"Huff… huff…"
Standing on a relatively safe giant boulder in the distance, Orochimaru gasped heavily. The wound through his left shoulder began bleeding again from the strain of forming hand seals.
Yet his golden serpent eyes remained fixed on the area buried under rock and flood, attempting to sense any trace of movement within.
"Did it work…?"
Manda's colossal body suddenly burst up through the rubble, scattering dust into the air. Mud and shattered stone clung to half its head and the severed stump of its tail, making it appear utterly wretched.
Its feral vertical pupils swept the ruins shrouded in dust, searching for the figure it loathed with all its being.
"Manda!"
At that moment, Orochimaru suddenly shouted, his voice sharp with unprecedented urgency and alarm. "Below you!"
A deadly sense of danger washed over Manda like a bucket of ice water. Its enormous head jerked downward, pupils contracting instantly.
From beneath the seemingly quiet rubble, an unbearable wave of searing heat erupted without warning!
Countless rocks melted at once into crimson liquid, as if thrown into a blazing furnace!
Then—
[Boom!!!]
A blazing torrent of pure molten lava, over five meters in diameter, erupted from beneath Manda like the fury of a volcano awakened after countless years, tearing through the earth in a pillar of destruction!
"Hsss!!!"
Manda hissed in shock and fury, its massive body reacting with impossible agility driven by survival instinct, twisting violently like a startled giant python.
It narrowly avoided the core of the lava torrent's impact—barely.
However, the extreme heat at the torrent's edges, hot enough to melt gold and iron alike, lashed against its underbelly like invisible whips of fire.
[Zzzzz—]
The sickening sound of searing filled the air as the scales along Manda's belly blackened, warped, and split open under the scorching heat.
A thick stench of charred flesh spread through the air.
Though it hadn't been a direct hit, the burning agony brought by that extreme heat was no less than the pain of the severed tail from before!
Manda's vertical pupils filled with hideous blood veins from pain and fury.
The madness in its eyes was nearly overflowing.
The agony completely awakened Manda's ferocity. It suddenly opened its colossal jaws—wide enough to swallow a house—and from the special openings near the roots of its two massive fangs, it spewed out a stream of viscous, ink-dark green gas.
The poisonous vapor surged like a living flood of toxic mist, instantly blanketing an area hundreds of meters wide below.
Where the miasma passed, even the strange mosses and fungi unique to Ryūchi Cave—plants that could normally survive within its poisonous air—withered visibly at once.
Even more horrifying, the solid rock surfaces touched by the poison began to emit a terrifying sizzling sound.
They corroded rapidly, pitted with countless holes.
As if drenched in the strongest acid.
Even Orochimaru, standing on a distant boulder, turned pale. He could clearly feel his skin pricking and burning as if pierced by needles, his breathing growing strained.
"Damn it! Manda! You fool!"
Startled and enraged, Orochimaru quickly pulled a specially made purple pill from his ninja pouch and shoved it into his mouth, shouting darkly toward Manda, "Didn't I already tell you—warn me before you use that move! Do you plan to kill me along with him?!"
As the medicine dissolved, the numbing, corrosive sensation finally eased somewhat, though the burning pain across his skin remained.
"Hmph! I'm risking my life helping you kill the enemy, and you're still whining!"
Manda's enormous head lowered, its vertical pupils filled with impatience and savagery. "Say one more word, and I'll leave you here to face that lava monster yourself!"
Its patience with Orochimaru had clearly reached its limit.
Yet just as Manda's words fell, a new change occurred.
Across the battlefield scorched with magma and poison miasma, gigantic trees with impossibly thick trunks suddenly broke through the ground at unnatural speed.
They ignored the venomous fumes, ignored the searing heat—their roots dug deep into the ancient earth veins of Ryūchi Cave as their trunks surged upward and expanded wildly.
In the blink of an eye, a dense, primal forest filled with surging vitality rose abruptly upon the battlefield of death.
Each towering tree reached a height of nearly 100 meters, its branches and leaves flourishing—some even higher than Manda's lifted head.
"Wh… what?!" For the first time, disbelief and shock appeared in Manda's bloodshot vertical pupils.
