Uehara didn't form any plans this time. He had formed a plan of action and still failed. Under the tunnel vision of his ocular technique, he would’ve been knocked out or at worst, died (possibly). Now, due to having been so close to a possible death, his chakra had instinctively flared itself in an act of self-preservation, destroying the seals that were placed by his father to limit the amount of chakra he could release at a time.
Since he knows he’ll face a potential beating for his carelessness, he may as well take out his anger on the hundreds of soon-to-be corpses within the vicinity.
Tensing his muscles, he focused his enhanced perception on Keiji.
[His chakra signature was on the kunai.]
He tilted his neck to the right, releasing a satisfying CRACK. Then, he rushed forward. Grabbing Hozuki’s corpse, he weakened the defenses of the obsidian dome a bit and threw it upwards, making it crash through walls.
Instantly, everyone’s attention was drawn to it.
“The patriarch!”
One of the elders immediately jumped into the air to catch it. At the same time, Uehara crashed through the walls as well. Knowing full well the corpse of the patriarch would provide somewhat of a distraction, he honed in on Keiji, the man who had earned his ire.
CRACK
Reaching out with his right hand, he shoved four of his fingers into Keiji’s mouth, shattering the clenched teeth of the Minamoto Assassin.
With his thumb clamping like a vice on his chin, Uehara slammed Keiji down into the ground...hard!
BOOOM
Just the force of the slam rattled the aged brain of Keiji. But that wasn’t enough. With Uehara’s left hand still free, he pointed it in the general direction of the six men unfortunate enough to have stood behind Keiji. Two clones had instantly formed at his side and copied his actions as well.
Quickly, water began to swirl into the palms of Uehara and his clones, forming a sphere the size of an orange.
[Water Shotgun]
BANG
Reminiscent of shotgun shells, droplets of water enhanced by the power of gravity all sped forward at thrice the speed of sound. The water shotgun jutsu was one of the few techniques he had comprehended enough to utilise without handsigns.
Luckily for the Minamoto elders, they were able to react fast enough to deploy their respective defenses. The black robed elders had used ki to harden their bodies while the white robes had used chakra to harden their skin using an earth jutsu. The black-robed elder that had caught Hozuki even used his own body to shield the corpse.
Regardless, this gave Uehara a narrow window of time to act. No longer playing, he flooded his chakra into the still dazed Keiji, causing the man’s eyes to widen in pain.
Having such pure sage chakra enter his body was causing his body to turn into stone.
“MMMMMMM!!!!!!!!!”
Violently thrashing around, panic had already begun to set in. With how violently Uehara was transferring chakra into his body, Keiji’s control over his own chakra was rendered nonexistent. Fortunately for the former patriarch, Uehara’s window of opportunity was over.
The young demon jumped away, a shield of crystal clear ice forming in front of him. He successfully managed to block two fireballs, although a ki blast did manage to put a slight crack in his shield.
Two of the black robes circled around him in a burst of speed, attacking him from both sides with a pincer attack. Their hands were stretched out like knives, ready to cleave through anything in their path.
With instincts honed from years of fighting his father, Uehara jumped up while twisting his body in a manner reminiscent of a corkscrew. Now mid-flip with his head pointing down, time seemed to slow down. Uehara saw the newly formed ki blades of the two elders slice right where his legs and right arm were.
Still upside down at face-level with the elders, Uehara stretched out his arms and opened his palms directly in front of their faces.
With an exquisite display of chakra control, a spiral of golden sage chakra roaring with danger formed in both of his palms.
Nothing more needed to be done except for Uehara to tense his arms. With the forward momentum of the elders, they quite literally ground their faces into the spheres.
Kriii…BOOM
A minor explosion resulted from the elder’s contact with the spheres, knocking them back while also causing devastating injuries to their faces. Suppressing their groans of pain, they began healing their injuries, closing the revealed cheekbones and knitting the skin back together. Their eyes were bloodshot in anger, practically glaring at Uehara to death.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
At the same time, the white-robed elders weren’t idle. While Ryu had already retreated with the injured Keiji as well as Hozuki’s corpse, the remaining two elders had already unleashed a combination attack consisting of a wind-powered fireball. As for Ryo, one of the black-robed elders, he had already charged in to catch his two brothers and get them out of the way.
Uehara, who was still upside down in midair, wouldn’t just float still and watch the massive fireball come close to him. He couldn’t go up, back, right, or left since the fireball was too big and it was too close for him to manoeuvre around.
Furthermore, any hastily built earth wall would crumble and he wouldn’t have enough time to inject his chakra into the fireball to control it. Even water techniques would quickly evaporate before he could create enough water to smother the flames. Creating ice or very cold water with the deviant element of temperature would take too long to do as well.
So, channeling wind chakra around his feet, he pushed himself down and disappeared underground just as the fireball passed by him.
FUUUUUSSSSHHH
He had the idea of sneaking up on them, but upon seeing their gazes locked on him, he reneged on the idea. Of course, he could also feel the earth around him trying to grab him like a hand.
So, bolting out of the ground, he was just a few metres into the air before weaving a few handsigns.
