CHAPTER 137: BLAZING SUN
"Do you want to dance?"
Ragnar's words hung in the scorched, rain-steamed air, a direct challenge to the entire army. His eyes held a terrifying clarity, a complete absence of fear that was more unnerving than any battle cry.
After he spoke, a profound silence gripped the battlefield for a single, held breath. Hundreds of Iwa and Suna genin stared, their initial bravado replaced by a dawning, icy shock. They looked at the lone figure standing amidst the broken bodies of their comrades. Who was this? Why did the aura of one person feel like a tidal wave crashing against them? He wore a genin's forehead protector, but this… this was no genin.
The Suna boy in his grip gagged, his face purpling, his whole body shuddering with primal terror. Ragnar watched the light fade from his eyes for a second, then closed his fist. A sickening crack echoed, and he let the lifeless body slump to the mud.
"Come, then. All of you."
He swept his gaze across the seething mass of enemies, his expression one of pure, disdainful arrogance. It was the look of a predator surveying a herd.
"HOW DARE HE?!"
"LOOK AT HIM!"
"KILL HIM! USE NINJUTSU! ALL TOGETHER!"
The insult, the casual murder, shattered their paralysis. Fury, hot and mindless, replaced fear. They were an army. They would crush this arrogant fool with sheer, overwhelming force.
"Only the weak huddle together for warmth," Ragnar said, his voice carrying effortlessly over the growing tumult. He crossed his arms, a picture of utter contempt. "They seek comfort in numbers for their fragile spirits. But in the face of what is absolute… your numbers are meaningless."
His presence seemed to expand, a psychic pressure that made the enemy front line instinctively take a half-step back. He wasn't a boy; he was a cliff face.
"FIRE RELEASE: FLAME BULLET!"
"FIRE RELEASE: FLAMING SHOT!"
"FIRE RELEASE: GREAT FIREBALL TECHNIQUE!"
"FIRE RELEASE—!"
The air itself screamed as dozens, then over a hundred Iwa and Suna genin in the front ranks unleashed their fire-nature ninjutsu simultaneously. It wasn't coordinated; it was a volcanic eruption of rage. Individual jets of flame, fireballs small and large, merged and fed into one another, creating a rolling, roaring wall of orange and crimson death. The heatwave hit like a physical blow, instantly baking the mud beneath their feet into cracked clay. The endless rain sizzled into steam before it could touch the inferno.
But they weren't done. As the first rank finished their seals and crouched low, a second rank surged forward. Dozens more hands flew through seals.
"WIND RELEASE: GREAT BREAKTHROUGH!"
"WIND RELEASE: VACUUM SLASH!"
"WIND RELEASE: WIND-FIRE BOMB!"
WHOOOOOOSH!
A dozen gale-force winds, fueled by chakra, converged into a single, thunderous typhoon. It slammed into the burgeoning wall of fire.
Wind fed fire.
The result was cataclysmic. The fire didn't just grow; it exploded. The combined elemental fury expanded horizontally and vertically, becoming a raging, hundred-foot-tall tsunami of flame that roared toward Ragnar, devouring the distance between them. It lit up the gloom-choked battlefield with the light of an artificial hell, painting the low clouds a bloody orange. The power was staggering, easily surpassing A-rank, brushing against the threshold of S-rank destruction.
Even the chunin skirmishing on the flanks broke apart, scattering backward to avoid the backwash of heat and concussive force. No jonin would willingly stand in the path of this.
In the Konoha lines, despair washed over the genin. It was too late. It was over.
"What a waste…" someone murmured.
Senju Nawaki stared, his earlier frustration boiling into impotent rage. "You idiot! Why did you have to go so far out?!" He slammed a fist into his own thigh.
Namikaze Minato's analytical mind shut down, replaced by a hollow feeling. He had just witnessed Ragnar's breathtaking, impossible taijutsu prowess, a display that rekindled his own competitive fire. To see it extinguished like this, in such a stupid, overwhelming deluge… it felt wrong. Unjust.
The wall of flame, now a churning mountain of fire, reached Ragnar. The heat was enough to blister skin at fifty yards. It blotted out the sky above him, a fiery maw about to close.
Ragnar, standing directly in its path, finally uncrossed his arms.
He looked at the retreating Konoha forces, a flicker of something that might have been pity or scorn in his eyes. Then he looked back at the incoming annihilation.
A faint, almost imperceptible smirk touched his lips.
Did they really think this could touch him?
He brought his hands together in a single, sharp clap. It wasn't a proper hand seal. It was a statement. A starting pistol.
Then he stood still, waiting.
"What is he doing?"
"Is he trying to form a counter-jutsu?"
"That's a thousand-man combined assault! S-rank power! You can't counter that!"
