…
The formation spread through the field with the practiced efficiency of shinobi who had done this in worse terrain.
Murakami watched them through the gaps in the collapsed trunk, reading their spacing, their angles, the way the three Kumo jonin pushed wide while the remaining three Iwa nin moved through the center.
The sensor among them was almost certainly one of the Kumo three, their positioning was too deliberate, always maintaining line of sight with each other while the Iwa nin pushed forward as the striking force.
Find the sensor. Blind them first. Everything else becomes easier.
He let them come another ten meters before he moved.
His palm hit the earth.
There were no hand seals or announcements.
The Mountain Embracing Technique cascaded through the ground in the same instant.
Not the formation-spanning eruption he'd used in the mountain pass, but a targeted application, three meters wide and directed at the center of the Iwa formation where two jonin were moving through a gap between boulders.
The earth between them surged upward.
It wasn't large enough to bury them, he didn't have the spiritual energy reserves for that scale right now, the reversed flow technique was still running and drawing against both reserves simultaneously.
But it didn't need to be large. It needed to be unexpected, and it was.
The nearer Iwa jonin threw himself sideways, clearing the rising formation by half a meter. The second wasn't as fast.
He managed to throw his upper body clear, but his lower half remained over the eruption.
The stone caught him beneath the hip.
His eyes widened as a hoarse scream tore from his throat as the impact shattered his hip bone and hurled him sideways.
His body crashed through the trunk of a young tree before striking the ground and tumbling across the forest floor, finally coming to rest in a broken heap, the pain knocking him unconscious.
The other five reacted immediately, chakra spiking as they reoriented but Murakami was already somewhere else.
He came around the right side of the boulder field at a low sprint, angling toward the Kumo flank where the sensor would be.
The three lightning-affinity signatures were already repositioning, the one on the far right pulling back slightly, putting the other two between herself and the direction the attack had come from.
Her.
The one pulling back was the sensor. Protecting herself instinctively.
He filed that away and kept moving. He couldn't afford to remain in one spot for too long, but at the same time, he didn't rush.
Every step was controlled, his chakra suppressed as much as possible.
Just then, he noticed a shift.
Not sound, but Intent.
His body, already in a state of heightened perception, reacted before his mind finished processing it.
Murakami turned his head slightly to catch a figure that was already there.
A Kumo jōnin emerged from the cover of the trees, tall and broad-shouldered, lightning chakra snapping around his fists as he drove forward.
He had found him and came in hard, his fist coated with crackling chakra.
No technique, just raw speed and impact force.
Murakami didn't try to match it.
He angled his body and let the first punch pass his shoulder, feeling the displaced air against his ear, then released the Shockwave Jutsu at point blank range into the man's exposed chest.
The primary burst hit him square before he could redirect his momentum and the secondary sweep dispersed outward in the same instant, catching the second Kumo jonin who had been closing from behind and disrupting her footing enough that her follow-up strike went wide.
The broad-shouldered man skidded back six meters, hit a boulder, and stayed against it.
Not dead. Winded and temporarily out of the exchange.
The second Kumo jonin recovered her footing faster than Murakami would have preferred, she was better than the first, her chakra already reforming into something deliberate as she ran through a short seal sequence.
"Lightning Release: False Darkness."
A spear of lightning erupted from her fingertip, straight and fast, and Murakami activated the Phantom Step.
The space he'd occupied emptied.
He reappeared two meters to her left, already pivoting, the staff swinging in a horizontal arc toward her ribs.
She was fast enough to get her arm in the way.
The impact hit her forearm instead of her side and she absorbed it better than he'd expected, stepped into the force rather than away from it, used the momentum to spin and bring her elbow around toward his jaw in the same motion.
He ducked under it, drove his shoulder into her chest to create separation, and pushed off hard to create distance before he slipped behind a tree and suppressed his presence.
Behind him, the remaining Iwa formation had changed.
