Chapter 23: Neural Reaction Speed
The campfire crackled softly, sending up sparks that flared for a moment before vanishing into the darkness of the night.
Izumo leaned against the support pole of his tent, his fingertips brushing along the cold, hard edge of his kunai as his brows furrowed in deep thought.
"My fighting style, my ninjutsu tendencies, even my tactic of using Water Release to restrain enemies… Iwagakure seems to have completely figured it all out."
His heart sank. In the world of shinobi, leaked information was no different from a deadly weakness laid bare.
"How do I stop my combat data from leaking like this?"
He closed his eyes, and a pale blue panel spread across his vision. The list of his skills appeared clearly before him:
[Basic Taijutsu: Expert (351/1000)]
[Body Flicker Technique: Beginner (93/100)]
[Substitution Technique: Expert (121/1000)]
"Ninja are, by nature, high-offense and low-defense existences. Without absolute defense, the only way to gain the upper hand is through speed and reaction."
Izumo's train of thought gradually became clear and steady.
"In the world of martial arts, there's no such thing as an impenetrable defense. There's only speed that can't be surpassed."
More than half of the strongest shinobi in history were speed-oriented fighters. The Fourth Raikage relied on Lightning Release to boost his movement and dominate the battlefield, while Minato Namikaze earned the title of the "Yellow Flash" through the Flying Thunder God Technique.
At the same time, speed-type ninja were never afraid of being surrounded. As long as their opponents were slower than them, almost all enemies could be eliminated in an instant.
Aside from those endgame-level monsters who crushed everything through sheer, unreasonable power—like Madara Uchiha and Hashirama Senju—most peak-level combatants treated speed as their core, or at the very least, something that could never be allowed to become a weakness.
"I don't have a Kekkei Genkai. I don't have any high-level Dōjutsu either. All I can do is train my abilities to their absolute limits."
Izumo made his decision.
"Prioritize improving Basic Taijutsu and the Body Flicker Technique. Taijutsu is about precise control over the body, while the Body Flicker Technique determines burst speed. The two of them complement each other perfectly."
Before dawn broke, Izumo slung his ninja pack over his shoulder and headed toward the valley behind the camp.
The area was filled with scattered boulders and towering trees, making it an ideal training ground. Quite a few Konoha ninja who had free time were already there, running through their own drills.
He lowered his hips into a solid stance and threw his first straight punch, following the principles of expert-level taijutsu.
The tip of his fist sliced through the air, producing a faint, whistling sound.
Again.
And again.
He watched the panel flicker slightly as the proficiency rose:
[Basic Taijutsu: Expert (352/1000)]
"As long as I don't drop dead from exhaustion, I'll keep training until I die!" Izumo muttered to himself, forcing a grin. "Compared to people who get stuck at level caps, I'm really lucky!"
He quickly adjusted his posture, fed a thread of chakra into the tips of his knuckles, and struck again.
He deliberately practiced side kicks on uneven piles of rocks, demanding that every kick land precisely on a marked spot on a tree while maintaining his balance.
He also made sudden turns while sprinting, using the Body Flicker Technique to dodge imaginary "traps" he set up for himself.
At first, when practicing side kicks on the rocks, Izumo constantly lost his balance. His ankles turned red and raw from being scraped, and he nearly fell more than once.
Training sudden direction changes with the Body Flicker Technique was even worse.
Sometimes he slammed straight into tree trunks because his chakra burst unevenly. Other times, he lost his footing and tumbled off the rocks after changing direction too abruptly.
"The key to the Body Flicker Technique isn't 'speed.' It's 'stability' and 'flexibility.'"
Izumo sat down on a boulder. As his proficiency continued to rise, understanding flowed endlessly through his mind.
"A simple straight-line charge is easy to predict. Only when you can change direction freely at high speed can you truly seize the advantage."
He stood back up, took a deep breath, and evenly gathered chakra into both legs.
This time, he didn't rush to dash forward.
Instead, he practiced quick, small-scale lateral movements on the spot, feeling the rhythm of chakra flowing across the soles of his feet.
Once his body adapted to that rhythm, he suddenly unleashed his strength.
The Body Flicker Technique activated, and his shadow shot forward like a ghost toward a tree ten meters away.
Just before colliding with it, the chakra in his legs abruptly shifted direction.
His body slid sideways at an impossible angle.
As he avoided the tree, he threw a side punch that landed cleanly on the mark carved into the trunk.
The panel in his vision flickered.
[Body Flicker Technique: Beginner (99/100) → Expert (1/1000)]
A strange, warm current swept through his entire body.
Unlike the raw physical reinforcement he felt when his taijutsu broke through, this change was concentrated somewhere else entirely—
Izumo's eyes flew open.
He could clearly trace the path of the tiny sparks drifting near the campfire. He could even see each blade of grass clinging to the sole of a ninja's sandal as someone walked in the distance.
He raised his hand and snatched a flying insect out of the air.
The sensation at his fingertips was unbelievably vivid, and all of it happened in the blink of an eye.
"This… did my dynamic strength and neural reaction speed increase?" Izumo's heart trembled.
High-speed movement demanded faster neural signal transmission to maintain balance and control. Through long-term training, the nervous system itself was naturally honed.
And now, reaching the expert level had pushed Izumo's nervous system even further in that very aspect.
When it came to neural reaction speed, it could be said to be the core indicator of a ninja's combat ability.
Its strength or weakness directly decided life or death in battle.
If someone's reaction speed was too slow while their movement speed was too fast, then in a real fight, there was a high chance they would deliver their own body straight into an enemy's blade.
Yet there were very few ways to improve in this field.
In the shinobi world, only Lightning Release was known to directly stimulate neural activity, or Kekkei Genkai like the Sharingan and Byakugan, which indirectly enhanced reaction efficiency through superior visual processing.
Even so, the gap in reaction speed between different levels of ninja was enormous.
It was said that Minato Namikaze's raw reaction speed could reach 44.6326276 nanoseconds.
That meant Minato's neural reflexes were so fast they pierced through the limits of conventional physical perception.
For example, the Fourth Raikage's top speed could reach "near the speed of light in Lightning Release Chakra Mode."
But compared to Minato's reaction speed, the Raikage's charge would look like it was moving in slow motion.
Minato could make decisions, form hand seals, or activate the Flying Thunder God Technique at the very instant the Raikage's fist was about to touch him—or even in less time than that—allowing him to evade the attack with ease.
It was precisely because his reaction speed so far surpassed that of normal humans that he was able to stand at the very top as the fastest shinobi in the world.
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