Ch407. Explosion

Temari wasn't aiming to kill Karin. Far from it. Karin was an S-rank ninja and something like this should not be able to kill her off. If it did, then she would have been just a waste of air.

Temari's whole plan was based on the fact that the chakra armor took a lot of chakra out of Karin to stay active. The three sand giants were not only a distraction but also a means to gather intel and probe Karin's defenses.

Finding out that putting pressure on a part of the armor meant Karin had to focus more and spend more chakra to reinforce that part was the reason for Temari's plan. The chakra armor seemed really menacing but having this kind of obvious and massive weakness... it really was not a finished technique yet. What gave Karin the confidence to use it against her, Temari would never know.

In short, underground, Karin's armor would be pressured from all sides, which would drain Karin's chakra at an extreme pace. Yet, she would be unable to drop the armor since she would be surrounded by Temari's sand.

'It should not take long for the girl to faint from chakra exhaustion.' Temari vindictively thought as she sensed what was happening underground through her sand.

It would have been so easy to squash the Uzumaki brat to a bloody mangled ball of broken bones and torn flesh but no matter how much animosity was between them, Karin was still one of the ninjas from the Village on the Other Side, and killing her would not make Rei happy so Temari refrained from wringing that pathetic head of hers.

Suddenly something underground shifted. Temari was not exactly seeing what was going on, rather, she was feeling it not unlike a blind person trying to orient himself with touch. The difference was, Temari felt everything every grain of her sand was 'touching'

It was a very cumbersome sensing technique that was useless most of the time but Temari was proud of having it. It took her months to perfect, after all, and it was an incredibly efficient way to train her control over sand with her chakra.

This time, however, it gave her the necessary warning of Karin's last vain attempt at resistance.

Except... 'Oi, oi, oi! You ain't gonna blow the entire place up, are you!?' Temari frantically screamed in her mind when she realized the massive chakra underground started compressing and gaining intensity and density in a very similar way to the techniques of the Explosive Corps of Iwa.

Temari, who was still crouching upside down on the 'ceiling' of the dome made of chakra covering the arena, looked down with alarm and quickly started to prepare her defenses.

Tendrils of sand abruptly sprang up from the ground, flowing through the air towards Temari before the sand started to form shield mid-air while hardening, compressing, and becoming enhanced with more and more chakra.

This was just the first shield and as the intensity of the underground chakra build-up increased, sweat started forming on Temari's forehead. Realizing just her sand shield would not be enough, she started to compress and quicken winds in front of the shield to provide a bit more resistance and partially scatter the force of the explosion before it could even reach her shield.

This happened too fast, in fact, only three seconds passed since Karin started compressing her chakra so Temari did not have much time to create countermeasures.

The chakra build-up underground suddenly stopped but Temari was not happy at all. The amount of chakra in it...

The only warning the spectators got was a brief expansion of the sand surface before it burst and filled the entire arena with a deafening explosion as blinding white light flooded the chakra barrier. Many people in the audience were blinded by it and had to rub their eyes to recover their sight while others tried to cover their ears because of the loud booming sound.

Fortunately for them, Rei's chakra barrier held otherwise at least a half of Konoha would have been just a crater.

Still, both Tsunade and Rei started to be quite annoyed with how much they had to focus to prevent a massive earthquake from occurring... again.

Honestly, did the two women not understand this was supposed to be a fight between genins? What's with this village destroying shit-show!?

The explosion quickly reached Temari's wind shield, blowing through it as if it didn't even exist and only slightly diminishing in intensity. It reached her sand shield, and the sand started to instantly turn the surface of it into a glass before it shattered due to the extreme heat the explosion carried.

The sand shield held somewhat even though the explosion was getting through it layer by layer. By the time the sand shield was completely destroyed, the force of the explosion was greatly reduced and Temari had a barrier made out of her chakra in front of her.

She might not be extremely proficient in this kind of Jutsu, but she wasn't just a one-trick pony who could only do wind Jutsu and manipulate sand. Lady Pakura has beaten an entire repertoire of Jutsu into her just in case she someday needed them.

The force of the explosion met Temari's hastily put chakra barrier, making it violently tremble. Alas, Temari's chakra barrier was directly supplied by Temari's chakra... and damn if it wasn't draining as heck... so the barrier was preserved even if only barely.

Temari successfully withstood the explosion that could level half of a village and didn't even get scratched. After all, getting a scratch from fighting Karin would have been embarrassing in her opinion.

Of course, she completely ignored the fact she did not inflict even a scratch on Karin either.

The blinding light started to clear out and the aftermath left many spectators in a daze. Where previously were dunes of sand, now only a massive crater spanning the whole surface of the arena remained. It wasn't a 'clean' crater either. Its surface was filled with many jagged protrusions that seemed to be made of something similar to obsidian, the whole ground was black and shiny, so much so, a person could even see their reflection on it.

The environment of the arena was rearranged for the third time during this fight alone.

And in the middle of this crater, Karin was huffing and puffing, her hands on her knees as he tried to catch her breath. The reason for her survival was obvious as her whole body was covered by the human-sized version of her previously massive chakra armor.

Now, it only covered her body, not unlike Ringo's Lightning Armor technique.

Seeing it, Temari's expression twisted into a grimace. The biggest weakness of Karin's chakra armor was its chakra consumption. Because of its huge size, the redhead had to supply an ungodly amount of chakra to keep it active. But now with size reduction, she could focus more of her chakra to strengthen its defenses, make the chakra more condensed, while also using much less chakra overall.

'Did I just help her to get a breakthrough in her Jutsu?' Temari disgruntledly thought in deep displeasure as she flopped down from the 'ceiling' of the chakra barrier onto the shiny black ground just a few feet away from the huffing Uzumaki.

Karin grinned at Temari through her heavy breathing, "Heh... How did, haaa, you like it? B-, haa, -itch?" She asked, causing Temari's eye to twitch.

"Such a cheeky mouth when you are half-dead on your feet. You really should learn some humility. Someone else might have killed you by now because of how annoying you are. Well, I guess that is a genetic defect of the Uzumaki bloodline so you can't really help it." Temari retorted back in a condescending manner, knowing it would annoy Karin a lot.

Contrary to Temari's expectations, there was no explosion of temper. The Uzumaki was probably too exhausted for that.

Karin just derisively snorted, "You, haaa, are underestimating, huuu, me too much." She raised her gaze, her determined red eyes looking straight into Temari's teal ones, causing them to widen when...