Renjiro's jutsu, the strongest of his wind nature jutsus bar the Rasenshuriken [Fūton: Amatsu Arashi Sōsō], was not a jutsu; it was a divine punishment given form. The only way it upped the Rasenshuriken was that this was a better AOE jutsu than the Rasenshuriken.
From within the calm eye of this self-created hurricane, Renjiro watched, his chest heaving, every muscle fibre screaming in protest from the strain of the Five Gates and the colossal chakra expenditure. His Mangekyo Sharingan whirled madly, tracking the incomprehensible destruction he had unleashed. He had become the calm, silent god of a storm of his own making.
And at the storm's edge, where the wall of cutting wind met its limit, stood the Third Raikage.
He did not evade. He could not. The area-of-effect was too vast, too absolute. Instead, he planted his feet, crossed his arms before his face, and met it head-on. His Lightning Release Chakra Mode, already weakened by the chakra-devouring green flames of the last Rasenshuriken, flared in a final, defiant act of incandescent brilliance. The sound of the wind blades grinding against his armour was a continuous, high-pitched whirl that fought against the roar of the typhoon.
"SCREEEEEEEEE!"
For a long, terrifying moment, it held. The Raikage was a violet-and-blue lighthouse against a tsunami of silver death, unmoving, unyielding. But the Amatsu Arashi was relentless.
Then, with a sound like a dying star, the Lightning Chakra Mode failed. It didn't fade; it was violently extinguished, torn apart by the endless, grinding wind.
The Raikage was left bare.
The full force of the storm hit him. His legendary durability, a product of a lifetime of training and his own immense chakra, was now his only shield. The wind blades scoured his skin, his famous tattooed muscles, his face. They did not cut deep; his body was too tough for that, but they sandblasted him, leaving a million superficial, bleeding scratches across his entire form. His clothes were shredded to rags. He was forced back a step, then another, his boots carving deep furrows in the earth that was itself being planed away beneath him.
Finally, the jutsu spent its energy. The shrieking wind died, the vortex collapsed, and an unnatural, deafening silence fell over the battlefield. Or what was left of it. The landscape was now a perfectly smooth, bowl-shaped crater half a mile wide, coated in a fine, white powder that was all that remained of the forest and the earth.
At the crater's edge stood the Raikage.
He was a terrifying sight. Blood welled from countless tiny cuts across his chest, arms, and face, making him look as if he had been dipped in red ink. His remaining clothes hung in tatters. He was breathing heavily, great gusts of air that misted in the cold night. The brilliant lightning cloak was gone, completely destroyed.
A slow, deliberate clapping sound echoed across the barren crater.
"Clap. Clap. Clap."
It was the Raikage. He was applauding.
"To completely destroy my Lightning Chakra Mode," the Raikage's voice boomed, raw but filled with a grudging, profound respect.
"To force me to rely solely on my body's own resilience… you are truly an outstanding shinobi."
He lowered his hands, his eyes boring into Renjiro from across the distance. "It is… sad. A waste. Your allegiance is to Konoha. With power like this, with such destructive potential… you would have been a perfect shinobi for Kumogakure."
Outwardly, he seemed merely impressed, but inwardly, his mind was a cold forge of strategic calculation.
'This cannot stand. He is not even twenty years old. He is battered, drained, operating on fumes and desperation, and he still managed this.' The thought was ice-cold and lethal.
'If he is allowed to live, to grow, to master this power… he wouldn't just be a Kage-level shinobi. He would be a pillar that could support Konoha for a generation. A future Hokage. And that is a future I will not allow.'
The Raikage's right hand came up. Not with all four fingers extended for the dreaded Hell Spear. He held up only two fingers—his index and middle fingers. They began to glow with a concentrated, terrifyingly intense point of lightning chakra. It was the Nukite.
Across the crater, Renjiro's Mangekyo tracked the movement.
'He's not even using the four-finger version,' he thought.
'He's going for the two-finger. He thinks I'm so spent, so broken, that a surgical strike is all he needs. And he's probably right.'
