Konoha: Superman template, the spoiled brat becomes strong.

"Now!" Naruto suddenly grabbed Sasuke's wrist.

The golden cloak formed by the Nine-Tails' chakra spread along the skin where the two were in contact, and Sasuke felt his Lightning Release being pulled and changed shape by some more violent force.

The Chidori Stream, which was about to dissipate, transformed into a lightning spear wrapped in crimson flames under the protection of the tailed beast's chakra.

The roar of the summoned beast shattered the ice shards within a ten-meter radius, and the chakra fusion of the two transformed into a spiral-shaped pillar of light.

Naruto heard the sound of his right little finger bone breaking, but Sasuke's lightning spear pierced the crystal cluster with more precision than ever before.

The moment the beam of light pierced through the spirit beast's chest, the asphalt-like black substance suddenly solidified into an eerie deep purple.

The shattered crystals rained down like a storm. As Naruto dragged Sasuke into the crevice, the roar of a collapsing mountain came from behind them.

The overlapping chakra of the two left a faint golden trail in the air. Sasuke barely opened his right eye, which was covered in blood, and saw half of a bone fragment covered with runes protruding from the chest cavity of the summoning beast.

It was a sealing technique from Sunagakure. Naruto used a kunai to pry open the weathering crystal clusters, and suddenly shivered when his fingertips touched the bone fragments.

Those dark red patterns seemed to pulsate on his retina as if they were alive, and for a moment they even overlapped with the flow of the Nine-Tails' chakra.

Sasuke used the Kusanagi sword to pick up the bone fragment and discovered that the back was decorated with a half-scorpion pattern in cinnabar.

The morning mist had dissipated at some point, and the rising sun cast long shadows of the two people on the crystalline sand.

As Sasuke leaned against the broken rock, catching his breath, he noticed that the burns on the back of Naruto's neck were healing at a visible speed.

He looked away to wipe the bloodstains from the Kusanagi sword, but then heard his own voice mixed with the soft sound of sand rubbing together: the chakra connection from just now.

The cry of the snow owl pierced the sky, and Naruto suddenly pointed to the treetops in the northeast.

The moment the sunlight pierced through the clouds, pale purple spots of light suddenly appeared in the area where they had just fought.

The light spots traveled along a specific trajectory, eventually converging at the spot where the spirit beast fell to form a scorpion pattern exactly like the one on the bone fragment.

Sasuke's Sharingan automatically recorded the trajectory of the moving light spot, and the three tomoe solidified into a special shape on his iris.

He reached out to grab the scattered purple light, but the points of light seeped into his meridians the moment they touched his skin.

Naruto's ninja tool pouch suddenly hummed, and the mission scroll he brought from Sunagakure three days ago moved automatically without wind, slowly revealing the same dark red patterns as the bone fragments.

"Hey, you loser." Sasuke used the tip of his sword to pick up the still-glowing bone fragment. This thing was the same one that Granny Chiyo had asked us to find three days ago... His voice trailed off—the scorpion pattern that had been clearly visible just moments before was now rapidly fading under the sunlight.

Chapter 364 The Mirage Seal of Sunagakure

The sunlight made the sand crystals look like scattered diamonds on the ground. Naruto squatted in front of the faded scorpion pattern, scratching his head.

Sasuke's Kusanagi sword suddenly plunged into the sand, the tip of the sword only half an inch away from Naruto's finger, and the sand it kicked up fell in a flurry onto the dark red patterns on the scroll.

Just as Naruto was about to protest, he saw Sasuke's fingertips gathering indigo chakra.

The moment the energy filaments touched the faded pattern, the ground suddenly trembled and three purple light spots rose up, exploding into a burnt smoke right in front of the two people's noses.

"I told you not to do anything reckless!" Naruto patted his headband, which was splattered with sparks. Granny Chiyo had specifically instructed him to use a Sand Village sealing technique to deal with it! He pointed to the cuneiform script that had newly appeared on the edge of the mission scroll, the symbols twisting and deforming like melting wax.

Sasuke's Sharingan suddenly contracted into the shape of a three-bladed shuriken, his iris reflecting the completely healed skin on Naruto's nape: "Your Nine-Tails chakra can sense more information, right?" The bandage on his sword hilt suddenly moved without wind, or was it that the loser couldn't even control his chakra resonance?

The shadows of the trees separated the two people, creating a line of light and shadow.

