Sukumo stared, his face a perfect canvas of bewildered admiration. It wasn't just a question mark hovering over his head; it was a full-blown, flashing neon sign that read, "HOW IN THE NAME OF THE SAGE OF SIX PATHS IS SHE DOING THAT?!"
He could have, maybe, just barely, wrapped his brain around the first part.
The wings of pure chakra were insane, sure, but he could logic his way through it. Incredible chakra control, he'd tell himself.
She's basically a hummingbird—as long as she doesn't make any sudden, energy-intensive moves, she can hover all day. Unprecedented, but not… completely illogical.
But then she had to go and break the universe.
First, she cast a Fireball Jutsu. No hand seals. Not a single "Tiger," "Ram," or "Snake." She just willed a sphere of incandescent death into existence.
Sukumo's mind, already working overtime, sputtered like a faulty engine. Okay, fine, he thought, desperately trying to keep up, seal-less jutsu is a legendary skill, but it exists. She's a prodigy. I can accept this.
Then, the fireball started moving. Not in a simple, predictable arc. No, this one was doing loop-the-loops, dancing in the air like a drunken will-o'-the-wisp that she was piloting with her mind.
It was at this precise moment that the little logic centers in Sukumo's brain threw their hands up in unison and short-circuited with an audible fizzle-pop.
And Azula was just getting warmed up. Spotting him gaping from below, a predator's grin split her features.
She didn't just attack; she opened a wholesale warehouse of fireballs. A veritable barrage shot forth, each one born without the slightest gesture.
"Again," Sukumo muttered to the empty air beside him, "no seals."
To be perfectly honest, he was feeling profoundly speechless. His entire fighting philosophy was built on a very simple, very effective principle: get close, hit once, and it's done.
It was efficient! With his speed, if he got within melee range, the fight was over unless you were so monumentally stronger that you could swat him like a fly.
The downside, of course, was that his style was exclusively designed for killing. It was terrible for sparring. There was no 'friendly tap' in his arsenal; every move was a final one.
And how, pray tell, do you apply a one-hit-kill technique to a woman who is cheerfully flying thirty feet above your head?
Unless this was a true, no-holds-barred death match where he could just start hurling kunai at her face without a care, he was effectively a ground-bound turtle trying to argue with an eagle.
It was, he had to admit, a little bit helpless.
This state of affairs, naturally, delighted Azula to no end. She was fully aware that her advantage stemmed from a fundamental mismatch in their styles—her long-range aerial dominance perfectly countered his close-quarters brutality.
But wasn't that the whole point of training? To find and exploit weaknesses?
His style restrained hers on the ground; hers restrained his in the air. It was a beautiful, frustrating stalemate. Well, almost.
He was still stronger, objectively. His most glorious feat—tangling with an Elite Jōnin and living to tell the tale—was something she knew she couldn't replicate yet.
As expected, her fiery onslaught proved utterly useless. Sukumo became a blur, effortlessly dodging every single fireball with the Body Flicker technique.
He wasn't even breathing hard. He simply ceased to exist in one spot and reappeared in another, leaving her attacks to harmlessly scorch the earth.
"It seems," Azula called down, her voice laced with a mix of annoyance and respect, "that my Fire Release techniques are simply too slow for you."
Sukumo shook his head, finally pausing his ghost-like dance. "The techniques are fine. It's your execution that's... unprecedented. I've never even heard of a flying technique like this. This is your invention, isn't it?"
Despite the intensity, this was still training, and a casual conversation mid-combat felt strangely normal.
"That's right," she confirmed, a spark of pride in her eyes. "You are the first to witness the Fire Style: Kasai no Tsubasa (Wings of Conflagration). It was perfected very recently. But enough talk."
As she said this, she did something completely unexpected: she let the magnificent wings of fire dissolve into shimmering heat haze.
Sukumo blinked. Why would she give up her biggest advantage?
The reason was simple. Azula was a tactician. She knew her fire was too slow to tag him. And unfortunately, she hadn't yet mastered the delicate, insane art of wielding Fire and Lightning Release simultaneously. So, she had to choose.
"The aerial display was merely to test my new jutsu," she declared, landing gracefully before him. "Now, I will show you my true strongest fighting style."
As the last word left her lips, the air crackled. Without a single hand seal, arcs of blue-white lightning began to spiderweb around her body, coalescing into a shroud of raw, terrifying power.
Sukumo's eyes widened. He immediately recognized the similarities to the infamous Lightning Chakra Mode of the Hidden Cloud Village.
He had told himself, after the seal-less fire and the literal wings of flame, that he was immune to surprise. That the world had nothing left to throw at him that could make his jaw drop.
He was wrong. Again.
A slow, impressed sigh escaped him. "As expected of someone who theorized about manipulating chakra through breath alone," he mused aloud. "Is that the method you're using? To bypass hand seals entirely?"
But then he frowned, his sharp eyes analyzing her.
"But... no. It doesn't seem so. Your breathing is normal. It's not a special rhythm. It's as if..." he trailed off, the realization dawning with terrifying clarity, "...as if you're just forcing the chakra to bend to your will through an unrecognizable level of control."
