Chapter 198: Chapter: 196

Hey guys, here is the new chapter hope you will liked and read thru everything.

If we hit 150 PW I post a extra chapter.

One of the best one i have made enjoy.

Don't forget to leave your power stones along with your comment if you have any ideas or opinions that could help me, as well as a review to continue showing your support.

Enjoy the chapter!

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Following the sonic boom that preceded the clash of forces between the Kazekage and the leader of Akatsuki, a current of dust, pulverized gravel, and glass debris hung suspended in the dry desert air.

In the sky, Pain's figure remained unperturbed, but the glint in his concentric pupils had changed radically. There was no longer a hint of simple distant observation; the destruction of the Preta Path at the hands of Daigo's pure physical power had forced the Rinnegan user to deploy his true tactical severity.

The absolute silence that followed the snap of the Kazekage's neck lasted for a mere fraction of a second.

Without uttering a single word or visible signal, Pain's five remaining paths coordinated their movements with instant, inhuman precision. The shared perception of the Rinnegan converted each body into a focal point of vision, perfectly eliminating any blind spots.

At the center of the formation, Pain slightly raised his left hand, and at that exact moment, the coordinated assault began.

Daigo reacted instantly. Aware that a single miscalculation against that intertwined network of vision meant getting trapped in a deadly combination, he decided to adjust his combat stance immediately.

He reduced the margin of his offensive movements and adopted a strictly defensive scheme, keeping his body centered, his knees slightly bent, and his arms raised. He covered his forearms with a solid layer of pink crystal (Shōton) that gleamed under the midday sun, taking advantage of his pure speed to deflect the initial probing exchanges.

Impacts began to reverberate against his crystal defenses. The Asura Path moved at breakneck speed along his left flank, extending its mechanical limbs equipped with blades of chakra, while the Human Path sought to flank from the right to attempt direct contact with his head.

Daigo blocked the first strike of iron with his left forearm, generating a shower of pink sparks, and dodged the Human Path's swipe by millimeters, spinning on his own axis.

As he blocked and dodged the incessant cascade of attacks, Daigo's analytical mind processed information at an astounding speed.

"If I maintain this pace of defensive exchanges, I'll end up trapped by wear and tear," Daigo evaluated amidst the chaos, listening to the hum of cutting air behind his back.

"But the real problem isn't these bodies attacking head-on. If I don't destroy the Naraka Path first, all the damage I manage to inflict will be completely useless."

Moving in a fast aerial zigzag using the stone pillars that still stood around the main plaza, Daigo forced a tactical pause. He raised his gaze slightly above the line of neighboring rooftops and extended his seismic perception through the village ground. More than two hundred meters away from the main combat line, in the shadows of a partially collapsed structure, he saw it.

The Naraka Path was crouching inside the semi-destroyed building. Before it, the massive, grotesque head of the King of Hell emerged from the ground in a flare of purple chakra.

The gigantic statue's jaws were wide open, and from its throat emanated a hand-shaped tongue that was already holding the shattered remains of the Preta Path. The bone structure of the face, deformed by Daigo's colossal punch, was beginning to reconstruct itself at an astonishing speed inside the demon entity's mouth.

"It's trying to repair the Preta Path to return it to the battlefield..." Daigo thought, his gaze icy. "I can't let it."

Without wasting a single millisecond in hesitation, Daigo pushed his legs against the adjacent ledge and launched himself in a low-altitude flight directly toward the Naraka Path's building, prepared to crush the entire structure before the restoration could conclude.

However, Nagato immediately anticipated the target adjustment.

A deafening roar shook the street below. Before Daigo could cover fifty meters in a straight line, the stone floor burst in a massive cloud of dust and debris.

From the depths of the earth emerged a gigantic grayish figure: a rhinoceros similar in size to Daigo's own summons, with bone plates on its back and eyes dominated by the wave pattern of the Rinnegan, summoned just in time by the Animal Path. The enormous beast charged upward on an ascending trajectory, its frontal horn aimed directly at the Kazekage's body.

