After Hinata finished her attack, she didn’t get to relish in self-satisfaction or inwardly gloat and preen. Her body was not yet ready for something that powerful. The second she released that amount of chakra, the bones in her broke again, and it was only thanks to using Heavenly Shield as a buffer that her injuries were not more severe.

The first time she had used this kind of thing during her training, stacking multiple of her strength-enhancements and using them to empower a lightning technique, her bones shattered, and her muscles were torn apart from the recoil.

Even her nerves burnt out from the surge of violent lightning chakra, causing her to drop to the ground and scream herself hoarse for the next several minutes.

Just remembering it was enough to make her shudder.

Nowadays, she has improved upon it massively. She learned her lesson and knew to deaden her nerves around her shoulder area while also using her lightning chakra to coat the nerves in her arm, partially shielding them from the violent surge of lightning necessary to unleash this technique. And she had also developed the Heavenly Shield to deal with the recoil.

Hinata wondered what kind of face Ino would show when she learned that this amazing defensive technique of hers was developed for that purpose. The fact that it could be used standalone to a great effect? That was just a happy coincidence. One that made Hinata very delighted.

She wasn’t like Ino. She wasn’t a prodigy at making ninjutsu techniques who could pull out some new bullshit out of her ass every other week while acting as if it was nothing special. She had worked on this for months. Practically ever since she was taught Railgun. The fact that it turned out so well, Hinata considered it a great accomplishment. Yet, it was far from finished.

Still… Hinata winced in pain as her bones snapped back together with a quick application of her medical chakra, and she subconsciously frowned.

This thing, she called it Lightning Armament.

It was her attempt to make a variant of Ren’s Railgun that could be cast instantly. Without the need to carefully channel her lightning chakra for several seconds. But so far, it was no good as it still damaged her body upon use. It made Hinata marvel at how well-balanced the Railgun technique was.

It was so powerful, yet it didn’t cause any damage to the user. She… felt a bit inferior when she realized that. Lightning Release was not even Ren’s thing, but he was able to casually make the Railgun jutsu while she had spent months on her Lightning Armament, and the result…

With a soundless sigh, Hinata started to soothe her bruised nerves and slightly damaged chakra coils with a stream of medical chakra, slowly healing them. For the next dozen seconds, there would be no Lightning Techniques for her from that particular arm.

Abruptly, Hinata’s eyes widened as her internal musings were interrupted when she noticed a hail of golden dust bullets suddenly appear to her left side. A chakra barrier instantly sprang up, blocking the bullets peppering it as Hinata spun in a hasty Kaiten while Ino substituted with a leaf outside of the bullets’ range.

Waves of golden dust abruptly burst out of the ground, wrapping around the Kaiten while being continuously repelled, trying to fully submerge it.

Realizing that her opponent wanted to trap her, Hinata stopped spinning and interrupted her Kaiten. Usually, Kaiten needed to be stopped slowly to not suffer the chakra backlash from the technique, but just as the backlash was about to hit her, Hinata funneled it out of her tenketsu.

The faint blue chakra barrier around her intensified, persisting despite the Kaiten being interrupted. Then, when the chakra build-up reached a critical point and started to turn unstable, Hinata used her Heavenly Wall. A surge of chakra burst from her body, spreading outward like a shockwave and catching all the dangerously accumulated chakra around Hinata, pushing it forward and away from her.

The ocean of golden dust covering her was instantly blown apart, popping like a soft bubble from the force that hit it. Not waiting for her opponent to recover, Hinata’s eyes swept the surroundings, her Byakugan scanning for any clue about Rasa’s whereabouts, when she noticed golden dust gathering on the ground underneath her feet.

Hinata hastily and awkwardly jumped up, and despite not being fully ready, Rasa showed his experience. Knowing that his surprise attack was discovered, he activated it despite not being fully ready yet.

A tendril of golden dust drilled out from the ground and rapidly snapped toward Hinata. It was about to hit her when she pulsed chakra from the tenketsu on the soles of her feet and somehow managed to jump on the air as if it were solid ground, evading the tendril by a few inches.

But Rasa was not having it. Shard spikes instantly burst from the tendril, intending to skewer Hinata… only for a vacuum bullet to hit the other side of the tendril, tearing it apart and sending Hinata crashing back from the resulting pressure wave.

Hinata spun midair, managing to regain control of her momentum and landing in a handstand a few meters away, only to wince as a surge of pain hit her from her still-damaged arm. Despite that, she quickly pushed herself up and landed on her feet before sharing a glance with Ino.

‘What? No thank you, bitch?’ Ino’s smug voice resounded in Hinata’s mind. causing her to click her tongue.

‘I didn’t need your assistance, bimbo.’ Hinata replied, irritated that she was sent tumbling through the air by Ino’s vacuum bullet. ‘Just a bit of lightning chakra and his golden dust would be repelled.’ She sent the impression of rolling her eyes to Ino.

‘Suuuuure. Whatever lets you sleep at night.’ Ino sent the same impression back. ‘Now, where is he hiding? The whole area is drowning in his chakra signature, so I have a supremely hard time locating the bastard.’ She grouchily admitted, not happy at all.

‘He is…’ Hinata waited for a moment, ‘Behind me! Substitute, now!’

Their whole exchange lasted barely a split second as thoughts moved extremely fast. There was barely any lag between Hinata sending that message to Ino and suddenly swapping places with her.

As Rasa burst out of the ground at speeds that would make him a blur to an ordinary ninja, he slashed a kunai at his target while also creating five spears out of his golden dust and hurling them forward. At such a close range, there should have been no way for his target to evade. Especially when he was attacking from behind.