Naruto's knuckles turned white as he gripped his ninja tool pouch. The sealing technique notes he had copied from the Sunagakure database three days ago were now a jumbled mess in his mind.

He could feel the burning pulse emanating from the scroll at his waist, just like the warning roar that Nine-Tailed Fox had emitted from the depths of his consciousness when he touched the puppet covered in runes three days ago.

At least wait until Iruka-sensei

The sound of wind cutting through the air interrupted Naruto's words.

Twelve kunai were driven into the sandstone around them, forming a jagged, interlocking blockade.

The dust kicked up by Iruka's descent from the sky startled the snow owls in the treetops; his dark green vest was still covered in resin from his journey through the Death Forest.

Finally, he made it. Iruka wiped the sweat from his brow, and when he saw the fading runes on the ground, his movement of untying his ninja tool pouch suddenly froze.

Naruto noticed that his teacher's index finger, which he used to hold a pen all year round, was trembling slightly—it was an old injury left by Iruka when he demonstrated the sealing technique during their special training before the Chunin Exams.

Sasuke suddenly held the Kusanagi sword horizontally above the runes: How about activating the remaining chakra with Lightning Release? The lightning crackling on the sword cast spiderweb-like shadows on the ground, and the faded patterns suddenly pulsated like blood vessels.

Iruka suddenly pressed down on Sasuke's wrist, causing a bandage to slip from his sleeve—wrapped with a burn similar to the one on Naruto's nape.

This is the Mirage Seal of Sunagakure. Iruka's voice seemed to come from a very distant place, from twenty years ago... no, perhaps an even more ancient technique. His kunai scraped sparks against a twisted cuneiform script, and the normally hard sandstone suddenly rippled like liquid.

Naruto suddenly grabbed the hot edge of the scroll.

Nine-Tails chakra surged uncontrollably from his fingertips, and in the golden-red halo, the scorpion patterns that were about to disappear suddenly reflected the three-tomoe pattern—the very light spot trajectory that Sasuke's Sharingan had just recorded.

"Teacher, look!" Naruto spread the scroll out in front of Iruka, the dark red patterns resonating with the remaining purple light on the ground.

Sasuke's sword tip suddenly turned towards the northeast treetop, where dark red spots identical to the bone fragments had appeared, rearranging themselves along the route they had taken three days ago to chase the summoning beast.

Iruka pulled out a sealed scroll he always carried with him, the yellowed pages fluttering rapidly in the wind.

When he stopped on one of the pages, Naruto noticed a fine layer of cold sweat on the back of his teacher's neck—the scorpion drawing on that page was missing three scale-shaped runes from its tail hook.

This is the Second Kazekage's notebook... Iruka's fingertips traced the scorch marks on the edge of the scroll, but the solution section had been deliberately torn off. His kunai suddenly drew a cross mark in a certain direction, and the remaining purple light on the ground suddenly condensed into a prism-like structure, refracting the sunlight into dazzling bands of color.

Blood suddenly seeped from Sasuke's Sharingan.

Chapter 365 The Bonus Amulet

In his vision, the colored light bands were reconstructing a 3D projection of the Sunagakure mission hall. Every subtle expression of Granny Chiyo when she handed over the bone fragment three days ago was magnified infinitely—the old woman's wrinkled fingers lingered for 0.3 seconds longer at a certain spot on the bone fragment, precisely where a certain wedge-shaped symbol was now appearing on the ground.

"Get out of the way!" Sasuke's Chidori spear suddenly pierced towards the symbol.

Naruto was too late to stop it; the golden palm formed from the Nine-Tails' chakra collided with the lightning release, creating dazzling sparks.

As the light faded, the three of them held their breath—the faded scorpion pattern had become vividly red again, and the shadows of the surrounding trees were bending unnaturally, as if the whole world had been put into a funhouse mirror.

Iruka suddenly shielded the two students behind him, and his sealing scroll spontaneously combusted without fire, the ashes forming incomplete Shukaku runes in the air.

The mission scroll at Naruto's waist suddenly floated up, its dark red patterns writhing like living blood vessels, while the colorful light bands were now weaving a huge cocoon-like barrier above their heads.

The sand began to float upwards against gravity, and Sasuke's Kusanagi sword hummed in its sheath.

When the first grain of sand touched the cocoon of light above their heads, everyone heard a crisp sound like porcelain cracking—the exact same sound they heard three days earlier when they shattered the core of the summoned beast.

The humming sound of distorted space made one's teeth ache.

