The Third Raikage's declaration hung in the air, not as words, but as a sentence of execution. The hatred in his voice was a physical weight, a finality that sought to crush Renjiro's spirit before his body.
But within the Uchiha-Uzumaki, that hatred found not resignation, but a forge. It ignited the last dregs of his defiance, tempering his fear into a cold, sharp blade of desperation. He would not die cowering.
He formed a hand sign and three soft pops of displaced air, three perfect replicas materialised around the Raikage, forming a rectangle of certain doom. There was no coordination needed; they shared a single, desperate mind.
"Katon: Gōka Messhitsu!" all four Renjiros roared in unison, their voices a ragged symphony of defiance.
The world ended in fire.
It was not a stream of flame; it was a tidal wave, a volcanic eruption focused into a single, annihilating direction. Four concentric tsunamis of incandescent orange and red roared inward from the clones, meeting and merging with the jet from the original to form a single, catastrophic sphere of pure heat.
The air itself screamed as it was consumed, the oxygen ripped away to feed the inferno. The ground beneath the Raikage didn't just melt; it vitrified, turning to a shimmering, bubbling sheet of glass. The trees at the clearing's edge, thirty yards away, instantly blackened and burst into spontaneous flames.
At the epicentre, a sun had been born. And at its heart was the Raikage.
He didn't dodge. He didn't counter. He simply stood there, arms slightly crossed, as the inferno consumed him. The brilliant, sun-like corona of his Lightning Release Chakra Mode flared to an intensity that was painful to look at, even for the Sharingan.
Inside the storm, the Raikage's eyes, narrowed against the brilliance, showed a flicker of not concern, but genuine surprise.
'This volume… this potency…' he thought, his mind cutting through the roar. 'For a boy his age, even with Uzumaki reserves, this is… exceptional. Hiruzen chose his weapon well.'
Through the dissipating haze, the Raikage stood untouched, his cloak flickering steadily.
"An impressive display of power," his voice boomed, calm and utterly unfazed. "But fire, boy, no matter how hot, will never penetrate my armour." With a crackle of lightning, he flickered, reappearing twenty yards away on a patch of unglassed earth.
"It is a futile effort."
'Yeah, no shit!'
Renjiro's mind screamed back, the thought a frantic, sarcastic retort against the tide of despair. He hadn't expected it to work. He had needed a distraction, a single second of obscured vision.
He got it.
As the Raikage finished speaking, Renjiro forced open the first five Gates. Power, raw and vicious and damaging, flooded his system. His veins bulged, his skin flushed red, and a visible aura of green chakra erupted around him. The pain from his wounds was vaporised in the surge of adrenaline.
He crouched, and the ground where he stood cratered from the force. With a guttural yell, he launched himself into the air, not a jump but a cannon shot, soaring nearly a hundred feet skyward.
High above the Raikage, he raised his right hand. Wind chakra, sharp and keening, screeched to life, compressing and spinning with violent intensity into a sphere of howling, destructive energy. The Rasenshuriken whirred to life, its sound a high-pitched, grinding wail that cut through the night.
He hurled it downwards.
The Raikage's eyes tracked the incoming attack. He didn't recognise the jutsu, but he recognised its profound danger. With that impossible speed, he moved, a lightning bolt sidestepping a falling star. The Rasenshuriken struck where he had been standing.
The effect was not an erasure. A dome of microscopic wind blades expanded silently for a fraction of a second before the sound hit.
"SKREEEEE-BOOM!"
The vitrified ground was not shattered; it was pulverised into fine, glittering dust. The crater deepened exponentially, and the shockwave ripped the burning trees from the earth and threw them back like kindling.
The Raikage, already in a new position, stared at the devastation, his usually impassive face registering stark shock.
'What manner of jutsu is that?! It has no physical form, only cutting wind! To create and control such a thing…'
He didn't have time to finish the thought. From the sky, Renjiro launched a second, then a third Rasenshuriken. The Raikage evaded the second with a hair's breadth, the wind blades nicking his cloak and making it flicker violently. The third, he couldn't fully avoid. He took it on his raised forearm.
The sound was horrific; a grinding, screeching wail of countless microscopic blades trying to find purchase on the ultimate shield. The Raikage was forced back, his feet carving deep trenches in the earth, his entire arm vibrating from the impact. The Rasenshuriken pushed him, scouring the landscape behind him into a wasteland before it finally spent its energy and dissipated.
