"Cough… cough, cough!"
Bloody foam spilled from the corner of his mouth, staining half his pale face red.
But worse than the physical pain was the humiliation.
Hiruko, a ninja of the same generation as the Sannin, a scholar who had devoted himself to researching the fusion of bloodline limits, was being so thoroughly suppressed by some mere junior.
"Chimera Technique!"
Boom!
The ruined body of the Ultimate Summoning Beast suddenly convulsed, and from the shattered wounds Kiyohara had inflicted, countless dark-purple fleshy tendrils burst out.
They writhed like living things, instantly wrapping around Hiruko's body, dragging him in and binding him tight.
Flesh fused with flesh, bones connected to bones, chakra pathways joined to chakra pathways.
Hiruko's body seemed to melt into the torso of the Ultimate Summoning Beast, while the beast's fish-and-beast hybrid head split open down the middle, and Hiruko's upper body began growing out from within it.
The sight was revolting.
"H-he's becoming one with that monster!"
Shizune covered her mouth, her face pale.
Kurenai's genjutsu was completely useless in a situation like this. All she could do was stay ready to unleash Wind Release at any moment.
The Three-Tails' chakra surged reactively inside Rin, a red aura wrapping around her body.
She instinctively wanted to go help, but Tsunade raised a hand and stopped her.
"Don't."
Tsunade shook her head.
Rin might be helpful in a situation like this, but she might also end up agitating the tailed beast inside her even further.
She had not expected Hiruko to truly complete the Chimera Technique.
Back then, Hiruko had talked to them about the concept behind it.
But it would obviously require large-scale human experimentation, and Tsunade had rejected the idea outright at the time.
Now that the technique was complete, what that implied was self-evident.
"Hiruko… you really did come this far."
She remembered the classmate from years ago, the one who had always kept his head down in the lab, buried in research.
Back then, Hiruko had been quiet, but there had still been light in his eyes.
Now, that light had long since been swallowed up by obsession.
"Sensei…"
Kiyohara's voice suddenly came from nearby.
At some point, he had already retreated back to stand beside the others. The massive tail behind him swayed slowly, and the orange-red markings around his eyes looked eerily demonic in the dim light.
"Please take everyone back."
Kiyohara did not turn around. He was planning to end all of this here.
He still had a lot left to do afterward. The ninja war was not over yet.
"The fight from here on out might spread a long way."
Tsunade opened her mouth as if to say something, but in the end she only gave a heavy nod.
"Be careful."
"I know."
Kiyohara turned and walked toward Hiruko again.
After completing the fusion, Hiruko's body was nearly ten meters tall. His upper body grew out from the monster's chest, while his lower half had completely merged with the lizard-like body of the Ultimate Summoning Beast.
Most horrifying of all was his face. Hiruko's originally refined features had become twisted and distorted. The right half still retained human features, but the left half was covered in green scales.
His eyes had multiplied to three, and their murky yellow pupils rotated in different directions.
"Do you see it now… Kiyohara…"
Hiruko spoke, his voice sounding as though his vocal cords had been twisted out of shape.
"This… is the form of evolution!"
He raised his right arm, and the bone blade attached to it sliced through the air with a booming shriek.
"The me standing here now possesses the Ultimate Summoning Beast's limitless potential for evolution, while still retaining my intelligence and my bloodline limits…"
Kiyohara looked up at the misshapen creature.
Then said flatly,
"Ugly."
In the ninja world, the stronger someone was, the more style points they usually had.
Even becoming the Ten-Tails' jinchuriki came with a brand-new white robe covered in magatama patterns.
Hiruko's smile froze.
"What… did you say?"
"I said you're ugly."
Kiyohara repeated.
Hiruko was smart, sure. But trying to reach the pinnacle of the ninja world on the Chimera Technique alone was far too difficult.
Either you had to go all-in on taijutsu like Might Guy, or go all-in on senjutsu like Kabuto Yakushi.