Even more astonishing, countless massive blossoms of radiant color and strange luminescence bloomed instantly upon those thick branches.
The petals unfurled, releasing torrents of visible pollen.
The cloud of pollen swept directly toward the green poison gas Manda had unleashed.
[Hiss—]
The poison and pollen clashed midair, dissolving each other with a violent sizzling sound, like cold water poured into boiling oil.
"...Wood Release?!"
An expression of pure shock and terror surfaced on Manda's rough serpentine face, disturbingly humanlike.
"Orochimaru! Why didn't you tell me this intelligence before?!"
Manda roared furiously.
The next instant, the countless giant trees that had erupted from the earth began to creak and groan, as if grasped by an invisible pair of colossal hands.
Their thick trunks and gnarled branches twisted and intertwined wildly, merging together until a gigantic wooden humanoid—several times larger than Manda—stood towering before Manda and Orochimaru.
The wooden giant slowly lowered its head. Two massive wooden spheres embedded in its eye sockets suddenly snapped open.
Those eyes, devoid of emotion, instantly locked onto Manda below and Orochimaru upon the distant boulder.
Before Manda could even react, the wooden giant raised its enormous fist, woven from dozens of interlaced trees.
There were no ornate techniques—only pure, unrestrained power.
The fist tore through the air, shrieking like a falling meteor, descending upon Manda's massive head at a speed beyond sight!
[Boom!!!]
A dull, heart-stopping impact resounded—like heaven and earth collapsing. Manda's enormous face, covered in thick scales, was crushed inward on contact, deforming visibly like a melon struck by a siege hammer.
The scales on its face shattered piece by piece; blood and flesh burst forth.
A massive venomous fang, taller than a man, snapped off and spun through the air before embedding deep into a distant rock wall.
"Hsssaaang—!!!"
The indescribable agony made Manda emit a scream more wretched than any beast's howl—filled with pain, fear, and utter disbelief.
Under the overwhelming might of that heaven-shattering wooden fist, Manda's colossal head was mercilessly smashed into the shattered ground below. Its massive body was dragged backward by the force, rolling violently as it plowed a terrifying trench several meters deep across the earth.
A storm of dust surged upward like a tsunami reaching the heavens.
Standing atop the giant boulder, Orochimaru was sent flying by the cataclysmic impact—his body tossed away like a leaf in a hurricane, caught in the violent shockwave.
He tumbled through the air in disarray, barely managing to regain balance before crashing down upon another collapsing boulder. A trickle of blood spilled from the corner of his mouth.
Yet the Wooden Giant's assault was far from over.
At the very moment Manda's head was driven into the ground and it struggled in pain to lift itself—
From the massive right arm of the wooden titan, near the shoulder, great surges of viscous crimson magma began to well up.
Like a living organism, the molten flow wrapped swiftly down the giant's wooden arm, entwining along its surface of gnarled trunks.
As the searing magma met the life-rich wood, an intense burning sound erupted—the wooden texture blackened and carbonized at a speed visible to the naked eye.
And just before the entire arm was consumed by flame—
That right arm, now fully engulfed in molten lava and blazing fire, came crashing down toward the still-dazed, pain-ridden Manda!
In the corner of Manda's bloodshot pupils, that titanic molten fist expanded rapidly, filling its vision completely.
Its eyes were finally overtaken by endless terror and despair.
"No—!!!"
[Rumble!!!]
A detonation ten times more powerful than all previous explosions combined shook the entirety of Ryūchi Cave. Blinding crimson light illuminated nearly every shadowed crevice, and the furious shockwave swept outward in an instant.
The remaining rock walls, the towering trees, even the lingering dust in the air—all were pulverized and blown apart by the force.
At the epicenter of the impact, Manda's enormous head was vaporized and annihilated under the unimaginable power and scorching heat.
A vast section of its neck and upper body was obliterated along with it, leaving behind nothing but a bottomless crater whose edges streamed with dark-red magma and blazed with roaring fire.
The air was thick with the stench of scorched flesh and sulfur.
Manda—
Dead.