Vents on the Twin Flounder Blades began to breathe, thin mouths exhaling vapor. White fog rolled out, spreading fast, swallowing Mangetsu until he vanished inside it.
Gasps rippled through the stands. This wasn't the usual Hidden Mist. Mangetsu had liquefied and broken himself down into countless micro-droplets scattered through the blade-born fog.
And this wasn't ordinary fog at all—it was chakra, made visible.
The Twin Flounder Blades hung in midair, glowing white.
No one knew what Mangetsu was preparing—not even Kaede. Was this the blade's real face?
Neji hovered in the air, wrapped in the chakra of his evolving eye. In the next instant, every kunai on every spectator and shinobi outside the ring flickered out of existence—and reappeared inside the arena.
It happened between two heartbeats. A child gripping his kunai tight felt it vanish; he stared at his empty hand in shock.
Some noticed at once. Others didn't notice at all—still staring, slack-jawed, at the duel below—until tens of thousands of kunai bloomed around Neji in a spinning halo.
"My kunai—!"
"Mine too!"
"Impossible… how—"
All those blades drifted under Neji's control, wrapped in blue light.
A beat later, the storm of kunai screamed toward Mangetsu—
—or rather, toward the fog.
A silhouette rippled inside the white.
The kunai cut into the fog, diving straight for the outline… and froze. The moment they crossed the threshold, motion died—as if they'd passed into a still frame. No spin, no drift, no sound.
In the stands, a thousand lungs forgot to breathe. What looked like stillness was in truth a duel at knife-edge.
Inside that fog, Mangetsu was shaping a zone he could command. Anything entering it met a net of micro-chakra droplets that seized and halted it. But Neji's kunai were wrapped in his own blue chakra—his will tugging the other way.
Two controls, one object.
The result: perfect stasis.
To most eyes, the two seemed evenly matched. In truth, the balance was slipping. Mangetsu felt it first—the strain in his grip. The Twin Flounder Blades could store chakra in monstrous amounts—ten times a glutton blade like Samehada, by some measures.
But even that didn't measure up to the nature of Otsutsuki power. They harvest worlds by planting Divine Trees and feeding on them. Every one of them carries ocean-deep chakra.
Kaguya, in Kaede's memories, stood at the end of the world—final boss of a dying story.
And yet here, in the white fog, blue light began to creep—inch by inch—back over the frozen steel.
(End of Chapter)
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