CHAPTER 146: BUDDHA'S WRATH, KIRIN'S JUDGMENT
"Perhaps the soul's true nature is thirst, and revenge is merely the story we tell to justify the blood."
On the windswept hilltop, Uchiha Madara let the words roll through his mind like distant thunder. A faint, appreciative smirk touched his withered lips. To hear such a clear-eyed dissection of mortal hypocrisy from one so young… it was refreshing. It resonated.
Yes. These ninjas were all the same. Hypocrites draped in bonds and honor, repeating their cycles of violence while singing paeans to peace. They knew their sins, acknowledged them even, and then committed them again. It was the incurable rot at the core of their nature.
He had seen it. He had understood it. That was why he had broken with Hashirama's naive dream, why he had left Konoha. The only cure for this diseased world was absolute, overwhelming force. Impose a new order through power so immense that resistance was unthinkable. Not through begging at summits.
History had proven him right. The world had not embraced Hashirama's peace; it had descended into ever-larger wars. They were all just… thirsty.
"Pathetic," Madara murmured, his Rinnegan fixed on the struggling masses below. "All of them."
"Indeed, Lord Madara. They cannot comprehend your vision," Black Zetsu agreed smoothly, its yellow eye watching Ragnar with heightened interest.
"I hope he survives this," Madara said, a note of casual curiosity in his voice. "The world grows dull without such… interesting variables."
On the battlefield, Chiyo's defiance had fanned the embers of the Iwa-Suna alliance into a final, desperate blaze. This was no longer a battle for advantage; it was a crusade to slay a demon.
"White Secret Technique: Ten Puppets of Chikamatsu!"
Chiyo's hands flew through seals. A scroll unfurled, and ten puppets materialized in a flash of smoke and chakra. These were not her old ones. These were reforged with alloys gifted by the Third Kazekage, their surfaces treated, their frames dense with Suna's finest sand-iron. Each one moved with the lethal precision and power of an elite jonin.
Simultaneously, Onihira slammed his palms into the mud. "EARTH RELEASE: EARTH GIANT!"
The ground heaved. Massive arms of packed soil and bedrock punched upward, followed by a torso, legs, a head. A colossus of earth, fifty meters tall, hauled itself from the planet's womb. It was half the Buddha's height, but its density, its connection to the very land, made it a formidable anchor.
"CHAKRA TO ME!" Onihira bellowed.
Without hesitation, the Iwa ninja behind him formed chains, hands on shoulders. A river of chakra, drawn from hundreds of shinobi, poured into Onihira, and from him, into the earthen titan. It began to grow, swelling as more soil and rock from the shattered field flew to it, accreting like a planet forming. Soon, it stood nearly eighty meters tall, a mountain given crude, violent life.
"THIS IS THE WILL OF IWA!" Onihira's voice boomed from within the giant's core.
"VICTORY!"
"VICTORY!"
The Iwa forces' roar was a unified tremor.
Chiyo nodded, a grim smile on her face. Let him pay.
"ATTACK!"
"WIND RELEASE: WIND BLADES!"
"WIND RELEASE: GREAT BREAKTHROUGH!"
"FIRE RELEASE: FIRE DRAGON BULLET!"
"EARTH RELEASE: EARTH-SPEAR RAIN!"
A renewed, focused barrage of ninjutsu, smaller but more precise, hammered against the Golden Buddha's legs and torso. They sparked and sizzled against the radiant surface, doing no visible damage but creating a screen of distraction.
"WHITE SECRET TECHNIQUE: SEVEN TREASURES ABSORPTION!"
Chiyo's fingers danced. Seven of her ten puppets arranged themselves in a precise, deadly formation, their abdominal compartments snapping open. A violent, twisting tornado, visible as a distortion in the air, erupted from the center of the formation. It wasn't meant to damage the Buddha; its power was suction, a vortex designed to lock the colossal form in place, to rob it of mobility for the crucial moment the Earth Giant needed.
