"Who's there?!"
"Show yourself! Or I'll turn this whole area to dust!"
Deidara screamed, his voice raw with fury. The Iwagakure's Shinobi flinched back instinctively.
"There's... someone else?" Kurotsuchi muttered, her brow furrowed in sudden understanding. She had misjudged the situation.
There was another Shinobi here, one who used explosives! That was who had destroyed the bridges!
"Still hiding, are you?" Without another word, Deidara plunged his hands into the pouches at his hips. He pulled out two lumps of clay, shaping them into bird-like forms and hurling them towards the opposite tree line.
"Katsu!" As Deidara formed the seal, the bird-bombs detonated violently amidst the foliage.
Boom!!!
The explosion sent a flock of birds scattering from the trees. A moment later, two figures emerged calmly from the forest.
"So it's you?" Deidara snarled, "Who the hell are you?! You dare destroy my clay bird!"
Deidara was incandescent with rage. Kurotsuchi and the other Iwagakure's Shinobi moved to surround the area, but the wide, fast-flowing river separated them from the newcomers, forcing a standoff across the water.
"Tch. That's what you get for acting without thinking." Takumi replied, his tone utterly dismissive, "That's no way to use explosives."
Initially, Deidara had just wanted to teach the interloper a lesson for destroying his ride and interrupting his fight.
But this was different. This stranger had the audacity to insult his explosions? This was a blasphemy against his art! An unforgivable sin!
"You bastard! How dare you look down on my art!" Deidara shrieked, "Do you have any idea who I am? I am the greatest explosion artist in the entire Shinobi World!"
"What? You?" Takumi's face was a mask of contempt, "Your 'explosion art' isn't even fit for a child's toy box."
The insult was a direct hit, striking at the very core of Deidara's being. It enraged him completely.
"Who is that guy...?" Kurotsuchi stared, stunned, "He dares to say that about Deidara's art..."
She knew Deidara was a fanatic, a man who lived and breathed for his explosions. It was his entire reason for being, the very thing that had gotten him exiled from the village.
She believed he valued his art more than his own life. And this person... was insulting it so casually?
"This guy... he's going to send Deidara over the edge." Kurotsuchi took an involuntary step back, already feeling the intense killing intent pouring from the blond bomber.
"You bastard! Insulting my art! I'll kill you for this!" Deidara's hands dove back into his pouches. The mouths on his palms bit off chunks of clay, spitting out a swarm of seventy or eighty skittering locust bombs.
"Die!" The insectoid bombs swarmed across the river, homing in on Takumi and Kurenai.
"Look out!" Kurenai reacted instantly, hurling two explosive tags that detonated mid-air, catching most of the swarm. But a dozen or so locusts slipped through the blast.
They were mere feet from Takumi when they suddenly stopped dead, suspended in the air as if caught in an invisible web.
Pop! Pop! Pop-pop-pop!
The locust bombs detonated one after another, but the explosions were pitifully small, mere whispers of sound, like firecrackers failing to ignite properly.
"This!?" Deidara gasped, "What happened!?"
The reaction was universal.
Kurenai, Kurotsuchi, every Iwagakure's Shinobi on the riverbank stared in disbelief. They could all sense the faint web of Chakra that had intercepted the bombs.
But how had it turned Deidara's creations into harmless duds? And why had they detonated on their own, outside of his control?
"You! What did you do?!" Deidara demanded, his voice a mixture of shock and fury. Kurotsuchi watched intently, desperate to understand.
"Nothing complicated." Takumi said calmly, "I just used my bombs to set yours off early."
"Don't lie to me!" Deidara spat, "My bombs aren't that weak!"
Takumi's brow furrowed slightly, "When you dismantle a bomb, you don't set it off, do you?"
It was an analogy he knew would be lost on Deidara. The only language he would understand was a superior demonstration of power.
Furious, Deidara's palms spat out fresh clay. It molded itself into two humanoid puppets on the ground, which he controlled with Chakra Threads.
Swish! Swish!
