Naruto : Monsters

How was I supposed to win?

I knew that to accomplish my goals I needed to grow strong. Strong enough to defeat the greatest ninjas in history, the ones who stood at the top of the Shinobi world, the monsters known as S-Class.

But how was I supposed to do that?

...

The Hyuuga were powerful in their own right, of that there can be no doubt. They had produced more A-rank ninja than any single Clan in Konoha. But that was just it, they only produced A-rank ninja. Never in the entire history of the Clan had it ever succeeded in producing an S-rank ninja.

Which meant I could not rely on the Hyuuga fighting style alone to get me there, I had to produce one of my own.

So I searched. From the very depth of my memories to every scroll in the Hyuuga Clan Library, I searched. I researched the fighting style of every S-rank ninja the Shinobi world ever produced, dissected their techniques and tried to figure out if they were compatible with my own. I spent years trying to find a solution.

And like with most things in life, I ended up stumbling over the answer by luck.

It was when I first learned of my affinity, when I stared at the crumpled strip of chakra paper in my hand, that an old half-forgotten memory began to surface.

It was of a dark-skinned man who wrapped himself in lightning, donning it as if it were a cloak.

A man who moved so fast that the eye could not track him.

A man who fought a Tailed-beast with nothing but his bare hands.

It was then that I knew what I must do.

Speed

That was my answer.

With my Gentle Fist, I had no need for strength. What meaning was there in a punch that could turn boulders to dust when I could kill a man with but a single tap of my fingers? No, strength was not something I had use for. It was speed which I needed. Speed so fast that I could reach out and touch an enemy before he knew I was there.

And who was the fastest man alive?

The Raikage – He who ran with lightning.

A scroll containing information on the Raikage's famed lightning armour, the Lightning Release Chakra Mode, did exist in the Library. It held all the instruction needed to learn the jutsu but when I began my first tentative attempts to learn the technique my father had outright forbidden me from even trying.

I said it before, jutsu were stupidly hard things to learn and the lightning release was on a completely different level of difficulty. In the forty years since my Clan gained possession of the scroll not a single Hyuuga ever came close to learning it. Many of our most promising ninjas had given it a try and all had failed, some had even died in their attempt.

Just to begin learning the Lightning Release, one had to meet two prerequisites.

The first was to obtain a high degree of chakra control along with a powerful lightning affinity. Both were something I had in abundance. Chakra control was my forte, even among the Hyuugas who are famed for it I was on another level. And ever since I discovered my lightning affinity I had been training it every chance I could. 

Even as I read my books during class, I would practice moulding my lightning chakra so that sparks of electric currents leapt between my fingers.

The second prerequisite was a solid understanding of how the human anatomy worked, in particular the nervous system. The Lightning Release uses electricity to stimulate the user's nervous system, which in turn results in a massive increase in reaction time and pushes the user's physical prowess to the absolute limit, allowing for tremendous raw speed.

You couldn't simply pour electricity through your nerves and expect them to work faster, if you tried something that stupid all you would end up doing was cooking yourself from the inside out. The nervous system was incredibly complex, made up of billions of neurons. 

And to make matters even harder, as if they weren't already hard enough as it was, there were hundreds of different kinds of neurons. This meant that each type of nerve had a different threshold for the amount of lightning chakra it could hold before burning out. 

The nerves in your brain for example were far more fragile than the ones in the muscles of your arm.

I had spent the last few years learning everything I could about the human nervous system. I read every medical textbook I could get my hands on, memorized every chart or technique that could help me. It took me thousands of hours of work and entire years but I managed to do it in the end.

And I had one major advantage that helped me along the way, my Byakugan.

With it I could see my own nervous system, see the electric impulses running through my nerves. I knew how much lightning chakra I could pour into myself because I could see the moment the nerve approached its breaking point and began to strain.

My father had told me that I would only be allowed to study the scroll when I succeeded in obtaining both of those prerequisites. It took a while but I finally managed to meet his requirements last year.

After several years of hard work, I finally obtained the right to begin learning the technique. See? I told you jutsu was stupidly hard to learn.

The Lightning Release Chakra Mode turned out to be not so much as a single technique but the combination of two techniques into one. One half of the jutsu taught you how to speed up your body, the other taught you how to speed up your mind.

