Chapter 74: A Thousand Calculations
"Cough, cough… What—what monstrous strength. It's like fighting someone with the Eight Gates open. And Ryū-kun looks like… cough… he still has plenty left in the tank."
Guy's face was a portrait of shock and disbelief. He simply could not fathom how a human being could possess such terrifying power.
He was certain Ryū was human. And that he had absolutely zero chakra.
Even granting those bizarre, alien martial techniques—that still shouldn't account for strength on this level.
A premonition crept into Guy's mind: even if he opened the Sixth Gate—the Gate of View—he might still fail to match Ryū's speed and power. Or perhaps more accurately, his current base strength was simply too low for the Gates' multiplier to close the gap.
He wrestled himself upright from the wreckage of splintered trees, feeling a sharp, lancing pain shoot through both arms.
He drew a deep breath of dust-laden air and nearly choked into another coughing fit.
His expression hardened into something grave.
He wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth.
Gazing at Ryū, who was now well over a hundred meters away, Guy murmured under his breath, his face tight with tension:
"One casual throw sent me flying at least a hundred meters? Ryū-kun's strength really is something else."
"But if that's the case—then I can't hold back either. Otherwise, how can I truly experience the burning passion of Youth?! Eight Gates…"
The instant those words left his lips, Guy's battered aura transformed. The scattered rubble at his feet began to tremble.
A vortex of energy coiled around his body. A vivid green glow radiated from his frame.
"Eight Gates… Gate of Closing—OPEN!!"
A ripping pain tore through his body. Guy's expression didn't change—the agony that came with opening a Gate was something he'd long since grown accustomed to.
His gaze locked onto Ryū in the distance.
"I wonder… with the Gate of Closing open, can I actually keep up with Ryū-kun's speed? Surely I can… right?"
In truth, even Guy himself wasn't confident. After opening the Fourth Gate, could he really match Ryū's speed?
Because Ryū's speed was simply… absurdly fast. Fast enough to vanish from the naked eye.
The Gate of Closing, once opened, massively amplified the user's speed—to the point of breaking the sound barrier. Exceeding the speed of sound wasn't out of the question. It could push the user to velocities that were literally invisible to the unaided eye.
Of course, for those who possessed dōjutsu, that was a different story.
But even dōjutsu wasn't a cure-all. You could see through your enemy's speed all you liked—if your body couldn't keep up with your brain at the critical moment, it meant nothing.
* * *
A muffled boom erupted from beneath Guy's feet. His figure vanished, leaving behind a sizable crater in the dirt and a plume of displaced dust.
Ryū, naturally, had been watching Guy's transformation with keen interest. That green-energy-radiating state was something he—a transmigrator who'd read the original Naruto—could hardly fail to recognize.
So the bowl cut actually opened the Eight Gates, huh? His speed just jumped by a huge margin…
Feeling the gale bearing down on him, Ryū's body went weightless—as if gravity had momentarily forgotten about him—and he drifted aside like a sheet of paper.
His eyes tracked a fist that grazed past his cheek by a hair's breadth.
If he'd been a hundredth of a second slower on the dodge, that punch would have connected.
And more importantly—this brat was aiming for his face!
Ryū's expression darkened.
Guy's speed boost had genuinely caught him off guard. Before the Gates, Guy had been quite slow—or rather, extremely slow by Ryū's standards.
But this new speed? It earned a few notches of genuine wariness.
Only a few notches, though.
It was instinctive caution, nothing more.
Because in Ryū's eyes, Guy was still—just barely—a touch too slow. With the Gate of Closing open, Guy's speed had genuinely reached the speed of sound, maybe even flirting with supersonic. To any ordinary shinobi, that would be blindingly fast.
Even a jōnin harassed by an enemy at this speed would find it a serious headache.
There was a very real chance of being caught off guard and injured—or worse.
Shinobi were, as a general rule, glass cannons. That much went without saying.
Unfortunately for Guy, Ryū's Six Powers were at Perfection across the board, his physical constitution had been enhanced to an absurd degree, and on top of all that he had Low-tier Observation Haki boosting his perception. The speed of sound, through Ryū's eyes… was, frankly, just okay.
* * *
After his first strike missed, Guy didn't let up.
His fists and feet became a storm of afterimages, each strike too fast for the human eye to follow. An ordinary bystander probably couldn't even have tracked the green glow surrounding his body, let alone his limbs.
By normal human standards, his speed was genuinely extraordinary.
But against Ryū—who had all six Powers at Perfection and Observation Haki on top of that?
Miss.
Miss.
Miss.
Miss.
Miss…
Guy had lost count of how many punches he'd thrown. All he felt was a wave of exhaustion crashing over him, and the pain in his body escalating toward something unbearable—his face was starting to twist from it.
But the real problem was: no matter how he punched, no matter how he kicked—
He could not land a single hit on Ryū. Not so much as a scratch.
It was like trying to strike a sheet of tissue paper caught in a windstorm.
Every single attack felt like Ryū had "predicted" it before it arrived.
The frustration built and built, an almost suffocating feeling.
Imagine going to a carnival, firing a BB gun at a row of balloons. You burn through hundreds of pellets—and not a single balloon pops. That kind of maddening futility.
It was precisely that thought that caused Guy's movements to falter, just for a fraction of a beat.
He'd just launched a spinning roundhouse kick—
When a horrific force slammed into his side.
His eyes bulged. His body rocketed backward once more.
Even with only the Fourth Gate open, the number of people in Konoha who could casually kick Guy hard enough to send him flying could be counted on one hand.
Ryū was one of them.
As he sailed through the air, only one thought occupied Guy's mind: the gap between himself and Ryū was simply too vast.
But then again—Kakashi had been beaten too, so getting defeated himself wasn't exactly embarrassing.
This suffocating sense of overwhelming power… it was like facing a Hokage.
* * *
"Guy—you lost focus. In a fight where your opponent outclasses you, getting distracted by anything else means defeat is already certain. Not a shred of a chance to turn things around."
A familiar voice reached Guy's ears mid-flight. He froze internally.
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a fist materializing at the edge of his vision.
And then the fist made intimate acquaintance with his face.
Guy felt his entire face warp and deform under the impact.
He even heard a distinct crack from the bridge of his nose.
Then his brain went blank…
And consciousness left him.
* * *
Ryū released the localized Iron Body hardening on his arm. He'd put real force behind that last punch—enough to guarantee Guy and Kakashi would have a nice few days to chat it up in the hospital together.
The biggest problem now was getting this guy to the hospital.
Wait—oh, shit. He'd miscalculated.
Was he going to be stuck paying the medical bill?
Ryū's expression flickered.
A thousand calculations. Ten thousand contingencies.
And he'd missed this one.
☆☆☆
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