The Golden Buddha, lashed by elemental attacks and gripped by the powerful vacuum, seemed to strain for a moment, its forward momentum halted.
Now!
The mountainous Earth Giant, guided by Onihira's will and fed by the chakra of an army, took a ground-shaking step forward. Its fist, a boulder the size of a house, drew back, gathering the kinetic energy of its entire mass.
On the Konoha side, tension spiked.
"Captain Sakumo! They're coordinating! We have to move!" Tsunade urged, her fists clenched.
"Give the order!" Jiraiya echoed, ready to leap.
"Hah…" Orochimaru's sibilant laugh cut through their urgency. "Do you still not see? This battlefield… it belongs to him alone. Our intervention now would be an intrusion. A distraction." His golden eyes were alight with the spectacle. One man, truly facing an army.
Hatake Sakumo nodded slowly, his gaze locked on the serene golden figure. "Orochimaru is correct. Ragnar has controlled the tempo from the start. We must trust him to finish his symphony."
Within the Buddha, Ragnar acknowledged the strain. The combined force was significant. The Daibutsu form granted immense power and wisdom, but his physical stamina, while superhuman, was not infinite. Maintaining this scale of manifestation against concentrated, high-level resistance was draining.
The body has limits, he thought, his mind crystalline calm. Then we shall use a force that does not.
His eyes lifted past the struggling giants, past the screaming ninja, to the sky.
The storm he had felt earlier was ripe. The churning black clouds, pregnant with natural lightning, formed a perfect ceiling over the carnage.
KSHAAA—!
Ragnar floated up from the Buddha's chest, breaking the seamless connection for a moment. In his right hand, a seething, chaotic orb of pure white lightning chakra formed, crackling with insane energy.
All eyes on the field followed him. Why lightning? Now?
He didn't form a seal. He simply raised the crackling orb above his head like an offering.
Then, he threw it. Not at the enemy. Straight up, into the heart of the blackest cloud.
The orb vanished into the gloom.
For a second, nothing.
Then—VZZZZZZZZZT!
The white chakra acted as a catalyst, a lodestone. It seared through the cloud layer, connecting Ragnar, the sky, and the earth in a circuit of his will.
Across miles of roiling stormfront, the latent, natural lightning—terrifying in its scale and wild power—was pulled. Like iron filings to a magnet, titanic arcs of blue-white electricity, each one capable of vaporizing a fortress, began to converge above the battlefield, drawn to the point Ragnar had marked.
The sky itself seemed to convulse. Snaking tendrils of raw celestial power danced and merged in the clouds, gathering, concentrating. The air filled with the ozone stink of a coming apocalypse, the hair on every shinobi's neck standing on end.
CRACKLE-BOOM!
A single, monstrous arc of lightning, thicker than a ancient tree, lanced down from the heavens. It didn't strike the ground. It connected to Ragnar, who still hovered before the Buddha's face. He didn't flinch. He absorbed the immense voltage, his body a living conduit, his eyes glowing with stolen sky-fire.
The Golden Buddha's serene smile seemed to sharpen in the hellish, flickering light.
Ragnar's voice, when it came, was no longer just his own. It was layered with the deep rumble of thunder and the serene, terrible certainty of the divine statue behind him.
"The Buddha's Wrath…"
He brought his hands together in front of his chest, the same Gasshō mudra the Buddha held. The converging lightning in the sky above swirled, taking shape. No longer random arcs, it formed the outline of a majestic, four-legged beast of pure electricity, its head crowned with a single, blazing horn.
"…KIRIN."
The sky-born beast of legend, forged from the storm and guided by a god's will, finished its coalescence. It hovered for a heartbeat, a spectral, electric dragon of biblical scale, casting the entire battlefield in stark, blinding white and deep shadow.
Then, with a silent roar that was felt in the bones, not heard by the ears, Kirin descended.
Its target was not the Earth Giant. Not Chiyo's puppets.
Its target was the entirety of the assembled Iwa and Suna force, and the land they stood upon.
(End of Chapter)
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