As the purple lightning continued to provide limited illumination to the overall apocalyptic gloom emanating from the skies above the Box it seemed like there’d be no end to this incredible battle. At least there was none in sight. The two opponents had thrown immensely powerful attacks against each other that’d have decimated any opponent not on their unbelievably high level and yet these two only brushed the damage off despite its world shattering proportions.
Finally the Konoha jounin decided to make the first move after Francho had regained his freedom of movement. It was risky to attack the man head on however Kusagoro wanted to scout out just what Francho’s current chakra level was as the warrior suspected that the pills may have boosted the man’s chakra pool tenfold for a brief moment but it also may have reduced the pirate’s power afterwards. Such was usually the nature of such risky power ups. The payoff usually made the benefits not worth the hassle if the opponent survived the sudden explosion of power.
Francho decided to not wait until his body and face got pummeled by Kusagoro’s ground shattering and impossibly fast combinations of punches. The hulking brute threw a powerful straight punch which landed right in Kusagoro’s extended hand. The blow however wasn’t simply stopped by the crafty shinobi. A silent popping sound suggested a more complicated strategy being in play. The brief smile on the jounin’s face only strengthened this theory…
Suddenly Francho’s fist, Kusagoro’s body and then his face and the entire area got swallowed in a cloud of smoke as Francho’s crushing blow cracked a smoke bomb which the ninja had held in his hand having carefully removed it from his pouch while his opponent’s attention was fleeting.
Loud thuds and cracks emanated from inside the smoke cloud. Francho must’ve been caught unprepared in a pretty devastating beatdown as the loud thundering blows and the shockwaves coming after them quickly dispersed the dark smoke cloud. Francho’s stumbling body looked around not being able to see his opponent anywhere. It was clear that the Pirate Lord had received quite an ass kicking inside that cloud, his bruises and severely busted nose, eye and lip testified it. Now Francho’s greatest concern was finding his opponent.
Without alert or taunting Kusagoro crashed on top of his opponent from high above. Dashing from above the layers of black as tar clouds so swiftly that the emanating airwaves split a gigantic hole in the skies letting a brief ray of sunlight in before it closed down again, fueled by the malicious chakra of the Box. Francho’s jaw gapped wide open as his throat was crushed by Kusagoro’s elbow and drove to the ground so deep and with so much force that it split the waters wide open and went well into the abysmal crater at the bottom.
After a brief moment the waters snapped back like the jaws of a monster crushing the two fighters underneath them, making it very unclear what was transpiring below. Finally Mana witnessed a bunch of astonishingly wide beacons of light, signaling the upcoming devastation to follow and finally beams of white light shot out from under the oceans into the sky, each at least fifty meters wide or larger and didn’t seem to weaken as they left Earth’s atmosphere. The ground beneath was shaking and erecting crashing waves that reached the very upper layers of the heavens above and yet standing on top of the Box seemed to absorb any shocks from down under. Almost like the Box had a protecting force field around it that only living avatars of chakra could pass and not destructive forces of nature around them.
Kusagoro appeared from down under after jumping out from the bottom of the abyss he had crushed his opponent down in. The jounin was struggling to breathe calmly, he appeared grasping for air but then his breathing sort of equalized and the man’s hands weighed down. After the life returned to the shinobi’s arms he lifted them back up and stretched his numbed up muscles out.
“Scared me for a moment there… Almost destroyed the whole damned planet” Kusagoro jumbled out as he grinned while looking down at an unseen point deep underwater as if he could see his opponent. Even through his remarkable restraint, even transferring all but inconsequential percentages of his chakra right into his opponent wasting none on the world around them the planet was suffering, both from the malicious effects of the Box seeing the light of day and from the cataclysmic battle transpiring before it.
After a moment of awkward silence Kusagoro blinked rapidly a couple of times and scratched the back of his head uneasily. Shimo and Kouta looked at each other wondering if the Pirate Lord will even surface. Surely he must’ve perished after an attack like that?