Every eye on the battlefield, friend and foe, was glued to him. His calm was the most terrifying thing they had ever witnessed.
"FIRE RELEASE."
His voice, when it came, wasn't a shout. It was a declaration that cut through the roar of the approaching inferno like a scalpel.
"GREAT FLAME ANNIHILATION: EMPEROR OF FLAMES!"
BOOM.
The ground at Ragnar's feet didn't crack. It transmuted. Circles of golden fire erupted, spreading outward in concentric waves with terrifying speed. In a heartbeat, the earth for hundreds of meters around him was no longer mud and rock—it was a swirling, liquid sea of golden-white flame. The temperature on the battlefield didn't just rise; it skyrocketed. The air became a furnace. Shinobi gasped, their mouths and lungs burning with each breath. The very ground was being consumed.
Then the sea of fire spiraled upward, a colossal vortex of incandescent power, converging above Ragnar's head.
He raised his right hand, palm open to the sky.
And there, coalescing from the vortex, it formed.
A fireball. But to call it a fireball was to call the ocean a puddle. It was a miniature sun.
Hundreds of feet in diameter, it hovered above his palm, a sphere of pure, white-gold annihilation. Its light was blinding, bleaching the color from the world, casting stark, long shadows behind every rock and shinobi. The rain ceased to exist within a hundred-yard radius, vaporized instantly. The very air crackled and popped.
The battlefield fell into a dead, awestruck silence. The roaring of the enemy's combined jutsu seemed suddenly small, pathetic.
Ragnar looked from the man-made sun in the sky above him to the wall of flame rushing toward him. His expression was one of utter boredom.
"Emperor of Flames."
He made a casual, underhand tossing motion with his raised hand.
The miniature sun streaked forward. It didn't fly; it drifted with inevitable, majestic slowness, a celestial body on a collision course.
It met the thousand-man Fire-Wind tsunami.
And it didn't collide. It subsumed.
Where the white-gold sphere touched the orange-red wall, the enemy's flames didn't resist—they were erased, absorbed, converted into more fuel for the Emperor. The colossal fireball expanded as it traveled, growing from hundreds to thousands of feet wide, a wave of absolute incineration rolling back the way the attack had come.
The tide had turned. Instantly. Completely.
The wall of flame was gone, swallowed whole. Now, the expanding sphere of the Emperor of Flames, now a rolling firestorm two thousand meters across, bore down on the stunned, frozen ranks of Iwa and Suna genin. The heat radiating from it melted the kunai in their pouches. Their uniforms began to smolder.
A thousand young faces looked up at their own fiery death descending from the heavens, their minds blank with incomprehension.
"JONIN! INTERVENE! NOW!" A desperate scream tore from an Iwa commander.
From the rear of the enemy formations, dozens of figures blurred into motion—jonin, moving with the speed of desperation. They appeared in a line between the advancing cataclysm and their genin.
Hands became blurs of motion.
"WATER RELEASE: WATER DRAGON BULLET!"
"EARTH RELEASE: EARTH-SHIFTING WAVE!"
"WIND RELEASE: VACUUM BREAKTHROUGH!"
"FIRE RELEASE: FIRE DRAGON FLAME BULLET!" (A futile attempt to somehow divert the fire)
"EARTH RELEASE: EARTH-STYLE WALL!"
A- and B-rank ninjutsu, dozens of them, lashed out at the descending sun. Simultaneously, massive walls of packed earth and stone erupted from the ground, forming a desperate, layered fortress.
The Emperor of Flames met the barrage.
The resulting explosion was not a sound. It was the end of sound. A silent, blinding-white flash consumed the world, followed by a pressure wave that flattened anyone not braced for miles. The ground heaved. The layered earth walls vaporized in the face of the sun's heart. The combined counter-jutsu were simply erased, their elemental chakra adding to the conflagration.
When the light finally faded, leaving purple afterimages burned into every retina, and the deafening roar of the explosion echoed away, a new landscape was revealed.
A massive, glass-smooth crater, half a mile wide, steamed and glowed with residual heat where the center of the Iwa-Suna genin formation had been. The edges were littered with the scorched, stunned forms of those on the periphery who had been shielded by the jonin's sacrifice and the earth walls. The air stank of ozone, burnt earth, and cooked meat.
Of the nearly thousand enemy genin, perhaps two hundred remained, scattered, broken, and utterly demoralized. The jonin who had intervened were scattered around the crater's rim, some wounded, all shell-shocked.
And in the center of the Konoha side, standing untouched on the edge of his own sea of golden fire which now gently guttered out, was Ragnar. He lowered his hand, a wisp of white smoke curling from his fingertips.
He looked across the devastated field at the remnants of the enemy army, his expression once again that of cool indifference.
The dance was over. The first song had been a solo, and it had ended in fire.
(End of Chapter)
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