to his clone. "Show him... the ultimate art."
The real Deidara then turned, leaped back onto his dragon, and flew high into the sky, putting as much distance as possible between himself and the battlefield. He wasn't retreating; he was getting a front-row seat for the show.
Down below, the Deidara clone began to tear at the stitches on its chest, revealing the grotesque, fanged mouth hidden there. It pulled out a large lump of clay and began to knead it into the chest-mouth, a process that was both horrifying and sacred.
Naruto watched, intrigued. "A clone? You're going to fight me with a clone? I'm disappointed."
The clone looked up, a beatific, ecstatic smile on its face. Black veins began to spread from its chest, crawling across its skin like cracks in porcelain. "This is not a fight," the clone said, its voice filled with religious fervor. "This is art."
The energy radiating from the clone became immense, a suffocating pressure that dwarfed everything Deidara had shown before. The very air began to vibrate.
"C0!" the clone declared.
Naruto's grin widened. Yachiru, who had returned to his shoulder, whistled. "Whoa, Kenny! This one looks like it's gonna be a big bang!"
"Yeah," Naruto breathed, his eyes gleaming with excitement. "It does."
He didn't move to stop it. He didn't try to flee. To a warrior like him, a man who had faced down Itachi's Susanoo and Jiraiya's Sage Art, this was not a threat to be avoided. It was a challenge to be met head-on. It was a test. A new, exhilarating peak to conquer.
He hefted Nozarashi, planting his feet firmly in the cracked earth. His golden Reiatsu began to pour from him, not in a wild explosion, but in a dense, steady torrent that wrapped around him like a shroud.
The Deidara clone began to shrink, folding in on itself as the massive amount of chakra condensed into a single, infinitesimally small point. The black veins covered its entire body. It was a human star, on the verge of going supernova.
"WITNESS MY ART!" the clone screamed, its body glowing with blinding white light. "KATSU!"
There was no sound at first. Just a silent, expanding sphere of pure, white annihilation. It vaporized the ground, the rocks, the air itself. The world was bleached of all color, all substance, consumed by the beautiful, terrible finality of Deidara's ultimate art. The explosion swelled, rushing towards Naruto, a wave of total destruction with a ten-kilometer radius.
Naruto stood his ground, a lone figure against the apocalypse. He raised his massive cleaver, gripping it with both hands.
"You call that destruction?" he roared, his voice a defiant challenge against the silent, all-consuming blast. "Let me show you what real power looks like!"
He poured an immense of his Reiatsu into his blade. The golden energy condensed, swirling around the jagged edge of Nozarashi until it shone like a miniature sun.
He swung.
He didn't aim for the center of the blast. He didn't try to block it.
He aimed to cut the explosion itself.
"Kūkan-kiri!"
Nozarashi moved, and for a moment, it felt as if the world itself held its breath. The blade didn't just move through the air; it tore a wound in the fabric of reality. A thin, black line of absolute nothingness appeared in front of Naruto, stretching from the sky to the earth.
The silent, expanding sphere of C0 hit the line.
And it split.
The apocalyptic explosion, a force capable of wiping a village from the map, was cleaved perfectly in two. The two massive hemispheres of destructive energy were redirected, parting around Naruto as if flowing around a stone in a river. They continued their path, carving two immense, semi-circular craters into the landscape for miles in every direction, but the space where Naruto stood remained utterly untouched.
When the light faded, the devastation was absolute. The battlefield was gone, replaced by a massive, smoking gouge in the earth.
And in the center of it all, Naruto stood in a small, pristine circle of untouched ground, Nozarashi resting on his shoulder. He looked up at the sky, at the tiny speck that was the real Deidara.
Naruto's grin was gone. His expression was one of pure, utter disappointment.
"That's it?" he called out, his voice echoing across the silent wasteland. "That was your 'ultimate art'?" He scoffed, the sound dripping with contempt.
"That was boring."
High in the sky, Deidara could only stare, his artistic soul shattered into a million pieces. His masterpiece, his ultimate statement... had been cut in half.
Tbc