At the same time, the Human Path dove from an upper roof to cut off his escape line from above, while the Asura Path threw open the compartments on its shoulders, firing a new barrage of chakra-charged homing missiles that hissed aggressively in the air.

Daigo observed the triple threat descending simultaneously on his position. His face showed no panic, only cold severity.

"If I allow all these detonations to collide here, the shockwave will destroy three whole blocks of the residential area," Daigo reasoned instantly.

"The destruction of the village will be inevitable if I don't redirect this impact."

In midair, Daigo joined the palms of his hands in a movement to form a hand seal.

"Crystal Release: Pink Dragon Prison!"

An extremely dense pink glare detonated in the middle of the street. Large structures of emerald crystal began to sprout wildly from the ground and adjacent walls, shaping themselves into gigantic protective arches and curved barriers.

The crystal spikes intercepted the giant rhinoceros's horn head-on, halting its monstrous kinetic momentum, while trapping the trajectories of the Asura Path's missiles inside thick, transparent walls to cushion the detonations.

BOOOOM! BOOOOOOM!

The explosions echoed muffled inside the crystal structures, containing the fire and metallic fragments to prevent them from spreading toward nearby houses.

However, Pain had no intention of allowing the Kazekage to dictate the boundaries of the terrain. From the heights of the sky, the main body of the Deva Path extended both arms downward, adjusting his chakra with overwhelming intensity.

"Shinra Tensei."

An omnidirectional repulsive force of crushing density detonated directly from Pain's position.

The wave of invisible gravity fell upon the area like the weight of a collapsed firmament. Daigo's majestic Pink Dragon Prison cracked in a fraction of a second before shattering into millions of bright shards.

The surrounding houses disintegrated in a rain of dust and stone, and the gravity wave itself hit Daigo's body, forcing him to dig his feet into the ground as he slid back at top speed, leaving two deep trenches in the floor.

Daigo was pushed back more than fifty meters, stopping right at the edge of a secondary plaza. Looking up confirmed that the scale of the battle surpassed any normal parameters. His Kazekage robe showed tears at the shoulders, and the dust accumulated on his skin was beginning to mix with fine threads of sweat.

"I see..." Daigo murmured softly, adjusting his stance on the broken stone. "With this level of continuous pressure, the margin for error is absolutely zero."

To survive the continuous rain of combined attacks and break through the shared vision barrier, Daigo knew he had to push his physical capacity beyond the limits of his body.

He clenched his fists at his waist. His lungs expanded to the maximum, absorbing a massive amount of air through a deep, rhythmic breathing technique.

"Seven Heavens Breathing, Sixth Breath... Activation!"

FWOOOOOOSH!

An eruption of a pink, translucent, brilliant, and extremely dense aura burst loudly from Daigo's body. The veins at his temples and neck bulged sharply, his heart rate spiked to inhuman levels, and the wind around him began to spin in a violent whirlwind.

The temperature of the area seemed to rise sharply under the pressure of the physical energy emanating from his body.

Without giving Pain time to readjust his formation, Daigo vanished.

There was no visible trail or prior sound. He simply ceased to be in his original position.

The Human Path, advancing from the right to support the summoned rhinoceros, didn't even have time to register the direction of the movement through the Rinnegan. Daigo reappeared right in front of its face, surrounded by the scorching pink aura.

With terrifying speed, Daigo unleashed a combination of direct physical strikes against the Human Path's torso and head. The first impact fractured the reanimated corpse's sternum; the second shattered its left shoulder joint, and the third was an ascending kick of pure brute force that sent the body spinning out of control into the air.

Daigo charged crystal chakra into his right hand to connect the final strike that would pulverize the Human Path's body mid-air.

However, right before the crystallized fist made contact, a massive figure interceded abruptly in the attack's trajectory.