A Hiruko who did neither could only be described as hopelessly off-meta.
Because the Chimera Technique could not revert him back into an Otsutsuki ancestor.
In the next instant, repulsive force exploded from beneath Kiyohara's feet.
All three of Hiruko's eyes widened at once. Yet even with the dynamic vision he now had from combining Swift Release and the Ultimate Summoning Beast's body, all he could catch was a faint blur.
Where?
Left?
Right?
Above?
His judgment was wrong.
Kiyohara appeared directly in front of him, less than three meters away.
His right fist was drawn back at his waist.
But even that plain-looking punch made Hiruko feel true danger.
"Steel Release: Complete Steel Hardening!"
Hiruko's entire upper body instantly turned a dull metallic color. Even the texture of his skin became cold and hard like iron.
At almost the exact same moment, Kiyohara's fist moved.
It struck Hiruko's crossed forearms.
Boom!!
A spherical shockwave exploded from the point of impact, and the ground within a thirty-meter radius sank by half a meter.
Broken stone, earth, and shattered trees were blasted outward by the shockwave. Even Tsunade and the others, hundreds of meters away, had to raise their arms to shield themselves from the gale rushing toward them.
As for Hiruko—
It was like being hit head-on by a speeding train.
His entire body was blown backward.
From the point where Kiyohara's fist had landed, spiderweb-like cracks spread across Hiruko's fully steel-hardened arms, accompanied by the sound of metal splitting apart.
"N-no… impossible…"
Hiruko tried to adjust his posture in midair, but the force was too tyrannical. It tore through his hardened defense and crashed straight into his chest.
Crack!
Crack!
At least four ribs broke.
He slammed heavily into the ground, rolled another dozen meters, and finally stopped, plowing a deep trench through the earth.
"Gah…!"
A huge mouthful of blood mixed with fragments of organs burst from his mouth.
Hiruko struggled to prop up his upper body, all three eyes locked onto Kiyohara as he slowly approached.
"Why… why is your strength…"
"Your purity is too low."
Kiyohara shook his head.
By now, Kiyohara had copied more or less all the techniques on Hiruko's body that interested him.
So he was starting to lose interest.
If there were no more tricks left, then it was time to die.
"Storm Release: Thunder Cloud Inner Wave!"
With that, Hiruko unleashed Storm Release.
The sky suddenly darkened. Thunderclouds formed out of nowhere, drawn together by chakra. Lightning crackled through them.
The next second, countless fine bolts of lightning rained down like a storm of needles.
"Kiyohara!"
Rin cried out from the distance.
But Kiyohara did not even look up.
He merely raised his left hand, palm facing upward.
Sage Art: Magnet Release: Gold Dust.
Golden grains of sand surged up from the ground and from the gourd at his waist, instantly forming a curved dome over his head.
Clang clang clang clang clang!
The lightning strikes slammed against the dome in a continuous barrage, but not a single one penetrated.
"That's all?"
Kiyohara said.
Hiruko gritted his teeth and poured all his remaining chakra into the technique.
"Storm Release Secret Art: Demon Dragon Storm!"
The thunderclouds churned and swelled violently, blanketing the entire sky in an instant.
The lightning within them shifted from blue to a blinding white. A giant dragon made of lightning appeared in the clouds, roaring thunderously.
The power of this attack was even greater than the future Lightning Release: Kirin Sasuke would later develop.
The giant dragon lunged downward with overwhelming momentum.
It opened its jaws and swallowed Kiyohara's figure whole.
White light exploded outward, too bright to look at.
The blast shook the earth, and the shockwave flattened everything within a hundred-meter radius.
Was it over?
Panting heavily, Hiruko stared at the center of the explosion with all three eyes.
The smoke gradually began to clear.
A lone figure was still standing there.
Kiyohara.
His entire body was wrapped in crackling arcs of lightning.
But he was not injured. He had dodged the attack at the last moment and returned to the same spot.
