The words—"I thought you would open the Gates earlier than this."—had barely left Kushina's lips before the world changed. It was as if her statement had been a key turning in a hidden lock.
The air around Renjiro didn't just grow tense; it shimmered, warping with a sudden, oppressive heat. A low, sub-audible hum vibrated through the clearing, making the pine needles on the nearby trees quiver. The calm, grounded presence he had manifested moments before now radiated a ferocious, barely contained intensity.
Kushina didn't wait. She lunged, a red-haired blur closing the distance in the time it took to blink.
"How many?!" she demanded, her fist already a cannonball aimed at his centre.
Renjiro didn't answer aloud. Internally, the calculation was cold and swift. 'Three, well two actually. The Gate of Life and the Gate of Pain, since the gate of healing can't work on me. That should be enough. More than enough for a spar. I can't go too deep, not when we're still… warming up. I need to control the damage.'
He met her strike with a crossed-arm guard, bracing for the impact he now felt he could match.
"CRACK-BOOM."
The sound was not of flesh on flesh, but of a small detonation. The shockwave ripped outwards, tearing grass from its roots. Renjiro's sandals slid back a full foot in the hard earth, carving trenches.
A jagged bolt of pain, bright and shocking, lanced up his arms despite the Gate-enhanced reinforcement. The force was staggering, orders of magnitude beyond her previous strikes. He had misjudged her. Horribly. She had gone ahead and used more strength.
He gritted his teeth, the grin wiped from his face by sheer, focused strain. 'Fine. You want to see the monster? Let's see it.'
The escalation was not a single burst, but a progressive, terrifying unlocking.
Fourth Gate: The Gate of Limit.
A strangled gasp tore from his throat as something deep in his chest wrenched open. The veins on his neck and temples bulged, pulsing with furious greenish light visible beneath his skin.
Fifth Gate: The Gate of Closing.
His muscles visibly swelled, not with bulk, but with corded, explosive density. Steam, tinged faintly green with chakra, began to jet from his pores with a sharp, pressurised hiss. The air around him grew hazy with heat distortion.
Sixth Gate: The Gate of View.
His eyes, already blazing with the Mangekyō, seemed to ignite from within. The crimson pattern swam in a sea of emerald-hued chakra flame.
(Author's note: Only the base Sharingan changes with the opening of the gates; the Mangekyo, or Mangekyos in this case, are not affected by the eight gates.)
The steam became a torrent, a roaring, violent aura that tore at the ground around his feet. His heartbeat was a war drum in his ears, each beat a thunderclap of pain and power that didn't dull his senses but sharpened them to a razor's edge. Every nerve was a live wire. His posture settled into something profoundly predatory—knees bent, centre low, every fibre of his being a coiled spring of lethal potential.
The fight didn't restart; it transcended.
They were no longer trading blows. They were creating localised cataclysms. Where before there had been the thwack of impacts, now there were sonic booms.
Each clash generated visible, concentric shockwaves of force that shredded the bark from nearby trees and hammered the earth into instant craters. They moved in blinding, furious exchanges, their forms blurring into streaks of red hair and green-tinged steam.
Renjiro fought with terrifying precision. He used angles, leverage, and the predictive power of his Mangekyō to turn Kushina's overwhelming force against itself, redirecting punches that would have levelled a small building into the ground, creating new pits and trenches. He was a surgeon with sledgehammers for hands.
Kushina was an avalanche. She didn't bother with redirection or complex techniques. She advanced, a relentless tide of pure, concussive might. Her punches were simple, direct, and carried the momentum of a charging bull. Her kicks carved canyons in the soil. She met his surgical precision with geological force. Neither was holding back. This was the edge of annihilation, dressed as a spar.
Many yards away, Sama's hand had flown to her mouth. Her eyes, wide with disbelief, tried and failed to track the combatants. They seemed to teleport from one explosion of dirt and splintered wood to another.
"How… how is she overwhelming him?" she breathed, her voice thin with awe. "He has the Mangekyo; he should be able to see everything!"
Beside her, Minato stood with his arms crossed, his expression one of intense, analytical focus.
"He can see everything, Sama," Minato explained, "But seeing an attack and being able to stop it are two different things. Reaction time, muscle speed, raw physical output—the Sharingan doesn't enhance those. It only provides the data."