“That attack was Hell’s Gate - one of father’s strongest, he directs the majority of his available chakra into a singular beam that devastates his opponent and grinds them into the ground exploding underneath and erupting back in the shape of countless beams that leave the Earth’s surface and travel away. I’d assume that when the attack detonates it doesn’t hurt anything living… It’s required because most bodies can’t take this attack and may die too soon, leaving most of it for the world to handle” Kouta’s face began shifting into a smile. Slowly the boy was becoming more and more confident that the opponent must’ve been destroyed.
“Or he ate another pill in desperation to survive… That means that right now he is cowering and suffering the after-effects and your father is wasting his time to finish this” Shimo shrugged, as time went on and on it was becoming apparent that no one would surface. Then Francho simply blinked into existence just twenty meters further from Kusagoro as if he was moving at completely untraceable speeds.
The Pirate Lord was injured, solid chunks of flesh had peeled off exposing his muscle and bone in several spots of his body and large areas of his body were burnt up or singed. At that moment his coat had completely been torn off and incinerated so not a single string of cloth remained. His black tank top had gaping holes exposing the wounds or twitching tense muscle tissue under it. Yet somehow Francho found the time to pick up his captain’s hat from wherever it laid in the battlefield. Most gruesomely a beaten body laid in his weighed down arms halfway drowning as Francho barely had the chakra to hold himself on the water’s surface at that moment “ it was beaten and unconscious Hachiro.
“Not sure what this landlubber is but I found him on my ship trying to sail away…” Francho grinned lifting Hachiro’s unconscious body up and showing it to Kusagoro who just indifferently shrugged.
“I’ve no idea who he is either. So you’ve wasted time running to your ship then? Should’ve covered your tail and ran while you’re at it… I really hope you’re not planning on using this unconscious Uchiha trash as hostage?” the jounin coldly replied.
“I guess not…” Francho tossed the Uchiha aside letting him float with his head down and under forcing Kouta and Shimo to move forward. While Francho’s eyes traced the two younglings he did not attempt to intercept them, it could’ve been quite dangerous to direct his attention to kids and ignore a pissed off opponent he could barely handle already.
“Yeah, sorry ‘bout that, just had to fetch some rum and then pick up my hat, it was floating sea miles away. I kinda need this thing, it’s my pride as a Pirate Lord!” Francho explained pulling out a bottle with chestnut colored drink which he flipped up and shook his face rapidly as his cheeks began to blush and his nose dyed red. The Pirate’s eyes began to roll around as if he was chasing wild fairies or something.
Francho tripped up over his own feet beginning to stagger around in a manner in which a drunkard staggered around. Kusagoro punched his own palm before taking a combat stance and rushing at his opponent attempting to take him out. After that last attack there couldn’t have been much fight left in the Pirate Lord. The two had been dishing out inhumanly powerful attacks at each other and finally it looked like one of them was taking actual damage. Francho’s movements were different, he had to retreat to his ship and fetch a drink all of a sudden “ this was not a behavior of a fighter who thought himself in a good place with solid chances of winning.
The Akimichi weaved back in a wildly unstable manner avoiding Kusagoro’s punch. The brawler’s eyes wildly shot open in surprise, who on Earth dodged that way? Just weaving back allured one’s opponent to just step forward and extend their hand further, to bash the unprotected head. Weaving right back was just a careless move, Francho was wildly untrained in martial arts but not this bad! Then, in a sudden outburst of speed and ferocity, the pirate just tossed his upper body onwards shoving a fist in Kusagoro’s face and making the jounin slide back on the water’s surface grabbing his bursting with blood busted nose.
The pirate let a silly hiccup out as he continued to sway onwards and backwards, weaving to the left and right as if struggling to keep his moves straight.