But unlike his expectations, he was not met with the Hyuga girl’s back. Instead, he was met with the grinning Yamanaka girl who was already swinging her wind-coated blade in his direction while her hair was released from the ponytail and lengthened, covering the front of her body.

Rasa’s pupils constricted, and he aborted the attack, hastily swapping with a clump of golden dust he quickly shaped into a sand clone.

Ino’s sword hit true, cleaving through Rasa, who quickly dissolved into golden dust just as the five spears rammed into Ino’s body, but their sharp tips could not penetrate Ino’s extremely durable and chakra-hardened hair. Upon impact, half of the spears were dispersed back into golden dust due to the force of the attack.

Ino hissed like an angry cat as the dust got into her hair.

But Rasa did not make a sand clone while substituting for fun. Using the moment when Ino thought she had him cornered, he suddenly appeared a few meters away from Ino and raised his arm while pointing his palm at her.

Golden dust around Ino’s feet sprang up and started to coil around her body like a snake as it wrapped around it.

“Sand-” Rasa was about to close his hand when he noticed several needles flying at him. His eyes widened, realizing what kind of an attack this was. He remembered the explosions that happened in the previous match and didn’t want to be hit by them.

But too invested in his current offensive, he didn’t dodge or substitute away. Instead, golden dust sprang up around him, covering him in an armored layer just as the needles hit and sank halfway into the hardened golden dust.

“- Burial!” Rasa finished the technique, and the golden dust around Ino constricted just as the explosion seals on the needles detonated with a deafening explosion.

Rasa’s organs rattled from the pressure of the explosions around him, and a small trail of blood leaked from the corner of his lips, but his shield of golden dust held, protecting him from most of it as he triumphantly watched the blonde Yamanaka be crushed with a grave satisfaction in his eyes.

But then he noticed something was wrong. He noticed pieces of wood…

A sword penetrated through the back of his golden shield, the wind-coating allowing it to go through it like a knife through butter, and Rasa’s eyes widened as the blade exited out of his chest. He didn’t manage to react as Ino slashed the sword across his chest and abdomen, going through as many vital organs as the sword’s position allowed her.

Rasa’s golden shield abruptly softened, turning back into golden dust, but Ino’s grim satisfaction suddenly froze when she felt the Rasa inside of it also dissolve into golden dust.

Alarm bells rang in her head.

The massive amount of golden dust right in front of her shifted, and Ino was almost skewered by numerous spikes that extended out of it.

She had managed to evade. In her previous position, only a small leaf slowly floated down toward the ground amidst several criss-crossed spikes.

Rasa didn’t get even a second of respite as he appeared on a floating platform made out of his golden dust. Hinata was already prepared, and with a zapping sound, she appeared behind him, nearly instantly after his substitution. Rasa managed to make half of the platform surge up and harden in time, creating a very hard golden wall just as the fist of Hinata’s undamaged arm smashed into it.

The air shook from the force, and the platform barely managed to stay floating as the golden wall cracked. Rasa gritted his teeth. Hinata clenched her fist tighter and pulled it an inch back. She then delivered a short punch.

Despite the power of the punch being weakened, under the second strike from Tsunade’s strength-enhancing technique, the already cracked golden wall partly shattered, and Rasa was peppered by shrapnel made out of his own defensive technique.

The shrapnel’s velocity was so great that it went straight through his body without stopping, making him into a bloody Swiss cheese… before he again dissolved into more golden dust, showing he managed to get away in time once more.

But this time, his trap was finally prepared.

All over the massive arena, golden dust burst from the ground and started to fill the arena en masse. Ino had to jump up as the golden dust burst underneath her and tried to skewer her yet again, but since she could not do Hinata’s trick of kicking with her chakra against the air very well, she had to land on the nearest surface, which was yet more of Rasa’s flowing golden dust. It was trying to flow upward and above her, most likely to eventually collapse on her.

But Ino was not having it. She quickly ran up on it, barely evading the golden dust spikes surfacing from it, hot on her heels while covering her soles in wind chakra to prevent herself from being tripped up.

Hinata was forced to jump off the floating platform as it tried to grab her ankle, and when she noticed what was going on inside the arena, she realized she could not land on the ground.

Both girls, for the first time, felt the pressure of fighting a Kage as their options were quickly dwindling while the amount of golden dust, now majorly mixed with sand, started to increase.

Narrowing her eyes, Ino reached the top of the rising golden dust in a second and jumped off into the air. She put her palm against her stomach and channeled the Earth Nature chakra through it into her body, using a technique that took an unreal amount of effort to learn, and she regarded it as useless, but Ren vehemently pushed her to master it.

Now she knew why as she started gently floating in the air.

Ren wasn’t happy with half-assing their training, and he tried to prepare them for any eventuality, so Hinata also wasn’t left completely helpless when she needed to stay in the air.

Channeling her lightning chakra into her soles, she created a layer of halfway solidified air? Hinata honestly had no idea. She only knew it worked, and she could shakily stand on the air with it.

That was enough for her as she suddenly appeared next to Ino and solemnly watched the arena slowly filling with more and more sand, glancing at the lowest row of spectators.

The sand was not far from reaching it. Even the other ninjas stopped fighting as the remaining invaders mostly fled, while the Konoha ninjas anxiously watched what was going on with silent trepidation filling them.

“This might be a problem.” Hinata disgruntledly muttered, only for Ino to scoff.

“You tell me. We never intended to get dragged into fighting the Kazekage. We still have a job to do in this invasion, dammit.” Ino quietly complained, her eyes scanning the surroundings and trying to find a way out.

They could not dilly-dally here. Even though the fight so far had lasted barely over a minute, they did not have much time to spare if they wanted to be on time.

This was so not going according to plan.

It was time to improvise.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep