Feitan tried to pull back and open the distance, only to realize that the speed he was so proud of gave him no real advantage against Ronin.
Especially because he knew Ronin still had that state where he surrounded himself with lightning, and that was when Ronin could unleash his true top speed.
But right now, his attacks weren't putting any pressure on Ronin at all.
Ronin really was using Feitan as a whetstone. In his current state, combined with the Sharingan, he could already keep up with Feitan's speed with ease and suppress him in close combat.
But that wasn't the main point.
The real point was seeing what would happen after Feitan got hurt.
He had already tested the speed. Next came strength.
With that thought, when Ronin threw his next punch, he didn't bother slipping past Feitan's guard. He drove it straight into Feitan's arm.
Crack.
The sound of bone splitting rang out.
The combination of the Super Destructive Punch and Cherry Blossom Impact was still as vicious as ever.
Feitan's body was sent flying instantly, but Ronin had no intention of stopping there. He stepped forward, and his figure vanished in a flash.
The next moment, he reappeared directly above Feitan.
Doing his best to avoid meeting Ronin's eyes, Feitan still saw the massive fist dropping down toward him from above.
Shocked, he abandoned part of his defense and poured more aura into the thin sword in his hand, then suddenly thrust it upward toward Ronin's chest.
Judging from the move, he was planning to trade one life for another.
But Ronin was never going to give him that chance.
Amenotokotachi activated instantly.
The arm Feitan had thrust out froze in midair, and his flying body also tensed and halted abruptly.
That sudden stop from the inertia made Feitan feel a sharp wave of discomfort, but more importantly, the sword he had thrust out missed Ronin entirely because his arm had been locked in place.
Ronin's descending punch, on the other hand, landed squarely on him as if it had all been calculated in advance.
Boom!
With an explosive roar, Feitan's body was smashed straight into the ground.
Dust and debris erupted everywhere. Ronin landed lightly just outside the cloud of dust, took a deep breath, and for the first time brought both hands together in a seal. Leaning forward and opening his mouth, he spat out a torrent of scorching flame packed with chakra.
Fire Release: Great Fire Annihilation.
There was no need to restrain the spread of the flames anymore. Even with just a single seal, the technique instantly filled a hundred-meter radius with fire.
But through the Sharingan, Ronin could still see a figure wrapped in aura slowly walking out from inside the flames.
It was Feitan, the one he had just smashed into the ground.
That punch hadn't severely injured him?
Or had the damage been bad enough to directly trigger his Nen ability, Unforgivable One—or something close to that?
Ronin made that guess, and when he saw Feitan walking out of the flames, he became even more curious whether Feitan was about to unleash that blazing little sun just like in the manga.
Though if Feitan thought he could burn him to death with fire, Ronin could only say the guy was dreaming.
"'Elbairav,' 'hguone s'enihsup ruoy'."
("Damn you," "you're pushing your luck too far.")
The reversed words began spilling out of Feitan's mouth.
That meant his Nen ability had been triggered. Rage, injury, and reversed speech—those three were the conditions of Feitan's restriction.
And the power born from that vow was the reason he was confident he wouldn't lose to anyone in a one-on-one fight.
"?tahw os dnA"
("And so what?")
Ronin answered in the exact same reversed way.
With that alone, he made his contempt for Feitan crystal clear.
Boiling anger became the key that drove Feitan's restriction, and the increase it gave him was even greater than the boost from his injuries.
The clothing Feitan wore as he stepped out of the flames was a gothic-style fireproof suit.
It was something he had conjured after releasing his aura, a mostly white outfit accented with red and black that wrapped around his whole body.
A huge amount of aura poured out from the suit, a sickly, ominous green that made people instinctively uncomfortable.
The only part left exposed was his eyes.
And now those narrow eyes were fully open. They still weren't large, but they radiated a chilling coldness.
"'llif uoy htiw niap, dra tsab!'"
("Bastard, I'll make you feel pain!")
The twisted words coming from Feitan's mouth were unpleasant enough, but what caught Ronin's attention more was the outfit's red-white-black color scheme—it was beginning to shift.
The hot red tones were quietly changing into a cold icy blue.
A massive amount of aura began gathering in front of Feitan, rapidly condensing into a Nen bullet the size of an egg.
The Nen sphere shone with a blinding light, the result of Feitan compressing his aura to the absolute limit.
There were no further words.
At that moment, the only thing in Feitan's eyes as he looked at Ronin was cold killing intent.
The Nen bullet rose into the air.
"Become utter cold, sinner beyond forgiveness—be sealed by absolute frost: Ice Moon."
Boom!
The compressed Nen bullet that shot upward instantly formed into the shape of a bright, radiant blue moon.
At the same time, a terrifying cold spread from it in every direction.
Frost began forming on the trees, icy spikes rapidly rose from the ground, and even Ronin's breath instantly turned white in front of him.
A chill rose from deep inside his body, then his skin felt the sting of a cold sharp enough to pierce bone.
It felt as though the temperature had dropped to around minus fifty degrees in an instant—and it was still falling.
Ronin drew in a deep breath. Chakra built up in his mouth, and as his hands flashed through seals at blinding speed, it transformed into fire-nature chakra.
When Ronin completed forty-four hand seals in less than four seconds, large red blotches had already begun appearing across his body from the extreme cold.
That was the first stage of frostbite.
The next stage would be for the deep red to turn pale white, and once it reached that point, it meant the flesh was dead and amputation would be necessary to survive.
But Ronin threw his head back and exhaled a blast of blazing chakra, which instantly formed into a gigantic fireball.
Fire Release: Great Fire Destruction.
A B-rank ninjutsu, originally meant to be fired downward at the ground, but Ronin reversed it and aimed it up at the Ice Moon in the sky.
The fireball shot toward it like a meteor.
Even though the Ice Moon was constantly pouring out extreme cold, it still couldn't freeze the Great Fire Destruction in an instant.
Because the principle behind Great Fire Destruction was almost the same as Feitan's Ice Moon.
Both techniques compressed energy to an extreme degree. The only difference was that Feitan compressed his even further, while Great Fire Destruction didn't need to go quite that far.
The moment the fireball collided with the Ice Moon in midair, the compressed chakra inside it exploded outward, turning the Ice Moon itself into the center of a massive sea of flames.
Fire rained down from the sky like countless brilliant phoenix flowers.
And as the falling flames drove the temperature back up, Ronin's figure had already shot forward at high speed—
straight toward Feitan.
~~~
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