Gando, the leader of Iwa's Explosion Corps, was a pragmatist, not a brawler. His mission was simple: cause maximum carnage and destabilize the enemy command. A direct confrontation with Uchiha Daichi, a clan head famed for his ferocity and a veteran of the previous great war, was the antithesis of his purpose. He fought like a saboteur, not as a shinobi. As Daichi closed the distance with lethal intent, Gando didn't stand his ground. He retreated, but his retreat was a weapon.
He didn't just backpedal; he sculpted the battlefield. With sharp, economical hand signs, he slammed his palm onto the scorched earth.
"Bakuton: Suishō Bakuretsu Jirai!"
The ground between them shimmered for a microsecond before settling, now seeded with a dozen invisible crystal mines. He wasn't trying to hit Daichi; he was trying to herd him, to control his movement, to make every step a potential tripwire to oblivion.
Daichi, a force of pure aggression, was not so easily corralled. His Sharingan was a potent tool. It saw the faint, malicious chakra signatures buried in the earth. He didn't slow down. Instead, he became a blur of motion, his footwork a masterclass in evasion. He'd leap over a mine's trigger radius, use the body of a fallen shinobi as a stepping stone, or angle his run to skirt the edge of the deadly field. All the while, he retaliated.
"Katon: Gōkakyū no Jutsu!"
A massive fireball, hot enough to turn sand to glass, roared from his lips. It was a technique of overwhelming power, designed to incinerate everything in its path.
Gando didn't flinch. "Bakuton: Suishō Kabe!"
A wall of multifaceted crystal, six inches thick and gleaming with internal fire, erupted from the ground. The fireball whooshed against it, the flames splashing and swirling around the barrier, licking at its surface but failing to penetrate.
The crystal didn't melt; it merely glowed a furious orange-red, dissipating the immense heat with terrifying efficiency. Behind his shield, Gando was already moving, layering another section of minefield to his right, forcing Daichi to veer left.
This became their deadly dance. Daichi, the unstoppable force, presses forward with blistering speed and fiery power. Gando, the immovable object, using the environment itself as his armour and his weapon, creating a labyrinth of instant death to slow the Uchiha's advance. Daichi launched a series of smaller, faster fireballs, a torrent of flaming projectiles meant to overwhelm.
Gando responded not with one large wall, but with a series of smaller, rapidly forming crystal plates that interlocked like a shield, each one clinking into place just in time to block a fireball with a shower of sparks and a hiss of superheated air.
'Durable,' Daichi thought, a flicker of frustration cutting through his battle calm.
'Annoyingly so. Fire isn't cutting through it. It's like trying to burn a diamond.'
His Katon was legendary, but it was a blunt instrument against this kind of precise, mineral-based defence. He needed something sharper. Something that could pierce.
He abandoned the hand signs for fire. Mid-stride, his chakra nature shifted. The air around him, once shimmering with heat haze, now crackled with ozone. Blue-white electricity began to arc around his hand, gathering with a high-pitched zzzzt.
Gando saw the change. His eyes widened slightly. Lightning was a different proposition altogether. He threw his hands forward, not to defend, but to attack.
"Bakuton: Kyū Sōhō!"
Two charged clay spheres shot from his sleeves, arcing through the air toward Daichi.
But Daichi was already moving. He didn't dodge. He met them. His lightning-wreathed hand shot out, not to block, but to tap each sphere with impossible speed. The lightning chakra, a perfect counter to the earth-based explosion release, didn't trigger the detonation; it disrupted it. The spheres fizzled, the chakra within them neutralised, and they fell to the ground as inert lumps of clay.
"Raiton: Gian!" (Lightning Release: False Darkness)
Daichi didn't pause. A bolt of solid lightning, shaped like a spear, screamed from his fingertips. It was fast—faster than any fireball.
Gando's reaction was pure instinct. He aborted his next mine-laying technique and threw his arms up.
"Bakuton: Suishō Tate!" (Explosion Release: Crystal Shield).