The Preta Path, completely restored—with firm skin, readjusted bones, and clothes reconstructed by the King of Hell—appeared in the middle of the attack line with both palms extended forward.

Seeing the Preta Path's open hands ready to devour the chakra concentrated in his fist, Daigo aborted the strike immediately. He flexed his body mid-air, bounced off an adjacent wall, and pushed back several meters to prevent the absorption ability from coming into contact with his aura and body.

"It returned to the fight so quickly..." Daigo analyzed as he landed lightly on the adjacent roof.

"Indeed, the Naraka Path is the engine of this army."

Without losing the momentum of the Sixth Breath, Daigo switched targets in a fraction of a second. He turned his attention to the Asura Path, which was reconfiguring its mechanical cannons on a stone building.

Moving in a curved, unpredictable trajectory, Daigo evaded burst after burst of chakra projectiles, dodging the shots by mere centimeters. He appeared beside the Asura Path, grabbed two of its mechanical limbs with both hands, and applying colossal physical strength, ripped them out by the roots in a crunchy snap of metal and reanimated flesh.

Immediately after, he delivered a devastating knee strike directly to the center of its face, disabling the body instantly and leaving it lying limp upon the ruins.

Nevertheless, Pain's response was immediate.

The Deva Path, hovering above Daigo's position, had already accumulated a massive amount of chakra during the brief seconds the Asura Path's execution took.

"Shinra Tensei."

A gravitational impact charged with a power far superior to the previous ones fell fully onto Daigo from an upper angle. The force of the repulsive wave was so overwhelming that it broke through the layer of pink aura, crushing Daigo against the roof and projecting violently downward.

BOOOOM! BOOOOOOM!

Daigo's body crashed through the structures of five consecutive houses in an out-of-control diagonal trajectory, kicking up massive plumes of smoke, splintered wood, and broken stone blocks along more than a hundred meters of street.

Silence momentarily settled over the devastated area once more.

Among the smoking ruins of the fifth collapsed structure, the rubble began to move slowly. Daigo emerged from the debris, standing up firmly. His posture remained straight and dominant, but a thin thread of crimson blood trickled from the left corner of his mouth, sliding down his chin to drip onto the few torn scraps of his robe that remained.

He raised his right hand and, with the back of his partially broken crystal gauntlet, wiped the blood from his mouth in a single calm motion.

"Indeed... fighting against the Six Paths of Pain at the same time is extremely complex," Daigo reflected in the silence of his mind, observing the shadows of the enemy bodies gathering against the sun.

In that brief moment of tactical pause, Daigo's memory inevitably evoked scattered fragments of knowledge from his past life. He recalled passages of the anime he had watched in his former life and the speculations about the great battle in the Village Hidden in the Rain.

"Jiraiya would have had a much higher chance of surviving and winning if he had possessed complete information about the division of each body's abilities from the very first second..." Daigo thought as he adjusted the airflow in his lungs to maintain his breathing.

"But knowing it in advance doesn't eliminate the terrifying practical difficulty of the battle. The shared perception of those Rinnegan eliminates any possibility of a conventional surprise. Every movement, every ninjutsu preparation, and every shift in weight is seen simultaneously from five different angles. To land a definitive blow on the main formation, one must overcome a perfect tactical network."

While these thoughts crossed Daigo's calculating mind, the real danger was not coming from the skies where Pain hovered.

In the densest shadows created by the smoke of the demolished buildings behind his back, a red silhouette moved at a truly terrifying speed.

The movement emitted no chakra vibration, no sound of footsteps, and no alteration in the wind current. The shadow cut the distance in a fraction of a second, capitalizing on the exact moment Daigo's sensory attention was concentrated on the paths of Pain. It slipped cleanly into Daigo's lower blind spot, unsheathing a dark-bladed katana whose tip traveled with lethal precision aimed straight at Daigo's heart.