What was the point of moving faster when you lacked the reflexes to match it? What good was moving at the speed of lightning when your thoughts could only move at a fraction of that speed? To completely master the Lightning Release you needed a mind that could think and react as fast as lightning itself. So I concentrated on mastering the mind half of the jutsu first.

Last month I succeeded.

And now I would finally get to test it.

I opened my eyes and what greeted me was a frozen world.

The leaves that drifted down from the trees hung suspended in the air as if held by invisible hands. A bird that was gliding down toward a branch now dangled unmoving, just an inch above its intended perch. Even Kakashi didn't move, didn't even breathe from where he stood across from me.

Yet I knew that the world was no different than it had been before I had shut my eyes. It was not the world that had changed but me. Or to be more precise, it was my perception of the world that had changed.

Right now the neurons in my brain were firing several dozen times faster than normal, allowing me to process my thoughts at an unbelievable speed, almost lightning fast. And that was exactly what I was seeing right now, this was what the world looked like through the eyes of lightning, a world that moved so slow that it practically stood still.

This was my answer to obtaining S-rank.

Pouring chakra into my muscles, I drew out the maximum amount of strength from them that I could before taking a fast step toward Kakashi. My right foot crawled forward, so slow I could barely perceive it moving, as if it was forcing its way through thick liquid concrete than air.

This was the major flaw with learning only one half of the technique. It was only my thoughts that had sped up, not my body. But even without mastering the Lightning Release I was fast, far faster than any Genin had the right to be, yet for all of my speed I was nothing compared to my thoughts. So now I appeared to be moving with all the speed of a snail.

But that was fine – I had already found a way to work around that particular problem.

Focusing on a patch of grass ahead of me, only a couple of feet in front of Kakashi, I began to mold my chakra into a jutsu before swiftly releasing it.

The world seemed to dash by me as my body flew forward, tearing through the air so quickly that it was fast even to my current perception, before I instantly came to a complete stop just in front of Kakashi.

Shunshin no Jutsu - a high-speed movement technique that needed a large amount of concentration and control to cast. Though for all of its uses it was deemed near worthless in combat due to the amount of time one needed to cast it.

The user of the Shunshin needed time to focus on a location to flicker to, time to get rid of the disorientation of appearing so fast in a new location, and time to assess his new surroundings. All in all it needed far too much time to be serviceable in combat.

But to me it was far from worthless, after all, I had all the time in the world.

My right foot was still only halfway through completing its first step by the time I had finished flickering. Kakashi himself still hasn't moved at all and was looking straight past me, over my head and at the spot I had been before I flickered in front of him.

That was understandable. From my point of view two whole seconds had already passed since I flickered away, but from Kakashi's perspective it had only been the smallest fraction of a second if that. Had Kakashi been ready, had even guessed I was capable of doing this then things might have been different, but as it was he simply had no time to react or even process that I had already moved.

Perfect.

The hand by my waist shot ahead, moving in time with my foot as I stepped forward, both limbs travelling as fast as I could push them. While my hand began to creep towards Kakashi I started moulding chakra into my palm in preparations for an attack.

Time crawled slowly by as my strike grew closer towards Kakashi's chest, moving almost painfully slow to my eyes. In any other circumstances, I could have landed over a dozen more strikes it took for this one to hit, but within my Lightning Release state, I needed what subjectively felt like four seconds to me to complete even a single strike.

When my palm had finally reached the optimum striking distance, a spot only inches away from his chest, and Kakashi still hadn't even begun to react to me, I released my technique.

Eight Trigrams Vacuum Palm!

A wave of chakra erupted from my palm just as it was about to touch Kakashi – a vacuum shell with enough raw force behind it to blow a full-grown man off his feet, and I made sure to hold nothing back. 

It shouldn't be anywhere near enough to kill Kakashi but even for a Jonin like him there was no way he was walking out of this without his share of fractured ribs, something that would give me more than enough of a handicap to snatch the bell off him.

In my mind ten seconds had passed since I entered my imperfect Lightning Release state, but in reality, everything that just happened occurred in barely a tenth of a second.

It was over. All I had to do was-

"Maa~ Aren't you the scary one?" A voice came from my right.

...

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