Chapter 357: Minato, Utterly Baffled
Inside the mirror-space, the passage of time barely registered at all. There was no day, no night — the "sun" overhead was nothing but a static afterimage, showing no sign of ever moving.
Kaguya had long since lost track of how long she'd been fighting inside this place.
All she knew was that her stamina was dropping fast. By now, less than forty percent of it remained.
For a Dimensional Chat Group powerhouse who specialized in hand-to-hand combat to be down to under forty percent stamina said everything about just how brutal — and how long — this fight had been.
Faint beads of sweat had broken out across her pale forehead. Her eyes, fixed grimly on the three Void Beasts before her, held an expression more serious than she'd ever worn before as she slowly let out a breath.
With every hour that passed, more and more Void Beasts kept crawling out of the rift — the numbers only climbing.
At first she'd only had to handle two at a time, and even that had felt fairly comfortable. Now it was three, and that was already starting to push her limits.
With her stamina this badly drained, the situation felt genuinely dangerous to her.
Unless she got three or four hours of rest, the less-than-forty-percent she had left was bound to run out sooner or later.
In a fight this intense, Kaguya knew exactly what could happen if her stamina hit zero — it could easily cost her her life.
Even so, all she could do for now was grit her teeth and keep fighting the three beasts in front of her. Crimson blood ran down from a cut on her forehead, painting her right eye's vision entirely red.
She didn't spare the wound a second thought — with her constitution, it would close up completely within fifteen minutes at most.
Out of nowhere, a violent whistling tore through the air behind her, the fierce gust snapping at her clothes.
Her crimson eyes narrowed slightly. Just as she moved to dodge, she froze.
Because through her Observation Haki, she'd already sensed it — someone had blocked the attack for her.
"Yaraya~ra. Little Kaguya, why don't you go take a break — leave these ugly things to me. Wouldn't want that pretty face getting hurt now, would we?"
Yukari's faintly teasing voice drifted in from behind her. Kaguya turned to look and found Yukari floating calmly on empty air, having used — with some technique Kaguya couldn't quite place — brute force to stop a Void Beast of truly absurd size dead in its tracks.
Pressing her pale lips together, Kaguya didn't bother with false modesty. She gave a serious nod. "All right. Yukari-nee, give me three hours."
The instant she found an opening, she vanished from the fight in a flash.
The Ancient One, who'd been on support duty this whole time, immediately tossed a glowing ring her way.
Kaguya stepped through it, leaving the mirror-space behind for the time being, and the sparking ring slowly sealed shut behind her.
Once outside, Kaguya's gaze swept across the desolate landscape around her, and she let out a slow breath.
A flicker of motion, and she vanished from what was now a massive crater where Konoha used to stand — reappearing an instant later just beyond the crater's edge.
Not caring how filthy the ground was, she simply sat down where she stood, quietly steadying her breathing, working to recover her stamina as fast as possible.
Must have killed twenty or thirty Void Beasts by now. At least fifteen of those were mostly-intact kills, plus the rest in worse shape — that's close to twenty thousand Points, all told.
A satisfied look crossed her fine, delicate features, still marked with a few smears of blood.
She knew perfectly well she was the weakest of the eleven fighting in there, and she felt no need to measure herself against the others.
Holding her own against two — sometimes three — Void Beasts at once, and killing twenty or thirty of them in the process: that result was more than good enough for her.
A little over a year ago, after all, she'd been nothing but an ordinary girl. The only thing remotely special about her back then had been her status as the heiress of the Shinomiya conglomerate.
Beyond that... nothing, really. Well — did being pretty count as special?
Looking at how far she'd come in just over a year, Kaguya was genuinely satisfied with her own growth. She wasn't exactly some cheat-blessed protagonist, after all.
Of course, plenty of people out there would say every single member of the Dimensional Chat Group looked like a walking cheat code.
Wiping the blood from her face, Kaguya's fine brows suddenly drew together. She picked up a small stone from the ground and flicked it casually behind her.
The stone, no bigger than a quail egg, shot off at blistering speed — fast enough that even an elite Jōnin wouldn't have had time to react.
An instant later, a booming crash rang out. The little stone slammed into the ground a hundred meters behind her, tearing out a crater ten meters across, the earth shuddering faintly with the impact.
Getting an ordinary little stone to hit with that kind of force was simple enough — she'd coated it in Armament Haki.
Just then, a voice rang out from behind her, still faintly shaken. "...That was fast. And that reflex — I nearly got hit."
Kaguya rose slowly to her feet and turned around without any particular hurry, her cool, striking eyes settling on the completely unfamiliar man standing before her.
She studied the stranger in front of her. Minato studied the unfamiliar girl in front of him right back.
Because the person who'd suddenly appeared behind Kaguya — and been spotted instantly for it — was none other than Konoha's Fourth Hokage, Namikaze Minato.
Minato had come out here wanting to get an up-close look at Konoha's current state.
Instead, the moment he arrived, he found a strange black-haired girl sitting at the edge of the crater.
And before he'd even had a chance to react, a jolt of pure, lethal danger had shot through him, sending him scrambling sideways on instinct.
A heartbeat later, the exact spot he'd been standing on erupted into a ten-meter crater.
All of that had happened in the span of a few short seconds.
To be fair, Minato had no idea who Kaguya was. He looked her over carefully, with the appraising eye of someone taking a threat's measure.
Her looks were genuinely striking, he had to admit — though as a man deep in the late stages of being thoroughly whipped by his wife, he didn't dare let his thoughts wander anywhere near another woman.
None of that was really the point, though. The real question was —
Who was this black-haired girl?
Why was she here?
He'd never once heard of anyone like her in all of Konoha!
And she looked like she'd been through the wringer — the sheer killing intent radiating off her was enough to make even Minato's heart skip a beat.
It was obvious she'd just walked out of some kind of brutal battle.
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