With the speed granted by senjutsu, Magnet Release, Lightning Release, and Body Flicker combined, Kiyohara was now slightly faster than even Hiruko's Swift Release.
Hiruko simply had not developed Swift Release as far as true Swift Release specialists could.
"Well then, my turn."
Kiyohara vanished again.
This time, Hiruko could not even catch an afterimage.
He only felt a cold hand land on top of his head.
"Sensei, take everyone back another kilometer."
Kiyohara's voice came from above him.
"It's about to get a little loud."
Hiruko had not even processed what was happening yet when that hand on his head suddenly exerted force.
Boom!
Kiyohara grabbed the head of Hiruko's fused body and stomped down on the ground with both feet.
An immense force erupted, and the two of them shot upward like cannonballs, instantly breaking through the treetops and flying high into the sky.
"AAAAAAAHHHHH!"
Hiruko's scream quickly faded into the distance.
On the ground, Tsunade and the others could only look upward, watching the two figures rise higher and higher until they became tiny black dots at the edge of sight.
High in the sky, the air was bitterly cold.
After the first wave of panic, Hiruko finally regained enough awareness to react.
The eagle wings on his back beat wildly, trying to wrench him free from Kiyohara's grip.
His bone blades swung, slashing at Kiyohara's arm.
Clang!
The blade struck Kiyohara's arm and did nothing more than send off a few sparks.
At some point, Kiyohara's arm had already been covered in a layer of pitch-black metallic sheen.
Steel Release.
And it was purer, denser, and more refined than Hiruko's.
"You… how are you using the same…"
"I watched you use it enough times just now. I more or less figured out the principle."
Kiyohara replied flatly.
At this close range, Hiruko could clearly see that Kiyohara had Steel Release too.
And Steel Release had many possible applications, many techniques that could be developed from it.
What Kiyohara had just used was clearly the exact same secret technique Hiruko himself used.
It was just layered with Earth Release: Earth Spear on top of it.
If Hiruko were not also a Steel Release user, he probably would not even have noticed.
That realization nearly made him cough up blood again.
He had turned himself into a monster to obtain this power.
Yet Kiyohara had gained it so casually.
At that moment, the pressure Kiyohara put on Hiruko felt even greater than what the three Sannin had once put on him in their youth.
But Hiruko did not have time to feel angry anymore.
Because Kiyohara was accelerating.
He was dragging Hiruko downward, using the acceleration of freefall itself.
"Y-you… what are you trying to do?!"
Hiruko shrieked in terror.
"I want to know whether your Steel Release can hold up against a fall from two thousand meters, with my added momentum on top of it."
A chill shot through Hiruko's heart. He tried to struggle, but Kiyohara's grip was like a steel clamp, utterly unmoving.
He thought about using Swift Release, but at this speed of descent, moving in the wrong direction would likely just mean hitting the ground first and being turned to paste.
The ground expanded in his vision at terrifying speed.
Three hundred meters.
Two hundred meters.
One hundred meters.
Now!
Kiyohara formed hand seals with his left hand alone while his right still gripped Hiruko's head.
Sage Art: Fire Release: Microwave Bullet.
Kiyohara spat out a fireball, and under the effect of microwave heating it turned white-hot.
Then he pressed the fireball against Hiruko's chest.
"Goodbye."
Kiyohara said.
And then he kicked off Hiruko's body, drifting backward.
Hiruko, with the fireball still embedded in him, smashed toward the earth at even greater speed.
First came the flash.
Then an orange-red fireball swelled outward from the point of impact, then turned white.
Only after that came the shockwave.
A ring of white air pressure swept out from the center of the blast. Wherever it passed, trees were uprooted and rocks were ground into powder.
The earth rippled like water, splitting apart into countless bottomless fissures.
Even from a full kilometer away, Tsunade and the others still felt their eardrums ache from the blast despite covering their ears.
A mushroom cloud slowly rose, casting an enormous shadow beneath the evening sky.
