"Huh? Hinata... what does this mean?"
Naruto's eyes went wide on instinct. To most people he was nothing but a loudmouthed idiot, yet as someone who had grown up surrounded by every flavor of hostility and rejection imaginable, he possessed a keen sensitivity to the uglier emotions lurking inside human beings. And right now, what he sensed radiating from the girl standing before him was a malice so brazen she barely bothered to conceal it.
"Last night, ronin were killed in the capital district... Don't tell me—"
Sasuke picked up on it just as quickly. As a surviving member of the envied and resented Uchiha Clan, his emotional radar was no less sharp than Naruto's, and when you factored in an analytical mind that outstripped the blond's by a comfortable margin, the dark-haired boy connected the dots in an instant—linking the intelligence Hinata had mentioned earlier to the pale-eyed girl herself.
"Heh heh heh..."
Hinata flashed a dangerous smile. She raised both hands and spread them open. On those Sacred Fist Gauntlets—mechanical, precise, almost machine-like—a grotesque layer of blackish-red clung to the metal. It was the kind of discoloration that only appeared when fresh blood had been scorched and seared into the surface.
Swordsmiths often said that blades soaked in too much blood would transform into cursed demon blades. The claim sounded fanciful, yet it did go some way toward explaining the uncanny aura that certain killing instruments gave off—as though the lingering grudges of the dead had seeped into the weapon through their blood, imbuing it with a ferocity all its own.
There was no question that the gauntlets on Hinata's hands now exuded an air of menace utterly different from before. The change was impossible to put into precise words, but anyone with experience could tell at a glance: these gauntlets had tasted real blood.
"Hey! You lot—what do you think you're doing skulking around here?! Don't you know this is Gatō-sama's warehouse?!"
Right on cue, Hinata's group attracted the attention of the ronin guarding the storehouse. The one at the front came stomping over with a string of profanities on his lips. As a thug well accustomed to throwing his weight around in the Land of Waves, it hadn't even occurred to him to consider who these brats actually were.
"Hinata, are you really going to—"
Naruto took an involuntary step backward. His blue eyes contracted with a flicker of alarm. The pale-eyed girl standing there simply let a vicious grin split across her face, then pivoted on her heel. Her slender, graceful frame exploded forward like an arrow loosed from a bow, closing several meters in the blink of an eye. Before the lead ronin even registered the danger, a searing pain—like being branded with open flame—erupted from his chest and tore through his entire body.
"Urghk~~~"
His mouth fell open in dumb shock. The ronin leader crumpled to the ground like a felled log, and the samurai clustered around him erupted in outraged disbelief. In the Land of Waves, it had always been them doing the bullying. No one had ever dared attack them first. Bellowing in fury, they snatched up their weapons and charged.
"Watch closely. Live materials like these don't come along every day."
Drawing a shallow breath, Hinata settled into a fighting stance and spoke coolly over her shoulder to Sasuke and Naruto. Then her silhouette blurred and she plunged straight into the oncoming mob.
A cascade of screams and shrieks erupted from the rabble almost immediately. Hinata didn't waste a single extra motion on any of them—one strike per person, and done. A blow to the Yunmen acupoint to cripple an arm. A strike to the Chongmen acupoint to drop them where they stood. Or a hit to the Tanzhong and Qihai acupoints to knock them out cold on the spot.
"Those people... each one went down in a single hit..."
Sasuke had already activated his Sharingan on pure reflex. He could see it with perfect clarity: Hinata hadn't used more than one attack on any of these ronin. The bulk of her attention was devoted to dodging and closing distance, and yet every casual strike she threw was enough to completely strip a ronin of his ability to fight.
Granted, ronin were a full tier below ninja in combat capability, but they had been the world's dominant fighting force before shinobi emerged. They possessed a working understanding of chakra, and anyone who could cultivate chakra would see substantial gains in physical toughness and durability. Getting cut by one of their blades could still be fatal.
And fighting a crowd was an entirely different proposition from fighting one person. Even though Hinata and her teammates had already reached the destructive output of a jōnin, that didn't mean they could casually mow through a group of ronin. After all, attack power didn't splash—there was no area-of-effect here. Without crowd-clearing techniques, you still had to take them down one at a time.
That was precisely why even elite chūnin had to exercise caution against a pack of ronin. A taijutsu practitioner who could drop each one with a single offhand blow was, without question, operating at the level of an elite jōnin.
Otherwise, Naruto's old strategy of flooding the field with Shadow Clones for a mass headlong charge wouldn't have been nearly as effective as it was in the early and mid arcs of the original story.