He nodded toward the maelstrom. "Kushina has fought the Uchiha before. She knows their advantage. So she doesn't fight with feints or deception. She fights with volume. She throws so much force, so many attacks, from so many angles at such speed that even perfect prediction becomes a burden. You see the ten punches that will shatter every bone in your body, but you only have the physical capacity to block three. Which three do you choose?"
He watched as Renjiro barely twisted away from a hammer-blow that left a crater two feet deep.
"And being a Jinchūriki… it's not just about the beast's chakra. It helps keep the host's body in a state of perpetual peak condition. Her stamina isn't monstrous. It's almost inexhaustible on this timescale. Her chakra output for reinforcement is… unnatural." He paused, then delivered the casual, devastating footnote.
"And this isn't even her top speed."
Sama's head snapped toward him, her shock palpable. The scale of the conflict snapped into horrifying, exhilarating focus.
Back in the epicentre, Renjiro's mind, operating at blinding speed amidst the pain-clarity of the Six Gates, reached a cold conclusion.
'Taijutsu alone won't close the gap.'
He broke the kinetic deadlock with a sweeping, two-handed sign.
"Katon: Gōka Mekkyaku!"
A colossal, rotating spiral of orange-white fire erupted from his mouth, not aimed at Kushina, but at the ground between them, sweeping in a wide, controlling arc to cut off her angles and engulf her in a wall of superheated death.
Before the first flame touched the ground, his hands were already moving again.
"Fūton: Daitoppa!"
But he didn't release the great breakthrough. Instead, he compressed the wind, shaping it into a focused, slicing gale that screamed into the heart of his own firestorm.
The result was not a larger explosion, but a terrifying transformation: the Great Flame Spiral was sheared into dozens of whirling, incandescent scythes of compressed fire and wind, a net of annihilation tightening around Kushina.
She didn't dodge. She planted her feet, crossed her arms, and her chakra erupted. A visible, deep crimson aura, thick as syrup, flared around her. The whirling fire-scythes struck it and… splashed. They screeched and sparked, carving glowing grooves in the chakra shield but failing to penetrate. She wasn't burned. But she was stopped. Forced to defend.
With a roar that was more frustration than effort, Kushina shoved her arms outward.
"Kai!"
A dome-shaped chakra shockwave burst from her body, a physical, concussive pulse of pure energy. It didn't just dispel the remaining fire; it extinguished it, sucking the oxygen from the air and leaving behind a ring of charred, smouldering vacuum.
Then she retaliated. No hand signs. Just a sweeping, backhand gesture. Five dense orbs of violent crimson chakra, each the size of a wagon wheel, shot from her fingertips, fanning out to cover Renjiro's possible dodges before converging.
This was a jutsu Kushina had come up with after she witnessed one of Minato's jutsus.
Renjiro was already moving, but the sheer area of effect was inescapable. He crossed his arms, layering his own chakra reinforcement and Gates-enhanced durability.
"BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!"
The concussions were seismic. Renjiro was blasted off his feet, hurtling backwards like a rag doll. He crashed through the splintered stump of a half-uprooted pine, skidded across the ground, tearing a twenty-foot furrow in the earth before slamming to a stop against a rock face. The stone behind him cratered with a sickening crunch. Dust and debris rained down.
The message was brutally clear: Kushina's chakra volume dwarfed his maximum output. She could brute-force her way through elemental advantages and tactical complexity. She didn't need finesse. She had power.
The shockwave from the chakra blast finally reached the observers' ridge, carrying with it a cloud of dust and shredded foliage. Minato's hand moved in a blur.
A substantial barrier, hexagonal and humming with energy, snapped into existence around him and Sama just before the debris storm hit. It rattled against the barrier like hail on a window.
Sama flinched, her heart hammering. "Minato! Shouldn't you… contain their spar?"
Minato watched Renjiro push himself, steaming and bleeding from minor cuts, out of the rock crater. A sigh, born of long experience with both individuals, escaped him.
"Contain them?" he said, a faint, weary smile on his lips. "Sama, how much chakra do you think it would take to erect a barrier strong enough to cage a jinchūriki and a shinobi operating at that level? It would be a titanic, wasteful effort. They'd either break it or exhaust me trying to hold it." He nodded toward the battlefield, his blue eyes seeing layers of intent Sama could not.
"Besides…"
He let the word hang as Kushina stalked toward the rising Renjiro, her crimson chakra aura flickering with eager, violent joy, and Renjiro's steam began to swirl into a new, more complex pattern around his hands.
"…they aren't even serious yet."