A silent, absolute attack executed with the mastery of an assassin with decades of experience.

Yet, despite the absence of noise or detectable chakra in the air, the katana's blade failed to pierce the Kazekage's chest.

In the final millisecond before the definitive impact, the stone ground beneath the attacker's feet transmitted a tiny vibration through the earth's mass. Daigo's seismic sense—that profound sensory ability he had meticulously perfected after years of training and patience alongside the elephants Daisen Zoyu Iron and Matangi—registered the exact pressure wave of the footstep.

"Thanks to your teachings..." Daigo thought in a microfraction of a second.

With superhuman reflexive movement, Daigo twisted his torso drastically to the left. The katana blade grazed and shallowly cut the skin on his side, leaving a bloody line, but completely missing any vital organs.

Deliberately accepting the minor cut to lock his aggressor's position, Daigo set his teeth, spun on his axis with crushing ferocity, and concentrated all the remaining momentum of the Sixth Breath into his bare right fist.

PAAAAM!

A solid, heavy, and devastating punch collided square against the mysterious attacker's chest. The power of the shock generated a circular shockwave that dispersed the curtain of smoke around them.

The attacker was sent flying backward like a red streak, crossing the air at more than fifty meters in height before executing a series of acrobatic flips to cushion the inertia. He landed hard on the roof platform where Pain's paths remained, just as the Naraka Path finished reintegrating the rest of the repaired bodies into the formation.

The swordsman managed to plant both feet on the broken stone, but the violence of Daigo's punch was such that the man couldn't hold back an involuntary gag, coughing up a mouthful of crimson blood onto the ground.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his dark gauntlet, breathing slightly heavily as he adjusted his sword stance.

That man was none other than Banatel, the legendary old samurai.

In the silence that followed his landing, Banatel looked down at the surface of his own armor. The protective aura of dense chakra he always maintained active around his body to cushion any physical damage had ended up completely cracked and almost destroyed at the exact point where Daigo's fist had impacted.

"Impressive..." Banatel thought, feeling the dull ache in his ribs. "A single direct hit almost blew right through my reinforced chakra defense. This demon's brute strength isn't normal."

Daigo closely observed the new participant in the conflict. He immediately recognized the attire and imposing presence of the veteran warrior. However, instead of displaying surprise or fear, Daigo's gaze turned ironic, letting out a soft grunt of fatigue while slowly shaking his head.

"Well, well..." Daigo said aloud, directing his sharp gaze toward Pain's motionless figure in the sky.

"Is the threat I represent to your worldview so great that the great Akatsuki organization needs to resort to a six-on-one just to try to subdue me? Or will you call the others too?"

Pain did not respond to the mockery. His concentric violet pupils remained fixed on Daigo before slightly shifting his focus toward the figure of Banatel beside him.

Banatel, ignoring the coldness of Akatsuki's leader, reached for the top clasps of the black cloak decorated with red clouds that he was wearing. With a sharp movement, he ripped it from his shoulders and let it drop to the ground, where it quickly disintegrated under the desert wind.

Upon shedding the cloak, the samurai's imposing battle armor was completely exposed to the sunlight.

Over his shoulders rested a heavy, dark crimson cape, crowned by a thick collar of jet-black fur framing his stern, battle-hardened face.

His torso was protected by a dull silver plate armor filled with deep dents, old scuffs, and metal scars bearing witness to hundreds of duels to the death, completely devoid of any vain sheen or unnecessary ornament. A thick leather belt with a large antique gold emblem bound his combat tasset, while boots reinforced with dark greaves were planted with absolute firmness on the shattered stone.

This armor was no coincidence; it was one Banatel had managed to craft in the Land of Iron with the help of engineers from the Land of Snow, creating a unique chakra armor capable of standing on par with the Kage.

Banatel gripped his katana with both hands, settling his center of gravity.