“Tsk… You had to go ahead and pull that old thing out, didn’t you?” Kusagoro complained scratching the side of his head and feeling up his nose until his elemental in battle ninja healing factor took care of his rapidly bleeding nose to the point where it didn’t stand in the way of him continuing the battle.
“Lurrned it from an old haaaag in Neigong island up north…” Francho grinned slurring in a barely intelligible manner.
“What are those weird moves?” Shimo wondered annoyingly staring at the staggering pirate as he kept embarrassing himself in his drunk sway.
“The Drunken Fist Style” Hachiro weakly exclaimed as his eyes slightly peeked open looking at the battlefield. The Uchiha eyes must’ve witnessed this fighting style in the past or at the very least heard of it, it didn’t appear to particularly surprise the man and he happened to identify the style immediately having just woken up from his knocked out state.
“So… You learn how to fight when you’re drunk?” Kouta scratched the back of his head looking confused, “That doesn’t match what we were taught as medical ninja…” the young man added scratching his chin. To him such a style happened to be a total mystery, it wasn’t easy to pick up that the young man has never had much experience with drinking or seen himself get drunk. His wild party on Read’s ship may have been the young man’s first experience with alcohol…
“No. You get drunk when you’re drunk. However some people, very few “ just barely enough to fuel the legends, do not get drunk like they usually would. Instead they awaken a hidden style of martial arts hidden within their genetic code. Something that only very few inherit in any given generation” Hachiro explained slowly picking himself off the top of the Box and sitting up before trying to stand up but collapsing on his knees.
As the injured Uchiha attempted to explain the style to the young ninja Kusagoro desperately tried to land a single blow on his opponent but the patterns of the drunk pirate were impossible to predict. Right after avoiding a series of strikes the pirate weaved back and delivered a flurry of swift and strong blows in angles and combinations that he must’ve been making up on the fly. Kusagoro flew back getting blown away by the unpredictable and impeccably odd movements of his opponent.
“I once tried copying such a style from a wandering ninja who possessed this ability. Even my Sharingan couldn’t predict it or copy it. It could easily copy the movements but simply doing that wasn’t enough. It just needs that drunkenness and that wild unpredictability factor that only poor resistance to alcohol grants. It’s a style only people born into it can use, at any point there can’t be more than a handful of people with this ability” Hachiro continued to explain as Kusagoro launched another series of attacks.
This time Francho leaned back so wide that the fatso tumbled down raising a huge splash of water that washed the opponent away. Once the Jugo finally gathered his focus back the Pirate Lord suddenly jumped up recovering from his peaceful drunk slumber and began wildly kicking the shinobi up in a rapid succession the likes of which he could not pull of sober. Francho was a strongman, he swung wide and tried to hit slow, for a ninja, but insanely strong hits. Such speed and rapid combinations were unseen from his sober state and tough to believe, even tougher to survive…
“The worst thing is that the moves cannot be predicted, the user’s emotions cannot be read because they change too wildly, even the user doesn’t know their own movements, they just act… Because of that even if a Yamanaka would attempt reading their opponents’ minds they could not accurately predict anything to come from such an enemy” Hachiro concluded his explanation before clutching to his chest wound. Kouta sat down and began treating the man once in a while turning at the battlefield and checking on his father.
“Wow! I never imagined such a style existed!” Meiko shouted out in disbelief, her manner suggested that the redhead was more excited to see it than scared of Kouta’s father losing. “How does one fight it?” she wondered.
“You must snap the user out of it. Just like their easy access to the style through minimal ingestion of alcohol they also enter the state of heightened awareness easier. A strong blow or drawing of their own blood should do the trick, still, it’s easier said than done” the Uchiha lowered his head letting his hair flow all over. The man must’ve been in a lot of pain and yet his attempt at an escape using Francho’s own ship felt a bit dirty. Mana realized that the Uchiha may have only cared about them because of that strange belief that this man he was afraid of wanted Mana alive. She suspected this before but wasn’t completely sure, this attempt only helped her make sure.