The puppets mimed a slashing motion, then froze. Deidara seemed to realize they couldn't cross the water.
Boom!!!
In a fit of pique, he detonated them where they stood.
"See?! That's the power of my art!" He yelled, gesturing at the dissipating smoke.
Kurenai and the Iwagakure's Shinobi looked suitably impressed by the blast. Takumi and Kurotsuchi, however, shared a look of deep disappointment.
"Deidara..." Kurotsuchi said quietly, "You only blew them up because you realized they were useless, didn't you?"
"Shut up! Or you're next!" Deidara's face was crimson. He was losing control. He needed a bigger statement.
C2 · Dragon!
A massive, serpentine clay dragon erupted from the ground, its form radiating immense, unstable energy. The very air seemed to tremble.
"Heh! Scared now, aren't you?!" Deidara crowed, "This is my…"
Boom!!!!
The dragon vanished. Not in a grand explosion, but in a puff of dust and a muffled thump, as if its very structure had been instantly and silently unraveled from within before it could even activate.
Deidara stood frozen, his mind refusing to process what his eyes had just seen. He'd been close enough this time to see it clearly… a near-invisible mesh of Chakra had enveloped his creation, and with a subtle vibration, snuffed its power out completely.
"How... how is this possible?!" He stammered, a cold sweat breaking out on his skin, "That was just Chakra! A tiny amount! It can't... it can't just nullify my work! What technique is this?!"
"I told you." Takumi said, his voice still infuriatingly calm, "Your art lacks refinement."
Compared to the decades of brutal, obsessive refinement Takumi had undergone in his simulated life, Deidara's bombs were amateurish.
Takumi could turn his sweat, his hair, the very air around him into a weapon. Anything his Chakra touched was a potential bomb, its yield perfectly controllable.
"I don't believe you!" Deidara screamed, his sanity fraying, "I don't believe any of this!"
Blinded by rage and wounded pride, he went for his ultimate trump card.
C4 · Garuda!
A colossal, humanoid replica of Deidara himself formed from clay, towering over the riverbank.
A collective gasp went up. Kurotsuchi's face lost all color, her body trembling, "No... Deidara, you maniac! Are you trying to kill us all?!"
The other Iwagakure's Shinobi recognized it too. This was one of the two techniques that had made Deidara an outcast.
The doll would disintegrate into countless microscopic bombs, a nano-scale cloud of death. Once inhaled, they would infiltrate every cell, every blood vessel.
A single thought from Deidara would cause the victim to explode from the inside out.
"We're dead!"
"This is why he was banished!"
"Run!"
Panic erupted. Shinobi scrambled over each other to flee. Kurenai and Kurotsuchi stood paralyzed, their legs turned to lead.
Deidara was ecstatic, caught in a frenzy of destructive glee, "It's useless! No one escapes Garuda! You will all die here!"
He raised his hands high, "KATSU!"
Nothing happened.
The giant clay figure stood inert.
Deidara's triumphant grin faltered. He leaped forward to investigate, his eyes widening in horror.
Garuda had activated. It had broken down into the microscopic bombs. But they weren't spreading. They were trapped, every last one of them, inside a perfect, shimmering sphere of Chakra that Takumi had woven around the form.
"Boom." Takumi said softly, making a faint fist.
The sphere flashed, the space within it churning violently for an instant as the microscopic bombs harmlessly consumed themselves. The Chakra membrane bulged slightly, then stabilized.
Deidara stared, his mind utterly broken. His second-greatest technique, neutralized with what seemed like a casual flick of chakra.
"Wh-what are you?" he whispered, his voice trembling.
"Nobody special. Just a Genin from Konoha."
The statement was so absurd it felt like a physical blow to Deidara, "No! Impossible! A Genin couldn't... your skill... it's impossible!"
Takumi merely shrugged. It was the truth, however unbelievable.
"Your technique... what is it? It's nothing like mine!" Deidara cried out, pounding a fist on the ground in frustration. He had one technique left, C0, the ultimate self-destruction, but it was unfinished.
