Chapter 226 - Too Naive, Nagato
The sight of Hyuga Ritsu launching himself forward left more than just Nagato wide-eyed. Minato and Jiraiya both stared in disbelief.
In an anoxic environment with no fresh air to replenish what the body consumed, a person who held perfectly still might last a few minutes on a single breath. The moment anyone moved with any real intensity, that window shrank at a terrifying rate.
Push past the limit and the damage would come fast.
Dizziness. Splitting headache. Nausea. Limbs gone heavy and useless. Then unconsciousness. Then death.
It was true that scientists of Orochimaru's caliber were extraordinarily rare among the shinobi world. But when it came to the art of killing, every truly capable ninja had developed a deep and thorough understanding. Every last one of them.
"We're not finished yet, Nagato!"
Ritsu let out a sharp cry as he charged.
He hadn't anticipated the situation evolving into exactly this shape. But then, that was simply how battlefields worked. Conditions shifted in an instant. Too much remained uncertain, and no one could predict the outcome until the dust finally settled.
So once you stepped onto a battlefield, you seized every opening you could find and drove the result toward the goal you had set for yourself.
He crushed the instinct to breathe through sheer force of will.
Then he threw his body at Nagato and launched an attack from range, using Gentle Fist Style: Whirlwind Iron-Cutting Fist. A volley of wind blades screamed through the air toward his target.
A sharp, clinking ring echoed through the dark.
Golden chains swept through the space between them and shattered every last wind blade.
Nagato held his ground. He did not dare move.
His Uzumaki bloodline was unusually pure, yes, but the Uzumaki were ultimately only one of six bloodlines descended from Kaguya Otsutsuki. He was nothing like Hyuga Ritsu, who had already fused four separate bloodlines into a single body - Hyuga, Kaguya, Senju, and Otsutsuki. Calling Ritsu half an Otsutsuki himself would not be an exaggeration.
Nagato's body simply could not endure the same punishment from a hostile environment.
So he kept still. He did not dare raise his arm to activate Almighty Push, because even that small movement would eat into the time he had left on his breath. In this desperate situation the only technique he could rely on was the Diamond Chain Jutsu - a technique that had gathered dust for years and was now, tonight, proving its worth.
It had a convenience to it he had never fully appreciated before.
No hand seals. Not even a twitch of a finger. A single thought was enough to direct the chains wherever he needed them, attacking or defending at will.
But it was still only a stopgap.
Even if he stood completely motionless, his held breath had a hard time limit. Once that limit was reached, the symptoms of suffocation would begin to surface one by one.
While using the Diamond Chain Jutsu to deflect Ritsu's assault, a detailed map of Amegakure's underground tunnel network spread open in his mind. If he punched through approximately eight meters of rock to the upper left, he would reach another passage. The air in there would be stale, far from fresh, but it would be breathable. Enough oxygen to function.
So a second head emerged from his collarbone.
Blank-faced and bald, built from steel and mechanisms.
Asura Path.
The top of the mechanical skull split open like a blooming lotus, exposing a silver-white barrel that belonged to no era the shinobi world had yet reached. Chakra poured in as fuel. The white light building at the muzzle climbed rapidly in intensity.
When it peaked -
The cannon fired.
But in the fraction of a second before the beam left the barrel, a three-pronged kunai was thrown. Whoever threw it had already anticipated exactly where the shot would be aimed, placing the kunai directly in the laser's projected path.
That kunai alone would never stop the beam.
But before the cannon could vaporize it, a figure appeared from nowhere. Minato had used Flying Thunder God to place himself directly in the line of fire. His expression was set, absolutely without fear, staring down a shot capable of leaving nothing of him behind. He raised the three-pronged kunai in both hands, met the incoming beam head-on, and triggered the technique's derived ability.
Flying Thunder God: Thunder Guide.
The laser cannon vanished without a sound. Darkness reclaimed the passage.
Somewhere above, in the streets of Amegakure, a blinding beam of light tore into existence from thin air and punched clean through five buildings in a row, leaving scorched, perfectly circular holes burned through every wall. Minato stood on the rippling surface of a puddle, completely unharmed, pulling fresh, damp air into his lungs in long, ragged breaths.