Kusagoro shouted out in rage. His feet morphed into jets that fired off chakra flames sending the man forward in manner greatly surpassing his normal combat speed allowing him to boost not only his speed but also the weight behind his punch. The man’s hands switched into enlarged fists, almost like gigantic hammers held on human arms.
“Father…” Kouta mumbled out, “Don’t overdo it, you’ll enter Curse Mode unwillingly if you morph too much of your body at once”
Just as the jounin got close to his opponent the pirate leaned back just as he usually did, without a doubt even with his empowered attack there would’ve been little success to Kusagoro’s approach however the brute was smarter than that. Instead of trying to hit the pirate with his enlarged hammer hands he slammed them together unleashing a mad shockwave bubble that extended wide beyond the battlefield raising crashing tsunami waves. Shimo and Meiko had to intensify their chakra flows to form a protective aura of chakra around the young ninja or else they’d have been blown back for tens of thousands of kilometers away.
At least the attack succeeded, while spitting off blood from his busted up nose and lips Francho rolled backwards tossed around by the shockwave. The young ninja cheered for the jounin that fought one of the three most powerful pirates alive to bring them all home. Such an intense blow powerful enough to raise tsunami waves that drowned hundreds of small uninhabited islands all around the ocean thousands of kilometers away should’ve knocked the Drunken Fist right out of Francho’s head.
Kusagoro dashed back and raised his arms up for a competent defense, he wasn’t completely sure if the Pirate Lord had the Drunken Fist beaten out of him. He decided to play it safe just in case.
A wild yet slurry laughter pierced the skies and air overpowering even the sounds of purple thunder lightning up the heavens above. Francho wiped the blood off his nose before taking another chug from his bottle of rum. After taking a large enough gulp to send streams of rum down his mouth, beard and all over his belly the Pirate Lord stood on one leg extending one of his arms forward as if he held a cane. Kusagoro’s confused expression made him involuntarily tilt his head up. The shinobi was confused as to how the Drunken Fist style could still remain in the pirate’s system.
“This Drunken Fist isn’t any usual Drunken Fist. I’ve honed my style. The martial artists on Neigong call the uninitiated style “ Loopy Fist, mockingly of course. The honed style is referred to as “Zui Quan” because it focuses on imitating and honoring the eight greatest masters of Drunken Fist of the past. Now you’ve just killed one of the immortal masters within me “ Lu Dongbin, forcing me to change into Li Tieguai “ the one-legged cripple master!” Francho’s drunken laughter once again erupted out loud so loud and annoying that it almost made Kusagoro cover his ears.
Kusagoro grunted angrily before pointing his arm at the opponent. Francho grabbed one of his feet bending his leg up beginning to hop on his other leg as if he was about to fall.
“Chakra Grenade!” Kusagoro yelled out building up an excessive charge of chakra into a sphere sending it flying slowly at his opponent, trying to confuse the drunkard with the awfully slow timing of the unstable explosive sphere. The Pirate Lord awkwardly stumbled around leaping on his grounded foot before he bent down and tossed a swiping kick with the dominant leg, tossing the bottle of rum in the air and letting go of the weak leg. The grenade got kicked aside before it detonated. Normally the blast would’ve still blasted the pirate away and busted him up pretty badly but just before detonation the drunkard appeared to tumble over his own leg right after he lifted it up to his own hand and rolled aside swiftly and covering some great distance in seemingly no time at all.
Kusagoro didn’t notice the blindingly fast rolling human meatball as it deformed back into the drunkard that was fighting him using a kick with his dominant leg which Francho didn’t bother bend and lift up holding. The powerful kick sent Kusagoro flying back and bashing violently into the Box that absorbed all of the force of impact. Then the pirate simply bounced back on one leg to his initial location only to grab his bottle of rum and tease his pissed and bleeding opponent with it.
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