The Raikage stood, smoke rising from his arm. His cloak was still active, but it was visibly dimmer. He had tanked it, but it had cost him.
Renjiro landed hard, panting, the strain of the Gates and multiple S-Rank jutsu screaming through his body. He saw the Raikage still standing, and despair threatened to swallow him whole. It wasn't enough. It would never be enough.
With a roar of effort that tore at his throat, he brought both hands together. Another Rasenshuriken began to form, but this one was different.
The usual pale white of the wind chakra was underlaid with a deep, malevolent green. The ethereal, green fire of his Mangekyo Sharingan—the flames that could consume chakra itself—wreathed the spinning sphere, merging with the wind blades until it became a horrifying, keeling vortex of green, a shuriken of annihilation that hissed with a hunger all its own.
'Wind is his weakness. My only edge. I have to use it!'
As the Raikage shook off the last effects of the previous attack and began his charge, a blur of lethal intent, Renjiro acted.
From his chest, chains of brilliant, shimmering Adamantine Seal erupted with a sound like ringing steel.
They spun, each link rotating at impossible speeds, becoming four massive, drill-like projectiles that shrieked through the air, aiming to impale and hold.
The Raikage, surprised by the Uzumaki-specific attack, was forced to swat them aside. His lightning-clad hands deflected the drilling chains with thunderous clangs, but they were relentless, harrying him, slowing his advance for a crucial half-second.
It was all the opening Renjiro needed. He hurled the new, green-tinged Rasenshuriken.
The Raikage, seeing the familiar attack, braced himself. He took it head-on, crossing his arms in a guard. The impact was immediate and wrong. The familiar grinding was there, but with it came a terrifying new sensation: a draining, a leaching.
The green flames licking at his cloak didn't burn; they devoured it. They siphoned his chakra, drinking deeply from the well of his lightning nature. His brilliant cloak, the symbol of his invincibility, began to thin, to flicker erratically like a guttering candle. The wind blades, no longer facing their full-power counter, bit deeper.
'It's not just wind! It's… consuming my chakra! My armour is failing!' the Raikage thought, a spike of genuine alarm piercing his fury.
With a titanic roar of effort and frustration, he pushed, unleashing a massive surge of chakra that finally, violently, dispelled the Rasenshuriken.
But the cost was terrible. His lightning cloak was now a pale, faint shimmer around him. He was breathing heavily. He had been wounded, not physically, but where it hurt a shinobi most: his chakra reserves.
Enraged, humiliated, he ignored his fatigue. With a final burst of that god-like speed, he closed the distance, his hand reaching for Renjiro's throat.
An orange barrier sprang to life around Renjiro, blocking the grab.
"NO BARRIER WILL PROTECT YOU!" the Raikage bellowed, his voice raw with fury.
He raised his right hand, the legendary Hell Spear, and began to gather a terrifying concentration of lightning chakra into his fingertips, aiming to pierce straight through.
But it was another feint.
From the shadows, three more Renjiros—shadow clones created in the moment of the chain attack—appeared around the Raikage. Their hands were already in a final seal.
Orange light erupted from them, forming interlocking barriers that encased the Raikage, trapping him in a cage of pure energy. It wouldn't hold him for long. A second, maybe two.
It was enough.
High above, the real Renjiro, having used the briefest of distractions to create distance, drew in the deepest breath of his life. The Five Gates were tearing him apart from the inside. He poured everything he had left—his Uzumaki vitality, his Uchiha hatred, his will to live, the very essence of his reincarnated soul—into a single jutsu.
His voice, when he shouted, was not his own. It was the roar of the storm itself.
"FŪTON: AMATSU ARASHI SŌSŌ!"
He exhaled.
What emerged was not breath, but the apocalypse. It was
A colossal vortex of razor-sharp wind pressure erupted from his mouth, a physical manifestation of pure cutting force.
It was Heavenly storm. A jutsu he had come up with to bolster his fire jutsus.
The ground for a hundred yards in every direction was not torn up; it was planed flat, then planed again, ground into a fine, atomised dust. Every remaining tree, every boulder, every trace of the previous battle was obliterated, consumed by a swirling maelstrom of microscopic wind blades.