"Secret Art — E = mc²."
The moment Hanzō spoke those words, the unease in Hiruzen Sarutobi's heart spiked to its absolute limit.
In the next instant, at the spot where Hanzō had stood seconds earlier, a red sphere bloomed into existence—its heat and shockwave erupting outward like a newborn sun.
Chiyo and the other puppet masters, who were positioned in the very rear due to their weakness in close combat, saw it with perfect clarity:
A crimson ball rising from Konoha's defensive line, swelling and intensifying.
As it expanded, the surrounding air warped into massive, visible heatwaves.
A searing white light burst outward.
The allied Suna–Ame forces facing it head-on were forced to stop, raising their arms to shield their eyes.
Then came the tremor.
Even though they were nearly a kilometer away, Chiyo and the others felt the ground shudder violently beneath their feet.
The red sphere continued growing.
A wall of dust lifted from the earth, swirling into a howling sandstorm racing across the battlefield.
Far ahead, the dozens-meter-tall earthen ramparts that Konoha had raised with Earth Release began to crumble before the sphere even touched them—falling apart into clods of dirt that were immediately ground into gravel by the twisted air.
At the epicenter, everything—absolutely everything—was vaporized into gas in an instant.
Hundreds of shinobi didn't even register pain.
They did not scream.
They simply vanished from existence.
The expanding blast wave blasted Konoha's frontline shinobi skyward.
As the wave spread, their clothes, skin, and hair ignited.
Dozens of ninja burned like living torches—only to be swallowed a moment later by the sandstorm sweeping in behind the heat.
From Chiyo's vantage point, she saw:
A red sun rising, Konoha shinobi near the center twisting like smoke, dissipating into nothing.
While those at the edges caught fire,
turned pitch black, and were devoured by the rolling sand.
At that same moment, the wall of sandstorm—still carrying terrifying force—came roaring toward them.
A tiny black speck was sprinting ahead of it with desperate speed.
So fast, in fact, that the distance between him and the sandstorm stayed nearly constant.
Chiyo's mind flashed white.
Adrenaline flooded her body.
Her chakra flared so violently she accidentally blasted two Suna shinobi away from her.
Then she screamed—the loudest she had ever screamed in her life:
"GET DOWN!!"
Chiyo had faced death countless times, but this—this was different.
It felt as if the Shinigami itself was watching her from ahead.
Not approaching.
Not threatening.
Simply observing—pressing a burning palm to her cheek, silently asking:
"Well?"
"What do you think of my handiwork?"
The Suna–Ame alliance, already shaken dumb, completely snapped.
Many stared in horror, petrified, their weapons slipping unnoticed from numb fingers.
"W-Wait… this… this has to be a dream! Right?! AH—!"
Those with stronger mental fortitude reacted first, tackling the frozen ones to the ground.
"DOWN! DON'T LOOK UP!"
Thousands of soldiers instantly dropped to the earth like a field of caterpillars.
A few dozen seconds later, a black blur streaked past their position.
Seconds after that, the shockwave slammed into them.
A wall of sand swallowed their vision, and a crushing weight—like several bodies forcing them into the ground—pressed down on their backs.
A few with weaker constitutions began coughing blood under the pressure.
...
The crimson sphere finally reached its limit.
It ceased emitting white light, crumbling—shedding burning fragments that fell like molten debris.
The battlefield was completely shrouded in dust.
The sandstorm began to slow.
The man fleeing it—Hanzō—felt the distance stretching between them and the pressure decreasing.
He gradually slowed, eventually dropping to all fours and sliding across the ground on momentum alone.
He stabbed his scythe into the earth, carving a long scar across it, slowing himself sharply until he came to a stop.
Raising a hand to shield his eyes, he squinted at the wall of dust rolling toward him.
Like the allied shinobi, he too felt the pressure—but far less so.
His monstrous physical resilience spared him from most of it.
Even so, he was in terrible shape—especially mentally.
Running shoulder-to-shoulder with death itself had pushed him past 120% of his limits, forcing out speeds beyond anything he had ever achieved.
"Hah… hah… What went wrong this time…?
Even doubling the number shouldn't cause this.
Did the seals break at the same frequency and amplify each other?"
The hurricane winds roaring past his ears couldn't silence the calculations in his mind.
"Last time, twenty thousand explosion tags didn't create anything like this.
Even doubling it shouldn't change the entire nature of the blast… so why…?"
The truth was simple in hindsight—like how an apple falling revealed gravity.
No one had ever thought to seal an explosive tag inside another explosive tag to stack the energy.
Hanzō was the first to attempt it.
Just as the discovery of gravity unlocked the laws of motion and eventually sent humankind to the moon, Hanzō's nested explosion seals followed a similar principle:
Quantitative change triggers qualitative change.
When enormous energy is forced into a tiny space, the space can no longer contain it.
Explosion occurs.
But if the energy is sealed again and again, unable to escape…
The energy is compressed, concentrated—forced into a new form.
The sealing arrays acted like a cage, locking the blast in place for a split second.
Two hundred explosive cores were confined inside one storage seal.
That instant of confinement triggered a change in the nature of the energy:
A space the size of a single explosive tag
held the destructive power of two hundred town-level blasts.
In that microscopic moment, space itself could not withstand the energy.
Black cracks tore through the air—space rupturing.
Then, under the distortion of the rupture, the sealed zone collapsed into a point of impossible density, forming a temporary vacuum.
A strange new force manifested.
The black fissures vanished.
What remained was a single compressed black dot.
Then—
The dot expanded at unimaginable speed,
turning red, releasing heat of several thousand degrees,
and unleashing a shockwave of annihilation
before rapidly collapsing.
All of this happened in less than one-thousandth of a second.
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150 Powerstones - Bonus Chap
300 Powerstones - Bonus Chap
500 Powerstones - Bonus Chap
700 Powerstones - Bonus Chap
1000 Powerstones - Bonus Chap