The training ground was dead silent.
The air solidified, even the noisiest cicadas went silent.
Everyone, teachers, students, onlookers with snacks, their eyes were fixed on the middle of the field.
Fixed on the thing curled up in that mud pit.
Namikaze Minato.
Sweat, blood, and mud smeared his face. His eyes were swollen to slits, everything he saw tinged with red.
A cough made his throat feel torn from the inside. Every breath was a cramp of bone-deep pain.
"Ugh… cough… pfft…" Bloody foam mixed with mud sprayed out.
He propped himself up on his elbows. His fingernails dug into his palms. Veins throbbed like earthworms under the mud and blood.
Pain? His whole body falling apart?
That was nothing.
What truly burned his heart was humiliation. Two years. Over ten defeats.
That monster, Ryo, did not even bother to lift an eyelid, just casually waved his palm.
"Cough… cough…" Minato stared through the blood-smeared slits at that figure.
That mountain. That nightmare.
Kamiyama Ryo.
Damn it.
He had not even broken a sweat from start to finish.
This was too much.
Hands in his pockets, the same lazy expression as always.
But around him, an invisible pressure. Heavy, cold, making everyone's breathing tight.
"Minato-kun! Give up! Don't, don't force yourself!"
Kimura Shū's voice was sharp and urgent, like a spark.
In an instant, it ignited that barrel of humiliation in Minato's chest that had been suppressed for two years, almost spontaneously combusting.
Force himself? Again, force himself?
I am not a dead last barely scraping by.
"Get out!"
A roar.
A self-destructive, all-consuming fire erupted from his bones. It burned away the pain, burned away reason.
Crack. Clang.
That muddy body was forced upright by a beast-like will. He stood.
"I can fight!"
Bang.
His palms slammed into the bloody mud, exploding it.
Using the force, his muddy body sprang out of the pit in a twisted posture. Like a broken rag doll, swaying, but nailed to the ground. Sweat mixed with blood spattered into the dirt, sizzling.
Those beautiful blue eyes, like the sky, were now blood red. Burning with madness, burning with recklessness. From the look of it, he intended to burn the entire world, along with that monster named Ryo, to ashes.
"Ryo!"
Golden hair flared, burning.
Minato himself became a scorching golden branding iron, shooting out like lightning.
Chakra? He squeezed it out with his life. Veins throbbed, blue sparks hissed under his skin. Retreat? No. Technique? Speed? Defense? All discarded. Just one word, charge.
Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.
Every step was a giant stomp. Rocks and dirt burst and rolled. Heavy footsteps beat war drums. Dust billowed, obscuring the sky.
Just a mad bull. Eyes bloodshot, only one thought in his mind, kill him. Even if his body shattered, he would charge.
"Damn it! Minato's gone crazy." Onlooker A was terrified.
"This aura… is he trying to die?!" Onlooker B's voice trembled.
Kushina's faint smile froze harder than ice, a chill rising from the soles of her feet to the crown of her head. Even Mikoto had her smile frozen, shock in her eyes impossible to hide.
On the high platform, Hiruzen, puffed on his pipe, brows knotted tight.
At the center of the storm, the one called the monster, Ryo, finally reacted.
Barely perceptibly.
The hand in his right pants pocket did not move.
His left hand rested casually on the Kusanagi at his waist.
Slow.
Extremely slow.
And extremely casual.
That hand, knuckles distinct, seemingly containing endless power, slowly raised the scabbard.
The motion was light and airy, carrying an air of "this is really troublesome."
His eyelids finally opened a sliver.
In the depths of his narrow, empty eyes, a slight ripple appeared.
Like a sesame-sized pebble dropped into a stagnant pool.
His thin lips parted slightly.
The words were few, just three.
"Stubborn and unyielding."
Before the words had even finished, the killing blow arrived.
Minato, burning his life, charged. Five meters. The hot, bloody aura almost sprayed onto Ryo's perpetually calm face.
Ryo's hand on the sheath moved.
Buzz.
Not a slash.
Just a casual, light, even lazy and impatient forward swing at the air.
The blade did not even leave the sheath.
The tip of the sheath sliced out.
Tear.