The jōnin caught by the Mountain Embracing Technique was no longer part of the battle. Murakami could still sense his chakra, but it was unstable and weakened, the man reduced to little more than a wounded presence on the battlefield.
The others had adapted.
They had lost too many people too quickly to continue fighting as individuals.
The remaining shinobi tightened their formation, three chakra signatures moving with more caution than before.
They had stopped underestimating him.
Now they were trying to contain him.
They were adjusting.
He needed to escalate before they finished adjusting.
His eyes found the sensor again, still pulling back and keeping distance, her two Kumo colleagues now reduced to one.
He wasn't going to reach her through the formation.
He'd have to bring the formation down first.
The nearest Iwa jonin came in hard, both hands slamming the earth in front of him as he ran.
"Earth Release: Rock Dragon."
The technique tore upward from the ground in a continuous wave, a serpentine formation of compressed stone moving at speed with its jaws angled toward Murakami's legs.
He jumped it, took to the air, and felt the Kumo jonin he'd shoulder-checked already tracking his trajectory, she'd anticipated the jump, a kunai leaving her hand on a leading angle designed to catch him mid-arc.
He twisted, knocked it aside with the staff, and landed on a boulder to his right.
The Iwa jōnin whose leg had been destroyed was still there.
Murakami had already categorized him as neutralized.
A mistake.
The man had lost mobility, not intent.
Stone wrapped around his damaged leg, forming a crude support as he forced his body forward with Earth Release reinforcement.
His breathing was ragged, his chakra unstable, but his eyes remained focused.
He wasn't trying to win.
He was trying to take Murakami down with him.
This realization hit Murakami a fraction too late as the man's fist connected with his chest before he had fully registered the attack.
The impact drove the air from his lungs and sent him off the boulder sideways, he caught a branch on the way down, arrested the fall, swung himself back upright, and put distance between himself and the boulder before the Iwa jonin could follow up.
His chest burned.
He checked internally, no crack, the skin refining's increased resilience had distributed the impact, but he'd felt it.
That was a jonin's full output hitting him without the benefit of anticipation or angle.
He couldn't absorb another one of those cleanly.
The formation was closing.
All five remaining signatures including the sensor tightening the perimeter, cutting off the angles one by one with the unhurried certainty of people who had run this kind of encirclement before.
Murakami exhaled slowly and let his perception expand fully.
Kaito's signature was two hundred meters northeast and opening. Hideki's beside it. Still moving, still together.
He needed thirty more seconds. Maybe forty.
He looked at the terrain around him, the boulder field, the collapsed trunks, the shattered ridge where the earth had been torn apart in some earlier engagement.
His palm still carried residual earth chakra from the Mountain Embracing Technique.
The ground here was already fractured, the structural integrity compromised in half a dozen places.
That was useful.
He pressed his fingers to the nearest boulder.
Not the full technique. A controlled pulse of his chakra threads poured into it, smaller and more targeted, directed not at a single point but along the existing fault lines in the shattered terrain.
He wasn't trying to raise anything. He was trying to drop it.
The ground between the five approaching jonin cracked.
Not dramatically, but in a series of sharp snapping sounds as existing fractures widened, the compromised terrain giving way in a line that split the formation's path.
Two Iwa jonin stumbled as the ground shifted beneath them.
One of the Kumo jonin leapt clear, but landed short of her intended position, putting her out of line with the others.
Half a second of disorganization.
He used it.
Phantom Step activated as he came off the boulder, a single burst that ate the distance between him and the disorganized Kumo jonin before she'd finished landing.
The staff came around low, taking her legs as she touched down. She went down hard, rolled, and tried to come back up.
But he wasn't about to allow that as he swung the staff across her back as she rose and she stayed down.
Her life and death, unknown.
Four remaining.
The sensor was still pulling back. Sixty meters now, but she was alone.
The Iwa jonin with the destroyed leg was the closest, he was the one who'd hit him with the fist strike and he was already moving again, hands beginning another seal sequence.
"Earth Release: Earthquake Slam."
The ground beneath Murakami's feet heaved.