And also, would even that be enough to faze this monster?
Seeing the genuine, if twisted, passion in the boy, Takumi felt a flicker of something akin to camaraderie. They were both devotees of the blast, after all.
"Your explosions are crude." Takumi explained, "All power, no finesse. Anyone can make a big bang. For example..."
He raised his right arm, pointing index finger extended, towards an empty field far in the distance.
Every eye followed his gesture. Kurotsuchi, Kurenai, Deidara... all watched, holding their breath.
Two seconds passed. Five.
Just as impatience began to set in...
Boom!!!!
The world tore apart. A fireball of pure annihilation blossomed in the distance, a sphere of incandescent fury that scorched the air.
The ground heaved, vomiting soil and rock into a crater hundreds of meters wide.
The silence that followed was heavier than any sound.
Remote detonation. No seals. No tools. Not even a hand seal. Just a thought, a point, and utter devastation. If he had pointed at them...
Several Iwagakure's Shinobi fainted on the spot. Others collapsed to their knees. Kurotsuchi's legs buckled, saved from falling only by sheer will.
Deidara looked like a man who had just seen his god proven false.
"Wh-what technique... is that...?" He stammered, "No medium... just... an explosion... of that scale..."
No one present had ever conceived of such a thing. This was the culmination of a Black-grade talent and a lifetime of single-minded devotion.
"Do you see now?" Takumi's voice was that of a master addressing a student, "Power alone is meaningless. True mastery lies in control."
"H-how?" Deidara begged, his earlier arrogance completely shattered, "How do you control it?"
His desire to kill had been replaced by an overwhelming need to understand, to learn from this demigod of demolition.
"Control... is the difficult part." Takumi said simply. He had spent years, risked everything, to achieve it, "But since you seem dedicated to the craft, I'll give you a demonstration. You, the young lady with the black hair and long legs. Pick up a stone."
Kurotsuchi looked around, realized she was the only one who fit the description, and blushed fiercely.
"Hurry up!" Deidara snapped, his focus entirely on Takumi.
Flustered, Kurotsuchi bent and picked up a stone roughly the size of her fist.
"Will this do?"
"Acceptable."
Takumi nodded. Under the rapt attention of hundreds, he slowly raised his hand. Faint, nearly imperceptible threads of Chakra, fine as spider silk, extended from his fingertips. They drifted lazily across the river and settled upon the stone in Kurotsuchi's palm.
He made a subtle, almost graceful movement with his fingers.
Crick-crackle-pop.
A series of tiny, precise vibrations ran through the stone. Kurotsuchi felt a faint tingle.
Then, the stone in her hand seemed to dissolve. It didn't shatter… it deconstructed, the fragments rearranging themselves in mid-air before settling back into her palm.
It was now carved into the shape of a perfect heart. And etched into its surface, in clean, elegant grooves, were two words:
[Love Kurotsuchi]
A silence so profound it felt physical fell over the riverbank.
"This is... impossible..."
"How...?"
"By the gods..."
"It's a miracle..."
"Divine skill..."
The whispers were filled with awe. The hundred-plus Shinobi, Kurenai, even Deidara, were struck dumb. Kurotsuchi stared at the stone heart in her hand, her face burning, her heart hammering against her ribs so hard she thought it might burst.
"You see?" Takumi said, lowering his hand as Kurenai stared at him as if he'd grown a second head, "That is control."
Across the river, Deidara had been utterly conquered. His own art, his life's work, seemed like the clumsy scribbling of an infant next to this masterpiece of precision. He was nothing. Less than nothing.
"Senpai!" Deidara dropped to his knees, pressing his forehead to the dirt in a deep, abject bow, "Please! Tell me your name!"
The gesture shocked everyone, but in their hearts, they echoed the sentiment. They had to know the name of this explosion deity.
Takumi did not speak. He simply raised his hand once more.
---
FOR EVERY 50 POWER STONES, I'LL UPLOAD ONE CHAPTER