“It’s been a while since I had this much fun!”
Summary
The Mizukage continues his battle with Gaara’s fourth company, deciding to bring out his trump card, Jouki Boy and refuse to continue helping the Allied shinobi, claiming that if they can’t defeat him, they would have no chance of beating the enemy boss. Meanwhile, Mu is revealed to have split his body at the very last moment, and Kabuto ponders on reanimating another corpse using Mu’s power.
Impression
There was a fair amount of fighting this week too, and it was all centered around the battle between the Mizukage and Gaara’s 4th company – yes, those idiots who were pretty much useless in taking out the Mizukage’s giant clam summon. Anyway, as predicted Oonoki never died at all, and was replaced with Gaara’s Sand Clone at the very last minute. Gaara’s pulling off some pretty fancy jutsu without looking like he’s losing much chakra at all, especially with the giant sand pyramid the Allied forces tried to trap the Mizukage in. I suppose lots of sand already being present in their desert battlefield is to his advantage. The Mizukage himself has his own share of fancy jutsu, including Jouki Boy, which makes use of a neat bit of chemistry in order to pull off consecutive successive explosions with just one clone. With the clone made of water covered by an oil exterior, moving around generates friction, heating the oil and causing the water to boil rapidly. This eventually results in a huge steam explosion, taking out loads of Allied ninja and subsequently forming back again after the air forced upwards by the steam turns to hail, cooling the clone down. It’s a cool trick, but it also makes sense that the Mizukage would get seriously weakened from creating such a clone – especially if its moving around fast enough to avoid Gaara’s sand and have decent attack power as well. Like Naruto’s more…fragile Kage Bunshin, this thing seems to have a decent level of intelligence too, being able to take all of the original Mizukage’s seal tags off right as Gaara was about to complete his pyramid.
It wasn’t ideal for the Mizukage to suddenly decide to stop helping them – it’s what everyone (even the Tsuchikage) was riding their hopes on after all. From the perspective of a standard shounen series though, it’s good training for people like Gaara to put their lives on the line – and the Mizukage himself says that if they can’t beat him, there’s no way they can go up against stronger opponents like Tobi (though that’s not a battle to be fought by either Gaara or the Tsuchikage). People’s power intensifies in a life/death situation, and the same is true with Gaara, who ended up being able to quickly think of a strategy to counter the giant mess of oil and water. A bit more chemistry too – using the oil’s heat to melt his father’s gold, which bonded with the clone and made it much, much denser. With extra conductive properties, it was chilled more than it needed to, and just froze over!
Mu splitting himself turned out to be the thing that saved his life – as it’s fission instead of a clone, I’m guessing this version can act independently of its original. If you’re not feeling ominous about Kabuto’s premonition of summoning “him”, you should be. Especially if this particular person taking a long time to do – and Kabuto could summon many high-class and Kage level ninja without too much trouble. Anyway, I think we might be heading back into filler territory with the anime’s extension of Naruto’s rematch with the Sound Four – if it’s interesting and I have the time, I might give blogging next week’s filler a shot.