The Three-Tails Isobu's three massive tails had been forcibly melted off, and at the severed stumps tailed-beast chakra fountained out like an out-of-control waterfall, spraying and dissipating wildly.
Its sky-rending scream of agony made for a shockingly visceral scene—every Hidden Mist Anbu who heard it in the distance felt their scalps prickle and a chill run down their spines.
Momochi Zabuza stood there stunned. The eyes that were usually cold and murderous were now filled with raw shock and disbelief.
He'd guessed that this "Lava Release Beast" from the Konoha, Uchiha Chizumi, might be the only one who could go toe-to-toe with the Fourth Mizukage.
But he never imagined their very first head-on jutsu clash would end in such crushing fashion.
The one on top—was that lone Uchiha from the Konoha!
With the Fourth Mizukage plus a tailed beast's power, it was basically two against one. And yet, in the face of that calamity-level Lava Release kekkei genkai, they looked this feeble?
A cold bead of sweat slid from Zabuza's temple down his tightened cheek. By nature, the "Demon" was long used to life-and-death battles; even against stronger foes, what should have risen in him was bloodlust, not fear.
Yet now a feeling he hadn't tasted in a long time—fear—coiled around him like a cold viper. For a fleeting instant his body sent a primal warning—run.
Run. Get out of here now.
He crushed that impulse with willpower, but he couldn't deny the flicker of cowardice sprouting in his heart.
"The Fourth can perfectly control a tailed beast—that alone makes him a monster beyond reason," Zabuza rasped, his voice dry and hoarse, carrying a hint of terror he didn't notice himself. "But that man—Uchiha Chizumi—he's even more of a monster than a monster. Without a tailed beast's nearly bottomless chakra, can an ordinary shinobi really train himself to something that… inhuman?"
On the other side, Terumi Mei felt the scalding gale wash over her, stinking of sulfur and char, the aftershock of heat slamming into her face. She had to squint just to make out the distant fight. Her long, lustrous hair whipped about in the wind, leaving her looking a touch disheveled. Shock was written across her delicate features; fine beads of sweat dotted her skin. She couldn't tell if it was the heat baking them out, or the sight before her scaring them out.
"Is… is this Konoha's ultimate weapon they've been hiding all this time?"
She clenched a fist and muttered, "To let a being this dangerous rampage into the Land of Water—are they formally declaring war on us?"
The thought sent a chill through her marrow. She realized her clenched palm was slick, her back already drenched in sweat.
Drip.
Drip. Viscous, scalding beads of magma slid down Chizumi's elemental, molten body and spattered on the charred ground with soft ticks, burning out one smoking pit after another.
His face was impassive as he walked forward, step by step. With each footfall the earth beneath him liquefied at once, leaving behind a footprint wreathed in roaring flame. Black smoke billowed off him like a signal fire, and the sheer heat warped and jittered the air around him so violently that, in Isobu's single eye far away, his silhouette looked unreal, flickering—like a specter out of hell, impossible to pinpoint.
Pain still knifed up from its tails, and the mortal danger radiating from the man drawing near—felt through the raw instinct of a tailed beast—made Isobu's heart hammer. Its pupil quivered.
"ROAR!!!"
It bellowed, and its vast tailed-beast chakra erupted at a speed it had never reached before. At the melted stumps of its three tails, flesh buds and chakra writhed madly, reknitting with visible speed.
At the same time it made the most primal defensive move it had: its thick forelimbs snapped into the spiked carapace, and that ugly, massive head tucked in as well. The enormous body curled tight until it became a giant sphere wrapped entirely in an iron-hard, spike-studded grey-white shell—like a tyrant tortoise shielding every soft spot.
This was its proudest absolute defense.
And its danger sense hadn't lied.
The very next second—BOOM!!!
The scorched ground under Chizumi's feet exploded. It was as if a volcano erupted beneath his soles, blasting out an unparalleled burst of force. His fully molten, elemental body seemed dragged into a crimson torrent of destruction.
To every distant onlooker there was only a razor-bright streak of red—so fast it blew past the limits of the eye.
An instant later, Chizumi was simply there, ghostlike, above the Three-Tails' curled-up shell.
Below him lay the Three-Tails' so-called absolute defense, that thick, spike-studded "shell."
Suspended in midair, Chizumi's right arm—already wound to its limit—had swelled into a blazing sphere of lava as big as a small sun, dense destructive power packed inside until even the surrounding space trembled.
He didn't hesitate. The motion was simple and brutal: he hammered that lava colossus of a fist straight down at Isobu's back.
Yes—at the very point where its defense was supposed to be strongest—exactly where he chose to strike.
CRASH!!!
The instant fist met carapace, the sound was like a meteor slamming into the earth. The impact was so savage that even Isobu's proud, iron-hard back shell let out a tooth-aching crack. Fractures radiated from the impact point like spiderwebs, racing outward.
Worse, the searing lava forced itself through those cracks and flooded the interior, scorching Isobu's chakra-woven flesh and viscera.
"ROAAARRR—!!!"
Curled inside its shell, Isobu screamed again, a deafening, ragged howl stuffed with pain it had never known.
And it still wasn't over.
