Chapter 370: Superiority

Chapter 370: Chapter 370: Superiority

The Jonin’s hands blurred through a sequence of seals the exact millisecond my speed ignited. The world warped into a breathless blur as I exploded forward, already driving my spear toward his lowered stance. His reaction time, however, was monstrous. He slapped the dirt before my strike could connect, and a suffocating density of earth chakra flooded the ground beneath my feet.

I snarled, flickering to the side just as the entire clearing detonated upward. The eruption hit like a subterranean bomb. Massive shockwaves shattered the forest floor, uprooting ancient oaks and turning the terrain into a chaotic, jagged nightmare of churning earth and splintered roots. Only a few trees remained standing, heavily tilted amidst the ruined landscape. The broken ground was now completely impossible to sprint across at top speed.

"Smart," I spoke, my voice cutting clearly through the settling dust.

He glared at me, his eyes burning with raw hostility. "You think you are the first lightning user I have faced? You are all so smug about your speed. Let us see how useful that speed is when..."

His eyes widened, cutting his own taunt short. He jerked his head to the side, evading a lightning-coated kunai thrown by my puppet, his veteran instincts saving his life at the last possible moment. He slammed his hands together, raising a thick, defensive earth wall between himself and my advancing puppet. The barricade proved useless. Tanngrisnir simply hovered upward, easily clearing the crude stone defense. Its chest cavity snapped open, unleashing a torrential volley of poisoned senbon directly down at him.

The veteran threw himself backward to evade the deadly steel rain, vaulted gracefully to the side over the broken earth, and right into my trap. I had already anticipated his retreat path, firing a rapid cluster of concentrated lightning shots straight at his landing zone.

Caught midair with nowhere to dodge, the Jonin hastily weaved through hand signs and exhaled a desperate burst of chakra. Multiple wind slashes erupted around his body to deflect the incoming strike. It was a sloppy, unrefined application of Wind Release, clearly not his primary nature. However, he compensated with a higher chakra expense, as the sheer blunt force of the sudden gale was just enough to scatter the worst of the electrical impact.

The stray lightning still clipped his shoulder and upper chest, tearing fiercely through his flak jacket. He roared in pain as the electric burns seared his flesh, but the rudimentary wind barrier had successfully saved him from a fatal blow.

Landing heavily on the jagged earth, he skidded to a halt. He kept his breathing measured as he slowly shifted his stance. Even wounded, his tactical awareness never wavered, ensuring both the hovering puppet and I remained squarely in his immediate field of view.

I was already completing a brutal throwing motion. The veteran’s eyes narrowed in sheer confusion, unable to understand why I was pantomiming an attack with empty hands. Exactly a fraction of a second before my arm reached the apex of the swing, I summoned Gungnir directly into my grip. A blinding streak of blue lightning split the world in half. The delayed summon meant the projectile was not thrown at absolute maximum force, allowing the Jonin to throw himself to the side and barely evade the crackling spear.

He rolled across the jagged earth, desperately dodging a volley of shuriken launched by Tanngrisnir. Slamming both hands onto the dirt, he raised another hasty stone wall to block a barrage of lightning shots from my fingertips. The electrical currents easily shattered the barricade into glowing rubble. However, he used the brief visual cover to charge directly toward the hovering puppet.

His sharp green eyes scanned the ruined clearing frantically. I could tell that, like the vast majority of shinobi, he was not a sensor. He had to rely entirely on his acute battlefield intuition and experience to track the chakra threads back to their source. His instincts were terrifyingly accurate. He was rapidly closing in on the exact location where my shadow clone was hidden, manipulating the puppet from the shadows.

I immediately leaped high into the canopy to draw his attention. Pushing a surge of chakra outward, I cast a brilliant web of jagged lightning across the remaining trees. The Jonin cursed loudly at the flash. Refusing to lose his momentum, he inhaled deeply and unleashed massive wind slashes in every direction. He consumed a significant amount of chakra yet again to ensure the rudimentary jutsu covered a wide area, shearing through the thick foliage.

The resulting destruction forced me to stay away and stripped the visual cover, finally exposing my shadow clone in one move.

The veteran’s face shifted into a look of pure concentration. He slapped both hands against the ground. A cluster of deadly earth spears erupted from the soil directly beneath the clone, despite the distance. My clone leaped away at the very last second, narrowly avoiding impalement. But the Jonin was already a step ahead. With the clone momentarily airborne and distracted, he expelled a dense, highly compressed earth bullet straight at the exposed puppet.

My clone jerked its hands backward from a compromised midair position, desperately hauling the mechanical beast out of the direct line of fire. The evasion was a fraction of a second too late. The heavy stone projectile clipped the construct, shattering a large portion of its wooden chest cavity. The sickening crack of breaking timber echoed loudly as one of the puppet’s arms was completely severed, tumbling uselessly to the ruined forest floor.

