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"Where are you looking this time?"
The indifferent voice whispered directly into his ear again, followed instantly by the chilling flash of cold steel. The Blood Ninja's hair stood on end. He flipped his left hand, drawing a second kunai, and violently crossed his blades to block the incoming sword strike.
Out of the corner of his eye, he glanced back at the spot where Xuan had just been standing. In that split second, the space was completely empty.
The moment the blades clashed, Xuan's figure reappeared at his original position without the slightest warning, as if he had simply popped back into existence from thin air.
What kind of Jutsu is this?! Cold sweat dripped from the tip of the Blood Ninja's nose. He couldn't track the boy's movements at all. He had absolutely no idea how his opponent was instantaneously teleporting beside him. How could a Ninjutsu like this even exist in the world? It completely defied all logic.
Xuan ignored the mercenary's panic. Giving the Amanokumo sword a casual swing, he muttered to himself, "As expected, a longsword just isn't as smooth as a kunai. If Madara had been the one to execute that point-blank slash, this guy would have lost at least half his life, if not died outright. With my technique, he only gets a light scratch."
Xuan tested his grip on the hilt a few more times and chuckled lightly. "But that's fine. I'll just use him as target practice. It's good Taijutsu training."
With a single thought, he vanished again in a fraction of a second. Reappearing directly in front of the Blood Ninja, the Amanokumo blade gleamed with deadly intent as it slashed forward.
The Blood Ninja's reflexes were razor-sharp. Having already witnessed this bizarre attack twice, his guard was up. While he still couldn't grasp the pattern of the teleportation, he moved to block with absolute maximum speed.
The more dangerous the situation, the more he needed to stay calm. He thrust out his right kunai to parry the longsword, simultaneously driving his left kunai straight toward the boy's eyes.
He hit nothing but air!
The Blood Ninja's eyes widened. The boy who was right in front of him had vanished yet again in that same bizarre, omenless manner. In less than a breath, he reappeared, his longsword slicing straight for the mercenary's throat.
His heart leapt into his chest. He violently threw himself backward, narrowly dodging the lethal strike by a hair's breadth. Without even looking, he thrust his kunai purely on instinct toward where the attack had come from.
But... he missed again!
Before he could even regain his footing, the boy was already upon him with another flurry of sword strikes. The slashes were endless and terrifyingly erratic, leaving absolutely no opening for a counterattack.
Gritting his teeth, the Blood Ninja could only rely on raw instinct to defend himself. In this situation, Ninjutsu and Taijutsu were a complete joke. He didn't even have a fraction of a second to weave hand seals for Ninjutsu, and Taijutsu was entirely useless against an opponent whose clothes he couldn't even touch.
The sword strikes grew faster and faster. The Blood Ninja could literally feel his opponent improving in real-time. The boy's initial clumsiness with the longsword was rapidly fading into smooth, lethal proficiency. Every single strike was sharper and heavier than the last.
From a distance, it looked like a singular flash of light was endlessly circling and hacking at the mercenary. Xuan's figure was completely untraceable. All one could see was the Blood Ninja frantically waving his twin kunai, locked in a desperate, one-sided struggle.
In reality, the Blood Ninja was entirely on the defensive. He had lost count of how many times the blade had sliced into his flesh. Blood continuously seeped from dozens of fresh, shallow wounds covering his body.
No, this can't go on!
The Blood Ninja screamed internally. It was an incredibly suffocating, agonizing way to fight. He had realized almost immediately that this brat's foundational Taijutsu wasn't even close to his own level. But that instantaneous teleportation Ninjutsu was just too terrifyingly overpowered; it completely negated any attempt at a counterattack. If this were a straightforward Taijutsu brawl, he was confident he could snap the kid's neck within ten minutes.
However, that was just a delusional fantasy. The moment he parried a strike from the left, another slashed in from the right. Before the right-side attack even fully materialized, a cold gleam of steel rained down from above. It felt as though an infinite number of enemies were ambushing him from every conceivable angle. He was spinning his twin kunai so fast they formed a solid wall of steel, yet it still wasn't enough.
After the blade gouged another long, bloody gash across his shoulder, he finally roared in desperation. "Blood Secret Art: Blood Encampment Wall!"
It was one of the few secret jutsu in his arsenal that didn't require any hand seals. However, the cost was severe—it demanded a massive volume of fresh blood.
Suddenly, blood violently erupted from all the shallow cuts covering his body. The crimson liquid sprayed into the air, instantly atomizing into a thick mist. In the blink of an eye, the mist solidified into a dense, dome-like blood barrier, completely enveloping him in a protective shell.