Smoke and dust filled the battlefield, blotting everything from sight.
After a stretch of silence, the sound of footsteps slowly emerged from within the smoke.
A figure walked out.
It was Kiyohara.
He had already returned to normal and descended back down from the sky.
As the dust slowly cleared, the center of the blast finally came into view.
There was now a crater more than a hundred meters wide and ten meters deep.
At the bottom of it lay a charred mass barely maintaining a human shape, twitching faintly.
It was Hiruko.
Or rather, what was left of Hiruko.
He had already separated from the Ultimate Summoning Beast.
"Hh… hh…"
Every breath he took brought more blood foam from his mouth.
Kiyohara walked to the edge of the crater and looked down.
"Still alive? Not bad. A body fused with so many bloodline limits really is durable."
He jumped into the crater and landed beside Hiruko.
Hiruko's one remaining good eye turned to stare at him.
"Why… why are you…"
"Why am I stronger than you?"
Kiyohara finished the question for him.
"Because I've worked harder than you."
Kiyohara shook his head.
Hiruko relied on fusing himself with all kinds of random things, while Kiyohara only refined himself.
One was pure. The other was muddled and corrupted.
The difference was obvious.
Kiyohara crouched down and placed a hand on Hiruko's charred left shoulder.
Then suddenly he exerted force.
Crack!
Kiyohara tore Hiruko's left arm clean off at the shoulder.
"AAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!"
Hiruko's body convulsed violently as dark red blood sprayed from the stump.
Mixed into that blood was green slime, clearly the bodily fluid of the Ultimate Summoning Beast.
"My… my Dark Release!"
Hiruko screamed, his one intact eye nearly popping out of its socket.
The Dark Release seal was primarily inscribed into his left arm. Losing that arm meant losing Dark Release forever.
"I need to recover this arm."
Kiyohara calmly put the severed arm away.
Then he reached toward Hiruko's right shoulder.
"W-wait… wait!"
Hiruko tried to pull back in horror, but his body had long since stopped responding.
"You can't… Steel Release… my Steel Release…"
"Don't worry. The Steel Release bloodline is spread across your skin. As long as you're alive, it'll recover eventually."
Kiyohara said, almost reassuringly, though his hands never stopped moving.
Of course, if Hiruko wanted to keep living after this, that was no longer possible.
"But I need this arm too."
"No!!!"
The second scream tore out of him.
His right arm was ripped off as well.
Hiruko collapsed at the bottom of the crater like a worm with its spine removed.
Both arms gone, blood pouring from him like a fountain.
"Kill me… kill me…"
He muttered weakly.
"Please… kill me…"
"Not yet."
Kiyohara shook his head.
"There's still a lot of valuable stuff in that head of yours. Like the full formula for the Chimera Technique. And all your research on bloodline fusion over the years."
A red light flashed in his eyes.
The three tomoe of his Sharingan began to spin.
The genjutsu activated.
Hiruko's unfocused pupils suddenly shrank, then quickly dilated again.
In his current weakened state, he had no strength left to resist.
It had to be said, Hiruko's experiments really were insane.
He had stitched together all kinds of people and summoning beasts, and only then tried to fuse them afterward.
Merging little girls with dogs was practically the mild end of it.
His research was so disgusting that even Kiyohara felt nauseous.
Still, the Chimera Technique he developed did have some interesting merits.
"That's enough."
Kiyohara released the genjutsu.
A little awareness returned to Hiruko's hollow eyes.
All he could do was watch as Kiyohara stored both severed arms away in a sealing scroll.
And just as Hiruko made one weak, pitiful attempt to crawl away, Kiyohara's fist came down toward his head.
Thud.
Flesh and bone scattered everywhere.
And with that, Hiruko's life of evil came to an end.
Kiyohara felt that, in a way, he had done a good deed.
That guy's research had been even more sanity-draining than Orochimaru's.