Chizumi's right shoulder bulged and compressed again, harder—an even wilder surge of lava poured into his arm.
RUMBLE—!!!
A fiercer, volcano-erupting force rammed down his right arm and into Isobu's shell.
SPLAT—!
This time a tightly focused lance of crimson magma, like a red-hot needle through leather, bored clean through the thick carapace—then ripped past layer after layer of tough, chakra-forged flesh.
And then—
It punched out beneath Isobu's belly.
The magma beam had gone straight through its colossal body, leaving a gaping hole from front to back, the edges still melting away.
"ROOOAA—!!!"
Indescribable pain swallowed every inch of Isobu's consciousness. It couldn't hold its curled defense anymore and began thrashing like mad. That giant body, wreathed in tailed-beast chakra flames, rolled and crashed without aim in every direction like a runaway steamroller.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
Hummocks and little hills shattered like powder under its bulk. The ground was ploughed into trenches ten to twenty meters deep. It tried to use this carpet-bombing, indiscriminate destructive roll to grind the tiny human who'd hurt it into paste.
But beyond trashing a battlefield already in ruins—and scaring the badly wounded Mist Anbu in the distance into scrambling for their lives—none of it posed even the slightest threat to Uchiha Chizumi.
His figure had already vanished from where he'd been, looking down coldly at the tailed beast writhing in pain.
The heat rolling off the field was almost unbreathable. Jujirō squinted just to make his eyes stop stinging. Staring at the Three-Tails flailing in the distance, the cat spoke up: "Meow, Chizumi-sama once briefed me on the nine tailed beasts. I remember the Three-Tails is called Isobu, and it's best at powerful Water Release. But—"
He paused, pointing a paw at the hellscape around them. "Chizumi-sama's Lava Release has baked the area almost completely dry. The ground is cracked, the air is scorching, and most of the moisture's been boiled off, meow."
"That means a beast that relies heavily on water can't leverage the environment. Its Water Release is weakened, meow."
"In theory, water counters lava. A long time ago, Chizumi-sama really did take water-style users seriously."
Jujirō licked his nose, parched by the heat, and went on, "But when the water in the surroundings is far less than the lava—there's no counter anymore. The lava ends up countering what little water remains, meow."
"It's like trying to pour a cup of water into the mouth of a volcano."
Listening to Jujirō and watching the Three-Tails' misery, Biwa Jūzō drew a searing breath. "A thought just hit me: the Three-Tails—and the Mizukage—are both puppets controlled by Uchiha Obito's Sharingan."
"Their actions aren't their own. In that case, can what they've done really be counted as their 'crimes'?"
Jujirō stopped licking his paw, tilted his head at Jūzō, and shot back, "What makes you think the Fourth Mizukage was an 'innocent good man' before he was controlled, meow?"
His words were cold needles popping Jūzō's fragile sentiment. "Weren't you the one who said the Mist had already started enforcing the brutal 'Blood Mist Policy' before Obito took the Mizukage's reins, meow?"
"Meow—if you're the village's Kage, how could you not understand how self-mutilating that policy was for the village's future? While Yagura was in power, did he try to stop it or push to reform it?"
"If he had—even if he failed—you might argue he didn't deserve to die, meow."
He paused, voice turning sharp. "But did he? Was someone holding a blade to his throat, forcing him to carry the Blood Mist Policy to the bitter end?"
"Meow—does anyone in your Mist Village have the power to order a Mizukage who wields a tailed beast to do anything?"
The barrage of questions landed on Jūzō's heart like hammer blows, leaving him speechless—and then, like cold water to the face, they snapped him awake.
"…Hah."
Jūzō let out a long breath and gave himself a bitter, self-mocking smile. "Maybe it's just because I'm Mist-born too that I let myself feel a bit of unrealistic pity for the Fourth."
That line was already an indirect answer to Jujirō's challenge.
No—Yagura Karatachi had not tried to halt or reform the Blood Mist Policy. If anything, he'd likely been its determined enforcer. He hadn't started it, but he was the key driver of its continued execution and escalation.
That alone… said plenty.
With that, the last trace of hesitation in Jūzō's eyes vanished, replaced by a glacial clarity. "You're right. Yagura—he's no innocent."
"What—what on earth happened here?!"
A figure finally hurried onto the scene: Ao, the Byakugan user. But the image he'd expected—traitor Biwa Jūzō trapped and being crushed—was nowhere to be seen. Instead his eyes took in an apocalypse and a gigantic tailed beast rolling and roaring in pain.
He sucked in a breath, nearly scorched by the heat wave blasting his face. Ao snapped his gaze to the familiar silhouette not far away and blurted, "Terumi Mei-sama! The Mizukage—what happened to him?!"
Mei didn't turn. She kept her eyes locked on the much smaller figure in the distance, the one far more impossible to ignore than Isobu's bulk. Her voice was thick with tangled emotion. "The Mizukage—he's about to be killed by that 'Lava-Release Beast' from the Konoha."
"What?!!"
Ao's eyes went wide; even the Byakugan under his eyepatch seemed to tremble. No—that can't be on some Lava-Release Beast. What the hell happened?
Ao stood there, stunned.