Azula had never, not for one single, sane moment, abandoned her gloriously unhinged idea of using Lightning Release to give her own cells a motivational pep talk.
Her philosophy was simple: why wait for nature to dole out maturity in boring, incremental steps when you could just electrocute your way to peak performance?
She was essentially trying to simulate a cellular boot camp, accelerating her growth and forging a body tougher than a week-old rice cracker.
Admittedly, her research suggested this 'motivational pep talk' method was aggressively shaving years off her lifespan. Azula's reaction to this minor detail was a dismissive sneer that could curdle milk.
Lifespan? Please. That was a problem for quitters and mortals. She had a laundry list of a thousand ways to bypass that pesky issue, starting with the obvious classic: chomping down on a divine Chakra Fruit and achieving Kaguya-level immortality.
One doesn't worry about the wear and tear on a rental car when they're planning to steal a starship.
And anyway, thanks to a level of chakra control that would make any ninja weep with envy, she had already achieved the impossible.
She could now coat her entire body in a crackling sheath of lightning chakra without so much as frizzing a single hair on her head. Well, mostly.
The only caveat was pushing to absolute extremes of power and speed, where the theoretical physics became… inconvenient.
Theoretically, there was a velocity at which her own magnificent form would simply decide to atomize itself. A minor design flaw she was confident she could work out later.
"This," she announced, her voice full of excitement, "is my Lightning Chakra Mode. Developed with… inspiration from the version in Kumogakure. I call this Stage One. Are you ready, Sukumo-senpai?"
The question was purely rhetorical, a formality she dispensed with before she vanished in a retina-searing blur, reappearing to plant her foot squarely in his chest with a sound like a thunderclap.
It was the first solid hit she'd landed all day! A triumphant smirk began to form on her lips… only to wither as her target transformed with a poof into a very innocent, and very kicked, log.
Substitution Technique. Of course. It didn't surprise her, but it was profoundly annoying, like finding a hair in your soup.
Sukumo materialized behind her with the silent grace of a shadow, his own strike already in motion. But Azula was already pirouetting, not just to block, but to counterattack, her body moving on pure, electrified instinct. Their limbs met in a shower of sparks.
What happened next—or rather, what didn't happen—made Azula's meticulously calibrated brain stutter.
Sukumo, having made direct contact with enough voltage to power a small village, simply stood there.
He didn't convulse. He didn't scream. He didn't even smell like overcooked meat. He just looked… highly impressed.
Azula leaped back, her crackling aura humming with her confusion.
"How?" she demanded, the word sharp and sizzling. "How are your limbs not currently extra-crispy? My chakra mode tends to be aggressive against anyone touching me!"
Sukumo, ever the calm academic even mid-spar, gave a casual shrug. "I'm in a bit of a unique state. My Lightning Release training, inspired by those 'Breathing Techniques' from your drawings, has had some… side effects. Apart from pure impact or sharpness, most lightning-based jutsu that touch my chakra tend to get… canceled out."
He said it as if he'd just found a slightly more efficient way to brew tea. Azula, a scholar of chakra theory with a mind that dissected the universe's laws for fun, was utterly dumbfounded, experiencing what he had experienced earlier.
What she was doing was masterful chakra control. It was supreme skill. What he was doing was… cheating. It was unscientific! It was like someone declaring themselves immune to gravity by simply refusing to acknowledge it.
And then it hit her. The strange chakra she'd sensed from him earlier. He wasn't just using Lightning Release; he was trying to become it.
He wasn't developing a new jutsu; he was stumbling, accidentally-on-purpose, toward a full-blown Kekkei Genkai!
Well, not a true Kekkei Genkai, as it was only one nature, but the effect was just as absurd. Immunity to lightning attacks?
If he perfected this, he could potentially achieve a state similar to the Hozuki clan's Hydrification Technique, but with lightning!
It was almost like that 'logia elementalization' from a certain God of Sky—a state where he'd be immune to physical attacks, with only a handful of esoteric ninjutsu capable of harming him.
A slow, genuine grin spread across Azula's face, a rare expression that usually preceded either a breakthrough or widespread property damage.
"Haha! I have to admit, what you're fumbling towards is… fascinating," she declared, her tone laced with arrogant approval. "If you actually succeed, you might just be one of the few people worthy of accompanying me to the very end of the road."
In her mind, this wasn't arrogance; it was a coronation. Her road led to battles against full gods like the Ōtsutsuki, and judging someone worthy to stand beside her was the highest compliment she could muster—on par with acknowledging Tobirama's intellect or Orochimaru's… well, his everything.
Sukumo, for his part, had a complicated expression, the look of a fully-fledged Jōnin—capable of tangling with Elite Jōnin—being given a performance review by a student who still had academy homework.
A very, very special student, but still.
Azula didn't wait for his response. Her Lightning Chakra Mode came with a twenty-minute time limit, which, while not exactly short, was no time for chit-chat.
(END OF THE CHAPTER)
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