The air visibly distorted, instantly drained, compressed, and torn by a terrifying force.
Blood light exploded.
A massive crimson slash, condensed like molten magma, appeared out of thin air, erupting from the sheath tip.
Crimson, violent, obscuring the sky.
A terrifying crescent several stories high. The moment it appeared, a tsunami of deathly aura swept out.
Its edges were sharp enough to cut space, to distort light.
Screech.
Silent?
No, it was a shriek so sharp it tore at the soul, flooding everyone's minds. Only the burning red crescent remained on their retinas.
"Holy crap! What was that?!" someone screamed, voice cracking.
"A slash?! No hand seals?! He did not even draw the sword?!" Kimura Shū's eyes almost popped out, his worldview shattered.
That crimson crescent did not cut Minato. It grazed the scalp of the charging Minato.
Boom.
An indescribable, irresistible shockwave, like an invisible giant palm, slammed into Minato.
Condensed power, will, burning life, snapped. Shattered.
All the momentum of his charge went to zero, crushed to powder. His bones groaned. His will collapsed.
"Puff!" A great mouthful of foul blood mixed with fragments of organs sprayed into the sky like a fountain.
His body, like a crushed empty can, flew sideways ten times faster than he had charged.
And his so-called golden lightning, ignited by burning his life, was like a candle in a hurricane before the faint ripples of the crimson crescent, snuffed out with a puff, gone.
No suspense.
Absolute crushing.
As for that crimson crescent that deliberately avoided Minato?
Its target was not Minato at all.
It was purely to make the weak see the chasm-like gap.
Its target was the edge of the training ground, the dense, unsuspecting forest.
Rumble, rumble.
The earth groaned and burst.
The crimson giant blade slashed into the ground.
Sizzle.
There was no crashing sound.
Like a hot knife cutting through hot butter. Silent, yet even more terrifying.
The incredibly solid, ninjutsu-reinforced training ground floor, like paper, was instantly torn into a bottomless, dark gully. Over a meter wide. Its length spanned the entire field.
This was just the beginning.
The soil and rocks on both sides of the gully, the reinforced wooden stakes, vanished the moment the crimson crescent passed. Not even dust remained.
Lingering power?
A destructive hurricane, an unleashed dragon, wildly rampaging, crushing everything in its path.
It spanned out, tearing through the training ground wall, plunging into the primeval forest outside.
Boom. Crash, crash, snap, snap.
A hundred meters away, entire swathes of ancient trees.
Thick, with tangled roots, centuries of growth?
At this moment, they were bundles of fragile wheat stalks, reaped by an invisible scythe.
Devastating. Irresistible.
Where the crimson path passed, trees exploded and shattered, boulders vanished, soil rolled and vaporized.
A shocking corridor of destruction, hundreds of meters long and astonishingly wide, was carved into the earth, like a scar left by a giant's casual strike, deep enough to see bone.
At the end of sight, the once lush green mountains disappeared, replaced by scorched earth, broken trunks, exposed roots, and a massive dust cloud rising like an apocalyptic column.
Buzz.
A destructive backdraft storm rolled from the forest back into the training ground.
Dust mixed with leaves and wood chips covered everything, slamming down.
Whoosh. Bang, bang, bang.
It hit the remaining walls, the stunned faces of the onlookers.
The wind brushed Ryo's clothes.
His left hand still gently held the sheath, as if nothing had happened.
His right hand stayed in his pants pocket.
His eyes returned to their usual indifference.
As if the strike that tore the earth and felled the forest had been a casual flick of dust.
He even frowned slightly, as if the dust blowing back was a nuisance to his peace.
The training ground was dead silent.
A silence more terrifying than before.
Heartbeats pounded in eardrums. Thump. Thump. Thump.
Only the wind sounded, wailing through the massive scar of the flattened forest.
At the edge of the gully, mud tumbled down.
At the side of the field, Namikaze Minato was embedded like rotten wood in a pile of collapsed wall bricks, unconscious and motionless.
In the center of the field, that tall figure still stood.
That terrifying gully that cut across the field and extended to scorched earth, the residual crack in the air still visible in the sunlight, the wailing wind in the dead silence.
(To be continued.)