His mind, running on the last dregs of adrenaline and Sharingan-enhanced processing, analysed his options.
Another large-scale jutsu was suicide. The hand signs, the chakra gathering, it would leave him a stationary target for a man who was still, even without his cloak, faster than anything he could comprehend. His only hope was evasion and a desperate, insane counter.
'Just be ready,' he commanded his trembling body, forcing his breathing to steady. 'I just have to injure him like Naruto did. Make him stab himself. Just one opening. One mistake. Then I can run. I just have to live.'
The Raikage moved.
It was not the crackle-zoom of the Lightning Chakra Mode. This was different. Purer. More terrifying. It was a silent, utter disappearance.
Renjiro's Mangekyo Sharingan, almost the pinnacle of visual perception, saw nothing. Its predictive abilities were useless against a speed that transcended visual cues. He abandoned his eyes and threw his awareness outward, towards his chakra field.
'There!'
A ripple of immense, focused power materialised directly behind him, the two-finger spear aimed with surgical precision for his spine.
Renjiro's body reacted before his mind could fully process the information. He twisted, his left hand coming up, chakra swirling into the beginnings of a Rasengan.
The plan was perfect: use the spinning sphere to deflect the spear, to guide it, to use the Raikage's own unstoppable force against him.
But the plan was a fantasy.
The thought 'I was slow' had barely begun to form in his mind when the world dissolved into pure, white-hot agony.
There was no sound of impact first. There was only the feeling. A sensation of incredible, unbearable pressure and heat erupting in his abdomen, followed by a wet, tearing sound that seemed to come from inside his own head. The sound of his own flesh and organs being pierced was an afterthought, a distant echo of the pain that had already consumed him.
His mind, reeling, tried to comprehend. The Raikage's attack had reached his brain before the auditory information of the sound. Reality itself had been outpaced.
He looked down. The Raikage's arm was buried in his gut up to the wrist. The two fingers, still crackling with faint lightning, were protruding out of his back. There was surprisingly little blood at first; the attack had been too fast, too hot, cauterizing even as it destroyed.
Time seemed to slow. The Raikage's face was inches from his own, those violet eyes devoid of hatred now, filled only with a cold, clinical finality. With a brutal, casual jerk, he pulled his hand free. The motion was accompanied by a wet, sickening sound and a sudden, hot gush of blood that soaked Renjiro's clothes.
The Raikage flicked his wrist once, disdainfully, scattering Renjiro's blood onto the white dust of the crater.
Renjiro's legs gave out. He crumpled to his knees, his hands instinctively clutching the horrific wound in his stomach. The Rasengan that had been forming in his left hand sputtered and died.
"So much potential," the Raikage scoffed, looking down at him. The words were not praise; they were an epitaph.
Despair, black and total, washed over Renjiro. This was it. His second chance at life ended in a forgotten crater in a foreign land, at the hands of a man who saw him as nothing but a strategic nuisance. The irony was bitter. He had cheated death once, only to meet an end even more futile than the first.
And then, something snapped.
It was not a sound, but a feeling. A fundamental fracture deep within his soul. The despair did not vanish; it was consumed, incinerated by a sudden, all-consuming rage that erupted from a place he never knew existed.
It was a fury at the world, at the Raikage, at his own weakness, at the cruel absurdity of his two lives both ending in meaningless violence. This would not be his end. He refused it. He would not die kneeling before this man.
The Raikage, already turning to leave, stopped dead. His entire body went taut. He sensed it a fraction of a second before it manifested; a shift in the atmosphere, a pressure change that had nothing to do with the weather. Without a moment's hesitation, his body reacted, flickering away a hundred yards in an instant.
He was just in time.
Where he had been standing, the air itself shattered.
A pillar of shimmering, incandescent silver light erupted from Renjiro's kneeling form, shooting into the sky. It coalesced around him, forming bones of pure, spectral energy that grew at an astounding rate—a ribcage, a spinal column, a skull. The skeleton of a giant, forged from Renjiro's bottomless rage and desperate will to live. It was Renjiro's Silver Susanoo.