And the taijutsu Hinata was displaying right now was unmistakably the art of fighting one against many. The ronin couldn't so much as graze the hem of her jacket before they were sent sprawling to the ground, unable to rise again.
Savoring that Dynasty Warriors-esque rush of harvesting enemies by the dozen, Hinata had to admit she was genuinely excited.
Her taijutsu had certainly been impressive among Genin before this, and she'd deliberately developed specific techniques like Aragami and R.E.D. Kick to supplement her offensive toolkit. But something had always felt missing—some core element she couldn't put her finger on, a nagging sense of directionlessness.
Only after conceiving a skill designed to target eight specific acupoints on the human body did she finally feel that void fill in.
Possessing forms and raw power was meaningless if you had no designated striking targets on the enemy's body. Even a complete repertoire of techniques would struggle to deliver its full potential without a clear objective. But when you had explicit target zones on the opponent's anatomy—when forms and power were unified in service of hitting those targets—that paralyzing uncertainty of where do I even aim simply evaporated.
If the enemies were numerous, pick one or two of the eight acupoints per target and keep moving. If the enemies were few, seize the openings and stack acupoint damage until you'd landed the full sequence.
This wasn't a single technique. It was a genuine taijutsu philosophy—a combat doctrine that could govern every engagement plan she'd ever need.
Its name was—
"Ya Otome!!"
Her left elbow dropped and slammed into a ronin's lower abdomen—the Qihai acupoint. Hinata watched with a savage grin as his eyes rolled back and he pitched forward. In the same motion her right fist drove upward, punching clean into another ronin's side, dead on the Zhangmen acupoint beneath the lower ribs. The man's face twisted in agony and he toppled sideways, clutching his flank. Her strikes carried no extraordinary force, but these precision blows to the body's weak points were more than any ronin could withstand.
And the less power she poured into each strike, the more fluid and nimble her movements became. Without Ya Otome she could certainly have beaten these ronin too, but she'd have had to be far more careful with each attack—one misjudged swing and she'd risk injuring herself.
"One, two... twelve people in total, and she dropped every single one of them in an instant..."
Naruto counted the bodies on the ground with wide-eyed caution, swallowing hard. He'd always known Hinata was strong, but watching her single-handedly flatten twelve men in mere seconds without taking so much as a scratch was still enough to stun him.
"I see... so this is the new secret art she was talking about."
The twin tomoe in Sasuke's eyes rotated slowly. Unlike Naruto, who only saw the surface-level spectacle, Sasuke perceived something deeper—the underlying principle that could end a life with trivial ease.
"This is the new secret art I've mastered. Its name is—Ya Otome."
Planting one foot on a ronin's head, Hinata let her white eyes gleam with undisguised pride and ruthlessness. She hadn't killed any of them—if she had, they wouldn't have gotten off with merely collapsing to the ground.
Still, given Naruto and Sasuke's age and emotional maturity, neither of them had yet been hardened enough to kill casually. She had no choice but to use a somewhat gentler approach.
After all, since she fully intended to make use of these two male protagonists from the original work, she had to manage them the way one managed pets—keeping a careful eye on whether their physical and psychological development was proceeding according to plan.
"That was incredible!! Hinata!! Can you teach me?!"
Naruto's eyes had already turned into starbursts as he bounced over to Hinata's side. His expression, his body language—he looked exactly like some oversized dog breed. If he'd had a tail, it would have been wagging hard enough to generate a breeze.
"Who do you think I went through all that trouble developing this secret art for, you idiot? If you can't even learn this much, Naruto, you'll be wearing that dress for the rest of your life."
Reaching up to sweep a strand of hair from the side of her neck, Hinata's lilting tone sent an involuntary shudder down Naruto's spine. As far as he was concerned, Hinata had never once failed to make good on a threat.
"Heh~ that said, you're obviously just looking for excuses to keep getting stronger yourself. At the end of the day, you're the one holding the Sacred Fist manual. You get to decide what techniques to learn."
Sasuke folded his arms and let out a dry snort, though as a member of the Uchiha Clan, the dark-haired hothead clearly had no intention of conceding verbally. "So you've been selectively picking out techniques from the manual based on what you can actually master. Fine by me. Whatever you can master, I can master too."
"Yeah, yeah! Me too! I can definitely do it!"
Not about to be left behind, Naruto chimed in from the sidelines, desperate to assert his presence. Hinata merely gave a thin, cold smile.
"Good. It puts my mind at ease to see you both so motivated."
"After all, this technique is classified as a forbidden art. Once you begin training it, trying to stop midway..."
"Won't be so easy~"