Sasuke's Kusanagi sword suddenly flew out of his hand, the bandages wrapped around the hilt taut as if pulled by an invisible hand.

The moment Naruto grabbed his wrist, the Nine-Tails' chakra exploded into golden-red arcs of electricity at the point where their skin touched.

Let go! Sasuke's Sharingan spun wildly, and the blood that seeped from the corner of his eye condensed into a floating dot in the weightless state.

His calves were already trapped in the distorted light curtain, and the scratches on the Sand Village headband were reflecting multiple afterimages at bizarre angles.

Naruto's burns on the back of his neck suddenly stung.

The puppet runes he had touched in the Sand Village database three days ago were now flashing blue light along his spinal cord.

He bit his tongue to force himself to stay awake, and the three tails formed from the Nine-Tails' chakra were firmly driven into the ground—the claw marks left three days ago when he chased the summoning beast perfectly overlapped with the cracks in the ground at this moment.

"Northwest!" Iruka's roar, accompanied by the sound of burning sealing scrolls, echoed.

The specially made kunai that slipped from his sleeve pierced Naruto's feet, and the sealing technique engraved on the blade resonated with the scroll at Naruto's waist.

The previously chaotic bands of light suddenly converged into a bundle, illuminating the bone fragment clipped to Sasuke's belt—the very amulet that Chiyo had given him three days ago when he handed over the mission.

Sasuke suddenly stopped struggling.

His Sharingan reflected the dark patterns emerging from the bone fragments, perfectly matching the blue light shimmering on the back of Naruto's neck. The bottom-of-the-barrel guy, he grabbed Naruto's wrist and channeled chakra into the bandage on my sword hilt!

The moment the Nine-Tails' chakra wrapped around the Kusanagi sword along the bandages, the electric net formed by lightning on the sword suddenly turned dark gold.

Sasuke plunged the tip of his sword into the still-healing old wound on his left shoulder, and the chakra mixed with blood drew a broken Shukaku seal on the ground—the core pattern of the summoning beast they had defeated together three days ago.

The cocoon of light emitted a crisp sound like shattering glass.

Naruto suddenly remembered the principle of chakra resonance that Iruka had demonstrated at the training ground the night before the Chunin Exams.

With his left hand maintaining the output of Nine-Tails chakra, he quickly formed the basic sealing hand seals of Sunagakure with his right hand—this action had elicited a meaningful smile from Chiyo's younger brother, Ebizo, when he was copying data from the database three days ago.

The speed of spatial distortion suddenly slowed down.

Iruka seized the opportunity and threw the burning sealing scroll into the crack in the cocoon of light. The Shukaku runes made of ash overlapped with the pattern drawn by Naruto.

Sasuke seized the opportunity to pull his right leg out of the light barrier, and the light spot trajectory recorded by his Sharingan reassembled into a complete scorpion tail pattern in his pupil.

Now! Naruto slammed the scroll at his waist onto the ground.

The writhing dark red lines suddenly contracted into the shape of three tomoe, exactly the same as the mark Sasuke had casually drawn on the mission report three days ago.

The moment the Nine-Tails' chakra flowed into the earth's veins along the scroll's patterns, everyone heard a whooshing sound, like a scroll unfurling.

In the last half second before the blinding light engulfed his vision, Naruto caught a glimpse of the old headband slipping out from inside Iruka's vest—the vortex symbol belonging to Konoha on it had been transformed into the core of some kind of sealing technique.

This detail reminded him of a similar pattern that Granny Chiyo had deliberately covered with her sleeve when she was wiping the bone fragments three days earlier.

The feeling of weightlessness lasted shorter than I had imagined.

When Naruto's back bumped into something soft, his nostrils were filled with the smell of damp, decaying leaves.

He barely opened his eyes, which were stinging from the bright light, and saw that the protective shield formed by the Nine-Tails' chakra was slowly dissipating, while Sasuke's Kusanagi sword was stuck diagonally in a tree trunk five steps away—the residual Lightning Release chakra in the bandage on the hilt was burning some kind of fluorescent fungus.

As Naruto groped his way to his feet, his fingertips touched the unusually low temperature of the scroll at his waist.

The parchment surface, which should have been displaying mission details, now showed vine-like patterns completely different from those found in the Sand Village Ruins.

He looked up at the pale moonlight piercing through the tree canopy and found that the arrangement of the stars bore no resemblance to the star map displayed by the Sunagakure Observatory three days earlier.