Safely barricaded behind his blood shield, the mercenary finally had a moment to catch his breath. Never in his wildest nightmares did he imagine a day would come when a mere Tokubetsu Jōnin would push him to the absolute brink of death.
He violently shook his head, trying to clear the dizzying fog clouding his mind—a direct consequence of severe blood loss.
The Blood Encampment Wall has a strict time limit. I have to figure out a countermeasure before it drops, he thought frantically. An omnipotent Ninjutsu that lets him teleport anywhere for free cannot possibly exist. If it did, he would be invincible. There has to be a mechanic I'm missing. Stay calm. Think!
The Blood Ninja meticulously replayed every single second of his clash with Xuan, refusing to let even the smallest detail slip past. At the same time, his eyes darted over his own body. There had to be a clue. An absolute, rule-breaking Jutsu like that simply didn't exist without a heavy condition!
Suddenly, he noticed a bizarre, faint glint of red light reflecting off his right arm.
What is that? A chakra thread?!
His heart skipped a beat. Squinting closely, he realized that a kunai was bound tightly to his right bicep by a nearly invisible loop of chakra wire. The only reason he hadn't noticed it during the frantic melee was because the wire had been completely dyed red by his own blood.
In that exact moment, a flash of realization struck him like a bolt of lightning. He remembered the very beginning of the fight—the first kunai he had instinctively dodged.
His attacks were so relentless and suffocating that he never gave me a single second to breathe or check my own body! To think I made such a catastrophic, amateur mistake!
Gritting his teeth, he violently snapped the chakra wire and ripped the kunai from his arm. Inspecting the weapon, he noticed it was slightly heavier and longer than a standard shinobi tool. The grip was wrapped in complex, intricate sealing formulas that he couldn't even begin to decipher.
"So that's the trick!" the Blood Ninja snarled. With a vicious squeeze, he crushed the custom kunai into pieces.
A short distance down the street, Xuan chuckled lightly. Resting his foot on the original kunai he had planted in the dirt, he murmured, "Took you long enough to figure it out. I guess you aren't completely brain-dead."
The three tomoe in Xuan's eyes spun rapidly as his hands blurred through a sequence of seals. The exact second the blood barrier dissipated, a roaring dragon forged of condensed fire erupted from his mouth.
"Fire Style: Dragon Flame Bomb!"
Seeing the boy resort to standard Ninjutsu confirmed the Blood Ninja's theory: the teleportation was tied to those marked kunai. His confidence surging, he quickly crossed his hands into a seal. "Blood Secret Art: Crimson Light Wave!"
A massive orb of bloody light expanded outward, transforming into a devastating shockwave that crashed head-on into the fiery dragon. The resulting explosion ripped through the street, obliterating the surrounding buildings like dry twigs. Fortunately, the few surviving civilians had already fled through their back doors or side windows, keeping the collateral damage to a minimum.
Just as the smoke from the blast began to settle, six kunai pierced through the dust cloud, their blades gleaming with deadly intent as they shot toward the mercenary.
"Where are you?!" the Blood Ninja roared, his eyes frantically scanning the debris, desperate to pinpoint where Xuan would materialize next.
Suddenly, a flash of cold steel appeared right in front of him. Xuan blinked into existence, driving the Amanokumo sword straight for the man's heart.
With a feral grin, the Blood Ninja forcefully twisted his torso, narrowly avoiding a fatal strike. He allowed the longsword to cleanly pierce his shoulder, ignoring the agonizing pain as he simultaneously lunged forward, driving his own kunai directly into Xuan's chest.
"Got you!" the mercenary roared in triumph. He released a long, shaky breath of relief. This suicidal counterattack was the only viable strategy he had managed to formulate. He knew the only way to catch the teleporting brat was to bait him into a lethal strike and trade a blow for a blow. It seemed luck was finally on his side again.
But before he could even savor the victory, the 'Xuan' impaled on his kunai suddenly vanished in a loud poof of white smoke.
A split second later, a cold, steel blade violently pierced through the Blood Ninja's back, exploding out from his chest and cleanly severing his heart.
How...? That was a clone? the Blood Ninja thought, his vision rapidly darkening as blood poured from his mouth. But how could a basic clone act on its own... and show facial expressions? Unable to turn his head to look at his true killer, his consciousness finally faded into the abyss.
"This technique is called the Spiralling Flash Super Round Dance Howl Stage Three," Xuan whispered smoothly into the dead man's ear. "Alright, I'm just messing with you. It's actually just a basic Shadow Clone mixed with the Flying Raijin."
Pulling his kunai free with a sickening squelch, Xuan let the corpse collapse into the dirt, delivering a punchline that only he would ever understand.
[Ding! Hatamoto Clan Jōnin killed. Reward: 5,000 Points!]