"Hm. This sealing scroll actually survived."
Kiyohara noticed that one of Hiruko's sealing scrolls had somehow not been destroyed.
After thinking about it, he guessed that Hiruko must have embedded it into his own flesh, which was why it had survived.
Kiyohara had just left the bottom of the crater and walked a few dozen meters, not yet having time to open it and inspect it, when Tsunade and the others arrived behind him.
"Kiyohara!"
Tsunade was the first to rush over, grabbing his shoulders and looking him up and down.
Her impressive chest swayed dangerously as she did.
Sensei, that's a chest-first tackle.
Kiyohara very much wanted to say it.
"You're not hurt, are you?"
Tsunade asked.
"I'm fine, Sensei."
Kiyohara shook his head and glanced toward the center of the blast.
"But Hiruko's dead…"
Tsunade fell silent for a moment.
The developments today had really come too fast.
Still, killing a rogue ninja like Hiruko would not cause any trouble.
Whether it was attacking fellow Konoha ninja or conducting human experiments, either one was enough to brand him a missing-nin.
"Sensei, I'm going to deal with what's left of the Ultimate Summoning Beast."
He meant the lower half that had fused with Hiruko and then been mangled in the explosion.
"Go ahead."
Tsunade nodded. She could not handle the sight of blood, so she stayed back.
"Kiyohara, I'll come with you."
"Me too."
Kurenai and Rin spoke up at the same time.
Shizune said nothing, but silently stood as well.
Kiyohara looked at them and finally nodded.
"All right."
The group headed back down into the crater.
Scattered around it were large amounts of charred flesh and shattered bones—the remains of the Ultimate Summoning Beast.
"This thing's vitality is unbelievable."
Kurenai kicked aside a piece of flesh that was still twitching faintly and frowned.
"It's been blasted to pieces, but the cells are still alive."
"It was an experimental subject with limitless evolutionary potential, after all."
Kiyohara crouched down and placed his hand on a larger chunk of the remains.
He formed hand seals.
Sage Art: Magnet Release: Gold Dust Furnace.
Golden grains surged in from all directions, gathering in midair to form a giant furnace-like structure.
At the base of the furnace, Kiyohara fed in fire-nature chakra, and the temperature rose rapidly.
"Throw the fragments in."
The others began helping.
In the end, only one large piece remained.
It was the Ultimate Summoning Beast's heart.
Even separated from the body, it was still beating slowly.
It was about the size of two human heads, its surface covered in green scales and thick blood vessels twisted across it like roots.
"This is the core."
Kiyohara stepped up to the heart.
The spiritual form of Toad Kiyohara emerged from behind him, its slit-pupiled eyes fixed on the heart.
"That's it… past me, kill it, and my final wish will be fulfilled."
Kiyohara could hear the excitement in the spirit's voice.
"I know."
He raised his hand and condensed highly compressed wind-nature chakra in his palm.
Wind Release: Rasengan.
A deep blue sphere of light formed in Kiyohara's hand, and he drove it into the heart.
Shhhk!
The rotating wind blades acted like tens of thousands of scalpels, shredding it down to the cellular level.
At last, it dissolved completely into a pool of blood and dripped slowly onto the ground.
At that point, both the Ultimate Summoning Beast and Hiruko were deader than dead.
No level of regeneration could heal wounds like these.
"So that counts as fulfilling your wish, right?"
Kiyohara asked.
"More or less. Though I feel like I'm dissolving awfully fast."
Toad Kiyohara looked down at his spiritual form, which was already beginning to break apart into countless points of light.
That meant Kiyohara had fulfilled two wishes at once.
Apparently, on a subconscious level, Toad Kiyohara had already acknowledged Kiyohara's mastery of sage arts.
Even with Kiyohara only borrowing his senjutsu chakra, his use of Mount Myoboku Sage Mode was already excellent.
Once he inherited the complete version of that sage art, it would probably reach another level altogether.
~~~
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