Standing on his floating sand platform with his hands crossed under his chest, Gaara gazed down at the Iwa ambush troops scattered across the desert sands full of small craters.
A small frown appeared on Gaara's face as his expression turned strange.
These Iwa people... Their main army had been struggling with the mines just three days ago, and yet, they still had the courage to just carelessly run straight in?
Gaara didn't know if their commander should be praised for being daring or berated for being dumb.
No matter. Their current distraction as they tried to regroup without triggering any more mines was to his advantage. An amused glint passed through his eyes. Really. He resisted the urge to shake his head. His timing was great. They were sitting ducks right in the middle of the minefield.
Outstretching his right hand, Gaara's fist opened as if he was grasping at something while he aimed it toward them and intensely focused, ignoring the feeling of eager anticipation coming from his new seal.
"Grand Feet Burial." Gaara ominously whispered as he felt his chakra seep into the sands below, without the Iwa ninjas noticing until it was too late.
Sand underneath their feet sprang up, destabilizing their footing while burying their feet ankle-deep. Many Iwa ninjas managed to react in time, jumping up, using earth chakra to reinforce their feet, or doing something else that saved them from the impending consequences.
But many were too slow as Gaara's hand crisply closed back into a fist with a snap, and with it, the feet of over a hundred and fifty Iwa ninjas were crushed.
Ren recommended that he should not focus on fully crushing his opponent, but rather, he could aim to incapacitate. Crushing a limb might as well end the fight, just as well, while it required way less chakra and sand.
Gaara had to admit, he was too focused on grand, big, and impressive overkill techniques. But looking at the Iwa forces in disarray, panicking and screaming in pain, he had to admit that subtler uses of his sand techniques were satisfactory, too.
He didn't wait for the Iwa ninjas to regain their wits. Right after his fist closed and the sand below compressed, he instantly pulled his hand back, and his chakra lashed out.
From the sandy ground underneath the Iwa forces, thousands of thin, hardened sand needles started to shoot upward, missing the ninjas whose feet were crushed because most of those had already fallen on the ground. Instead, it was those experienced ninjas who had realized the attack was coming and jumped up that were the target.
It was the perfect opportunity. Up in the air, there would be no use of Earth Techniques to counter it.
Around eighty more Iwa ninjas were changed into porcupines by multiple sand needles while several dozen failed to block at least one and suffered a wound for it.
Yet, hundreds still managed to defend themselves properly. Gaara's eyes narrowed. Clasping his hands together, he let out a grunt.
"Vast Sea of Sand." He muttered, reaching deep into the seal to power the technique up. Shukaku, the tsundere tanuki, eagerly provided, and Gaara didn't even notice as his eyes changed to resemble Shukaku's.
The sands pulsed, and the Iwa ninjas screamed and scrambled in fear. Driven by a sudden burst of intense negative emotions due to using the bijuu chakra, Gaara savagely grinned as his chakra flared, actualizing the technique.
Like waves in the stormy sea, the sands surrounding them rose high above their heads out of nowhere, like a tsunami about to crash onto their heads. For a brief moment, time seemed to freeze for many of them as the vision of certain death stared them in the eyes, and the waves covered even the sun, causing the Iwa battalion to be engulfed in dark shadows.
Gaara leaned slightly forward, and his eyes slightly widened in a silent anticipation as his breath slightly hitched. With this attack, he might be able to destroy all of the remaining Iwa ninjas from the five-hundred-strong force!
He inwardly started to wonder if not insisting on joining the main battlefield was a mistake when, suddenly, he felt a pulse of foreign chakra spread through his sand. Then another. And another. Dozens more started to quickly join it, and Gaara began feeling the strain as his considerably massive chakra soon struggled against a conglomeration of over a hundred different earth-natured chakras, all working in tandem.
'We are not losing this fight, brat!' Shukaku yelled in Gaara's mind, and his chakra flooded out of the seal, flushing through Gaara's body with enough force to make him gasp.
For a moment, a fear that Shukaku was trying to break out flashed through Gaara's mind, but no. Shukaku's chakra quickly joined the energy tug of war and reinforced Gaara's chakra, trying to push back against the chakra of the Iwa forces.
But even then, the mental battle was short-lived. It all took barely three seconds. Jinchuuriki or not, his bijuu's help or not, they simply found they could not win it. Not against those numbers. Shukaku was too restricted by the seal to do more than make it way more challenging for the Iwa ninjas.
For the first time in his life, the bewildered Gaara experienced losing control of his sand as it hardened due to the foreign earth chakra that invaded it and dispersed his own chakra.
Quickly, the massive, tsunami-like waves of sand started solidifying into rock, much to the elation of the Iwa ninjas. It only caused them to grow more motivated, and their push against Gaara's chakra intensified. From the surface, their chakra spread deeper and deeper into the sand.
