"To tank a Water Release with your bare body."
"To catch a Lightning Release with one hand."
"Is that something a human can do?."
"Why do I feel like these swords we're holding… are basically toys?"
The moment the Seven Ninja Swordsmen of the Mist witnessed Garp's actions, all of them twitched violently.
Especially Raiga, he immediately lowered his head and checked his own blade.
Confirmed. It wasn't swapped.
But then why did the famous Lightning Sword, known for its overwhelming destructive power, perform so pathetically?
"The Seven Swords? You really brought these toys all the way here just to amuse me?"
Garp clapped the dust from his hands and swept his gaze across the seven swordsmen.
Each of the seven stood there gripping their blades, faces uniformly filled with shock, like a group who had never seen the world. Garp couldn't help finding it both ridiculous and sad.
Earlier, when he saw the Seven Ninja Swordsmen arrive with a thousand Mist-nin, stepping directly between the two forces to issue a formal challenge to him, he had actually felt a rare spark of excitement.
He thought that after the humiliation of the past era, after an entire age had passed, Kirigakure must have undergone some kind of transformation.
Maybe not earth-shattering, but at least something impressive.
Yet no matter how hard he tried, he still couldn't find the slightest flash of brilliance in the seven men standing before him.
The Seven Swordsmen of the Warring States era were one thing.
The Seven Swordsmen of the shinobi village era… were exactly the same thing.
"You're absolutely right. We are here to play with you."
The fury on Raiga's face suddenly vanished. He looked up and revealed a mocking grin.
It wasn't just him. The previously shocked Fuguki, Kushimaru and the others all wore bizarre, twisted smiles.
"Has the era I lived in grown so distant that I can no longer understand what you people are saying?"
Garp shrugged. "Because it really sounds like we're speaking different languages."
"No language barrier," Fuguki said darkly, his expression twisted into that same eerie grin.
"We mean it exactly as it sounds."
"If you don't get it, we'll be even more direct."
Raiga lifted his sword and pointed it at Garp from afar.
"We're worried that since you're old, you might've forgotten what the Seven Swordsmen of the past era were like.
So we just gave it our all, put on a full performance, so you could relive just how weak our predecessors really were."
Jinpachi stared at him with dead-fish eyes, his tone dripping with mockery.
"And then?"
Garp's expression didn't change.
"Then you can compare with your Iron Fist and tell us, before you die, exactly how much stronger we are than the generation you once fought."
He spread his hands, the gesture almost arrogantly casual.
"Don't worry. We'll be careful. We'll make sure you're still breathing."
Kushimaru said coldly.
"Because we're all very curious," Juzo added, "to see just how strong we really are."
As soon as he finished speaking, he suddenly slammed his long blade into the surface of the water.
The others followed suit.
All seven simultaneously plunged their ninja swords into the flowing water, and with their left hands they gripped the hilts tightly.
"Release!"
The next second, the seven of them formed a single-handed seal.
Seven blades burst into seven different colors of blazing light.
The moment the colors flared, they crawled from the hilts into the swordsmen's arms, then spread rapidly across their bodies.
Centered around the seven men and their seven blades, one violent storm after another erupted with deafening roars, stirring the lake into furious waves that surged outward in every direction.
The towering trees around the lake bent instantly under the pressure of the raging winds.
Younger, weaker trees snapped on the spot, crushed beneath the force.
If rooted trees fared this poorly, then the surrounding grass and soil didn't stand a chance.
Within a radius of a hundred meters around the lake, the surface of the earth was peeled back nearly a meter thick.
Grass and foliage were ripped clean from the ground, flung skyward by the stormborn shockwaves unleashed by the Seven Swordsmen.
On both banks of the lake, Konoha and Mist-nin stood bracing themselves.
They weren't blown away outright, but they had to channel chakra into their feet, rooting themselves firmly to the surface to avoid being swept off.
"What the hell are those seven doing?"
"This chakra output… is this really something the Seven Ninja Swordsmen are capable of?"
"No way, this kind of pressure, only a Tailed Beast can release something like this!"
Orochimaru, Tsunade, and the Ino–Shika–Cho trio shielded their faces from the whipping winds, disbelief written all over them.
Since the founding of the shinobi villages, the Seven Ninja Swordsmen had always been Kirigakure's signature force.
Information about them had long been a priority target for every major nation, ever since before the First Great Ninja War.
Across the successive Ninja Wars, more than ninety percent of the intelligence concerning the abilities of the Seven Swords and their wielders had been fully cataloged and confirmed.
The swords themselves aside, the seven who wielded them varied greatly in skill, ranging from elite Jonin at minimum to, at best, an ordinary Kage-level fighter with no special Kekkei Genkai, secret techniques, or unique constitution.
But this?
Releasing chakra on a scale that caused outright atmospheric distortion, something that could twist the heavens?
Across every Ninja War fought so far, nothing like this had ever happened.