Naruto Vol. 36
- ISBN
- 9781421521725
- Publisher
- Viz Media
- English release
- Pages
- 192
- Chapters
- 320–329
- Anime
- Season 4: 不死の破壊者、飛段・角都の章 (Hidan and Kakuzu) ep. 72–88
Chapters 320 to 329 are most of one engagement, and the engagement does not end in this book. A Niju Shotai team meets the Akatsuki pair in the field, and the problem is not a duel: one of the two opponents cannot be killed by any method the series has established in thirty-five volumes. Shikamaru gets the analysis chapter, numbered 324, and his thinking is treated as the weapon rather than as a delay before one. Read a chapter a week, this is one fight arriving in ten weekly pieces. Collected, it is the reason the volume exists. Shippuden's season 4, episodes 72 to 88, covers chapters 312 to 340, so this whole book and the one after it sit inside one season, and the one before it crosses into it two chapters in. It stops mid-arc and the next volume is not optional. Viz published Vols. 34 through 37 on the same day, 3 February 2009.
Spoilers — why this volume matters. Tap to reveal.
Asuma dies. He led the squad Shikamaru grew up in, which chapter 328 names Cell Number 10, and Hidan kills him with a stake through his own chest after Shikamaru has worked out most of how the ritual functions and still cannot stop it in time. That is the volume's design: the analysis is correct and arrives late, which is a harder loss for a shonen serial to stage than being outfought. Hidan's immortality is the mechanical half. Damage does not kill him, and a ritual makes a target share whatever he suffers, so the series has to invent a different category of answer, and that answer is what the next two volumes are for. Naruto spends the same chapters failing to combine wind chakra with the Rasengan, offstage from all of it. The burial at the end is not a coda. It is the motive the following arc runs on, and it is handed to the people who were in the room.
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