The previous sandy tsunami had been changed into huge walls of rocky jagged cliffs under the influence of their chakra and was shielding them from the still swirling sands outside.
Gaara coldly smiled, suddenly letting go of his control over the sand. He had gathered the sand from the immediate surroundings, and the Iwa forces forgot they stood in the middle of...
As Gaara's chakra's pushback disappeared, the Iwa forces' chakra invaded the remaining sand with blinding speed, and it abruptly reached all the exploding seals Gaara had gathered from the minefield and kept buried in the waves for a follow-up surprise attack.
Abruptly, the chakra reached them, and the seal tags all went off at once. As clumped as they were together, their power amplified, causing a massive earth-shattering explosion to ring out.
The jagged rocky cliffs that were supposed to act like a shield instantly turned into a deadly cage as the immense force of the explosion shattered them and sent shrapnel made of hard and sharp rocks back at its creators.
Dozens of experienced Iwa ninjas swiftly kneeled on one knee and slammed their palms onto the ground in desperation. A split second later, a massive earth dome covered all the Iwa ninjas, shielding them from the merciless hail of shrapnel that continuously rained on it and the shockwaves that smashed against its surface, causing continuously repairing cracks to appear and disappear one after another.
Gaara's eyes narrowed as he observed the situation through a sand eye. He had it positioned directly above the Iwa forces, so despite the massive, crumbling rocky walls around them, he could see what was going on inside.
Begrudgingly, he had to admit that his surprise attack was not as effective as he hoped. Only the first two attacks caused satisfactory casualties. Once the Iwa ninjas mobilized... His last technique was practically a titanic waste of chakra. It didn't manage to wound even one enemy.
As trapped as they were in their own earth dome, he could not even surprise attack them from the ground, as they had turned it into rock. It would take him considerable time to grind through it with his sand.
But it was useless to try. Before the war kicked off in full, Ren had warned him and his siblings that most Iwa sensors sensed things through chakra in the ground. Maybe if he were up against only one, he might have sneaked something through their perception.
But Gaara highly doubted there was only one in the enemy group. Especially when, according to Ren, the earth sensing was a learnable skill for those who practiced the Earth Release to at least a somewhat competent degree.
The more Gaara experienced facing it, the less he liked it. It was yet another way the Iwa ninjas countered him.
Thankfully, Ren also informed them of the weakness of this kind of sensing. They could not sense what was not touching the ground.
Gaara's expression changed back to its usual stoic and emotionless look as he started to gather sand in the air high above the Iwa's protective earth dome. With his will, he shaped and compressed the sand, creating hundreds of sharp lances out of it, all aimed downward.
'And now, we wait.' Gaara disgruntledly thought, resisting the urge to look westward where the other, most likely also attacked outpost was located.
Despite his worries, he knew he had to fully focus on the enemy in front of him. The second Iwa ninjas opened their dome, his sand lances in the air were going to make them into skewers. He only hoped it would be enough to quickly end the fight so he could go reinforce the other outpost.
His fellow Suna ninjas from the eastern outpost were no doubt already on their way here, so he could leave whatever remained of these Iwa forces to them.
With his plan mentally made up, Gaara settled down to patiently wait, and he wasn't left waiting for long. Three or so minutes later, the earth dome cracked, and Gaara's fingers twitched, making the sand lances in the air pull a bit back in preparation to be hurled forward.
The cracks slowly spread, the technique was at its limits...
But before the earth's dome could crumble, a massive molten lava bullet tore it wide open from the inside with a deafening roar before rising high into the air and flying straight through Gaara's pre-prepared sand lances. Due to the heat, the lances instantly turned into glass and shattered in short order as Gaara lost his control over them.
Reaching its highest point, the lava bullet abruptly detonated, and Gaara's eyes widened before he had to hurriedly hurl his sand platform backward as several smaller, molten rocks started to haphazardly rain over the surroundings, with one accidentally heading straight at him.
Its speed was so swift and the attack so unexpected that it almost grazed his sand platform as he steered it upward to evade the lava bullet. It still turned the platform's underside into glass as it passed below it, and Gaara almost completely lost control over his means of flight.
It took all his focus to keep the platform shakily in the air while he panickedly guided it toward the ground. Despite his effort, the landing was still rough, and Gaara was sent tumbling across the sand.
"Ugh." With a groan, he pulled himself up and slowly stood up, ignoring the sting of pain coming from his bruised back, while still wondering what the hell had just happened.
Blinking, Gaara's instincts suddenly flared, and he swiftly swapped places with a hastily made sand clone just a second before his previous position and the sand clone were hit by another lava bullet from behind.
"So you are the bastard that caused us so much trouble, huh?"
Gaara heard a cocky, female voice with an undertone of fury enter his ears as he turned toward it, and saw a black-haired kunoichi glaring at him with a ferocious grin that promised violence.
"I expected somebody less wimpy looking." She snarked, and the temperature in the surroundings suddenly rose a notch.