Flying Thunder God: Thunder Guide could redirect any jutsu attack launched by another party - even a Tailed Beast Ball could be sent to the other side of the world. In its own way, it was an absolute defense.
Three seconds later he was gone, reappearing deep underground beside Jiraiya to observe the situation in front of him.
Only five or six seconds had passed. The battlefield had already changed.
Nagato's attempt to blast through to the neighboring tunnel had been intercepted and redirected. His effort had come to nothing. Time kept moving without mercy, and the window left on his breath grew shorter by the moment.
What made it worse was that Ritsu was bearing down on him with relentless aggression, moving as though he had no need to breathe at all, and the Fourth Hokage, who had made a laser cannon vanish into thin air, had simply walked back in looking no worse for wear.
Even with Jiraiya visibly restraining himself, even with his teacher holding back, Nagato's mood was bleak.
Because if this continued, he was genuinely going to lose consciousness from oxygen deprivation. After that he would either become Konoha's prisoner or he would be killed outright.
Neither outcome was acceptable to him.
So he made his decision.
He would pay a cost far beyond what was ordinary to break out of a situation that was only getting worse.
But Ritsu's Byakugan had been watching him the entire time, tracking every fluctuation in Nagato's chakra network. The moment Nagato's chakra began to surge and spike - and the faint ember of his life force dimmed by one clear measure - Ritsu understood immediately. Nagato was going all in.
He activated Wind Release Chakra Mode without hesitation, quietly, buying himself every fraction of a second he could. And he remembered to warn the other two.
"Watch out. Something big is coming."
The words had barely left his mouth when Nagato moved.
Super Almighty Push.
A repulsive force as savage as a tidal wave exploded outward in every direction. The surrounding rock walls were obliterated and compressed simultaneously. The blast punched through more than a dozen separate underground tunnels and merged them all into one enormous open cavity. The oxygen that had been sealed out of the passage rushed in from every newly opened corridor. The air tasted stale and old, carrying the smell of something long closed-off, but its oxygen content was adequate. Nagato finally drew a breath.
But in the very next instant, the air around him was disturbed by something lighter than footsteps.
A slender hand landed against his back.
For a single moment it felt like a charging bull had hit him from behind. Pain wrenched his expression into something unrecognizable and his spine arched involuntarily. But the physical damage was only the surface of it. Beneath the crushing pain that drilled through him came something far worse: a foreign chakra far denser and more potent than his own forced its way inside his body and lodged itself in his chakra network like stone packed into a pipe, sealing every last pathway shut.
Chakra was the source of every technique a ninja possessed. Ninjutsu, genjutsu, taijutsu - all of them required chakra to function. With his network completely blocked, the vast ocean of chakra inside him was entirely inaccessible. He could not use a single technique.
This was the most terrifying possible outcome.
There was no need to look to know who had done it. Nagato endured the pain and forced out the words, though his voice came out broken and difficult.
"White Yaksha... how did you..."
Among every bloodline limit and secret technique in the shinobi world, only the Hyuga clan's Gentle Fist could seal another person's chakra this cleanly and completely. That wasn't something anyone could replicate.
"You shouldn't have been soft-hearted."
Hyuga Ritsu's hand closed around Nagato's throat. He smiled.
"You couldn't bring yourself to damage your old friend's body. You even took care to control the blast radius at the cost of your own power. That was too naive, Nagato."
The body of the Deva Path - Yahiko - lay quietly on the ground not far away. The Super Almighty Push had reduced everything in the surrounding area to rubble, but the small patch of ground around Yahiko remained untouched, a perfect calm at the center of the storm.
Ritsu had gambled that Nagato would never destroy that body. So he had moved there first, at the highest speed his Wind Release Chakra Mode could produce, and positioned himself beside it.
He had been right.
Sheltered in the one place Nagato's attack would never reach, he had waited out the blast without taking a scratch.
Then, once the shockwave passed, he had slipped around behind Nagato.
Nagato had just burned through his lifespan to activate Super Almighty Push. His condition was at rock bottom. His senses had dulled. And the surrounding terrain had been completely restructured by his own technique, which meant every Flying Thunder God coordinate Minato had set in this area was destroyed. There was no risk of the Fourth Hokage suddenly appearing beside him.
So Nagato had, for just one moment, let his guard down.