Despite the catastrophic damage to its chest, Tanngrisnir remained fully operational, moving with a slight imbalance. My shadow clone eyed the Jonin warily from its new position, refusing to give the bleeding veteran an opening.

The Jonin did not hesitate. His hands flew through another rapid sequence of seals before he violently slammed his palms onto the broken earth. He pumped an incredible amount of chakra into the ground, producing a massive cluster of jagged earth spears all around him. With a desperate shout, he launched the deadly projectiles in every conceivable direction.

It was a chaotic, omnidirectional jutsu designed specifically to force me, my clone, and my puppet back. The barrage would open up vital breathing room while creating enough thick dust and carnage to mask his escape. For an experienced veteran caught at a severe disadvantage, there was only one logical option left. He was executing a tactical retreat so he could survive and fight another day.

I refused to let him escape.

Fierce arcs of blue lightning exploded from my body, completely enveloping me in a dense, crackling coat of lightning chakra. I launched myself directly into the storm of flying rock. The earth spears shattered into harmless dust the exact moment they made contact with my supercharged armor.

Bursting right through his defensive barrage, I slammed Gungnir downward in a vicious arc. The Jonin barely had time to register his shock, reacting purely on instinct to pull away, yet the crackling blade still tore across his torso. It sliced a deep, bloody gash from just below his neck down to his waist.

Roaring in agony, the veteran desperately threw himself backward. He exhaled a rapid volley of pressurized air slashes toward my face to cover his retreat, forcing me to abruptly flicker backward to avoid the slicing gales.

At that exact moment, my shadow clone made its move. It flicked a single, near-invisible chakra thread down to the ruined forest floor, attaching it directly to the severed arm of my puppet.

Sensing sudden movement near his feet, the Jonin reacted with pure battlefield reflex. The severed mechanical hand jerked toward him, its wooden fingers spread wide. He stomped down viciously, kicking the center of the open palm directly with the metal-plated heel of his shinobi boot. He relied entirely on that steel plate to protect him from any hidden poisoned blades that might snap from the open palm, a classic puppet attack he had seen before.

With the immediate threats pushed back, the veteran Jonin noticed that I had finally stopped moving. He eagerly seized the brief pause, desperately needing time to formulate a plan. Up until this exact second, he had been relying purely on battlefield instinct and sheer experience just to survive. My puppet and I had not given him a single moment to breathe since the ambush began. He was also silently praying that a nearby Iwa patrol had heard the chaos and was rushing to reinforce him.

He stared at my silhouette, his eyes locking onto the metal plate of the Konoha headband securing my long hair. "What kind of monster are you?" he spat, his chest heaving as he tried to buy time. "By the headband tying your hair, you are a Konoha shinobi. However, from what I have seen just now..." His eyes widened in genuine horror as he processed my lightning coat. "Are you a bastard of the Raikage or something?"

I did not reply. Instead, I sheathed Gungnir and smoothly drew a sharp tanto into my right hand, covering it with lightning as the metal heated. Without taking a single step forward, I thrust the short blade directly through the empty air.

The Jonin’s eyes narrowed in sheer confusion. He frantically scanned my position, my clone, and my puppet, noting that none of us had closed the distance. Seeing absolutely no physical threat in a melee thrust from that far away, a mocking sneer crossed his face. "Have you gone insa..."

The Flying Thunder God mark I had secretly stamped onto his metal boot flared to life. The world vanished. I materialized directly inside his guard, already mid-thrust. The tanto pierced flawlessly through his heart before I brutally dragged the blade to the side, slicing his chest wide open. A massive splash of dark red blood sprayed across the cold forest floor, steaming in the freezing night air.

The Jonin immediately collapsed, a horrified, pained look frozen on his face. His dead body suddenly began to glow with a sickly, pulsating light before he even hit the ground. Multiple intricate sealing formulas spread rapidly across his skin.

I recognized the seal formulas immediately. It was a brutal dead-man’s switch. It was designed to weaponize his remaining chakra as explosive fuel, acting as a final, violent trap meant to obliterate whoever managed to kill him.

Without a single second of hesitation, I activated the spatial equation again. I locked onto the seal on my puppet and teleported.

A blinding detonation ripped through the immediate area, shattering the surrounding timber and leaving a smoldering, ruined crater behind.

----

A/N: First time Noa is truly stretching his legs since waking up! FYI, he is still getting used to his new body, so there is plenty more to come. I absolutely cannot wait for your feedback on this fight, so do not be shy and let me know your thoughts in the comments. Oh, and by the way. When I made the poll to name Noa’s puppets, the winner was Thor’s goats: Tanngrisnir (Tooth-gnasher) and Tanngnjóstr (Tooth-grinder). Hence the current puppet’s name XD