Chapter 255: Three Tails

Naruto was so thunderstruck by Li Cheng's shamelessness that it took him a while before he shook his head and said, "Sorry, sir—should be Master Pi Fu, right?

We've already promised Mr. Eugene that we'd help him eliminate his competitors."

Naruto is a pretty standard hot-blooded shonen jump manga protagonist. Li Cheng didn't go on a killing spree of innocents like Joker did at the start, and even expressed willingness to cooperate, so his attitude was fairly friendly.

The sudden Rasengan blast on the ventilation duct earlier was also meant to force Li Cheng out of the nuclear island, to avoid damaging the nuclear power plant if they fought.

Eugene's heart skipped a beat—this version of Naruto was still a bit too naive and childish; with one casual sentence, he'd leaked critical information to the other party—

Helping eliminate competitors meant Eugene had already revealed to Toy City's upper echelons that only by taking out the other isekai players could one win the Key Game.

And considering the laxity shown by Toy City's police force during Joker's terrorist attack earlier today, one could deduce that at least before that, Eugene had not warned Toy City Hall about the incoming supernatural.

In other words, he had at most reached a cooperative intent with City Hall this afternoon, and such cooperation wasn't very solid.

If they forcibly took out Eugene, whether City Hall would go all out in revenge for him—that was a huge question mark.

Thinking of this, Eugene's pinky twitched slightly, and his whole body suddenly retreated more than ten steps backward, leaning forward, face showing pain, coughing up a large mouthful of blood, as if blasted away by an invisible cannon shell.

"Hm? Sneak attack?"

Naruto furrowed his brow, gathered chakra at the soles of his boots, kicked off the ground and shot out like lightning, sweeping a right roundhouse kick toward Li Cheng's waist.

Being provoked this easily—guess this really is the incomplete version, huh?

Li Cheng sighed helplessly. Black chitinous armor grew beneath his skin; his left hand blocked Naruto's ankle horizontally, while his right hand drew a rusted cleaver from the void, slashing diagonally.

Clang!

Naruto flipped his wrist, using a kunai hidden in his sleeve to block the cleaver's edge, while his left foot kicked off the blade's hilt mid-air, freeing his right leg.

The instant he landed, he leaned forward, lowered his center of gravity, dodged the cleaver's second slash, and thrust the kunai straight at Li Cheng's right shoulder.

Seeing the fight break out, Eugene felt slightly relieved. If stormtroopers were Toy City's regular police, and the Star Wars soldiers of the SWAT team were Toy City's anti-terror special police,

then an extremely special individual like Naruto was equivalent to Toy City's special forces—one of City Hall's strongest enforcers.

As long as they could hold out until reinforcements arrived, they could deal with Master Pi Fu however they wanted.

Calling Liu Angxing, Xiao Fugui, Yukihira Soma, Cooking Master Boy, Komatsu and other top chefs over to make a Master Pi Fu sashimi wouldn't be out of the question.

"Reducto!"

Eugene shouted low, flicked his wrist, controlled his wand to release the Bone-Splintering Curse, aiming a firework-like white orb of light at Li Cheng.

Crack!

The orb was intercepted mid-air. Grey Rain grabbed the Bone-Splintering Curse with one hand, her entire arm exploding apart, only to self-heal the next second.

"Let's play whack-a-mole."

She grinned, picking up the Skull-Smasher Hammer.

"Bone-Splintering Curse! Confringo! Sectumsempra!"

Eugene wildly swung his wand, continuously casting spells from Harry Potter, but Grey Rain was completely unreasonable—any injury, no matter how horrific, healed in an instant—and she just kept charging forward in great strides.

With no choice, Eugene first cast a gust-summoning spell, raising a gale to blow himself backward, while shouting loudly: "Levicorpus!"

Grey Rain's feet left the ground, hanging in mid-air, but the next second she went native and yelled "Kabuda Transform!"

Her head and limbs all melted, then regrew from the opposite direction, restoring her head-up, feet-down posture, and dropping back to the ground.

What kind of monster is this—Terminator T-X?!

Cold sweat seeped from Eugene's forehead. He cast Apparition, teleporting beneath the nuclear island's containment shell, pulling distance again, placed his wand by his mouth, and roared: "Fiendfyre!"

Blazing fire spewed from his mouth; under the constraint of the spell called Fiendfyre, the flames gathered and took shape, transforming into a giant serpent composed purely of raging fire.

Its body was a full fifteen meters long. The truck-head-sized serpent head rose slowly, looking down at the ant-like Grey Rain from above, then suddenly opened its bloody maw and spewed scorching Fiendfyre at her.

In the Terminator movies, no matter how advanced the liquid metal robot, it still feared ultra-high temperatures or ultra-low temperatures freezing its central chip—the one before them should be no exception... right?

