The explosion detonated instantly, right before my eyes. In that microsecond as the searing flash scorched my retinas, I moved on pure instinct. My reflexes took over, wrenching my torso to the right with everything I had to evade a direct impact.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!"
The pain was beyond description, an all-consuming tide that my consciousness simply couldn't weather. The world flickered out. My eyes rolled back, and I plummeted into a cold, bottomless void. Yet that moment of oblivion lasted only milliseconds; the same hellish agony, now sharpened to a jagged edge, hauled me violently back into reality.
"I can't feel my arm..." was the first coherent thought to surface.
My heart hammered against the base of my throat. Was it gone?
Had I lost the limb?
Damn it!
No!
I forced my vision to focus, straining to look askance. The arm was still there, but the sight of it turned my face ashen and made my teeth grind until they threatened to crack.
From the shoulder joint down to the elbow, the skin was simply gone—sheared away by the shockwave along with the upper layers of flesh. I stared at the bared, tattered fibers of muscle. As my gaze drifted down to the forearm, a wave of nausea rose in my throat.
Beneath the shredded, blood-soaked remnants of my protector, the muscles had been literally wrung and twisted by the monstrous impulse, like a wet towel. What little skin remained had turned into a crimson, weeping mess of ichor. Before my very eyes, the limb continued to swell, bloating into a deathly, bruised purple-black. Capillaries were bursting internally, transforming the appendage into a heavy, alien hunk of meat.
I tried to flex my fingers. Nothing. Only a dull, muffled echo resonated somewhere deep in my mind. The nerves were either incinerated or had simply shuttered from the shock, leaving nothing behind but a ringing silence.
"Kotetsu!" Tsubaki's voice reached me as if through a thick layer of water.
"Aah—" I spat out a thick glob of blood. The metallic tang of iron filled my mouth. I lifted my head. The Iwa shinobi was clawing his way out of a dust cloud, gasping for air. He had been caught in his own blast, but he was still upright. His left glove was torn away and his face was masked in gore, but his eyes burned with a manic desperation to finish what he had started.
"Still breathing?" he rasped, spitting out a shattered tooth. "Well, that won't last long."
I rose slowly, clutching the mangled arm against my stomach. The pain throbbed in perfect sync with my heartbeat, veiling my vision in a red haze.
My left hand still gripped the kunai. The leg weights felt like leaden anchors, but I knew: if I fell now, neither I nor Tsubaki would be leaving this place alive.
"Tsubaki..."
My voice was low, but steady. I felt my mind trying to slip back into that cold void, but I clung to the remnants of my self-control like a drowning man to a piece of driftwood. My right arm hung like a heavy, useless sack. Every heartbeat detonated within it like a supernova, and I could feel the damaged chakra pathways in my forearm pulsing with venom.
The Iwa shinobi took a staggering step forward; the blast had clearly taken its toll on him too. My left hand—the only one that still obeyed—snapped upward. My fingers were stiff with adrenaline, but muscle memory remained flawless. I shifted the kunai into a reverse grip.
"One of us dies here—and it won't be me!"
I spat, along with another mouthful of dark, viscous blood. The words were a struggle, my jaw barely functioning, but the signal was sent. I felt Tsubaki behind me.
I violently wrenched the last of my chakra toward me. It was physically agonizing; the scorched meridians in my shoulder flared with a sting as if molten lead had been poured into an open wound.
Denied its usual path through the right arm, the chakra hit the dead end of the severed channels and surged like an uncontrollable torrent into my left. The forearm shook, veins bulging under the sheer pressure of the flow.
"You... you're dying here," the enemy growled, fumbling an explosive tag from his pouch. His fingers were slick with dust and blood, barely able to hold the paper.
The world slowed to a crawl. I could see every bead of blood flying from his mangled face; I could hear the whistle of the wind through the canopy.
The weights will slow me down, the thought flashed like lightning. A second's delay meant death. No time to fumble with buckles. I flooded them with chakra until they simply shattered and fell away.
In the next heartbeat, I launched.
The burst was so powerful the earth cracked beneath my feet, kicking up a shroud of dust. The Iwa-nin barely managed to raise the hand holding the tag, but his reaction, dulled by concussion, was hopelessly late.
My right arm swung uselessly with every movement, a heavy, crimson weight causing excruciating pain, but I used that momentum. At the final moment before impact, I carved a sharp arc, forcing him to shift his aim, and dropped so low my shoulder nearly brushed the soil.
"Die!" he bellowed, thrusting the tag forward.
At that exact moment, Tsubaki's kunai whistled past my back, pinning his hand and the tag to a nearby tree trunk. An explosion roared to the side, showering us in nothing but heat and splinters.
The path was clear. My left arm, overflowing with the jagged sting of "wind" chakra, lunged forward. I didn't just strike with the blade; I struck with every ounce of fury and pain I had gathered in those minutes.
"Take this!"
I drove the kunai deep under his chin, pouring the full inertia of my desperate sprint into the blow. The resistance of flesh, the crunch of bone—and then, silence. We both collapsed to the ground. He, forever; I, because my strength had finally reached its limit.
The earth was cold. I lay there staring up at the gray sky, listening to the frantic thudding of my heart. My right arm wasn't just throbbing anymore—it was incinerating in a furnace of hellfire, and I felt my consciousness slowly but surely drifting into the dark.
I won't black out... That thought was the only thing keeping me afloat. I forced myself to concentrate my chakra, my will gnawing at every drop of energy left in my marrow.
Hah...
Hah...
Hah...
My breath came in ragged, whistling gasps.
My heart drummed in my ears, drowning out the world. I realized then that an absolute silence had fallen. Was I deafened? Or had my brain simply stopped processing sound due to the shock?
I slowly turned my head toward where my right arm should be. At first, I saw only a blurred, bloody smear. But then...
A green light.