The final, shimmering hexagon of Minato's barrier solidified just as the shockwave from another chakra detonation hit. It didn't thud against the translucent wall so much as screech—a high-pitched, grating wail of force meeting immovable, expertly structured chakra.
Dust, rocks, and shredded pine needles slapped against the barrier and slid down its sloping sides, piling up at the base. Sama flinched, her hands instinctively coming up, but no debris touched her.
She stared, wide-eyed, at the violent storm of particulate matter just inches from her face, and then at her brother's profile, set in concentration. The necessity of the barrier was no longer theoretical; it was a visceral, life-saving fact.
In the newly created crater-field below, Renjiro didn't pause to assess his bruises. The moment his sandals found purchase on the shattered earth, his hands were already a blur of signs. The Gates' steam still poured from him, mingling with the dust. He wasn't thinking, only acting, his mind a machine fed by the Mangekyō's predictive clarity and the Gates' painful hyper-awareness.
"Katon: Shakunetsu no Hamon!" (Fire Style: Expanding Heat Wave).
He didn't blow a massive fireball. Instead, he exhaled a wide, low wall of shimmering, transparent heat that rippled outward across the ground. It wasn't meant to burn; it was meant to superheat, turning the air into a blistering, suffocating blanket.
Before the wave had travelled ten feet, his hands reshaped.
"Fūton: Atsuryoku Shō!" (Wind Style: Pressure Push)
A focused, hammering gust of wind slammed into the back of the heat wave, not dispersing it, but compacting and propelling it forward with the force of a tidal wave of invisible coals.
The effect was instant and brutal. The very air between them warped, visibility turning into a liquid, wavering nightmare. The oxygen grew thin, scorching lungs with every breath. The battlefield transformed into a rolling, open furnace.
Kushina, standing amidst the devastation, didn't flinch. Her hands came together in a single, powerful clap.
"Suiton: Shōryū Heki!" (Water Style: Rising Surge Wall).
From the churned earth at her feet, a thick, churning wall of water erupted, taller than she was, a liquid bulwark of immense density. The expanding heat wave hit it with a colossal hiss—a sound of profound, elemental negation.
The water didn't boil away instantly; it absorbed the catastrophic heat, its surface churning violently. The clash didn't produce fire or destruction, but a vast, billowing cloud of superheated steam that erupted skyward, blinding and scalding.
From within the heart of the blinding, white mist, a golden light flashed. "Kongō Fusa!"
Kushina's voice rang out, and her golden Adamantine Chains, glowing with their own inherent power, shot forth from the steam. But they didn't spear toward Renjiro. Instead, they plunged directly into the heart of her own water wall.
Then, they crackled to life with Lightning chakra.
The steam cloud, already deadly, became a killing field. Jagged, white-blue lightning arced through the vapour, turning it into a colossal, drifting storm cloud that crackled and spat ozone. There was no safe approach, no clear line of sight—just a scalding, electrocuting fog advancing towards Renjiro.
He watched it come, the crackling death-mist. A calm, almost academic part of his mind noted the brutal efficiency.
'Now this is unfair. An AOE by a jinchuriki. What's stopping them from spamming this in every fight?' Renjiro cursed.
His own silver Adamantine Chains erupted from his back, but he didn't throw them at the storm or at Kushina. He drove them down, deep into the wet, conductive earth around him. Then, with a thought, he willed them to branch, to weave, snapping taut just below the surface to form a vast, grounded lattice—a Faraday cage made of chakra-conductive Uzumaki lineage.
The advancing electro-steam cloud met the grounded lattice. The lethal lightning, seeking a path, found it. With a sound like a thousand snapping wires, the arcing energy was siphoned off, drawn down through Renjiro's chains and harmlessly dispersed into the deep earth. The steam remained, hot and blinding, but now it was just hot water vapour.
The tactical contrast was breathtaking. Kushina used her chains as conductors and amplifiers, turning the environment into a weapon. Renjiro used his as grounding and insulation, making the environment safe again.
"Always with the clever tricks!" Kushina's voice boomed from the thinning steam, half-mocking, half-admiring.
"Always with the brute-force solutions!" Renjiro shot back, a grin tugging at his pained lips despite the strain of maintaining the Gates and the chain lattice.
He didn't let her regroup. His hands moved again.
"Fūton: Gen'ei no Kama!" (Wind Style: Crescent Guillotine).
A single, monstrously wide blade of compressed air, visible only as a rippling distortion, screamed horizontally across the battlefield, low enough to slice through the remaining water wall and anything behind it.