[Dog-Rat-Pig]-(Water-Gravity-Fusion)
Instantly, two water balls the size of a man’s torso formed beside Uehara.
“[Water Gravity Shot]”
The water balls moved forward, bearing on the cusp of breaking the sound barrier as they lurched forward. In the eyes of the five remaining elders, the water balls were somewhat easy to avoid due to the fact that in their perception, it was like someone was just casually throwing a stone at them from far away.
So, they prepared to remove themselves from the trajectory of the water balls that were currently showing signs of curving towards each other.
[[[?!]]]
Noticing the oddity of the water balls, years of experience prompted the elders to jump away, particularly the white-robed elders when they finally sensed the immense amount of chakra within the attack.
(AN: Uehara utilises sage chakra, meaning, his already normally hard to sense nature chakra becomes even harder to sense when nature energy blends into it. To counter the contradictory statement of why the elders could still sense Uehara underground? Well, there are a multitude of reasons, but I will list the two primary ones. The first is instinct. The elders have categorized Uehara as a very powerful threat. Thus, their senses instinctively hone in on his position. It is similar to how some people can just feel when someone is watching them and how trained people know when they are being tailed. The second reason is because of the amount of pressure Uehara is releasing. His chakra right now is the furthest thing from calm due to the rage he feels at himself. Even if there’s nature energy flowing through his veins, the amount of sage chakra energetically flowing through his body in preparation for combat causes him to release a level of pressure that any human can feel, never mind trained martial artists and shinobi.)
They were very right in doing so since the moment the two water balls finally clashed, a large explosion of water occurred. Large geysers of water easily surpassing fifty meters in height exploded from the two water balls.
The water soon fell from the sky like a massive blanket and covered the ground, temporarily making shallow waters due to how hard the earth currently was, greatly restricting the water’s ability to seep into it.
The elders had already jumped away from the geyser explosion, their guards already up for any following subsequent attack. They looked at the water warily, their muscles tense for any sudden movement.
On the other hand, Uehara was already weaving handsigns for another technique.
[Monkey-Bird-Ox-Tiger-Pig: Lava Torrent]-(Concept-Earth-Fire-Fusion: Lava Torrent)
Jumping high up into the air, he pursed his lips and released a large torrent of lava from his mouth, aimed right at where the geyser exploded. With the speed concept of wind, the lava, besides being much hotter, moved much faster than normal lava.
As such, as soon as the lava reached the water on the ground, it didn’t take even a second before massive explosions started occurring. The cold water merging with the insanely hot lava resulted in a mishmash of molecular reactions that concluded in an explosion that created massive amounts of boiling mist hot enough to melt bone.
In less than the time it takes to walk five steps, the entire region was already covered in thick boiling mist, the temperature of the vicinity skyrocketing, the epicenter being much hotter. At the same time, Uehara directly infused his chakra into the mist, maintaining its thickness and temperature.
In his sage mode, his senses are drastically increased. This means that even in the thick mist, he could still feel where the five elders were.
The elders were fine. Using their own respective energies to keep their bodies safe and the air breathable, surviving against such mist was a trifling effort. But, their visibility was also lowered as a result. To counter this, they jumped even further back, placing some distance between the small region of mist and themselves.
On the other side of the mist, Uehara continued to flood the mist with his chakra in preparation for his next move.
Creating a clone to continue flooding the mist with sage chakra, Uehara began weaving a set of handsigns.
[Monkey-Bird-Monkey-Tiger-Horse-Pig] (Concept-Water-Concept-Fire-Light-Fusion)
Placing his hands together to form a sort of square prism, golden-yellow energy began gathering in the space between his hands. The buildup of chakra was immense. But due to the clone continuously flooding the mist with chakra, it was hidden.
“[Sage Art:]”
Taking just under three seconds to gather and mold enough chakra for the technique, Uehara quietly muttered.
“[Vulkan Flash]”
A golden semi-translucent beam in the shape of a square prism burst forward at the speed of light. With the prism being roughly the size of a watermelon, everything within its confines would be subjected to evisceration.
That proved true when the technique instantly struck one of the black-robed elders on the torso. Like a razor, the attack cleaved right through his lungs, leaving only small chunks of the organs hanging freely.
Not wasting any more time, Uehara readjusted his aim and pointed the golden orb within his palms at the next black-robed elder, who still hadn’t noticed his brother had already died. The flash was so fast and so precise that he couldn’t perceive it.
Already having laid the premise for the technique, he didn’t need to utter its name again to hone his focus.
Inserting more chakra into the golden orb hovering between his hands that surrounded it like a cage, the orb began to expand a bit more as layers upon layers of light-infused sage chakra were compounded into it.
Fwoop…Fwoop…Fwoop..Fwoop..Fwoop.Fwoop x100
With the Vulcan flash primed and ready to fire, he let the gathered chakra loose.
Doof
(AN: Sorry for not updating. It was the weekend and the network at the area I stay in is…terrible to put it mildly. “Your network is interrupted” is what I would get whenever I try to use the internet on my pc. Either way, I’ve settled enough into this new schedule and I can scrounge up enough time to write and upload a chapter every two days except weekends.)