The Naruto Technique That Only Two Characters Were Ever Able To Learn

The Shinobi of Naruto live or die by their techniques.

The hit manga and anime series from Masashi Kishimoto has produced some of anime's most impressive abilities that call to other popular anime like Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball Z. Fans can still trace much of Naruto's DNA to Toriyama's iconic series. For instance, Dragon Ball started as a comedic adventure series before evolving into something focused more on hyper martial arts action, featuring characters who possess absurdly powerful skills. Naruto maintained this trend especially with its follow-up series Naruto: Shippuden, which upped the ante when it came to battles and new jutsus that could either destroy a village or make an enemy into nothing more than particles of dust.

In Naruto, that latter skill is known as the Dust Release technique — something only two characters have ever mastered.

The Shippuden series greatly expanded the world of Naruto by introducing more interesting and more powerful characters. This was definitely a highlight during the "Five Kage Summit" arc, which featured a meeting between the various village leaders. To become a Kage means that a character has to know some powerful jutsus, and this is definitely the case with Ōnoki, the Third Tsuchikage. He's one of two characters to have mastered Dust Release.

Ōnoki was already deemed pretty powerful by Naruto standards thanks to some of his past battles, which included a fight against Madara Uchiha. He was the only living Kage at the summit to have encountered Madara and lived. But it's his rare Dust Release technique that makes him a major threat. For one, the jutsu involves combining three nature transformations: fire, wind, and earth. Most nature transformation combinations cap off at two for other powerful characters — like Konoha's First Hokage, who was capable of combining Earth and Water Chakras for his Wood Release abilities. Second, Dust Release traps its target in a structure while a sphere capable of reducing a person into particles of dust expands. The force is very powerful once it hits its target, but thanks to the enclosing structure, it's also contained.

In short, the technique is powerful yet strangely efficient. The only two people to have mastered Dust Release are Ōnoki and the person who taught the technique to him: Mu, the Second Tsuchikage.

The move wasn't confined to just Naruto: Shippuden, as Ōnoki did manage to make an appearance with it in the Boruto series. Given how Boruto has introduced other new, powerful techniques, it makes sense that Ōnoki would have to come in and remind fans of why Dust Release is still a top contender for one of the series' strongest skills.