The words had barely faded when killing intent arrived.
Swish! Swish! Swish!
Three blurred figures tore through the fog from different directions, ninja blades gleaming cold in their hands.
"Right side—diagonal downward slash. Left rear—straight thrust at the flank. Dead ahead—low sweeping cut to the legs. You're the first target," Swordsman Kiyohara reported, feeding everything into Kiyohara's mind.
For a normal genin—or even an average chūnin—caught in this blinding mist with their senses dulled, such a coordinated triple assault would likely end in instant death or serious injury.
But Kiyohara wasn't normal.
Before Swordsman Kiyohara finished speaking, his body had already moved.
He stomped back and to the side, springing like a compressed coil out of the path of the sweeping attack.
At the same time, his right hand brought the kunai up to block the slash from the right.
Clang!
Sparks exploded as he caught the diagonal cut.
"Kiyohara!" Kurenai cried.
She'd seen another attack that he hadn't dodged yet.
Kiyohara's expression didn't change. He dipped his shoulder, twisted his waist, his core firing all at once as his body pivoted sharply, slipping past the last blade.
Waist and legs moving as one.
All that core training with the stone bar was paying off.
"What?"
The Mist shinobi whose strike glanced past Kiyohara's body couldn't believe how fluid his movement was—like he had some kind of x-ray vision.
The next second, Kiyohara's foot drove off the ground; power traveled up through his legs, hips, and back, concentrating in his right arm as he brought the kunai down in a vicious chop.
The blade targeted the gap at the left shoulder joint of the Mist ninja who'd just finished his slash—between exertions, old strength spent and new strength not yet gathered.
Schk!
The kunai slipped into the weakest seam in the armor and buried itself deep.
The Mist shinobi screamed, his blade clattering to the ground as he staggered back.
The other two looked shocked, immediately shifting their stance to press the attack on Kiyohara.
"Good. Now you can use ninjutsu to push them back," Swordsman Kiyohara said approvingly.
The past him was better than he'd expected.
"Got it."
Kiyohara flashed through hand seals, blasting compressed wind at the one on his left rear, sending him tumbling back into the fog.
Wind Release: Great Breakthrough.
He formed seals again, slammed his right hand to the ground, and blue lightning raced across the earth toward the front.
As Suinosame pulled his leg back, a jolt of numbness shot up from his feet—his movements locked.
Lightning Release: Electromagnetic Murder.
All of this happened in a breath.
From the moment the three Mist ninja launched their ambush to Kiyohara's response, it was over in the space of a lightning strike.
Off to the side, Kakashi's visible eye actually widened a little.
He'd been about to use Chidori to assist—only to watch Kiyohara dismantle the triple strike alone.
Kiyohara… since when did his close combat get like this? He clearly used to rely more on ninjutsu… Is his growth really that fast? Kakashi wondered.
It wasn't just him. Genma and Rin stared in disbelief.
All they'd seen was Kiyohara's silhouette flicker a few times in the fog, a few metallic clashes, a couple of screams—and the three incoming Mist shinobi were either down or dying.
This far exceeded their previous sense of his capabilities.
Kiyohara panted lightly, feeling his remaining chakra and the faint ache in his arms.
He knew that nine-tenths of the credit belonged to Swordsman Kiyohara's intel.
Those callouts had turned the Mist ninja's "perfect ambush" into their own undoing.
After all, Hidden Mist didn't just mess with Sharingan—it could interfere with even Rinnegan's sight.
He glanced at the wounded Mist shinobi clutching his shoulder, drew a shuriken, and flicked it to finish him.
Almost the moment it struck home, a shrill, piercing sound like a thousand birds crying erupted from the side.
"Chidori!"
Kakashi, having taken a moment to judge the situation, turned into a streak of blue lightning. Using the chaos Kiyohara had created as reference, he locked onto another Mist ninja who hadn't quite regained his footing.
The flash of lightning and a short scream were all it took; that Mist shinobi's life winked out.
The last one—the one who'd mocked them at the start—Suinosame, watched his two comrades die with barely a flicker of emotion.
He pulled a blade from his back, not a standard ninja sword but a longer greatsword, obviously custom-forged.
He poured chakra into his legs and exploded forward like an arrow from a bow.
Not at Kakashi.
Straight at Kiyohara, who'd just thrown the finishing shuriken and looked spent.
"Konoha brat, don't get cocky!"
The greatsword howled through the fog, coming down in a vicious vertical cut aimed right at Kiyohara's face.
The speed, power, and pressure of that swing far surpassed the previous two chūnin—clearly this was a jōnin or tokubetsu jōnin who specialized in swordsmanship.
"Watch out!" Kurenai and Rin cried together.
Kakashi tried to move in, but he'd used Chidori just now; the drain was heavy and he was too far to intervene in time.
Faced with the sudden strike, Kiyohara quickly brought up the Mist-standard sword he'd just picked off the ground, holding it horizontally.
At the same time, deep inside, he shouted:
"Future me—help!"
If it was going to be tough, he'd just offload the thinking to the future.
"Might as well—been a while since I got to move. I'll help you," Swordsman Kiyohara said.
In an instant, he took over.
A completely different feeling flooded Kiyohara's body.
Muscle memory, power pathways, how the sword felt in hand, even his breathing rhythm—all shifted in a heartbeat.
Facing the descending greatsword, Kiyohara—possessed by Swordsman Kiyohara—took a half-step off-line.
He traced a smooth circular line with his blade, meeting the enemy sword at the exact point where the force was greatest—and hardest to redirect.
Claaang!
The clash rang out louder and clearer than anything before, sparks bursting in a shower around them.
Power traveled up the blade; Suinosame's wrist went numb.
His "guaranteed hit" felt like it had slammed into a spinning cushion of cotton—
Or like he'd chopped at a slippery fish, his ten parts of strength suddenly reduced to three.
"What?!"
He stared, stunned.
To do that, the other side's understanding of swordsmanship had to outstrip his by a wide margin.
"How is this possible—you're clearly not a sword ninja…"
He'd watched Kiyohara fighting with kunai earlier, and he'd only just picked up his fallen comrade's weapon.
How could someone go from "random pickup" to "twenty-year veteran" in one swing?
"Hard to wrap your head around?" Swordsman Kiyohara asked with a faint smile.
Truth be told, this enemy's sword art was, in shinobi terms… pretty low-tier.
~~~
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