Kushina reacted. Her golden chains, still dripping, retracted and then whirled around her in a complex, interlocking spiral. As they spun, she infused them with a swirling sheath of water chakra, creating a spinning, fluid shield of chain and liquid. The Crescent Guillotine hit the spinning water shield.
The wind blade shredded the outer layers of water into mist, but the chains beneath, reinforced by their own adamantine nature and the centrifugal force, held. The technique dissipated against the relentless, liquid rotation.
And then she attacked. The water-coated chains, now lancing forward like electrified sea serpents, split into a dozen different strands, each crackling with renewed lightning, attacking from high, low, and every angle in between.
Renjiro's own chains rose to meet them. But he didn't try to block or entangle. As his silver chains shot forward, they frayed at the last second, splitting into hundreds of hair-thin, razor-sharp filaments. He infused these with wind-natured chakra, making them vibrate at a frequency that sang through the air. He didn't attack Kushina's chains.
He attacked the water coating them.
With a sound like a million tiny knives cutting silk, his wind-charged filaments swept over the advancing golden chains, shearing the water away in a fine, dispersed mist. The lightning, suddenly bereft of its conductive medium, fizzled and snapped harmlessly in the air before grounding out against the wet earth. The now-dry chains were still a threat, but a familiar, manageable one.
Again, the philosophical difference was laid bare. Kushina added elements to her foundation. Renjiro stripped elements off hers.
"Not bad!" Kushina laughed, genuine exhilaration in her voice as she retracted her chains.
"You're not so bad yourself, 'old lady!'" he shouted back, the camaraderie of mutual, terrifying respect woven into the insult.
A strategic truth hung unspoken in the ravaged air: both of them could have, at any moment, used their chains' barrier ability to block each other's attack.
Renjiro didn't because he knew Kushina would simply hammer it with relentless, overwhelming force until his chakra or will broke. It would drain him faster than her. Kushina didn't because if she turtled up, Renjiro, for all his power, likely couldn't breach it—but where was the fun in that?
As they circled each other in the wreckage, steam and dust slowly settling, Renjiro's mind, for a split second, turned inward past the pain and the battle-high.
'Is this what it takes? Is this the level needed to even face a Jinchūriki, let alone contain one?'
He remembered his desperate, near-fatal clash with the Two-Tails' host. That had been chaos, terror, and survival. This was different. Fighting Kushina was like punching a mountain that punched back with geological force. It was clarifying, and for his long-term plans, it was sobering.
For Kushina, this was pure, unadulterated catharsis. The grin on her face wasn't just competitive; it was joyful.
The weight of the fox, the burden of being a weapon, the careful control of every moment—it all melted away in the simplicity of sanctioned, all-out release. She hadn't been able to let go like this since the war. This wasn't a spar; it was a celebration of power, and she was dancing.
On the ridge, Minato was utterly mesmerised. His analytical mind, which could calculate trajectories and tactical probabilities in microseconds, was delighting in a different puzzle.
He watched the chakra interactions—how the heat wave's energy transferred to the water, how the lightning sought grounding paths, how the wind sheared the water molecules apart. He was, in the middle of the cataclysm, quietly nerding out over the beautiful, violent physics of high-level ninjutsu.
'I've heard the reports,' he thought, his eyes tracking Renjiro's every movement.
'The Susanoo. The war contributions. But hearing and seeing… are different.'
He acknowledged, with clear-eyed honesty, the immense power Renjiro wielded. And then, with a wry, internal humility, he added the crucial context: 'And he's fighting Kushina. The Nine-Tails Jinchūriki. And holding his own.'
It was then that the atmosphere shifted for the third time. The playful, testing quality vanished from the clearing. The pressure didn't just increase; it condensed, growing heavy and profound, as if the air itself was being drawn toward a single point behind Renjiro.
The steam surrounding him began to coalesce, not dissipating, but thickening, swirling into a massive, turbulent green vortex. From within that emerald-hued maelstrom, something immense began to rise—a suggestion of a colossal ribcage, then a skeletal spine, then the outline of a towering, humanoid form constructed of chakra so dense it seemed to swallow the light.
Sama gasped, her hand flying to her mouth once more. "Minato… what is that?"
Minato didn't look away. His blue eyes reflected the growing manifestation, his expression one of solemn recognition. He answered quietly, the words carrying the weight of legend and dread.
"That," he said, "is Renjiro's Susanoo."