Chapter 359: Scorched
Animals that understood human speech weren't exactly rare in the Naruto world. Most of them, of course, were various breeds of ninja beast — Konoha's Inuzuka clan, for instance, kept an entire kennel of ninja hounds.
Ninja hounds counted as a branch of ninja beasts in their own right, so calling one that wasn't exactly wrong.
But what in the world had that hammer just been?
The speed of the thing — it had moved like light itself, fast enough that he'd barely registered it in time.
Beads of cold sweat had broken out across Minato's forehead without his noticing, a leftover reaction to that hammer grazing past his face at close range.
If that thing had actually connected with his skull at that speed, unguarded as he'd been, his brains would have ended up somewhere behind him. It was solid metal, after all.
Out of the corner of his eye, he'd caught it clearly enough — the hammer had absolutely come from that strange dog. It had been clutched in the creature's paw right up until the moment it left its grip.
Wait.
Hold on.
Could a dog's paw even grip a hammer's handle?
Minato found himself suddenly staring down an epic-tier philosophical crisis.
Meanwhile, the dog, still barking furiously at him and clearly hurling some kind of insult, had very obviously taken offense to the word "runt" muttered a moment ago.
Minato felt supremely awkward about the whole thing — he'd genuinely had no idea the dog could understand human speech. And it wasn't even wrong, strictly speaking; Thor's shoulder height barely reached Kaguya's thigh, and even that was mostly thanks to his ears.
"Ah — sorry about that, I didn't mean anything by it. Slip of the tongue, just a slip of the tongue."
Minato shook off the spiral of thoughts and offered an awkward, apologetic smile. Lately, he mused, everything about how this world was unfolding felt just plain wrong. He could feel the whole thing coming apart at the seams.
Konoha vanishing out from under them was one thing. Ryū going missing for several days was another. Then a shockingly powerful black-haired girl shows up out of nowhere — fine, sure. And now, on top of all that, a dog that appeared to be just as absurdly strong?
Minato genuinely felt like his brain wasn't equipped to process all of this. Why did every single strange thing have to happen to him of all people? What were the odds?
Just as Minato decided this wasn't a place worth lingering — not with this short-tempered dog around, anyway — the black-haired girl suddenly spoke up. "Oh, right. What's your name?"
Minato blinked, caught off guard, then answered with an awkward smile. "I'm Konoha's Fourth Hokage. Namikaze Minato."
This time it was Kaguya's turn to freeze. She studied him with a look of dawning suspicion, muttering to herself. "I think I've heard that name from Admin-sama before. He mentioned once that the place he lives is called Konoha."
This guy claiming to be Konoha's Fourth Hokage — could he be the village head or something? Which would mean he probably knows Admin-sama. Might even be a friend of his?
A handful of possibilities ran through her head, though she couldn't say for certain whether this "Namikaze Minato" and Ryū actually knew each other.
One thing she couldn't deny, though — this Minato wasn't weak. Dodging a Mjölnir thrown by Thor was no small feat. That kind of reaction speed on its own was borderline unbelievable. He doesn't have Observation Haki too, does he?
Meanwhile, back in the mirror-space, with Kaguya and Thor both having pulled out to recover from serious stamina loss, the remaining nine fighters found the pressure on them climbing sharply — though still within manageable limits.
Ryū, who'd been juggling anywhere from four to five Void Beasts at a time, was now handling six all at once, single-handedly.
What did it feel like to be swarmed by six Void Beasts at once? Picture playing soccer solo against an entire opposing team. Even if you were a World Cup-caliber player and the other side couldn't have qualified for the tournament to save their lives, sheer numbers would still wear you down eventually.
"Armament — Iron Body... Full Body!"
Armament Haki swept across his entire body in an instant. A heartbeat later, three black energy blasts, each tens of meters across, slammed into him at once, full force.
A massive explosion tore through the air, the shockwave rippling outward in every direction as a towering mushroom cloud surged skyward.
The heat at the explosion's center had already broken past a hundred million degrees Celsius.
The ground beneath was peeled back in a layer over a hundred meters thick, and the sky's worth of dust and debris was scattered instantly by the blast wave.
Barely anyone even noticed. Explosions on this scale were going off constantly, nonstop, throughout the mirror-space — as if countless nuclear warheads were detonating one after another without pause, more than a few of them on par with the Tsar Bomba, or worse.
If the Ancient One hadn't been continuously reinforcing the mirror-space the entire time, it wouldn't have taken long before the whole thing simply shattered apart.
And this was a mirror-space roughly a quarter the size of the entire Naruto world — one Yukari had already reinforced with her spell cards on top of that.
Even so, it was already straining under the load. Without the mirror-space containing all of this, the Naruto world's planet would very likely have been reduced to a scattering of rubble drifting through space by now.
Its moon, too, would have had a ninety percent chance of getting caught in the blast radius and suffering the same fate.
Which said everything about just how vital the Ancient One's mirror-space magic was for containing a battle of this scale.
Ryū had already made up his mind to learn it himself, one way or another. Master that spell, and he'd never have to worry about a fight spilling over into the real world again.
Open up a mirror-space, and it became its own perfectly contained battlefield. No matter how thoroughly things got torn apart inside it, the real world outside would never feel a thing.
As the explosion finally cleared, Ryū's silhouette came back into view — his clothes singed black in places, but otherwise unharmed.
"Ow. That one stung a bit."
Standing on empty air, he rubbed the back of his neck. The dust cloud did nothing to hinder his Observation Haki.
Getting hit by several Void Beasts' fully-charged black energy blasts all at once was bound to hurt — though it was a good thing he'd gotten Armament Haki and Iron Body up in time. Without them, this wouldn't have been mere pain; he'd have been coughing up a fair amount of blood.
He'd long since lost all sense of how much time had actually passed. What he did know, though, was exactly how many Void Beasts he'd personally killed — since entering the mirror-space, his own tally had already broken past a hundred.
Add in everyone else's kills, and the total number of Void Beasts taken down so far was likely somewhere between 550 and 650.
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