Just as Eugene watched the Fiendfyre's effect with a tense face, the other side of the battlefield had also reached a white-hot stage.

Clang clang clang clang!

Li Cheng and Naruto's afterimages crossed each other in rapid succession; on-site one could only hear the fierce clashing of the rusted cleaver and kunai, along with occasional explosive sounds from the concrete floor.

'Does it have to be this exaggerated?' Li Cheng ranted wildly inside. This version of Naruto was even harder to fight than Bartmos; just in terms of taijutsu, he could casually pull off spin kicks, elbow strikes, knee strikes, 翻转 hand throws, forearm hammers, shoulder throws—everything.

The situation was so intense that he didn't even have time to pull out the skill USB drive and use the Familiar Swap skill to escape.

Li Cheng had to keep the Multi-Thread Brain Domain active at all times to boost reaction speed, and maintain half-insect transformation to enhance physical attributes, just to keep up with the opponent's movements and cling to the distance, not giving Naruto a chance to form hand seals and use techniques like Shadow Clone or Rasengan.

As time went on, the multiple心神 produced by the Multi-Thread Brain Domain started chatting with themselves inside Li Cheng's mind.

'No way, this guy's only fifteen—is this what a hot-blooded manga protagonist is like?'

'This one must not be allowed to live!'

'Hehehehe, seize his Supreme Bone—cough, no, seize the Nine-Tails within him, take his destiny!'

'Uh, actually Naruto entered the ninja academy at six, so theoretically he's already studied combat for nine years. Our牢 Cheng has strictly speaking only been a player for half a year, not even a full year, right?'

'Mm, then our牢 Cheng levels up a bit faster—seized Grey Rain, took his destiny!'

Li Cheng banished the chaotic thoughts flying through his mind, found the right moment, and triggered the Burst Qi effect of the Qi Condensing Internal Explosion Fist.

Boom boom boom boom!

Explosive sounds rang out all over Naruto's body; even with the Nine-Tails' chakra protecting him, his skin still cracked and split open, blood spraying everywhere.

Taking advantage of this brief gap, Li Cheng pressed down on Naruto's head, but before he could release the Brain Entropy Drain skill, the latter exploded with a "crack" and turned into a piece of smoke-wreathed wood.

Ninjutsu: Substitution Jutsu.

Naruto, whose clothes had been blasted to tatters, appeared out of thin air twenty meters up in mid-air, formed hand seals to release the Shadow Clone Jutsu, summoning a hundred identical clones in one breath.

All clones paired up in twos, each spinning up a Rasengan.

In the Information Integration Glasses, every Rasengan was immensely powerful.

So yeah, infinite blue bar is really annoying.

Li Cheng pushed both hands forward, casting 【Driving Tide Wind Urgent Waves Rolling Clouds】 to generate a violent hurricane that blew him away.

Simultaneously using Leopard Leap's double jump, combined with the Instant Thunder skill and the Bat Claw Gun, he triple-jumped in a Z-shaped displacement, barely escaping the Rasengan explosion range.

Boom!

The explosive flash completely drowned out the streetlights and the searchlights of the distant fire engines; the shockwave sheared a layer straight off the road, and at the center of the surface a giant crater seven or eight meters deep was left behind.

The shadow clones that had fallen to the ground were about to attack again, and Li Cheng, who had already retreated to the outer perimeter of the nuclear power station, suddenly raised his arm and clenched his fist.

Thud!

A muffled cannon report came from an extremely distant place, and a black dot suddenly flew across the sky, seemingly slow but in reality fast, smashing into the nuclear island's containment shell and blasting apart a large amount of the cement casing that was on the verge of breaking.

That was a high-explosive shell fired from a magic-energy six-legged cannon emplacement on a distant rooftop.

The contingency he had prepared in advance finally came into play now; the shell burst, and several tons of cement shell fragments rained down, nearly crushing to death or injuring the Lego fire brigade down below, commanded by the protagonist of PAW Patrol — Marshall (a white-spotted fire dog).

"You?!"

Naruto's pupils contracted sharply, and he instantly realized it was Li Cheng's doing.

Driven by extreme rage, his golden hair stood on end, his eyes reddened, his pupils turned into vertical beast-pupils, and fangs poked out of his mouth,

surging red chakra energy spilling out of his body and condensing on the surface into a fox phantom with three tails.

"Sigh, nobody wants something like this to happen."

Li Cheng said in the tone of a TVB television drama, and snapped his fingers.

Thud!

Another shell came flying in, and just as it was about to follow the hole previously blasted out by the Rasengan and precisely fall into the interior of the nuclear island,

Naruto, who had activated his three-tails stage, had no choice but to stop attacking Li Cheng, leap high into the air, and slap the shell away with one palm.