The wind whipped past his ear as he free fell after dispersing the platform of sand.

His white cloak flapped around him as he neared the ground.

Beside him Rasa too plummeted to the ground with him, both of them spread-eagled to maximize drag.

Lin Feng chuckled inwardly at the refusal of the man to attenuate his fall with his golden sand before he used his own.

The stoic redhead had a competitive streak a mile wide. Probably why he started the war anyway.

He definitely wanted to come out of the shadow of the Third Kazekage and capture his title of the strongest.

As they both came closer and closer to the ground, close beads of sweat appeared on Rasa’s forehead only to be whipped away by the wind from his descent.

Finally, just about a hundred metres from the ground, he couldn’t insist anymore and called upon gold dust from the gourd strapped to his back and slowed his fall.

Lin Feng laughed heartily and inspired deeply, the world vitality flowing into him and then through him and out of his pores.

His body was a woodwind instrument and the world vitality the air it needed to play its melody.

The air around him twisted and vibrated in a strange rhythm, blurring his form as a vortex formed centred on him.

Everyone in the battlefield stopped as a huge pressure covered them. Looking up, they saw his form expanding as sand accumulated on him.

The fully transformed four-tails roared its challenge as it leapt up to meet him mid-air, lava wreathing its fist.

Magma fist and sand claw met with a shockwave that rippled across the battlefield.

Globules of molten glass scattered from the point of contact, causing many shinobi to have to hastily fend to the side to avoid a painful death.

Aided by the momentum from the fall and the turbulent world vitality, Lin Feng came off from the encounter with only a ruptured arm while the four-tails was embedded deep into the earth.

Fissures spread in all directions from the crater as Lin Feng in the shape of Shukaku waddled towards it while sand accumulated on his lost arm and it regenerated.

As he approached, a heatwave washed over him. The fissures began to glow with a dim red light as the rock at the centre of the crater softened and began to melt.

The heat distorted the air as a pillar of flame rose up to the skies. With a manic howl, a humongous ape with rust red hair hurtled out of the flames towards him.

Lin Feng, fully transformed as Shukaku, inhaled deeply and the air and world vitality for miles around him became sparse as his stomach inflated.

The four tails lost control of its mad dash and tumbled head over heels as it was sucked towards the inflated sandy racoon.

Hammering a fist to his bloated stomach, he spat out a ball of compressed air at the approaching four-tails.

A deafening collision was followed by the form of the tailed beast flying away like red bullet and slamming into a cliff face, collapsing it on top of it.

Gesturing with his arms, sand surged forwards like the sea and buried the area where the four-tails had fallen.

With an effort of will, the sand formed a sphere around the struggling ape and slowly rose up into the air slowly shrinking as it got compressed.

The four-tails howled and emitted flames from every pore, the extreme heat fusing the sand into glass.

In a few moments, the entire sphere hade become translucent as it melted into liquid glass.

Lin Feng gritted his teeth as he supported the orb with hard and stubborn effort. The four-tails was a lot stronger than the one tails and if it were not for him providing support by imbuing world vitality into the sand, it would have already broken free.

His eyes bloomed with an extraordinary splendour as he invested the entirety of his will into some Void Force he had transformed from world vitality within the day he had spent idly after capturing Suna.

He delved into the world principles contained within Shukaku, barely managing get a superficial read on it due to his fusion with its soul.

He found what he was looking for and with a primal yell, he erupted with the entirety of his Shattered Void cultivation base.

The remaining sand which constituted his colossal body flowed away towards the glass orb and wrapped around it, leaving him exposed.

Before the four-tails could struggle free from the new impediment, his fingers blurred as he pinched seals. Every stroke inspiring invisible ripples in space that all converged on the surface of the sphere, forming patterns similar to those on Shukaku’s body.

With a final shout of “SEAL”, the world seemed to grow still as the world vitality gathered towards the floating orb, filling in the etched patterns with a glowing blue energy.

As suddenly as it had begun, the mutation ended. The large glass orb crashed onto the ground, the light from the patterns fading away leaving the four tails stuck like an insect in amber.

Lin Feng barely had time to gasp for breath before he had to teleport away from a beam of white light that would surely have blown a hole in him.

He reappeared above the sphere and looked towards the source of the beam.

A hoary headed midget floated in the air, keeping off Rasa’s offensive with relative ease as he kept one eye on Lin Feng.

“Who’s short-stuff?” Lin Feng asked Rasa. He had felt a profound sense of danger from the beam that had grazed him.

“The Third Tsuchikage, Onoki.”