A thick, hexagonal crystal shield formed on his forearm. The lightning spear struck it with a sound like a thunderclap.
"KRAKOOM!"
This time, the crystal didn't just glow. It cracked. A spiderweb of fractures spread across its surface from the point of impact. The concussive force of the blow knocked Gando back several feet, his boots skidding through the ash. A jolt of numbing energy travelled up his arm. His eyes, for the first time, showed a flicker of genuine alarm. The Uchiha had adapted. Quickly.
The fight escalated. It was no longer a pursuer and a saboteur. It was a clash of titans. Gando, realising he could no longer simply evade, began to fight back offensively. He'd create a crystal spike from the ground beneath Daichi's feet.
Daichi would sense the chakra buildup and flicker aside, the spike shooting up into empty air. Gando would detonate a mine remotely as Daichi passed over it; Daichi would already be gone, the explosion merely scarring the earth where he had been a microsecond before.
Daichi would feint with a lightning jab, only to drop low and sweep a leg encased in crackling electricity. Gando would block with a hastily formed crystal greave, the impact shattering the mineral armour and sending shards flying. They were reading each other, predicting, adapting.
A thrown explosive sphere was met with a lightning-fast shuriken coated in Raiton chakra, puncturing it mid-air for a premature detonation. A wall of crystal was met with a concentrated lightning cutter that carved a molten groove through it, forcing Gando to duck.
"Raiton: Nagashi!"
It was a breathtaking display of high-level combat, a battle of wits as much as power. Gando's mind raced, calculating angles, chakra costs, and terrain. Daichi's Sharingan processed it all, his body moving with preternatural efficiency, his every action a step closer to ending the fight.
Then, during a momentary lull as they circled each other, Gando's senses expanded. He pushed out his chakra feelers, seeking the presence of his remaining subordinates, hoping to coordinate a combined attack.
What he felt was a void. A chilling silence where once there had been fifty vibrant, destructive chakra signatures. Now, there were only a handful, flickering weakly, being systematically extinguished by the relentless Konoha forces.
The reality of his situation crashed down upon him. His mission had failed. His corps was annihilated. He was alone, cornered by one of the most dangerous shinobi alive. There would be no retreat, no reinforcement. Despair curdled into a final, grim resolution. If he were to die here, on this foreign, scorched earth, he would not die alone. He would take the Uchiha Clan Head with him. He would give Iwa a victory even in his utter defeat.
A strange calm settled over him. The frantic calculations ceased. All that remained was a single, devastating equation.
He stopped retreating. He stopped his defensive, evasive tactics. He planted his feet wide, ignoring Daichi's crackling lightning hand. He brought his hands together in a final, complex sequence of seals—a ritual, not a technique.
"You fight well, Uchiha," Gando said, his voice raspy but steady. "But some things are worth more than victory."
Daichi's survival instincts, honed over decades of warfare, screamed a warning that was almost physical. The air grew heavy, thick with the scent of ozone and something else—something sharp, like the air before a volcanic eruption. The very chakra around Gando began to condense, to vibrate at a terrifying frequency.
Gando threw his head back and roared, pouring every last ounce of his life force, his chakra, his very being into his final act.
"BAKUTON: SHŌMETSŪ NO JINGAI!"(Explosion Release: Annihilation Crystal Garden!)
The ground around him didn't just crack. It bloomed. Not with flowers, but with death. A forest of colossal, jagged crimson crystals erupted from the earth in a hundred-foot radius. They weren't for defence. They weren't for trapping. They were conduits. Each one pulsed with a malevolent, unstable light, growing brighter and brighter, feeding on the caster's life, gathering energy for a single, cataclysmic detonation that would erase everything within its reach.
Daichi stared at the unfolding spectacle, the light of the pulsing crystals reflecting in his wide, shocked eyes. The sheer scale of the technique was apocalyptic. There was no outrunning it. No defending against it with a simple lightning cutter. The leader of the Explosion Corps had turned himself into the ultimate bomb, and the countdown had already begun.
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