Chapter 366 The Girl's Attack

The ground, piled with decaying leaves, made a soft, crackling sound as Naruto's back pressed against the moss-covered tree trunk.

Sasuke lay on his back in a depression in the tree root two meters away, the bluish-purple veins on his neck reflected by the fluorescent fungus.

Naruto's action of tearing open his ninja tool pouch froze in mid-air—the hidden compartments that should have contained soldier rations were oozing a dark green slime.

Hey, you bottom-of-the-barrel guy... He lowered his voice and lightly kicked Sasuke's shin with his toe, causing half of the broken senbon to fall out from the lining of Sasuke's leg guards.

The Nine-Tails' chakra surged restlessly within his meridians, causing three faint claw marks to appear on the back of his right hand.

The moonlight filtering through the gaps in the tree canopy suddenly dimmed by a third, and a kind of mist carrying the smell of rust was spreading from the southeast.

As Naruto reached for the shuriken at his waist, his fingertips suddenly touched the cold metal edge of the parchment scroll.

Three days ago, the bone fragments that Granny Chiyo wiped in the Sunagakure ruins suddenly became clear in my memory—the animal bones soaked in chakra potion also had inscriptions on their surfaces that transformed the Konoha headband into a sealing core.

He abruptly ripped open the scroll's bindings, and the text that should have recorded the mission details transformed into countless writhing vine patterns, strikingly similar to the burning fungal veins on Sasuke's Kusanagi sword.

A crisp sound of a withered branch breaking came from deep within the shadows of the trees.

Naruto instantly stuffed the scroll back into his ninja tool pouch, and the Nine-Tails' chakra condensed into a semi-transparent protective layer in his palm.

The moment he turned around, a human figure suddenly emerged from the bushes at the twelve o'clock position—a girl wearing a bone mask was standing on tiptoe on a tree burl seven steps away, the silver chains wrapped around her bare feet vibrating like buzzing with her breathing.

Just as Naruto raised his right hand in a gesture of goodwill, two clusters of eerie blue flames suddenly burst forth from the eye holes of the girl's mask.

He reflexively threw out three shuriken, but the sound of metal clashing came from where Sasuke was lying—the shuriken that should have been aimed at the girl had mysteriously appeared above his companion's head, deeply embedded half an inch into the rotten wood beside Sasuke's ear.

The girl tilted her head and let out a laugh that sounded like an owl, and the silver chain on her wrist suddenly straightened into a sharp line.

Naruto took a half step back and was about to form hand seals when he realized that the opponent's attack trajectory was not aimed at him at all—the air blade flicked from the girl's fingertips was aimed straight at Sasuke's heart!

The Nine-Tails' chakra, enveloped in sand and dust, exploded with a deafening roar. The air blade grazed Naruto's left shoulder, slicing through the night sky and severing a fern thirty meters away at its roots.

"What exactly..." The question stuck in Naruto's throat as he watched in shock as the girl flipped through the air.

The silver chains that should have been on the ground suddenly defied gravity and floated up, and the curse marks that appeared on the surface of the chain links were exactly the same as the vine patterns on the scroll.

The girl's second wave of attacks came without warning, with seven energy blades arranged in the shape of the Big Dipper, blocking all escape routes.

Naruto gritted his teeth, grabbed Sasuke by the back of his collar, and sped backward. Only when his back slammed into the tree trunk did he realize that the opponent's real killing move was hidden in the shadow of the moonlight—the eighth transparent air blade was slicing towards his ankle along the ground!

As the humus splattered, Naruto slammed his right palm heavily onto the ground.

The Nine-Tails' chakra transformed into crimson flames, overturning a three-meter-square layer of soil. The air blades made a tearing sound as they cut into the chakra barrier.

He took the opportunity to throw Sasuke to the safer side of the tree hole. As he turned around, he saw that half of the girl's mask had been blown off by the aftershocks of the explosion—on that face, which was seven parts similar to the Sand Village puppet, there was a seal tattoo unique to the Konoha Anbu.

Humus mixed with sawdust fell softly onto Naruto's eyelashes.

Beneath the girl's tattered mask, the unique three-tomoe seal tattoo of the Anbu gleamed bluish-gray in the moonlight. This familiar mark caused Naruto's pupils to shrink sharply—three years ago, during the Chunin Exams, he had seen the same cursed seal on the neck of his teacher, Hayate Gekko.

Before Konoha could voice his question, the eighth energy blade suddenly split into a spiderweb pattern.