"Listen closely, Pain," Banatel said in a deep, raspy voice loaded with ancient authority, without turning his head toward the Rinnegan user.

"My previous opponent in the other sector was way too easy. A total bore. I don't give a damn about your orders or your speeches about world peace. I came here to have fun, and this Crystal Demon is infinitely more interesting than any other ninja who set foot in this village today or in recent years."

Pain contemplated the samurai's attitude for a second. Understanding that the defeat of the previous enemy at Banatel's hands freed up that battlefront, the leader of Akatsuki gave a slight nod.

Although the absolute pride of his self-proclaimed divinity took a minor blow by requiring an external element's intervention to ensure victory, Nagato was an absolute pragmatist. He knew that eliminating a physical and tactical monster of Daigo's magnitude justified any combination of forces on the field.

Daigo listened attentively to Banatel's words regarding his previous opponent. In the Kazekage's mind, a quick list of the high-level ninjas defending the outer sectors of Sunagakure crossed his thoughts.

"He mentioned his previous rival was too easy?" Daigo pondered, keeping his facial expression unreadable.

"I doubt it was an ordinary ninja. He probably faced one of the Seven Swordsmen of the Sand or one of my main commanders. I hope Baki, Malenia, or Kisame haven't fallen so quickly... No, they know their strategic limits perfectly well. They must be holding off further casualties at the perimeters."

With the confirmation that the present fight had formally transformed into a full-scale battle of one against six Kage-level combatants, something deep inside Daigo's mind began to shift.

Suddenly, a remarkably clear and distant memory surfaced in his mind with near-crystal clarity.

He remembered the night of his childhood on the outskirts of the village, many years ago, when the village did not yet possess its current magnificence or power, and when Shizuka was still alive. He remembered sitting around a temporary campsite, watching the fire of the campfire while Shizuka looked at him, asking why he loved battles so much.

Then, the crystal-clear memory of his answer to her question came back to him:

"Shizuka, when I become the strongest in Suna and become the Kazekage, I will challenge the other Kage to a battle among all of us. That way I'll show Suna's strength along with what a true battle is, surpassing Hashirama and Madara, leaving my name in the history of this world as the man who defeated all the Kage of the strongest villages. And I want you in the front row so you can feel the excitement. So don't die until then."

Although he couldn't fulfill that promise with her alive, he knew she was watching him from wherever she was, so she wouldn't miss this moment—because this would be one of those battles that would be remembered by the entire shinobi world.

Clearing his mind of that thought, Daigo smiled as he contemplated the enemy lineup before him.

There was Pain, the divine entity of the Six Paths possessing the Rinnegan, alongside Banatel, the legendary samurai warrior whose individual capability undoubtedly rivaled Kage rank. The combination of both represented a military threat of such immense magnitude that it far surpassed the combined power of an army of Chunin and Jonin from one of the great villages.

He felt his blood begin to boil in his veins. A burning, electric heat spread from his chest into every one of his limbs.

Since the traumatic deaths of Shizuka and Yashamaru in his youth, Daigo had approached every aspect of his life and war with a cold, calculating, relentless mindset, devoid of superficial emotion. He fought out of duty, governed out of strategy, and executed his enemies out of pure necessity for Suna's survival.

But at this precise moment, facing the ultimate threat that sought to erase his life's work from the face of the earth, two facets of his existence fused for the first time in perfect harmony:

His absolute responsibility as the Kazekage who swore to protect Sand's destiny, and his true primary essence: the untamed thrill of Daigo, the Crystal Demon, savoring the ecstasy of a decisive battle at the absolute limit of his capabilities.

Daigo flashed a broad, cold smile, full of terrifying confidence. He adjusted the airflow of the Seven Heavens Breathing, Sixth Breath, allowing the pink aura around him to become so dense that it began to crack the ground beneath his feet.

"Very well..." Daigo said, raising both crystal-covered fists toward the sky.

"Let's see if six are enough to put out the fire inside me."