Ritsu had walked straight through that opening.
"Damn you..."
With a hand around his throat, breathing itself was a struggle. Nagato forced the words out in fragments. His Rinnegan burned with raw frustration. He possessed the Rinnegan - the greatest of the three legendary dojutsu, the eyes that stood at the top of all ocular abilities - and he was being beaten by the Byakugan, the weakest of the three?
But with his chakra network sealed, his resistance was nothing. The full catalog of the Rinnegan's abilities, the Diamond Chain Jutsu flowing through his Uzumaki blood, every technique he had - all of it was locked away. He had no way to resist the grip closing around his throat.
Ritsu kept his grip firm. With his free hand he reached into his pocket and pulled out a three-pronged kunai - one Minato had given him to carry.
Then he used Whirlwind Iron-Cutting Fist.
Wind blades hissed, and the sound of steel scraping steel filled the space as the blades raked across the kunai. The three-pronged weapon was left deeply scored. More critically, the etched formulae on the kunai's surface were damaged beyond function. The coordinate marks could no longer serve as a destination for Flying Thunder God.
He tossed the ruined kunai aside without ceremony.
"No one's going to interrupt us now. Without a coordinate, even Hokage-sama and Jiraiya-sensei will need five or six minutes to get back here."
Ritsu looked at Nagato with a smile that did not quite reach his eyes. The hunger in them was unmistakable.
A direct Uzumaki bloodline of exceptional purity was right there in front of him. Ritsu could barely contain his eagerness to use the Chimera Technique and claim it, to take one more enormous step on his path toward completing the Otsutsuki atavism.
Nagato met that pale gaze and felt a chill pass through him.
He had the sense, with growing certainty, that what was coming next would be very bad. But he was powerless to stop it. All he could do was watch as Hyuga Ritsu extended that pale, slender hand toward him.
Above ground, in Amegakure.
Jiraiya and Minato stood together on an elevated platform, looking out over the water churning violently in the streets below.
"The Hyuga kid didn't come back up with you."
Jiraiya's brow creased.
He wasn't close with Ritsu, but he was a Konoha shinobi, and that meant he cared about the safety of anyone who had fought alongside him.
"Sensei, don't worry. Ritsu refused to come with me - he waved me off. If he chose to stay, he had a reason."
Minato said it plainly, because it was the truth.
The situation underground had been moving at lightning speed, but Minato's reaction time was never in question. He could have brought Ritsu with him. Ritsu had shaken his head and turned him down.
Everything had happened in the span of a heartbeat.
Minato had trusted that and moved - taking Jiraiya through space back to the surface. Two seconds later the ground shook as though the earth itself were splitting, and the water running through Amegakure's streets surged and crashed like ocean waves caught in a storm.
That alone told him everything he needed to know about the scale of what Nagato had just unleashed underground.
Jiraiya's concern was completely understandable.
"An attack like that - even the Hyuga clan's Eight Trigrams Palms Revolving Heaven couldn't hold against it."
Jiraiya wasn't convinced.
Minato's brow furrowed slightly, though not because of what Jiraiya had said. Something else was bothering him. He could not feel the three-pronged kunai he had given Ritsu to carry.
That was unsettling.
For a moment, doubt crept in.
Had Ritsu genuinely overreached this time?
But the doubt lasted only a moment. He pressed it down and cleared his mind. This was not the time for speculation. The priority was getting back underground. The problem was that every coordinate marker he had set down there was now gone.
"Sensei, whether Ritsu is alive or dead - we'll know the moment we get back."
"True enough."
Jiraiya gave a short nod. Then he drew a long breath and said, "Minato, wait up here. I'll go first and signal you once I'm in position."
"Understood."
Minato didn't argue.
Jiraiya's strongest techniques were Fire Style and Earth Style. Minato's Earth Style was nowhere near his teacher's level. Sending Jiraiya ahead through the rock made sense - it was the fastest option available to them.
Jiraiya formed a sequence of hand seals and dropped into the ground.
Earth Style: Subterranean Navigation.
He moved through the earth like a fish cutting through water, slipping beneath the surface and driving himself forward at full speed toward the last known position of Nagato.
Minato remained above.
He did not pace. He did not move. He simply stood still, watching the disturbed water slowly settle in the streets below.