He launched himself off it before the full eruption developed, clearing the worst of the impact, but the shockwave caught his legs mid-air and sent him off-angle.
He hit a tree trunk instead of the branch he'd been aiming for, bounced off it, and came down in a controlled roll that still jarred his shoulder on landing.
Too close.
He was running hot and he knew it, the reversed flow technique was still drawing against both chakra and spiritual reserves simultaneously, and the sustained combat was consuming faster than he'd calculated.
He could feel the moon's luminescence dropping at the edge of his awareness, the threads running harder than they were designed to sustain indefinitely.
He had time, but not much.
The three remaining signatures, one Kumo, two Iwa, were coming in from three directions simultaneously, the encirclement completing as he'd known it eventually would.
He straightened, staff in hand, breathing measured.
No more displacement. No more hit and run.
He didn't have the reserves to keep relocating.
This was his last hand, and he played it.
His lips moved and the Song of Darkness went out in three directions at once, not the precision application he'd used on the isolated Iwa-nin at the start, but a wide broadcast, deliberately unfocused, cast across all three approaching signatures simultaneously.
It would hit all three with a fraction of the potency it had hit the single target, nowhere near enough to fully disorient a veteran jonin.
But that wasn't the point.
The point was the half-second of hesitation it produced in each of them as their senses registered something wrong.
In that half-second, Murakami moved.
Not toward any of them.
He went straight up, high and fast, clearing the canopy in two jumps and breaking into the open air above the treeline.
Below him, the three signatures reacted to the sudden vertical movement, the formation craning upward, the Kumo jonin already pulling lightning chakra together for a ranged technique.
He didn't give her time to complete it as he brought his palms together.
The impact of the clap was almost insignificant compared to what followed.
The earth beneath the battlefield trembled as the Mountain Embracing Technique activated, erupting through the ground, driven by everything remaining in his reserves.
The two completed threads burned with heat as spiritual energy flooded outward, abandoning precision for scale.
This wasn't an attack aimed at one person, it was a declaration that the battlefield itself was no longer stable.
The ground beneath the three jonin rose.
Not the controlled swell he'd produced on the Hokage Mountain.
Something rawer, the cascade running fast and hard through already-fractured terrain that had no structural resistance left.
The formation came up in a wave that covered thirty meters across, stone and earth surging upward simultaneously beneath all three of them.
The forest disappeared beneath a rising wall of earth. Trees snapped under the pressure, boulders rolled away from their foundations, and the battlefield they had been fighting on ceased to exist.
The Kumo jōnin reacted first.
The moment the earth shifted beneath her feet, lightning chakra exploded through her legs and she launched herself upward, barely clearing the rising mass as stone tore through the space she had occupied a heartbeat earlier.
She wasn't untouched.
The edge of the eruption caught her before she escaped, throwing her sideways through the air and sending her crashing through branches before she regained control.
The Iwa jōnin survived differently.
He didn't outrun the technique.
He understood it.
His connection to the earth gave him the slightest warning before the eruption fully formed. He forced his damaged body sideways with Earth Release reinforcement, sacrificing the injured leg's support completely to escape the center.
He cleared the worst of it by meters.
The rising stone still clipped his side, breaking his balance and sending him tumbling across the ground, but he survived.
When the earth finally settled, neither of them looked the same.
The battlefield had changed.
So had their assessment of Murakami.
While the had both survived the third and the rest who were unconscious on the battlefield didn't.
Even then, neither escaped unharmed.
The Kumo jonin landed hard, one arm hanging slightly lower than before, while the Iwa shinobi's already damaged leg screamed under the strain of forcing his injured body through the escape.
They survived.
But they didn't walk away untouched.
Neither moved immediately.
They had both been through enough to understand the danger of rushing in against an opponent who had already survived this long.
They were wounded, but they were still standing.
And so was he.
Murakami stood several meters away, one hand pressed against his side, the other gripping what remained of his staff.
His breathing was ragged.
Not the controlled breathing of combat, but the harsh intake of someone whose body was trying to recover faster than it physically could.
Every breath scraped against his lungs. Every movement carried the accumulated weight of the battle.
The glow beneath his skin was beginning to fade.
The two green threads that had carried him through the fight still pulsed faintly, but the overwhelming pressure they had produced earlier was gone.
The reversed chakra circulation was reaching its limit.
The Iwa shinobi with the damaged leg watched him carefully.
The boy looked exhausted with his chakra almost depleted.
His body was clearly approaching its limit, but his eyes were still the same.
Calm, focused and still measuring them.
The Kumo shinobi glanced at Murakami, then at the ruined battlefield behind him.
The bodies.
The shattered earth.
For several seconds, neither of them spoke.
They didn't need to. They had both reached the same conclusion.
This was not a normal genin.
A normal genin did not break through a formation of jonin-level shinobi.
A normal genin did not adapt after every exchange and force experienced fighters to change their approach.
A normal genin did not stand after taking everything this battlefield had thrown at him.
The Iwa shinobi's expression darkened. "If he survives..."
He didn't finish the sentence but the Kumo shinobi understood.
Her gaze remained fixed on Murakami.
The problem wasn't what he was now but what he would become.
The boy was still growing.
Leaving him alive meant facing something far worse in the future.
The Kumo shinobi's expression hardened. "He dies here."
Although he couldn't hear them over the distance, Murakami noticed the killing intent immediately.
They were preparing to execute him.
His fingers tightened around the now broken staff.
His body was exhausted, his reserves were nearly empty but his mind remained clear.
He had known from the beginning that this was the possibility.
The battlefield did not care about age.
It did not care about potential.
A threat was a threat.
The two shinobi prepared to move.
Then—
"Murakami!"
The voice cut through the forest.
Both enemies stopped.
The sound of multiple bodies moving through the trees followed immediately after.
Fast and organized.
"Konoha shinobi." The Kumo shinobi's expression changed first.
Not out of fear but in calculation.
The Iwa shinobi turned his head slightly, sensing the approaching chakra signatures.
More than one.
Through the gaps between the trees, figures appeared all forming green flak jackets and konoha headbands.
Reinforcements.
At the front was Hideki.
His expression changed the moment he saw Murakami standing there.
Relief came first.
Then anger.
Then something closer to disbelief as he looked over the battlefield.
The destruction.
The fallen enemies.
The state Murakami was in.
"You're unbelievable," Hideki muttered as he reached him.
Murakami opened his mouth to respond, but no words came.
The moment his body realized the danger had passed, the last thread of adrenaline holding him upright began to disappear.
His knees weakened.
The broken staff slipped slightly in his hand and the world tilted.
The Kumo and Iwa shinobi exchanged one final look.
They were injured and outnumbered.
The opportunity to eliminate him was gone.
But the conclusion remained the same.
This boy was dangerous.
They would remember him.
'Murakami…huh?'
The Kumo shinobi stepped back first.
The Iwa shinobi followed.
Neither needed to say anything.
The battle was over.
For now.
Murakami watched them disappear into the forest.
Only after they were gone did his body finally give in.
His knees hit the ground.
Hideki reached out to grab him before he fell completely.
"Murakami."
For once, there was no irritation in Hideki's voice.
Only concern.
Murakami looked up at him briefly.
"I'm fine."
Hideki stared at him.
"You look like you fought an entire army."
Murakami glanced at the battlefield behind him.
A pause.
"...It felt like it."
Then the exhaustion finally caught up and darkness took him.
---------_-
A/N: I've got to congratulate myself for bringing this arc to a successful and wonderful end....I dedicated the entirety of today to this and I managed it before the day came to an end.😭😭😭
This chapter alone is over 3000 words long... Can y'all imagine? Damn.
I really need a pat in the back.
See y'all when I'm done celebrating my birthday. If you wanna show some support, subscribe to my Patr@on. I'm already at chapter 34 inside Volume 2.